Gebre Meskel Lalibela
Ethiopian king of the years around 1200, also called Gebre Meskel. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church venerates him as a saint and ascribes to him the rock-hewn churches of the town that bears his name.
The Synaxarium of the Ethiopian church calls him Lalibala, surnamed Gabra Masqal, king of Ethiopia. It tells that his elder brother, the king, had him beaten out of jealousy, that an angel kept him from harm, that he inherited the kingdom, gave much to the poor, built ten churches as an angel showed him in a dream, and left the throne to his brother’s son (Ethiopian Synaxarium 12 Sanê (Budge, pp. 995–996)). His Life adds the vision of the churches in heaven and the building of their likeness on earth with the help of angels (Life of Lalibela Perruchon, pp. 86–89) (Life of Lalibela Perruchon, pp. 121–125).
Jules Perruchon, who edited the Life, reports a near-contemporary notice in the Arabic History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria, where a metropolitan ordained in 1210 finds reigning in Ethiopia a king whose name Ignazio Guidi read as Lalibala (Life of Lalibela Perruchon’s introduction, p. xvi, note). In the 1520s Francisco Álvares was told at Lalibela that the name means “miracle”, that bees had covered the king at his birth without harming him, and that he was a saint whose tomb drew pilgrims (Álvares, Prester John of the Indies 53 (pp. 122–131)).
In the timeline
- about 1200, traditional dateThe Rock-Hewn Churches of Lalibela
In the highlands of Ethiopia a group of churches is cut whole out of the living rock. Ethiopian tradition ascribes them to the saint-king Lalibela, about 1200; the written sources are late, and archaeologists still debate how long the work took.