ON 12 FEBRUARY 1548, King Gälawdéwos of Ethiopia (r. 1540–59) issued a royal edict banning the trafficking of Christians and their sale to Arab owners under the penalty of death. The edict sought simultaneously to regulate and centralize the slave trade, protect freeborn Christians from enslavement, and ban the sale of already enslaved Christians to non-Christians. The edict did not, it is important to underline, challenge slavery itself. While the edict banned any trade in Ethiopian Christian slaves outside Ethiopian territory and their transfer to non-Christian masters within the country, it continued to permit the enslavement of adult converts to Christianity and those baptized as infants in slavery. In a pivotal passage, the king declared that the edict was to be the “established law of Ethiopia” and required universal obedience to it.

Currently held in the church of Tädbabä Maryam in northern Ethiopia, this edict has hitherto been unknown to scholars and has never before been published. Furthermore, it is a remarkable text, of a type uncommon in the Ethiopian documentary tradition. Analysis of the edict's content and context sheds light on a broad set of issues concerning slavery, the encounter between medieval legal worlds, and the discrepancy or congruence between actual behavior and documentary norms in late medieval Ethiopia. It also reflects the religious, legal, and ethical precepts already laid down in the law book Fetha Nägäst (Law of Kings), Plate 1. The Edict of Gälawdéwos in its Manuscript Context: Tädbabä Maryam, MS Wängél.This manuscript page displays seven different texts. The edict begins at the top of the left-hand column and ends on line 13 of the right-hand column. Its scribe has distinguished it from the following charter (also issued by Gälawdéwos, appointing a Muslim governor for the province of Ifat) with a decorative row of alternating black and red dots. Another charter of Gälawdéwos, just below, is a donation to the church of Tädbabä Maryam, where the edict was recorded. However, this document has been partially erased and a later scribe has added a brief charter issued by King Iyasu I (1682–1706), recording his donation of land to one Fitawrari Mahdärä Mäläkot.