Six Nubians walk to Ethiopia to ask for priests and are turned away

Francisco Alvares, a Portuguese priest who spent six years in Ethiopia in the 1520s, wrote down two reports about the country to the west. A travelling Syrian named John told him he had found about a hundred and fifty churches in Nubia still holding crucifixes and paintings of the Virgin, whose people were now neither Christian, Muslim nor Jewish and who said they wished to be Christians. Then, while Alvares was still in the country, six Nubians arrived at the Ethiopian court. They had come to ask the Emperor Lebna Dengel to send them priests and monks. He refused, explaining that his own metropolitan came to him from Alexandria and that he could not give away what another gave him. They went home. This was roughly forty years after the last recorded Nubian bishop, which is about the length of time the last priests he ordained would have lived.