Christianization of the Nubian kingdoms

After the fall of Kush in the 4th century three kingdoms arose on the Middle Nile: Nobadia in Lower Nubia, with its capital at Pachoras (Faras); Makuria around Dongola; and Alodia, with its capital at Soba near the confluence of the Blue and White Nile. Some Nubians had become Christians earlier, and in the 530s the temple of Isis at Philae, long frequented by the Nobadae, was closed on Justinian’s orders. Justinian and Theodora both wanted to win the Nubians as allies, but for rival creeds. According to John of Ephesus, the empress sent the Miaphysite priest Julian and warned the governor of the Thebaid to hold back the emperor’s Chalcedonian envoys until her mission had passed; in 543 the king of Nobadia and his nobles accepted Julian’s faith and politely refused the emperor’s.

Julian stayed two years, baptising the king, the nobles and many of the people, and left the new church in the care of Theodore, bishop of Philae. Makuria, according to the chronicler John of Biclaro, “received the faith of Christ” around 568, in the Chalcedonian form; in 573 a Makurian embassy brought ivory and a giraffe to Constantinople. The bishop Longinus, whom the emperor Justin II had kept in the capital for three years, escaped in disguise — wearing a wig over his bald head, John says — and in 569 reached Nobadia, where he built a church and ordained clergy; the mudbrick church found beneath the cathedral of Faras may be his.

In 580, at the request of the king of Alodia, Longinus set out for the south. Because the king of Makuria had posted guards on the roads to seize him, he travelled with a Nobadian escort by the desert road east of the Nile — by modern reconstructions, the caravan road from Korosko across the Eastern Desert to Abu Hamad, which cut off the great bend of the river — and seventeen of his camels died of heat and thirst. The king of Alodia received him with honour, and after a few days’ instruction he, his family and his nobles were baptised; his letter of thanks to the king of Nobadia is preserved by John of Ephesus. Nobadia and Alodia joined the Miaphysite church of Alexandria, Makuria for a time the Chalcedonians; the conversion of the countryside took centuries.