The life of St Frumentius of Ethiopia
As a boy he and his brother were taken along on a voyage up the Red Sea that ended badly, the two of them captured and brought into service at the court of the king of Aksum; after the king's death, they remained on as tutors to the young prince who would become King Ezana, serving under the boy's mother during her regency. When Ezana came of age and released them from that duty, Frumentius's brother returned home, but Frumentius himself went instead to Alexandria, where he asked the newly consecrated Patriarch Athanasius to send a bishop to the kingdom he had come to know. Athanasius chose to consecrate Frumentius for that mission himself.
Frumentius returned to Aksum and baptized King Ezana, and under that king's rule Christianity became the kingdom's official faith, the beginning of Ethiopia's Christian history. He built churches as the faith spread through the country and came to be called by his people abouna, meaning our father, a title still carried by the head of the Ethiopian Church. Decades later, when an Arian leaning emperor pressed King Ezana to replace him with a bishop of Arian sympathies, the attempt came to nothing, and Frumentius remained in his see. He died around the year 383, and the practice of consecrating Ethiopia's chief bishop at Alexandria, begun with him, continued for many centuries afterward.
