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[caption id="attachment_460" align="alignright" width="300"] This is the third of four blog-posts going back to a paper at the International Congress at Leeds in 2017: I. Introduction II. Aregawi as Pachomios‘ son III. The saints’ interaction with the Aksumite kings IV. Conclusion[/caption]Finally, I will discuss is the saints’ interaction with the Aksumite kings, which would have been chronologically impossible had they trained with Pachomios. The authors of the chosen gadlat wrote their holy men into established late antique narrative traditions surrounding Kaleb and by doing so not only negotiated their role in this ostensibly revived Solomonid kingdom but simultaneously used these traditions to present their own ideas of what the role of a secular king ought to be.If one text in the entire corpus of this hagiographic tradition ever wholly embodied a Solomonic “party line,” it would be that of Garima. He never finds himself at odds with the church or king, and the text as a whole is quite sympathetic to the Solomonid dynasty, even explicitly asserting that Kaleb was a descendant of Solomon as well. After Garima destroys a snake that had been worshipped at Aksum, the kingdom falls into chaos until finally, “when God had seen the orthodox faith of Ethiopia, he sent a strong and powerful man, who was named Kaleb. And he caused him to rule over Ethiopia.” Kaleb, and by extension the Solomonid dynasty, are portrayed as a gift of stability to a fractious kingdom, assigned to rule by God himself without any mention of the church or the monks.However, there is a little more than just the party line embedded in this narrative episode. Garima is later granted a vast array of lands by Kaleb, presumably through gults although this is not explicitly stated. As Kaplan has pointed out, while monasteries had originally disavowed royal beneficence and pursued economic independence, they later become major beneficiaries of these kinds of land grants. However, these grants were not inherently inalienable and hereditary, and gults often had to be renewed, which meant that land could potentially be confiscated or transferred by the monarch. But by having ancient and revered Aksumite kings, the very models of secular authority in Solomonid Ethiopia, grant lands in perpetuity to equally ancient and revered holy men, the author undermines this dynamic completely, and presents the perfect rhetorical move by which to protect the landholdings of the monastery: After all, the land in question was not given to a lowly abbot by a living king, but rather, was gifted in perpetuity to a holy man, and by extension his institution, by the legendary Solomonid predecessor of the current king. To dispossess the monastery could be read as tantamount to undermining the legitimacy of the Solomonid dynasty that the text itself meant to help establish. Granted, it is highly unlikely that the author of the Garima text was able to defend his monastery’s claim to cities like Adwa, allegedly given to Garima by Kaleb, but the fact that the attempt is made at all and that it survives suggests that these arguments may have been made quite often.In a variation of this move, the Libanos text offers a far more hostile encounter between the king of Aksum and the holy man, preserving the rebellious character of early Ethiopian monasteries and the monk’s historical predisposition to freely engage in parrhesia. In his wandering as an anchorite, Libanos discovers that the bishop of Aksum, was engaged in simony. Outraged, he demanded an end to the practice, only to find himself exiled from the city on the king’s order. A terrible drought follows and realizing his mistake, the king summons Libanos. Libanos’s response is stark: “If you want reconciliation, tell them not to profit from illegal contributions for the granting of the priesthood. The king, metropolitan, and bishop must act following the will of the lord and the rules laid down by our fathers the apostles.” They [the king and bishop Elyas] said “We will do as he orders!” And the rain fell. Then Libanos said “Give a gult to the metropolitan, so that he does not draw illicit contributions”This particular episode in the life of the saint is interesting in the amount of space it devotes to the discussion of a single legal issue: that of the selling of church offices. The Solomonid government’s lackluster attempts at reintegrating the Alexandrian bishop into Ethiopian religious life, combined with said bishop’s relative social, political, and religious isolation, had created a situation which conceivably incentivized him to sell ecclesiastical offices to those notables willing to buy them, if only to build local support. While this lonely Egyptian churchman might be entirely harmless in isolation he could become quite dangerous to monastic interests when aided by a retinue of loyal local allies, better able to sway the king than himself. So the author gives the polemicist the perfect tool with which to undermine Alexandrian attempts at influencing the theological landscape of Ethiopia without appearing to undermine the king and his fragile church.[cite]