Several Abyssinian converts of the Portuguese missionaries who had become devotedly attached to the Roman Catholic form of the Christian faith had proceeded to Italy for further instructions. Indeed, all through the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries Abyssinians constantly journeyed to Italy. They were able to traverse the Muhammadan countries of Nubia and Egypt very easily, either disguised as Copts or affecting to be Muhammadans. From the ports of Egypt they easily made their way to Venice or to Naples as traders. Four of these Christian Abyssinians, one of them known as Gregory, were established at Rome in the middle of the seventeenth century. At Erfurt in Saxony was born, in 1624, the celebrated Ludolf, whose real name was Hiob Leutholf. Ludolf at an early age exhibited a remarkable talent for acquiring languages, and he had a special bent for the Semitic tongues. Having been entrusted with a secret mission to Rome by the Swedish Ambassador at Paris, Leutholf, or Ludolf, encountered in Rome these four Abyssinians. He spent three years in enthusiastically studying Amharic, and also the older liturgical tongue of Ethiopia, the Gez or Ge’ez. By the help of these Abyssinians he compiled a grammar of the Amharic, and dictionaries of that tongue and of the Ge’ez. He also wrote a history of Ethiopia; but, above all (as far as this book is concerned), he did important work in elucidating the geography of the northeastern portion of the Nile basin, and the information he received from Gregory and the other Abyssinians he carefully collated with the works of the Portuguese Jesuits. Although Ludolf never visited even Egypt, he did a great deal to assist the map-makers of his time to delineate the course of the Blue Nile and of the Atbara with its various affluents. Ludolf passed a good many years of his life in the diplomatic service of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha. Curiously enough, he not only visited England repeatedly, but became an Anglophil, and desired to establish trading connections between England and Abyssinia. The troubles consequent on James II.’s reign, and the jealous opposition of the Coptic Church in Egypt baulked his scheme, which was much taken up in high quarters in England, and which might, if it had been carried out, have strangely anticipated events in northeast Africa by establishing British influence in Egypt and Abyssinia at the end of the seventeenth century.