Badabedi

Badabedi appears among the Ethiopian places depicted on Fra Mauro's great map of the world, completed in Venice in the fifteenth century. The Venetian cartographer placed it on a river he called Guaa, near other places he named Ambat, Ambanegst and Achiafed. The map shows the region as a country of plateaus, river valleys and scattered towns, where the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia held sway. Its information came in part from Ethiopian clerics, who travelled between the royal court and the provinces and carried knowledge of the land's towns and rivers. Farming communities of the highland plateaus grew cereals and kept livestock, while churches and monasteries anchored each district in the wider religious and political life of the kingdom.