ALMEIDA, Manuel de. - Jesuit missionary, b. in Viseu (Portugal) in 1581 and entering the religious life in 1594, departed for the missions of the Orient in 1601. He was rector of the novitiate in Goa and of the college at Bazaim before going in 1624 to Ethiopia as visitor and superior of the Jesuit mission. He remained there until 1634 amid great hardships and tribulations. Expelled from the country by Emperor Fasiladas, he returned to India, where he was rector of the College of St. Paul in Goa (1633-36) and provincial of the province of Goa; he died in the same city on 10 May 1646.
By order of his superiors, he wrote a *History of Ethiopia* begun in that land before 1628; through various revisions, it provided the substance for the *Historia de Etiopia a Alta*, published by Fr. Balt. Telles in 1660. The original work of Fr. Almeida was published by Fr. C. Beccari in *Rerum Aethiopicarum Scriptores occidentales*, vols. V-VII, Rome 1907-1909. The work consists of ten books and traces events back to the most ancient times; from book VIII onward, the author narrates events of which he was an eyewitness. At the head of the first book is a map of Ethiopia, with the precise indication of the sources of the Blue Nile, discovered by Almeida together with Fr. Pietro Paes.