PAEZ, PEDRO. – Jesuit, missionary, b. at Olmeida (diocese of Toledo), d. at Gorgorà (Ethiopia) on 20 May 1622.
He entered the Order in 1582 and was assigned to resume the mission in Ethiopia; he went to Goa in 1588. In 1589 he began to make his way northward, disguised as an Armenian, through western Asia, but was taken prisoner and brought as a slave to Janaa (Yemen), where he remained until 1595, when he was transferred to Moca. Ransomed, he had to return to Goa. Resuming his attempt to reach Abyssinia in 1603, he finally landed at Massaua.
His tireless work of nineteen years earned him the title of “second apostle of Ethiopia.” Indeed, he succeeded in winning Negus Atnaf Sagad (Za-Denghel) to the cause of union with Rome. When the latter was massacred (1604) by the people, incited by the monks precisely because he favored union, he won his successor, Malak Sagad II, to the cause. But when this ruler too was massacred for the same reason, Fr. Paez continued to work so effectively with his successor Malak Sagad III, or Seltan Sagad, that he induced him to abjure the errors of Eutyches, to be received into the Catholic Church, and to negotiate union with the Pope (1622). Under Seltan Sagad, Ethiopia became largely Catholic. Fr. Paez, who erected the royal castle at Gondar, was given a tract of land at Gorgorà on which to establish a missionary residence. Others were also founded elsewhere, with churches and chapels. Fr. Paez was likewise the first European to discover the sources of the Blue Nile (contrary to J. Bruce’s assertion, who in his book: Travels to discover the Source of the Nile [III, Edinburgh–London 1790, p. 615 ff.] attributes the discovery to himself); his account De origine Nili (1618) forms part of his Historia Aethiopiae (Beccari, op. cit. in bibl., II, pp. 255–63) and was published in A. Kircher, Mundus subterraneus (Rome 1665, p. 72 ff.) and Oedypus Aegyptiacus (I, ibid. 1652, pp. 57–59; cf. Beccari, op. cit. in bibl., I [1903], pp. 269–75). He also wrote: Historia Aethiopiae, edited by C. Beccari, ibid. (II–III, Rome 1905–1906); a work of great ethnographic, historical, and religious value.