PAEZ, PEDRO. - Jesuit, missionary, b. at Olmeida (diocese of Toledo), d. at Gorgorà (Ethiopia) on 20 May 1622.
Having entered the Order in 1582 and being destined to take up again the mission of Ethiopia, he moved to Goa in 1588; in 1589 he began to make his way up through western Asia, disguised as an Armenian, but he was taken prisoner and carried off as a slave to Janaa (Yemen), where he remained until 1595, when he was transferred to Mocha. Ransomed, he had to return to Goa. Having resumed the attempt to reach Abyssinia in 1603, he finally landed at Massawa.
His tireless work of 19 years earned him the title of "second apostle of Ethiopia." He succeeded, in fact, in winning over to the cause of union with Rome the negus Atnaf Sagad (Za-Denghel); when this one was murdered (1604) by the people stirred up by the monks, precisely because he favored the union, he won over to the cause his successor Malak Sagad II; but when this one too was murdered for the same reason, the Father continued to work so well with the successor Malak Sagad III, or Seltan Sagad, as to persuade him to abjure the errors of Eutyches, to be received into the Catholic Church and to negotiate the union with the Pope (1622). Under Seltan Sagad, Ethiopia became largely Catholic. The Father, who erected the royal castle at Gondar, received as a gift at Gorgorà a tract of land on which to found a missionary residence. Others too were founded elsewhere with churches and chapels. The Father is also the first European who discovered the sources of the Blue Nile (against the assertion of J. Bruce, who in his book Travels to discover the Source of the Nile [III, Edinburgh-London 1790, p. 615 ff.] attributes it 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.