A period of Conflict (c. 700-1200 Ad.)

One of the most outstanding pupils of Iyasus-Mo'a was Abba Takel-Haymanot of Shoa (d.1313). He apparently joined Iyasua-Mo'a's school as a middle-aged man with many years of clerical service in Shoa behind him. He spent some nine years with Iyasus-Mo'a who gave him his first serious Christian education.

After having been invested with the monastic habits by Iyasus-Mo'a, Takel-Haymanot decided to visit the ancient monastic centers in northern Ethiopia. He went to Debra-Damo and other places in Tigre where he remained for over ten years. In the meantime, he undertook further religious and monastic training and he apparently gained a much deeper insight into the history and ecclesiastical traditions of Ethiopia. He returned to Hayq with many followers after his long sojourn in Tigre.

Iyasus-Mo'a now advised him to go back to his native district of Shoa and start a new monastery of Debra Libanos which has become one of the most important religious centers of Christian Ethiopia. Similar monastic leaders were emerging during the same period in northern Ethiopia, and they established other cultural centres.

Abba Ewostatewos (d.1352) deserves particular mention. He was apparently born in Gar'alta, in central Tigre and he studied under his own uncle, Abba Daniel, who was the abbot of Debra Mariam there. He then left Gar'alta and began teaching in Sara's, in what is today the province of Eritrea. There he was joined by many students who later founded their own monastic centers in the area. Ewostatewos himself was persecuted by his colleagues in the Ethiopian church for insisting on the Biblical custom of the observance of the Sabbath, and he left his country for Egypt, Palestine, Cyprus, and Armenia where he died after fourteen years of self-exile.

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He was accompanied by some of his pupils on his foreign travels, and some of them managed to return to Ethiopia after his death. Together with their colleagues who had remained in northern Ethiopia, these followers of Ewostatewos effectively organized themselves and they become one of the two monastic houses of the Ethiopian Church. (The other is the House of Takla-Haymanot of Shoa) important cultural and educational centers like Debra Mariam of Qohain, and Dabra Bizan (on the eastern edge of the Hamasen plateau) were later founded by the followers of Abba Ewostatewos.

Thus, by the fifteenth century, numerous monastic centers had been established at a number of crucial points from northern Hamasen to Lake Zuway in the south, from the eastern edge of the Ethiopian plateau to beyond Lake Tana in the west. And, just like the ancient center founded by the nine Saints, the new monastic communities provided the only educational facilities available in the Christian highlands.