The earliest notice of Enfraz was in the 14th century, when Gebre Iyasu, a disciple of
Ewostatewos, founded a monastery there. The Adal Imam camped there during the
rainy season of 1543, after he defeated
Cristovão da Gama at the
Battle of Wofla. The Emperor
Menas later used it as his camp during the rainy season of 1559, and thereafter it was favored as an administrative center by the succeeding Emperors:
Sarsa Dengel spent the rainy season there three times between 1571 and 1580, then every rainy season for four years beginning with 1585, eventually building a stone castle there, possibly modelled on the
Ottoman fort at
Debarwa. The 17th century philosipher
Zera Yacob settled there on his way to
Shewa in order to escape imperial authority after
Atse Susenyos converted to catholicism and ordered his subjects to do the same. He found a patron, a rich merchant named Habta Egziabher (known as Habtu), and married a maid of the family. Yacob became the teacher of Habtu's two sons, including
Walda Heywat, after which he lived a fulfilled family life in Emfraz and remained there until his death. Despite the move of the capital to
Gondar, Enfraz still retained some importance in the following years. When the European traveler
Charles Jacques Poncet visited the town around 1700, he compared it favorably to Gondar. He describes how it was an important marketplace for
slaves and
civet, favored by Ethiopian
Muslims because there they could openly practice their religion, unlike in Gondar. The Emperor
Tewoflos held his coronation in Enfraz a few years later. While over the next fifty years Enfraz declined in importance when
James Bruce visited the town he remarked on its trade in blue Surat cloth. Records at the Nordic Africa Institute website records that by 1967 the
Ethiopian Telecommunications Company had a pay telephone station in this town, but no telephone subscribers. == Demographics ==