Ethiopian–Adal War

The Ethiopian–Adal War was fought from 1529 to 1543 between the Christian Ethiopian Empire and the Muslim Adal Sultanate of the northern Horn of Africa. Under Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, the forces of Adal overran most of the Ethiopian highlands, until a small Portuguese expedition helped the Ethiopians turn the tide. The war exhausted both states, changed the balance of power in the region for centuries, and is known in Arabic as the Futuh al-Habasha, the "conquest of Abyssinia".

In the early 1500s Adal had raided Ethiopian territory repeatedly. After its leader Imam Mahfuz was killed by the forces of the Ethiopian emperor Lebna Dengel, Adal went through a period of civil strife from which Ahmad emerged as its dominant figure. Contemporary chronicles do not explain his reasons for war. Historians have proposed several: resentment at paying tribute to a Christian state, a wish to end Ethiopian dominance over the region's Muslim sultanates, the wealth of the highlands, and a religious, end-times mood around the imam. His army drew on Harari, Somali and Afar fighters, with Arab and Turkish gunmen. Ethiopian tradition later explained the disaster as divine punishment for the emperor's pride.

Clashes began before 1529, but Ethiopian chronicles date the war from Ahmad's victory at Shimbra Kure in March of that year, where his cavalry outmanoeuvred a larger Ethiopian army. In 1531 he won decisive battles at Antukyah, where cannon fire panicked the imperial troops, and at Ayfars, and entered the imperial capital. Ethiopia had very few firearms at the time, and Muslim communities living inside the empire sometimes aided his advance.

Over the following years Adal forces pushed deep into the highlands, burning many churches and monasteries. In Tigray they defeated the local levies who gathered to defend Aksum, and destroyed the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion there; Ahmad's chronicler claimed more than 10,000 Christians were killed. Lebna Dengel spent his last years as a fugitive in his own country and died at the mountain monastery of Debre Damo on 2 September 1540, leaving the throne to his son Gelawdewos.

The war overlapped with a wider conflict between the Portuguese Empire and the Ottoman Empire. In February 1541 a Portuguese fleet landed about 400 musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama at Massawa on the Red Sea coast, after the Bahr Nagash, the ruler of Ethiopia's northern coastal province, persuaded the Portuguese viceroy to send them. Joined by Ethiopian troops, they won several engagements in 1542, wounding Ahmad at Antalo. Ahmad then asked the Ottomans for help, offering to become a vassal of Sultan Suleiman I, and received around 700 soldiers and ten field guns. With them he defeated the Portuguese in August 1542; da Gama was captured and, on 28 August, executed on Ahmad's orders. About half the company died, but the survivors joined Gelawdewos.

On 21 February 1543 the combined Ethiopian and Portuguese army defeated Adal at the Battle of Wayna Daga, near Lake Tana. Ahmad was shot, sources disagree by whom, and then beheaded by an Ethiopian cavalry commander. When his men learned of his death they fled, and the Adal occupation collapsed. In October 1544 Gelawdewos defeated and killed Ahmad's nephew Abbas, who had tried to hold the southern frontier provinces.

Both states emerged badly weakened. Large numbers of Harari had been killed, contributing to their decline, and the exhaustion of both sides opened the way for Oromo groups to migrate into large parts of the south and east. Some Ethiopian provinces, such as Fatagar, were lost for good. About 170 Portuguese soldiers settled in Ethiopia, but Gelawdewos rejected pressure to adopt Catholicism. Many historians see the war as a root of later hostility between Ethiopia and Somalia.

Our 1500 and 1530 maps show the Ethiopian kingdom in the highlands of the Horn of Africa, and the 1600 map the region after the war.