By Alex Wodzicki
This is part three of a multi-part series on the history of Ethiopia. If you haven’t read it already, be sure to check out last week’s post on the Medieval Kingdom of Ethiopia.
Muslim Arab merchants had arrived in the highlands of Ethiopia during the tenth and eleventh centuries, and through their dominance of the ivory and slave trade, came to dominate the economy of the region. In the early twelfth century, a number of merchant settlements came together under the leadership of a single family, forming the Sultanates of Shoa and later Ifat. These sultanates would soon came into conflict with the powerful and united Kingdom of Ethiopia under the Zagwe and Solomonid dynasties. The small and disunited Muslim sultanates proved to be no match for the Ethiopian army, and between 1320 and 1340 they were defeated and their territories integrated into the expanding Ethiopian Kingdom. However, the defeated rulers of the Sultanate of Ifat were able to escape to the Harer plateau, where they founded the Sultanate of Adal and set about rebuilding Muslim power in the Horn of Africa.
The Sultanate of Adal and the Kingdom of Ethiopia would be at war for most of the fifteenth century, mostly in the form of raids and counter-raids in each other’s territory. Adal found powerful allies in the pastoral Somali nomads to their east, who formed an increasingly important part of the Muslim armies, but in general a rough balance of power prevailed in the region during the fifteenth century. This changed in 1526, when Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi became the ruler of Adal. He sought to end the conflict with Ethiopia by conquering and destroying the Kingdom, and called a jihad, or holy war, in order to accomplish it. Armed with modern firearms supplied by the Ottoman Empire, the Muslim armies were able to decisively defeat the Ethiopians at the 1529 battle of Shimbra Kure. The unity of the nascent Ethiopian Empire had been contingent on the power of their standing army, and upon its defeat, the Kingdom collapsed into chaos. The Adal army overran the country, looting and destroying settlements and churches and establishing Muslim rule in the South of the country. In desperation, the Ethiopian King Lebna Dengel called for aid from Christian Europe, especially the Portuguese, who had been in contact with the Ethiopians for decades. In 1543 a small Portuguese force arrived in Ethiopia and helped inflict a devastating defeat on the Sultanate of Adal at the battle of Wayna Daga. Ahmad was killed, and his poorly consolidated territorial gains were rapidly reversed under the leadership of the Ethiopian King Galadewos. Ethiopia had survived, but the Kingdom was devastated by decades of warfare and destruction. This weakness allowed Oromo pastoralists to migrate northwards into Ethiopian territory, and it is their conflict with the Ethiopian Kingdom that we will turn to in next week’s installment of this story.