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Founding
Founding of Medri Bahri
Eritrean kingdom from 1448 to 1580
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Founding
Eritrean kingdom from 1448 to 1580
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Medri Bahri or Mereb Melash was a semi-autonomous province of the Ethiopian Empire, located north of the Mereb River, in the Eritrean Highlands, primarily comprising the historical regions of Hamasien and Seraye. It was governed by the Bahr Negash. The province originally held authority over coastal territories, including the port of Hirgigo and Massawa, but lost control of the coast to the Ottomans in 1557.
The highlands of Hamasien and Seraye had been part of the ancient Aksumite kingdom, whose influence reached the Red Sea port of Adulis. After Aksum's decline in the seventh century, waves of Beja and then Agaw peoples moved into the region, before it came to be dominated by Tigrinya-speaking communities under the early Solomonic dynasty. From at least the twelfth century the coastal region was ruled by local governors bearing various titles. In the mid-fifteenth century, Emperor Zara Yaqob extended the Bahr Negash's authority over Hamasen, Seraye, Shiré and Bur. Control of the trade routes linking the highlands to the coast brought the office into repeated conflict with the Ottomans during the sixteenth century, and Bahr Negash Yeshaq was killed fighting alongside them at the Battle of Addi Qarro in 1578.
By the seventeenth century, the administration of the province was by hereditary local dynasties, most prominently the family of Hab Sellus. Fragmentation of authority between the rival families of Hamasen took place during the Zemene Mesafint era, until the province once again regained its importance in the empire through Yohannes IV, who protected it against an Egyptian invasion at the Battle of Gura in 1876, and subsequently appointed Ras Alula Engeda its governor. Italian occupation followed Alula's recall in 1889, and the territory became the core of the colony of Italian Eritrea in 1890.
Below the Bahr Negash, certain settlements were allowed to govern themselves, and highland communities followed their own traditional laws, administered by councils of elders. Gold, ivory and enslaved people passed along the province's trade routes, and weapons imported helped resist the Ottomans and later the Egyptians.
The territory that would later form Medri Bahri was part of the heartland of the ancient Aksumite Empire. Archaeological evidence shows that the Hamasen highlands had been an area of economically flourishing culture since around 800 BC, with a settlement density among the highest on the African continent, linked to the so-called Ona culture. The name Hamasen itself may be ancient, with a possible identification with MSW ("Amasu"), a province registered in the Egyptian "Lists of Foreign People" of Pharaoh Thutmosis III, ca. 1458 BC. In Aksumite times, Hamasen appears in a pre-Christian fourth-century inscription of King Ezana, who received the homage of the Metin peoples there after subduing the coastal kingdom of Gabaz.
Seraye, the southernmost of the three highland provinces, also has a documented Aksumite presence. A rock inscription at Sehuf Emni, Qwahayn, in Epigraphic South Arabian script and palaeographically comparable to Ezana's trilingual inscriptions, testifies to the region's role in Aksumite times, and Aksumite-period church foundations survive at Enda Mikael in Debarwa, on the border of Hamasen and Seraye. According to the historian Sergew Hable Selassie, the name of the Mareb River itself may derive from the South Arabian settlers who named it after the famous dam of Marib in Yemen, and "Serae" (Seraye) is similarly linked to the South Arabian Sarawat Mountains.According to written and oral traditions, around the end of the 13th and early 14th century, the former Balaw (of Beja origin) and Kunama inhabitants of Seraye were replaced by the Adkama Malga, Agaw immigrants from Lasta, who assumed the Tigrinya language and played a dominant role in the area until the 18th century, when they came into conflict with the Daqqi Tassem of Hamasen.
Adulis remained the principal Aksumite port on the Red Sea throughout this period. The Egyptian merchant and monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who visited the port in 523, described its trade, together with that of the Ethiopian and Nubian interior, with India, Ceylon and other regions in his geographical treatise, the Christian Topography. According to his account, the Aksumites at the time required all vessels passing through that part of the Red Sea to pay for the right of passage and call at Adulis.
After the decline of Aksum around the seventh century AD, parts of Hamasen came under the control of Beja and other Muslim tribes, possibly responsible for the first exploitation of gold mines in the region. During the last decades of the Zagwe dynasty and the first period of the restored Solomonic dynasty, Agaw groups linked with the Zagwe fled from Lasta into Hamasen, and the ancestors of the Bogos (Bilin) people also migrated through Hamasen at this time. These population movements left traces in many Cushitic-origin toponyms in the region, including the name of Debarwa itself.
Trade routes departing from Massawa and then following the course of the Anseba river northward connected Hamasen with the lowlands of the Sudan. The local Tigrinya groups of Hamasen kept their own petty leaders but were possibly tributary to the maekele bahr (lit. "the middle of the coast"), as the governor of the provinces between the Ethiopian highlands and the Red Sea is called in a series of local 13th- to 15th-century documents from the "Golden Gospel" of Debre Libanos of Ham.
Relations between the Aksumite kingdom and Arabia turned to open conflict in the seventh century. After pirates from the Kingdom of Axum sacked Jeddah in 702, Arab forces retaliated by seizing a string of harbors on the opposite shore, including Suakin, where they dispossessed the Beja who held it, along with Massawa, then still only an anchorage, and the Dahlak islands. Arab control of the ports sharply reduced Aksum's foreign trade and is thought to have spurred the empire's expansion southward into the interior instead, coinciding with growing Beja pressure on the highlands as Beja groups moved into Hamasen from the late seventh or early eighth century.
A tributary relationship with the coast nonetheless outlasted the loss of direct control for some time. The Arab historian al-Yaqubi, writing in 872, described the Najashi's kingdom as still reaching the sea and encompassing the Dahlak islands. Al-Masudi, writing in 935, likewise reported that Dahlak and the neighbouring coastal plain remained tributary to Ethiopia, and that the Najashi had concluded a treaty of friendship with the Yemeni king Ibrahim bin Ziyad, under which ships from Zabid traded freely with Ethiopia. Ibn Hawqal, writing in 977–78, similarly described Zeila as under Ethiopian Christian rule and at peace with its Muslim trading partners. This tributary relationship broke down amid the political fragmentation of the Zagwe era, during which separatist dynasties took control of both Dahlak and Zeila.
Both Hamasen and Seraye "passed, like much of the northern highlands, under Zagwe suzerainty" according to Taddesse Tamrat, confirmed by a land grant of the Zagwe king Lalibela preserved in the monastery of Debre Libanos of the north. The Zagwe pursued a deliberate strategy for annexing the regions beyond the Mareb River, at one point resettling Agaw groups from Wallo there. The title baher nagasi for a governor of the coast appears even in a land grant of the Zagwe king Tatadim, who ruled during the eleventh century, in a grant issued in the twelfth year of his reign to the church of Ura Masqal; the document threatened excommunication against the seyyuman ("appointed ones") of Agama, Bur, and Sarawe, as well as an officer bearing the title of baher nagasi, described as viceroy of the coast.
The fall of the Zagwe dynasty around 1270 and its replacement by the Solomonic dynasty "sparked off a series of population movements from the Lasta region to north-eastern Tigray, Akala-Guzai, Hamasen, and Saraye," resulting in a struggle for power between newcomers and original inhabitants, and the eventual transfer of political supremacy from the Christian Balaw tribes to new Tigrinya-speaking settlers. The Balaw tribes were of Beja origin and had dominated the Eritrean plateau, including probably some districts south of the Mareb, before this transformation. Local genealogical tradition traces the early Solomonic-period Tigrinya settlement of Hamasen and Akkele Guzai to a single legendary founder remembered as negui Meroni.
The office of the Bahr Negash had roots stretching back to the Aksumite period. The coast around Massawa is recorded as under Beja domination by the 8th century, before the rise of the Dahlak sultanate in the 11th century made the port the main link between the Muslim-controlled Red Sea coast and the Christian highlands.
Local tradition records the existence of a ruler called the shum bahri (also ieyyuma baher, meaning "ruler of the sea"), who controlled trade routes between Massawa and the Christian highlands, and who may originally have been a prefect appointed by the Aksumites. Even after the Sultanate of Dahlak became independent, its sultan continued to be referred to by the Ethiopians using the Aksumite title ieyyuma baher, reflecting the persistence of Ethiopian institutional memory over the coast.
During the reign of Amda Seyon I (r. 1314-1344), the northern maritime provinces were brought under tighter imperial control. When a rebellion broke out in Tigre in 1328, the king placed one of his sons over the region with the title of maekele bahr, meaning "between the rivers or seas", covering the territory between the Mareb River and the Red Sea, a title already used in the Zagwe period and probably the precursor of the later Bahr Negash title.
Amda Seyon was deeply concerned about the dangers of Muslim power on the Eritrean coast. His recent campaigns against the Muslims of Ifat and eastern Shawa were resented by their fellow Muslims in the north, who may have cooperated with the rebellious army in northern Tigre. This may have provided an immediate reason for his expedition to the region. A land grant issued by Amda Seyon to the monastery of Debre Hayq Estifanos states: "...And I, King Amda Seyon, went to the sea of Eritrea. When I reached there, I mounted on an elephant and entered the sea. And I took up my arrow and spears and killed my enemy, and I saved my people.
Despite this appointment, the maekele bahr did not yet constitute a formal administrative unit; rather, it remained a descriptive geographic term for the region between the Mareb River and the Red Sea, governed by local chiefs recognized by the Solomonic kings until the time of Zara Yaqob. By the same year, two named officials in Hamasen already appear in the sources as local rulers.
At least four Ethiopian monarchs of this period are recorded granting land to monasteries in the far north. Amda Seyon issued a land charter in favor of the monastery of Debre Libanos. Sayfa Ar'ad (r. 1342–1370) allocated two areas in Seraye to the convent of Abba Madhanina Egzi'e of Bankwal. Emperor Dawit granted an estate at Karnessem in Hamasen to the monastery of Debre Bizen, while Yeshaq I gave a stretch of land in Seraye to that of Debre Abbay. Contact between the court and the northern provinces is further suggested by another medieval text, which records that the courtiers of Emperor Dawit I (r. 1380–1409) included men from Hamasen, Seraye and neighbouring districts.
Before Zara Yaqob's formal administrative reforms, Yeshaq I (r. 1414–1430) had already extended imperial presence along the coast by settling a military regiment at Massawa in 1417.
The older title maekele bahr ("middle of the coast"), used during the Zagwe period and still in use during the reign of Amda Seyon, was abolished by Zara Yaqob, who sought to unify the administrative system of his kingdom. According to historian Richard Pankhurst, it was during the reign of Emperor Zara Yaqob (r. 1433–1468) when the title Bahr Negash ("Ruler of the sea") appeared for the first time. In a reform datable to between 1436 and 1439, he "increased the power of the bahr nagash" and raised him "much above" all the shums, and he was given authority over the rulers of Shire as well as control over the shum of Saraye, the two kantibas of Hamasen, and the shum of Bur. However, according to the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, it was his Zara Yaqob's son, Emperor Baeda Maryam I, who subsequently established the specific title of Bahr Negash for the three northern provinces of Angot, Qeda, and Tigray.
To strengthen the imperial presence in the area, Zara Yaqob also established a military colony consisting of Maya warriors from the south of his realm. These settlers were believed to have terrified the local population, and it was said that the "earth trembled at their arrival" and the inhabitants "fled the country in fear".
In 1449/50, only one year after establishing the military colonies on the plateau, Zara Yaqob began construction of a seaport at Girar on the mainland opposite Massawa, intending a more permanent occupation of the coastal districts. This activity was met with hostility from the local Muslim population and led to armed conflict. It is reported that the islands of Massawa and Dahlak were pillaged in 1464/5, and that the Qadi of the islands lost his life in the encounter. However, a lasting occupation of the coast ultimately did not succeed.
The capital of the Bahr Negash was Debarwa, located next to the sources of the Mareb River; he occasionally moved to other district centres, including the nearby Addi Baro, which has sometimes been mistakenly identified as the original seat of the office.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Medri Bahri”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.