The Ethiopian–Adal War, also known as the Abyssinian–Adal War and Futūḥ Al-Ḥabaša (Arabic: فتوح الحبش, lit. 'Conquest of Abyssinia'), was a war fought between the Christian Ethiopian Empire and the Muslim Adal Sultanate from 1529 to 1543. The Christian Ethiopian troops were drawn mainly from Tigray, Amhara, Gojjam, Begemder, Angot, Qeda, Gan, Medri Bahri, Gafat, and a certain numbers of Agaw troops At the closing of the war, the Christian forces were supported by the Portuguese Empire with no less than 400 musketeers. The Adal forces were composed of Harla/Harari, Somali, Afar as well as Arab and Turkish gunmen. Both sides would see the Maya mercenaries at times join their ranks. The conflict was followed shortly by the 16th century Ottoman–Ethiopian War.
Background
In the early 1500s, Ethiopia faced significant pressure from the Adalites, who, under Imam Mahfuz, had commenced threatening their territory. The period following his death at the hands of the Ethiopians under Lebna Dengel was marked by an extended military succession crisis in Adal known as the Adalite Civil War, which concluded with Ahmed taking control. The defeat of Mahfuz had inadvertently strengthened the Adalite leadership, leading to a situation where proponents of peace with the Ethiopians would be reduced to a minority.
Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi was a military leader of the medieval Adal Sultanate in the northern Horn of Africa. Between 1529 and 1543, he embarked on a campaign referred to as the Futuh al-Habasha, bringing the three-quarters of Christian Abyssinia under the control of the Muslim empire. With an army composed of Harari (Harla), and Somalis, al-Ghazi's forces came close to extinguishing the ancient Ethiopian kingdom, slaughtering any Ethiopian who refused to convert to Islam. Within the span of fourteen years the Imam was able to conquer the heartland of the country, wreaking havoc on the Christian nation.
However, the Abyssinians managed to secure the assistance of Cristóvão da Gama's Portuguese troops, and maintained their domain's autonomy. Both polities exhausted their resources and manpower in the process, resulting in the contraction of the two powers and altering regional dynamics for centuries to come. Many historians trace the origin of hostile Ethiopia–Somalia relations to this war. Some scholars also argue that this conflict proved the value, through their use on both sides, of firearms such as the matchlock musket, cannons, and the arquebus over traditional weapons.
Ethiopia's rulers had only recently gained access to firearms when the war began. Emperor Yeshaq I (1414–1429) was probably the first to acquire them, employing a former Turkish governor of Upper Egypt, Tabunga Muqrif, to train his men in their use, but for nearly a century afterward few such weapons reached the interior. By the 1520s Lebna Dengel possessed only two swivel guns and fourteen muskets recently purchased from the Turks, and almost all firearms in the country remained in royal hands.
Course of the war
Fighting between Ahmad and the Christian kingdom had in fact broken out before the war's conventional starting date at the Battle of Hubat. Christian sources record a raid into Muslim border territory in 1527 led by Dagalhan, a brother-in-law of Lebna Dengel, and the Futuh al-Habasha describes two further clashes: at Badeqe in September 1528, and at Shimbra Kure in March 1529, where Ahmad's forces met the Christian king's army directly for the first time. Both sides still treated these as raids for plunder rather than a war of conquest; it is the Ethiopian chronicles that mark 1529, the year of Shimbra Kure, as the start of what they call the persecution. At Shimbra Kure itself, Imam Ahmad's Adal troops defeated a larger Ethiopian contingent; the Harari cavalry, also known as the Malassay, proved instrumental, as the Abyssinian troops were outmaneuvered.
The victories that gave the followers of Imam Ahmad the upper hand came in 1531. His forces routed the Emperor's massed army at the Battle of Antukyah on 23 February, cannon fire panicking the Ethiopian soldiers at the outset, one of the first shells cutting an olive tree in two and sending the Christian soldiers tumbling over one another as they fled, and followed it with a second victory at Ayfars on 31 March; the Adal army entered Barara, the imperial capital, that April or May.
Muslim communities within Christian territory helped Ahmad's advance multiple times. At Wis, a Muslim trading town in northern Sawa, the local population gave Ahmad a large quantity of gold when he passed through. He then took it for the war effort rather than pass it on to his wife Bati del Wambara as first offered. The same town later received three bronze and iron cannon carried overland from Zayla by camel. At Barara, south of the Awash, the Muslim population welcomed Ahmad and asked him for soldiers to protect them from Lebna Dengel's army while telling him where to find the monastery of Dabra Libanos and the royal treasury at the palace of Badeqe. Some Muslim inhabitants of Badeqe later collaborated with him and handed over treasure that had been intended for the Emperor.
When the war turned against him, Lebna Dengel placed Dagalhan at the head of his army. According to Ahmad's chronicler, Dagalhan found himself unequal to the task and privately asked his wife, Wayzaro Amata Watin, to speak with her brother the Emperor so that he might be relieved of command. He told her that if he were killed she would be left a widow and their children orphans, but asked her not to reveal that the request had come from him. She did so in secret, and Dagalhan was in due course replaced by another officer, Eslam Sagad, who was killed in battle.
Lebna Dengel narrowly escaped capture at the Battle of Amba Sel in Amhara on 27 October and spent his remaining years moving from place to place within his own realm, finally taking refuge at the isolated monastery of Debre Damo, where he died on 2 September 1540. These victories allowed the Adalites to enter the Ethiopian Highlands, where they began to sack and burn numerous churches, including Atronsa Maryam, where the remains of several Emperors had been interred.
Imam Ahmad defeated the armies of Agame and Tembien and marched towards Aksum to capture the historical Ethiopian city to solidify his rule in Ethiopia, echoing Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople, but the locals of Tigray had all assembled to defend their holy city. The Imam defeated and killed a large number of them as Arab Faqīh states, "Not a single one managed to slip away. They killed them in the forts, in the valleys and in the gorges. The ground was so thickly covered with their corpses, that it was impossible to walk in that place because of the dead bodies." He estimates that over 10,000 Christians were killed. The Imam reached Aksum and besieged the city, whereupon he destroyed the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion. During his invasion of the Tigray region Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi visited the tomb of Najashi in Negash to pay his respects.
Geographically isolated from the main theatre of war, the country of the Bahr Nagash was among the last parts of the empire to face the Imam's armies directly. Men from Särayé had nonetheless joined the imperial forces fighting Ahmad further south. During those engagements, Bahr Negash Zä-Wängel, who held the port of Dehono, and the governor of Hamasén both died in battle against the Adäl army in Damot, and the ruler of Särayé was taken captive.
Having subdued the rest of the empire, the Imam turned northward in 1535, marching into Tegray and seizing Aksum before sending part of his army across the Märäb River into Särayé. Seeking to maintain local cooperation, the Adäl commanders installed Tédros, a relative of a prominent Christian family, as a subordinate governor under Vizier 'Abbas, the Imam's nephew. Local resistance proved fierce. A nobleman named Täsfa Le'ul killed Tédros and then 'Addolé, one of the Imam's senior commanders, whose severed head was despatched to Emperor Gelawdewos as a token of defiance. The Emperor marked the occasion with public celebration. The Imam retaliated by marching into Särayé in force, routing the defenders and putting Täsfa Le'ul and his sons to death. He then reorganised the administration of the region, appointing Täsfawi, the brother of the slain Tédros, as provincial governor and a local man named 'Afra as Bahr Negash.
The Adäl hold on Tegray lasted roughly a year before disease, supply failures and a conversion crisis within Ahmad's army prompted a withdrawal. The destruction left behind was severe. When the Portuguese soldier Miguel de Castanhoso reached the summit in 1541 he found churches burnt and the countryside around Debarwa, the Bahr Negash's seat of power, entirely abandoned, the inhabitants having fled into the hills with their livestock. Monks who had spent the occupation in hiding emerged to greet the Portuguese column carrying crosses and praying aloud.
Dawit's son and future emperor Prince Menas was captured by the forces of Imam Ahmad; the Empress was unable to react as she was besieged in the capital. The Portuguese forces would also be ambushed by the Adalites at the Battle of Massawa becoming the first encounter between the two groups. In February 1541, the Portuguese navy landed in Ethiopia 400 musketeers led by Cristóvão da Gama via Massawa, a port in Medri Bahri. The Portuguese went on to win battles, such as the Battle of Baçente, Jarte, Hill of the Jews which halted Adal's expansion. The turning point of the war seems to have begun at that moment.
The Portuguese besieged and took Amba Sanayti in central Tigray in February 1542, their first action after wintering with Empress Sabla Wangel at Debre Damo. In April they met Ahmad's army a second time at Antalo in Wajirat, the first engagement of his career against an enemy equipped with cannon, in which Ahmad was wounded and his horse killed under him. He sent an urgent appeal to Zabid for reinforcement, promising in return to become a vassal of Sultan Suleiman I, and Ottoman forces from Zabid answered with ten field guns and 700 soldiers. The Portuguese, reduced by the loss of fifty to a hundred men, spent the rains of 1542 at Wofla with the Empress, and da Gama sent Ayres Dias to open contact with Gelawdewos. In August they crossed the Tekeze into Semien, killed the Muslim commander Sidi Muhammad and restored a captured stronghold to its Beta Israel lords. A reinforced Muslim army caught up with them soon after; on 28 August 1542, Cristóvão da Gama was wounded, captured and killed along with thirteen of his men on Ahmad's own order, possibly at Wofla itself. About half the Portuguese company died in the fighting, but the survivors made their way to Semien and joined Gelawdewos in October 1542.
The Ethiopians and the Portuguese led by the Emperor scored a decisive victory in the Battle of Wayna Daga, fought at Zantara, also known as Gran Bar, within the district of Wayna Daga near Lake Tana. Accounts differ on who fired the fatal shot. Whiteway's account, drawing on Castanhoso, credits a Portuguese musketeer named João de Castilho, who had charged alone into the Muslim lines and died in the attempt; the Encyclopaedia Aethiopica's entry on Cristóvão da Gama instead follows Bermudez in crediting Pero de Lião, one of da Gama's own servants, with mortally wounding Ahmad by musket. By either account, the wounded Imam was beheaded on 21 February 1543 by an Ethiopian cavalry commander, Azmach Calite. His son Muhammad was taken prisoner at the same battle. Once the Imam's soldiers learned of his death, they fled the battlefield. The death of Imam Ahmad and the victory at Wayna Daga caused a collapse of Ahmad's forces and forced an Adalite retreat from Ethiopia.
Galawdewos's own campaign against Ahmad drew more than 100,000 people in total. Castanhoso, however, described one critical moment in the fighting when the actual fighting force numbered only 20,000 infantry and 2,000 cavalry, the rest being camp followers and women.