Ethiopian Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ethiopian Empire survived for more than seven hundred years, from the rise of Yekuno Amlak in 1270 to the military coup that ousted Haile Selassie in 1974. That is a span encompassing the Black Death, the Renaissance, the Transatlantic slave trade, two world wars, and the birth of the United Nations. Yet for most of that time, this state in the Horn of Africa outlasted every empire that tried to erase it. How did a kingdom built on a biblical origin myth endure crusades, jihads, Ottoman encirclement, and European colonialism? What held it together? And what finally brought it down? Those are the questions this story will answer.

• 2. A Dynasty from Solomon

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  Yekuno Amlak rose to the throne in 1270 AD after defeating the last Zagwe king at the Battle of Ansata. He was a young Amhara nobleman from Bete Amhara, backed by the Orthodox Church on a promise to make it a semi-independent institution. His legitimacy rested on a chain of descent reaching back to the biblical king Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The canonical account of that lineage was recorded in the Kebra Nagast, a 14th-century text that narrates how the Queen of Sheba visited Jerusalem, conceived a son with Solomon, and returned to Ethiopia to give birth to Menelik I, the dynasty's legendary founder.

  His successor Yagbe'u Seyon pushed for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church to gain its own metropolitan bishop from Alexandria while simultaneously protesting the Mamluk sultan's treatment of Christians in Egypt. Near the end of his reign, Yagbe'u decreed that each of his sons would rule for one year in rotation. The arrangement collapsed almost immediately. By 1299, one son named Wedem Arad had seized the throne outright, setting a pattern of dynastic instability that would recur across centuries.

• 3. Conquest and the Chronicles

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  Amda Seyon I, who reigned from 1314 to 1344, transformed the Ethiopian Empire from a politically fragile kingdom into the dominant force in the Horn of Africa. His campaigns generated the first detailed royal chronicle in Ethiopian history, a record that historian Richard Pankhurst called "a masterpiece in historical chronicling." That text, The Glorious Victories of Amda Seyon, was the first in an unbroken chronological series of royal biographies that would continue until modern times.

  The military record it preserved was striking. When the Mamluk Sultan an-Nasir Muhammad began persecuting Copts around 1320, Amda Seyon threatened to divert the Nile. When the sultan of Ifat seized and imprisoned an Ethiopian envoy, Amda Seyon invaded, killed the sultan, sacked the capital, ravaged the territory, and took slaves. The successor sultan Sabr ad-Din I rallied Muslim forces and launched a rebellion. Amda Seyon responded with another campaign, pushing as far as Adal, Dawaro, and Bali in what is now eastern Ethiopia. By the end of his reign the empire had more than doubled in size.

  Alongside the wars, his reign also produced the Fetha Nagast, or Law of the Kings, a legal code largely drawn from biblical principles that codified social and legal ideas of the time and remained in use until the early 20th century. That combination of military expansion and legal codification gave the empire a formal structure that would outlast Amda Seyon himself by generations.

• 4. Zara Yaqob and the Golden Age

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  After five emperors succeeded each other in five chaotic years, Zara Yaqob established himself on the throne in 1434 and presided over what became the empire's peak. His reign lasted until 1468 and brought together military dominance, religious consolidation, legal centralization, and an extraordinary flowering of literature. He personally authored two texts, Mats'hafe Berhan ("The Book of Light") and Mats'hafe Milad ("The Book of Nativity"), making him one of the few rulers in the empire's history to be both a sovereign and a writer.

  Zara Yaqob replaced regional warlords with administrative officials appointed directly by the crown. He also launched a campaign against survivals of pagan worship within the church. Those found to have worshipped pagan gods were publicly decapitated. He later founded the town of Debre Berhan after seeing what he interpreted as a miraculous light in the sky, ordering a church built on that site and constructing an extensive palace nearby.

  On the military front, he defeated and killed the Adalite Sultan Badlay ibn Sa'ad ad-Din at the Battle of Gomit. The next Adalite sultan, Muhammad ibn Badlay, agreed to pay Zara Yaqob an annual tribute. In 1445, following that victory at Gomit, the chronicles record that Zara Yaqob began garrisoning the provinces with Chewa regiments. The Ge'ez translation of the Fetha Negest was completed around 1450, ascribed to a scholar named Petros Abda Sayd. Queen Mother Eleni of Ethiopia, one of his wives, would go on to serve as regent to his 7-year-old grandson Eskender after the death of his son Baeda Maryam I in 1478.

• 5. Jihad, Portugal, and Survival

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  In 1527 a young imam named Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi rose to power in the Adal Sultanate. Two years later, armed with imported firearms, cannons, and Ottoman weaponry, his forces inflicted a heavy defeat on Emperor Dawit II and invaded Ethiopia. By the mid 1530s, most of the empire lay under Adalite occupation. The chronicles describe his men as having slain every adult Christian they encountered, carrying off youths and maidens to sell as slaves. Emperor Lebna Dengel fled from mountain fortress to mountain fortress until dying of natural causes at Debre Damo.

  His 18-year-old son Gelawdewos inherited a desperate situation. By 1540 he commanded a small force of around 70 men holding out in the highlands of Shewa. In 1541, four hundred Portuguese musketeers arrived at Massawa and advanced through Tigray, defeating larger Adalite contingents. Alarmed, the imam appealed to the Ottoman Empire, received 2,900 armed reinforcements, and led a joint attack on the Portuguese camp at Wofla. Two hundred Portuguese were killed, including their commander Cristovao da Gama. The survivors reached Gelawdewos in the Semien Mountains.

  The alliance of Gelawdewos and the surviving Portuguese turned the tide at the Battle of Wayna Daga, where the imam died and his army collapsed. In 1559, Gelawdewos himself was killed at the Battle of Fatagar; his severed head was paraded in Harar. But in the same engagement, his cousin Hamlamal sacked Harar and killed the Adalite Sultan Barakat ibn Umar Din. The last known member of the Walasma dynasty was executed. The Adal Sultanate, which had nearly extinguished the empire, was finished as a military power by 1573 when Emperor Sarsa Dengel defeated, captured, and executed Adalite Sultan Muhammad ibn Nasir at the Battle of Webi River.

• 6. Gondar and the Princes Era

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  In 1636, Emperor Fasilides founded Gondar as the empire's permanent capital. The city became a prosperous commercial center and the site of the royal complex Fasil Ghebbi. Around Lake Tana, 44 churches were established. The Gondarine period produced diptychs and triptychs, murals, and illuminated manuscripts, and notable philosophers including Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat. The reign of Iyasu the Great from 1682 to 1706 included the dispatching of embassies to Louis XIV's France and to Dutch India.

  That stability did not hold. After the deaths of Emperor Iyasu II in 1755 and Iyoas I in 1769, the empire entered the Zemene Mesafint, or Princes Era, which lasted from 1769 to 1855. During this period the Rases, roughly equivalent to English dukes, fought among themselves for control while emperors wielded only limited power over the area around Gondar. Religious conflict, both within the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and between the church and Muslims, was used as a pretext for repeated strife. The development of society and culture stagnated.

  Emperor Tewodros II ended the Zemene Mesafint and reunified the empire, but he died in 1868 during the British Expedition to Abyssinia, choosing suicide over surrender. His successor Yohannes IV defeated the Egyptians and the Mahdists before dying against the latter in 1889. It was Menelik II who would press the empire into its modern form, conquering territories including Kaffa, Welayta, and Harar, so that by 1898 Ethiopia had expanded into the boundaries it holds today.

• 7. Adwa and the Italian Wars

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  The First Italo-Ethiopian War turned on a translation dispute. Italy signed a treaty with the autonomous kingdom of Shewa, but the Italian and Amharic versions differed significantly. Italy believed it had absorbed Ethiopia as a protectorate; Menelik II repudiated that status in 1893. Italy declared war in 1895. At the Battle of Adwa in 1896, numerically superior Ethiopian forces equipped with modern imported weaponry decisively defeated the Italian army. The Treaty of Addis Ababa, signed in October of that year, forced Italy to recognize Ethiopian independence and fixed the borders of Eritrea. Delegations from France and the United Kingdom arrived shortly afterward to negotiate their own treaties.

  Four decades later Italy returned. In 1935, Italian troops under Marshal Emilio De Bono began the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Italian forces deployed sulfur mustard through bombs, airplanes, and powder spread on the ground, violating the Geneva Protocol Italy had signed seven years earlier. Reports recorded 150,000 chemical casualties, mostly from mustard gas. Addis Ababa fell on the 5th of May 1936, and an Italian victory was declared on the 9th of May. King Victor Emmanuel III was proclaimed Emperor of Ethiopia. The Italian East Africa colony merged Ethiopia with Eritrea and Italian Somaliland.

  On the 30th of June 1936, Haile Selassie traveled to Geneva to appeal to the League of Nations not to recognize the Italian occupation. He had fled on the 1st of May, taking a train to Djibouti and then a British ship to Jerusalem, where he prayed with Ethiopian monks at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He eventually settled in Bath, England, purchasing Fairfield House and living there under financial restriction. On the 10th of June 1940, Italy declared war on Britain and France. A British-supported campaign launched in January 1941 restored Selassie to the throne on the 5th of May 1941.

• 8. Empire's End

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  On the 27th of August 1942, Haile Selassie abolished the legal basis of slavery throughout the empire and imposed severe penalties including death for slave trading. Ethiopia became a charter member of the United Nations. On the 2nd of December 1950, UN General Assembly Resolution 390 (V) established the federation of Eritrea into Ethiopia, giving Eritrea its own constitution while Ethiopia managed its defense, finances, and foreign policy. In 1961, tensions between independence-minded Eritreans and Ethiopian forces produced the Eritrean War of Independence. By 1962, Selassie had declared Eritrea the fourteenth province of Ethiopia.

  In 1963, Selassie presided over the formation of the Organisation of African Unity, which established its headquarters in Addis Ababa. He was elected its first official chairperson. Along with Modibo Keita of Mali, he later helped negotiate the Bamako Accords, ending the border conflict between Morocco and Algeria. On the 13th of December 1960, while Selassie was on a state visit to Brazil, the Imperial Guard briefly proclaimed his eldest son Asfa Wossen as emperor. Regular army and police forces crushed the coup. The attempt was later described as the moment Ethiopians first questioned the power of the king to rule without popular consent.

  The government's failure to respond adequately to the 1973 Wollo famine, combined with high fuel prices from the 1973 oil crisis and widespread discontent among urban groups, triggered a revolt in February 1974. A group of military officers formed the Derg in June of that year. Selassie was deposed and imprisoned on the 12th of September 1974. General Aman Andom, a Sandhurst graduate, was named acting head of state; he was executed on the 23rd of November 1974 after quarreling with radical elements in the Derg. The monarchy was formally abolished in March 1975. Haile Selassie died on the 27th of August 1975 under circumstances that have never been fully explained, with his personal physician absent at the time of his death.