
Ethiopia History – Middle Age
In 1270 Yekuno Amlāk (“May the Lord be for him”) took over the kingdom and founded the new Solomonid dynasty, moving the seat of the kingdom even further south, from Lāstā to Scioa (Šawā). Soon his successors had to face a bitter and very long struggle against the Muslims of the South. Indeed, as the Aksumite kingdom expanded towards the interior of the plateau from north to south, Muslim propaganda also advancing towards the plateau from east to west based on the trading colonies of the Red Sea coast it had gained many SE populations. Ethiopian, which justly saw, also, in Islam the only possible sign of resistance to Christianity in the kingdom of the invading Abyssinians.) or Muslims to raid on the borders of Shia to reconstitute their independent state under the leadership of the first two sons of Sa‛d ad-dīn Aḥmed who had already taken refuge in Yemen (during the reign of the negus Yesḥaq in the first decades of the 15th century). The third son of Sa‛d ad-dīn, Sultan Badlāy ibn Sa‛d ad-dīn, referred to in the Ethiopian Chronicles as “the proud Badlāy”, continued the work of his brothers by fighting the negus Zar’a Yā‛qob, successor of Yesḥaq, but he was defeated and killed in a deeisiva battle in the region of Dawāro on December 26, 1445.
According to ebizdir, the battle of the Dawālo was followed by a truce. Sultan Muḥammad ibn Badlāy became a tributary of the negus; the capital of the Muslim state was moved from Ifat to Adal, to move it away from the Abyssinian border. But only a few years later, in 1479, the negus Eskender starts again in war against the sultan Shams ad-dīn ibn Muḥammad and is defeated in the Adal by the Muslims; while later, on the contrary, the sultan Muḥammad ibn Aẓhar ad-dīn leads an unfortunate campaign against the negus Lebna Dengel and is assassinated on his return by his officers.
In the meantime, in the Muslim state a hostile party to the old Walasma dynasty was being formed ‛which had worn out precisely in the wars against Christian Abyssinia. And on the death of Muḥammad ibn Aẓhar ad-dīn, next to the Walasma sultans ‛reduced to real rois fainéants, leaders succeeded one another who seized effective power. One of these leaders, Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm (called by the Abyssinians: Gr ā ñ “the Left-handed” and by the Muslims Ṣāḥ ib al – fat ḥ “the Conqueror”) killed the sultan Abū Bakr ibn Muḥammad, replacing him on the throne with another prince Walasma ‛Devoted to him he assumed for himself the title of im ā m and from Harar, the new capital of the Muslim state, he went to war against Abyssinia in 937 ègira (1530-1531).
This war led by Aḥmad ibn Ibrāhīm was the greatest attempt by Muslims to conquer Abyssinia. The Mancino victorious in several battles arrived with his troops as far as Tigrè and went down to Massawa (Meṣwā ‛) thus putting himself in relation with the opposite Arab side. But the same political character of Mancino’s successes, that is to say that of revenge of the secular enemy of the Christians of Abyssinia, and the restlessness of the Muslim troops who, composed largely of Danakal-Somali Bedouins, were more ready to raid than to conquer, they made the position of the Muslims less strong. A body of Portuguese troops under the command of Don Cristoforo da Gama, sent by the viceroy of the Indies to help the negus, gathered and framed a new Abyssinian army and the Mancino was defeated and killed in February 1543 (see gama, Christovam from).
Mancino was later succeeded, always with the title of imn ā m, by Nūr ibn Mugiāhid, who also nominally kept the sultans Walasma‛e on the throne of the Muslim state, who had gone to war against Abyssinia, won and killed the negus in battle Claudius (Galāwdēwos) in 1559. But even this victory was not lastingly useful to the Muslims, because at that time the Galla, who had lived for centuries in the lowland between Uebi and Juba and on the southern edge of the plateau at noon of Lake Regina Margherita, were pushed – probably from the pressure of the Somalis advancing towards the great rivers – to attack the Christian and Muslim peoples north of their territory to reach the plateau.
Since then the hostilities between Abyssinia and southern Muslims have been reduced to raids and coups deeds, and the last notable of these expeditions was that of Sultan Muḥammad ibn Naṣīr against the negus Malak Sagad in 1577. An attempt by the Turks to profit from a dissent between the chief of Tigrè and the negus to settle on the plateau ended with the Abyssinian victory of Abba Garima near Adua in 1578. Instead, both Abyssinians and Muslims had to defend themselves from the Galla invaders. The Muslim state, also divided by internal struggles between the various parties, was less able to resist. The new transport of the capital from Harar to the lowlands of the Aussa did not improve the conditions of the Muslim state in any way, on the contrary it reinforced the autonomist tendencies of the emirs of Harar and Zayla‛ and prepared the definitive division of the