Ethiopian Empire

A church cut downwards

Drafted from Tamrat, Oxford Studies in African Affairs (1972)formation

At Lalibela in the Ethiopian highlands there are eleven churches that were not built. They were excavated: a trench cut down into solid volcanic rock to isolate a block, and the block then carved from the top down into a building, complete with roof, windows, columns, arches, doorways and interior chambers, with drains and a tunnel system connecting them.

Bete Giyorgis, the best known, is a cross in plan, about twelve metres deep, standing in a pit of its own making. It is a single stone.

They are conventionally attributed to the Zagwe king Lalibela, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, and are still in use. Priests serve in them daily and have for eight hundred years.

What it took to make one

Eleven monolithic churches, cut down into the rock from the surface, with the interiors hollowed out afterwards — columns, aisles, vaults and windows carved in place out of the living stone, so that every cubic metre removed had to be carried up and out.

There is no scaffolding on a building like that, no correcting a mistake, and no possibility of building up what you cut away wrongly. The work runs in one direction only.

A dynasty that could commission eleven of them was directing organised labour at a scale comparable to the Aksumite stelae four centuries earlier, and the comparison is worth making because it points somewhere. Aksum put that capacity into royal tombs. The Zagwe put it into churches — publicly usable buildings, laid out as a representation of Jerusalem, with a stream beside them named the Jordan.

The difference between what a state builds for its dead kings and what it builds for its congregations is a statement about what had changed in four hundred years.

The usurpers who built it

The Zagwe ruled the highlands from about 1137 and were overthrown in 1270. They were not Aksumite in origin — they came from the Agaw of Lasta, further south — and the tradition that replaced them spent the following six centuries calling them usurpers.

That is worth holding against the buildings. The dynasty the official tradition treats as an interruption is the one that produced the most remarkable thing anybody in the region ever made; the dynasty that called them usurpers produced nothing of the kind. The Zagwe held the state, the church, the script and the liturgy for a hundred and thirty years, and cut eleven churches out of a mountain.

Between the end of Aksum around 940 and the Zagwe in 1137 there is very little anybody can say. What is not in doubt is that the church, the script, the liturgical language and the highland Christian kingdom carried through the gap without a break, and that what came out the other side was recognisably the same civilisation with a different family on the throne.

The Kebra Nagast

Drafted from Tamrat, Oxford Studies in African Affairs (1972)expansion

In 1270 Yekuno Amlak overthrew the last Zagwe king. The dynasty he founded ruled for seven hundred and four years, on the most elaborate genealogical claim any dynasty anywhere has advanced.

The queen of Sheba visited Solomon. She bore his son. The son, Menelik, went to Jerusalem as a young man and came back with the Ark of the Covenant, which the priests' sons had taken and which has been in Ethiopia ever since. Therefore the kings of Ethiopia are Solomon's line, the country is the new Israel, and the church at Aksum where the Ark rests is the reason the emperors were crowned there.

The text that assembles all of this is the Kebra Nagast — the Glory of Kings — compiled in the fourteenth century, and it is a national epic that is also a constitutional document.

What the site counts

The claim was invoked continuously for six centuries and then written into the constitution of 1955, which reserved the throne to the line of Haile Selassie, descendant of Menelik I, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba.

A twentieth-century constitution citing the Book of Kings as a title deed.

A claim on something that may not have existed

That last point is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a curiosity, because it tests the rule.

There is no evidence outside the Hebrew Bible for the queen of Sheba. Whether she was Sabaean, Ethiopian, both or neither is argued about, and the South Arabian inscriptions — which are numerous, and which name a great many Sabaean rulers — do not contain her.

Which does not matter in the least to the force of the claim, and that is the interesting part. A dynasty ruled a country for seven hundred years, and was still ruling it in the age of aircraft, on a descent from a woman nobody can demonstrate existed, by a king whose historicity is itself thinly attested, via a son who is known only from the story. The claim did the work regardless. What a legitimising genealogy has to be is believed, and it has to be unfalsifiable, and this one was both by construction.

What it was for

Not antiquarianism. The Solomonic claim did specific work.

It delegitimised the Zagwe retrospectively, which is why the dynasty that made it needed it. It made the church and the crown a single project, which is Taddesse Tamrat's subject. And it gave a Christian kingdom surrounded by Muslim powers a story about itself that was not about being surrounded — the new Israel, holding the Ark, rather than a highland remnant cut off since Egypt fell in the 640s.

It was tested, four hundred years later, when the surrounding nearly finished it.

A city of tents

Drafted from Tamrat, Oxford Studies in African Affairs (1972)peak

For five centuries Ethiopia had no capital. The emperor moved, and the court moved with him, and the court was enormous.

Portuguese visitors in the 1520s describe it: a camp of tents laid out to a fixed plan with the emperor's enclosure at the centre, the churches in their appointed places, the great officers ranged around, streets and markets, and a population they estimated in the tens of thousands. It stayed somewhere for a few months, ate the district, exhausted the firewood, and moved.

For most of its history this empire had no capital city at all, and that is the single most distinctive fact about how it was governed.

Why a mobile court

Because governing the highlands meant being present in them.

The provinces were held by hereditary lords and by the church, and both were loyal in proportion to how recently the emperor had been there. A court that travelled was a court that collected its own tribute, judged its own cases, and reminded a governor annually that the crown existed. Taddesse Tamrat treats the itinerant court as the administration itself rather than as an eccentricity of it.

The costs were exactly what they look like. The camp destroyed the country it passed through. It could not accumulate anything: no archive, no treasury building, no permanent institution of state beyond the church.

The gult

The fiscal arrangement that went with it was the gult: a grant of the right to collect the tribute of a district, made to a church, a monastery, a soldier or an official, in place of a salary.

It is the same instrument, arrived at independently, that the Byzantines called pronoia and the Ottomans called timar — pay a man with the revenue of a district rather than with money, because you have districts and you do not have money. Revocable in principle. Hereditary in practice, especially where the grantee was a monastery, because taking land back from a church is a different proposition from taking it back from a man.

The chewa regiments — settled soldiers on granted land, garrisoning the provinces and answering to the emperor rather than to the local lord — are the military half of the same idea, and they sat alongside the levies the provincial lords raised. The tension between those two is most of Ethiopian political history: an emperor who could hold the chewa governed, and one who could not was governed by the men who raised the levies.

The mountain

The emperor named his heir, and the instrument that made the designation stick is one nobody else thought of.

Male relatives of the emperor were confined on a mountain — Amba Geshen in the medieval period, Wehni later — a flat-topped massif reachable by a single guarded path. They lived there in reasonable comfort, with servants and priests, and they could not leave and could not conspire. When an emperor died, the designated heir was brought down and the others stayed.

It is worth comparing with the alternatives, because the problem was universal and the solutions mostly were not solutions. The Ottoman answer to the same question was fratricide: the successful son had his brothers strangled, by law, for a century and a half. The usual answer everywhere else was a civil war every generation. Ethiopia's answer was a comfortable prison on top of a mountain, and it worked for several hundred years.

What it could not survive was the collapse of imperial authority after Gondar. Once the regional lords were stronger than the crown, they took to fetching princes off the mountain themselves and installing them, which turned the instrument inside out: the mountain had been where the crown kept its rivals, and became a shop where the nobility went to pick an emperor.

Fourteen years

Drafted from Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (2002)contraction

In 1529 Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, imam of the sultanate of Adal in the lowlands to the east, beat the Ethiopian army at Shimbra Kure and then spent fourteen years taking the highlands apart.

He had Ottoman matchlockmen and artillery. The Ethiopians had cavalry, spears and a country they could not defend from a force that could shoot into it. By the middle of the 1530s most of the plateau was his, the emperor was a fugitive moving between mountains, and the churches and monasteries were being burned — including the treasuries where the kingdom's manuscripts were kept, which is why so much less survives from before 1530 than from after it.

Ethiopian tradition calls him Gragn, the left-handed.

Two interventions

In 1541 four hundred Portuguese musketeers landed at Massawa under Cristóvão da Gama, Vasco da Gama's son. They had come because an Ethiopian embassy had spent years asking, and because Portugal wanted a Christian ally behind the Ottoman position in the Red Sea.

They were badly mauled and da Gama was captured and executed. The survivors joined the emperor Gelawdewos, and in February 1543 at Wayna Daga near Lake Tana Ahmad was shot and killed and his army dispersed within days.

The shape of it is what makes it worth dwelling on. An Ottoman-equipped Muslim army from the Horn nearly destroyed a Christian African kingdom, and was stopped by four hundred Portuguese musketeers who had sailed round the Cape of Good Hope to get there. Two of the largest powers of the sixteenth century fought a proxy war in the Ethiopian highlands, four thousand miles from either of them, over a country most people in both empires could not have placed.

What it cost

Nearly everything, and then the state came back.

The kingdom was reduced to a fraction of itself and never recovered the south-eastern provinces. Adal collapsed too, exhausted, within a generation. And into the emptied country came the Oromo, moving north in a large migration through the second half of the century, settling in territory both states had just finished ruining and permanently changing the demography and eventually the politics of the highlands.

That is the outcome of the fourteen years that mattered most and it belongs to neither side of the war.

Fourteen years, and a century to recover

The war lasted from 1529 to 1543 and the recovery took the rest of the century.

A state that loses most of its territory in fourteen years, holds a remnant in the mountains, and is back at something like its former extent a hundred years later has been through something the usual vocabulary of rise and fall does not describe. It did not decline and it was not destroyed. It was very nearly killed and then was not, and what came out was poorer, more dependent on the church, and carrying the knowledge that a neighbour with firearms could do that again.

The Ottoman-supplied matchlock is the whole difference. Ethiopia's answer was to find a supplier of its own, which is why the Portuguese were in the country at all, and why Jesuits followed the musketeers and spent the next century trying to convert the emperor — with enough success, briefly, to cause a civil war of a different kind.

Two caltrops

Drafted from Bermudes, The Portuguese Expedition to Abyssinia in 1541-1543 (1902)contraction

Two of the four hundred Portuguese who landed at Massawa in 1541 wrote the campaign up, and between them they are the only eyewitness account of the war that decided whether the Ethiopian highlands stayed Christian.

Miguel de Castanhoso was a soldier in the force. João Bermudes said he was patriarch of Ethiopia, probably was not, and wrote a version in which he features more. Whiteway printed both and set the Ethiopian and Arabic accounts against them at the end of each chapter, which is the right way to read them.

What arrived in the winter

The Portuguese beat Ahmad ibn Ibrahim twice in the first season — in the first battle he was wounded by a matchlock ball — and Castanhoso's account of what he did about it is the clearest statement anywhere of what the war was actually about.

Finding himself, in Castanhoso's phrase, with his people dead or cowed, Ahmad sent secretly to the Ottoman commander at Zabid across the Red Sea, told him to regard him as a vassal of the Grand Turk, and sent much money. Nine hundred Turks came, all arquebusiers, very fine and good men, with ten field bombards — because, Castanhoso notes, Ahmad had worked out that the damage done to him had been done by artillery and matchlocks, and he had never had field pieces before. Arabs came too, and among them twenty Turkish horsemen with gilt stirrups and their horses shod with iron, for in the Preste's country the horses go unshod.

All of that arrived over the course of one winter without anybody on the other side knowing. In August 1542 Ahmad caught Cristóvão da Gama with about half his force and destroyed it. Da Gama got away wounded into a thicket with a few men.

The letter

What happened next is in Bermudes' narrative, and it is the best thing in the book.

A woman fleeing the Moors ran into the same thicket, and the pursuers following her found da Gama. They asked who he was and he told them. They fetched a eunuch who had been in Portuguese service to identify him, and took him to the king, who was delighted, and offered him great honour if he would turn Muslim. Da Gama answered sneeringly that he was the servant of Jesus Christ, whom he would not change for a lying dog, and was buffeted and had his beard plucked out.

Four days later Ahmad had him brought back, spoke to him pleasantly, told him not to be afraid, and swore to give him his liberty and a ship home if he would write to the surviving Portuguese telling them to abandon the Ethiopians and go back to their own country. Da Gama agreed and wrote the letter. The eunuch was set to check it, and it said exactly what he had been told to say and nothing else.

But by his signature he put two calthrops, by which he meant "Look out what you do."

The letter was carried to the Portuguese camp. The queen mother read it and was as one dead, thinking the message genuine — until the caltrops beside the signature were pointed out to her, at which she was pleased and took it in good part. The commander wrote back thanking the king of Zeila very much for his good will, declining it, and saying that they expected instead to complete the enterprise their own king had sent them on, which was to capture or kill him.

Whiteway adds, in a footnote, the detail that makes the drawing remarkable: da Gama's right arm had been broken above the elbow less than a week earlier.

He was executed shortly afterwards.

Wainadega

The hundred and twenty surviving Portuguese joined the emperor, and in February 1543 the combined force met Ahmad's army near Lake Tana. Castanhoso gives the order of battle with a quartermaster's precision: on their side two hundred and fifty Ethiopian horse and three thousand five hundred foot in the van with the Portuguese, the emperor behind with another two hundred and fifty horse and the rest; against them the king of Zeila in person leading two hundred Turkish matchlockmen, six hundred horse and seven thousand foot, and a second division of the same size behind.

The Turks were beating them until the sixty Portuguese horse charged, and the Ethiopians, ashamed to see them fight so, went in hard. Then:

When the King saw that his men were losing ground, he in person led them on, encouraging them, and with him was his son, a young man, helping him; they came so near that he was recognised by the Portuguese, who, seeing him close, fired at him with their matchlocks … one ball should strike him in the breast, and he fell over his saddlebow and left the press; when his followers knew that he was wounded to the death, they lost heart and took to flight.

Castanhoso then spends as much space on the Turkish captain who refused to run — bare-armed with a long broadsword, sweeping a space in front of him, wrenching a javelin out of one horseman's hand and houghing another's horse, and killing the Portuguese who finally speared him before he died of the wound.

Of the two hundred Turks, forty got away.

What it settled

The empire survived, and the shape of the modern Horn was set by fourteen years of one man's campaigns and the two seasons it took to reverse them.

The Portuguese wanted something for it and did not get it: the union with Rome that Bermudes claimed to have been promised was refused, and the Jesuit attempt to impose it a century later produced a civil war and their expulsion. What Ethiopia took from the episode was the firearms, the knowledge of what they did, and a story — a man with a broken arm, writing a letter to order under the eye of his captors, signing it with two small iron spikes.

Adwa

Drafted from Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (2002)contraction

On 1 March 1896, near Adwa in Tigray, an Ethiopian army destroyed an Italian one. About seventeen thousand Italian and Eritrean troops advanced in three columns over ground they had mapped badly; Menelik II met them with something in the region of a hundred thousand men, most with modern rifles, and about seven thousand Italians were killed and three thousand taken prisoner.

Italy recognised Ethiopian independence in the treaty that followed.

The one that did not go the other way

Adwa is the only occasion in the partition of Africa on which an African state met a European invasion in the field, destroyed it, and kept its sovereignty.

It is worth saying what that meant at the time rather than in retrospect. In 1896 the partition was essentially complete and the assumption behind it — that European armies beat African ones as a matter of course — had not been seriously tested by an African state with a modern army, because there were almost none. Seven thousand Italian dead in a single day, in a war Italy had started, ended the Italian government within a fortnight and made Ethiopia a subject of international law rather than of colonial administration for the next forty years.

The rifles

Adwa was not won by spears against machine guns, and the version in which it was does the Ethiopians no favours.

Menelik had spent a decade buying modern breech-loading rifles — from France, from Russia, and from Italy, which had supplied them under the treaty it was now attempting to enforce. He had artillery. He had spent that decade conquering southwards, which paid for the rifles and produced the army. And he had the diplomatic sense to keep the European powers divided about him.

What the Italians had was a colonial expedition operating on bad maps at the end of a long supply line against a numerically superior force with comparable weapons, sent forward by a government in Rome that wanted a victory before the budget debate.

What paid for it

The part that should not be passed over.

Menelik's expansion in the 1880s and 1890s roughly doubled the empire, into the Ogaden, the south and the south-west — Oromo, Sidama, Kaffa and other territories that had not been part of the Christian highland state. The conquests supplied the tribute, the ivory and the manpower, and they were conducted with a brutality Ethiopian historiography was slow to describe and that Marcus is direct about.

The empire that survived the scramble for Africa did so partly by conducting one of its own, at the same time, in the same decade, with the same rifles. Both things are true and neither cancels the other: Adwa was a genuine defeat of a European invasion, and the army that won it had been assembled and paid for by conquering peoples who had no more chosen Ethiopian rule than the Ethiopians had chosen Italian.

The Zemene Mesafint, and how it ended

There nearly was not an empire to defend, and the reason is the century before Menelik.

From 1769 the emperors at Gondar reigned without ruling. Regional lords fought over which prince would hold the throne and be controlled; the Ethiopian sources call it the Zemene Mesafint, after the era in Judges when there was no king in Israel and every man did what was right in his own eyes.

It was not an interruption in the state so much as a hollowing of it. The throne went on being occupied throughout, and the men fighting over it were fighting to control the emperor rather than to abolish him — which is a different condition from an interregnum, and a more durable one, because nobody involved had any interest in the office ceasing to exist.

It ended in 1855 when Tewodros II, a provincial soldier with no dynastic claim worth the name, had himself crowned emperor and set about forcing the country back together. He failed, besieged by a British expedition at Magdala in 1868, and shot himself with a pistol Queen Victoria had sent him as a gift. What he began, Yohannes IV continued and Menelik finished.

1974

Drafted from Marcus, A History of Ethiopia (2002)end

In September 1974 a committee of junior officers — the Derg — deposed Haile Selassie, drove him out of the palace in the back of a Volkswagen, and abolished the monarchy. He died the following year in circumstances the regime did not explain.

The Solomonic dynasty had claimed continuous descent for seven hundred and four years and, in the constitution of 1955, from Solomon.

Taken from inside

Nobody conquered Ethiopia in 1974. Nothing fragmented — the state continued, and considerably more centralised than before. No rival dynasty replaced the dynasty. A committee inside the state simply took the state.

That is a stranger way for a polity to end than it sounds, and it is not unique. The Attalid kingdom was left to Rome in a will. The Venetian republic voted itself out of existence with a French army on the mainland. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by its own emperor rather than by anyone who had beaten him. Four polities, spread across two thousand years, ended by a document or a decision taken by people already inside them, and in none of the four is there a battle to point at.

The last monarchy standing

1974 is very late for this kind of history. Most of the world's dynastic polities had stopped being dynastic polities somewhere between the eighteenth century and the First World War.

Ethiopia is the exception because the same dynasty, the same church, the same script and the same claim were all still in place. The throne Haile Selassie was driven from rested on a claim of descent from Solomon, set out in a text compiled in the fourteenth century and written into the constitution of 1955 as a matter of law.

An institution that had been running since 1270 ended on the radio.

What the officers took

It is worth being exact about what the Derg actually inherited, because it was not a medieval kingdom.

Haile Selassie had spent fifty years building a centralised modern state on top of the old one: a written constitution, a standing army with foreign training, an air force, a bureaucracy, schools, a national bank, and an international position — Ethiopia was a founding member of the United Nations and Addis Ababa was the seat of the Organisation of African Unity. The gult had been abolished on paper. The provincial lords had been reduced.

Every one of those things was an instrument, and in 1974 the instruments changed hands intact. A committee of majors and captains took over a functioning modern state that a monarchy had spent half a century assembling, and used it to abolish the monarchy.

That is the specific irony of the ending. What killed the Solomonic dynasty was not the medieval Ethiopia it had ruled but the modern Ethiopia it had built.

The line of Solomon

Drafted from Nagast, The Queen of Sheba and Her Only Son Menyelek (1922)afterlife

The emperor was deposed in September 1974 and died the following year. His body was buried under a lavatory floor in the palace, and stayed there until 1992, when it was dug up. It was reinterred in Holy Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa in the year 2000, twenty-five years after his death, in a ceremony the government declined to make a state funeral.

The claim he had ruled on outlived him in two places, and neither of them is Ethiopia.

What the claim was

Budge sets out what the compiler of the Kebra Nagast believed, in three propositions, from the man's own colophons:

1. That the lawful kings of Ethiopia were descended from Solomon, King of Israel. 2. That the Tabernacle of the Law of God, i.e. the Ark of the Covenant, had been brought from Jerusalem to Aksum by Menyelek, Solomon's firstborn son.
2. That the God of Israel had transferred His place of abode on earth from Jerusalem to Aksum.

Isaac assembled that at Aksum in the early fourteenth century, in the reign of a dynasty that had taken the throne in 1270 and needed it. The 1955 constitution reserved the imperial dignity to the line of Haile Selassie, descendant of Menelik I, son of Solomon and the queen of Sheba, which put a fourteenth-century book into a twentieth-century legal instrument as a title deed.

Nineteen years later the officers who abolished the throne cited, among other things, that the emperor was the head of an unelected dynasty.

Where it went

To Jamaica. In 1930 Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned at Addis Ababa with a list of titles that included Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah and Elect of God, and the coronation was reported around the world. In Jamaica, where a Christian black population had been reading the psalm about Ethiopia stretching out her hands to God, a series of preachers concluded that a black king with a biblical genealogy taking a throne in Africa was the fulfilment of prophecy.

The movement that grew out of it took his name — Ras Tafari — and made him a divine figure. He visited Jamaica in 1966 and something over a hundred thousand people met the aircraft. He was an Orthodox Christian and does not appear ever to have accepted the identification, which made no difference whatever, because nothing in the doctrine required him to.

A claim assembled in a highland church in the fourteenth century, to legitimise a usurping dynasty, became a religion in the Caribbean six hundred years later, among people whose ancestors had been shipped there from a different part of Africa entirely.

And to a family in exile. The dynasty's descendants live abroad. The Crown Council maintains the succession. Nobody has restored anything, and there is no serious movement to.

What actually survived

Not the dynasty and not the claim, but the two things underneath both of them.

The church is still there. It has been Miaphysite since Frumentius in the fourth century, took its head from Alexandria until 1959, and is now autocephalous — the same institution, in the same liturgical language, with the same canon, running continuously for sixteen hundred years, which almost nothing else on earth can say.

And so is the writing. Ge'ez is written today in the script Aksum built out of a South Arabian alphabet by adding vowels, used for Amharic and Tigrinya, by tens of millions of people. It is the only indigenous African writing system in widespread daily use, and it has been running without interruption since before the conversion.

The kings claimed Solomon. What they actually inherited, and passed on, was an alphabet and a church — and both of them are older than the claim, and have now outlasted it.