- [Narrator] Ethiopia, February 21st, 1543.
This is the battle that will determine
if the Solomonic dynasty lives or dies.
A year and a half ago, 400 Portuguese musketeers came
to Ethiopia's aid against the Adal Sultanate,
but they found themselves outnumbered
and the Ethiopian emperor a fugitive in his own land.
And today, the Portuguese stand here with only 130 men left.
Six months prior, they'd lost over half of their force,
including their captain, in an Adal ambush,
though this battle they swear will be their revenge.
They repulse the Adal's first charge,
and as the second wave comes,
they spot the enemy general among the onrushing warriors.
Ordered to bring him down,
Portuguese and Ethiopian musketeers
send a hail of bullets in his direction.
Ultimately, another story insists
that a lone Portuguese musketeer,
furious at his commander's death,
runs directly into the Adal ranks
and shoots their general point blank.
But regardless of how it got done, the result is the same.
The Adal general lies slain on the battlefield,
his army dissolves, and Ethiopia will live another day.
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The death of their general effectively put an end
to the Adal Sultanate's attempt
to conquer the Ethiopian Empire.
But that didn't mean that Ethiopia was secure, as internal
and external threats would bombard them for centuries.
Indeed, the broader question of our series
could basically be summarized as this:
How did Africa's only medieval Christian kingdom
not only endure, despite being isolated
amongst the Muslim states,
but then also resist European colonialism?
Well, it was not easy.
See, when the Ottoman Empire had provided the Adal
with troops, equipment, and money,
their hope was to destroy Ethiopia
and to keep the Red Sea trade all to themselves.
But that plan didn't end with this specific war.
In fact, the Ottomans would continue this policy
for the next three centuries.
Over and over, the Ottomans would back coastal Muslim states
against Ethiopia, generally in the regions
of modern Somalia and Sudan,
and the land that is now Eritrea,
with its vital ports, often went back and forth,
not to mention religious tension tended
to lead to tit-for-tat regional wars.
Also, while we're taking a step back,
let's point out a few more things.
First of all, if you realized
that the Adal Sultanate was roughly in the same area
as the earlier Ifat Sultanate that Yekuno Amlak invaded,
you get a gold star.
Ifat and Adal were different dynasties,
but the same land with largely the same groups
of people living in it,
and taking the long, long view, we should mention
that many of these tensions we're describing,
both with neighbors and internally, have echoes today.
Modern Ethiopia has had major conflicts with Somalia
as well as Eritrea, which won independence
from Ethiopia in 1991 after 30 years of fighting.
There's also an ongoing civil war,
which has involved large civilian casualties,
and while we can't possibly speak on it knowledgeably,
we do hope that peace comes soon
and encourage viewers to be aware and learn more about it.
But for now, back to the 1500s.
By the end of the Ethiopian-Adal war,
Ethiopia had managed to arm itself
with a significant amount of European firearms
and win back much of its lost territory.
But to look at either side as a victor would be mistaken.
Both were damaged and weakened,
and the greatest consequence would impact them both.
The chaos of the war and its aftermath triggered a wave
of human movement known as the Oromo migration
when the pastoral Oromo people
from southern Ethiopia moved north
as well as into Adal territory, conquering several fiefs.
Oromo culture was significantly different
than the ruling Ethiopian culture,
with a legal system that was largely democratic
and cultural practices that made it easy for local people
to be integrated into the Oromo way of life.
Many of them also practiced a traditional pagan religion.
Plus, adoption was an important institution in Oromo,
and any child adopted was considered
to be the family's biological child,
including for the purposes of inheritance.
As a result, within a few centuries,
many noble families of the Solomonic line had married
into the Oromo, making the group major political players.
Indeed, by 1607, Ethiopia was being ruled
by an emperor raised by adoption in an Oromo family.
Amid the destabilization of migrations
and constant wars with Muslim neighbors,
former Ethiopian territories along the periphery
just decided to sort of, you know, not send tribute,
and when nothing happened, they kept not doing it.
This led to a rapid deterioration of Solomonic power.
True, Ethiopia was still an empire,
but the reach of the throne increasingly didn't extend
fully through the territory the central government claimed.
But the migrations weren't the only internal pressure.
Military aid from Portugal had come
at the cost of admitting Roman Catholic missionaries,
meaning Ethiopia's state religion
no longer had a monopoly on Christianity.
Two emperors converted,
with one briefly making Catholicism the state religion,
and both times, it triggered uprisings.
When the second uprising swept Emperor Fasilides
into power in 1632,
his first act was to kick out the Catholic clergy.
In other words, there was a lot of chaos.
In the old days, when there was no capital,
the emperor dealt with instability
by physically moving his base of operations
to the troubled area, but things were changing.
In 1635, Fasilides founded the city of Gondar
to serve as the new imperial capital,
erecting several churches, a castle,
and inaugurating what was known as the Gondar period.
And while today synonymous with political weakness
and a decline of central authority,
the Gondar period was actually one of the most
culturally significant eras in Ethiopian history.
Not only did the era's monarchs build churches, castles,
and libraries, some of which remain national treasures,
but it also produced Ethiopia's most famous philosophers.
Their philosophical texts feel quite modern.
They examine the idea of morality,
tie it to promoting social harmony, and insist
that this moral system should be separate from religion.
One philosopher even argued that the practice of slavery,
common in the region, was immoral and unnatural.
Now, you might imagine a scenario where these inward-looking
and culturally focused Gondar emperors lost the empire
to the surrounding Muslim states, but they didn't.
Nope. They lost it to other Ethiopians.
In 1767, with a young pro-Oromo king on the throne,
a civil war broke out,
broadly split into pro- and anti-Oromo factions.
So the king called in the most powerful lord
in Ethiopia to back him,
and, well, that didn't go so great,
because that lord, to make it brief,
realized the emperor was a puppet of the Oromo faction
and decided instead to depose and murder him.
This was a landmark event in imperial history.
While it was common for Solomonic emperors
to die in battle or from natural causes
or fall fighting rebels or even abdicate,
never before had one just been murdered,
and it's hard to overemphasize how shocking this was.
The death of this king came one year shy
of the empire's 500th anniversary, and in that whole time,
a monarch had never been outright killed.
And this just wasn't a political taboo, mind you.
It was a religious one, because remember,
the Solomonic line were descendants of King Solomon,
possessors of the Ark of the Covenant,
and head of the Ethiopian Orthodox church.
But once you show that you can kill a king,
there's simply no going back.
Increasingly, power fell into the hands of noble families,
and fiefdoms broke away to act on their own.
They were still broadly Ethiopia, mind you,
but the monarchs ruling in Gondar lost almost all control
over provincial governors and military commanders.
To make sense of this, many Ethiopians,
with their ties to the Old Testament, looked at a quote
from the book of Judges to contextualize what was going on.
"There was no king in Israel," it read.
"Every man did what was right in his own eyes."
We know this period today as the Era of the Princes,
as Ethiopia became increasingly decentralized
with power residing locally.
In fact, many governors would declare themselves
to be literal princes, and by bloodline,
many could make that claim,
since many noble dynasties had married
into the Solomonic line, forming their own branches.
Civil wars were constant, as ethnic, religious,
and political tensions regularly led to infighting,
and various factions installed
and removed puppet emperors at will.
But in 1855, things changed abruptly
when a headstrong new monarch,
Tewodros II, came to the throne.
Raised in the Era of the Princes
and impoverished by his noble parents' divorce,
he built himself up as an outlaw military commander,
and he was so effective and beloved by the people
that the royal couple considered him
both useful and a potential threat,
so they married him to their granddaughter.
This attempt to control him backfired, however,
and he rebelled, marched into Gondar,
deposed the emperor, and assumed the crown.
Then, Tewodros, believing he was on a divine mission
to rebuild the empire, embarked on a crusade
to unify and modernize Ethiopia, and just in time,
for the era of European colonialism
was descending on Africa, and soon,
Ethiopia would not just be battling
its Ottoman-backed neighbors
but the great powers of Britain and Italy.
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