Adal-Ethiopian War (Ahmad Gran's Jihad)
The Sultanate of Adal invaded Christian Ethiopia in 1529 and came close to destroying it in a war that both sides internationalised. Adal was a Muslim state in the eastern lowlands around Harar and Zeila, and its relationship with the Ethiopian highland empire had been one of raid and tribute for two centuries. Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known as Gragn, the left-handed, took control of it in the 1520s, unified the Somali and Afar clans behind a jihad, and beat the much larger Ethiopian army at Shimbra Kure in March 1529. His forces then overran most of the highlands over the next decade, burning churches and monasteries, destroying manuscripts and forcing conversions, and Emperor Lebna Dengel spent his last years as a fugitive and died in a monastery in 1540. Both sides had firearms and foreign help. The Ottomans supplied Adal with matchlocks, cannon and Turkish gunners; Portugal, which had been in contact with Ethiopia since a mission in 1520, landed 400 musketeers under Cristóvão da Gama in 1541. Da Gama was defeated and executed, and the survivors joined the emperor Gelawdewos, who caught Ahmad at Wayna Daga in February 1543 and killed him with a shot from a Portuguese gun. Adal collapsed almost immediately. Both states had exhausted themselves, and the Oromo migrations that followed reshaped the population of much of the region. The war is remembered in Ethiopia as a national catastrophe, and its documentary record on the Muslim side, the Futuh al-Habasha, is a rare account written from inside a campaign.
- Year: 1529 CE
- Category: Military
