Ethiopian Empire

Politics and institutions

The Ethiopian Empire of the Solomonic dynasty was restored in 1270, when Yekuno Amlak overthrew the Zagwe and claimed descent from Solomon and Sheba; every later emperor bore the title Lion of Judah, and the court — a mobile capital of tents and pavilions — moved with the army through the highlands. Power balanced among king, church and army: emperors granted land to monasteries, governed through provincial governors, and were in turn made and unmade by the great houses. Zara Yaqob tightened royal administration and church discipline in the fifteenth century; the kings of Gondar, seated from 1636 in castle-palaces, lost real power to the regional lords of the Zemene Mesafint after 1769; and the nineteenth-century emperors Tewodros, Yohannes and Menelik rebuilt the monarchy into a modern state.

Economy and finance

Ethiopia's highland economy ran on the plough, the monastery and the caravan. Barley, teff and cattle from the plateau fed a state of fortresses and churches; slaves, coffee, gold, ivory, civet and musk moved out through the Muslim caravan towns of the escarpment to the Red Sea ports of Massawa and Zeila, taxed by the emperor and fought over by his governors. The coast itself was usually in Muslim or Ottoman hands, which made control of the caravan routes a permanent policy. Menelik II added the south and west in the 1880s — Kaffa, Harar and the Oromo lands — giving the empire the shape of modern Ethiopia, and after Adwa customs revenue and foreign loans financed railways, telegraph lines and the growth of Addis Ababa.

Society and culture

Ethiopian society was built by the church. Christianity, adopted in the fourth century in Aksum, organized the year by fasts and saints, endowed the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, and kept Ge'ez as the language of scripture, law and chronicle; the royal chronicles of the Solomonids are among Africa's longest literate traditions. Monasteries copied manuscripts and painted the two-dimensional icons of Ethiopian art; the tabot, the altar ark, made every church a Zion. Nobles and peasants were bound by gult land grants and by the plough, and the age-set institutions of the expanding Oromo entered the empire's fabric. Amharic rose with the state; by Haile Selassie's time it was the language of the empire's schools and ministries.

Military and frontiers

Ethiopia's armies were hosts raised by vassals, and their history alternated holy war and highland victory. Amda Seyon's campaigns in the fourteenth century broke the Muslim sultanates of the coast; in the sixteenth the empire nearly died when Ahmad Gragn's Adal forces, with Ottoman guns, burned the churches of the highlands, until Portuguese muskets helped restore the king in 1543. The Gondarine kings fought the Oromo migrations; Menelik II fought the decisive modern battle: at Adwa on 1 March 1896, with modern rifles and forty thousand Oromo cavalry, his army annihilated an Italian colonial force and fixed Ethiopia's borders for a generation. Haile Selassie's empire fell not to invasion but to its own officers: the Derg deposed him in 1974.

Foreign relations

Ethiopia's diplomacy was survival among faiths and empires. It fought the Adal sultanate for two centuries, called in Portugal in 1541, and after the Ottomans took Massawa lived largely sealed from Europe — a fact that fed the legend of Prester John. Menelik II played Italy, Britain and France against one another, defeated Italy outright at Adwa in 1896, and won from every power a recognition of sovereignty unique in Africa. Haile Selassie appealed to the League of Nations in 1936 as Mussolini's planes dropped gas on his country; exiled, he returned with the British in 1941, and made Addis Ababa the capital of African diplomacy — the OAU's home from 1963 — until his own officers ended the empire in 1974.

Legacy and influence

Ethiopia's legacy is independence. It was the one ancient African state the scramble missed, and Adwa made it the emblem of African resistance — the battle is commemorated across the continent to this day. The Solomonic claim gave Ethiopia a Christian imperial genealogy three thousand years deep in its own telling, and its church, script and calendar mark it as a civilization apart. The OAU and then the African Union kept Addis Ababa as Africa's diplomatic capital, and far beyond diplomacy the Rastafari movement took Haile Selassie for a messiah. The Derg's revolution of 1974 ended the empire, but the idea it preserved — an African state that was never colonized — outlived the throne.