First Italo-Ethiopian War

The First Italo-Ethiopian War was fought between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ethiopian Empire, mainly from late 1894 to 1896. Italy wanted to turn Ethiopia into a protectorate, a country controlled by Italy in foreign affairs and eventually in much more. Ethiopia refused and fought back.

The war ended with the Battle of Adwa on 1 March 1896, one of the most decisive defeats suffered by a European army in Africa in the colonial era. After Adwa, Italy had to sign a treaty that recognised Ethiopia as a fully independent state. Apart from Liberia, whose position was very different, Ethiopia was the only African country that kept its independence throughout the “Scramble for Africa”, and it did so by winning a war.

In Ethiopia the war is usually remembered simply as “Adwa”. In Italy it was long remembered as a national humiliation, a memory that fascist Italy later used to justify a second, much more brutal invasion in 1935.

Ethiopia was one of the oldest states in Africa. Its rulers traced their line back to the ancient kingdom of Aksum and, according to the Kebra Nagast, to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church, with its own script (Ge’ez) and calendar, had been at the centre of highland life for more than 1,500 years.

In the mid-nineteenth century, after a long period in which regional lords held the real power, Emperor Tewodros II (ruled 1855–1868) and then Emperor Yohannes IV (ruled 1872–1889) worked to reunite the country. Yohannes defeated invading Egyptian armies in 1875 and 1876, and his general Ras Alula destroyed an Italian column at Dogali in 1887. Yohannes was killed fighting the Sudanese Mahdists at Metemma in March 1889.

Menelik, king of Shewa in the centre of the country, then became emperor. Menelik had already been building a strong state, buying modern rifles and expanding his rule to the south, east and west. These southern conquests brought many Oromo, Sidama, Gurage, Wolayta and other peoples, as well as the city of Harar, under his rule, often through violent campaigns. This expansion gave Menelik land, trade and soldiers, but it is remembered very differently by the peoples who were conquered, and that difference still matters in Ethiopian debates today.

Menelik ruled together with his wife Taytu Betul, an intelligent and politically skilled empress who came from a noble family in the north. Together they founded the new capital, Addis Ababa, in 1886.

Italy became a unified kingdom only in 1861 and arrived late in the race for colonies. It took the Red Sea port of Assab and in 1885 occupied Massawa. From there it pushed into the highlands. On 1 January 1890 Italy united its possessions into the colony of Eritrea.

On 2 May 1889, Menelik and the Italian envoy Pietro Antonelli signed the Treaty of Wuchale. Menelik gave Italy some northern territory in return for friendship, weapons and a loan. The trouble was Article 17. The Amharic text said the emperor could use the Italian government for dealings with other powers. The Italian text said he must do so. On the basis of the Italian version, Italy informed other European governments that Ethiopia was now its protectorate.

The European setting mattered. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 the European powers had agreed rules for claiming African territory, including notifying each other of new claims. By announcing a protectorate over Ethiopia to the other powers, Italy was trying to make its claim legal in European eyes without ever conquering the country. Britain, which wanted a friendly Italy on the Red Sea to balance France, largely accepted the Italian claim in agreements of the early 1890s. From Addis Ababa, this looked like a plan to divide Ethiopia on paper before a single battle had been fought.

Menelik learned of this when European governments began to reply to him through Italy. He protested, and Empress Taytu is remembered as the strongest voice against any compromise. Menelik denounced the treaty and repaid the loan, and by 1893–1894 had formally rejected it. Meanwhile he imported large numbers of modern rifles, many through French-controlled ports on the Red Sea coast. Italy, led by the ambitious Prime Minister Francesco Crispi, decided to enforce its claim by force.

Fighting began in the border region of Tigray. The Tigrayan ruler Ras Mengesha Yohannes, son of the late Emperor Yohannes, had at first had contacts with the Italians, but he joined Menelik. In January 1895 Italian forces under General Oreste Baratieri, governor of Eritrea, defeated Mengesha at Coatit and Senafe and then occupied much of Tigray, including Adigrat and Mekele.

In September 1895 Menelik issued a call to arms to his whole empire. Armies from Shewa, Gojjam, Wollo, Tigray, Harar and the newly conquered south marched north, many soldiers bringing their own food and weapons. On 7 December 1895 the Ethiopian vanguard under Ras Makonnen, Ras Alula and others overwhelmed an Italian force of about 2,000 men under Major Pietro Toselli at Amba Alagi.

The Ethiopian army was not a modern standing army of the European type. It was made up of the personal forces of the emperor and of regional rulers, each of whom brought his own soldiers, servants and supply train. Many soldiers were accompanied by women who cooked, carried water and cared for the wounded. This system could put an enormous force into the field very quickly, but it could not keep it there for long, because the army lived largely off the land and its food ran out. Both Menelik and Baratieri knew that time was against the Ethiopians as well as the Italians.

The Ethiopian army next besieged the Italian fort at Mekele. According to tradition, Empress Taytu advised cutting off the fort from its water springs. After several weeks, in January 1896, the garrison was allowed to leave with its weapons after negotiations, which also let the Ethiopian army move forward. By February the two armies faced each other in the mountains near the town of Adwa.

Both armies had supply problems. The Ethiopian army was very large and was running out of food in a region that had recently suffered famine. Baratieri considered retreat, but he was under heavy pressure from Crispi’s government, which sent him angry telegrams demanding a victory. With his brigade commanders in favour of attack, he decided to advance at night and take strong positions in the hills, hoping the Ethiopians would attack him there or break up.

In the night of 29 February–1 March, four Italian brigades under Generals Matteo Albertone, Giuseppe Arimondi, Vittorio Dabormida and Giuseppe Ellena advanced over rough, poorly mapped ground. Albertone’s brigade, largely made up of Eritrean askari, went too far forward and was attacked on its own at dawn. The other brigades could not support each other properly; Dabormida’s brigade moved into a different valley and was cut off.

The Ethiopian commanders reacted quickly. Menelik committed his reserves at the right moment, and forces under Ras Makonnen, Ras Mikael of Wollo with his Oromo cavalry, Ras Mengesha, Ras Alula, Negus Tekle Haymanot of Gojjam and the empress’s own troops attacked the separated Italian columns one after another. Ethiopian artillery, including modern quick-firing guns, played a part. By midday the Italian army was collapsing; Arimondi and Dabormida were killed and Albertone was captured. Survivors fled back towards Eritrea, leaving behind their artillery and thousands of rifles.

Italian losses are usually estimated at about 6,000–7,000 killed, including thousands of Eritrean askari, with some 3,000–4,000 taken prisoner. Ethiopian losses were also severe, perhaps 4,000–7,000 killed and many more wounded, though figures are uncertain because no complete count was made. The battle took place on a Sunday, and in Ethiopian memory it is often linked with Saint George (Giyorgis), a much-loved saint of the Ethiopian Church.

The Italian prisoners were marched south and held for months. Most were treated reasonably, and they were released after the peace treaty, with Italy paying an indemnity officially described as the cost of their upkeep. Some prisoners were killed, especially in the confusion after the battle.

The fate of the Eritrean askari was much harsher. These were African soldiers, mostly from Eritrea and from the Tigrinya-speaking highlands, who served in the Italian colonial army. Many Ethiopians saw them as traitors. Several hundred captured askari (a figure of about 800 is often given, though estimates vary) had their right hand and left foot cut off as punishment. This episode is a painful part of the history of Eritrea and Ethiopia and shows how colonial armies set Africans against Africans.

Ordinary people in Tigray and the north also suffered. The region had been hit by the great famine and cattle plague of 1888–1892, and the passage of huge armies, both Italian and Ethiopian, consumed food and animals. The mobilisation also placed heavy demands on peasants in the conquered southern regions, who supplied grain and soldiers for a state in which they had little voice.

In Italy the news of Adwa caused riots and demonstrations, and Crispi’s government fell within days. On 26 October 1896 Italy signed the Treaty of Addis Ababa. It cancelled the Treaty of Wuchale and recognised “absolutely and without reserve” the independence of Ethiopia. The provisional border was drawn along the Mareb, Belesa and Muna rivers, so Italy kept Eritrea.

Why Menelik did not push on to drive Italy out of Eritrea is still debated. His army was short of food, the rainy season was approaching, and a campaign in the lowlands would have been hard and costly. Some Eritrean and Tigrayan critics later argued that Menelik gave up Eritrea to secure his own position. Whatever the reasons, the decision meant that Eritrea remained an Italian colony until 1941, which shaped the separate histories of Eritrea and Ethiopia in the twentieth century.

After Adwa, European powers took Ethiopia seriously as a sovereign state. France, Britain and others sent missions to Addis Ababa and signed border and trade treaties with Menelik, and Ethiopia continued expanding to reach roughly its modern borders. Menelik used the prestige of the victory to modernise his state with a telegraph, schools and the railway to Djibouti.

In 1935 Mussolini’s fascist Italy invaded Ethiopia again, partly to “avenge Adwa”, using poison gas and air power. Italy occupied the country from 1936 to 1941, when Ethiopian patriots and British Commonwealth forces restored Emperor Haile Selassie. The first war thus cast a long shadow over the second.

In Ethiopia, Adwa Victory Day is a national holiday celebrated on Yekatit 23 of the Ethiopian calendar, usually 2 March in the Western calendar. People gather in Addis Ababa and other cities with patriotic songs, traditional dress, shields and horses. Adwa is remembered as a victory won by soldiers from many regions and peoples of Ethiopia, and many Ethiopians see it as a foundation of national pride.

Beyond Ethiopia, Adwa became a symbol for Black people across Africa and the African diaspora. In the Caribbean, the United States and South Africa, “Ethiopianism” and later Pan-Africanism drew inspiration from an African state that had defeated a European army. The green, gold and red colours of the Ethiopian flag inspired the flags of Ghana and many other African states after independence, and Ethiopia has a special place in Rastafari.

Within Ethiopia, however, the memory is not simple. Some Oromo and southern critics argue that celebrating Menelik ignores the violence of his southern conquests, while others stress that Oromo cavalry and soldiers from the south fought at Adwa. Some in Tigray feel that Tigrayan leaders such as Ras Alula and Ras Mengesha receive too little credit. In recent years the celebrations have sometimes become the scene of political tension. In Eritrea the amputated askari and the loss of Eritrea at the peace are part of a different memory.

In Italy, “Adua” was a byword for disaster. Nationalists and later fascists spoke of avenging it, and for a long time Italian public memory treated colonialism as mild or even kindly, the idea of the “good Italians” (italiani brava gente). Since the 1970s, Italian historians have challenged that view and have brought colonial violence, including the later war of 1935–1941, back into public discussion.

Ethiopian sources include the court chronicle of Menelik’s reign written by his chronicler Gebre Sillasie, letters and proclamations of Menelik and Taytu (including the famous mobilisation proclamation of 1895), and a rich tradition of oral poetry, war songs and later memoirs. These sources express the view of the imperial court and must be read with its aims in mind, but they are essential for understanding how Ethiopians themselves explained the war.

Italian sources are abundant: parliamentary debates, diplomatic correspondence (the “Green Books” published by the Italian government), military reports, the court-martial of Baratieri, and memoirs by officers and former prisoners. Baratieri was tried and acquitted, but the court criticised his leadership, and his defence and that of his critics shaped Italian accounts for decades.

Foreign observers also left records. Russian officers and a Russian Red Cross medical mission were in Ethiopia at the time of the war, and French, Swiss and other Europeans in Menelik’s service or in Addis Ababa wrote accounts. The two texts of the Treaty of Wuchale themselves remain the central documents of the dispute: scholars have compared the Amharic and Italian versions to ask whether the difference was a deliberate deception by Antonelli or a mistake.

For a long time many European writers explained Adwa mainly as the result of Italian mistakes: bad maps, poor coordination and political pressure from Rome. Historians of Ethiopia such as Harold Marcus, Richard Pankhurst and Bahru Zewde have stressed instead the strength of the Ethiopian state, Menelik’s diplomacy and arms purchases, the mobilisation of resources across a large empire, and the skill of Ethiopian commanders. Raymond Jonas’s The Battle of Adwa (2011) placed the battle in a global story of empire, race and the spread of modern weapons.

A second debate concerns the nature of the Ethiopian state itself. Some scholars describe Menelik’s expansion to the south as a form of internal colonialism or as African participation in the Scramble for Africa, while others see it as the reunification of territories connected to earlier Ethiopian states. How one answers affects how Adwa is interpreted: as a victory of the whole of Ethiopia, or as the victory of an expanding empire that defended its own conquests against a rival empire.

Italian historiography changed greatly after the work of Angelo Del Boca, whose multi-volume history of Italians in East Africa exposed the violence of Italian colonialism and challenged the idea of a gentle Italian empire. More recent research also looks at the Eritrean askari as historical actors rather than only as instruments of Italy, at the role of women such as Taytu, and at how Adwa has been used by later governments and political movements.