Cristóvão da Gama storms Baçente: Portugal's war in Ethiopia, 1542

At dawn on 2 February 1542, the feast of the Purification of the Virgin, several hundred Portuguese soldiers made a general confession at the foot of a mountain in northern Ethiopia, before a crucifix held up by a priest. The patriarch who travelled with them gave absolution, and the men formed up in three columns, one for each path to the top.2 sources2 sources

The mountain was called Baçanete, which modern writers spell Baçente. It rose alone from a plain, its summit a flat table about a league round, with a spring, fields and cattle. The Muslim garrison, about 1,500 archers and men with bucklers, raided the villages below. The chronicler Gaspar Correia says they had held the hill for eight years.2 sources2 sources

Cristóvão da Gama, the 25-year-old son of Vasco da Gama, took the steepest path himself. It ran over slippery rock to a scarp about four fathoms high, climbable only by chiselled holes and cracks. He went up it using his pike as a staff, while the Portuguese guns and matchlocks fired at the rim to keep the defenders from rolling rocks down.2 sources2 sources

The attackers were twice thrown back before they forced the gates. On the summit the garrison's commander ran one Portuguese through with a javelin before three men brought him down. The Ethiopians with the column killed those who hid in the houses; some defenders leapt from the cliffs. By evening eight Portuguese were dead and more than forty wounded.1 source1 source

Gama had the mosque on the summit, once a church, consecrated as Our Lady of Victory, and buried his dead there. The Ethiopian queen who travelled with him was invited up to see the place and declined: the path, she said, was too full of bodies.1 source1 source

The queen was Sabla Wangel, widow of the emperor Lebna Dengel, who had ruled Christian Ethiopia from 1508. Europeans called the country Abyssinia and its ruler Prester John, after a legendary Christian king of the East. Its church was Orthodox, under the Coptic patriarch of Alexandria, and its emperors claimed descent from Solomon.3 sources3 sources

To the south-east lay Adal, a Muslim sultanate whose ports included Zeila on the Gulf of Aden. In the late 1520s Ahmad ibn Ibrahim, a soldier of obscure origin known as the Imam, began raiding the Christian highlands. Ethiopians called him Gragn, the left-handed. R. S. Whiteway, who translated Castanhoso in 1902, thought he was probably a Somali.2 sources2 sources

He had an edge the Christians lacked. Firearms reached Arabia around 1515 and passed through Zeila to Adal, and the Imam kept a regular corps of Turkish matchlockmen recruited from Zabid in Yemen. At Shimbra Kure, in March 1529, he routed Lebna Dengel's army. Both sides agreed the emperor's force was far larger, though Adal's chronicle, the Futuh al-Habasha, claimed 16,000 Christian horse where the Ethiopian accounts said just over 3,000.1 source1 source

Then the empire came apart. Debre Libanos, the most revered monastery, was burned in July 1530. In 1539 the Imam's men stormed Amba Geshen, the mountain prison where the royal princes were kept, and killed them. Churches were stripped of their gold. Lebna Dengel died on 2 September 1540 at Debre Damo, a monastery on a mountain top, with almost no followers left.2 sources2 sources

The plea for help went through João Bermudes, a barber-surgeon of the 1520 embassy who had stayed on and later called himself patriarch of Ethiopia, a title Whiteway doubted. In 1540 Lebna Dengel wrote that he had asked the King of Portugal for men, and had heard that three hundred trained men were promised.2 sources2 sources

Help came on the back of another plan. Estêvão da Gama, Vasco's second son and governor of Portuguese India from 1540, sailed into the Red Sea to burn the Ottoman galleys at Suez. His fleet reached Massawa, on the coast of today's Eritrea, on 10 February 1541. He went on to Suez, found the Turks too strong, and was back at Massawa on 22 May.1 source1 source

At Massawa letters reached him from the Ethiopian court, and Isaac, the Bahar Negash or governor of the northern province, came to ask for help. Hunger and fever had broken discipline on the ships in his absence: a hundred sailors deserted inland and only two came back alive. Estêvão decided to send an army and gave the command to his younger brother Cristóvão, a choice the chronicler Diogo do Couto says was badly received because he was so young.3 sources3 sources

Cristóvão had first sailed to India at sixteen and had served at Malacca and Diu. On 9 July 1541 the brothers parted for the last time; Correia and Couto say 6 July, which Whiteway took to be the day the camp moved to the mainland. The force marched by night across the hot coastal plain and climbed to the plateau, then sat out the rains at Debarwa, the Bahar Negash's town, from July to December.2 sources2 sources

The new emperor, Lebna Dengel's son Galawdewos, was hundreds of kilometres south in Shoa with a handful of men. The Imam sat between him and the Portuguese, near Lake Tana. So the alliance was negotiated by the queen mother, Sabla Wangel, whom Gama fetched from her refuge at Debre Damo, and by the Bahar Negash.2 sources2 sources

After Epiphany the army moved south at two or three leagues a day. When Gama learned that a strong hill held for the Imam lay on his road, he resolved to take it rather than leave an enemy behind him. The queen told him to march on and join her son first.1 source1 source

Gama answered that they were Portuguese and would take it with little loss. On 1 February he camped below the hill and made a feint, to draw the defenders' fire and find where his guns would do most harm. The garrison celebrated all night with trumpets and drums; the queen, who had watched, lost heart. The next morning he attacked.2 sources2 sources

The victory paid at once. Local lords who had submitted to Adal came back to the queen, and Castanhoso claims forty leagues of country returned to her obedience. Whiteway thought the queen was probably right all the same: the news brought the Imam north before the Portuguese could join Galawdewos.2 sources2 sources

The Imam found them near Jarte, probably the district of Wajarat, at the start of April. He sent a herald with a friar's cowl and a rosary, mocking Gama as a mere boy misled by a woman, and offered to let the Portuguese go home. Gama sent back a small pair of tweezers for the eyebrows and a large mirror.2 sources2 sources

Castanhoso put the Imam's army at 15,000 foot, 1,500 horse and 200 Turkish matchlockmen; the Portuguese numbered about 350, as 40 had gone to the coast for supplies. Short of food, Gama marched out in a square on Tuesday 4 April 1542 with the queen in the centre. He was wounded, but a matchlock ball struck the Imam in the leg and his army broke.2 sources2 sources

On 16 April they fought again. The Imam's cavalry nearly broke the square until some gunpowder exploded and the horses would not face it. The Adal camp fell. The two battles cost the Portuguese about thirty dead. The Ethiopian chronicles date the first fight to 25 March and record that the Franks shot the Imam, but he did not die.2 sources2 sources

The Imam withdrew to Zabul, a hill country with a road to the Red Sea, and sent for help to the Ottoman governor at Zabid. The Portuguese wintered at Wofla, south of Lake Ashenge, where the hills hid what was coming. During the rains Gama took a hundred men to seize a mountain held by Adal troops above a population of Ethiopian Jews, and came back with horses and plunder.2 sources2 sources

When he returned, the Imam's army was at the foot of his hill, reinforced by matchlockmen from Zabid. Castanhoso says 900 came and that over 1,000 took the field; Correia gives 800 and Galawdewos over 600. The battle came on 28 August by Castanhoso's date; Diogo do Couto says the 29th and the Ethiopian chronicles the 31st. Whiteway thought the 29th most likely.3 sources3 sources

Gama answered the Turkish fire with sallies, and each one cost men on the way back. He was hit in the leg, then a ball broke his right arm. Four of his five captains were killed. As the Turks broke into the camp, a wounded Portuguese crawled to the powder store and blew it up with those around him. At nightfall the survivors fled uphill with the queen.2 sources2 sources

Gama and fourteen companions hid in a wooded valley and were found at dawn. Castanhoso, who had the story from two Portuguese who got away, says the Imam showed him the heads of more than 160 Portuguese, had him flogged, burned his beard with wax and plucked his eyebrows with the tweezers he had sent. Then the Imam beheaded him with his own hand.2 sources2 sources

The Imam thought the Portuguese finished. He sent the Turks home, kept his usual 200 matchlockmen and returned to Lake Tana. But about 170 had escaped, 120 with the queen and 50 with the captain Manuel da Cunha. Galawdewos came north from Shoa and joined them, in September by Castanhoso's account and in October by the Ethiopian chronicles.2 sources2 sources

The Portuguese rearmed from stores at Debre Damo and made new powder. Galawdewos wrote that he collected 130 of them and made their captain Ayres Dias, Gama's servant, a man of mixed descent whom Ethiopians called Marcos. Castanhoso tells it differently: the survivors, 120 by his count, would have no captain but marched under the banner of the Misericórdia.3 sources3 sources

The army set out on Shrove Tuesday, 6 February 1543, beat an Adal force at Woggera, and found the Imam near Lake Tana.2 sources2 sources

On 21 February 1543 the armies met at Wayna Daga. Castanhoso gives the Imam 200 Turks, 1,200 horse and 14,000 foot in two divisions. The Portuguese, 60 of them now mounted, led the Christian van with 250 Ethiopian horse and 3,500 foot; Galawdewos followed with 250 more horse and the rest of the infantry. The Portuguese made for the Imam and his Turks. A ball struck him in the breast, and when his men saw it they ran. Only 40 of the 200 Turks escaped.2 sources2 sources

Who fired the shot is disputed. Castanhoso says no one knew; Gaspar Correia names a soldier known as John the Galician, who died in the act. Galawdewos's chronicle gives the kill to one of the emperor's own men, while a fragment of another Ethiopian chronicle says a Frank killed him and cut off his ear.2 sources2 sources

A young Ethiopian captain, Azmach Calite, finished the Imam off and galloped to Galawdewos with his head. Galawdewos had it carried round the country on a spear. Four Portuguese died.2 sources2 sources

No fleet came to bring them home. Most of the survivors married Ethiopian women and took the lands Galawdewos gave them; in his letter of 1550 he wrote that the Franks lived with him at their pleasure. Ninety-three were still alive in 1555. Henry Salt, in the nineteenth century, recorded a tradition that their descendants peopled the province of Wajarat.2 sources2 sources

The war did not end with the Imam. In 1559 his successor, Nur, who had married the Imam's widow on condition that he avenge her husband, killed Galawdewos in battle. In Whiteway's judgement, Ethiopia was never again prostrate before a foreign conqueror while Galawdewos lived.1 source1 source

Miguel de Castanhoso reached Goa in April 1544 with his left arm crippled, carrying letters from Galawdewos and his own account of the campaign. In 1564 João de Barreira printed a reworked version in Lisbon. Its account of Gama's death reads like a saint's life: an old woman who led the Imam's men to Gama's hiding place and vanished, a healing spring where his blood fell, a monastery tree that uprooted itself at the hour of his death.3 sources3 sources

Luís André Nepomuceno argues that the Gama family may have hoped to have Cristóvão declared a martyr, and that the cause never advanced in Rome. João Bermudes, who was also at Wofla, wrote an account that blamed the defeat on Gama's failings and gave himself the credit for the successes; Whiteway found it unsupported by any other witness.2 sources2 sources

Jesuit missionaries followed the soldiers to Ethiopia. In 1626, at the request of Cristóvão's great-nephew Francisco da Gama, viceroy of India, a search party went to Wofla. The Jesuit Jerónimo Lobo wrote as if he had led it: relics from under a heap of stones, and teeth and a jaw from a spring where the head had been thrown with a dead dog. The relics reached India in 1627.3 sources3 sources

Whiteway doubted them. Lobo, he noted, was not with the searchers, and Castanhoso says the Turks took Gama's head back to Zabid.2 sources2 sources

Portugal's empire is usually told as a story of ships and trading forts. The Ethiopian campaign was something else: a few hundred men marching hundreds of kilometres inland to fight for an African Christian king, in a war his mother had invited them into.2 sources2 sources

The sources remember it differently. Castanhoso wrote that the freed Christian women kissed the Portuguese's feet and credited them with the victory. The Ethiopian chronicles, Whiteway noted, say little of the Portuguese lest it reflect on Ethiopian glory, and Galawdewos's chronicle gives the victory to God and the emperor. Galawdewos's letters thank the King of Portugal for his men, but add that Gama with 400 could not destroy the Moors, while Ayres Dias with 130 did.3 sources3 sources

Adal had its own chronicler. Shihab al-Din Ahmad, known as Arab Faqih, wrote the Futuh al-Habasha, the conquest of Abyssinia, from the accounts of men who had fought beside the Imam. To him the burning of Ethiopia's churches was a triumph. Whiteway drew on the Futuh for the conquest years; his account of 1541 to 1543 rests on the Portuguese and Ethiopian writers.2 sources2 sources