What If the Adal Sultanate had Conquered Ethiopia?
- cepmurphywrites
- Apr 18
- 9 min read
By Gary Oswald.
The Adal Sultanate was a Muslim Somali Sultanate based around modern Somalia and the Ogaden or Somali region of modern-day Ethiopia. It is normally considered to have existed from 1415 to 1577, though there is an argument to be made that there was political continuity with both its predecessor and successor states. For the vast majority of that time, Adal was at war with the Christian Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia, a battle of religions and civilisations that would go on to involve two of the first global empires and decide the fate of the Horn of Africa.
Adal had significant advantages over the diplomatically isolated Ethiopians, in that it was connected into a Muslim trade network that spanned from India to Anatolia and as such was richer and better armed than its opponent. Under Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, Adal conquered the vast majority of Ethiopia and reduced its Emperor, Dawit II, to an outlaw with a band of around 20 followers.
But this situation was not to last. Over the next few years, Dawit’s son, Gelawdewos, led a rebellion which drove Adal back out of the Ethiopian Highlands and killed Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi in 1543. While Gelawdewos himself would die in an assault on the Adal capital of Harar, Adal would never recover their relative strength versus Ethiopia and in 1576, an Ethiopian victory at the Webi River annihilated the army of the Adal Sultanate, ending them as a major power in the region. Shortly after that, the pagan Oromo people of northern Kenya marched north in huge numbers, taking advantage of the exhaustion and losses both Adal and Ethiopia had taken in this centuries long war to conquer huge areas of land from both Christian and Islamic people, leaving the Horn of Africa almost unrecognisable from where it had been a century earlier.
But how close was Adal to complete victory? Why didn’t that happen, how could that happen and what would be the consequences if it did, in terms of both the war against the Oromo and the demographics of the region?
Adal was very close to victory. Dawit II died of illness while leading his guerrillas in 1540 and without serious relief, the Ethiopian resistance would have remained relatively low level. Which is not to say that Adal wouldn’t have been forced to retreat from their new conquests at some later point under a less competent leader, but that isn’t guaranteed either.
The reason why that didn’t happen in our timeline was due to two consecutive strokes of luck for Ethiopia. First of all, Portugal attempted to burn Suez.
It is often taught that the 1453 fall of Byzantine Constantinople was the beginning of the age of exploration as it cut off the Christian powers from the Asian spice markets. This isn’t true. By 1453, Constantinople was a mostly depopulated city state, it simply wasn’t a major trader in spices. Most spice at that time came into European through Venetian merchants buying it in Alexandria from Egyptian traders and so there was no major change in spice prices due to the fall of Constantinople. It was 52 ducats for pepper in Venice in 1439 and still 52 in 1471. The big change came in 1499 when the Portuguese opened up a second supply by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, meaning prices jumped to between 87 and 100 ducats in 1500 due to a reduce in supply going through Alexandria. The previous big jump had come in 1411, 57 ducats rising to 128, not through Muslim conquest but thanks to the Ming Dynasty of China’s Treasure Fleet buying up pepper in the Indian Ocean before it reached Egypt. It took until 1439 and the end of the Treasure Fleets before it returned to normal. Muslim conquest had not cut off Europe from the spice trade, but it had meant it was reliant on middlemen and not able to buy from the source the way the Chinese could.
Portugal certainly wanted another spice route so they wouldn’t be at the mercy of Venice and Egypt, but their actions in disrupting the Islamic spice trade was in fact not initially aimed at the Ottomans at all but rather at the Mamluk Sultanate, the rulers of Egypt. By reducing the income the Mamluks could rely on from spice, this would hopefully open them up for an Iberian attack on Egypt. This idea, of being able to attack Egypt from both sides and take control of the Red Sea, thus opening up Mecca for Christian attacks and strangling the Islamic spice trade, was one Portugal did not give up on until the 1560s. They kept this possibility in mind even after the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1516 and then Yemen in 1527, when the most powerful Muslim Empire was in a position to resist the Portuguese attacks into the Red Sea they had been waging since arriving in the Indian Ocean.
Portugal and the Muslim powers aligned against them fought repeated battles in India, the Swahili Coast, and Arabia, with Portuguese and Ottoman forces fighting in Yemen and Oman. In 1541, Portugal launched their largest counterattack yet, aimed at burning the Ottoman Red Sea Fleet at Suez. This expedition was a disaster, with the much better armed Ottoman defences destroying the Portuguese ships. As a result, the Armada retreated to the friendly Christian port of Massawa, in modern day Eritrea, where they received supplies from the local Ethiopians. 550 men of that fleet would remain in Massawa and fight for Gelawdewos against Adal, whose ships and ports Portugal had been attacking for decades as part of the Blockade of the Red Sea and who had recently signed an alliance with the Ottoman Empire (who had sent Adal both weapons and men).
Upon learning that Portugal had joined the fight (and that the Ethiopians had made a promise to recognise the Pope in Rome in return for Catholic aid), the Somali launched an attack on Massawa, killing a column of 100 Portuguese soldiers who had, ironically, recently mutinied because they wanted to go home and not fight any more. Ahmad also agreed to rent an Ottoman army, acquiring 900 musketeers and 10 cannons for 100,000 okkas of gold.
But the remaining 450 Portuguese were in the country prior to the arrival of the Ottoman reinforcements. And as such, with their superior discipline and weapons, they quickly began to breathe new life into the Ethiopian rebellion. If the Portuguese had been smart enough not to launch an assault on the Suez, it is likely the rebellion would have petered out.
Instead, in 1542, the Portuguese and Ethiopian forces won a series of major battles against the Adal occupiers at Baçente, Jarte, and the Hill of the Jews. However, with the arrival of the Ottoman mercenaries, Imam Ahmad managed to chase down the Portuguese with an army he personally led and destroyed them in the Battle of Wolfa, killing 250 Portuguese soldiers, capturing their leader, and forcing the rest to flee. This disaster was enough to discourage any further attempted by Portugal to interfere in this war. Adal was, once again, on the verge of victory.
This is when the second stroke of Luck for Ethiopia happened.
It was a major foreign policy objective of the Ottoman Sultan to arrange a peace in the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese so the spice trade could start up again. Negotiations to this extent had been going for several years without either side giving much ground. But as such, the taking of high-status Portuguese prisoners to use as a bargaining chip was an Ottoman priority and the leader of the Portuguese forces in Ethiopia was Cristóvão da Gama, the son of Vasco da Gama. The Ottoman man on the spot demanded that Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi hand over da Gama to Istanbul. Ahmad refused and had da Gama executed on the spot. Enraged, the Ottomans went home, taking the best soldiers in the Adal army with them and ending the warm relationship with Adal’s most important ally.
Because of that, the Ethiopian resistance (which still included 130 Portuguese soldiers) managed to regroup and win the 1543 battle of Wayna Daga, where Imam Ahmad was killed and the Adal occupation of the Highlands was undone. Had the Ottomans stayed on the field or the Portuguese fleet never sent in the Red Sea, both of which are relatively easy to get (you just need da Gama to die and not be captured for the first one), it is likely the Ethiopian resistance would have been put down entirely and Adal would have faced the Oromo invasion in a very different position.
I think it is likely that the Oromo migrations would have been significantly less successful if instead of facing two battered Empires who had been fighting each other for centuries, they instead faced a united Islamic empire that had conquered that land around forty years earlier. Adal would likely fight other wars in that time period, but probably not one so significant and that would weaken it so much. This would not mean that the Oromo wouldn’t have any success but they are probably going to conquer much less land and remain a secondary power to that of Adal.
Adal at the time was part of an expansion of Somali speakers that had begun in around the 10th century and saw the Somali language expand both through land into Kenya, Eritrea, and Ethiopia and across the Indian Ocean to the Maldives and Mozambique. Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi’s success as a military leader was at least in part because he was able to unite numerous clans of Somali speakers into a single army, and his defeat and death halted much of that expansion because it removed that unity. This Somali Golden Age ended in the 16th century, when Ethiopia and the Oromo drove them out of much of their land and Portugal cut into their maritime trade in the Indian Ocean. Without those defeats, that expansion would continue. Probably not as a single empire but Islam and the Somali language would spread due to Mogadishu and Harar remaining as rich cultural and political centres.
Because Adal was considerably richer than Ethiopia, this was not really a war waged by the Somali for riches or land, it was a religious war waged for converts and for security. Removing the major Christian power in East Africa would help secure the position of the Muslim powers and the Adal Sultanate practiced a policy of forced conversations and executions of prominent nobles who refused to convert. The aim was very much to wipe out Christianity in the region. This would never happen entirely but given the fact that Sudan was also Christian around this time and is now almost entirely Muslim, it would probably be far more successful than in places like Spain or the Balkans when the Muslim leaders were more tolerant and the Christian population less isolated from the rest of Christendom. The Ethiopian Church might become something closer in power and population to the modern Coptic Church in Egypt, with most of its churches instead being mosques.
The Oromo, who in OTL are split around half and half between those who converted to Islam and those who became Christian, would in this world probably all take up Islam, in the way the Turks did, due to primarily fighting against and interacting with Islamic states. From there it is entirely possible that Islam would spread into the Great Lakes Region centuries before its OTL arrival in the 19th century and so be cemented before Christian missionaries got there.
This greater spread of Islam in East Africa would probably benefit the Islamic Swahili traders on the Indian Ocean Coast and their backers in Oman and the Ottomans against the Portuguese. It is entirely possible that, with stronger Somali allies, the Ottomans could succeed in their late 16th century efforts to conquer land in Kenya, Tanzania, and India from the Portuguese.
However, we must be realistic about what that means. Whenever the Ottoman Empire had to choose whether to give more resources to the Indian Ocean front or the European front or fighting in Persia, it always chose the latter two. Ottoman troops in the Indian Ocean were working on a shoestring most of the time.
It is still trivially easy for them to win one of those campaigns and gain the city in India or East Africa that they were aiming to, because Portugal was also operating a long way from home in hostile territory and the Ottomans could normally rely on the support of local Muslim allies. But it feels like if the Ottomans do take a city in India or Kenya, they'll just not hold it very long. Someone else with more resources in that area, whether a Muslim power like the Mughals or Persia or a non-Muslim one like the British or the French, will come and take it from them because again it was never their priority to defend.
The Ottomans didn’t successfully capture Diu in India in OTL for the same reason Adal didn’t conquer Ethiopia in OTL: infighting between the Ottomans and their local Muslim allies, meaning the two armies didn’t remain united and the Christians took advantage to win. This clash of personalities is still going to happen, even if we delay the exact incident that caused it. The Muslim world has never been a hive mind and eventually, especially as Portuguese power diminishes, the Ottomans are going to be increasingly unwelcome to throw their power around in East Africa, even if it is far more Muslim.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.
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