Battle of Wayna Daga (1543): Ethiopia and Portugal Defeat Adal

The Battle of Wayna Daga was fought on 21 February 1543 near Lake Tana in north-western Ethiopia. An army of the Ethiopian emperor Gelawdewos, strengthened by the surviving Portuguese musketeers of Cristóvão da Gama’s expedition, defeated the forces of the Adal Sultanate and killed their leader, Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi. His death brought the Adal conquest of the Ethiopian highlands, begun fourteen years earlier, to a sudden end.

Background

Since his victory at the Battle of Shimbra Kure in 1529, Imam Ahmad of the Adal Sultanate, known to Ethiopians as Ahmad Gragn (“the left-handed”), had overrun most of Christian Ethiopia. Churches and monasteries had been burned, much of the population had been killed, enslaved or converted, and Emperor Lebna Dengel had become a hunted fugitive.

Lebna Dengel had appealed to Portugal, a fellow Christian power active in the Indian Ocean, for help. He died in 1540 without seeing it arrive. His young son Gelawdewos, aged about eighteen or nineteen, succeeded him and continued the struggle from the mountains with a small following.

The Portuguese expedition

In February 1541 a Portuguese fleet under Estêvão da Gama, governor of Portuguese India, anchored at Massawa on the Red Sea coast. He landed a force of about 400 soldiers, most of them armed with matchlock muskets, under his younger brother Cristóvão da Gama. Both were sons of the navigator Vasco da Gama.

The Portuguese were in the Red Sea partly to fight the Ottomans, who had taken Egypt in 1517 and were extending their power along the Arabian coast. Helping Ethiopia offered Portugal a Christian ally in a strategic region, as well as a chance to strike at Muslim powers linked to its Ottoman rivals.

In July 1541 the expedition marched inland to Debarwa, the seat of the Ethiopian governor of the coastal province, where it waited out the rainy season and was joined by Lebna Dengel’s widow, Empress Seble Wongel. Late in the year it moved south, dragging small cannon and supplies through mountainous country. In April 1542 the Portuguese twice defeated Imam Ahmad’s army in Tigray, at battles known as Baçente and Jarte, and the imam himself was wounded.

Ahmad then sought help from the Ottoman-held ports of Arabia, receiving several hundred musketeers and some artillery. On 28 August 1542, at Wofla, his reinforced army defeated the Portuguese. Cristóvão da Gama was captured and, after refusing to convert to Islam according to Portuguese accounts, was executed. Ahmad then dismissed most of his Ottoman troops, apparently believing the danger was over.

The battle

The Portuguese survivors, around 120 to 170 men according to different accounts, joined Gelawdewos. Recruits gathered to the emperor during the winter, and early in 1543 the combined army advanced towards the imam’s camp near Lake Tana.

The battle was fought on 21 February 1543 at Wayna Daga, east of the lake; the name, roughly “grape highland” in Amharic, is also used for Ethiopia’s temperate middle highlands. Both armies numbered in the thousands, with Adal’s force usually described as larger, but the Christian side had the advantage of the Portuguese firearms and a determined leadership.

During the fighting Imam Ahmad, riding near the front, was hit by a musket ball and fell. Portuguese tradition credits the shot to a soldier named João de Castilho, who was killed soon afterwards. As news of the imam’s death spread, his army lost heart and broke. Many of his followers were killed in the pursuit, and his camp was taken.

Ahmad’s widow, Bati del Wambara, escaped from the field and made her way back to Harar. His son Muhammad was captured and was later exchanged for Gelawdewos’s brother Minas, who had been held prisoner by Adal.

Sources

The best-known account of the campaign was written by Miguel de Castanhoso, one of the Portuguese soldiers, and published in Lisbon in 1564. A second Portuguese narrative was written by João Bermudes, a priest who claimed the title of patriarch of Ethiopia, though his account is considered less reliable. Ethiopian chronicles of Gelawdewos’s reign describe the victory from the court’s point of view.

The Arabic Futuh al-Habasha, the main source for the earlier stages of the war, does not help here: its surviving text breaks off in the late 1530s. As a result, the battle is known mainly from Christian sources, and the figures they give for numbers and casualties cannot be checked against an Adal account.

Key people

• Gelawdewos (reigned 1540–1559): Ethiopian emperor whose leadership turned the tide; he spent most of his reign rebuilding the kingdom.
• Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi (c. 1506–1543): Adal commander, killed in the battle.
• Cristóvão da Gama (c. 1516–1542): leader of the Portuguese expedition, executed after Wofla; remembered in Ethiopia and Portugal as a heroic figure.
• Miguel de Castanhoso: Portuguese soldier whose narrative is the main European account of the campaign.
• Bati del Wambara: Ahmad’s widow, who later pressed his successors to continue the war.

Consequences

The death of Imam Ahmad ended the Adal occupation of the highlands. Many of the regions he had conquered returned to Ethiopian rule, and numbers of people who had converted under his rule went back to Christianity. Gelawdewos spent the following years restoring royal authority, rebuilding churches and defeating local rivals.

The war was not over. Bati del Wambara married Ahmad’s nephew Nur ibn Mujahid, who became emir of Harar and continued the conflict. In 1559 Gelawdewos was killed in battle against Nur’s forces. Both kingdoms, exhausted by decades of war, were soon reshaped by the large-scale migrations of the Oromo people into both the highlands and the lowlands.

The Portuguese who stayed in Ethiopia settled and married locally, and their presence helped open the way for later Jesuit missions in the 16th and 17th centuries, which would lead to new religious conflicts.

Gelawdewos himself was a determined defender of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. When Catholic missionaries pressed him to accept the authority of the pope, he set out the beliefs of his church in a written statement of 1555, known as the Confession of Gelawdewos, while remaining on friendly terms with the Portuguese who had fought for him.

The battle also showed Ethiopian rulers the power of firearms. Musketeers, few in number but disciplined, had played a decisive part in the campaigns of 1542 and 1543, and later emperors sought to obtain guns and to recruit soldiers who could use them. The descendants of the Portuguese veterans formed a small community in the north-west of the country that was still recognisable in the 17th century.

Timeline

• 1529, March: Imam Ahmad defeats Lebna Dengel at Shimbra Kure.
• 1540: Lebna Dengel dies; Gelawdewos becomes emperor.
• 1541, February: A Portuguese fleet reaches Massawa and lands Cristóvão da Gama’s force.
• 1542, April: The Portuguese defeat Ahmad at Baçente and Jarte.
• 1542, 28 August: Ahmad defeats the Portuguese at Wofla; Cristóvão da Gama is executed.
• 1543, 21 February: Ethiopian and Portuguese forces defeat Adal at Wayna Daga; Ahmad is killed.
• 1559: Gelawdewos is killed in battle against Nur ibn Mujahid.

Why it matters

Wayna Daga saved the Christian Ethiopian kingdom from destruction and ended the most serious threat it had ever faced. It also shows the growing importance of firearms in East Africa and the involvement of Portugal and the Ottoman Empire in the region’s wars. In Ethiopian memory it is a moment of deliverance, while in Somali and Harari tradition Imam Ahmad remains a celebrated hero.