The Princes of Axum


 * The Princes of Axum
 * by Jonathan I. Edelstein
 * 3 June 2002


 * When the dog dies, Rats breed; When the king falls, Princes quarrel.


 * -- Anonymous, Axumite, c. 450.

Axum ... The period from 331 to 465 [1103-1237 CE] is known to historians as the Age of the Princes, but to Axumite poets it was the Time of the Rats. Where once there had been a rich kingdom, a beacon of Christ in a land of heathens, there was now dozens of petty states contending over the ruins. Where once the people had lived under the even hand of the Negus negusti, now they were despoiled by plagues and princes both.

In the century of the Princes, the overwhelming fact of life was warfare. Every ruler was alert for the opportunity to seize his neighbor's domain, and at the same time watchful against attack. Warfare became the purpose of the state; armies and fortifications grew ever larger, and other aspects of government were neglected. These armies were fed and paid for with increasingly oppressive taxation, and troop rosters were filled out with peasants drafted from their fields.

The result, predictably, was famine. By the waning years of the fourth century, plagues and conscription had left many Axumite successor states with too few peasants to work the land, and the dwindling harvests were increasingly taken to feed the soldiers. As an unknown Axumite poet wrote sometime around 390 [1162 CE]:


 * The prince's soldiers
 * Marched through yesterday.
 * Invaders would once
 * Have despoiled us less.

By that time, Axumite peasants could count themselves fortunate to go three years without starvation stalking the land; the Rats had eaten the people's bread.

Slavery, once the lot of criminals and prisoners of war, became a common condition. Peasants taxed off their farms became slaves of their lords, laboring as before for a slave's ration. Parents unable to feed their children sold them instead, reckoning even a slave's meager existence better than starvation.

In one area did fourth-century Axum excel: the building of castles. By 400 [1172 CE], the castles of Axum rivaled any in the world; they were virtually impregnable to assault, and were taken only through siege or treachery. In the troubled times of the Age of the Princes, treason was far from unknown; some of the most tragic stories of this era concern loyal captains forced into treason by blackmail or family connections.

The Axumites did not fight only among themselves. In its weakened state, the land of Axum was vulnerable to foreign invaders, especially along its border-marches. In 386 [1158 CE], the port of Djibouti fell to a Yemenite assault, and the provinces along the Red Sea coast had Najdite overlords by the fifth century. In the Horn of Africa, Omani and Yemenite armies clashed both with each other and with the Axumite remnants.

Such were the times that many of the coastal people welcomed foreign conquest. In Djibouti, for instance, the rule of the Yemenites was strict, but the city governor organized sanitary measures against the plagues and brought some measure of justice and order. The Yemenites did not molest the churches, and taxation actually decreased. The poverty of the countryside prevented Djibouti from regaining its former prosperity as an entrepot, but its people no longer starved.

The Axumite coast would remain under foreign rule for less than a century, but the conquerors would leave an enduring legacy, particularly in the form of religion. There had always been communities of Mandaean and Muslim merchants in Axum, but in the time of the Negus negusti they had been forbidden to preach. Under foreign rule, the religions of the conquerors were given equal status with Christianity, and the merchants were joined by civil servants and farmers. The great majority of Axumites retained their own faith -- although some few, deciding that Jesus had forsaken them, adopted those of their conquerors -- but Christians were a minority in some coastal provinces by 450 [1222 CE].

In the heartland, though, the Christian faith was as strong as ever. By unspoken agreement, monasteries and churches were left unmolested by the princes' armies. Defeated lords sought sanctuary by becoming monks, and peasants weary of the world found their way to the monastery gates. In the monasteries on Lake Tana, in Axum town and in isolated valleys, the sacred Ge'ez language was spoken and manuscripts were copied as if nothing had changed.

It was a renegade monk, ironically, who would change everything. His name was Sahle; he claimed descent from King Solomon, and he would become known as Sahle the Bloody.

Little is known of Sahle's early life; the first records of him date from his time as a monk in Debre Maryam about 445 [1217 CE]. In that year, the chronicles of the monastery record that he was tried before a court of his fellow monks and expelled for heresy, fighting and theft of monastery stores.

For the next several years, the histories are silent, although it is probable that Sahle lived as a bandit in the mountains of northern Ethiopia. By 453 [1225 CE], however, he was something more than a mere bandit leader. Leading an army against his native city of Mek'ele, he captured the prince's castle by suborning the gatekeeper. The prince and his family were put to the sword; the faithless soldier received a traitor's reward by being hanged from the castle's tallest tower.

There were no massacres of the people and garrison of Mek'ele, however; those, Sahle made his own. He had captured the castle nearly intact, and with little loss of life among the defending troops; he offered them amnesty and honorable service if they swore loyalty to him. Nearly all accepted, and those who did not were given safe conduct out of the city.

This show of mercy was a calculated act on Sahle's part. By showing such restraint, he not only displayed his strength but cast himself in a different mold from the rapacious Rats. Soon, the legend of Sahle the just and benevolent ruler had far outpaced the reality of the bandit turned warlord.

The next decade would show that, whatever the legend, Sahle was a genius at siegecraft and intrigue. One by one, he led his armies against the neighboring kingdoms, adding them to his own. By 462 [1234 CE], he had reunified much of northern Axum, taking Gondar after a siege of nine months. Through all this time, he maintained his reputation as a harsh but just ruler, allowing himself only one act of revenge -- the destruction of Debre Maryam and the seizure of all its treasures. It was one of these stolen relics -- a crown said to have been worn by Solomon himself -- that Sahle wore when he was crowned Negus negusti at Mek'ele in 465 [1234 CE].

The remaining quarter-century of Sahle's rule were spent in retaking the coastal provinces. He warred with the armies of Yemen and the Najd, sometimes defeating them on the field and sometimes falling back to defend his heartland. In 482 [1254 CE], he decisively defeated the Najdite armies south of Massawa, and captured the port in 483 after a year-long siege. By the time of Sahle's death in battle in the spring of 490 [1262 CE], only Djibouti remained under foreign rule.

The defeated foreigners were permitted to keep their faith, and their soldiers were welcomed into the Axumite armies. While this strengthened Axum's might, it had unintended consequences; Muslim and Mandaean merchants and veterans could now settle freely in the Axumite kingdom, and many cities that had been exclusively Christian for more than a millennium now knew thriving foreign settlements. The people often muttered against these settlers, and also against the native Jews, and their displeasure sometimes expressed itself in riots. Monks and priests also urged that the foreign religions be suppressed, but Sahle was not ready to take such a step.

Nor was his successor. Sahle's son Meles, although sadistic and monstrous in his personal habits, was a brutally efficient ruler who put the strength of the kingdom before religion. It was said that Meles denied God as a young man and declared that his hell would be on earth, but in truth he restored much of the prosperity of the former kingdom. Through use of forced labor, he built roads and cleared abandoned plots for planting. He encouraged trade through tax and labor exemptions for merchants and artisans, ignoring the complaints that he favored Jews and heathens above his own people. He stamped out banditry in the countryside and fortified the northern border against the resurgent Egyptian kingdom. By the end of the fifth century, he had begun to cast his eyes to the south, with the intention of completing his father's work of unification.

Between 502 and 520, Meles' army campaigned without cease through the southern provinces. However, although he retook much of southern Axum, he was not successful in reuniting the old kingdom. In the face of Meles' forces, many petty lords of the south chose to cast their lot with the League of Kings, hoping that Reshem's power would save them from Meles'. The armies of Axum and the League clashed along the border several times during Meles' reign, but he did not feel ready to attack the League in force.

Instead, he turned his wrath on Djibouti. His father had besieged the city and forced it to pay tribute, but it remained defiantly under Yemenite rule, and controlled the entrance to the Red Sea. In 526 [1298 CE], Meles besieged Djibouti with an army of 60,000 men. The defenders fought fanatically, and the power of the Yemenite fleet prevented Meles from imposing more than an intermittent blockade, so the city held out for year after year. The siege dragged on through Meles' death in 531 [1303 CE], and might have lasted decades longer if his son Teklemikael had not made an opportune purchase from an Indian merchant. With the crude bombs at his disposal -- and the recipe for making more -- Teklemikael succeeded in undermining Djibouti's walls in 533 [1305 CE], and the city was taken at last. Gunpowder had come to Axum...

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