Battle of Adwa

On March 1, 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, the army of Emperor Menelik II defeated an Italian invasion force under General Oreste Baratieri. The Ethiopian army, perhaps around 100,000 strong and armed with large numbers of modern rifles, faced roughly 17,000 to 18,000 Italian and Eritrean colonial troops advancing in separate columns through rough terrain. The columns lost contact with each other and were overwhelmed one by one. Italy lost several thousand men killed and about 3,000 taken prisoner in a single day, the worst defeat a European army suffered in the colonial wars in Africa.¹²

Italy, unified only in 1861, wanted an empire like those of Britain and France and had taken the Red Sea coast as its colony of Eritrea. In 1889 it signed the Treaty of Wuchale with Menelik, but the Italian text of Article 17 made Ethiopia an Italian protectorate while the Amharic text only allowed Ethiopia to use Italy for foreign relations if it chose. When Menelik rejected the Italian reading, Italy invaded. Menelik had spent years buying rifles and artillery from France, Russia and Italy itself, and he and Empress Taytu Betul rallied regional nobles behind the old Solomonic monarchy.²

The Treaty of Addis Ababa in October 1896 annulled Wuchale and recognized Ethiopia's full independence, and European powers soon sent envoys to Menelik's court. In Italy the defeat brought down Prime Minister Francesco Crispi's government. Ethiopia became, with Liberia, one of only two African states never colonized during the Scramble for Africa, though Fascist Italy occupied it from 1936 to 1941.²