What happened at the Battle of Adwa?
On 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, the army of Emperor Menelik II destroyed an Italian army of 14,519 men under General Oreste Baratieri. The Italian columns lost touch with one another in a night march and were beaten one after another. Italy lost all its guns, and the peace that followed annulled the treaty on which it had claimed a protectorate over Ethiopia.2
The Italians called it the battle of Abba Garima, after one of the mountains on the field; in Ethiopia it has always been Adwa. Augustus Wylde, a British former vice-consul who rode over the battlefield eight times and questioned commanders on both sides, wrote that it "solidified the Abyssinian kingdom, and placed King Menelek firmly on the throne".3
Who won the Battle of Adwa and why?
Ethiopia won. Menelik II had gathered more than 100,000 men, many armed with modern rifles, while Baratieri attacked with 14,519. His four columns lost touch with one another in a night march over badly mapped mountains, and the Ethiopians overwhelmed them one at a time, so the Italians never fought as a single army.4
From partners to enemies
Italy and Menelik began as partners. While he was still king of Shewa, the Italians helped his rise with weapons and money. When Emperor Yohannes IV was killed fighting the Mahdists at Metemma in March 1889, Menelik took the imperial throne, and in May he signed the treaty of Wuchale with Italy. Soon afterward Italian troops occupied Keren and Asmara, the core of what became their colony of Eritrea.5
The quarrel grew out of Article 17 of that treaty. In the Italian text Menelik "consents" to use the Italian government for all his dealings with other powers, and Italy read this as a protectorate. Menelik, relying on the Amharic text, held that the clause allowed him to use Italy's services but did not oblige him to. Baratieri himself wrote that the article gave Italy a protectorate over Ethiopia.6
The war in Tigray
Fighting began on the border. In January 1895 Baratieri, governor of Eritrea, defeated Ras Mengesha, the lord of Tigray, at Coatit and again at Senafe, and his troops went on to occupy Adigrat, Mekele and Adwa. By the end of 1895, Wylde notes, the Italians held nearly the whole province of Tigray. Menelik answered by calling up the forces of almost all Ethiopia.7
The first blows fell on the Italian outposts. On 7 December 1895 Major Toselli's force on the mountain of Amba Alagi was overwhelmed by the Ethiopian vanguard under Ras Makonnen, who led the troops of Harar, and Toselli was killed. The fort at Mekele was then besieged until its water ran out, and in January 1896 Menelik let its garrison march out; Agostino Gaibi, in the Enciclopedia Italiana, suggests he hoped this would open the way to a peace that canceled the treaty of Wuchale.8
Menelik then moved his army west and camped around Adwa, where it stayed for about a month. Two Tigrayan chiefs in Italian pay, Ras Sebat and Hagos Tafari, went over to him with their men and modern rifles, and turned on the Italian supply lines. Peace talks went on almost to the eve of the battle, but they failed because the Italian government insisted on keeping the treaty of Wuchale.9
Menelik, for his part, would not attack the fortified Italian camp. The Enciclopedia Italiana says he weighed the danger of such an attack and the difficulty of feeding his army, and was ready to negotiate; Wylde judged that the Italians, had they stayed in their entrenchments, could have beaten off the whole Ethiopian army. To the Italian envoy Major Salsa, as his chronicler records it, Menelik had already answered that he would not let "the banner of Rome" be planted in his country.10
Baratieri's decision
By late February both armies were hungry. The Italian camp around Sauria had food for only a few days, and Baratieri was preparing to retreat into Eritrea. The Ethiopian army had stripped the Adwa valley bare, and many of its mules and horses had died.11
Pressure came from Rome. On 25 February Prime Minister Francesco Crispi telegraphed that the campaign was "a military phthisis, not a war", and the government had already named General Antonio Baldissera to replace Baratieri without telling him. Baratieri, by his own account, did not know when the telegram reached him that he had been replaced three days earlier.12
At a council of war at the end of February, all four brigade commanders, Generals Albertone, Arimondi, Dabormida and Ellena, spoke for an advance. Arimondi had argued for the offensive for months against Baratieri's preference for defense, and Baratieri, though inclined to retreat, gave way.13
His plan was not to attack Menelik's camp. The army would march by night to a strong position closer to Adwa, on the heights in front of the town, and there offer battle, so that the Ethiopians would have to attack it or withdraw. Wylde, writing as a critic, compared him to "a gamester" who threw his dice for a big coup and lost.14
The armies
The Italian official count, given both by the Enciclopedia Italiana and by Wylde, is 14,519 men and 56 guns in four columns: Albertone's brigade of Eritrean askaris, African soldiers in Italian service, with 4,076 men and 14 guns on the left; Arimondi's 2,493 men and 12 guns in the center; Dabormida's 3,800 men and 18 guns on the right; and Ellena's reserve of 4,150 men and 12 guns.15
The Enciclopedia Italiana puts Menelik's army at over 100,000 fighting men, 10,000 of them cavalry; Wylde says at least 120,000. It came from all over the empire: the emperor's own Shewan army and the troops of Empress Taytu, Ras Makonnen with the men of Harar, Ras Mikael with the Wollo cavalry, Ras Mengesha and Ras Alula with the Tigrayans, and King Tekle Haymanot of Gojjam. It also had quick-firing guns.16
The battle fell on Sunday 1 March, the feast of Saint George in the Ethiopian calendar. Many soldiers had left the camp to forage or to pray at the churches around Aksum and Adwa, and were not expecting to fight.17
The battle: three fights instead of one
The columns set out on the evening of 29 February. Albertone's brigade cut across the path of the center column, then hurried on, reached the position it had been given and kept going: the sketch map issued by headquarters and the guides placed the pass of Kidane Mehret farther on. Around half past five in the morning its advance guard ran into the Ethiopian outposts and raised the alarm in Menelik's camp.18
The Ethiopian court chronicler, Gebre Sellassie, was there. He describes the firing that began in the last hour of the night as falling without pause like rain, and writes that it was impossible to describe all that "our eyes saw and our ears heard at the battle of Adwa".19
Albertone's guns threw back the first attacks, and the opening of the battle was an artillery duel. But the Ethiopians worked around his flank and closed the ring. Most of his officers fell, Albertone was taken prisoner, and toward eleven o'clock the survivors broke and fled, leaving their guns, which had fired their last rounds.20
The second fight came on the heights of Mount Belah and the pass of Rebbi Arienni, where Arimondi's and Ellena's brigades had been sent to hold the line. Masses of Ethiopian troops pressed them from the front and the flank, and another column slipped through the gap between them and the distant Dabormida. By about half past twelve both brigades had dissolved. Arimondi was killed, and Ethiopian cavalry cut down the fugitives jammed in the valleys behind.21
The third fight was Dabormida's alone. Ordered to help Albertone, his brigade followed the ground into the valley of Mariam Shewito instead and lost touch with the rest of the army. It beat back the attacks in front of it into the afternoon, until Ethiopian forces fresh from the victory in the center came around behind it. Dabormida fell, and most of his men were killed or captured.22
Empress Taytu was on the field near the emperor. The pursuit lasted only some 10 to 15 kilometers, but the fleeing soldiers were attacked all the way by the people of the countryside. Baratieri reached the fort of Adi Caieh on the morning of 3 March.23
Counting the losses
The Italian figures vary. The Enciclopedia Italiana gives 6,600 dead and 1,700 prisoners, and the Italian biographical dictionary about 9,000 dead and captured, Italians and Eritreans together. Wylde puts the prisoners at about 4,000, half of them Italians, close to the official figures Maurice de Coppet cites: about 4,000 prisoners, 1,865 of them Italians. All the Italian guns were lost.24
Ethiopian losses are harder to pin down. The Ethiopian chiefs, according to a Russian writer cited by Baratieri, reported 4,000 dead and 6,000 wounded to the emperor; Abune Matewos, head of the Ethiopian church, gave 4,500 dead, as de Coppet records. Wylde, who saw the wounded in the towns months later, estimated 5,000 to 6,000 killed and about 8,000 badly wounded, and the Enciclopedia Italiana about 7,000 dead and 10,000 wounded.25
The harshest fate fell on the captured askaris. A council of Ethiopian chiefs judged them traitors, and about 800 had their right hands and left feet cut off. Wylde, who saw the place, noted that no distinction was made between Christians and Muslims; Omer writes that half of them were Muslims from the coast or Somalis.26
Aftermath
Menelik did not follow up into Eritrea. His army was short of food, and within weeks it began to march home. In Italy the defeat brought down Crispi's government, and Antonio Starabba di Rudinì became prime minister. Baratieri was tried by a military court at Asmara and acquitted, and left the army.27
The blame has been argued over ever since. Mariano Gabriele, in the Italian biographical dictionary, faults Baratieri's order of operations, which said nothing clear about what to do once the first objectives were reached or if a retreat became necessary. Wylde laid the magnitude of the defeat "entirely" at Baratieri's door, and saw its main cause in the long halt of the center and the reserve, which left nearly half the army out of the fight.28
Baldissera, the new commander, sent Major Salsa back to Menelik to open peace talks and to ask leave to bury the Italian dead on the battlefield.29
Peace followed on 26 October 1896. The treaty of Addis Ababa ended the war and annulled the treaty of Wuchale, and the Italian prisoners were later set free. With it fell the claim to a protectorate that had started the war.30
Legacy and memory
In February 2024 Ethiopia inaugurated the Adwa Victory Memorial in the Piassa district at the heart of Addis Ababa. Its museum displays weapons, documents and photographs of the campaign alongside statues of Menelik II, Empress Taytu and the commanders who fought at Adwa, and its sections honor the farmers, the women and the pan-African leaders the victory inspired.31
The anniversary is still marked every year. › 1 March in military history: the Battle of Adwa, 1896
