On 1 March 1896, in the mountains around Adwa in northern Ethiopia, the army of Emperor Menelik II destroyed an Italian force under General Oreste Baratieri. Several thousand Italian and Eritrean soldiers were killed and thousands more were taken prisoner. The defeat ended Italy's attempt to make Ethiopia a protectorate, and Ethiopia kept its independence while most of Africa fell under colonial rule.
A treaty with two meanings
Italy had helped Menelik, then king of Shewa, with modern weapons, ammunition and money, and he used that strength to make himself emperor in 1889. In the same year Italy and Ethiopia signed the Treaty of Wichale, also spelled Wuchale or Ucciali. Its Article 17 said in the Amharic text that Ethiopia could use Italy's services in dealing with other powers, while the Italian text made this an obligation, which Rome read as a protectorate. Menelik rejected the article in 1890 and the whole treaty in 1893. South African History Online stresses the part played by Empress Taytu in refusing to give up Ethiopia's sovereignty.1
Italy turned to force from its colony of Eritrea in 1895, but by the end of the year large Ethiopian armies were threatening the Italian outposts. In February 1896 the two main armies faced each other near Adwa, and both were running short of food. The whole campaign is told in our article on the Battle of Adwa.2
The night march
Baratieri was reluctant to attack. On 28 February the Italian prime minister, Francesco Crispi, sent him a furious telegram to goad him into action, Britannica writes, and the next day, after a meeting at which most of his generals argued for an attack, Baratieri gave the order to advance.3
His brigades, under Generals Matteo Albertone, Giuseppe Arimondi, Vittorio Dabormida and Giuseppe Ellena, marched through the night over broken ground, without reliable maps. The plan was for columns close enough to support each other, but during the night they lost contact and ended up miles apart. When the Ethiopians attacked on the morning of 1 March, they could deal with the Italian brigades one at a time.4
Albertone's column, made up of Eritrean battalions, broke first. Dabormida's column was cut off and destroyed in a narrow valley, and his body was never found, according to the military history site HistoryOfWar.org. By midday the Italian army was in flight through difficult country.5
Disputed numbers
Every figure for Adwa is an estimate. Britannica gives Baratieri 14,500 men against an Ethiopian army of some 100,000, well armed with modern rifles. HistoryOfWar.org gives the Italians about 18,000 infantry and 56 guns, part of them tied down in supply duties, and Menelik more than 100,000 men. South African History Online speaks of about 100,000 Ethiopians against 20,000 Italians.6
Britannica estimates that more than 6,000 men of the Italian army were killed, slightly more than half of them Italians and the rest Eritrean askari, and that 3,000 to 4,000 were captured; it gives Ethiopian losses as more than 5,000 killed and 8,000 wounded. HistoryOfWar.org puts the Italian dead at over 7,000 and the Ethiopian casualties at a similar number.7
Independence kept
The defeat brought down Crispi's government: a vote of censure forced him to resign in March 1896. Under the Treaty of Addis Ababa of October 1896 the Treaty of Wichale was annulled and Italy gave up its claim to a protectorate over Ethiopia. Italy kept Eritrea, whose borders were fixed by treaty in 1900.8
Britannica calls Adwa the first crushing defeat of a European power by African forces in the colonial era, and South African History Online describes it as a lasting symbol of African resistance to colonial conquest. Italy invaded Ethiopia again in the 1930s under Mussolini. For other battles of the age of rifles and railways, see our guide to the greatest battles of the industrial age.9
Note: army sizes and losses at Adwa are estimates that differ widely between sources, and the text names the source for each figure.
Also on this day
- 1942: Second Battle of the Java Sea. Japanese warships caught the damaged British cruiser HMS Exeter and two escorting destroyers as they tried to slip out of the Java Sea, two days after the main Allied defeat there.
