Administrative and military impediments of medieval Ethiopian economy

Abstract

The administrative and military structures of the medieval Ethiopian state were based on a system called the gult system that gave tribute-collecting rights to state officials and military personnel. Nevertheless, there were various occasions in which the administrative and military system and structure of the state were hampering the economic development of the medieval Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia. There were different factors that were responsible for the underdevelopment of medieval Ethiopian economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the administrative and military impediments to the economy of medieval Ethiopia. Using different primary and secondary sources, this study endeavoured to thematically analyse how the administrative and military structures were hampering the economic development of Ethiopia in the period. Analysis of fragmentary sources of the period has revealed that the inherently precarious nature of the gult system, the military deployment, the soldiery, and the incessant war that had been fought in the state had been impeding the economic prosperity of the medieval Ethiopian state.

Keywords:

• economy
• gult system
• medieval Ethiopia
• administrative and military structures
• wars
• Christian kingdom

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Ethiopia is a developing country whose economy has long been dependent on the agricultural sector. Although it has had the potential for growth and development, with a plenty of natural resources and snug climatic conditions, the Ethiopian economy has remained underdeveloped for a long period of time. This underdevelopment of Ethiopian economy inevitably has a medieval antecedent. Various reasons can be mentioned for the minimal development of the medieval Ethiopian economy. This study has thus attempted to examine the negative impacts of the administrative and military structures of the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia on the economy of the period. Investigating the factors that have been impeding the economy of Ethiopia in the past will have invaluable contribution by providing some inkling in the effort to prosper the economy of Ethiopia.

1. Introduction

After the “restoration of the Solomonic dynasty” in 1270, Christian Amhara kings of Medieval Ethiopia conducted extensive territorial expansions in different directions of Ethiopia and the Horn. This territorial expansion and consolidation of the Christian state began to be conducted in large scale and magnitude, particularly after the coming of King Amda-Tsiyon to leadership. This large-scale territorial consolidation and expansion of the Christian state had also been carried out by the successors of King Amda-Tsiyon in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (Taddesse, 1972). The territorial expansions and consolidations of the Christian state seem to have inevitably broadened the economic bases and enhanced the wealth of the Christian state. Following these expansions and consolidations, various networks of trade routes, which stretched from the Red Sea ports and the port of Zayla to the interior of the Christian state, could become under the control of the Christian state. The number of tributary provinces had also considerably increased which again widened the sources of wealth for the Christian kingdom (Ibid).

After the establishment of the Muslim sultanate of Adal in the late fourteenth century, the Christian highland state began to be challenged by the Walasma rulers until the beginning of the sixteenth century. The challenge of Adal had become apparent following its control over the trade routes that stretched from the port of Zayla to the interior Muslim provinces of the Christian state. In particular, as Marcus (1994) stated, “when Ethio-Egyptian relations were strained, Adal’s highly mobile Somali and Afar cavalry entered Solomonic territory and, with the cooperation of their fellow Muslims, waged guerrilla war against Christian garrisons”.

Skirmishes between the Christian kingdom and the sultanate of Adal continued until the beginning of the sixteenth century when the conflict had reached its peak following the rise of Imam Ahmed (known as Ahmad Gragn in Ethiopian traditions) into the leadership of Adal. The coming of the Imam had changed the situation in the Horn of Africa, and the dominance of the Christian state in the region came to an end. By rallying different Muslim communities of the east for a common cause, to fight the “common enemy,” Imam Ahmad conducted a large-scale and destructive invasion of the Christian state. The war had exhaustively devastated the Christian state in the short run, and it had resulted in the weakening of both the Christian state and Adal sultanate itself in the long run. As reported by Arab Fakih, the chronicler of the Imam, the conquest was very destructive in which the majority of the economic bases and accumulated heritage resources of the Christian state were destroyed (Stenhouse, 2003).

In the meantime, there was Oromo population movement and expansion that had brought havoc on the central provinces of the Christian state. The war and the population movement were followed by political, economic, and demographic changes in the central provinces of the Christian state. This in turn had forced the Christian state to shift its center to the northwestern part of Ethiopia, to the Lake Tana and Gondar areas, where the Christian rulers had attempted to establish a stable political and economic base in the seventeenth century. This stability could not last long, for the political instability of the Christian state was followed by the weakening of the Christian kings at Gondar and the subsequent strengthening of different provincial lords of northern Ethiopia after the second half of the eighteenth century. This period of instability is referred to as Zamana Masafint (the era of princes) in Ethiopian history (Abir, 1968). During this period, there were various regional conflicts among different provincial lords of northern Ethiopia to get the prestige of the title called ras bitwaddad from the weak kings of the Christian state at Gondar.

In this long process of ups and downs of the state, the economy had faced voluminous hitches. There is a general belief that the stability of a state and the strength of the central power would have created more or less fertile ground for the development of the economy of a certain state. The instability and weakening of the Ethiopian state of the period understudy had, however, greatly affected its economy. Particularly, in the period when centrifugal forces had triumphed, the peasants and the traders of the period had suffered a lot from different impediments, and thereby the economy suffered immensely (Marcus, 1994).

The Christian kings of medieval Ethiopia had established administrative and military structures that were somewhat similar, albeit with some fluctuations, throughout the medieval history of Ethiopia. It may be assumed that the administrative and military structures of a certain state could protect the economic activities and facilitate them to flourish. Contradictively, the administrative and military structures which were established by the Christian kings of medieval Ethiopia were not as such favorable for the effective functioning of the then traditional economy. Although the structure had facilitated the governance system of the period, it had been peril the economic production of the state. Hence, it is here the rationale for this study emerges. The purpose of this article is to examine how the administrative and military structures of the state had been hampering the economic development of medieval Ethiopia.

2. Materials and methods

This study focuses on the history of medieval Ethiopia which is a relatively distant period of historical study. Recorded documents that recite economic activities and their challenges in the period understudy are scarcely available. However, there are fragmentary sources that describe economic activities and challenges affecting these activities. Despite this paucity of historical sources, we have attempted to employ available documents to show how the administrative and military structures of the Christian highland state had been impeding the economic prosperity of medieval Ethiopia. In terms of the proximity of the sources to the historical event in terms of time and space, the historical sources can be categorized into primary and secondary sources. The primary accounts consisted of scrappy foreign sources like the accounts of Father Francisco Alvarez, a priest who escorted the Portuguese mission; the document called Futuh al-Habesha (the conquest of Abyssinia); and records of Manuel Almeida. The secondary sources used for this study include books, journal articles, and book chapters.

The study has employed a qualitative research approach in which the researchers engaged in a rigorous thematic analysis of this fragmentary historical evidence to provide glimpses into the impact of administrative and military structure of the state on the economic activities.

3. Administrative and military impediments of medieval Ethiopian economy

One of the basic features that characterized the medieval Christian Kingdom of Ethiopia, mainly from the end of the thirteenth century to the first half of the seventeenth century, unlike Aksumite and the Zagwe kingdoms, was the absence of permanent royal capital. The medieval Christian kings had been ruling from temporary camps. Except for Tagulat and Dabra Berhan, where the Christian kings had attempted to establish permanent political seats, there was no place that served as a permanent seat of the Christian Kingdom until the foundation of Gondar by King Fasiladas in 1636. Hence, the kings of medieval Ethiopia had wandered here and there to administer over their vast territories (Gamst, 1970).

Looking at the royal camps of the medieval Ethiopian rulers would have great significance, because the camp signified the political, economic, and socio-cultural lives of medieval Ethiopian ruling classes and even the society at large. Although there were seasonal fluctuations, according to the accounts of Father Francisco Alvarez and Manuel de Almeida in the early sixteenth and early seventeenth century, respectively, the number of population living around the medieval royal camps is estimated to have been between 20,000 and 40,000. In addition to the officials who were in the services of the king, there were also different administrators, merchants and craftsmen, and other camp followers who were living in the mobile capital of medieval Ethiopia (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1954, 1961). This huge population had no food and beverage to take unless the peasants near the temporary camps could nourish them. There was also a tradition that forced the nearby peasants to supply food and necessary facilities for the camp dwellers (Horvath, 1969). This destructive nature of temporary camping seems to have hardly encouraged agricultural productivity by taking the production of the peasants and by discouraging them from surplus production.

Thus, here it is important to comprehend what kind of economic repercussions would have been brought to the peasantry. Besides, the absence of permanent capital and the general little development of urbanism had affected the prosperity of economic activities, particularly commercial and handicraft activities. As we took an episode from the establishment of Gondar and the subsequent prosperity of trade and handicraft works in and around the city, the formation and development of urban centers could have contributed for the prosperity of medieval Ethiopian economy. However, urbanism had been a very slow process in the history of Ethiopia, and the rulers had failed to establish a permanent political center for centuries. This seems to have greatly discouraged economic prosperity (Gamst, 1970).

Maintaining its scrupulous rule and typical organization wherever it moved, the royal camp had functions similar to that of a city. This could also be attested by the travelers’ accounts of Alvarez and Almeida in the beginning of the sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, respectively (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1954, 1961). The royal camp of Christian kings had in fact begun to develop a certain structure since the time of Amda-Tsiyon, but the internal structure of the roving capital saw its complete development in the first half of the fifteenth century (Taddesse, 1972). Wherever the camp was established, the royal court had been organized soon. “Being at the pinnacle of the military and administrative organization,” as Taddesse (1972) noted, “the royal court was the perfect model of the whole empire.” The nucleus of the mobile medieval royal camp was the royal court which in turn had its own distinct structure. Making the Emperor’s tent its center, the royal court often had a circular or oval growth from the center.

The custom of medieval Ethiopia had dictated that the peasants of the region “should provide food and shelter for all who were either guests or in the service of the emperor” (Horvath, 1969). This tradition had in turn far-reaching implications on the economic life of the peasants. The economic basis for the power of the Christian monarch lay in his traditional right to distribute fiefs in return for military or other services. The roving capitals of medieval Ethiopia had thus been redistributive centers (Ibid). It is also relevant to quote the words of Horvath:

The roving capital was basically a redistributive center. The emperor had at his resources such as land, land taxes, market taxes, gifts, spoils of war, and labor in the form of feudal dues. The emperor could resources in various ways. The nobility might receive large tracts of the emperor’s land in exchange for nobility in turn redistributed their resources among one were in the service of the king, all needs were market mechanism was substantially less important the roving capital than was the redistributive mechanism.

The army organization of medieval Ethiopia, which was instituted by King Amda-Tsiyon, had two basic elements: the central army of the king and the local militia which were raised from the Christian provinces in times of national or local crises (Taddesse, 1972). Similarly, Deresse (2014) has also divided the army of Amda-Tsiyon into two: “the royal court army and provincial regiments composed of infantry and cavalry corps.” The militarization of the medieval Ethiopia had also been reinforced by King Zar’a Yaeqob and his successors particularly following the territorial enlargement of the Christian kingdom. According to Deresse, there were important military regiments that had been established in almost all provinces of the Medieval Kingdom of Ethiopia from the beginning of the fifteenth to the early sixteenth century. These military regiments were known by the name chewa and were under the direct command of the king which “marked the presence of the authority of central power in the medieval kingdom of Ethiopia” (Deresse, 2014).

For centuries, according to Pankhurst (1961), the emperor of Ethiopia had been able to collect and command large armies of feet and cavalries who carried shields and tents and fought with bows and arrows, spears and swords. Citing the account of al-‘Umari, Taddesse (1972) has also corroborated the idea of Pankhurst on the weapons used by the soldiers of medieval Ethiopia. This implies that the Christian army of medieval Ethiopia had employed little technology and technicality in the use of modern firearms rather it used traditional arms. For instance, modern firearms were for the first time introduced to the Christian state at the beginning of the sixteenth century during the conflict with the sultanate of Adal (Rey, 1929; Taddesse, 1972).

The army of the Christian state had been one of the most important subjects of various European accounts. For instance, Francisco Alvarez has reported the recruitment of the soldiers, the establishment of military regiments in the provinces, and the command of these military regiments in the early sixteenth century (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1961). After a century, the Portuguese missionary Manuel de Almeida also reported the arms employed by the Christian army, the military discipline, the mobility of the military camps, and various other aspects of the Christian army at the beginning of the seventeenth century (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1954). Even later in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Bruce (1790), a Scottish traveler, has also described the conditions of the military.

After the fall of Aksum, there had been no currency in most of the medieval history of Ethiopia; it was only at the end of the eighteenth century that foreign currency could be introduced. In a moneyless society managing huge amount of army would have been inevitably difficult, and its influence on the economy could not be easy. Unable to afford the soldiers’ salary in money, the kings of medieval Ethiopia used to grant land from which the soldiers generated a means of subsistence in the form of tribute (Abir, 1980). Furthermore, Pankhurst (1961) has also remarked that “soldiers were generally speaking neither paid nor supplied with provisions by the state though many lords, courtiers and even minor functionaries […] received grants of land in turn for their service.” Therefore, the task of nourishing the soldiers passing around their villages was inevitably on the shoulders of the peasants. This in turn would have had a great impact on the peasants’ production motive and productivity.

Following the dawn of the fourteenth century, the Christian state had conquered various new territories and consolidated the former provinces of the Zagwe kingdom. To administer over these vast territories, the Christian rulers had employed a military-administrative system that included both local governments and appointments of civil and army officers, court officials, and kinsmen. It was king Amda-Tsiyon (r. 1314–1344) who attempted to institutionalize the administrative system of the Christian kingdom. The Christian rulers who came after him had also employed the same system of administration with few variations (Marcus, 1994).

The administration system, which these medieval Ethiopian kings had established to administer over their vast empire, was on the basis of granting a plot of land to the administrative officials and to those who were in the military service. The system was usually called the gult system, for the granted land was named gult in the Geez language. Hence, it would be better to understand that the administrative and even the military system of medieval Ethiopia was on the basis of granting of land [by the emperor] to officials who were involved in the administrative and military systems of the state. In fact, the gult system had never allowed the ruling class to get direct access to land, except in the case of rim lands in the eighteenth century. The system had rather given officials only the right to collect tributes from the peasants working on the gult land. Hence, as Merid noticed, the political system of Ethiopia had not been based on the ownership of the basic means of production, i.e. land rather on the right to an appropriate portion of the peasants’ produce. Thereby hereditary ruling families did not seem to have evolved out. The ruling classes had been functional as long as they were believed to be loyal and necessary; otherwise, the emperors/kings could have removed them from their positions. As a result, the position of gult seems to have been dangerously insecure (Merid, 1986).

The precarious nature of the gult system, therefore, had forced the gult holders to be more exploited when they were in position. The rəst holder peasants, on the other hand, had continued being immobile from their hereditary rəst land ownership. And taking advantage of peasants’ immobility, the ruling classes used to impose them the status of serfdom. Although it was different from European serfdom in its inherent nature, the tribute paying, gabar, system of Ethiopia had also been more exploitative. The ruling classes used to supervise the production of the peasants under their realm. As Merid remarked, “the gult holder understood that his gabar would not exert himself to produce more than what he needed for his own sustenance. To avoid being cheated he began watching him as soon as the crops were ready for harvest. He or his representative perched himself near the threshing floor and stayed there until he received his share of the produce” (Merid, 1986).

This excessive engagement of the gult holder in the agricultural production of the peasants and the subsequent appropriation of his share of produce seem to have reduced the peasants’ motivation to productivity. Although they were unassailable and had complete autonomy in deciding their production, the peasants were hardly happy to produce surplus agricultural products. This was because of the exploitative nature of the gult system. The situation seems to have worsened in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following the evolution of rim land tenure. Unlike the gult system, the rim land tenure had provided its holders direct access to lands and the agricultural laborers working on it. And the rim land-holding system had become more exploitative than the gult system, for the system had completely transformed the cultivators into dependent laborers who worked for the benefit of the rim holders. This in turn seems to have inevitably reduced the initiation of cultivators for productivity (Habtamu, 2011).

In the early medieval Ethiopia, the economic resources of the Christian state had widened following the expansion of the state and the subsequent incorporation of various territories. Compared to the post-sixteenth century, the economic resources of the state had been relatively better in these early medieval periods, and the state had been collecting significant amount of tributes from the peasants and from the commercial sector. However, throughout the medieval Ethiopia, the interest and commitment of the Christian kings to accumulate and properly redistribute their treasure had been very weak. Factors like the attitude of the rulers as well as the society for wealth seem to have discouraged the wealth accumulation system of the state. Therefore, the rulers had redistributed the state’s resource by offering to their dignitaries, their army, religious establishments and by preparing different feasts (Mengistie, 2018).

The military system, the soldiers, and the incessant wars that had been recurring in Ethiopia also had their own impact on the economic productivity of the state in the period understudy. The military system of medieval Ethiopia could not have established a salary for the soldiers. To express the pre-Gondarine military system of the Christian state, Pankhurst has stated that the military service was, based in large measure on the system of land tenure. Vassals [gult holders] thus held- or were granted- fiefs on condition that they served as soldiers, and, if they failed to do so, their lands were forfeited to others. The Emperor, who did not have to pay his soldiers, was in this way able to assemble a large army without much expense (Pankhurst, 1992). Mobilized from different districts and provinces, several thousands of soldiers became ready for war in a brief period after being called by the Emperor. This issue has been reported by different European travellers from the late fifteenth to the late of the eighteenth century. For example, Suriano in the late fifteenth and Alvarez at the beginning of the sixteenth century have reported the mobilization of more than 100000 soldiers (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1961; Crawford, 1958). Similarly, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Almeida also reported that Emperor Susenyos was mobilizing around “thirty to forty thousand soldiers, four or five thousand on horseback and the rest of foot (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1954).

In fact, this custom of mobilizing a huge army had also continued during the Gondarine period. This was corroborated by the accounts of Poncet at the close of the seventeenth century and Bruce at the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Although it seems a little bit exaggerated, Poncet has reported the existence of “almost infinite number feudatories” that could contribute huge amount of armies within a short period of time when the Emperor needed it. In 1699, for example, the last powerful Gondarine Emperor, Iyasu I (r. 1682–1706), was said to have commanded a huge force that was estimated between four and five hundred thousand soldiers (Foster, 1949).

Informed by the oldest officers of Gondar, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, Bruce has told us about the army of the weaker state. According to him, the largest army that participated at the battle of Sabrakussa, to defeat the force of Ras Mika’él Sehul, seems to have reached between fifty and sixty thousands (Bruce, 1790, III and IV). To sum up, both during the pre-Gondarine and Gondarine period the Christian State had managed to mobilize huge amount of army that could have great implications on the economic life of the society.

Although they had some gult lands in their respective districts or provinces, the army had nothing at hand for its survival, while it was travelling for fighting. Hence, the army seems to have been highly dependent on the peasants where it passed through and made fighting. Both the soldiers and the war they fought had had very destructive effect on the economy of Ethiopia in the period under consideration.

Warfare had been common in the pre-sixteenth century of history of Ethiopia, because the state had been engaged in frequent wars to conduct various territorial expansions and to suppress rebellions and deviant provinces. Surprisingly, however, the sixteenth century was a period when very extensive and destructive wars were fought. Among these, the war between Adal and the Christian state seems to have been the most destructive of all, for it had brought extensive catastrophes on the state and its economy (Bartnicki, 1969–1970).

As Rey has clearly stated, “the effects of this battle were decisive; for over a decade the Muslims pillaged and ravaged the unhappy kingdom from end to end.” The war had, therefore, brought extensive calamities on the economy of the Christian state. Agricultural production was highly halted by this large-scale invasion of the force of Imam Ahmed of Adal. Concerning the destruction brought by the war, Rey continues to explain that “the desolation wrought by this period of pillage is almost impossible to describe. Crops could not be cultivated, whole people starved; it was unsafe to light a fire, lest a marauding party should be attracted thereby, and on this account it is alleged the Abyssinians then began to practice, which obtains today, of eating their meat raw” (Rey, 1929).

More importantly, the ravage wrought by the war of Imam Ahmed was described by an account known as futuh al-Habesha, its author, Shihad ad-Din or commonly called Arab Faqih, had accompanied the war of conquest and was an eye-witness for many of the events he described. According to him, the war had brought very severe calamities on the economic lives of the society. Moreover, the war had targeted churches, and thereby numerous churches were burnt and destroyed by the conquest. Since churches were the treasury house of the Christian state where majority of the revenue was stored, the destruction of churches had extensive economic repercussions on the Christian state (Stenhouse, 2003).

What we can understand here is that the war had affected the economy of the Christian state. The effect can be understood in two ways. Firstly, the war had greatly endangered the agricultural production of the peasants, and thereby it had dragged the society to poverty that reached as far as starvation. Secondly, by weakening the economic resources of the provinces and districts, this destructive war had reduced the amount of revenue that had been submitted to the central state even after the end of the war. That was why Emperor Galawdewos and Sartsa Dengel were attempting to make recover different provinces and districts to their positions held before the war, and thereby to restore the economic position of the country (Bartnicki 1969–1970).

In the meantime, there was also the Oromo population movement and expansion, which in turn had large-scale repercussions on the economy of the Christian state. Following the weakening of the Christian state due to the war of Adal, the Oromo people had started an extensive population movement and expansion mainly in the second half of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century. This movement and expansion had greatly ravaged many provinces and districts of the Christian state; as a result, many of the southern provinces were lost to these expanders. This expansion had endangered the economic resources of the Christian state. First of all, it had impoverished the southern districts and become an increasing threat to the central provinces. And to avoid the Oromo menace, the Christian rulers such as Sartsa Dengel had been exempting the bordering provinces from paying tributes, just to strengthen and cope up the influx of the Oromo (Bartnicki 1969–1970). This, in turn, had greatly weakened the revenue of the state, which was ravaged by the war with Adal, internal conflicts and lack of stabilization. The frequent wars with the Oromo and the continued internal instability had increased the burden on the peasants by demanding much of their produce to the fragile state. The difficult situation of the peasants was intensified by famine and epidemics (Ibid).

In the early seventeenth century, as Pankhurst (1961) stated, there were problems of successions and peasant rebellions in defense of the old Orthodox faith following the declaration of Catholicism as official state religion. This turmoil was of considerable influence on the economic life of the peasants. And this misery of peasants’ life had worsened with the frequent droughts and pestilences that had been inevitably followed by famine. Side by side, the expansionist Oromo were taking territory after territory, and many of the southern and eastern territories had been falling under this destructive Oromo invading force. Thereby the number of provinces and districts and the subsequent state revenue from these districts and provinces had been highly declining.

Although a relative relief seems to have been achieved after the establishment of Gondar as a capital, internal political instabilities and problem of successions had prevailed at the beginning of the eighteenth century. These instabilities would have influenced the economic life of the society. Moreover, following the weakening of the power of Gondarine rulers, vulnerability to extensive civil wars seems to have been prevalent. Later on, in the mid of the eighteenth century, the power of these rulers had severely deteriorated, and the sense of regionalism which paved the way for incessant civil wars began to grow. In the second half of the eighteenth century, civil wars had become common. These civil wars had considerable influences on the economic life of the society (Marcus, 1994).

Concerning the civil wars of the eighteenth century, Pankhurst (1992) has noted that “the peasantry in the second half of the eighteenth century suffered frequently from the ravages of the civil war.” A contemporary account, of James Bruce, has reported probably the most credible situation of the period. For example, to express the effect of Ras Mika’el Sehul’s army on the area it had passed, Bruce (1790) has stated that “all the country was forsaken; the houses uninhabited, the grass trodden down, and the field without cattle. Everything that had life and strength fled before that terrible leader [Ras Mika’el Sehul] and his no less terrible army.” Here, we could comprehend that weakening of the imperial power at Gondar and the subsequent strengthening of regional powers had intensified the civil war in the northern part of Ethiopia. This in turn had brought great repercussion on the life of the peasants, and the life of the peasants seems to have been precarious. This miserable situation had indeed continued until the mid of the nineteenth century (Zewde, 2002).

In addition to the effect of different wars on the economic life of the peasantry, the soldiers themselves had also been bringing tremendous distresses on the peasantry and the agricultural production of the period. As was noted previously, the soldiers had been hardly paid, and there was a tradition that entitled them to loot whatever they required everywhere they travelled. The existence of such burdens is described in both contemporary Ethiopian chronicles and accounts of European travellers.

For example, citing the chronicle of Emperor Eskindir (1478–1494), Pankhurst expressed that the soldiers of the Emperor had ruined the people. A century later, the chronicle of Sartsa Dengel had also shown how destructive the soldiers were for peasant production. For example, in one occasion when he was in the province of Tigre with his soldiers, the Emperor said that “If I prolong my stay in Tigre [,] the country will be ruined because our soldiers are numerous, indeed innumerable.” In fact, in some occasions, the Emperor used to give permission to his soldiers to plunder the peasants, and the case of Hamasien, which was ravaged by the permission of the Emperor, is a good example for this.

We can learn from the account of Almeida (Beckingham & Huntingford, 1954) that the burden brought by the soldiers on the poor peasants had been very heavy. According to him, the area through which the soldiers had passed had been greatly plundered and ruined. Probably, the repercussions of the soldiers on the peasantry had gone beyond economic aspects. In explaining the situation, he has noted that:

Big companies of men, soldiers and lords bringing many servants come daily to quarter themselves in small villages. Each one goes into the house he likes best and turns the owner into the street, or occupies it with him. Sometimes it is a widow or a married woman whose husband is away, and then by force he gets not only her food and property, but her honour.

Furthermore, since there was the prevalence of lawlessness, as Almeida stated, many groups of soldiers were always going about the whole country, eating, plundering, and looting everything (Ibid).

Learned from his Ethiopian friend, Abba Gregorius, Ludolf (1684) also stated the effect of the soldiery on the peasants. Expressing that the soldiers of the period were unpaid and seemingly poor, the soldiers used to impoverish the peasant society of Ethiopia in the period. To state in his own words:

The poverty of the soldiers impoverishes the countries through which they march. For […] they take what is not freely given to them; and by that means lay waste their own countries no less than their enemies, whereby the poor country people are constrained to turn Soldiers, and so taught to deal with others as they were dealt with themselves.

Although the effect of the soldiery on the peasants had been prevalent almost in all of the period under consideration, the ravages of the soldiery seem to have reached its worst phase in the late eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century. The weakening of the imperial state at Gondar and the subsequent strengthening of regional powers and the importation of huge amount of firearms by regional nobilities seem to have enhanced the number of people at arms. The growing number of soldiers would have inevitably increased the burden on the cultivators. The soldiery as well as the frequent wars of particularly the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century had greatly affected the productivity of the peasants by reducing the motivation to produce and by ravaging the produces as well. This situation seems to have sometimes forced the peasants to abandon their agricultural production and to join banditry, which was probably the only way of securing themselves from the ravages of the soldiery.

The effect of the soldiery had not in fact been limited to the agricultural production only rather it had also been hampering the development and prosperity of the commercial sector and the handicraft activities as well. Soldiers of different regional lords, particularly during the Era of Princes, had been affecting the caravan trading activities. It was mainly excessively demanding taxes at different custom posts and by creating insecurity of the trading activities and the merchants as well. Even the existence of some prosperous commercial centers before the Gondarine and in the Gondarine period was related with the absence of soldiers contact with these commercial centers.

4. Conclusion

The economy of medieval Ethiopians had been greatly hampered and had failed to show significant progress in change. The gult system, the absence of urbanism, frequent wars, the soldiery, and the military system in general had hardly encouraged economic productivity in the pre-19^th century Ethiopia. Their destructive nature had inevitably ravaged the production of the peasants, and this in turn had greatly reduced the production motive of the peasants. It was due to the peasants not being happy to produce to be pillaged or to feed the unsatisfied soldiers. Similarly, the commercial and handicraft activities had also been suffering from the precarious nature of the military system. This historical inquiry is not a comprehensive investigation that entirely addresses the havoc brought by the administrative and military structures of the medieval Ethiopia. Thus, further historical investigations addressing the factors which had been hampering the development of medieval Ethiopian economy are needed to widen historical awareness of the issue.

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Mengistie Zewdu Tessema

Mengistie Zewdu Tessema is a lecturer in History and Heritage Management at the Department of History and Heritage Management, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, Woldia University in Ethiopia. He has been leading the department for the last 3 years. He has also been active in teaching, research, and community service activities for the last 5 years. Currently, he is rigorously endeavouring to publish articles in the fields of History and Heritage Studies. His main research interests are Ethiopian history, heritage studies, tourism studies, and cultural economics.