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In 2015, an unprecedented number of people from Africa and the Near East took flight and sought refuge in Europe. By the end of that year, some 1.8 million migrants had arrived in the EU, the vast majority having come across the Mediterranean. Since then, despite measures to host some of the people fleeing the Syrian war in Turkey and concurrent attempts to physically seal off some borders in Eastern Europe, the numbers of refugees traveling to Europe has continued to top half a million annually. A mass migration on a scale not witnessed in modern times is underway, and it has presented Europe with its greatest challenge of the twenty-first century. Asfa-Wossen Asserate argues here that buil...
This book explores why Ethiopian kings pursued long-distance diplomatic contacts with Latin Europe in the late Middle Ages. It traces the history of more than a dozen embassies dispatched to the Latin West by the kings of Solomonic Ethiopia, a powerful Christian kingdom in the medieval Horn of Africa. Drawing on sources from Europe, Ethiopia, and Egypt, it examines the Ethiopian kings’ motivations for sending out their missions in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – and argues that a desire to acquire religious treasures and foreign artisans drove this early intercontinental diplomacy. Moreover, the Ethiopian initiation of contacts with the distant Christian sphere of Latin Eur...
In February 1937, following an abortive attack by a handful of insurgents on Mussolini's High Command in Italian-occupied Ethiopia, 'repression squads' of armed Blackshirts and Fascist civilians were unleashed on the defenseless residents of Addis Ababa. In three terror-filled days and nights of arson, murder and looting, thousands of innocent and unsuspecting men, women and children were roasted alive, shot, bludgeoned, stabbed to death, or blown to pieces with hand-grenades. Meanwhile the notorious Viceroy Rodolfo Graziani, infamous for his atrocities in Libya, took the opportunity to add to the carnage by eliminating the intelligentsia and nobility of the ancient Ethiopian empire in a pog...
One hundred years ago, from 1910 to 1916 the young prince Lij Iyasu (1897-1936) assumed power as the uncrowned emperor of Ethiopia. However, he was overthrown by an alliance of oligarchs led by the future emperor Hayle Sillase. The short reign of Iyasu, disrupted by fierce inner competitions in the international context of World War I, has remained obscure, even to specialized researchers. Yet, over the past two decades, new sources have been uncovered, allowing for new questions and searching for new answers. This book assembles diverse perspectives on Lij Iyasu's politics and life, his 'pluralistic' and controversial religious inclinations, and his international relations. (Series: Northeast African History, Orality and Heritage - Vol. 3)
In 1935, Fascist Italy invaded the sovereign state of Ethiopia—a war of conquest that triggered a chain of events culminating in the Second World War. In this stunning and highly original tale of two Churches, historian Ian Campbell brings a whole new perspective to the story, revealing that bishops of the Italian Catholic Church facilitated the invasion by sanctifying it as a crusade against the world’s second-oldest national Church. Cardinals and archbishops rallied the support of Catholic Italy for Il Duce’s invading armies by denouncing Ethiopian Christians as heretics and schismatics, and announcing that the onslaught was an assignment from God. Campbell marshalls evidence from th...
Over the years little has been written about the remarkable life of Empress Menen Asfaw (April 3, 1891-February 15, 1962), who was the wife of the last reigning Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Sellassie I. With this first time translation and publication of her biography, readers can become reacquainted with the life of Empress Menen and the great contribution she made to her faith, her nation and her family. The foundation for this biography is a rare book entitled, "Her Imperial Majesty Menen Asfaw" which was written shortly after her passing in 1962. The original book has been translated from the ancient Ge'ez language of Ethiopia to Amharic and then to English. To make this a true reflection ...
In his vivid letters home to his father in the Scottish Borders, Sandy Curle (190080) paints an engaging picture of 1940s Ethiopia supported by over 100 illustrations and comprehensive explanatory notes. During the liberation, Sandy had led his Ethiopian irregular troops up from Kenya, but he had not seen his wife for three years or their new daughter the editor of this book at all. As part of the new Ethiopian government, he observes tensions between the restored Haile Selassie and the veterans of colonial administration. Sent to Jimma in 1943 to advise the governor of the south-west, he wins the trust of the old school Ras Birru, and helps support the Emperors modernising policies on the ground. His family is at last able to join him here in 1944 after an adventurous wartime voyage. Full of telling detail, the letters bring alive a complex society recovering from the unpredictable and brutal Italian occupation. Sandys extensive social circle includes friends across the nations from his 20 years in East Africa, old comrades and, of course, Scots. He shares with us his wide interests in archaeology, religion and the natural world together with domestic worries and family drama.
The relations between Ethiopia and Israel, until their dramatic severance in the aftermath of the October 1973 War in the Middle East, revolved around issues of regional strategy as well as of ancient religious concepts of identity. For Haile Selassie's Ethiopia, Israel was centrally important. This book follows these relations as they developed along the modern history of the Middle East and Africa, and as they were influenced by ancient Christian, Islamic and Judaic legacies. It attempts to reconstruct the complex relations between the two states.
The book is about the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, a remarkable person who with skill, commitment, and wisdom laid the foundations for Ethiopia's development. The book focuses on the person of Haile Selassie rather than his achievements as a statesman and the adroit politician about whom a lot has been written. His leadership skills, his religious devotion, his humor, sensitivities, his bias for education and the educated, his humanism- are reflected through unvarnished narration of some episodes and interactions of the Emperor with young and old, his officials, and petitioners.