After victory at Shimbra Kure in 1529, the armies of the Adal (Barr Sa'd ad-Din) sultanate led by Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi, known in Christian Ethiopian tradition by the pejorative 'Grañ' ('left-handed'), advanced into the Christian kingdom and in the early 1530s brought northern Shewa, Amhara and Tigray under Muslim governors; the Library of Congress country study records that his forces burned churches, took prisoners and collected booty, and quotes Taddesse Tamrat that Shimbra Kure 'broke the backbone of Christian resistance'. Amélie Chekroun's 2023 study, reviewed by Anaïs Wion and Alain Gascon, dates the shift from raiding to a deliberate war of conquest to 1531 and describes a systematic occupation in which, according to Gascon's summary, Christians in the southern provinces converted to Islam while those in the north became tributary dhimmi, with a poll tax levied on those who did not convert. Emperor Lebna Dengel's appeal to Portugal brought a small Portuguese force; Emperor Galawdewos, with its survivors, defeated the Imam at Wayna Daga near Lake Tana, where he was killed in February 1543, and his army disintegrated. Fighting continued intermittently until a definitive Muslim defeat in the early 1560s, and the exhaustion of both states is widely cited as opening the way for the Oromo expansion. The country study says Ethiopians suffered 'extraordinary material and moral losses'.
The armies of the Barr Sa'd ad-Din (Adal) sultanate under Imam Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi overran most of the Christian Ethiopian kingdom, placing it under Muslim governors until Ethiopian and Portuguese forces defeated and killed the Imam in 1543
No defensible total exists. The Futuh al-Habasha gives figures for individual battles and massacres, such as more than 10,000 Christians killed in Tigray, but these are triumphal numbers in a work written to glorify the campaign and motivate recruits, and no independent count survives for either side.
The Library of Congress country study records that Ahmad's forces burned churches across the conquered highlands; the destruction of particular churches, such as Atronsa Maryam and Maryam Seyon at Aksum, is reported from the Futuh and Ethiopian chronicles.
Ethiopia