Italo‐Abyssinian Wars (1887–1896, 1935–1936)

Abstract In 1885 Italy occupied the Red Sea port of Massawa. Partly to make up for the French occupation of Tunis in 1882, which many Italians thought should have been appropriated by Italy, Foreign Minister Pasquale Mancini, encouraged by the British who aimed to limit French expansion in the area, declared that “the keys to the Mediterranean,” in an infamous phrase of the Italian politician's, were to be “found in the Red Sea.” Egyptian power had collapsed along that sea's coast since the Mahdist rebellion in the Sudan and Britain's 1882 intervention in Egypt proper, but there is little doubt that Mancini's decision was made with an eye to Ethiopia, where for more than 20 years Italian missionaries, explorers, and emissaries had been particularly active. The occupation of Massawa, which in fact gave Italy a strip of land running almost the entire length of the territory between the Ethiopian highlands and the sea, was cause for alarm at the court of Ethiopian emperor Johannes IV, who realized an ambitious European power had replaced a decaying Egypt on his kingdom's lowland borders. For the time being Johannes banked on the Hewitt Treaty signed with Britain in 1884 and supposedly guaranteeing Ethiopian territorial invulnerability with the might of the British Empire. Johannes's vassal Menelik (king of Showa to the south and west of Johannes's territories) was more amenable to the Italians, seeking to profit from their presence to strengthen his claim to Johannes's throne. Ensconced on the Red Sea coast, the Italian military sought to make something of the uneasy relationship between emperor and vassal, favoring Menelik with arms, ammunition, and flattering embassies.