The king, as if equally tired, followed them no further than the precincts of his camp; and the Moors, scarcely comforted by this forbearance after so great a loss, retreated to receive succour of fresh troops as usual, and enjoy their repose in the neighbourhood of shade and water. They had, however, scarce thrown aside their arms, disposed of their wounded in proper places, and begun to assuage their thirst after the toils of the assault, when the Abyssinian horse, breaking through the covert, came swiftly upon them, unable either to fight or to fly, and the whole body of them was cut to pieces without one man escaping.
The king, upon return of his troops, began to consider, and, by combining various circumstances in his mind, to suspect strongly, that, from the Moors attacking him, as they had for some time lately done, always in the most unfavourable circumstances, there must be some intelligence between his camp and that of the enemy. Upon examining more particularly into the grounds of this suspicion, three men of Harar (who had long attended the army as spies) were discovered, and being convicted, were carried out, and their heads cut off at the entrance of the camp; after which the king, who now found himself without an enemy in these parts, struck his tents, and returned to Gaza in Dawaro.
This movement of Amda Sion’s had more the appearance of opening a campaign than the closing of one, and occasioned great discontent among the soldiers, who had done their business, and were without an enemy, just at that time that the rains fall so heavy, and the country becomes so unwholesome as to make it unadvisable to keep the field. They, therefore, remonstrated by their officers to the king, that they must return to their houses for the several months of winter which were to follow; and that, after the fatigues, dangers, and hardships they had undergone for so many months, to persist in staying longer at such a season in this country was equal to the condemning them to death.
Gimmel-eddin, moreover, the new-appointed governor, insisted with Amda Sion, that he was able enough himself to keep all the tributary provinces in peace, and true allegiance to the king; but if, on the contrary, the king chose to eat them up with a large army living constantly among them, as well as upon every pretence laying them waste with the sword in the manner he was now doing, he could not be answerable for, nor did he believe they would be able to pay him, the tribute he expected from them. But the king, who saw the motives both of his officers and of the Moorish governor, continued firm in his resolutions. He sharply reproved both Gimmel-eddin and his army for their want of discipline, and desire of idleness, and ordered the officers to acquaint their men, that, if they were afraid of rains, he would carry them to Adel, where there were none; that, for his part, he made a resolution, which he would keep most steadily, never to leave his camp and the field while there was one village in his own dominions that did not acknowledge him for its sovereign.
Accordingly on the 13th day of June 1316, immediately after this declaration, he struck his tents, and marched into Samhar, to disappoint, if possible, the confederacy that some of the principal Moorish states had entered into against him, which were agreed, one by one, to harrass his camp by night, and, after having obliged him to retreat to Shoa in disorder, to give him battle there before he had time to refresh his troops. The authors of this conspiracy were seven in number, Adel, Mara, Tico, Agwama, Bakla[5], Murgar, and Gabula, and they had already collected a considerable army. The king, who saw they persisted in their nightly attacks, rode out, thinly accompanied, to choose a post for an encampment that was to give him the greatest advantage over his enemy; and, whilst thus occupied, he was suddenly surrounded by a body of troops of Adel lying in ambush for him. A soldier (in appearance an Abyssinian) came so close to the king as to strike him with his sword on the back with such violence that it cut his belt in two, and, having wounded him thro’ his armour, was ready to repeat the blow, when the king pierced him through the forehead with his lance, upon which his party fled.
But the Moors, for five successive nights, did not fail in their attempts upon his camp, which wearied and greatly contributed to discontent his men; and the more so, because the enemy declined coming to any general engagement, though the king frequently offered it to them. Amda Sion, therefore, decamped the 28th of June, and, leaving this disadvantageous station, advanced a day’s march nearer Mara, pointing, as it were, to the very center of that kingdom. But here, again, he was stopt by the discontent of his soldiers, who absolutely refused to go farther, or spend the whole season in arms, in this inclement climate, while the rest of his subjects, in full enjoyment of health and plenty, were rioting at home.
This disposition of his army was no sooner known to the king than he called the principal of them together, and, planting himself on a rising ground, he began to harangue his soldiers with so much eloquence and force of reasoning, that they who before had only learned to admire their king as a soldier, were obliged to confess that, as an orator, he as much excelled every man in his state, as he did the lowest man of his kingdom in dignity. He put his soldiers in mind, “that this was not a common expedition, like those of his predecessors, marching through the country for the purpose of levying their revenue; that the intention of the present war was to avenge the blood of so many innocent Christians slain in security and full peace, from no provocation but hatred of their religion: that they were instruments in the hand of God to revenge the death of so many priests and monks who had been wantonly offered as sacrifices upon their own altars: that they were not a common army, but one confederated upon oath, having sworn upon the sacrament, at the passage of the river Hawash, that they would not return into Abyssinia till they had beat down and ruined the strength of the Mahometans in those kingdoms; so that now, when every thing had succeeded to their wishes, when every Mahometan army had been defeated as soon as it presented itself, and the whole country lay open to the chastisements they pleased to inflict, to talk of a retreat or forbearance was to make a mockery at once of their oath, and the motive of their expedition. He shewed, by invincible reasonings, the great hardships and danger that would attend his retreat through a country already wasted and unable to maintain his army; what an alarm it would occasion in Shoa, to find him returning with an enemy at his heels, following him to his very capital; that such, however, must be the consequence; for it was plain, that, though the enemy declined fighting, yet there was no possibility of hindering them from following him so near as to give his retreat every appearance of flight, and to bring an expedition, begun with success, to an ignominious and a fatal end.
“He upbraided them with his own example, that early their prophets had foretold he was a prince fond of luxury and ease, which, in the main, he did not deny, but confessed that he was so; and that they all should have an attachment to their pleasures and enjoyments, he thought but reasonable. He desired, however, in this, they would do as much as he did, and only suspend their love of ease and rest as long as their duty to God, to their country, and their murdered brethren, required; for, till these duties were fulfilled, ease and enjoyment to a Christian, and especially to them bound by oath to accomplish a certain purpose, was, in his eyes, little short of apostacy.” A loud acclamation now followed from the whole army. They declared again, that they renewed their sacrament taken at the passage of the Hawash, that they were Christ’s soldiers, and would follow their sovereign unto death.
Though the great personal merit of the king, and the grace, force, and dignity with which he spoke, had, of themselves, produced a very sudden change in the mind of the soldiers, yet, to the increase of this good disposition it had very much contributed, that a monk, of great holiness and austerity of manners, living in a cell on the point of a steep rock, had come down from Shoa to the camp, declaring that he had found it written in the Revelation of St John, that this year the religion of Mahomet was to be utterly extirpated throughout the world. Full of this idea, on the feast of Ras Werk, in the month of July, the army passed the Yass, a large river of the kingdom of Mara, and encamped there. The troops were alarmed, the night after their arrival, by a piece of intelligence which proved a falsehood.
A woman, whose father had been a Christian, said, that she had very lately left the Moorish camp; that the enemy were at no great distance, and only waited a night of storm and rain to make a general attack upon the king’s army; and the clouds threatening then a night of foul weather, it was not doubted but the engagement was thereupon immediately to follow. It blew, then, so violent a storm, that the king’s tent, and most of those in the camp, were thrown down, and the soldiers were in very great confusion, imagining, every moment, the Moors ready to fall on them. But whether the story was a falsehood, or the storm too great for the Moors to venture out, nothing happened that night, nor, indeed, during their stay in that station.