The horn of Africa now became the site of bitter conflict, originally a trading rivalry, but soon a long religious and political fight between Christians of Ethiopia and the Muslim coastal states. The sultan of Adal (now between Somalia and Ethiopia), Ahmad Gran, attacked into the heartland of Ethiopia in the 1520s with the help of Danakill and Somali nomads. The Christian Amhara nation dominated the Ethiopian plateau at that time and sustained a flourishing ecclesiastical art. (Ref. 8, 270) The pope sent Portuguese soldiers, led by Christopher da Gama (Vasco's son), to help against this Muslim conquest in a 20 year long war. As a result of that help by Portuguese, Ethiopia came under Catholic influence for the first time, as their own Coptic Church had been declared heretical some 1,100 years previously. The Jesuits with the Portuguese tried to convert the Ethiopians, apparently without too much success, as all Catholic missions were expelled by the next century. But the old Christian empire was so exhausted by the warfare that the pagan Galla, from the south and east then invaded and settled in the country, with general anarchy resulting. (Ref. 175, 8, 83) Additional Notes

On 27 April 1848 Victor Schoelcher, the French under-secretary of state for the colonies, signed a decree abolishing slavery. To force the decision through, he had warned of the danger of a general uprising if nothing was done. Resistance by the slaves themselves was thus of capital importance in the French government's decision, and freedom, when it came, was due more to Africa's own efforts than to a sudden burst of humanitarian feeling on the part of the slave traders. The course of human (...)

Helping the poor to help themselves in Guinea-Bissau West Africa

The first work to offer 5,000 years of authoritative historical coverage of ancient and modern cities in the Middle East and North Africa--from their founding to the present--highlighting each city's cultural, social, political, and economic significance.

In the early 17th century northern Europeans, already experienced in smuggling and raiding Spanish-American shipping, began to establish permanent colonies of their own in America. The north Europeans ' advantages included their access to the sources of shipbuilding material (particularly around the Baltic), fewer political commitments and diversification of European interests and finally more sophisticated devices for obtaining capital and spreading risks - the chartered joint-stock company. (Ref. 8)