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The Abridged History of Al-Habashah: From Axum to Abyssinia
By Taym Ansary

Adhan From Every Mountaintop.

Let us look around the world a tad at this time frame of 1270.

In North Africa outside of Tunis, King Louis IX of France was laying siege to Tunis on his way to making a bid for reining Christianity to North Africa. Tabriz is established as the capital of the Mongolian Ilkhanate. The Livonian Order suffers a defeat by the Lithuanians. The Koreans revolt against the Mongolian Puppets. Works on Optics are translated from Arabic into Latin and distributed throughout European Academic Circles. And finally Al-Kaleem Faysal is declared Emperor of Al-Habashah.

In ways an eventful year, certainly not the most eventful in terms of global impact, but sometimes history has its off years. Though for Habashah the impact would be quite important in years to come. By uniting the Asmera and Roha Sultanates the first Al-Habashah Sultanate had been created. While more interesting developments would take time to happen the more immediate was the marshaling of manpower between the Tigraeans, Zagwe, and Ahmaric speaking peoples under one administration. Uniting the people under the house of Islam! By the end of his reign Faysal would push his territory into the region of the Falasha and take the region of Lake Tana for his Sultanate-from there he would establish a power basin that would serve Habashah rulers for centuries! Taking torch to the local settlements of the region he would establish his own, distinctly Islamic, city of Gondar on the north side of the Lake as a new administrative and royal capital. Decidingly pushing Habashaean interest into the region by force. A stream of nobles, slaves, laborers, craftsmen and more were funneled into the plain around Lake Tana, converting, pushing, or marginalizing the Falasha influentials to the point that within a few decades the ethno-linguistic make up of the area was unrecognizable.

With the Falasha broken, Faysal and his grandson would be able to roll up all of the northern Plateau into a united Islamic Sultanate. With the Northern Plateau rolled up his grandson in particular would look eastward to the Adal Sultsnates sitting along the Gulf of Arabia across the Great Rift Valley with keen interest. Habashah was sparsely known in the Islamic World sue to its geographic isolation. Negus Hafiz Ahmed would change all of that.