In A Future Division Of Our Work More Ample
Accounts Will Be Given Both Of This Portuguese Expedition, And Of Other
Matters Respecting Abyssinia.
- E.
[Footnote 347: From the Portuguese Asia of De Faria, II. 24.]
[Footnote 348: In an account of this expedition of the Portuguese into
Abyssinia, by the Catholic Patriarch, Juan Bermudez, who accompanied
them, this difference of the number of men is partly accounted for.
According to Bermudez, the force was 400 men, among whom were many
gentlemen and persons of note, who carried servants along with them,
which increased the number considerably. - E.]
* * * * *
Some time before the expedition of De Gama into the Red Sea, Grada Hamed
the Mahometan king of Adel or Zeyla, the country called Trogloditis by
some geographers, submitted himself to the supremacy of the Turkish
empire in order to obtain some assistance of men, and throwing off his
allegiance to the Christian emperor of Abyssinia or Ethiopia,
immediately invaded that country with a numerous and powerful army. On
this occasion he took advantage offered by the sovereign of Abyssinia,
to whom he owed allegiance, being in extreme youth, and made such
progress in the country that the emperor Atanad Sagad, otherwise named
Claudius, was obliged to retire into the kingdom or province of Gojam,
while his mother, Saban or Elizabeth, who administered the
government in his minority, took refuge with the Baharnagash in the
rugged mountains of Dama, a place naturally impregnable, which rising
to a prodigious height from a large plain, has a plain on its summit
about a league in diameter, on which is an indifferent town with
sufficient cattle and other provisions for its scanty population.
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