Axum

Zara Yaqob was crowned at Mary of Zion in 1436 and lived on in Axum for three years, and when the Portuguese priest Francisco Álvares came in the 1520s he still found good stone houses and a great five-aisled church. That church did not survive the war with Adal. In 1535 the troops of Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi sacked and burned the town, and a Jesuit visitor afterwards counted only about a hundred inhabitants among the ruins. From then on town and church rose and fell together: Sarsa Dengel rebuilt both and was crowned there in 1580, Oromo raiders burned them in 1611, leaving fewer than two hundred mud houses, and Fasilides restored the church in 1655. Axum never regained its old size, but the coronations went on, and in 1693 Iyasu I was crowned in a church that now stood over little more than a village.