The Ethiopian Empire was the Christian highland state that endured in the Horn of Africa from the Solomonic restoration of 1270 until the fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 — one of the world's oldest continuous Christian polities, legitimized by a tradition that its kings descended from Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and the one African kingdom that defeated a European colonial invader at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 and kept its sovereignty through the Scramble for Africa, despite a later Italian occupation from 1936 to 1941.
On the morning of 1 March 1896, near the town of Adwa in northern Ethiopia, an Italian army marched into the mountains expecting to add another African country to Europe's collection of colonies. By nightfall it had been destroyed. Emperor Menelik II had gathered roughly a hundred thousand fighters and shattered the invaders in a single day. It was the most complete victory an African state won over a European colonial army in that age. Unlike earlier battlefield wins such as the Zulu at Isandlwana, this one preserved the independence of the state that won it. For Black people across the world, Adwa became proof that the era's confident assumption — that European armies could not be beaten by Africans — was simply false.