Crusaders were traditionally permitted, and indeed encouraged, to pillage, and Italy’s crusade against Ethiopia continued the practice with a vengeance, despite the establishment of the Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War on Land, which Italy had signed in 1899 at The Hague along with 23 other Europeans states. Renewed in 1907, the Convention, which was designed to bring to an end the looting that had been normal practice for European powers throughout the second half of the 19th century, made any form of pillage—and specifically the plundering of cultural artefacts from religious institutions—an illegal act.1 However, the Italians share with their Axis partners the dubious distinction of ignoring the Convention and extending the tradition of ‘to the victor go the spoils of war’ well into the 20th century.
During the invasion and occupation of Ethiopia, looting of churches, houses and farms was de rigueur. Indeed, long after Mussolini claimed that the war had come to an end, Graziani, who acknowledged that the war was still being waged, was actually issuing written instructions to his subordinates to maintain the principle of war booty. On 27 October 1936 he instructed his military, ‘We must continue the inexorable work of destruction of everything. It is superfluous to add that plunder, cattle or anything else of value belongs entirely to the detachments that carry out the raid.’ These instructions remained in place in occupied Ethiopia until they were cancelled by the Duke of Aosta on 19 January 1940. On that occasion, 41 years after the Hague Convention was signed, the duke declared that ‘raiding’ by all regular and irregular military detachments, guards and police should cease, saying that ‘recognizing and respecting the right of private ownership …, it is time to put an end to the methods of the past’. The viceroy ordered in writing, ‘All directions issued in the past by [provincial] governments in their respective territories and by the former Intendenza of the A.O.I. [Africa Orientale Italiana] … regarding war booty, cease to be in force on the date of this circular [19 January 1940].’2
Thus until 1940 Italian forces were entitled to plunder whenever actions were being taken against civilians, including during the massacre of Addis Ababa, when pillage was widespread.3
In the countryside the most popular object of secular plunder was livestock; military telegrams frequently mention thousands of head of cattle being stolen by Italy’s marauding askaris. In the urban areas the Italians generally looted cultural artefacts and personal possessions such as money and jewellery, although chickens were also popular as eggs were in short supply.
In addition, the Italian administration appropriated without compensation all fixed and movable assets belonging to anyone suspected of opposing the Italian administration, including those in prison or executed, leaving their families destitute. In Addis Ababa alone, this resulted in the confiscation of the land, houses, furniture and other personal property of hundreds of residents, including some of the city’s finest properties, which were converted to Italian use.4
Lost Patrimony
No comprehensive study of the loss of Ethiopia’s tangible cultural heritage during the invasion and occupation has ever been published, but it was certainly massive, spanning the entire spectrum from personal possessions to national treasures. Many of the stolen artefacts were religious, belonging to or associated with the Ethiopian Church. There is no doubt that during what is today known as the ‘Italian period’, Ethiopia suffered its most extensive loss of patrimony since the Ottoman-backed jihad of the early 16th century.
It is not possible here to undertake a detailed analysis of the items involved, but some indications can be made of the nature and extent of the pillage.
The most important and best-known single item looted was the Aksum obelisk (or, more accurately, stela), which, though dating from Ethiopia’s late pre-Christian era, constituted one of the nation’s most celebrated items of tangible cultural heritage and an iconic symbol of its ancient civilisation. The second-largest carved stone monolith in the world (the largest being another of the stelae at Aksum), as high as a nine-storey building, carved with door and windows and weighing some 160 tons, the 4th-century granite monument was removed by the Italians in pieces. By March 1937 it had been shipped to Naples, following which it was transported to Rome, where it was re-erected in the Piazza di Porta Capena as a war trophy. In one of the many ironies surrounding the invasion of Ethiopia, the Italians were very proud to have made war against people capable of creating such a great monument of civilisation, during an invasion for which one of the purported reasons was their lack of civilisation. Whether the Roman public saw the irony is not known.
As the campaign against the Ethiopian Church intensified, particularly during 1936 and 1937, the number of churches and monasteries pillaged and burned reached the thousands, and the amount of loot reached a level where accounting for it is now all but impossible. The finest sacred items, such as Gospel books and psalteries in the form of luxury hand-crafted and illustrated parchment codices written in the liturgical language of Gi’iz, were popular with the Italians. These were expensive and time-consuming to produce; a large edition of, for example, The Miracles of Mary, could well require the skins of an entire flock of sheep. Such items would typically have been seized by the officers. Also much prized were large items such as the silver-bound drums, traditionally played by the debteras, and ornate processional crosses. Persian carpets if they were in good condition would only have appealed to the most senior commanders who had access to international transport for their loot. Items made of gold, silver or gilt, such as chalices, were sometimes taken from churches by low-ranking officers in the Colonial Battalions and fashioned into secular artefacts.
Ethiopia has a rich tradition of ecclesiastical wall paintings and manuscript miniatures, some dating back to the early centuries of Christianity. Between the 15th and 20th centuries the Ethiopian Church was also prolific in its production of icons. Usually diptychs and triptychs of considerable sophistication, and reflecting the more contemplative tradition of the Orthodox Church, they typically depicted the Virgin and Child, the Crucifixion, the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, and the Apostles, flanked by various saints, from both Ethiopia and elsewhere. These had a relatively high survival rate compared with the icons of most Orthodox Churches (partly because of the temperate climate of the Ethiopian highlands), though by the 1930s they were no longer being used in the liturgy, and Ethiopian church treasuries frequently contained a number of them. Some of these icons had survived only after being hidden in caves from the 16th-century jihadists, and would be attractive items of loot for 20th-century Italians.
Lesser but nonetheless valuable items included the hand crosses typically carried by priests and monks, which were usually made of silver, brass, iron or wood, small parchment prayer books contained in leather cases, and small personal icons hung from the neck.
Finally, since Ethiopian churches were traditionally used as safe deposits for royalty, the larger and more important churches in each region would contain, for example, royal crowns and state regalia which would be made available for use by the sovereign or other members of the royal family when visiting that district.
The Pillage of Debre Libanos
During the occupation the destruction and looting of churches became rife, and reached unprecedented levels in 1937, particularly during the massacre of Debre Libanos. The situation at the monastery was unusual—and possibly unique—in that the massacre during which the looting took place was ordered in writing by Graziani, and at least some of the many items removed from the treasury of the monastery church of St Tekle Haymanot and the House of the Cross were listed by the military in a two-page document (see Appendix VII).5
The monastery’s most important and valuable treasures were reported by the few surviving monks, who happened to be absent during the massacre, to have been removed on the personal orders of General Maletti and taken to his military camp at nearby Fiché. These included a large illustrated 16th-century codex donated to the monastery by Emperor Gelawdéwos, which was ‘decorated in gold’ and is said to have required more than one man to carry; a large gold-bound drum; a gold chalice and dish; an ancient cross believed to be cast in gold; and a number of crowns, including those of Emperor Yohannis IV and Emperor Menelik II, as well as a crown of Emperor Haile Selassie, all thought to be made of gold.6 None of these substantial items appear on the official list of artefacts removed by the Italians, which is limited to more common items of modest value.
The memorandum attached to the inventory in General Maletti’s report of the massacre states that the items listed were to be delivered to an entity in Addis Ababa to be specified.7 However, research conducted by the present author in the 1990s with the assistance of His Holiness Patriarch Abune Pawlos, failed to reveal the fate of any of these items, with the exception of the cross reputedly the property of St Tekle Haymanot himself, marked ‘(I)’ by the Italians in the list in Appendix VII, page 2. Fitawrari Nebiyye-Li’ul, who at the time of the research was acting sacristan of Debre Libanos in place of his father-in-law Li’ul-Ras Kassa, showed evidence to the present author that this cross, which is highly venerated and of considerable renown, was at Debre Libanos when it was reopened by the Italians following the change of policy in late 1937, and is still there. It was most likely returned to Debre Libanos when the monastery was rehabilitated under the Duke of Aosta.
The Italian inventory states that 22 sacred books were removed from the church of St Tekle Haymanot, and 60 from the House of the Cross. Since this category apparently covers all books found (i.e. printed books as well as traditionally bound parchment manuscripts), this represents far too small a library for an important teaching institution such as Debre Libanos. The present author’s research in the 1990s suggested that by the early 20th century the monastery church library at Debre Libanos consisted of more than 500 parchment manuscripts and printed books, which would be a realistic number for such a monastery church. The analysis concluded that the Italian list of items removed is incomplete, and estimated that around 400 books—the majority being parchment manuscripts—were most likely removed during the massacre but were omitted from the Italian inventory.8 In 2018, sources in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church confirmed this figure, stating that Church records show that the Italians stole around 400 books from the Debre Libanos library.9
There is no doubt that this figure included many parchment manuscripts; in an affidavit sworn for the UN war crimes trials, Lij Hayle-Maryam Gazmu, who was in the company of Colonel Garelli at the monastery of Debre Libanos on 20 and 21 May 1937, testified:
his [General Maletti’s] soldiers plundered the property and wealth of the church. Also, as this church was the burial place of many nobles and dignitaries, the Italian soldiers broke open the tombs, hoping to find gold … This church was one of the wealthiest of all the churches and monasteries of Ethiopia, and the Italian armies plundered the property of this church without leaving anything intact; they took even the oldest books [emphasis added].10
Also missing from the Italian inventory, as noted above, are the most valuable items, none of which ever reappeared at the monastery, such as the large illustrated 16th-century codex that reportedly required more than one man to carry, the large gold-bound drum, the gold chalice and dish, the ancient cross believed to be cast in gold, and the royal crowns of Emperors Yohannis IV, Menelik II and Haile Selassie.
Looting Countrywide
We have seen that apart from Debre Libanos, hundreds of churches were pillaged by the Italian military before being burned. To identify all the churches ransacked would be a vast undertaking, and would probably now be no longer possible. As we have seen, many were small parish churches, but some—particularly around the gorge of the Abbay (Blue Nile) River—were edifices of renown, with long-standing connections to royalty. Some instances of pillage of such churches have already been mentioned; others include the celebrated church of Mahdere Maryam in Begémdir, from which many sacred books were looted, and the late medieval church of Gétésémané Maryam in Gojjam (see Map 10).11 The ancient church of Weyn Washa Teklehaymanot, together with its monastery known as Tara Gedam, in southern Begémdir (see Map 9), was also pillaged. There the Italians forced their way into the church and stole its entire tangible heritage including sacred books—a loss regretted by the priests to this day.12
While many churches were stripped of everything they possessed, in some cases the clergy hid their treasures in caves or underground. For example, at Debre Libanos, despite the apparent theft of every movable artefact that the Italians found, the two most important and priceless items were well hidden and thus survived the occupation. One was a holy relic: a foot of St Tekle Haymanot (said to have fallen off owing to his long period of confinement in a cave at the monastery) preserved in a gold reliquary. The other was the saint’s own tabot, or altar slab, consecrated to Mary the Mother of Christ. Both artefacts were hidden from the Italians at Wula Gebeba, near the church of Weberi Washa located on a secluded ledge below a rocky outcrop at the edge of the plateau above the monastery.13
Another instance of artefacts being hidden occurred at the historic church of Cheleqot Sillassé (‘Church of the Trinity’) in southern Tigray (Map 9), whose clergy had been entrusted with many precious items in the 19th century. However, in this case the outcome was tragic, for the Italians killed the church treasurer when he refused to reveal where the ecclesiastical treasures had been hidden.14
Personal Artefacts
There is also the question of personal artefacts stolen from the clergy and monks when they were killed. For obvious reasons there is very little information available on this subject. Nonetheless, the various reports of items such as silver hand crosses, prayer books and prayer staffs (sometimes silver-topped) being taken from massacre victims are consistent and undoubtedly correct. Tibebe Kassa of Debre Libanos reported not only that the Italians removed hundreds of personal hand crosses, manuscripts, vestments and prayer staffs from the captives before their execution at Laga Weldé, but also that he travelled to Debre Birhan in an Italian military truck in which many of these artefacts were being transported.
It should be noted that such personal items were not included in the Italian inventory of Debre Libanos. Since an estimated 1,300–1,700 of the victims executed at the two sites of Laga Weldé and Borale were monks, priests or deacons, and since a large proportion were adults wearing ecclesiastical vestments, who would have been carrying at least one cross or parchment manuscript (and in some cases one of each), it may be estimated that the total number of such items unaccounted for from the massacres of Debre Libanos alone could be in excess of a thousand. Countrywide, there are thus thousands of personal ecclesiastical artefacts to be accounted for.
What Happened to the Loot?
Ethiopian clergy who survived the massacres of the occupation and who were interviewed by the present author in the 1990s generally believed that the majority of artefacts stolen from the churches by the Italians were taken to Italy. According to the Debre Libanos monastery council, none of the items known to have been removed from the monastery church were returned. It is not known if the lesser items were actually taken to Addis Ababa as planned, according to Maletti’s report;15 they have never been traced. During the research conducted into the matter by the present author together with Richard Pankhurst and Degife Gebre-Tsadiq in 1991–2, the clergy of Debre Libanos said that they believed that some—perhaps all—of the stolen manuscripts found their way into the Vatican library, where, they assumed, they are still held.16
The evidence supporting these beliefs is compelling. It is well attested that the Italian military commanders removed substantial amounts of Ethiopia’s tangible heritage when they left the country. Pietro Badoglio, the first Italian viceroy, appropriated half of the 1.7 million Maria Theresa thalers in the Bank of Abyssinia, and installed in his Rome villa the astonishing number of 300 crates of booty that had been flown from Ethiopia by the Regia Aeronautica. Graziani returned to Italy in 1938 with no less than 79 crates of artefacts, and Attilio Teruzzi, the minister of Italian Africa, took away four truck-loads after a single, brief visit in 1939.17
In the case of Graziani, at least some of the items reappeared in public, for in 1939 several Ethiopian treasures, including a number of royal crowns, coronets, lion’s-mane headdresses and other objects, were exhibited in Rome for the official opening of the Museo Coloniale, the museum of the Ministry of Italian Africa. Mussolini, who donated the collection to the Museum, was reported by the Fascist authorities to have been given the collection by Graziani. There can be little doubt about this, since the room housing items from the collection was named the Graziani Room.
The display case in the left foreground in the photograph of part of the Graziani Room published by the Italian government in 1939 (Fig. 51) contained ‘the precious crowns of the last four Ethiopian emperors’.18 This case, which in the photograph contains four elaborate Ethiopian royal crowns together with what appears to be a fine ecclesiastical crown, formed the pièce de résistance of the newly created exhibition. All four royal crowns are in the 19th-century style or earlier, and could well have belonged, as the Italian sources indicated, to the most recent Ethiopian emperors.19
These five crowns are likely to be those stolen from the church of St Tekle Haymanot at Debre Libanos, although they were—not surprisingly—omitted from the Italian inventory. The question is: what happened to them? We know that they did not remain for long in the Graziani Room at the Museo Coloniale, for the contents of that museum were dispersed not long afterwards. When he was caught and executed by Italian partisans in April 1945 at Dongo, in northern Italy, the Duce reportedly had in his possession over 60 kg of gold, several thousand pounds sterling in various currencies, letters from world leaders, and a number of Ethiopian royal crowns. It is apparent that these artefacts were being carried for their resale value, suggesting that the Ethiopian crowns were thought by Mussolini to be made of gold.20
After Mussolini’s execution, partisan leaders General Raffaele Cadorna and ‘Colonel Valerio’ (Walter Audisio), who personally shot the dictator, were photographed with these crowns, which are clearly the same crowns displayed in the Museo Coloniale, and even carry the museum display cards (Fig. 52).
So what happened to these crowns, described by the Italians as the ‘most valuable part of the Dongo treasure’,21 in the short interlude between the partisans proudly displaying them and their return being requested by the Ethiopian government? According to the peace treaty finally signed in 1947, all of these artefacts should have been restored to Ethiopia:
The question of loot taken from Ethiopia during the Fascist occupation (as well as the tragic fate of the monks and deacons of Debre Libanos) was raised by the Ethiopian Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1946. The Italian government was forced under Ethiopian pressure to agree in Article 37 of the peace treaty of 1947 that: ‘Within eighteen months … Italy shall restore all works of art, religious objects, archives and objects of historical value belonging to Ethiopia or its nationals and removed from Ethiopia to Italy since October 3, 1935’, i.e., the date of the Fascist invasion.22
Given the considerable importance and value evidently attributed to these artefacts not only by the Fascists but also by the partisans, it is difficult to imagine that the new Italian government, which included several of the partisan leaders, were unaware of their existence and location at the time of the peace conference. However, more than seven decades later, Ethiopians are still waiting for the Italian government to abide by the terms of the 1947 peace treaty.
Of the thousands of artefacts stolen during the occupation, only two have been returned; a statue of an Ethiopian lion, which had been removed from outside the Addis Ababa railway station, and the great stela of Aksum, the latter having been returned reluctantly and only after repeated refusals by the Italian government led to a fierce international campaign for its reinstatement. The voices of condemnation finally led to Italian capitulation and the return of the stela to Ethiopia in 2005 and its re-erection in Aksum in 2008.
So far as the present author is aware, none of the ecclesiastical and state treasures looted from Ethiopian churches and monasteries during the invasion and occupation, nor the numerous personal artefacts that were confiscated, have ever been returned. It is not even clear what steps, if any, the Italian government has taken to trace Ethiopia’s cultural patrimony that it is still bound under the 1947 Peace Treaty to return to Ethiopia. As Andrea Riccardi put it in 2017, ‘There is a whole patrimony still to be recovered from [Italian] religious bodies.’23 A striking comparison may, however, be drawn with Italy’s current policy concerning the restitution of cultural heritage to their countries of origin. It is ironic that 21st-century Italy has emerged as a European leader in that field, in its successful quest to recover looted artefacts of Italian patrimony acquired by museums in America.