the south up to the borders of Nubia and Abyssinia and founded the powerful state of Sennaar. When the army of Aḥmad Grāñ invaded Abyssinia and made its way right through the country from south to north, it effected a junction about 1534 with the army of the sultan of Maseggia or Mazaga, a province under Muhammadan rule but tributary to Abyssinia, lying between that country and Sennaar; in the army of this sultan there were 15,000 Nubian soldiers who, from the account given of them, appear to have been Musalmans. [315] Fragmentary and insufficient as these data of the conversion of the Nubians are, we may certainly conclude from all we know of the independent character of this people and the tenacity with which they clung to the Christian faith, so long as it was a living force among them, that their change of religion was a gradual one, extending through several centuries. Let us now pass to the history of Islam among the Abyssinians, who had received Christianity two centuries before the Nubians, and like them belonged to the Jacobite Church. The tide of Arab emigration does not seem to have set across the Red Sea, the western shores of which formed part of the Abyssinian kingdom, until many centuries after Arabia had accepted the faith of the prophet. Up to the tenth century only a few Muhammadan families were to be found residing in the coast towns of Abyssinia, but at the end of the twelfth century the foundation of an Arab dynasty alienated some of the coast-lands from the Abyssinian kingdom. In 1300 a missionary, named Abū ʻAbd Allāh Muḥammad, made his way into Abyssinia, calling on the people to embrace Islam, and in the following year, having collected around him 200,000 men, he attacked the ruler of Amhara in several engagements. [316] King Saifa Arʻād (1342–1370) took energetic measures against the Muhammadans in his kingdom, putting to death or driving into exile all those who refused to embrace Christianity. [317] At the close of the same century the disturbed state of the country, owing to the civil wars that distracted it, made it possible for the various Arab settlements along the coast to make themselves masters of the entire seaboard and drive the Abyssinians into the interior, and the king, Baʼeda Māryām (1468–1478), is said to have spent the greater part of his reign in fighting against the Muhammadans on the eastern border of his kingdom. [318] In the early part of the sixteenth century, while the powerful Muhammadan kingdom of Adal, between Abyssinia and the southern extremity of the Red Sea, and some others were bitterly hostile to the Christian power, there were others again that formed peaceful tributaries of “Prester John”; e.g. in Massowah there were Arabs who kept the flocks of the Abyssinian seigniors, wandering about in bands of thirty or forty with their wives and children, each band having its Christian “captain.” [319] Some Musalmans are also mentioned as being in the service of the king and