Aksumite Army

The army of the Kingdom of Aksum, the trading power centered in the northern Horn of Africa, was already an organized force backed by state coinage and an intensive agricultural economy by the beginning of the fourth century AD, and it operated alongside a strong navy that Aksum used to profit from and dominate Red Sea trade routes. In the third century King GDRT dispatched Aksumite expeditions across the Red Sea into southern Arabia, briefly controlling the Tihama coast, Najran and al-Maafir before Sabaean and Himyarite forces pushed the Aksumites back, and in the fourth century King Ezana led four separate campaigns against the Beja, Agwezat and Afan peoples and, after his conversion to Christianity, against the Noba and Kasu to Aksum's west. Aksum's most consequential military intervention came in the sixth century, when King Kaleb invaded Yemen against the Himyarite king Dhu Nuwas to halt the persecution of Christians there, a campaign his brother Sazanas helped command, but Aksum's later attempt to hold Yemen was reversed in the Aksumite-Persian wars of 570 to 578, which ended in Aksumite defeat and the loss of its Arabian foothold. The kingdom's military reach across the Red Sea, unusual for an African power of its era, marked Aksum as one of the significant states of late antiquity even as its power receded after the Persian defeat.