the Abyssinians, from their repeated quarrels and disputes, heartily hated them all.
The armies were drawn up and ready to engage, when the chief priest of Debra Libanos came to the king to tell him a dream, or vision, which warned him not to fight; but the Moors were then advancing, and the king on horseback made no reply, but marched briskly forward to the enemy. The cowardly Abyssinians, upon the first fire, fled, leaving the king engaged in the middle of the Moorish army with twenty horse and eighteen Portuguese musqueteers, who were all slain around his person; and he himself fell, after fighting manfully, and receiving twenty wounds. His head was cut off, and by Nur delivered to Del Wumbarea, who directed it to be tied by the hair to the branch of a tree before her door, that she might keep it constantly in sight. Here it remained three years, till it was purchased from her by an Armenian merchant, her first grief, having, it is probable, subsided upon the acquisition of a new husband. The merchant carried the head to Antioch, and buried it there in the sepulchre of a saint of the same name.
Thus died king Claudius in the 19th year of his reign, who, by his virtues and capacity, might hold a first place among any series of kings we have known, victorious in every action he fought, except in that one only in which he died. A great slaughter was made after this among the routed, and many of the first nobility were slain in endeavouring to escape; among the rest, the dreamer from Debra Lebanos, his vision, by which he knew the king's death, not having extended so far as to reveal his own.
