Queen Edla II Eirikrsdottir af Munsö
Lived: 1456-1502
Queen of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Africa, Abyssinia, Arabia and Jerusalem: 1485-1502
Archduchess of Verona: 1485-1502
Head of House af Munsö: 1485-1502
Edla II succeeded her sister in 1485, her rule prolonged the peaceful and prosperous period that had settled upon Egypt in the latter half of the 15th century – but is most remembered for the exploits of the explorer Klas Nils.
Klas Nils (1439-1495) was the greatest of all Egyptian explorers and perhaps the second most significant figure during the entire Age of Exploration. As the brother of the power and wealthy Jarl of Oman, he grew up in a culture in Muscat that was already attatched to the sea and tended to look Eastward towards the riches of India rather than Westward towards Cairo. Working for his brother out of Muscat during the 1480s he sailed as far as Madagascar, mapping the Indian Ocean more accurately than anyone before. In 1488 he was commissioned by Queen Edla to discover once and for all whether it was possible to circumnavigate the continent of Africa – a fascination of rulers of Egypt for millennia. It took two entire years by Klas Nils catapulted himself to international fame with a spectacular journey from Aden to Alexandria.
Having accomplished such a remarkable feat, Nils chose to once again take to the seas in 1494 – reaching as far as South China, meeting emissaries of the mighty Zhou Emperor who ruled over China South of the Yangtze and establishing formal diplomatic relations. However the aging explorer died during the return journey to Egypt. Nils’ expeditions set off the age of exploration that was to be furthered by Andalucian and British explorers, as well as other Egyptians in the century to come, thus making Nils one of the most significant figures of the Early Modern era.
Nils would not live to see the birth of the Egyptian colonial Empire, which began just months after his death with the establishment of Egyptian control over the Maldives in 1496. The islands were an ideal colony for Egypt – far enough from India that they were not under threat but close enough to allow for Egyptian interference, and able to act as a naval and trading base for involvement in India. However the Egyptian colonisation did not go as smoothly as later efforts in other parts of the Indian Ocean would. After just a few months of Egyptian occupation the local populace began to revolt against foreign rule, the response of the Egyptian state to this was a programme of massacre and expulsion. The native population of the islands was to be totally expelled and then replaced with peoples from the Egyptian Empire. Although the tyrannical campaign only lasted a few years the majority of the native population was indeed killed or exiled during this period.
Closer to home, with East Abyssinia cowed into subservience of the crown in the latter days of Queen Sofia’s reign, moves were made to establish control over the Ogaden Desert – reaching Egyptian power further South into Africa. Egypt’s advance into the Ogaden drew the ire of the Swahili, who had previously backed the revolt in East Abyssinia. The tensions that had been building between Egypt and the Swahili finally erupted into war in 1496 when Egyptian troops moved to occupy Mogadishu and began terrorising the Swahili Coast. After two years of war and the defeat of the Swahili on both land and sea a peace treaty was signed in which Mogadishu was surrendered to Egypt – thus giving the Egyptians a valuable East African port – alongside a large tribute to be paid to Egypt.
As Edla II died peacefully in 1502 power passed smoothly from mother to daughter as Edla III was crowned Queen. By far the greatest of the Queens who ruled Egypt during the late 15th and early 16th centuries Edla III would be Egypt’s first monarch since Eirikr IX to once again involve the country in the struggle for power in continental Europe, simultaneously looking to establish total Egyptian domination in the Indian Ocean.
