history. Significance of the Adowa victory. News of the disaster caused the fall of the Crispi government in Italy and riots in urban areas. The shock of Adowa exceeded the British shock at Isandhlwana, with both disasters magnified by the realization that forces armed with medieval weaponry had beaten modern European regulars in the open field. As one Italian historian notes: "It was the realization that their belief in their superiority over the "blacks" was an illusion.. A whole swaggering ethos.. of conquest was shattered before the eyes of soldiers who saw thousands of human lives snuffed out in a few hours in a strange and hostile land with no possibility of defence, who succumbed before a people who had been reduced to semi-savages in their eyes, who were beaten by an African army depicted right up to the eve of battle as disorganized, poorly armed and incapable of formulating a strategy." While Adowa has attracted much attention in a political and African nationalist sense, one Western military historian notes that the battle was a relatively costly affair for a European army in terms of force-ratio casualties- indeed one of the most proportionately costly major battles of the 19th century. "Baratieri's army suffered 50 percent casualties, far higher than those suffered by participants in any other major battle of the nineteenth century. Eylau, the greatest blood-letting of the Napoleonic era, cost the French army casualties of 33.8 per cent and its losses at Waterloo were just under 30 per cent. "Macello, carneficina, strage" (butchery, slaughterhouse, slaughter) are the words which recur in the memories of the Italian combatants at Adowa." Summary of African military systems: 1800–1900 Military systems on the continent during the 19th century illustrate the complexity of previous eras, to which was added the growing pace and weight of European colonialism. These systems defy the easy categorization and depictions of popular media and imagination- often stereotyped in terms of wildly charging hordes on foot, while ignoring the continent's long established archery and cavalry traditions. As noted by one Western historian for example, the notion of countless attacking spearmen is a myth. Manpower resources were often limited. In the 19th century, European nations like Prussia could put some 300,000 men into a single campaign. Only the Ethiopians at Adowa with their 100,000 effectives approached this level of mobilization – "the savage hordes of popular lore seldom materialized on African