The decisive victory of the Ethiopian Empire over the Kingdom of Italy in the 1896 Battle of Adwa, during the First Italo-Ethiopian War, made a profound impact on the historiography of Italy and Ethiopia. It was not lost to the collective memory of Italians, since the Italian capture of Adwa, Tigray Region, Ethiopia in 1935, during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, was hailed as an act that avenged their previous humiliation and defeat. Historiography about Ethiopia throughout much of the 20th century focused primarily on this second invasion and the Abyssinian Crisis that preceded it, in which Ethiopia was depicted as being relegated to the role of a pawn in European diplomacy. The Ethiopian courtier (i.e. "blatta") and historian Marse Hazan Walda Qirqos (1899–1978) was commissioned by the Selassie regime to compile a documentary history of the Italian occupation entitled "A Short History of the Five Years of Hardship", composed concurrently with the submission of historical evidence to the United Nations War Crimes Commission for Fascist Italy's war crimes. Coauthored by Berhanu Denque, this work was one of the first vernacular Amharic histories to cover the Italian colonial period, documenting contemporary newspaper articles and propaganda pieces, events such as the 1936 fall of Addis Ababa and the 1941 British-Ethiopian reconquest of the country, and speeches by key figures such as Emperor Selassie and Rodolfo Graziani (1882–1955), Viceroy of Italian East Africa.