The Kingdom of Limmu-Ennarea was one of the kingdoms in the Gibe region of Ethiopia that emerged in the 19th century. It shared its eastern border with the Kingdom of Jimma, its southern border with the Kingdom of Gomma and its western border with the Kingdom of Gumma. Beyond its northern border lay tribes of the Macha Oromo. Jimma was considered the most civilized of the Gibe kingdoms, which had a population in the 1880s between 10,000 and 12,000. It was converted to Islam by missionaries from Harar in the first half of the 19th century; C.T. Beke, writing in 1841, reported that its "king and most of his subjects are Mohammedan." Limmu-Ennarea's capital was at Saqqa.

The location of this former kingdom has a north to south central elevation between 1,500 to over 2,000 metres (5,000 to over 6,500 feet), and is covered with forests. The population of this kingdom was estimated in 1880 to have been about 40,000, including slaves. However, this was after an epidemic of plague in the late 1840s, and Mordechai Abir estimates the population before that calamity to have been around 100,000.

The kingdom of Limmu-Ennarea was a continuation of the older kingdom of Ennarea, which successfully resisted for many decades the encroaching Oromo, who had overrun other kingdoms tributary to the Ethiopian Emperor including Bizamo and Konch. Despite this, as Mohammed Hassen observes, Ennarea eventually drifted into an extended period of civil war and by "the middle of the second half of the seventeenth century, Ennarya not only lacked a single leadership, but also her feuding leaders probably fought more with each other than with their common enemy." In 1704, when Emperor Iyasu the Great campaigned south of the Abay River, and reached Gonga, the stronghold of Ennarea on the Gibe River, he was met by two rival leaders of the crumbling kingdom. In the years following the Emperor's expedition to Ennarea, the warring potentates gradually fled south to the Kingdom of Kaffa. The remaining Sidamo population was absorbed by the Oromo, who as a practice made no distinction in ethnic ancestry for inclusion into their society.

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