Lij Iyasu
Lij Iyasu was emperor of Ethiopia from December 1913 to September 1916, uncrowned, the grandson whom Menelik had named his heir in 1909 and who was deposed by the Shewan nobles and the church at twenty-one for what they called his apostasy to Islam. That is the charge the throne was taken on and which his defenders have disputed for a century. He was the son of Ras Mikael of Wollo, the Muslim lord whom Menelik had made a Christian and a ras, and of Menelik's daughter Shewaregga. He had the empire's two halves in his blood, the Christian highlands and the Muslim lowlands and east, and seems to have thought he could rule both. He spent the years of his reign away from Addis Ababa, among the Afar and the Somali and in Harar. He married Muslim wives, gave the Ogaden Somalis and Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan of the Somaliland dervishes arms, and was said to have sent the Ottoman consul a flag with the crescent on it. He told the British, French and Italian ministers, in the middle of the world war, that he thought the Central Powers would win. The three legations and the Shewan nobility, led by Ras Tafari, whom he had made governor of Harar and then removed, and by the minister of war Habte Giyorgis, agreed on 27 September 1916 to depose him. The Abun released the nobles from their oaths on a photograph of Iyasu in a turban that may have been doctored. Menelik's daughter Zewditu was proclaimed empress with Tafari as regent and heir. Ras Mikael marched south from Wollo with eighty thousand men to restore his son. He was beaten at Segale on 27 October 1916 in the largest battle the country had fought since Adwa. Iyasu escaped to the Afar desert and was five years at large. He was captured in January 1921. He was kept in gold chains at Fiche, in the house of Ras Kassa, for fourteen years. He died there in November 1935, a month after the Italians invaded, at forty, of what the government said was illness and everybody else assumed was an order. He was born in Wollo. The reign that had no coronation is the one the country's Muslims remember as the one that might have been theirs.
- Lived: 1895 CE – 1935 CE
- Nationality: Ethiopian
- Roles: emperor, monarch
