Tewodros II

Tewodros II ended the Era of the Princes and shot himself rather than be captured by a British army, and modern Ethiopia is usually dated from him. He was born Kassa Hailu, the son of a minor noble, and began as a bandit chief in the borderlands near Sudan - a shifta, which in Ethiopia was a recognised route into politics for a man with no inheritance. For the previous eighty years the emperors at Gondar had been figureheads controlled by whichever regional lord held the capital. Kassa beat those lords one at a time, at Gorgora Bichen, at Gur Amba, at Ayshal, and in 1855 had himself crowned Tewodros II, taking a throne name loaded with prophecy about a king who would restore justice. He tried to build a state rather than a coalition: a salaried army in place of levies raised by nobles, roads, an attempt to tax the church's enormous landholdings, and an artillery foundry at Gafat staffed by European missionaries, whose great mortar Sebastopol had to be dragged over the mountains by thousands of men. The church and the nobility resisted all of it and the reign turned violent and increasingly erratic. His fatal mistake was diplomatic. He wrote to Queen Victoria in 1862 proposing an alliance against the Muslim powers around him, received no reply because the letter sat unanswered in the Foreign Office, and in fury imprisoned the British consul and a group of Europeans at Magdala. Britain sent Robert Napier with thirteen thousand troops and an enormous train of elephants and engineers. The hostages were released and the fortress stormed in April 1868. Tewodros shot himself with a pistol Victoria had sent him as a gift. His son Alemayehu was taken to England and died there at eighteen.

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