Emperor Tewodros II

Kassa Hailu was born in 1818 at Quara in the Begemder province of present-day Ethiopia, the son of a minor Qwara chief and his second wife Atitegeb Wondbewossen. The Ethiopian imperial throne had since 1769 lain functionally vacant — the period the chronicles called the Zemene Mesafint, the Age of the Princes, during which the powerful regional warlords of Tigray, Gondar, Gojjam and Shewa retained nominal allegiance to a series of weak emperors while ruling their provinces as autonomous principalities.

He spent his twenties as a shifta — a frontier raider — on the western marches of Ethiopia against the Sudanese border. By 1853 he had reduced the principal regional warlords in succession: Goshu of Gojjam in 1852, Birru Aligaz of Begemder in 1853, and Ras Ali II of Yejju at the battle of Ayshal on the twenty-ninth of June 1853. On the eleventh of February 1855 the abuna Salama of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church crowned him at Derasge as Tewodros II — Theodore the Second — restoring the imperial title after eighty-six years of effective vacancy.

His thirteen-year reign reorganised the Ethiopian state. He created a salaried standing army to replace the feudal levies of the regional warlords. He reformed the taxation of church lands, attempting to alienate the surplus to the state for the modernisation of the army. He commissioned the manufacture of artillery — including the eighty-ton mortar called Sebastopol — at his fortress of Magdala. He opened diplomatic correspondence with Victoria of Britain.

The failure of the British correspondence — a letter to which he received no reply for over a year — produced the diplomatic crisis that culminated in the British expedition under Robert Napier in 1868. Napier's army of thirteen thousand reached Magdala on the tenth of April 1868. Three days later, refusing to be taken prisoner, Tewodros raised a revolver — a gift from Queen Victoria — and shot himself.

He is honored here as the restorer of the Ethiopian imperial throne.