Emperor Fasilides

Alem Sagad Fasilides was born on the twentieth of November 1603 at the imperial camp at Dankaz, the eldest son of Emperor Susenyos I (placed in this archive) and Woizero Sultana Sayfa Sagad of Damot. He was raised at the imperial court of his father across the Catholic-Orthodox civil wars of the period.

He received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the Solomonic princes under both the Jesuit instructors of his father and the Orthodox monastic clergy of his mother — and was instructed in the military arts at the imperial camps of the period.

He was named heir apparent at the conversion of his father to Catholicism in 1622 — but remained Orthodox at his mother's insistence and her connections with the Lake Tana monasteries.

He led the principal Orthodox restoration campaigns of the late 1620s and early 1630s — and was acclaimed Emperor on the fourteenth of June 1632 at the abdication of his father. He was crowned at the Cathedral of Aksum.

He expelled the Jesuit mission of Ethiopia on the eighteenth of March 1633 — and concluded the principal anti-Catholic alliance of 1644 with the Imam of the Yemen and the Pasha of Suakin to prevent the return of Jesuit missionaries through the Red Sea ports.

He founded the city of Gondar in 1636 at the foothills of the Wegera plateau north of Lake Tana — and made Gondar the permanent imperial capital, ending the centuries-old practice of the moving imperial camps. He built the principal imperial castle at Gondar — Fasil Ghebbi — in the 1640s, which remains at this day the principal monument of the Gondarine period of Ethiopian architecture.

He built the Debre Birhan Selassie Church at Gondar in 1659 — the principal surviving Gondarine church of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo tradition.

He died at Azazo on the eighteenth of October 1667 of complications of a long illness, at sixty-three.

He is honored here as the founder of Gondar.