Emperor Iyoas I

Adyam Sagad Iyoas was born in 1755 at Gondar, the son of Emperor Iyasu II of the Gondarine Solomonic line and Empress Wubit, a Wollo Oromo princess of the Yejju line — the principal Wollo-Solomonic dynastic alliance of the mid-eighteenth century. He was raised at the imperial court of Gondar under the protection of his Solomonic-Qwaran grandmother Empress Mentewab (placed in this archive).

He received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the Solomonic princes at the imperial library of Gondar — under the monastic clergy of the Debre Birhan Selassie Church and the Qwesqwam complex — and the principal Oromo court instruction of his maternal kin at the imperial camp.

He was acclaimed Emperor at six on the twenty-seventh of June 1755 at Gondar at the death of his father Iyasu II — and was crowned at the Cathedral of Aksum. He was the youngest acclaimed Emperor of the Gondarine period.

He was the principal Solomonic emperor under the regency of his Solomonic-Qwaran grandmother Empress Mentewab and his Wollo Oromo mother Empress Wubit — and the principal subject of the Qwara-Wollo dynastic struggle that characterised his reign.

He came of age in the mid-1760s and assumed personal authority of the imperial state in 1766 — at the conclusion of the Qwara-Wollo regency settlement of the period.

He relied increasingly across the late 1760s on the principal Wollo Oromo party at court — under Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigray and the Wollo Oromo Yejju line of his mother Empress Wubit — at the gradual loss of Solomonic-Qwaran imperial authority across the period.

He was assassinated at Gondar on the fourteenth of May 1769 by the agents of Ras Mikael Sehul at the conclusion of the Qwara-Wollo-Tigrayan dynastic crisis of the period — at the principal Gondarine throne-room of the Fasil Ghebbi compound — at fourteen.

His assassination is conventionally dated as the beginning of the Zemene Mesafint, the Age of the Princes, of Ethiopian history — the eighty-six-year period of regional warlord rule that ended at the imperial coronation of Tewodros II in 1855.

He is honored here as the last imperial Solomonic emperor before the Zemene Mesafint.