Empress Mentewab

Walatta Giyorgis Mentewab was born about 1706 at the Qwara province of north-western Ethiopia, the daughter of Asahel Krestos of the Qwaran nobility and Woizero Enkoyye of the Qwaran Solomonic line. She was raised at the Qwaran court of her father.

She received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the daughters of the Solomonic Qwaran aristocracy at the Qwara monastic schools — and was renowned at the imperial court of Gondar for her beauty and her learning from her arrival in the late 1720s.

She was selected as imperial consort by Emperor Bakaffa (placed in this archive) at Gondar in 1723 — and bore the future Emperor Iyasu II in 1723.

She was made regent for her son Iyasu II at the death of Bakaffa on the eighth of September 1730 — and ruled the Gondarine Empire as principal regent through the minorities of her son and grandson, from 1730 to 1755.

She founded the Qwesqwam church complex at Gondar in 1730 — the principal Gondarine-period imperial residence north of the original Fasil Ghebbi compound — and the principal surviving Qwaran-line monument of the Gondarine period.

She patronised the principal Gondarine school of religious painting at the imperial library of Gondar — including the principal manuscript illuminations of the Bisrate Gabriel Gospel of 1736 and the principal Mariological frescoes of the Qwesqwam imperial chapel.

She lost imperial influence at the assumption of the throne by her grandson Iyoas I (placed in this archive) in 1755 — and the rise of the Wollo Oromo party at the Gondarine court under Ras Mikael of Wollo.

She withdrew to the Qwesqwam complex at Gondar in 1769 at the murder of Iyoas I and the collapse of the imperial Solomonic authority.

She died at Qwesqwam on the twenty-seventh of June 1773 of complications of a long illness, at approximately sixty-seven.

She is honored here as the principal regent of the Gondarine eighteenth century.