Empress Taitu Betul

Taitu Betul was born in 1851 at Debre Tabor in the province of Begemder, the daughter of Betul Hailemaryam — a nobleman of the Yejju Oromo aristocracy of the Wollo region descended from the Imam Ali line of the Yejju ras dynasty — and Yewubdar of the Solomonic royal house. She was raised at the Yejju and Begemder courts of her maternal kin.

She received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the daughters of the Solomonic nobility — reading the Ge'ez Psalter and the chronicles of the kings — and was instructed in the political arts at the courts of her father and her uncle Ras Wele.

She was married four times before her marriage to Menelik in 1883 — the final union conducted at Ankober under the rite of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and presided over by Abuna Matewos. She was thirty-two and Menelik was forty.

She founded Addis Ababa in 1886 — selecting the site at the foot of Mount Entoto for its hot springs and its defensive position — and named the new capital Addis Ababa, 'the new flower,' in the Amharic. The naming and the city are recorded under her authorship in the imperial chronicle.

She served as principal adviser to Menelik through the negotiations preceding the Battle of Adwa — and rejected at Wuchale in May 1889 the Italian interpretation of Article XVII of the Treaty of Wuchale, which would have placed Ethiopia under an Italian protectorate. She accompanied the imperial army to Adwa in February 1896, with a personal force of approximately five thousand fighters and three thousand camp followers.

She commanded the right wing of the Ethiopian forces at Adwa on the first of March 1896 — the battle that ended the Italian colonial campaign in the Horn of Africa for forty years.

She lost imperial influence after Menelik's stroke of 1906 and was confined to the imperial palace at Entoto by the regent Ras Tessema Nadew.

She died at Entoto on the eleventh of February 1918, at sixty-seven.

She is honored here as the empress who refused Article XVII.