Sahle Selassie of Shewa

Sahle Selassie Wossen Seged was born on the twenty-second of November 1795 at Ankober, the capital of the Shewan kingdom in the central highlands, the son of Meridazmach Wossen Seged of Shewa — of the Shewan Solomonic line descended from Negasi Krestos of the Manz district — and Woizero Zenebework. He was raised at the Shewan court of his father at Ankober.

He received the classical Ge'ez and Amharic literary education of the Shewan Solomonic princes under the monastic clergy at the Debre Berhan and Debre Libanos monasteries — the principal Shewan ecclesiastical centres of the period.

He was elevated to the Shewan kingship on the seventh of June 1813 at the murder of his father Wossen Seged by the Galla Oromo of the eastern Shewa — and consolidated his authority through the Battle of Aramba of the same year against the Galla forces.

He extended the Shewan kingdom across thirty-four years of campaigns into the surrounding Oromo lands of the central Ethiopian highlands — into the Galla territories of the eastern Shewa, into the Soddo and Gurage of the southern Shewa, into the Tulama of the western Shewa, and into the Maitcha and Tulama of the north-western Shewa.

He concluded the principal treaty between Shewa and the British Crown on the sixteenth of November 1841 at Ankober — the first treaty of friendship and commerce between a sovereign Ethiopian state and a European power of the modern period — negotiated by Captain William Cornwallis Harris of the British East India Company. The Shewan-British treaty established the basis of Shewan engagement with the European powers across the following sixty years.

He concluded the principal treaty between Shewa and the French government on the seventh of June 1843 at Ankober — negotiated by the French scientific mission of Rochet d'Héricourt.

He was the grandfather of the future Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia through his second son Haile Melekot of Shewa.

He died at Ankober on the twenty-second of October 1847 of complications of pleurisy, at fifty-one.

He is honored here as the founder of the modern Shewan kingship and the grandfather of Menelik II.