Solomonic Ethiopia lasted from 1270 until the 1974 Derg coup
The Ethiopian Empire—Abyssinia—covered today’s Ethiopia and Eritrea from Yekuno Amlak’s Solomonic restoration around 1270 until Haile Selassie’s fall to the Derg in 1974. Claiming descent from Solomon and Sheba, it survived Adal jihads, British and Mahdist wars, and even a brief Fascist occupation.
Yekuno Amlak replaced the Agaw Zagwe rulers, whom later church writers slighted as lacking pure Solomonic blood after Aksum’s tenth-century fade. Early Solomonic kings were shaky until Amda Seyon (reigning 1314 to 1344) and Dawit (1382 to 1413) drove major expansion. Muslim Adal pressure climaxed under Imam Mahfuz, then in the Ottoman-backed jihad of Ahmed Gran; Portuguese aid helped smash Gran in 1543, though the empire emerged badly scarred.
The Zemene Mesafint era of princely fragmentation ended when Tewodros II, ruling 1855 to 1868, reunified the realm and dragged it toward modernity before dying in the British Expedition to Abyssinia. Yohannes IV beat Egyptians and Mahdists yet fell to the latter in 1889; Menelik II later anchored a new imperial centre and kept independence when much of Africa did not.
Yekuno Amlak won the throne with the backing of the Orthodox Church, to which he promised semi-independence, and of the neighbouring Muslim Makhzumi dynasty; he wrote to the Mamluk sultan Baybars styling himself protector of Abyssinia's Muslims. His claimed descent from Aksum's last king, and through it from Solomon, took canonical form in the Kebra Nagast, a fourteenth-century text in which the Queen of Sheba conceives a son with Solomon in Jerusalem. Amda Seyon's reign launched a series of royal chronicles giving an unbroken record of the medieval Horn.
Amda Seyon's eastern campaigns more than doubled the empire and tilted the balance toward the Christians for two centuries; around 1320 he even threatened to divert the Nile unless the Mamluk sultan stopped persecuting Copts. Most Muslim states of the Horn, Ifat among them, became tributaries. Centuries later Mussolini's Italy occupied the country and folded it into Italian East Africa, but British forces helped drive the Italians out during the Second World War, Ethiopia became a founding member of the United Nations, and Eritrea was federated to it in 1952. The 1973 Wollo famine fed the discontent that ended the monarchy.
Source: Ethiopian Empire
