Tewodros II ended Ethiopia's Era of the Princes and began its modern state
A freelance warrior from Qwara named Kassa rose to become Emperor Tewodros II in 1855, ending the fragmented Era of the Princes, when regional lords held real power. He paid his governors salaries, built a standing army and started a library, yet spent years crushing noble revolts.
Kassa Hailu was born around 1818 in Qwara, west of Gondar, son of an Amhara nobleman. A powerful relative, the warlord Maru, had held the district known as Ye Maru Qemas, meaning roughly the taste of honey, but after Maru died in 1827 the lands passed through other hands, and Empress Menen Liben eventually took them back under her own control, leaving Kassa without an inheritance. The French traveller Antoine d'Abbadie met him at Gondar in 1848 dressed as an ordinary soldier, keen to talk about firearms.
Crowned in 1855, he aimed to rebuild a unified Ethiopian state rather than serve the interests of the regional nobility. Shewa, whose ruler had even called himself king, was brought to heel, and Tewodros raised the captured Shewan prince Sahle Maryam as his own son; that boy later reigned as Menelik II. Rebellious nobles resisted his modernising for years, and although the country was fairly quiet from about 1861 to 1863, the cost of suppressing revolts drained his energy and treasury.
His reforms pointed ahead of their time: salaried governors and judges, a professional army instead of levies raised by local lords, tax codes, administrative districts and a collection of books. Taxing and then seizing church lands to fund the state, however, turned the clergy against him and won little support elsewhere.
Foreign observers were struck by him. British consul Walter Plowden, who had predicted his rise, praised his energy and self-control, and the geographer Clements Markham compared him to Peter the Great, admiring his genius while noting his frequent atrocities. The explorer Tristram Speedy described a man over five feet ten with unusually brilliant eyes. Tewodros died by his own hand on 15 April 1868 in the fighting at Magdala against a British expeditionary force.
Source: Tewodros II
