Yohannes IV

Yohannes IV (born 1831—died March 10, 1889, Metema, Sudan) was the emperor of Ethiopia (1872–89). Like his predecessor, Tewodros II (reigned 1855–68), Yohannes IV was a strong, progressive ruler, but he spent most of his time repelling military threats from Egypt, Italy, and the Mahdists of the Sudan.

Superior weaponry allowed Yohannes, a dejazmatch (earl) of Tigray in northern Ethiopia, to fight his way to the Ethiopian throne on January 21, 1872, four years after Tewodros’s death. His main rival was Menilek II, king of Shewa, who did not recognize Yohannes as emperor until 1878/79, after a military defeat. Menilek’s eclipse, however, was only temporary. In 1882 a dynastic marriage was arranged between Menilek’s daughter and Yohannes’ son, and it was agreed that Menilek would be Yohannes’ successor as emperor. Yohannes also recognized Menilek’s control of the south, and their separate spheres of influence were carefully defined. Tensions between the two rose again by 1888, however, when Menilek, fearing that Yohannes’ son might try to follow his father to the throne, made an agreement with the Italians in exchange for arms.

Aside from the recurrent problem of the powerful king of Shewa, Yohannes’ domestic concerns were mainly to reduce the power of the other regional nobles (and thus create a unitary government) and to increase his hold on his subjects through enforced conversion to the Ethiopian Orthodox church. His attempt to use religion as a basis for unity aroused resistance, however, particularly from Muslims who were ordered to build churches, pay tithes, and eventually be baptized.

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The expansionist khedive (Ottoman viceroy) Ismāʿīl Pasha of Egypt posed the first external threat to Yohannes’ empire. By the mid-1870s Egypt had encroached on Ethiopia to the east and south, but Ethiopian forces, in what verged on an anti-Muslim crusade, won decisive victories in the mountainous country of the north in 1875 and 1876. Italy, the next aggressor, in 1885 occupied the former Turkish and Egyptian Red Sea port of Mitsiwa (now Massawa, Eritrea) and then began to expand inland toward the province of Tigray, only to be soundly defeated by Yohannes in 1887. In the same year, the Islamic revivalist Mahdist forces, gaining ground in the Sudan, invaded Ethiopia and devastated the old capital, Gonder. In retaliation, and possibly in the hope of getting Sudanese gold and slaves and even of gaining access to the Nile River, Yohannes invaded the Sudan and was killed in the Battle of Metema (March 1889).