- [Matthew] Ethiopia, February 11th, 1855.
This coronation ceremony
was supposed to be for someone else.
The man at the center of it being blessed
by the head of the Ethiopian church was once an outlaw,
a man of the people who attacked nobles
and used what he stole
to buy food and plows for poor farmers.
He's now the most popular leader in the crumbling empire.
At first, taken in by the royal family, then spurned,
he raised a rebellion, and in the past three years,
he's defeated all comers.
In fact, his last enemy was a rival prince
who set up this very coronation ceremony for himself.
Pity to let all that preparation go to waste.
He is blessed, the crown placed on his head,
and now he must pick a royal name.
Hmm. His mind thinks back to an old Ethiopian legend.
In it, a king named Tewodros would reunify the empire
and bring about justice.
So to fulfill that prophecy,
he takes that name: Tewodros II.
(bright cheerful music)
Thanks so much to Hello Fresh
for continuing to help us bring history to the table.
Before we begin, a quick content warning up top.
This episode contains discussions of suicide,
so viewer discretion is advised.
When Tewodros II came to the throne of Ethiopia,
it seemed unlikely that he would be remembered
as one of the greatest ever emperors.
Oh sure, in hindsight it feels obvious
that he'd become a legend.
I mean his origin story alone,
becoming the bandit governor of a province,
pulling Robin Hood antics,
and marrying into the royal line before overthrowing it
is like Hollywood-level stuff,
and read any contemporary account of him
and it's clear he was a force of nature.
An excellent strategist and battlefield commander,
he was also personally accomplished
in the Ethiopian arts of war.
Plus he understood power,
getting the Ethiopian church on his side
well before assuming the throne,
and he was smart, educated in a monastery
and able to read and write in Arabic
as well as local languages.
Yet that passed as a minor noble didn't separate him
from his subjects.
Sometimes called the barefoot emperor,
he was known to live in extreme modesty
and occasionally pitch in
and help farmers work their fields.
Despite having battled and deposed her family,
he also treated his wife with kindness
and they had an extremely loving relationship.
And at the beginning of his reign,
he even, unsuccessfully, attempted to abolish slavery.
So given all that, who could possibly dislike Tewodros II?
Well, precisely the folks that tended not to enjoy
Robin Hood figures robbing the rich.
You guessed it: the rich!
Specifically, the elites who had ruled semi-autonomously
and didn't love these ideas of modernization
and unification, especially under a former bandit
with a weak claim to the Solomonic line.
Regardless, by the 1840s, Tewodros head seen the threat
descending on his homeland.
As an outlaw border prince,
he'd battled Ottoman-backed Egyptian incursions.
He'd even mounted a counter invasion
into Sudanese territory
where he'd experienced modern Ottoman artillery
for the first time, handing him his only defeat.
He'd also met European foreigners,
particularly from Britain.
And while he liked many and even kept one as an advisor,
he recognized the dangers
that they and their missionaries posed.
If Ethiopia was going to survive,
he reasoned, it must be united and modern
with a reorganized military and institutions.
The people also had to be on the side of the government,
meaning that the abuses and excesses of the era of princes
had to be curtailed.
So Tewodros went to war, expanding his domain
province by province, defeating rivals,
and locking them and their family members
as political hostages in a fortress prison.
These campaigns went far better
than even Tewodros had hoped.
His army was large and disciplined
with far more rifles than his enemies'.
His opponents riven by division
couldn't stop fighting internally even under his threat.
And finally, many common people welcomed his rule,
believing it would end the chaos of the last century.
By 1856, he'd either conquered or received submission
of all Ethiopia, the nobility reluctantly bowing down,
acknowledging him in the face of popular and church support.
He reorganized the military,
creating a rank and unit structure
Ethiopia still uses today,
and equipped his troops with the modern rifles
he'd taken from his defeated folks.
He also made the army and civil service
professional and salaried,
loyal to the central government rather than local lords.
Yet this honeymoon period lasted only a few months,
because Tewodros didn't just want to rule Ethiopia.
He wanted to reform it.
First, he instituted a series of local garrisons
to watch over the provinces, but this meant raising taxes
on an already over-squeezed peasantry who turned on him.
He then antagonized the church with new taxes,
and when it refused, seized church land
and redistributed it to the peasants.
And with these pillars of society souring on his rule,
the nobles saw their chance.
Many rebelled, often courting French and British support
in order to obtain firearms and artillery.
Tewodros would spend
almost his entire reign suppressing rebellions,
perpetuating the state of constant warfare
he'd hoped to end.
And ultimately, his authority rarely extended further
than the power base of his army.
Once he marched into one rebel province,
another would take arms against him.
And it was then that Tewodros started to formulate
his biggest idea, one that could unify
and safeguard the country.
There were, he thought, two major external threats
to Ethiopia: the Ottoman-Egyptian alliance
and European colonialism.
So, why not use one to fight the other?
This was partially a plan he devised
due to his good relationships with two Englishmen,
John Bell, a longtime advisor,
and British consul Walter Plowden.
Tewodros admired the British,
considering them to be a culture of strict discipline.
He also found Protestant missionaries more acceptable,
as they often sent men with skills like engineering
marrying religious missions with development aid.
He wanted modernization, especially modern firearms,
but he didn't just wanna buy guns.
He knew that dependence was a trap.
Instead, he wanted Smiths to come and teach Ethiopians
to make guns and more.
He wanted skilled workers of all stripes,
a technological Ethiopia run by Ethiopians.
He also wanted to form an Anglo-Ethiopian alliance,
which would support a crusade against the Ottoman empire,
its Egyptian vassals, and the growing Turkish presence
in the Red Sea.
This crusade would unify his country
fighting external forces and win him the European support
that would shield him from colonialism.
But while his goals soared,
his rule became increasingly bloody.
First, in 1858 his beloved wife died
while he was on campaign.
Always a harsh disciplinarian with a violent streak,
one doesn't become a banded chief by being a pacifist,
it soon became clear that his wife had been a calming
and restraining influence on him.
Then, when his friend John Bell,
another restraining influence,
was murdered on a mission two years later,
he had hundreds of prisoners beheaded in retaliation.
When peasants rebelled
due to an uncontrollable drought and famine,
he made the situation worse by destroying towns and fields.
Discipline in the army became fanatically harsh,
including mass executions.
And by 1865, he was ruling solely via terror.
Which is when things came to a head,
because in 1862 he'd written a letter
to Queen Victoria proposing his alliance,
and given it to a British consul to deliver personally.
But when the consul reached port,
the Foreign Office instructed him
to send the letter on to London
and carry out a different mission in Sudan.
When the letter reached the Foreign Office,
it was labeled pending, forgotten for a year,
then forwarded to India where it sat a second year.
Tewodros, thinking he was being ignored,
then imprisoned all British subjects in Ethiopia
in a bid to get Victoria's attention.
It worked.
He got his response, just not the one he wanted.
It was lukewarm, and the diplomat carrying the letter
didn't have the power to negotiate.
See, from the British perspective, this idea of a crusade
was not in any way attractive.
The British textile industry ran on imported Egyptian cotton
and the government wanted the Ottomans
as an ally against Russia.
So Tewodros ignored diplomatic immunity
and through the letters deliverer
into prison with the others.
Then, when he received an ultimatum
threatening and invasion if he didn't release them,
he ignored that.
A sort of fatalism had set in.
Torn from within and without,
neither Tewodros nor his reign would survive.
Defeated easily by the British force,
his dissolving army withdrew
to the new capital he'd founded, refusing to surrender.
And the last of his men dying from artillery barrages,
he released his British prisoners unharmed
and killed his Ethiopian ones.
When they found him, he was dead,
killed by a self-inflicted gunshot.
He'd used the dueling pistol
Queen Victoria had sent as a gift.
But though his work remained incomplete,
Tewodros II had laid the groundwork for Ethiopia
to become a modern state,
one that would survive the Scramble for Africa,
because the British didn't stay
and Ethiopia's next great king was already active.
Tewodros's adopted son, former captive
and child of his enemy, Menelick II,
who would soon defeat an Italian invasion
and win lasting security for Ethiopia.
And since the story of the Ethiopian empire is so vast,
we are actually extending this series one more episode,
but there's no way we could start that epic conclusion
on an empty stomach.
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