Zewditu

She was born Askala Maryam in 1876 in Werrehimenu, in the highlands of Wollo, the daughter of Emperor Menelik II — the ruler who, twenty years later, would shatter an invading Italian army at the Battle of Adwa and keep Ethiopia free. Her mother, a Wollo noblewoman, separated from Menelik early, and the girl was raised inside the deep ceremony and faith of the imperial court. Married first at about ten, widowed, and married three more times, she found her steadiest companionship late, with Ras Gugsa Welle — a marriage that would one day cost her everything.

When Menelik died and his young grandson Lij Iyasu lost the trust of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the great nobles, the empire reached not for another warlord but for Menelik's own daughter. On 27 September 1916 the Council of State and the Church deposed Iyasu and proclaimed Zewditu empress; the rebellion that followed was crushed days later at the Battle of Segale. On 11 February 1917 she was crowned in St George's Cathedral in Addis Ababa — the capital her father had founded — taking the title Negiste Negest, "Queen of Kings," a deliberate feminine remaking of the ancient "King of Kings."

Real power, by design, rested with her regent and heir, her cousin Ras Tafari Makonnen — the future Emperor Haile Selassie I. Their fourteen years together were a slow contest between two visions of Ethiopia. He led the country into the League of Nations and toward the abolition of slavery; she, devout and conservative, feared that too much change would hollow out the faith and customs that held her people together, and she resisted. After a failed conservative revolt in 1928 she was pressed to crown him Negus, a king beneath the empress. Then, in 1930, her own husband Gugsa Welle rose against Tafari and was killed at the Battle of Anchem on 31 March. Two days later the empress was dead. With her ended the direct male-line of the Solomonic dynasty — a royal story Ethiopians trace back, across more than a thousand years, to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba.