Zara Yaqob

Zara Yaqob, who reigned as Emperor of Ethiopia from 1434 to 1468 under the throne name Constantine, was one of the most powerful rulers of the medieval Solomonic dynasty. He enforced religious uniformity on the Ethiopian Orthodox Church with great severity, defeated the Muslim sultanate of Adal, founded a new capital at Debre Birhan and wrote theological works in Ge'ez. The historian Edward Ullendorff judged him the greatest Ethiopian ruler since Ezana of Aksum.

He was born in 1399 at Telq in the province of Fatagar, the youngest son of Emperor Dawit I. One tradition says he was hidden from a jealous brother and brought up in Tigray, studying at Axum, but the historian Taddesse Tamrat rejected this, noting that Zara Yaqob himself wrote of being released from the royal prison on Mount Gishen just before he became emperor. His brother Tewodros had him confined there around 1414, and he remained a prisoner for some twenty years while several brothers reigned in quick succession. When he finally came to the throne in 1434 he had, as the writer David Buxton put it, no experience of government and faced plots, heresies and foreign threats.

He was crowned at Axum in 1436. Early in his reign he set out to root out pagan practices among Christians. According to a later manuscript, spies hunted down people accused of worshipping old gods, and those found guilty were publicly beheaded, among them several of the emperor's own sons and daughters. He ordered Christians to wear inscriptions on their foreheads and arms declaring their faith and rejecting the Devil. He also ended a century-old dispute over the Sabbath, winning both the followers of the monk Ewostatewos, who kept Saturday as well as Sunday, and the Egyptian bishops to a compromise, finally accepted by the bishops at a council held at Debre Mitmaq in 1450.

When the Egyptian sultan Jaqmaq destroyed a Coptic monastery, Zara Yaqob protested, reminding him that Ethiopia held power over the waters of the Nile. Egypt then encouraged the Adal Sultanate to attack the province of Dawaro, but in 1445 the emperor defeated and killed Sultan Badlay at the battle of Gomit, strengthening his hold over the Muslim and Sidamo lands of the south. He forced the kingdom of Hadiya back to paying tribute and married its princess Eleni, who became a powerful figure at court. In the north he planted soldiers from Shewa as military settlers, probably created the office of Bahr Negash to govern the coast, and in 1464 or 1465 raided Massawa and the Dahlak islands. His campaigns against the Agaw and the Beta Israel, then called Falasha, were less successful.

In 1456 a bright light in the sky, which historians identify with Halley's Comet, appeared shortly after heretics had been stoned to death; taking it as a sign of divine approval, he built a church on the spot and made the place, Debre Birhan, his capital. He sent delegates to the Council of Florence in 1441, where Europeans insisted on calling him Prester John, and in 1450 a mission led by the Sicilian Pietro Rombulo asked Alfonso V of Aragon for skilled craftsmen. He is credited with the Mashafa Berhan, the "Book of Light", which sets out his reforms, and other theological works.

In later life he grew suspicious and harsh. He had the abbot of Debre Libanos beaten and imprisoned for criticising him, and the abbot died in prison. After a supposed plot in 1453 he turned on his own family; the mother of his heir, Baeda Maryam, died after a beating in 1462. Father and son were later reconciled, and Baeda Maryam succeeded when Zara Yaqob died on 26 August 1468. In the next century the Adal leader Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Ghazi had his palace at Debre Birhan destroyed.

Our 1400 and 1492 maps show the Christian highland kingdom of Ethiopia before and after his reign, beside the Muslim sultanates of the Horn of Africa.