Yekuno Amlak of Ethiopia

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Emperor Yekuno Amlak (throne name Tasfa Iyasus) was nəgusä nägäst (1270 - 1285) of Ethiopia and founder (or some say restorer) of the Solomonic dynasty. He traced his ancestry through his father, Tasfa Iyasus, to Dil Na'od, the last king of Axum.

Much of what we know about Yekuno Amlak is based on oral traditions. Most sources state that his mother was the slave of an Amhara chieftain in Sagarat (located in the modern Dessie Zuria district of the Amhara Region). Yekuno Amlak was educated at Lake Hayq's Istifanos Monastery near Amba Sel, where some traditions state Saint Tekle Haymanot raised and educated him, and helped him to depose the last Zagwe king. However, the British historian G.W.B. Huntingford believes "a better case can be made out" for Iyasus Mo'a, the abbot of Istifanos Monastery in Lake Hayq, "if either of these saints had any part in the politics of the day.^[1]

Traditional history further reports that Yekuno Amlak was imprisoned by the Zagwe king Za-Ilmaknun ("the unknown, the hidden one") in Malot, but managed to escape. He gathered support in Amhara provinces and in Shewa, and with an army of followers, defeated the Zagwe king. Taddese Tamrat argued that this king was Yetbarak, but due to a local form of damnatio memoriae, his name was removed from the official records.^[2] A more recent chronicler of Wollo history, Getatchew Mekonnen Hasen, flatly states that the last Zagwe king deposed by Yekuno Amlak was none other than Na'akueto La'ab himself.^[3]

Yekuno Amlak is also said to have campaigned against the Kingdom of Damot, which lay south of the Abbay River.

Recorded history affords more certainty as to his relations with other countries. For example, E.A. Wallis Budge states that Yekuno Amlak not only exchanged letters with the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII, but sent to him several giraffes as a gift.^[4] At first, his interactions with his Muslim neighbors were friendly; however his attempts to be granted an Abuna for the Ethiopian Orthodox Church strained these relations. A letter survives that he wrote to the Mamluk Sultan Baibars, who was suzerain over the Patriarch of Alexandria (the ultimate head of the Ethiopian church), for his help for a new Abuna in 1273; the letter suggests this was not his first request. When one did not arrive, he blamed the intervention of the Sultan of Yemen, who had hindered the progress of his messenger to Cairo.

Taddesse Tamrat interprets Yekuno Amlak's son's allusion to Syrian priests at the royal court as a result of this lack of attention from the Patriarch. Taddesse also notes that around this time, the Patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch were struggling for control of the appointment of the bishop of Jerusalem, until then the prerogative of the Patriarch of Antioch. One of the moves in this dispute was Patriarch Ignatius III David's appointment of an Ethiopian pilgrim as Abuna. This pilgrim never attempted to assume this post in Ethiopia, but -- Taddesse Tamrat argues -- the lack of Coptic bishops forced Yekuno Amlak to rely on the Syrian partisans who arrived in his kingdom.^[5]

Yekuno Amlak ordered the construction of the Church of Gennete Maryam near Lalibela, which contains the earliest surviving dateable wall paintings in Ethiopia.^[6]

[edit] References

^ G.W.B. Huntingford, The Historical Geography of Ethiopia (London: The British Academy, 1989), pp. 74f.
^ Taddesse Tamrat, Church and State in Ethiopia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 68n.1.
^ Getachew Mekonnen Hasen, Wollo, Yager Dibab (Addis Ababa: Nigd Matemiya Bet, 1992), p. 28-29.
^ Budge, A History of Ethiopia: Nubia and Abyssinia, 1928 (Oosterhout, the Netherlands: Anthropological Publications, 1970), p. 285.
^ Taddesse, Church and State, pp. 69ff.
^ Paul B. Henze, Layers of Time, A History of Ethiopia (New York: Palgrave, 2000), p. 59.