Ethiopian Christianity — Tewodros to Menelik

After a century in which Ethiopia's emperors were figureheads and the regional lords ruled, a provincial soldier crowned himself Tewodros II in 1855 and set out to remake the empire. And its church, whose lands he seized and whose clergy he tried to bring under his hand, until his quarrel with Britain ended with a redcoat army at Magdala and his suicide in 1868. His successor Yohannes IV settled a doctrinal argument that had divided Ethiopian theologians for two centuries: at the Council of Boru Meda in 1878 he ruled for the Tewahedo position on how Christ's divinity and humanity are united, and enforced it as the empire's single teaching. Menelik II then did what no other African ruler managed in that century — at Adwa in 1896 he destroyed an invading Italian army and kept his country independent. And Ethiopia entered the twentieth century as an ancient Christian state that had never been colonized, its church still receiving its head, the abun, from the Coptic patriarch in Egypt.