Skip to content
Wellsprings
Menelik II

Menelik II

1844 CE1913 CE · Addis Ababa

Menelik II, previously king of Shewa, became emperor of Ethiopia in 1889 and greatly enlarged the empire's southern and eastern territories. In 1896 his forces defeated an invading Italian army at the Battle of Adwa, preserving Ethiopian independence during the European partition of Africa. He founded Addis Ababa as his capital and introduced modern infrastructure such as railways, telegraph lines, and schools. His reign established much of the shape of the modern Ethiopian state.

See Menelik II’s journey on the map →

Life journeyclick any stop, or use ←/→Trace on the map →

Stop 1 of 1Seat Of Power

Addis Ababa

We know they were here, but the specifics of what they did at this stop aren’t recorded yet in our corpus.

In Addis Ababa at the same time

Haile Selassie I

See other sages who lived in Addis Ababa

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers, teachers, and rulers whose lives overlapped with Menelik II’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works

No works attributed in the corpus yet.