Emperor Iyasu V (Lij Iyasu)

Iyasu Mikael was born on 4 February 1895 at Dessie, in the Wollo province of Ethiopia, and was baptized Kifle Yaqob. His father was Negus Mikael of Wollo, a powerful nobleman of Mammedoch Oromo descent who had been born Mohammed Ali and lived as a Muslim until 1875, when he converted to Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity — a conversion that came decades before his later elevation to Negus, or King. Through his mother, Woizero Shewaregga, eldest daughter of Emperor Menelik II, the young Iyasu carried the blood of the Solomonic line and of Menelik's own house.

Named heir to the throne in 1909, Iyasu became the effective, uncrowned ruler of Ethiopia upon Menelik II's death on 12 December 1913. Never formally crowned, he is remembered by the honorific Lij — "child of royal blood." He was a young sovereign of reforming instinct, reaching toward Ethiopia's Muslim subjects and its peripheral peoples in a way that unsettled the Christian Shewan nobility at the imperial center.

That reach became his undoing. On 27 September 1916, while at Harar, the Solomonic nobility deposed him, charging that he had embraced Islam and thereby forfeited the crown. His half-aunt Zewditu was raised as Empress, and Ras Tafari Makonnen — the future Haile Selassie I — was named heir. Iyasu resisted, was captured in 1921, and lived his remaining years in confinement.

He died on 25 November 1935. A king who looked toward the whole of his people before his time was ready to follow, Lij Iyasu is honored here as a bridge-builder whose vision outran his throne.