1872–1889: (Yohannes IV — The Tigrayan Emperor Who Complemented Military Force with Diplomacy, Established a Marriage Alliance with Menelik, Faced the Egypti…

1872–1889: (Yohannes IV — The Tigrayan Emperor Who Complemented Military Force with Diplomacy, Established a Marriage Alliance with Menelik, Faced the Egyptians on the Coast and the Italians Who Replaced Them, and Was Killed Fighting the Mahdists in 1889): After a brief interregnum, the Tigrayan Ras Kassa became Emperor Yohannes IV in 1872, continuing the process of building a unified, expansionist state. Unlike Tewodros, Yohannes complemented military force with diplomacy, employing the age-old mechanism of intermarriage between regional ruling families — establishing a marriage alliance with Menelik, who aspired to the imperial throne but decided to bide his time. Yohannes brought about a degree of internal stability, but his horizons were clouded by the Egyptians on the coast — an uneasy though symbiotic relationship made fraught by Yohannes’s territorial claim over much of modern Eritrea. The Egyptians evacuated under British auspices in the mid-1880s, only to be swiftly replaced by the Italians, who already had a foothold at Assab. Yohannes’s northern frontier, watched over by his faithful lieutenant Ras Alula, was only one of his concerns — another was the rise of the Mahdist state in the Sudan, and indeed Yohannes himself was killed in 1889 while fighting the Mahdists. With his unexpected death came an end to Tigray’s preeminence in the Ethiopian empire — Tigrayans would not claim leadership again for another century.