Asfa Woosen, grandsire to the reigning monarch, succeeded to his father Emmaha Yasoos, and reigned thirty-three and a half years. Of forty-eight male children he was the bravest. He was a great Nimrod, and an unparalleled warrior, slaying three hundred Pagans with his own spear from the back of his favourite war-steed Amádoo. Amongst many other despotic laws enacted during his reign, was one prohibiting the manufacture of hydromel by the subject. Three great rebellions threatened the stability of his empire, which had now shaken off all allegiance to Gondar, but each in turn was quelled by his personal valour. The last insurrection was headed by Woosen Suggud, the heir-apparent. In a pitched battle the youth was wounded by the hand of his father, taken prisoner, and immured throughout the term of the monarch’s life. During the last fifteen years of his reign, Asfa Woosen was totally blind. It is fully believed that the sight of one eye was destroyed by Thavánan, as already narrated in the legend of “the tormentor,” and that one of the royal concubines, whom that sorcerer had spirited away, destroyed the other shortly afterwards, by means of a powerful spell imparted by her paramour.
Since the commencement of the present century, the custom of consigning to a dungeon the brothers and kindred of the reigning monarch has fallen into desuetude in Northern Abyssinia. The princes of the blood-royal now wander over the country unmolested and unheeded, attaching themselves to any chief who may be willing to extend countenance and support, and holding themselves at his disposal in the event of his gaining ascendancy over his rivals, and requiring a titular emperor to perform the indispensable ceremony of nominating a Ras. But the form is still retained, of placing the crown upon the brows of a descendant of the ancient line of Solomon, who is content to be a mere puppet in the hands of the temporary minister; and enjoying a stipend of three hundred dollars per annum, with the paltry revenues accruing from the tolls of the hebdomadal market in the capital, he remains a prisoner upon parole in his palace at Gondar.
Volume Three—Chapter Three.
The Monarch and the Court.
Sáhela Selássie, “the clemency of the Trinity,” seventh king of Shoa, whose surname is Menilek, was twelve years of age when the assassination of Woosen Suggud called him from a monastery to the throne, and placed in his hands the reins of despotic government over a wild Christian nation. His sire had enjoyed a brief, but exceedingly active reign of four and a half years, during which he extended his empire far beyond the limits bequeathed to him by Asfa Woosen—made conquests in the south to the mountains of Garra Gorphoo, and in the west to the Nile. The most despotic measures marked his transient but iron rule; and had he survived, the expectations formed of him would in all probability have been realised, and he would have become monarch of all Abyssinia. But the nation groaned under his oppression; and after a series of the harshest acts, induced by visits in disguise, like those of Haroun Alraschid, the great Kaliph of Bagdad, to the houses of his subjects, and to places of public resort, a Shankela slave, whom he had provoked by ill usage, turned upon his royal master, and having slain him with a sword, set fire to the palace at Kondie, which was burned to the ground; and the wealth amassed in many earthen jars melted, according to the tradition, into a liquid stream of mingled silver and gold, which flowed over the mountain-side.
In Shoa, as in other savage countries, the tidings of the dissolution of the monarch, unless timely concealed, spread like lightning to the furthest extremities of the kingdom, and become a signal for rapine, anarchy, and murder, which rage unrestrained during the continuance of the interregnum. Every individual throughout the realm deems himself at full liberty to act according to the bent of his own vicious inclinations—to perpetrate every atrocity, and to indulge in the gratification of every revengeful and licentious passion, without fear of retribution or of punishment; and it being perfectly understood that there exists neither law nor rule until the new sovereign shall have been proclaimed, the kingless land for a season runs rivers of blood. Fearful was the tragedy that followed the assassination of Woosen Suggud. The royal family residing at Ankóber, and the heir-apparent at a still greater distance from Kondie, there ensued a scene of anarchy and confusion which it would be difficult to describe; and at Debra Libanos alone there fell no fewer than eight hundred victims to private animosity, of whose murder no account was ever taken.
The eyes of the monarch being closed in death, the minister styled Dedj Agafári, “the introducer through the door,” proceeds to the inauguration of the successor, who, unless some other arrangement shall have been willed, is usually the heir-apparent. Presented to the senators and to the inmates of the palace, the herald proclaims aloud, “We have reason to mourn, and also to rejoice, for our old father is dead, but we have found a new one.” The accession thus declared, the king is invested with the robes of state, and taking seat upon the throne, the public officers first in order, and then the people, offer homage, and bow before his footstool.
General mourning is invariably observed during the seven days which follow the promulgation of the national calamity. Men, women, and children, evince their grief by tearing the hair, scarifying the temples with the nails, and casting themselves sobbing and screaming upon the ground—the good qualities of the deceased being extolled the while. But the chief mourners on the melancholy occasion are those princes of the blood-royal who are affected by the barbarous practice handed down from the earliest periods of Abyssinian history. For in the kingdom of Shoa revolutionary projects against the crown have invariably been anticipated by consigning the uncles and brothers of the sovereign to a subterranean dungeon, where they pass the remainder of their days in the elaborate carving of harps and ornaments of ivory.