705. Queen Victoria’s Revenge: The Mad Emperor of Abyssinia (Part 1)

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook begin the story of one of the most extraordinary military expeditions in world history: the British expedition to Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia) in the 1860s. Emperor Tewodros II, a colourful and controversial ruler, had imprisoned British emissaries after feeling slighted by Queen Victoria's failure to respond to his diplomatic overtures. The episode explores Tewodros's rise to power, his increasingly erratic behavior, and the chain of events that prompted Queen Victoria's government to launch an ambitious and logistically staggering rescue mission deep into the African interior.