Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia’s Solomonic line, was deposed in Addis Ababa on 12 September 1974 by a committee of junior officers and soldiers known as the Derg, and died in palace custody on 27 August 1975 — almost certainly strangled on the orders of the military government, ending a dynasty that traced its claim, by tradition, back through seven centuries to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He had reigned, as regent then emperor, for nearly six decades. He fell not in a single coup but in a slow unravelling — a “creeping” revolution that stripped his authority away piece by piece over eight months before a small car carried him from his own palace.
Crowned in 1930, Haile Selassie had become one of the towering figures of the twentieth century: the modernizer who gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, the exile who stood before the League of Nations in 1936 to indict Fascist Italy’s invasion of his country, the founding patron of the Organisation of African Unity, and — without his knowledge or wish — the messianic figure of the Rastafari movement, who took their name from his pre-coronation title, Ras Tafari. Abroad he was an icon of African independence. At home, by the 1970s, he presided over a feudal and impoverished empire that had stopped reforming and an emperor who had grown old and remote.
The collapse began with hunger. A drought and famine in the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray in 1972–74 killed tens of thousands; the government concealed it, and when foreign film of starving Ethiopians was juxtaposed on television with footage of the emperor’s lavish court, the regime’s moral authority was destroyed. Through 1974 army mutinies, strikes, and student protests spread, and a committee of soldiers — the Derg — methodically arrested ministers, abolished institutions, and isolated the emperor until nothing of his power remained.
What followed was captivity and murder. The 82-year-old emperor was held in a wing of his Grand Palace as the Derg consolidated into a Marxist dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam and began the killings — sixty senior officials shot without trial that November, and, in the years after, the mass terror of the “Red Terror.” Haile Selassie died the following August. The official cause was respiratory failure; the truth, set out in a later trial, was that he had been strangled in his bed. His body was hidden under a palace floor and not recovered until 1992, after the Derg itself had fallen.
Bahadur Shah Zafar, the twentieth and last Mughal emperor, reigned in Delhi from 1837 until 1857, but he ruled almost nothing: by the time he inherited the throne the Mughal Empire had shrunk to a pension, a palace, and a title the British East India Company allowed him to keep. When the Indian Rebellion of 1857 erupted, mutinous sepoys marched on Delhi and proclaimed the elderly poet-emperor the figurehead of a revolt he had not started and could not control. After the British recaptured the city in September 1857, they took Zafar at Humayun’s Tomb, shot his sons and a grandson, tried him for treason, and exiled him to Rangoon in British Burma, where he died in 1862. With his deposition the house of Timur and Babur, which had ruled much of the Indian subcontinent for more than three centuries, came to an end.
Zafar was eighty-two when he died in a foreign country, buried in an unmarked grave so that no shrine could form. He had been a calligrapher, a Sufi devotee, and one of the finest Urdu poets of his age, presiding over a literary court that included Mirza Ghalib and Mohammad Ibrahim Zauq. He was not a soldier or a statesman, and the rebellion thrust on him a role he was unequipped to fill. His reign is remembered less for what he governed than for the manner of his fall and the violence of the suppression that ended his line.
The fall of the Mughals was not a single defeat but the closing act of a century of erosion. The empire had been hollowed out long before 1857 — by provincial breakaways, by Persian and Afghan invasions, and above all by the East India Company, which governed in the emperor’s name while reducing him to a client. The 1857 Rebellion did not topple a functioning monarchy; it gave the British the occasion and the pretext to abolish the shell that remained.
The suppression of the revolt was brutal and the reprisals indiscriminate. The recapture of Delhi was followed by mass killings of its inhabitants and the plunder and destruction of much of the old Mughal city; historians’ estimates of the wider rebellion’s death toll run into the hundreds of thousands of Indians, dead in the fighting and in the famines and epidemics that followed. The deposition of one frail emperor was the smallest of these losses, but it was the symbolic end of an empire and the prelude to direct Crown rule over India.
Richard II, the last Plantagenet king of the senior line, was deposed in London on 30 September 1399 and replaced by his cousin Henry of Bolingbroke, who took the throne as Henry IV. Within five months Richard was dead at Pontefract Castle in Yorkshire — most likely starved to death on the new king’s quiet instruction — at the age of 33. He had reigned for twenty-two years, and he lost his crown in a single summer, undone less by foreign enemies than by his own treatment of the great nobles of his realm.
Richard had come to the throne in 1377 as a boy of ten, the grandson of Edward III, and his minority and early reign were shadowed by powerful magnates who curbed and humiliated him. In 1387–88 a group of senior lords, the Lords Appellant, used a hostile “Merciless Parliament” to destroy the king’s favorites and reduce him to a figurehead. Richard never forgot it. After years of careful, even successful, government in the 1390s, he turned in 1397 to a calculated revenge: he had the leading Appellants killed, imprisoned, or exiled, packed Parliament, extracted forced loans, and ruled as something close to an absolute monarch, claiming the laws were in his own breast.
The single act that destroyed him followed the death in February 1399 of his uncle, John of Gaunt, the richest man in England. Richard confiscated the vast Lancastrian inheritance and converted the existing exile of Gaunt’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, into banishment for life. The rule of inheritance was the foundation of the whole noble order; by seizing one duke’s lawful estate, Richard taught every magnate in England that nothing they owned was safe. When the king then sailed to Ireland with much of his strength, Bolingbroke landed in Yorkshire to reclaim his birthright, and the nobility flocked to him.
Richard returned to find his support evaporated. He surrendered at Flint Castle in August 1399, was carried to the Tower, and on 30 September was made to renounce the crown; Parliament confirmed his deposition and a long bill of charges. Henry IV was crowned on 13 October. A failed plot to restore Richard early in 1400 made the deposed king too dangerous to keep alive, and he died at Pontefract around 14 February 1400. The usurpation he provoked left the Lancastrian title clouded by the manner of its taking — a flaw that, three generations later, would help open the dynastic bloodletting of the Wars of the Roses.