popular imagination." A French trader who had conducted business with him declared in 1808, "He is without doubt the richest, the most feared, the most enlightened, and has the largest kingdom, of all the kings of Madagascar." Malagasy textbooks characterize him as a hero and the originator of the notion of a unified Malagasy national identity. The primary source of information about the reign of Andrianampoinimerina is Tantara ny Andriana eto Madagasikara, a Malagasy language book relating the oral history of the Merina kings as collected by a Jesuit missionary, Francois Callet, in the late 19th century. Prior to the eventual release of a French language translation in the 1950s, references to the king in academic and popular writing during the colonial period de-emphasized his role as a conduit of traditional religious power and authority, instead glorifying his administrative practices in an attempt to bring greater credibility to the colonial government as a vehicle for building upon and strengthening the principles of good governance that he introduced. Beginning in the 1970s, historians began to focus more on the spiritual aspects of his role as king, and researchers questioned and compared sources in an effort to arrive at a more factual and balanced history of Andrianampoinimerina and his reign. Innovations during the reign of Andrianampoinimerina were to have long-standing consequences for the structure of Malagasy society in the 19th century. Madagascar specialist Francoise Raison-Jourde attributes the widespread conversions of the masses following the conversion to Christianity of Ranavalona II in 1869 to the precedent established by Andrianampoinimerina of a state religion in which the sovereign is the head and the people are expected to follow. Similarly, Andrianampoinimerina's decision to empower the hova and the two families of advisers in particular led over the next fifty years to the strengthening of the hova middle class that formed the backbone of the merchant, craftsman, farming and administrative cadres. By the reign of Radama II, hova power rivaled and ultimately exceeded the power of the nobles, leading to the aristocratic coup d'etat that ended Radama's reign and the absolute power of the monarch, and established a joint system of government in which the hova Prime Minister and his cabinet governed while the sovereign was reduced to a symbolic figurehead of ancestral power and authority. Ambohimanga, which Andrianampoinimerina declared the spiritual capital of Madagascar, remains among the country's most important spiritual and cultural sites, and