Iyoas I (Ge'ez: ኢዮአስ; died 14 May 1769), throne name Adyam Sagad (Ge'ez: አድያም ሰገድ) was Emperor of Ethiopia from 27 June 1755 to 7 May 1769, and a member of the Solomonic dynasty. He was the infant son of Iyasu II and Wubit (Welete Bersabe), the daughter of an Oromo chieftain of the Karrayyu. Iyoas and Mentewab Despite his extreme youth, he was the candidate proposed by Empress Mentewab, his grandmother, who then acted as his regent. Her proposal was supported by the great nobles of the reign, Ras Wolde Leul her brother, Waragna, Ayo governor of Begemder, and Ras Mikael Sehul. One handicap with this tactic of ruling through a proxy, as Richard Pankhurst points out, was that neither Iyoas, due to his age, nor Empress Mentewab, due to her sex, could operate far from the capital city of Gondar, and relied on Waragna and her brothers to lead many of the military campaigns. The very first challenge to Iyoas' rule, when Nanna Giyorgis rebelled in Damot out of envy for Waragna's increased influence in the court, had to be suppressed by a force led by Waragna and the Empress' brother Grazmach Eshte. Another problem grew from Mentewab's arrangement of the marriage of her son to Wubit, the daughter of an Oromo chieftain. Iyasu II gave precedence to his mother and allowed her every prerogative as a crowned co-ruler, while his wife Wubit suffered in obscurity. Wubit waited for the accession of her own son to make a bid for the power wielded for so long by Mentewab and her relatives from Qwara Province. When Iyoas assumed the throne upon his father's sudden death, the aristocrats of Gondar were stunned to find that he more readily spoke in the Oromo language rather than in Amharic, and favored his mother's Oromo relatives over the Qwarans of his grandmothers family, or the Gondarine nobility that had surrounded the Solomonic monarchs since the reign of Fasiledes. His preference of the Oromo only increased when Iyoas reached adulthood. He assembled a Royal Guard with 3000 of that people, and put his Oromo uncles Birale and Lubo, the brothers of Wubit, in command of them. On the death of the Ras of Amhara province, he attempted to promote his uncle Lubo governor of that province, but the outcry led his uncle Wolde Leul to convince him to change his mind. In 1764 Ras