empire. He camped for about two and half months in Aksum at the time of his coronation, but there is no indication that he would make it the imperial capital. It seems that he intended to revive the tradition of a mobile capital of medieval Ethiopia. There were, nonetheless, three centers which he frequented: Adwa where he usually celebrated Meskel, Amba Chara and Semera, both of which were located in Begemder. In the early 1880s, however, he chose Mekelle as his center where he had a palace erected by an Italian craftsman, Giacomo Naretti. Religious policy Yohannes inherited the empire encumbered with three religious questions which provoked him to seek a solution: the internal dissensions of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (EOC), Islam, and Christian foreign missionary activities. He regarded all of them as menaces to the unity and stability of the state. By 1878, Yohannes was ready to tackle the problems by summoning a council at Boru Meda, Wollo. Most of the high dignitaries and notables of Ethiopia were present at the council. The leading theologians of the three major disputing groups of the EOC — Karra (predominant in the north), Sägga or Śost Lədät (prevalent in Begemeder and Shewa) and Qəbat (based in Gojjam and Lasta) — tried to defend their respective doctrines. Yohannes readily accepted corrections made by a notable on procedural matters. Apparently, he had a long-prepared plan for the council, as he had a letter from the patriarch of Alexandria read out at the end of the disputation which endorsed the imperial tenet. The policy transcended Yohannes's reign, though there were indications that the suppressed tenets had by no means been eradicated. Foreign policy War with Ottoman Egypt Throughout his reign, Yohannes was embroiled in military struggles on his northern frontiers. First was from Khedive Isma'il Pasha of Egypt, who sought to bring the entire Nile River basin under his rule. The Egyptians flirted with encouraging Menelik of Shewa against the King, but earned Menelik's enmity by marching from the port of Zeila and occupying the city-state of Harar on 11 October 1875. Both Menelik and Yohannes had regarded Harar as a renegade province of Ethiopia, and Egyptian seizure of the Emirate was not welcomed to either of them. The Egyptians then marched into northern Ethiopia from their coastal possessions around the port of Massawa. Yohannes pleaded with the British to stop their Egyptian allies