Treaty of Wuchale
Treaty of Wuchale 1889
The Treaty of Wuchale (also spelled Treaty of Ucciale; Italian: Trattato di Uccialli, Amharic: የውጫሌ ውል) was a treaty signed between the Ethiopian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy. The signing parties were King Menelik II of Shewa, acting as Emperor of Ethiopia, and Count Pietro Antonelli representing Italy, on 2 May 1889, established the treaty after the Italian occupation of Eritrea. It was signed in the small Ethiopian town of Wuchale, from which the treaty got its name. The purpose of the treaty was to promote friendship and trade among the two countries. It was a treaty to maintain a positive long-lasting relationship between the two empires. The treaty has twenty articles written in two languages, Amharic and Italian; however, there were marked differences in the Italian and the Amharic versions of the treaty, which created miscommunications between the two countries. Specifically, Article 17 of the treaty was translated and interpreted differently by Ethiopia and Italy. Italy claimed the article imposed a protectorate over Ethiopia, while Ethiopia claimed the article allowed international diplomacy to be conducted through Italy by choice. When Menelik II denounced the treaty in 1893, Italy attempted to forcefully impose the protectorate over Ethiopia in the First Italo-Ethiopian War, which ended with Italy's defeat at the Battle of Adwa and the resulting Treaty of Addis Ababa.
Background
Around the time the treaty was signed, European colonization was greatly expanding in Africa.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2707120. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1889 and 1893.
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This entry incorporates text from “Treaty of Wuchale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.