Ras Makonnen Wolde Mikael Wolde Melekot (8 May 1852 – 21 March 1906), known simply as Ras Makonnen, was an Ethiopian military commander, provincial governor and diplomat, and the father of the future Emperor Haile Selassie. Through his mother, a daughter of Negus Sahle Selassie of Shewa, he was a first cousin of Emperor Menelik II, at whose court he was raised from the age of fourteen. He rose through a series of campaigns in the 1870s and 1880s to become, in January 1887, governor of Harar, a post he held until his death, and the Russian poet and traveller Nikolai Gumilev later called him one of the greatest leaders of Abyssinia.
As governor, Makonnen built a hospital and schools in Harar, encouraged the extension of the railway, imported the region's first printing press, and helped the French develop the port of Djibouti, while also extending imperial authority east and south into the Ogaden. The historian Tim Carmichael describes him as fair and just toward his subjects, with the exception of the Somali, and credits him with promoting relations between Harar's Christian and Muslim communities. Other accounts describe his rule as marked by heavy exactions from the city's Harari population and, in some sources, the destruction of its main mosque; the French traveller Jules Borelli's contemporary account of looting by Menelik's soldiers was later disputed by the historian Richard Caulk, who described the occupation of Harar as conducted in an "exemplary" manner. In 1895 and 1896 he commanded Ethiopian forces against the invading Italians, taking part in the sieges of Amba Alagi and Mekelle before fighting at Adwa, where he was wounded twice and, by tradition, saved by his son Yilma, whom he afterward legitimised.
Makonnen's contact with the European residents of Harar made him Ethiopia's leading envoy of the period. He travelled twice to Rome over the Treaty of Wuchale and its aftermath, in 1897 helped fix Ethiopia's boundary with British Somaliland, and in 1898 helped suppress a rebellion in Tigray, of which he was briefly made governor alongside Harar. Later tradition holds that Menelik rewarded him by naming him heir to the throne, though the historian Richard Caulk has questioned whether Menelik seriously intended this. From 1899 Makonnen also coordinated operations with the British against the Somali leader Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, and in 1902 he led Ethiopia's delegation to the coronation of Edward VII in London, receiving the KCMG and honours from Russia, France, Italy and the Ottoman Empire.
In the 1890s Makonnen built the church of Kulubi Gabriel after vowing to do so if peace could be restored to the Charchar region, and he died there in 1906 of typhus contracted while travelling to Addis Ababa at Menelik's summons; the shrine he founded later became one of Ethiopia's largest pilgrimage sites. His equestrian monument in Harar, erected in 1959, was destroyed by rioters in June 2020 amid unrest that followed the killing of the singer Hachalu Hundessa.