King Alexander I Was Bitten By A Monkey
In 1920, a macaque rocked the history of Greece. The monkey that bit King Alexander I of Greece in his palace at Tatoi changed the country’s fate forever.
The monkey that bit King Alexander I.
This monarch, the third king of the Hellenes, led a brief and strange kingship shortly after the First World War. The strangest thing about it, however, was its cause of death : a monkey bit King Alexander I and he died of the injuries.
The Gibraltar macaque is a species that has been kept as pets all over Europe. It existed in Roman Pompeii and prehistoric Ireland. So it’s not really that surprising that the monkey that bit the Greek king belonged to this species.
He was the pet of one of King Alexander I’s servants. The property manager even kept several macaques as pets.
The attack on the monarch
While walking through the vineyards, one of the monkeys and the king’s German shepherd collided. When the king tried to intervene to settle the dispute, the monkey bit him in the stomach and leg.
The monkey was then killed and the servants cleaned the monarch’s wounds. However, it was already too late because bite wounds quickly become infected. This is even more true if they come from a Gibraltar macaque.
The king then suffered from a terrible fever and pain and died within a few days.
What happened through that bite?
To understand what this meant for Greece, one has to know that Alexander’s father, Constantine I, was neutral during the First World War.
Despite this, the King was friendly to Germany, while the Prime Minister was more on the side of France and Russia.
This led to a parallel government and ultimately the exile of the king and his family. The Triple Entente, which dominated Greece under the figure of the Prime Minister, nevertheless did not want to declare the country a republic.
That is why he was crowned as Alexander I. However, this was done in an illegitimate manner and he was also the only member of the royal family to be on Greek soil.
During these years Alexander I died. This gave the monarch a new impetus and Constantine, his father, came back to the throne.
However, his dissatisfaction and the lost war against the Greeks made him abdicate after just two years. Referring to the lost war after Constantine I returned, Churchill said that the macaque killed a king and 250,000 Greeks.
It’s interesting that a monkey’s bite caused so much turmoil in this European country. The fall of the monarchy and the loss of the country’s territories arose due to the death of Alexander I.
Who would have thought that a single monkey could bring down an entire empire?
