Being a royal might sound like fun, but it's not all jewels and feasts.
Some royals have to deal with jealous family members, wars, and even disappearances that
history still can't explain.
These royals mysteriously vanished, and they probably won't be showing up anytime soon.
As far as Byzantine emperors go, Constantine XI's life was kind of rough.
According to historians, when Constantine came to the throne he pretty much knew that
his life was going to be a series of battles.
He knew he'd have to fight the Turks and he was pretty sure his empire would eventually
collapse.
Imagine if you spent your days never making any progress and eventually dying in the line
of duty.
You'd probably take a pass on the whole ruling an empire thing.
The last time anyone saw Constantine was at the fall of Constantinople.
He pretty much knew he'd lost the battle, so he jumped into the fray along with all
his common soldiers.
As for what happened next, stories differ.
In some versions he avoided capture by asking one of his soldiers to kill him.
In others, he escaped by boat.
But since Constantine threw his royal emblems aside when he leaped into battle, it seems
most likely that he just died along with the other common soldiers.
Legend says Rome was founded by twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she-wolf
after their uncle tried to have them killed.
The story goes that in 753 BC the brothers started Rome, and then Romulus ruled it for
nearly 40 years.
One day, Romulus went down to the temple of Vulcan to talk to some senators and promptly
disappeared.
There are a couple different versions of this story.
In one, a cloud engulfs him and he's just never seen again.
That's super dramatic and cool, but it also really doesn't seem very likely.
In another version of the story, a solar eclipse comes along and when it's gone, so is Romulus.
That one doesn't seem likely, either, since we had an eclipse in 2017 and it totally failed
to take out any world leaders.
Romulus was most likely just assassinated by the senators, who then made up the cloud
story.
What finally ended the debate back in ancient Rome was the sworn testimony of Julius Proculus.
Julius said that when he last saw Romulus, Rome's co-founder told him he'd actually been
a god all along and he was going back to the heavens.
The Romans figured that was plausible, and it was settled.
Royal succession in the old days was supposed to be pretty simple.
The King has a prince, the prince becomes king, and then the new king makes more princes.
But what happens when the king doesn't have any sons?
For some reason, no one ever seemed to settle on the absolute rules of succession, therefore
a bunch of people usually had to die.
"Are you ready for a war?!"
"Yeah!"
This kind of thing happened in 1190 AD, when the childless King Richard I of England decided
to make his nephew Arthur, Duke of Brittany, heir to the throne.
Then Richard went off to Crusade and died on his way back.
In his brother's absence, Richard's younger brother John decided he'd love to be King.
Arthur, only 12 years old at the time, wasn't cool with that.
Naturally, this meant war.
John defeated Arthur and for a while it looked like he planned to spare his nephew's life.
Then, in 1203, Arthur disappeared.
One story goes that John killed him with his bare hands when the boy said something snarky.
In another, it was Arthur's jailers who killed him, mostly because John told them to.
Either way, John certainly had something to gain from killing his rival.
As with a lot of historical mysteries, though, we might never solve the whodunit.
No one in Archduke Johann [YO-hahn] Salvator's family really approved of him.
The Archduke was always going on about how bad the Austrian educational system was and
talking smack about the military.
His family wasn't all that impressed with his liberal way of thinking, and Johann didn't
seem too impressed with their lifestyles either.
Johann didn't really care for the whole royal thing, and in the late 1880s he gave up his
title and married a dancer.
This was extra-scandalous at the time because royals were only ever supposed to marry other
royals.
Not long afterward, Johann got a captain's commission and purchased a cargo steamer,
with the intent to travel to South America.
Johann and his wife were last seen at Cape Tres Puntas on July 12, 1890.
Conventional wisdom says their ship probably sunk during a storm off Cape Horn, but with
no witnesses there's really no way to know for sure.
Still, Johann wasn't actually declared dead for more than two decades.
Rumors that he lived under an assumed identity in Norway and thus has heirs that can claim
his lands have persisted ever since.
By the time Julius Caesar came to power, it was fairly well established that the Romans'
purpose was mainly just to crush enemies and dominate the world.
So Caesar did what was expected of him.
He conquered nations and championed the Roman way of life.
One of the first territories on his list was Belgica, where modern Belgium is today.
Caesar introduced himself to the region by conquering them and selling a bunch of them
into slavery.
A few years later, he sent his legions into the region to establish winter quarters and
got his butt kicked by a tribe called the Eburones, led by a king named Ambiorix.
Within a year, Caesar and his legions had put down the uprising for good.
But after his last stand, Ambiorix was seen running off into the forest with some guards
and was never heard from again.
According to legend, his people resettled among the German tribes.
As far as history remembers, the Romans never did track him down.
Today the Belgians consider him a national hero.
Cleopatra gets a lot of love, but her children are hardly ever mentioned.
She had four of them, but when Octavian defeated her in 31 B.C., she famoously committed suicide
- leaving the kids to fend for themselves.
Octavian had Cleopatra's oldest son murdered, so that was that.
Then he took the younger kids, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus to Rome.
He spared their lives, but still paraded them around the city in golden chains.
After that, the kids were sent to live with Octavian's sister.
Then, as far as history is concerned, the two boys sort of fall off the face of the
earth.
We know that Cleopatra's daughter went on to become a queen in her own right, but no
one knows what happened to the boys.
Hereward was kind of the black sheep of the family.
His father exiled him from England when he was 18, which was the medieval version of
kicking your kid out of the house for obnoxious behavior.
For a while he worked as a mercenary soldier, and then he heard about the Norman conquest
of 1066 and figured he'd better go back home.
When he arrived, he found that his family had been murdered and their lands had been
given to some random Norman guy.
After that he sort of lost it.
With the help of just one follower, he killed 14 Normans and then went on to lead a rebellion
against William the Conqueror.
William was concerned enough about Hereward that he enlisted the help of a witch, which
seems pretty extreme for a Christian king.
In the end, the Normans were able to defeat Hereward by bribing someone to help them get
across the marshes where he was hiding.
No one knows what happened to Hereward after that.
Some stories say that William eventually pardoned him, which really seems pretty unlikely.
Other stories say he lived as an outlaw until he was killed by the Normans.
Either way, things didn't exactly turn out great for his cause.
William remained king, England remained Norman, and that random Norman guy still had all his
land.
Today the eldest son of the king or queen of England holds the title "Prince of Wales,"
but once upon a time there was an actual Prince of Wales and he was actually Welsh.
The kings of England almost universally did not like the fact that the Welsh were running
around Wales being independent.
In 1282, Edward I finally put a stop to that, taking down the last Prince of Wales.
The Welsh never really got over this, and 100 years later a soldier named Owain Glyndwr
decided to start a rebellion.
The people of Wales got behind Owain and abandoned their universities, farms, and even their
places in the English army to join him.
By 1400 he'd reclaimed the title "Prince of Wales," but the Welsh never did have a whole
lot of luck against the English.
It was all sort of destined to fall apart.
In 1406 he lost the battle of Pwll Melyn and by 1410 he was an outlaw.
Most outlaws are caught eventually, but not Owain.
No one ever gave up his hiding place, and he probably died in peace and relative safety.
He lives on in his banner, which the Welsh like to fly when they want to annoy the English.
Sebastian of Portugal was a religious fanatic and heir to the throne of Portugal.
He was educated by the Jesuits and believed that it was his destiny to take down the Muslims.
Destiny aside, Portugal was not exactly keen on starting a deadly war.
That changed when Sebastian took power in 1568.
Ten years later, he was ready to lead an army to Morocco, where.
It turned out his fellow countrymen were right to worry about the war, and so ended Sebastian
of Portugal ... mostly.
History doesn't remember what happened to Sebastian after his defeat in Morocco.
It's likely he died in battle, but when history is vague there are always people who want
to fill in the blanks.
Four different people tried to impersonate Sebastian of Portugal between 1584 and 1598,
and after that people just hoped he'd come back someday.
That hope gave rise to an entire messianic faith called Sebastianism.
The followers of this faith believed that Sebastian would one day return and so far,
they're still waiting.
Nefertiti was married to the Pharaoh Akhenaten, and she ended up quite a bit more famous than
him.
She had so much political power, in fact, that experts say she's depicted in ancient
reliefs about twice as often as her husband.
He didn't seem to really mind, though.
After his death he had her image carved into the four corners of his sarcophagus so she
could protect his mummy, which basically meant he considered her a god.
Despite this popularity, Nefertiti disappeared from the historical record about 16 years
into her husband's reign just a year before he himself died.
Because historians love to speculate, there are theories that she either died or fell
out of favor.
Other theories suggest she took a new name and ruled as co-regent after her husband's
death.That certainly beats living as an outlaw or dying without fanfare, but some actual
answers would be nice.
Jianwen was the second emperor of the Ming dynasty, and the guy who almost wrecked everything
for future rulers.
When he came to power in 1398, he was mostly concerned with getting rid of all the other
Ming princes so he could rule over everything..
During the first year of his reign he took out several rival princes and was feeling
pretty good about himself.
Then he turned on his uncle, who was the prince of Yan.
His uncle said, "No, thank you," and rebelled.
The war lasted four years and ended when the Prince of Yan attacked the capital and burned
down Jianwen's palace.
Sadly, when Jianwen saw his uncle coming he reportedly just hid in the palace and he apparently
was still there when it all burned to the ground.
Still, there are some people who believe he actually escaped.
The truth will likely never be known.
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