There have been plenty of royal heads of state throughout the
centuries who had very short reigns due to unfortunate circumstances and poor choices.
Some of their stories are quite epic, even if few remember their names anymore.
Keep watching to discover the tragic stories behind the shortest reigns in royal history.
Anyone who's seen a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar knows
how dangerous the job of Roman emperor was. Marcus Didius Julianus found that
out the hard way in the year 193 AD when he reigned for just 66 days.He'd had a
massively successful career as a prefect and general.. But things were not well in Rome,
as the emperor Commodus was killed by a group of conspiring senators and replaced by a new emperor,
who just lasted 86 days before he was killed in turn during a military uprising.
That killing was reportedly accidental, but since there was no appointed successor, Didius Julianus
strolled in and declared that he was emperor — and everyone pretty much went along with it.
Everyone that is, except for Septimius Severus.
When he heard about the self-appointment of the new emperor, he declared that he was emperor and
then rounded up his men and headed to Rome. By the time he got there, the Senate already
knew that their soldiers weren't going to fight the man rapidly approaching. So they bailed,
and just in time, as an assassin sent by Severus killed and beheaded Didius Julianus.
Russian history between 1598 and 1613 is known as the Time of Troubles, and it started with the
untimely death of Fyodor I. When he died without an heir, that kicked off a succession debate,
and among the contenders were the so-called False Dmitrys, a series of pretenders who claimed to be
the prince Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible, who had actually been killed as a child.
The False Dmitrys had the support of Poland and Russian rebels who thought it was time
for a bit of a change, which brings us to Fyodor II, who was put on the throne on April 23, 1605.
Only 16 years old at the time, Fyodor II just as quickly lost the support of the military. When his
mother stepped in to try to fix things, that irked the Russian aristocracy, who in turn encouraged a
full-blown riot. The rioters killed both Fyodor II and his mother in early June, and just two
months into his short-lived rule, the throne was wide open to be occupied by the first pretender.
Maximinus Thrax might sound like the name of an MCU villain,
but he was actually a Roman emperor whose reign lasted just three years starting in 235 AD.
But this story isn't primarily about him. Thrax was obsessed with his military campaigns to the
point that the Senate got sick of his spending and decided to appoint someone else as emperor.
His replacements were Gordian I and II, a father-son duo who cemented their claim to
the throne by having assassins kill Maximinus Thrax's top commander.
The Gordians immediately got to work by disbanding the secret police,
declaring the former emperor an enemy of the state, and preparing to fend off a military invasion.
That invasion happened with the help of a governor loyal to their predecessor who
just happened to be in the area. It was Gordian II who led the charge against the advancing army,
so he was the one to die first. When word of his death got back to his father,
Gordian I immediately killed himself. Their reign lasted only 22 days.
Jane Grey was declared queen of England on July 10, 1553. She reigned for just nine days,
and that's not even the most tragic part, as she didn't even want to be queen in the first place.
But she was caught up in the soap-opera style drama that was the Tudor family,
and she'd been groomed to not only be queen but a figurehead for the country's relatively
new faith of Protestantism. At the time that she was married and then told that she was
going to be queen, she was only about 16 years old, and she fainted at the news.
Grey's entourage, led by John Dudley, the Duke of Northumberland, installed her in
the Tower of London, where they thought that she would be safe. But they hadn't expected
her rival Mary Tudor to gain so much support so quickly. Just nine days after Grey became queen,
the royal council revoked their statement and named Mary as the official Tudor heir,
and the Tower of London became not a seat of power but a prison. Grey was held there until February
12, 1554, when she was taken to the Tower Green and executed. Her last words were reportedly,
"Lord, into thy hands I commit my soul."
Being born into royalty doesn't automatically mean a life of luxury.
Just consider France's John I. He was born on November 15, 1316,
just five months after the death of his father Louis X. He was given the nickname John the
Posthumous and was crowned king immediately at his birth, but he died a mere five days later.
While that was of course the end to John I's reign, that's not the end of the story.
Fast-forward to 1356, when the royal court of France had to deal with a claim that John I
hadn't died at all but had instead been swapped for another baby and raised as a commoner.
A man named Giannino claimed to have been told of his supposedly true history by a politician
who had died before he could complete his mission of seeing the right monarch ascend the throne.
This sounds like the sort of thing that people would just roll their eyes at,
and many did. Giannino appealed to the Hungarian royal court for help in reclaiming his so-called
birthright but was sent away. He only managed to put together a small army of mercenaries to
harass the French court, but when John II rose to power, he was largely forgotten.
When it comes to the Crusades, Western history tends to talk a lot about the Western leaders,
like Richard the Lionheart. Less frequently discussed are the leaders of the other factions,
like Conrad of Montferrat, who was briefly king of Jerusalem in 1192. Conrad had a pretty
incredible intellect. If he were a Dungeons & Dragons character, he would have high scores in
wisdom and intelligence, as well as the strength of a barbarian and all the charisma of a bard. He
was so widely popular that he was elected king of Jerusalem during the Third Crusade by a landslide.
Unfortunately for Conrad, that made him a target. After having lunch with a friend one day,
he was walking back to his house when he was attacked, stabbed, and killed.
One of the assassins was killed instantly, and when the other was tortured for information,
he spilled the beans. He was a member of the Assassins, a Shia Muslim sect who lived in
the mountains of Persia and Syria. Conrad was king for just four days before he was killed,
and Richard the Lionheart was ultimately blamed for hiring the assassins.
Not only does the tale of Khalid bin Barghash involve one of the shortest reigns in history,
it also involves the shortest war in history. It's a record that's unlikely to be broken,
as the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896 lasted just 38 minutes. The full story takes longer to tell
than the war lasted. The short version is that it started when control of Zanzibar was ceded
to the British, who decided to install their own sultan. He died about three years into his reign,
and the running theory is that he was poisoned by his cousin, Khalid bin Barghash.
A good rule of thumb is that if you want to kill someone to usurp their position and avoid suspicion,
don't move into their palace and declare yourself sultan before the body is even cold.
Khalid started gathering his troops as a precursor to taking on Zanzibar's British overlords, and it
was just a matter of hours before the British fleet stationed in the nearby harbor got the
go-ahead to employ whatever measures were deemed necessary. Khalid responded by saying that he was
sure they wouldn't fire on the sultan's palace, but then the British did exactly that. Just 38
minutes later, the new sultan's flag was down, 500 of his men were dead, and Khalid fled. He wasn't
captured until 1916; he was exiled first to Saint Helena and then to East Africa, dying in 1927.
In June 2001, shocking news emerged from the Nepalese palace, as King Birendra, his wife,
and eight other members of the royals' inner circle had been killed by a mysterious gunman.
On June 4, it was then announced to widespread confusion that Nepal had named a second king
in just two days. Prince Gyanendra was now regent, following the appointment and death
of the crown prince Dipendra. A few days after that, it still wasn't clear what had happened,
but it was reported that several journalists had been arrested after publishing a story
that named the man behind the massacre: Dipendra himself.
Stories varied, but it was later reported that Dipendra, who was outraged that his family had
denied him the right to marry the woman he'd fallen in love with because her grandmother had
been a concubine, simply walked into the palace dining hall and started shooting.
He then attempted to kill himself but ended up in a coma, which is when he
was appointed king of Nepal. He remained in the coma for three days before he died,
and the massacre kickstarted a complete overhaul of Nepal's political construct.
"And royalty lived, as it still does, by its very own rules."
The infamous Napoleon Bonaparte had one legitimate son with his wife Marie-Louise.
Napoleon II was only three years old when he became the French emperor for the first time,
after his father abdicated in 1814. But there was a bit of a snag,
as Napoleon I had officially removed all of his descendants from being in the running for emperor.
"How's it going, dudes?
That's far from the end of the story, though. Napoleon I didn't go away completely,
as he returned in 1815. His son was officially a prince again,
and then when Napoleon I was defeated at Waterloo, Napoleon II became emperor again.
That lasted for just 20 days, though, and when the French aristocracy refused to recognize his rule,
he headed to Austria and was taken under the wing of Francis I, the Austrian emperor,
who was also his grandfather. He was raised as a prince, and while he was officially
the French heir, he never took power and died of tuberculosis at the age of 21.
In 1889, King Carlos I took the Portuguese throne,
and when he came to power, Portugal wasn't a great place to be. There was plenty of unrest and
corruption, as well as a devastating financial recession, which all led to an open revolt.
In an attempt to regain control, Carlos decided to try to overthrow the Parliamentary
government and make it a dictatorship, but it definitely didn't go as planned.
Carlos and his son Luis Filipe, who was just shy of 21 years old, were riding through the
capital of Lisbon when they were targeted by an assassination attempt. The open carriage probably
made it pretty easy, and Carlos was killed instantly. Luis Filipe was shot and mortally
wounded even as the carriage made a run for it, and it was a 20-minute mad dash for safety,
during which time the heir apparent had become king. Also in the carriage were Luis' mother and
younger brother Manuel, who was likewise wounded in the attack. Despite Manuel's best efforts,
Luis died as he was being removed from the carriage, having been king for just 20 minutes.
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