For World Monkey Day: The death of King Alexander of Greece

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Today is World Monkey Day and to mark it here's the sad story of King Alexander of Greece.

Alexander came to the throne in 1917 after his father (Constantine I) and elder brother (Crown Prince George) were deposed by the Entente Powers and the Liberal statesman Eleftherios Venizelos. Alexander became a puppet king under the control of Venizelos, and Greece continued to fight the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.

In 1919 Alexander married Aspasia Manos, a commoner. This became a major scandal. and the couple were forced to leave Greece for several months. 

Soon after their return to Greece, Alexander tried to separate his dog from a tame Barbary macaque with which it was scuffling. In the process, he was bitten by the monkey and died of sepsis a few days later aged 27.

Wikipedia spells out what his death led to:

Under the restored King Constantine I, whose return was endorsed overwhelmingly in a referendum, Greece went on to lose the Greco–Turkish War with heavy military and civilian casualties. The territory gained on the Turkish mainland during Alexander's reign was lost. 

Alexander's death in the midst of an election campaign helped destabilize the Venizelos regime, and the resultant loss of Allied support contributed to the failure of Greece's territorial ambitions. Winston Churchill wrote, "it is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite".

The Rest is History podcast once chose the greatest 10 monkeys in history and unaccountably left this one out. I have never quite trusted it since.