User:Fredrick Wilhelm
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This is mu user page - set up to help me work out how to make posts for Wikipedia
TRANSPLANTED MONARCHS OF EUROPE
Through out European history Kings where often placed on the throne of a nation to which was not their nations. For the most part of history this was due to the main royal line dying out, and thus a new monarch was required. When this happened, someone from a secondary or cadet branch of the family was often chosen to be the new monarch and their family became the new royal family. However sometimes the person placed on the throne was not from a secondary branch of the royal family. This person was usually chosen because: i) they were distant blood relations to the past/current monarch and held the best claim to the throne; ii) they were related via marriage - either a present marriage on a past marriage up to hundreds of years ago; iii) they were chosen as a result of an agreement between warring parties to end wars of succession; or iv) in some cases the new monarch had no viable claim over the throne and were chosen either by fellow European Monarchs or the nobles of a particular state.
The last case was the main cause for "new" transplanted monarch's in the late 1800's. New states where being formed, largely in the Balkan areas that were previously under the control of the Ottoman Empire, and monarchy was seen as the best form of government. As these states usually had no local royal/noble house, a new Monarch was usually chosen, or at least approved, by a joint decision of the other major European Crowned Heads.
The choice of a new monarch always involved a lot of politics, and was very important diplomatically. This was especially the case in the late 1700's onwards, as the Monarchs across Europe were moving away from the idea of a absolute rule and towards a more constitutional model of monarchy, hence the some of the odd choices of monarchs. The Great Powers tried to choose monarchs over which they could have a degree of control or influence over.
This list does not include monarchs, who through Personal-Unions of thrones, being vassal states or other similar situations found themselves ruling over a nation that was not from where they were born/from. See below for exclusions under this rule.
The aim of this page is to have a list of all the "transplanted" monarchs of Europe on the one page. There is a bit of background to each of the monarchs, and why they were chosen for their crowns, but for further information on any of them look at their wiki-page (or my references).