Alfonso XIII of Spain
Alfonso XIII was King of Spain from the moment of his birth in May 1886 until 1931, his father having died six months earlier. His mother Maria Christina governed as regent until he came of age in 1902. The regency ended with the disaster of 1898, in which Spain lost Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines to the United States in a few months — a defeat that produced a generation of national self-examination and discredited the political system. He took an active and constitutionally questionable role in government, intervening in the choice of ministers and taking a particular personal interest in the army and in Morocco. The colonial campaign there produced the catastrophe at Annual in July 1921, where some eight thousand Spanish soldiers were killed; an official inquiry was heading towards the king's own responsibility when it was stopped. He kept Spain neutral in the First World War, and used his position to run an office at the palace that traced missing prisoners and wounded men across the belligerent countries, handling hundreds of thousands of cases. In September 1923 General Miguel Primo de Rivera seized power, and Alfonso accepted and endorsed the dictatorship, which tied the crown's fate to it. Primo fell in January 1930, and the monarchy had no remaining constitutional cover. Municipal elections in April 1931 returned republican majorities in almost every city. Alfonso left the country without abdicating, saying he did not wish to provoke a civil war. He lived in exile in France and Italy, renounced his rights to his son Juan weeks before dying in Rome in 1941, and is the grandfather of Juan Carlos I.
- Lived: 1886 CE – 1941 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: king, head_of_state
