20 Royal Sibling Rivalries That Rewrote History’s Crowns

In 51 BC, Cleopatra VII, then 18, ascended to the throne as co-ruler of Egypt with her younger brother, Ptolemy XIII, to whom she was married in accordance with Egyptian royal customs. In 48 BC, when his counselors ousted her, Cleopatra mustered an army and enlisted the support of the Roman general Julius Caesar. The Roman troops defeated Ptolemy XIII’s forces in 47 BC, and the young king drowned while escaping through the Nile in full battle dress.

The Catholic daughter of King Henry VIII, Mary I ascended to the throne of England in 1553 following her defeat of an opposing contender for the crown. When Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, was implicated in a revolt in 1554, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Mary was pressured to order Elizabeth’s execution because of the treasonous actions of others, but she refused to act without evidence. On her death in 1558, she designated her sister as her successor, maintaining the succession within the Tudor family.

Richard, the youngest of three sons of the Duke of York, watched his brother Edward IV have their middle brother, George, executed for repeated betrayal. With Edward IV dead in 1483, he was made Protector for the boy king, the 12-year-old Edward V. But then he declared the boy’s parents’ marriage invalid, placed Edward V and his younger brother in the Tower of London, and crowned himself. No one knows what happened to the boys.

Caracalla and Geta were made co-emperors of Rome upon their father’s death in 211 AD. They hated each other so much that they divided the palace in two. In December that year, Caracalla invited Geta to meet with him in the quarters of his mother, Julia Domna, for the purpose of reconciliation, only to have him murdered by his soldiers at the meeting. Caracalla then ordered that all traces of Geta be erased from monuments and coins throughout the empire.

In 1682, Sophia Alekseyevna instigated an uprising by the palace guard that allowed her to make herself regent of Russia in the name of her brother, Ivan V, and 10-year-old half-brother, Peter. She ruled for several years. In 1689, Peter uncovered another conspiracy against him, called out his own loyal troops, and sent Sophia to a convent. Ivan continued to serve as co-tsar until he died of natural causes in 1696. Peter, eventually known as Peter the Great, was now firmly in control.

King James II’s son, James Francis Edward Stuart, was born in 1688. His two Protestant half-sisters, Mary II and Anne, supported a rumor that the infant had been smuggled into the bedchamber in a warming pan, an outright lie designed to disqualify him from the line of succession. Mary’s husband, William of Orange, invaded in the same year, and Parliament decided that James II had abdicated. In 1701, a law ruled that no Catholic could ever occupy the throne.

After the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, famous for building the Taj Mahal, was taken ill, his four grown sons started fighting over his throne, a tradition called “the throne or the coffin.” Dara Shikoh, the scholar and favorite son of the Mughal emperor, lost two important battles to his brother Aurangzeb. Aurangzeb took Dara through the streets of Delhi in chains, killed him for apostasy, and kept Shah Jahan under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

After Huáscar’s father died with no fixed rule of succession in place, Huáscar and his half-brother Atahualpa were left to fight for the Inca throne. Huáscar, based in the capital of Cuzco, opposed Atahualpa, who was in charge of the army in the northern city of Quito. A civil war ensued, and in early 1532, Atahualpa’s generals seized Huáscar, murdering his court. In November of that year, Atahualpa was taken captive by the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro. Fearing that Huáscar would ally with the Spanish, Atahualpa, though himself held captive by Pizarro, had Huáscar executed.

Henry of Trastámara, an illegitimate half-brother of King Pedro I of Castile (who had executed many of the nobility in an attempt to assert royal authority), led a civil war against the king in 1366, supported by French soldiers. Pedro won a battle with English support the following year, but lost it after failing to pay them. After being cornered at Montiel, Pedro met his brother for negotiations and was stabbed to death by Henry in 1369. Henry became King Henry II, beginning the Spanish Trastámara dynasty.

When William the Conqueror died, the eldest son, Robert, got Normandy. The second son, William Rufus, got England. The third, Henry, got nothing but money. The brothers feuded for years over border lands. One day, William Rufus was shot dead by a stray arrow while hunting in the forest, though there was never any proof of foul play. Henry then seized the treasury and declared himself king while Robert was off on crusade. When Robert came back, Henry defeated him in battle and imprisoned him for life.

When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror died in 1481, his two sons rushed for the throne. Bayezid II claimed the throne in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, while his half-brother Cem Sultan seized the city of Bursa and proposed that they share the empire. When Bayezid turned down the offer, he defeated Cem in battle, forcing him to seek refuge with a Christian military order on the island of Rhodes. Several European kings, along with the pope, kept Cem as a hostage for several years, receiving an annual tribute from Bayezid, before Cem died in exile in 1495.

When Frankish king Chlodomer was killed in battle in 524 AD, his full brothers, Childebert and Chlothar, duped their mother, Queen Clotilde, into giving them custody of Chlodomer’s young sons, two of whom they had put to death and the third tonsured. The brothers also divided their late sibling’s territory between themselves. But eventually Childebert died without a surviving son, allowing Chlothar to inherit the whole of it once more.

Emperor Go-Fukakusa was forced to abdicate in favor of his younger brother Kameyama, and their father died without deciding who would rule after that. The two brothers continued fighting over control of imperial lands and revenues, but neither had any actual armed forces, which belonged to the Kamakura Shogunate, Japan’s military government. The Shogunate divided the imperial family into two competing branches, and alternated the throne between them. This compromise merely postponed the inevitable civil war.

Bayezid II, the Ottoman sultan at that time, favored his elder son Ahmet as his successor, though Ottoman succession followed no fixed rule, and any surviving prince could still make a claim. Selim, another of Bayezid’s sons and Ahmet’s half-brother from a rival mother in the harem, worried about his life when Ahmet became sultan. Selim got the support of the Janissaries, the special elite army, and headed towards Constantinople. His father had to step down. In order to prevent further rebellion, Sultan Selim I hunted down Ahmet and killed him together with some of his nephews.

Following the death of Roman emperor Constantine the Great, his three sons divided the empire between them. Constantine II received Gaul, Britain, and Spain, Constantius II received the East, and his youngest brother, Constans, received Italy, Africa, and the Balkans. Constantine II considered his inheritance to be unfair and began an invasion of Constans’s Italy. Constans’s army ambushed and killed him near the city of Aquileia, making Constans the sole ruler of the Western Roman Empire.

King Ferdinand split his realm among three sons, but the eldest, Sancho, rejected the arrangement. He deposed one brother, García, and defeated the other, Alfonso, in battle the following year, declaring himself sole king. Sancho was killed by a traitor during the siege of Zamora, and Alfonso returned from exile to reunite his kingdom, keeping García in prison until his death.

King Henry II of England crowned his eldest son as a junior co-king, but never let him have any actual power. So the boy joined his brothers Richard and Geoffrey in a rebellion against their father. Then the brothers turned on each other, and before long, both the young king and Geoffrey had died. Richard was now his father’s eldest surviving son and heir. Richard allied himself with the French king, defeated his elderly father, and became Richard I.

Eric XIV inherited Sweden’s crown but grew erratic and began executing nobles, pushing his half-brothers into rebellion. Eric’s half-brother, John, deposed and jailed Eric, who died years later. In recent times, his remains were found and tested for traces of arsenic. The results were highly positive, confirming that Eric had been murdered. When John died, his Catholic son inherited the crown, but his youngest brother Charles led a Protestant revolt and took the crown as Charles IX.

After Emperor Louis the Pious died in 840, his son, Charlemagne’s grandson Lothair I, declared himself ruler of the entire empire. His younger half-brother Charles the Bald and full brother Louis the German formed a coalition against him. They defeated him in battle the next year and entered into a sworn alliance shortly afterward. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Verdun in 843, dividing the empire into three realms that over the following centuries would evolve into France and Germany.

When Tsar Alexander I died unexpectedly without a male heir, the Russian throne should have passed to his older brother Constantine, who years earlier had secretly renounced his succession rights in order to marry outside royal rank. To complicate matters, Alexander had also secretly designated his younger brother Nicholas to succeed him. As Nicholas declared allegiance to Constantine, Constantine likewise declared allegiance to Nicholas from his posting in Warsaw. In the confusion that followed, reformist officers attempted an armed insurrection. Nicholas quickly suppressed the rebellion with artillery fire, then ascended the throne as Nicholas I.

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