Alfonso XIII of Spain

Alfonso XIII became King of Spain the moment he was born in 1886, his father having died months earlier. His mother served as regent until he took full powers at sixteen in 1902, four years after Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War left the country searching for renewal. He married Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg in 1906; a bomb thrown at their wedding carriage missed them both. During World War I, he used his ties to European royalty to maintain Spain's neutrality and worked with the European War Office, earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 1917 - the only monarch ever nominated. But his reign unraveled through the 1910s and early 1920s as constitutional order fractured and violence in Morocco spiraled. In 1923, he gave his blessing to General Miguel Primo de Rivera's coup, choosing dictatorship over liberalism. When that regime collapsed, Alfonso withdrew his support in 1930, but the damage held. Municipal elections in April 1931 returned results that amounted to a referendum on the monarchy itself. On 14 April 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed, and Alfonso left Spain without abdicating.