Ferdinand I of Romania

Ferdinand Viktor Albert Meinrad was the second son of a Swabian Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, born in 1865 to a Portuguese infanta. He became heir to the Romanian throne in 1886 after his father and brother renounced their claims, married Queen Victoria's granddaughter in 1893, and ascended in 1914 when his uncle Carol I died. Ruling through World War I, he broke with Germany and joined the Triple Entente - a choice that got Kaiser Wilhelm II to strike his name from the Hohenzollern rolls. The gamble paid: by 1920 Bessarabia, Bukovina, Transylvania, and slices of Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș had folded into the kingdom, and Ferdinand was crowned king of Greater Romania in a grand ceremony in 1922. His final years brought agrarian reform, universal suffrage, and a succession crisis when his eldest son Carol renounced the throne in 1925, leaving a four-year-old grandson in line. Ferdinand died of cancer in 1927; the boy, Michael, took the crown under a three-man regency.