The 1568 iconoclasm campaign inaugurated the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule and for independence. In this movement, the Netherlands at that time, the biggest nobleman - William Orange (Prince Orange) of the back of the important, in terms of class sentiment, he has been the former king of Spain, Carlos's kindness; in terms of national feelings, around the Dutch people's cries and blood and make him sleep and eat. After a period of uncertainty, he finally stood with the Dutch people and embarked on the road of no return against the most powerful empire at that time - the Spanish Empire.
From then on, he became a thorn in the side of King Philip II of Spain and the most wanted man in the country. Philip II offered a huge bounty for his head.
After years of bloody struggle, the Dutch independence forces under the leadership of Prince of Orange stood firm in the north of the Netherland. The Dutch provinces were ready to crown the highly respected man on July 12, 1584, as king. But two days before the big day, tragedy struck.
On July 10, the Prince of Orange was in the midst of a casual conversation after lunch with the Mayor of Leuwarden***, when his guards came up and reported, "Balthasar has completed all the formalities, including his passport, and has come to collect a few letters which the Prince has written to the French Minister."
Balthasar was a Frenchman, and his post was that of a postman who carried messages to France for the Prince, and he had not been long in the Prince's service.
When Prince Orange walked down the stairs, Balthasar, who was already hidden behind one of the columns by the stairway, suddenly lunged at the Prince, raised his pistol and fired three shots, which struck the Prince in the vitals, and the great man of his generation fell, never to rise again.
The assassin rushed to escape, but in the doorway just stepped on a pile of dog shit slipped and fell to the ground, was captured alive on the spot. He confessed that he was a spy sent by Philip II, and that he had assassinated the Prince for the sole purpose of winning a large bounty and title from Philip II. In the end, he was beheaded after being tortured with a branding iron and scraped with a knife.
The Prince of Orange's children and grandchildren succeeded him as consul of Holland, eventually winning Dutch independence and becoming the analyzed hereditary royal family of the Dutch era.
2 The most unexpected assassination of all: all of France weeping
The 16th century was a difficult time for France in its transition to a fully-fledged modern nation-state. Having just completed the unification and centralization of the country, it was caught up in the complex disputes between Catholicism and Protestantism. Among the religious conflicts in the whole of Europe at that time, the most complicated situation was in France, because the power of Catholicism and Protestantism was evenly matched. Since the "Night of St. Bartholomew the Terrible" in 1572, France had been plunged into a long period of civil war and turmoil, and since then two kings had been assassinated consecutively, including Henry III, who was assassinated by a fanatic because he had betrayed his own Catholic camp and turned to sympathize with and even help Protestantism, and Henry IV (reigned from 1589 to 1610), who was assassinated. 1610) was a more unexpected assassination.
Henry IV was originally a Protestant king of a small state called Navarre on the southern border of France. Because Henry III died without an heir, Henry IV, a distant relative of the latter, was able to succeed to the throne. At that time, France was in the midst of the Huguenot War, a religious war, and Henry IV personally fought in the battlefield, showing excellent military skills. But what really showed the greatness of Henry IV was that in 1593, in view of the reality that Catholics were the majority in France, Henry IV resolutely declared his conversion to Catholicism, and then in 1598, he announced the "Decree of Nantes", which declared Catholicism to be the state religion of France, and at the same time, recognized the freedom of belief and the due status of Protestantism. "The Decree of Nantes was the first masterpiece of religious tolerance in the West and eventually brought peace to France. Afterwards, Henry IV devoted himself to the development of production and economic recovery, which was very fruitful.
One day in 1610, Henry IV passed through a narrow street on his way to visit his minister, Sully, when two cars collided in front of him, blocking the traffic, and the king's car was stuck in a ditch with its right wheel. At that moment, the king's car stopped right in front of a store whose signboard depicted an arrow shooting through a crowned heart. A madman named Ravilak, who was trailing behind, perhaps inspired by this in some way, stabbed his bicycle at the king, who cried out, "I have been stabbed"! And at that moment, Ravilak stabbed a second time, and was then caught red-handed, and he didn't try to escape.
Ravilak is said to have been a madman, and to have had a strong desire to stab the king, a disease that has been given the name of regicide.
Later, Queen Anna (Henry IV's daughter-in-law) to assist the underage Louis XIV, had said to him, to learn your grandfather (Henry IV), do not learn your father (Louis XIII), Louis XIV asked why, Anna said, Henry IV died, everyone cried; and Louis XIII died, everyone laughed. It is true that there are many wise kings in the history of France, there are Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon, etc., but like Henry IV in the merits and personality are beyond reproach, he is the only one.
3 The most romantic assassination: the black hand at the masquerade
Today's Sweden, in the eyes of outsiders, is nothing less than a paradise, known for its high income, welfare, and high civilization. But did you know that there was a time in Sweden's history when corruption and disorder were the order of the day? That was in the mid-18th century, when the aristocracy seized power and entered the so-called "age of liberty" after Sweden suffered a defeat in the Northern War.
In 1772, Gustav III (reigned from 1771 to 1792), who had been subjected to the rule of the nobility for many years, took advantage of the contradictions within the aristocracy and the discontent of the monks, the citizens, and the commoners towards the nobility, and staged a bloodless coup d'état, dissolved the Council of State, and resumed the autocratic rule of the king. In this sense, he was a great master of his generation.
But instead of solving the financial crisis at home, he risked a war with Russia, which resulted in heavy losses and a mutiny among a large number of officers in the country. He lived a life of luxury and was obsessed with theater, and was known as a "gifted actor.
Here we should also add a masquerade ball. Masquerade is very popular in the European court of a kind of entertainment, that is, in the ball wearing masks, disguise themselves as fairies, ghosts and monsters, etc., so that it is conducive to uninhibited into the ball.
On March 16, 1792, Gustav III was preparing to attend an evening masquerade ball. Gustav III laughed at the rumor that he had heard dozens of similar rumors, all of which were true, according to reliable sources. That night, when the ball was at its height, a man shot the king in the back. The ball was thrown into chaos with screams. The murderer took advantage of the chaos and fled, but was captured before he got very far.
The murderer was a captain of the Kingsguard named Anstrom, and his backstage was General Pisarin, a great nobleman of the time. Gustav III's policy of curbing the aristocracy had caused a number of people in the nobility to cut their teeth against him, and this, together with dissatisfaction with his economic and foreign policies, had caused a clique to form around him who wanted to remove him.
Thirteen days later, Gustave III died from medical treatment, leaving two words on his deathbed, "It was the Jacobins of France who killed him, and forgive those who killed him." But the murderer was shackled to the public after three days of flogging, and finally beheaded and split into pieces and thrown into the sea.
4The most tragic assassination: the King of Spain's wedding bloodshed
Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 stirred up the passions embedded in the hearts of the Spanish people, and Spain turned from a dead corner of the 18th century into the country with the most number of revolutions and fiercest revolutions in Europe in the 19th century. Ferdinand VII relied on the people to restore the country, but eventually betrayed and suppressed the people's despicable behavior, so that the Spanish royal family once became a target. The revolt reached its peak under his son and daughter, Isabel II, whose reign saw 41 governmental reorganizations by the General ****, seven constitutions, 15 riots by political forces in various parts of the country, and two assassination attempts on herself. in 1868 she was forced into exile by a coup d'état.
Then Isabel II's son, Alfonso XII, returned to the throne, and the situation in Spain was calm for some time until the time of his son, Alfonso XIII (reigned 1886-1931).
Alfonso XIII, whose father died of an illness when he was still a foetus, became king at birth (there are only two other such cases in Europe) and grew up to be a capricious and passionate ruler of a country. 19 years old, a visit to England led him to fall in love with his "European grandmother", Queen Victoria's granddaughter. The granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Victoria Eugenia, may have carried the causative agent of hemophilia, the family disease of the English royal family, and their engagement was strongly opposed in Spain, but at last he convinced his mother --But in the end, he finally convinced his mother, the Dowager Empress Christina, known as the "Lady of Virtue", to marry him.
It is said that Eugenia's godmother gave her a string of pearls, but told her not to wear them at the wedding because a gypsy witch had predicted long ago that if the bride wore the necklace, she would shed as many tears as pearls, but Eugenia took it as a fairy tale and wore the mysterious necklace at the wedding.
The wedding took place on May 31, 1906, in the city. As the procession traveled down the narrow Rue Majorelle, a bouquet of flowers fell from a building with a bomb hidden in it and exploded in front of the bride and groom's royal carriage, sending smoke and blood flying. The tragedy, total **** resulted in 22 deaths and more than 70 injuries, although the king and queen were lucky to escape with their lives from the blood and flesh. The gypsy witch's prophecy was fulfilled, and this was only the beginning of a lifetime of bad luck for the couple, who were about to face what would be Spain's most tumultuous years ......
The assassin, named Moral, was an extreme anarchist. The day before the tragedy, he had been seen throwing things down the stairs again and again, thinking he was insane and not caring. It turned out that he was trying to measure the exact time it took for the object to reach the ground. He later committed suicide when he was about to be arrested.
5The coldest assassination of all: the fall of the Portuguese monarchy
Two years after the Spanish royal bloodbath, in 1908, another country on the Iberian Peninsula, Portugal, suffered an assassination that had an even greater impact on history.
In the late 19th century, Portugal's ****harmonists sided with elements of the Disillusioned King's Party, the ****jihadists, in a quest to destabilize the Portuguese crown.
Portugal's then King Carlos I (reigned 1889-1908) was a very talented man, but two events caused him to lose the hearts and minds of the people; first, in 1890, his attempt to link two African colonies, Angola and Mozambique, was opposed by the British, and under threat of force Britain was He was forced to withdraw his troops and abandon his plan to link the two colonies, causing discontent at home. The other was the appointment as prime minister in 1906 of Franco, a member of the hard-line royal party, who was an unpopular dictator.
In 1908, King Carlos and his eldest son, Crown Prince Louis-Philippe, were shot dead in the square in front of the palace by two **** and party militants (the background to this case has never been thoroughly checked). His youngest son, Manuel II, who was only 18 years old, succeeded to the throne. The situation in the country has been turbulent ever since, and when the Portuguese bourgeois revolution broke out two years later, Manuel could find no one to do his bidding and had to flee to England in disgrace.
The rule of the Portuguese royal family, which had once produced outstanding emperors such as Alfonso the Conqueror and Jo?o the Great, came to an end forever, leaving behind it only a series of sighs.......
6The saddest assassination: Never had the fairy tale of Princess Sissi
1848 European countries, the winds of revolution, the most serious blow is located in the heart of Europe, the complex class contradictions and national contradictions intertwined with the Austrian Empire. In the midst of this storm, the young prince - Franz Joseph was thrust onto the throne. Little did he realize that he would sit on that throne for 68 years.
More than 10 years later, another storm came, in the Italian unification movement and the German unification movement, Austria as the representative of the old guard forces were repeatedly hit, forced to give up their own German positioning, and instead to the Hungarians in the country concessions to the unicameral Austrian empire into Austria-Hungary - a bicameral empire.
In European history, Austria-Hungary was destined to be an unlucky character, which was born in the background of humiliation, and finally collapsed in the storm of humiliation. In order to maintain such a large national assemblage, its rulers - members of the Habsburg family - became nationalists of all races within the country. There were also public enemies of the neighboring great powers that were watching. Almost every member of its royal family has been the victim of numerous assassination attempts.
But the most famous member of the empire was not the long-lived emperor, but his wife, Elizabeth, Princess Sissi of Bavaria.
Sissi's life was so storied that her story was made into a movie that took Europe and the U.S. In place of her older sister, she was chosen by the young Austrian emperor at the age of 15, and from that day on, her destiny was bound up with the old empire. Sissi loved to write poetry, ride horses, and travel, but her life had been steeped in tears. From the day her only son, Rudolf, died by suicide, her heart "had practically gone with him, and all that remained was an aging body."
In 1898, Sissi traveled to Geneva, and at noon on Sept. 10 she prepared to leave by boat. As she was walking toward the pier with her waiter, an ambush named Lucernes snapped out an awl and poked her in the chest, the awl was so sharp and thin that Sissi got up from the ground and walked to the boat herself. But as soon as she was in the boat, she fell down. The courtesan beside her rushed to unbutton her bodice and found a very small spot of blood on her chest. The captain ordered the ship to turn around and go back to shore, and the people carried her back to the inn on a stretcher. At the inn, the doctor sliced the Queen's elbow socket artery, the blood stopped gushing out, and Sissy died.
Lucceni was an Italian anarchist, and the assassination was carried out firstly for the sake of fame, secondly out of anarchist hatred of the Crown, and thirdly out of the traditional hostility of the Italians to the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
7 The most influential assassination: the shot that ignited the World War
Since the 19th century, the old feudal empire of Turkey in decline at the same time, in the whole of Europe under the influence of the wave of nationalism in the Balkans nationalism is also increasingly high. But on the one hand, the nation-states in the Balkans had disappeared for centuries, and the demarcation of peoples and boundaries was very blurred, and on the other hand, the great powers surrounding the Balkans were surrounded by them, and regarded the Balkans as a piece of flesh that could be slaughtered at will.
This makes the situation in this region very complex, since the middle of the 19th century, it has become the focus of Europe's successive conflicts in the region, there is a "powder keg of Europe," said.
The Balkan region against the Turkish national liberation movement, the major powers reacted differently. Russia, as the "protector of Slavic brothers all over the world", has always incited and supported the national movements in this region. Austria, on the other hand, because of the large number of Slavic peoples under its rule, feared that the revolution would burn in its own jurisdiction and favored the status quo. Britain and France, on the other hand, acted according to their own interests and changes in the situation. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Balkan peoples had become free of Turkey, and Austria-Hungary changed its conservative attitude to actively reach out to the region.
In 1912 and 1913, in the Balkan countries due to the territorial division of the problem of the two small wars, Serbia won one after another. The nationalists in Serbia were greatly energized, and their goal of building a Serbian-dominated state that included all the peoples of Yugoslavia was firmly established, and the number one enemy to achieve this goal was Austria-Hungary.
As early as 1908, Austria-Hungary officially announced the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (in fact, has been occupied for a long time), which caused Serbia's serious protests, Austria-Hungary also to the Serbian border to the army, the situation is tense, known as the "Bosnian crisis". The situation was called the "Bosnian Crisis". Later, Serbia was forced to make concessions after the intervention of the Great Powers. But Serbia's domestic hatred of Austria is expanding, many people believe that Austria-Hungary will next annexation of Serbia, with the "demonization of Austria-Hungary" to describe the eyes of the Serbian Austrian more accurate.
It was against this background that Crown Prince Ferdinand and his wife, nephews of the old Austro-Hungarian Emperor Joseph, chose to tour Bosnia on the Serbian National Day of Shame, a move that many Serbs regarded as a blatant insult to Serbia, and the military maneuvers that were held in Bosnia used Serbia as an imaginary enemy. On June 28, 1914, after watching the military exercises, Ferdinand and his wife, accompanied by the governor and mayor, traveled to City Hall in an open car.
When the caravan reached the center of the city, a young Bosnian, Chabrinovic, who was lying in ambush by the roadside, rushed forward and threw a bomb at Ferdinand's car, which missed and only wounded one of the officers accompanying him. Ferdinand played it cool and ordered the convoy to continue. Returning by car after attending a ceremony at the town hall, the car suddenly slowed down as it traveled around the corner of a street. Hidden in the roadside of the Serbian youth Princip, sprinted forward, with a pistol aimed at the Ferdinand Mr. and Mrs. shot twice, bullet-free, two shots killed two people.
Primsip, the assassin, was a member of the "Young Bosnia" organization, which was a carefully planned and prepared assassination. After the assassination, Princip took his own life, knowing that he would not be able to escape.
The Ferdinands and Princip were bitter enemies, but they had one thing in common: they were both victims of ultra-nationalist ideology.
What happened later is very familiar to everyone, the European countries of the conflict because of this incident and intensified, the original already tense situation, finally out of control, one after another country was involved in the war, divided into two major groups to kill. This is the First World War, in this catastrophe, Europe actually no winner.
8The most determined assassination of all: Emancipation of the serfs = opening Pandora's box?
When Alexander I led his mighty army across the land of France in 1814, the glory of Tsarist Russia, the main force in the defeat of Napoleon, was at its peak. For the next 40 years, Russia played the role of "gendarme of Europe" as the backbone of the "Holy Alliance", including the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution, a revolution in which it had nothing to do.
But the Crimean War of 1853-1856 made the tsarist Russia from the top of the glory fell to the bottom of the shame, would have liked to take the defeat from many years of Turkey to bite off a piece of fat meat, did not expect to encounter the British and French intervention, in the war, the backwardness of the tsarist Russia and the corruption exposed, from the gun to the ship to the road, and should be sent to the difference of a large section. Tsar Nicholas I in the combat of successive defeats in the case of a mental breakdown served poisoned suicide. The task of revitalizing the old empire fell to his son, Alexander II (reigned 1855-1881).
Alexander II understood that backward serfdom had become a bottleneck to Russia's progress, a problem so vast that many of the great masters of the ages, including Peter I and Ekaterina II, dared not touch it. But history has put the onus inescapably on Alexander II, and a day late in reforming the problem is a step worse.
In 1861, the tsar finally issued an edict for reform. While emancipation proclaimed the personal freedom of the serfs, it also stipulated that all land would remain in the hands of the landlords, and that peasants could redeem a small piece of land in accordance with the regulations, but the ransom payment was often two or three times higher than the actual price of the land. Alexander wanted to make both the serf-owners and the serfs grateful to himself, but the emancipated serfs felt the most confusion and overwhelm, and the land they received was actually less than what they had been using before the reform, and they all thought they had been cheated. As a result, the peasants struggled even more fiercely to resist, with 126 peasant disturbances in 1860, rising to 1,176 in 1861, the year of the reforms.
Alexander II was one of the most assassinated emperors in European history. There were at least five well-planned assassination attempts on Alexander II from 1866 to 1880, and in 1879 the Executive Committee of the Public Opinion Party, a newly formed radical organization that sentenced Alexander II to death, formed a specialized assassination organization and trained specialized assassins. The backwardness of the Russian political system was a major reason why Alexander became a target, in addition to the backlash against the reforms mentioned above, and Alexander's corrupt life in his later years no longer seemed to be able to move history forward.
After two assassination attempts, the POP's tireless efforts were finally rewarded when, on March 1, 1881, the Tsar's carriage came out of the Winter Palace and rounded the corner, and Rossakov, who had already been in ambush, rushed forward and threw a bomb, seriously wounding the Tsar's guards. The Tsar thought he had escaped again, he got out of the carriage, wanted to inspect the wounded and say a few words of comfort, when another bomb flew over, the Tsar fell in a pool of blood, the assassin was called Grinevitsky, who was himself killed by the bomb.
That afternoon Alexander II bled to death. His reforms became a major reason for his murder, something he probably could never have imagined in the first place.