Constantine I of Greece

Biography

Constantine was born in Athens in 1868, the eldest son of King George I and Queen Olga, and was the first heir to the Greek throne born in Greece. Tutored by leading Greek scholars, he entered the Hellenic Military Academy in 1882, continued his military training in Berlin in the German Imperial Guard and studied in Heidelberg and Leipzig. In 1889 he married Sophia of Prussia, sister of Wilhelm II. As crown prince he presided over the organising committee of the 1896 Athens Olympics.

He commanded the army in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, a humiliating defeat that made him unpopular, and he was removed from the army after the Goudi coup of 1909 before Eleftherios Venizelos restored him. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 he led the Greek army to Thessaloniki and Ioannina, and after his father's assassination in March 1913 he became king, defeating Bulgaria in the Second Balkan War.

In the First World War he insisted on neutrality against Venizelos, who favoured the Allies, and twice dismissed him. The quarrel, the National Schism, split Greece between a Venizelist government in Thessaloniki and the royalist south; after the Noemvriana clashes and an Allied blockade, Constantine left the country on 11 June 1917 in favour of his son Alexander.

After Alexander's death and Venizelos's electoral defeat, a referendum in December 1920 brought him back. The war in Anatolia that his governments continued ended in the rout of 1922, and after an army revolt he abdicated on 27 September 1922 in favour of his son George II. He died in exile in Palermo on 11 January 1923.