A Monkey Bite Killed the King of Greece

King Alexander of Greece went for a walk with his dog on October 2, 1920. Twenty-three days later, he was dead. 

The chain of events involved two monkeys, a badly infected wound, doctors debating whether to amputate his leg, and a political crisis that helped change the direction of Greece. 

King Alexander of Greece was only 27 years old. 

And yes, he really did die after being bitten by a monkey.

It started with his dog

Alexander was walking through the royal estate at Tatoi, outside Athens, with his German Shepherd, Fritz.

Somewhere on the grounds was a Barbary macaque belonging to one of the estate workers.

The dog and the macaque got into a fight.

Alexander stepped in to separate them.

Bad idea.

A second macaque appeared and attacked the king, biting him deeply in the leg and torso. Servants eventually drove the animals away.

At first, this did not look like an event that belonged in history books.

The wounds were cleaned and dressed. Alexander apparently considered the whole thing embarrassing enough that he did not want it publicised.

Then the bites became infected.

The monkey did not technically kill him

The infection did.

Within hours, Alexander developed a fever.

His condition continued to deteriorate over the following days as the infection spread through his body.

A modern medical review of the case, based partly on the king’s daily medical bulletins and post-mortem records, concluded that he developed a severe soft-tissue infection and septic shock after the macaque bites.

Doctors reportedly considered amputating his leg.

They did not do it.

The modern researchers looking back at the case believe an early amputation might actually have saved him.

Today, antibiotics make many infected animal bites treatable.

Alexander had the spectacular misfortune of being bitten in 1920.

Penicillin would not be discovered until 1928, and effective antibiotic treatment was still years away.

For more than three weeks, doctors watched the infection win.

Alexander died on October 25, 1920.

He was 27.

Alexander was king partly because his father wasn’t allowed to be

This is where the story stops being a bizarre royal accident and becomes genuinely interesting.

Alexander had not originally been expected to become king.

His father, Constantine I, was on the throne during World War I.

Greece became bitterly divided over the war. Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos wanted Greece aligned with Britain, France and the other Entente powers. Constantine favoured neutrality and was viewed with deep suspicion by the Allies, not least because he was married to the sister of Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In 1917, under heavy Allied pressure, Constantine left Greece.

His eldest son, George, went into exile with him.

That left the second son.

Alexander.

At just 23 years old, he became king.

But real political power largely sat with Venizelos.

Greece entered the war on the Allied side, and by 1920 Venizelos appeared to be achieving something extraordinary.

Greek territory was expanding.

The Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, offered Greece major territorial gains from the collapsing Ottoman Empire, including eastern Thrace and administration over the area around Smyrna, today’s İzmir.

Venizelos seemed to be approaching the peak of his career.

Then somebody’s monkey attacked the king’s dog.

The timing could hardly have been worse

Alexander died just days before an important Greek election.

His death created an obvious problem.

Who was going to be king?

Venizelos then suffered a stunning electoral defeat in November 1920.

The royalists returned to power.

A referendum followed, and Alexander’s father, Constantine, came back from exile and reclaimed the throne.

That mattered outside Greece too.

Constantine was deeply unpopular with several of the Allied governments because of his position during World War I.

The international political environment around Greece changed dramatically.

France and Italy increasingly moved away from supporting Greece and toward accommodation with the Turkish nationalist movement led by Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk.

Yet Greece continued its military campaign in Asia Minor.

It went badly.

Greek forces pushed deep into Anatolia in 1921 but failed to break the Turkish resistance near Ankara.

By 1922, the Greek army was collapsing.

Turkish forces retook Smyrna in September. The city burned. Vast numbers of Greek and Armenian civilians fled or were killed amid the catastrophe and the wider upheaval that followed.

Eventually, the borders established by the Treaty of Sèvres disappeared with them.

All of that began for reasons vastly larger than one monkey.

But Alexander’s death landed right in the middle of the crisis and removed a king whose presence had helped keep one explosive political question temporarily contained.

Winston Churchill never forgot the monkey

Years later, Winston Churchill looked back at what had happened.

His conclusion was spectacular.

Writing about Alexander’s death and everything that followed it, Churchill said:

“A quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite.”

The full point was slightly more cautious than that famous line makes it sound. Churchill wrote that it was “perhaps no exaggeration” to describe the consequences that way.

And historians have good reason to be careful here.

The monkey did not cause the Greco-Turkish War.

It did not make Venizelos lose the election.

It did not force Greece to continue advancing into Anatolia.

It did not single-handedly make France and Italy change policy.

History does not work like a row of dominoes where removing one piece tells you exactly what would have happened instead.

But Alexander’s death undeniably changed Greece’s political situation at an extremely sensitive moment.

It reopened the monarchy question.

Constantine returned.

The relationship between Greece and the Allied powers changed.

And the next two years ended disastrously.

Historians actually use this story to argue about history

That may be the strangest part.

The monkey bite became an example in one of the most famous books ever written about how history works.

In What Is History?, historian E. H. Carr discussed Alexander’s death while asking how seriously historians should take accidents.

Sometimes enormous historical forces are already moving.

Armies, economies, governments, ideology, public anger.

Then something completely stupid happens.

A person becomes sick.

Someone misses a train.

A king tries to rescue his dog from a monkey.

Suddenly all those larger forces have a different person, date or crisis to work around.

That does not mean the accident caused everything that followed.

It means history contains randomness too.

And Alexander’s death is almost an absurdly perfect example.

A king did not die heroically in battle.

He was not assassinated.

There was no palace coup.

He went for a walk.

His dog got into a fight.

He stepped in.

A monkey bit him.

And within weeks, the throne of Greece was changing hands.

Sometimes history turns on speeches, wars and revolutions.

Sometimes it turns on an infected bite on someone’s leg.

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