This is a list of regicides.
Further information: Regicide |
The etymology of the term regicide is from the Latin noun rex ('king') and the Latin verb caedere ('to kill'); thus, a regicide is literally a 'king-killing'. Different cultures and authors in history have used different definitions for what constitutes the crime of regicide. Rex is usually but not always understood to refer to not just kings, but any type of monarch, which leads to semantic problems of scope. Some monarchs, such as Nicholas II and Haile Selassie, had already ceased to be de facto rulers at the time of their deaths due to forced or voluntary abdication, but especially after forced abdications (depositions), these monarchs (and their supporters) often still saw themselves as the de jure rulers; therefore, whether a current monarch or former monarch had been killed could be a point of view on their legitimacy. A well-known controversy in historiography is the 1793 Execution of Louis XVI: Legitimists might say it was a "regicide" of the legitimate "King Louis XVI" by "the rabble", but French Revolutionaries could have regarded it as the "lawful execution" of "citizen Louis Capet" after a "fair trial" that had found him guilty.[1] Other killings, such as the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, are generally disqualified as "regicides", because this crown prince had not yet taken the throne. Suicide is generally discounted as well, as are the killings of monarchs' consorts or other relatives, such as that of Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, or Earl Mountbatten in 1979. As such, it is difficult to make a universally accepted list of what constitutes a regicide. The following is a list of cases of monarchs in history who were deliberately killed by someone else in some fashion, according to reliable sources.[citation needed]