Succession Crisis / Real Life

Succession Crises in real life.

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• The Macedonian Succession Wars (also known as the Wars of the Diadochi, diadochi being Greek for successors) is arguably the Trope Namer and certainly the Trope Codifier. From the ancient world to the modern, Alexander the Great's conquests, and the manner in which his empire and gains were undone by his death, is Exhibit A for "how not to manage succession" and also used to highlight the importance of succession to truly consolidate your gains. These wars were a Gambit Pileup on a tri-continental scale, featuring wars from the Adriatic and Aegean Seas to the Indus River. Half a dozen weak next of kin (the first was a mentally ill half-brother), scheming women, poison, scores of generals battling for supremacy and ripping off kingdoms for themselves resulting in division of his empire, you name it. That's what happens in a culture where the strongest get to rule by killing their rivals.
• Succession crises started the War of the Spanish Succession, the War of the Austrian Succession, the Hundred Years War, and the Wars of the Roses, among many others. In medieval England alone, the deaths (sometimes murders) of William Rufus, Henry I, Richard I, Edward II, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III all led to irregular successions, and other countries have histories no less colorful. In Tsarist Russia, this was particularly a very common thing, with the many Palace Revolutions resolved by the Leib Guards, before the strict succession laws were introduced by Paul I.
  • Re. England:
    • The death of the childless Edward the Confessor also caused a succession crisis with far-reaching consequences, as three different successors emerged with rival claims; his brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, the Earl of Wessex, who claimed Edward had, on his death bed commended the kingdom to his protection and who was elected by the Witan the next day; William, Duke of Normandy, a distant cousin whom Edward had (allegedly) promised to make his successor (allegedly swearing this over holy relics no less); and Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, who claimed the throne based on an agreement his father had made with Edward's maternal half-brother, King Hardcnut of England and Denmark, that if either died childless, the other would inherit their lands. The three claimants fought a series of battles in 1066; William won out in the end, making him William The Conqueror.
    • William had the good sense to make provisions for his succession before his death. Unfortunately, the setup just planted the seeds of another crisis, as he divided his estate between his three sons. He named his eldest surviving son Robert "Curthose" his heir as Duke of Normandy, but named his next surviving son William "Rufus" heir to the throne of England, and gave his youngest surviving son Henry "Beauclerc" no land but a massive pile of cash. (His second son Richard predeceased him.) Upon the Conqueror’s death in 1087, Robert immediately began to plan war on his brother William, leading to thirteen years of on-and-off fighting until William died in a Hunting "Accident" that may or may not have been engineered by Henry. Historians still debate whether Henry assassinated his brother or just saw an opportunity and took it, but he immediately rushed to Winchester (where the royal treasury was kept) and had himself proclaimed king. Robert was none too pleased, and war continued for seven years more until Henry decisively defeated Robert at Tinchebray in 1106. Robert was imprisoned for the rest of his life, and Henry reigned in England and Normandy for almost 30 more years without challenge to his throne (though constantly fending off the attacks of his enemies, not least of whom was the King of France).
    • Henry I's death was followed by a nasty civil war called the Anarchy, as Matilda (Henry's only surviving legitimate offspring) was a woman, and so many nobles recognized Henry's nephew, Stephen, Count of Blois, as King, a claim Stephen backed up with an army, but Matilda's husband Geoffrey of Anjou had his own army and ensuing civil war was a stalemate; the issue was settled ad hoc by allowing Stephen to reign but having Matilda's son Henry succeed him rather than Stephen's son Eustace.^note Eustace was unsurprisingly pissed, but it seems that Stephen was not only desperate to end the war and unify England, he was increasingly seeing his violent-tempered son as unsuited to rule, and it was rendered moot when Eustace died childless around the same time negotiations began, and Stephen's second son William didn't press his claim.
    • Richard I's death without an heir split the succession between his underage nephew Arthur of Brittany and his unsavoury brother John; the English nobles were persuaded to accept John on the basis of "better the devil we know", and ganged up to force some restraints on him when he (as they expected) got out of hand. (John's seven-year-old son was readily accepted as his successor when John died suddenly, soon after the ganging-up at Runnymede.)
    • Edward II was a borderline case, as he was deposed and (allegedly) murdered following domestic strife and discontent with reign, especially in regards to the influence of the father and son duo of Hugh Despenser the Elder and Younger, who became his favorites and the latter of whom was rumored to be his lover, and his wife and her lover became regents while his son (Edward III) was underage.
    • Richard II's death was not the cause of an irregular succession but its consequence, and neither did Edward V's death cause a succession crisis, as he had not even been crowned before he was passed over (you could perhaps argue that he and his brother were murdered to prevent the possibility of a future succession crisis, which is why some people try to pin the blame on Henry VII).
    • Richard III's death ended the Wars of the Roses in favour of a line that had been officially excluded from succession by Henry IV. The death of Edward VI was followed by an irregular succession (Jane Grey, then Mary I), and from the Catholic point of view, so was the death of Mary I.
    • This Catholic view was one of the thorns in Elizabeth I's side as she dealt with her own succession crisis: there were few potential heirs to her throne because most of them either disqualified themselves in some way (for example, both Katherine and Mary Grey, sisters of Jane Grey, were struck from the succession because they both married without Elizabeth's permission, which under law they needed as princesses of the blood) or were children, the most likely heir, Mary, Queen of Scots, was also the most troublesome because of her Catholic faith (and complicating things was that as far as the Catholics were concerned, Mary was the real Queen of England because they didn't recognize Elizabeth as a legitimate heir) and Elizabeth refused to solve the crisis the simple way by marrying and having children herself because she didn't want to share her power with a man. It's very possible this problem was why it took nearly twenty years for Elizabeth to consent to Mary's death: to get time for a more suitable heir—Mary's son James, who was raised Protestant—to come of age.
  • Re. Russia: The period of palace revolutions was largely the result of the law instituted by Peter I, that every reigning Czar or Czarina could name his or her successor freely. (Peter was probably trying to avoid a repeat of Russia's "Time of Troubles", which lasted from 1598 to 1613 and involved six usurpers out of seven actual rulers.) Unfortunately, when Peter died, he had named no official successor. Since his wife, Catherine, was already co-ruler by this time (and was believed to be supportive of those currently in power), she was chosen as his successor and a palace revolution assured her ascension. After Catherine I's reign, the next three rulers' ascensions were stable though short. The ascension of the infant Ivan VI and the regency of his mother, which was marked by various problems, ultimately resulted in Peter's daughter, Elizabeth, who was already popular, had been gathering support for some time, and arguably had a better claim than Ivan, leading a palace revolt to ascend the throne. She tried to prevent further incidents by immediately naming her nephew, Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, as heir. Unfortunately, Peter's policies lost him popularity in the wrong circles and the relative popularity of his wife, the future Catherine the Great, led to yet another palace revolt, which installed her as empress.
    • The death of Catherine the Great sparked yet another one due to the above law and her planning to name her grandson Alexander as heir in place of her son (and Alexander's father) Paul, who she was keeping exiled in the palace of Gatchina, but dying a few days before being able to formally announce it. Alexander, greatly respecting his father and knowing he would become tsar anyway, solved it by hiding until his father arrived at the Winter Palace, at which point he came out and kneeled before him. Once settled, Paul changed the succession law and established a clear line of succession.
  • Re. the War of the Spanish Succession: the Spanish Habsburgs bred themselves into extinction by a series of incestuous marriages, with Charles II being the last of the line, leading to rival claimants backed by France (Philip V Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, second son of Louis, Grand Dauphin, himself son and heir of Louis XIV of France, who was married to the half-sister of Charles II), Austria (Archduke Charles, second son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, who was married to Charles II's full sister, though Archduke Charles was from a subsequent marriage but still was descended from the Spanish Habsburgs), and an Anglo-Dutch alliance (Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, great nephew of Charles II, was their first choice, but when he keeled over, they decided the Austrians were less threatening). The Anglo-Dutch for a while supported Charles of Habsburg, but when his elder brother Joseph I died, this made Charles the new Emperor, and they did not want him to rule both the Holy Roman Empire and Spain. So, when the dust finally settled, Philip got to keep the throne of Spain on condition that he renounce any claim to the throne of France (the current king of Spain, Felipe VI, is a direct descendant). So instead of becoming King Charles III of Spain, Archduke Charles became Emperor Charles VI — and since he had no son, his death would directly lead to the War of the Austrian Succession.
    • Spain has actually had a few succession crises, one right at the beginning when it was formed by the union of Castile and Aragon through the marriage of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon. In order to succeed as queen of Castile to her half-brother Henry IV, she had to assert her claim to the throne against Henry's daughter Joanna (Juana) in the War of the Castilian Succession (1475-1479), during which Castile was invaded by armies from Portugal and France. It helped her that Henry IV was rumored to have been impotent and that it was widely believed that his consort, Joan of Portugal, had conceived her with someone else, most likely the courtier Beltran de la Cueva. Joanna was thus called Juana la Beltraneja and la hija de la reina ("the queen's daughter") by those who contested her succession. Joanna eventually ended her days as a nun but continued to sign with the traditional Yo, la Reina ("I, the Queen").
    • Prior to the unification of Spanish kingdoms, Aragon had a succession crisis upon the death of King Martin in 1410 without any surviving legitimate descendants. The contenders for the throne were Frederic, Count of Luna (Martin's grandson, being the illegitimate son of Martin's late son, Martin I of Sicily, whim Martin had sought to have legitimized), James II, Count of Urgell (Martin's brother-in-law and senior legitimate agnate of the royal line as patrilineal great-grandson of Martin's grandfather Alfonso IV, who claimed the throne by agnatic succession), Infante Ferdinand of Castile (paternal uncle and regent of King John II of Castile and Martin's nephew, being a matrilineal grandson of Martin's father Peter IV, who claimed the throne by proximity of blood), Louis of Anjou (son of the Duke of Anjou and Martin's grandnephew, being a matrilineal grandson of Martin's older brother and predecessor John I, who claimed the throne by cognatic primogeniture), Alfonso I, Duke of Gandia (80 year old grandson of Martin's great-grandfather James II, who claimed the throne by agnatic seniority and proximity of blood to previous kings), and John of Ribagorza (Alfonso's brother, who inherited his claim after Alfonso's death in 1412). Ultimately, the Compromise of Caspe made Ferdinand the king as Ferdinand I.
    • When Philip V became King after the War of the Spanish Succession, one of his main priorities was to centralize and formally unify Spain (Spain had been practically unified for about 200 years by this point, but officially the two kingdoms of Castile and Aragon were separate countries), and this meant settling on a succession law. Castile traditionally used male-preference primogeniture (a female could succeed to the throne if there were no immediate male heirs; this was the system used in England and Britain until 2013), while Aragon historically preferred semi-Salic Law (a female could only succeed to the throne if there were no male heirs whatsoever, essentially the system used for the French monarchy). In an attempt to pacify Aragon, which had largely opposed him in his own bid to become King, Philip introduced semi-Salic law for all of Spain; conveniently, this also aligned the succession with the French system, which couldn't have been inconvenient for Philip (who was a member of the French House of Bourbon). 120 years down the line, this became a problem: King Ferdinand VII had no sons, only a very young daughter, Isabella. Under Philip's law of succession, this made Ferdinand's younger brother Charles the heir to the throne. However, Ferdinand ignored the laws of succession and declared Isabella his heir. Ferdinand's death in 1833 led to the first of three wars based on this issue.
    • In 1936, Charles' last male-line descendant died, making the exiled King Alfonso XIII (the heir of Isabella who had been forced from the throne in 1931, and was a male-line descendant of Ferdinand VII and Charles' brother Francisco, as Isabella had married her first cousin, Francis, Francisco's son) the heir to both lines of the Spanish Royal Family. Ironically, the Carlists (those who had supported Charles and his heirs) opted to ignore this (while pointing to old rumors that Alfonso XIII's father Alfonso XII wasn't really Francis' biological son, as Isabella and Francis' marriage was known to have been unhappy, given that Isabella was suspected to have had affairs and Francis was rumored to be gay or impotent, and also claiming that Francisco had committed treason by recognizing Isabella as queen, thus disqualifying his descendants from the throne) and instead declared the Duke of Parma, a distant relative of the Spanish Royal Family who had supported the Carlist cause, to be Charles' rightful heir. In 1975, the monarchy was formally reestablished and Alfonso XIII's grandson King Juan Carlos I took the throne with the ancient Castilian male-preference primogeniture restored; this system prevails in Spain to this day. (At one point, Spain toyed with the idea of changing to absolute primogeniture to prevent this from happening again, but the idea's been shelved for now since either way the current heir to the throne would be a woman—Felipe VI has two daughters and no sons, so his elder daughter Leonor is expected to succeed. She was even named Princess of Asturias—the title traditionally given to the heir apparent—after her father took the throne.)
  • Re. the Austrian War of Succession: Came with the death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, who was also hereditary King of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria and Duke of Parma. Charles, lacking any sons, had passed the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, which allowed his daughter Maria Theresa to inherit his hereditary lands. Things were further complicated by the fact that the Holy Roman Empire was an elective monarchy and that the Prince-Electors in theory could choose whomever they wanted. The situation was comparable in the latter stages of the Polish-Lithuanian "Commonwealth", although here succession was more often settled by bribery than force of arms (although there was a Polish War of Succession in 1734/35). Since the title of Holy Roman Emperor had never been held by a woman, and thus Maria Theresa wasn't a candidate for the title, the plan was for her husband Francis Stephen, Grand Duke of Tuscany, to be elected as Emperor. However many of the German rulers, led by Prussia, opposed this and went to war. Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria, who was descended from the Habsburgs and was a son-in-law of Charles VI's brother Joseph I, put his claim forward, based partially on the fact his wife was the daughter of the older brother, while Maria Theresa was the daughter of the younger brother. There had in fact been a Mutual Pact of Succession between Joseph I and Charles VI, which stated that in the absence of male heirs, Joseph's daughters would come before Charles', but that was superseded by the Pragmatic Sanction. Charles Albert was crowned King of Bohemia after his side captured the country and was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Charles VII and claimed the Austrian lands. After his death three years later, his son Maximilian III Joseph, Elector of Bavaria, made peace with Maria Theresa's faction and renounced his claim on Austria in exchange for the return of his ancestral realm of Bavaria, which had been taken by Maria Theresa's forces, and acknowledging that Charles VII had been the legitimate emperor until his death. Ultimately, Maria Theresa was recognized as Queen of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, Archduchess of Austria and Duchess of Parma, while her husband was elected Holy Roman Emperor as Francis I. After he died, they elected Maria Theresa's eldest son Joseph, making him co-ruler with his mother.
• The Ottoman Turks of the 16th Century had a novel way of avoiding this. With the Sultan usually having many male children via his various harem wives, it became standard practice for the Sultan on his deathbed to name his heir, and the palace attendants would simply strangle all the other potential claimants in their beds. Job done... except that having more than one wife meant that they could start the succession crisis on behalf of their children well before he died, and when one of the kids survived, they tended to be angrier.
  • Another story on how the Ottomans did things (possibly not accurate, as it came from a history professor, but heaven only knows how right he was): All the various princes/contenders would be farmed out to different provinces to practice ruling and government. When the Sultan died, those sons would race for the throne, and whichever of them landed his derriere on it first would get the title, usually followed by a period of fratricide. The point is that the Succession Crisis was built in to the process, in a way that (at least in theory) encouraged survival of the fittest.
    • That is probably a Panglossian interpretation ex post facto, as the first on the throne would not necessarily be the best man for the job, and fratricide and internecine strife had a great potential for weakening the Ottoman Empire vis-a-vis its neighbors and rivals.
  • In fact, both the farming out of potential heirs to the provinces and the murder of same are true, the former practice leading to the latter for exactly the reasons stated. The practice of murdering the late Sultan's other sons ended abruptly when a Sultan died young and many of the executed sons were mere children, which proved more than the Turks could stomach. The final system, in operation till the end of the Empire, was to literally imprison sons inside the harem until and unless they succeeded, a practice that probably contributed to the high number of mentally disturbed sultans.
  • Of note with regards to the Ottoman custom of strangling other male heirs was the death of Bayezid I as a captive of Timur, which caused his sons to squabble over the Ottoman territory.
  • This Klingon Promotion style of succession led often to situations where there were no other male members of the Othman family line alive except the sultan apparent. To prevent the extinction of the family line, the later sultans invented the practise of Kafes, literally "golden cage", where the other male members of the dynasty were incarcerated, to keep them alive but not endangering the regime of the Sultan.
• The Roman Empire had a similar problem. Theoretically, the position of Emperor was not inherited, since it was not officially a monarchy: new emperors (Princeps) were supposed to be appointed to the position by the Senate (or by the Senate and the Army, or the Senate, Army, and People, depending who you asked. The Praetorian Guard would claim that the appointment was made by them, as they tended to overthrow any Emperor who didn't bribe them upon assuming the throne, and they once auctioned the throne off outright). This tended to lead to civil wars since pretty much any senator or general officer could be proclaimed emperor. There was a workaround where an Emperor could nominate a successor during his reign by adopting a respected politician or general — this usually quashed any rival claimants to the throne, but not in every case. The Five Good Emperors (Nerva to Marcus Aurelius) were all "adoptive", but Aurelius' heir was biological and it turned out badly. But he really had no choice, since the only reason his predecessors adopted heirs was that they didn't have sons. Said son's name was Commodus and his malfeasances led to his assassination and another brutal round of civil wars (tellingly, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire begins with the reign of Commodus). The Byzantine Empire went in for dynasties, which produced more stability, but while dynastic succession increased the legitimacy of an imperial claim, the Byzantines still considered the triad of Senate, Army, and People as having the ultimate authority to decide the succession, leading to some level of conflict.
• The Byzantine Empire was still subject to these, though — especially in its period of terminal decline. Even the appointment of the last Byzantine Emperor, at a time when Byzantium amounted to Constantinople and a sliver of Greece, was the subject of a succession crisis; Demetrius Palaeologus tried to seize power in Constantinople while his brother Constantine, the rightful heir, was in the Morea. The decline of the empire itself can be attributed to multiple succession crises; the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade was the result of an exiled Byzantine prince bribing the crusaders to depose the ruling emperor and seize control for himself, while the main reason the Battle of Manzikert resulted in more than mild border adjustments and coughing up some ransom was the Emperor being promptly deposed after the Sultan sent him home and the whole thing slagging down into civil war.
• Bulgaria had some. Around 730, half a century after the foundation of the Bulgarian Khanate, for unclear reasons, the ruling dynasty was usurped and 7 rulers changed over 15 years, including the usurper clan. Finally, in 777 a new (and according to some sources, the original) clan took the throne, and founded a dynasty that lasted about 200 years before its last member was castrated (and his brother murdered by border guards on Border Crossing Dressing as the Enemy) and his chief general took the throne. The Second Bulgarian Empire had this since the very beginning — the original Sibling Team were all killed by usurpers, and their nephew took advantage and banished the rightful heir, who soon returned to build a prosperous state. However, after his death, his three wives played their sons against one another, then their daughters as several power-hungry boyars vied for their hands and the realm, then several rivaling families switched for the next 60-70 years. Then the neighboring Serbian king used the Tangled Family Tree to ensure that the prince to get the Bulgarian throne was his nephew. The usurper of that one ended up marrying twice, disinheriting his older son because he promised the throne to his new wife and her son, then split the kingdom between the two sons. The two immediately started a war, the weakening caused another ruler to secede, and then they were all conquered by the Ottomans.
• The Frankish Empire had a different type of succession crisis under the Merovingians and Carolingians (until Louis the Pious and his sons): Here the emperor would divide his realm up among his sons, which frequently led to wars among them as every one of them tried to expand at the expense of the others. And when a king succeeded to get the whole empire by war, murder, and/or being lucky enough that his rivals died childless, he would then divide it among his sons and the process would start again. (Germany and France got their start as separate political entities after the division of the Frankish empire among the three sons of Louis the Pious.)
• Yongzheng, the Chinese emperor who won a bloody succession crisis (and killed all but one of his brothers in the process), also tried to avert future crises by... keeping a succession note prepared when he's alive but hiding it in a location only known to very close confidants. So the succession was made loud and clear when the emperors' health still allowed them to do so, but it was announced after his death. Thus any would-be usurpers weren't given advance notice of who they'd need to assassinate in order to seize power, and his heir also wouldn't be tempted to make a play for the throne ahead of schedule.
• Way before Yongzheng, Imperial China had plenty of succession issues:
  • It starts all the way from the First Emperor Ying Zheng himself, as he died without naming a crown prince. He never bothered to do so because, consumed by paranoia and superstition, Ying Zheng had decided to simply not ever die. To that end, he commissioned doctors and scholars to search for the secret to immortality (executing the ones who failed to do so) and began taking massive quantities of folk medicines meant to prolong his life (which contained large amounts of mercury, ironically contributing to his physical and mental decline). His paranoia and madness alienated nearly everyone in China with power, and when he died without naming a clear successor a desperate power struggle began. His two most influential subordinates Li Si and Zhao Gao threw their support behind Ying Zheng's younger son Hu Hai, in defiance to the claim of the elder son Fu Su, and a few years later Qin was consumed by civil war.
  • For Qin's successor, the Han Dynasty, trouble began after the second emperor (Emperor Hui) died. His mother, Empress Dowager Lü Zhi, decided that she would rule through puppet emperors. ^note Lü had already amassed great power for herself even while her son was alive. This lasted until her death, whereby her husband Liu Bang's son via concubine Lady Bo (Liu Heng, Emperor Wen) was made emperor. Further down the road, Liu Heng's grandson Liu Che (Emperor Wu) killed his crown prince Liu Ju and most of Ju's family after a series of misunderstandings.
• When the Pope dies, the Sacred College of Cardinals elects his successor from among their number at a Conclave.^note Technically, they can elect any male Catholic (although a layman would have to be made a deacon, a priest, and then a bishop before succeeding to the Papal throne), but only cardinals have been elected for centuries. The system wasn't always this clear, though. Over its two-thousand-year history, the office has seen Popes try to name their own successors, Popes installed by force of arms, and elected Popes contested by candidates chosen by powerful kings or emperors. Individuals who had strong backing to the Papacy but who the church does not recognize as legitimate are called "Antipopes". At one point, there was a dispute between two claimants, so the Cardinals chose a third man to replace them, but neither of them stepped down, leaving three men who claimed to be Pope!
  • Eventually, two of the popes were talked into resigning and a new pope was elected who was recognized by everyone. (Or almost everyone: the third pope refused to step down and spent the rest of his life living in the castle of one of his remaining supporters, where he would regularly perform excommunication ceremonies on the entire rest of the Catholic church for not Respecting his Authoritai.)
  • And all of this says nothing about yet another problem — even when the College is allowed to choose the Pope normally, the bickering can last for a very long time indeed. Several conclaves in the Middle Ages dragged on for months, until eventually, in 1268, the town of Viterbo, where the cardinals had been "electing a pope" for three years (admittedly due to extenuating circumstances such as foreign political pressure, a French army moving in town to make sure the new pope was friendly until a scandal convinced them to leave, and the first two choices literally running away) first put the cardinals into forced seclusion, then denied them all materials or sustenance save bread and water, and finally removed the roof of the building the cardinals were meeting in, at which point they promptly elected Gregory X. However, Gregory was off fighting in the Crusades, and he didn't return to take office for another eight months. Upon finally taking the papal throne, Gregory instituted new rules that included requiring the election be held in a closed room, limiting the cardinals to one meal daily after three days in conclave, bread and water after five days, denying them separate quarters, and cutting off their pay for the whole time they were in conclave. A modified form of these rules remains to this day, and since then, very few conclaves have lasted more than a few weeks.
    • In 1292, after another 7 popes (popes tend to be quite old when elected, and thus short reigns are common) there was yet another impasse that lasted for over 2 years. Gregory X's conclave rules were not obeyed. Eventually Pietro Angelerio, a Benedictine monk who was living as a hermit at the time, sent a letter to the cardinals telling them that if they didn't pick a pope soon, God's judgement would wreak vengeance on them. Pietro being famed for his piety, the desperate cardinals decided to break the deadlock by electing him as the new Pope. Pietro initially tried to flee, seeing himself as unworthy of the position, but was convinced by a delegation of cardinals to take it and became Celestine V. Five months later he passed a decree giving Popes the right to resign and then did exactly that. However, the College of Cardinals had learned their lesson and the conclave rules have been always been adhered to for the next 700+ years. Celestine's successor Boniface VIII ended up imprisoning him out of fear that his rivals would grab him and try to install him as a puppet Antipope.
    • Then there's the matter of Pope John XXII. After the death of Clement V (the successor to the aforementioned Boniface VIII), the cardinals failed to elect a new Pope for two entire years, because their votes were terminally split between three factions: the Italian bloc (who wanted the Papacy to return to Rome), the Gascon bloc (who were perfectly cool with the Avignon Papacy, as long as they enjoyed the same privileges as under the previous Pope), and the French bloc (who wanted to keep the Pope on French soil but without the special privileges). Lots of corruption and votes for sale all around, and no resolution in sight. Eventually, the King of France had enough of waiting—he needed a Pope double-quick so he could divorce his first wife—and forced a conclave, locking the cardinals up inside a convent with rationed food and water until they made up their minds. According to one story, the future John XXII (then still Monsignor Duke) waited until his peers were weak with hunger, then pretended to be on his deathbed. He was 72 at the time. The rest of the cardinals promptly elected him, figuring he'd last a few months tops, and then they'd happily be back to the lucrative status quo of bribes-for-votes in a new conclave. Not only did John's reign as Pope last for 18 years after that, but he was one of the most activist Popes in history, heavily involving himself in European politics and reorganizing the entire Church.
    • Under rules set down by Benedict XVI, conclaves go to a runoff between the top two candidates if no Pope is elected after 32 ballots. John Paul II had earlier established rules that after 32 ballots the number of votes needed to be elected Pope dropped from 2/3 to a simple majority. Benedict reinstated the 2/3 vote requirement but introduced the runoff system that if not changed by Francis will be used for future papal elections.
• This even happens in republics. The US alone has had its difficulties.
  • The faults of the original electoral college system — whereby the winner would become President and the runner-up Vice-President, which had already resulted in Thomas Jefferson ending up as Vice-President to John Adams, despite them being political enemies — came to a head in the 1800 election, when Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr, tied on votes, sending the election into the House of Representatives. Jefferson needed a two-thirds majority of that vote to be elected President, but the rival Federalist party tried to elect Burr as President, as a way of sticking two fingers up at Jefferson. On top of that, there was no mechanism whereby Burr could just concede the Presidency to Jefferson, meaning that he would have had to withdraw from the race altogether, which ironically would have left Adams as the Vice-President.^note (More realistically, Jefferson would likely have ended up with Adams's running mate, Charles Pinckney, as VP, as there's almost no way that Adams would have agreed to serve as VP under Jefferson.) This resulted in the Representatives voting thirty-five times, with the exact same outcome each time, until Alexander Hamilton was able to persuade enough states to swing toward Jefferson to give him victory. Unsurprisingly, the electoral college was redesigned to have distinct President and Vice-President votes for 1804.
  • The 1824 election was a four-way race in which Andrew Jackson won a plurality of both the popular vote (41 percent)^note Though with 6 out of the 24 states at the time not actually holding a vote and instead having their state legislatures pick the winner, a true nationwide popular vote didn't actually exist yet. and in the electoral college (99 votes), but not an absolute majority in the latter. Under the Twelfth Amendment, it now fell on the House of Representatives to decide on the new president. It elected John Quincy Adams, who had come second in the popular vote (31 percent) and in the electoral college (84 votes). This was denounced by Jackson and his supporters as a "Corrupt Bargain", as it was widely believed that Adams had struck a deal with fourth-placed candidate Henry Clay, whom he appointed as his Secretary of State.^note Though since Congress is only allowed to choose from among the top three candidates and thus Clay was already out of the running, it's just as likely that he threw his support behind Adams, whom he agreed with more anyway, simply to deny Jackson the victory. All this led to the split of the Democratic-Republican party and the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828.
  • Before William Henry Harrison's term, there were still some open questions about how Vice Presidential succession would work as no President had ever been sufficiently incapacitated to need their understudy. Harrison forced answers to those questions by getting seriously ill immediately after taking office — and then dying only a month into his term. John Tyler announced that he was the President, not the Acting President, that the office of Vice President was now vacant, and that he would hold and exercise the full powers of the presidency. He famously refused to even read any letters that addressed him as "Acting President". The Whig party of the United States of America thought THAT was a crisis, as Tyler was essentially a Democrat who now had just shy of a full term to do as he pleased. No successor VP since has inherited so much of his running mate's time in office.
  • Woodrow Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke towards the end of his term. The ad hoc arrangement used to address his incapacity — the VP picked up some duties while Wilson worked on whatever his wife Edith felt he was up to handling that day, with the whole situation kept secret from the public — raised serious concerns about unelected shadow government. The 25th Amendment, which set out detailed rules for Presidential succession in case of death, illness, or other incapacity, was designed to keep delegation of powers above board. It also provides for the appointment of a new VP any time the office becomes vacant, so that the President is never without their primary successor. US law has also codified a line of succession 18 people deep (who by tradition are never allowed to gather at a single function; at least one "designated survivor" is always to be absent) to ensure such a crisis won't happen in the future. If anyone other than the Vice President succeeds to the Presidency, under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 [3 USC § 19], he or she would "act as President", in the words of the act, unless and until such time as someone qualifies for the presidency constitutionally (e.g., through election). The act uses the title "Acting President". For reference, the Speaker of the House is next in line after the Vice President, followed by the President pro tempore of the Senate, followed by the Cabinet secretaries in the order their departments were established ^note Potential successors still must satisfy the Article II requirements for taking the office (i.e., be a natural-born US citizen at least 35 years old and have resided in the US for the past 14 years) — every president since Bill Clinton has had at least one secretary who was born overseas and were/are skipped over for the purposes of presidential succession. But the last time any secretary has failed to meet the "35 years old" requirement was in 1814, long before cabinet secretaries were even part of the line of succession..
  • Gerald Ford was appointed Vice President when Spiro Agnew resigned amidst a corruption investigation, marking the first time the Vice Presidential vacancy clause of the 25th Amendment was implemented. Technically, under the 25th, Richard Nixon could have nominated anyone to fill the VP seat; practically, congressional leaders said later, "we gave him no choice but Ford". When Nixon resigned less than a year later in the Watergate scandal, VP Ford automatically got the Presidency. This makes Ford unique in being the only person to have served as both Vice President and President despite not having been elected for either post. After his succession, Ford nominated his own VP, Nelson Rockefeller, who was confirmed by Congress.
  • In 1973 the Speaker of the House, next in the line of succession after Nixon and Agnew, was Democrat Carl Albert (Nixon, Agnew, Ford, and Rockefeller were all Republicans). Albert was the one to advocate for Ford as Agnew's replacement, as Nixon was already deeply embroiled in the Watergate scandal, and the Senate was prepared to vote for removal from office if the House could pass the Articles of Impeachment. By ensuring that Nixon would NOT be replaced by a Democrat, Albert gained enough Republican support to begin impeachment proceedings. It was only then, once impeachment and removal had become inevitable, that Nixon resigned. Albert refused to even consider trying to keep the Vice Presidency vacant in order maintain his own place as 1st in the line of succession, feeling that such an act would be essentially a coup.
• In 2001, the president of Argentina, Fernando de la Rúa, resigned from office during a period in which the vice presidency was vacant. This set off an elaborate, month-long chain of events in which various officials of the Argentine Congress were either briefly forced to serve as acting president for a couple of days or preemptively resigned to avoid having to do the job.
  • A similar situation happened in New Jersey following Christine Todd Whitman's January 2001 appointment as George W. Bush's head of the EPA. Since the state had no lieutenant governor, Senate President Donald DiFrancesco served as acting governor for nearly a year until a week before the elected Jim McGreevey could take office, when DiFrancesco's term as Senate President ended with the end of that Senate session in January 2002. With both the Senate Presidency and the Assembly Speakership vacant, Attorney General John Farmer Jr. served as acting governor for 90 minutes until the next Senate President was elected. As it happened, after the 2001 elections, the State Senate was evenly split between the two parties. It was agreed both party leaders would serve as Co-Presidents of the Senate and each of them would serve 3 1/2 days of the remaining week as acting governor, with Republican John O. Bennett coming first and Democrat Richard Codey finishing out the term. After McGreevey himself ended up resigning (because he was discovered to be having an affair with his "terrorism advisor" — who was another man^note Today, this is mostly scandalous for the infidelity aspect, but in 2004 the "and his lover was a man!" aspect was more damning in the public eye, even in liberal New Jersey. —, making Codey acting Gov again, the Democrats having since gained a majority in the State Senate, until the term ended in 2006, the state constitution was amended to create the position of lieutenant governor (and to officially recognize that anyone who served as acting governor for at least 180 days "counted" as an actual governor for purposes of stuff like pensions, which resulted in DiFrancesco and Codey retroactively being numbered as governors).
• The Soviet Union also suffered this towards the end of the Cold War, eventually contributing to its dissolution. Or rather, it was a crisis of reassignment of powers between the union center and the constituent republics; some of the latter, pushed by growing separatist movements, demanded more powers reassigned to them from the union center. The fall itself happened when the Russian Federation, the central republic, jumped on the separatist bandwagon, leaving the union center the center of exactly nothing.^note The Soviet Union legally continued to exist for another week before its official dissolution, but when Kazakhstan became the final republic to officially secede, it was a "Union" with no territory and a population of zero.
• Historian Simon Schaama has interpreted the Restoration in England in this way — Charles II became king not because England needed a successor for Charles I, but because it needed one for Oliver Cromwell and Cromwell's own son wasn't up to the job. Cromwell had become king in all but name, a fact that everybody in England understood.
• A Canadian example occurred when Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada, died in office just after being reelected in 1891. Macdonald had dominated his Conservative party for so long that when he died, there was no immediate successor. From 1891 to 1896, the Conservative party had four separate leaders, who each became Prime Minister in turn. Sir John Abbott eventually resigned when he got tired of the job, Sir John Thompson came to be seen as Macdonald's natural successor but died in office, Sir Mackenzie Bowell was forced out of office by a Cabinet revolt, and Sir Charles Tupper eventually took over in the last few months of the Conservatives' mandate. By the time of the 1896 election, the Conservative party was so damaged that it was said that "not even Sir Charles Tupper could put it back together again." Wilfrid Laurier and the Liberal party won the 1896 election handily, and Laurier would serve as Prime Minister until 1910. There was one more crisis before power was handed over to Laurier, when Tupper actually refused to step down as Prime Minister, claiming that only the Conservatives had the ability to rule the country and quite absurdly insisting that the Liberals would be unable to form a government despite their having won 55% of the seats in parliament. However, this one was quite easily dealt with, when the Governor-General simply threatened to have Tupper arrested if he refused to leave his position. Tupper, for his part, thought the Governor-General's actions were unconstitutional but ultimately relented.
• Another Canadian example was the King–Byng Affair in 1926. William Mackenzie King's Liberal government was reduced to second-largest after the previous year's election but clung onto power via an agreement with the third-largest party, the Progressives. The agreement eventually fell apart after a bribery scandal, and King asked the Governor-General, Lord Byng, to call an election so as to let the public decide on whether the Liberals should continue to govern. However, Byng refused to do this, and instead threw the Liberals out of power and installed Conservative leader Arthur Meighen as the new Prime Minister. This naturally resulted in a huge firestorm between those who considered Byng's actions an affront to democracy, and those (including Byng himself) who thought that the Conservatives should have been allowed to form a government after the previous election, and that the Liberals and Progressives had entered into a corrupt bargain. King decided to force the issue and immediately called a vote of no confidence in the new Conservative government, which they lost, and the Liberals won the new election that followed, albeit just barely, and still without a majority. The mess could potentially have dragged on further had the smaller parties chosen to back the Conservatives, but in a stroke of fate, Meighen actually lost his own seat and was quickly ousted as the party's leader, leaving them in no condition to govern.
• According to many Mexican (and foreign) experts, this could happen in Mexico if the president dies due to natural causes, by an accident, or is convicted of federal crimes (like treason), since the Mexican Constitution forbids the president to even quit the office, even if it's the last thing he/she can do. However, Articles 84 to 86 of the Mexican Constitution stipulates that in the case that the Office of the President of Mexico is vacated for whatever reason, the Secretary of the Interior must step in to fill the void and call for elections within the congress, and must select an interim president within a 60-day period; or if the president has gone past two years of his mandate, to just outright elect a new one by way of federal elections. However, a true example could happen if during this timeframe the Congress does not select an interim president for whatever reason.
• Occurred in Australia after the disappearance and presumed death of Prime Minister Harold Holt in December 1967. The job of Prime Minister was expected to go to Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party Billy McMahon; however, Leader of the Country Party^note Now known as the National Party and Deputy Prime Minister John McEwen became Caretaker Prime Minister^note In Australia, the Liberal and Country/Nationals parties act in a coalition, imaginatively called "The Coalition". The leader of the Liberals is the Prime Minister when they're in government, and the leader of the Country/Nationals is Deputy Prime Minister. He despised McMahon and refused to let him become Prime Minister, saying the Country Party wouldn't serve under him. Instead, the job went to John Gorton. However by 1971, McEwen had retired, and Gorton had lost the support of the party^note including Minister for Defence and future Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser insulting him on the floor of Parliament while quitting his ministerial position. Gorton then held a motion of confidence in his leadership, which was tied — he then resigned as Leader and Prime Minister. McMahon finally became Prime Minister... only to lose the election to Labor under Gough Whitlam the next year.
• The reason for the split between Sunni and Shi'a Islam was a dispute over who should have succeeded Muhammad as Caliph.^note Caliph literally means "successor", so Muhammad himself was never a Caliph. The Shi'ites only recognize the short reigns of Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law Ali, who they felt should have been Muhammad's direct successor, and his son Hassan, while the Sunnis recognize Ali and the three Caliphs who preceded him.
  • The reason this wasn't resolved when Ali was eventually chosen as Caliph by the Sunnis anyway was that the dispute wasn't just over who should rightfully succeed Muhammad, but how succession should even be determined in the first place. The Sunni viewed the Caliph as someone who should be chosen by all Muslims (basically an elected monarchy), while the Shi'a viewed the Caliph as someone who should be chosen by God, or in practical terms, by the imams as representatives of God's will. Thus, even when both sides arrived at the same candidate, the divide remained because there was no guarantee they'd be able to agree on the next successor.
• When Brazil's first Emperor (Dom Pedro the First) inherited the throne of Portugal, he had to choose between remaining Emperor of Brazil or becoming Dom Pedro the Fourth, King of Portugal, because the Brazilians, not wanting to return to being second-class citizens as a mere colony of Portugal, demanded a separate monarchy. He decided to stay in Brazil and pass the Portuguese crown to his daughter, Maria the Second. Unfortunately, her uncle Miguel managed to usurp the throne, and Pedro returned to Portugal to rescue her and restore her to the position. Upon leaving, he abdicated the Brazilian throne in favor of his son Dom Pedro de Alcântara, who'd later become known as Dom Pedro the Second. Because Pedro II was still a minor when Pedro I abdicated, the Empire of Brazil was ruled by regents until he was deemed ready to rule. During that time, republicans attempted to show Brazil that it didn't need a monarch. At first, there was a trio of regents; then another trio; then a regent being the sole ruler; then another one; and then the Government decided to declare Pedro the Second an adult so he could rule in his own right despite being only fourteen years old. Forty-some years later, a coup d'etat by some rich landowners ended his rule (despite overwhelming support by the general public, Pedro II refused to contest the coup, peacefully abdicating because he didn't want anyone to die fighting for him), and Brazil has been a republic ever since. Even after the abolition of the monarchy, there is still a dispute over who the rightful claimant is. Pedro II was succeeded as pretender by his only surviving child, his daughter Isabel. Isabel's eldest son Pedro de Alcântara renounced his rights after contracting an unequal marriage, so upon Isabel's death, she was succeeded as claimant by Pedro Henrique, the elder son of her deceased second son Luís. However, upon Pedro de Alcântara's death, his son Pedro Gastão claimed the right as head under the argument that his father's renunciation was invalid. The claim is currently disputed between Pedro Henrique's son Bertrand and Pedro Gastão's son Pedro Carlos. As for Portugal, they became a Republic and after the death of the last monarch, Maria II's great-grandson Manuel II, it would be Miguel's descendants who became the claimants to the throne.
• Speaking of Portugal, a Succession Crisis began when the young King Sebastian, who succeeded to the throne after the death of his grandfather John III, disappeared in a battle. As Sebastian had no children, his heir was his great-uncle Henry, the brother of John III. Since Henry was the fifth son of John III's predecessor King Manuel I, he joined the church due to his remote chances of succeeding to the throne and became a Cardinal, which naturally meant he was unmarried and without children. Henry attempted to renounce his Church orders and hoped to marry so as to continue the dynasty, but Pope Gregory XIII, who was allied with Philip II of Spain, who was son of John III and Henry's sister Isabella, as well as maternal uncle to the last King Sebastian, refused to allow this, so when Henry died two years later, the succession was disputed. Philip II sought the crown, as did: António, Prior of Crato, illegitimate son of Manuel I's second son Luís; Infanta Catherine, Duchess of Braganza, daughter of Manuel I's sixth son Edward; Ranuccio Farnese, Hereditary Duke of Parma, Catherine's nephew by her late older sister; and Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy, the son of Manuel I's second daughter Beatrice. Ranuccio was the senior heir by primogeniture; however, his father Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, was an ally and subject of King Philip, so his claim was set aside. Infanta Catherine, whose claim was strengthened by the fact that her husband João I, Duke of Braganza, was not only a male-line descendent of an illegitimate son of King John I, but was also a great-grandson of Manuel I's sister Isabella, saw some support but was dismissed due to her gender and distant claim. Emmanuel also was dismissed as he saw that his chances were slim compared to King Philip II, indisputably the most powerful claimant. He managed to get the Portuguese nobility on his side and many favored a union with Spain given that the Spanish Empire was at its peak while the Portuguese Empire was in financial crisis. Antonio, who had previously claimed the crown after Sebastian's disappearance, but was passed over in favor of Henry due to his illegitimacy, declared himself king, but he was only recognized in the Azores and was subsequently defeated and sent into exile. Felipe's dynasty would rule Portugal for 60 years until the union of Spain and Portugal was broken and John IV, the grandson of Catherine, Duchess of Braganza, was made king.
  • Portugal has had a few succession crises through the years, the first in the 1380s. Ferdinand I, the last king of the first Portuguese ruling house, had been at war with neighboring Castile for years. His only child was a daughter, so he married her off to King John I of Castile and declared that John would become heir to the Portuguese throne. However, many Portuguese nobles feared this would threaten Portuguese independence, so instead they proclaimed Ferdinand's illegitimate half-brother, John of Aviz, to be King. The subsequent war was won by the latter, who became King John I of Portugal and founded the Aviz Dynasty of kings.
• Japan:
  • The Ōnin War was precipitated by a succession crisis in the Ashikaga shogunate. The shogun Yoshimasa, seemingly preparing to abdicate, announced that, since he had no sons of his own, his younger brother Yoshimi (who at the time was in a monastery) would serve as his heir. The next year, Yoshimasa's son Yoshihisa was born. This led to a feud between the Hosokawa and Yamana clans. Fighting broke out in 1467 and lingered on for about a decade, by which time Kyoto was reduced to ruins and Yoshimasa remained in power, despite having relinquished the title to his son three years before. The infighting weakened the Ashikaga shogunate to the point where rival clans across Japan all started vying for the title, leading to the Sengoku Jidai.
  • Another one happened towards the end of the Sengoku Jidai, after Toyotomi Hideyoshi died and left a five-year-old heir, Hideyori. This led to Hideyoshi's former ally Tokugawa Ieyasu seizing power and decisively ending the Sengoku Jidai by establishing the Tokugawa Shogunate. Which might have been inevitable anyway; Tokugawa was descended from the Minamoto clan and thus was able to install himself as shogun in his own right, while Hideyoshi, on account of being a commoner, could only be kampaku (regent to a puppet shogun). Unlike his father, Hideyori actually had aristocratic lineage, as his mother, Yodo-dono, was a paternal descendant of the Fujiwara clan (through the Azai clan) and a maternal descendant of the Taira clan (through the Oda clan; her mother was the sister of Oda Nobunaga), but this wasn't enough for him not to get deposed by the Tokugawa.
  • In the modern day, the constitution Japan adopted after World War II^note at the gentle urging of the United States limits possible heirs to the Chrysanthemum Throne to male-line descendants of Hirohito (Emperor Shōwa) or his three (now deceased) younger brothers, of whom only the youngest, Takahito, Prince Mikasa, had children. The real problems started once all three of Prince Mikasa's sons passed, with one of them childless and the other two leaving only daughters. Hirohito had 2 sons, but the younger is childless, while the elder (Akihito, who became Emperor upon Hirohito's death in 1989) had only female grandchildren until 2006 when Prince Hisahito was born. This means that, before the birth of Hisahito, there were a grand total of 6 people in the line of succession, with none under the age of 40^note Compare this to the Crown of Great Britain, which has about 5,000 people in the line of succession. There were many discussions of changing the rules of succession to either allow empresses regnant — Japan has had female rulers in the past, most recently Empress Go-Sakuramachi from 1762 to 1771 — or allow for princesses of the blood to pass claim to the throne to their sons. Hisahito's birth has put a damper on those discussions for now, but the issue is likely to surface again, especially as the Imperial Family themselves have (quietly) made known their displeasure about the immense pressures the Imperial Household Agency puts on them. Severely limiting the size of the Imperial Family means that very few people can share those duties. Akihito (Emperor Emeritus, who will be known posthumously as Emperor Heisei) was the first to abdicate from the Chrysanthemum Throne in over two hundred years on April 30, 2019, making way for his son, the current emperor Naruhito (Emperor Reiwa, though this would only be his title posthumously). As of 2024, there are now only three people in line for the throne.
• Britain normally avoids this sort of thing in modern times because Parliament actually has the final say on who is crowned, but in 1936 they had a particularly unfortunate one after Edward VIII declared his intention to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson. (It was a different time.) The actual crisis wasn't so much that Edward couldn't be replaced if he agreed to abdicate, which he eventually did, but the serious questions about his younger brother George's ability to take over; he'd had no real training for the job and didn't particularly want it either, to say nothing of his severe speech impediment and subsequent lack of self-confidence. He did alright in the end.
  • A succession crisis was what actually led to Queen Victoria's existence, let alone her reign. Despite George III having fathered 13 children who lived to adulthood, toward the end of his reign he only had one legitimate grandchild: the future George IV's daughter Charlotte. After she died in childbirth at 21 after giving birth to a stillborn son, all of the other sons of George III scrambled to marry acceptable wives and produce legitimate children to be potential heirs to the throne, seeing how George IV was unlikely to have another one with his estranged wife, who was also likely past childbearing age. Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, who was fourth in line after his older brothers George IV and the future William IV^note A brother, Frederick, in between George and William predeceased George, produced Victoria but died only a few days before his father, making her next in line after William, whose daughters died in infancy.
• Another UK example, this time relating to political party leadership, happened to the Conservative Party after the death of Benjamin Disraeli in 1881. The party didn't have a formal leadership election system in place at the time, since as they saw it, they were the country's natural and rightful party of government, and so the duty of choosing the party leader and Prime Minister fell to the reigning monarch, who would make the decision on advice from the outgoing leader. The main problem with this system (besides the obvious ego issues) was that it didn't account for what would happen if the outgoing leader died, or if the party were in opposition when the leadership became vacant, and Disraeli's death caused both to happen. As a result, they stumbled on for about three years without a formal leader; House of Commons leader Stafford Northcote and House of Lords leader Lord Salisbury feuded for control of the party, with Salisbury eventually winning out just because Northcote eventually became too senile to seriously challenge him. Despite the problems this system (or lack thereof) caused, it wasn't until 1965, when they were once again in opposition, that then-leader Alec Douglas-Home decided they should have a proper leader election system in place.
• The Allies couldn't quite agree on who should govern France after Napoleon abdicated in 1814. Tsar Alexander I had become friends with the recently elected Crown Prince of Sweden, Charles John – formerly known as Marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte – and was partial to the idea of having him on the French throne; meanwhile, Francis of Austria would rather retain the Napoleonic Empire, with his daughter Marie-Louise – Napoleon’s second wife – as a Regent on behalf of her son, the King of Rome. However, Great Britain and the provisional government assembled in Paris by the cunning Talleyrand – who had played a large part in setting up Napoleon's downfall – preferred to restore the traditional Bourbon dynasty, which meant bringing back Louis XVIII – Louis XVI’s brother – from his foreign exile.
  • The same question arose one year later among Napoleon's partisans in the crisis following Waterloo: this time, Marshal Davout and Napoleon's brother Lucien advocated for a military dictatorship to fight off the Allied armies; others wanted to proclaim the King of Rome as Emperor (rather unrealistic now that he was in Austria along with his mother); and there was a Republican faction. In the end, Napoleon abdicated and the Royalists came back with a vengeance.
  • Another succession crisis took place in France following the fall of Napoleon III's Second Empire in 1870. The consensus was that France should be a monarchy, but France's various regime changes in the nineteenth century left them trying to choose from three possible monarchies to restore. There were the Legitimists, who favoured the old Bourbons, overthrown in 1830, the Orléanists, who favoured the succeeding "July Monarchy", which was itself overthrown in 1848, and the Bonapartists, who wanted Napoleon III's son. A Third Republic was set up as a temporary measure while they sorted the dispute out. It took so long that people began to notice that the Third Republic was actually working rather well, so in the end, none of the possible monarchies was ever restored. The first (monarchist) President, Adolphe Thiers, said in the end that "it is the republic that divides us least". (France is currently on the Fifth Republic; the Third Republic fell to the Nazis in 1940, and the Fourth Republic, created after the Germans left and a provisional government was set up, collapsed in 1958 thanks to strife over the independence of Algeria from France.) Each of these three parties still exists and still have their own claimants, pretty much ensuring France will never have a monarchy again.
  • A succession crisis is how Marshal Bernadotte became the Swedish crown prince (and later king, whose descendants still reign in Stockholm). The Swedish king, Charles XIII, was both elderly and childless, with his natural son having died young^note this was actually the point of Charles XIII becoming king. Sweden had just deposed Gustav IV Adolf, and to avoid an immediate succession crisis it was agreed to enthrone his uncle, Charles, who as an unambitious, elderly, childless man was an excellent placeholder while the various factions decided who would be the next king.. Various factions wanted different candidates to succeed King Charles, and initially the Danish prince Charles August was chosen... except he promptly died after falling off a horse while touring Sweden, setting off the succession crisis again. This time the anti-Russian faction, who wanted a French general to ensure Napoleon's support in a potential war against Russia, won out. Ironically, Sweden under Bernadotte wound up as an ally of Russia against Napoleon.
• Genghis Khan attempted to avert this with his sons by bringing them together and demonstrating how a single arrow could be broken with no effort, but a bunch held together were much harder to break, to emphasize that they needed to stand together to survive. They eventually agreed to have his second son, Ogedei, take over the Empire after his death, since no was one entirely sure if his eldest son Jochi was actually his since his mother had been abducted and raped by a rival chieftain around the time he would have been conceived. Genghis' plan worked for about a generation until his grandsons began squabbling over rule of the Empire and eventually caused it to split.
• In Denmark, King Frederick III made the monarchy hereditary in 1660, and succession was limited to his male line descendants. Ultimately, his male line ended with the childless King Frederick VII, whose only heir was his uncle Prince Ferdinand, who was also childless. With no one else left in line, they had to find a new heir. Further complicating the matter was that the Danish king was also Duke of Schleswig and Holstein, which threatened to break away from Denmark and join Germany. The contenders were Frederick, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, a great-grandson of Frederick VII's great-uncle King Christian VII, Princesses Caroline and Wilhelmine, daughters of Christian VII's son Frederick VI, Princess Charlotte of Denmark, Frederick VII's aunt, and her son-in-law Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, also Frederick VII's second cousin through King Frederick V, who was the father of Christian VII. Ultimately, Prince Christian was named the heir after his mother-in-law and her children renounced their rights in his favor. He succeeded as King Christian IX after Hereditary Prince Ferdinand and King Frederick VII both died within five months of each other, and Christian's descendants are still on the throne.
  • Unfortunately succession in the Duchies of Schleswig was not limited to descendants of Frederick III, which potentially gave Duke Frederick a better claim here. The significant German-speaking minority of Schleswig, along with the Kingdom of Prussia, supported his claim, resulting in two wars, the last one in 1864 leading to Schleswig and Holstein being annexed by Prussia. The Danish-speaking part of Schleswig was reunited with Denmark after World War One, where the current border between Germany and Denmark was established.
• Upon the death of Alexander I of Russia without a son, his brother Constantine would have been first in line to the throne. However, Constantine had secretly renounced his succession rights two years prior following an unequal marriage. As a result, the next in line was Alexander and Constantine's next brother Nicholas. Due to the secrecy involved, there was confusion about the succession, and Nicholas was torn between declaring himself Emperor or swearing loyalty to Constantine. The Russian government and troops initially recognized Constantine as Emperor, but after Constantine affirmed his renunciation of the throne, prompting Nicholas to officially declare himself Emperor as Nicholas I, they switched their support to Nicholas. However, some troops revolted in support of Constantine in what became known as the Decembrist Revolt. Nicholas put down the rebellion and became undisputed as monarch.
• Throughout its (long) history, Ancient Egypt had its share of crisis. Possibly the most prominent was the death of Tutankhamun at the age of 19. Since he had no children, inheritance would default to his sister-wife Ankhesenamun, meaning whoever married her would be able to declare themselves pharaoh without issue, something that was not lost on anyone in the court. Dreading the prospect of having to marry any of these men, she sent a message to the Emperor of the Hittites to send one of his younger sons to marry her. As this would've essentially made Egypt a client state of the Hittite Empire (considered Egypt's archenemy at the time), this was the one thing the whole court could agree could not be allowed to happen. At any rate, the Hittite prince never made it to Egypt (either having died along the way or been murdered), essentially rendering the issue moot. Ultimately, Ay, the former vizier to both Tut and his father, won out, though he didn't live long enough to produce any heirs, and from there, the chief general of the army, Horemheb, took the throne. Unfortunately, he also didn't end up producing an heir either and left the throne to his longtime friend and lieutenant, Ramses, who already had a son, and a grandson.
  • Ironically, only a couple generations later, this dynasty fell victim to this as well. As Ramses II had lived into his nineties, a number of his (many) sons had died before him. By the time he finally kicked it, the one left to inherit the throne was his thirteenth son.
• In the U.S. state of Georgia, there was the Three Governors controversy from 1946–1947. The governor-elect, Eugene Talmadge, had died before he could take office. There was debate over who should become governor. The outgoing governor, Ellis Arnall, believed that he should stay in office until the successor was properly sworn in. Melvin E. Thompson, who was elected to the newly created office of Lieutenant Governor, believed he should succeed to the office of Governor. Talmadge's supporters, who were unsure of his chances of surviving to take office, concluded from the state constitution that if the governor-elect died, the Georgia General Assembly would choose the successor from the runners-up. Since Talmadge was unopposed, they secretly put in write-in votes for Talmadge's son, Herman Talmadge. Thompson wanted the election results to be certified, which would give him the stronger claim, but Herman Talmadge's supporters postponed the certification and he was elected by the General Assembly on January 15, 1947. Both Arnall and Thompson protested the decision, with Thompson appealing to the State Supreme Court and Arnall physically refusing to leave office. When Talmadge took control of the governor's office and changed the locks, Arnall ended his claim in favor of Thompson. In March of the year, the State Supreme Court ruled that the Assembly violated the constitution by electing Talmadge and said that Thompson was the rightful governor. They said that a special election would be held in November 1948 to serve the remainder of the term. Talmadge gave up the governorship to Thompson but later beat him in the special election.
• Yet another Austrian Habsburg example: Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to Emperor Franz Joseph, shot himself at the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889. He only had a daughter, Elisabeth (Erzsi), with his wife Stéphanie of Belgium - he had rendered her infertile by infecting her with gonorrhea (likely from his frequent visits to brothels), so there wasn't going to be any further heirs from that marriage anyway. As the succession was male-line only, Elisabeth couldn't inherit, nor could Franz Joseph's daughters and their children. In principle, the next in line to the throne was Archduke Karl Ludwig (b. 1833), the emperor’s younger brother. However, he was never officially designated heir to the throne – he was only three years younger than Franz Joseph and not a realistic choice: although Karl Ludwig frequently represented his brother on official occasions – earning him the nickname ‘Parade Archduke’ ­– he was otherwise considered unsuitable for this office. Extremely reactionary and anti-liberal, Karl Ludwig died in 1896 from an infection he had caught from drinking water from the River Jordan while on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The succession thus passed to Karl Ludwig’s eldest son, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria (b. 1863). The archduke’s health was seriously affected by a lung complaint. In addition, he was a difficult character and earned many enemies, who backed his younger brother, Archduke Otto (b. 1865), the next in line. However, Otto was the black sheep of the family because of his scandalous lifestyle and died of syphilis in 1906. Franz Ferdinand eventually recovered from his illness and was officially declared heir presumptive in 1898.^note Franz Joseph was not happy with the choice, since he never forgave Franz Ferdinand for marrying Countess Sophie Chotek, who was below him in rank. As a result, the children born of this marriage did not have succession rights. And then he got shot. The succession circled again to Otto's elder son, Karl.^note This one Franz Joseph approved of, both as a person and for marrying Zita of Bourbon-Parma, an excellent match to secure the dynasty. Karl's son Otto would be the last Crown Prince of Austria since the monarchy was abolished and the Habsburgs were forced into exile. Otto died in 2011.
  • Historians have also theorized that Rudolf shot himself (among other reasons) because he thought he wouldn't live to inherit the throne anyway — Franz Joseph lived to be 86, by which time Rudolf would have been 58, an old man, probably senile. (In addition to suffering from the aforementioned gonorrhea, he supposedly did inherit the much-vaunted "Wittelsbach madness" from his mother Elisabeth, who was first cousin to his father.) In this scenario, the succession crisis was inevitable.
• Early medieval Norway had one of these that lasted more than a century, courtesy of succession laws that didn't distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate offspring, making it hard if not impossible to determine which heir had seniority — meaning that the issue tended to be settled by force. The throne eventually settled on the family of Sverre Sigurdsson, a Faroe Islander who claimed to be the son of king Sigurd Munn^note  one can almost hear the cries of "yeah, riiiight" echoing the length and breadth of Norway, but Sverre had an army to back up his claim, but the wars continued on for several decades until all rival claimants had been put down and the laws had been amended to establish a clearer line of succession.
• The Kingdom of Italy:
  • There was one during the reign of Umberto I due to his son, the future Victor Emmanuel III, being perceptive: knowing the dangers of Royal Inbreeding, especially because he could blame his parents and three of his grandparents being cousins for his short height and poor health, he refused any arranged marriage with Europe's royal houses, as they were all related, thus keeping himself from having children. To avert it, the various royal families of Europe joined forces to make him fall in love with the one princess he was unrelated to, and he managed to have a son and heir shortly after his accession to the throne.
  • The Italian throne today has two claimants, Prince Emanuele Filiberto and Prince Aimone, both of whom are descended from Victor Emmanuel II. The former has a stronger claim, since he is Victor Emmanuel III's great-grandson, but his father's claim was disputed by Aimone's father, who argued that Vittorio Emanuele (Emanuele Filiberto's father) didn't receive permission from his father, the deposed king Umberto II, to marry, which is a requirement in monarchical law.
• The Italian Republic had one in 2013: under the republican constitution the president is elected by the Parliament plus delegates of the Regions with a two-thirds majority in the first three ballots and simple majority for any other ballots, but at the end of Giorgio Napolitano's term the situation in the Parliament was so deadlocked they couldn't elect a president after five ballots. This was solved by the incumbent prime minister and the leaders of the main parties when they convinced Napolitano to assent for re-election, at which point he was promptly elected with 738 out of 1007 votes. By the time Napolitano resigned due to his advanced age, the political crisis had been long solved and Sergio Mattarella was elected at the fourth ballot.
• The throne of Saudi Arabia traditionally passes down from brother to brother, then father to son. Every single Saudi king since 1953 are the sons of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the Founder of the Kingdom, despite all of them being ancient. Naturally, crises have occasionally popped up over the years, as it's not uncommon for the heir apparent to be switched around if they fall out of favor. The current king, Salman, has replaced the heir apparent twice, both times breaking tradition by giving it to two grandsons of Ibn Saud, one of whom, Mohammad, is his son. The decision is not without controversy, and Prince Mohammad has taken steps to secure his candidacy by silencing royals who are opposed, earning him something of a ruthless streak.
• Similar to what happens in Succession, this also happens in corporations, especially family-owned enterprises.
  • In 1986, Leonard "L.S." Shoen was forced out of his position as president and CEO of moving company U-Haul International by the majority of his children/heirs, who took over the company themselves. Shoen and his only loyal offspring, eldest son Sam, sued the rest of the Shoen siblings, and the resulting feud turned so ugly that there were physical confrontations at company meetings. The matter was further complicated by the 1990 murder of Shoen's daughter-in-law, Eva Berg Shoen, which brought a lot of unneeded publicity to the family drama.^note The murder itself turned out to be a burglary-gone-wrong that was unrelated to U-Haul Shoen's children were able to retain control of U-Haul, with his son Joe currently serving as president and CEO as of 2022. Shoen himself committed suicide by driving his car into a telephone pole in 1999.
• Since 2005, there has been an ongoing dispute over the succession to the throne of the Balobedu people of South Africa. When Queen Makobo Modjadji died, the throne was expected to pass to her daughter, Princess Masalanabo. However, conflicts within the royal family, including the infant princess being stolen by a man claiming to be her father, made the intended succession difficult, as the princess being kept away from the royal family meant she missed training vital for the position. As such, the royal council secretly appointed her older brother, Prince Lekukela, as heir and began training him. Because it was kept secret this led the public to believe Masalanabo would become queen at the age of 18, as the throne had been matrilineal for the past 200 years, even to the point of being officially recognized as such by the South African government in 2016. The announcement of Lekukela has caused a rift among the Balobedu, as some support Lekuleka and others support Masalanabo and a legal team working on Masalananbo's behalf is planning to challenge Lekukela's intended succession, which was scheduled for October 2022. While a coronation did intend take place, the following year, a rival faction ofthe Royal Council announced they would support Masalanbo and so she was scheduled to be crowned as queen in August 2023, but the coronation was later moved to April 2024. The two factions are apparently planning to go to court to settle the issue.
• Nepal experienced this in 2001, when Crown Prince Dipendra went on a drunken shooting spree and killed his father, King Birendra, his mother, Queen Aishwarya, and his younger siblings, among other people. Dipendra shot himself and entered a coma, during which time he was crowned king before he ultimately succumbed three days later, and was succeeded by his uncle Gyanendra, whom many suspected had a hand in the massacre. While the succession wasn't a problem per se, the real problem laid in the fact that the Nepalese just basically crowned at least one criminal as their king, which proved to be such a controversy that they eventually decided to abolish the monarchy in 2008.

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