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The Sibling Rivalry That Wrecked an Empire, and Other Self-Destructive Royal Family Episodes

Khalid Elhassan January 5, 2020 33 min

Wars of the Roses - Battle of Bosworth Field — The Wars of the Roses, during which the Plantagenet Dynasty destroyed itself. Encyclopedia Britannica

16. The King Whose Mother Made Clear He Was Not Her Favorite Child

Caesar’s Cleopatra was not her dynasty’s first scandalous Cleopatra. A century earlier, when Ptolemy VIII Potbelly died in 116 BC, his wife and reigning queen, Cleopatra III, made her son Ptolemy IX, nicknamed Chickpea, her co-regent. However, Ptolemy IX had not been her favorite son, and she had been forced to choose him because of public pressure.

She worked out some of her resentment by forcing Chickpea to divorce his sister-wife Cleopatra IV, and replace her with his mother’s sister and Ptolemy IX’s aunt, Cleopatra Selene I. The ditched sister and ex-wife fled to Syria. There, she married into the royal family and reigned as queen until she was murdered. As to Ptolemy IX Chickpea, Cleopatra III accused him of having tried to murder her and deposed him in 107 BC. In his place, Cleopatra III installed her favorite son, Alexander, who ascended the throne as Ptolemy X.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.