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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

12. The King Who Married His Sister – and Murdered Her Kid on Their Wedding Night

In the second century BC, the Seleucid king Antiochus IV invaded Egypt, captured Alexandria, and made King Ptolemy VI his puppet ruler. The people of Alexandria rioted, and chose the puppet king’s obese younger brother, Ptolemy VIII Potbelly as monarch. After the Seleucids were forced out of Egypt by Roman threats, Ptolemy Potbelly agreed to a three-way joint rule, with his brother Ptolemy VI, and their sister Cleopatra II, who was also Ptolemy VI’s wife.

The arrangement did not work out. Ptolemy Potbelly was away from Egypt when Ptolemy VI died in 145 BC. Cleopatra II, the deceased king’s sister-wife, and Potbelly’s sibling as well, promptly declared her son, Ptolemy VII, as king. When Potbelly returned, he convinced his widowed sister to marry him, promising that the sibling spouses would rule jointly. However, he doubled crossed his sister/ new wife, by having her son, Ptolemy VII, murdered during the wedding feast. He also reneged on his promise to rule jointly with his sister-wife and declared himself sole ruler.

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.