Spike
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In 1920, a Barbary macaque monkey on the grounds of a Greek royal estate got into a fight with a German Shepherd named Fritz. The dog's owner stepped in to break it up. That man was King Alexander of Greece — and that moment of ordinary instinct cost him his life, his country its future, and a quarter of a million people their lives.
It started simply enough. Alexander was walking through the Tatoi estate outside Athens on October 2, 1920, when Fritz tangled with one of the monkeys kept by the palace groundskeeper. The king waded in to separate them. A second monkey seized the moment and bit him deeply on the leg and torso. Servants arrived, chased the animals away, and the wounds were cleaned. Alexander, embarrassed by the whole undignified episode, asked that it be kept quiet. He didn't think it was serious.
He was catastrophically wrong.
That evening the wounds turned infected. Fever set in. Sepsis followed. His doctors debated amputating his leg but couldn't agree on who would take responsibility for the decision. Days passed. The infection spread. By the time it was clear that nothing would save him, it was already too late. On October 25, 1920 — just 23 days after a monkey bit him — King Alexander of Greece was dead at 27.
What followed was a chain reaction that reshaped an entire region. Alexander's sudden death threw Greece into a succession crisis, destabilized the government, brought back his exiled father King Constantine, and triggered a catastrophic military campaign against Turkey that ended in the destruction of the Greek presence in Anatolia — an ancient civilization erased in months. His wife Aspasia was pregnant when he died. Their daughter Alexandra was born into a world that had already declared her father's marriage invalid and her own existence illegitimate.
Winston Churchill, surveying the wreckage, put it with characteristic bluntness: a quarter of a million people died of that monkey's bite.
A dog fight. A king who couldn't walk past it. A wound nobody cauterized. History is sometimes that random — and that brutal.
