Monarchies in Europe


In European history, monarchy was the prevalent form of government throughout the Middle Ages, only occasionally competing with communalism, notably in the case of the maritime republics and the Swiss Confederacy.
In the early modern period, republicanism became more prevalent, but monarchy still remained predominant in Europe until the end of the 19th century. After World War I, however, most European monarchies were abolished. There remain, as of 2025, twelve sovereign monarchies in Europe. Seven are kingdoms: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. Three are principalities: Andorra, Liechtenstein, and Monaco. Finally, Luxembourg is a grand duchy and Vatican City is a theocratic, elective monarchy ruled by the pope.
The monarchies can be divided into two broad classes: premodern states and those that gained their independence during or immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the UK, Spain, and Andorra are the successors to premodern monarchies. Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg were established or gained independence through various methods during the Napoleonic Wars. The State of the Vatican City was recognized as a sovereign state administered by the Holy See in 1929.
Ten of these monarchies are hereditary, and two are elective: Vatican City, and Andorra.
Most of the monarchies in Europe are constitutional monarchies, which means that the monarch does not influence the politics of the state: either the monarch is legally prohibited from doing so, or the monarch does not utilize the political powers vested in the office by convention. The exceptions are Liechtenstein and Monaco, which are usually considered semi-constitutional monarchies due to the large influence the princes still have on politics. There is currently no major campaign to abolish the monarchy in any of the twelve states, although there is at least a small minority of republicans in many of them. Currently six of the twelve monarchies are members of the European Union: Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.
At the start of the 20th century, France, Switzerland and San Marino were the only European nations to have a republican form of government. The ascent of republicanism to the political mainstream started only at the beginning of the 20th century, facilitated by the toppling of various European monarchies after the end of World War I; as at the beginning of the 21st century, most of the states in Europe are republics with either a directly or indirectly elected head of state.

History

Origins

The notion of kingship in Europe ultimately originates in systems of tribal kingship in prehistoric Europe. The Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation provide the earliest examples of monarchies in protohistoric Greece. Thanks to the decipherment of the Linear B script in 1952, much knowledge has been acquired about society in the Mycenaean realms, where the kings functioned as leaders of palace economies. The role of kings changed in the following Greek Dark Ages to big gentleman farmers with military power.

Archaic and classical antiquity

Since the beginning of antiquity, monarchy confronted several republican forms of government, wherein executive power was in the hands of a number of people that elected leaders in a certain way instead of appointing them by hereditary succession. During the archaic period, kingship disappeared in almost all Greek poleis, and also in Rome. After the demise of kingship, the Greek city-states were initially most often led by nobility, after which their economic and military power base crumbled. Next, in almost all poleis tyrants usurped power for two generations, after which gradually forms of governments led by the wealthy or assemblies of free male citizens emerged in Classical Greece. Athenian democracy is the best-known example of the latter form; classical Sparta was a militaristic polis with a remarkable mix between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy ; the Roman Republic had a mixed constitution of oligarchy, democracy and especially aristocracy. The city-states of the Etruscan civilization appear to have followed a similar pattern, with the original monarchies being overthrown and replaced by oligarchic republics in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE.
The dominant poleis of Athens and Sparta were weakened by warring each other, especially during the Peloponnesian War won by Sparta. They were defeated and ruled by Thebes for a time, after which Sparta's role was over. Eventually, all of Greece was subjugated by the Macedonian monarchy in 338 BCE, that put an end to the era of free autonomous city-states, and Athenian democracy as well in 322 BCE. In the subsequent Hellenistic period numerous diadochs fought one another for the kingship of Macedon, definitively obtained by the Antigonids in 277 BCE. Meanwhile, the Phoenician city-state of Carthage, located in present-day Tunisia, aside from settling large swaths of North Africa's coast, also set up several colonies on Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, the Baleares and in southern Iberia. The Carthaginian empire, according to tradition founded in 814 BCE, started out as a monarchy, but in the 4th century transformed into a republic where suffets ruled. Finally, Rome gradually conquered all of Italy, and defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars. In 168, Macedon was subdued by the Romans, and partitioned into four client republics. These were annexed as Roman provinces in 148, as happened to Greece in 146, making Rome's territory envelop all of literate Europe. The remainder of Iberia, the Illyrian coast and eventually Gaul by general Julius Caesar were added to the Roman Republic, which however was experiencing an institutional crisis. After defeating his rival Pompey, Caesar was appointed dictator to restore order. He almost managed to found a dynasty in the process, but was killed by a republican cabal led by Brutus in 44 BCE.

Roman Empire and legacy

Caesar's adoptive son Octavian prevailed in the ensuing civil war, and converted the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire in 27 BCE. He took on the name Augustus, with the rather humble title of princeps, as if he were merely primus inter pares, when he had in fact founded a monarchy. This limited emperorship was strengthened in 284 by Diocletian to absolute reign. The Empire recognised various client kingdoms under imperial suzerainty; most of these were in Asia, but tribal client kings were also recognized by the Roman authorities in Britannia. Most of the barbarian kingdoms established in the 5th century
recognised the Roman Emperor at least nominally, and Germanic kingdoms would continue to mint coins depicting the Roman emperor well into the 6th century.
It was this derivation of the authority of kingship from the Christian Roman Empire that would be at the core of the medieval institution of kingship in Europe and its notion of the divine right of kings, as well as the position of the Pope in Latin Christendom, the restoration of the Roman Empire under Charlemagne and the derived concept of the Holy Roman Empire in Western and Central Europe.

Medieval Europe

The monarchies of Europe in the Christian Middle Ages derived their claim from Christianisation and the divine right of kings, partly influenced by the notion of sacral kingship inherited from Germanic antiquity. The great powers of Europe in the Early modern period were the result of a gradual process of centralization of power taking place over the course of the Middle Ages.
The Early Middle Ages begin with a fragmentation of the former Western Roman Empire into "barbarian kingdoms". In Western Europe, the kingdom of the Franks developed into the Carolingian Empire by the 8th century, and the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England were unified into the kingdom of England by the 10th century.
With the breakup of the Carolingian Empire in the 9th century, the system of feudalism places kings at the head of a pyramid of relationships between liege lords and vassals, dependent on the regional rule of barons, and the intermediate positions of counts and dukes. The core of European feudal manorialism in the High Middle Ages were the territories of the kingdom of France, the Holy Roman Empire and the kingdoms of England and Scotland.

Early Modern Europe

With the rise of nation-states and the Protestant Reformation, the theory of divine right justified the king's absolute authority in both political and spiritual matters. The theory came to the fore in England under the reign of James I of England. Louis XIV of France strongly promoted the theory as well.
Early modern Europe was dominated by the Wars of Religion, notably the Thirty Years' War, during which the major European monarchies developed into centralised great powers sustained by their colonial empires.
The main European monarchical powers in the early modern period were:
The House of Habsburg became the most influential royal dynasty in continental Europe by the 17th century, divided into the Spanish and Austrian branches.

Modern Europe

The modern resurgence of parliamentarism and anti-monarchism began with the French Revolution. The absolutist Kingdom of France was first transformed to a constitutional monarchy, before being fully abolished on 21 September 1792, and eventually the former king even executed, to the other European courts' great shock. During the subsequent French Revolutionary Wars, the great European monarchies were unable to restore the monarchy; instead, the French First Republic expanded and annexed neighbouring territories, or converted them into loyal sister republics. Meanwhile, the German Mediatization of 1803 thoroughly rearranged the political structure of the Holy Roman Empire, with many small principalities and all ecclesiastical lands being annexed by larger monarchies. After Napoleon seized power, however, he gradually constructed a new imperial order in French-controlled Europe, first by crowning himself Emperor of the French in 1804, and then converting the sister republics into monarchies ruled by his relatives. In July 1806 due to Napoleon's campaigns a larger number of states in the Western part of Germany seceded The Holy Roman Empire and this brought in August 1806 the emperor Francis II to decide dissolving the entire empire, bringing an end to 1833 years of history of Roman emperors in Europe.
Following Napoleon's defeat in 1814 and 1815, the reactionary Congress of Vienna determined that all of Europe should consist of strong monarchies. In France, the Bourbon dynasty was restored, replaced by the liberal July Monarchy in 1830, before the entire monarchy was again abolished during the Revolutions of 1848. The popular Napoleon III was able to proclaim himself Emperor in 1852, thus founding the Second French Empire.
The kingdoms of Sicily and Naples were absorbed into the Kingdom of Sardinia to form the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Austria and Prussia vied to unite all German states under their banner, with Prussia emerging victorious in 1866. It succeeded in provoking Napoleon III to declare war, leading to the defeat of France, and the absorption of the southern German states into the German Empire in the process. From the ashes of the Second Empire rose the French Third Republic, the only great republican European power until World War I.
Much of 19th century politics was characterised by the division between anti-monarchist radicalism and monarchist conservatism.
The Kingdom of Spain was briefly abolished in 1873, restored 1874–1931 and again in 1975.
The Kingdom of Portugal was abolished in 1910. The Russian Empire ended in 1917, the Kingdom of Prussia in 1918.
The Kingdom of Hungary fell under Habsburg rule in 1867 and was dissolved in 1918. Likewise, the Kingdom of Bohemia under Habsburg rule was dissolved in 1918. The Ottoman sultanate was abolished in 1922 and replaced by the Republic of Türkiye the following year.
The Napoleonic Wars transformed the political landscape of Europe, and a number of modern kingdoms were formed in a resurgence of monarchism after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the defeat of the French Empire:
Many countries abolished the monarchy in the 20th century and became republics, especially in the wake of either World War I or World War II.