King leupold ii of belgium biography template
King leupold ii of belgium biography template download.
Leopold II (Leopold Lodewijk Filips Maria Victor, 9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was King of the Belgians.
Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I, he succeeded his father to the throne in 1865 and remained king until his death.
King leupold ii of belgium biography template
He was the brother of Empress Carlota of Mexico and first cousin to Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.
He is chiefly remembered as the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken by the King.
The state included the entire area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He ran the Congo brutally, as his personal fiefdom; for him it was a business venture. A friend of Henry Morton Stanley, he used Stanley to help him lay claim to the territory he called Congo.
Leopold thought of himself as an astute businessman and he once spent a week in Seville studying Spanish records of their trade with their Latin American colonies.
The regime of L