20 Fake Royals Who Tried To Steal Thrones And Fortunes

This is one story where we’re really not sure if the imposter in question was actually one! In 522 BCE, a man who called himself Bardiya ruled as king for several months, claiming to be the brother of the Persian king. His reign was short-lived because Darius the Great wanted the throne, so he killed him. To justify his actions, Darius claimed that Bardiya was really a Median priest named Gaumata, and that he wasn’t related to royalty whatsoever. To cement his story in history, he wrote up his version of events on the Behistun Inscription, carved into a cliff. Whether he was telling the truth or just trying to save his reputation is up for debate.

Because Nero died in 68 CE under rather mysterious circumstances, and his body was never exhibited publicly, it wouldn’t be impossible for someone to try to claim his identity. According to Cassius Dio, roughly a decade or so after Nero’s death, a man named Terentius Maximus appeared in the East, claiming to be the deceased emperor. Some people believed him, and he eventually escaped to Parthia, where King Artabanus III used him as a pawn against Rome for a while. That’s where his story ends for us, since we don’t know much else about him.

People just love to claim they’ve risen from the dead, and in the 10th century, the story repeats itself with a man who claimed to be a resurrected emperor (though it’s unclear which emperor he claimed to be). He was successful enough in his ploy that he led the Byzantine peasant uprising, and he did so with a copper or bronze hand!

In 1290, Margaret, Maid of Norway, died at only seven years old. Ten years later, a woman saw an opportunity and took it. She arrived in Bergen from Lübeck claiming to be Margaret. In her story, Margaret had never died at all, and had instead been sent away to Germany. There was just one problem, though: the woman was around 40, while Margaret would have only been 17. Whoops! That major blunder cost her her life, and she was executed in 1301.

In 1318, a man called John Deydras showed up at Beaumont Palace in Oxford, claiming to be the real Edward II. Now this story, if true, would be real juicy. He claimed that when he was an infant, his ear had been bitten off by a sow. A king couldn’t have a bitten-off ear, so a carter’s son took his place. He, the real king, went on to live a peasant’s life, while the peasant got to live it up as a royal. This is like The Prince and the Pauper, though the infants switched places against their will. So, was his story true? Nope! He confessed to making the whole thing up at trial and was hanged that same year.

In 1348, an old man showed up saying he was Margrave Waldemar of Brandenburg, who was believed to have died in 1319. In his story, he claimed that the buried body everyone believed to be the king’s was some random man, and he faked his death so he could go on pilgrimage. Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV didn’t believe him, but recognized his claim anyway because doing so would help weaken his rivals, the Wittelsbachs. The impostor dragged Brandenburg into seven years of civil war before it finally fell apart.

If you’re going to pretend to be a king, you should at least know how to act like one. This wasn’t the case for a man in Elbing. In 1402, he claimed to be King Olav IV of Norway, who had died 15 years earlier. He was taken before Queen Margaret I of Denmark, but there was one major problem. He didn’t speak a single word of Danish! He was quickly called a fraud, and paid a deadly price.

This is one of those unique stories where perhaps the public made the wrong call. In 1402, the Ottoman Prince Mustafa Çelebi disappeared during battle but reappeared in 1419, backed by Byzantine forces, to lay claim to the Ottoman throne. Sultan Murad II didn’t believe he was the real deal, so he was hanged in 1422 to send a message. The chroniclers called him Düzmece, or “Fake.” However, there’s a plot twist: most modern historians agree that he really was the son of Sultan Bayezid I. Poor guy!

No one would ever suspect a kid of being a fraud, right? Well, that’s exactly what Yorkist rebels believed when they taught ten-year-old Lambert Simnel how to act like the real Earl of Warwick. He was presented in Dublin in 1487 and crowned as “King Edward VI.” After Henry VII defeated the army at Stoke Field, he had the real Earl of Warwick paraded through the streets to crush any further claims. He acknowledged that Lambert was merely a pawn and sent him to work in the royal kitchen.

In 1491, a Flemish youth named Perkin Warbeck said he was Richard, Duke of York, one of the two boys who had disappeared from the Tower of London. He was supported at various times by France, Burgundy, and Scotland, each simply as a means of pressuring Henry VII. In 1497 he tried to invade England, but was captured. While in prison, the truth finally came out. He confessed to the lie and was hanged at Tyburn in November 1499.

In 1578, the Portuguese King Sebastian vanished in battle. However, many people held on to hope and truly believed that he would eventually return. That created an opportunity for a baker named Gabriel de Espinosa. In 1594, he attempted to impersonate the missing king, teaming up with an Augustinian friar, who helped arrange his marriage to an illegitimate niece of Sebastian’s who was living in a Spanish convent. Records indicate that the young man had no relation to royalty at all, and he was arrested and executed in 1595.

Most frauds were found out before they gained any real power, but there was one imposter who actually claimed the throne. A renegade monk, whose identity is unclear (but most people say he was Grigory Otrepyev), invaded Russia pretending to be Tsarevich Dmitry, who had died in 1591 under mysterious circumstances. Hunger and resentment against Boris Godunov let him slip through the border, and he took Moscow on June 20, 1605. He was then crowned Tsar a month later, on July 21. Boyars assassinated him within the year because of his connections to Poland.

Several men had impersonated the murdered Tsar Peter III over the years, but one of the earliest men to do so appeared in 1766…though unintentionally. A physician turned up in Montenegro, and rumors began swirling that he was the murdered Russian tsar. While he never affirmed the rumors, he didn’t deny them either and let people call him Šćepan Mali, ‘Stephen the Little.’ He was declared leader of the nation in 1767, and ruled for six years, putting an end to feuds and building infrastructure, before being assassinated by an Ottoman agent in 1773.

In 1773, an illiterate Don Cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev also claimed he was the resurrected Tsar Peter III. He issued a decree abolishing serfdom and seized a string of Ural fortresses. Pugachev’s supporters may not have believed his story, but they were so desperate for change that they went along with it. Catherine the Great knew she had to stop him, so she sent out her army, and Pugachev was captured in 1774 before being executed in Moscow in January 1775.

In the early 1770s, a woman called Princess Tarakanova claimed to be the secret daughter of Empress Elizabeth of Russia. When Catherine the Great learned of this, she was not happy and ordered Tarakanova to be captured. She dispatched Count Alexei Orlov to lure Tarakanova aboard a Russian warship in Livorno and bring her back to St. Petersburg, where she would end up dying in prison of tuberculosis on December 4, 1775.

In the early 19th century, an English artist named Olivia Serres claimed she was the secret daughter of Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland. Her story was quite elaborate: she claimed that her parents had been secretly married, so she was, in fact, a legitimate princess. She even called herself “Princess Olive of Cumberland.” When her claims reached Parliament in the early 1820s, however, they were dismissed, and she was deemed a fraud.

Sometimes a story is so ridiculous, you want to believe it. This was the case for a youth named Kaspar Hauser. In 1828, he wandered into Nuremberg, saying that he had spent his whole life locked in a darkened cell, raised in total isolation. His unusual appearance and strange story were enough to cause speculation that he was actually the hereditary Prince of Baden, who had been kidnapped and exchanged at birth. This drew the attention of doctors and philosophers, making him a celebrity throughout Europe. He died in 1833 from a wound now believed self-inflicted, and a 2024 DNA study confirmed he had no link to the Baden dynasty.

France’s ‘lost Dauphin,’ Louis XVII, was officially recorded as having died in prison in 1795. Years later, in the 1830s, a German watchmaker named Karl Wilhelm Naundorff came to Paris claiming to be the king. Several former royal servants chose to believe his story, but the French government didn’t buy it and threw him out. He died in the Netherlands in 1845. And if you need more proof that this guy was a fraud, DNA tests, done in 1998 and again in 2014, comparing him to the Dauphin’s heart, which had been preserved, showed both times that he was not Louis XVII.

In the 1920s, Harry F. Gerguson began calling himself Prince Michael Romanoff, claiming to be a nephew of Nicholas II. The truth was that he was just a regular guy who was raised in Brooklyn. Unlike many of the others on this list, when he was exposed as a fraud, he was actually celebrated. Yep, Hollywood ate his story up, and Gerguson became a celebrity in his own right. With his newfound fame, he was able to open Romanoff’s in 1939, a restaurant that remained a staple of the Beverly Hills dining scene for decades until its owner’s death in 1971.

In 1920, a woman was pulled from a canal in Berlin. She claimed she was Grand Duchess Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Russia’s last tsar, who had been killed along with his family in 1918. The woman, now calling herself Anna Anderson, spent decades fighting for her identity in the German courts, collecting allies and gaining press coverage in the process. She died in 1984 without resolving the case. However, in 1994, a genetic study published in Nature Genetics uncovered the truth once and for all. She was, indeed, Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory girl, and had no blood relation to the Romanovs whatsoever.

This content was created with the help of AI.