Puppet monarch

"Puppet king" redirects here. For the fictional marionette, see Puppet King (Teen Titans).

A puppet monarch is a majority figurehead who is installed or patronized by an imperial power in order to provide the appearance of local authority, while allowing political and economic control to remain among the dominating nation.

Figurehead monarch, as source of legitimacy and possibly divine reign, has been the used form of government in several situations and places of history.

There are two basic forms of using puppets as monarchs (rulers, kings, emperors):

• figurehead: the monarch is a puppet of another person or a group in the country, who are ruling instead of the nominal ruler.
• puppet government under a foreign power.

Examples of the first type are the Emperors who were the puppets of the shōguns of Japan and the kings who were the puppets of the Mayor of Palace in the Frankish kingdom. The British Empire's colonial relationship with King Farouk of Egypt, in the 1950s, is an example of the second type.

List of puppet kings

• Aimone of Savoy, King of Croatia
• Aisin-Gioro Puyi, Emperor of Manchukuo
• Bảo Đại, Emperor of Vietnam
• Claudius, Emperor of the Roman Empire
• Charles the Bewitched, the last Habsburg ruler of the Spanish Empire
• Edward VI, King of England and Ireland
• Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse, King of Finland (elected but never reigned)
• Elector and later King, Frederick Augustus I of Saxony, appointed as Napoleonic Duke of Warsaw (present-day Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania)
• Elisa Bonaparte, Italian ruler as Grand Duchess of Tuscany and Princess of Lucca
• Louis Bonaparte of the Kingdom of Holland
• Leo I the Thracian, Eastern Emperors of the Byzantine Empire
• Mary II of England, Scotland and Ireland
• Manco Inca, Emperor of Tawantinsuyu
• Musa, an puppet Ilkhan ruler in Mongol Persia.
• Moctezuma II, Tlatoani (Emperor) of Tenochtitlan and Aztec Triple Empire
• Qin Er Shi, Emperor of the Qin Empire
• Philip II Philoromaeus of the last Seleucid, King of Syria
• Romulus Augustulus, Emperor of the Western Roman Empire
• Sisowath Monivong, of Cambodia
• Jérôme Bonaparte, of Kingdom of Westphalia (present-day cultural Germany)
• Joseph Bonaparte, of Napoleonic Spain and Neapolitan Kingdom
• John Balliol of Scotland
• Emperor Xian of Han of China
• Simeon Bekbulatovich Russian Tsar for one year as Puppet monarch of Ivan the Terrible