Michael I of Serbia
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Michael of Serbia Serbian Cyrillic Михаило Обреновић (1823–1868) was prince of Serbia from 1839-1842 and again from 1860-1868. He was deposed in 1842 and assassinated in 1868.
Michael was the son of Prince Milos Obrenovic (1780, Dobrinje-1860, Belgrade) and his wife Ljubica Vukomanovic (1788-1843, Vienna). He was born on September 16th 1823 in Kragujevac, the second surviving son of the couple. His elder brother Milan was born in 1819 but was usually in poor health.
On June 25th 1839 their father, Prince Milosh, abdicated in favour of Milan, who was by then mortally ill. His reign was to be short-lived, and he died on July 8th 1839 without having recovered consciousness and perhaps never realising the crown was in his own hands. Thus, Michael (or Mihailo) became Prince of Serbia, but was accepted as an elected ruler rather than a hereditary prince. However, he was still young and fairly inexperienced, and could hardly cope with the political problems, both internal as well as external, that Serbia had to deal with at the time.
In 1842 his disastrous reign came to a halt when he was overthrown by a rebellion led by Toma Vucic-Perisic, which enabled the Karageorgevics to acceed to the Serbian throne. Eleven years later, Michael married Countess Julia Hunyady von Kéthely (1831-1919). The marriage was childless. Finally, Michael was accepted back as Prince of Serbia in 1860 after the death of the prince Alexander Karageorgevic rule. For the next eight years he ruled as an enlightened absolutist monarch.
On June 10th 1868 he was moving about the streets of Belgrade in a carriage with his cousin Anka (or Anna) Obrenovic, wife of Alexander Konstantinovic, when they were both killed as a result of a plot that has never been sufficiently clarified. The Karageorgevics were suspected for being behind the crime but there is not much proof to corroborate this.
Anka's granddaughter Natalia Konstatinovic (b.1882) married the Montenegrin Prince Mirko Petrovic-Njegos (1879-1918) whose sister Zorka married King Peter I Karageorgevic in 1883.
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