About: Leopold II of Belgium   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : dbkwik:resource/B3VWIytDR3C8gxlFoVV2aQ==, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

Leopold II (, ) (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and , he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death.

AttributesValues
rdf:type
rdfs:label
  • Leopold II of Belgium
rdfs:comment
  • Leopold II (, ) (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and , he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death.
sameAs
dcterms:subject
foaf:homepage
dbkwik:military/pr...iPageUsesTemplate
Alternative
  • Sire
Birth Date
  • 1835-04-09(xsd:date)
death place
  • Laeken, Belgium
Spouse
Name
  • Leopold II
  • Leopold II of Belgium
Issue
Reference
Father
Mother
Birth Place
  • Brussels, Belgium
Title
death date
  • 1909-12-17(xsd:date)
House
Successor
Religion
  • Roman Catholic
Years
  • 1840(xsd:integer)
  • 1865(xsd:integer)
burial place
Reign
  • --07-01
  • --12-17
spoken
  • Your Majesty
Succession
Predecessor
abstract
  • Leopold II (, ) (9 April 1835 – 17 December 1909) was the King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second (but eldest surviving) son of Leopold I and , he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death. Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the colonial nations of Europe committed the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions and ran the Congo using a mercenary force for his personal gain. Some of the money from this exploitation was used for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forcing the population to collect sap from rubber plants. Villages were required to meet quotas on rubber collections, and individuals' hands were cut off if they did not meet the requirements. His regime was responsible for the death of an estimated 2 to 15 million Congolese. This became one of the most infamous international scandals of the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced to relinquish control of it to the Belgian government.
is Predecessor of
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software