Word: monarchs
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...Distinguished Highness the Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie. Few 20th century rulers have reigned with more imperial assurance and panache. A charmer, a demagogue and a despot with an implacable will to power, Haile Selassie had contrived for 44 years to present himself to the world as an enlightened monarch and a forward-looking statesman while his subjects remained in boundless poverty and ignorance...
...irrigated the shoes of officials who danced attendance on the Emperor. Recalled the keeper: "I had to walk among the dignitaries and wipe the urine from their shoes with a satin cloth. This was my job for ten years." The function of another aide was to act as the monarch's animated timepiece, bowing several times as "a signal to His Perspicacious Majesty that one hour was ending and that the time had come to start another...
...Polish nationalism dates from Sweden's invasion of the country in 1655. For 40 days, as the Swedes surrounded the monastery, the monks prayed to the Virgin for deliverance. The siege failed, and the Poles subsequently drove the Swedes out of the country. In gratitude, the reigning Polish monarch, Jan Kazimierz, dedicated his throne and the country to "the Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland." In 1711 the people of Warsaw walked to Czestochowa to thank the Virgin for saving the city from the bubonic plague. Ever since, the pilgrimage has been an annual rite...
...office one night recently, Glenn sat back and talked about himself and his campaign. His staff had gone home, and the room was totally quiet. He puffed on one of his carved pipes, this one in the shape of a bearded monarch. Glenn is a difficult man to unpeel. After years of dealing with an accepting public, he drifts easily into platitudes. One keeps wondering what now drives him. Obviously the ambition is still great. For it, Glenn had swallowed his pride and invited even the hated Metzenbaum to his presidential announcement in New Concord in April...
...Libya, he fled to Cairo a few years after the territory was occupied by Italy in World War I to lead the resistance against the Mussolini fascists. Idris' troops fought alongside the British Eighth Army in World War II, and in 1951, with British support, he was proclaimed monarch of the newly federated Libya. A strict Muslim who claimed descent from Muhammad, Idris ruled with benign autocracy, had no heirs (to his dismay) and became increasingly out of touch as the oil discoveries of the late 1950s brought some modern Western ways to his primitive land...