Kings, queens found to have most dangerous job

It may look like Prince William has a lot to look forward to with his wedding and impending kingship, but a new study shows that being king is the most lethal job in history.

The study reveals the rate of violent death among European royals is higher than for soldiers in modern war zones. Almost a quarter (22 per cent) of the royals have died in bloody circumstances and 15 per cent of the deaths were a result of murder.

Cambridge University professor Manuel Eisner looked at 1,513 European kings and queens over 1,200 years. He discovered that a king or queen is four times more likely to die than a soldier and 200 times more likely to die than the average person living in the city with the highest murder rate in the world - Cuidad Juarez, Mexico.

To contrast with Canada, which has about 600 murders per year, kings and queens are over 8,300 times more likely to be murdered than the average Canadian.

"The rate at which they were murdered was stunningly high," Eisner said in a recent Guardian article. "I was astonished by how much violence was perpetrated, almost exclusively by elite power groups."

He found the most common reason monarchs were killed was power. Neighbouring monarchs were also responsible for many of the murders along with reasons such as personal grievances and revenge.

via ca.news.yahoo.com