Leopold II was not yet the ruler of Belgium when his ambitions had already turned toward conquest. Born in Brussels on April 9, 1835, he was the second child of Leopold I and Louise of Orléans, but his older brother had died in infancy, making him the heir to a newly independent Belgian throne that his father had been elected to lead in 1831. As an adolescent, he was described as reserved and awkward, and his early life was marked by loss when his mother died of tuberculosis when he was just fifteen. His relationship with his father was distant, with the king reportedly referring to his son as “the little tyrant.
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At the age of eighteen, Leopold married Marie Henriette of Austria. The couple had four children, but the death of their first son, also named Leopold, created an irreparable rift in their marriage. Though they remained together for fifty years, they spent most of that time living apart. Leopold first entered the Belgian Senate in the same year he married, and in the decades that followed, he traveled extensively across Europe, Africa, China, and India, observing lands that would later fuel colonial ambitions.
He also rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the Belgian army. When his father died of dysentery in 1865, the thirty-year-old Leopold took the oath of office and ascended the Belgian throne. He was no longer just the ruler of a small European kingdom; he had long been consumed by imperial fantasies that extended far beyond the borders of the country he governed.