The Athens garrison moves to the neighboring Goudhi Hill in August and forces the resignation of Premier Demetrios Rhalles, replacing him with Kyriakoules Mavromichales.

It also forces King George to dismiss his sons, who are held to favor the promotion of their own protégés, from military commands.

The league finds itself unable to create a new political system, however, and therefore summons to Athens as its political adviser the charismatic lawyer and journalist Eftherios Venizelos, who has made his mark in the politics of his native Crete.

Venizelos persuades the king to revise the constitution and asks the league to disband in favor of a National Assembly.

The Allied blockade eventually renders the Greek king's position untenable.

In June 1917, when the British and French threaten to bombard Athens if Constantine remains, the king, passes his crown to his second son Alexander and leaves Greece on June 12, although he does not formally abdicate.

Venizelos, installed by the Allies as prime minister of a formally united but bitterly divided Greece, is now free to throw full Greek support behind the Allied cause.

Greece declares war on the Central Powers on June 27.

Venizelos, dominating King Alexander and the Greek government, and having gained for the kingdom the territories of Smyrna and eastern and western Thrace from Turkey and Bulgaria, presents the twenty-seven-year-old monarch with the prospect of expanding Greece's frontiers farther into Anatolia.

Before Alexander is able to pursue that objective, however, he is bitten by a pet monkey and dies from blood poisoning on October 25, 1920, leaving the exiled Constantine as the only claimant to the throne.