Prince Agustin Jeronimo of Mexico (Napoleon's World)

Agustin Jeronimo de Iturbide y Huarte (September 30, 1807 - January 19, 1834) was the first son of Agustin I of Mexico and Dona Ana Maria de Huarte, his mother who tragically died during the Mexican Revolution in 1815. Known as Prince Agustin Jeronimo and assumed to be the future heir to the Mexican Empire after his father's coronation in 1822, these hopes were dashed when in the fall of that same year his father married the Hapsburg Princess Clementina and in 1824 sired a new son, Agustin Francisco Carlos de Iturbide y Hapsburg, who would eventually succeed him.

Upon turning eighteen and dissatisfied with his likely inability to succeed his father, Prince Agustin Jeronimo travelled the world and spent a great deal of time in France, where he befriended a great number of political leaders with a strong distaste for the Hapsburg family and who were alarmed at the expanding power of the deposed Austrian line in Mexico, and fearing the threat the Iturbide-Hapsburg allegiance might cause their ally in the United States.

By 1833, Agustin Jeronimo was an outspoken critic of Prime Minister Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who had effectively marginalized the Emperor and ran Mexico as a dictator along with the Austrian expatriates who supported him. The French government agreed to support a coup against Santa Anna and the Hapsburgs in Mexico and install Agustin Jeronimo as the guaranteed successor to his father, but in January of 1834 he was assassinated in Paris, allegedly by agents of the Hapsburgs still in Europe. Agustin I was apparently striken with grief over the death of his estranged son, furthering Santa Anna's grip over Mexico. Agustin Jeronimo's son, Agustin Antonio Dolores (1832-1901) was the last pretender to the Mexican throne, claiming to be the "true Mexican" heir as opposed to a half-Austrian dynasty, and lived out the entirety of his life in Europe.