Editing Victor Emmanuel III (section)

===Colonial expansion===
====Emperor of Ethiopia====
[[File:Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and Horthy Miklós Governor of Hungary at the Royal Castle, Budapest – May, 1937.tif|thumb|Victor Emmanuel III visiting Hungary in 1937]]
[[File:Vittorio Emanuele III 1936.jpg|200px|thumb|King Victor Emmanuel III in his uniform as [[Marshal of Italy]] in 1936]]
Prior to his government's invasion of Ethiopia, Victor Emmanuel travelled in 1934 to [[Italian Somaliland]], where he celebrated his 65th birthday on 11 November.<ref name="dsajfsdk">{{citation |url= https://books.google.com/books?id=JLtaAAAAYAAJ |title=The American Philatelist | volume = 110 | issue = 7–12 | publisher = American Philatelic Association |year=1996 |page=618}}</ref><ref name= "bigl7i">{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dascAAAAQBAJ |title=Nomads in the Shadows of Empires: Contests, Conflicts and Legacies on the Southern Ethiopian-Northern Kenyan Frontier |last= Oba |first= Gufu |date=11 July 2013 |page=160|publisher=Brill |isbn=978-90-04-25522-7}}</ref> In 1936, Victor Emmanuel assumed the crown as [[Emperor of Ethiopia]]. His decision to do this was not universally accepted. Victor Emmanuel was only able to assume the crown after the Italian Army invaded Ethiopia (Abyssinia) and overthrew Emperor [[Haile Selassie]] during the [[Second Italo-Abyssinian War]].

Ethiopia was annexed to the [[Italian Empire]]. The [[League of Nations]] condemned Italy's participation in this war and the Italian claim by right of conquest to Ethiopia was rejected by some major powers, such as the United States and the [[Soviet Union]], but was accepted by Great Britain and France in 1938. In 1943, Italy's possession of Ethiopia came to an end.

The term of the last acting [[Viceroy of Italian East Africa]], including [[Eritrea]] and [[Italian Somaliland]], ended on 27 November 1941 with surrender to the allies. In November 1943 Victor Emmanuel renounced his claims to the titles of Emperor of Ethiopia and King of Albania,<ref>Indro Montanelli, Mario Cervi, ''Storia d'italia. L'Italia della guerra civile'', RCS, 2003.</ref> recognizing the previous holders of those titles as legitimate.

====King of the Albanians====
The crown of the [[King of the Albanians]] had been assumed by Victor Emmanuel in 1939 when [[Italian invasion of Albania|Italian forces invaded]] the nearly defenceless monarchy across the [[Adriatic Sea]] and caused [[Zog of Albania|King Zog I]] to flee.

In 1941, while in [[Tirana]], the King escaped an assassination attempt by the 18-year-old Albanian patriot [[Vasil Laçi]].<ref name= "Pearson153">Owen Pearson, ''Albania in Occupation and War: From Fascism to Communism 1940–1945'', 2006, p. 153, {{ISBN|1-84511-104-4}}.</ref> Later, this attempt was cited by [[Communist Albania]] as a sign of the general discontent among the oppressed Albanian population. A second attempt by Dimitri Mikhaliov in Albania gave the Italians an excuse to affirm a possible connection with [[Greece]] as a result of the monarch's assent to the [[Greco-Italian War]].

[[File:VE3 lira 1940.jpg|250px|thumb|Victor Emmanuel III depicted on a 1 [[Italian lira|lira]] coin (1940)]]