According to the old-style Julian calendar, the boy who would grow up to be King Alexander was born on the Balkan Peninsula on this date in 1888. The birth year is our tip-off that today's Alexander was not Alexander the Great: that better-remembered ruler was born some 2,200 years before Alexander the First.

The two men had more in common than their names and a birthplace in the Balkans. Both men built empires (Alexander the Great is remembered as one of the greatest generals ever, the man who extended Hellenism from Gibraltar to Punjab, while the Alexander born 113 years ago today created the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and then, in 1929, attempted to consolidate the three rival groups into the unified kingdom of Yugoslavia). Both men died young (Alexander the Third of Macedonia at 33, Alexander the First of Yugoslavia at 45), and the political borders established by both rulers did not long outlast their creators.

Both men left behind linguistic legacies, too. Alexander the Great was the inspiration for the Alexander romance, a literary label for any of a body of legends about his life told and retold with varying emphasis and purpose by succeeding ages. And the Alexander who started us off today is credited with renaming the kingdom over which he reigned Yugoslavia, a word that translates as "Land of the South Slavs."