Lusitania puppet Kingdom of Northern Lusitania as one of the successor states to Portugal under the assumption that such a campaign would result in an easy French victory. The province was also the namesake of the North Atlantic Ocean Liner RMS Lusitania infamous for being torpedoed by a German Uboat in 1915. The ship’s owners the Cunard Line commonly named their vessels after Roman provinces with the Lusitania so being called after the Roman Iberian province to the north of the Strait of Gibraltar while her sistership RMS Mauretania was named after the Roman North African province on the south side
RMS Lusitania Kingdom a war zone, and the German embassy in the United States had placed newspaper advertisements warning people of the dangers of sailing on "Lusitania". On the afternoon of 7 May, a German U-boat torpedoed "Lusitania", off the southern coast of Ireland and inside the declared war zone. A second, unexplained, internal explosion, likely munitions she was carrying, sent her to the seabed in 18 minutes, with the deaths of 1,198 passengers and crew. Because the Germans sank, without warning, what was a completely defenceless, officially non-military ship, killing almost a thousand civilians, many of whom were children, they were