That's interesting and sounds like a hole in my knowledge of history. I'm curious, were those monarchies actually dictatorships? The UK still has a monarch, but it's not a dictatorship.
Going further back in the history, some feudal monarchies were actually not absolutist in the sense the king had to manage various factions of landowners, clergy, etc (so-called Estates) or even share power with them. So it all depended on the relative power of the monarch and others in the society.