When reading about someone who is the prince of this or the duchess of that, most people immediately conjure up an image of someone who is very grand, an elite part of the old aristocracy of Europe. But I am very often struck by how frequently historians, including professional academic historians, regularly use noble titles indiscriminately and interchangeably, and when asked to clarify whether the person being referred to is a count or a duke or a baron they say ‘it’s all the same, right?’ This short introductory piece will explain how they are not the same, and will focus on the top two titles in the system of noble titles: the prince and the duke.
The aristocracies of Europe have a wide range of variations in their composition, nomenclatures and customs, but there are also certain similarities across the Continent—for example, most have some form of the titles ‘prince’ or ‘duke’, both deriving from Latin words for command or leadership. There are exceptions, like in Germanic and Slavic languages, which use non Latin-based words, but with similar meanings. Most European countries went through a period of monarchy at some point in their history, some briefly while others maintain it still, and all of these monarchies created a system of hereditary nobility to assist them at first in defending the country and later in governing as well. The base-level nobles, the vast majority, were called lords or barons, but those who were given greater responsibilities, usually in a particular region, were created ‘counts’ (earls in English) or viscounts (‘vice-counts’), from the Latin word for companion (comes). This system emerged about the time Europe was reorganising itself under the Carolingians (the family of Charlemagne) in the 9th and 10th centuries. Higher up the hierarchy still, members of the ruling dynasties were called ‘prince’ (from princeps, the ‘first one’), which indicated they shared some of the authority of the head of their family, the monarch. Princely status from its earliest emergence was therefore something that is given to all members of a ruling family, by right of birth, not merit or achievement. This issue came up again just this year, when people asked whether Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, could have his status as prince removed. Back in the age of the Carolingians, some princes were given larger territories to govern, as autonomous rulers, with the title ‘duke’ (from dux, or ‘leader’). Often these leaders were supplied by the tribal chiefs of the ethnic groups being incorporated into the wider Imperial whole, like the dukes of the Saxons or the Bavarians east of the Rhine, or the dukes of the Gascons in southwestern France. The German term for duke is herzog, loosely from heer and ziehen, ‘puller’ or leader of the fighting men. In Slavic languages a similar term is voivode, ‘war leader’.
For much of their history, the titles prince and duke were restricted to royalty or semi-royalty only. As Europe’s kingdom’s evolved into more centralised territorial bodies, dukedoms were still given to younger sons to rule as ‘junior kings’ in what are called apanage territories, and these could be ruled with a certain degree of autonomy, but ultimately remained part of the kingdom as a whole. Well known examples in France include the duchies of Anjou, Orléans or Burgundy, or in England the dukedoms of Cornwall, Lancaster and York, but similar apanages existed in most countries: the duchy of Styria for junior Habsburgs in Austria, the duchy of Coimbra in Portugal, the duchies of Halland and Södermanland in Sweden, and so on. This predominance of royal-only dukedoms started to shift in the fifteenth century, as certain magnate families established so much power they had to be recognised as power-sharers in their own right within the kingdom. There were non-royal dukes in Germany and Italy from the 13th and 14th centuries (Brunswick, 1235; Mecklenburg, 1348; Milan, 1395), and these maintained such a degree of autonomous authority that we might call them semi-royal anyway. The same is true in Russia and Poland, where the word kniaz can be translated as either duke or prince (and seems to be a derivative of the early Germanic word for king). But the western monarchies of France, Spain and England did not have their first non-royal dukes until much later.
Early French non-royal dukedoms were given to powerful semi-autonomous magnates such as the Count of Armagnac (Duke of Nemours, 1461), important Italian allies (Valentinois for Cesare Borgia, 1499; Nemours for the Medici, 1515), then for representatives of foreign dynasties settling in France (Cleves, Lorraine, Savoy), and finally for some ‘native’ French noble families (Gouffier, Brosse, Montmorency) by the middle of the sixteenth century who had strong connections, personal or by marriage, with the royal family. Across the Channel, for the Plantagenets, aside from the early anomaly of the ‘duke of Ireland’ (Robert de Vere, 1386, for life only), the first non-royal dukedoms were created for nobles with close blood relations with the royal family: Norfolk for Thomas de Mowbray, 1397; Buckingham for Humphrey de Stafford, 1444; Suffolk for William de la Pole, 1448. Only a handful were created in the Tudor era (restoring the Howards, and new dukedoms for royal favourites Charles Brandon, Edward Seymour, and John Dudley), so it was not until the 17th century that the numbers began to increase in England (and the first Scottish dukedoms as well), with a similar large-scale increase in France as well. Still, overall numbers of dukes in France or Britain were never more than 20 or so at a time (today there are about 25 in the United Kingdom, and about 40 in France).
a French ducal coronet
Looking further south, we see Spanish non-royal dukedoms emerging in the mid-15th century for grandee families like Luna, Guzman, Osorio, La Cueva, Alvarez de Toledo and Zuñiga. Portugal had only one non-royal dukedom this early, Bragança, and that was created for an illegitimate member of the dynasty (ie, his mother was not the queen), and Portugal never had more than a handful of dukedoms, royal or non-royal. In Spain, in contrast, by the 17th century, there was an ever-growing number of dukedoms (already about 40 by 1600), and, even more spectacularly, the kings of Spain began to reward loyalty in their overseas territories in Italy (Naples and Sicily) with dukedoms so these began to proliferate, literally into the hundreds by the 18th century.
To separate out some of these families, the higher title of ‘prince’ was introduced, but this too grew to exorbitant numbers in southern Italy until a principality came to mean little more than a particularly large feudal estate. In the Holy Roman Empire as well, a new title was introduced in the 17th century to distinguish certain grandee families, usually with strong connections with the Imperial court: there already were the territorial dukes (Saxony, Bavaria, etc), so instead these were called fürsts or ‘princes’—in German, a distinction can be made between the word prinz which generally refers to members of those older ruling families, and fürst, a ‘ruling prince’ (from the same root word as the German führer, leader) who is not royal and not a duke. Well known princely families like these include the Liechtensteins, Fürstenbergs, Dietrichsteins and Schwarzenbergs. Their ‘rule’ was only personal until they acquired a fief that was held from no other prince besides the emperor (known as an ‘immediate fief’) and they then were allowed to join the top governing body of the Empire, the Council of Princes which acted as the upper house of the Imperial Diet. Liechtenstein is the only one of these tiny immediate territories that survived into the modern age as a sovereign state, a principality, not a kingdom—and ironically, until the 19th century, the estates around the castle at Vaduz in the Alps were not really considered an important part of the family’s landholdings, which were mostly concentrated in Austria nearer to Vienna, or in Bohemia. A few of these non-royal princely titles were granted in the Habsburg-governed Netherlands as well, for the magnate families like Ligne, Epinoy, or Croÿ. The most famous prince in the Low Countries, the Prince of Orange, was of a different kind, however, as a ruler of a sovereign territory in southern France, not too far from another sovereign family, the Princes of Monaco (sovereign meaning at least nominally outside the control of any other power). These micro-sovereignties were mostly self-proclaimed, and sometimes their status was recognised by their larger royal neighbours, and sometimes they were not.
a princely crown from the Holy Roman Empire
So there are different kinds of prince, royal, non-royal, sovereign prince, imperial prince, and a very uneven distribution, from hundreds in Sicily, to none at all in England. France had almost no creations of non-royal princely titles, but those that were formed a peculiar category called the ‘foreign princes’, which included the dukes of Guise, princes of the House of Lorraine, and were the subject of my doctoral research. These families were considered to be princely because they were members of foreign sovereign dynasties, but their native titles had no legal standing within France—so all of them were granted dukedoms in France to maintain their elevated dignity and status, and, I would argue, to boost the prestige of the French court. French kings could point to their courtiers and show that they ruled over not only the subject nobility but also the higher princely clans of Europe—a sort of hearkening back to the ancient world’s concept of ‘king of kings’—and allowed them to compete in prestige with their rivals, the emperors in Vienna.
If you’d like to read a recent academic piece of mine on this topic, here is a chapter I published in Adel und Nation in der Neuzeit: Hierarchie, Egalität und Loyalität 16.-20. Jahrhundert, Martin Wrede and Laurent Bourquin, eds (Thorbeke Verlag, 2017)–don’t worry, it’s in English:
The chief difference between princely status and ducal status in most of these countries was in the differences of inheritance systems. All members of the house of Lorraine, for example, were princes and princesses by birth, but only the senior male in France was the duke of Guise. This reflects the two basic systems of inheritance and succession that operated in medieval and early modern Europe: partible inheritance and primogeniture. Germanic custom leaned more towards partible, that is equally divided, inheritance, so all children got a portion of their parents’ wealth: all of the children of a duke of Saxony were called duke or duchess of Saxony, though in terms of actually ruling, men were (no surprise) favoured. But this is why Germany so famously saw ever increasingly tiny dukedoms in the late middle ages, until primogeniture was imposed, often by force, in the early modern period. Primogeniture, in which the firstborn gets everything, had been the more favoured system in the Roman world, and gradually took hold in the Germanic kingdoms once it became clear that, while seemingly unfair to younger sons, avoided quite a lot of bloodshed, fratricide and civil war. Primogeniture mostly favoured males, and this is true for principalities and dukedoms as well as for royal thrones, but not always, and there are certainly instances where, in default of a son, a throne passes to a daughter, even if there male cousins—though this was almost always a source of strife and legal deliberation. At one end of the scale, German dukedoms never passed to a woman, and this is (mostly) true for England and France as well, though there are some exceptions. In these kingdoms, dukedoms were created, existed for a few generations, then became extinct through lack of a male heir. At the other end of the scale, Spain allowed for almost universal succession, so it is the one place in Europe where hereditary titles never become extinct, and certain aristocratic clans simply accumulate more and more, resulting in extreme cases like the Duchess of Alba, who died in 2014, and was the possessor of about 40 titles, eight of them dukedoms, the most titled person in the world according to the Guinness World Book of Records.
There are also a good deal of other variants in the two titles of prince and duke. Some dukes were deemed to be of higher status than others, so they were called ‘grand dukes’, first with the Medici of Tuscany in 1569—which annoyed the neighbouring dukes of Savoy and Mantua and Ferrara very much, whose ruling families saw themselves as older and grander, even if they had less wealth. Many more grand duchies were created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars: Luxembourg, Mecklenburg, Baden, etc. In keeping up with the Joneses, the Habsburgs wanted to ensure that everyone knew their dynasty was of higher rank than anyone else in Europe, so invented the title of ‘archduke’ for their sons and daughters in 1358. Because the language of eastern Europe makes duke and prince fairly interchangeable, the early rulers of Poland were called grand dukes or grand princes before they were fully recognised as kings at the end of the 13th century. The same is true for Russian grand princes of Kiev, Moscow, Vladimir, Tver and so on, until the line of Moscow adopted the title of tsar (‘caesar’ or emperor) in the 16th century. From this point, grand duke and grand duchess began to be used for all members of the Russian imperial family. All of the magnate families who could claim descent from the original rulers of the various Russian principalities began to use princely titles, and by the 19th century, these numbered in the hundreds. Other rulers in the east in the early modern era were referred to as prince or grand prince—Transylvania, Wallachia, Moldavia, Serbia—in part to show their simultaneous autonomy and subservience to a greater power, whether Byzantine, Ottoman or Habsburg. On the other edge of Europe, the title of prince was sometimes used by Celtic families in Ireland or Wales to indicate descent from a family that had been formerly sovereign before the coming of the English, for example the O’Donnell princes (or flatha) of Tyrconnell or the MacCarthy princes of Desmond. Some would say the title ‘prince of Wales’ used today is a bit of an insult to those princes of Gwynedd and Powys who were genuinely Welsh.
Besides the hereditary principalities and dukedoms, there were also those (rare) given for life only—as a reward for a great victory or peace accord—and there were those held by churchmen. Ecclesiastical titles originally were part of the means for making the church independent of the state, by allowing bishops to rule a particular territory and generate their own income, but later they became a means for honouring senior prelates. In France, the earliest of these were the ancient Frankish bishops who were central to coronation rituals: the archbishop of Reims was considered a duke and a peer of the realm (see below for what it means to be a peer), as were the bishops of Laon and Langres. Later (1674) the archbishop of Paris was similarly honoured with the title duke of Saint-Cloud, but it didn’t have the same sense of territorial rule over the lands in his diocese. Imperial bishops started out with much the same powers, but as Germany increasingly decentralised (as opposed to France increasingly centralising) their powers as territorial rulers were strengthened and they became known as prince-bishops. The top three were the prince-archbishops of Cologne, Mainz and Trier, and they controlled vast territories in the Rhineland and central Germany as virtual sovereigns. Some of the largest of these territories were formally recognised as duchies: Bremen, Magdeburg, Würzburg (aka ‘duke of Franconia’), and Westphalia (ruled by the archbishops of Cologne). There were also several large abbeys that enjoyed princely status, such as Fulda or Corvey, and some for women, like Essen or Quedlinburg. Being a princess-abbess was just about the best job you could get if you were a woman in pre-modern Germany and you didn’t want to rule as simply a consort to a duke or prince. The main thing that connected all of these ecclesiastical princes was of course that they were non-hereditary (at least in theory; in practice some families treated them as their own personal fiefs, most notably the Wittelsbachs in Cologne).
The other thing that connects together all of the hereditary and non-hereditary princes and dukes, at least in the pre-modern world, was their formal role in creating their monarchs, and in holding them to account if necessary. These magnates were thus known as ‘peers’ in that they were equal (from pair in French) to each other, and in the early days of the history of monarchy, equal to the prince before his coronation (or sacralisation once the Church got involved)—they liked the use the phrase primer inter pares, the ‘first amongst equals’, to describe this semi-tribal tradition, and to remind monarchs that they were made and could thus be un-made. Those responsible for choosing or electing (or perhaps merely acclaiming) the monarch were called peers, formally codified into peerages in England and France, and only informally in Spain or Portugal (where they were called ‘grandees’), and they developed even further in the Holy Roman Empire into ‘electors’. By the mid-14th century there were seven electors in Germany, three sacred and four secular. Not all of these were dukes: only the elector of Saxony was a duke (and arguably the archbishop of Cologne), while the others were the king of Bohemia, the margrave of Brandenburg and the count palatine of the Rhine, though all of these ranked as territorial princes. In France, the original six lay peers entrusted with the coronation ceremony included three dukes (Normandy, Aquitaine and Burgundy), but also three counts (Flanders, Champagne and Toulouse), and when new dukedoms were created, they were also called peers (mostly; some were not), which did not affect the coronation rites, but it did reflect their other role which was to act as a supreme court for the Kingdom, as members of the Parlement of Paris. Similarly, in England, the peers of the House of Lords acted as a supreme court, a job they retained until 2005. Of course, there are a lot of peers in England who are not dukes (barons have been peers since the earliest days of the English peerage), which underlines that much of this history is imprecise and hard to put into firmly delineated categories.
Charles VII of France sitting with some of the Peers of the Realm in the Parlement of Paris
So to conclude this introductory essay, we can see that there are a lot of overlappings and variations of definitions, systems, practices. The peerage does not always mean the dukes; and the titles duke and prince are often overlapping (in fact, in the early modern period, most dukes in England are referred to as ‘high and mighty prince’ in formal documentation). This is why I am treating them together here on this website. There is quite a large chronological and geographical spread to be covered, so I have made some dangerous generalisations above. In England, there are generally only two kinds of dukes, royal and non-royal, though they can be divided into separate peerages for England, Scotland and Ireland. In Germany and Italy they can be ruling and non-ruling (like Mantua for the Gonzagas versus Bracciano for the Orsini). In France the scene is much more complex, with ancient dukes like Aquitaine or Burgundy wielding essentially sovereign (or ‘regalian’) rule, ancien-régime (that is, before the Revolution), dukes acting as peers in the Parlement, then Napoleonic, Restoration and Second Empire dukedoms being created mostly as purely honorific titles. And then there are the countries that have virtually no non-royal princely or ducal titles (like Denmark or Sweden), and those where princely and ducal titles run into the hundreds, like Russia or Naples. There is also a lot of confusing and sometimes contradictory information out there, so hopefully, I can help navigate these complexities to provide some interesting history!
This website is the product of many years of research, travel, conversation with friends, and so on. I first became obsessed with dynastic history when my family and I visited Innsbruck, Austria, in 1984 and I saw the magnificent tomb of Emperor Maximilian I — who was this guy? who were these ancestors?
I was hooked on the Habsburgs, wrote papers about them as an undergraduate, then wrote about their relatives, the princes of Lorraine for my doctorate. This sparked the idea that there was more to just studying kings and queens, or the nobility of one particular nation or other. I wanted to do a much broader comparative study of those who were not fully royal (kings, queens, emperors), nor fully ‘local’ nobility (barons, counts). There was an in between category, the dukes and princes, who could easily move between the courts of Europe and had an identity all their own.
each rank has its own style of crown
In addition to reading about all these families, I have continued in my initial desire to see the spaces in which they lived or were buried, so I have enjoyed many years of travel to locations all across Europe to visit country houses, palaces, or ruins. One of my favorite adventures was finding the Duke of Albemarle’s house in the remotest corner or Devon.
Great Potheridge, near TorringtonThe remaining south wing, now an outdoor activity center for young people
The blogs I write here will tell the stories of these families, from Spain to Russia, make comparisons, share photos of trips I have made to these properties, and so on. I hope you enjoy them!
Jonathan
Me and the Duke of Westminster’s carriage, Eaton Hall, Cheshire
Those knowledgeable about the dynastic details of the life of Queen Victoria will know that she had a half-sister, Princess Feodora. But her appearance in season three of the television series Victoria surprised many—at the time, I was asked if this was a fictional character added to make the series more interesting, as historical dramas often do. She was indeed a real person: one of two children born to Victoria’s mother from her first marriage to the Prince of Leiningen.
Princess Feodora of Leiningen, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, c1858 (Royal Collection)
Leiningen? What is it? It was one of several ancient counties of the Holy Roman Empire that was elevated to the status of an autonomous principality in the final years of the Empire’s existence, then was snuffed out in the re-shuffling of Europe’s political boundaries at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The family retained a princely rank, if no genuine sovereignty, all the way up to the fall of the German Empire in 1918. And because they were related to the British royal family, they forged several marriages of the highest order beyond the level of their peers. The other German princely family most associated with Princess Feodora was Hohenlohe—her husband’s family—and they too kept up relations with the British royal family, notably through Feodora’s third son Victor who came to live in the United Kingdom and served in the Royal Navy. But the Hohenlohes are part of a different story and will have their own blog post. The two half-siblings of Queen Victoria, Feodora and Karl of Leiningen, belonged to one of the most ancient noble houses of the Palatinate, the area of the Rhineland that was the political and economic core of the Holy Roman Empire from its earliest days.
cousins Ernst of Leiningen and Viktor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 1857, by Frederick Richard Say, now in the British Royal Collection
Leiningen Castle was built by a Count Emich in about 1100, in the area of hills west of the middle Rhine where the flat river plain meets the Palatine Forest (the Pfälzerwald), near the ancient episcopal city of Worms. The family also built about this same time a nearby abbey, Höningen, to serve as the family sepulchre. There is a record of an earlier Emich (or Amicho) who donated property in the Worms area to a local abbey in 782, and descendants were called the Emichonen (because many of them held this name), owning property in the mid-tenth century in the area known as the Nahegau (the valley of the river Nahe). Unlike most noble families, the date for their elevation to the rank of count is impossible to pinpoint, but they were certainly called counts by the time of another Emich, a leader of the First Crusade in the 1090s.
The origin of the family name is also not known for certain. It is possible the castle, and then the family, took its name from the Leinbaum, the lime tree growing on the banks of the Leinbach (now called the Eckbach)—and indeed, the older family coat-of-arms bore a lime tree. The area around their holdings became known as the Leiningerland.
a French map of the Middle Rhine, with the County of Leiningen (Linange in French) in pink between the bishoprics of Worms and Speyer, with ‘Old Leiningen’ at the far western end of the county
The first castle, now known as Altleiningen, endured centuries of conflict as armies marched up and down the Rhine, then was badly damaged in the Peasants War of 1525 and rebuilt in a newer Renaissance style. Destroyed again by French troops who ravaged the Palatinate in 1690, it was not rebuilt, and was used for building materials by local residents. It was still owned by the family in 1933 when it was acquired by the local government; in the 1960s Altleiningen Castle was partly rebuilt and used as a youth hostel. Today it is not only known for hosting a number of local festivals but also as a home for the largest colony of wild bats in Germany, sleeping in its ancient vaults.
the ruined Altleiningen Castle, 1854
In the twelfth century, the family added to its prestige in the typical way of many German noble families in this period, by obtaining prized episcopal seats for its sons: the middle of this century saw two bishops of Würzburg and two bishops of Speyer, the latter at that point still one of the core religious centres of the Holy Roman Empire. Through this connection, the counts of Leiningen were given more senior titles by the emperor, notably in 1205 that of Landvogt (district governor) of the Speyergau, the region around the city of Speyer.
The original line of counts died out in 1220—the last count’s sister Liutgarde married Simon II, Count of Saarbrücken. Saarbrücken was a larger county further to the west, in what is now called the Saarland (see Nassau-Saarbrücken), which passed to their eldest son, while their second son Friedrich took the name Leiningen and restarted the dynasty. Count Friedrich II was also known as a composer-performer of German songs, a Minnesinger.
Friedrich II, Count of Leiningen, from a 14th-century manuscript now in the University of Heidelberg; he bears the arms of the family: three silver eagles on blue
Friedrich inherited a castle, Hardenburg, built around 1205 a bit further to the south, on a bend in the river Isenach. It would become the senior branch of the Leiningen family’s main residence after 1560, until they moved to the town in the plains below, Bad Dürkheim (see below) after the ravages of the French armies in the 1690s. A further wave of French destruction did the rest in the 1790s, and the castle has remained a ruin since. Acquired by the state in 1820s, it is maintained today by the State of Rhineland-Palatinate.
the grand ruins of Hardenburg Castle today (photo Wolkenkratzer)
Friedrich’s son Simon of Leiningen married an heiress, Gertrude, Countess of Dagsburg (more on that below), but they had no children so both inheritances passed to his brother, Friedrich III. In about 1240, Friedrich built a new castle five kilometres from Altleiningen named Neuleiningen. This castle was completely destroyed by the French in 1690 and was not rebuilt.
the ruins of Neuleiningen around 1800
Other Leiningen castles built in this period, also ruins since the 1690s, include Battenberg Castle and Emichsburg in Bockenheim—the latter was a grander residence, of which some walls remain, having been incorporated into a local winery—the Leiningerland is one of the centres of the German wine country.
the old gateway from Emichsburg Castle
When Count Friedrich IV died in 1316, his domains were divided into the lines of Leiningen-Dagsburg and Leiningen-Hardenburg. The former was based much further to the south and west, in the Vosges mountains, along what was for many centuries the frontier between Alsace and Lorraine—though both were part of the Empire until the seventeenth century, and both Alsace and this eastern edge of Lorraine were German speaking.
The County of Dagsburg is a fascinating fragment of Imperial feudalism that persisted as an independent entity well into the modern age, until it was finally absorbed by France during the Revolution (and renamed ‘Dabo’ as it is called today). It is most famous for its huge pink sandstone rock (or rocher) that towers over the forested valleys of the Vosges mountains. Atop this rock (elevation about 650 meters) an ancient castle perched rather precariously, as does today the Chapel of Saint-Léon, named for Dagsburg’s most famous son, Pope Leo IX (Léon in French). Originally built by the local ruling family called the Ettichonids (or the House of Alsace) in the tenth century, the castle was probably named for a former Frankish nobleman called Dago (so ‘Dago’s Castle’ or burg).
Dagsburg Castle in the Vosges, sketched in the 1660s
the Rock of Dagsburg (Dabo in French) today, with its chapel of St Leo, built in the 1890s (photo Gzen92)
In the mid-eleventh century Dagsburg’s heiress, Heilwig, married an Alsatian count of Egisheim. Heilwig has several legends associated with her, including the discovery of holy relics in local monasteries and the performance of great miracles. She is also famous as the mother of Bruno of Dagsburg-Egisheim, Bishop of Toul from 1026, elected Pope Leo IX in 1049. A major church reformer (though his inflexibility led to the permanent break with the Eastern Church in 1054), he has been venerated as a saint since shortly after his death. The Pope’s older brother, Hugo, continued the line of counts of Dagsburg until its extinction in 1212 and its inheritance by Countess Gertrude. Gertrude is a fascinating historical person, an heiress and a poet, before she married Simon III of Leiningen, she was also a duchess and a queen, having survived two much more prominent husbands: first Thibaut I, Duke of Lorraine, and secondly Thibaut IV of Champagne, King of Navarre.
an imagined 17th-century portrait of Gertude of Dagsburg (wrongly labelled Agnes) with her first husband Thibaut de Lorraine
So Gertrude of Dagsburg was quite a catch for the Leiningers, and their augmented status continued to be enhanced in the next century with two more bishops of Speyer (Heinrich and Emich), a bishop of Bamberg, and, finally, an archbishop of Mainz: Gottfried von Leiningen-Dagsburg scaled to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Holy Roman Empire, and was also thus one of the seven imperial electors—though only briefly, from 1396 to 1397.
A further territory was added in 1344, a few miles to the west, across the crest of the Vosges: the County of Rixingen, or Ruxinge in French (many German place names ending in ‘ingen’ become ‘inge’ or ‘ange’ in French, including Leiningen itself, called Linange in French sources). Today the town is called Réchicourt, which is not a transliteration of Rixingen: the ancient Carolingian villa of ‘Richis Curtis’ became Réchicourt, while the Frankish village below was Ruadgisingen or Rixingen. Situated in the upper reaches of the river Saar, this was for centuries on the linguistic border between French and German. Its twelfth-century castle would be destroyed in 1469 in a conflict with the powerful Duke of Lorraine; later rebuilt in Renaissance style, in the 1660s it was sold to the Ahlefelt family. In the late eighteenth century the county was held by the Duke of Fronsac (in the Richelieu family) though it remained firmly outside the jurisdiction of the King of France until the Revolutionary wars of the 1790s. The last of the line of counts of Leiningen-Rixingen demonstrates well the trans-national character of this branch in particular: Philipp Ludwig, who converted to Catholicism in 1671, grew up in Lorraine (at the time occupied by France) and at first served in the army of France, then after 1688 shifted to Imperial service, but also served on the Privy Council of the Elector Palatine. He was killed as an Austrian general at the Battle of Cassano, 1705.
Philipp Ludwig, Count of Leiningen-Rixingen, Imperial general
The senior line of counts of Leiningen-Dagsburg continued to move between the Rhineland and their possessions in the Vosges until 1467 when the last count, Hesso, died; the family’s principal heiress Margarete married a nobleman from across the Rhine, Reinhard III, Lord of Westerburg, from a junior branch of the House of Runkel. We will encounter Runkel again in another post as the Princes of Wied-Runkel. Their lordship of Westerburg was situated across the Rhine in the hilly region called the Westerwald. The castle dominates a landscape wedged between the estates of the electors of Trier and the counts of Nassau. Built in the 1190s by the House of Leiningen, it was held by the Runkels from about 1220, forming a separate branch soon after, then, from the 1550s formed a separate branch of a renewed house of Leiningen-Westerburg. The castle remains in private hands today.
Westerburg Castle (photo Oliver Abels, SBT)
A reborn and rebranded dynasty, Leiningen-Westerburg, with the bulk of the Leiningen possessions west of the Rhine, and the Westerburg castles and lordships east of the Rhine, would divide, re-combine and re-divide until the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. Many of the Westerburg lands passed out of the family in the mid-seventeenth century, so the two remaining branches in the eighteenth century were called Leiningen-Westerburg-Altleiningen and Leiningen-Westerburg-Neuleiningen. They remained counts, not princes, so are not covered in detail here, but they were given compensatory lands like their princely cousins in 1803 when their estates west of the Rhine were confiscated by the French: the secularised abbeys of Ilbenstadt and Engelthal in the Wetterau. Several branches died out in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the last male of this line dying in 1956. Some of these distinguished themselves as soldiers, notably Viktor, an Austrian Field Marshal Lieutenant (d. 1880), and his cousin Karl, a Hungarian freedom fighter, killed during the uprisings of 1849. In the twentieth century, Count Wilhelm of Leiningen-Westerburg-Neuleiningen (d. 1956) was a prominent chemist, forestry scientist and university professor.
Ilbenstadt, another secularised abbey for the Leiningen family in 1803 (photo Haral Gärtner)
One curious element about this split in the Leiningen family after 1316 and the extinction in the male line of the senior branch in 1467, was that both the new Leiningen-Westerburg family and the junior line—still ‘genuine’ Leiningers by patrilineal standards—kept the same arms, three silver eagles on blue, both marked by a three-point red label (since both were descended from a younger line of the House of Saarbrücken). The Westerburg branch quartered this with their own arms, a gold cross on red, with twenty smaller gold crosses.
the arms of Leiningen and Westerburg
Even though most of the old Leiningen territories went to the Westerburgs, the castle of Dagsburg passed back to the junior line based in Hardenburg. They also continued to acquire lands in and around the Duchy of Lorraine, like the lordship of Aspremont in 1466, in the Meuse valley, and the lordship of Weißenburg in Alsace (today’s Wissembourg). In my own research on the Duchy of Lorraine, I encounter these in the seventeenth century as ‘comtes de Linange’.
A further dynastic division in 1560 created the lines of Leiningen-Dagsburg-Hardenburg and Leiningen-Dagsburg-Falkenburg. The later were based at another castle deep in the Palatine Forest built on a rock of red sandstone and acquired by the family in about 1300. Entirely destroyed by the French in the 1680s, nothing remains of Falkenburg Castle. But by this point, these counts had moved to another castle, Heidesheim, closer to the main centres of Leiningen power, southwest of Worms, built in 1608. Another line settled further north in Guntersblum. These two lines came to an end in 1774, but two brothers, formerly excluded from the succession due to illegitimate descent, sued the main line of Leiningen and (surprisingly) won, re-creating two imperial counties in Guntersblum and Heidesheim, which persisted until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. Count Christian Karl of Leiningen-Dagsburg-Falkenburg-Guntersblum built a new Leiningen Palace in Guntersblum, in 1787—it remains a fine building, still privately owned.
the new Leiningen Schloss in Guntersblum (photo Jivee Blau)
Having only been re-established, these two tiny counties were overrun by the armies of revolutionary France in the 1790s, and both families fled (and Heidesheim Castle burned down); by a treaty between France and the Empire both were given lands in compensation in 1803, east of the Rhine: Guntersblum got Billigheim (formerly part of the lands of the Elector Palatine), while Heidesheim got Neudenau (formerly a fief of the Elector of Mainz). Both of these were almost immediately mediatised and joined to the new aggrandised Grand Duchy of Baden in 1806. These two cadet lines eventually died out, the last in 1925.
Meanwhile, in 1725, the main line of the family moved its main seat down from the mountain at Castle Hardenburg to the town of Dürkheim in the valley below. This was an ancient spa town, with several mineral springs. On the site of a Roman villa was an important medieval abbey (Limburg) and a mercantile town, acquired by the Leiningen family in 1554. Count Emich IX had already made the town the dynastic centre and built a new chapel there for the family necropolis in 1508. The town was destroyed by the French in the 1690s, so Count Freidrich Magnus rebuilt it and added a new residence for himself on the edge of town, Schloss Dürkheim, in the 1720s. This new baroque palace was soon augmented with formal gardens, completed by his son Karl Friedrich in the 1760s. He also added new wings, and converted one of these into a theatre open to the public, where several of his family members performed as amateurs. A few miles to the west, the counts built a smaller hunting lodge, Jägerthal, where the family resided in the summer months. But, as seems to happen a lot in this story, French armies invaded in the 1790s, with Schloss Dürkheim as a particular target since it had housed the commanders of the army of French noble émigrés, and both the city palace and the rural hunting lodge were completely destroyed. Neither was rebuilt, but in the nineteenth century, the town was developed into a spa town (and it changed its name in 1904 to Bad Dürkheim)—today its Kurhaus hosts a casino, spa and restaurant.
Schloss Dürkheim in 1787
From 1756, the head of the senior branch of Leiningen-Dagsburg-Hardenburg was Count Karl Friedrich, born in the new Schloss Dürkheim. He became a Chamberlain at the Imperial court and served the Elector Palatine on his Privy Council and as a lieutenant-general in his armies. In 1774, he inherited the lands of the Leiningen-Falkenburg branch (though as seen above, he later had to give them back), so in 1779, Emperor Joseph II augmented his status by elevating him to princely rank—though not fully autonomous like other Imperial princes: he had did not have an independent vote in the Diet, but voted as a member of the College of Counts of the Wetterau, the collective body at the Diet representing the high nobility of the Middle Rhine.
Karl Friedrich, 1st Prince of Leiningen
In the 1790s, as French revolutionary armies advanced towards the Rhine, they incorporated many German principalities into the expanding French Republic. The Prince of Leiningen lost his lands west of the Rhine, but according to the Treaty of Lunéville (1801), he was compensated, with lands taken from secularised ecclesiastical territories on the other side of the Rhine. A re-constituted Principality of Leiningen, created in 1803, was formed from lands east of the city of Heidelberg taken from a now secularised Archbishopric of Mainz—notably the Abbey of Amorbach, which became its capital—and from the Electoral Palatinate—including another former abbey, Mosbach—plus some smaller fiefs from the Bishopric of Würzburg to the east. Added to his princely title, Karl Friedrich’s other formal titles now included Count Palatine of Mosbach, Count of Düren, Lord of Amorbach and so on.
The Abbey of Amorbach was one of four grand abbeys established by the Frankish kings of the eighth century to help convert this region (Franconia). It was for a while an independent Imperial abbey, but by the tenth century was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Würzburg, then in 1656 transferred to that of the Archbishop of Mainz. The abbey church and its residence were rebuilt in the 1740s in a baroque style. In the 1780s, it was given a new organ, which remains one of the finest in the world. After 1803, the abbey church was given to the local parish (now Protestant) while the residence became the first seat of the princes of Leiningen. A few streets away, one of the archbishops of Mainz who had been born in Amorbach built a residence for himself there in the 1720s, and this became the preferred residence for the princes of Leiningen, and remains their private home today.
the former Abbey of Amorbach, with the princely residence to the right
on the edge of town, the Leiningen Palace of Amorbach, painted in 1857 (and the Catholic church of St Gangolf)
Having barely been created, the Principality of Leiningen was mediatised in 1806, and absorbed within the new Grand Duchy of Baden (today part of the state of Baden-Württemberg). After the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15, the former lands of the old County of Leiningen in the Palatinate—on the west bank of the Rhine—were given to the new Kingdom of Bavaria. Baden also ceded some of its territory, including Amorbach, to Bavaria. The 1st (and only independent) Prince of Leiningen died only a year later, in 1807. He was succeeded by his son, Emich Karl, who had long run the affairs of the family, particularly negotiating the delicate balance between French and Imperial politics.
Emich Carl, 2nd Prince of Leiningen
The 2nd Prince had married twice, both to women with later connections to Queen Victoria. The first was Countess Henriette of Reuss-Ebersdorf, from the curiously Pietist branch of that minor princely house from Thuringia, whose sister Augusta would become the grandmother of both Victoria and her husband Prince Albert. A year after their only child, Hereditary Prince Friedrich Karl, died in 1800, she also died. With no surviving children to sustain the newly created principality, the Prince married his wife’s niece, the much younger Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and they had two children, Karl and Feodora. He died in 1814, and his widow remarried the Duke of Kent in May 1818, giving birth to Princess Victoria of Great Britain and Hanover almost exactly one year later. For that first year of their marriage, the Duke and Duchess of Kent lived in the Leiningen Palace in Amorbach, so it is interesting to consider that the eminent British queen was conceived in Leiningen territory.
Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Dowager Princess of Leiningen, now Duchess of Kent (1818)
Queen Victoria’s elder half-brother, Karl, 3rd Prince of Leiningen, born in 1804, was educated in art and in law. Encouraged by the liberal outlook of the both the British royal family and the House of Saxe-Coburg, he took an active part in the reinvigorated political life of Germany, as a member of the Diet of the Grand Duchy of Baden, but also in the legislative body of the Kingdom of Bavaria (in which his seat, Amorbach, was located). In fact, he rose to the rank of President of the Bavarian Upper House in 1842, and lieutenant-general in the Bavarian Army. He had a reputation as a reformer, and an advocate for parliamentary government and limits to aristocratic privilege. So when a democratic movement swept across Europe in 1848, German liberals created a new central government based in Frankfurt, and in August, named Archduke John of Austria as ‘Regent’ and the Prince of Leiningen as First Minister (of the ‘Provisional Central Power’). Delegates to the Diet of Frankfurt appreciated the balance of a Catholic Archduke and a Lutheran prince, as well as Leiningen’s connections with the British establishment, hoping this could sustain their revolution. By September, however, Prussia defied the rest of the constituent states of this German confederation in making a separate peace with Denmark over the Schleswig-Holstein Question (ask Prince Albert to explain it), and Leiningen resigned as First Minister. By May 1849, the Austrian and Prussian delegates had abandoned the National Assembly in Frankfurt altogether and it dwindled away and died. The 3rd Prince also died, in 1856.
Karl, 3rd Prince of Leiningen
In his personal life, Prince Karl’s tastes also reflected his British connections: in 1828, he built a new princely residence in the forests southwest of Amorbach, the Odenwald. His father had developed a wildlife park here and built a small hunting lodge named Waldleiningen, after the forests of Leiningen his family had left behind. The new castle was built on a grander scale, in a romantic neogothic style, inspired by Abbotsford, the gothic novelist Sir Walter Scott’s country house in the Scottish Borders. In World War II Waldleiningen was converted into a hospital and today is run by the princely house as a private psychiatric clinic.
Waldleiningen, painted in 1863 by August Becker (Royal Collection)
Karl’s sister, Princess Feodora, born in 1807, was fully named Anna Feodora, after her maternal aunt, Juliane of Saxe-Coburg, who had married a Russian grand duke and adopted the name Anna Feodorovna. Feodora of Leiningen was raised and educated in Kensington Palace alongside her younger half-sister Victoria, by their beloved German governess, Baroness Lehzen. In 1825, she was courted by a young man still trying to figure out his place in the British royal family: Augustus d’Este, the son of the Duke of Sussex and Lady Augusta Murray, whose marriage was seen as legal in some circles, but not recognised by the royal family, so the boy’s attempts to call himself ‘Prince Augustus’ were scorned, and his pleading letters to Princess Feodora—which you can see in the National Archives at Kew—got him nowhere. Another suitor was the Duke of Nassau, head of the newly augmented House of Nassau-Weilburg. This match would have made Feodora a sovereign duchess, but according to most narratives, her mother the Duchess of Kent was concerned about any hint of overshadowing her half-sister the future queen, so in 1828, when she was 21, Feodora (sometimes spelled Feodore by the family) was married to a prince, but a very minor one: Ernst I, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. He was a cousin of Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen, Duchess of Clerence (soon to be Queen Adelaide), who facilitated the match. Hohenlohe, like Leiningen, was an ancient imperial county that had been elevated to full princely status in the eighteenth century (slightly earlier, in 1744), then mediatised and absorbed into its larger neighbour, the Kingdom of Württemberg. Its lands were further east than Leiningen, in the borderlands between Württemberg and Bavaria, notably its main princely seat, the castle of Langenburg, where Feodora lived out the remaining years of her life, raising six children, and corresponding frequently with Queen Victoria. She visited Britain a number of times, notably at her half-sister’s coronation in 1838.
Princess Feodora of Leiningen in 1818, George Dawe (Royal Collection)
Continuing the line, Princess Feodora’s nephew, Ernst, 4th Prince of Leiningen, was born at Amorbach and spent much of his childhood here or at the British court. In 1849, he joined the British navy, and served all over the world, notably in Burma and the Crimea. Given the rank of captain in 1860, he commanded Her Majesty’s Yacht Victoria and Albert. In 1863, he was suggested to take up the throne of the Kingdom of Greece by the British government (as an alternative to Victoria’s son Prince Alfred, which the Great Powers rejected), but he declined. Years later there was even a suggestion he could become Duke of Lorraine in 1890, in an effort to stabilise that region annexed by the German Empire—this would have been an interesting return of the House of ‘Linange’ to that region, heirs to the Rock of Dagsburg. By that point, Ernst had retired from the Royal Navy with a rank of Admiral (from 1887), having served as Commander-in-Chief of the Nore (the Thames Estuary and Medway), 1885 to 1887. He certainly kept up family ties with Britain, with both his children, Alberta and Emich, born at Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s summer residence on the Isle of Wight. Ernst paid attention to his duties as a German prince too, marrying Princess Marie of Baden in 1858, attending sessions of the upper houses of the diets of Bavaria and Baden, and improving his estates, notably converting poorly developed agricultural lands into forestry (in the Odenwald). He died in 1904.
Ernst, 4th Prince of Leiningen
Emich, 5th Prince of Leiningen, has a much smaller profile, and spent most of his career in Germany, tending his estates, and serving in the Prussian army. In 1894, he married his second cousin, Princess Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, and they had several children (the eldest son, Emich Ernst, was killed in the First World War on the Western Front in March 1918 at age 22). The Prince managed to secure his inheritance in 1925 (at a time when government pressure was trying to break up the large aristocratic estates), then drifted to the right and joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He died six years later, on the eve of World War II.
Emich, 5th Prince of Leiningen, and Feodora of Hohenlohe-Langenburg
The 6th Prince, Karl, also joined the Nazi Party and served in the war that broke out just as he assumed headship of the family. He was taken prisoner by the Soviets and died in the USSR in 1946. Interestingly, he had married a Russian princess, Grand Duchess Maria Kirillovna, back in 1925. And she was not just any Russian princess who had survived the Revolution, but the sister of Grand Duke Vladimir, who, since 1938 had claimed the throne of the old Russian Empire. A further connection with Great Britain was reinforced as well: her mother was Princess Victoria Melita of Saxe-Coburg, daughter of Prince Alfred and thus granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Grand Duchess Maria Kirillovna of Russia in 1925
This re-connection to the senior royal families in Europe (regnant or deposed) was re-asserted even further in the next generation: the eldest son, Emich Kyrill (7th Prince of Leiningen), married Duchess Eilike, daughter of the Grand Duke of Oldenburg; Prince Karl married Princess Marie Louise, older sister of King Simeon II of Bulgaria; Princess Kira married Prince Andrew of Yugoslavia; and Princess Margarita married Friedrich Wilhelm, Prince of Hohenzollern (head of the Swabian branch of that family). An even longer-term impact was that the eldest son of Emich and Eilike, Prince Karl Emich, would be named by the Monarchist Party of Russia in 2013 as head of their movement to reclaim the throne of Russia. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves a bit.
The 7th Prince of Leiningen, a businessman in postwar West Germany, kept much of the family fortune together until his death in 1991. That same year, he had disinherited his oldest son due to an unequal marriage (though hardly a commoner—a member of the extended Thyssen business clan, and later after a divorce, the second wife of the 4th Aga Khan), and so the succession passed to his younger brother, Andreas (b. 1955), who today is the 8th Prince of Leiningen. Andreas had certainly satisfied the requirement to marry a princess through his 1981 marriage to Princess Alexandra of Hanover, sister of the current head of the House of Hanover. Their son the Hereditary Prince, Friedrich (b. 1982) did the same, marrying Princess Victoria Luise of Prussia, though they only have two daughters, so in the future the headship of the House of Leiningen will pass to Prince Hermann (b. 1987) or his son Prince Leopold (b. 2019).
Andreas, 8th Prince of Leiningen and his wife, Princess Alexandra of Hanover
Meanwhile, Prince Karl Emich and his third wife, Countess Isabelle von und zu Egloffstein, were invited to occupy a nebulous throne by the Monarchist Party of Russia in 2013. This group adheres strictly to the Pauline Laws of succession in Russia, saying the throne (or claims to it) cannot pass to a woman, thus denouncing the claims of the Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna and her son Yuri, who have claimed to be heads of the House of Romanov since 1992. Karl Emich is a great-great-great-grandson of Tsar Alexander II, and although he also descends via a female (his grandmother Maria Kirillovna), his supporters deem him ‘more acceptable’ than Maria Vladimirovna since they consider her parents’ marriage to be unequal. The Prince of Leiningen converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Nikolai Kirillovich Romanov or ‘Nicholas III’. Since then, the MPR has tried to acquire some land it can declare sovereign, over which their ‘Russian Imperial State’ can rule—apparently trying to acquire land in Russia itself, or Montenegro or offshore in the Mediterranean…or even as far off as the Gambia or Kiribati in the South Pacific. The Prince has a son and heir, Emich Albrecht, born in 2010.
Prince Karl Emich of Leiningen, claimant to the Russian throne, in 2014 (photo Anton Bakov)
Though there are now two princely lines established, with strong connections to the royal houses of Germany and Russia, the likelihood of either the Sovereign Principality of Leiningen or the Russian Empire or the being reborn is slight. Nevertheless, the Leiningen story is a good example of how a family dispossessed of its ancient lands can rebuild again using the strong connections of a half-sister of Queen Victoria.
Shortly after his marriage to his first cousin, Princess Henrietta of England, in March 1661, Philippe de France, second son of Louis XIII and younger brother of Louis XIV, was given the Orléans apanage (for its earlier history, see Part I). Philippe had, as Gaston had before him, been known as Duke of Anjou, but just as a courtesy title. He was now formally Duke of Orléans, Duke of Chartres and Duke of Valois. Louis XIV restricted his brother’s access to the full wealth of the apanage however, by keeping the castles of Blois and Chambord for the Crown. Later Philippe’s apanage was augmented (at the time of his second marriage in 1671) with the Duchy of Nemours, and eventually (though many years later) he inherited significant properties from Gaston’s daughter, La Grande Mademoiselle, notably the Duchy of Montpensier and the Principality of Joinville—these latter two were not part of the apanage, but held as private property (ie, they could pass to a daughter or could be sold).
Philippe de France, Duke of Orléans, known as ‘Monsieur’ as brother of the King
Philippe, Duke of Orléans, is different to his predecessors in that he had very little to do with the Orléannais. He did build the Orléans Canal, connecting the Loire to the Seine (via the Loiret) in the 1680s, but his life was lived almost exclusively at court or his preferred residences: the Palais-Royal in the heart of Paris, or the Château of Saint-Cloud on the road towards Versailles. The former was initially the grand palace built close to the Louvre by the First Minister of Louis XIII, Cardinal Richelieu, in 1629, so was known as the Palais Richelieu. After he died in 1642, it was taken over by Queen Anne and her two little boys, Louis XIV and Philippe, as a more comfortable residence compared to the old fortress of the Louvre. Renamed the Palais-Royal, it was given as a residence to Philippe after he married in 1661, then added more completely to his apanage in 1692—it thus remained part of the Orléans patrimony until the middle of the nineteenth century. Since the proclamation of the Third Republic it has housed various government institutions, notably the Council of State as well as the Ministry of Culture, which is appropriate since once wing still houses the Comédie-Française, which, in one form or another, has existed here since the Duke of Orléans installed the theatre troupe of Molière in the 1660s.
the Palais Royal in Paris, residence of the dukes of Orléans from the 1660s to the 1840s (today the seat of the Council of State)
The Château of Saint-Cloud, initially built by the Gondi family of Florentine bankers on the outskirts of the city of Paris, it was purchased for Philippe by Cardinal Mazarin in 1658. It became his pride and joy, and the focus of his herculean patronage efforts in the 1670s-80s. Perched high above a bend in the river Seine, its chief glory was a grand waterfall called La Cascade, which is the only part of Saint-Cloud to remain visible today. Inside the château was a golden chamber where Philippe received guests, a gallery for Chinese porcelains and Japanese lacquers, and even a hall of mirrors, built several years before the more famous hall of that name at Versailles. Unfortunately, the Château of Saint-Cloud burned down in the turmoil at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
the chateau of Saint-Cloud, by Allegrain, with its famous Cascade down to the Seine
If Philippe wanted to go further afield, unlike Gaston he did not go south to the Loire valley, but north to his Duchy of Valois and its chief château, Villers-Cotterêts. Built as a royal castle by François I in the 1530s on the site of an old hunting lodge, it was the site of a significant edict, in 1539, by which the King decreed that French, not Latin, would henceforth be the language of government and law. In 1661, it was given to Philippe as part of his apanage, and he spent much time here in the time of his first marriage to Henrietta of England, particularly at times when he left the court to protest against a decision made by his brother the King. Villers-Cotterêts remained in the Orléans family until the French Revolution when it was confiscated and given over for use by the French army, then in the nineteenth century was used as a home for the poor, and later a retreat for the elderly. This lasted until 2014 when the building was basically abandoned and was left to rot, until the French president established a Cité Internationale de la Langue Française—to commemorate the edict of 1539—and re-opened a renovated palace in 2023.
the chateau of Villers-Cotterêts in the 18th century
The Duke of Orléans had a huge apartment at Versailles as well, adjacent to the central core apartments of the King and the Queen. Known simply as ‘Monsieur’ as the brother of the King, Philippe was known as a prince who was loyal and fun, even frivolous and scandalous due to his fairly open sexual preference for men and his long-term relationship with the Chevalier de Lorraine. But he could be serious and reliable, offering support and counsel to his brother when needed on issues of court etiquette and proving himself as a commander on the battlefield, notably at the Battle of Cassel in Flanders where he defeated the Prince of Orange in 1677.
Philippe also did his duty in terms of the dynasty. He had a male partner for over thirty years, the Chevalier de Lorraine, but married twice, both for diplomatic reasons, and produced seven healthy children. His first wife was Henrietta, sister of the King of England, and his second was Elisabeth-Charlotte, daughter of the Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Naturally his focus was on having a son, to pass on the Orléans apanage. Philippe-Charles, Duke of Valois, was born in 1664, but died 2½ years later. Another Duke of Valois was born in 1673, Alexandre-Louis, followed by a second son, Philippe-Charles, called the Duke of Chartres, in 1674. Valois died in 1676, but Chartres survived, and as Philippe II, succeeded his father as Duke of Orléans in 1701.
**
A new House of Orléans was born—the first since the fifteenth century—and survived and thrived throughout the eighteenth century as the second royal family of France. Thanks to the work of Philippe I, a financial empire had been created that allowed them to be autonomous from the French Crown, a factor that irked their cousins Louis XV and Louis XVI.
From 1709, the Orléans princes added a new title: ‘First Prince of the Blood’. This was not given to Philippe II, since he already held a higher rank, ‘Grandson of France’, but to his son, Louis, born in 1703, and as his father had been, titled Duke of Chartres. This elevation in status meant that the Prince of Condé no longer held the prestigious title (and its pension) of ‘First Prince of the Blood’, and these two branches of the royal family, Bourbon-Orléans and Bourbon-Condé, would be rivals for the rest of the century. This rivalry was fiercest early on, when Philippe II was named Regent of France in 1715, in charge of the government during the minority of Louis XV (born in 1710), and Condé (known by his secondary title Duke of Bourbon) was given a seat on the Regency Council, but also looked after the King’s household as Grand Master of France. The two men were also brothers-in-law, both having married illegitimate daughters of Louis XIV. The Regency of the Duke of Orléans was a period of experimentation in government, mostly unsuccessful, though the King kept him on as First Minister when the Regency formally ended in 1722. When Orléans died in 1723, he was succeeded in this role by the Duke of Bourbon, who swiftly undid most of his rival’s policies, particularly in foreign policy.
Philippe, 2nd Duke of Orléans, Regent of France, with his son the Duke of Chartres
For Orléans had not only solidified the King’s position abroad by arranging a marriage with the daughter of the King of Spain, he also ensured that the House of Orléans shared in this glory, by sending two of his own daughters to wed Spanish princes. Despite loathing his wife, Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, from the very start of their marriage (he called her ‘Madame Lucifer’), Philippe II had seven healthy children. Aside from the son and heir noted already, the eldest daughter ‘Mademoiselle’ (as the eldest unmarried daughter of the cadet line was always known) had been married to Louis XIV’s grandson, the Duke of Berry, while ‘Mlle de Valois’ was sent abroad to marry the Duke of Modena, before ‘Mlle de Montpensier’ and ‘Mlle de Beaujolais’ were sent off to Spain in 1723 to marry Crown Prince Luis and his brother Infante Felipe. The Crown Princess, Louise-Elisabeth, became Queen of Spain briefly in 1724, but due to her husband’s sudden death and her universally loathed behaviour, she (and her sister) were sent back to France, like unwanted packages. Once Louis XV began having children of his own, the children of the House of Orléans would return to their secondary position, as princes of the blood with the style of ‘Serene Highness’.
Luisa Isabel de Orleans, Queen of Spain (for seven months)
The new Duke of Orléans, Louis, was of a very different character to either his intellectual father or his vivacious grandfather. He seemed to have inherited some of his grandmother Madame de Montespan’s headstrong passions: as a young man he loved and he fought with vigour, not always forethought, and in middle age, he threw himself completely into a life of religious contemplation, retiring from the world of the court and becoming known as the ‘Hermit of Sainte-Geneviève’ (the abbey near the Latin quarter in Paris). Louis ‘the Pious’ had a short marriage to a German princess, Jeanne de Bade (Baden), which produced one child, a son, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Chartres (b. 1725).
Louis, 3rd Duke of Orléans
Louis-Philippe, 4th Duke of Orléans, succeeded to this title in 1752. When he came of age in 1740, he had initially been proposed as a groom for Louis XV’s second daughter, Madame Henriette, and the teen-aged couple had even displayed real affection for each other; but it was decided that such a marriage would emphasise the Orléans cousins too much as potential heirs to the French throne and antagonise strained relations with Philip V of Spain. So the prince was married instead to another, more distant, Bourbon cousin, ‘Mlle de Conti’, in 1743, in an effort to heal the breach between the Orléans and Condé/Conti branches of the family. This marriage was not more successful than his grandparents’ had been, and they produced only two children, Louis-Philippe II, Duke of Chartres, and Bathilde. Orléans revealed his attachment to the ideas of the French Enlightenment through the education of these children, and in 1756 they were made examples of for the entire court by being inoculated for smallpox. Orléans was also an ally of his brother-in-law, the Prince of Conti, an influential member of the ‘loyal opposition’ to the King’s inclinations towards continued absolutism rather than the fresh political ideas of the era.
Louis-Philippe I, 4th Duke of Orléans
The 4th Duke of Orléans set out to expand the already vast Orléans empire, adding the county of Soissons to his apanage in 1751, and the nearby lordships of La Fère, Marle and Ham in Picardy. Like his great-grandfather, he increased his revenues by developing a waterway, the Ourcq Canal, to bring supplies and fresh water to Paris from his duchy of Valois; and developed the area around the Palais-Royal in Paris for commercial enterprise. His wife died in 1759, and the widowed Duke settled far from court at a large château he purchased in the countryside east of Paris, Le Raincy. This château had been built in the mid-seventeenth century and owned by the Princess Palatine (Anne de Gonzague) then her daughter the Princess of Condé. The Duke of Orléans now redesigned the château and developed its gardens in the newly fashionable English style.
the chateau of Le Raincy in the 17th century
Orléans moved here with his mistress, the widowed Marquise de Montesson. They forged a committed relationship and the King agreed to their marriage in 1773, as long as it remained secret and she was not given any rights or titles. The Duke was mocked by members of high society, who quipped that “unable to make Madame de Montesson a Duchess of Orléans, he made himself Monsieur de Montesson”. The new couple acquired yet another château, Sainte-Assise, southeast of Paris on the road to Fontainebleau. Here the Duke put on great entertainments for his guests, with plays written and acted by the Marquise. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette refused to visit what they saw as a shocking set up, which further distanced Orléans from his support of the Crown. This château has survived, modified, passing through many hands until it was owned by the princes of Beauvau, but since the 1920s property of a radio broadcasting company.
the chateau of Saint-Assise in 1921
The Duke of Orléans was already annoyed with the royal family since he had tried to negotiate a marriage for his son with Princess Kunigunde of Poland in 1769, but was blocked by the King who thought that Chartres was not of sufficient rank to marry the daughter of a king. The Duke arranged instead a wedding to the daughter of the Duke of Penthièvre, a Bourbon, but from an illegitimate branch. Members of the court mocked him again, scorning this marriage as a mésalliance. A convincing factor was of course the bride’s vast fortune: a dowry worth about four million livres in real estate, and some of the finest châteaux of the Loire valley.
The union of two of the grandest fortunes in France, Orléans and Penthièvre, in 1769, ensured that the family could act independently of the Crown, and both the Duke of Orléans and the Duke of Chartres shocked the court by signing a letter of protest against the King’s plans to dismiss the parlements of France in 1771—along with several other princes of the blood, they were exiled from court. The Palais-Royal became a focal point for political discontent against the troubled regime of Louis XV.
Louis-Philippe II d’Orléans as Duke of Chartres, with Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre and two of their children (including the future King Louis-Philippe)
As a new reign began in 1774, the Duke of Orléans retreated to the Château de Sainte-Assise with his wife, Madame de Montesson. The Duke of Chartres, named formally Louis-Philippe II but referred to generally as Philippe, was also socially isolated, despite his early friendship with Marie-Antoinette and the bright young things at court. Like them, he too accumulated debts through lavish living and grand patronage of artists and architects. One of his early projects was the pleasure gardens at Monceau, on the northern edge of Paris. This ‘fantasy park’ brought together elements from around the world: a Chinese pagoda, an Egyptian pyramid, a Roman colonnade, a Dutch windmill… The Duke’s servants walked around the park dressed in Chinese costume or as animals. He later added a large rotunda, the Pavillon de Chartres, with offices on the ground floor and an apartment above for himself and his mistresses.
the Duke of Chartres’ pleasure gardens at Monceau
Meanwhile Chartres was raising two families. With his wife Marie-Adélaïde (the former ‘Mlle de Penthièvre’), he had a son, Louis-Philippe III, Duke of Valois, in 1773, followed by another, Antoine-Philippe, Duke of Montpensier, in 1775. These boys were followed by twin girls in 1777, Mlle d’Orléans and Mlle de Chartres, and then another son, Louis-Charles, Count of Beaujolais, in 1779. The Duke was also raising two foundling daughters with his mistress, the Comtesse de Genlis, a niece of Madame de Montesson who had been appointed as a lady-in-waiting to his wife. The more well-known of these daughters, Paméla, was officially an orphan, but may have been Chartres’ child. All the children were raised together, with Madame de Genlis as their governess. She already had a reputation as an educationalist; her aim was to mould the young princes with values of humility and public service. They read Voltaire and Rousseau, and she encouraged them to gain confidence and poise through theatre—she even published an educational tract on this theme, amongst her other works on the education of princes and of women.
a popular engraving of the famous Madame de Genlis at her writing desk
Madame de Genlis’ focus on educating young women had the most impact on Mlle d’Orléans, Adélaïde, who became a respected intellect as an adult; she never married and remained a constant figure at the side of her brother Louis-Philippe well into the nineteenth century. Paméla went abroad during the Revolution and married Lord Edward Fitzgerald, a leader of the Irish Revolt of 1798, during which he was arrested and died in prison.
The Duke and Duchess of Chartres lived mainly at the Palais-Royal in Paris and sometimes at their suburban residence the Château of Saint-Cloud. But Saint-Cloud had been neglected, and just before he died in 1785, the old Duke of Orléans sold it to the Crown. The new 5th Duke of Orléans was able to use these funds therefore to focus his attentions on expanding the gardens at his father’s favoured country retreat, the Château of Le Raincy. Already the most English of the Bourbon princes, Philippe d’Orléans refashioned the gardens along the latest English styles. He even built a small café for visitors in which the waiters spoke English. He also had a new English mistress, the well-known socialite Grace Elliott. Ever the anglophile, the prince spent a good deal of time in London, with a house on Portland Place, living incognito as the ‘Count of Joinville’. He desired nothing more than to live as a ‘Milord Anglais’, investing in business, betting on horses at Newmarket, and gambling with his old friend, and fellow liberal, Charles James Fox.
Philippe, 5th Duke of Orléans
With two families and expensive building projects, Orléans thus needed employment. As part of his marriage arrangements with the daughter of the Duke of Penthièvre, Admiral of France, it was understood that Philippe would embark on a naval career and ultimately succeed his father-in-law in this prestigious post. He had begun service in the navy in 1772, served in a few campaigns, and by 1778 was a junior admiral. But that summer he made a crucial command error during the battle of Ouessant (‘Ushant’ in English) off the coast of Brittany that allowed the British navy to escape. He was not given another command, further alienating him from Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
By the mid-1780s, Orléans had a significant political faction of his own, supporting opponents of the Crown known as the ‘Patriot Party’. In 1784, he allowed a banned play, ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ to be put on at the Comédie française, the theatre supported by him at the Palais-Royal. He took part in the Assembly of the Notables in 1787, where he protested against the Crown’s fiscal proposals and called for an Estates General. The King clashed violently with his cousin the Duke, publicly, in Parlement: when the Duke questioned the legality of a new law being presented, the King shouted ‘It is legal because I wish it!’ Orléans was once again forbidden from appearing in Parlement, and two of his supporters were arrested. In the winter of 1788-89, the Palais-Royal hummed with activity, printing pamphlets to agitate the public.
As Revolution broke out in Paris in the summer of 1789, the Palais-Royal remained the nerve centre for popular radicalism, where cries for reform became ever louder. The Estates General proclaimed itself a National Assembly on 20 June, and most of the clergy defied the King by joining it on 25 June, followed the next day by nearly fifty nobles—led by Philippe, Duke of Orléans, First Prince of the Blood. He was soon asked to preside over that body, but refused. He also rejected—at least publicly—calls to name him Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom or regent for the Dauphin, or even king himself. Orléans at first tried to act as a mediator between the Assembly and his cousin the King, but was pushed away by the court. The King sent him as a diplomatic envoy to Great Britain, where he tried to use his popularity in high society in London to forge a career as international diplomat. By mid-1790 his popularity in Paris was fading as the revolution radicalised and anyone with connections to the Old Regime, no matter how liberal their personal politics, became suspect. Many found it suspicious that much of his private fortune had been moved into British banks and investments.
Nevertheless, the Duke of Orléans continued to demonstrate his devotion to the Revolution. He joined the Jacobin Club, and after the King’s attempted flight from France in June 1791, formally asserted his loyalty and again dismissed ideas of making him regent or king. He even changed his name: after the proclamation of the Republic in September 1792 and his election as a deputy to the Convention, he took the name ‘Philippe Égalité’. His eldest son Louis-Philippe eagerly followed his father’s lead; he joined the Army of the North in the summer of 1791, and swiftly gained glory, notably at one of the first victories of the revolutionary armies at Quiévrain, April 1792. In January 1793, Égalité made his most powerful mark on the history of France by voting for the death of Louis XVI, and opposing any efforts to amend the sentence to exile or life imprisonment.
a loyal citizen of the French Republic
But only a few months later, the defection of General Dumouriez into Austrian service, prompted the start of the Terror. Crucially, Dumouriez had convinced Égalité’s son, the former Duke of Chartres, to go with him. This defection made it clear to the revolutionary government that no one of royal blood could be trusted. On 1 April 1793, a decree was passed in the National Convention that condemned to death anyone with connections to counter-revolution. Philippe Égalité had voted in favour, yet just seven days later, he himself was arrested and taken to prison. He was put on trial on 6 November and guillotined the same day.
The new (if nominal) Duke of Orléans, Louis-Philippe III, age 20, headed to Switzerland where he moved from place to place, teaching classes to earn much-needed money, then began several years of far-reaching—and rather extraordinary for a Bourbon prince—peregrinations in Europe and North America. After a year in Scandinavia in 1795, he travelled to the United States, settling at first in Philadelphia. Joined by his brothers Montpensier and Beaujolais, he spent time in New York City and Boston, and travelled as far as Tennessee and Maine. In early 1798, hearing that their mother had been deported from France, the brothers travelled south to New Orleans, the city named for their great-great-grandfather, the Regent Orléans, hoping to return to Europe. After a year, they finally made their way back and settled in Twickenham, in the western suburbs of London. Here they watched as the Napoleonic wars unfolded, maintained by the British government as potential political or diplomatic pawns.
Louis-Philippe III, Duke of Chartres, as a lieutenant-general in 1792 (the year before he became 6th Duke of Orléans)
In 1809 the Duke of Orléans journeyed to Sicily where he met and married his cousin, Maria Amalia, daughter of King Ferdinand IV. The marriage had been fiercely opposed by Queen Maria Carolina—the sister of Marie-Antoinette—who harboured great anger against the regicide Philippe Égalité, the groom’s late father. The new couple remained in Palermo, in a residence near the Royal Palace, the ‘Palazzo Orléans’, where three of their children were born before they finally returned to France in 1814. The Palazzo Orléans would remain an important Orléans residence until it was seized by the Italian state in 1940—today it serves as the seat of the president and the Regional Council of Sicily.
the Palazzo Orleans in Palermo today (photo How Rapid)
Sadly, neither of the Duke’s brothers survived the revolutionary period. Both Montpensier and Beaujolais had been kept in prison in Marseilles for several years after their father’s arrest, and both suffered long-term damage to their health. After their adventures in America, Montpensier’s health worsened and he died near Windsor in 1807; while Beaujolais, who had joined the British Navy in 1804, tried to improve his health by visiting the Mediterranean, but he too died, on Malta, in 1808. The Dowager Duchess of Orléans also survived the Revolution. Despite her disinterest in revolutionary politics, following her husband’s execution, the ‘Veuve Égalité’ had been brought back to Paris in late 1793 and imprisoned in the Luxembourg Palace; here she met and fell in love with a disgraced Girondin deputy, Jacques-Marie Rouzet, who later obtained Marie-Adélaïde’s freedom and lived with her in Paris until both were exiled in 1797. They resided first in Spain, then in 1809 joined the small Orléans court in Palermo, then returned to France in June 1814.
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At the Restoration of the French Monarchy in Spring 1814, Louis XVIII made every effort to reconcile the two branches of the royal family. The 6th Duke of Orléans, Louis-Philippe III, returned to France from Sicily with his wife and children. At first an eager supporter of his royal cousin’s regime, when Napoleon returned from Elba in March 1815, Orléans did not accompany the King and his court to Ghent, and instead established connections with the Bonapartist government. Thus the hereditary mistrust of the two branches was rekindled and continued to fester in the second Bourbon Restoration through minor but very public humiliations, like denying Orléans the use of the royal box at the Opera. Although an avowed liberal, Orléans was strongly attached to etiquette and hated being slighted socially, for example being treated as a ‘Serene Highness’ when, in comparison, visiting foreign princes from junior ruling houses like Bavaria and Saxony were now ‘Royal Highness’. When Charles X took the throne in 1825, he tried to balance this by decreeing that all princes of the blood would be Royal Highnesses.
Louis-Philippe, 6th Duke of Orléans, First Prince of the Blood, in the Restoration (1820s)
The Orléans family residence was re-established at the Palais-Royal in the centre of Paris, where Duchess Marie-Amélie was formally hostess. She had a relatively reserved personality, and society looked instead to the Duke’s sister, Adélaïde, ‘Mademoiselle’, as the real political hostess. She ran a salon attended by Parisian liberals and clashed with the senior women of the royal family. The Duke’s mother, the Dowager Duchess Marie-Adélaïde set about asserting her possession of the numerous properties she had inherited from her father, the Duke of Penthièvre. One of the major châteaux added to the Orléans holdings at this time was Amboise, in the Loire valley. Amboise, in Touraine, had been a royal property since Charles VII confiscated it from the powerful Amboise family in 1434. It had been part of the apanage of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, between the 1620s and 1660s, but was otherwise maintained as a royal, not ducal, property—associated probably the most with King Francis I and his invited Italian master, Leonardo da Vinci (who lived in the smaller château next door 1516-19). Gifted by Louis XV to his First Minister the Duke of Choiseul, and after his death purchased by the Duke of Penthièvre, it thus entered the portfolio of the dukes of Orléans. In the nineteenth century the family set out to restore it to its former glory, and the family foundation, the Fondation Saint-Louis continues to do so today.
the chateau of Amboise (photo Gzen92)
Besides the Dowager Duchess’s recouping of properties like Amboise, but also the Norman estates of Eu and Aumale, her most enduring contribution to the House of Orléans was the construction of a new site, the Royal Chapel of Saint-Louis, built at Dreux from 1816, a fantastic example of Neo-Gothic architecture, about an hour west of Paris. It became the necropolis for the Orléans family and a centre for royal ritual and memory—which it remains to this day.
the Chapelle Royale Saint-Louis de Dreux, the Orléans family necropolis (photo Renaud d’Avout)
The Orléans family also acquired a new country residence: the Château of Neuilly, in the western suburbs of Paris. Neuilly had been built in the 1750s and passed through various hands until it was bought by Marshal Joachim Murat in 1804 who expanded it then gave it to Napoleon’s sister Pauline in 1808. In 1819, the Duke of Orléans acquired the château and its extensive parklands for his summer residence. It remained a centre of Orléanism for the next three decades until it burned down in 1848 and its estate auctioned off. Part of it survives today as a convent.
Neuilly, the new Orléans family suburban residence, in 1836
Further afield Mademoiselle purchased a château of her own far to the south in rural Auvergne, Randan, which she rebuilt as a neo-gothic fantasy. This castle had been built by local lords in the thirteenth century who took the name ‘Château-Randan’, then passed to the Viscounts of Polignac, another Auvergnat family in the sixteenth century who rebuilt it in a Renaissance style. It passed to the La Rochefoucauld and Bauffremont families, under whom Randan was erected into a curious dukedom for mother and daughter (for whom there will be a future blog post), before it passed through several other ducal families: Foix-Candale, Caumont, Durfort and Choiseul. An heir to the later sold it to Mademoiselle in 1821. The Orléans family held on to the property until the 1920s when a terrible fire destroyed most of the building. An heiress took it to the Huarte family from Spain until the regional government purchased the ruins in 1999.
the ruins of Randan in the Auvergne (photo Domain Randan)
Meanwhile, the Duke of Orléans’ personal fortune had continued to grow. Already one of the richest men in France, he inherited the vast estates of his mother in 1821. Then in 1829, the last Prince of Condé made a will naming Orléans’ fifth son Henri his universal heir, bringing an even larger fortune into the collective arms of the House of Bourbon-Orléans. This included in particular the spectacular domain of Chantilly, north of Paris. An ancient lordship of the Montmorency family, Chantilly had been turned into a princely seat by the princes of Condé in the eighteenth century, famous notably for its stables built on a royal scale. Henri d’Orléans, created Duke of Aumale by his father, rebuilt the château entirely in the 1870s in a deliberately historicist style. When he died in 1897, Aumale donated the château and its estates to the Institut de France, which still owns it today. It maintains some of the finest elements of the Condé-Orléans art collections and a great library—a treasure-trove to historians of Bourbon history.
Chantilly, the Bourbon-Condé seat until 1830, then passing to the Bourbon-Orléans (photo by ignis)
In Paris, the Palais-Royal continued to buzz as a centre of Orléanism. It was the setting for a huge party in May 1830, just as a political crisis was brewing that would bring down the senior branch of the Bourbons just over a month later. Orléans made headlines by celebrating in style the visit of his brother-in-law, the King of the Two Sicilies. There were 3,000 guests, but there were also crowds shouting against the King’s new ultra-royalist ministry. When political events spiralled out of control for Charles X in July, the King attempted to preserve the throne by appointing the Duke of Orléans—his cousin and old friend from their far-off youth at Versailles, but by now on far ends of the political spectrum—as Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom, and hopefully as regent for his grandson, the Duke of Bordeaux. Louis-Philippe hesitated between accepting these proposals, or suggestions that he accept the French crown himself. His family was divided: his sister Adélaïde urged him to take the throne, against the views of his more conservative wife Marie-Amélie. Orléans himself was at the Château of Le Raincy, while the two women were both at Neuilly—so when the delegation from the provisional government came there, Adélaïde accepted the crown on her brother’s behalf.
Adélaïde d’Orléans, ‘Mademoiselle’ (1838)
Back in Paris, Louis-Philippe was unsure what to do following this ‘July Revolution’. He was very popular, as a moderate option between ultra-royalism, militant Bonapartism or radical republicanism. On 8 August the Chamber of Peers invited him not to be regent, but king, and he accepted. He chose the regnal name Louis-Philippe I, and adopted the title ‘King of the French’ (not ‘of France’) indicating that his throne came from popular sovereignty, not divine will or ancient conquest. He was officially proclaimed king by the French legislature at the Palais Bourbon on 9 August 1830. He was escorted during the ceremony by two of his sons, the dukes of Chartres and Nemours. A few days later, Chartres was re-branded as Duke of Orléans and ‘Prince Royal’—not Dauphin, another sign of the new approach for this ‘July Monarchy’.
Louis-Philippe leaves the Palais Royal in July 1830 to accept the crown
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The rest of the story of King Louis-Philippe is the history of the French monarchy rather than the dukes of Orléans—though it should be noted that several more conservative foreign royal families continued to refer to him as the Duke of Orléans, seeing him as no more than a usurper—so we should move on to his son and anticipated successor.
the large family of King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amélie
Prince Ferdinand-Philippe, born in Palermo in 1810, had been named for his grandfathers, King Ferdinand of Naples and Philippe d’Orléans. During the Restoration he had been educated in Paris and steered towards a military career. Once he became Duke of Orléans in 1830, Ferdinand swiftly became a quite popular prince, helping to put down a revolt of silk workers in Lyon without violence and visiting cholera patients in Paris. He earned military glory through his service in military ventures in Belgium (1831-32) and in three campaigns in the French conquest of Algeria (1835-36, 1839 and 1840). He was seen as a great hope for the future of Orléanism in France and therefore needed to marry and produce an heir. In 1836, Ferdinand went on tour to the capitals of Europe—Brussels, Berlin, Vienna—but did not find a suitable Catholic bride. The search was widened to include Protestant princesses with links to the ruling houses of Denmark or Prussia. Here the Duke of Orléans finally found his match, Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a niece of the King of Prussia. They were married in May 1837, in a civil ceremony at Fontainebleau since the Archbishop of Paris refused to preside over a wedding to a Protestant in Notre Dame Cathedral. They soon had two sons, Philippe and Robert, and set themselves up in the Tuileries Palace, where the prince established a large collection of medieval art and East Asian porcelains.
Ferdinand-Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Prince Royale, by Ingres (1842)
Just as things were looking rosy for the next generation of the House of Orléans, in July 1842, the Duke was injured in a carriage accident on the road to Neuilly and died several hours later. All of France went into mourning, and eventually several grand memorial statues were erected to his memory. Perhaps the most touching is the memorial on his tomb at the Saint-Louis Chapel at Dreux, finished only when his widow died in 1858; as a Protestant, Hélène could not be interred within the chapel, so her sarcophagus sits just outside, and her outstretched arm reaches through the wall for the hand of her beloved.
Ferdinand and Hélène buried side by side at Dreux (photo by Patrick)
There was already hope for the next generation, however. After 1842, the Duke of Orléans’ son, Philippe, became the ‘Prince Royal’, as heir to his grandfather. He was given the courtesy title ‘Count of Paris’, a deliberate re-assertion of the ancientness of the dynasty, one of the very first titles used by Hugh Capet before his rise to the French throne in 987. His younger brother, Robert, was given the title Duke of Chartres. There were also numerous other dynastic titles regularly seen in the House of Orléans, now in use for the King’s numerous sons and grandsons (Nemours, Joinville, Aumale, Montpensier, Penthièvre), and new ones added from the succession of the Prince of Condé (Guise, Alençon or Condé itself). Louis, Duke of Nemours would become head of the family after their father’s death in 1850 (since his nephews were children), while Henri, Duke of Aumale later became its intellectual head, as a historian and political writer. Antoine, Duke of Montpensier married a Spanish infanta and established a separate branch that meddled in internal affairs in Spain, and remains a part of the extended Spanish royal family today.
The Orléans monarchy fell in 1848. There would be no more formal dukes of Orléans, but the title was used again, as a ‘courtesy’ by later members of the family.
The previous Duke of Orléans’ son, Philippe, Count of Paris, died in 1894, he was succeeded as head of the royal family in exile by his son, Philippe, who took the title ‘Philip VIII’. Born in Twickenham in 1860, he returned to France with his family in 1871 at the fall of the Second Empire, but was exiled again by the Third Republic in 1886. In 1880, his father gave him the title ‘Duke of Orléans’, and sent him to complete his education at Sandhurst—he then served as a staff officer to Lord Roberts, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in India. In 1890 he came of age, and demanded he be allowed to fulfil his required military service like any young Frenchman. Instead, French officials arrested him and imprisoned him in the Conciergerie in Paris. But here he was well housed and well fed; he received high-ranking visitors and even carried on an affair with a Parisian dancer. He was soon pardoned and evicted from France, mocked by the French press for being such a pampered prisoner.
Philippe, Duke of Orléans, Orleanist Pretender to the French throne, 1910
While the family had resided in Paris in the 1870s, they lived at the Hôtel de Galliera in the fashionable faubourg Saint-Germain. This enormous hôtel particulier was built for the princes of Monaco in the 1720s and called the Hôtel de Matignon (the princes’ former surname before they adopted Grimaldi). Confiscated during the Revolution it was later given the Crown to the Orléans family, who eventually sold it to the Duke of Galliera (like the Grimaldi, from a family of Genoese bankers), whose widow then generously opened it up for the Count of Paris and his family (since they no longer owned the Palais-Royal). After her death it became the Embassy of Austria-Hungary, then was acquired by the French government for use as a residence of the head of government. Renamed Hôtel de Matignon, it still houses the Prime Minister of France.
Hôtel de Galliera, or de Matignon, today’s home of the Prime Minister of France
In 1886, when the news came that the Orléans family had to leave France, they were spending the summer at their preferred country residence, the Château of Eu. Like Chantilly and Amboise, Eu is one of the finest remainders of the glories of France’s country houses. It was built in the 1570s by the Duke of Guise on the site of an ancient fortress—watching over this area of the Norman coast since the tenth century. The Guise family passed it in 1661 to La Grande Mademoiselle (Gaston d’Orléans’ daughter, seen above), who was forced by Louis XIV to give it to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Maine. From Maine’s heirs it passed to the Duke of Penthièvre and thus back into the House of Orléans, along with its vast forests—a significant source of revenue for the family. It was the favoured country retreat of Louis-Philippe during the July Monarchy, and was where he received Queen Victoria and her family in a famous meeting of the monarchs that established an entente cordiale in 1845. From 1905 to 1940, it was the residence of one branch of the Orléans family who were also (by marriage) the claimants to the imperial throne of Brazil (Orléans-Bragance). Sold by their heirs in 1964 to the town of Eu, the château now houses a very grand Musée Louis-Philippe. Interestingly, some of the estate is still owned by the last Duke of Orléans (below) and his cousin.
the chateau of Eu (photo by Marc Ryckaert)
Eu, the arms of the Bourbon-Orléans and Braganzas of Brazil, with a royal and an imperial crown
Over the next two decades, the exiled Duke of Orléans became an explorer, notably in the Arctic, discovering new parts of northeast Greenland (‘Duke of Orléans Land’ and nearby ‘Cape Philippe’). Boatloads of stuffed wildlife were brought back to England and to his new residence in Worcestershire, Wood Norton. He was elected to the Royal Geographic Society in 1893. Just before the First World War, however, he moved to Belgium, to a residence dubbed the ‘Manoir d’Anjou’ at Putdaël, near Brussels. Huge dioramas of natural scenes had been created at his museum in Wood Norton, which eventually were donated to the National History Museum in Paris (the ‘Gallerie du duc d’Orléans’—built in 1928, torn down in 1959). Politically he had tried to keep Orléanism alive, but distanced himself from the far right wing monarchist party, Action française. The Duke of Orléans died in 1926 in the Orléans Palace in Palermo, Sicily. In 1896, he had married Archduchess Maria Dorothea of Austria, but they soon separated and had no children.
The headship of the House of Orléans passed to a cousin, whose son ultimately took over as Henri, Count of Paris. His second son Prince François was killed in Algeria in 1960 and was posthumously given the title of Duke of Orléans. A few years later, in 1969, the title was revived for the fourth son, Prince Jacques. Born in 1941 in Rabat in the French Protectorate of Morrocco, Jacques was the younger of a pair of twins. Michel, the older brother, was moved to a lower position in the order of succession by their father when he married a woman of unequal rank. Jacques married the daughter of a French duke, Gersende de Sabran-Pontevès, which was deemed appropriate—and the reversal of their birth order was confirmed by later heads of the family. It was said that the ducal title of Orléans was given as a snub to his twin (titled merely Count of Evreux), and in consequence, Jacques’ sons would be given higher ranking titles: Duke of Chartres (b. 1972) and Duke of Aumale (b. 1974). Prince Jacques also has a daughter who married the second son of the Duke of Mouchy (a Noailles).
Jacques, Duke of Orléans
In the 1990s, the Duke of Orléans led his siblings in a revolt against their father, in an attempt to block his sales of some of the family properties (and to raid the private fortune of his wife, their mother). Orléans would publish a tell-all book about it in 1999. At the time, the family still owned property worth about 15 million euros, including art and jewels, the Château of Amboise, and the domain of Dreux with the family necropolis. Other items had been sold long before, notably the Manoir d’Anjou in Belgium and the Palais d’Orléans in Sicily in the 1940s.
The current Duke of Orléans’ children are considered by Orléanist monarchists to hold the rank of ‘first prince of the blood’. Somewhat confusingly, those who support the Legitimists in case of a restoration of the French throne (the House of Anjou in Spain) consider instead that the head of this branch of the family, Prince Jean, is not the Count of Paris, but in fact the 13th Duke of Orléans, by right of primogeniture established by Louis XIV for his brother Philippe all the way back in 1661.
a modern representation of the power of the dukes of Orléans in the city of Orléans
France and England share a tradition of using a select group of ducal titles for their second sons—most often York for England and Orléans for France. But not always, since, in both cases, if the holder of the second son title had his own son it carried on into the next generation, so the Crown would turn to another title for the second son, like Gloucester in England or Anjou in France.
the traditional coat of arms of the second son of the kings of France
The most famous dukes of Orléans are those younger brothers of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, Gaston and Philippe, the latter of which founded a dynasty that continues to the present day (the House of Bourbon-Orléans). But the title stretches back much further into the history of the French monarchy as a dukedom, and even further, to the very foundations of the monarchy, as a county and a kingdom.
The Orléannais is one of the richest, most agriculturally productive regions of France, conveniently watered by the broad river Loire which also served as an efficient means to transport grains and grapes from France’s interior to its Atlantic ports. So it was a natural spot to base the centre of one of the early Frankish kingdoms under the Merovingians and Carolingians, and eventually became the prized possession and power base of the family that eventually unseated the Carolingians: the Capetians.
the Orléanais and the great bend of the Loire, with Paris at the top of the map
The city of Orléans itself is ancient, built at a good crossing spot on the Loire, so it developed into a trading centre for the people of Gaul, Cenabum, as far back as the second century BC. It was destroyed by Julius Caesar in 52 BC, then rebuilt several centuries later by the Emperor Aurelian (d. 275 AD), who renamed it after himself: Civitas Aurelianorum. By the Middle Ages it had become one of the three richest cities in France. Several important battles were fought here across the centuries, at this strategic crossing of the river: from Atilla the Hun versus the Franks and Visigoths in 451, to Joan of Arc versus the English a thousand years later in 1429.
a postcard of the crossing of the Loire at Orléans from the 1890s
The Merovingians and Carolingians divided and re-divided their Frankish kingdom into sub-kingdoms, including one based in Orléans, from the 510s until the reign of Charlemagne. Probably the most famous of these was Guntram, king of Orléans from 561-592, who ruled a fourth of the Kingdom, including much of the east (Burgundy). Two centuries later, Charlemagne reunited all of the various pieces of the Frankish realms, and granted the region of Orléans as a county to loyal Frankish generals. One of these, Odo (d. 834), was related to the royal family, and was a key support in their fight against the Viking invasions from the North Sea. Odo’s son Guillaume succeeded him as Count of Orléans, and his daughter Ermentrude became a queen, as wife of Charles the Bald, who later accused William of treason and executed him (866).
The County of Orléans was given to another Frankish lord, called Robert, founder of the Robertians who gathered a significant land power base in Orléans, Anjou, and Touraine (the old ‘March of Neustria’, a block of territory that protected the Frankish heartlands from Vikings and Gascons), and importantly the County of Paris and the area around it, which became known as the Duchy of France, or the Ile de France. This power allowed them to take the throne of France several times, and then more permanently under Robert’s descendant Hugh Capet, who had himself crowned in the Cathedral of Orléans in 987. Orléans remained the preferred seat of the Capetian monarchy well into the eleventh century.
But where did they reside? There’s little evidence of a royal palace in Orléans, but it was likely located on the riverbanks, next to what became known as the Châtelet—as in Paris, the name given to the seat of justice and its prison. Vestiges of the Châtelet of Orléans remain today. Like many cities in the Middle Ages, effective local power was exercised by the local bishop, who had a palace next to the Cathedral, while the counts and later dukes resided in the countryside in increasingly magnificent castles, for example Beaugency (see below). One significant early building in the city is the ‘King’s House’ (built in the early fifteenth century); constructed on the northeast edge of the old walled city, it was the administrative centre of the Orléannais, a law court, and housed princes or cardinals when they passed through the city. Rebuilt in the early sixteenth century as the Hôtel Brachet, then renamed the Hôtel de la Vieille Intendance in the eighteenth century, it has housed the tribunal court for Orléans since 1989.
the Vieille Intendance, Orléans
Orléans and Paris became the two most important parts of the royal domain in the period when most of France was dominated by its feudal magnates. The first time the County of Orléans was given to a second son was in 1250, for Prince Philippe, son of King Louis IX. This was the era when French kings were creating the system of ‘apanage’: the lands and revenues could be enjoyed by a junior prince with a great deal of autonomy, but they remained ultimately part of the royal domain and would return to the pot if the apanagiste had no legitimate heir (they hadn’t yet learned that these should be males only titles, but they soon would, once Artois was lost through female inheritance…). Young Philippe (about fifteen) retained this title when his older brother Louis died in 1260 (there not yet being a tradition to name the heir ‘dauphin’), and went with his father on crusade to North Africa in 1270. The King died in Tunis, so Orléans became King Philip III (‘the Hardy’).
In 1344, Orléans was made a duchy-peerage and given to another Philippe, second son of King Philip VI, when he was about eight years old. He was also Count of Valois, another important part of the royal domain to the north of Paris, and Count of Touraine, immediately downriver from Orléans, which was also raised into a duchy-peerage. His father also married him (still age eight) to his cousin Princess Blanche of France, daughter of Charles IV. After Philip VI died in 1350, Philippe d’Orléans became an important supporter for his older brother, King John II. He fought alongside him at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 (where John was taken prisoner), then was exchanged as a hostage of the peace forged by the Treaty of Bretigny, 1360—and remained in England until 1365.
the wax seal of Prince Philippe, the 1st Duke of Orléans (1353), already using the coat-of-arms used by the dukes of Orléans for centuries to come
One of Duke Philippe’s residences in his apanage was the Château de Beaugency, a few miles downriver from the city of Orléans. This was a stronghold built by the lords of Beaugency in the eleventh century, later acquired by the Crown in 1292, and given to Philippe in 1344. It is still one of the most impressive medieval castles in the Loire Valley, though much of what we see today was built slightly later by the Count of Dunois (below). His descendants, the Orléans-Longueville family, also made new additions, in the Renaissance style, in the 1520s, and it was held by subsequent dukes of Orléans until the French Revolution.
the cheateu of Beaugency, with its medieval tower, Renaissance residence and the abbey church (chateau-beaugency.com)
The 1st Duke had also acquired, at the start of King John’s reign, a grand residence in Paris from his brother, so he could also live like a prince in the Kingdom’s chief city. This was the Hôtel de Navarre, on the rue St-André des Arts (in the area between what’s now the Metro stops of St-Michel and Odéon). This princely residence had been built in the 1260s on the Left Bank (most other princes, notably the Duke of Burgundy, lived closer to the Louvre, on the Right Bank) by Thibaut, King of Navarre (held at that time by the French family of Blois-Champagne). When his descendant King Charles of Navarre clashed with King John of France, his estates, including the Hôtel de Navarre, were confiscated. This site would be the main Parisian residence for the dukes of Orléans until the era of Louis II in the 1480s, then was sold to various other proprietors until it was divided into two lots in the 1640s (and became the hôtels de Châteauvieux and Vieuville, entirely rebuilt in the eighteenth century).
the sign that marks the spot of the Hôtel de Navarre in the 6th Arrondissement in Paris
The first Duke of Orléans died in 1375, at only 39 years old, leaving no legitimate children from his wife Blanche, though there were several illegitimate sons, including Louis d’Orléans, who became Bishop of Poitiers and Bishop of Beauvais, and died in 1397 on a trip to the Holy Land.
So the Duchy-Peerage of Orléans was re-created in 1392 for the first Duke’s great-nephew, Louis, the younger brother of King Charles VI. He had already been given lands from the royal domain, the Duchy of Touraine, in 1386, which he now exchanged for Orléans as well as the County of Valois (which was later raised to a duchy as well, 1406). Louis continued to acquire even more feudal estates, like the County of Château-Thierry and other lands in Champagne (the only other region of France equal to the Orléannais in the richness of its agriculture), the counties of Blois and Dunois (to add to his block of Orléans and Touraine), and the counties of Angoulême and Périgord, stretching his influence down towards the southwest of France—and spaces contested by the King of England.
Louis, Duke of Orléans, receives a book from Christine de Pizan (c1410)
In 1389, Louis married Valentina Visconti, the daughter of the Duke of Milan. She brought with her as a dowry the County of Asti, a small territory but strategically wedged between Piedmont, Lombardy and Genoa. She also ultimately became heiress to the Duchy of Milan itself—a factor that affected the histories of both France and Italy for a century—but not until the 1440s, well after her death.
Valentina Visconti, with the coat-of-arms of both Orléans and Visconti-Milan (1398)
Louis and Valentina became known as organisers of grand fêtes. In Paris they lived at the Hôtel de Navarre (or Hôtel d’Orléans), noted above. He was also given a smaller residence, the Hôtel du Petit-Musc, purchased for him by his brother in 1378, just inside the Paris city walls near the Porte Saint-Antoine (today’s Place de la Bastille). This building named for the street or district ‘Petit-Musc’ could refer to a small hidden street, or it may have been ‘pute et muse’, a hidden place to promenade with prostitutes. Nothing of it remains today as it was entirely rebuilt as the Hôtel de Boisy by the dukes of Roannais in the 1560s, then acquired by the Duc de Mayenne in 1605. A member of the House of Lorraine-Guise, Mayenne enlarged it into how we see it today, and it bears his name, so is part of the story of the dukes of Guise.
Outside Paris, Louis I preferred to reside not in his Duchy of Orléans, in a château like Beaugency, but his County of Valois, northeast of Paris in a region favoured by French royals for its excellent hunting grounds in the large royal forests of Compiègne and Villers-Cotterêts. The Duke rebuilt an ancient castle here, Pierrefonds, built by local nobles and acquired by the royal domain in the late twelfth century. Duke Louis rebuilt it completely in the 1390s, a massive structure with seven grand towers. Pierrefonds was later given to various nobles in the sixteenth century, then was dismantled on orders of Louis XIII in 1617—its ruins became a fashionable Romantic tourist spot in the nineteenth century, then the castle was almost entirely rebuilt on the orders of Napoleon III in the 1860s (in what is known as ‘Troubadour Style’, a sort of Romanticised vision of Medieval architecture), which is how we see it today.
a drawing of the chateau of Pierrefonds before its reconstruction (1858)
Not far away was the Château of La Ferté-Milon, also a much older castle, acquired by the Crown for the County of Valois in the 1290s, and now added in the 1390s to the Orléans apanage. Louis also planned to rebuild this into a more elaborate residence, but it was still incomplete at the time of his death, and his successors took little interest in it. La Ferté-Milon was dismantled in 1594 on the orders of Henry IV, and remains a ruin.
the ruins of La Ferté-Milon today (photo Matteo Bombardieri)
a sculpted Coronation of the Virgin at La Ferté-Milon, with a clear example of the Orléans arms (photo Patrick Clenet)
The Duke of Orléans was thus a very powerful magnate, with bases in the Loire valley, the Valois and in Paris, and able to step in when his brother needed him in 1392 when he was attacked by debilitating mental illness. The royal brothers’ uncle, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, had been Regent of France while Charles VI was a child (1380-88), and he now re-asserted his power, pushing out the Duke of Orléans from any attempt to be regent for his unwell older brother. This starts a long and bloody feud between the houses of Burgundy and Orléans that continued for the next two generations. As part of this rivalry, in 1402, Orléans made yet another acquisition, the Duchy of Luxembourg, to spite uncle Burgundy’s desire to unite the northern and southern halves of his domain (but also perhaps to connect to his domains in Valois, on the road from Paris to Luxembourg). Philippe of Burgundy died in 1404, and was succeeded by his son Jean who continued to wield his father’s control over the King and his council. In frustration, the Queen, Isabeau of Bavaria, made an alliance with the Duke of Orléans and the Duke of Berry (another of the King’s uncles), December 1405, and by 1407 managed to push Burgundy and his supporters out of government and out of Paris. In response, Duke Jean got his men to assassinate the Duke of Orléans in the street near the Hôtel de St-Pol (the favoured royal residence, on the eastern edges of the city of Paris), in November 1407.
the assassination of Louis, Duke of Orléans
This murder provoked a civil war in France, Burgundians versus Armagnacs, so called for the new Duke of Orléans’s father-in-law, mentor and war commander, Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac. The new Duke, only 13, was named Charles. His marriage to Bonne d’Armagnac in 1410, at age 16, was in fact his second marriage, having married at first when he was 12 Isabelle of France, daughter of Charles VI (herself already the widow of King Richard II of England), in 1406. She died in childbirth in 1409, only 19 years old. The 2nd Duke of Orléans (of the second creation) made a bold debut on the battlefield at Agincourt in 1415, where miraculously he was not killed or maimed, but was captured and taken to England—where he remained for the next 24 years.
The Duke of Orléans, as hostage of the King of England, moved around a lot: the Tower of London, Bolingbroke Castle, Pontefract and others. Henry V refused to allow him to be ransomed, but the French prince was relatively free in his daily life, and spent this time becoming a poet—in fact, he is regarded as one of the leading poets of this period, in both French and English. Over five hundred of his poems survive, some of which were set to music in the late nineteenth century during a revival of all things medieval—notably the ‘Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans’, premiered by Debussy in 1909.
Orléans was finally freed in 1440 thanks to the intervention of the Duke of Burgundy (and lots of ransom money). In return, he had to promise to stop the vendetta seeking vengeance for his father’s murder. He solidified this new bond with a third marriage, now to Burgundy’s niece, Marie de Clèves, daughter of Adolf, Duke of Cleves (and it was her dowry that secured the ransom). He settled into his château at Blois where he nurtured a court of art and music and poetry. He died in 1465.
Charles, 2nd Duke of Orléans, wearing the robes of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and with his arms quartering Orléans with Milan
The 3rd Duke of Orléans, Louis II, was born from this third marriage, so was only three when he succeeded to his elderly father’s titles. But before we look at this generation, we need to look at Duke Charles’s brothers, Vertus and Angoulême, and his half-brother, one of the most famous men of this period, Dunois.
Philippe, second son of the 1st Duke of Orléans, was known as the Count of Vertus. This county in central Champagne had in fact been given as a dowry to a French princess who married into the ducal family of Milan, then returned with Valentina of Milan as part of her dowry. Both he and his older brother Charles quartered Orléans and Visconti in their coat-of-arms. Vertus took over as head of the Armagnacs while his older brother was held hostage in England, and supported the Dauphin Charles in his campaigns to recover his claims to the Kingdom after he had been disinherited by the Treaty of Troyes (between Henry V and Charles VI) in May 1420; but he died unmarried only a few months later.
Jean, the third son, was given the County of Angoulême as his part of the Orléans succession in 1407. He was sent to England as a hostage even before the Battle of Agincourt, in 1412, in an attempt to broker a peace. He was only 13. Like his oldest brother, he stayed in England for a very long time—33 years! Also like Charles, he was bookish, and when he returned to France finally in 1444, he brought back quite a library, some of which is still at the core of the National Library of France today. His son Charles, Count of Angoulême, did not make much of a mark himself, but was the progenitor of the House of Valois-Angoulême, fully royal once his son François succeeded to the French throne in 1515. But that’s a different story. Angoulême also joined the Dauphin’s campaigns versus the English in the 1440s, notably alongside his illegitimate half-brother Dunois.
Jean, ‘Bastard of Orléans’, is famous as one of the companions and generals of Jeanne d’Arc at the siege of Orléans, 1429, after which he helped the Dauphin, now calling himself Charles VII, drive the English out of France. In thanks, his brother (still in England) gave him the County of Dunois (west of Orléans, centred on the town and castle of Châteaudun, or ‘Château Dun’). The King augmented this with the County of Longueville in Normandy, by which title his descendants (who continued to use the surname ‘d’Orléans’) are known—they were raised to the rank of dukes in 1505, so will have a post of their own. Their coat-of-arms is a fascinating example of the intersection of cadency and bastardy: Dunois bore a three-point silver label of the House of Orléans ‘bruised’ by a silver bend sinister denoting bastardy. This bend was then reversed to become a bend dexter once the Orléans-Longueville family obtained legitimation as princes of the blood by the King of France in the sixteenth century—though their exact status as princes of the blood remained contested, much to their chagrin.
Jean, ‘bastard of Orléans’, Count of Dunois
Inheriting the Orléans apanage at such a young age, Louis, 3rd Duke of Orléans was raised under the watchful eye of his mother, Marie de Clèves, and through her, the Duke of Burgundy. This new alliance—a complete reversal of family politics at the start of the century—worried the new King of France, Louis XI, who is remembered as one of the most politically manipulative kings in French history. As such, in a juicy anecdote that is often told, worthy of ‘Game of Thrones’, the King is said to have forced his young cousin Orléans in 1476 (when he was 14) to accept the honour of marriage to a royal princess, his own daughter Jeanne, despite knowing that she suffered from disfigurement that would prevent her from having children. A perfect way to kill off a rival dynasty. Specialists of the era now cast doubts on this story, pointing out that it was circulated during Orléans’ later proceedings to get this marriage annulled for political reasons, and that the ‘evidence’ he presented to the ecclesiastical courts also included accusations of witchcraft, so the story may have simply been part of the campaign concocted to blacken the reputation of Jeanne and her father. The marriage was indeed annulled, but in the long run, Jeanne won a rather large victory (in terms of the celestial and the eternal) as she was canonised as a saint in 1950.
Jeanne de France, Duchess of Orléans, later canonised
As he matured, Louis of Orléans became known as a reformer, displayed at the Estates General of 1484, held in the city of Tours, where he supported demands for an end to corrupt taxation practices and to foreign influence in the French church and military. He also put himself forward as the best man to lead the Kingdom as regent, since Louis XI had died and his son Charles VIII was only 13 and temporarily being governed by his older sister, Anne, Dame de Beaujeu. The Estates General sided with Anne, and Louis and his reform ideas were pushed aside. The next year, Orléans joined a revolt against Anne’s regency, known as ‘the Mad War’ (la Guerre Folle), in league with the Duke of Brittany and other disgruntled grandees. He was defeated at captured at St-Aubin du Cormier, in eastern Brittany, in July 1488.
Pardoned in 1491, Orléans patched things up with his now adult cousin Charles VIII by going on campaign with him to Italy in 1494. The King was invited to the Italian peninsula by the Pope, to stake a claim on the Kingdom of Naples (to keep it out of the hands of the King of Aragon), but also by the Duke of Milan, who sought protection from his enemies in Venice and Florence—unwittingly reviving the Duke of Orléans’ claims to that Duchy himself in the name of his grandmother Valentina Visconti.
Suddenly, Charles VIII died, in April 1498. Though he and his wife, Anne of Brittany, had had several children, none of them survived, and there was no one else in line of succession, so Louis, Duke of Orléans, became Louis XII, King of France. Right away he marched back to Italy and finally took the Duchy of Milan in the Autumn of 1499. A year before, he had successfully arranged for his first marriage to Jeanne de France to be annulled, and he married the late King’s widow, Anne of Brittany, ensuring that Brittany remained a part of France. Domestically, Louis XII also put into place many of the reforms he had tried to champion at the Estates General back in 1484. The last Duke of Orléans of this line had a good reign as Louis XII, but is overshadowed in popular memory by his cousin and successor, Francis I. Lovers of Tudor history remember Louis XII as the elderly king who married Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and died shortly after from an excess of marital passion…
Louis II, Duke of Orléans, in 1498 when he has become King Louis XII, surrounded by the patron saints of France (painting by Jean Bourdichon)
One of the chief castles Louis II of Orléans had inherited in his apanage was the Château of Blois. Not in the Orléannais, it was in the county next door, and had been built in the tenth century by the powerful Counts of Blois—one of the major feudal dynasties of the Middle Ages in France. It had been given to Louis I, first Duke of Orléans, when his apanage was created in 1392, and was inhabited in the 1440s by Duke Charles, the poet-duke, who made it a court of poets and musicians. But it wasn’t until Louis II became King that he began major renovation works and created the ‘Louis XII Wing’ of the château as we see it today, in flamboyant gothic style. The more famous wing at Blois is that built by Louis XII’s successor, Francis I, in a dramatic Renaissance style (with its famous twisting staircase). It remained a royal, not ducal residence, a favoured nursery for royal children, first for Queen Claude then for Queen Catherine de Medici, until it was given again as part of the Orléans apanage to Louis XIII’s brother Gaston (see below), who built a third magnificent wing in the 1630s, and had plans to demolish the other two wings and rebuild if and when (he assumed) he became king. The birth of Louis XIV in 1638 scuppered those plans (thank goodness!), then the French Revolution interrupted other plans to demolish the château in 1788 (!), so Blois remains mostly untouched, one of the finest heritage sites in the Loire Valley.
the Louis XII Wing of the chateau of Blois (photo Christophe Finet)
**
The reign of Francis I, starting in 1515, is usually seen as the turning point between the Late Medieval and Renaissance eras of French history. A few years later, in 1519, Francis and his queen, Claude (the daughter of Louis XII and Anne of Brittany), celebrated the birth of a second son, Henri, who was—as was now tradition—created Duke of Orléans. The young Duke, only 7, was sent to Spain as a hostage in 1526, along with his brother the Dauphin, in exchange for their father’s freedom following the shocking Battle of Pavia. Henri was said to be sulky and often melancholic after his return to France in 1530, hardly cheered by his marriage three years later to Catherine de Medici, a strategic marriage since she was niece of Pope Leo X (and also heiress of a significant chunk of central France) but not someone of rank deemed sufficient to marry a royal prince of the House of Valois. This discrepancy in rank became even more awkward in 1536, when the Dauphin François died, and Henri became the new Dauphin. The Orléans apanage was transferred to the next brother, Charles, three years younger.
King Francis I at council, with his three sons, the Dauphin François, Henri, Duke of Orléans, and Charles, Duke of Angoulême
Prince Charles had first been called Duke of Angoulême, inheriting this apanage on the death of his grandmother, Louise de Savoie, in 1531. After he became Duke of Orléans in 1536, his father continued to build up his estates, granting him the counties of La Marche and Clermont in 1540, as well as the Duchy of Châtellerault (in Poitou, a less prestigious title, but it came with a peerage, which gave Charles a seat in the Parlement of Paris). He was very much his father’s favoured son, and a court favourite, some say because of his more sunny disposition, having not suffered the three years of imprisonment in Spain as the Dauphin Henri did. The court even divided into rival factions in the early 1540s, presided over by the King’s mistress, the Duchesse d’Etampes (with Orléans) and the Dauphin’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers. This was exacerbated when the Duke of Orléans was successful in his early military career in 1542 while the Dauphin was not, and even more so when the King opened negotiations in September 1544 to secure a peace treaty with Emperor Charles V by means of a marriage between Orléans and a Habsburg (further highlighting the Dauphin’s low-born wife). The Emperor even offered as a dowry the Duchy of Milan, which the Dauphin thought should be his by right of his senior descent from Valentina Visconti. The King counter-offered by giving Orléans yet another duchy, Bourbon, a rich territory in the centre of France recently confiscated from the junior branch of the royal house. Negotiations dragged out until the Emperor finally agreed in September 1545, only to discover that the Duke of Orléans had died a few days before, of plague while on campaign near Boulogne. He was only 23.
Charles, Duke of Orléans, by Corneille de Lyon (1536)
The Dauphin Henri became Henri II in 1547, and despite their rocky start, he and Catherine de Medici had numerous sons. As before, the eldest, François, was named Dauphin, while the second son, Louis, was created Duke of Orléans (1549). He died only a year later (not yet two years old), and the apanage was transferred to the third son, another Charles. After the brief reign of Francis II, Charles became king as Charles IX in 1560, so the Duchy of Orléans was given to the next brother, Henri, who later exchanged it (in 1566) for the Duchy of Anjou.
the widowed Queen Catherine de Medici with her children in 1561: Charles IX (the former Duke of Orléans), Henri, Duke of Orléans (later Duke of Anjou), Marguerite (future Queen of Navarre), and François, Duke of Alençon (workshop of François Clouet)
The Orléans estates were given to their mother, Catherine, to add to her own estates, which included the Château of Chenonceau—famous for its long gallery extending across the river Cher—in the Duchy of Touraine. She had big plans to expand this royal residence, but the Wars of Religion caused delays, until her death in 1589 brought all these properties back into control of the Crown.
The next creation of the Duchy of Orléans as a royal apanage was in 1626, for Gaston de France, younger brother of Louis XIII. There had been a brief ‘Duc d’Orléans’ as a courtesy title (not a formal investiture as an apanage) for an unnamed second son of King Henry IV (lived 1607-1611, and sometimes erroneously assumed by genealogists to be named ‘Nicolas’, from the N. (‘not named’) printed in royal genealogies of the time), so Gaston (b. 1608) had been given the title Duc d’Anjou as a baby. His apanage of Orléans was given in 1626 as part of a marriage and peace deal after brief revolt against his brother (though he was only 18, so was mostly being manipulated by powerful courtiers). This marriage was to Marie de Bourbon-Montpensier, an incredibly wealthy heiress (owning huge chunks of central France). His apanage also included the duchies of Chartres and Valois and the County of Blois.
the marriage of Gaston, Duke of Orléans, and Marie de Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier, 1626
It was at Blois that Gaston, Duke of Orléans, focused much of his energies as a princely patron. He spent many years residing here in the 1630s-50s, as he had made himself very unwelcome at the court of Louis XIII. For years he remained, awkwardly, in the position as heir to the throne, from 1611 until his sister-in-law Queen Anne finally produced a male heir (Louis XIV) in 1638. He tried to be loyal, but continually got dragged into court intrigues and rebellion, which mostly ended badly…for his friends, since he himself could not be severely punished since he was, as ever, the heir to the throne. The Conspiracy of Chalais of 1626, the Day of Dupes of 1630, the Montmorency rebellion of 1632… Retiring to Blois from 1634, the Duke of Orléans hosted a number of artists, musicians and political exiles—men and women who had fallen foul of the King and his first minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Gaston had grand plans to expand this into a very grand royal residence, as we’ve seen above.
Blois, the Gaston Wing in the centre, and the more famous Francis I Wing on the right
Gaston also had plans to build a much grander château at Chambord, located within the Duchy of Orléans itself. Chambord was at the centre of one of the largest royal hunting parks in France (which, incidentally, it still is), a part of the Orléans apanage since the 1390s, returned to the Crown in 1498, and favoured by Francis I, who built an entirely new château here in the 1520s. It was rarely used after the 1550s, so was due for renovation when Gaston set his eyes on it in the early 1640s. Chambord was held by the royal family once more after Gaston’s death in 1660, and was given as residence to various people in the next century—notably Louis XV’s father-in-law, the exiled King Stanislas of Poland—and remained property of the Bourbons even after the Revolution, finally being sold to the nation in 1930. In Paris, Gaston lived in his mother Marie de Medici’s grand new palace, the Palais du Luxembourg, which was called at this time the Palais d’Orléans.
Though he had two wives, Gaston died without a male heir. Marie de Montpensier had died soon after giving birth to a daughter, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier, better known to history as ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’. She and her father had a fraught relationship—he cherished her (and her money, as sole heir of her mother), but also very much wanted a son, to whom he could pass on the Orléans apanage. His second marriage, to Marguerite de Lorraine, sister of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine and Bar, had been blocked by his brother the King, so he was not allowed to live with her until after his brother’s death in 1643. The Duke and Duchess of Lorraine once again made their home at Blois and started a family. A son, Jean-Gaston, was born in 1650, given the title Duke of Valois, but died only two years later. So Gaston and Marguerite focused on raising their three daughters, Marguerite-Louise, Elisabeth, and Françoise. These could not inherit the throne however, so when Gaston died in February 1660, the Orléans apanage returned once more to the Crown, and was given out again in 1661, to Philippe de France, younger brother of Louis XIV. Philippe d’Orléans is the founder of the House of Orléans that persists today.
Gaston, Duke of Orléans as painted in 1634 by Anthony Van Dyck
Croatia was a kingdom for a thousand years, from 925 to 1918, yet for most of that time it was subject to rule by neighbouring dynasties, the Hungarian Arpads, the Austrian Habsburgs. Its western Adriatic coastline was for centuries dominated by Italian maritime republics, Venice and Ragusa. Croatia’s nobility therefore was always tightly intertwined with the histories of Hungary or Venice. Some families did maintain a Slavic identity, however, none more famous than the Frankopans, whose sovereign rule over the island of Krk, with the title of knez (prince or lord) gives them entry into the world of dukes and princes. They were one of the three most important Croatian families, holding sway from the early twelfth century until their disappearance in the seventeenth, and were a vital force in defending the northern end of the Balkan peninsula from being overrun by the forces of the Ottoman Empire.
the town of Krk, with the Frankopan castle overlooking the harbour (photo Arne Müseler)
One thing to note right away is that for the first few centuries, their name was not Frankopan at all. Like most aristocrats in Europe, they initially took a surname from their chief possession, so in this case ‘Krčki’, from the island of Krk, the largest and most populous island in the Adriatic, tucked into the ‘armpit’ formed by the Istrian peninsula and the Croatian mainland. The newer surname was ‘borrowed’ from an ancient Roman noble family, the Frangipani, to give the Croatian noble house more heft, associating them with the Roman Empire and its power in the Adriatic. The Frangipani name is also associated today with frangipane, the almond custard paste, or the scent of the plumeria plant used in perfumes. A popular etymology of the name in Croatia—which I suspect has an element of truth pertaining to its adoption by the family who ruled Krk in the fifteenth century—was frank pan or ‘free lord’, and many of the Frankopans in that century were indeed appointed to the important office of ban (or viceroy) of Croatia by the kings of Hungary. It is easy to guess (as I did) that ‘ban’ and ‘pan’ were variants of the same Slavic word for lord or ruler, but a short look at etymological dictionaries suggests that pan, used by northern Slavs (Poles, Czechs), came from an Indo-European word for protector, while ban, used by southern Slavs (Croats, Serbs) came from a Turkic word for noble leader (similar to bay or bey).
And indeed, Frangipani did not mean ‘free lords’—the Italian family claimed descent from the ancient Roman clan of the Anicii, initially a plebian family in the Republic era, who by the late Imperial era had developed into the Anicius family of nobles. They were prominent in their act of acceptance of Christianity, one of the first families of senatorial rank to do so, and frequently served as consuls. Olybrius (Anicius Olybrius) became Emperor in the West, briefly, July to November 472; he was chiefly a puppet of Germanic warlords, and his family were quick to support the new regime of the Ostrogoths in the following decades. One of these, Anicius Manlius, became a consul and advisor to the Ostrogoth kings, but is more famous as the philosopher and historian Boethius. Later members of Gens Anicius moved to the Eastern Empire and served as consuls and generals there. While late Roman genealogies are quite fuzzy, it is thought that both Pope Felix III (d. 492) and Pope Gregory I ‘the Great’ (d. 604) were members of this family.
Then there is a gap. The first attested Roman family member with the name Frangipani comes from 1014. This house was very powerful in the twelfth century, influencing the making and unmaking of popes. From 1130 they held the Colosseum and turned it into their own defensive post in Rome. They also held rich agricultural lands in Campania. They divided into several branches, and in the seventeenth century, the last of the main line, Mario Frangipane, Marchese di Nemi, named the Croatian lord, Fran Krsto Frankopan, as his successor to the name and arms, then died in 1654. The coat of arms of the Frangipani of Rome was distinctive and punning: two golden rampant lions facing each other, breaking bread (frangere panem) together.
the arms of the Frangipani family of Rome
the arms as adopted by the Frankopans of Croatia-Dalmatia
a nineteenth-century guide showing the difference between the old and new arms of the family
The family legend—which is certainly possible—was that in the early twelfth century, younger brothers of the Roman Frangipani left to settle in Venice and Illyria (the ancient name for the Adriatic coastline of the Balkan peninsula). In 1118, a man called Count Dujam (Doimo in Italian) was given permission by the Doge of Venice to rule the island of Krk (then called Veglia in Italian) as a vassal of the Serene Republic. By 1221, King Andrew II of Hungary gave the brothers Henry and Servidon Krčki the islands of Brač, Hvar and others further down the Adriatic coast (closer to Spalato/Split), thus establishing the dual relationship of this family between Venice and Hungary that persisted for many years. Andrew’s son Béla IV took refuge on Krk in 1240-41, and the family helped him win back his kingdom from the Mongols, and also to win a war against the Duke of Austria, so were given lands on the mainland of the Kingdom of Croatia (in personal union with Hungary since 1102): the counties of Senj and Modruš. From here on, Krk would remain a vassal state of Venice, while the mainland territories were held as fiefs of the kings of Hungary.
a map of Istria from 1636 (with north at the left): Venice is just beyond the border at bottom, while Krk (Veglia) is partly seen at the very top of the map
Another family legend from this early period was that the lords of Krk were responsible for bringing the Holy House of the Virgin from Nazareth to Croatia, to their castle of Trsat overlooking the city of Rijeka (aka Tersatto and Fiume, respectively, in Italian), in 1291. One story says that Nikola Frankopan sent architects to the Holy Land to obtain measurements so he could rebuild the stones that arrived just as they had been; he then sent the entire construction as a gift to the pope, across the Adriatic to Loreto, where it remains to this day. But a shrine was then built on the spot, Our Lady of Trsat, which still contains a precious treasure: a painting of Mary said to be painted by St Luke. The Frankopans also built a monastery here. The medieval structures were rebuilt in baroque style in the 1640s, and again in the 1690s after a devastating fire.
Rijeka and Trsat and the monastery of Maria of Loreto in 1689
Trsat Castle as it appears today (photo by nepoznat)
The island of Veglia—Vikla in Dalmatian (a descendant of Latin spoken along the Illyrian coast, now extinct)—had an older name, Kyrista or Kyrikon in Greek, Curicta in Latin. Its original inhabitants were called the Liburnians, who called it Curicum. Why did the Venetians rename it Vekla or Veglia, I do not know. The island had been colonised by Rome, then formed an independent city-state until it was re-absorbed into the Roman Empire (of the East) in 812, then ceded to Venice in 1001. The family who took the name ‘of Krk’ (and later Frankopan) built a powerful fortress overlooking the main town on the southwest coast of the island in the 1190s; a large round tower was added in the century that followed. Frankopan Castle is still today one of the chief tourist attractions of the island. From here they ruled as semi-independent princes, nominally paying tribute to Venice.
Frankopan Castle in Krk, look closely to see the Lion of Venice (photo RobertaF)
On the mainland, Modruš was a town and a county (part of the Lika region, a connector between the sea and the mountains forming the border with Bosnia), located on a strategic road between the Adriatic and the Pannonian Basin (ie, Hungary). Modruš (or Modrussa in Latin) was a royal estate until given to the Frankopans in 1193. The town was dominated by the Castle of Tržan, which remained the family’s principal seat on the mainland for centuries (its name comes from the Croatian word for trade, tržiti). This fortress was very old, probably with foundations from the ninth century. It was enlarged by the Frankopans in the early fifteenth century, and was never in its history taken, even when the town was burned by the Ottomans in 1493. In the mid-fifteenth century, the town was given its own bishop, but this area became increasingly dangerous once the Ottomans took over the neighbouring kingdom of Bosnia in 1461, and the see was transferred to Novi Vinodolski (and eventually merged with Segna). By the mid-sixteenth century, trade declined, the castle decayed, and Modruš became part of the new Habsburg Croatian Military Frontier district, its castle taken over by the army. Tržan was abandoned entirely in the 1790s and today is a ruin.
the ruins of Tržan Castle near Modruš (photo by Silverije)
More safely on the coast, to the west, the county of Senj was formed around the ancient city of Senia, founded by Illyrians and Liburnians, perhaps three thousand years ago. Croats arrived in the Balkans in the seventh century and settled along this coast. Senj was the seat of a bishop by 1169, then held from the King of Hungary-Croatia by the Templars from 1184. It was then given to the lords of Krk in 1271. Whereas their other domains were influenced by Venice, Senj remained a centre for Croatian language and culture, and even their own script, Glagolitic (a relative of Cyrillic). In 1469, the King of Hungary took the city away from the family and granted it status of an independent royal city.
Senj with its castle of Nehaj (photo by SI-Ziga)
Also along the coastal region was Novi Vinodolski, held by the family from the 1280s to the 1670s. Its castle still survives in one single tower in the town square, having suffered devastation by the Turks in 1527, the Venetians in 1598, and a major earthquake in 1750.
the remaining tower at Novi Vinodolski (photo by Ante Perkovic)
By the turn of the fourteenth century, the Krčki family had become kingmakers in Hungary and Croatia. Dujam II (or ‘Doimus’), lord of Krk since 1290, and ‘podestà’ of Senj, took part in a magnate conspiracy that usurped royal authority across the two kingdoms in the reign of Andew III, the last king of the Árpád dynasty. When Andrew died in 1301, Dujan supported the candidacy of the King’s great-nephew, Charles Robert of Anjou, Prince of Naples, and accompanied him on his journey from Naples to Spalato on the Dalmatian coast, and from there to Zagreb, the Croatian capital, then helped him fight for the crown which he finally succeeded at winning in 1308. Dujam of Krk remained loyal to the new Angevin dynasty, and was rewarded with confirmation of possession of the County of Modruš augmented by the counties of Vinodol (on the coast) and Gacka, with its castle of Ostočac. He died in 1317.
a modern monument to Dujam II Krčki in Otočac (photo by Silverije)
Otočac, also in the Lika region (called Ottozzec or Ottocaz in Italian), was rebuilt by the Frankopans as a major fortress in 1448, and again in 1619. As with Modruš, a bishopric was established here, in 1460, in an effort to aid this branch of the family in defending this increasingly fragile frontier against Islam. But also like Modruš, the bishopric declined and was suppressed in 1534. A decade later, the cream of the Croatian nobility gathered in Otočac and defeated the Ottomans, preventing their advance towards the Adriatic coast. The fortress was demolished in the 1820s.
Otočac in an 18th-century print
The family reached its apogee in Nikola IV. His mother was a daughter of the Count of Gorica (Görz), a member of the hereditary imperial aristocracy and the most powerful lords of northern Croatia. From her, he inherited a rivalry with the other great magnates of Croatia-Slovenia, the Counts of Celje (Cilli), whose daughter became a queen by her marriage to Sigismund of Luxembourg, king of Hungary and Croatia. The two clans came close to civil war in the 1420s, but Nikola several years before had supported Sigismund’s control of the Hungarian throne when challenged by an Angevin claimant in 1403, and had also loaned the King money, in return for towns and fortresses like Knin, on the frontier with Bosnia, and Bihać, now in Bosnia. So in 1425, Sigismund (by now elected King of the Romans, and soon crowned Holy Roman Emperor) confirmed these grants (in Italian, ‘Begle [Veglia], Segnie and Modrusse) to ‘Niccolo Frangiapan’, and the next year named him Ban of Croatia and Dalmatia (1426-32), the first of many Frankopans to hold this office.
Nikola IV’s grave (clearly using the name Franghapani) in the family mausoleum in Trsat
Frankopan was now the name he used. In 1424, Nikola had travelled to Rome and was recognised as a descendent of the ancient Frangipani family. He had already (two years earlier) begun to use their name and their arms (its lions quite distinct from the gold star on a gold and red shield). He used the title ‘Prince of Krk and Modruš’, and was also lord of the island of Rab (or Arba, not far from Krk), until it was reattached to Venice in 1409. On the mainland, he added significantly to the family domains with the castles of Cetin, Slunj, Ozalj and several others. These castles were later distributed to various descendants and gave names to separate lines: Centinski, Slunjski, Ozaljski and so on.
Of these castles the finest still today is Ozalj, today on the Croatian border with Slovenia. Built on a high cliff above the Kupa river in the 1240s, it was for many centuries jointly owned by both the Frankopan and Zrinski families, and was the centre of their joint conspiracy in the 1670s (see below). Today it is a museum, one of the best preserved in Croatia.
Ozalj Castle today (photo by Bern Bartsch)
Further south, close to the border with Bosnia, is the Castle Cetin (lit. Cetingrad), Frankopan property from 1387. It is best known as a place where the Croatian nobility gathered in 1526 after the terrible defeat (and death) of the Hungarian king by the Turks at the Battle of Mohacs—the Cetinska Sabor. Here the Croatians voted to recognised Ferdinand of Austria as their king (rather than the Hungarian candidate), and although the Kingdom of Croatia remained a subsidiary part of the Kingdom of Hungary for the next four centuries, many Croatians see this as an important mark of their loyalty to the Habsburgs directly and a step towards independence. The Frankopans were run out of this castle by the Ottomans in 1536, and when it was retaken it was incorporated into the defensive system of the Habsburg Military Frontier province. It was taken and re-taken by the Turks over and over again until 1809, and the fortress was destroyed in 1866.
Cetingrad in the 1790s
Castle Slunj, a short distance to the west, was also part of this border defence system and was repeatedly ravaged by the Turks, resulting in the area’s depopulation until the later eighteenth century. No longer needed, the castle became a ruin.
the ruins of Slunj Castle (photo Neoneo13)
Nikola IV’s son, Ivan VI Frankopan, took over from his father as Ban of Croatia in 1432. He travelled a lot and is known by different names: Giovanni Franco in Italy or Johann Franke in Sweden, where he was in the service of King Eric of Pomerania—they had met in Venice in the 1420s and went together to the Holy Land (1423-25), then the King named ‘Johann’ Bailiff of Stegeborg, a fortress on the east coast of Sweden. Back in Croatia, Ivan married one of the heiresses of the Nelipić family, ‘dukes’ of Knin, Cetina and Trogir (the interior of Dalmatia). But King Sigismund, forgetting the past favour of Ivan’s father, denied his claims to this succession and confiscated all of his lands and titles in a short civil war in 1436. Frankopan was on the verge of victory, but died suddenly—perhaps poison? The King gave away these lands, but he too died, after a long and eventful reign.
Ivan VI had ruled with his brother Stjepan (Stephen) III, who later served as a diplomat for the King of Hungary. In 1449 a more permanent division was made between their sons, with Ivan VII ruling in Krk and Barnardin in Modruš (his descendants were known as the Frankopan Modruški). Ivan VII, known in Latin sources as Ioannes de Frangapanis, is one of the only members of the family to genuinely rule as a ‘prince’ on the island of Krk, as an ally of the King of Hungary and the King of Naples in the 1440s-50s, though he placed his principality under the protection of Venice in 1451 ,and solidified his ties through marriage to a prominent daughter of Venice, Elisabetta Morosini, in 1454. He encouraged the settlement on the island of Vlachs—Christian refugees from the Ottoman Empire—and they stayed for centuries. But conflict with his brothers, who ruled on the mainland, and the King of Hungary (Matthias Corvinus), prompted him to cede full control of Krk back to the Venetian Republic in 1480, and he took refuge with the Emperor Frederick III—the last years of his life were spent fighting with then against Corvinus and died exiled and landless in 1485.
Ivan’s brother Bernardin of Modruš became known as a hero in the defence of Croatia against the Turks, especially at the Battle of Krbava Field, 1493, a defeat in which many Croatian nobles (including his cousin, Ivan IX) died. This battle provided a temporary pause in the ongoing rebellion the Frankopans were waging against their overlord, the Hungarian born Ban of Croatia, Imre Derencsényi. Rule over Croatia was being contested at this time between the Habsburgs of Austria and the Hungarian magnate Matthias Corvinus, as seen with Ivan VI above, and Bernardin tried his best to maintain ties with both, until Corvinus confiscated his castle of Senj in 1469—a breach later healed by the marriage of Bernardin’s daughter Beatrica to Matthias’s son János. To make things even more interesting, Bernardin’s maternal family ties were with Italy, as the son of Isotta d’Este, from the ruling house of Ferrara, and the husband (after 1476) of Princess Luisa Marzano d’Aragona, a granddaughter of the King of Naples. He used these various international connections to obtain help for Croatia and Dalmatia, by means of impassioned speeches given before the Doge of Venice and the Imperial Diet in Nuremberg. He was also patron of the Croatian language and culture, including sponsoring a translation of the Bible. Towards the end of his life, his links with the Corvinus family made him join the anti-Habsburg factions that supported the Jagiellonians and later János Zápolya in their rule in Hungary after 1526—unlike most of the Croatian nobles noted above at the Cetinska Sabor. He died in 1529.
Battle of Krbava Field, 1493
Bernardin Frankpan had built a new fortified residence after Modruš was destroyed by the Turks in 1493. Ogulin Castle and its surrounding village became the new centre of the defence of central Croatia, and the Frankopan serfs there were freed from most of their owed labour so they could focus on soldiering instead—reputedly very successful at this, they were rewarded by their lords in 1622 with complete freedom. The castle in Ogulin today is the regional museum.
Ogulin Castle (photo by Rootmaker)
Bernardin’s son, Krsto Brinjski (of castle Brinj, near Modruš), was also a supporter of Zápolya in the succession crisis of 1526 (against Ferdinand of Austria), and was named by him as Ban of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia and Captain-General of the Kingdom of Hungary between the Drava and the Danube (he also restored him to his estates at Senj). He was not always been anti-Habsburg, however: a renowned general, Krsto (or Christof) had previously fought in the service of the Habsburgs against Venice, and in the 1510s was rewarded with lands in Carniola (one of the Habsburg duchies, today’s Slovenia), and encouraged to attempt to free Krk from Venetian rule in 1512 and again in 1514 (resulting in his imprisonment for five years). In 1519, he travelled to the court of Emperor Charles V to have his possession of estates in Carniola confirmed, and was named Military Commander of Istria. By 1523, however, he had clashed with the Emperor’s brother and regent in Austria, Archduke Ferdinand, so he entered the service of Lajos II, King of Hungary, who named him ‘Protector’ of Croatia in 1525. Frankopan warned the young king not to engage the Turks in 1526 but to wait until his Croatian army (and hopefully reinforcements sent by the Pope) could arrive, but Lajos did not wait, and the Hungarian army was annihilated at Mohács. Krsto was not present at the battle, but his brother Matija was, and was killed. Formally named Ban of Croatia in 1526 by Zápolya, Frankopan did not live long and was himself killed at the siege of Varaždin in northern Croatia, September 1527, a huge blow to the anti-Habsburg faction in Hungary, which led Zápolya to flee to Poland. Although Krsto had a famous love match with Apollonia Lang, sister of the Archbishop of Salzburg, he had no children.
Another prominent member in the time of turmoil after the Battle of Mohács was Franjo, son of Ivan IX. He initially supported the succession of János Zápolya to the throne of Hungary, not the Habsburgs, and worked as a diplomat to secure recognition of his rule in the rump of Hungary (the rest being occupied by the Turkish army), first at the court of the King of Poland, and then at the court of Charles V in Spain. In about 1535 Zappolya appointed him Archbishop of Kalocsa, in south-central Hungary, though this was never formally recognised and practically irrelevant since this diocese was under occupation. By 1538 he was instead recognised by Pope Paul III as Bishop of Eger, in northern Hungary, and urged him to work to stop the spread of Protestantism in that Kingdom. Instead, Franjo (or Ferenc in Hungarian), identified that the Turks were the greater threat and urged Hungarians to unify behind the Habsburgs as the best hope for the country’s survival. He died in 1543.
Leadership of the family passed to Juraj (George) III, from the Slunjski branch of the family. The area around their landholdings, Slunj and Cetin, were devastated by repeated Turkish invasions from Bosnia in the sixteenth century (and were not fully re-populated until the nineteenth century). It was Juraj Slunjski who in late 1526 had organised the assembly of the Croatian estates at Cetin that elected Archduke Ferdinand as King of Croatia (opposed by his cousins Krsto and Franjo). In the next generation, Juraj’s son Franjo was rewarded for this loyalty to the Habsburgs by his appointment as the next Frankopan Ban of Croatia in 1567. He died in 1572, the last of this branch.
Juraj III Frankopan Slunjski
By the early seventeenth century, the only branch remaining was the Trsat branch. Nikola IX of Trsat (Trsatski), was as usual combining his military and administrative role on multiple fronts: defending the frontier against the Turks as Grand Captain of Senj, fighting against the Venetians along the coast, and defending Habsburg interests in the area against a rebellion of Hungarian magnates. Emperor Matthias appointed him Ban of Croatia in 1617—the last Frankopan to hold this title—and the Croatian assembly named him Captain of the Cavalry of the Kingdom in 1619. He resigned from these positions in 1622 and lived out of the spotlight until his death in 1647.
Frankopans and other border barons lost ground in this period, as the Ottomans stepped up their encroachment in the Balkans: in 1633, one of the old fortresses of the Frankopans, Velika Kladuša, not far from Cetingrad, was conquered by Turkish forces, and it became one of their major bases for operation in the next century. Of all the many Frankopan castles in the region, it is the only one that has remained on the other side of the border and is still in Bosnia and Herzegovina, not in Croatia (and interestingly, was the headquarters of the breakaway republic of Western Bosnia in 1993 to 1995).
Velika Kladuša in Bosnia (photo by Raffaello)
Meanwhile, Nicola IX’s brother, Vuk II Krsto (d. 1652), was a Habsburg captain of various frontier castles and was governor of one of the six border captaincies (Karlovac) in Croatia. His daughter Katarina, wife of Count Petar Zrinski, was known as a patron of the arts and a writer, who became a popular heroine in the Croatian national revival of the nineteenth century. Katarina Zrinska later inspired and gave her name to women’s clubs in twentieth-century Croatia, and in 1999 she was commemorated on the 200 kuna silver coin.
Vuk Krsto Frankopan Trsatski (his name and title given here in German)
a Croatian coin for Countess Katarina Zrinska
Katarina’s husband and her brother, Fran Krsto (or Ferenc Kristóf in Hungarian), were both leaders of a conspiracy against the Habsburg Emperor-King, Leopold I. Like many magnates in Hungary and Croatia, they were angry that Leopold had ceded territories back to the Ottomans after the Peace of Vasvár (August 1664), and sought to re-assert local independence from the Habsburgs by any means—sending out feelers in 1666 to the courts of France, Poland and Sweden, and even to the Doge in Venice. Nobody wanted to get involved. An offer was made to place Hungary and Croatia under Ottoman suzerainty in return for local autonomy (similar to affairs in Transylvania and Wallachia, but the Sultan was himself not interested at this time in renewing war with the Habsburgs. Plotting took place at the jointly co-owned Castle of Ozalj. A failed attempt to capture Emperor Leopold in 1667 and circulation of pamphlets inciting an insurrection in 1670, finally caused the Emperor to order the arrests in March 1671 of Zrinski, Frankopan and other co-conspirators including Hungarian magnate Ferenc Nádasdy. After two trials, one before the smaller court of the Emperor and one including a number of Hungarian peers, all three were executed in Wiener Neustadt (south of Vienna) in April 1671. The widowed Countess Zrinska was held in a prison near Vienna for some time, then confined to a convent in Graz for the rest of her life.
the execution of Zrinski, Nádasdy and Frankopan, 1671
Fran Krsto had married a Roman noblewoman, Giulia di Naro in 1660, in an aim to solidify his family’s claim to the succession left to them in 1654 by the last of the Roman Fangipani, the Marchese di Nemi (so on his tombstone he is referred to as a marquis). But with his death in 1671, the Croatian house of Frankopan came to an end. His remains were repatriated to Zagreb Cathedral only in 1919. He too has been commemorated recently in Croatian currency.
a 5 kuna note with Zrinski and Frankopan (in front)
The main fief left to him by the Frangipani of Rome, Nemi, was one of the lordships in the Alban Hills, the aristocratic playground for papal families, southeast of Rome. The Frangipani had supposedly held this fief in the eleventh century, but for much of the Middle Ages it had alternated ownership between the Cistercians and the princely Colonna family. The Frangipanis did purchase it in 1572. After the end of the Croatian line Frankopans, it passed to a line of Frangipani in Friuli (the borderlands between Italy and Croatia) who held it until 1781 when it was sold to Luigi Braschi Onesti, nephew of Pope Pius VI, who raised the lordship in rank to a dukedom. The dukedom of Nemi was then sold on again in 1835.
Years later, in the mid-twentieth century, the name re-surfaced, as an addition to a Dalmatian-Italian noble surname Doimi de Lupis. I’m not enough of a scholar on the history of the nobility of this part of the world to say what is certain, but it seems that Louis Doimi de Lupis, who was born in Split in Yugoslavia in 1939 and emigrated to London, found a family tradition that the Doimi (or Dujmić in Croatian) descended from the Nikola Frankopan associated with the Holy House of Nazareth of 1290 (described above), and so he added this to his surname, along with two other names of the leading Croatian nobility, Šubić and Zrinski. Two of his children are prominent in British upper crust society today, a daughter, Paola, married since 2006 to Lord Nicholas Windsor (second son of the Duke of Kent)—recently announcing their separation—and Peter, a Professor of Byzantine History at Oxford University and author of the celebrated Silk Roads. While the former has openly used the title ‘princess’ (at her wedding for example), the latter has quietly dismissed the claims (though does use Frankopan as his surname). Was it based on the coincidence of the name Doimi with the twelfth-century founder of the family in Krk, Doimo?
Paola and Lord Nicholas Windsor meet the Pope (photo from Lupis.it)
What I can discern more concretely from genealogical sources is that Doimi de Lupis is a composite family: the Doimi were non-titled nobles from Parenzo, on the west coast of Istria (renamed Poreč after it became part of Yugoslavia in 1947); while the Lupis were from Lissa, the Italian name for the island of Vis, one of the more southern Dalmatian islands, off the coast of Split (the old Italian city of Spalato). The origins of the Lupis family reach back much further, to Lorenzo de Lupis, who was sent from Apulia to the Dalmatian coast to act as Imperial notary in the city of Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) in 1291. The famous Italian genealogist of the nineteenth century Pompeo Litta placed him as a member of a junior branch of the family of Lupis de Soragna, who ruled a small state on the Lombard plain (Soragna) and became princes of the Empire, so will get their own blog page in the future. These in turn claimed descent from a family in Gaul (which included St Lupo of Troyes who died in 478) and even back to the ancient Roman Empire. A senior descendant of Lorenzo de Lupis, Count Niccolò, a noble of Lissa (where the Palazzo Lupis remains today), died in 1795; his daughter Orsola had married (1756) Stefano Doimi of Parenzo, and they created a new hybrid family of Doimi de Lupis. Their noble status was acknowledged by the Emperor of Austria (who was also King of Croatia) in 1855 and they were given a hereditary title of ritter (similar to Captain Von Trapp, also from the Austrian Littoral, as seen in a blog post about his family). Ultimately this all created a really fascinating conglomeration of Dalmatian, Italian and English kinship. In a blog post about a frontier family on the borders between Christianity and Islam, between Hungary and Venice, and who had already borrowed their name from a dying Roman noble family, this all somehow seems to make sense. Long live the House of Krk!
a coat of arms from the Palazzo Lupis in Vis (Lissa), which uses the Frankopan arms in the position of honour in the first quarter (from palazzolupis.it)
The city of Manchester was a rough city in the industrial age. The history of the dukes of Manchester shares some of the underworld aspects of the great northern powerhouse, but in fact has nothing to do with the city—like most British dukedoms, the title does not align with the geography. Three modern dukes of Manchester have spent time behind bars—but the long history of their family is much more interesting than that.
Kimbolton Castle, Huntingdonshire, seat of the dukes of Manchester
The Montagus were known in the Middle Ages as the earls of Salisbury, powerful magnates in the west of England and often very close to the Crown. A secondary branch of Montagus—perhaps not related at all, but certainly claiming to be (as we shall see)—built up their powerbase not in Somerset but in Northamptonshire, in the Midlands. At the start of the eighteenth century, the senior line obtained the first family dukedom, Montagu (1705), while the junior lines had already established themselves as earls of Manchester (1626), earls of Sandwich (1660), and eventually earls of Halifax (1714). The dukedom carried on, but passed into an allied family, the Brudenells, then went extinct in 1770. Meanwhile, the earls of Manchester were given the family’s second dukedom, of Manchester (1719), which continues to this day. Other interesting side-branches of the House of Montagu are the Wortley-Montagus, famous for its Enlightened women in the eighteenth century, and the Montagus of Beaulieu, famous for the National Motor Museum and a gay sex scandal of the 1950s—though their story belongs more to the story of the dukes of Buccleuch, whose surname is Montagu-Douglas-Scott; these became Montagus only by marriage so will have their own blog, under Scott.
As with many families, the Montagu family in all its branches is held together by a shared heraldry: the three distinctive red diamonds are known as ‘fusils’. This was later quartered with the arms of Monthermer, a very distinctive green eagle, and junior branches added small symbols as they became established: a red crescent, a red star, and so on. The name, initially spelled Montaigu, Montague or Montacute, is from the Latin monte acuto, or ‘pointed hill’.
arms of the Montagus as earls of Manchester (with a red crescent as they were the cadet branch at the time)
Some have tried to trace the surname to the Norman village of Montaigu-les-Bois in Coutances—and there was a French noble family with this name, which died out in 1715—and that a companion of William the Conqueror, Drogo, came from there and gave his name to estates he was granted in Somerset after the Conquest. Others, however, suggest the opposite, that he took his surname from these estates, for a priory dedicated to Saint Michael on a ‘pointed hill’ (Mont Agud), near Yeovil in eastern Somerset. Historical records show that this area of the county had initially been granted to the Count of Mortain, half-brother of the Conqueror, and that the Norman nobleman named Drogo was in his suite and became his vassal for about twenty fiefs in Somerset and Devon. Two of the key estates he was given in Somerset were at Tintinhull and Wincanton, near Bruton, a bit to the northeast. The latter included Knowle Park, held directly from the King. Also nearby was Shepton Montague. These all passed to the Neville family in the 1420s.
Montacute House in the 1780s, with its ‘pointed hill’ behind
Montacute Priory was founded in about 1080, a dependency of the Abbey of Cluny in France, and Montacute House was built nearby. The Priory was dissolved in 1539 and became a farmhouse on the Phelips estate: Sir Edward Phelips, a yeoman farmer who became Speaker of the Commons, rebuilt the house in the 1590s—one of the finest examples of the Elizabethan country house. But his family soon faded back into the rural gentry and found it hard to maintain such a grand house. Their distant descendants ultimately sold it in 1931, becoming one of the first properties acquired by the National Trust.
Montacute House today (photo Mike Searle)
Meanwhile, the descendants of Drogo were summoned to Parliament as Lord Montagu or Montacute in 1299. Simon, the first baron, fought with Edward I and Edward II in Wales, Aquitaine and Scotland, and was named Admiral of the Fleet in 1310. His son William was Steward of the Household of Edward II in 1316 and Seneschal of Gascony in 1318. He thus established great intimacy with the Plantagenet kings, and propelled his three sons to the highest social, political and ecclesiastical positions in the land. William, 3rd Baron Montagu, was created Earl of Salisbury in 1337 and Marshal of England in 1338. His brother Simon was Bishop of Worcester, then of Ely; while Edward was also summoned to Parliament as Baron Montagu, 1348, having married Alice of Norfolk, a granddaughter of Edward I. They had only daughters, so a junior line was not established at this point.
The earldom of Salisbury had first been created in 1145 by Lady Matilda, at a time when she held power, as a reward to an ally for watching over the western parts of England, notably the Salisbury plain. The original line soon died out and the title passed through three heiresses until re-granted to William de Montacute in 1337. He had grown up as a close companion of Edward III, and solidified his position as a royal favourite when he helped the young king overthrow his mother and her lover Mortimer in 1330. Salisbury served with Edward in Scotland and in France, and frequently served as his representative in diplomatic activity. The King also recognised him as King of Mann, supporting his claim to rule that island due to a supposed grant given to his grandfather Simon by Aufrica de Connoght, whose identity is unclear, but may have been heiress of the last Norse king of Mann, Magnus Olafsson. But first the Earl had to conquer the island from the King of Scots, which he did in 1343, and he and his son were recognised as sovereign lords until they sold these rights to the Le Scrope family in 1392. Closer to home, the Countess of Salisbury is remembered in myth or anecdote as the woman whose honour was defended by Edward III when she dropped her garter at a ball (and thus the source of the name for his order of chivalry).
The main seat for the family at this point, to be closer to court in London or Winchester, was Bisham Manor, in Berkshire. A manor house was built here in the 1260s by the Knights Templar, whose properties were confiscated by the Crown in 1307; Bisham was then sold to the 1st Earl of Salisbury in 1335, who founded a priory next door to serve as the Montagu mausoleum. When the Salisbury dynasty ended, Bisham returned to the Crown under Henry VIII, who also dissolved and pulled down the priory in the 1540s. The manor was acquired by the Hoby family who held it for the next two centuries.
Bisham Manor today (photo WyrdLight.com)
When the 1st Earl of Salisbury died in 1344, he was one of the wealthiest men in the Kingdom. His son William Montagu, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, was one of the first knights of the Order of the Garter, in 1348, and a military commander in the war in France. He married Joan of Kent, the King’s first cousin, though this was declared invalid; and his title passed to his nephew. John, 3rd Earl of Salisbury, was also heir to his mother, Margaret de Monthermer, heiress of the 2nd Baron Monthermer, whose father was the Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, and mother was Joan of England, daughter of Edward I. The origins of the Monthermer family are unknown and it is unclear where the name comes from (though likely Norman). As close kin and friend of King Richard II, the 3rd Earl fell from power with him in 1397, then was executed in 1400 for plotting against the new king, Henry IV. Thomas, 4th Earl of Salisbury, recovered the lands and titles in 1409, and swiftly gained the favour of Henry V, fighting alongside him in France in 1419 and given the County of Perche as one of the spoils of war. In 1423 he was named Governor of Champagne, as part of the English occupation of northern France, then was killed as one of the English commanders in the siege of Orléans, 1428.
William de Montagu, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, in his Garter robes, and wearing his Montagu-Monthermer colours (from a manuscript of 1430)
Alice Montagu was left as her father’s heir—medieval earldoms could be inherited through women, so she was the 5th Countess of Salisbury in her own right, as well as Baroness Montagu and Baroness Monthermer. She had married Richard Neville in 1420 and they had several children: the elder sons were the earls of Warwick and Salisbury, while the 4th son, John, a Yorkist commander, was created Baron Montagu, 1461, then Earl of Northumberland in 1464 and Marquess of Montagu in 1470 (in exchange for giving up the Northumberland earldom)—only to lose all of this on the execution block in 1471. The earldom of Salisbury passed from the Nevilles to George, Duke of Clarence (brother of Edward IV), then to his son Edward, though only nominally since he was a prisoner in the Tower after the Battle of Bosworth Field. His sister, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, is remembered as the cousin of Henry VIII that was dragged to the Tower as an old woman, and executed for simply having too much Plantagenet blood in 1541. Eventually, the earldom of Salisbury was recreated for the Cecil family (1605), and they hold it still today.
The medieval Montagu family was gone. But another emerged at about the same time, claiming that their branch’s founder, Richard Ladde, who took the name Montagu in 1447, was a son or grandson of John or James Montagu, an illegitimate son of the 4th Earl of Salisbury. Richard’s family certainly used the same coat of arms, so either this is true, or they assumed the name and arms due to a gift in the last Earl’s will. But the family has few connections to Somerset or Wiltshire: Richard was a yeoman from Hanging Houghton, and his son Thomas Montagu was of Hemington, both villages in Northamptonshire. Hanging Houghton, in the centre of the County, was a great country house, owned by the family since about 1470, with great gardens and terraces, though eventually abandoned by them in 1665. It was in ruins by the eighteenth century, and now just a footprint remains.
It was Thomas’s son, Sir Edward Montagu, who brought this family back to the top ranks of English aristocratic society. A lawyer, he became Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and of the Common Pleas (1530s-50), a member of the Privy Council, and in 1547 was named one of the sixteen executors of Henry VIII’s will and governor of the child-king Edward VI. He narrowly avoided execution in 1553 for having drafted Edward VI’s will naming Lady Jane Grey as heir instead of Princess Mary.
Sir Edward Montagu, Chief Justice
Sir Edward had moved his chief residence to Boughton, also in Northamptonshire, in 1528. There was a de Boughton family in this county since the early Middle Ages, with a manor house just north of the town of Northampton. The estate of Boughton, however, was further north, near the town of Kettering. Buildings here were part of a monastic complex that, when shut down by Henry VIII, was sold to Montagu. The grand country house we see there now was built by his great-grandson, Ralph Montagu, in the 1680s, inspired by his periods of residence in France and the newly built château of Versailles. John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, developed extensive gardens, again in a French style influenced by his Grand Tour (and giving him the nickname ‘John the Planter’). In the eighteenth century, however, Boughton House lost prominence, designated as a residence for dowagers or younger siblings, and, because it was not the family’s main residence, it was not renovated to keep up with the latest styles and therefore remains almost completely untouched in its original seventeenth-century form—a rarity amongst the English country houses. After 1790, Boughton was part of the inheritance of the dukes of Buccleuch, but continued to fade (since they resided primarily in Scotland), but since the 1990s, new life has been breathed into Boughton, particularly its gardens, and re-oriented towards tourism.
Boughton House (photo Euan Myles)
Chief Justice Sir Edward Montagu’s son Edward was an MP for Northamptonshire and held several posts in the county (including county sheriff four times). He expanded the family’s landholdings in this county even more, notably acquiring Barnwell Castle in the 1540s, to which he added a manor house—the Tudor house (and older castle ruins) passed to the dukes of Buccleuch in the early nineteenth century; they sold it in 1913, but it was purchased in 1938 by the 6th Duke’s grand-daughter and her husband the Duke of Gloucester. The Gloucesters—cousins of Elizabeth II—lived here until the 1990s and it was sold in 2024.
ruins of Barnwell Castle
The second Edward Montagu died in 1602, leaving behind a set of sons who each rose to prominence in different ways. Three of them, Edward, Henry and Sidney, spawned the separate lines of Montagu of Boughton, Montagu of Manchester and Montagu of Sandwich. Of the others, Walter and Charles gained knighthoods and served in Parliament, while James entered the church and served the Crown as Dean of the Chapel Royal from 1603. He had Calvinist leanings and a scholarly reputation, so was close to King James, whose works he edited, and who promoted him to Bishop of Bath & Wells in 1608 then of Winchester in 1616. A Privy Councillor and first Master of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge University, he died relatively young only two years later in 1618.
The eldest brother, Edward, an MP for Northamptonshire since the 1580s, was promoted to the House of Lords by the King in 1621, as Baron Montagu of Boughton. He remained a loyal servant of the Stuarts and when tensions arose between Parliament and Charles I, he backed the King and was arrested, 1642. The damp of the Tower of London made him ill and though he was transferred to a hospital, he died in 1644.
Edward, 1st Baron Montagu of Boughton
Meanwhile, his brother Henry had become a lawyer like their grandfather, and Chief Justice of the King’s Bench by 1616. King James named him Lord High Treasurer in 1620, and created him Viscount Mandeville and Baron Montagu of Kimbolton, then the next year raised him to the post of Lord President of the Council. King Charles continued his father’s favour and raised him in rank to Earl of Manchester, 1626, and Lord Privy Seal, 1628. Like his elder brother, he remained one of the most trusted counsellors of Charles I, but when he died in 1642, his son was already known as a leader of the Parliamentarian opposition, and a commander of their army. The youngest brother, Sidney, of Hinchingbrooke, was also a judge, serving as a Master of Requests, part of a lawcourt closely attached to the Crown through the Privy Council. He remained a loyalist, and like his brother Edward was arrested in 1642; and though he was released, he too died in 1644, leaving a son, Edward, who became 1st Earl of Sandwich—his story will be picked up again towards the very end of this post.
Henry Montagu, 1st Earl of Manchester (as Chief Justice of the King’s Bench)
Of the senior line, of Boughton, there were two brothers: Edward, 2nd Baron Montagu, who sided with Parliament in the Civil War, and Sir William, another lawyer and a member of the House of Commons for fifty years. Charles II favoured the latter with the office of Chief Baron of the Exchequer (a judge), 1676, but he was removed by James II in 1686. We thus see this family continually balancing between military and judicial service, and between loyalty and opposition. The 2nd Baron’s heir, another Edward, reversed his father’s position and helped bring about the restoration of the monarchy in 1660; he was rewarded with the office of Master of the Horse for Queen Catherine of Braganza, but was killed in 1665 in the Anglo-Dutch War before he could succeed to his father’s title, which thus passed in 1684 to his brother Ralph, who had already taken over the post of the Queen’s Master of the Horse.
Ralph Montagu was a court gallant in the Restoration. He served as a diplomat in France in 1669-70 (when Charles II and Louis XIV were trying to form an unwieldy alliance), then was given a prominent court position, Master of the Great Wardrobe, 1671, but fell from favour for trying to bring down the Earl of Danby as first minister along with his chief supporter the Duchess of Cleveland, and for supporting the Exclusion Party in Parliament (the faction trying to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York from succeeding to the Crown). Charles II thus removed Montagu from his court posts in 1678.
Ralph Montagu, 1st Duke of Montagu
Succeeding to the peerage as 3rd Baron Montagu in 1684, he focused on rebuilding Boughton House as we’ve seen above, recalling the grand French châteaux he’d seen when he was ambassador. He also built a grand London mansion, Montagu House, situated on the northern edge of the old city, next to open fields in a district known as Bloomsbury. The house was built starting in 1675, with French and Dutch influences, and murals by renowned Italian painter Antonio Verrio, but in 1686 it burned down, and Montagu had to start again. The second Montagu House was grander and more clearly influenced by French classicism. In the 1750s, thinking the Bloomsbury area becoming too ‘middle class’, Montagu’s son sold the house to the newly founded British Museum. The site remains the home of this classic British institution, though Montagu House itself was torn down in the 1840s and rebuilt as a much more imposing Greek Revival building.
Montagu House, Bloomsbury, in the 1750s
Ralph, Baron Montagu of Boughton, returned to royal favour after he backed William III in 1689, and was restored to his post as Master of the Great Wardrobe. He was also created Earl of Montagu and Viscount Monthermer—the latter title a formal recognition by the Crown that his family was indeed descended from the ancient House of Montagu. The Earl had married a very wealthy heiress, Elizabeth Wriothesley, heiress of the earls of Southampton, and potentially heiress of her first husband the Earl of Northumberland. She died in 1690, and two years later Montagu married again, another rich widow: Elizabeth Cavendish, heiress of her father the Duke of Newcastle and of her first husband, the Duke of Albemarle (Christopher Monck). It was said at the time that the Dowager Duchess of Albemarle was ‘mad’ (and some joked she was the ‘Monkey Duchess’ punning on her first husband’s surname) because she was convinced that, as the greatest heiress in England, she could only remarry a crowned head, and somehow thought this must be the Emperor of China. And so (as the story goes), Ralph Montagu dressed up in Chinese robes, proposed, and she accepted.
the Duchess of Montagu in her first marriage
One of the properties Elizabeth Cavendish brought into the Montagu portfolio from Albemarle was the Lordship of Bowland, a vast wilderness of hills and dales in Lancashire. Its extent was enormous, covering about 800 km2 with ten manors and four parishes. It had been designated the ‘Forest and Liberty of Bowland’ by the Normans, and was held with the Honor of Clitheroe by the de Lacy family, then passed to the earls of Lancaster in the fourteenth century. It thus became part of the Duchy of Lancaster, which was held directly by the Crown, until the Restoration when Bowland was granted to General Monck as part of his new dukedom of Albemarle. Along with most of the Montagu of Boughton branch properties, the Lordship of Bowland passed to the dukes of Buccleuch at the start of the nineteenth century, and from them to the local Lancashire Towneley family. The title was disused by the end of the century, but was revived in 2008 when it was sold to a private (and secret) person at Cambridge University.
After such a long career, and now with a fantastic fortune, Ralph, Earl of Montagu, was promoted by Queen Anne in 1705 to Duke of Montagu and Marquess of Monthermer. This promotion was also thanks to the favour Montagu had with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, whose daughter Mary his son married that same year. The 1st Duke died a wealthy and powerful man in 1709. His Duchess—the ‘Empress of China’—survived for another twenty-five years in the halls of what is now the site of the British Museum. Maybe she haunts it still?
Their son John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, was active in both government and society. He was interested in science and medicine, as a founding governor of the Foundling Hospital in London in 1739, and a Grand Master of the first Masonic Lodge in England in 1725. He was named governor of the islands of St Lucia and St Vincent in the West Indies in 1722, but the British were soon chased off these islands. In 1740, Montagu’s political career was crowned with the office of Master-General of the Ordnance, a post responsible for organising military supplies, hospitals, transportation etc…and thus often one of the most lucrative positions in government, as each commission always came with a ‘fee’.
John, 2nd Duke of Montagu
The 2nd Duke moved his chief London residence away from Bloomsbury in the 1730s and built another Montagu House in the more aristocratic district closer to Westminster on Whitehall Street. The site had been the location of the London residence of the medieval archbishops of York, and later part of the Whitehall Palace complex itself (before it mostly burned down in the 1690s). This second Montagu House was relatively modest, with a front on the Thames. Like Boughton, it passed to the dukes of Buccleuch in the nineteenth century, who replaced it with a much grander building. This was demolished in 1949 and the site is today part of the Ministry of Defence buildings.
Montagu House, Whitehall, fronting on to the Thames, 1750s
There was even a third Montagu House, built by the 1st Duke at Blackheath Common, overlooking Greenwich Park and the Thames valley in southeast London. Eighteenth-century Montagus used this house as a retreat from the smells of urban London, but it is best known for housing a royal tenant, Caroline of Brunswick, Princess of Wales, estranged from her husband and thus from court, who lived here with her daughter, Princess Charlotte, between 1799 and 1812. It was the scene of Caroline’s alleged love affairs and gained lots of bad press, so in 1815 it was torn down. All that remains today are tennis courts on the site.
Montagu House, Blackheath, as it appeared in the 18th century
John and Mary Montagu had a son, John, who died when he was five, and two daughters. The first, Lady Isabella, married the 2nd Duke of Manchester (below), then Edward Hussey, an MP from an old Anglo-Irish family, who legally took the name Hussey-Montagu, and when he retired from Parliament in 1762 was created Baron Beaulieu, of Beaulieu (Hampshire), then in 1784, advanced to Earl of Beaulieu. They had a son, John, Lord Montagu, another MP, but he died before his father, and when the latter died in 1802, these titles went extinct.
The younger daughter, Lady Mary, married George Brudenell, 4th Earl of Cardigan, who also took the name and arms of Montagu. The Brudenell family were, like the Montagus, a landowning family from Northamptonshire, based at Deene Park; and like the Montagus they also rose to prominence through the career of a sixteenth century high court judge. Made barons in 1628, then earls in 1661, they only renounced Catholicism in 1709. The 3rd Earl had married Lady Elizabeth Bruce, heiress of the Earl of Ailesbury and Elgin, so while the eldest son George was set up with the earldom of Cardigan, and later the Montagu succession, the younger son Thomas took the name Bruce and was re-created Earl of Ailesbury in 1776. This was a family on the rise, and the 4th Earl was swiftly named Justice in Eyre North of the Trent, 1742, Governor of Windsor Castle, 1752, and re-created Duke of Montagu in 1766. He was later given a seat on the Privy Council and finally named Master of the Horse, 1780. In London, the Brudenell-Montagus lived at Montagu House on Whitehall and at Cardigan House. In the countryside, they inhabited Boughton House or Deene Park, and further afield enjoyed the revenues of the Forest of Bowland, which the Duke inherited from his sister-in-law Isabella in 1786 (his Duchess, Mary, had died in 1775).
George Brudenell-Montagu, Duke of Montagu and 4th Earl of Cardigan
As with his first cousin John Hussey-Montagu, John Brudenell-Montagu was set up as a politician and an heir: in Parliament he was moved to the House of Lords as Baron Montagu of Boughton in 1762 (as a Tory supporter), then became Marquess of Monthermer as courtesy title when the dukedom was re-created for his father and mother. But he too died before his father; so in 1786, the Crown re-created the barony of Montagu once more, this time with special remainder for his father and then for his nephew. In 1767, his sister Lady Elizabeth had married Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, a descendant of King Charles II, and their second son, Henry, took the name Montagu-Scott and 2nd Baron Montagu of Boughton on his grandfather’s death in 1790. He was also Lord of Bowland. He died in 1845 with only daughters, so the barony went extinct, while the Lordship of Bowland went to his older brother’s descendants, who now took the triple-barrelled surname Montagu-Douglas-Scott. This offshoot of the Montagus—who also inherited the house at Boughton and several other properties noted here—will have their own separate blog post as dukes of Buccleuch.
This is one of the more complicated arranging and re-arranging of surnames and titles that seems to have been commonplace amongst the British aristocracy of the eighteenth century. In the end, the headship of the house of Montagu passed to the next line, Manchester, while the junior line of the house of Brudenell reclaimed its earldom of Cardigan, and its seat, Deene Park, where they still live today, having merged with the earldom of Ailesbury (one of the Bruce titles), raised to a marquessate in 1821.
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We pick up the Manchester line again with the 2nd Earl who succeeded his father at the start of the English Civil War. Edward Montagu had already been advanced to the House of Lords in 1626 as Viscount Mandeville (also known as Baron Kimbolton), and unlike his father was a vocal opponent of royal absolutism. As 2nd Earl from 1642, he became a Parliamentarian general, in command of the eastern counties in 1643, and leading the forces to victory at the Battle of Marston Moor. In subsequent years, Oliver Cromwell challenged his commitment to the cause and he resigned. The Earl of Manchester took up his seat in the House of Lords where he tried to reconcile the Parliamentarians with the Royalists, and tried to avoid bringing the King to trial. Having failed at these goals, he retired from public life during the Commonwealth, and was ultimately rewarded by Charles II in the Restoration with the post of one of the commissioners for the Great Seal of England and the Order of the Garter.
Edward, 2nd Earl of Manchester
The seat of this branch of the Montagus was Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire (today part of Cambridgeshire). A castle was built here in the twelfth century by the 1st Earl of Essex, Geoffrey FitzPeter, whose sons adopted the name Mandeville, after one of their maternal ancestors (Geoffrey de Mandeville had been one of the companions of William the Conqueror a century before), and this name will re-appear frequently in the history of the House of Montagu. In 1522, the medieval castle was acquired by Richard Wingfield, a Tudor courtier and diplomat, who rebuilt it as a Tudor manor house, with a moat. Because it was secure with a moat, and relatively far from London and the court, Kimbolton was offered by Wingfield as a residence for the disgraced Queen Katherine of Aragon (now recognised officially only as the Dowager Princess of Wales). Wingfield was a well-connected host, as a cousin of Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk (Henry VIII’s best friend and brother-in-law), and also a diplomat who had earned the favour of Emperor Charles V, Katherine’s nephew. She lived at Kimbolton in total isolation, seeing almost no one and only leaving her rooms to attend mass in the castle’s chapel, from May 1534 until her death in January 1536. The Wingfields organised her funeral at nearby Peterborough Cathedral. In 1615, Kimbolton Castle was purchased by the future 1st Earl of Manchester; it was then rebuilt by the 1st Duke of Manchester in about 1700, in a classical style but with battlements to give it more of a ‘castle’ feel. Over the next two centuries, most of the Manchester family would be buried in St Andrew’s church in the village, but the house itself slowly fell into disrepair, only to be overhauled, with indoor plumbing and electric lights, in the 1930s, but at far too much cost, forcing the sale first of the contents in 1949, then of the castle itself in 1950. It now houses the Kimbolton School, and is only open for tourists on certain open days each year.
Kimbolton Castle today (photo Jim Osley)
The 2nd Earl of Manchester died in 1667, and although he married five times, he had only one son, Robert, the 3rd Earl, who did not live long as earl, and died in 1683, having served as a Gentleman of the Bedchamber for Charles II and Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire. His son Charles would become the 1st Duke of Manchester, but before we move to him, the 2nd Earl’s younger brothers and nephews should be mentioned.
Walter Montagu is one of the most fascinating members of the family—and certainly for me as a historian of the court of Louis XIV. He was sent several times as a diplomat from Charles I to France in the 1620s-30s (often with secret instructions). In 1634, he converted to Catholicism and was given a place in the household of the French-born (and Catholic) Queen Henrietta Maria. In the Civil War Montagu left with the Queen for France, and joined a monastic community, becoming abbot of a Benedictine monastery in Nanteuil and also abbot of St-Martin of Pontoise (with its generous revenues) through the intercession of the Queen and her sister-in-law, the Regent of France, Anne of Austria (on whose behalf he continued to run secret missions to England in the 1640s). In 1647, Abbé Walter was named Chaplain to the British queen, and her almoner (her court at this point was based in the Palais Royal in Paris). During the Restoration Abbé Montagu lived at the Queen Mother’s court at Somerset House in London, then returned with her again to France in 1665, and officiated at her funeral at St-Denis in 1669. He then joined the household of Henrietta Maria’s daughter, Henriette, Duchess of Orléans, but she died the following year, so he retired from court and died in 1677.
a set of essays written by Walter Montagu
A younger half-brother, George, of Horton Hall, was an MP for Huntingdonshire in the 1640s, then for Dover in the 1660s-70s. Horton Hall was also in Northamptonshire, but on the opposite side from other Montagu properties, close to the border with Buckinghamshire. It was an old estate owned in the sixteenth century by the Parr family (relatives of Queen Katherine Parr); Baron Parr of Horton built a Tudor mansion. Acquired by the 1st Earl of Manchester then held by this younger branch of the Montagu family—and rebuilt in the 1740s in a palladian style—it was later sold in the 1780s to diplomat Robert Gunning. Horton passed through other hands in the nineteenth century, then was demolished in 1936.
Horton Hall in the 1780s
Hon. George Montagu of Horton had two sons: James was a judge and Whig politician, rising to the post of Attorney General in 1708 and Chief Baron of the Exchequer in 1722; Charles was also a Whig politician, but rose more prominently as part of the ‘Whig Junto’ who often ran the government in the reigns of William III and Anne. In 1694 he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Bank of England. King William created him Baron Halifax (of Halifax in Yorkshire). He later was a major supporter of the Act of Union (1707, joining England and Scotland), and of the Hanoverian Succession, so in 1714 was rewarded by George I with the post of First Lord of the Treasury and the earldom of Halifax. He died the following year, so the barony passed to his nephew George, who was re-created Earl of Halifax that same year. He was appointed Ranger of Bushy Park in west London and built the ‘Upper Lodge’ in 1714/15, which today is known as Bushy House (and was for a time the residence of King William IV and his wife Adelaide).
Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, leader of the Whig Junto
George, 2nd Earl of Halifax is known most for his role in developing trade with the North American colonies in his capacity as President of the Board of Trade from 1749—and in that same year founding a new city, Halifax, in the colony of Nova Scotia. There are also counties in Virginia and North Carolina named for him (in fact quite close to each other, on the border between the two states). As a leading Tory politician of the 1760s, he was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, First Lord of the Admiralty, and a Secretary of State. Unlike others of his party, he was a supporter of the rights of the colonists and opposed to slavery. He returned to government in 1770 as Lord Privy Seal in the new administration of his nephew and protégé, Lord North, but died a year later, his titles extinct.
George, 2nd Earl of Halifax
Charles Montagu, 4th Earl of Manchester from 1683, was a supporter of the accession of William and Mary in 1689, and fought under William in Ireland. He was appointed Ambassador to France, 1699-1701, and to Venice, 1707-08, then under George I was given a post in the Household as Lord of the Bedchamber and finally elevated to a dukedom in 1719. This meant there were now two Montagu dukedoms, Montagu and Manchester, a rare honour for a single family. He died three years later and the title passed to his heir, known as Viscount Mandeville.
Charles Montagu, 1st Duke of Manchester
William, 2nd Duke of Manchester, was, like many of his family, Lord Lieutenant of Huntingdonshire. He was also, like the Duke of Montagu, one of the founders of the Foundling Hospital in London. As we’ve seen, he married his cousin Lady Isabella Montagu, but they had no children, so when he died in 1739, the titles passed to his brother Robert.
Robert, 3rd Duke of Manchester
The 3rd Duke of Manchester was a Whig politician (unlike his cousin the Earl of Halifax), and Lord of the Bedchamber for George II from 1739, then Lord Chamberlain for Queen Charlotte form 1761 until his death a year later. He had two sons: the younger, Lord Charles Montagu, was one of the last royal governors of South Carolina (off and on three times between 1766 and 1773), and commander of a regiment of redcoats in the War of American Independence. He did not make it back to Britain and died in 1784 in Nova Scotia, appropriately in Halifax, where he is buried.
Lord Charles Montagu, Governor of South Carolina
George, 4th Duke of Manchester, took over from his father as Lord of the Bedchamber in 1762, and set about remodelling Kimbolton Castle and developing properties in central London. In the ministry of his cousin Lord North, he was appointed Lord Chamberlain of the Household, 1782, and a member of the Privy Council, but was removed when the North government fell a year later. Instead, he was sent as Ambassador to France (by now a familiar posting for his family) where he helped settle the details of the Treaty of Paris, 1783, that ended the war in North America.
George, 4th Duke of Manchester
The Manchester properties in London were part of the Portman estate in Marylebone, across Oxford Street from Mayfair. In the 1770s, the 4th Duke developed Manchester Square, and on one side built Manchester House. This name did not remain very long however: after a short stint as the Embassy of Spain in the 1790s, the house was sold to the 2nd Marquess of Hertford (of the Seymour family) in 1797. Again used as an embassy, this time for France (1836-51), the house, now called Hertford House, eventually passed—along with one of the greatest art collections of the age—to an illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess, Richard Wallace, who bequeathed it to the nation in 1890. The Wallace Collection in Hertford House still presides gracefully over Manchester Square.
Manchester House, later Hertford House, now the Wallace Collection (1816)
William, 5th Duke of Manchester, succeeded his father in 1788. He had led a fairly quiet life as Lord Mandeville, but made an impact later on, notably as Governor of Jamaica, 1808 to 1827, during which time he oversaw the abolition of slavery in that colony. He had married a daughter and co-heiress of the Duke of Gordon, but she ran off with a footman in 1812 and they legally separated.
Their son, George, 6th Duke of Manchester, was known for most of his life as Viscount Mandeville (and gave this name to a parish in Jamaica while his father was governor) since he only held the ducal title from 1843 to 1855. At this time there was a neogothic revival in Britain, and a passion for all things medieval; the Montagus joined in the fun by reviving the name Drogo, which appeared somewhere in the list of names of sons in every generation from here on. The Duke also married an heiress, Millicent Bernard-Sparrow, daughter of a general and heiress of Brampton Park in Huntingdonshire, and large estates in Ireland.
George, 6th Duke of Manchester
Brampton Park had a red brick house from the sixteenth century, built by the Throckmortons. It was then owned by the Bernard family (baronets) and was rebuilt by the last heiress, Olivia Bernard, Lady Sparrow, a prominent philanthropist, in the 1820s. Much of the house was destroyed by fire in 1907; it was restored and lived in by the Manchester family in the 1920s-30s, then housed German prisoners of war in World War II. It became the officers’ mess building for the Royal Air Force at Brampton, 1955 to 2013, and is now being developed into residential units.
Brampton Park
The heir to the Montagu and Bernard fortunes, William Drogo, 7th Duke, was thus a very wealthy landowner, with 13,000 acres in Huntingdonshire and 12,000 in County Armagh, Ireland. He was passionate about religion, and was active in the Canterbury Association, set up in 1848 to colonise New Zealand—he bought land there and was encouraged to emigrate and lead the new colony, but he didn’t—then from 1861 to 1888, he was Grand Prior of the Order of St John (the Protestant charity set up to replace the old Order of St John, aka Malta).
William Drogo, 7th Duke of Manchester, carte-de-visite, 1860
In 1852, the future duke married the intriguing German countess from Hanover, Luise von Alten, a courtier who became Mistress of the Robes to Queen Victoria, 1858-59, and a noted political hostess and friend of the Prime Minister, Lord Derby (whose grandson later married her daughter Lady Alice Montagu). Widowed in 1890, Duchess Louise soon married the Duke of Devonshire, gaining her nickname the ‘Double Duchess’. She was known as a great beauty and a member of the Prince of Wales Set (the friends of the future King Edward VII).
Louise von Alten, Duchess of Manchester, by Winterhalter, 1859
Her son, George, 8th Duke of Manchester, also made an interesting marriage, in 1876, to Consuelo Yznaga, daughter of a Cuban plantation owner and niece of a New York banker. She came with a six million dollar dowry, then inherited further millions from her brother in 1901; she was one of the inspirations for characters in Edith Wharton’s The Buccaneers—Wharton had known the Duchess personally, but the book didn’t come out until 1938, long after her death. Consuelo commissioned the famous Manchester Tiara from Cartier in 1903, which kept the family afloat even in its darkest moments, then was given to the nation in 2007 to cover death duties (now housed in the Victoria & Albert in London).
Consuelo Yznaga, Duchess of Manchester, by Singer Sargent, 1907
But such extraordinary wealth also seems to have brought on the downturn in fortunes of the House of Montagu, from which it is still reeling. Part of the problem was the collapse in the 1880s of the land rental market in Britain, resulting in a drop in income for the Manchester landed estates from £90,000 to £25,000. But the 8th Duke also made matters worse through poor financial decisions. As Viscount Mandeville, George Montagu had a modest career as an MP and soldier, but became better known as a drunk and a social outcast. He spent most of his wife’s dowry on gambling and women (notably a mistress, music-hall singer Bessie Bellwood), so was exiled by his father to Tandragee Castle in Armagh. His wife remained in London. The same year he succeeded to the dukedom, 1890, he was declared bankrupt, and died just two years later of cirrhosis, only 39. His widow lived on until 1909.
George, Viscount Mandeville, in Vanity Fair, 1882, later 8th Duke of Manchester
Tandragee was originally the seat of the O’Hanlon family. Confiscated after Ireland’s Nine Years War in 1603, the estate and its castle were given to the St John family, then destroyed in the rebellion of 1641 when the O’Hanlons tried to take it back. The Sparrow family acquired the estate in the eighteenth century and it thus passed by marriage to the dukes of Manchester. The 6th Duke rebuilt the castle, and it became the secondary residence of the family after Kimbolton. In 1956, his impoverished descendants sold it to a local man who installed a business he had created: the very glamourous sounding Tayto Potato Crisp Company.
Tandragee Castle, Co Armagh (photo GreyHobbit)
The teenaged William (Lord Kimbolton while his grandfather was alive and known as ‘Kim’ by his friends for the rest of his life) became 9th Duke of Manchester in 1892. He was able to avoid some of the worst of his father’s bankruptcy by relying on his mother’s sizeable American estate, wisely kept separate. But like his predecessors, he spent a lot of money, entertaining, travelling, collecting, and gambling. As a young peer he joined the Liberals in Parliament and was appointed Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard in 1905 by the government of Campbell-Bannerman. Five years earlier, he had married another American, Helena Zimmerman of Cincinnati, another heiress as daughter of a railroad president and major stockholder in Standard Oil. The marriage was in secret since his mother did not approve of the match—was this New York money looking down on Ohio money?
Helena Zimmerman, Duchess of Manchester
Eugene Zimmerman paid off many of Kim’s debts, and bought the couple an estate in County Galway, Kylemore Castle, 1903—a grand former abbey, which they had to sell not long after. Still the Duke’s debts grew and grew and he spent much of his time abroad evading creditors. His wife divorced him in 1931, and he immediately married the West End actress Kathleen Dawes. Soon after he was convicted of making false financial statements to a pawnbroker and sentenced to nine months in Wormwood Scrubs Prison in west London (his brother, Lord Edward, also spent time here in 1935, then died mysteriously in a Mexican jungle). The 9th Duke of Manchester died in disgrace in 1947.
William, 9th Duke of Manchester
Alexander, Viscount Mandeville (known as ‘Mandy’), now became the 10th Duke of Manchester. He had started a career in the Royal Navy in the 1930s, then moved to British East Africa (now Kenya) in 1946 to farm a huge estate—10,000 acres, where he could live like a duke, with 14 houseboys and 20 gardeners—and try to undo generations of profligate spending. He had spent a lot on Kimbolton Castle in the 1930s, bringing in modern plumbing and electricity, but by the 1950s, he sold it, and Tandragee Castle as well; as his businesses continued to fail in the 1960s, he sold of the rest of the family’s interests in the United Kingdom. He was succeeded in 1977 by his elder son, Sidney (also known as ‘Kim’), who continued to develop the family interests in Kenya and South Africa but only held the ducal title for eight years before his own death in 1985.
Alexander, 10th Duke of Manchester
The new 12th Duke of Manchester seems to have inherited his grandfather’s propensity for double dealing and evading the law. As a young man, Lord Angus Montagu (or ‘Aggi’) had moved to Australia where he worked as a salesman, a cattle wrangler, a barman and a crocodile wrestler. Much of his history is colourful and difficult to substantiate for certain, but he seems also to have worked in Texas oil fields and sold trousers in a Melbourne department store. By the 1980s Angus was living in a modest flat in Bedford, a short drive north of London, but also not too far from Kimbolton where he could maintain at least some family ties as ‘lord of the manor’. In 1985, on succeeding to his lofty titles (but inheriting next to nothing), he was charged with conspiracy to fraud a British bank, but was acquitted by a judge who deemed him too ‘absurdly stupid’ to be guilty, and duped instead by a cleverer con-man. Rather than retreat from this brush with the law, the new duke only increased his activities with associates often connected with the London criminal underground. And his debts continued to increase. Over the next decade he used his title to try to start up fundraising schemes, but was convicted of fraud in 1996 in the United States, where he spent two years in prison then was deported to the UK. He did set up a moderately successful tourism business in later years, offering Americans a chance to tour England in the company of a ‘real duke’. He married four times and died in his flat in Bedford in 2002.
Angus, 12th Duke of Manchester, with younger son Kimble (photo Allan Warren)
Since 2002, the 13th Duke of Manchester has been Alexander Montagu, born in Australia in 1962, but living in the US since the 1980s. As a duke with no fortune he has also struggled to find his place, like his father spending time in prison (in Australia), and as recently as 2013 was charged with fraud for a bad cheque in Las Vegas, Nevada, and soon after that served time for burglary and making a false police report (for which he served several years in prison after 2017). But he has also been dogged by lawsuits and scandals involving his marriages. There are reports of a first brief marriage in Australia to a woman (who claims he tried to kill her), and legal protests from him that he does not owe child support for offspring from a marriage he says never existed. He had a second wife in the US for several years, whom he divorced, and although it seems he considers their son Alexander (b. 1993) to be his heir, it will be interesting to see how the British peerage regulators will consider him since (if the claims are correct) the Duke was still married to wife number one when he married wife number two. The heir himself, Viscount Mandeville, has himself already featured in the US press when he was a child as one of the many purported ‘special friends’ of Michael Jackson, then as an aristocrat working in fast-food in southern California to put himself through college. The online social media profiles of both the 13th Duke and his Duchess (a third wife, a real estate professional in Las Vegas) are a bit nutty, but I’ll leave this there, since I’m a historian, so will retreat to safer ground…!
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Before wrapping up, there is one final line of the House of Montagu that reached prominence, and another earldom, that of Sandwich. Sir Sidney Montagu, youngest brother of the 1st Earl of Manchester, acquired another estate in Huntingdonshire: Hinchingbrooke. Like so many country houses in the history of the English aristocracy, this one began its life as a monastic building, a Benedictine nunnery from the eleventh century. It was secularised and acquired by none other than a nephew of Thomas Cromwell (the man conveniently behind the dissolution of the monasteries), in 1538. The Cromwells rebuilt it as an Elizabethan manor house in the 1560s, and held on to it until Sir Oliver (uncle of the more famous Oliver) got into financial difficulties and sold it in 1627 to Sidney Montagu. The Montagus of Hinchingbrooke were based here for the next three centuries, rebuilding the house after a major fire in 1830, then selling it in 1962 to Huntingdonshire County Council. In 1970 it became the main building of the Hinchingbrooke School.
Hinchingbrooke Castle in 1818
Sidney of Hinchingbrooke’s son Edward was an MP in the 1640s-50s and a soldier in the Parliamentarian army. During the English Commonwealth he sat on the Council of State (1653-59) and was appointed General at Sea in 1656. He remained involved in naval affairs in the Restoration, benefitting from his familial link with naval administrator Samuel Pepys who was his mother’s great-nephew. The King created him Earl of Sandwich (in Kent) in May 1660 in recognition for his part in ensuring the Restoration earlier that year (with subsidiary titles Viscount Hinchingbrooke and Baron Montagu of St Neots, both in Huntingdonshire). He was entrusted with important diplomatic roles: Ambassador to Portugal, 1661-62 (to settle the King’s marriage with Catherine of Braganza), and Ambassador to Spain, 1666-68 (to negotiate the Treaty of Madrid, 1667, which aimed to block French advances in the Low Countries and to mediate between Spain and Portugal). Lord Sandwich continued his naval career and was killed at the Battle of Solebay in 1672—such was his reputation in England that he was given a state funeral.
Edward Montagu, 1st Earl of Sandwich, 1666
As this branch were not dukes or princes, we shouldn’t follow its path entirely, but several names jump out as prominent members of eighteenth-century British society. John, 4th Earl of Sandwich, was a prominent politician and supporter of the expansion of Britain’s overseas empire. He was Secretary of State in the governments of George Grenville and Lord North in the 1660s-70s (the ‘Patriot Whigs’), and First Lord of the Admiralty off and on between the 1740s and 1780s; as such he sponsored the journeys of Captain Cook in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and had two distinct island chains named for him in the 1770s: the Sandwich Islands (aka the Kingdom of Hawai‘i) in the Pacific, and the South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic (near Antarctica). There’s also Montague Island off the coast of Alaska and Hinchinbrook Island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. We remember him most, however, for being too busy at work on naval affairs to stop for lunch (or to stop at the gambling tables, depending on which tale you believe), so asking for meat to be placed between two slices of bread: a sandwich.
John, 4th Earl of Sandwich
The earldom of Sandwich continues today with Luke Montagu (b. 1969), 12th Earl since February 2025. Since 1955 they have lived at Mapperton in Dorset, an ancient manor house rebuilt by the Morgan family in the Tudor era. Mapperton House has been voted one of England’s finest country houses, and its gardens regularly win heritage prizes—both are used frequently as sets for film and television.
Mapperton House (photo Mike Searle)
Back in the eighteenth century, the younger son of the 1st Earl of Sandwich, Sidney, became very wealthy, having married his father’s ward, the heiress of the Wortley baronets of Wortley Hall, nearly Barnsley in Yorkshire. Under the ground at Wortley was black gold, coal, which Sidney developed with great financial success. His son Sir Edward Wortley Montagu was Ambassador to Constantinople, 1716-18, but it is his wife Lady Mary (daughter of the Duke of Kingston), who is more famous today, as a writer of letters and travel diaries, and in particular reporting on her experiences inside the Ottoman harem in Constantinople, where she learned of a technique for preventing smallpox, which she used on her own children and even convinced her friend back in London, Caroline, Princess of Wales, to use on the royal children. Her son Edward was also known as a traveller and a student of languages—going so far as to abandon English culture altogether and living ‘as a Turk’ in Venice in the 1750s-60s.
Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, in Turkish dress, 1716
Another prominent member of the fashionable intellectual set of London society in this period was Elizabeth Montagu, wife of another Montagu cousin, who was known as one of the leaders of the ‘bluestockings’, educated women either admired or reviled for their learning and independence of spirit. This branch of the Montagus owned yet another ‘Montagu House’ in London, this one on Portman Square, in Marylebone—built about 1780, it survived until the area was bombed in the Second World War. There is also a Montagu Square nearby, developed in 1810 and named for the famous Salon hostess.
Elizabeth Montagu, 1776
Montagu House, Portman Square, 1870s
There is yet another peerage title ‘Baron Montagu’, this one of Beaulieu, created in 1885, famous for its beautiful Beaulieu Palace House in Hampshire (home to the National Motor Museum since 1952), and for the 3rd Baron’s imprisonment for homosexuality in 1954. But this branch more properly belongs to the Montagu-Douglas-Scott line, dukes of Buccleuch, so will be covered there.
One other claimed branch—distant, and of an unsure connection—is Montague of Boveney (in Buckinghamshire), which contributed one prominent churchman (Bishop of Chichester, 1628-38, then Norwich, 1638-41), and a colonist who migrated to Jamestown, Virginia in 1621. His family set up a plantation on the Charles River (now the York River), and left descendants, including Andrew Jackson Montague, the 44th Governor of Virginia, 1902-06.
Andrew J. Montague in 1913
From one of the richest and most powerful families in eighteenth-century Britain, the House of Montagu is today living under the shadow of the criminally indebted twentieth-century dukes of Manchester.
another view of Montagu House, Bloomsbury (the garden side)
The Kingdom of Poland, a remarkably egalitarian society, officially had no title rankings within its nobility. It therefore had very few families with the titles duke or princes within its borders—those that did bear higher titles received them from foreign powers, either the Holy Roman Empire or Russia. Amongst these, one stands out as also receiving recognition as ‘foreign prince’ from the King of France, and even further, as a ‘cousin du roi’, a rare accolade for anyone who wasn’t royalty: Jabłonowski.
Prince Joseph Alexander Jablonowski, a portrait made while he was ambassador to France, proudly displaying a princely crown and ermine mantle, and a open book (on left) open to the pages ‘Tabulae Iablonovianae’…the proud genealogy of a prince
The status of ‘prince étranger’ (foreign prince) and ‘cousin du roi’, was a great honour in France, but its precise privileges were only vaguely defined. It provided premier access to exclusive spaces within France’s royal palaces, privileges regarding sitting in the presence of the Queen or keeping on your hat in the presence of the King, but also precedence over dukes in ceremonies, and, more tangibly, privileged access to places in military academies or elite convents for your children, or posts within the royal household. So why did a relatively obscure family from Poland (not even one of the most well-known magnate families, like Czartoryski, Sapieha, or Radziwiłł) receive such honours from one of the grandest courts of Europe? All because of a curious marriage arranged for Louis XV in 1725—about which more below.
The Jablonowskis were not the grandest Polish magnate family; nor were they ‘ancient’ when compared to many of their peers. But once they arrived at the premier level of aristocratic society in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, they remained prominent for the next century and a half, then faded away again. (correctly spelled as Jabłonowski in Polish, I’ll ‘Frenchify’ it for this post).
In the sixteenth century, a family with the surname Wichulski purchased an estate called Jabłonowo in the southern borderlands of what was then known as ‘Royal Prussia’, the part of Prussia that was held directly by the Crown, and not by the Knights of the Teutonic Order. This estate was close to the Vistula river, downriver from Warsaw, close to the town of Chełmno. The family took the name of the estate as their new surname. They also adopted one of the ‘herbs’, the heraldic signs shared by inter-related clans of the Polish nobility. This one is referred to as ‘Prus III’, indicating that its bearers had (or claimed to have) connections to the ancient people of this region of the Baltic coast, the Borussians (or Prussians). There were two elements in this coat-of-arms: the silver double-cross on red was said to come from an ancient Borussian prince who converted to Christianity; while the horseshoe and cross on blue, a pobog (‘for God’), was a symbol for luck.
the herb ‘Prus III’ adopted by the Jablonowskis
The family first rose to prominence in the 1670s with Stanisław Jan Jablonowski, the son of Jan Stanisław, Sword-Bearer of the Polish Crown, and Anna Ostrozanka, daughter of a senior courtier and governor, Jan Ostoróg. As a young man, Stanisław Jan gained a reputation fighting in wars against Sweden in the 1650s, and was appointed to official ranks at court and in the field, notably, Grand Guard of the Crown, 1660, a senior military officer that accompanied the king to war. In 1664, he was appointed Voivode or Governor of Ruthenia, one of the eastern territories of the Kingdom of Poland (now western Ukraine), with its capital at Lwów (today’s Lviv). Here he acquired new lands to enable his family to rise to magnate status, for example Zawałów, in the region of Galicia (now Zavaliv in Ukraine). The castle had been built by the Makowiewski family in the early seventeenth century, destroyed by invading Turkish armies in 1675, then purchased and rebuilt by Jablonowski. By the nineteenth century it was part of the Austrian Empire and belonged to the Raczyński family, then was destroyed in World War I.
Zawałów Castle, Galicia
In 1668, Stanisław Jan supported the election of the Prince of Condé (Louis de Bourbon) in the elections to the Polish throne, an unsuccessful bid against the more local candidate, Michal Korybut Wiśniowiecki. This was thus the family’s first strong connection to France. Turning his attentions again towards the east, Jablonowski took part in the important battle of Chocim (Khotyn) in western Ukraine, 1673, that solidly defeated the Ottoman armies. He was appointed Field Hetman of the Crown in 1676, then Grand Hetman of the Crown in 1683—these were the senior positions of the Polish army, second only to the king. As such he commanded one wing of the army led by King Jan Sobieski in the defence of Vienna against the Turks in 1683. This was followed by another victory, over the Tatars at Lwów in 1695, and in 1696 was a candidate for the throne of Poland-Lithuania itself when Sobieski died (and potentially the hand in marriage of his widow).
Stanisław Jan Jablonowski, holding the mace of Grand Hetman of the Crown
In 1698, he was created Prince of the Holy Roman Empire by Emperor Leopold I, in the hopes of luring him out of the pro-French camp and instead support the Austrian candidate for the Polish throne, Augustus of Saxony. Grand Hetman Jablonowski did initially support Augustus, but he and his family did not long stay in the pro-Austria faction, as we shall see. He died in 1702 in Lwów, the city of his great victory, and he was honoured there with a prominent statue. His princely title being only a personal one, it died with him.
The statue of Stanisław Jan in Lwów, before it was destroyed in 1945
Another estate acquired by Stanisław Jan in Galicia was an ancient town he renamed Mariampol (Mariiampil today), after an icon of the Virgin Mary he supposedly had carried with him in the defence of Vienna. Here he built a fortified residence, with towers and moats. Over the next century this remained one of the main Jablonowski strongholds, with a new palace built in the 1730s, alongside a Capuchin monastery, to which the Pope sent precious relics of Saint Victor in 1740 (remember, these were Catholic nobles in a sea of Orthodox vassals). The entire town of Mariampol still had its ramparts when it became part of the Austrian Empire in the early nineteenth century until the Habsburg authorities ordered them dismantled in 1817. The remaining palace was partly destroyed in World War I, then nationalised and demolished in World War II.
Mariampol ruins in 1926
Just two years after the 1st Prince Jablonowski’s death, in 1704, his grandson and namesake, Stanisław Leszczyński, became King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania in a French-backed coup against Augustus of Saxony. The Leszczyński family were also Polish magnates, from further west, taking their name from the estate of Leszno. Like Stanisław Jan, Rafał Leszczyński had also risen through the ranks in courtly and administrative positions, notably as voivode of several western provinces, and in 1676 married Anna Jablonowska. Their son Stanisław was born a year later. Already by this point both families were aligned as members of the pro-French faction in Polish politics.
The eldest son of Prince Jablonowski, Jan Stanisław, sustained the family’s prominent place in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth by serving as Voivode of Volhynia, 1693, and of Ruthenia like his father, from 1697. He also solidified the pro-French stance of the family through his marriage in 1693 to Jeanne-Marie de Béthune, whose father was the French ambassador to Poland, and whose mother was the sister of the Queen of Poland (Marie-Casimire de la Grange d’Arquien). Nevertheless, Jan Stanisław did not support the Swedish (and French) coup of 1704 that put his nephew Stanisław Leszczyński onto the throne in place of King Augustus, and he left Poland with the latter to reside at the Saxon court in Dresden. In 1706, once Augustus appeared to be losing ground, he switched sides, returned to Poland and was appointed Royal Chancellor by his nephew. But Leszczyński’s unstable reign came to an end in 1709 when he too was driven off the throne and into exile, meaning Jablonowski lost his job too. The latter tried to mount a coup against the restored Augustus of Saxony in 1713, aiming to restore his nephew with Ottoman help, but was arrested and held prisoner for four years in Saxony. He lived on for another decade and a half, now focusing on patronage of the arts, rebuilding his residences in Lwów and Mariampol, and publishing a number of texts on religious and political thought—he is considered an important pre-Enlightenment thinker in Poland.
Jan Stanisław Jablonowski
Jeanne-Marie de Béthune, niece of the Queen of Poland
His younger brother, Aleksander Jan, was Grand Standard Bearer of Poland, a high military position, and deserves to be noted here mostly for his excellent portrait.
Aleksander Jan
Their sister, Anna, now mother of the ex-King of Poland, went with Stanislas (as he’s known in western Europe) and his family into exile, first to Sweden, then to the small German duchy of Zweibrücken, and finally to France in 1719. With them was her grand-daughter Maria, whose marriage in 1725 to the young King Louis XV of France surprised royal watchers all over Europe. She was not from one of the major royal families of Europe, and although her father had been a king, he certainly wasn’t one now. Queen Marie Leszczynska is not one of the better remembered queens of France, yet she reigned longer than most (43 years) and was in fact cherished by her subjects as a model of piety and motherhood, a queen who caused no scandals and did not involve herself in politics. Her grandmother Anna Jablonowska lived long enough to see this amazing rise in her family’s fortunes, and died at the Château of Chambord in the Loire valley in 1727. She is buried nearby in the Cathedral of Blois. Queen Marie had several children and grandchildren, including kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X. What this kinship meant for the Jablonowski family we can see below.
Anna Leszczynska, born Jablonowska, in 1709, grandmother of the Queen of France
The headship of the family now passed to Stanisław Wincenty. He managed his family’s estates in the east, in Volhynia (now northwest Ukraine), building new castles in tiny villages of Krzewín (now Kryvyn), to house his rich art collections, and Płużne (now Pluzhne), where he deposited the Jablonowski family archive. Both were completely destroyed in the early twentieth century. One of the reasons the family was increasingly attracted to this area was because of the extinction in the 1680s of the princely house of Ostrogski, one of the four main landowners in what is now western Ukraine (see Radziwill and Wiśniowiecki). The principal Ostrogski lands were based here, in and around the town of Ostróg (now Ostroh), sometimes considered an independent duchy or principality in the pre-modern period. Although the main claims to the Ostrogski estates passed to the princely Lubomirski family, this was disputed, and litigation continued all the way through the eighteenth century. Sometimes the family members in the eighteenth century are referred to as ‘Prince Ostróg’ or ‘Duke of Ostróg’, but this wasn’t formally recognised by anyone, and most claims disappeared by the time this area became part of the Russian Empire after 1793.
Jablonowski Castle in Krzewín, Volhynia
But Stanisław Wincenty never became a major public figure in Poland-Lithuania. He was a voivode, but of a smaller province in the centre of Poland (Rawa). He supported the re-election once again of his cousin Stanislas Leszcynski in 1733, which sparked the War of Polish Succession, really a proxy war between France and Spain versus Austria and Russia—in the end, the latter were the stronger and imposed King Augustus III in Poland, while Leszczynski limped back to France. Stanisław Wincenty Jablonowski stayed out of politics, and focused on writing and poetry. He visited the French court several times to visit his cousin the Queen, who honoured him as a ‘cousin du roi’, granting him access to her cabinet as if he was a prince of the blood, and arranged in 1741 for him to be presented with the Order of the Golden Fleece sent to France by King Philip V of Spain. On another visit in 1750, he was given the Order of the Holy Spirit by Louis XV himself. Meanwhile, in 1744, the pro-French Emperor Charles VII (of Bavaria) reinstated his grandfather’s princely rank, but this time extended it to all his brothers and cousins and made into a hereditary title. This was confirmed a few decades later by Emperor Joseph II (of Austria), in 1773, about the time of the first partition of Poland, when it was a useful tactic to gain allies in his new Galician territories (the Russians would also confirm the princely title, but not until the 1840s, see below).
Stanisław Wincenty, Prince Jablonowski, ‘cousin du roi’
Stanisław Wincenty had two brothers, Jan Kajetan and Dimityr Hippolyte, and two sisters who maintained the connection with France. Of the sisters, Catherine-Dorothée married Franciszek (François) Ossolinski, who as Grand Treasurer of Poland had been one of King Stanislas Leszczynski’s chief court officers, and moved with him to Nancy when he became reigning Duke of Lorraine in 1736. ‘Duc Ossolinski’ (as he was called in France) became Grand Master of the Household of Lorraine, while his wife became one of King Stanislas’s many mistresses; she died at the Lorraine summer palace at Lunéville. Meanwhile Marie-Louise Jablonowska married Anne-Charles de la Trémoille, Prince de Talmond, from a cadet line of his family. The La Trémoille family were also recognised at the French court as ‘foreign princes’, so together with the Jablonowskis they had a lot of clout, whether in Versailles or Lunéville. The Princesse de Talmond became a member of the close circle of Queen Marie Leszczynska at Versailles, and a go-between with their cousin, King Stanislas at Lunéville. She was, like her brother, treated as a princess of the blood, with rights to sit in the Queen’s presence with a ‘chair with a back’ (ie, better than duchesses who were given only a stool). In the 1740s she had a short and tumultuous relationship with the exiled Stuart Pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie, and tried to prevent (unsuccessfully) his expulsion from France. As she aged, Marie-Louise was known by the Paris salonnières as a woman of spirit, a beauty and a wit admired by Voltaire, who was ‘truly Sarmatian’ in her pride, a reference to the adopted ‘horse-warrior’ identity of the Polish nobles.
[I’d love it if someone could a find a portrait of the Princesse de Talmond for me!]
Prince Jan Kajetan became the eldest male of the clan in 1754, and the same year (having reconciled with King Augustus III), was appointed Voivode of Bracław, another large province of south-eastern Poland (now Braclav, Ukraine), and later served as an Austrian Field Marshal. He supposedly considered himself to be of royal rank due to his cousinage with the French royal family, and by the 1770s used the title ‘Duke of Ostróg’.
But it was his wife, Princess Anna Jablonowska who made more of a mark on history—regarded by many as one of the most significant women in eighteenth-century Poland. The daughter of Prince Kazimierz Sapieha, and an heiress of one of the grandest of Polish magnate houses, she became known as a widow for improvements on her estates (building textile factories, schools and hospitals) as well as social advances, working to transform serfs (which she freed) into rent-paying tenants, for example via a generous loan fund. She set up a printing press and opened a midwifery school. She was passionate about science and known for her natural history collection kept in her castle at Kock. Princess Jablonowska also got involved in politics, a leader of the opposition of the reign of King Stanislas Poniatowski (elected in 1764), and a member of the Bar Confederation, which in 1768 attempted to remove this king (and Russian influence) through ties with Vienna (and more remotely, with Versailles). When this noble revolt was suppressed in 1772, Anna retired from action and died in Ostróg (by now in the Russian Empire) in 1800.
Princess Anna Jablonowska (born Sapieha)
Princess Anna Jablonowska’s efforts were mostly focused on the old Sapieha estates of Siemiatycze in Podlasie and Kock near Lublin (both now close to the eastern frontiers of Poland). In Siemiatycze she had a palace built in 1773, which was destroyed by a fire in the 1860s. More well known was her castle at Kock. Under an older form of the name, Koczsko, the estate had been owned by the powerful Firlej family, Protestant magnates in the sixteenth century. In the mid-seventeenth century, they died out and their estates passed through various hands. In the 1770s, the Princess erected a new palace here, a main central house with two wings. She also constructed a town hall, market square and an elegant Catholic church for the town. Her work attracted the attention of monarchs: both Emperor Joseph II and the future Tsar Paul visited in the 1780s. After her death, the Jablonowski Palace and the rest of Kock passed back to the Sapieha family, then soon into other hands. A new Classical front was added in the 1820s. Kock was once more in centre stage on 6 October 1939 when the last remnants of the independent Polish army surrendered in the castle courtyard to the Germans. After the war, the house served as a school until it was transformed into a social care home in the 1980s.
Kock Palace in eastern Poland (photo Jackowy)
Also prominent in the eighteenth century was a cousin, Józef Aleksander, son of Aleksander Jan. He too was raised to the rank of Imperial prince in 1744, and at the same time was given the prominent court office of Stolnik of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (equivalent to a ‘pantler’ in western courts, who served a monarch at table). In 1755, like his cousin, he was appointed to a large voivodeship in Lithuania, Nowogródek (now Novogrudok, Belarus), and the next year was honoured by Louis XV with the Order of the Holy Spirit. Like his cousins, he visited France numerous times in the 1730s-60s, and left written accounts of some of his observations of the court of Versailles. At one point in the 1730s, he considered marriage to a French princess (Mlle de Bouillon) and settling in France. But by the 1760s, his interests shifted away from France and towards the reigning Saxon dynasty, though in 1764 the heir, Elector Frederick Christian, failed to be elected to succeed his father in Poland-Lithuania. The Elector nevertheless extended his protection to a new scholarly endeavour: the Jablonowski Scientific Society at the University of Leipzig in Saxony, one of the main centres of learning in Central Europe. Founded in 1768, the Society’s aims were to promote the study of history (primarily of the Poles and other Slavs), mathematics and economics, with new works being published in the journal Acta Societatis Jablonovianae. Prince Jablonowski died in Leipzig in 1777, but the Scientific Society continues.
Prince Józef Aleksander Jablonowski, with the star and sash of the French Order of the Saint-Esprit
Prince Józef Aleksander’s particular interest in history was shown in his own large-scale publications about Poland and the Cossacks, and a Jablonowski genealogy (full of mythical ancestors), as well as his patronage of other scholarly works, notably the first major atlas of Poland, published in 1772. In 1761, his love for sixteenth-century Polish poet Jan Kochanowski led him to purchase his family estate, Czarnolas, in Lesser Poland (on the left bank of the Vistula, south of Warsaw). The villa here was rebuilt by the Jablonowskis in the nineteenth century in a neoclassical style—and still exists today as the Kochanowski Museum.
Czarnolas House
But the Prince certainly didn’t lack other places to stay: by the end of his life he owned at least eighteen castles all over the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, though by that point, much of these lands had been annexed by Russia or Austria in the First Partition of 1773.
Two of these were prominent: Lisianka and Lachowce. The first was built in the 1730s by Józef Aleksander, on the river Tykich, in the Dnieper Uplands of what is now Central Ukraine (further east than what we’ve encountered so far). He donated the older castle here to a group of Franciscans—and indeed, like many of his family members, he built several Catholic churches and convents all over this region. Lisianka Castle burned down in 1842. Lachowce Castle was an older fortification on an island in the river Horyń, in Volhynia, built in wood in the later seventeenth century; here Prince Józef Aleksander built a new residence in brick, and imported some of the ceremonial practices he had witnessed on his trips to Versailles. This building passed to the Sapieha family by marriage in the early nineteenth century, but was confiscated by the Tsar for a later family member’s participation in the Decembrist Uprisings against Russian rule in 1825. Today there is no trace of the palace.
To add even more to these, Józef Aleksander inherited some estates from his wife, another Sapieha heiress, including a village with an incredible spelling: Szczeczyce. Perhaps understandably, he renamed the estate Jabłonów. Located on the Neman river near Grodno (now Hrodna, on the western borders of Belarus), he enhanced the existing noble palace and added a family burial chapel (in the 1760s). The estate passed out of the family by the end of the century (but retained the name) and became part of Russia (with the Russian spelling of the name, Yablonov). Today the village is gone, but the ruined chapel remains. Incidentally, there is another village that was named Jabłonów, further south in Galicia, though it had no direct link to the Jablonowski family. Today it is called Yabluniv in Ukraine.
the chapel at Jabłonów (today in Belarus)
the entrance to the village of Yabluniv, Ukraine (photo by Volodymyr Khanas)
In the next generation, the head of the family became Prince Antoni Barnaba, son of Stanisław Wincenty. Like his forebears, he was a governor, as Voivode of Poznań (in west-central Poland) from 1760, and Castellan of Krakow from 1782. Usually a Polish kasztelan was a lower rank than a voivode, but Krakow, the former royal capital, was an exception. His position here placed him in a key location during the time of the dismemberment of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1773 and 1795. Already in 1764 he had made his anti-Russian sentiments known when he joined the Confederation of Bar and was sent to Vienna as the rebel group’s envoy. In 1788, he joined the Patriotic Party whose aims were to halt further partitions and create a constitution for Poland. Despite nominal support from Revolutionary France, Russian armies loomed in the region of Krakow, and Antoni Barnaba Jablonowski took part in the Kościuszko Uprising against this threat in 1794. It failed, and a year later Krakow was annexed by its former supporter Austria. The Prince died a few years later in 1799 in Warsaw, temporarily part of the Kingdom of Prussia.
Prince Antoni Barnaba Jablonowski
By this point the Jablonowski princes were amongst the greatest magnates in Poland, with two major urban palaces in which to put on a magnificent display. In the old capital, Krakow, the family took over the Zbaraski Palace in the 1770s. Built in the 1540s, linking together several townhouses on the south side of the city’s Main Market Square, the palace passed through many magnate families, Zbaraskis, Wiśniowieckis, Potockis … and finally to the Jablonowskis, who added a neoclassical façade and a new wing (expanding into the house next door). In the nineteenth century it passed into other hands, then back to the Jablonowskis then back to the Potockis.
Jablonowski Palace in Krakow (Pałac Potockich)
A much grander palace was built in the country’s new capital, Warsaw, by Prince Antoni Barnaba between 1773 and 1785. Located on one of the two grand boulevards of the old town that converge close to the Royal Castle (Senatorska Street), Jablonowski Palace was one of the grandest buildings in the city, directly across from the Grand National Theatre, built in the 1820s. By that point, the palace had been nationalised by Russian authorities and rebuilt as Warsaw’s city hall. Its characteristic tower was added in the 1860s. Destroyed like so much of Warsaw in 1944, it was rebuilt in the 1990s to prewar designs. Today it houses a major international bank.
Jablonowski Palace in Warsaw, as the City Hall, 1862
Meanwhile, Antoni Barnaba’s cousin from a collateral (non-princely) branch, Konstanty Aleksander, had a son who is worth mentioning here. Władysław Franciszek was referred to by contemporaries as ‘the black one’ (czarny), and many historians now are certain that he was the product of an extra-marital liaison by his mother, and celebrate him as Poland’s first African general. If he was illegitimate, he was accepted by his father as his own. Of more interest to us here was how he re-asserted his family’s connection to France once again, though in a very different context. He was sent to France to study at the military academy in 1783, where he was classmates with Napoleon Bonaparte. On graduation, he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Regiment-Royal Allemand, in 1789 (age twenty), then served in Poland in the Kościuszko Uprising of 1794, before returning to France as a soldier in the Revolutionary army in 1798. Appointed a general of the Polish Legion in 1799, he served in Italy then was sent on an expedition to Saint-Domingue (modern Haïti) in 1802 where he (ironically if his African origins are true) fought to put down a major slave rebellion. He died there of yellow fever, as did so many French officers that year.
Władysław Franciszek Jablonowski, ‘Czarny’
In the aftermath of the partitions of Poland-Lithuania, the Jablonowski family found itself divided into two branches, Russian and Austrian (though they themselves retained a Polish identity). The Russian branch was headed by Stanisław Pawel and his half-brother Maksymilian (and are sometimes seen with the Russian spelling, Yablonovsky). Born over two decades apart, their roles to play in Polish history were quite different. Stanisław Pawel was a commander in the Polish-Lithuanian army in the 1780s, rising to the rank of major-general and head of the Foot Guards Regiment, before the independent army was taken over by Russia in 1794. In 1807, Napoleon liberated much of central Poland and created a new ‘Grand Duchy of Poland’, nominally ruled by the new King of Saxony. Prince Jablonowski, reliably pro-French and married to a relative of Marie Walewska—Napoleon’s mistress and advisor at this time—was appointed ‘Senator Castellan’, a new rank in this attempt at reviving an independent Poland, then ‘Senator Voivode’ in 1812. That year, however, Napoleon marched into Russia to disastrous consequences, and Poland was abandoned to its fate, and once again partitioned between Russia and Prussia. The Prince died in 1822.
Prince Maksymilian, on the other hand, was much more fully integrated into the power structures of the Russian Empire. He was given the rank of an Imperial chamberlain as early as 1804, and in 1820 was appointed a Senator-Castellan of the new Kingdom of Poland (part of Russia). In 1825, the Tsar appointed him Voivode of Poland, and in 1829, a chamberlain of the Polish court—which still existed in Warsaw, with the Russian emperor as its king. After the failure of the Polish Uprising of 1830-31, he was appointed to the Royal State Council and Grand Chamberlain of court, and eventually President of the Heraldic Court of Poland (the regulatory body of the Polish nobility). In 1844, the Tsar confirmed his title of prince (legally transforming his title Prince of the Holy Roman Empire to Prince of the Russian Empire); and a year later this title was formally recognised in the Kingdom of Poland. He died in 1846 on his estates in Volhynia. Prince Maximilian’s wife, Teresa (born a Princess Lubomirska), was considered one of the great beauties of Warsaw and hostess of her own fashionable salon.
Princess Teresa Jablonowska (born Lubomirska)
The Prince’s nephews, however, were not so malleable to Russian interests. Prince Antoni held the rank, like his uncle, of chamberlain of the court of Poland, and held a minor administrative position in the government. But he was a member of Polish nationalist secret societies, and in 1825 took part in the Decembrist Uprising against Russian rule—he was arrested and sent to prison in Saint Petersburg where he was sentenced to twenty years of hard labour. He was pardoned by the Tsar, for giving names and was sent to live in a remote corner of Russia for the next decade, after which he was allowed to return to his estates in eastern Poland where he died in 1855. His brother Stanisław was at first more pro-Russian, and joined the army in the fight against Napoleon. But he too joined a nationalist uprising, this one 1830-31 (during which his troops defended one of Warsaw’s gates), and was exiled. He died in Krakow (in Austrian territory) in 1878, the last of this branch.
Jablonowski’s men defending the Warsaw Tollgate, 1830
The younger Jablonowski branch held lands now incorporated into the Austrian Empire, so focused their identities towards Vienna. Already during the Congress of Vienna of 1815, Prince Ludwik Jablonowski demonstrated his loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty, and in 1816 was appointed Ambassador to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. After his return to Vienna in 1820 he was confirmed in the rank of Fürst, then was rewarded with the offices of Imperial chamberlain (1831), privy councillor (1833) and Grand Equerry of the Kingdom of Galicia (1834)—Galicia having been erected into a kingdom ruled by the Austrian emperor, as a counterpoint to the Russian kingdom of Poland.
Ludwik, first Austrian Fürst Jablonowski
The 2nd Prince Jablonowski of the Austrian branch, Karol (or Karl) became a conservative politician in the House of Lords of the Austrian Empire, representing the great Polish landowners who were now part of a much wider empire. He helped establish a separate Privy Council for Galicia, based in Lwow (or Lemberg, as it was called in German) in the year of nationalist uprisings, 1848, and worked to ensure measures were taken to improve the Galician economy (notably its railroads), and opposed land reforms and the abolition of serfdom. His younger brother, Alexander, was an Austrian Field Marshal-Lieutenant who helped pacify Vienna in 1848.
Karol, 2nd Prince Jablonowski (Royal Collection, London)
In 1834, Prince Karol married an heiress of the Skarbek family who had built a grand palace in Galicia at Bursztyn (now Burshtyn in Ukraine). This property, formerly the seat of the powerful Sieniawski family who died out in the mid-eighteenth century, became the Galician branch’s principal seat until they were driven out of the area at the end of the Second World War. The Bursztyn Palace was demolished in 1944, though a family burial chapel remains.
Bursztyn Palace in the 1920s
Prince Karol died in 1885 and was succeeded by his son, Stanisław Maria Ferdynand, 3rd Prince Jablonowski, whose rank was augmented by Emperor Franz Josef with the style ‘Serene Highness’ in 1905. In 1909 his son Stanisław Maria Ludwik became the 4th Prince—neither the 3rd or 4th prince played much active role in public life. The latter married a daughter of a Polish nobleman, Zygmunt Mineyko, an engineer and cartographer who helped develop the newly independent Greek kingdom in the late nineteenth century, and whose other daughter married Georgios Papandreou, a strongly anti-monarchist Greek politician who later Prime Minister at the end of World War II. When the 4th Prince died in 1921, he left only daughters, who carried on the family tradition from exile after the Communists expropriated their estates in Poland and Ukraine—the last died in London in 2004. The princely title had passed to a cousin, Karol Ludwik, who died a few years later in Graz, Austria, in 1925. The princely branches of the House of Jablonowski passed out of existence. There are many others who bear this name in Poland (and Yablonovsky in Russia), but these come from other more distant branches, or indeed from other families who bore the same name (but a different coat of arms).
the full Jablonowski princely arms as used in Austria
(images Wikimedia Commons; thanks to interesting articles by Katarzyna Kosior on the Franco-Polish relations for the family in the eighteenth century; and to Rafe Heydel-Mankoo for assistance with information about the Austrian branch)
One of the most interesting aspects of the high aristocracy in European history is its fluidity. In the centuries before the rise of nationalism, elites could and often did move from place to place and adapt to new scenarios with relative ease. On this site, we’ve seen examples of this already with the Scottish Hamiltons in France, the Portuguese Lancastres in Castile, or the Livonian Lievens in Sweden. And the older you get with an aristocratic family, often the more mobility you get. One family whose claimed roots stretch back to the eleventh century were the Cantacuzinos, who began their journey amongst the military aristocracy of the Byzantine Empire, then re-emerged as Greek Phanariot merchant-princes under Ottoman rule in the mid-sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were regularly serving as Ottoman governors of the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia—and later were prominent in the push towards fusing these provinces into the modern nation of Romania in the nineteenth century. Along the way, they also established separate branches of Russian princes, Austrian counts and French exiles. The spelling varies between Greek Kantakouzenos and Cantacuzino in Romanian to Cantacouzène in French.
A Greek official in Ottoman service (early 19th century)
The link between the Byzantine family who held several of the top posts in the imperial government from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, and even briefly held the imperial title itself (John VI and Matthew, 1341 to 1357), and the family of Greco-Romanian princes in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, is tenuous. Some historians dismiss it outright as a wild claim built on the chaos that followed the destruction of the Byzantine Empire in 1453; while others consider it plausible if unprovable. For the sake of this post, I am going to assume it is true, and although I will introduce the Byzantine family, I will move swiftly on to the more modern period, since that’s what I know more about as a historian.
The family first emerged amongst the military elites of the Empire of the East in the eleventh century: an early member was Manuel Kantakouzenos, a military commander in 1079. Speculation on the origin of the name has posited the joining of two Greek names Katina and Kusin, perhaps through a marriage, to form Καντακουζηνός (Latinised by medieval historians in the West as Cantacuzenus). Another thought is that they came from Kouzenas near Smyrna in Asia Minor. The real founder of the imperial dynasty was Ioannes Kantakouzenos, a military commander in the western parts of the Empire in the 1150s who rose to the rank of Pansebastos sebastos—basically ‘commander of all commanders’ (equivalent to the title ‘augustus’ in the West, second only to the emperor). He was killed in Anatolia, in battle against the Seljuk Turks in 1176, but not before siring at least one son with Maria Komnene, a relative of the ruling Komnenos (Comnenus) dynasty. His son Manuel was imprisoned and blinded by Emperor Manuel I Komnenos in about 1175/80—a typical way of getting rid of a rival, since ideologically an ‘imperfect’ man could not represent the divine as a ruler on earth. But there are two others who may have been sons or nephews of Ioannes: Andronikos and another Ioannes. The elder was declared a gambros, or kinsman, of Emperor Isaac II Angelos, the founder of the new dynasty that followed the Komnenoi in 1185. He had already been named sebastos by 1150, and was given the post of dux (military governor) of two provinces in Asia Minor in 1175. His (maybe) brother Ioannes rose even higher, despite being blinded by Emperor Andronikos I in 1183, by the new emperor, Isaac II, whose kinsman he more clearly was, having married his sister, Eirene Angelina, back in 1170. Isaac II appointed him caesar (the rank below sebastos) in 1185, gambros, then despot (a rank higher than caesar but still lower than sebastos), as military commander in Bulgaria in 1186. Another member of the family, Mikhael, perhaps a cousin, was involved in the conspiracy that deposed Emperor Isaac in 1195, and is perhaps the same Mikhael (a son of Ioannes and Eirene Angelina) who claimed the throne in 1199, but was imprisoned by the man who had taken it from Isaac II, his brother Alexios III…
This is all quite confusing, and made more so as most of these intermarried Byzantine dynasties took various forms of each other’s names, so tying one person to a specific dynasty is difficult—usually they had a string of names: Komnenos Dukas Angelos, etc. Indeed the next family member to rise to prominence was Ioannes Komnenos Angelos Kantakouzenos. He was given the court office of Pinkernes (cup bearer) in 1242, then was appointed Dux of Thakesion in Asia Minor in 1244. He governed here on behalf of the ‘rump’ of the Byzantine Empire based in Nicaea, for whom he defended the coast against the Latin rulers who had taken over the bulk of the Empire in 1204. More importantly from a dynastic point of view, Ioannes married Eirene Palaiologina, daughter of the Megas Domestikos, the commander-in-chief of the army of Nicaea, and sister of Michael VIII who would eventually drive the Latins out and restore Greek rule in Constantinople in 1261.
Eirene is actually the more interesting person in this story. Before he died, her husband Ioannes retired to a monastery, a common practice, and Eirene became a nun. After her brother became Emperor, she was an important influence on his early reign, but opposed his religious policies that favoured a proposed union with the Western Church in 1277, for which she was imprisoned. She thereafter became the focus of the opposition to Michael VIII’s reign at the court of her son-in-law, Ivailo, Tsar of the Bulgarians. Her daughters played an interesting part in this first reign of the Palaiologos dynasty as well: Theodora, also a widow-nun, was arrested with her mother in 1277 for opposing her uncle. She later restored the Church of Saint Andrew of Crete in Constantinople and made it her political base in the capital. Her sister Maria Kantakouzene was married in 1269 to Konstantin Tikh, Tsar of the Bulgarians, who became paralysed soon after and left much of the governing to his wife—she too led the opposition to the religious policies of Michael VIII; ruled as regent for her son, Tsar Michael II of Bulgaria, 1277-79; then married her husband’s killer, the leader of a peasant revolt named Ivailo, who then became Tsar of Bulgarians. In 1279, his reign was ended by a Mongol and Byzantine invasion, and Maria was taken back to Constantinople as her brother’s prisoner. Nearly two decades later, however, under the new Palaiologos emperor, Andronikos II, the third sister, Anna Kantakouzene, once more took power over a neighbouring territory, the Despotate of Epirus, in the name of her son Thomas Komnenos Dukas, until about 1313.
What we don’t have is a clear link between these powerful Byzantine women and Mikhael Kantakouzenos, the father of Emperor John VI. It is assumed he was a cousin, and his kinship with the imperial family was strengthened by his marriage to Theodora Angelina Palaiologina, possibly a niece of Emperor Michael VIII. Kantakouzenos was appointed Epitropos (steward or governor) of Morea, the southernmost part of Greece, in 1308. It was his son Ioannes who would make the biggest mark in Byzantine history for this family.
Ioannes Kantakouzenos as Emperor John VI, with his court
In 1321, Ioannes Kantakouzenos aided a young Prince Andronikos Palaiologos in rebellion against his grandfather Emperor Andronikos II, and by 1328, he was himself de facto ruler of the Empire as Megas Domestikos for the young prince, now Andronikos III. His high rank was made even higher with the fabulous new title ‘Panhypersebastos’ in 1340. When the Emperor died in June 1341, he was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, John V, and Kantakouzenos was proclaimed Regent of the Empire, but was opposed by powerful figures including the Patriarch and the boy’s mother, Anna. Ioannes left the capital to defend the frontier in Thrace against the Serbs, and declared himself co-emperor in October, as John VI. I’m guessing it is one of the only times in history when two people with the same name served as king or emperor at the same time. A civil war raged until John VI was victorious over John V and changed his position from junior co-emperor to senior co-emperor in 1347. Over the next few years he placed family members in key positions all across the Empire: his eldest son Matthaios, already Governor of Thrace, was named co-emperor in 1353; his second son Manuel, was Eparchos (city governor) of Constantinople, then Despot of Morea (and married to the daughter of the King of Armenia); while a cousin, Nikephorus, was Governor of Adrianopolis. Of his daughters, the younger, Helena, was married to John V and thus became empress; while the elder, Theodora was married to Sultan Orkhan, the second ruler of the new Ottoman state emerging in Anatolia. This must have been quite a shock for a Christian princess.
This points to a new alliance being forged: John VI and Sultan Orkhan versus John V and the Serbs. When civil war broke out again in 1352, Turkish forces took their spoils, and the Ottomans gained their first foothold on the European side of the Bosporus. The Turks had their first major victory on European soil at Demotikos, near Adrianopolis, and John V’s forces were vanquished. Matthaios was now formally crowned as co-emperor (Matthew I) in 1354, but the tide was soon reversed and by the end of the year, his father John VI was driven from Constantinople and forced into a monastery, then later into exile at his younger son’s court in the Morea, where he dedicated himself to writing books on history and theology, and died nearly thirty years later.
By this point, Morea was virtually an independent state with its capital at Mistra, run by Despot Manuel Kantakouzenos. Emperor Matthew settled here after he too was defeated by the alliance of John V and the Serbs, in 1357. After Manuel died in 1380, Matthaios declared himself the successor as Despot in Morea, but was run out when the real governor arrived from Constantinople in 1382. John V died in 1391, leaving as the last person standing in all this his wife, Empress Helena Kantakouzene, who became a nun (‘Hypomone’), then re-entered politics in 1393 as Regent of the Empire when her son Emperor Manuel II was absent from the capital.
The Byzantine Empire in the mid-fourteenth century, with Morea in pink in southern Greece
Matthaios had two sons, both given rank of ‘despot’, the younger of these, Demetrios, also trying to continue the family rule in Morea in 1382-83. By the 1390s, the family’s power had all but dissipated. A grandson of Emperor John VI, Theodoros, was Byzantine ambassador to France and to Venice, where he was honoured with the title Patrician, 1387, and Senator, 1409—the Venetians being keen to maintain solid alliances with families of influence particularly in Morea, where they had colonial interests. His children made a bit of a comeback, with daughters marrying a Serbian prince, a Georgian king (though which one I cannot determine), and an emperor of Trebizond—a subsidiary Greek state on the northern coast of Anatolia—and sons occupying posts in the Byzantine government and army (though one, Thomas, became a commander of Serb armies, and is listed as marrying a daughter of the Emperor of Germany…but who?). The family tree is quite extensive at this point with many named in various positions in the defence of Constantinople in its last days as capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Ioannes Kantakouzenos was a general for Konstantinos Palaiologos in Morea, and then helped him ascend the throne as the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI, in 1449. His cousin Andronikos Kantakouzenos was the last Megas Domestikos for Constantine XI, and was executed after the fall of the city in May 1453 to Sultan Mehmet II ‘the Conqueror’, along with many others from this family, including his son Theodoros. His brother Giorgios, survived, and is the potential link to the later Cantacuzino family.
Giorgios Kantakouzenos, known as ‘Sachatai’—a Turkish nickname, though none of the online sources suggest what it means—had travelled quite a bit in the 1430s-40s, to the courts of Morea, Trebizond and Serbia, the last as brother-in-law of its ruler, Djuradj Brancović, who appointed him archon (governor) of the Serb capital, Semendria (today’s Smederevo) in 1454. Of his sons, the eldest, Theodoros, continued to live in Serbia in the 1450s; his second son Manuel was proclaimed ‘Despot of Albania’ by rebels in the Peloponnese in 1453-54; and his fourth, Demetrios, returned to Constantinople where, in about 1466, he was appointed ‘Domestikos’ of the Orthodox Church. Daughters in this generation continued to make useful alliances: with Venetian or Ragusan lords, with an emperor in Trebizond, with a duke of Saint Sava (what is today Hercegovina), and so on. One of Demetrios’ sons, Theodoros, married an Italian woman, and had children, but details about them are not known—one of these is thought *perhaps* to be Michael ‘Son of the Devil’, from whom all modern Cantacuzinos descend.
arms traditionally said to be used the Kantakouzenos as an imperial dynastyarms said to be used by the Kantakouzanos as a private family
This ‘Son of the Devil’, or Şeytanoğlu in Turkish, Michael Kantakouzenos, was a wealthy Ottoman magnate who dominated the affairs of the Orthodox community in Constantinople in the middle of the sixteenth century, and acted as a conduit between them and the court of the Sultan (who gave him the title ‘archon’). He was very rich, enjoying monopolies on certain items in the capital city (notably saltworks), fisheries along the Black Sea coast, and the fur trade with Muscovy. His fellow Christians saw him as rapacious and cruel and gave him his nickname. In the 1570s, he extended his reach to the Balkan provinces where he was a tax farmer, and built his own Black Sea fleet to look after his fisheries and fur trade. He built a huge palace along this coast, in Anchialos (now Pomorie, Bulgaria). As he extended his reach economically, so too did he extend his reach politically, becoming a ‘king maker’ for the two Romanian principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) and of the various Greek bishops and even patriarchs of the Orthodox Church. It is possible that Iane Kantakouzenos of Zagori was his brother (or cousin), and was placed as Ban (viceroy) of Oltenia, the western half of Wallachia; while a certain Theodora Kantakouzine was the mother of Prince Michael the Brave, the temporary unifier of all of the Romanian principalities in the 1590s—Prince Michael called Iane ‘uncle’, so Michael Kantakouzenos may have been his uncle too. In any case, Şeytanoğlu married as his second wife a daughter of Mircea III, Prince of Wallachia (of the family of Dracul), thus firmly moving his family from merchants to princes.
But Archon Michael didn’t live to see this. In 1576, he was accused of plotting against Sultan Murad III, arrested and hung from an archway of his own palace in 1578. There’s always a lesson to be learned from reaching too far too fast.
Michael’s son Andronikos (Mihaloğlu Derviş, Turkish for ‘son of Michael’ and ‘holy man’) managed to regain much of his father’s confiscated wealth, and returned to the task of integrating himself within the Romanian political elites (so is known in their histories as Andronic). He became a boyar in Wallachia, then Ban of Oltenia in 1592, and finally Co-Prince of Moldavia (with his perhaps cousin Michael the Brave), May to June 1600. He gained lands in Buzău County, on the borders between Wallachia and Moldavia, and a house in Târgovişte, the old capital of Wallachia. He managed Michael the Brave’s diplomatic affairs with Western Europe, but during that Prince’s rebellion against the Sultan in the summer of 1600, Andronikos went back to Constantinople and disappeared—perhaps he was executed, or perhaps he retired into a monastery.
There were at least three sons, but I’m unsure what order they go in. Possibly the eldest, Georgios, Gheorghe or ‘Iordaki’ in Romanian, returned to Moldavia and became ‘Grand Treasurer’ and chief of its armies in the 1630s-40s. He married twice, to daughters of local boyars, and founded the Iordaki Branch (or Moldavian Branch) of the Cantacuzino family. His brother Konstantinos or ‘Kostaki’ went south and became ‘Grand Boyar of Wallachia’. He married the daughter of one of the most influential local families, Elena Bassaraba-Craiovescu, daughter of Prince Radu Şerban of Wallachia, and founded the Kostaki Branch (or Wallachian Branch) of the family. Konstantinos was strangled in 1663 by the rival Ghica family, but his wife managed to keep her sons safe and re-established their power by the next decade.
Konstantinos, Grand Boyar of Wallachia
The first genuine prince in the family, though, was the son of the third brother, Michael (Mihalis): Demetrius (Dumitraşcu) was appointed by Sultan Mehmet IV to the post of Hospodar or Prince of Moldavia in 1673, though only for a few months, then was reappointed again briefly in 1675, and again for over a year 1684-85. This time he was driven out by his general, Constantin Cantemir, about whom I’ve written elsewhere. Prince Demetrius returned to Constantinople and died, and did not start a separate branch like his brothers.
The Wallachian branch is more extensive and reached higher ranks, so it will be simpler to start with the Moldavian branch, perhaps on the assumption that it was the senior line anyway. I am unclear when they began to call themselves ‘prince’—as with several other local families from whom were drawn successive hospodars or voivodes (seemingly interchangeable terms that are translated either as governor, viceroy, or more elevatedly, as prince) of the Romanian principalities. They are also referred to as Phanariots, the name given to Greek families who lived in Phanar, a quarter of Constantinople, who now increasingly were sent by the Ottoman sultans to rule subject Christian populations in the Balkans.
Many members of the Moldavian line took the name of its founder, Iordaki (sometimes given as Iordache). Right away they divided into two lines: the Cantacuzino-Deleanu, for their chief estate at Deleni and the Cantacuzino-Paşcanu at Paşcani
The older of these residences, Paşcani, was built in the mid-seventeenth century by the Grand Treasurer Iordache. This was located in Iaşi County, west of the city of the same name (known historically as Jassy, the capital of the Principality of Moldavia), towards the slopes of the Carpathians that separate Moldavia from Transylvania. In 1812, the mansion passed into the hands of other noble families, who held it until private properties were expropriated by the Communist government in 1948. The house became the home for a Pioneer Youth Club (part of the movement all across the Eastern Bloc to educate future party members); today it belongs to the Ministry of Education, but is dilapidated and need of restoration.
an old photo of the Cantacuino residence at Paşcani
A short distance away, closer to the mountains, this branch of the family also acquired (by marriage in the early seventeenth century) the Şerbeşti estate and its manor house, now called the Iordache Cantacuzino House, in a town now called Ştefan cel Mare. A second floor was added in the nineteenth century; today it is a school.
the house at Şerbeşti (photo Cezar Suceveanu)
The other branch’s residence at Deleni was built in 1730 on an estate acquired earlier in the century, further to the north but still in Iaşi County. This mansion also passed out of the family at the end of the eighteenth century, by marriage, to the Ghica family who held it until World War II. Soviet soldiers occupied it for two years and burned much of the interiors. Over time it was transformed into a cultural centre, and now a medical facility for the town.
the mansion at Deleni (photo Cezar Suceveanu)
The Cantacuzino family also owned residences in the city of Iaşi itself. The Cantacuzino-Paşcanu Palace, built in 1780, was the Moldavian branch’s primary residence for a century, then became the City Hall in 1912. In 1970 Iaşi City Hall moved into a larger building, so this became the Registry Office. There is a statue of another Romanian prince, Cantemir, who lived in an earlier palace on this site.
Cantacuzino Palace in Iaşi (photo Argenna)
In another part of town was the Cantacuzino House, built in in 1840 in grand style by the Grand Chancellor, Dumitrache Cantacuzino. In 1875, it was acquired by the Romanian royal family who used it as their principal residence when visiting Iaşi, their second capital after Bucharest; during World War I it became the principal residence of Queen Marie (the best-known Romanian queen to English readers, as a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria) when Bucharest was occupied by foreign armies. It too became a ‘Palace of Pioneers’ in the Communist era, and since 1989 has been converted into the ‘Children’s Palace’.
Cantacuzino House in Iaşi (Photo Argenna)
Iordache, Lord of Deleni, was Grand Chancellor of the Principality of Moldavia in about 1740. His grandson Matei moved to Russia in 1791 and was recognised formally as a prince by Catherine the Great, and given the post of Councillor of State. He and his sons moved back to Moldavia in 1812, though by this point it had been annexed to the Russian Empire. The next generation was thoroughly Russified: the eldest son Grigori, a colonel in the Imperial Guards, had been killed defending Russia at Borodino (1812), while the youngest, Egor, was married to a sister of the Russian Chancellor, Prince Gorchakov. It was the middle son, Alexander, a chamberlain at the Russian court, who redirected the family’s energies back towards Moldavia when he joined the fight for independence, first in Moldavia, 1821, and then in Greece, 1829, where he bought up some of the estates of retreating Turkish magnates, including Tatoi, near Athens, which after 1872 became the private residence of the Greek royal family.
a postcard of Tatoi when it was a royal estate, c 1915
Prince Alexander had a number of sons. Mikhail was an officer in the Greek and Russian armies, maintaining links with both states as Marshal of the Nobility of Bessarabia (the part of Moldavia still in the Russian Empire), and son-in-law of the Prime Minister of Greece in the 1830s; he then became a politician in the new state of Romania, as it forged its independence from the Ottoman Empire in the 1850s-60s (from 1858 known as the ‘United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia’, and after 1862, the ‘Romanian United Principalities’, still a vassal state of the Ottoman sultans). His brother Alexander (Alexandru in Romanian) took a more prominent role, as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the new state, June to September 1862, and Minister of Finance, July 1862 to March 1863.
Prince Alexandru Cantacuzino, c.1860
Other family members stayed in Russia: Mikhail and Alexandru’s nephew Prince Grigori was a diplomat in the United States (1892-95), then in the Kingdom of Württemberg, where he died in 1902. A cousin, Mikhail, a lieutenant-general in the Russian army, tied himself to the Imperial family by marriage to Olga, an illegitimate daughter of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaievich (a younger son of Tsar Nicholas I). Another cousin Mikhail was appointed Bulgaria’s Minister of War in 1885, a year when Russia tried to completely dominate its Balkan protégé’s government—but he was run out with all the other Russian officers following a coup in Sofia. Still other cousins from this branch devoted themselves to the new nation of Romania: Ioan Alexandru was one of the last caimacams (Turkish governors) of Moldavia, 1858-59, and later served as Minister of Finance of the Principality of Romania in 1870, and then its envoy to France and to Serbia; his nephew Constantin was a prominent leader of the conservative party in Romania after it declared its full independence from the Ottomans in 1877, and was elected President of the Assembly of Deputies in 1907 and again in 1912-14, after which he was appointed to the Crown Council, where he urged the King to remain neutral in World War I, then changed his tune to press for Romania to join the Allies in 1916 (which it did). Most of the Cantacuzino marriages in this period, male and female, were to other Romanian princes of this class: Callimachi, Stirbey, Ghika, Sturdza. The last male princes of this (Moldavian) line died in the 1920s.
Constantin Cantacuzino-Paşcanu in 1910
Now turning to the Wallachian branch (or the Kostaki branch), we see the sons of the murdered Grand Boyar Konstantinos Kantakouzenos flourishing in Wallachia in the late seventeenth century. The eldest, Serban—named for his grandfather, Prince Radu Serban of Wallachia—was himself appointed by the Sultan as Voivode (or Prince) of Wallachia in 1678. He was noteworthy in his support of early Romanian nationalism, in ordering a Romanian translation of the Bible and abolishing the old Slavonic liturgy in Wallachian churches. Forced to support his Turkish overlords at the siege of Vienna, 1683, he made secret plans to join the Christian side—this failed, and a few years later he was poisoned by his brother Constantin. Constantin was the ‘Vel Stolnic’ or High Steward of Wallachia, a humanist scholar and early historian of the Romanian people. He was offered the job of voivode by the Sultan in 1688 (I guess in thanks for offing his brother), but preferred to stay behind the throne as an advisor for his sister’s son, Constantin Brancoveanu, and after his death in 1714, for his own son, Stefan. Prince Stefan II was the last semi-independent Prince of Wallachia, and had been involved in the downfall of his cousin in 1714, denouncing him to the Sultan for double-dealings with the Russian tsar. But Stefan in fact had plans of his own, to put Wallachia under Austrian protection—he managed to temporarily do so with the help of Austrian troops led by Prince Eugene of Savoy in 1715, but he was soon arrested and he, his father, and his uncle Mihai were all taken to Constantinople and beheaded.
Prince Serban, Voivode of Wallachia
Prince Stefan II, Voivode of Wallachia
Meanwhile, their cousin Toma had filled the Wallachian court offices of Grand Postelnic (Chamberlain) and Grand Spatar (Sword Bearer) under Prince Constantin Brancoveanu, until he led the Wallachian cavalry in support of Russia against the Ottomans in 1711; after Russia’s defeat in 1712, he fled there (similar to Cantemir…see that blog post). In Russia, Prince Toma was created a count of the Russian Empire, and appointed a major-general in the Russian army and commander of the citadel at Rostov guarding the River Don. He did not leave children to form a Russian branch, but his nephews did: Matei, and Prince Stefan II’s sons, Radu and Constantin. Of these two sons, the latter was formally recognised as a prince of the Russian Empire, and was a major-general in the Russian army; although he had two sons, his line died out in 1781. I’ll pick up the Russian line of Prince Matei again below.
Prince Radu Cantacuzeno was one of the most interesting members of the family. After his father’s execution in 1716, he and his younger brother were taken by their mother to Vienna where they obtained a pension from the Habsburg emperor and a promise that if Austria liberated Wallachia again, Radu (or Rudolf in German) would be placed on its throne. This did not materialise, so Radu, in desperate need of funds, began to use his family’s exotic-sounding name and mostly unknown past to his advantage as an entrepreneur. He was the first to assert clearly that his family descended from Emperor John VI, and published a genealogy, with a few invented names filling in the gaps. He changed his coat of arms from the earlier arms depicting an eagle holding a cross, to an expanded version with quarterings representing various Byzantine imperial dynasties and Romanian regions, a version still in use by the family today.
the expanded Cantacuzino arms from a publication in 1744, with arms of the imperial families on top, the Wallachian raven and Moldavian bull in the centre row, a double headed eagle (with B’s for Byzantium) and an imperial crown, and the collar of the Constantinian Order of St George
As a self-proclaimed claimant to the imperial title of Constantinople, he revived a supposed Constantinian order of chivalry, the Order of Saint George (which by all accounts was entirely invented in the sixteenth century, since the Byzantine Empire had no chivalric orders), and as its Grand Master, sold knighthoods to members of the Austrian nobility. He may even have been recognised as Grand Master by Emperor Charles VI (in part to challenge the other claimant to the grand mastership, Charles, King of Naples, son of his onetime rival for the Spanish throne). On his faked diplomas he used the titles ‘Prince of Wallachia, Moldavia and Bessarabia, despot of the Peloponnese, prince of Thessaly…’ and so on. He managed to create a small army, the ‘Illyrian Regiment’ in 1736, which he and his brother led all over the Balkans trying to start revolts to claim thrones in Wallachia or Serbia. By 1744, Charles VI’s daughter Maria Theresa was in charge in Vienna and was less impressed with Radu’s lofty claims, and more concerned with his mounting debts and disruptions caused to her diplomatic efforts to maintain the peace with the Ottomans. She declared his chivalric order fake and ordered his arrest—he fled abroad but his brother Constantin spent forty years in prison in Hungary then went to Russia as above. Prince Radu travelled all over Europe, from Berlin, to Paris and Venice, and died in Poland in 1761.
Meanwhile the senior line of this family, the descendants of Prince Serban I, remained more fixed in Wallachia. Serban’s son, Gheorghe (or Iordache), as a child was pushed forward by the Austrians as his father’s successor, unsuccessfully, then appointed Ban of Craiovia, the part of western Wallachia that had come under Austrian rule (1718-26). His eldest son Matei was created an Austrian count and established a branch that persisted there until 1883. The younger son Toma established a branch that also moved closer into the Austro-Hungarian sphere by becoming became lords of Corneni, near Cluj in Transylvania (then part of Hungary). The Cantacuzino-Corneanu continue to the present.
Other lines remained in Wallachia and, as they divided, took on nicknames to differentiate themselves. Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Rafoveanu was Minister of Finance of the Kingdom of Romania, 1895-98; while his cousin, Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul (known as ‘Zizi’; his nickname Grănicerul means ‘the Border Guard’, from his time serving on the border in the war), a nephew of Gheorghe Manu, Prime Minister in 1890, became a Romanian general in World War I, then a conservative member of parliament. In 1934, he became President of the pro-fascist Nationalist Party, and briefly led a legion in Spain in the army of General Franco. His sister Ioana was an aviator, the first woman pilot in Romania, while their brother Ioan entered the world of the theatre through his marriage to actress Maria Filotti, a prolific stage performer, longtime teacher at the Conservatoire and between 1939 and 1948 director of the National Theatre in Bucharest. Their son Ion Filotti Cantacuzino continued in this vein, as a writer and film producer. He made short films for the Romanian war department in World War II, which caused him to be blacklisted after 1945 when the Communists took over. He had two sons, Georghe, a historian with specialisms in heritage and archaeology (monasteries), who served as chief museologist of the National Museum of Romanian History until 1990, then became an inspector at the Direction of Historical Monuments (d. 2019). The younger son, Şerban, became an actor in Paris in the 1990s (d. 2011).
Gheorghe Cantacuzino-Grănicerul, Romanian general and far-right political leader
It was in the line of Parvu (d. 1751) that the most significant leaders of the first decades of Romanian independence emerge. His two great-grandsons, Grigore and Constantin, saw the future of Romania in opposite visions. Both brothers served as Vornic of Wallachia, a court office in charge of justice and internal affairs. But Grigore became a leader of the nationalist liberals pressing for independence, and clashed with Constantin, a leader of the conservative boyar class who preferred the status quo: autonomy within the Empire. Constantin thrived in the government of Prince Alexander II Ghica in the later 1830s, as Postelnic and Logothete (Secretary of State and Justice Minister), but was unsuccessful in the election of 1842 to replace Ghica as prince. He joined the Ottoman army in 1848, and in return was named Caimacam (Regent) of Wallachia, 1848-49, and in the 1850s tried to obtain the princely throne again, as a champion of remaining under Ottoman rule. After Turkey’s defeat in the Crimean War, Prince Constantin was named Vice President of an ad hoc ‘Divan’, or caretaker government (and again in 1856). He tried once more to obtain the princely throne itself in 1859, but by this point the winds had changed, and outright independence was in the air.
Constantin Cantacuzino in traditional dress, c.1820, later Caimacam of Wallachia
Constantin the Postelnic built a family residence at Filipeştii de Târg, in one of the mountain valleys northwest of Bucharest, in a county called Prahova, where many of the later Cantacuzino residences would also be built. Today it is one of Romania’s chief tourist regions, and its old road leading across the Carpathians linking Wallachia and Transylvania is now travelled by those seeking access to ‘Dracula’s Castle’ at Braşov.
the ruins of the Cantacuzino mansion at Filipeştii de Târg (photo Nenea Hartia)
While Constantin’s son Ion became Minister of Justice for the new United Romanian Principalities and President of the Court of Appeals, it was his cousin, Grigore’s son, who made more of a mark: Prince Gheorghe Grigore was known as ‘Nababul’ (‘the Nabob’) due to his great wealth and grandiose lifestyle. He was a lavish builder: the Cantacuzino Palace in Bucharest, the Cantacuzino Castle in Buşteni and others. In government, he was elected mayor of the city of Bucharest in 1869, then held the posts of Minister of Finance (1873-75), President of the Chamber of Deputies (1889-91), President of the Senate (1892-95), and finally Prime Minister of Romania, twice, from 1899 to 1900 and 1906 to 1907, as head of the Conservative Party. In the later year, he failed to put down a major peasant revolt, so resigned.
Prince Gheorghe Grigore Cantacuzino, ‘Nababul’, twice Prime Minister of Romania
In 1901, the Nabob built a colossal place in the northwest quarter of Bucharest in Beaux-Arts style, mixing in French classical and rococo influences. It has gates built to resemble those built for Louis XIV at Versailles. In 1913, it served as the site for the signing of the Peace of Bucharest with Bulgaria; and during World War II it was the residence of the President of the Council of Ministers. The Prince’s daughter-in-law later married Romania’s most famous composer, George Enescu, and since 1956 the Cantacuzino Palace has housed the Enescu Museum.
Cantacuzino Palace in Bucharest shortly after it was built
Meanwhile, up in picturesque Prahova County, the Nabob built Cantacuzino Castle at Buşteni, at the foot of the Bucegi Mountains. Completed in 1911, it served as a family summer residence and hunting lodge. Built in quite a different style to the city palace, Buşteni Castle, also known as Zamora Castle, is described as ‘neo-Romanian’, with lots of marble and mosaic, wood ceilings and friezes—lots of full-size family portraits and numerous coats-of-arms of various Wallachian noble families. Nationalised in 1948, it became a sanatorium; then after the fall of Communist regime in Romania, it was returned to Cantacuzino heirs who restored it and, since 2010, have opened it up as a museum—today one of the most popular tourist spots in Romania, and since 2022 seen on television screens all over the world as the setting for Nevermore Academy in the Netflix series ‘Wednesday’.
Cantacuzino Castle, Buşteni (photo Costea Stefan)
prominent Cantecuzino ancestors painted at Buşteni
Finally, returning to his great passion for French architectural styles, the Nabob started a palace at Floreşti (not far from Buştemi), also known as the Romanian ‘Little Trianon’. This was started in 1911, but Prince Gheorghe Grigore died in 1913 before it was completed, and his son Mihail had little interest. So it deteriorated almost immediately. Pillaged in World War II then nationalised, the Floreşti Palace became a dog training facility. Its roof collapsed in the 1970s and villagers began to use the stones for other building works. Returned to the family in 1989, they decided it wasn’t worth saving, so it was sold to a private entrepreneur. He has plans to restore this strangely grandiose building the rural countryside, but it looks like they remain still only plans.
the ‘Little Trianon’ at Floreşti (photo Nenea Hartia)
In the twentieth century, this branch continued to be eminent in various areas of public life: Ion’s son Ion (or ‘Iancu’), a physician and bacteriologist at the Romanian School of Medicine and Pharmacy, led campaigns against cholera and typhus in World War I; his cousins, Mihail and Grigore (sons of the Prime Minister), both served as Mayor of Bucharest in the years leading up to the First World War. Mihail later became Minister of Justice (1910-14 and 1916-18). They had prominent wives too: Mihail’s wife Maria (‘Maruca’), was a lady-in-waiting to Romania’s popular Queen Marie, and later in life re-married the famous composer George Enescu (as noted above). Grigore’s wife Alexandrina was a leading feminist in Romania in the 1920s, vice-president of the International Council of Women and representative for women’s rights at the League of Nations, but ultimately was pulled by her conservative aristocratic roots towards fascism (she and her circle became labelled as ‘nationalist feminists’).
Prince Grigore Gheorghe and his wife Alexandrina out for a drive
Princess Alexandrina Cantacuzino later in life as a leader of the women’s rights movement in Romania
In the next generation, Mihail’s son Constantin became an ace pilot in World War II; then, his lands confiscated by the postwar government in 1946, he settled in Spain with his wife, the Romanian actress Nadia Gray, who became a film star in French, English and Italian films, notably 1960’s La Dolce Vita. Grigore’s son Alexandru became a leader of the Fascist ‘Iron Guard’ in Romania in 1935, and fought with them in Spain, in support of Franco. He returned to Romania in 1937 where he was elected a deputy in the National Assembly, but was arrested in April 1938, on orders of King Carol II. He was released but plotted to overthrow the King that summer, so was arrested again in October—he refused to submit to a trial run by the royal regime and was executed in September 1939.
Flying Ace Constantin
Finally we return to the branch of Cantacuzino princes established in Russia, where they were known as Kantakuzen or Cantacuzène in French (the language of the high aristocracy). This branch descends from Matei, son of Parvu. He was lord of Magureni in Wallachia—in Prahova County, as so many estates we’ve encountered already (suggesting this area was seriously infested with Cantacuzinos!), and also as with those estates, the Cantacuzino mansion in Magureni is now little more than rubble. Matei’s eldest son Constantin established a branch here (the Cantacuzino-Magureanu), which persisted into the twentieth century. Another Matei was a judge and professor of civil law in Iaşi at the end of the nineteenth century, mayor of that city, 1912-14, then a conservative member of the Romanian Chamber of Deputies, rising to national posts of Minister of Religious Affairs (briefly in Spring 1918) and Minister of Justice (also briefly, in Summer 1920); his son George Matei was an architect and painter, who moved to art school in Paris in the 1920s (so many of these Cantacuzinos we’ve encountered were educated in France), then returned to Romania to work on restoration projects of prominent buildings in Bucharest; from 1948 to 1953 he was a prisoner of the new Communist regime, then freed and joined the country’s directorate appointed to look after Romania’s historic monuments. But in 1957, he was again declared an enemy of the people and lost his positions—still he worked in historic restoration even as a blacklisted architect (for example for the Metropolitan of Moldavia); though he died in 1960s, interest in his worked was revived in the 1990s. He has a son, Stefan, who grew up in England and was a respected architect there.
architect George Matei Cantacuzino
The second son of Matei of Magureni, Parvu, was yet another Wallachian leader who revolted against Ottoman rule in the mid-eighteenth century, and, after succeeding in taking over the principality in 1769, was swiftly brought down and executed, within the year. It was his brother, the youngest son, Radu, who established the Russian line. Radu, also known as Radukan, or Rodion Matveievich in Russian, fought for Wallachia against the Turks in his older brother’s rebellion, then joined Russian service in 1770 and was appointed a colonel of a regiment he recruited in the Danubian principalities. He died in 1774 and left two sons, Ivan and Nikolai, the elder of whom moved back to Wallachia and into Austrian service, while Nikolai stayed in Russia and rose through the ranks. He was recognised formally by Catherine the Great as a prince in 1772, and was appointed colonel of different regiments (or ‘hosts’) of Cossacks in Ukraine. He established his family in an estate near Odessa, and acquired a residence in Saint Petersburg. I have no information about either of these residences, so would love to know more.
Nikolai Rodionovich, Prince Cantacuzene
the Cantacuzino arms as used in the Russian Empire: this includes the Angelus, Comnenuns and Palaiologus arms on top, Moldavia, Cantacuzino and Wallachia on bottom, all over a golden double-headed eagle on red, and a very ‘Byzantine’ crown on the helm
Prince Nikolai Rodionovich Cantacuzene’s son Rodion Nikolaievich was also a soldier, like his father rising to the rank of major-general. He raised the profile of this branch somewhat through his marriage to Princess Maria Alexandrovna Frolova-Bagreeva, the grand-daughter and heiress of the famous liberal reformer Count Mikhail Speransky, virtual prime minister of Russia under Alexander I in the Napoleonic era, and, while less influential under Nicholas I, was responsible for a huge codification project of Russian laws, for which he was awarded the title of count (and special permission to allow his grand-daughter to pass this title to her Cantacuzino husband and sons) in 1839. The name Speransky was ‘self-fashioned’ (he himself being illegitimate), from the Latin sperare (‘to hope’). Maria also brought with her the Speransky estate in Ukraine, Great Buromka, on the Buromka River southeast of Kiev. Once a great ‘Gilded Age’ mansion, only some ruins and the park of this once very grand estate remains today.
Buromka (or Bouromka) c. 1920
Rodion and Maria’s son Mikhail was confirmed as Count Speransky by the Tsar in 1872. An imperial privy councillor, he acted as Director of the Imperial Department of Spiritual Affairs and Foreign Confessions, a job he had interesting insights on as a descendant of Orthodox Greeks, but also married to Elisabeth Sicard a daughter of French Huguenots, merchants who had settled in Odessa. Their son, Prince Mikhail, Count Speransky, married an even more unusual bride: Julia Grant, granddaughter of the US president. They had met while he was a diplomat in Italy and married in a grand society marriage in Newport in 1899. In Russia, he was aide-de-camp of the Tsar at the start of World War I, the became a prominent cavalry general in the Russian defensive line in East Prussia. During the Revolution, he and his wife fled to the United States. Princess Cantacuzène published three fascinating books between 1919 and 1921 giving eye-witness accounts of the Russian aristocracy, the court in Saint Petersburg and the Bolshevik Revolution. In America, the couple’s marriage was annulled in 1934 and he died in Sarasota, Florida, 1955, while she lived on until the age of 99, dying in Washington DC (the city of her birth) in 1975. She is buried in the National Cathedral.
Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Cantacuzene, Count Speransky
Prince Mikhail’s wedding to Julia Grant in Newport
The Cantacuzène-Speransky line continues today, mostly in the United States, but with ventures elsewhere, one son, Mikhail, establishing a business in Mozambique then South Africa; a daughter, Zenaida, marrying Sir John Hanbury-Williams, Director of the Bank of England and a member of the households of George V and George VI; and a cousin, Pierre, born in France, who rose through the ranks of the Russian Orthodox Church in exile (as Father Ambrose) to become Bishop of Bishop of Vevey (1993, in Switzerland), Vicar for Western Europe (based in Geneva) then Bishop of Geneva and Western Europe, 2000-06 (d. 2009).
The new Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, born Countess Stéphanie de Lannoy, comes from an old noble family from the Low Countries. The House of Lannoy is one of the most distinguished noble houses in Belgium, yet nether of the two princely titles they held at different parts of their history—Sulmona and Rheina-Wolbeck—were located in Belgium. Nor in fact is the village of Lannoy itself in … any more.
Anvaing Castle in Hainaut, seat of the Lannoy family today (photo Jean-Pol Grandmont)
The name Lannoy, as the seventeenth-century royal genealogist Père Anselme pointed out, is pretty common, and the commonness of the name goes back to its probable meaning, l’aune or the alder tree. There was, for example, a castle and lordship of Lannoy in eastern Lorraine in the Middle Ages; and in the seventeenth century, a Lannoy family came to great prominence at the French court, then died out. Charles, Comte de Lannoy (or sometimes Lannois) was the King’s Premier Maître d’Hôtel in the 1640s, and Lord of Brunoy, a seigneurie on the banks of the Seine southeast of Paris which he left to his daughter, Anne-Elizabeth, who married the Duke of Elbeuf, one of the subjects of my doctoral research—Brunoy was later given to the Count of Provence, younger brother of Louis XVI, and erected into a duchy-peerage, so was again central to my own research on this prince. But neither of these Lannoy families connect directly with those of Belgium, There is also a claim—maybe true, maybe not—that a younger son of one of the Belgian Lannoys became a Protestant during the Reformation and his descendants left for America in the 1620s where they spelled their name De Lano or Delano, and became one of the leading families of Boston, and ultimately gave their surname to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The village of Lannoy we are concerned with here is in French Flanders. It is now part of the wider suburban sprawl of the city of Lille in France, but very close to the border with Belgium. Lille was once one of the major towns of the County of Flanders, as part of the Spanish Netherlands, but when it was captured by the French in the late 1660s, it took with it the village of Lannoy. By this point, the Lannoy family were no longer proprietors of the fief, it having passed out of the family at the end of the fifteenth century. There had been a castle there, of which little remains, but the Lannoy family did retain their very distinctive coat of arms, three green lions, crowned, on a silver field.
Lannoy arms from a stall plate for a knight of the Golden Fleece in Bruges
The Lannoy family were based in French Flanders and in Hainaut, the county immediately east to the east (also divided today between France and Belgium). This is a francophone area, but they also held lands further north in Flemish speaking areas around the regional capital, Brussels, and one branch expanded further east and held the lordship of Clervaux in Luxembourg, where German (or a German dialect) was more common. As noted above, their princely titles were even more far flung, with Sulmona being in the Kingdom of Naples and Rheina-Wolbeck being in northwest Germany, near the city of Münster.
The first members of the family who came to real prominence were three brothers from the cadet line of Santes and Molenbaix (lordships located on either side of Lille), Hugo, Gilbert and Baldwin. All three held senior positions at the court of the dukes of Burgundy in the early fifteenth century. The dukes of Burgundy were at their height as princes at this point, and often based their court nearby at Lille. Hugo and Gilbert were both diplomats and soldiers for hire, travelling to the Holy Land, Muscovy, Spain and Poland. Both fought at Agincourt against the English. As part of the peace process that followed, Hugo arranged a marriage between the Countess of Holland and the Duke of Gloucester (brother of Henry V), while Gilbert was sent by Henry V to Syria and Egypt in 1421 to sound out possibilities of re-establishing a Christian Kingdom in Jerusalem. He published accounts of his travels in the Middle East, Poland and Russia, and also wrote a book, Advice for a Young Prince, in 1440, for the young Prince Charles of Burgundy, later Duke Charles the Rash (clearly not taking Gilbert de Lannoy’s advice).
Hugh de Lannoy, as a Knight of the Golden Fleece
brother Gilbert, also a Knight, from the Book of Statutes, 1472
The youngest brother, Baldwin, was also an ambassador from Burgundy to the court of Henry V, and served as Governor of Lille for fifty years (1424-74). All three were founding members of the Order of the Golden Fleece when it was instituted by Duke Philip the Good in 1430—its first chapter met in Lille. Baldwin celebrated the event by having his portrait painted by Jan Van Eyck.
Baldwin de Lannoy, by Jan Van Eyck (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin)
In the next generation, the head of the senior branch, still based at Lannoy itself, Jean II, was also a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece (and also depicted in their distinctive red robes in a book of their statutes compiled in 1473). In all, fifteen members of the House of Lannoy would receive this honour. His father Jean I had been killed at Agincourt, so Jean was lord from a young age. He was nephew of Antoine de Croÿ, one of Burgundy’s leading courtiers (and of Agnès de Croÿ, mistress of the Duke), and by 1448 was appointed Stadtholder (or governor) of Holland and Zealand, adding Walloon Flanders (the French-speaking parts of the county around Lille and Douai) in 1459. At this point he befriended the young Dauphin of France, Louis, who spend several years in Burgundy in exile, then helped this prince reclaim his throne as Louis XI in 1461. But this shift in loyalty angered the Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Rash, so Lannoy lost his posts in the Low Countries in 1463, and by 1468 was in open conflict with his former lord and went into exile in France. He returned to service in Burgundy when it was taken over by Emperor Maximilian (married to Mary of Burgundy, Duke Charles’s heiress), serving as his chamberlain and ambassador—notably in 1482 to arrange peace with his old friend Louis XI.
Jean II de Lannoy
When Jean de Lannoy died in 1493, his lands were divided up by his daughters, and Lannoy itself passed out of the family. His brother Antoine founded a line at Maingoval (today spelled Mingoval) in Artois. It was his grandson Charles who was the most famous member of the House of Lannoy and its first prince. His early career was spent as a soldier in the service of Emperor Maximilian’s son, Philip the Handsome, husband to Juana, heiress of the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon. In 1515, Charles de Lannoy was appointed First Equerry and a member of the council of their son Charles, Duke of Burgundy, who soon became king of Castile and Aragon as Carlos I (and Lannoy’s title became Caballerizo mayor), and after 1519, Holy Roman Emperor as Charles V. in 1511, Charles de Lannoy purchased a sizeable castle in Brabant to be closer to the court in Brussels, Hof ter Ham, in the town of Steen-Ockerzeel, northeast of Brussels. It was a medieval castle rebuilt in a more modern style with a much grander moat in the 1490s by Philippe Hinckaert, a leading courtier. The Lannoy family sold it in 1577, and it would be held by various Belgian families until 1929 when it was leased to the exiled Emperess Zita of Austria-Hungary who raised her large brood of Habsburg archdukes and archduchesses here until 1940 when they fled to Canada in the face of the Nazi invasion. Badly damaged in the war, it has been beautifully restored.
Hof Ter Ham (photo Johan Bakker)
In the 1520s, the Emperor-King fixed his eyes on the Italian peninsula. He wished to secure his grandfather’s succession in the Kingdom of Naples, but also to wrest control of the Duchy of Milan from the French who had taken it in 1515. Lannoy was at first sent to Naples to govern as Viceroy, 1522-23. In 1523 he was brought north to Lombardy and given command of Charles V’s armies: he defeated the French first at Sessia in 1524, then decisively at Pavia in 1525—we have seen in 2025 several commemorations of that epic battle between Francis I and Charles V, resulting in the King of France’s capture and utter humiliation. It was Charles de Lannoy in fact who was charged with taking the captive King Francis to Madrid, then escorting him to the frontier with France a year later to exchange him for his young sons as hostages. As a reward, in 1526, Charles de Lannoy (or Don Carlos de Lannoi) was created a count of the Empire (a benefit accrued to his family as a whole), and was given the County of Asti in Lombardy (recently conquered from the French) and the Principality of Sulmona in the Abruzzo, the northernmost province of the Kingdom of Naples on the Adriatic coast (and also given the fief of Ortona, sometimes spelled Ortona a Mare, as the chief port of Abruzzo). He was given the rank of a Grandee of Spain. Charles de Lannoy died in Gaeta, one of the chief fortress cities of Naples, in 1527.
Charles de Lannoy, 1st Prince of Sulmona
Sulmona the city is famous as the birthplace of the poet Ovid. Today it is more well known as the home of confetti, the brightly coloured sugared almond candies. Most of the medieval city was destroyed in an earthquake in 1706, so today’s appearance is almost completely baroque. The Lannoy family did not reside here in a palace, but were given the lucrative rights to collect a tax on the wool trade in the Abruzzo. It had been granted numerous rights as a free city under the Angevin kings of Naples, but Charles V curtailed these, and the Lannoy princes ruled absolutely, causing much civic unrest.
Sulmona in the Abruzzo, in 1647
The 1st Prince of Sulmona had married Françoise de Montbel, from a Savoyard family also in the service of Emperor Charles V. In particular, she had been one of Charles’s wet nurses, so was always in favour. As a widow, in 1528, she consolidated her family’s position in the Kingdom of Naples by exchanging the County of Asti in the north of Italy for the Duchy of Boiano and the County of Venafro, both in the province of Molise, in the mountains north of Naples.
Boiano, or Bojano, had been the ancient city of Bovianum, an ancient city of the Samnites, enemies of the Romans. In the middle ages it was erected into a county for Norman knights who came to Italy with the Hauteville family (who created the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples in the eleventh century)—according to some sources they were called ‘de Moulins’ (‘from the mill’) and eventually Italianised their name into Molise, which became the name of the county and then the province itself. By the fifteenth century it was owned by the Pandone family, close allies of the ruling House of Aragon, and when the 1st Duke of Boaino, Enrico Pandone, sided with the French against Charles V, he lost his lands as well as his head in 1528. The old Norman Castello Pandone di Bojano above the town had already mostly crumbled due to frequent earthquakes in this region, but the Palazzo Pandone in the town centre remained and was given to the Lannoy family. It still stands today.
the ducal castle in Boiano
Enrico Pandone also lost the County of Venafro, a few miles to the west. Here too the Pandone family had rebuilt an older castle in Renaissance style, in the 1440s, famous for its horse frescoes. The Dowager Princess of Sulmona made this her chief residence and raised her many sons here. By the 1700s the Castello Pandone had passed to a major Neapolitan family, the Carafa, and then to others—it is still privately owned.
Castello Pandone in Venafro (photo Lucio Musacchio)
The eldest son, Philippe de Lannoy (or Filippo de Lanoya), 2nd Prince of Sulmona, retained the great favour of Emperor Charles V, who, in 1534, attended his wedding in Naples to Isabella Colonna, daughter of the Duke of Traetto and widow of the Condottiero Luigi Gonzaga—she was one of the most well-connected Italian aristocrats of the day. As a wedding present, the Emperor gave them the Castello Capuano, one of the two oldest palaces in Naples, though they didn’t hold on to it for long—the new viceroy appropriated it (in exchange for another palazzo, today’s Palazzo d’Aquino in the Via Medina) to build his centralised judicial complex, which it remained for several centuries.
the Capuano Castello in Naples, briefly a Lannoy residence
The 2nd Prince was also a soldier, leading the imperial cavalry in Charles V’s wars against the Duke of Saxony. He died relatively young in 1553, and was succeeded by his son Carlo. Carlo renounced his titles only a few years later, so it was Orazio de Lanoya who became Prince of Sulmona and Count of Venafro, between 1559 and 1597—though he sold Venafro and Ortona in 1582. He was a colonel in the Spanish infantry and married a daughter of Alfonso d’Avalos, Marchese di Pescara, a Spanish family that had also become ‘Neapolitanised’. The 4th Prince was succeeded by his son Filippo II, who died fairly young in 1600, leaving a small child, Filippo III, who died in 1604. Sulmona returned to the Crown and in 1610 was given out again as a principality to the Borghese family, who retain the title still today.
Meanwhile, the Duchy of Boiano had been given by the 1st Princess of Sulmona to her second son, Ferrante (or Ferdinand). He sold it in 1538 to his brother Giorgio, and as Comte de la Roche, moved north back to the Low Countries, where he served as an imperial artillery general and married a daughter of Nicolas Perrenot de Granvelle, one of the chief advisors to the Emperor in the Low Countries and Germany. Due to these connections he was appointed governor of several key places in the Low Countries and the Franche-Comté (the home of the Perrenot de Granvelle clan) and became a military engineer and cartographer there.
Giorgio, 2nd Duke of Boiano, stayed in Italy and married another daughter of a Neapolitanised Spaniard, Giulia Diaz Carlon, Countess of Montovia. Their first son Carlo became 3th Duke, while their younger son Costantino entered the church and was briefly Bishop of Vico Equense, on the Bay of Naples. Carlo de Lanoya died in 1575 and the Duchy of Boiano passed by marriage of his daughters into the Carafa family. The Italian chapter for the House of Lannoy came to an end.
Back in the Low Countries, the junior branch of Molembais continued into the seventeenth century. Scanning the family tree we see numerous sons and daughters in positions of authority within the Habsburg court in Brussels: Baldwin II was Premier Maître d’Hôtel for Mary, Duchess of Burgundy, then for her husband Emperor Maximilian, and was appointed to lead the household of their son, Archduke Philip the Fair, as his steward: upon that prince’s coming of age, Baldwin de Lannoy-Molembais accompanied him to inauguration ceremonies in all the provinces of the Low Countries, notably in Leuven in September 1494 where he was sworn in as Duke of Brabant, and in July 1495, when he had his grand ceremonial entry into Brussels. Lannoy’s son Philippe would later become head of the Council of Finances and Grand Maître of the Household of Mary of Hungary, Charles V’s sister, when she was appointed Governor of the Low Countries in the 1530s; and his two sons in turn would act as governors of Hainaut and Tournai. This branch died out in the 1590s (though this is where the claimed descent to the Delano family of America fits in).
The next branch down were the lords of La Motterie, another fief on the borders of Belgium and France northeast of Lille. Claude de Lannoy was created Count of La Motterie in 1628 by the King of Spain—by this point, the Low Countries had been divided into the Dutch Republic in the north and the Spanish Netherlands in the south. He was successively Governor of Maastricht (1616), Namur (1634) and Luxembourg (1638), and Camp Master General for Philip IV, serving as a Spanish commander in the Thirty Years War and a member of the war council of the governor general in Brussels.
Claude de Lannoy, Count of La Motterie
His marriage to Claudine d’Eltz, from an old noble house from Luxembourg, brought into the family the Barony of Clervaux: Clerf in German, Klierf in Luxemburgish. This compact territory, fairly autonomous within the northern reaches of the Duchy of Luxembourg consisted of a twelfth-century castle and a large abbey, the Abbey of St. Maurice and St. Maur. It was built by the Count of Sponheim, a member of an extensive noble family that dominated the remote hills and valleys of this area of the northern Ardennes; its large round towers were added in 1400 by the noble Brandenbourg family. The Lannoy family would possess the barony of Clervaux until it was sold in the 1920s. Claude de Lannoy enlarged it by building its impressive ‘Knights’ Hall’. Badly damaged in World War II, the castle was restored and now serves as the seat of the local administration and a regional history museum.
Clervaux in Luxembourg, abbey and castle (photo Jean-Pol Grandmont)
The 1st Count had two sons founding separate lines of La Motterie and Clervaux. Starting with the junior line, we come to the second princely title for the House of Lannoy. Adrien-Gérard, Count of Lannoy-Clervaux (d. 1730) was Governor of Namur, and lord of the ‘libre terre’ of Bolland. This ‘free land’ and its castle were located in the old Duchy of Limburg, today’s Province of Liège, where feudal boundaries were often quite blurry. The castle was built in the sixteenth century and was held by the Lannoys into the nineteenth century—it remains in private hands today.
Bolland Castle, in Limburg (photo Soluwe)
In 1789, Count Florent-Stanislas married Clémentine-Joséphine de Looz-Corswarem, daughter of the Duke of Looz-Corswarem, one of the few ducal titles in the Austrian Netherlands (see Beaufort-Spontin), who later became 1st Prince of Rheina-Wolbeck. The 1st Prince, Wilhelm von Looz-Corswarem, only ‘reigned’ for a few months in 1803 then passed his title to his son, Joseph Arnold. And when he died in 1827, the claims to this title passed to his brother-in-law Lannoy (Clémentine died the year before).
Rheina-Wolbeck was an unusual principality, a tiny sliver of land running along the west bank of the River Ems northwest of the city of Münster. Rheine was an old city in a region known as Münsterland, the lands belonging to the Prince-Bishopric of Münster; it also bordered the imperial counties of Lingen and Bentheim (on the very western edges of Germany’s modern borders). Wolbeck was also part of the Prince-Bishop’s lands, just outside the city on the southeast, with a fortified castle to which the bishops retreated when their citizens became unruly (like so many bishops of the Holy Roman Empire, they were forced to reside outside their episcopal city). With a mighty octagonal tower at its centre, over the centuries it developed into a hunting lodge, with a zoo added in the early eighteenth century. But all this was destroyed in the Seven Years War and almost nothing remains of Burg Wolbeck.
the tiny Principality of Rheina-Wolbeck (in red), 1803
In 1803, most of the ecclesiastical states of the Holy Roman Empire were secularised and given to other princes. Münster was the same. As a result of the Treaty of Lunéville two years before, aristocrats from the Austrian Netherlands who lost their lands to ever-expanding French conquests were compensated on the far side of the Rhine. The Duke of Looz-Corswarem was one of these, and this rather strange new state was created for him though he was at first slow to claim it. Apparently he considered Rheina to be a better latinised form of the name, rather than Rheine. One of the few real sources of income was a toll on a bridge over the River Ems which flows due north into the North Sea. There were plans to develop the Ems for better river transport, but only three years later, the principality was dissolved and its lands given to the new Grand Duchy of Berg, ruled by Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. In 1811, the lands on the left bank of the Ems were incorporated directly into the French Empire. As Napoleon’s empire began to collapse in 1813, Duke Wilhelm von Looz-Corswarem’s son, Joseph Arnold, tried to reclaim the Principality of Rheina-Wolbeck. But in the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15, these lands (along with most of the Münsterland) were given to the Kingdom of Prussia as part of the new Province of Westphalia. Some of the lands, however, he was allowed to keep, notably the former Abbey of Bentlage.
Bentlage was founded as an abbey for the Order of the Holy Cross (sometimes called the Crusader Brothers) in 1437. It was never huge and by the eighteenth century had only about a dozen resident friars. It was secularised in 1803, and given to the new Prince of Rheina-Wolbeck as its seat. When Joseph Arnold died in 1827, the property passed to Count Florent-Stanislas de Lannoy-Clervaux, and it stayed with his descendants, renovated as a country seat, until 1912, then passed back to Looz-Corswarem heirs, until they died out in 1946 and it passed to another family. Acquired by the city of Rheine in 1978, it has been turned into a museum.
Bentlage Abbey converted into a castle, 19th century
Florent-Stanislas de Lannoy-Clervaux’s succession to these lands, but also to the (now empty) title of Rheina-Wolbeck, was contested. It wasn’t until 1840 that the Bentlage estate was confirmed as his, and the King of Prussia re-created the title Prince of Rheina-Wolbeck for his heir, his grandson Napoléon de Lannoy, though without any sovereignty, merely the top of the noble hierarchy in the Prussian House of Lords. The title and seat were confirmed again in 1878 by Emperor Wilhelm I for the 3rd Prince of Rheina-Wolbeck (with the style ‘His Princely Grace’), Arthur de Lannoy. By this point the family was living mostly back in Belgium, and Bentlage was neglected. Arthur never married and was succeeded in 1895 by his brother Edgar who died in 1912. He did have a son, but his marriage was deemed unequal by the standards of Imperial princes, so the title and estates passed back to Looz-Corswarem heirs. This branch of the family (Lannoy-Clervaux) died out by the end of the twentieth century.
Returning to the more senior line of Lannoy-La Motterie, Philippe, 2nd Count of La Motterie, was Maître d’Hôtel of Archduke Leopold and Don Juan de Austria, successive governors of the Spanish Netherlands, though this latter appointment was cut short as he was killed in 1658 in the Battle of the Dunes against France. By his second marriage, he brought in another significant fief, Beaurepaire, in southern Hainaut (now also in France).
As this branch grew and spread in the eighteenth century, their actual title, Count of the Empire, was applied by different sons to different estates they acquired: Annapes, Watignies, Beaurepaire. In a junior branch, Eugène-Hyacinthe, 5th Comte de la Motterie, was Governor of Brussels (1737), a Field Marshal and Artillery General in the Imperial Army, and ultimately Grand Marshal of the Court of Brussels, 1751-56.
His son Chrétien-Joseph (d. 1822) was Imperial Lord Chamberlain from 1756, a leader of the court of Prince Charles of Lorraine, Governor-General of the Austrian Netherlands from 1741 to 1780. He resided at the Hôtel de Lannoy in Brussels. Before he died, Chrétien-Joseph, like many nobles had to adapt to his country being absorbed into the French Empire, so in 1804 he accepted a position as Senator of France, and in 1808, Count of the Empire. The line of La Motterie died out with him, while his cousins, the counts of Beaurepaire continued until 1870.
Chrétien-Joseph de Lannoy, Count of La Motterie
The Hôtel de Lannoy is on the rue aux Laines (or Wolstraat, ‘wool street’), a street popular with aristocrats from the fourteenth century, on the edge of the old city, south of the Coudenberg, the seat of the court (today’s Royal Palace). It was built as a city residence for the family in the eighteenth century, across the street from the grand Palais d’Egmont and its large gardens. There was also a Hôtel de Lannoy built in the 1770s, closer to the Royal Palace, sold to the Ligne family in the 1830s, so today known by that name.
Hotel de Lannoy, rue aux Laines, Brussels (photo Michel wal)
The senior line, who used the title more straightforwardly as ‘Comte de Lannoy’, came into greater prominence in the nineteenth century. Gustave-Ferdinand (d. 1892) was Chamberlain of King William I of the Netherlands, then after Belgium declared its independence in 1830, Grand Master of the Household of the Queen of the Belgians.
His country seat was the Château d’Anvaing, in the town of Frasnes-lez-Anvaing in Hainaut. Originally built by Jacques de Boubaix in 1561, in the style of a Renaissance water castle, it was then acquired by the Lannoy family in 1781. Extensive French-style gardens had been added in the early eighteenth century, and in about 1800 the estate was modified again, turning the old moat into a proper lake and refashioning the castle to have a more medieval ‘defensive’ look again becoming popular for aristocratic dwellings. Anvaing became famous in the twentieth century as the site of the capitulation of the Belgian Army in May 1940. It remains the main seat of the Lannoy family.
the Lannoy lion at Anvaing Castle
In the twentieth century, Philippe, Count of Lannoy (d. 1937), was Marshal of the Court of King Albert II of the Belgians—when the latter died, the Marshal was responsible for organising his funeral. He then became Grand Master of the Household of the now widowed Queen Elisabeth. Hie grandson, another Philippe, Count of Lannoy (d. 2019), was a provincial councillor of the Province of Hainaut. He and his wife, a member of an Antwerp family ennobled in 1614 (della Faille de Leverghem), had seven children and then one more after a gap of eight years: this is Countess Stéphanie, the new Grand Duchess of Luxembourg.
Stéphanie de Lannoy, now Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, visiting last year’s exhibition about heraldry at the National Library guided by its curator (and my old friend) Dr Pit Péporté (photo Maison du Grand Duc, Kary Barthelmey)
On 3 October 2025, Henri, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, abdicated his throne in favour of his eldest son, Crown Prince Guillaume. The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg as an independent sovereign state has only had its own ruling family since 1890, though the Duchy of Luxembourg itself (and before that the County) is far more ancient, with roots stretching back into the eleventh century, and the Grand Duchy existed as an autonomous state within the Germanic Confederation, with the King of the Netherlands as its sovereign, from 1815. At that time, the dynasty that ruled the Grand Duchy was the House of Orange-Nassau, whose history has been traced here; after 1890, they were succeeded in Luxembourg by very distant cousins from the House of Nassau-Weilburg. One of the new Grand Duke Guillaume’s subsidiary titles is thus Prince of Nassau. But he and his siblings also bear another title: Prince of Bourbon-Parma, which makes the history of this ruling family even more interesting. Although they officially still are called the House of Nassau-Weilburg, strictly speaking from a traditional patrilineal perspective, they are Bourbons, members of the ancient House of France, with ancestry stretching back to the first Capetians in the tenth century.
the arms of the grand dukes of Luxembourg, with quarters for Luxembourg and Nassau, and overall the arms of the house of Bourbon-Parma
An interesting twist, for those interested in historical drama on television, is that the actor currently playing Louis XVI in the series ‘Marie-Antoinette’, Louis Cunningham, despite lacking the heavy paunch and jowls of the real Louis XVI, certainly has a very Bourbon nose, and with reason—his mother is Princess Charlotte of Luxembourg, Princess of Bourbon-Parma, cousin to the current grand ducal family.
So how did this come about, that there are Bourbons masquerading as Nassauers in Luxembourg? This blog will look first at the twentieth-century dynastic history of Luxembourg and the Bourbon-Parma family, then will step back to look at the Princes of Nassau-Weilburg, one half of the House of Nassau. A previous blog has looked at the junior half of this dynasty, in its many branches that became princes (Dillenburg, Hadamar, Siegen and Dietz)—the last of these also became princes of Orange (a French territory they no longer possessed) in 1702, Dutch Stadtholders then kings of the Netherlands in 1815. As in Luxembourg, although the male line died out in 1890, the royal family there retains the name Orange-Nassau (rather than adopting Mecklenburg, Lippe or Amsberg for each successive spouse of a reigning queen). The branch of Weilburg also included other lines that also established principalities (Idstein, Usingen and Saarbrücken); and evolved into the relatively short-lived Duchy of Nassau, one of the new states created in the course of the Napoleonic Wars in Germany, but which disappeared in 1866.
the Middle Rhine in the Middle Ages, with the County of Nassau stretching northward from one of its capitals, Wiesbaden. Weilburg (here as ‘Weilbg’), is at one end of the river Lahn, while Nassau castle itself is at the other.
To start, we can look at the strange circumstances in Luxembourgish history that followed the death of Grand Duke William IV in 1912. He and his wife, the former Portuguese Infanta Maria Anna, had six daughters but no sons. There were no other male members of the House of Nassau, in either of its two main branches—except the Count of Merenberg, but we’ll come back to him and the reasons for his exclusion. The Grand Duke passed a law that would allow him to be succeeded by his eldest daughter, Marie-Adélaïde. She governed the Grand Duchy for nearly six years, but in January 1919 abdicated in the face of her pro-German sentiment during the First World War. Her sister Charlotte, age 23, took over as Grand Duchess. A few months later, she married Prince Félix of Bourbon-Parma, and together they re-generated a grand ducal dynasty for Luxembourg, over which she presided until her abdication in 1964. Félix was her first cousin (he also had a Portuguese infanta as a mother), and although he was created ‘Prince of Luxembourg’ the day before their wedding, he retained his title Prince of Bourbon-Parma for the rest of his life—after all, the Bourbons outranked the Nassaus, and his children by right could now be called Royal Highness instead of Grand Ducal Highness. Why was this so? What or where was Bourbon-Parma?
Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg and Prince Felix of Bourbon-Parma shortly after their marriage (Collection of the Maison Grand Ducale de Luxembourg)
It was not a place, but a branch of the royal house of Bourbon that ruled in the Duchy of Parma (and Piacenza, to give it its full name) from the 1730s to 1859, when it was annexed to the Kingdom of Sardinia (which soon became the Kingdom of Italy). The Bourbon Dynasty is of course one of the most well-known royal houses in Europe, ruling France from 1589 to 1848 (with some gaps), and Spain from 1700 to the present (with some gaps). In 1731, the son of the first Bourbon king in Spain (Philip V), Infante Carlos, sailed for Italy where he took possession of the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, ruled by his mother’s family, the Farnese, since 1545. Duke Charles I was not satisfied with this relatively small state, however, and in 1734, marched an army south to reclaim the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, lost to his father at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Parma was then annexed by Austria, only to be returned to the Bourbons—to another son of Philip V and Isabel Farnese (Infante Felipe)—at the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748 (and with the addition of a third duchy, tiny Guastalla). Duke Philip was seen as an extension of the royal family of Spain, but his wife, Duchess Elisabeth-Louise, was the eldest and favourite daughter of Louis XV of France. Their son Duke Ferdinand of Parma was thus caught between the wills of the French and Spanish branches of the Bourbon dynasty, though he came to rely increasingly on his wife, an Austrian archduchess, Maria Amalia (an older sister of Queen Marie-Antoinette), and they forged a more independent path.
The family of Philip, Duke of Parma, with his consort, Louise-Elisabeth of France. The future duke Ferdinand plays with his sister, the future Queen Maria Luisa of Spain (Giuseppe Baldrighi, 1757)
So by the time of the French Revolution, there were four ruling branches of the House of Bourbon—France, Spain, Naples-Sicily and Parma—plus some non-ruling branches like the dukes of Orléans and the princes of Condé and Conti. All four lost their thrones as a result of the French Revolution—though the Bourbons of Naples held on in Sicily throughout, and the Bourbons of Parma actually got a promotion, briefly, as kings of Etruria, a curious revival of an ancient name for a monarchy created in Tuscany by Napoleon as a satellite or dependant state of the French Empire (1801-1807). Norman Davies included this interesting puppet state in his book Vanished Kingdoms from 2012: ‘Etruria: French Snake in the Tuscan Grass’. The Bourbon-Parma family then had to wait until Napoleon’s widow, ex-Empress Marie-Louise died in 1847 before they were fully restored to Parma and Piacenza (in the meantime they were compensated with the smaller duchy next door, Lucca). By this point, Duke Charles II (who curiously had been called Louis II as child-king of Etruria) was hardly interested in governing, and abdicated in 1849 in favour of his son Charles III. This duke was assassinated in 1854, and his infant son Robert was deposed in 1859 by the unstoppable surge of the Italian Risorgimento. Unified Italy would soon take over in Naples and Sicily as well.
Duke Robert I of Parma, with his mother Louise as regent (Carlini, 1854)
So after 1859, the Bourbon-Parma family was a ruling dynasty with nowhere to rule. Robert married twice and had twenty-four children. (yes!) The last of these, Zita, did not die until 1989, at 96 years old. Despite not having a throne, their royal blood and kinship ties to other royal houses still afforded them prestige and first-class marriages: in 1893, the eldest child Princess Maria Luisa married Ferdinand, Prince of Bulgaria (later Tsar), and in 1903, Prince Elias married Archduchess Maria Anna of Austria. A far more significant marriage occurred in 1911, when their half-sister, Zita, married Archduke Carl of Austria, heir to the throne after 1914, and they succeeded as Emperor and Empress of Austria, King and Queen of Hungary, in November 1916. Zita’s brother Prince Félix then married Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg, in 1919, as we’ve seen. Her other brother Sixtus had already made his name somewhat a few years before, in what’s now known as the ‘Sixtus Affair’.
When World War I broke out, the head of the family, Prince Elias (known as Élie in French—like much of his family, or indeed his class, they preferred to speak and write to one another in French) served in the Austrian army, in an honoured position as brother-in-law of the Emperor Carl, as did his brothers René and Félix (the actual eldest brother, the titular Duke Henri, was in fact severely mentally disabled, as was the next brother, Joseph, so Elias had been appointed by the Austrian court as their guardian, along with several of their sisters, also disabled). In contrast, two of their half-brothers, Sixtus (or Sixte in French, as he was the 6th son) and Xavier, joined the Belgian army. In March 1917, Sixtus arranged a meeting via his sister Empress Zita in Switzerland between French officials and Emperor Carl, in an effort to make peace terms before Austria-Hungary crumbled altogether. The French had stipulations for the peace, notably the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine and the independence of Belgium, which Carl was unable to guarantee in the face of fierce opposition from his German allies. So nothing was finalised, and when news of the negotiations leaked to the press in April 1918, the Emperor denied involvement until French President Clemenceau published the relevant letters and documents. This weakened any influence the Habsburg emperor had in Berlin and only hastened the collapse of his empire.
Four of the Bourbon-Parma brothers, circa 1920: Sixtus, Xavier, Felix and Rene
Although the Bourbon-Parma dynasty had no throne, they had no shortage of money, inheriting not just private estates in Italy like the Villa Pianore near Lucca, but also the wealth of the senior branch of the House of Bourbon when it died out in 1883, notably several castles in Austria and the Château of Chambord in France (Duke Robert’s mother had been the sister of the last Bourbon, the Comte de Chambord). Since Elias had fought for the Austrians, his French estates were sequestered in 1915, then liquidated by the French state in the 1920s; this action was contested by his half-brothers Sixtus and Xavier, who had served in the Belgian army, allied with France, and therefore not subject to the same wartime sanctions. In 1925 the French government awarded them an equal share of the patrimony (what remained of it). Chambord, however, had to be sold to the state, for 11 million francs, in 1932. Elias succeeded as titular Duke of Parma in 1950, after the incapacitated Henri and Joseph died. His son, Robert II, then headed the clan until he died without a son in 1974.
Villa Borbone delle Pianore, near Lucca
Meanwhile, Prince Xavier had still other dynastic claims to press. Although he wasn’t the eldest son, in 1936 he was selected to act as ‘regent’ for the Carlist party in Spain. This is not the place to go into the history of Carlism in Spain, but in a nutshell, back in 1833, Infante Carlos, younger brother of King Ferdinand VII, refused to accept that the Spanish throne could pass to a woman and tried to block the accession of his niece Isabel II, and three Carlist Wars followed, very nearly toppling the government. After 1883, they also claimed to be the legitimate heirs to the French throne, as the senior lineal male descendants of King Louis XIV (though this hardly meant much given that France was now a republic). In 1936, the last of the Carlist pretenders died childless, so the Carlist organisation asked Xavier to be ‘regent’ and symbolic commander of their troops fighting in the Spanish Civil War (the actual king, Alfonso XIII, had been expelled in 1931). Xavier was not the next in line, lineally, but he did share the values of the movement, in its extreme devotion to conservative politics and the Catholic Church. He was expelled from Spain by General Franco in 1937; then arrested by the French Vichy government in 1944 and deported for having close links to the Resistance, and was incarcerated at Dachau until May 1945. From 1952, Xavier was named ‘king’ (Javier I) by leaders of the Carlist movement, though he himself shied away from it. In 1975, once he became titular Duke of Parma, he abdicated as ‘King of Spain’ in favour of his son Carlos Hugo (b. 1930), who became ‘Carlos VIII’.
the Carlist coat of arms for Spain since the 1930s, with the arms of Bourbon-Parma (instead of Bourbon-Anjou) in the centre
So it would seem the senior branch of the Bourbon-Parma family should be mostly associated with Spain today, but that is not in fact the case. Carlos Hugo had married Princess Irene of the Netherlands, the second daughter of Queen Juliana. Their engagement in 1964 had caused a constitutional crisis, since the Dutch government refused to sanction the marriage due to his father’s claims to be a head of state. They were nevertheless married, in Rome, with the Princess converting to Catholicism and losing her succession rights to the Dutch throne. None of her family attended the wedding. They lived in Madrid until Franco expelled them in 1968, and so they moved to France. After 1981, Irene and Carlos Hugo were divorced, and she and her children lived in the Netherlands, at Soestdijk Palace. Her husband had re-engaged with the Carlist movement in the 1970s, notably trying to reform it after a neo-fascist attack on his more liberal supporters in May 1976 in Navarre (the ‘Montejurra Massacre’). In fact, Carlos Hugo was a socialist, totally at odds with the Carlist movement, so in 1979 he renounced his claims in favour of his brother, Sixtus Henry, a real devotee, regarded as a ‘standard bearer of tradition’, who now took the name ‘Enrique V’. Sixtus Henry (or ‘Don Sixto’) remains active in Far Right politics all over Europe and prefers to use the title ‘regent’ of the Carlists, rather than king, in hopes that his nephew might return to traditional ideology. This nephew, Prince Carlos (b. 1970), was raised in the Netherlands and married a Dutch citizen. Since 1996 he and his siblings have been formally recognised as part of the Dutch Royal Family. In 2010 he succeeded his father as titular Duke of Parma, but also took up the Carlist claim, as either ‘King Carlos Javier’ or the Duke of Madrid (the title used by previous Carlist pretenders). He acknowledges these various titles and styles, but makes no active claims on the Spanish throne. Instead, his energies are focused on Dutch environmental issues. His son, Prince Carlos Enrique (b. 2016), is known as the Duke of Piacenza.
Carlos Hugo of Bourbon-Parma and Irene of the Netherlands, 1964 (Dutch National Archives, Photo Collection)
There is still one more branch of the Bourbon-Parma family today: after the end of the First World War, Prince René married Princess Margaret of Denmark, daughter of Prince Valdemar (a younger son of King Christian IX). They lived in France in the interwar period, then in Denmark after 1945, and raised a number of children including Princess Anne who married King Michael of Romania in 1948 (just after he had abdicated that throne); and Prince Michel whose family are still considered distant extensions of the Danish royal family. Prince Erik in fact closed the circle somewhat by marrying his cousin, the daughter of Princess Marie-Gabrielle of Luxembourg, in 1980.
Returning therefore to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Charlotte abdicated in 1964 in favour of her son Prince Jean. His father, Prince Félix of Bourbon-Parma, had earned a prominent position in the Grand Duchy, notably as the president of the Luxembourg Red Cross, 1923-32 and 1947-69. He died in 1970 in Fischbach Castle—an estate owned by the Grand Ducal family since the 1840s, deep in the hills north of the city of Luxembourg. Charlotte died in 1985, the last member by birth of the House of Nassau-Weilburg (four of her five sisters had died relatively young). Two years later, Grand Duke Jean decided formally that his family would be known as the House of Nassau-Weilburg, not Bourbon-Parma—but this decision was reversed by his eldest son Grand Duke Henri when Jean abdicated in 2000. Both male and female members of the dynasty are now known as both prince/princess of Nassau and of Bourbon-Parma. The House of Bourbon-Parma continues to thrive as a royal house also through the marriages of some of its other members: Grand Duke Jean married the sister of the King of the Belgians, Joséphine-Charlotte; their daughter Marie-Astrid married a Habsburg, Archduke Carl Christian of Austria (a descendant of Empress Zita); and her sister Margaretha married Prince Nikolaus of Liechtenstein (younger brother of the ruling prince). In an interesting twist to the situation of her grandfather Félix, Margaretha is permitted to retain her HRH style, while her husband is a Serene Highness.
Fischbach Castle as it appeared in the 1840s
And so we can now step back to the early years of the Holy Roman Empire, to follow the path of the House of Nassau-Weilburg that led them from relatively minor counts in the Rhineland to one of the ruling houses of Europe.
As seen in the previous blog post about the princes of Orange (part 2), the counts of Nassau emerged in the early twelfth century as lords controlling much of the Lahn river valley as it flows between the Taunus mountains and the Westerwald into the Rhine in the middle stretch of the great river between Mainz and Koblenz. They shook off any ties of vassalage to the local bishops of Worms or Mainz, and were soon included amongst the imperial counts, that is, those with real autonomy and a voice in the imperial diet. In 1255, the family’s landholdings were divided between two brothers, Walram and Otto, and the two main branches of the dynasty were formed, with the Lahn acting as a north-south boundary between them. The senior line, the Walramians, took over the southern lands, notably Wiesbaden and Weilburg; while the Ottonians were based further north at Dillenburg and Siegen, and would eventually (three centuries later) acquire the principality of Orange and become major political players in the Low Countries, before becoming the royal dynasty of the Netherlands from 1815 to the present. One thing that makes this family really interesting is that even more than others of a similar rank, they always maintained a common dynastic interest: all branches, no many how many they bifurcated into, maintained joint ownership over the main castle of Nassau on the Lahn (even after it fell into disrepair); and several mutual succession pacts were signed, not just within the two sub-branches, but between the Walramian and Ottonian branches as well, which had significant ramifications, namely that the line of Nassau-Weilburg, Walramians, were called to succeed the line of Nassau-Dietz (or Orange-Nassau), Ottonians, on the throne of Luxembourg, even after six hundred years of separation. That’s really something.
the Nassau lion, shared by both branches of the dynasty–the only difference was that the Walramians used a crowned lion, in remembrance of their brief possession of the imperial crown (a house decoration in Wiesbaden)
The first main seat of the Walramians was Wiesbaden, at the far southern end of the County of Nassau. This is a really interesting city, a spa town with gardens and theatres, located on the huge bend of the Rhine where it is joined by the river Main near the city of Mainz. The name gives it away that this was always a spa (‘baden’), and it had been a royal residence of Frankish rulers since the eighth century (this was in fact part of the ancient Duchy of Franconia). The Nassau counts acquired the town and built a new castle here in the 1230s, later developed as a renaissance palace in the sixteenth century, then fell into disuse in the seventeenth when the family base shifted elsewhere. Wiesbaden was revived in the nineteenth century when it became the capital of the enlarged Duchy of Nassau (see below), and its Stadtschloss (‘city palace’) was rebuilt as a neoclassical palace in 1841. It later became part of Prussia, and a favoured summer residence for Germany’s emperors—who also patronised the development of the spa, notably in its grand main building, the Kurhaus (1907), with baths, concert halls, casinos and restaurants. With the fall of the German Empire, the former Nassau palace served several functions: as headquarters for the British Army in the 1920s, seat of the Wehrmacht for the western districts of Germany in the 1930s, then headquarters for the US Army, 1945-46. Since 1946 it has housed the Hessian State Parliament.
the Stadtschloss, Wiesbaden, in 1920
The other main residence of the early Walramian counts of Nassau was Weilburg. This castle sits in a loop of the river Lahn, near the mouth of a smaller river called Weil. Deep in the hills, it guards one of the ‘high roads’ (ie, not the roads following along the valley of the Rhine) between Frankfurt and Cologne. It too was an ancient royal foundation, as an abbey dedicated to St Walpurgis (tenth century), with a nearby royal residence, which the Nassau counts received in 1225 at first as vogts or advocates (secular defenders of ecclesiastical lands), on behalf of the bishop of Worms, but then sold to them outright in 1294. A new castle was built in the 1350s, replaced by a renaissance palace in the mid-sixteenth century, then upgraded again in baroque style in the early eighteenth century, and expanded with orangeries (two!) and an ornamental garden. This was the main seat of the Duchy of Nassau from 1806 to 1818 when it moved to Wiesbaden, and although these lands were also annexed to Prussia after 1866, the Nassau-Weilburg family continued to own the castle until sold to the State of Prussia by Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg in 1935 (the family still retains ownership of the dynastic burial chapel).
the baroque town of Weilburg on the Lahn river, in 1900
Both branches of the House of Nassau received a huge prestige boost in 1292 when Count Adolf was—to the surprise of many of the great magnates—elected King of Germany, the first step towards being crowned Holy Roman Emperor. This was the second time in a row the German princes had elected a relative nobody after the collapse of the Hohenstaufen imperial dynasty, with the idea that if the person occupying the top position in the Empire had little wealth and no large territorial base, he couldn’t be a threat. Count Rudolf of Habsburg had been the first, in 1273, but when he died in 1291 his supporters tried to elect his son Albert, now Duke of Austria, as his successor. This went against the idea of keeping a weak person on the throne, so opponents elected Adolf of Nassau. His father Walram II had been the marshal of the court of King Rudolf and a member of his privy council, and Adolf as a young man had also served at his court, and those of the archbishop-electors of Cologne and Mainz. So he was elected mostly by these Rhenish archbishops as a block to Albert of Habsburg, and he had to agree to many concessions and restrictions on his power. He very quickly broke all his promises however, making an alliance with the King of England against the King of France (which the archbishops opposed), and trying to build up his dynasty’s territorial base (as the Habsburgs had done) by annexing lands in Thuringia and Saxony, thus alienating the electors of Saxony and Brandenburg. By Spring of 1298, the princes had enough, and Adolf I was deposed, and Albert of Habsburg elected in his place—Adolf held on for a short while but was killed in battle against Albert near Worms in July.
Adolf of Nassau, King of Germany, painted in 1662
Most medieval noble families raised themselves up the ranks by obtaining important episcopal positions, especially those noble families in the Rhineland. So the Nassauers’ position in imperial politics was saved following this disaster by the election in 1300 of Adolf’s brother, Diether, as Archbishop of Trier. His relatively short reign there was also pretty disastrous though, as he made enemies of the new emperor (Albert), of his own chapter and citizens in Trier—even leading to violence—and ruined the electorate’s finances. He died in 1307. A more sustained run of ecclesiastical power for the House of Nassau was in Mainz, where King Adolf’s son Gerlach was Archbishop for a long time (1346-71)—including the crucial period when the final number of imperial electors (including himself) was determined by the Golden Bull of 1356—followed after a gap by his nephew Adolf, 1381 to 1390, then his brother Johann, 1397 to 1420, and finally another Adolf, 1461 to 1475. So for nearly 150 years, the Nassau dynasty controlled one of the three key archbishoprics in the Empire, Mainz, based just across the river from their seat at Wiesbaden. The Archbishop of Mainz was also the Imperial Arch-Chancellor, who presided over meetings of the prince-electors following the death of each king or emperor—though the House of Nassau was never again tempted to fill this seat themselves.
In the 1340s, like most German princely families, the Walramians divided up their lands between brothers, starting the sub-branches of Nassau-Weilburg and Nassau-Wiesbaden, to which was also called Nassau-Idstein. In 1366 all the members of the family were formally named as imperial counts (subject to no one but the emperor himself), and a few years later, another important territory was added to this branch, located much further to the west on the borders with France, the county of Saarbrücken. The lines of Weilburg, Wiesbaden-Idstein and Saarbrücken would be divided, re-united, and divided again many times over the next three centuries. But until they were elevated to the next step, imperial princes, I will only skim over the most pre-eminent members.
The senior line based at Idstein occupied a castle just a few miles north of Wiesbaden, in the Taunus mountains. Unlike many of the other Nassau properties, its medieval castle served as a residence almost continually between 1100 and 1721, and its twelfth-century Hexenturm, or ‘witches tower’, remains an icon of the town. A new residence was built in the early seventeenth century, but the older buildings were left intact. After 1721, the family moved to Biebrich, a new palace on the other side of Wiesbaden, so Idstein was used to house administrators and the comital archives.
Idstein with its ‘Witches Tower’ in 1655
The most prominent member of this branch was Count Adolf III, a supporter of Emperor Maximilian I in his efforts to govern his new territories in the Low Countries, for which he was appointed Stadtholder of Guelders in 1489. Succeeding generations were also involved in the politics of the Low Countries (and married into the nobility there), which interestingly mirrors what their Ottonian cousins were doing at the same time. This line of Wiesbaden-Idstein died out and the lands passed back to Nassau-Weilburg.
Back in the 1380s, a new territory, Saarbrücken, was inherited by Count Philipp of Weilburg, who became quite involved in German politics at the national level, appointed by Emperor Wenceslas of Luxembourg to maintain the peace in the Rhineland (and given the right to coin his money in his domains), then taking part in the deposing of this emperor, and of his successor, Rupert of the Palatinate. He later became a senior advisor on the council of Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg, and was appointed by him to be hauptmann in Luxembourg, aka, leader of the nobility. When he died in 1429, Weilburg and Saarbrücken were divided between his two sons.
Philipp, Count of Nassau-Weilburg and Count of Saarbrucken, a drawing of his tomb done in the 1630s
Saarbrücken has a fascinating history of its own, aside from its long association with the House of Nassau between the 1380s and the 1790s. As its name suggests, a county was formed around an important crossing of the river Saar (the river that gives its name to the Saarland, Germany’s most western, and smallest, state). But it’s possible that the word brücken does not come from bridges (like nearby Zweibrücken, ‘two bridges’), but in fact from an older Celtic term briga, ‘large stone’—and the river Saar itself takes its name from a Celtic word, sara, for ‘running water’. In French, this is known as the Sarre, and today it forms much of the boundary between German and French speaking areas, though in the past it didn’t—the language frontier was further west, within the Duchy of Lorraine. Nevertheless, this really interesting cultural frontier zone, the Saargau, fragmented early on in the history of the Holy Roman Empire, and spawned numerous tiny principalities like Saarbrücken (and nearby Saarwerden, which we’ll encounter below) in the area between the provinces we now know as Alsace and Lorraine. Several of these remained independent imperial enclaves even after the Kingdom of France had taken over both these provinces, and will feature in other future blogs (like Leiningen, Salm, or Hanau-Lichtenberg)—and when the Holy Roman Emperor was looking for a pretext to launch a war against the French Republic in 1792, the rights of these princes provided it. That included Nassau-Saarbrücken.
Nassau properties in the late 18th century (orange), showing Saarbrucken (and Saarwerden at very bottom) bordering France in purple, with the Palatinate (Pfalz; in green) and Mainz (in pink) separating it from the rest of Nassau at upper right (with the small lordship of Kirchheim next to Falkenstein) [Fsm. is ‘principality’; Gft. is ‘county’]
Saarbrücken was a county from 1080, at first as a vassal of the bishops of Metz, then as autonomous imperial counts. The County of Zweibrücken was carved out of its eastern parts in the thirteenth century, and had its own very interesting history—but that is part of the story of the Wittelsbachs of the Palatinate, not Nassau. The original dynasty of counts died out in 1233 (and similar to the House of Nassau, their prestige was boosted by having two archbishops of Mainz, Adalbert I and Adalbert II, between 1111 and 1141). A second dynasty died out in 1381, and passed Saarbrücken by marriage to the House of Nassau-Weilburg. This succession also brought them the lordship of Commercy, a real curiosity in that it was wedged between the duchies of Lorraine and Bar, yet legally subject to neither. Its owner was thus drawn much further west towards politics of the Kingdom of France—but the counts of Saarbrücken (probably wisely) sold this tiny sovereignty to the duke of Lorraine and Bar in 1444.
Saarbrücken had an ancient castle, since it was situated on high ground at a crossing of the Saar, a key river that flows northward to join the Mosel just above the city of Trier. This castle was destroyed and rebuilt many times over the centuries, then was developed into a more comfortable residence by Count Philipp IV in the late sixteenth century, primarily as a summer residence (in the winters, he lived back across the Rhine in Nassau proper). This residence was destroyed in war in 1677, and rebuilt by Count Louis Crato, who, in emulation of Versailles, opened up the courtyard so that the new palace faced the town. He also ordered French baroque gardens. His successor Wilhelm Heinrich built an even grander palace on this site, getting rid of the old medieval defensive structures, and planning an entirely new town, on a grid, with a palace for his heir, a city hall, and a grand public square called the Ludwigsplatz. Completed in 1748, this was a model town for the new ‘Enlightened’ style, organised and neat. He expanded the baroque gardens as well, and built wings on the palace to house his government and administrative archives (again, very much like at Versailles). Much of this was destroyed when the French chased the dynasty out in 1793, and after the Napolenoic Wars ended, Saarbrücken was not returned—the palace was converted into flats and the central pavilion demolished. In 1910 it was acquired by the Saarland district government. It served as a Gestapo headquarters during the Second World War, and was again badly damaged—totally renovated in the 1980s, a new central pavilion was built, with a very modern steel skeleton, and today it serves as the administrative centre for the Saarland.
Saarbrucken painted in 1770
There were numerous intermarriages between the branches of Nassau-Weilburg, Idstein and Saarbrücken, and also with their more distant cousins from Nassau-Dillenburg, Siegen and Dietz. Most of them (but not all) joined the Protestant movement in the 1530s, though some chose Lutheranism and others Calvinism and imposed these on their subjects in the County of Nassau. Count Philipp III of Weilburg created a new school in his town, the Gymnasium Philippinum, and was a close ally of his neighbour, Landgrave Philipp of Hesse, one of the leaders of the reform movement in central Germany. As part of their alliance, they exchanged some territories between Nassau and Hesse, notably parts of the old medieval County of Katzenelnbogen, situated on both sides of the great bend of the Rhine (which I always thought gave its name to this ‘cat’s elbow’, but apparently not). The Katzenelnbogen family had died out in 1483, and the houses of Nassau and Hesse fought over the succession in the imperial lawcourts for over fifty years (the wonderfully named Katzenelnbogische Erbfolgestreit, or ‘Katzenelnbogen Succession Struggle’). It is worth pointing out, however, that it was an Ottonian branch of the Nassauers that claimed this land, not the Walramians; and although they ultimately lost the lawsuit, they continued to use the title ‘Count of Katzenelnbogen’, which eventually passed into the collection of titles still used by the Dutch royal family today. In 1815, the old County of Katzenelnbogen was added to the new Duchy of Nassau (to compensate for lost lands west of the Rhine), and so after 1890, the grand dukes of Luxembourg also started to use this title when listing all of their dynastic titles. And so it appears in lists today in the titles of both the kings of the Netherlands and the grand dukes of Luxembourg today. Isn’t that peculiar?
As Philipp of Hesse lost influence in the 1540s, Philipp of Nassau worked to construct an alliance of small counts in this part of the Empire, known as the Wetterau Association. As the reform movement progressed, Philipp dissolved the ancient Abbey of Weilburg (and others) in the 1550s.
Meanwhile, the County of Saarbrücken was still Catholic. In 1527, the territory of the Nassau-Saarbrücken branch had been expanded significantly with the addition of the County of Saarwerden, a few miles upriver on the Saar, in the Vosges mountains. A werd was a small island in German, and this county was built up in the twelfth century around the towns of Saarwerden (presumably in the river at the time) and Bockenheim on a nearby bank. Like Saarbrücken, it was initially a fief of the bishops of Metz, then independent for several centuries. The most famous member of its first dynasty was Friedrich, Archbishop of Cologne, 1370-1414. By the time of his death, the county had passed by marriage to the counts of Moers (whose lands were much further north, in the lower Rhine near Cologne). In the 1550s, Lutheranism was introduced here, despite the fierce opposition of the neighbouring prince, the Duke of Lorraine—it became a place of refuge for Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, so for a time had both a Lutheran and a Calvinist church existing peaceably side by side. In the 1570s, the counts started also to introduce the reform in Saarbrücken as well, so the Duke of Lorraine struck back and claimed both counties, pursuing the House of Nassau in the Imperial courts. The progress of this lawsuit is another excellent example, as with Katzenelnbogen above, of the incredible slowness of justice within the Holy Roman Empire, and due to this, and of course the intervening turmoil of the Thirty Years War, nothing was resolved until the Treaties of Westphalia, 1648, which restored both Saarbrücken and Saarwerden to the House of Nassau—though as a security, the Duke of Lorraine retained control over the two towns of Saarwerden and Bockenheim (now Frenchified as Sarreverden and Bouquenom). The Count had to move across the river and built a new capital, Neu-Saarwerden, though not until 1702. There was never a grand princely residence in Saarwerden (it was a very remote place), but the new schloss did reflect the ethos of the time, built along the sober and organised ideas of the Enlightenment (and has sometimes between called ‘the Mannheim of the Nassau’, referring to the idealised planned city on the Rhine, built about the same time). After Lorraine was annexed to France in 1766, Sarrewerden remained a Protestant enclave in Catholic France (and with Catholic Bouquenom as an enclave within an enclave at its centre). In 1793 it was annexed to the French Republic, and the two towns were united with a new name, Sarre-Union, which they still retain today.
the very simple castle at Neu-Saarwerden (photo by Ralph Hammann)
A more interesting residence was built by this branch at Ottweiler, in the eastern part of the County of Saarbrücken. It had an old fortification from the twelfth century, a gothic schloss from the fourteenth, then rebuilt in Renaissance style in 1550, with four wings and open galleries. When the Weilburg and Saarbrücken branches were merged after 1574, the Weilburg branch temporarily made this their chief residence. When the lines were split again in 1640, Nassau-Ottweiler became its own entity. But damaged in the Thirty Years War, its castle was neglected and later demolished in 1753. The town was developed by later princes of Nassau-Saarbrücken as a centre of porcelain manufacture (from the 1760s).
the castle at Ottweiler, drawn in 1617
Of the later sixteenth-century Nassauers, Count Albrecht of Saarbrücken was most prominent, as brother-in-law of William of Orange and a supporter in his armed struggle against the Duke of Alba in the Low Countries in 1568. By 1605, Albrecht’s son Count Ludwig II re-combined all of the Walramian branches—Wiesbaden-Idstein, Weilburg and Saarbrücken—and moved his seat more permanently to Saarbrücken. Here he built a school like that in Weilburg, the Ludwig Gymnasium, and sponsored projects that would make the river Saar more navigable. When he died in 1627, the lands were divided once again, with lands west of the Rhine going to the eldest, Wilhelm Ludwig, and lands east of the Rhine going to Johann (Idstein and Wiesbaden) and Ernst Kasimir (Weilburg). These three brothers joined the Protestant side against the Emperor in the Thirty Years War (first fighting alongside the King of Sweden, then aligning themselves with France), and thus had much of their lands confiscated. Even when many Protestant German lands were restored by treaty in 1635, the Nassau counts were deliberately excluded, and they had to wait until the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648—by which time many of their towns and castles were ruined, their populations decimated.
the more complex coat of arms used by the Walramians by the seventeenth century, with Saarbrucken and Saarwerden at the top, the distinctive green of the lordship of Merenberg, and Nassau overall
The senior line, in Saarbrücken, split again into three: Ottweiler, Saarbrücken, and a new division, Usingen. Of these counts, the most prominent was Count Gustav Adolf of Saarbrucken (clearly named for the Swedish king), who, although he had served in the French army in his youth, clashed with Louis XIV’s ‘reunion’ strategies as an older man in the 1670s. The French king directed his army of lawyers to find obscure feudal laws with which to claim territories that should be ‘re-united’ with France. In particular, since France now ruled over Metz, the former fiefs of Metz should be French too—this included Saarbrücken and Saarwerden, and both territories were occupied. Gustav Adolf’s son Count Ludwig Crato fought against this and served in the armies of the Dutch Republic against France, until his lands were restored by the Treaty of Ryswick, 1697. He continued to develop Saarbrücken into a fine baroque capital, as seen above. He also built a country retreat, a lustschloss called Monplaisir, in Halberg, east of the town, complete with a baroque garden, to which later princes added a zoo, an English garden and a Chinese pavilion. All of this was destroyed by the French in 1793 (a new and completely different castle was built at Halberg in the 1880s). Ludwig Crato’s brother, Count Karl, continued to develop the county’s economy, adding glass and salt industries that laid the foundations that established this region as a leader in the Industrial Revolution.
Meanwhile, the line of Wiesbaden-Idstein was led by Count Georg August, who served at the Siege of Vienna in 1683 and was one of several counts of the House of Nassau to be elevated in rank to become a Prince of the Empire, in 1688. Several of the branches of the Ottonian branch had been so created in the 1650s (Dillenburg, Hadamar, Dietz, Siegen), which much have irked those of the Walramian line considering that they were technically the senior branch. Also elevated to the rank of fürst in 1688 were the counts of Weilburg and Usingen, though why not Ottweiler or Saarbrücken, I am not certain—perhaps because they were occupied by France at the time. As imperial princes, the Nassau lords now had a vote in the Imperial Diet, not just one of the collective votes held by the counts of the Wetterau.
Georg August commemorated his new status by building a Herrengarten in Wiesbaden, and moving his residence from the old schloss at Idstein, to a brand new palace right on the banks of the Rhine, Biebrich. This was a residence fit for princes and remains one of the finest examples of Rhineland baroque architecture. Work began in 1702 and was completed in 1721; it included two pavilions connected by a long gallery and a circular ballroom at the centre. Two wings were added by later princes in the 1730s. Biebrich Palace was damaged in World War II, and mostly rebuilt in the 1980s. Today it is used by the state of Hesse for ceremonies and to house heritage offices.
the still stunning Schloss Biebrich on the Rhine, near Wiesbaden (photo by Fritz Geller-Grimm)
When Georg August died in 1721, his lands passed to the Ottweiler line, as did those of Saarbrücken when Count Karl died in 1723. The Ottweiler line itself went extinct in 1728, meaning all these lands (except Weilburg, see below) passed to the new branch, Nassau-Usingen.
Usingen was a small town in the High Taunus mountains, east of Weilburg, on the Usa river. It had been acquired by the Nassau family in 1326 who built a small castle, but otherwise left it alone. In the 1660s, Count Walrad carved out a new territory here and built a new residence. He served as a Field Marshal in the army of the Emperor and later for the Dutch Republic. He too served at the Siege of Vienna and then in the campaigns in Hungary, for which he too was rewarded by being created Prince of Nassau-Usingen in 1688. After a fire of 1692 destroyed much of his town, he rebuilt it—like Neu-Saarwerden, according to the ideals of the early Enlightenment, and he settled it with Huguenot refugees (and unlike some of his Lutheran cousins, he himself was a Calvinist). The princely residence was remodelled in the 1730s—destroyed in 1873, it was rebuilt in a quite sober style, and is now a school. There was also the ‘Prince’s Palace’, built in the centre of town in the 1770s, but sold in the early nineteenth century—it has housed local administrative offices ever since.
Usingen in 1864
The Prinzenpalais in Usingen
Prince Walrad died in service of the Emperor early in the War of Spanish Succession in 1702. His son Wilhelm Heinrich, 2nd Prince of Nassau-Usingen, once again reconnected the two main branches of the House of Nassau by his marriage in 1706 to Princess Charlotte Amalia of Nassau-Dillenburg. Wounded in the service of the Dutch army in 1703, he left military service and died relatively young in 1718. The 3rd Prince, Karl, was thus the cousin who gathered back together all the properties of Wiesbaden, Idstein and Saarbrücken in 1728, and moved into the fine new palace at Biebrich, where he lived a long and mostly peaceful life until 1775. He left two sons, soldiers, and a bastard, Karl Philipp, whose mother had been created Baroness von Biebrich in 1744, and who himself would be called the Count of Weilnau. This name came from a medieval county next door to Nassau, like Weilburg built above the river Weil, that was absorbed by the Nassau counts in the 1330s. Weilnau still has remains of an old castle and a new castle from the sixteenth century.
Walrad, 1st Prince of Nassau-Usingen
In 1735, Prince Karl of Nassau-Usingen gave the counties of Saarbrücken and Saarwerden to his brother Wilhelm Heinrich II, who was created a fürst as well, finally bringing the Saarbrücken branch in line with the others. The 1st Prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken ruled one of the smallest principalities in the Empire, at only 12 square miles and with only about 20,000 people. Nevertheless, it had one of the finest capitals, with a new grand baroque princely palace, as we’ve seen, and a burgeoning industrial economy, with Saarland coal and iron. Wilhelm Heinrich led a regiment of Nassauers in the service of King Louis XV of France, in the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, and was ultimately promoted to the rank of lieutenant-general. Back in Saarbrücken he constructed a new hunting lodge, Jägersberg—but ultimately all his projects left his principality in debt.
Wilhelm Friedrich, Prince of Nassau-Saarbrucken, French general, wearing the star and sash of the French royal Order of the Saint-Esprit
He was succeeded in 1768 by his son, Ludwig, 2nd Prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken who continued to develop this principality as an ‘enlightened absolutist’, building schools, developing agriculture, reforming the penal code. He too built a new palace, Ludwigsberg, in 1769, and a new state church, Ludwigskirche, 1775. Though he was a learned and determined reformer, that was not enough for the French revolutionaries who swept into the Rhineland in 1793, and he fled in May, dying the next year near Frankfurt. He left a son, Heinrich Ludwig, the 3rd Prince, who joined the Prussian army in 1793, but died in 1797, having never reigned in his occupied principality. Neither Ludwigsberg nor Jägersberg survived the revolutionary era.
Ludwig, 2nd Prince of Nassau-Saarbrucken
There was now only one male left of this line of Nassau-Saarbrücken, Adolf Ludwig, who had been born of the 2nd Prince’s second morganatic marriage so was not entitled to the rank of prince. His father had ensured that his mother, a former maid of one of his mistresses, had been created Countess of Ottweiler (1784), so the son also took this title. There are suggestions (but I’ve not seen any verification, and it sounds unlikely to me) that Prince Ludwig persuaded King Louis XVI to create his wife Duchesse de Dillange (aka Dillingen, in Saarbrücken), in the Spring of 1789, and that Adolf Ludwig was later called the Duc de Dillange. He did (as Count of Ottweiler) join the army of the King of Württemberg, then volunteered in Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812, where he died.
Back in Usingen, the 3rd Prince had been succeeded in 1775 by his eldest son, Karl Wilhelm, who added took the title 4th Prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken in 1797. He had served as a lieutenant-general in the Dutch army in the 1770s, and in 1783 was one of the signatories of the mutual succession pact for all of the branches of the House of Nassau (including Orange-Nassau, which was ultimately important to the history of Luxembourg, as we’ve seen). In the commission that dismantled the Holy Roman Empire in 1803, he was compensated for lands lost west of the Rhine (Saarbrücken and Saarwerden) with lands taken (mostly) from secularised archbishoprics of Mainz and Trier, but also from Hesse and the Palatinate. He died that same year, passing his lands and titles to his brother, Friedrich August, now 5th Prince of Usingen, an Imperial Field Marshal since 1790, who joined the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, and formed the new Duchy of Nassau with his Weilburg cousin in August—they agreed to a joint rule (with Friedrich August taking the senior title of Duke) since Usingen had no son. This was approved by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, and the 1st Duke of Nassau died in March 1816.
Friedrich August, 5th Prince of Nassau-Usingen, 1st Duke of Nassau
So finally, we need to focus again on the line of Nassau-Weilburg itself, and bring this story to a close. The youngest son of Count Ludwig II, Ernst Casimir, did not spend much time in his portion of the County of Nassau, as imperial troops drove him and the rest of his family out of the area during the Thirty Years War, and he died shortly after these lands were restored. It was his grandson, Count Johann Ernst, who brought this branch of the family back to prominence, and was, like the other heads of branches, created 1st Prince of Nassau-Weilburg in 1688. He served as a general in the army of the Elector Palatine, and later as an Imperial Field Marshal defending the Rhine against a French invasion in the War of Spanish Succession. He was also the Grand Master of the Court for the Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf until 1716, rebuilt his own smaller court residence in Weilburg, and died a few years later in 1719.
Johann Ernst, 1st Prince of Nassau-Weilburg
His son, Karl August, 2nd Prince of Nassau-Weilburg, had already been active as a diplomat in service of the Elector of Saxony (who was also the King of Poland). As a prince he was a cavalry general in the Imperial army in the 1730s. The 3rd Prince, Karl Christian, took over in 1753, and a few years later raised the dynastic profile of his branch of the family through marriage to Princess Carolina of Orange-Nassau, daughter of William IV, Prince of Orange, and Princess Anne of Great Britain, the eldest daughter of King George II. His connections with the Netherlands allowed him to rise in the military and by the 1770s he was a general in the Dutch Army and governor of the City of Maastricht.
Karl Christian, 3rd Prince of Nassau-Weilburg
The 3rd Prince died in 1788, leaving his principality to his son Friedrich Wilhelm, the 4th Prince, who agreed in 1815 to act as the junior partner in the joint rule of the new Duchy of Nassau, on the assumption that he would succeed the senior partner (Friedrich August of Usingen, as above), but he died three months too soon (in January 1816), so it was his son Wilhelm who became 2nd Duke of Nassau, the newly unified state within the German Confederation, pulling together all of the territories of the Walramian branches of the House of Nassau east of the Rhine (Wiesbaden, Idstein, Weilburg, Usingen), and some of the lands of the Ottonian branches (Dietz, Hadamar)—but not those further north like Siegen, which were given by the new King of the Netherlands (Orange-Nassau) to the King of Prussia by the Congress of Vienna in exchange for the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.
the Duchy of Nassau after 1816, showing parts that were joined together in 1806 from Usingen and Weilburg, and the lands of their cousins Nassau-Orange (in orange), then additions from the electorates of Mainz and Trier (in green) and from Hesse (light and dark red)
Duke Wilhelm married well, to Louise of Saxe-Hildburghausen, niece of Queen Louise of Prussia and Frederica, Duchess of Cumberland (later Queen of Hanover), and grand-niece of Queen Charlotte of Great Britain. His sister Henrietta connected the family to the Catholic houses of Europe by marriage to Archduke Karl of Austria, younger brother of Emperor Francis I and commander-in-chief of Austria’s armies. Intriguingly, Archduchess Henrietta did not have to convert to Catholicism herself, though her children had to be raised in the faith, and she left behind her ‘surname’ on the landscape of Austria, in the Weilburg Palace in Baden, a spa town south of Vienna—sadly destroyed by fire in April 1945.
Wilhem, Duke of Nassau
Duke Wilhelm was succeeded by his eldest son Adolf as 3rd Duke of Nassau in 1839. It was he who made Wiesbaden formally his capital and rebuilt the Stadtschloss there as his chief residence. Although he was a liberal ruler, his rule was threatened by the revolts of 1848 that shook all the thrones of Europe, and in the aftermath he became much more conservative. In an effort to support the old ways of Germany, under the guidance of the ancient Habsburg dynasty, he supported Austria in its short war against Prussia in 1866, and paid the price. Nassau was annexed to Prussia, and its Duke had to wander around the courts of Europe for a few years before settling into a new residence, Schloss Hohenburg in Bavaria. Built in the 1710s by Count von Herwarth, then sold to various people including the Prince of Leiningen (Queen Victoria’s half brother), Duke Adolf purchased it in 1870 from Baron von Eichthal. Twenty years later, already in his seventies, he succeeded to the Grand Ducal throne in Luxembourg, as seen towards the start of this post, by virtue to the Nassau Family Pact of 1783. He kept Hohenburg as a summer residence, and it later became the residence of Grand Duchess Marie Anne of Portugal, widow of Grand Duke William IV. She left Germany at the start of the Second World War and died before it ended. The castle was sold in 1953 to create a convent school.
Hohenburg in Bavaria, newly built in 1720
As with the previous generation, the sisters of Grand Duke Adolf (or Adolphe in French) helped link this new royal house to other reigning houses in Europe: Princess Helene became the mother of Emma, Queen of the Netherlands, while Princess Sophia had already become Queen of Sweden and Norway, since 1872. Adolf’s fifteen-year reign set the standard for limited direct involvement in the Grand Duchy’s government. He died in 1905 and was succeeded by his son William IV, who, as seen above, died only a few years later in 1912 with no male heirs. One faint claim was made, from Georg, Count von Merenberg, who protested that his father Prince Nikolaus’ morganatic marriage did not necessarily block him from the succession to the throne of Luxembourg. Wilhelm IV ruled that it did in 1907, and the throne passed smoothly to his daughter Princess Marie-Adélaïde.
Adolf, Duke of Nassau, as a young man
Prince Nikolaus of Nassau (who had died in 1905), was a Prussian general (so, no hard feelings about the annexation of his brother’s duchy then). In 1868, he married Natalia Pushkina, daughter of the famous Russian poet. Despite a very illustrious ancestry—very ancient Pushkins, Rurikovichi princes, and, more exotically, Abram Gannibal, Peter the Great’s famed African general, and Petro Doroshenko, a Cossack general—she was not deemed of sufficient rank to marry a prince, so the marriage was deemed morganatic, and she was created Countess of Merenberg—taking this title from another one of the old medieval counties absorbed by the counts of Nassau back in the fourteenth century, not far from Weilburg. The line of the counts of Merenberg continued into the twentieth century, with close connections to the Romanovs and later to the Mountbattens. When the last of these, Count Georg Michael, died in 1965, he was the last male member of the entire House of Nassau—he left one daughter, Clotilde, who is still living, the last scion of an ancient dynasty.
the beautiful Natalia Pushkina, Countess of Merenberg
Since 1964, the merger of the houses of Nassau-Weilburg and Bourbon-Parma has generated a hybrid Franco-German dynasty that suits this small state at the crossroads of cultures. Luxembourg’s daily newspapers are printed in French, German and Luxembourgish, and the sons and daughters of its ruling dynasty have married spouses from across the region, for example the new Grand Duke Guillaume’s consort, Stéphanie, who comes from a noble Belgian family, the House of Lannoy (which has in the past included some princely titles, so deserves its own blog post), and others from more far flung places, such as Grand Duchess Maria Teresa, born in Cuba.
the former Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Henri, with his consort Maria Teresa, and their son, the new Grand Duke Guillaume (photo by Disquatufais from 2009)
Kent is one of the most familiar names for an English county—but also unique in that it is one of the few that are never appended ‘-shire’ when giving historic names. It is also said to be one of the oldest place names still in use in England, named by the Greeks as Kantion in the fourth century BC, probably from a Celtic word for ‘land on the edge’ or ‘coast’, which certainly applies to this land famous for its white cliffs. When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC he called this area Cantia and its people the Cantiaci or the Cantii. Their capital eventually became known as Canterbury—bury being a Germanic toponym for a town.
So by the fifth century, it was a Germanic place, settled by Jutes and Saxons who formed a Kingdom of Cantware (‘Kentish people’). The first reliably recorded king was Aethelberht, who converted to Christianity in 597 and set up the first two episcopal seats in England, at Canterbury and Rochester. After 764, his descendants weakened and Kent was often a client kingdom of Mercia, and after 825 was absorbed by Wessex.
Kent, with Sussex, Surrey and Middlesex
The first time Kent was referred to as an earldom was in 1020 when King Cnut gave it to Godwin, already Earl of Wessex (another source says it wasn’t until Edward the Confessor’s reign started in 1042). Godwin died in 1053 and his lands were divided, with Kent going to his fifth son Leofwine (along with Essex, Middlesex and other earldoms in the southeast). Earl Leofwine was killed alongside his brother King Harold at Hastings in 1066 (shown in the Bayeux Tapestry as ‘Lewine’). It’s too bad Leofwine was erased from existence in recent BBC television dramatization of the Norman Conquest.
The death of Leofwine (left) in the Bayeux Tapestry
Kent was one of the few places that really resisted the Normans, so in 1067 it was given the status of a county palatine, and its new earl, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half-brother), more extensive powers. He later betrayed his family and forfeited his lands, including the earldom of Kent.
In the next three centuries, the earldom of Kent was re-created several times for key supporters of the English Crown. In 1141, it was for William of Ypres, a lieutenant of King Stephen; in 1227 it was for Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of England and Regent for the young King Henry III; then in 1321, for Edmund of Woodstock, sixth son of King Edward I. The earldom passed to his two sons, then after 1352 to their sister Joan, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’. She could pass on the lands to her children, but not the earldom, so her husband, Thomas Holland, was re-created earl of Kent in 1360.
Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent
The Holland family held the earldom of Kent for the rest of the fourteenth century, with Thomas and Joan’s grandson Thomas (the 3rd Earl) being elevated to Duke of Surrey in 1397, though quickly brought down again in 1399 and executed in 1400. His brother the 4th Earl died in 1408, meaning their sister, another Joan, Countess of Kent, could transmit it to her husbands, one of them being Edmund, Duke of York (though in the end she had no children).
Another very brief creation was for William Neville (younger son of the Earl of Westmoreland), an ally of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, and Steward of his Household. He was named Earl of Kent in 1461, then died in 1463.
Immediately, the earldom was given again in 1465 to another Yorkist supporter, Edmund Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin, Lord Treasurer of England. His son solidified the Grey family’s place at the top of the English aristocracy by marriage to the Queen’s sister, Anne Woodville (in 1480). So their descendants would be cousins of the Tudors in the century to come. The House of Grey is itself vast, with roots stretching back to the Conquest, and including the powerful Tudor magnate, the Duke of Suffolk, and his daughter, Lady Jane, several earldoms (including that for Prime Minister Earl Grey), and numerous baronies. The multiple branches of this family will have its own blog post in due course, but for now, we can focus on the last of the Grey earls of Kent, who became the one and only non-royal Duke of Kent, in 1710.
Henry Grey, Duke of Kent
Henry Grey, 12th Earl of Kent, was a moderate politician and courtier, who served in the Household as Lord Chamberlain for Queen Anne, 1704-10, and was created Marquess of Kent in 1706. He agreed to give up his post in exchange for a dukedom, which he got in 1710, with subsidiary titles Earl of Harold and Viscount Goderich. The latter title comes from a castle held by the Greys since the 1610s, Goodrich, a mighty Norman fortress in Herefordshire. I suspect the earldom was also an allusion to Norman ancestry and Harold Godwinson (though it was his brother who was Earl of Kent, as we’ve seen). The Duke of Kent later returned to the Household under the Hanoverians, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber and as Lord Steward, 1716-18, and in the government at Lord Privy Seal, 1719-20. He lived at Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, which today is the site of a magnificent, very French, country house—but it was a later reconstruction, not the house as the Duke of Kent knew it. Some of the earlier buildings remain, notably the lovely banqueting pavilion.By 1733, all of the Duke’s sons had died, so the King agreed to create a new title for him, Marquess Grey, with a special remainder to his grand-daughter, Lady Jemima Campbell. The Duke died in 1740, and his titles with him, except the marquisate—Lady Jemima married Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl of Hardwicke, that same year and the history of Wrest Park lies with her family.
Wrest Park in about 1710
The Pavillion at Wrest Park
And so we come to the first royal dukedom bearing the name Kent. The Hanoverians continued a Stuart practice of pairing together an English and a Scottish dukedom for royal princes, and this was done for the older sons of King George III as they came of age (but curiously not for the youngest two sons, whose dukedoms are English only). Prince Edward, the fourth son, was created Duke of Kent and Strathearn, in 1799. He had made a name for himself as Commander-in-Chief in British North America, 1791-1802 (and was an early advocate of the creation of Canada), then as Governor of Gibraltar, 1802-20. But he is mostly remembered today as the father of Queen Victoria, born when he was already in his fifties.
Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn
The Duke of Kent lived at Castle Hill Lodge in Ealing, west of London—he had bought the house from his brother’s secret former wife Mrs Fitzherbert in 1801, but left it in 1812, and it was eventually rebuilt, remodelled, and now serves as a home for wounded soldiers. When he died in 1820, his double dukedom reverted to the Crown.
Castle Hill Lodge in Ealing
The title was given out again for Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, but not as a dukedom. When he was created Duke of Edinburgh in 1866, his subsidiary titles were Earl of Kent and Earl of Ulster. By the 1880s the Duke of Edinburgh was an admiral, and was named Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and Admiral of the Fleet in 1893. That same year he inherited the title Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha and moved to Germany. He died in 1900 with no sons, so these titles returned to the Crown.
The Duke of Edinburgh did actually own property in Kent: a house at Eastwell Park near Ashford. There had been a house here since Tudor times, rebuilt in neo-Elizabethan style at the end of the eighteenth century, and occupied by Prince Alfred and his family in the 1870s and 80s. It was mostly destroyed by a fire in the 1920s.
Eastwell Park, Kent
Finally, we come to the present creation of the Dukedom of Kent. The title was raised once more into a dukedom in 1934 for Prince George, fourth son of George V. The new Duke of Kent, the most dashing and sociable brother of George VI, was meant to act as Governor-General of Australia in 1938, but was prevented by the outbreak of war. He was an RAF officer and died in an air crash in Caithness in August 1942. He had married in 1934 the glamourous Princess Marina of Greece, whose mother was a Russian grand duchess, which brought Romanov blood into this branch of the British royal family. Her first cousin Philip of Greece later married Elizabeth II. Princess Marina continued to be an active member of the House of Windsor for another twenty-five years.
Prince George, Duke of Kent
George and Marina, Duke and Duchess of Kent, 1934
From 1935, the Duke and Duchess of Kent lived at Coppins in Buckinghamshire, a nineteenth-century house first acquired by Princess Victoria, daughter of Edward VII. It would remain the family seat for the 2nd Duke of Kent and his family, until he sold it in 1972, and moved to Amner Hall, a Georgian House that became part of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk at the end of the nineteenth century (later the residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales), and from 1990, Crocker End in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, until recently. Since 1978, the Kents also resided at Wren Cottage, within the grounds of Kensington Palace.
Coppins, Buckinghamshire
The 2nd Duke of Kent, Prince Edward of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is the oldest living member of the British royal family (since September 2025). Born in 1935, he was only six when his father died and he succeeded to his titles. He followed a military career in the 1950s-70s, serving in Hong Kong, Cyprus and Northern Ireland. He became an honorary Field Marshal in 1993, and was colonel of the Scots Guards from 1974 to 2024. He has been very active in carrying out royal duties, often representing his cousin the late Queen overseas (such as independence ceremonies in Uganda and Barbados), and acting as chairman or president for a number of charities relating to sports, business or technology. He shares a passion for tennis for his wife, the now late Katharine Worsley. The daughter of a baronet from North Yorkshire, based at Holvingham Hall, she married the Duke in 1961, and like him became known for her connection to Wimbledon. The Duchess of Kent converted to Catholicism in 1994, and retreated from many of her royal duties, dropping the HRH styling from 2002 and focusing instead on her support for music, both performance and teaching (as simply ‘Katherine Kent’).
the 2nd Duke and Duchess of Kent, in 2013
The Duke and his siblings (Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Alexandra, Lady Ogilvy) all retain the style HRH, as grandchildren of a sovereign. Their children are not, however, so when George, Earl of St Andrews (b. 1962) succeeds his father he will be the 3rd Duke of Kent, but not royal. His son, Edward, Lord Downpatrick (b. 1988) became a Catholic, so while he is in line for the dukedom, is not in line for the throne, nor is his uncle, Lord Nicholas Windsor. The Duke of Kent’s brother, Prince Michael, married a Catholic, as did the Earl of St Andrews, so both lost their place in the line of succession, but were both restored to it by Elizabeth II in 2015. The last in the line of succession to the dukedom is Prince Michael’s son, Lord Frederick Windsor. There are of course Kent daughters and granddaughters as well, but although they are in line for the throne, they are not in line for the dukedom.
Dukes and Princes 