At the start of a recent episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, British comedian and presenter Sue Perkins meets with her long-time sparring partner Mel Giedroyc, and shares hopes that she would discover in the programme that one of her ancestors originated from Lithuania, as it would be an amazing thing for them to share, knowing that Mel’s own ancestors also came from there. Nothing further is said about Mel’s Giedroyc ancestry, and the show moves on to focus on Perkins’ interesting journey.

Not only does Mel Giedroyc’s family come from Lithuania, and indeed from a town named for them, Giedraičiai, but her family were princes, with dynastic roots stretching back into the late 13^th century. And like their kin, the Radziwill princes discussed in a recent post here, their history is intertwined with the stories of not just Lithuania, but Poland and Russia too. They split into so many different branches that by the 20^th century there were Polish branches, Russian branches and those in France, England and America. This post will, as usual, focus on the origins and development of the family and on the residences they lived in, but, as a nod to Mel Giedroyc—my favourite comedian, whose morning show helped welcome me to Britain so many years ago—will highlight in particular the strong role played by several women of the family.

Like many grand aristocratic families, a certain amount of mystery shrouds the origins of the Giedroyć family—this is the Polish spelling, with a mark on the c to make it a ‘ts’. The traditional story is that there was a Prince Giedrius, brother of a Grand Duke of Lithuania from the dynasty that ruled this area before the reign of the Gediminids (the 14^th to 16^th century). Giedrius built a castle at Giedraičiai, about 45 km north of Vilnius, on estates acquired from the Livonian Order of knights in about 1340, and gave the surname Giedraitis to his descendants. There is no castle there now, but there is a fine old tower on the Church of St Bartholomew, built in 1410 and rebuilt four hundred years later by one of the family bishops, Józef Giedroyć (Juozapas Giedraitis in Lithuanian).

Prince Giedrius’ son, Ginwill, was a candidate for the throne of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the next generation, but after that the family drifted further away from the direct seat of power, and by the end of the 15^th century, had split firmly into two lines, that of Prince Alexander and that of Prince Bartholomew. Earlier in the century, they had begun to use the symbol of the centaur (or ‘hippocentaur’) for their coat of arms, as one of the noble families adopted into the Polish system of heraldry following the Union of Hrodło (1413), drawing together the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland. At other times they also used the Poraj coat of arms, the five-pointed rose. I’m not exactly sure why they used both.

The only other major figure to emerge from the 15^th century is the family saint (or nearly): Blessed Michael (Mykolas in Lithuanian), a hermit renowned for prophecy and miracles, who died in 1485. He was born unable to walk unaided, became an Augustinian canon in a convent in Bystryca (which is now just over the border in Belarus), then moved to the capital of the Polish Kingdom, Krakow, where he was allowed to live in a simple hut attached to the Church of St Mark where he served as a sacristan. He lived as a recluse, eating little and self-flagellating, but people came to seek him out for his gift of prophecy. After his death, his cult spread across Poland and Lithuania and there were unsuccessful attempts to make him a saint, but he was beatified (a step towards canonisation) only in 2018.

Meanwhile the family were expanding, and acquired an estate a bit further to the north, Videniškiai, supposedly named for Prince Vidas, a grandson of Giedrius. This became the family seat in the 16^th century, and where they built a monastery of the Canons Regular of Penance of the Blessed Martyrs (the religious order to which their ‘house saint’ Michael, had belonged). Its chapel became the family burial place after the 1620s. The church, dedicated to St Lawrence, remains, though the monastery was closed by the Russians in 1832.

Just a short distance outside the village of Videniškiai was the castle Baltadvaris. It was built in the mid-16^th century by Prince Matas or his son Prince Marcin, from the line of Prince Bartholomew (see below), with a particular role to guard the strategic road that passed through this district on the way between Vilnius to Riga. Baltadvaris means ‘white manor’, but was built of red brick, so presumably was painted. Very little remains today but earthworks and an archaeological site that is covered by a wooden structure. It had lost its strategic value in the 17^th century, was sold off by the family, and fell into ruins.

Of the senior line, that of Prince Alexander, there is less of a story to tell. Some members did become Calvinist like many grand nobles of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in this era, but most did not. Generation after generation were landowners and governors of local towns and fortifications on behalf of the Crown. The right to a princely title was confirmed by the 1569 Act of Union between the crowns of Poland and Lithuania, but for the next two centuries, they don’t emerge as major actors on the stage of Polish-Lithuanian history.

When the great time of trial for the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth came about, the period of the three partitions between 1772 and 1795, several members of this branch were in prominent positions to either combat it or support it. Like the English or American civil wars, many aristocratic families were split in this period, either willing to die in the defence of Polish-Lithuanian independence, or considering that absorption within the powerful Russian Empire was the best chance to preserve stability and order. Prince Krzysztof Giedroyć, owner of the estates at Giedraičiai, and his four brothers faced this question from their positions within the government or military. His brother Jan Stefan, Bishop of Samogitia from 1778, was active in the Sejm (or parliament), first advocating independence, then an alliance with Russia.

Their cousin, Prince Romuald Tadeusz, was also a deputy at the Sejm, but took a more active stance against Russia, serving in the Polish-Lithuanian army in the 1790s, and becoming a general of Lithuanian troops that joined the French Grande Armée that pushed into Russia in 1812. His brother, Piotr Kacper, a priest, also tried to preserve the independence of their homeland, serving as a Secretary of State in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in its last years, 1790-95. Once most of Lithuania was absorbed into the Russian Empire, however, Prince Romuald was reconciled (it appears) with the new government, and retired as a Lieutenant-General in the army of the new client state, a reformed ‘Kingdom of Poland’. His son, Józef Stefan, however, was not: he too had served in the Grande Armée, and continued to serve in Napoleon’s armies, promoted to Brigadier-General on the fields of Waterloo in 1815. He remained in France after the war, was naturalised in 1835, and died there in 1855.

It is in Prince Romuald’s daughters that we find the first women of great interest in this story. Both were known as writers and supporters of the Polish cause for liberty. The elder, Kunegunda, had served briefly as a lady-in-waiting to the Empress Elisabeth (the wife of Alexander I) in Russia, then transferred to Empress Josephine in France. She spent the rest of her long life in Paris, publishing books, but also pamphlets in support of, for example, the November Uprising of 1830. Her sister, Princess Lucia (or Łucja), moved to France a bit later, in 1836, and also became known for her novels, but returned to Poland in the 1840s, and became known as a travel writer. Both were part of the great fascination seen in Western Europe, and France in particular, for Polish music, art and fashion.

In Lithuania, the family of Prince Romuald had lived at a prominent estate, Bobcin (or Bobtyna), in a village now known as Žemaitkiemis, near Lithuania’s second capital, Kaunas. Originally a 16^th-century manor house, it was acquired and aggrandised by the Giedraitis / Giedroyć family in the late eighteenth century, then sold once they were mostly living in exile in the 1830s.

But not all members of this branch were in exile: the youngest son of Prince Romuald, Alexander, became a chamberlain at the Imperial court in Russia. His son, and other cousins living in the Russian Empire, had their princely rank and titles formally confirmed by the Tsar in 1866. This main line became extinct in 1899.

One cousin, Prince Szymon Tadeusz, from a junior line, continued the family tradition of serving as Bishop of Samogitia (north-western Lithuania), from 1838 to 1844. His branch of the family ended up emigrating to Belgium after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and took the form of the name ‘Guédroïtz’. Prince Alexis was a prominent professor of Russian literature in Brussels and published translations of most of the great Russian classic plays, from Pushkin to Chekhov to Dostoevsky. His daughter Ania Guédroïtz (b. 1949) is a Belgian theatre actress.

The next line of this branch were also mostly in Russian service, but not entirely. Two cousins, Witold and Mikołaj, took part in a Polish anti-Russian conspiracy in 1863, and thus were excluded from the general confirmation of princely titles in 1866; the latter, who had been governor of the Vilnius region, was sent to prison. A century later, several members of this branch were deported to prisons in the Soviet Union in the 1940s and from there emigrated to the UK or Canada where many of them currently reside.

A final member of this senior branch (that of Prince Alexander) worth noting before moving on to the junior branch, is Jerzy Giedroyć (1906-2000) who had been a journalist and political activist in Poland before the Second World War, then emigrated to Paris where he founded a literary salon and a journal, Kultura, for Polish émigrés. His political ideas were to encourage exiled Poles, and the emerging European Union more generally, to accept the post-war boundaries of Poland and to foster reconciliation amongst all the states of Eastern Europe with an ultimate goal of coaxing an independent Belarus and Ukraine out of the Soviet Union. These ideas suddenly feel quite topical again. There is a Jerzy Giedroyć Square in Warsaw, located near the Łazienki Palace.

The second major branch of the family, that of Prince Bartholomew (Baltramiejus in Lithuanian) was at first more prominent than the senior branch. Bartholomew’s son, Matas (or Mathias) was sent as an envoy to Muscovy to make peace with Tsar Ivan the Terrible in 1551, then took up important posts as Governor of Vilnius and Marshal of the Court of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. When he died in 1562, his sons were all well placed: the eldest, Kaspar was a signatory of the Act of Union between Poland and Lithuania in 1569, and a Chamberlain of the court; Merhelis (of Melchior) was Bishop of Samogitia from 1576; and Marcin was Voivode (or governor) of the sensitive frontier province of Mstislav (now eastern Belarus) and a commander in the ongoing wars against Muscovy. Of these brothers, Merhelis left the most enduring historical legacy, as a champion of Lithuanian language and culture, sponsoring some of the first books printed in that language (religious and historical), and in supporting the reforms of the Catholic Church following the Council of Trent—building new seminaries, schools, etc.

The line continued through descendants of Prince Kaspar. This branch, like the senior branch, then split into many, many sub-lineages. The main line, who resided at the manor of Aviliai in northern Lithuania (Owile in Polish), but became Polonised over the centuries and were more based in Warsaw. In the early 20^th century, the head of this branch, Prince Franciszek Ignacy, became a celebrated historian of medicine, professor at the University of Warsaw from 1920, and was instrumental in setting up the new public health service in a newly independent Republic of Poland after 1918.

In a parallel branch at about the same time, Princess Vera Gedroits made a name for herself as well in medicine, but in Imperial Russia. The daughter of Prince Ignacy who had moved to Russia following the failed Polish uprising of 1863 (and had his princely title confirmed by the Tsar in 1878), Vera (or Wiera) wrote later that she had been inspired to study medicine by her brother Sergei’s early death as a child (and in fact used her brother’s name sometimes as her pen name). She led a truly fascinating life: it is fairly well established that she was a lesbian and arranged a marriage of convenience with a family friend to enable her to study abroad, which she did, in Lausanne. Back in Russia, she gained experience as a surgeon in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and received high honours, then was invited to work as a surgeon in the hospital at the Imperial residence at Tsarskoe Selo in 1909. When the First World War broke out, Princess Vera helped the Empress Alexandra establish her role as a nurse (and it is said, tried to speak reason to her to mitigate the damage being done by her blind faith in the faith-healer/conjurer Rasputin). After the war she became professor of medicine at the Kiev Medical Institute, where she was known as a pioneer in the area of abdominal surgery, and (so notes her online biography), lived fairly openly as part of a married couple with Countess Maria Nirod, a former maid of honour of the Empress and one of the nurses she had trained back at the Imperial court. She died in 1932 in Kiev (Kyiv).

Many other members of this Russian branch served in the Imperial armies and then emigrated during the Revolution. One, Prince Nikolai, moved to China and became an advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Nationalist Government. Another settled in Gdansk in Poland and another in Leeds in the UK. Still another moved to New Jersey in the early 20^th century, and it is I believe (but can’t seem to confirm) this branch that produced the American actor from 1990s TV shows, Jason Gedrick, born in 1965 in Chicago.

Returning to the Aviliai (Owile) branch, the line of Prince Jerzy (b. 1742) stayed in Poland and Lithuania in the nineteenth century. One of his descendants was Prince Tadeusz, born in Aviliai (then in the Russian Empire), and later owner of the Łobzów estate and manor house (now Labzova in western Belarus), which he inherited in the 1920s from aristocratic Polish relatives. After training with the Imperial army, after the First World War he helped establish border relations for the new Polish Republic and its neighbours in Ukraine and Lithuania. In the 1930s, Tadeusz worked in various administrative posts in the region of Łobzów which was by then eastern Poland, and in 1938 became a Senator of the Republic. Following the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland in 1939, he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and eventually executed in June 1941. His wife Anna and their three children were held in a Gulag in Western Siberia for two years until they escaped to Persia in 1942, and then made their way to the United Kingdom in 1947.

The youngest of these three children was Michal Jan Giedroyć, or Michael, who was 18 at the time of this dramatic escape in 1947. He went on to study in a British university then became an aircraft engineer and designer. Later in life he re-ignited his interest in family history and the history of medieval Lithuania, and after the re-emergence of Lithuania as an independent state in the 1990s, Michael worked to help reconstruct some of its historical monuments, including some of the Giedraitis churches and manors, notably the monastery at Videniškiai and the archaeological remains of Baltadvaris Castle. He and his English wife had four children, including one son, Michael, and three daughters: Kasia, a children’s book author and wife of former UK ambassador to the UN Philip Parham; Coky, a director of loads of British television shows (and now married to a baronet, so technically Lady Bowyer-Smyth); and Mel, the comedian and presenter with whom this post began. For a woman who is often presented as quintessentially English, she has a lot of fascinating non-English family history behind her.

(images mostly Wikimedia Commons)

(see here for Part I)

The seventeenth century was a century of great conflict in Transylvania, but also so its longest periods of stable autonomy and the emergence of its most famous national heros. Prince Gábor Bethlen’s 15-year reign, 1613 to 1629, and the 18 years of the reign of György I Rákóczy, 1630-1648, are seen as islands of respite in a mostly turbulent history.

There are two Bethlen noble houses in Hungarian/Transylvanian history. Both (probably) derive their name from the town of Bethlen (today Beclean) in northern Transylvania. Sources differ as to whether they were branches of the same family or not (they bear different coats of arms which is usually a strong indicator they are distinct). The family known as Bethlen de Bethlen was probably descended from the Apafi (see below), and while they were consistently one of the most prominent noble families in the region—all the way up to becoming Chancellor of Transylvania in the 1670s—they were not princely, so are not ‘on topic’ here. They outlived the princely Bethlen dynasty, continued to dominate local administration in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy of the 19^th century, and even remained prominent in the 20^th century: Count István Bethlen de Bethlen was Prime Minister of Hungary, 1921-31.

The other branch had their ancestral seat at Iktár, in a region of the old Kingdom of Hungary known as the Banat, which, following the conquest by the Ottomans in the 1520s, became a province directly ruled by the Sultan, the Eyalet of Temeşvar (the Temesvári vilajet, in Hungarian). The family moved their seat therefore in 1576 to Marosillye, to a fortified castle a short distance across the frontier in Transylvania. This castle was demolished in 1670 (leaving just a bastion), and the castle there today was one rebuilt by new owners in the 18^th century, the Bornemisza family.

Farkas Bethlen de Iktár was given lands in Transylvania by Stephen Báthory, and named Captain-General of the Principality, but left his two sons as orphans in 1591. The elder, Gábor, was raised under the aegis of István Bocskai, then supported the rule of Mózes Székely as one of his leading commanders. When the latter was defeated, Bethlen fled to the Ottoman Empire and became leader of the Transylvanian refugees. He returned to join Bocskai’s Uprising and was rewarded with lands in Hunyad County and the job of Lieutenant there (1605). He fell out with Gábor Báthory so went into exile once again into Ottoman lands. When Báthory was then replaced by the annoyed Sultan in 1613, Bethlen was the logical choice. He was soon endorsed by the Transylvanian Diet, then by the Emperor Matthias in Vienna in 1615.

Prince Gábor Bethlen (or Bethlen Gábor—remember it is traditional in Hungarian to reverse the names) was seen as an ‘enlightened’ ruler, and developed the area’s mines and industry. He built a new grand palace in Gyulafehérvár, founded a Protestant college here and sponsored Protestant students to go abroad and study in England and the Netherlands. Disliking increasing Habsburg persecution of Protestants in Royal Hungary, he invaded in August 1619, captured the chief cities of Kassa and Pozsony (the royal capital), and advanced into Austria but by November was pushed back out by Habsburg forces. After a temporary peace, in August 1620, he was elected King of Hungary by an anti-Habsburg assembly, though this was never recognised by all parties, and by December 1621, he renounced the election and signed another peace accord—in exchange he was given more counties on the eastern margins of Royal Hungary to govern, and the Emperor agreed to tolerate religious freedom in Bethlen’s domains. He was also given one of those small Silesian duchies that were always being handed out to solidify alliances (Opole), but did not hold on to it very long.

As the Thirty Years War, which broke out in 1618, started to heat up for the new Habsburg Emperor (Ferdinand II), Bethlen pressed for more advantages, including a Habsburg bride for himself (always a good thing for raising the status of your dynasty). When he was turned down, he negotiated instead for a Calvinist Hohenzollern bride from Brandenburg, Princess Catherine. She was the daughter of the Elector of Brandenburg, but also, crucially, the sister-in-law of King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Protestant military champion. The couple married in 1626, but had no children before Gábor died in November 1629.

Catherine of Brandenburg was named Princess of Transylvania in her own right in November 1629, and even minted her own coins, but she was replaced by her husband’s younger brother István in September 1630. She converted to Catholicism in 1639 to marry the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg and died in 1649.

Prince István Bethlen resigned only a few months later in favour of György Rákóczi, the son of Prince Zsigmond. Rákóczi had been the leader of the Protestant faction of nobles in Hungary in the reign of Gábor Bethlen, but also enjoyed the favour of the Habsburg regime in Vienna. He married a wealthy heiress, Zsuzsanna Lórántffy, and settled in her estate of Sárospatak.

The magnificent castle of Sárospatak, in the far northeast corner of Hungary (bordering on Slovakia) is today one of the crown jewels of the Hungarian National Museum network of museums. It is considered amongst the best-preserved Renaissance architecture in Hungary. The central fortified tower, the ‘red tower’, was built by King Andrew II in the 13^th century, and is thought to be the birthplace of one of Hungary’s national saints, Saint Elizabeth. The Perényi family added a Renaissance palace in the 1530s and 40s, a period when this area became known as a place for Protestant education and thinking—the first Protestant college in Hungary was founded here in 1530, and the famous Czech theologian Comenius (Komenský) was given safe have to write and teach here in the 1650s, by which time it was one of the main Rákóczy strongholds. After the tumults of the end of the century, much damaaged, the castle was handed over by the Habsburgs to various Austrian families, and today, restored, it serves as the Rákóczi Museum—it even features on the back of the 500 forint note.

György Rákóczi led troops in Gábor Bethlen’s war against the Habsburgs in the early 1620s, then (eventually) succeeded him as Prince of Transylvania from November 1630. The reign of György I is mostly uneventful, though he survived an attempt by the Ottomans to replace him in 1636 and unrest from neighbouring Wallachian and Moldavian princes later in the decade; but a mostly peaceful reign gave him time to continue to develop Bethlen’s princely court at Gyulafehérvár, and elevate his residences at Sárospatak and Munkács as truly princely residences in the 1630s and 40s, receiving ambassadors with lavish attention to augment his reputation in the diplomatic world.

The monumental fortress of Munkács was for centuries one of the most famous in Hungary, yet ironically isn’t in Hungary at all today. Called Mukachevo in Ukrainian, it is one of the major tourist attractions of the Zakarpattia (Trans-Carpathia) region of the far southwest of Ukraine. It was also called Plankenburg in German or Palanok in Ruthenian (early Ukrainian). Perched high on a volcanic hill, it was built as early as the founding of the Hungarian kingdom by Saint Stephen in the 11^th century to guard the Vereche Pass, over which the Magyar tribes had come from the steppes north of the Black Sea. Indeed, it proved a useful guardian against further tribes who crossed the same pass: the Pechenegs, the Mongols, the Tatars. By the mid-13^th century it was the largest, best defended fortress in the Kingdom of Hungary. Munkács was held by various noble families in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, then directly by the Crown in the 16^th, until Maximilian II gave it in 1573 to Gábor Mágócsi, whose sons were raised (and fleeced, it looks like) by their stepfather, Zsigmond Rákóczi. It again passed through different aristocratic hands until it was returned by Prince Gábor Bethlen to the Rákóczi in 1629.

Munkács remained the seat of the Rákóczi princes for much of the rest of the seventeenth century, and was famously defended by the widow of Prince Ferenc I, Ilona Zrínyi, in sieges lasting for several years in 1685 to 1687. Until she finally surrendered it in January 1688, Munkács was the only castle the Habsburgs were unable to take by force. It was retaken by Ferenc II Rákóczi in 1703, then retaken again by Imperial forces in 1711. But across the 18^th century, it lost its strategic value (especially once Galicia became part of the Habsburg domains following the partition of Poland), and it became a state prison. Many significant prisoners were held here until it was decommissioned by Emperor Franz Josef in 1896 in commemoration of the Millennium of the founding of the Hungarian Kingdom. In the 20^th century it was used as a barracks for the Czech, Hungarian, then Soviet armies, then restored and re-opened as a museum (as Mukachevo) by the Ukrainian government in the 1990s.

As the Thirty Years War was already starting to wind down, Prince György I Rákóczi decided to intervene, and attacked the forces of Emperor Ferdinand III in 1644. But the Sultan was not in a mood to wage war, and ordered his vassal to withdraw in 1645. The resulting peace treaty confirmed the earlier treaties (rule over some of the eastern counties of north-eastern Hungary and religious freedom for Protestants), and the Prince died soon after in 1648.

His son, Prince György II, had been elected as successor already in 1642, and in 1643 married Zsófia Báthory (from above), the last of her family. Her mother had forced her to convert from Catholicism in a bid to keep relevant in Transylvanian magnate politics, and she was a most unwilling bride. In 1657, the Prince joined Sweden in its war against Poland-Lithuania, with the aid of the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia, and Cossack troops disgruntled with Polish rule in the eastern steppes of what is now Ukraine. György decided to claim the Polish throne itself, perhaps drawing on the reputation of his wife’s Báthory name. Like his father, he did not consult with his overlord, the Sultan Mehmed IV, and was thus not supported when things went wrong. After initial successes in Poland, his forces were were thrown into disarray in the late summer, and as he fled back to Transylvania, his abandoned army was almost entirely captured by the Crimean Tatars, allies of Poland. György II was deposed formally by the Sultan in November, but defiantly reinstated by the Transylvanian Diet in January 1658. He was driven out then returned again in March 1659. The Turks invaded the principality in Spring 1660, and Rákóczi died from wounds he received in the fierce battle at Szászfenes (today’s Florești) in May.

György’s son, Ferenc (Francis), had been pre-elected like his father in 1652 (aged only 7), but was passed over for the throne following the debacle of 1657. His mother, Zsófia Báthory, hastily converted herself back to Catholicism, and her young son too, earning Habsburg favour, and even obtained from the Imperial court the title of count for the Rákóczi family (in 1664). As noted above, Hungarian nobles rarely sported any title at all, so this was a relatively rare privilege. We will return to Ferenc below.

In the confusion of 1657-58, a number of very short-lived princely reigns followed in quick succession: Rhédey, Barcsay, Kemény. The first was Ferenc Rhédey, who ruled from November 1657 to January 1658. The Rhédey were ancient nobles, a cadet branch of the powerful Clan Aba (one of the first families of Hungary, see below), who adopted the name Rhédey in the late 13^th century, taken from their properties of Kisréde and Nagyréde in Heves County, northeast of Buda. With the Turkish occupation of central Hungary in the 1540s, they moved east into Transylvania and were given lands in Maros County, and gradually built up lands there, and the title of baron, 1606. They acquired the castle of Erdőszentgyörgy there in 1627 (today’s Sângeorgiu de Pădure); as Rhédey Castle it was rebuilt in the 18^th century, then renovated in a classical style in the early 19^th century, and was the birthplace of Countess Claudine Rhédey who became the grandmother of Princess Mary of Teck, queen-consort of King George V of Great Britain. It is this connection that has brought Prince Charles to Transylvania in support of renovating its built heritage and conserving its wildlife. Rhédey Castle served as the local primary school in the 20^th century, and is now a museum. There is also a Rhédey Palace in the city of Cluj (formerly Kolozsvár), originally built by the Székely family in the 17^th century, inherited in the 18^th century by the Rhédeys, and rebuilt in the 1770s to house one of the very first Hungarian theatre companies.

Ferenc Rhédey, Prince of Transylvania, was closely connected to Prince Gábor Bethlen, his mother having remarried the Prince’s brother István Bethlen, and Ferenc himself marrying his step-sister Druzsiána Bethlen. Like his father, he served as lieutenant of Máramaros County, and became a trusted counsellor to Prince György II Rákóczi. He had the wisdom not to try to hold on to power in January 1658, when the latter reclaimed his throne, and was rewarded with the title of count in 1659. His branch of the family went extinct with his death in 1667, but his cousins were re-created counts again in 1744. The family was extinct by the end of the 19^th century.

In September 1658, the Sultan appointed another of Prince György’s chief commanders and advisors, Ákos Barcsay. Despite his stronger position as Rákóczy’s chief of council and one of the governors of Transylvania appointed while the Prince was away in Poland in 1657, he had initially been passed over for Rhédey as he was of lower rank. But only just. The Barcsay family traced their lineage back to the early 14^th century, and were originally based in Transylvania too (unlike the Bethlens or the Rákóczis), at Nagybarca (Bârcea Mare) in Hunyad County. Like most magnates they became Calvinist in the Reformation.

Ákos Barcsay had been a diplomat and counsellor of Prince György I, Lieutenant of Hunyad County from 1648, then, as noted, chief of council for Prince György II. His brother was one of the leaders of the Transylvanian army. In October 1658, the Diet agreed to the Sultan’s choice, and the new Prince Barcsay agreed to pay 40,000 thalers a year in tribute, and to capture the deposed Prince György. But in March 1659, at a time he was away from the capital, consulting with regional Turkish administrators, Rákóczi returned and resumed his government of the Principality. Barcsay was installed by the Turks once again by force in May 1660 (and from this point they occupied directly those counties of the Hungarian kingdom known as the ‘Partium’). One of his main generals was killed in battle by another of Rákóczi’s former commanders, János Kemény, in November 1660, and Prince Ákos himself was defeated in December and abdicated. He was murdered by Kemény’s men in July 1661. The Barcsay family continued for a while, named barons from 1742, but this branch soon died out.

Meanwhile, János Kemény was now Prince of Transylvania, this time as a vassal of the Habsburgs, not the Ottomans. His family were also ancient nobles, Transylvanian, from the 13^th century, based around estates at Magyargyerőmonostori (Mănăstireni), near Kolozsvár. In the 1640s, János acquired a castle further north at Aranyosmeggyes (Medieşu Aurit) in the far northwest of the Principality in Szatmár County, through his marriage to an heiress of the noble Lónyai family. The 13^th-century castle had been held for centuries by the Báthorys, then rebuilt in the Renaissance style in the 1620s, before it passed to Anna Lónyay. It was mostly destroyed in the rebellions of the later 17^th century, rebuilt in the 19^th century, then blown up in World War II and left as a ruin.

Like Rhédey and Barcsay, Kemény had been a chief advisor to Prince György II, and went with him to Poland as one of his commanders in 1657. He was held captive by the Tatars in Bağçasaray, the capital of the Crimean Khanate, until his wife paid a huge ransom in August 1659. He wrote a memoir of his experiences, which is considered one of the best of that genre of the 17^th century. So he had been completely out of the way during the confusion of 1658-59. He realised that György II would never regain the support of the Sultan, that Barcsay was unlikely to hold on to his throne, and that Transylvania would not recover any semblance of freedom without help from Vienna. So with authorisation from the Emperor, he organised a Diet to proclaim himself Prince of Transylvania in January 1661, and went further to declare the end of dependence on the Ottomans in April. But the Sultan felt differently, and sent an army back to Transylvania and defeated the ‘false prince’ in June. János Kemény tried again in September, but was killed in battle in January 1662. He left descendants who became barons in 1698, and counts in 1804.

Reasserting Ottoman authority, Küçük Ali Pasha chose another of Rákóczi’s former commanders, Mihály (Michael) Apafi, to be Prince of Transylvania in September 1661. Apparently he had asked three other nobles who had refused. Apafi accepted, was approved by the Diet, and immediately made a secret peace deal with the Habsburgs, who therefore abandoned Kemény. By 1664, in a new peace treaty between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, Emperor Leopold recognised Mihály Apafi as prince, and he settled in for a nice thirty-year rule.

At this point—for fun—we can delve a bit more into the very ancient history of the Magyar peoples, and look (finally) at the Aba Clan, progenitors of the Apafi. The ‘Gens Aba’ are considered to be amongst the founding fathers of the nation. According to the 13^th-century Gesta Hunnorum et Hungarorum, they descended from Attila the Hun and a daughter of Emperor Honorius, though Honorius (d. 423) had no children, and there aren’t nearly enough generations to their supposed son Csaba in the 9^th century. More historically the founder may have been a tribal leader of Khazars, a Turkic tribe that joined the Magyar federation in the 9^th century on the Pontic Steppes before they emigrated into the Danube Basin. They were given lands by Prince Árpád, the founder of the royal dynasty, in about 900, in the forests of the Matra Mountains, now Heves County (northeast of Buda), centred on Gyöngyös. They built a castle called Pata, or Gyöngyöspata. Prince Shaba (or Csaba) married in about 1009 a daughter of the Magyar chieftain, Géza, and had a son called Sámuel. The family converted to Christianity, perhaps from paganism, but maybe from Judaism (Samuel’s name is a clue)—there were in fact Khazar leaders who had adopted Judaism in the 8^th century. It is an intriguing idea. In any case, the newly Christianised Aba family built the Abbey of Abasár on their lands, around which formed the new Eger diocese. The name Aba could refer to the word for ‘father’, to represent their patriarchal piety.

Sámuel Aba became ‘count palatine’ (head of the court) for his first cousin, King Stephen I. When that king, founder of the Hungarian monarchy, died childless in 1038, he was first succeeded by his nephew Peter the Venetian, then by Sámuel in 1041. It is likely he who built Abaújvár (‘Aba’s New Castle’, a fortified hilltop, today just an archaeological site), which came to form the core of a new county in the northeast of the Kingdom, Abaúj. Peter the Venetian returned however, reclaimed the throne in 1044, and executed his cousin.

Famous Aba descendants include Miklós Aba, Ban of Dalmatia and Croatia, 1272-73, and Makján Aba, Palatine of Hungary, 1286-87. But the most famous was Amadé Aba, also Palatine, on and off several times between 1288 and 1310. After the death of the last king from the Árpád dynasty (András III) in 1301, Amadé led his own more or less independent foreign policy, supporting candidates for the royal throne from dynasties of Bohemia, Poland, Naples (Anjou) and Austria. He ultimately supported the election of Charles of Anjou in 1308, and was appointed Lieutenant of Szepes County—he became virtual ruler of a large domain in this area, centred on Gönc and Boldogkő castles (in Abaúj County), and the town of Kassa (today’s Košice)—stretching towards the Carpathians into what’s now Ukraine (Munkács—see above).

Prince Amadé Aba granted lands to his followers, and noble titles, and ran his own judicial court. But in 1310, he was stripped of his titles by the king he had helped create, and in 1311 was murdered by the citizens of Kassa. His sons tried to continue his powerful dominion but were defeated by King Charles’s army at Rozgony (Rozhanovce, near Košice) in June 1312. After the Battle of Rozgony, the Aba supremacy was crushed. Abaujvár and the core lands around Gyöngyös passed into other noble families. But nearly twenty noble houses trace descent back to the Clan Aba, including the Rhédey and the Bethlen de Bethlen (not the Bethlen de Iktár). And of course the Apafi (or Abafy or Apaffy).

The Apafi surname appeared in the early 14^th century, and they made their base at Apa-Nagyfalva (Nușeni in Romanian) in north-central Transylvania (Beszterce-Naszód County). This castle was destroyed several times in the 17^th century, then passed to the Bánffy family by the end of the century. As far as I can tell, there are no remains.

While the noble family name remained Apafi de Apanagyfalva, their dynastic headquarters, from the 15^th century, was Ebesfalva, in Szeben County (Sibiu), central Transylvania. It was also known just as Apafi Castle. (falva by the way means ‘someone’s village’). In the 1550s, the castle was rebuilt by Gergely Apafi, whose son and grandson rose to the rank of lieutenant of neighbouring Küküllő County. The latter’s son was Mihály Apafi, who became Prince of Transylvania. After the extinction of the family in 1713, the town was bought by Armenian settlers in 1720s, and renamed Erzsébetváros (or Elisabethstadt). The castle later served as a courthouse, a district court, a prison and a town hall; it is now a museum of Armenian culture (renamed Dumbrăveni in Romanian in the 20^th century).

Another residence was the villa at Almakerék (Mălâncrav, southwest of Sighisoara), built in late 16^th century, which passed to the Bethlen family in the 18^th century—this is one of those renovated with the aid of Prince Charles in 2000. The Lutheran church in this town was also the dynastic burial place for the Apafi family.

Mihály Apafi served with Prince György Rákóczy in the disastrous campaign in Poland in 1657, and like János Kemény, was held by the Tatars in Crimea until his wife paid his ransom in 1661. As we’ve seen above, he was appointed Prince of Transylvania by the Turks in September 1661, approved by the Transylvanian Diet, then recognised by the Habsburg emperor in 1664 (Treaty of Vasvár). This treaty, while good for Apafi, annoyed a lot of the Hungarian nobles who sensed the Ottoman Empire was finally on the defensive and potentially challengable. Seeing the Habsburg Emperor do nothing, they rebelled against him in 1666-67. They invited young Ferenc Rákóczy, the son of Prince György, to be their leader. The rebellion was disorganised and quickly put down, with most of its leaders brutally executed. But Ferenc’s mother, Zsófia Báthory, intervened and paid a huge fee (300,000 forints). She was a tremendous force; but so too was her daughter-in-law, Ilona Zrínyi, the immensely rich daughter of the Ban of Croatia, Count Peter Zrínyi (or Zrinski in Croatian) who had initially spearheaded the rebellion, and would be executed in 1671. Prince Ferenc I tried then to stay neutral in the coming years, and died, aged only 31, in 1676.

Apafi had stayed mostly out of all of this. As prince he resided mostly at Fogaras Castle (Făgăraș, the capital of the old Fogaras County, now in Brașov County), a traditional seat of Transylvanian princes, built in the 1310s, rebuilt in the 1520s, and transformed by Prince Mihály Apafi into a princely residence (as Gyulafehérvár had been mostly destroyed by the Turks in 1658). In the 20^th century it was used as a prison, and is today a museum—one of the great castle-museums of Romania.

Prince Mihály remained loyal to the Sultan during the Ottoman invasion of western Hungary and the siege of Vienna in 1683, and indeed led some Transylvanian troops in support (but carefully avoided actually engaging in battle), but after the spectacular (and rather surprising) defeat of the Ottomans, Apafi saw his autonomy threatened by Habsburg armies advancing across the Hungarian plain. Buda was liberated from the Turks in 1686, and troops of Duke Charles of Lorraine entered Transylvania. Apafi made a deal in 1687 recognising Habsburg suzerainty, and to pay a very large sum of money; in return, the Emperor recognised his son’s right to the succession, which was approved soon after by the Sultan as well.

Mihály I died in 1690, and was indeed succeeded by his son, Mihály II. He had been ‘associated’ with his father’s reign as prince since 1681. By the mid-1680s, however, the Turks had shifted their interests towards the leader of a new anti-Habsburg rebellion, Imre Thököly (more on him next). Emperor Leopold recognised Mihály II Apafi as Prince of Transylvania in 1691, though under a regency council (he was only 15). His councillors continued to negotiate for a semi-independent state, now under the protection of the Protestant Great Powers: England, the United Dutch Provinces and Brandenburg-Prussia. But in 1692, the young Prince was lured to Vienna and pressed to concede control of the principality. By 1696 it was under the rule of a military governor and he formally abdicated. Apafi was created a Reichsfürst, given a generous pension and lived out his days in Vienna where he died in 1713.

By this point, the attentions of Hungarian and Transylvanian nationalists had firmly shifted to Imre Thököly and his step-son, who happened to be Ferenc II Rákóczy.

The Thököly family are quite different from all the other families surveyed thus far, in that they were not very ancient, and were (at first) not very noble. They were also not from Transylvania, and the individual we need to focus on here, Imre, was only nominally prince of Transylvania for one year. His history mostly belongs to the history of Hungary and to the Ottoman-Habsburg wars more generally, so I’ll focus on his dynastic history here. From a family of horse and cattle merchants from Upper Hungary, Sebestyén Thököly began to accumulate great wealth in the mid-16^th century, so much that he was able loan some to the Habsburg monarchs to fund their wars. They reciprocated generously with ennoblement in 1572, then the title of baron in 1598. In between, he acquired an estate at Késmárk (today Kežmarok), in Szepes County, in 1583. This was a Lutheran town, and Thököly a member of the new faith. Most residents were in fact German (and the name of the town was German for ‘cheese market’), and would remain the majority until about 1910.

The newly minted Baron Sebestyén Thököly de Késmárk left his fortune to his son, István, who then married a great heiress, Katalin Thurzó, and acquired through this union notably the major fortress of Árva, perched dramatically above a river bend in the mountainous frontier between Hungary and Poland. This castle (now Orava) was built in the mid-16^th century on the site of a much older wooden fortification, and was added to by various magnate families, notably the Thurzós. Today it is frequently used as a set for filming, including the 2020 retelling of the Dracula story for BBC and Netflix (so Count Dracula does get into this story!).

Baron István’s son, also called István, became Lieutenant of Árva County, and as a steadfastly loyal supporter of the Habsburg monarchy, was elevated further to the rank of Count in 1654. He married a grand-daughter of Prince István Bethlen, with estates in Transylvania, and close relations with the Rhédey family. But the nervous Habsburg administration grew suspicious about Count István’s loyalties during an anti-Habsburg aristocratic plot in 1670, and when he and his family retreated to Árva Castle, they laid siege, during which he died. His young son Imre was smuggled out to safety to his mother’s estates in Transylvania.

Count Imre (usually translated as ‘Emeric’ in English) thus became the charismatic leader of Hungarian resistance to Habsburg rule for the next three decades, one of the most formidable. As an exile at the court of Prince Mihály I Apafi, he came into contact with a number of disgruntled Protestant nobles and clergy, who as soldiers took on the name kuruc, which some have thought to have come from cruciatus (‘crusader’) but is more likely from the Turkish word kurudsch, ‘rebel’. In 1677, Apafi made some secret deals with the king of France, Louis XIV, who agreed to subsidise a kuruc rebellion, especially if led by young Imre Thököly. He raised troops in Transylvania and initiated a grand revolt in 1678, and initially did extremely well, taking over much of the Kingdom of Hungary and proclaiming himself ‘Prince of Upper Hungary’ in 1681. Playing on his kinship relations with the Bethlen and Rhédey clans, he also married the widow of Prince Ferenc I Rákóczy for good measure— llona Zríniyi would certainly play her part as the ‘Kuruc Queen’. Sultan Mehmed IV went further and recognised Thököly as ‘king’ of Upper Hungary, a title confirmed by some local diets.

A triumphant Prince Imre aided the Ottomans in the siege of Vienna, but when that went badly for them, bore the brunt of the blame. In frustration, he tried to make a deal with Emperor Leopold, offering to end his rebellion in return for acknowledgement of the rights of Protestants in Hungary and of his title as Prince of Upper Hungary. Leopold refused. War re-commenced, and Thököly suffered a major defeat at Eperjes (now Prešov), 11 August 1685. When he sought the help of his Turkish protectors, they sent him in chains to Adrianople, and most of his kuruc followers abandoned him. A year later, however, he was released and sent with a small army to Transylvania to attempt to reclaim his principality. He had little success, nor in the attempt that followed in 1688, but in September 1690, he did defeat a combined Austrian and Apafi army, and was elected Prince of Transylvania by the Diet. But he was ousted soon after in 1691.

For the rest of the decade, Prince Imre Thököly served as an able cavalry commander in Ottoman armies, notably at the Battle of Zenta in 1697. But when a peace treaty was finally made (Karlowitz) in January 1699, his name was explicitly excluded from the amnesty that was offered to most Hungarian rebels. After one last attempt to reclaim his lands, he and his wife retired to the community of Hungarian exiles in Galata (the foreigner settlement across the Golden Horn from Constantinople). He received the title ‘Count of Widin’ (Vidin, Bulgaria) from the Sultan (Mustafa II), and spent the last years of his life in exile. After he died in 1705, in the city of İzmit (ancient Nicomedia), he was buried there, but in 1906 his ashes were returned to Hungarian (for the moment) soil in Késmárk.

The leadership role of anti-Habsburg rebellion in Hungary was now taken up by Thököly’s step-son, Prince Ferenc II Rákóczy. After the death of his father, Ferenc I, the boy had been raised, with his sister Julianna, at the family estates of Munkács and Sárospatak, though under the strict formal guardianship of Emperor Leopold. The powerful Countess Ilona kept her children safe during the three-year siege of Munkács in 1686-88, but after her surrender, all were taken to Vienna to be educated at court and integrated into the Austrian aristocracy. In 1694, young ‘Franz’ married Princess Amalia of Hesse-Rheinfels-Wanfried, and they settled down at Sárospatak Castle from where he could act as a loyal supporter of the Habsburg regime as Lieutenant of Sáros County.

But in April 1700, letters were intercepted by Habsburg authorities that implicated Rákóczy in a developing international plot by which France was attempting to gather allies for its impending war against Austria over the rights to the Spanish Succession. He was arrested, but escaped to Poland and by June 1703 accepted an offer to lead another kuruc uprising, a war of liberation. He convinced and army of peasant soldiers and Hajduks, but this time the bulk of the Hungarian nobility did not rally to the cause. Nevertheless, Rákóczy initially made great gains and occupied much of the Kingdom. In 1704, he assumed the title Prince of Transylvania, the last native son to bear this title.

But by 1705, France was doing badly in the war and was no longer able to send financial support. Still, in September, a diet of ‘Confederated Estates’ from all over Hungary elected Rákóczy as ‘Ruling Prince’. Peace talks with Vienna stumbled over the issue of the sovereignty of Transylvania, and in June 1707, the Habsburgs were formally declared ‘deposed’ by another diet. At the battle of Trencsén (Trenčin), 3 August 1708, the Prince suffered a defeat, and most of his allies abandoned him. He held out in Munkács, waiting for French aid that never came, until he fled once more to Poland in February 1711. The Emperor’s forces made peace with Rákóczy’s remaining troops in May (the Peace of Szatmár), and assured the Prince clemency if he would swear an oath of loyalty. He refused. His lands were confiscated, especially Munkács and others in Trans-Carpathia. He stayed in Poland—supported even as a candidate for the crown there by Tsar Peter I and others—then in 1712 went west on a tour and to press his case at the international peace negotiations then in full swing at Utrecht. He visited England and France and was viewed as a great hero by the fashionable set, but was completely ignored by the diplomats at Utrecht. His welcome in France ran out following the death of his erstwhile ally Louis XIV, so in 1717 he travelled to the Ottoman Empire, with a large entourage, where he settled in the large community of exiled Hungarian nobles at Rodostó on the Sea of Marmara (the ancient Rhaedestus, which was renamed Tekirdağ later in the 18^th century).

The last Prince of Transylvania lived here in comfort for many years and died in 1735. His heart was sent to France and his body to the Jesuit church in Galata, in Constantinople, alongside his mother Ilona. In 1906, their bodies were moved to the Cathedral in Kassa in a great Hungarian nationalist pageant—though of course, this city (Kosiče) is no longer in Hungary either.

Meanwhile, the Prince of Transylvania had become the Habsburg Emperor himself. From 1711 (and legally from 1699), Transylvania was incorporated more fully into the Habsburg monarchy and ruled directly by governors. None of these were from the great Transylvanian magnate families, with the exception of Count György Bánffy, who had a long run in quite challenging times: 1787 to 1822. After 1765, the status of Transylvania was raised to a ‘Grand Principality’ for Emperor Joseph II, as an autonomous realm of the Hungarian Crown. The rising numbers of Romanians in the population were ignored, and even though they were the majority, their numbers could always be balanced by the combined numbers of Hungarian and German subjects (according to some statistics, but not others—and this became controversial). In 1804, Transylvania was declared an Austrian Crownland, severing its link with Hungary, but in the 1848 revolution, it was incorporated into Hungary directly. Once this revolution failed, the situation was reversed, until the great compromise of 1867 joined Transylvania firmly to the Crown of Hungary and the separate Grand Principality was dissolved for good.

As the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed at the end of the First World War, Transylvania was proclaimed to be united with Romania, December 1918 (the Union of Alba Julia). This was sealed by the Treaty of Trianon, June 1920, but was not accepted by Hungary, who argued that 1.6 million Hungarians were now trapped on the wrong side of the border. By 2011, they still have a significant presence in some parts of Transylvania, cited at about 18% of the total population (with the ancient Saxon / German population now measuring only about 0.5%).

After 1711, there were also two ‘pretenders’ to the throne of Transylvania, the two sons of Prince Ferenc II Rákóczy: József and György. Both boys were kept in Vienna after the exile of their father, as ‘guests’ of the Emperor, who gave them an education and new ‘incognito’ titles: the Marchese di San Marco and the Marchese della Santa Elisabetta. I doubt people were fooled. In 1734, their father in far-off Turkey, probably sensing his end, decided to grant them better titles: the Duke of Munkács for the elder and the Duke of Makovica for the younger. József soon left Vienna and travelled through Italy, France and Spain, then visited Rodostó, and was recognised as Prince of Transylvania by the Sultan in 1737 as he prepared to launch a new war against the Habsburgs. This Prince Rákóczy was sent to the Balkans but didn’t get very far and died in 1738. György, on the other hand, had already settled in Paris much earlier (from about 1726) and lived there for many years, a fashionable curiosity in society, but little else. He did travel to the Ottoman Empire in 1742 on the invitation of the Sultan, but declined his offer to take up once more the Rákóczy family claims to Transylvania, and returned to France. He died at St Denis in 1756.

The house at Rodostó (Tekirdağ) in which Prince Ferenc II Rákóczy lived for many years was rebuilt after the property was donated to the Hungarian state in 1982. It now stands proudly as the Rákóczy Museum, a place of pilgrimage nearly four centuries after the Prince’s death. The memory of the Principality of Transylvania lives on.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

–A very big thanks to Dr Gábor Kármán of the Institute of History, Budapest, for helping me spot errors in this complicated story!

Families covered in this post:

• Hunyadi
• Zápolya
• Báthory
• Gutkeled
• Székely
• Bocskai
• Rákóczi
• Bethlen
• Rhédey
• Barcsay
• Kemény
• Apafi
• Aba
• Thököly

Castles visited:

in Romania (Transylvania):

• Hunyad (Hunedoara / Corvin Castle)
• Gyulafehérvár (Alba Julia)
• Somlyó (Şimleu, Báthory Castle)
• Erdőszentgyörgy (Sângeorgiu / Rhédey Castle)
• Aranyosmeggyes (Medieşu Aurit)
• Ebesfalva (Ibașfalău, now Dumbrăveni / Apafi Castle)
• Almakerek (Mălâncrav)
• Fogaras (Făgăras)

in Slovakia (‘Upper Hungary’):

• Trencsén (Trenčin)
• Makovica (Zboró, Zborov)
• Késmárk (Kežmarok)
• Árva (Orava)

in Hungary

• Nyírbátor
• Nagyecsed (Ecsed)
• Szerencs
• Nagykereki (Bocskai Castle)
• Sárospatak
• Boldogkő

in Ukraine (Trans-Carpathia):

• Munkács (Mukachevo or Palanok)

List of Princes of Transylvania and reigns:

1570-71: János Zsigmond Zápolya

1576-86: István Báthory

1586-98: Zsigmond Báthory

1599: András Báthory

1601-02: Zsigmond Báthory

1603: Mózes Székely

1605-06: István Bocskai

1607-08: Zsigmond Rákóczi

1608-13: Gábor Báthory

1613-29: Gábor Bethlen

1629: Catherine of Brandenburg

1630: István Bethlen

1630-48: György I Rákóczi

1648-57: György II Rákóczi

heir only: Ferenc I Rákóczi

1657: Ferenc Rhédey

1658: György II Rákóczi

1658-59: Ákos Barcsay

1659-60: György II Rákóczi

1660: Ákos Barcsay

1661: János Kemény

1661-90: Mihály I Apafi

1690-96: Mihály II Apafi

1690: Imre Thököly

1704-11: Ferenc II Rákóczi

Transylvania. The name conjures up images of vampires and werewolves, and the most famous vampire of all, Count Dracula. But really, his story is part of the Principality of Wallachia and the Carpathian mountains which separate that region from Transylvania. The potential historic inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, thus belongs to another blog post, for the princes of Wallachia and Moldavia, and a series of Romanian families. Another favourite tale of horror from this region is of the ‘Blood Countess’, Elizabeth Báthory, whose gruesome murders were said to run into the hundreds. But her chief domains, and the sites of her alleged horrific crimes, lay in what was once known as Upper Hungary, and is now the modern nation of Slovakia.

Báthory’s family, however, did hold much of their lands in the region ‘across the forest’ from the main body of the Hungarian kingdom—ie, ‘trans sylvania’—and they did take on the position of prince of Transylvania for three generations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For Transylvania did not have a specific princely dynasty of its own: at times it was simply a province of the Kingdom of Hungary, and at others a breakaway principality, ever-shifting between sovereignty and loyalty to either the Habsburg king or the Ottoman sultan. This blog post is thus about a series of Hungarian magnate families who rose from their status as ordinary nobles to be princes for a generation or two, then faded back from power. This will be a blog about the Zápolya, Báthory, Rákóczi, Bethlen, Apafy and others—amongst the most famous names in all of Hungarian history.

Today, Transylvania is one of the three regions that make up the modern nation of Romania (alongside Wallachia and Moldavia). For a thousand years, however, if was a frontier zone of mixed ethnicities, Romanians, Hungarians, Slavs and Germans. Still today there is a significant portion of its population who refer to themselves as Szeklers (or Székelys) who are ethnically Hungarian, and those called the Saxons (or Sachsen) who descend from German settlers who came to the region in the 12^th and 13^th centuries. The Magyar tribes first settled in this region in the late 9^th century, but there were also some Vlachs here, probable descendants of the Roman colonists of the province of Dacia from the 2^nd century AD, and also some Slavs, who may have given the name to the region’s capital, Balgrad, ‘white castle’ which translates as Fehérvár in Hungarian, Weissenburg in German, and Alba Julia in modern Romanian. The latter name, however, adds the name ‘Julius’, which might suggest a Roman connection, but in fact refers to one of the first Hungarian chieftains to establish a principality here for himself, Gyula. So the full name of his capital was Gyulafehérvár: ‘Gyula’s White Castle’ (in the 18^th century it was for a time renamed ‘Karlsburg’, for the Emperor Charles VI).

Prince Gyula, one of several pagan Magyar chiefs who arrived in the Pannonian basin—the wide flat plain watered by the Danube and its tributaries—in the 9^th century, supposedly defeated a local Vlach (Wallachian or Romanian) duke, Gelou, and set up his rule in this eastern portion of the great basin, while the other Magyar chiefs settled to the west in Hungary proper. There are also suggestions that ‘gyula’ may not be a person, but a military title (seen as ‘gyla’ in Byzantine sources), or perhaps a series of rulers named Gyula. Whatever the truth, according to medieval chronicles, in 1003, the first Christian king of Hungary, St. Stephen, defeated this Prince Gyula, and integrated Transylvania fully into the Kingdom. Gyula may even have been Stephen’s uncle, the father of his queen, Sarolt. Stephen also defeated other dukes, probably Vlachs, in the region: Ajtony (or Ahtum) and Menumorut. From this point onwards, Transylvania did not have its own prince, but a voivode, or governor, appointed by the Hungarian king.

By the 12^th century, the region was known in Hungarian as Erdély, which probably derives from Erdő elve, ‘beyond the forest’, or überwald in German. But the Germans also begin to call it Siebenbürgen, ‘seven castles’, for the seven fortified cities established by the Saxons who were brought in by Hungarian kings about this time to fortify the border between Hungary and the Byzantine Empire (and subsequently the Ottoman Empire). These seven castles feature on the coat-of-arms of Transylvania, along with the black eagle on blue of the Hungarian voivode (and may even refer to ancient Roman Dacia), and the sun and crescent symbols used by the Szeklers (see above).

Other groups who settled in this region—to make it even more complex!—include the Cumans, fleeing Mongol domination of the steppes north of the Black Sea. All of these groups, Hungarians, Szeklers, Saxons, Cumans, enjoyed a degree of influence and power in medieval Transylvania—the one group who did not, about one-third of the population, were the Romanians, excluded formally from government by the 1350s. Some of these, however, seem to have transformed themselves into Hungarians, converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, and joined the power structure. The most famous of these is (probably) the Hunyadi family, based at Hunyad Castle (Hunedoara in Romanian, also called Corvin Castle), one of the greatest landowning families in the region by the 1400s. János Hunyadi, one of the greatest generals defending against the Turks, was named voivode of Transylvania in 1440, and recognised as ‘Prince’ by the pope in 1448. His son Mátyás was elected King of Hungary in 1457, better known as Matthias Corvinus, and reigned for over thirty years, one of the greatest of all Hungarian kings. But the Hunyadi family died out shortly after the death of King Matthias in 1490. It seems an interesting feature of several families surveyed here is that they rose and fell in fairly quick succession.

Going back to the period of direct royal rule of Transylvania, we do have some early dukes rather than princes. Like royal dynasties in western Europe, the Árpád dynasty of Hungary diffused tensions between royal siblings by giving younger sons dukedoms to rule, as premier subjects of their king. Prince Béla, son of Andrew II, was duke of Transylvania from 1226, then succeeded as king (Béla IV) in 1235. His son Stephen was the same from 1257, before also succeeding to the throne (Stephen V). In the later Angevin dynasty, the tradition continued: Louis, son of King Ladislas, was duke of Transylvania, 1339, then succeeded as king (Louis, or Lajos I) in 1342. His younger brother Stephen, was duke of Transylvania from 1349, but also duke of Szepes and Sáros (what’s now eastern Slovakia) and duke of Slavonia, Croatia and Dalmatia, from 1353. He was thus a major potentate in the Balkans, but died only a year later in 1354.

From this point Transylvania was governed by local magnates as voivodes, not dukes or princes. The Szeklers had their own ruler, called the ‘Count of the Székelys’, based at a castle at Gőrgény (Gurghiu in Romanian). But these offices, voivode and count, were merged by the 1460s. Later the Turks would revive the title ‘Count of the Székelys’ for their local administrators, and it was revived again by Empress Maria Theresa in the 18^th century. The impetus for the re-emergence of an independent principality came after the Battle of Mohács, 29 August 1526, and the near complete destruction of the Kingdom of Hungary by Ottoman forces under Suleiman the Magnificent. The first to assert the title Prince of Transylvania was János Zsigmond Zápolya (or Szapolyai).

[Nota bene: in Hungarian, you normally reverse the first and second names, but to keep things simple here I will use the more familiar western style.]

It is unclear where the Zápolya family came from: unlike other Hungarian magnate families they did not trace their ancestry back centuries to the founding of the Kingdom, yet in the mid-15^th century, they suddenly emerged as the richest family in Hungary aside from the Hunyadi, to whom they may have been kin. They may therefore also have been originally Vlach, but it seems more likely they were Slavs, taking their name from the village of Szapolya (Zapolje), in Slavonia, on the borders with Bosnia (today in Croatia—Za polja is Croatian for ‘behind the fields’). They gathered properties in Pozsega County (now in Croatia) and Szepes County (now in Slovakia) and by the 1460s, three brothers emerged and took on the most prominent positions in the Kingdom, and formed the core of a ‘nationalist’ party, those opposed to either a Jagiellonian (Polish) or a Habsburg (Austrian) takeover, following the extinction of the previous Hungarian royal dynasty. The eldest, Miklós, was Bishop of Transylvania, based in Gyulafehérvár, from 1462; Imre was the Chief of the Treasury for King Matthias Corvinus, and Ban of Croatia and Dalmatia. A ‘ban’ is a viceroy or governor of a significant territory. The youngest brother, István governed the family’s domains in Szepes County from one of the most powerful fortresses in the Kingdom (Szepes Castle, now Spiš); and also from a second powerful castle a bit further to the west, Trencsén (now Trenčin). This part of Hungary, the mountainous northern section, was known until 1920 as ‘Upper Hungary’, and is today Slovakia. Though not a part of Transylvania, the story of these two regions is tightly interconnected for much of their histories.

As Matthias Corvinus turned his attentions to adding Bohemia and Silesia to his domains in the 1480s, he left Imre Zápolya behind as Palatine (Nádor) of Hungary, basically the regent or viceroy. The King also conquered the duchies of Austria, and left István Zápolya as governor there. István later succeeded his brother as Palatine of Hungary before he died in 1499. He left behind two sons, János and György, who became leading military figures. But the family was also by now linked by blood to the old Polish royal house, the Piasts, and in the early years of the 16^th century, would increase their status further through a marriage of their sister, Borbála, to Sigismund I, King of Poland (though she died only a few years later). Sigismund’s brother, Vladislas, was King of Hungary, and appointed János as Voivode of Transylvania and Count of the Székelys in 1510. Not bad for a family that hadn’t even existed a century before.

János Zápolya, from his base in Transylvania, led the Hungarian armies against the invading Ottoman Turks in successive campaigns after 1513, and both he and his brother György were commanders of the army at the fateful battle of Mohács, in which much of the Hungarian nobility, and the new young King (Lajos II) himself, were killed or captured. In the void, many Hungarian nobles elected the King’s brother-in-law, Ferdinand of Austria, as new King of Hungary. But a significant group of nobles, mostly the lower nobility and gentry, and those based further from Vienna, in Upper Hungary and Transylvania, voted instead for János Zápolya. His story is thus part of the history of Hungary more generally. From 1529, he made Hungary a vassal state to the Ottoman Sultan, and agreed that the Western part of Hungary (to be known as ‘Royal Hungary’) would be subject to the Habsburgs in Vienna. He solidified his family’s accession into the ‘royal’ world by marriage in 1539 to the daughter of his former brother-in-law (by his second wife), Princess Isabella of Poland. But he died only a year later, leaving an infant son.

Isabella of Poland was regent for her son King János II Zsigmond, from 1540 to 1551. The Turks took direct control of Buda, so she moved her government to Transylvania and its capital, Gyulafehérvár. In 1551, she and her son briefly ‘abdicated’ and fled to Poland, but were restored to their throne by the Sultan in 1556. Isabella died in 1559, leaving her son fully in charge of his half of the Hungarian kingdom. He placed it formally under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire once more in 1566, and did homage to Sultan Suleiman outside Belgrade. In the 1560s, as the Reformation continued to sweep across Europe, János Zsigmond first adopted Lutheranism, then Calvinism, and finally, Unitarianism—making him the only Unitarian monarch Europe has ever seen. Unitarians were also referred to as anti-Trinitarians, rejecting the divinity of Christ. János Zsigmond passed the Edict of Torda in 1568 saying that all people of Transylvania and Eastern Hungary (known as the ‘Partium’) could worship as their own conscience dictated. This was radical stuff! Two years later, by the Treaty of Speyer, he acknowledged that Emperor Maximilian II was King of Hungary, and in return he was recognised as sovereign Prince of Transylvania, a state under the protection of the Ottoman Empire. This first independent prince of Transylvania died only a year later, in 1571. He was succeeded by a Catholic, István (Stephen) Báthory.

Unlike the Zápolyas, or even the Hunyadis, the Báthory clan were amongst the most ancient and distinguished in all of Hungary, and were firmly based in Transylvania and perfectly poised to lead it into a century of semi-independence. They took their name from the town of Bátor, now Nyírbátor, in the far northeast corner of modern Hungary (Szabolcs County), on the borders with western Transylvania. The name is thought to stem from the Old Turkish word ‘batir’ (or even a Mongolian word, ‘bator’), originally meaning a ‘good hero’, and corresponding to ‘bátor’ in modern Hungarian.

The Báthory family emerged from one of the ancient clans of the Hungarian tribes known as the Gutkeled, though legend places the origins of this group as two brothers from Swabia, not Magyars, Gut and Keled, who emigrated to this area in the 1040s. Whatever their origins, they rose to great prominence in the period of the decline of the first royal dynasty in Hungary: István of Clan Gutkeled was Palatine of Hungary from 1246, and Ban of Slavonia from 1248—he established almost an independent state here, based in Zagreb, and took the title ‘Dux’ in 1254. When he died in 1259, his four sons took over in various powerful and semi-independent positions in the Kingdom, with Joachim in particular leading a rebellion against King Stephen V in 1272, and taking over as Guardian and Tutor of the new young king, Ladislas IV. This was the start of a period known as the ‘feudal anarchy’ when magnates basically ran the Kingdom as independent petty princes. The Árpád dynasty collapsed and then went extinct in 1301, and order was only restored with the accession of the powerful Charles of Anjou and the defeat of his rivals in 1308.

By this point, the Gutkeled Clan had divided into various sub-lineages, who started to adopt surnames based on their key properties (though they would continue to share the same or similar coats of arms). One of these was Briccius or Bereck, who was given Bátor in 1279 by Ladislas IV as thanks to him and his uncles for serving him in the magnate wars. Eventually the Báthory family split into two branches: one based in Somlyó (or Szilágysomlyó, today’s Șimleu Silvaniei, in Transylvania); and one in Ecsed (now Nagyecsed in northeast Hungary—this was the burial place of many members of the family, including the famous Countess Elizabeth Báthory). There is another family with a similar name, Báthory de Gagy, who were part of the Clan Aba, another one of the very early Magyar clans, who will come up again below.

The junior branch, at Castle Ecsed, rose to greater prominence first. In the early part of the 15^th century, István Báthory held several important court and government offices, notably Master of the Stewards, 1417, and Chief Justiciar of Hungary, 1435. His four sons were pillars of the reign of King Matthias Corvinus: Master of the Horse, Master of Stewards, Master of the Treasury, Chief Justiciar and Bishop of Vác (a chief royal counsellor). In 1479, István was named Voivode of Transylvania. His nephews were also prominent in the era of the Battle of Mohács, where one of these, György, Master of the Horse, was killed. The eldest, another István, was at the time the Palatine of Hungary, and he became one of the leaders of the pro-Habsburg faction after Mohács, organising the election of Archduke Ferdinand at Pozsony (now Bratislava). The Turks confiscated his lands, so Ferdinand gave him the Castle of Dévény (now Devin), a powerful fortress that guards the entrance to that city.

As we saw with the Zápolyas, István Báthory wanted to raise up his family’s status by marrying royalty: he married a Polish princess, Sophia, a potential heiress to the Duchy of Mazovia. They had no sons, however, so family leadership passed to three nephews, who again dominated court offices and regional administration, still loyal to the Habsburgs: the eldest, Bonaventura, was Master of the Treasury, Voivode of Transylvania and Chief Justiciar in the 1540s-50s. He was virtual ruler of the Kingdom of Hungary in a period when the Turks were pushed back (the 1550s).

Ecsed remained the family’s nearly impregnable base. The castle had been built by this branch of the Báthorys in the 1320s, on an island in a bog, not too far from the town of Bátor. A dragon was said to patrol this bog, and by some accounts it is this dragon’s teeth, pulled out by one of the warrior ancestors, that adorn the Báthory coat of arms.

Ecsed was considered to be one of the most impregnable castles in the Kingdom. From here, Bonaventura’s nephew, yet another István, Chief Justiciar from 1586, governed Szabolcs and Szatmár counties. His eldest sister, Erzsébet (Elizabeth), was raised here, and became his chief heir in 1605, though she resided at her late husband’s castle of Csejte (now Čachtice, Slovakia). Her reputation as the ‘Blood Countess’, that she bathed in the blood of hundreds of murdered virgin peasant girls, is based on accusations by her powerful neighbours—in particular her Thurzó cousins, who coveted her extensive lands—and fuelled by the Habsburg dislike of her Calvinist faith and excessive wealth. She was confined to house arrest in her castle in 1611, and died in 1614.

Ecsed and the other lands of this branch passed to the Somlyó branch, then to the Crown, which re-granted it to the Bethlen family, then to the Rákóczi family, both of whom will feature in the later sections of this blog. It remained an impregnable fortress and a centre of rebellions, until it was finally taken over by Emperor Leopold in 1711 and completely destroyed. There is apparently nothing left.

So we need to switch back to the senior branch, Somlyó, and to the story of Transylvania itself. This castle was acquired by marriage in 1351, and rebuilt as Báthory Castle in the 1590s. The town today remains about 30% Hungarian and 25% Calvinist.

In 1530, István Báthory of Somlyó was named Voivode of Transylvania by János Zápolya, Unlike his kin from the Ecsed branch, he did not support the Habsburg election after the Battle of Mohács. His son, István—the most famous István Báthory, with an international reputation, so I’ll call him Stephen—initially did fight for Ferdinand, but was captured by the Turks in 1553, and, the Habsburg king refusing to pay his ransom, promptly switched sides. When János II Zápolya, Prince of Transylvania, died in 1571, the magnates elected Stephen Báthory voivode, not prince, though he assumed that title later. Báthory was now seen as one of the most powerful magnates in the east, and was elected in 1575 to become King of Poland and Grand Duke of Lithuania, in an effort to stop the expansion of Habsburg power. He agreed to marry the last Jagiellonian princess, Anna, in 1576, and left for Poland, leaving his older brother Kristof behind as Voivoide of Transylvania. King Stephen, a Catholic, re-affirmed the policy of religious tolerance in both of his realms, Transylvania and Poland-Lithuania, and wanted to use Polish power to restore an independent Hungarian kingdom. Instead, he was occupied with war with Russia for many years, weakened, and died in 1586. His widow, Queen Anna, had considered promoting his nephew Zsigmond Báthory as the next king in Poland, but instead supported the election of her own nephew, Sigismund Vasa.

Zsigmond, Kristof’s son, had been named Voivode of Transylvania by his uncle in 1581 (though he was only 9 years old), and succeeded him as Prince of Transylvania in 1588. His reign was turbulent to say the least. He was governed by his uncle, István Bocskai, and was confirmed as prince by Sultan Murad III, in return for a 15,000 florin yearly tribute. Rejecting his mother’s Calvinism, Prince Zsigmond was a fervent Catholic, which made him unpopular with the local Transylvanian nobility. Making matters worse, he decided to challenge Ottoman suzerainty, ignoring the advice of his Báthory cousins, who, despite being strongly Catholic, did not think it wise to provoke the Ottomans without the full support of Poland. Imprisoning these cousins (and even executing one of them), in 1594 Prince Zsigmond joined the Holy League set up by the Pope and the Emperor, Rudolf II, to push the Ottomans back down the Balkans, and married the Emperor’s niece, Archduchess Maria Christina, in 1595. He was created Prince of the Empire in 1595 as well, and recognised by the Emperor as hereditary Prince of Transylvania and ‘Partium’ (the easternmost counties of Hungary). He even, for a moment, got the voivodes of Wallachia and Moldavia (the Romanian provinces subject to the Ottoman sultan) to acknowledge him as suzerain. Together they defeated the Ottomans at the Battle of Giurgiu, on the Danube along the border with Bulgaria, in October 1595. This was the high point of the independent Principality of Transylvania.

This was followed, however, by lots of defeats, and Zsigmond abdicated in 1598. Maria Christina was elected herself as Princess, until Archduke Maximilian of Austria arrived in 1599 to rule the territory directly as a province of the Habsburg Monarchy. Her marriage, never consummated for whatever reason (Zsigmond claimed he was bewitched; later historians suggest he was a homosexual), was dissolved. The Ex-Prince fled to Poland where he was given lands to rule in Silesia (Ratibor and Opole). He tried to return in 1599 to make a deal with the Sultan, but failed and abdicated again, then returned again in 1601 with a Polish army and briefly got the support of the Sultan, but was unable to establish stable rule, so he abdicated once more, now in favour of Emperor Rudolf. He settled in Bohemia (at Libochovice, in the far northwest), resisted several calls from the Emperor to try again to recover Transylvania, and died in exile in 1613. Maria Christina did not remarry but joined a convent back in Austria, where she died in 1621.

In the midst of all this, Prince Zsigmond had appointed his cousin András Báthory as Prince of Transylvania, in March 1599, with the support of Polish and Ottoman troops. A Cardinal since 1584 (nominated by his uncle, King Stephen—and at once point considered as a  possibility to succeed him as king in 1586), and prince-bishop of Warmia in Poland since 1589, he was firmly on the side of the Poles and the idea of re-catholicising Transylvania. He did re-establish the Catholic diocese in Gyulafehérvár, which remains today, but his rule as Prince of Transylvania lasted only a few months. The Habsburgs allied with the Prince of Wallachia (Michael the Brave, or Mihai Bravu in Romanian) and with the Székely peasants who always seem to get dumped on and had had enough, and in October 1599, the Polish-Ottoman troops of Prince-Cardinal András were defeated at Sellenberk (Șelimbăr near Sibiu, in the south-eastern corner of Transylvania). András was beheaded, and power was given to Prince Michael. The battle of Șelimbăr is seen today as the first moment leading to the unification of the Romanian people.

The Báthorys were not completely finished as a ruling dynasty, however, and we will return to Prince Gábor Báthory in a bit. First we have a quick succession of princes: Mózes Székely, István Bocskai and Zsigmond Rákóczi.

Mózes Székely was, as his name suggests, a Székler. His family was from Székelyudvarhely (now Odorheiu Secuiesc) in the eastern corner of Transylvania. It had been the seat of the Székler assembly since the 1350s, and the seat (‘szék’) of Udvarhely County. The family’s estates were centred on Siménfalva, a town still today 99% Hungarian and mostly Calvinist or Unitarian. His father had been a regional supporter of Zápolya and converted with him to Unitarianism in the 1560s, and was given the job of controlling the production of salt in this region, an important commodity. Young Mózes became a commander of the Székler guards of Stephen Báthory in the 1570s and accompanied him to Poland. He was granted estates back in Transylvania and took over his father’s post overseeing the salt mines, and defending the region against Turkish attacks in the 1590s. He helped restore Zsigmond Báthory in 1598, still leading the Székler army, but these turned on András Báthory and murdered him, as we’ve seen. Mózes became commander of the Habsburg troops in Transylvania, 1599, under the command of the Wallachian prince, Michael, but when the latter’s regime started to collapse in 1600, he travelled to Poland to try to bring about another Báthory restoration. When the Habsburgs regained control once more, Székely instigated a rebellion, 1603, with Turkish and Tatar aid, and in May claimed the title Prince of Transylvania. Again the Skékeler people allied with the Wallachians (who promised them a larger role in government), and they defeated and killed their former leader in July. So much for being the local boy.

Mózes Székely Jr was born a few days later. Raised by a Bethlen grandmother, he was put under the protection of a later Transylvanian prince, Gabriel Bethlen, who appointed him Master Steward of the Household, Justiciar of Udverhely County (1620), then gave him lots of estates and married him to a wealthy heiress. All of this was taken away from him by Prince György Rákóczi, however, in the 1630s, and Székely went into exile in the Ottoman Empire. As a prisoner/guest of the Sultan in Constantinople, he spent the next two decades as a diplomatic chesspiece, always a potential claimant to the Transylvanian throne to be wheeled out as needed. But he eventually lost his value, and the Turks sent him to live on the Island of Rhodes where he died in 1657 or ‘58.

A more successful story was that of István Bocskai. His family was from Bihar County in western Transylvania, and also had lands in Zemplén County, which is now eastern Slovakia (near the border with Ukraine). His older sister married the Voivode of Transylvania appointed by Ferdinand of Austria in 1553 (István Dobó), and young István was sent to the Habsburg court in Vienna where he served as a page, then a steward. His father converted to Calvinism in the 1560s, then died in 1570, leaving the teenager in the care of another sister, who married Kristof Báthory, the regent of Transylvania for his brother King Stephen (whom we encountered already above). The two families were therefore fairly entwined, so even as a youngster in 1581 (aged 14), Bocskai was appointed a member of the Regency Council for his nephew young Prince Zsigmond Báthory (aged 9). He married a wealthy widow with lands in Bihar County (the great fortress at Nagykereki), and was appointed governor (ispán) of that county by 1592. He helped Prince Zsigmond throw off the Turkish yoke in 1593-94, then led his armies to defeat the Ottoman forces in Wallachia in 1595 and put down a revolt of the Széklers in 1596.

By 1598 István Bocskai was crucial as an interlocutor between Prince Zsigmond and Emperor Rudolf II (who created him a Baron—a rare creation of a noble title for Hungarians who normally considered that a family name was honour enough). Then when Zsigmond abdicated, Bocskai was left behind as his viceroy. Rudolf changed his opinion of his ally however, and deprived him of this office, so the latter helped restored his Báthory cousin in 1599. The tables soon turned again, and Bocskai was sent to Transylvania as the Emperor’s envoy to unseat the pro-Ottoman Prince András. He therefore wanted to be recognised by Rudolf and perhaps rewarded with the voivodeship or even the title of prince, so he pressed his case in 1600, and the local diet confiscated his estates and banished him. He spent much of 1601-02 at the imperial court in Prague as a counsellor to Rudolf II, and was restored to his estates in 1604. He returned to the area to find the destruction of Transylvania caused by the Habsburg-Ottoman wars, and in particular the persecution by the Habsburg governors of the Calvinist nobility (like himself). He realised that only a free (Ottoman supported) principality would thrive, and launched the great Bocskai Uprising (or ‘war of independence’). In November 1604 he was given an ahidnâme (charter) from Sultan Ahmed I naming him Prince of Transylvania. He made peace with the Széklers and allied with the Prince of Moldavia. In February 1605, he was elected Prince of Transylvania by the local diet; this was confirmed by an assembly of nobles from Upper Hungary in April. At the height of his power, Prince István Bocskai asked the Sultan for a royal crown, for all of Hungary, and got one. He was styled as ‘King’ by the Pasha in Buda. This crown is still kept in the royal treasury in Vienna.

By the Treaty of Vienna, June 1606, Bocskai was confirmed as Prince of Transylvania (with the Ottoman sultan as suzerain), and the Emperor recognised the rights of Protestants to worship freely across Hungary. The Prince then helped negotiated a long-desired peace between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in November at Zsitvatorok. But by this point Prince István was weary and ill, and he died in December. He had no children from his late wife (though he had considered marrying the widowed Archduchess Maria Christina), and named a successor, one of his companions in arms, Bálint Drugeth, but the Transylvanian Diet chose someone else instead, a very wealthy older man, whose loyalties were neither to the Ottomans nor the Habsburgs: Zsigmond Rákóczi.

The name Rákóczi is of course for many synonymous with Hungarian history. The ‘Rákóczi March’ is quite a well-known tune—though not written till the 1820s, and made famous soon after through its use by Hector Berlioz in his ‘Damnation of Faust’ (and later by Liszt in one of his Hungarian Rhapsodies). The family traces its lineage back to the 13^th century, and the Bogátradvány family, whose origins were said to be from Bohemia (why do none of the Hungarian magnates seem to have actually Magyar ancestry?). An early notable ancestor from this clan was Ipoch, Ban of Slovenia from 1204, and Voivode of Transylvania in 1216-17. By the early 14^th century, a descendant took his surname from a castle called Rákóc, in Zemplén County (now in eastern Slovakia), which may have been named for the Slovak word for crayfish (rak; the village today is called Rakovec).

They remained a fairly minor gentry until they shot to the top with the rise of Zsigmond Rákóczi in the second half of the 16^th century. He owned lands in the Tokaj wine region of Zemplén County, and built up a family seat in the 1550s at Szerencs Castle. This remained the seat of the Rákóczi family, and a seat of Calvinism in this part of Upper Hungary, until the early 17^th century. In the 18^th century Szerencs was rebuilt as a palace, and today it is a hotel, a museum and a town cultural centre.

Zsigmond’s early career was in the Habsburg military, and he later served as a tax collector for Emperor Rudolf. By the 1590s, he was an important Habsburg commander in the region, despite his Protestantism, and was given command of the huge fortress of Eger, in Heves County, northeast of Buda. He was named Lieutenant of Heves County in 1588 and made a Baron. His wealth was prodigious, and he supported local Protestant schools and the first translation of the Bible into Hungarian. He even lent money to the Emperor for troops, and in 1597 was given the right to bear the Imperial eagle on his coat of arms, instead of the traditional Rákóczi raven. He continued to build his fortune particularly in the far northeast frontier, taking over Munkács Castle as guardian of his wife’s sons, then Makovica Castle from the bankrupt Ruthenian Prince Ostrogski.

Munkács will feature more in the next sections. Makovica, also known as Zboró (Zborov in Slovak), was an important fortress in Upper Hungary, near the frontier with Poland and guarding some of the key passes across the Carpathians. Built in the 13^th century it was held by the Czudar family for a century before becoming Crown property, then passed through various proprietors before being purchased in 1601 by Zsigmond Rákóczi. It became one of the main strongholds for the family in the century to come before it was destroyed by Habsburg forces in 1684. Rebuilt and destroyed again and again in the next two hundred years, it remains a romantic ruin today.

Now one of the richest men in Hungary, and possessing some of its strongest fortresses, Zsigmond Rákóczi became disillusioned with Habsburg rule in Transylvania and Upper Hungary, and joined the Bocskai Uprising in Spring 1605. He was named governor of Transylvania by the rebellious prince in August. His wealth and his control of key trade routes north towards Poland made him an invaluable magnate to the health of Transylvania, so it was not too surprising that he was elected Prince of Transylvania by the Diet in February 1607. He was acknowledged by the Ottomans, but not by the Habsburgs. Bocskai’s preferred successor Drugeth threatened a civil war, as did the Habsburg choice, Gábor Báthory, so Rákóczi abdicated in March 1608 to avoid more bloodshed. Well into his 60s, he did not have the energy or the desire to rule, and in fact he died only a few months later and was buried back in the Calvinist chapel in Szerencs.

Gábor (or Gabriel) Báthory, of the Somlyó branch of Báthorys, was born a Catholic, but was orphaned and raised by his Protestant cousin István Báthory from the Ecsed branch. When the latter died in 1605, Gábor inherited his lands, and thus joined together the possessions of the two lines, becoming one of the richest magnates in Hungary. He was also willed much of the lands of his cousin István Bocskai, so saw himself as the most logical successor when he died in December 1606. He gained the support of the Habsburgs by promising to re-convert to Catholicism (though he never did). He put forward his claims to the elderly Rákóczy in February and was elected by the Diet in March 1608, and was soon recognised by both the Sultan and the Emperor.

In 1610, the new Prince of Transylvania moved his capital from Gyulafehérvár, so badly damaged during the wars, to Szeben, the richest Saxon town in the region, known by them as Hermannstadt (and today as Sibiu in Romanian). Hermann was probably an early German founder of the settlement—it remained majority German, and Lutheran, until after the Second World War, but today following mass emigration has almost none of its former diversity.

Perhaps feeling a bit over-confident, Prince Gábor Báthory tried to extend his influence over the other two dependent principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia, greatly annoying the Sultan, Ahmed I, who sent troops to unseat him, in August 1613, and to replace him with another Gábor, from the ancient Bethlen dynasty. The last Báthory prince was murdered by assassins from the famous group of Hungarian soldiers known as the Hajdúk. One further member of the family, András, stayed mostly out of sight until he died in 1637, leaving one daughter, Zsófia, who would re-connect this ancient family to the Rákóczys and the future history of Transylvania.

[to be continued in Part II]

Sometimes one single prominent marriage can bring an entire family lineage back into the popular consciousness, even if the details of the who, what, where remain fuzzy. Such is the case for His Serene Highness Prince Stanisław ‘Stas’ Radziwiłł, whose celebrated marriage to Lee Bouvier in March 1959 propelled him into the limelight as part of the world of ‘Camelot’ and the American Kennedys.

Although before the second World War Prince Stanisław worked for the Polish delegation to the League of Nations and for the Polish Red Cross, the question of his ‘national identity’ is an interesting one. Was he a Pole? When he was born in 1914, at the Radziwill Palace of Szpanów, in Volhynia, he was a subject of the Russian Empire. This region became part of Poland when it regained its independence, then in 1939 it was incorporated into the Soviet Union as part of the Ukrainian SSR. But it had changed times several times even before that: joined to Lithuania in the 14^th century, then transferred to Poland in the 16^th, and from Poland to Russia at the end of the 18^th century. Today most of the grandest former Radziwill properties are in Ukraine and Belarus, but in the past the family were usually considered Polish aristocrats—yet at the very start they were a Lithuanian noble family. While the world’s media focuses this month on the volatile Russo-Ukrainian border, a look at the fascinating history of the princely Radziwill clan can help us understand some of the quite fluid history of this region of the world.

To start with Ukraine, one of the challenges in establishing a national identity in the past hundred years has been a lack of a clearly identifiable historical ruling dynasty, around which most, with few exceptions, European countries were constructed in the medieval and early modern periods. Nationalist state builders of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries knew this, hence the establishment of ‘imported’ royal families on the thrones of newly independent states from Greece to Romania, and the plan to do the same for countries emerging from the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917-18, like Finland or Lithuania, and for Ukraine too: Archduke Wilhelm of Austria was briefly considered for the throne of an independent kingdom, according to the fascinating book by Timothy Snyder, The Red Prince. But centuries before, when this area of what is now Belarus and western Ukraine was part of the federated state of Poland-Lithuania, there was a saying: “There is a king in Warsaw, and a Radziwiłł in Nesvizh”.

Nesvizh, today’s Niasviž in Belarus, was for centuries the centre of a private princely estate that rivalled in size and wealth many western sovereign states. At their height, the aristocratic owners of this estate possessed 23 castles, 426 towns, 2,000 manors and 10,000 villages. They had a private army, which, by the 18^th century, could muster 6,000 men. They had townhouses in most important cities in Poland and Lithuania (Warsaw, Lublin, Vilnius), and other regional centres further east (Minsk, Lviv), as well as the major European capitals, Paris, Vienna and Berlin. One of the most prominent in this last category was the Radziwill Palace in Berlin, on Wilhelmstraße near Potsdamer Platz, an 18^th-century palais which was acquired by the Prussian government in 1869, and soon after became the seat of the Imperial Chancellor, and was the residence of Adolf Hitler before the building of the New Chancellery in 1939, and was mostly destroyed in World War II.

The Radziwiłł family (properly spelled with two ł’s, which makes a w sound, but usually anglicised simply to Radziwill) were major landowners in what is now Ukraine, but they could never be seen as ‘Ukrainian’ princes, in part due to religion: throughout their history they were strong proponents of Catholicism or Calvinism, never Orthodoxy. Moreover, they were just one of several great princely families whose landholdings in this region were on a truly epic scale.

Instead, we need to see the Radziwills as representatives of an earlier, pre-nationalist, view of the world, a Lithuanian noble house who rose to power through merging its interests with the Polish monarchy (though sometimes strongly opposing it), and eventually asserting its own independent links to the other dominant powers in the region, Prussia and Russia. There are literally dozens of eminent members of this family, male and female, so this post will offer highlights, and as usual, will focus on dynastic links and built heritage—and there’s a lot of it, and much of it hidden from Western tourists for decades behind the Iron Curtain. So here we can do some virtual tourism thanks to the internet. I will start in Lithuania, then look at the two main branches of the family: the Biržai (Birże in Polish) line and the Nezvizh (Nieśwież) line. Though the latter is the senior branch, it’s the only one to continue into the present, so it makes more sense to finish with it. Across its history, the dynasty—raised to the level of princes in 1518—produced three bishops, two cardinals and one queen, plus eight grand chancellors and seven holders of the post of grand hetman (the highest military commander) of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

So let’s start with Lithuania. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people—they are not Slavs like their neighbours to the east and south. They were amongst the last group of Europeans to convert to Christianity, in the late 14^th century, but in the two centuries leading up to this the threat of Orthodox Slavic principalities to the east and crusading Catholic warriors from the west forced the Lithuanian nobles to consolidate tribal rule into a unified state, a Grand Duchy. One of the greatest of these Grand Dukes was Jogaila, who not only converted to Christianity, in 1386, but also married the young female ruler of Poland, Jadwiga, joining together the two principalities into one mega-state, Poland-Lithuania, which would stick together until the partitions of these lands between Russia, Prussia and Austria in the 1790s. As part of the dynastic merger agreements of the 1380s, many of the Lithuanian noble families were admitted to the Polish system of ‘heraldic families’, in which clusters of noble houses bore the same or similar coats of arms. The Radziwills’ arms would henceforth bear three horns (‘trąby’).

Grand Duke Jogaila changed his name to the Christian name Vladislav. At the same time, his greatest Lithuanian noble supporters did the same. One of these, Astikas, took the name Christian (or Kristinas). He was said to have descended from a younger brother of one of the early Lithuanian rulers. His son bore the name Radvila (and doesn’t seem to have used his baptised name, Nicholas), which, according to legend refers to a semi-mythical Lithuanian ancestor who was raised by wolves (rado vilko), the pagan high priest Lizdeika who went on to found the city of Vilnius (in an echo of the traditional founding of Rome story by Romulus and Remus). Another idea suggests that the name derives from an ancient Slavic name Radzivon, from the old Greek word for ‘pink’, linking the family to the earlier Slavic rulers of the area, and Greek Orthodoxy. These two contrasting ideas come from Lithuanian sources or Polish sources, so, as always, nationalism plays its part in the creation of history!

In any case, Radvila’s son, Nicholas (Mikalojus in Lithuanian or Mikołaj in Polish) adopted the name Radvilaitisas a surname, later polonised to Radziwiłł. All three of these founders were great landowners in the area of central Lithuania, including Musninkai, to the northwest of the Grand Ducal capital, Vilnius. In 1447, the Grand Duke Casimir granted Radvila the much larger town and estates of Kėdainiai (Kiejdany in Polish), further to the northwest, in a separate region of Lithuania known as Samogitia. This town would remain one of the main bases of the family in the centuries to come. They developed it into a commercial hub, with good water links to the Baltic Sea and to the Hanseatic League, and built one of the first Calvinist (ie, Evangelical Reformed) churches in the region at Kėdainiai, which still retains a family mausoleum.

But this extraordinary Protestant activity—one of the most interesting aspects of the Radziwill story—in mostly Catholic Lithuania is in the future. For now, Radvila and his son Mikalojus built up their dynastic power in the region by service to the Grand Duke: the father was Marshal of the Court from 1440, governor of Trakai (one of Lithuania’s former capitals), then castellan of Vilnius, in 1475; he served also as an envoy to the neighbouring Teutonic Order (Germans) and to the Golden Horde (Mongols). The son was also castellan of Trakai, governor of Vilnius, and rose to the post of Grand Chancellor of Lithuania (the top official after the Grand Duke) in 1492. The family would be governors (vaivada) of Vilnius for over 150 years, and one of their major urban palaces still stands in that city, whose history they dominated for so long. Originally a wooden house, then replaced with a baroque structure in the 1630s, Radvilas Palace was mostly unloved in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Today it houses an art museum, and although when I visited a couple years ago it looked quite dilapidated, it is undergoing major renovations and has big plans for the future.

Mikalojus ‘the Old’ (d. 1509) had four sons, Mikalojus II, Vaitiekus, Jonas (John) and Jergis (George), and a daughter, Anna, who married a Polish prince (from a junior line of the former ruling house), showing how far the family had advanced in just a few generations. Of these sons, the second became Bishop of Vilnius (taking the name Albert), while the others each founded a branch of the family. The eldest son was given lands confiscated by a Lithuanian rebel, Prince Glinski, in 1509, notably Goniądz in the historic region of Podlachia or Podlasie in eastern Poland. Nothing remains of the castle here, but its name became prominent briefly in 1518 as part of the princely title created for Mikalojus II by the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, as recognition for his part in the King-Grand Duke Sigismund I’s visit to Vienna a few years before. He also still owned the family’s dynastic patrimony in central Lithuania, and acquired another property through marriage, Medilas, to the east (Medele in Polish, now Miadziel in Belarus). He took over his father’s post as Grand Chancellor of Lithuania in 1510, and was a key proponent of forging tighter political links between Poland and Lithuania (and was thus given the nickname ‘Amor Poloniae’).

The title ‘Prince Radziwill of Goniądz and Medilas’ did not survive very long, however, as Mikalojus and his three sons were all dead by the 1540s. One son, Jonas, the 2^nd Prince Radziwill, was ducal governor of the Duchy of Samogitia, while the other was the Bishop of Samogitia—a pretty good monopoly on local power, secular and sacred. Jonas had three daughters, who took with them the lands of the senior branch into other noble houses—each of these sons-in-law was a voivode or governor of one of the key provinces of Lithuania’s great eastern expansion (done mostly in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, but a source of enduring tension with Muscovy): Polotsk, Vitebsk and Ruthenia. These lands form today the nation known as Belarus, so it is here where we will ultimately shift our attention for the second branch (Nesvizh). But it’s also worth noting that at least one of these three daughters, Anna (d. 1600), converted to Calvinism, and later Unitarianism, and became known as a religious writer and supporter of the Polish Brethren.

Although Anna and her cousins in both the second and third branches of the Radziwill family initially joined the evangelical reform movement sweeping across Europe in the 1530s-40s, only the third branch, Biržai, retained it. This branch, at first known for its earlier seat of Dubingiai (Dubinki in Polish), was founded by Jurgis (Jerzy, or George), known as ‘Hercules’ for his great prowess in battle against the traditional enemies of the Grand Duchy to the east: Muscovy, the Cossacks and the Tatars. He was at various points governor of the Kiev province, as well as castellan of Trakai and Vilnius, and in 1531 was named Grand Hetman of Lithuania. The term ‘hetman’ is a curious title used in various states of Eastern Europe to denote a military commander; it was also used by the Cossacks to denote the leader of the tribes. It seems to come either from German Hauptmann, ‘captain’, or Turkic ataman, ‘father of men’. As leader of the Polish-Lithuanian armies, and in conjunction with the rising political power of his son Mikolaj the Red and his nephew Mikolaj the Black, the Radziwills dominated the Grand Duchy in almost every aspect.

Mikolaj II ‘the Red’ forged an alliance with his cousin Mikolaj ‘the Black’ (see below). Both were strong proponents of greater autonomy for Lithuania, within the dual Polish-Lithuanian monarchy, though the family itself was increasingly Polish in language and customs (and I’ll switch to Polish spellings for their names from here on). When the senior princely line of the family became extinct in 1542, the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, extended this great honour by making both cousins princes of the Empire, in 1547 (confirmed by the Polish king in 1549).

This was a good move on the Emperor’s part and would secure a Habsburg ally—as we shall see—within Poland-Lithuania for years to come. The title of ‘imperial prince’ given to nobles who resided outside of the Empire was purely honorary and brought with it no legal rights within the Empire, such as a vote in the Imperial Diet. To mark their honour, both new princes were permitted to place their three-horned trąby arms onto a black eagle symbolising the Holy Roman Empire; the modern Radziwill coat-of-arms was born.

But another key element that propelled the Radziwills into the category of European princes was the fact that by 1547, Mikolaj’s sister Barbara was secretly married to a royal prince, who succeeded his father as King Sigismund II August of Poland (and Grand Duke of Lithuania) the next year, making Barbara Radziwillówna a queen. There was great opposition amongst the Polish nobility to allow her to be formally recognised, and some accused her of seducing the King or worse of bewitching him with spells or poisons. But through the great power of the two Radziwill cousins, Red and Black, she was crowned in Krakow in December 1550. She died only five months later, and her story soon evolved into one of true love and devotion triumphing over diversity, revived especially in the Romantic 19^th century, as the subject of paintings, plays and novels, and again today (there have been two recent musicals based on her story).

By this point Barbara’s brother Mikolaj the Red was the virtual ruler of Lithuania, second only to the King, as Grand Chancellor from 1566. After King Sigismund II died in 1572, the last of the House of Jagiello, the Radziwill princes demonstrated their loyalty to the Habsburgs by supporting a Habsburg candidate in the royal elections that followed (from 1573 onwards the Polish throne was elective, all the way into the 18^th century). But the Radziwill-Habsburg alliance was unusual given that both of the new imperial princes had embraced the Evangelical Reform movement (the branch of Protestantism started by John Calvin) in the 1560s, and actively built Protestant schools and churches in their estates and towns. Mikolaj the Red was based at Dubingiai, in the forested area just north of Vilnius. The castle there had been built by the Lithuanian grand dukes in the early 15^th century, and was rebuilt by the Radziwills in the early 16^th. At its height it was the largest castle in Lithuania, and became an important centre for Calvinism. The family moved to Biržai early in the 17^th century (below), and Dubingiai fell into ruin, but many of the members of this branch were buried in the Reformed church there, whose remains have recently been excavated.

The two sons of Mikolaj the Red (d. 1584) were Prince Mikolaj III (d. 1589) and Prince Krzysztof (d. 1603)—both are called ‘prince’ since the title ‘prince of the Empire’ extends to all sons and daughters (and all subsequent male descendants) of the original bearer, not just the eldest son. The elder brother, Mikolaj, followed his father’s footsteps and supported the establishment of Calvinist schools and churches in Lithuania, as well as the Habsburg candidates for the Polish throne (unsuccessfully). His son, Jerzy (d. 1613), castellan of Trakai, did much the same, but began to see his family’s influence decline as their clear lack of support for the new royal family, the Vasas, brought them increasingly into disfavour at court in Krakow. Krzysztof, on the other hand, made a great name for himself as one of the most celebrated military commanders of the era, in seemingly endless wars against Muscovy to the east and Sweden to the north, earning him the nickname ‘Piorun’, Polish for ‘thunderbolt’. Like his father and grandfather, he was also Grand Hetman of Lithuania.

Thunderbolt’s sons continued this military tradition, but also continued the Radziwill family’s trend to establish its own foreign policy, at the expense of its relationship with the ruling house of Poland. Prince Janusz (d. 1620) was part of a rebellion against King Sigismund III Vasa in 1606, which was badly defeated. He also grew the family’s reputation as ‘princely’ not merely noble, through two marriages: first to the heiress of one of the ancient Russian principalities, Slutsk (or Słuck in Polish); and second to a daughter of the Elector of Brandenburg. Religiously, these were interesting marriages, since Zofia Olelkowicz of Slutsk was Orthodox (and would be canonised by the Belarusian Orthodox Church in 1983) and Elisabeth Sophie von Hohenzollern was Calvinist. Slutsk brought with it 7 castles and 32 villages, now in south-central Belarus. Like the other Radziwill properties, it became a major centre for Calvinism, but also attracted large amounts of Jewish settlers (50% of the population by the late 19^th century). The marriage with the Elector’s daughter brought with it closer ties to the emerging Duchy of Prussia, the secularised properties of the Teutonic Order (in 1525), wedged in between Poland and Lithuania.

Janusz’s brother, Prince Krzysztof II (d. 1640), also established his name fighting against the Russians and the Swedes, and like others in his family, became increasingly opposed to the rule of King Sigismund III. Alienated from the court, he established himself at this branch’s new seat, Biržai (Birże in Polish—both accent marks indicate a ‘zh’ sound), located in the northern regions of Lithuania. His residence was a new building, from the 1580s, in Renaissance style, with an artificial lake. Krzysztof renovated it again in the 1630s, along Italianate lines, and filled it with treasures and curiosities from all over the world. He developed his stables into one of the largest and most famous in Europe. Unfortunately Biržai was almost completely destroyed by Swedish armies in 1704, but it was reconstructed from the ruins in the 1980s and today houses a regional history museum.

The sons of Janusz and Krzysztof, Prince Bogusław and Prince Janusz II, took the family’s international reputation to new heights, very nearly achieved sovereignty of a sort, but then came crashing down again, and this branch itself became extinct by the end of the century. After studies in Leiden and stints as ambassador to Holland and England, the older (but junior) cousin, Janusz, rose to prominence first, as Chamberlain of Lithuania (1633), then Field Hetman (1646), Voivode of Vilnius (1653) and finally Grand Hetman (1654). His first marriage was to a prominent Polish noblewoman, but his second marriage, to the daughter of the Hospodar (‘prince’) of Moldavia, signified that he had higher ambitions. He assumed his family’s now traditional position as protector of Protestants throughout the Commonwealth, which may have led him towards closer association with the traditional enemy, Lutheran Sweden. In one of the episodes of the Northern Wars, Sweden defeated and occupied much of Lithuania, and in August 1655, Janusz signed a peace treaty with Sweden—unsanctioned by his sovereign the Grand Duke of Lithuania (King John II Casimir)—at his family’s residence at Kedainiai. This was followed by the ‘Union of Kedainiai’ in October, which proposed to create a semi-sovereign Radziwill duchy within the Swedish Empire. But the ink was barely dry before Janusz, already seriously ill, died and the Swedes were chased out of Lithuania. The Prince was regarded by the rest of the Polish and Lithuanian nobility as the grandest traitor that had ever been seen.

Prince Boguslaw (d. 1669) had supported his cousin’s ambitions, led a Swedish-backed army against the royalist forces of Poland-Lithuania, and shared his cousin’s downfall and shame in 1655. He retreated to the Prussian capital of his cousin, the Elector of Brandenburg. He set up residence in Königsberg, and was soon named Governor of Prussia (1657).

Before he left Lithuania, he had renovated yet another major palace in the region, this time in Poland (east-central): Starawieś, acquired by marriage in the 16^th century. Boguslaw added towers and cupolas before he sold it in 1664. The palace passed through many noble hands before it was re-purchased by a Radziwill in 1912 (having been renovated again in the 1840s in neo-gothic style). Starawieś Palace was nationalised in 1945, and used as a school and a summer camp, before being bought and renovated by the National Bank of Poland in the 1960s, and used today as a training centre.

In 1665, Boguslaw married his cousin’s daughter and heir, Princess Maria Anna, to keep all the other titles and estates in the family. By now they were using the titles Prince of Slutsk and Duke of Biržai and Dubingiai. These were passed to his only child, Princess Ludowika Karolina, who spent most of her short life (1667-95) in Königsberg and Berlin, but took an active interest in maintaining ‘her’ Calvinists back in Lithuania and Slutsk.

Princess Ludowika Karolina married two times, first to a younger son of the Elector of Brandenburg (Prince Ludwig), and then in 1688, to Karl Philipp, Count Palatine of Neuburg, who would later succeed to the title Elector Palatine. She had a daughter from this latter marriage, and the succession would be contested between different Polish families (supported by the Polish Crown), and the Neuburg family for many years. Princess Ludowika Karolina’s much later descendant, the Duke of Urach, used this link to advance his candidacy as king of an independent Lithuania in 1918 (see my blog on Teck and Urach). Much of the Neuburg succession, notably the Lithuanian lands of Biržai and Dubingiai, was re-acquired by the Nesvizh line of the Radziwills in the mid-18^th century, but was later seized by the Russian authorities in 1811and sold to another noble family. This brings the story of the Biržai and Dubingiai branch to an end, and links us to the other main branch, that of Nesvizh, and the descendants of Prince Mikolaj the Black.

Nesvizh Castle is, by western European standards, a princely palace on an epic scale. But it is only one of the many stately homes built by the Radziwills in the 16^th century in what is now southern Belarus (Polotsk) and northwest Ukraine (Volhynia). Nesvizh (Nieśwież in Polish, Niasviž in Belarusian, Nesvyžiaus in Lithuanian) was a large estate owned by Mikolaj the Black from 1533. Its importance was recognised in 1551 when it became one of the repositories for the state archives of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This region had been known in the middle ages as the Principality of Polotsk, a vassal state of the princes of Rus’ in Kiev, but annexed by the Lithuanian dukes in the 13^th century. By the 16^th century, with these territories being so far from the royal court in Krakow, it was important to have powerful loyal families stationed here, particularly to defend the frontier in frequent wars with the rising power of Muscovy to the east. The castle of Nesvizh was largely rebuilt in the 1580s, on an immense scale, with an entire town attached. It was sacked by the Swedes in 1706, then refurbished and enlarged, with three separate buildings joined together around a courtyard. In 1792, it was seized by the Russians, its precious archive taken to St Petersburg and its massive art collection dispersed. It was abandoned by the family until a renewed interest in the late 19^th century (and given an English style park). It became part of Poland again in 1920, then part of Soviet Union in 1939 and the family were expelled.

Back in the 16^th century, the owner of Nesvizh, Mikolaj the Black, was not entirely subservient to the policies of the ruling Jagiellonian dynasty. As we have seen above, he and his cousin, Mikolaj the Red were elevated to the rank of imperial princes in 1547, and were also amongst the most prominent converts to Calvinism in this region. Prince Mikolaj the Black notably provided funds for the printing of the first complete translation of the Bible into Polish in 1563, and founded a Reformed church and college in Vilnius. He increased the power of the grand dukes of Lithuania (remember, these are also the kings of Poland) in the Baltic by acting as chief negotiator with the Grand Master of the Livonian Order to oversee its dissolution and transformation into a vassal state (Courland, now Latvia) in 1562. And he was one of the chief proponents of the increased polonisation of the area, in culture and language (it is noted that by now the family spoke Polish, not Lithuanian, or Ruthenian, the language of the elites in the Grand Duchy). He was a strong supporter of the Crown as Grand Marshal of Lithuania (1544), Grand Chancellor (1550), and Voivode of Vilnius (1551). But he was also a leader of the movement to strengthen the position of Lithuania relative to Poland within the dual monarchy.

Nevertheless, this branch of the family diverged from the Biržai branch, in returning to a mostly loyal position towards the Polish Crown, and indeed to a firm loyalty to the Catholic Church. Mikolaj the Black had four sons. Three of them became in turn Grand Marshal of Lithuania. A fourth, Jerzy (d. 1600), renounced Protestantism in 1572, studied abroad with the Jesuits, and became bishop of Vilnius (1580), cardinal (1584), and bishop of Krakow (1593). As one of the strong proponents of the Catholic Reformation, he created a seminary in Vilnius and helped gain university status for the Jesuit academy in that city (today’s Vilnius University, the oldest in the Baltics). As bishop of Krakow, he became one of the key advisors to King Sigismund III. He was even considered at one point as a candidate to become pope.

Cardinal Radziwill’s ally in the importation of the Jesuit Order into Lithuania was his older brother, Mikolaj Sierotka (or ‘the Orphan’, so called by King Sigismund August who found him ‘abandoned’ and crying as a child and tried to hush him). He founded a printing press for the Jesuits in Vilnius, and built a large Jesuit church in Nesvizh, which became the family mausoleum for the next 250 years. He decided to make Nesvizh his permanent base, and built roads, hospitals and schools there. He also created what was called an ‘ordinat’ (ordynacja in Polish), or entail, in 1586, a legal framework adopted by many magnate families that ensured their estates would stay together and pass from generation to generation, rather than be divided amongst all the sons as was tradition. From this point, the head of the ordinat would usually use the title ‘duke’, with the princely qualifiers of ‘illustrious’ and even Dei gratia (‘by the grace of God’), something usually reserved only for sovereigns. Like others of his family, Mikolaj Sierotka had a semi-independent foreign policy, supporting the Habsburgs in several royal elections in Poland-Lithuania, and pressing the King to forge ahead with his plans to reunify the Catholic and Orthodox churches—resulting in the Union of Brest, 1596, which created the ‘Uniate Ruthenian Church’, whose members survive today as Belarusian Greek Catholics and Ukrainian Greek Catholics. These are churches that are still Orthodox in theology and ritual, but are in full communion with Rome.

Mikolaj Sierotka was also a scholar and a traveller: he had taken a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Egypt in 1583-84, and converted in Rome on the journey. He then published a travel narrative in Latin in 1601. He was also a keen supporter of the emerging field of cartography and imported designers and architects to redesign his palace in Nesvizh in the 1580s, but also the nearby palace of Mir, about 18 miles to the northwest. The Radziwills had acquired this palace from the Ilyinich family in 1568, and Mikolaj transformed the old castle into a magnificent Renaissance palace. Famous for its five towers, it is (along with Nesvizh) a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Ordinats were also created in 1586 for Sierotka’s younger brothers, one at Kletsk for Albrycht, and one at Olyka for Stanislaw. Mikolaj the Black had created a Calvinist church in Kletsk, but his son handed it back to the Catholic Church and founded a number of convents in his estates. The castle there was destroyed by the Russians in 1660, and again by Swedes in 1706, and never rebuilt. The Radziwills are remembered visually, however, in the coat of arms of the town, which still bears a curved black horn.

Olyka was located further to the south, in the province of Volhynia, now in Ukraine. Like Polotsk, Volhynia had been an independent principality in the Middle Ages, then annexed by Lithuania in the 1300s. The town and castle of Olyka became Radziwill property in the 1560s, and Mikolaj the Black built a grand new palace there. It became one of the largest aristocratic residences in Ukraine. As a centre of revived Catholicism, a Collegiate Church was added later in the century, a replica of the Gesú church in Rome.

The lines of Kletsk and Olyka both continued into the 17^th century, but were both extinct by 1690, meaning their estates passed back to the main branch. Although the main line was based mostly in Nesvizh, they also naturally established bases further west in Poland, as they were frequently needed in Krakow or Warsaw to participate in assemblies of the nobles or elections of kings. The castle of Szydłowiec, a short distance southeast of Warsaw (which became the royal capital in the early 17^th century with the permanent transferral of the royal court from Krakow), served as one of these. Brought in to the family by marriage in 1548, it was redeveloped as a baroque palace in the 1620s. It also became a key economic centre for the family’s interests, attracting numerous Jewish settlers in the 18^th century, before passing out of Radziwill hands in the 19^th. Disused until the 1960s, today Szydłowiec Castle houses a cultural centre and a museum of folk musical instruments.

Not too far away from Szydłowiec was Biała Podlaska. Acquired in the 1560s, the castle here was rebuilt in the 1620s by Sierotka’s son Prince Aleksander Ludwik (d. 1654). This prince, a contemporary of the great hero/traitors Janusz and Boguslaw, stayed mostly out of politics. He developed Biała Podlaska (or ‘white town in Podlasie’) in part to stay safe when his eastern estates were under threat from Russian or Cossack invasions. He built an academy there—one of the oldest high schools in Poland still in existence—alongside hospitals and almshouses for the poor. A grand white tower was added in 1720. Most of this was pulled down in the 1880s and it became a Russian garrison.

Aleksander Ludwik’s son, Prince Michal Kazimierz (d. 1680), also brought this branch of the family into closer contact with the Polish court and the growing royal city of Warsaw. He married a sister of the King, Jan III Sobieski, and acquired a huge palace right in the centre of town, on the ‘Royal Avenue’ (aka Krawkowskie Przedmieście, or ‘Krakow Suburb’). This magnificent residence, built in the 1640s in Italian baroque style, was purchased from the Lubomirski family in 1674. A century later it was at the centre of Polish politics hosting meetings for a group that drew up Poland’s revolutionary constitution in May 1791. This branch became extinct in 1813, as we shall see, and by 1818 the building was confiscated by the new Russian rulers of Poland, and a viceroy was installed in the former Radziwill Palace. It was rebuilt in a Classical style (burned then restored in the 1850s), and became the seat of the Polish Prime Minister when independence was restored in 1918. Since 1994 it has been the seat of the President of Poland. It is fascinating to consider that between 1918 and 1939, the heads of government of both Germany and Poland resided in former Radziwill palaces!

Prince Michal Kazimierz, duke of Nesvizh, was succeeded by his sons Prince Jerzy (d. 1689), then Prince Karol Stanislaw (d. 1719), who became yet another Radziwill Grand Chancellor of Lithuania. He had two sons, Michal Kazimierz ‘Rybenko’ and Hieronim Florian, who continued to amass an ever greater fortune for the dynasty. Rybenko (‘fish’, a term he liked to call people as a term of endearment, like ‘pet’, so it became his nickname) was not a great general or politician, but was known as a courtier, a great supporter of the new Saxon dynasty ruling Poland-Lithuania from the early 18^th century. The younger brother, Prince Hieronim (d. 1760), managed to reacquire by mid-century the great lost succession of the Biržai-Dubingiai line, located mostly in Lithuania proper, but also including the principality of Slutsk in Belarus. Here he opened a factory to mass produce the famous ‘Slutsk sash’, by now the must-have element of a nobleman’s traditional attire and the symbol of the Polish, Lithuanian and Ruthenian nobilities.

Hieronim is remembered as an eccentric, creating a large private army and a cadet school to train it, a ballet school, an Italian theatre, but also, supposedly, cruel torture chambers at Biała, and a prison for a mentally ill cousin. He has an amazing portrait, and you can see why there was a rumour that he was Peter the Great’s illegitimate son.

When Prince Hieronim died his properties passed to his nephew Karol Stanislaw II (d. 1790), who became the richest magnate in Poland-Lithuania, and indeed possibly in Europe. He was known as ‘Panie Kochanku’ or ‘Beloved Sir’, apparently due to his reputation as a true gentleman of the old school, a noble patriot ready to defend Poland’s honour. Though he was a leader of the opposition to reform in the 1770s-80s (and thus against King Stanislas Poniatowski), he was also an ardent opponent of partition, and had to leave the country for a spell after several of his estates in the east became subject to Russia at the First Partition in 1772 and he refused to swear loyalty to Catherine the Great. His palace in Warsaw was ever a hub of political activity, and as a cosmopolitan prince, he also maintained a residence in Paris, the centre of the civilised world, on a street not too far from the Louvre, today called rue Radziwill.

Both Panie Kochanku and his brother Hieronim Wincenty died before the partitions could really make their full impact and destroy the independence of Poland-Lithuania for the next century. The latter’s son, Dominik Hieronim, was very young when the Second and Third Partitions happened (1793, 1795), making most of Lithuania, Polotsk and Volhynia part of the Russian Empire. Properties closer to Warsaw, notably Biała, became part of the Austrian Empire. Prince Dominik (b. 1786), the 11^th ‘ordinat’ or ‘duke’ of Nesvizh and Olyka, and the 8^th lord of Biała, prince of Slutsk, count of Szydłowiec, etc, at first embraced the new situation, re-established himself in Nesvizh, and became a chamberlain in the household of Tsar Alexander in 1804. But by 1807 he became disaffected and returned to Warsaw where he joined the movement allied with Napoleon to push for restored Polish independence. He joined the French-Polish army in 1810, his estates were confiscated by the Tsar in 1811, and he took part in the invasion of Russia of 1812, as part of the Polish Regiment in the Imperial Guard. He was wounded the next year in battle near Hanau in Germany, and died.

Dominik left behind a contested succession. His son, Alexander, was born in the midst of a divorce from his first wife and before the marriage to his second wife took place. He was thus excluded from the succession, which fell entirely to his daughter (born after the second marriage) Stefania. Alexander was recognised as a prince and heir to the Radziwill properties by the Austrian Emperor, but not by the Tsar. There is much less biographical information on Alexander’s descendants, who lived in Austria and the now Austrian parts of Poland—the newly formed Kingdom of Galicia. They established themselves at a castle near Krakow called Grójec. The last, Princess Maria Maximiliana, was forcibly evicted from there in 1945, and died in 1981.

Princess Stefania, though barred from inheriting much of the estates by the terms of the entail, was nevertheless still heiress of over a million hectares, mostly in Lithuania and Ruthenia. She was married by the Tsar in 1828 to a German princeling who was also a Russian general, Ludwig of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, but the lawsuits dragged on and on, and were not finally resolved until they belonged to her daughter, married to the Prince of Hohenlohe. By this point the family resided in Germany, where Hohenlohe was a rising politician (he would later become Chancellor of the Empire), and as non-nationals they were declared unable to possess property in Russia, and forced to sell it in 1893.

With the passing of the main line of the Nesvizh Branch in 1813, leadership of the family fell to a cadet line founded in the late 17^th century by Prince Dominik Mikolaj, another Radziwill who served as Grand Chancellor of Lithuania (1690-97). This branch was based in Kletsk, one of the three ordinats set up in 1586. Dominik was succeeded by Prince Jan (d. 1729) then Prince Marcin (d. 1782) who was, like his cousin Hieronim Florian, quite the eccentric, and in the end was the one referred to above as being imprisoned by Hieronim due to his mental instability. The stories about his behaviour range quite widely, including imprisoning his wife and sons for many years, creating a harem for slave girls, acting as a local highway robber and arsonist, and getting involved in cultish study of the more mystical parts of Judaism.

Marcin’s son Prince Mikolaj Jozef of Kletsk (d. 1813) weathered the storms of the three partitions of Poland. Finding his lands now in the Russian Empire, he began to focus his line’s activities instead in a new estate acquired by the family in the 18^th century, Przygodzice, in ‘Great Poland’ in the southwest near the border with Silesia and the city of Breslau (Wrocław). The real leader of the family at this time however was his youngest brother (and ultimate successor), Michal Hieronim (d. 1831), who was the last ever voivode of Vilnius—a title which became defunct after the third partition, 1795.

But he cannot be seen as a victim here—indications as early as the 1770s were that he was seen as a ‘reliable’ ally for Russian interests in the Polish Sejm (parliament), and is accused of receiving large sums from them in 1773 with which he acquired a major new estate, Nieborów, to the west of Warsaw. Nieborów was a baroque palace built in the 1690s by the Archbishop of Gniezno, with a French-style park. It had passed through several aristocratic hands in the 18^th century, before being purchased by Michal Hieronim Radziwill. He and his wife, Helena, filled it with vast art collections, and built a much-admired garden feature, ‘Arkadia’. These passed to various family members in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, until taken over by the state in 1945. Today Nieborów Palace houses a museum of interior design and 18^th-century furniture.

Whatever the truth of his Russian secret connections, Prince Michal Hieronim did vote in favour of the 2^nd Partition of 1793, and signed the document making it legal, as a representative of Lithuania. After 1813, he not only succeeded to his branch’s ordinat of Kletsk, but also managed to acquire the two ordinats of the main branch, Nesvizh and Olyka, all now situated in the Russian Empire. This huge windfall was granted by the Tsar not just due to his past loyalty to Russian, but also in part due to his second son’s increased favour with the Prussian royal family.

In 1796, Prince Antoni Henryk (d. 1833) had married Princess Luise of Prussia, daughter of Prince Ferdinand (younger brother of Frederick the Great) and thus first cousin of the King of Prussia (Frederick William III). The Radziwill lands in the west of Poland, notably Przygodzice, were now part of Prussia, and so Antoni founded the more ‘German’ branch of the Radziwill family.

His elder brother, Ludwik, in contrast, moved further into Russian orbit, and based himself in Kletsk and the other territories in what was increasingly being called ‘White Russia’ (hence today’s Belarus, from ‘biela’ or ‘white’). Ludwik’s son in particular, Prince Leon (or Lev) (d. 1885) became a Russian diplomat and cavalry general, and was close to Tsar Nicolas I in particular, as his wife, Princess Sofia, was rumoured to be the Tsar’s mistress. As a Russian military commander, Leon helped put down the ‘November Uprising’ of 1830-31, in which Poles attempted to free themselves of Russian rule.

In stark contrast, his uncle, the youngest brother of Ludwik and Antoni, Prince Michal Gedeon (d. 1850), was the commander-in-chief of the November Uprising. He had earned his stripes earlier in his career as a commander in the Polish army assembled by Napoleon in his fight against Russia. For his part in the Uprising he was imprisoned for five years in Russia, then retired from active service.

Michal Gedeon had acquired yet another new residence, through marriage in 1815: Szpanów, in Volhynia (today’s Shpaniv in Ukraine). This estate, near the town of Rivne (formerly Rovno), was not far from the family’s major estate of Olyka, and like it, was one of the grandest aristocratic estates in Volhynia. The Radziwills rebuilt it in the 19^th century, and developed its park and gardens. It became part of Poland again after the First World War, then the estate was taken over by the Soviet army during the Second World War, and nothing remains of the buildings.

Returning to Prince Antoni Henryk, his Prussian connections were encouraged. He was appointed in 1815 as the first and only Statthalter (autonomous governor) of the Grand Duchy of Poznań (Posen in German), the new Prussian province acquired in the Third Partition of Poland and erected as a Grand Duchy after the Congress of Vienna. Fifteen years later he removed from this position when the Grand Duchy lost its autonomy after the November Uprising (which many of the Poles in Poznań had supported). Shifting his interests to Berlin, Antoni’s palace there became a major centre of art and culture, a representative space for Polishness within the Prussian capital. Himself a talented musician and composer, he entertained many prominent musicians here, like Beethoven and Mendelssohn, and had several compositions dedicated to him, notably by Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin, who also gave lessons to his daughter, Princess Wanda.

Chopin also stayed at Prince Antoni’s new country residence near the family estates at Przygodzice, a small hunting lodge made of wood, built in 1822-24 and named after its builder: Antonin. This would be the home base for this branch of the family into the mid-20^th century, and still today hosts one of the major Chopin festivals in Poland.

The Prussian connections remained in the next generation: Antoni’s other daughter, Princess Elisa, was ardently desired in marriage by the Crown Prince (the future Kaiser Wilhelm I), but was deemed of insufficient rank. Elisa’s two brothers, Wilhelm and Boguslas, were both Prussian generals, sat in the Prussian House of Lords, and tried to oppose as best they could Bismarck’s anti-Catholic and anti-Polish policies in the 1860s-70s. The successive princes of this branch continued to act as representatives of Poles within the German Empire, but also maintained the presence of the family in Russia—Nesvizh remained the preferred burial site well into the 20^th century. Many were quick to support the re-emergence of an independent Polish state in 1918, though they were mostly advocates of the more conservative approach to re-forming a government, perhaps preferring a monarchy (and in fact their names were even suggested as potential kings of either Poland or Lithuania).

Nesvizh once again became an outpost in the eastern borderlands of Polish politics, particularly under Prince Antoni Albrecht, known as ‘Aba’ (d. 1935) who re-established it as his base. The Prince had social connections with the West, and in 1910 married an Anglo-American socialite, Dorothy Deacon, the sister of the scandalous Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough (the marriage ended soon after). He also maintained a residence in Warsaw. His uncle, Stanisław, pushed for Polish independence from the other side, as an officer of the Russian army and a founder of the ‘National and Preservation Party’ in 1917 in St Petersburg, and an early ally of Marshal Piłsudski, one of the founders of the newly independent Polish state in 1918.

In 1922, Prince Antoni Albrecht still owned about 80,000 hectares, while his brother Karol owned over 150,000 in the eastern reaches of Poland (now a borderland with the new Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic). The youngest brother, Prince Leon Władisław, was the last ordinat of Nesvizh (the 17^th) and also of Kletsk (the 14^th). When this part of Poland was annexed by Belarus in 1939, he moved abroad. His last male descendant, the lineal head of the House of Radziwill, Prince Jerzy, died in 2007.

The junior line of this branch, the branch of Przygodzice (a fourth ordinat, created formally in 1873)—or we might call them the ‘Prussian branch’—also took over one of the more ancient ordinats, that of Olyka. Prince Ferdynand (d. 1926) was the 12^th ordinat of Olyka, and owned about 43,000 hectares in Western Poland and Volhynia in 1922. As a former long-term member of the Prussian Parliament, his reputation as an elder statesman was drawn on to help set up the new Polish Parliament in 1919. His eldest son Michal ‘the Red’ (d. 1955) was not so revered: his vocally pro-German views led even to him offering his residence of Antonin to Hitler as a form of appeasement; while his scandalous personal life led him to be ostracised by society and most of his family. Instead of thanked, Prince Michal’s ordinat of Przygodzice was nationalised by the Germans, and he ended up leaving very little to his heir, his nephew, also called Michal (d. 1974), whose grandson Marcin (b. 1965) is since 2007 the lineal head of the Radziwill family, though keeps a very low profile in the world of modern princes.

One ordinat remained, Olyka, which was given to the third son of Prince Ferdynand, Prince Janusz (d. 1967). He also owned Nieborów and Szpanów and a palace in Warsaw—these given by a cousin from another branch who had no heir (this Radziwill Palace, on Bielańska street, is now the Museum of Independence), and, unlike his older brother Michal, became one of the leading politicians of the new Polish republic in the 1920s, in particular as a leader of the aristocratic conservative movement, which considered possibly restoring a monarchy of some sort (perhaps even with himself as monarch). In the very early days of Polish independence, he acted as director of the new State Department, creating a revived diplomatic service.

In 1939, Prince Janusz attempted to use his international connections to soften the German occupation, but he was imprisoned by the Nazis in 1944, then briefly imprisoned by the Soviets in 1945. Olyka and his other estates in Volhynia (including Szpanów) had been transferred to the Soviet Union in 1939 and thus nationalised, as was Nieborów in Poland, in 1945. Janusz’s elder son, Edmund (d. 1971), was also imprisoned in Russia, for two years (1945-47), while his younger son was Stanisłas (d. 1976), with whom we began this post—in later life he resided in London where he set up a school for Polish refugees and a centre for Polish historical research.

There are in fact many more junior branches, following literally an explosion of Radziwill princes and princesses in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. One of these was called the line of Szydłowiec, named for the property the family had held south of Warsaw since the mid-16^th century, though it was mostly administered from afar, until its own branch was formed in the early 18^th century. Prince Maciej (d. 1800) was the last Grand Chancellor of Lithuania (from 1786) and the last Castellan of Vilnius under the old Polish-Lithuanian union (1790-95). He was part of the group trying to save Polish independence through the creation of a modern constitution, and was a hero of the military action against partition in 1792. Partition occurred nevertheless, and he found that his estates now were part of Austria, and their new province of Galicia. When he died, due to serious financial difficulties, much of the inheritance that should have passed to his underage son, including Szydłowiec, was instead auctioned by the Austrian government and purchased by another magnate family, the Sapieha.

The many descendants of this underage son Konstanty Mikołaj (d. 1863) can thus be considered the ‘Austrian branch’, and they maintained their main sphere of interest in Krakow, the capital of Galicia after 1849. In the 1880s, his 5^th son, Prince Dominik, purchased Balice Palace, on the outskirts of Krakow, which became one of the main residences of this branch until it was nationalised in 1945—it is now part of the Jagiellonian University of Krakow.

They also held Sichów Palace, to the northeast of the city. None are very prominent in the history of Austria or Galicia, though one, Prince Dominik’s son Hieronim, married into the Imperial family itself in 1909, the Archduchess Renata, a cousin of the Emperor. Their son, another Dominik, married in 1938 Princess Eugénie of Greece (a cousin of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh), but the family’s fortunes came to a halt when Hieronim was sent to a gulag in Russia where he died in 1945, and Dominik and his family moved abroad.

In contrast, another member of this family embraced the new communist regime in Poland: Prince Krzysztof (d. 1986), known as ‘The Red Prince’ who had been in a German concentration camp during the war, and later served as a member of Parliament in the Polish People’s Republic. His daughter, Dr Anna Radziwiłł (d. 2009), was not so convinced, and as a specialist in the teaching of history, published textbooks in an ‘underground library’ to try to ensure that Polish children learned about truth, not propaganda. In the new regime following the fall of Communism, she twice served as under-secretary of state in the Ministry of Education, 1989-92 and 2004-05.

Radziwills still operate in the government of Poland: Dr Konstanty Radziwiłł (b. 1958), a physician, was a senator, and Minister of Health, 2015-18, and currently is a Voivode of the Province of Masovia; his cousin Dr Artur Radziwiłł (b. 1974), an economist, was under-secretary of state in the Ministry of Finance, 2014-15, and tasked with introducing the Euro to Poland (which did not succeed), and for advancing financial reforms in Ukraine, emphasizing once more the ongoing Radziwill ties between Poland and the lands to the east—Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine—and thus a fitting place to end this piece.

List of castles ‘visited’ in this post:

in Lithuania:

• Kėdainiai
• Dubingiai
• Biržai

in Poland:

• Goniądz
• Starawieś
• Szydłowiec
• Biała Podlaska
• Grójec
• Przygodzice
• Nieborów
• Antonin
• Balice

in Belarus:

• Miadziel (Medilas, Medele)
• Slutsk (Słuck)
• Niasviž or Nesvizh (Nieśwież, Nesvyžiaus)
• Mir
• Kletsk (Kleck)

in Ukraine:

• Olyka (Ołyka)
• Shpaniv (Szpanów)

Special thanks to Dr Anna Kalinowska for reading through this very long and complicated post! Historical errors and opinions of course remain my own!

(images from Wikimedia Commons)