Bloodlines

[Duke Malcolm]

I think most of the European Royal Families are connected the Queen Victoria in some way... She had many daughters who were married off to the continental Families...

Prince Charles and Princess Camilla are similarly related...

[lars573]

IIRC she had 8 kids, 5 girls and 3 boys. 1 daughter went to Russia. The others married German noble houses. Ex. 1 married the son of the king of Prussia. But what's frustrating is that I know a site that has jpegs of noble family trees, but it's servers are down.

[Watchman]

Which Byzantine imperial dynasty, incidentally ? There was quite a few of them over the centuries...

There was also that one Danish king at some point of the 19th century, I think, who had a whole slew of daughters he managed to marry off to other royal houses. He's apparently sometimes known as "the father-in-law of Europe" for that. Mind you, I've also read that annoying little hemophilia came to the Russian imperial family that way...

[lars573]

The site with the geneologies is back up. I'm going to quote what it says about the ERE-Habsburg connection.

Philip of Swabia, son of Frederick Barbarossa, who contended with Otto of Brunswick for the Empire, had no sons; but the marriages of his four daughters are among the most interesting in European history. In a reconciliation of their feud, his oldest daughter, Beatrice, married Otto himself. But they had no children. The younger daughters, Kunigunde, Marie, and Elizabeth, married King Wenceslas I of Bohemia, Duke Henry III of Lower Lorraine and Brabant, and King & St. Ferdinand III of Castile and Leon, respectively. All of these marriages produced children with living descendants, especially among the Hapsburgs and the royal families of Spain, as can be traced at the linked genealogies. This is all of particular interest because of Philip's wife, Irene, who was a daughter of the Roman Emperor Isaac II Angelus. Isaac, a disastrous Emperor, himself was a great-grandson of the outstanding Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, the restorer of Romania after the Turkish invasion. This means that a large part of modern European royalty have been descendants of the Comneni. My impression is that Roman (Byzantine) Imperial descent for recent royalty has often been claimed through the Macedonians, but the only genuine line seems to be from Macedonian in-laws. On the other hand, descent from the Comneni appears to be well attested and with multiple lines, all from Irene Angelina.

[Atilius]

On the subject of tangled bloodlines, we have this curiosity:

In 1420, during the Hundred Years War, a settlement between the French king Charles VI (or his agents; Charles was mad again at this time) and Henry V made Henry the de facto ruler of France. The English king took Charles' daughter Catherine as his queen, and became Heir to the French Throne and Regent of France.

Henry's line was extinguished in the Wars of the Roses.

After Henry's death, the queen began an affair with her Keeper of the Wardrobe. This man held no social rank, so the liaison was particularly scandalous. This man's name was Owen Tewdwr. Catherine and Owen's oldest son Edmund died in 1456, leaving behind his pregnant wife, the 13 year-old Margaret Beaufort. The child was born in 1457 and eventually crowned Henry VII in 1485 after defeating Richard III at Bosworth Field.

So, though one would have assumed in 1420 that Henry V's descendents would rule France, it was Charles VI's great-grandson who ruled England. His great-great grandson and great-great-great granddaughter became two of England's most famous monarchs, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.

[Justiciar]

Lovin' it.

[Watchman]

TV soap operas ain't got nuttin' on the aristocracy of old.

[lars573]

IMO soap operas rip off the aristocrats of old.