I would not be too surprised to see a constitutional monarchy in Ethiopia someday, mostly because they’re so politically unstable that I wouldn’t be too surprised to see just about anything happen in their government. And they’ve still got Zera Selassie hanging around in Addis Ababa.
I wonder which family has been out of power the longest, but still has a guy at the ready just in case. Once I stumbled across an internet site that featured the heir designee of the Komnenoi for heaven’s sake, and Trebizond fell in 1461. That’s a lot of time to be doing nothing.
Interestingly, Greece passed a law stripping the exiled King Constantine of his passport and Greek citizenship because he refused to adopt a surname. Some supporters also consider Constantine the heir to the Byzantine throne.
And apparently Jeff Foxworthy is the heir to the throne of Portugal.
Hey, there’s an idea: The Deposed Royalty Comedy Tour!
I wonder if we can sell the History Channel on a reality show.
“We put eight dispossessed claimants to the thrones of Europe all together in one chateau. See what happens when people stop being royal and start getting real.”
Note that only includes JCI, Sofía, their children, and the spouses and children of these - neither the rest of the Borbones (including for example Luis Alfonso de Borbón aka Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, one of the claimants to the French throne) nor the rest of the Greek royal family.
How do the Grimaldis fit in? I remember Catherine Oxenberg talking smack about Monaco’s royals, saying Princess Caroline had to use the honorific “Her Serene Highness” because she wasn’t entitled to use “Her Royal Highness.”
The Grimaldis are related to the others – Prince Rainier’s father was a Polignac, for example. His grandfather Prince Louis II’s mother was Lady Mary Hamilton, the daughter of the 11th Duke of Hamilton and Princess Marie of Baden (herself the daughter of Karl, Grand Duke of Baden and Stephanie de Beauharnais).
HSH/HRH has nothing to do with how closely related they are to anyone else, its just a matter of rank. Not that Catherine Oxenberg could really talk smack or should, considering she has no royal title at all – her father was a commoner and her mother a member of the royal house of Yugoslavia.
The royal house that genealogically is furthest out from the other European dynasties is probably the Zogu dynasty of Albania. Even then, Crown Prince Leka’s mother was a half-American, half-Hungarian countess and thusly he’s distantly related to the other royal families.