Dynasty is a curious concept. It is an incontrovertible fact that every human being has ancestry that comes from the dawn of time. We all come, without exception and by definition, directly from a line of ancestors who have succeeded in every generation (without skipping any since man appeared on Earth) to reach reproductive age.
However, there are lineages that are more prestigious and older than others. Indeed, it is survival over time that characterizes dynasties, what gives them a tone. In some not entirely rational way, the older they are, the nobler they are. Unfortunately, one of the most practiced strategies in Europe to guarantee the duration of the lineage was that of endogamy (marriages and reproduction between blood relatives) with terrifying effects on the genetic make-up of the families concerned.
The result of the effort to maintain blood purity was, in the long run, to have just the opposite of the desired effect. Thus the great dynastic families, often closely related to each other, arranged marriages that ended up favoring the accumulation of congenital genetic defects, such as the jaw of the Habsburgs, the hemophilia of the Romanovs and others.
Over time, the phenomenon worsened until the extinction of entire dynastic branches, as in the case of that genetic monster of Charles II of Spain, known as Charles the Bewitched (Carlos el Hechizado) due to the terrible accumulation of defects it presented. He was the last Habsburg of the Spanish branch. The insanity of George III of the United Kingdom (a descendant of the old German House of Hanover) is also commonly attributed by historians to porphyria, a rare hereditary disease.
Given the tendency for dynasties to lose their vitality (or even reason) over the centuries, it is perhaps a good thing that European royal lines are not all that enduring, at least in relative terms. In fact, the longest-lived dynasty in the West would be that of the Bagradi (often also called Bagrationi), the ruling house of Georgia, in the Caucasus: which lasted a thousand years, from the early Middle Ages until the early 19th century, when the kingdom was annexed by Russia (the vice is ancient…).
This is what appears from recorded history. According to Georgian oral traditions, the family would have descended in a direct line even from the biblical king and prophet David, the third king of Israel, known for killing the giant Goliath. The Bagradi would have arrived from Palestine in the lands where they would then reign around the year 530… The Habsburgs instead began to count for something in Austria only starting from the XIII century (practically upstarts, while the house of Windsor, the house British royal, it has formally existed only for a little over a century, since 1917, when it was invented by George V (at the time at war with Germany) to get rid of the too Germanic Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha, its previous name.
This article is originally published on italiaoggi.it
