czar nicholas family tree to queen victoria

When he died, his cousin Anna, daughter of Peter the Great's half-brother and former co-ruler Ivan V, became empress. Peter II was the last male Romanov leader who could be traced directly back through the family's paternal lineage. And when she died, their son Peter II, 12, ruled for only two years until his untimely death from smallpox. He had his second wife, Catherine I, crowned empress in 1724, though he ruled over her shoulder till his death the following year. Peter, the eldest of Alexis' three children with his second wife, expanded Russia's military might and turned the nation into an industrial and cultural powerhouse-and when he tired of his first marriage, he got a divorce and installed his ex in a convent. (They only co-reigned in the first place because, while Ivan V was a son from Alexis' first marriage, he was mentally and physically unwell and ruled in name only.) He lived till the ripe old age of 49 and was succeeded by his son Alexis, one of only four of his 10 children to reach adulthood.Īlexis died in 1676 and his sickly son Feodor III became emperor until 1682, when he died and his younger half-brother Peter the Great (as he was eventually known) ascended, at first sharing power with his older half-brother Ivan V until Ivan's death at 29 in 1696.

It all started with the reign of Michael I, the first Russian Tsar of the House of Romanov, upon his election to the post (by parliament, not the people) in 1613. The headship, meanwhile, is disputed due to the not-uncommon confusion over which man in the Romanov family tree had the right to jumpstart the line of succession after the last tsar of Russia was deposed in 1917. 'This marriage does not belong on our agenda in any way,' a Putin spokesman told reporters before the wedding.) (Not that, even when/if he becomes head of the family, he'd have any power in the country, where Vladimir Putin has been president for the better part of two decades. 24.Īnd the power struggle continues, George the disputed heir apparent to the headship of the Imperial Family of Russia, House Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov. 'No member of the Romanov family ever thought we would come back here,' the 40-year-old groom told The New York Times in an email before the grand religious wedding (the bride, born Rebecca Virginia Bettarini, converted to Russian Orthodoxy and took the name Victoria Romanovna), which followed their official civil ceremony on Sept. Catherine the Great came to power and ruled Russia for a record (for a female leader, anyway) 34 years after her husband (and second cousin) Peter III was violently overthrown in a coup and promptly died-or-was-assassinated in captivity. His daughter Queen Elizabeth I ordered the beheading of her perceived rival Mary, Queen of Scots because maybe Mary was plotting against her. King Henry VIII alone had two wives executed because divorce wasn't an option.

Which begs the reminder, no matter how scandalous the behavior of the modern royal families of Britain, Spain, Sweden, Monaco, et al., nothing really compares to the millennia of bloody intrigue that once defined the reigns of so many monarchs across Europe and beyond. 1, their lavish nuptials marked a rather epic return to the world stage for the Romanov family, whose 304-year rule in Russia ended more than a century ago in a hail of state-sanctioned bullets. When Grand Duke George Mikhailovich Romanov married Victoria Bettarini in St.

Czar nicholas family tree to queen victoria