THE INTERNATIONAL LAWS

THE PRETENDER

A pretender is a claimant to an abolished throne or to a throne already occupied by somebody else. The term in itself is not pejorative. The original meaning of the English word pretend, from the French word prétendre, means "to put forward, to profess or claim".

Pretender also is applied and to those with wholly fabricated claims as pretenders to Henry VII's throne Lambert Simnel. Lambert Simnel (ca. 1477 - ca. 1525) was a pretender to the throne of England. His claim to be the Earl of Warwick in 1487 threatened the newly established reign of King Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509).

Perkin Warbeck (circa 1474 - 23 November 1499) was a pretender to theEnglish throne during the reign of King Henry VII of England. Traditional belief claims that he was an impostor, pretending to be Richard of Shrewsbury, 1st Duke of York, the younger son of King Edward IV of England, but was in fact a Fleming born in Tournai around 1474. The "Perkin Warbeck" of the traditional tale was claimed to be the son of a French official, John de Werbecque and Katherine de Faro.

A Papal pretender is instead called an Antipope, but some Antipopes did rule as Pope, and might only be declared an Antipope afterward. 

An antipope (Latin: antipapa) is a person who, in opposition to a sitting Bishop of Rome, makes a widely accepted claim to be the Pope. There have been several anti popes throughout the history of the Roman Catholic Church. The period when antipopes were most numerous was during the struggles between the Popes and the Holy Roman Emperors of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The emperors frequently imposed their own nominees, in order to further their cause. (The popes, likewise, sometimes sponsored rival imperial claimants in Germany in order to overcome a particular emperor.) Rival claimants to the papacy were also common during the Western Schism and the Avignon Papacy.

(Above: Antipope Felix V, the last historically significant Antipope).

Pretenders in the Roman Empire

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world. Ancient Rome knew many pretenders to the office of Roman Emperor that ruled of the Roman State during the imperial period (starting at about 26 BC), especially during the crisi of the Third Century (also "Military Anarchy" or "Imperial Crisis") (235–284 AD) was a period in which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague and economic depression. The Crisis began with the assassination of Emperor Alexander Severus at the hands of his own troops, initiating a fifty-year period in which 20–25 claimants to the title of Emperor, mostly prominent Roman Army Generals, assumed imperial power over all or part of the Empire

.By 258–260, the Empire split into three competing states, with the Gallic Empire including the Roman provinces of Gaul, Britannia and Hispania; and thePalmyrene Empire, including the eastern provinces of Syria Palaestina and Aegyptus; becoming independent from the Italian-centered Roman Empire proper between them. The Crisis ended with the ascension of Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus (c. 22 December 244 – 3 December 311), commonly known as Diocletian, was Roman Emperor from 284 to 305.

These are customarily referred to as the Thirty Tyrants, which was an allusion to the Thirty Tyrants at Athens some five hundred years earlier; although the comparison is questionable, and the Romans were separate aspirants, not (as the Athenians were) a Committee of Public Safety. The Loeb translation of the appropriate chapter of the Augustan History therefore represents the Latin triginta tyranni by "Thirty Pretenders" to avoid this artificial and confusing parallel. Not all of them were afterwards considered pretenders; several were actually successful in becoming Emperor in at least in part of the Empire for a brief period.

According to the investigations and published works of genealogist  Christian Settipani, all the current royal houses of Europe, and some beyond, are for a long time descendants and potential heirs of most of Roman Emperors, as are many of countries' nobilities and even many commoners.

Greek Pretenders

The claimant of the throne of the last Greek kingdom is Constantine II,   who ruled as King from 1964 until the abolition of the monarchy in 1973, The sixth and last monarch of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (a branch of the House of Oldenburg), whose designated heir is his son Pavlos, Crown Prince of Greece. Constantine has never officially abdicated and remains a pretender to the Greek throne. He has continued to live abroad since 1967, but enters and leaves his native country freely and has a house on the coastal resort of Saronida, a village and a community in Attica 45 km from Athens.

There are pretenders to other Greek thrones:

The Byzantine Empire

Disputed successions to the Roman Byzantine Empire long continued at Constantinople. TheByzantine Empire (or Byzantium) was the Greek-speaking Eastern Roman Empire of the Middle Ages, centered around its capital of Constantinople, and ruled by the Byzantine Emperors, direct successors to the Ancient Roman Emperors. It was called the Roman Empire and also RomaniaNicomedia (in Anatolia) toByzantium on the Bosphorus, which became Constantinople, alternatively “New Rome”. (Constantine made Christianity the religion of Rome and built Constantinople, the new Christian capitol of the eastern Roman Empire). by its inhabitants and neighbors. As the distinction between "Roman Empire" and "Byzantine Empire" is purely a modern convention, it is not possible to assign a date of separation, but an important point is Emperor Constantine I´s  transfer in 324 of the capital from

Most seriously, after the fall of Constantinople to the Fourth Crusade  n 1204, and its eventual recovery by Michael VIII Palaiologos orPalaeologus (1223 – 11 December 1282) reigned as Byzantine emperor 1259–1282. Michael VIII was the founder of the Palaeologan dynasty that would rule the Byzantine Empire until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. He recovered Constantinople from the Latin Empire in 1261 and transformed the Empire of Nicaea into a restored Byzantine Empire However, Turk Beyliks began scattering Byzantine territory in 1260 and the Beylik ofMenteşe was founded in Caria region.

Cypriot pretenders

Following the defeat and death of King James III of Cyprus in 1474, his younger and illegitimate brother, Eugène Matteo de Lusignan, also styled d'Arménie (d. 1523) removed to Sicily, then to Malta.   He was acknowledged as rightful heir of the thrones Cyprus, Armenia, Jerusalem, and Antioch, though he never made serious efforts to reify the claims. The title of "Barone de Baccari" was created in 1508 for Jacques Matteo d’Armenia with the remainder to his descendants in perpetuity. Eugene, illegitimate son of King Jacques II of Cyprus, had, when his family were exiled, first gone to Naples, then Sicily, then settled on Malta, marrying a Sicilian heiress, Donna Paola Mazzara (a descendant of the Royal House of Aragon of Sicily and Aragon), with issue.

French pretenders

The establishment of the First Republic, on 22 of September 1793, and the execution of Louis XVI  led to the king's son becoming pretender, styled as Louis XVII. As Louis XVII was a child and imprisoned in Paris by the revolutionaries, his uncle, the Comte de Provence, proclaimed himself regent in his nephew's name. After Louis XVII died in 1795, the Comte de Provence became pretender himself, as Louis XVIII.

Louis XVIII was restored to the throne in 1814, and was succeeded by his brother Charles X in 1824. Charles X was, however, forced into exile by the July Revolution (The French Revolution of 1830, also known as the July Revolution). Charles X and his son, the Dauphin Louis-Antoine, abdicated their claims in favor of Charles's grandson, Henry, Duke of Bordeaux. However, their cousin the Duke of Orléans, a descendant of Louis XIV's younger brother, usurped the throne as Louis Philippe I.

For most of the July Monarchy, the legitimists, as supporters of the exiled senior line came to be known, were uncertain of whom to support; some believed the abdication of Charles and his son legitimate, and recognized the young Duke of Bordeaux as king, while others maintained that abdication was an impossibility, and continued to recognize first Charles X and then Louis-Antoine, until the latter's death in 1844. One of these latter was the Duke of Bordeaux himself, who on his uncle's death proclaimed himself king as Henry V, taking the title in pretense of "Count of Chambord".

In 1848, Louis Philippe himself was overthrown by the February Revolution (The February Revolution of 1917 was the first of two revolutions in Russia in 1917) and himself abdicated the throne in favor of his young grandson, the Count of Paris. However, a republic was proclaimed, leaving the Count of Paris, like his cousin Chambord, merely a pretender to a no longer existing crown.

Over the next several decades, there were several attempts at a so-called "fusion," which would unite both groups of monarchists together, presumably on the basis that the childless Chambord would become king, but would recognize the Count of Paris as his heir. Such efforts were fruitless in the 1850s, but after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, when a royalist majority was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, these efforts were renewed. As a result, in 1873, the Count of Paris withdrew his own claims to the throne and recognized Chambord as the legitimate pretender to the French throne. In spite of this apparent unity among the monarchist forces, the restoration of the monarchy was not to be; Chambord refused to accept the Tricolor flag. The monarchists decided to wait until Chambord's death, but lost their majority in parliament in 1877, making a restoration impossible.

Following Chambord's death in 1883, the majority of French monarchists accepted the Count of Paris as the pretender to the French throne. A small minority of ultra-reactionaries refused to accept this designation, and chose instead Don Juan Carlos María Isidro de Borbón, Count of Montizón (May 15, 1822 – November 18, 1887) was the Carlist claimant to the throne of Spain from 1860 to 1868.

(Carlism is a traditionalist and legitimist political movement in Spain seeking the establishment of a separate line of the Bourbon family on the Spanish throne)

The arguments are, on one side, that Philip V of Spain renounced any future claim to the French throne when he became King of Spain, and that the Dukes of Orléans were therefore recognized as the next heirs before the French Revolution (1789–1799).  On the other side, that this renunciation was invalid and impossible, and that Philippe Égalité and Louis-Philippe forfeited any remaining right to the crown for disloyalty. The split has continued to the present day, with supporters of the senior line reclaiming the title of legitimist, while supporters of the Orléans line are once again known as Orléanists. The current representative of the senior line is Prince Louis Alphonse of Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, a cousin of the king of Spain, whose line was excluded from the Spanish throne due to an unequal marriage, while the Orléanist line is represented by Prince Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans, Count of Paris, Duke of France(comte de Paris, duc de France), born on 14 June 1933, a descendant of Louis Philippe.

In addition to these two claims to the historic royal throne of France, there has also been a pretender to the imperial throne of France created first by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804 and recreated by his nephew  Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (20 April 1808  – 9 January 1873) was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III.  This claim today rests in the person of  Charles, Prince Napoléon (Charles Marie Jérôme Victor Napoléon Bonaparte) (born 19 October 1950) is a French politician, descendant of the  Jérôme-Napoléon Bonaparte, French Prince, King ofWestphalia, 1st Prince of Montfort (15 November 1784 – 24 June 1860) was the youngest brother of Napoleon who made him king of Westphalia (1807–1813).

 

Prince Louis Alphonse of Bourbon

Duke of Anjou, Prince Henri Philippe Pierre Marie d'Orléans

Charles, Prince Napoléon.

 

German pretenders

Revolution filled the air at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s, destroying many ancient monarchies. The majority of the revolting nations replaced their thrones with communist governments. While democracy plods on from day to day, the heads of the Royal Families  deposed, continue to use their titles, claim their thrones, and interact with other ex-royals on a regular basis.

The Hohenzollern of Prussia

The House of Hohenzollern is a noble family and royal dynasty ofelectors, kings and emperors of Prussia, Germany and Romania. It originated in the area around the town of Hechingen in Swabia during the 11th century. They took their name from their ancestral home, the Burg Hohenzollern castle near Hechingen.

Since the abolition of the Germany monarchy in 1918, the heads of the House of Hohenzollern have claimed to be the titular Kings of Prussian and Germany Emperors. These claims are linked by the Constitution of the former (2nd) German Empire: according to this, whoever was King of Prussia, although that Empire was abolished, was also German Emperor.

George Friedrich (born in 1976) is the great-great-grandson of William II (Emperor from 1888 to 1918) and is the head of the House of Hohenzollern. He succeeded his grandfather, Prince Louis Ferdinand I of Prussia as head of the House of Hohenzollern in 1994. As head of the house he is occasionally styled His Royal Highness The Prince of Prussia, or alternatively His Imperial and Royal Highness The Prince of Prussia.

The Law of Germany does not recognize princely titles, but German civil law these titles are considered to be a part of a person’s surname. Two of his uncles took him to court over his position as head of the House of Hohenzollern, and after many cases, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany stated that Georg Friedrich was the full heir of his grandfather and that the two uncles were entitled to a small portion of the Prussian inheritance.

The Throne of Russia

Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna is regarded by Russian monarchists as the Head of the Imperial Family of Russia and Titular Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias since 1992. Throughout her life she has used as her title and style of pretension Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Maria Vladimirovna of Russia. She was born in 1953, the daughter of Grand Duke Vladimir Cyrillovich of Russia, considered by some as the Head of the Imperial Family of Russia and Titular Emperor of Russia.

Since 1917 the Russian Imperial House is forced to be in exile, but continues to exist according to its unshakable / firm juridical and historical basis.

The Throne of Austria

Hungary

Otto, Crown Prince of Austria or Otto von Habsburg (born 20 November 1912 as Archduke Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius of Austria( died 4 July 2011) is the current head of the Habsburg family and the eldest son of Karl of Austria, the last Emperor of Austria and last King of Hungary, and his wife, Zita of Bourbon-Parma.

Otto lives in Bavaria in Germany, and is a German, Austrian, Croatian, and Hungarian citizen. Although his official name in Germany is Otto von Habsburg, he is referred to as Otto Habsburg-Lothringen by Austrian authorities. He is also often known as Archduke Otto of Austria, Crown Prince Otto of Austria, and in Hungary, simply as Habsburg Ottó. Otto passed away on July 14, 2011.

The Archiduque Carlos de Habsburgo-Lorena, Karl Thomas Robert Maria Franziskus Bahnam Georg von Habsburg-Lothringen, (Starnberg, Baviera,Germany, January 11, 1961). In 2007 succeeded his father Prince Otón de Habsburgo-Lorena who renounced.