Is The queen related to the byzantine emperors?

Status
Not open for further replies.
I was wondering 'cause i read somewhere that an niece of the last byzantine emperor married a russian tsar. And that the queen's great-great-whatever was related to the tsars. Just wasn't sure if it was the same family.

Zoe Palaiologina, the wife of Ivan the Great, was the niece of Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, and the granddaughter of Manuel II. Their great-grandson was the aforementioned Tsar Feodor I, last of the Rurik dynasty.

Edit: That is, Feodor was the great grandson of Zoe and Ivan, not Zoe and Manuel. Watch your antecedents!
 
I'd guess there's about a 100% percent chance the answer is yes. There were a lot of Byzantine emperors, they held onto part of Italy for a long time.

Yeah, and they frequently married away daughters as political bargaining chips. Though records become increasingly spotty and unreliable the further back you go there seem to have been a lot of different points at which royal Byzantine genes have entered the larger European pool. For example, one of the early kings of Portugal apparently married an Emperor's daughter; generations later, one princess of that line showed up married to a Danish king; a bunch of their descendants went on to rule various bits of Scandinavia and northern Germany and become ancestors via various paths of most of the upper classes there, etc.
 
Of course, it's said that all Europeans alive today are descended from Charlemagne. I don't know how likely that is!

Reasonably likely. The man had something like seventeen known children, including several sons who lived to adulthood and went on to found recorded lineages of some significance. Considering that it was quite fashionable for noblemen to have both wives and mistresses and quite often unrecorded byblows as well, he got a good start on spreading his genes down the generations -- and it's been something like 40 or 50 generations since then, which is ample time to mix thoroughly. Go back 40 generations and each of us would have about 10^12 ancestors (in reality these would obviously overlap many times over).
 
According to that logic, everyone is descended from everyone who lived 1000 years ago.

If you look back 2000 years or so, you're descended from about every prominent person who has left descendents at all. Julius Caesar and Confucius, yes, Jesus and Plato probably not.
 
If you look back 2000 years or so, you're descended from about every prominent person who has left descendents at all. Julius Caesar and Confucius, yes, Jesus and Plato probably not.

Except that Julius' known and suspected descendants all died out within two generations (though if his reputation was deserved, there may well have been any number of unrecorded byblows).
 
:bump: Queen Elizabeth II has no Byzantine ancestry. Her husband Prince Philip, however, is the grandson of King George I of Greece whose descent from the Palaeologus Dynasty of Byzantine emperors is well documented.
 
I'm not sure. Socrates did, though.
 
Socrates is reputed to have had three sons. I don't think much is known about Plato's family.

The concept that everyone is descended at one point from everyone alive collapses at a certain point in time because of the difficulties of transportation in early times. It is probably more accurate to say that a person is descended from all the persons living in a particular local area than itis to say the whole world. In fact, because the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation you go back, the greater likelihood that some of these ancestors will show up many times in one pedigree. It only takes about 275 years, roughly eleven generations, to arrive at the point where one person has over one million ancestors.

Simple tests can reveal the geographic origins of anyone's DNA within something like thirty broad localities. These are fairly inexpenisive and there are a number of on-line companies that perform them.
 
You may be right there. Still, there are gay men who get on incredibly well with women but also gay men who seem to exist in an exclusively male universe and don't know how to interact with anything in a skirt, and I get the impression that Plato was the latter kind rather than the former kind!
 
Yep, that is why wifes of spartan men actually cut their hair short and dressed like young boys very often, at least in beginning of their marriages. Men had only experiences of.. well, men (mentors!) so they needed something familiar. Sounds bit wierd, but is logical and true.
 
The concept that everyone is descended at one point from everyone alive collapses at a certain point in time because of the difficulties of transportation in early times. It is probably more accurate to say that a person is descended from all the persons living in a particular local area than itis to say the whole world. In fact, because the number of your ancestors doubles with each generation you go back, the greater likelihood that some of these ancestors will show up many times in one pedigree. It only takes about 275 years, roughly eleven generations, to arrive at the point where one person has over one million ancestors.

Yes, but then again it would only take one person travelling to another region and leave descendancts there which in turn would propagate the alien ascendancy and so on. Therefore the only people that wouls only relate to an isolated region are some small amount of tribes in the Amazonian forest and New Guinea. The world is perhaps off, but the entire population of Europe, North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia at least is probably related to a relatively recent time. One can never underestimate our ancestors' promiscuity (and our own...). ;)
 
You may be right there. Still, there are gay men who get on incredibly well with women but also gay men who seem to exist in an exclusively male universe and don't know how to interact with anything in a skirt, and I get the impression that Plato was the latter kind rather than the former kind!

:p The term "gay" carries modern connotations which might not fit ancient ones with the same precision. An Athenian male citizen could have a younger male lover, be married and have children, and go out and drink with Heterae in the evening. He was eramenos, the "penetrator" (of just about anything). Instead of a term such as "gay" you may want to consider a scale with extremes at either end in general (in which Plato probably tended toward one). These options were available and potentially acceptable for urban male citizens of Athens.

Also some of Plato's ideas about love may not be perfectly representative of the Athenian context. They almost have an ascetic quality and are idealized from what I remember.
 
Is queen Elizabeth II, of The UK..., descended from the Byzantine Emperors?

Have any of you noticed that the the English royals were descended of the Byzantine Emperors in the 1300s? Check Edward III's ancestry, his line goes through many French/Spanish/German lines until he gets to Alexios I Komnenos, Roman (Eastern Roman) "Byzantine" Emperor.
 
Hell 1/16 people on this earth are probable decendents of Gengis Khan.
(he was prolific at beding hes enemys wives / daughters / concubines)
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom