Even so, our student’s task would in some ways have been made easier the further back he dug, for the written record becomes correspondingly sparser and the blanks accumulate. But had he tried to track the archduke’s descent back to the eleventh century, he would have had to fill in the names of several hundred thousand ancestors, for every generation back yields double the number of forebears. He also apologized that he had been unable to take his investigations further back into the Middle Ages. 1ĭedicating his research to Franz Ferdinand, the student glossed over the extent of Habsburg intermarriage by demonstrating statistically that all the ruling families of Europe had in the past been equally incestuous. So Franz Ferdinand was related to the sixteenth-century Emperor Ferdinand I through more than a hundred separate descents and to Ferdinand’s distant cousin, the unmemorable but deeply pious Renate of Lorraine, by twenty-five. On account of intermarriage, however, there were so many overlaps that the student found only 1,500 separate individuals, for many husbands were also cousins, and wives were often nieces several times over. The genealogy he established ran to thirty-three tables and listed more than 4,000 of Franz Ferdinand’s ancestors, going back to the sixteenth century. 1 CASTLE HABSBURG AND THE ‘FORTINBRAS EFFECT’Īt the beginning of the last century, an unusually diligent student set himself the task of establishing the descent of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was at that time Emperor Franz Joseph’s heir.
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