“And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha . . .”

John E. J. James, editor
ALMANACH DE GOTHA
Volume One
1,370pp. Boydell and Brewer. £60.
978 0 953214 27 3

Published: 5 October 2012

“ I have known a German prince with more titles than subjects”, the Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith once observed. Anyone who glances at the entry for Michael-Benedict George Jobst Carl Alexander Bernhard Claus, Prince of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Duke of Saxony, Jülich, Kleve and Berg, Engern and Westfalen, Landgrave in Thüringen, Margrave zu Meissen, Princely Count zu Henneberg, Count zu der Mark and Ravensberg, Lord zu Ravenstein and Tonna, in the latest edition of the Almanach de Gotha: Volume One – the “legendary” (in the words of a recent editor) directory of European royalty and nobility – will catch his drift.

In the decades following its first publication in 1763 at the sober, scholarly court of the Dukes of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, the Almanach de Gotha acquired a kind of Pentateuchal status among the princely families of Europe. It lent authority to the founding sagas of the principal dynasties of Germany – providing, for example, the reigning Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin or Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel with direct lines of descent from primeval patriarchs like Niklot, Prince of the Obotrites, or Lambert I the Bearded. It defined who belonged to the sacred tribe of royalty and who was excluded, offering posthumous vindication to figures like the seventeenth-century Princess of Taranto, who was seldom out of mourning because, as she claimed, she was related to the entire Holy Roman Empire. It laid down the law on procreation, indicating what marriages enabled the transmission of regal blood and what matches would banish the parties and their heirs from the princely firmament – a distinction rendered all the more acute in the early nineteenth century by the creation of a category of “mediatized” families of the former Holy Roman Empire, who, despite losing their power, retained their royal status.

The world conjured by the Gotha resembles a magic realist landscape

By the middle of that century, the Gotha was as ubiquitous at European courts as books of courtesy in the royal libraries of the Renaissance – a vainglorious gothic subversion of the mirror-for-princes tradition. As its contents expanded to include royal and noble families from outside the Holy Roman Empire, “that incomparable catalogue”, as H. G. Wells called it, became a handbook for husband-hunters, fortune-seekers, pedants and pretenders. After the First World War, it was the last refuge for the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and other nomadic dynasties – one of the “vacant interstellar spaces”, in T. S. Eliot’s words, into which the old world had vanished. Yet in 1945, it too disappeared when the offices of its German publisher, Justus Perthes, were ransacked by the Soviet army searching for information on the whereabouts of surviving members of the Russian imperial family.

The publication was revived in London in 1998 to chart the current generation of European royalty. In the meantime, magazines such as Majesty and ¡Hola! had begun chronicling the fortunes of Europe’s princelings in glossy pantone, rather than eight-point print. The latest edition of the Gotha, which documents the royal and mediatized houses of Europe, does not try to compete (a proposed second volume will deal with non-sovereign dynasties). The only colour illustrations are a gloomy portrait of Elizabeth II with the Duke of Edinburgh and an advertisement for a private Swiss bank. Its punctilious itemization of titles, lineage and heraldry aims for scholarship rather than sensation.

The world conjured by the Gotha resembles a magic realist landscape, where present and past, politics and pantomime intermingle anarchically. Ten of the forty-four families listed in the first part, covering sovereign and ex-sovereign houses, retain their thrones. Representatives of several other dynasties have found that the ballot box is no necessary obstacle to power. They include Simeon II, a former king of Bulgaria, who won election as prime minister of the country in 2001, and Prince Paul Romanov, a great-grandson of Tsar Alexander II, who did a turn as mayor of that favourite high-society watering hole, Palm Beach.

Familiar names arise in unfamiliar settings. One Nicolas Sarkózy de Nagy-Bocsa appears in the guise of Co-Prince of Andorra by virtue of the office of French President (the book, which strives gallantly to remain up to date, went to press before this year’s presidential election). The actor Tim Bentinck, best known as David Archer in the eponymous Radio 4 series, features in part two, which lists the mediatized dynasties of the Holy Roman Empire, in the role of eleventh Count Bentinck and Waldeck-Limpurg. Scions of venerable dynasties surface in myriad places and professions. Austrian archduchesses serve as advertising executives and restaurateurs; a princess from the house of Bonaparte, whose founder scorned England as a “nation of shopkeepers”, works as a sales assistant.

This taxidermic display of the remnants of the ancien régime continues in the “Diplomatic and Statistical Directory”. Here, the Sovereign Military Order of Malta merits a longer entry than China, and the names of Canadian heralds or members of the Duke of Savoy’s “Grand Magistry of the Dynastic Orders” outnumber government ministers. Yet although the Gotha is an unembarrassed celebration of a world that is largely lost, the portcullis is not always jammed fast against modernity. Take, for example, the entry for Sigismund, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who divides his responsibilities as Grand Master of the Order of St Stephen with a career as a software engineer.

At times, nostalgia and idiosyncrasy stray into error. Spelling mistakes are almost as abundant as Saxe-Coburg ramifications, while a statement of editorial principles rather alarmingly dispenses with apostrophes. Some family legends – such as the Ottoman boast of descent from a grandson of Noah – do not merit inclusion in a work with authoritative aspirations. Most quixotically of all, the title page displays the word “Annual”, although it has been eight years since the last edition appeared. The “legendary” Almanach de Gotha, it seems, is not immune from a little myth-making of its own.

David Gelber is Secretary for the Society for Court Studies.