Status
In such cases, primary responsibility for promoting the family's prestige, aggrandizement, and fortune fell upon the senior branch for future generations. A cadet, having less means, was not expected to reproduce a family. If a cadet chose to raise a family, its members were expected to maintain the family's social status by avoiding derogation, but could pursue endeavors that might be considered demeaning for the senior branch, such as immigration to another sovereign's realm, or engagement in commerce, or a profession such as law, academia, or civil service.
In some cases, cadet branches eventually inherited the crown of the senior line, e.g. the Bourbon Counts of Vendôme mounted the throne of France (after civil war) in 1593; the House of Savoy-Carignan succeeded to the kingdoms of Sardinia (1831) and Italy (1861); the Counts Palatine of Zweibrücken obtained the Palatine Electorate (1799) and the Kingdom of Bavaria (1806); and a deposed Duke of Nassu was restored to sovereignty in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg (1890).
In other cases, a junior branch came to eclipse more senior lines in rank and power, e.g. the Kings of Prussia and German Emperors who were junior by primogeniture to the Counts and Princes of Hohenzollern, and the Electors and Kings of Saxony who were a younger branch of the House of Wettin than the Grand Dukes of Saxe-Weimar.
A still more junior branch of the Wettins, headed by the rulers of the small Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, would, through diplomacy or marriage in the 19th and 20th centuries, obtain the royal crowns of, successively, Belgium, Portugal, Bulgaria and the Commonwealth Realms. Also, marriage to cadet males of the Houses of Oldenburg (Holstein-Gottorp), Mecklenburg, Polignac, Bourbon-Parma, Lippe(-Biesterfeld) and Greece (Glucksburg) brought those dynasties patrilineally to the thrones of, respectively, Russia, The Netherlands, Monaco, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and, prospectively, the Commonwealth Realms.
By contrast, it was also sometimes possible for cadet branches to sink in status, either due to diminished fortune or genealogical distance from the reigning line. Such was the case of the Capetian branch of the princes de Courtenay, the last male of which died in 1730 without ever having been recognized by the French crown as dynastic princes du sang despite their undisputed but remote male-line descent from Louis VI of France. Likewise, the principi di Ottajano, an extant branch of the House of Medici eligible to inherit the grand duchy of Tuscany when the last male of the senior branch died in 1737, were bypassed by the intervention of Europe's major powers, which allocated the Florentine sovereignty elsewhere. Although the Romanovs mounted Russia's throne in 1613 due to kinship-by-marriage to a tsar (Ivan the Terrible) descended from the 9th century founding ruler Rurik, when in 1880 Tsar Alexander II wed Catherine Dolgorukov, a Rurikid princess, the marriage and its progeny were deemed morganatic.
Read more about this topic: Cadet Branch
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