What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

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What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Tue Apr 24, 2012 11:59 am

I'm not too familiar with how family relation and/or social status allows this or that title, in this case a princess. Is it only the daughter(s) of a queen? Are cousins and/or nieces of the ruling monarch or their children included? What about another position of high peerage, such as being the daughter(s) of a duke?

And since I only have some ideas based on Europe, how things work(ed) in other regions and time periods is fine, and might give me a better perspective on how this sort of thing works.
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Re: What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby Spokavriel » Tue Apr 24, 2012 1:51 pm

That's not entirely true. There are times when the children of such branches did succeed to the throne in smaller principalities but often they would only have titles along the lines of dukes and earls to show they weren't of the main line direct path to succeed the current monarch/patriarch.
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Re: What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby Crescent Pulsar R » Tue Apr 24, 2012 2:50 pm

That's another thing. Many of the fictional (and perhaps some non-fictional) stories often use the line of succession as a plot device, and a time or two the line was awfully long. At what point does one draw the, well, line in that line of succession, in that someone is just too distantly related to be considered as having one title or another? Or is the line that can be drawn only as distant as one's bloodline can be traced in relation to the ruling family?
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Re: What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby Spokavriel » Tue Apr 24, 2012 3:25 pm

Ideally you should never have to trace far to find a successor. That's why in movies like King Ralph they killed off dozens (low 100+ range) of people at the start of the movie saying clearly it was the entire known family. It also depends on how emphatic a people is for having someone of the blood continue to the throne. And if dalliances with non nobles are recorded and taken into account after about 20 generations the entire (17th century average) kingdom could have at least a marriage relation to someone of the blood.
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Re: What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby PCHeintz72 » Tue Apr 24, 2012 3:36 pm

The problem is the line of succession in a government with a royal or ruling family is *not* always direct. sometimes it is dependant on purity of the male or female line, (like always through family of first son born into the family)

Some anime gets really wierd with that... for example, Crest of the Stars... I believe the girl is 27th in line...

On the other hand, there is also a difference between nobility and royalty... many do not know the difference.
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Re: What qualifications/conditions grant the title "princess?"

Postby Ellen Kuhfeld » Tue Apr 24, 2012 4:36 pm

First we go back to Latin. The word 'prince' was derived from the Roman princeps -- one of the titles of the Emperors from Caesar Augustus on. (Augustus figured, rightly, that if he called himself 'king' or 'dictator' it might anger the Senate.) These Roman titles have quite a line of descent: Caesar has given rise to Kaiser and Czar (or Tsar). And in Medieval days, the Prince of Wales was the man in charge of Wales. (There are still people who mutter that if he'd called himself 'King' instead of 'Princeps' in the old Latin manner, the political evolution of Great Britain would have been different.) There are other ruling princes, e.g. in Monaco.

Be that as it may: the prince is either the man in charge, or the next in line to succeed him. And there's more than one way to claim the throne by blood descent. You can be child of the king -- or you can be the guy who came in, chopped his head off, spilled his blood all over the throne, and had a big enough following to make it stick. Rule by conquest, in other words.

Queens and Princesses have a similar situation. There was no doubt who was Princeps when Elizabeth I was on the throne. All you need to become princess is good luck and a good army. Descent by lineage is simply the peaceful way to do it. (And even then, it could get violent. Consider the Wars of the Roses. Richard III and Henry VII both had a decent claim to sit on the throne of England, and it took strenuous discussions on the battlefield to decide who got to sit, and who to lie silent.

For that matter, there was this little dispute in 1066 among Harald Hardrada, Earl Tostig, Harold Godwinsson, and William the Conqueror. But that was back when conquest was one of the standard ways to get a throne and a country to rule.
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