Cantacuzino (family)

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Coat of arms of the Princely House of Cantacuzino / Cantacuzene

Cantacuzino (also: Cantacuzene ) is a Romanian noble family, which derives its origin from the Byzantine imperial family of the Kantakuzenos .

The first members of the family, however, can only be attested in the late 16th century, with the phanariote Michael "Şeytanoğlu" Kantakuzenos , more than a century after the fall of Constantinople . Whether the Kantakuzenos family of the Ottoman period are actually descendants of the Byzantine imperial family is questionable, especially since it was common at that time among wealthy Greek families to adopt Byzantine surnames and declare famous noble houses of the Byzantine past to be their ancestors.

Byzantine scholar Steven Runciman wrote of the later Kantakuzenoi as "perhaps the only family whose claim to be in the direct line of Byzantine emperors is authentic," but according to his colleague Donald Nicol , "patriotically minded Romanian historians have tried to show that ... of all the Byzantine imperial families, that of the Kantakuzenos is the only one who can truthfully be said to have survived to this day; but the succession after the middle of the 15th century is, to put it mildly, uncertain. "

Cantacuzino Palace in Bucharest
Cantacuzino Castle in Buşteni , Romania

Well-known namesake

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jean-Michel Cantacuzène, Mille ans dans les Balkans Éditions Christian, Paris (1992) ISBN 2-86496-054-0 .
  2. a b George Finlay : The History of Greece under Othoman and Venetian Domination . William Blackwood and Sons, Edinburgh and London 1856, pp. 188-189.
  3. Steven Runciman : The Great Church in Captivity: A Study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the Eve of the Turkish Conquest to the Greek War of Independence . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, ISBN 0-521-31310-4 , p. 197.
  4. Nicol, The Byzantine Family of Kantakouzenos (Cantacuzenus) , approx. 1100–1460: A Genealogical and Prosopographical Study (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1968), p