House of Hohenzollern: A Fake Ancestor, a Bought Crown and a Modern Lawsuit

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The Hohenzollerns first appear in the records around 1061 with Burkhard I, counts of a castle on an 855 meter mountain in the Swabian Alps who served the Holy Roman emperors as Burgraves of Nuremberg. In 1218 the family split into a Catholic Swabian branch that stayed in the south and a Franconian branch that later turned Protestant and expanded relentlessly. Made electors in 1415, the Franconians bought the Margraviate of Brandenburg in 1417 for 400,000 Hungarian guilders from the cash-strapped Emperor Sigismund. In 1525 Albert of Prussia, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, consulted Martin Luther, converted, and turned the order's Baltic lands into the hereditary Duchy of Prussia under Polish suzerainty.

In 1701 Frederick I took a crown as King in Prussia rather than King of Prussia, a wording that avoided provoking the emperor and Poland. Frederick the Great finally became King of Prussia in 1772, and in 1871 Bismarck made Wilhelm I the first German emperor. Wilhelm II's naval race with Britain and the collapse of 1918 sent him into exile in the Netherlands, while the Swabian branch supplied Romania's kings from Carol I until Michael I was forced out in 1947. Today Georg Friedrich, head of the house, is suing the German state for palace residence rights, 266 paintings, a library and an imperial crown.

• In 1560 Count Carl I hired a historian to invent a fictional ancestor named Tassilo, supposedly a grandson of Charlemagne.
• Elector John Sigismund converted to Calvinism in 1613, but his Lutheran wife Anna of Prussia led the resistance and he abandoned forced conversion in 1615.
• Frederick William III merged Lutherans and Calvinists into the state-controlled Prussian Union of Churches with himself at its head.
• The Swabian Hohenzollerns handed sovereignty of their lands to their Prussian cousins in 1849 but kept their princely titles.
• In 2011 the exiled King Michael of Romania formally severed all dynastic ties with the German House of Hohenzollern.