Around what century did royalty stop incest?
They still practice it, specifically England. They usually marry "distant" cousins. The prince of Spain though he married a news cast women, she got lucky.
Were knights able to marry servants or only royalty?
The Anglo Saxon word for Knight is ` cntht ` and means `servant . In the late 11th and early 12th centuries , knights were the lowest tier of those who held land in return for military service , it was only as society became more complex that their social standing improved . Up until then they freely married servants as their own status was not of the higher orders A knight bachelor did not belong to any special order and would not have held much appeal as a potential spouse to the higher social classes
Why did many monarchs end during the 20th century?
The French Revolution (1789–99) exposed the brutal nature of the urban poor, who were unable to absorb the ideas of the Enlightenment except in their crudest, most violent form. Left wing terror reigned, followed by Napoleonic dictatorship and unending wars. Legitimacy of government was destroyed in France, papered over by one or another republican or quasi-monarchic pretense.In America, the tradition of republican self-government was established with relative ease.The royal houses of Europe observed and were learning the lesson. Throughout the 19th Century it was becoming clear that the aristocracy alone could not provide a sufficiently strong basis for monarchy. A triangular political structure emerged where the plebeian urban mass clamored for elected government, the royal house and the aristocracy were the opposing force both appealing to the uneducated class promising protection.In United Kingdom, not yet unified Germany and Italy, Austria Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium and Scandinavia, the societies stabilized under this inverted triangular system. This tentative balance remained till the Great War.The War destroyed Germany, Austria Hungary, and Russia. Monarchies died along with the civil societies in those countries. A period of social experimentation, that tried to ram socialist ideas into the traditional fabric of those East-Central European nations began. The Second World War ended the experiment for some, but not for all.Stable monarchies of Western Europe adapted to the crisis of governance by fading away from the public arena. Germany recovered as a republic. Russia did not recover.The last chapter in Europe has not been written yet. It is evident that republican self-government combined with left-wing cultural policies is working worse and worse in Europe. It is time for an aristocratic and monarchic force to emerge in order to protect people from their increasingly incompetent governments. Perhaps, in a generation or two some balance will be found. Monarchism, in some yet barely recognizable form, is in Europe’s future.
What language did European royalty use to speak to each other in the decades before World War I, particularly those descended from Queen Victoria?
Almost any royal of this period was able to switch between multiple languages. French was surely the most important language, the marker of a cultivated person, but other languages were used as well.Look, for instance, at this lady.Her name was Maria Pavlovna Romanova and she was a cousin to our last Czar, Nicholas II. She was 16 when this photo was taken. She was already fluent in Russian, French, English, German and Italian.However, the first marriage proposal came from Prince Wilhelm, Duke of Södermanland, the second son of the King of Sweden. She was “plump, mischievous and proud”, as she describes herself. He proposed to her on the second day and she (and her family) said yes. She immediately started studying Swedish. They were married the next year, when she was 18 and he was 24:Having become a Swedish Princess, she needed to be Swedish in everything. Here you can see Olga with her husband, wearing traditional Swedish costume:By the way, her grandmother was Queen Olga of Greece. Here you can see Princess Maria with her Swedish son, her Russian great-grandmother, and her Greek grandmother:It would be difficult to stick to just one language in such a situation, don��t you think?She left nice memoirs, by the way. They were first published in English:Education of a Princess, a memoir by Marie, Grand Duchess of Russia. Blue Ribbon Book. New York. 1931.
How are all European royal families related?
In a ferociously complicated web of cousins, uncles, aunties, marriages, and so on. It is so complicated it defies writing down without a massive chart or diagram.This is so complex because members of these families keep marrying each other and complicating it further, and have done for hundreds of years.This leads to weird things like the (former) royal family of Greece having conspicuously German “surnames” (i.e. name of Royal House)This also used to be true in the UK but King George V decided to change it because of the First World War.
If royalty have a kid out of wedlock, will they get to become kings/queens, princes/s?
No - a child must be legitimate to inherit a title. Charles II did have a lot of bastards, and created them dukes (some of their descendants are still around - the Dukes of Grafton, Beaumont and Richmond) but none were eligible for the throne. George IV only had illegitimate children and was succeded by his brother when he died. Incidentally, there was a Lord Berkeley whose marriage was declared invalid and had to re-marry his wife, and the title went to the first son born after the re-marriage. However he refused to use it, as doing so acknowledged the illegimacy of his elder brothers.