Dynasties of Europe

Khosroid

Iberia (Caucasus) · 580 – 786

11 figures

Khazar

Caspian Steppe / Eurasia · 650 – 969

1 figure

Umayyad Caliphate

Syria / Damascus / Spain · 661 – 750

The first hereditary Islamic dynasty, responsible for the rapid expansion of Arab rule from Spain to India.

2 figures

Carolingian

Frankish Empire / Holy Roman Empire · 751 – 987

The dynasty that ended Merovingian rule of the Franks in 751, built under Charlemagne the largest empire in western Europe since Rome, and held the imperial throne for the next two centuries. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 split the empire among Charlemagne's three grandsons into kernels of modern France, Germany, and the Low Countries. The senior West Frankish line ended with the death of Louis V in 987, when the magnates elected the Robertian Hugh Capet king — opening the Capetian century.

13 figures

Rurikid

Russia / Eastern Europe · 862 – 1610

2 figures

Argyros

Byzantium / Anatolia · 870 – 1056

1 figure

Plantagenet

England · 1154 – 1485

The royal house that ruled England for 331 years, from Henry II's accession in 1154 to Richard III's death at Bosworth Field in 1485. At its zenith under Henry II it controlled the Angevin Empire stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees; at its end it split into the warring Lancaster and York branches whose dynastic struggle became the Wars of the Roses.

19 figures

Mongol Empire

Mongol Empire / Eurasian Steppe · 1206 – 1368

The largest contiguous land empire in human history, built in a single generation by Genghis Khan and his sons. At its 1279 peak it spanned from the Pacific to the Black Sea, ruling perhaps a hundred million people across China, Central Asia, Persia, Mesopotamia, and the Russian steppe. Within a century of its founding it had fragmented into four major khanates — the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanate in Persia, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, and the Golden Horde over Russia — each ruled by descendants of Genghis.

14 figures

Austrian Habsburgs

Austria / Holy Roman Empire · 1273 – 1918

The senior Habsburg line, ruling from a single Swiss county at the time of Rudolf I's imperial election in 1273 to the abdication of Karl I in 1918. Between those endpoints they wore the Holy Roman crown almost continuously from 1438, brought Hungary and Bohemia into a single hereditary inheritance, weathered the Thirty Years' War and the Napoleonic dissolution of the Empire, and ruled the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy until the First World War destroyed it. Their continental dominance was built less by conquest than by marriage — bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube.

24 figures

Ottoman Empire

Anatolia / Balkans / Middle East · 1299 – 1922

One of history's most powerful states, bridging Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa for over 600 years.

3 figures

Stuart

Scotland and England · 1371 – 1714

The royal house of Scotland from 1371 and of England, Ireland, and ultimately Great Britain from 1603 to 1714. The Stuarts inherited the English throne through Margaret Tudor and lost it through a sequence of constitutional crises that produced the only public execution of an English king, the bloodless overthrow of another, and finally the parliamentary supremacy that defined the modern British state. The Acts of Union under the last Stuart, Queen Anne, fused England and Scotland into a single kingdom; her childless death ended the dynasty and brought the Hanoverians to London.

12 figures

Tudor

England · 1485 – 1603

The Welsh-Lancastrian house that took the English throne by force at Bosworth in 1485, ended the Wars of the Roses by marrying its rival into peace, and reshaped England in 118 years more decisively than any dynasty before it. Across five reigns the Tudors broke with Rome, founded the Church of England, suppressed the monasteries, defeated the Spanish Armada, and presided over the literary golden age of Shakespeare and Marlowe. The dynasty ended with Elizabeth I in 1603, the crown passing to her Stuart cousin in Edinburgh.

15 figures

Spanish Habsburgs

Spain / Holy Roman Empire · 1516 – 1700

A dominant European royal house known for controlling a vast global empire, and notorious for their strategic, yet ultimately catastrophic, generations of close intermarriage which led to the dynasty's genetic collapse.

5 figures

House of Romanov

Russia / Eurasia · 1613 – 1917

Ruled Russia for over 300 years, transforming a marginalized state into a transcontinental Eurasian empire through autocratic modernization and expansion.

4 figures