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Until the Treaty of Speyer, concluded on 23 May 1544, Adolf's half-brother Christian III of Denmark ruled the entire Duchies of Holstein and Schleswig in the name of the then still minor Adolf and his brother John the Elder. They determined their youngest brother Frederick was to have a career as Lutheran administrator. In 1551 Frederick became administrator of the Prince-Bishopric of Hildesheim. In 1544, following negotiations between the elder three brothers and the nobility of the duchies, th

On 17 December 1564 he married Christine, daughter of Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, and had the following children

Duke Adolf is a character in Stefan Heym's 1981 book Ahasver. Heym's depiction of the Duke is highly satyrical and unflattering. The Duke is shown in the midst of a night of lechery and drunkenness, charging Paul von Eitzen, Superintendent of the Lutheran church of the Gottorp share of Holstein and Schleswig, with creating "The Kingdom of God" in his duchy — i.e., imposing the newly minted Lutheran orthodoxy and persecuting "heretics" such as the Mennonites. At the same time the Duke, out ...

Legally, it remains unclear whether any ukase ever abolished the surname of Michael Romanov after his accession to the Russian throne in 1613, although by tradition members of reigning dynasties seldom use surnames, being known instead by dynastic titles. From January 1762 [O.S. December 1761], the monarchs of the Russian Empire claimed the throne as relatives of Grand Duchess Anna Petrovna of Russia, who had married Charles Frederick, Duke of Holstein-Gottorp. Thus they were no longer Romanovs

The Romanovs share their origin with two dozen other Russian noble families. Their earliest common ancestor is one Andrei Kobyla, attested around 1347 as a boyar in the service of Semyon I of Moscow. Later generations assigned to Kobyla an illustrious pedigree. An 18th-century genealogy claimed that he was the son of the Old Prussian prince Glanda Kambila, who came to Russia in the second half of the 13th century, fleeing the invading Germans. Indeed, one of the leaders of the Old Prussian rebel

The Holstein-Gottorps of Russia retained the Romanov surname, emphasizing their matrilineal descent from Peter the Great, through Anna Petrovna. In 1742, Empress Elizabeth of Russia brought Anna's son, her nephew Peter of Holstein-Gottorp, to St. Petersburg and proclaimed him her heir. In time, she married him off to a German princess, Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst. In 1762, shortly after the death of Empress Elizabeth, Sophia, who had taken the Russian name Catherine upon her marriage, overthrew her

On the night of 17 July 1918, Bolshevik authorities acting on Yakov Sverdlov's orders in Moscow and led locally by Filipp Goloshchyokin and Yakov Yurovsky, shot Nicholas II, his immediate family and four servants in the Ipatiev House's cellar. The family was roused from sleep around 1:30 a.m. and told that they were being moved to a newer, safer location. They dressed quickly but informally. They were then led from the house where they had been staying and taken across a courtyard and down some

On 18 July 1918, the day after the killing at Yekaterinburg of the tsar and his family, members of the extended Russian imperial family met a brutal death by being killed near Alapayevsk by Bolsheviks. They included: Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich of Russia, Prince Ioann Konstantinovich of Russia, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich of Russia, Prince Igor Konstantinovich of Russia and Prince Vladimir Pavlovich Paley, Grand Duke Sergei's secretary Varvara Yakovleva, and Grand Duchess Elisabeth Fyod