Marquis de Bourbon

Marquis - The Marquis

To fulfil their task, the margraves received border territories directly from the king or emperor as fiefs. The margraves had special powers compared to the normal counts. Thus they had the army and the high jurisdiction. Furthermore, they could order fortifications and were assigned a larger number of Frankish vassals to support them. These powers gave them, as commanders of important frontier marks, a strong independence and authority nearly equal to that of the tribal dukes. Defensible peasants were recruited throughout the Frankish Empire to settle in the Marches, so that in some places the margraves could raise considerable armies (the Heerbann) themselves. The margraves exercised the high jurisdiction without this first having to be transferred to them by the king.

The Bourbons

The House of Bourbon is a collateral line of the French royal family of the Capetians, descended from the youngest son of the French king Louis IX the Saint. Ultimately, Hugo Capet as the progenitor of the Capetians and his collateral lines is also the progenitor of the Bourbons. This led, among other things, to King Louis XVI being addressed by the civil name Louis Capet during his trial before the National Convention in 1792.

The last representatives of the Capetian dynasty today are the Bourbons, who still flourish in the male line. These include the Spanish line Bourbon-Anjou with its side branches Bourbon-Sicily and Bourbon-Parma as well as the line Bourbon-Orléans with the Brazilian side branch House of Orléans-Braganza. The Bourbons are the oldest dynasty still in existence in Europe, as all other Capetian main or collateral lines (such as the House of Valois with the collateral branch Valois-Alençon, the House of Artois or the House of Évreux) have now died out in the male line. The former Portuguese royal house of Bragança also derives from the Capetians, but it represents an illegitimate collateral line of the Elder House of Burgundy.

Castle Bourbon-l'Archambault

The name of the dynasty has its origins in the castle of Bourbon (Bourbon-l'Archambault), which can be traced back to the Carolingian period. In the High Middle Ages, this castle was the ancestral seat of a family of castle lords who were able to establish a dominion over their surrounding countryside. The Bourbonnais thus created came into the possession of Beatrix of Burgundy, herself descended from the Capetian House of Burgundy, through several successions. Beatrix was married to Prince Robert in 1272 and thus brought the Bourbonnais into his possession.

The family name resulted from a trade made by their common son Louis of Clermont, who in 1327 exchanged his paternal inheritance, the county of Clermont, with King Charles IV the Fair for the county of La Marche. On this occasion, the king also raised the rank of the Bourbon seigneury to that of a duchy and endowed it with the hereditary dignity of a pairie. At the time, this was a unique event, as until then only the traditional duchies based on ethnicity existed in France. The Bourbonnais thus became the most important possession for the family of Duke Louis I, and consequently all his descendants called themselves de Bourbon (of Bourbon).

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