As most European royal families are closely interrelated, it was just a matter of time before someone pointed out the blood relations between Queen Elizabeth II and the medieval rulers of Lithuania. The British monarchs are distant descendants of Lithuania’s Grand Duke Gediminas.
This was pointed out in a Facebook post by the Grand Dukes Palace museum in Vilnius.
“Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (1926-2022) had links to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and among her ancestors were representatives of the Lithuanian Gediminas dynasty. Thus, Queen Elizabeth II also had Lithuanian blood,” the museum’s Facebook page reads.
Grand Duke Gediminas (1275-1342) gave start to the dynasty that ruled Poland and Lithuania until the mid-sixteenth century. Its most prominent branch was the Jagiellon dynasty.
According to the Grand Dukes Palace museum, Queen Elizabeth II was a twentieth-generation descendant of Gediminas. Moreover, she was the seventeenth-generation descendant of the Polish-Lithuanian monarch Casimir IV Jagiellon (Kazimieras Jogailaitis, 1427-1492), whose daughter Sofia was married into to the German House of Hohenzollern in Brandenburg.
Casimir IV Jagiellon himself was a great-grandson of Gediminas.
“The Hohenzollern Dukes of Brandenburg later ruled Prussia. The first Duke of Prussia, Albrecht Hohenzollern, was, among other things, a true cousin of the Grand Duke of Lithuania and King of Poland, Sigismund Augustus (1544/1548-1572), who often visited the Vilnius residence.
“According to Stephen Rowell, a British historian living in Lithuania, the Hohenzollern dynasty is closely related in the female line to the Stewarts-Hanover dynasty, from which Queen Elizabeth II’s ancestors descended. Thus, the House of Hanover, now known as the Windsors, is descended through the female line from the Scottish House of Stewarts and the German House of Hanover.
“These dynastic links are reflected in all the genealogical tables of Elizabeth II. Thus, through the female line, a direct link can be traced between the Lithuanian Gediminas and the British Stuart-Hanoverian-Windsor dynasties,” the museum’s post reads.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
