Public Family Trees/Belgian Royal/Leopold of Belgium
1859 - 1869 · Male · Laeken, Brussels, Belgium
Son of Leopold II of Belgium and Marie Henriette of Austria
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Leopold of Belgium
1859 - 1869
Prince Leopold, Duke of Brabant (1859-1869) was the only son of Leopold II and Marie Henriette of Austria, and from his birth the heir apparent to the Belgian throne. Born at Laeken, he was given the title Duke of Brabant traditionally carried by the heir to the Belgian crown, and his arrival was celebrated as securing the direct line of the young dynasty. He died in January 1869, a few months before his tenth birthd…
Born1859
Born to Leopold II of Belgium, Marie Henriette of Austria.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Belgian Royal family.
Died1869
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 2 · 1840 - 1927
Princess Charlotte of Belgium (1840-1927), known in Mexico as Carlota, was the only daughter of Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orleans and the sister of Leopold II. Born at Laeken, she married Archduke Maximilian of Austria in 1857 and served with him in Milan while he was viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia, before the couple accepted the Mexican throne offered by French-backed conservatives in 1864. As Empress of Mexico she took an active part in government and acted as regent during Maximilian's absences, but the empire collapsed once Napoleon III withdrew French troops. She travelled to Europe in 1866 to plead for support and never returned; after Maximilian's execution in 1867 she lived sixty years in seclusion in Belgium, latterly at Bouchout Castle in Meise, where she died in 1927.
Gen 3 · 1870 - 1948
Princess Henriette of Belgium (1870-1948) was a daughter of Prince Philippe, Count of Flanders, and Princess Marie of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, and the sister of King Albert I. Born in Brussels as one of twin girls, she married Prince Emmanuel of Orleans, Duke of Vendome, in 1896 and settled in France as Duchess of Vendome, dividing her time between Paris and the family's estates. She was known for her charitable work in nursing and in support of wounded soldiers, which expanded greatly during the First World War, when she helped organise hospital care for Belgian troops and refugees. Her four children carried the Orleans line forward, and she died in Switzerland in 1948.
Gen 4 · 1901 - 1983
Leopold III (1901-1983) was the fourth King of the Belgians, reigning from 1934 to 1951. The eldest son of Albert I and Elisabeth of Bavaria, he married Princess Astrid of Sweden in 1926; she died in 1935, and in 1941 he married Lilian Baels, who took the title Princess of Rethy. As commander-in-chief he led the Belgian army during the German invasion of May 1940 and surrendered after eighteen days, then remained in occupied Belgium as a prisoner rather than joining the government in exile, a decision that divided the country for a decade. Deported to Germany in 1944 and kept abroad while his brother Prince Charles served as regent, he returned in 1950 into the political crisis known as the Royal Question and abdicated in favour of his son Baudouin in July 1951. He spent his later years travelling as an amateur anthropologist and naturalist.
Gen 4 · 1903 - 1983
Prince Charles, Count of Flanders (1903-1983) was the second son of Albert I and Elisabeth of Bavaria and served as Regent of Belgium from 1944 to 1950. A career naval officer trained in Britain, he was chosen by parliament to exercise royal powers after the liberation, while his elder brother Leopold III was held in Germany and then kept abroad during the dispute over his wartime conduct. As regent Charles presided over post-war reconstruction, the prosecution of collaborators, the extension of the vote to women in national elections and Belgium's entry into the Atlantic alliance. He withdrew almost completely from public life after handing power back in 1950, living quietly near Ostend, where he painted under the name Karel van Vlaanderen. He died in 1983.
Gen 4 · 1906 - 2001
Marie-Jose of Belgium (1906-2001) was the last Queen of Italy and the only daughter of Albert I and Elisabeth of Bavaria. Born at Ostend, she married Crown Prince Umberto of Savoy in Rome in 1930 and was Princess of Piedmont for sixteen years, during which she had four children, among them Vittorio Emanuele, later head of the House of Savoy. Opposed to the Fascist regime and to Italy's alliance with Germany, she was kept at a distance from political life and spent the end of the war in Switzerland. She became queen when Umberto took the throne in May 1946 but held the title barely a month before the referendum that made Italy a republic, which earned her the nickname the May Queen. She lived in exile in Switzerland and Mexico, wrote several works of history, and died in Geneva.
Gen 5 · b. 1934
Albert II (born 1934) was the sixth King of the Belgians, reigning from 1993 to 2013. The younger son of Leopold III and Astrid of Sweden, he was born at Stuyvenberg Castle in Laeken and spent part of his childhood in wartime captivity and then in Swiss exile. In 1959 he married the Italian noblewoman Paola Ruffo di Calabria, with whom he had three children: King Philippe, Princess Astrid and Prince Laurent. For decades he served as honorary president of the Belgian Office of Foreign Trade, leading trade missions abroad, before unexpectedly succeeding his childless elder brother Baudouin in 1993. His twenty-year reign covered repeated government crises and further federal reform. He abdicated on 21 July 2013 in favour of Philippe, and in 2020 legally recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as his daughter.
Gen 5 · 1942 - 2009
Prince Alexandre of Belgium (1942-2009) was the eldest child of King Leopold III and his second wife, Lilian Baels, Princess of Rethy, and a half-brother of King Baudouin and King Albert II. Born at Laeken during the German occupation, he was educated in Switzerland, the United States and Britain and served for a time in the Belgian navy. Because he was born of his father's second marriage he stood outside the line of succession, and he kept almost entirely out of public life, working in business and later giving his time to charitable work in Belgium. In 1991 he married Lea Wolman, a marriage made public only in 1998. He died in 2009 and is buried in the royal crypt at Laeken.
Gen 5 · b. 1956
Princess Marie-Esmeralda of Belgium (born 1956) is the youngest child of King Leopold III and Lilian Baels, Princess of Rethy, and a half-sister of King Baudouin and King Albert II. Born at Laeken and brought up at Argenteuil near Waterloo, she studied journalism and has worked as a journalist and documentary maker, publishing under the name Esmeralda de Rethy. She has written books on her father, on fashion history and on the Belgian royal family, and is best known internationally as an environmental and climate campaigner, taking part in public demonstrations and lending her name to conservation, biodiversity and women's rights causes. She lives in London and is married to the pharmacologist Salvador Moncada.
Gen 6 · b. 1962
Princess Astrid of Belgium (born 1962) is the second child of King Albert II and Queen Paola and the sister of King Philippe. Born at Laeken and named for her grandmother Queen Astrid, she studied in Belgium and Switzerland and in 1984 married Archduke Lorenz of Austria-Este, who was created Prince of Belgium in 1995. The couple have five children: Amedeo, Maria Laura, Joachim, Luisa Maria and Laetitia Maria. She leads Belgian economic missions abroad on behalf of her brother, serves as president of the Belgian Red Cross, and has worked for many years on campaigns against anti-personnel landmines and in support of the Special Olympics. She stands in the line of succession to the Belgian throne after King Philippe's children.
Gen 6 · b. 1963
Prince Laurent of Belgium (born 1963) is the youngest child of King Albert II and Queen Paola and the brother of King Philippe. Born at Belvedere Castle in Laeken, he trained at the Royal Military Academy and served as a naval officer. His public interests have centred on the environment and above all on animal welfare: he founded and chairs a veterinary foundation that works on animal health in Belgium and in developing countries, and he has campaigned on renewable energy, sustainable building and nature conservation. In 2003 he married the British-born chartered surveyor Claire Coombs, and they have three children, Louise, Nicolas and Aymeric. He remains in the line of succession to the Belgian throne after his elder siblings and their children.
Gen 7 · b. 2001
Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) is the eldest child of King Philippe and Queen Mathilde and the heir apparent to the Belgian throne. Born in Brussels, she is the first woman to hold the title Duke of Brabant, traditionally borne by the Belgian heir, and under the equal-succession reform of 1991 she is set to become the country's first queen regnant. She was educated in Brussels and in Wales, completed the officer training year at the Royal Military Academy, read history and politics at Lincoln College, Oxford, and went on to postgraduate study in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. She carries out a growing programme of official engagements in Belgium and abroad, and is the elder sister of Prince Gabriel, Prince Emmanuel and Princess Eleonore.
The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled England for 331 years, from the accession of Henry II in 1154 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, making it the longest-reigning royal house in English history. Fourteen Plantagenet kings held the throne in unbroken succession, and in the fifteenth century the family's two junior branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought each other for the crown in the civil wars later known as the Wars of the Roses. ## Origins The dynasty came from Anjou in western France. Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, is said to have worn a sprig of broom, *planta genista*, in his cap, and from that nickname the family eventually took its name, although it was not used as an actual surname until Richard, 3rd Duke of York, adopted it in the 1440s. Geoffrey's marriage in 1128 to Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I of England, gave their son a claim to the English throne that he made good in 1154. With Normandy and Anjou behind him, and Aquitaine gained through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, the assemblage historians call the Angevin Empire. ## Notable members The early, or Angevin, kings are among the most familiar names in English history: Henry II, whose itinerant justices and sworn juries laid the foundations of the common law; Richard the Lionheart, a leading commander of the Third Crusade; and King John, who sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey, Edward I conquered Wales and summoned the Model Parliament, and Edward III opened the Hundred Years' War and founded the Order of the Garter. Later generations produced Edward the Black Prince, the victor of Poitiers, Henry V of Agincourt, and Richard III, whose lost grave was rediscovered in Leicester in 2012. ## Lancaster and York Edward III's many sons divided the dynasty. From his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, came Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and, through Gaunt's Beaufort children, Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry VII. From his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, combined with the senior Mortimer descent from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, came Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his sons Edward IV and Richard III. The rivalry of those branches produced thirty years of intermittent civil war, ending when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the red and white roses. ## Significance No other family has shaped English institutions so deeply. Under the Plantagenets, Magna Carta became a settled principle, parliament grew from an occasional royal council into a body whose consent was needed for taxation, the common law took its enduring form, and English displaced French as the language of the court. Their castles, abbeys and cathedrals still define the medieval landscape of England and Wales. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Ruled | England, 1154 to 1485 | | Founder | Henry II, son of Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda | | Place of origin | Anjou, France | | Kings | Fourteen, from Henry II to Richard III | | Branches | Angevin, Lancaster, York | | Emblems | The broom flower, the red rose of Lancaster, the white rose of York | | Last king | Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485 | | Legacy | Magna Carta, English common law, the growth of parliament |
The House of Bernadotte is the royal family of Sweden, founded by the French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who was elected Swedish crown prince in 1810 and reigned from 1818 as King Charles XIV John, and it has held the throne in an unbroken line ever since, down to King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria and Princess Estelle. ## Origins The dynasty began far from Sweden, in the Gascon town of Pau, where Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 as the son of a provincial lawyer. He rose through the revolutionary French army to become a Marshal of the Empire and Prince of Pontecorvo. In 1810 the Swedish Riksdag, left without an heir after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf and the accession of the childless Charles XIII, unexpectedly offered the succession to the French marshal. He accepted, converted to Lutheranism, took the name Charles John and in 1818 became king of both Sweden and Norway. His marriage to Desiree Clary, a Marseille merchant's daughter once engaged to Napoleon, produced the dynasty's second king, Oscar I. ## Notable members Oscar I's marriage to Josephine of Leuchtenberg, a granddaughter of the Empress Josephine, brought a descent from Sweden's older royal houses into the line, and Gustaf V's marriage to Victoria of Baden, a great granddaughter of the deposed Gustav IV Adolf, reinforced it. Later generations produced an unusual number of figures known for work outside the court: Prince Eugen, one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters; Gustaf VI Adolf, a working archaeologist and botanist; and Sigvard Bernadotte, an industrial designer. The family's daughters carried the name into the other Scandinavian monarchies and into Belgium: Ingrid became queen of Denmark, Astrid queen of the Belgians and Martha crown princess of Norway, which makes this tree a close relative of the Glucksburg line. ## Significance Under the Bernadottes the Swedish monarchy moved from real political power to a purely ceremonial role, settled by the constitution of 1974. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full absolute primogeniture, making the infant Crown Princess Victoria heir ahead of her younger brother. Carl XVI Gustaf, who became heir at nine months old and king in 1973, is the longest reigning monarch in Swedish history. Several princes of the house lost their royal titles by marrying commoners and were created Counts of Wisborg by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, a kinsman through Queen Sophia of Nassau, which is why the Bernadotte name is borne today both by a reigning royal house and by a line of counts. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | House of Bernadotte | | Country | Sweden, and Norway until 1905 | | Founder | Charles XIV John, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763 to 1844) | | Reigning since | 1818 | | Monarchs | Charles XIV John, Oscar I, Charles XV, Oscar II, Gustaf V, Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl XVI Gustaf | | Current head | King Carl XVI Gustaf, reigning since 1973 | | Heir apparent | Crown Princess Victoria, Duchess of Vastergotland | | Principal residences | Stockholm Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Haga Palace | | Royal motto | "For Sweden, with the times" (Carl XVI Gustaf) |
The House of Glücksburg is the reigning royal house of Denmark and Norway and the former royal house of Greece, a branch of the ancient House of Oldenburg whose modern members all descend from King Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) and his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Through the marriages of their six children, a minor ducal family from the Danish-German borderland became the common ancestor of monarchs in Copenhagen, Oslo and Athens, of a British queen consort, of a Russian empress, and of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ## Origins The house takes its name from Glücksburg, a small castle town in Schleswig, and belongs to the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg line of the House of Oldenburg, which had held the Danish throne since 1448. Christian IX was a prince of that cadet branch with no expectation of ruling until the childless Frederik VII made the Danish succession an open European question. Christian succeeded him in 1863, and within months his second son was elected King of the Hellenes as George I, planting the family in Greece for 110 years. In 1905 his grandson Prince Carl of Denmark accepted the Norwegian throne as Haakon VII, giving Norway its own dynasty after centuries of union with Denmark and then Sweden. ## Notable members Christian IX was nicknamed the father-in-law of Europe: his daughter Alexandra married Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and his daughter Dagmar became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Nicholas II. The Danish line runs through Christian X, Frederik IX and Queen Margrethe II, a trained archaeologist and illustrator who reigned from 1972 until her abdication in 2024, to her son King Frederik X and Queen Mary. The Norwegian line runs from Haakon VII and Queen Maud through Olav V, an Olympic sailing champion, to King Harald V and Crown Prince Haakon. The Greek line produced Constantine I, Paul, Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, Queen Sofía of Spain, and Prince Andrew's son Philip, consort to Elizabeth II for 73 years. ## Significance No other western dynasty connects as many surviving monarchies in a single documented lineage. Two of Europe's ten reigning royal families, Denmark and Norway, are Glücksburg in the male line, and the house also sits in the ancestry of the British and Spanish royal families. Its history traces the transformation of European monarchy itself: from the dynastic matchmaking of the 1860s, through the loss of the Russian and Greek thrones, to the constitutional, publicly accountable monarchies of modern Scandinavia. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | House name | Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a branch of the House of Oldenburg | | Founding figure of the modern house | Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) | | Ancestral seat | Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig | | Thrones held | Denmark (1863 to present), Greece (1863 to 1973), Norway (1905 to present) | | Current heads of state | Frederik X of Denmark, Harald V of Norway | | Best-known member abroad | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921 to 2021) | | Nickname of its founder | The father-in-law of Europe |
Leopold of Belgium's recorded parents are Leopold II of Belgium, Marie Henriette of Austria.
Leopold of Belgium has 3 recorded siblings: Louise of Belgium, Stephanie of Belgium, Clementine of Belgium.
Leopold of Belgium is recorded as Duke of Brabant, heir apparent to the Belgian throne in the Belgian Royal family tree.
Leopold of Belgium's recorded native place is Laeken, Brussels, Belgium.
4 ancestors and 0 descendants of Leopold of Belgium are recorded so far, within a tree of 48 people.
Leopold of Belgium is recorded as Leopold I of Belgium's Grandson.
Leopold of Belgium is recorded in the Belgian Royal family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 47 other people.
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