Surprising connections

What does a well-known European princely family have to do with Canada's longest serving prime minister? I wouldn't have known until a few days ago.

Last week I checked out of the local public library a lavishly illustrated book titled, Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra. Although it appears to be simply another coffee table book, it is actually a quite well written account of the lives and times of the doomed Russian imperial family in the twilight years of Romanov rule. As I was reading it, I found a reference to a Princess Cantacuzene, whose surname struck me as being remarkably similar to that of the Cantacouzenos dynasty, which ruled the Byzantine Empire during the later centuries of its existence. Wondering whether there was a connection, I naturally did a search over the internet and discovered that they were one and the same family. The Cantacouzenoi were one of a number of prominent Greek families in the Phanar neighbourhood of Constantinople, who were known collectively as Phanariotes and were holdovers from the glory days of Byzantium. The Turkish sultan selected two members of one of these families to serve as vassal princes over the Danubian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, now part of Romania. This brought some of the Cantacouzenos family north of the Danube, where they stayed on. 

A branch of the family moved farther north and east into Russia and settled there, retaining their princely status. One member of this family, Prince Michael Cantacuzene, married Julia Grant (1876-1975), granddaughter of Ulysses S. Grant, famed Civil War general and later president of the United States. She thus became Julia Grant, Princess Cantacuzene. In 1899 she met Canada's future prime minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King, shortly before her marriage to the Russian nobleman. Years later the two met again, and a correspondence began which lasted throughout the 1930s and '40s right up until his death. Among other things, they shared an interest in spiritualism and efforts to contact the dead. After her divorce, there was apparently even talk of marriage between the two, but nothing came of it.


Library and Archives Canada

Julia Grant, Princess Cantacuzene

One mystery solved. But now there's another: was Maurice Paléologue (1859-1944), the last French ambassador to imperial Russia and the man largely responsible for bringing Russia into the Great War, related to the Palaeologos dynasty, the last to rule the Byzantine Empire before its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1453? According to this site, he was indeed.