Empires have existed for about 10,000 years. Their leadership structures sufered from three main points of failure:
- Lack of a sufficient number of trustworthy, disciplined top-level members
- The individual members were too self-centered in their ambitions
- Their visibility was too high
You needed to step over other people to make it to the top. You needed to blindside even your own family members if necessary. Keeping the numbers low of family members in leading positions, however, made you vulnerable. If someone got sick, injured or died, he wasn’t immediately replaceable. If your children didn’t turn out as expected, you had to sideline them and pick someone further away from your immediate family or someone outside your family altogether. Personal ambition could get you far in the game but left you with many enemies you made along the line who wanted to see you fall.. A really bad scenario was an intra-family war, a foud which spiralled out of control because everyboby wanted to continually exert revenge and there was no higher independent power to regulate the conflict. If your leadership group is rather small and pompous, its easier to attack by various means. Their close servants and advisors could be recruited as sources by spies.
Even the gods of the ancient world had been created in the image of such rulers: Egomaniacs who conspired against each other.
The aristocratic bloodlines of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars had started out in small scale. Welfs seem to be the oldest according to available information, continuing on after the fall of the Western Roman empire. Whereas Rome could deploy up to 700.000 soldiers total, the European bloodlines had to make things work with only thousands or tens of thousands for quite a while. Because they didn’t have much land, peasant serfs and troops, Welfs, Wettins and Reginars apparently decided to focus on numbers, coherence, loyalty and espionage. This allowed them to grow steadily, defend against bigger empires and gradually expand their territories from bits of Germany to Denmark, Scotland, Scandinavia and ultimately Britain where they put George I. on the throne in 1714.
The longevity, the coherence and the success of this aristocratic cluster was unique, unmatched. It is a historic anomaly. Besides the traditional, obligatory pomp, George I. was avoiding a lot of the limelight. The aristocratic cluster already had a staggering number of members and was staging a phony enlightenment using classic espionage tactics like creating political and corporate front organizations. Nobody was supposed to see its true size and intelligence capabilities.
The cluster in 1714 when it took the British throne
The top segment consisted of the living, legitimate dynasts in the male line of the three houses (plus their unmarried daughters still counted inside the house). A reasonable, defensible order-of-magnitude for the year 1714 is about 330 people, with a plausible range of ~285–380. That total is carried almost entirely by the Welfs and Wettins; as an agnatic house the Reginars were technically extinct but had successors. If we broaden “member” to anyone cognatically descended from those houses, the number balloons into the low thousands among Europe’s titled elites—and into the many tens or hundreds of thousands total. You did not need a title and the official name to be useful to the cluster – but you probably were kept on a strict need-to-know basis.
Diferent modes of counting
- living, legitimate agnates (men and boys in the male line) of each house in 1714 plus their unmarried daughters who were still recorded within the natal house in almanacs and genealogies.
- spouses who married into the house, illegitimate issue, and the vast field of cognatic descendants (people related through female lines who now belonged to other houses).
The three clusters in 1714
1) Welfs (House of Welf / Brunswick-Lüneburg, incl. Hanover & Wolfenbüttel)
By 1714 the Welfs were populous, split into several active lines:
- Hanover/Calenberg line (the new British royal house in 1714): George I; his heir George Augustus (later George II); a clutch of Hanoverian princes and princesses; collateral Calenberg/Lüneburg cousins who hadn’t merged into the Hanover line.
- Wolfenbüttel (incl. the Bevern cadets): Duke Anton Ulrich’s sprawling family (several adult sons with children) and collateral branches.
Agnatic adult males and boys across these Welf lines, plus their unmarried daughters, yields a household-sized headcount in the dozens per branch. Summing the branches:
- Hanover/Calenberg: ~20–30
- Wolfenbüttel (main): ~30–40
- Bevern & other cadets: ~35–45
Subtotal Welfs: ~90–110
Why this is reasonable: even a “small” German ducal house in the 18th century typically shows 10–20 living male dynasts and a comparable number of daughters at any moment; the Welfs had multiple such lines alive at once.
2) Wettins (House of Wettin: Albertine & Ernestine branches)
The Wettins were the most prolific German dynasty in 1714—dozens of Ernestine micro-duchies and several Albertine secundogenitures:
- Albertines:
- Electoral Saxony / Polish crown line (Augustus II and his legitimate line) was demographically modest, but…
- Saxe-Weissenfels, Saxe-Merseburg, Saxe-Zeitz (the Albertine “younger houses”) together produced several dozen living princes and princesses.
- Ernestines: the poster-children for partition—Saxe-Weimar(-Eisenach), Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Saxe-Meiningen, Saxe-Hildburghausen, etc. Descendants of Ernst “the Pious” alone create an unusually deep bench.
A cautious roll-up by branch sizes:
- Ernestine lines (aggregate): ~120–170
- Albertine lines (electoral + Weissenfels/Merseburg/Zeitz): ~75–100
Subtotal Wettins: ~195–270
Why this is reasonable: in any given Ernestine duchy around 1714 you can expect a dozen-plus living male dynasts and a similar number of daughters; multiplied across 5–7 active Ernestine lines plus 3 Albertine cadet lines, you arrive in the high hundreds when counting everyone in the house books—but trimming to the stricter dynastic definition lands you in the low-to-mid 200s.
3) Reginars (House of Reginar / Reginarids)
As a male-line dynasty the Reginarids (the old houses of Hainaut, Louvain/Brabant) had died out agnatically long before 1714; their medieval principalities had passed to other houses by marriage. On a strict dynastic reading, therefore, the 1714 headcount is 0. If you wanted to include cognatic offshoots, you’d be counting swathes of Europe’s nobility (Brabantine/Louvain blood runs everywhere by 1714), and the number becomes so large as to be meaningless for a “house membership” estimate.
Subtotal Reginars (agnatic): 0
Putting it together
- Welfs: ~90–110
- Wettins: ~195–270
- Reginars (agnatic): 0
Total (1714, strict dynastic definition): ~285–380, mid-estimate ≈ 330
What if you broaden the definition?
- Add married daughters still tracked as “of” the house until they produce heirs in another house → adds a few dozen on the margins but doesn’t change the order of magnitude.
- Add all cognatic descendants (anyone with Welf/Wettin/Reginar ancestry regardless of current house) → you race into the low thousands among titled families by 1714.
- The Wettins alone had intermarried with nearly every Ernestine/Albertine cousin house; their daughters populated neighboring princely families.
- The Welfs had a wide marital net (Hanover + Wolfenbüttel marriages into Prussia, Denmark-Norway, Hohenzollern lines, etc.).
- Reginar blood (from the medieval Brabant/Hainaut stock) is effectively ubiquitous in north-west European nobility by the early modern period.
- A cautious, defensible ballpark for “how many living titled people in 1714 have at least one of these lineages?” is 5,000–10,000, depending on how far down the comital/baronial ladder you go.
- Add the general population (all legitimate descendants over centuries) → numbers become huge (hundreds of thousands, likely millions) due to pedigree collapse and the sheer timespan.
Why the range is wide (and why it’s still useful)
- House books vs. reality: Early-18th-c. almanacs and genealogies track dynasts, not every child. Infant/child mortality and the lag in recording minors create noise of ±10–15% per line.
- Cadet churn: Small Ernestine and Albertine lines wink in and out with deaths/partitions; a single unexpected extinction or late-born prince shifts counts by half-dozens.
- Definition drift: Some genealogists include widowed daughters returned to the natal court; others move them out on marriage. I’ve resolved that by counting unmarried daughters inside the house.
Given those uncertainties, an interval is more honest than a single point.
