The Most Inbred Royal Bloodlines in History

The Most Inbred Royal Bloodlines in History The Romanov dynasty is often remembered for its violent end — a basement in Yekaterinburg, a firing squad, the extinction of three centuries of Russian imperial rule in a single night — but the biological story of the family is just as dramatic, and it started long before the revolution came. By the nineteenth century, the Romanovs had settled into a pattern common to nearly every royal house in Europe: marriage within an extraordinarily narrow pool of approved Protestant German noble families, the same surnames cycling through the genealogy across generations until the family tree looked less like a branching structure and more like a braid.