Talk:Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia

A fact from Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 20 May 2007. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia was exiled for life, after marrying a commoner of black ancestry?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2007/May.

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Romancing Mary of Teck

Despite allegations to the contrary, it is difficult to believe that Michael Mikhailovich's marriage to a Teck would not have been deemed morganatic in Russia. Russia very strictly interpreted Ebenburtigkeit, so that Tsar Alexander II's marriage to a Rurikid princess such as Princess Catherine Dolgorouky, was declared morganatic by the groom himself. Given that Michael's eventual marriage to Pushkin's granddaughter, Countess Natalia of Merenberg, was morganatic, it seems very unlikely that a Teck marriage would have been accepted as equal, especially by Alexander III in 1887 (or even Nicholas II later) any more than it would have been accepted by Kaiser Wilhelm II. Better documentation of this abortive romance is needed to support the article's implication that such a match would have been treated as legally dynastic. FactStraight (talk) 22:45, 31 December 2013 (UTC)[reply]

The Tecks may have been considered dynastically equal through their maternal line. Maximilian de Beauharnais, 3rd Duke of Leuchtenberg's marriage to Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna of Russia (1819–1876) was considered equal because of his mother's Bavarian lineage despite the fact the Beauharnais were parvenu royals tainted with Napoleonic connections.--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 11:36, 3 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I disagree. I concur that Maximilian's maternal line made him more palatable to the Romanovs but a Bavarian princess did not convey any legal "dynasticity" on the Beauharnais, and was not mentioned when a Beauharnais queen was chosen to be consort in Sweden: the King there explicitly acknowledged (in a letter to his wife, Désirée Clary) that the Beauharnais did not meet Sweden's legal standard, but the King authorized the marriage anyway because of Eugene de Beauharnais' uniquely high reputation -- which is also what I think persuaded the Romanovs (and the Braganzas of both Portugal & Brazil, the Hohenzollerns, etc). The Beauharnais were in a legal gray area, whereas the Tecks were not. FactStraight (talk) 23:55, 3 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]