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I promise I will blog more about the kindly yet strange wild goose, LG, who lives on my parents’ farm (there has been a big change in his life!), but first let’s get to what everyone cares about most–princely secession within the aristocracy of a distant foreign federal republic (where royalty isn’t even an official thing).
“What on earth are you talking about?” you might well be saying. “‘Unofficial aristocrats of a distant federal republic?’ Is this some weird version of the Nigerian Prince scam?” I guess the answer to that rhetorical question is: maybe?
Behold! Here is Omo Oba Utienyinoritsetsola Emiko, the brand new Olu (king) of Warri (a tribal nation of Nigeria’s southern Delta, which was subsumed into greater Nigeria during unification in the 20th century). The new olu was crowned on August 21st, 2021 after the death of his uncle (the previous king). Kings, emirs, and other hereditary aristocrats have no actual authority within the Nigerian constitution, however some such noblefolk still possess substantial cultural and religious clout. Accordingly, King Emiko used his new royal authority to reverse a curse cast by one of his ancestors upon the nation of Nigeria. He also remarked upon the power and importance of women and suggested that Nigeria needs to diversify its economy beyond reliance on oil. It is a promising start by the (American educated) ceremonial king.
Yet King Emiko’s coronation did not proceed without incident. King Emiko’s mother was a Yoruba woman and thus born outside of Warri nobility. Some traditional minded Warri, (including the sons of the previous king) felt that this fact might disqualify Prince Emiko from the throne. Also, just prior to the coronation, the ancient crown of Warri went missing and police were summoned to discuss the matter with the late king’s sons. The crown is said to date back to the time of the first Olu of Warri who ruled from 1625 to 1643 and received the gilded headdress from the king of Portugal in exchange for organizing a port for slavetrading at Warri.
Fortunately, the crown was quickly discovered (just after the police became involved). The coronation day was a day of celebration and happiness. Thus far the new king has evinced a forward looking philosophy and it is hoped that he really can use his cultural capital to dispel some of the curses which linger over Warri. If such is his intention, perhaps his majesty should himself hide that crown: I personally wouldn’t want anything from House Aviz OR House Braganza (the Portuguese throne also changed dynasties during the period between 1625 and 1643). Anyway hopefully this little news bulletin has clarified the original source of royalty in the Delta region of Nigeria and answered some questions about the role of kingship in the modern world.
Oba Adémuwagun Adésida II ( photo taken in 1959)
Hey! Have you in any way been affiliated with or interacted with the internet in the last two decades? If so, you have probably received a heartfelt plea for assistance from a deposed/dispossessed/dispirited Nigerian prince. This famous email scam requested a small amount of money upfront in exchange for a big chunk of the royal treasury once the hapless royal heir ascended to his (grammatically shaky) throne. Since Nigeria is a federated republic (and since this was, to reiterate, a scam), nobody ever received the royal payola. However there is a kernel of historical truth within the confidence trick: Nigeria was once an assortment of kingdoms, emirates, and tribal lands which was annealed together by the British. Each of these principalities (or state-like entities) had a ruler, and, although they were stripped of legal power during the colonial era, the various eclectic potentates have held onto ceremonial, spiritual, and cultural authority.
Yoruba Ade
All of which is to say, there are no Nigerian princes, but there are prince-like beings, each of whom has a different set of royal regalia. These “crown jewels” take the form of thrones, statues, “magical” items, and royal outfits…including sacred headdresses. The Yoruba people (who constitute the majority of Nigeria’s ever-increasing population) vested particular authority in ceremonial “crowns” known as ades. An ade is a conical beaded cap usually decorated with beads and faces. The kings of the Yoruba people styled themselves as “obas” (an oba being a sort of combination of king, high priest, and chief). The symbol of the oba’s authority was his ade—his crown (or for a high obas–the “adenla” which means “great crown”).
Beaded Crown “Ade”
(ca. 20th Century; Glass beads, cloth, thread, and basketry)
Obas were the powerful rulers of the Yoruba and their ades were the ceremonial font of their authority. This power was connected to the numinous world of spirits, gods, and orishas (which this blog has glanced upon in talking about voodoo—the syncretic new world religion based on Yoruba spiritual concepts). To quote the British Museum’s culturally suspect (but nicely written) website:
Beaded and veiled crowns…are traditionally worn by those kings who could trace their ancestry to Ododua, the mythic founder and first king of the Yoruba people. The crown is called an orisha, a deity, and is placed upon the king’s head by his female attendant. Powerful medicines are placed at the top of the crown to protect the king’s head and thus his future. The veil that covers the king’s face hides his individuality and increases attention on the crown itself, the real centre of power. The birds decorating the crown represent the royal bird, okin.
Originally ades had long beaded veils to conceal the faces of their wearers, but European ideas about royal headwear influenced the makers, and many more recent examples of the craft resemble European crowns. The beautiful beadwork and impressive otherworldly artistry of ades has made them popular—so some of these examples may be constructed for the tourist trade. Nevertheless, the Yoruba ade is a very impressive sort of crown. Here is a little gallery of online images of ades.
Yoruba Ade Oba (by ÌMÒ DÁRA)
Yoruba Beaded Ade (Oba’s Crown) from Southwest Nigeria (Barakat Gallery)
Ade Olójúmérìndilógún, (with 16 faces) from Formação da Cultura Yoruba
Chief’s hat from the Yoruba tribe in Nigeria (ca. 1940)
Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife get in their car in Serbia five minutes before they are both shot
A century ago, on June 28th, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Gavrilo Princip, a Yugoslav nationalist. The assassination began a terrible sequence of political events which ineluctably dragged the nations of Europe (and eventually most of the world) into World War I –and eventually into World War II as well. Western society had been running blindly towards a terrible abyss: Franz Ferdinand’s death was when everyone unknowingly stepped off the edge and plunged into horror.
An abandoned trench destroyed by shellfire, Delville Wood near Longueval, Somme, September, 1916
Historians are still arguing about the agonizing and labyrinthine causes of the war (which would almost certainly have happened whether or not the Archduke had been shot). His death was merely the incandescent spark which fell into a pile of explosives. In the coming days and years, the world will look back on the events of those times from the temporal distance of a century and we will all try (again) to figure out how everything went so completely wrong. This is a very necessary exercise for humanity: the same forces which caused the First World War are always at work–gnawing at all we have tried to build like the great serpent Níðhöggr chewing away the roots of Yggdrasil.
Franz Ferdinand
Today, however, let us ignore the larger issues of what caused World War I and concentrate instead on a single person, Franz Ferdinand himself—because he was a deeply strange individual from an odd and convoluted family. His personal story is a troubling and sad story. To begin with, Franz Ferdinand had not initially been the heir to the Imperial throne. The real rightful heir was Rudolf Crown Prince of Austria-Hungary, however Rudolf abdicated his inheritance (and his life) in 1889 when he shot 17-year-old Baroness Marie Vetsera in the head and then turned the gun on himself. The murder-suicide was believed to be an emotional response to an imperial edict from Rudolf’s father Franz Joseph I, who had ordered the crown prince to end his love affair.
Crown Prince Rudolph & Baroness Mary Vetsera
After the death of Rudolf (who was the only son of Franz Joseph I), Franz Ferdinand’s father Karl Ludwig became the heir to the throne, however Karl Ludwig quickly chose to renounce the throne and die of typhus. This left Franz Ferdinand in a position which he had not expected. He was an ultra-conservative aristocrat and military officer which a morbid obsession for trophy hunting (his diaries indicate that he personally killed 300,000 animals); but he was also a well-known romantic. This latter aspect of his personality became a huge problem which nearly ripped apart the Austrian imperial family (anew). In 1894 Franz Ferdinand met Countess Sophie Chotek and fell deeply in love, but the Countess was not a member of one of Europe’s ruling royal families. In his new role as heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand was expected to marry someone fitting of his station, but he refused to do so. The Pope, the Tsar, and the Kaiser interceded between the Emperor and the Archduke until eventually a solution was found. The couple would be married, but none of their children would inherit the throne. The Countess was elevated to but she was to be treated as a sort of underclass concubine at court (although she was at least styled as “Princess”).
Pre-1900 pastel painting of Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg held at Artstetten Castle Museum.
Once his controversial marriage had happened, Franz Ferdinand became less controversial: he raised a family and assumed more and more imperial honors and duties. On June 28th, 2014 he was visiting Sarajevo with his wife and his advisors when Nedeljko Čabrinović, tried to assassinate him by throwing a grenade at his car. The bomb missed and injured the occupants of the following car. Franz Ferdinand and Sophie decided to visit the people who were injured in the grenade attack, however the changed itinerary confused their chauffeur who got lost and had to back up to get back on course. Gavrilo Princip was sitting a t a café when he saw the Archduke’s car slowly backing up the street. He got up and walked over and shot Sophie in the abdomen and Franz Ferdinand in the neck.
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, on their state visit to Sarajevo. The illustration was published in the French newspaper Le Petit Journal on July 12, 1914.
The archduke was more concerned for his wife than for himself. As the car accelerated away from the gunman, he cried out “Sophie dear! Don’t die! Stay alive for our children!” As his increasingly alarmed aids and underlings begin to realize the gravity of the situation, Franz Ferdinand began to repeatedly say “It is nothing,” again and again until he fell silent and died. Sophie likewise died of blood loss on the way to the hospital. Then, because of the loss of this middle aged couple, the world began to fall apart.
The Imperial Crown of the Austrian Empire. Schatzkammer. Vienna, Austria.
The crown to the Austro-Hungarian Empire is one of the most splendid of all crowns (look for a post about it next week), but considering the stories of Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph I, Sophie Chotek, and Crown Prince Rudolf, one could legitimately wonder whether it is accursed. Considering the tragedy that spiraled outward in greater and greater circles from the death of the archduke and his wife, one wonders if the whole world might likewise suffer from some evil dementia.
The Crown for the Hereditary Prince of Sweden
So, I wish I could explain this better, but here are the crowns of the princes and princesses of Sweden. These images come from the amazing website Official and Historic Crowns of the World and Their Locations which is an amazing resource for all things crown related. Evidently each Swedish prince and princess had their own crown made based on a standardized template. The effect of all these nearly identical and yet subtly different crowns is rather remarkable–like a beautiful treasure-based version of one of those “spot the difference” games which one sees in the comics pages. Yet somehow it all seems excessive: couldn’t they just have reused one crown (is the one on the top an original?) and spent all of that sweet crown money on weapons research and mentally-ill Strindberg plays? Hmm, now that I say that aloud it occurs to me that actually redundant pointy princely crowns might have been the right way to go…
The crown of Princess Sophia Albertina 1771
The crown of Princess Hedvig Elisabet Charlotta 1778
The crown of Princess Eugenia 1860
The crown of Prince Wilhelm 1902
The crown of Prince Oskar 1844
The crown of Prince Carl 1771
The crown of Prince Frederick Adolf 1771
Prince Hans-Adam II
The other day I read an overview of the annoyingly smug Prince Hans-Adam II von und zu Liechtenstein and I realized that the prosperous inhabitants of that tiny mountain nation have a problem. The Prince of Liechtenstein has the power to “irreversibly veto any law, dissolve the legislature, and appoint judges in his principality.” He is an old school absolutist with complete power over his subjects (although he doesn’t particularly exercise his authority over the rich burghers and money launderers who live there). The Prince has a problem as well though—he is missing his fancy hat. It is ironic that the one European sovereign who maintains true political authority is the one without a crown.
Franz Joseph I, Prince of Liechtenstein (painting by Alexander Roslin)
The ducal hat of Liechtenstein was discovered to be missing in 1781 following the death of Prince Franz Joseph I. Commissioned in 1623 by Karl von Liechtenstein the hat was modeled on the Imperial Crown of Austria and featured eight jeweled acanthus leaves surrounding a red velvet cap with a big shiny button on top. The white diamonds and red rubies/spinels of the crown were alleged to have magical properties for protecting the Duke (although they don’t seem to have staved off death for Franz Joseph I, nor did they protect the hat itself from whoever walked off with it). A single gouache painting kept in the Liechtenstein Museum portrays the original crown which has vanished completely from history—well, actually I found an online account of how Bulgarian spider worshippers smuggled it into the United States to sell to Druids (but I thought that there were some issues of historical accuracy with that website).
Gouache from 1756 (Liechtenstein Museum)
The citizenry of Liechtenstein chipped in together and bought a replacement hat for their anachronistically powerful liege in 1976, but undoubtedly he can sense that it is not the real thing. Fortunately the lack of his actual crown has not prevented him from writing a new book The State in the Third Millennium which summarizes his philosophy about governance. The Prince apparently dreams of “the creation of numerous small principalities throughout the world, where people can live in happiness and freedom…” Each of these microstates would be controlled by a despotic Prince with absolute power. Thanks Prince Hans-Adam, I’m sure the world would work much better if everything broke apart into feuding city-states run by evil autocrats.
ferrebeekeeper 