Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg
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HRH The Grand Duke
HRH The Dowager Countess of Holstein-Ledreborg
HRH The Dowager Princess of Ligne Extended grand-ducal family
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The Grand Ducal Family of Luxembourg constitutes the House of Luxembourg-Nassau, headed by the sovereign Grand Duke, and in which the throne of the grand duchy is hereditary. It consists of heirs and descendants of the House of Nassau-Weilburg, whose sovereign territories passed cognatically from the Nassau dynasty to a cadet branch of the House of Bourbon-Parma, itself a branch of the Spanish Royal House which is agnatically a cadet branch of the House of Capet that originated in France.
In 1443 the last member of the senior branch of the House of Luxemburg, Duchess Elisabeth, sold the Duchy of Luxembourg to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, a prince of the French House of Valois. In 1477 the duchy passed by marriage of Philip's granddaughter, Mary of Burgundy, to Archduke Maximilian I of Austria of the House of Habsburg. Luxembourg was one of the fiefdoms in the former Burgundian Netherlands which Maximilian and Mary's grandson, Emperor Charles V, combined into an integral union, the Seventeen Provinces, by issuing the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. The southern Netherlands remained part of the Habsburg Empire, first held by the Spanish branch and then by the Austrian line, until 1794 when French revolutionaries replaced Habsburg rule with French hegemony until the defeat of Napoleon.
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Wikipedia