Saxe-Gessaphe

Saxe-Gessaphe is the name of a family descended in the female line from former kings of Saxony, a member of which was recognized by a childless pretender to that throne as eventual heir to the deposed dynasty's rights. The claim is contested by an agnatic descendant of the former royal house, and both claims are clouded by conflicting interpretations of the dynastic laws which governed the succession to the defunct throne of Saxony, and by familial dispute.

The family descends from Princess Anna of Saxony (13 December 1929 – 13 March 2012) and her husband Roberto de Afif (1916–1978). Anna was a sister of Maria Emanuel, Margrave of Meissen, the childless head of the ex-royal House of Saxony and, as such, King of Saxony. Of the five children of the late Prince Friedrich Christian (1893–1968), son and heir of Saxony's last king Friedrich August III (who was obliged to abdicate in 1918 coincident with Germany's surrender in World War I), Anna is the only one who has living, legitimate children.

Succession to Saxony's throne was semi-Salic: only if all male dynasts were to become extinct would the female dynast nearest in kinship to the last male, or her descendants, inherit the throne. Both male and female dynasts, however, were required to "marry equally" (to a member of a reigning, formerly reigning, or mediatized family) in order to transmit dynastic rights to their own descendants. Thus the eligibility of the Saxe-Gessaphe line for the royal Saxon legacy would depend on the dynasticity of their mother's marriage.

Afif belonged patrilineally to an ancient princely Maronite Catholic family in what is now Lebanon. Afif, emir in Keserwan and grandson of the Lebanese emir Mansur 'Asaf bin Hasan (1522-1580), is said to be the ancestor of the Christianised dynasty of the cheikhs of Bkassine, from which Roberto descends.

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