The Libertarian Catholic
Foreword to Achaean Disputes: Eight Centuries of Succession Conflicts for the Title of Prince of Achaea.
In my relatively short, and quite frankly, unexpected, and very independent career as a lawyer and a scholar, I have stumbled upon many kinds of legal cases and situations, some of which my own, some others of the people I have advised and done consultancy work for, and a last few purely theoretical abstractions into subjects only universities and researchers would be interested in.
But the subject of the study I’ve devoted myself for the last half-a-year is none of those. Maybe because it could be, in a sense, all of them, or maybe because it hardly falls into any of those categories.
I would not say this lays outside of my own personal interests, nor that could potentially benefit a particular person, and most definitely it has a certain worth for scholarly consideration, but that all in all, it combines my personal study passions, namely, law, history, genealogy, and academic research, with a family case so rare it could very well be fiction material.
On one hand, writing this book, the lengthy expansion of what originally was just a legal opinion on a case I was presented with, feels just like another chapter in an ongoing aristocratic moment of my life, maybe truly deserving that qualification. Perhaps because in the last year or so, I’ve become acquainted with some of Europe’s Gotha, mostly by chance and connections that have nothing to do with the old nobility, like common political interests, fast friendships, and even short-term dating.
For someone like me, who just a mere years ago would have though my future was tied to a certain land all over the ocean, back in Latin America, to have become involved in such a world as the one of the medieval Principality of Achaea (in Greece), its last rulers at the time of the end of the (Eastern) Roman Empire, and of its modern day descendants far away from their past dominions, living in the United States, really seems like a fever dream, something my younger self would not have even imagined when I first started studying law.
Or maybe because Frankokratia, the period of Crusader rule in Greece, between the Byzantine and Ottoman eras, is an age hardly known outside of academia, with the only common knowledge reference to it being in the ‘Rhodes’ part of the ceremonial name of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (the Hospitaller Order of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes & Malta).
But there’s a certain magic to it, or maybe destiny, since I am not the first one in my family to have undertaken writing tasks related to genealogy and family history, with my recently deceased granduncle, and my father, both of whom I share my name with, having published books in these subjects (my granduncle on our family in particular, same as my father’s work on it, amongst others, in the context of the Italian diaspora to Ecuador).
And there’s of course a certain “call of the blood”, so to speak, when it comes to these subjects: from apocryphal stories on both my mother’s and my father’s side on ancestors with a knightly and noble background, like the ones another dear granduncle of mine, an Ecuadorian Air Force General, would proudly show in the table painted with heraldic motifs he had at his home, or like the scarce but confirmed information we had from an ancestor on my dad’s family having been a high-ranking Catholic cleric as Canon of St. Peter’s Basilica and Vatican librarian.
However, none of these matter as much about the topic of this research because this work is not about me, despite how much I can reflect on it to come to the conclusions I come with in it. The topic of this book is about a ruler’s title as old as that of the Kings of England and about a family as ancient as the Habsburgs and the Bourbons, who, for a combination of chance and destiny, had their fortunes rise and fall all over eight hundred years.
Had things been different for them, maybe we could be now counting them among Europe’s royalty, even if deposed, like many others of their kind, and who despite their current circumstances, still do a fair share of work to promote caritative and cultural causes dear to their peoples and to the history they represent.
Now, to say this is not an exercise in political legitimism (or as it is also commonly called, monarchism) would not be true, but to call it simply partisanship would also be a lie, since there no benefit in supporting a cause as unpopular as misunderstood as that of monarchy in an age of procedural and performative democracy.
But there is certainly a sense of duty, both in the legal scholar and in the subject of his study, to stand for what seems right and fair, despite how distant a claim can be, as long as there is evidence to support it. And there are outstanding amounts of evidence.
And there’s also the fact that the main supporter of this research has been incredibly helpful with it. Not intervening with its development, nor trying to persuade for a certain conclusion, but simply providing with the resources to back every claim made and every contested point that appeared during the drafting process.
When I first got introduced to the history of the Damalas family, particularly through my contact with Constantine Paul Damalas, I knew there was something bigger going on, and as I went by with my research, many times reaching out to him for context or certain resources I could not get through my own means, he was always present and kind enough to provide them. I guess this runs through most of these bloodlines, as I’ve experienced with other nobles back in Europe. “Noblesse oblige”, as the saying goes.
After all these months, having overcome the struggle of my day job, my graduate law school classes and this research, not to say also the prospects of developing a personal life outside of all of this, I think that this study into the title of Prince of Achaea, into the history of the Zaccaria and Damalas family, and into the niche and obscure topic of nobiliary law (sometimes a subset of legal history, other times a subset of contemporary, comparative and private law) can be considered a personal victory for me.
And if it does end up serving a purpose to restore to mainstream knowledge a family that could have had a similar importance to both Habsburgs and Capetians in Western history, I will also consider it one of my crowning achievements (no pun intended).
In the end, this book is the result of the study into the genealogy and the legal history that would honor a man who would be prince. But as history, and this recount in particular, also show, there are no kings without kingmakers.
