The House of Braganza Today: The Crown That Never Came Back HT
The royal carriage is open. It is approximately 5 in the afternoon on the 1st of February, 1908. And King Carlos I of Portugal is crossing the Terrero Dopat in Lisbon with his wife, his eldest son, and his youngest son beside him. He wears his blue army general uniform. One-mounted cavalry officer, Francisco Figera Freyer, rides alongside.
The family has just arrived from the steamer Louu after a month-long hunting retreat at the Jucal Palace of Villa Vichosa. Their train derailed near Casaba on the way back, delaying them by an hour. The crowds in the square are thin. The route is exposed. Manuel Buisa, a primary school teacher and former army sergeant, kneels approximately 8 m behind the carriage.
He carries a Winchester model 1907 semi-automatic rifle concealed beneath a long overcoat. At the eastern edge of the square, he fires. The first round strikes Carlos in the neck, severing the corroted artery. The king slumps forward, dead almost before the sound reaches the crowd. A second shot clips his shoulder.
Alfredo Luis D Costa, armed with a small caliber pocket revolver, leaps onto the carriage step and fires additional rounds into the king’s body at point blank range. Queen Amily rises to her feet and strikes Costa across the face with a bouquet of flowers, screaming the word in fames. Both assassins then turn on the air. Costa shoots Crown Prince Lewis Filipe in the chest.
The bullet lodges in his sternum. The 20-year-old prince stands, draws his own weapon, and fires four shots, sweeping Costa from the carriage step, but standing makes him a target for Buisa’s rifle. A large caliber round strikes Luis Filipe through the skull. He will die approximately 20 minutes later at the Royal Naval Arsenal without regaining consciousness.
18-year-old Prince Manuel is hit in the arm by a stray round but survives. Queen Amilee is credited with shielding him with her own body. Both assassins are killed by police fire during the chaos that follows. At the naval arsenal, Queen Mother Maria Pia of Savoi arrives and cries in French. Honor Moris, they have killed my son.
Queen Amily answers a manosi and mine too. No autopsies are performed. The bodies are embarmed and taken to the royal pantheon at the monastery of Sao Vicente Deora. The boy with the wounded arm is proclaimed king that evening. He is 18 years old. He has just watched his father and brother die in front of him in the time it takes to cross a public square.
[gasps] He will hold the throne for exactly 2 years, 7 months, and four days. This is what happened to the house of Braganza after the crown fell. Manuel II, the boy who survived the carriage, was exiled to England. He became a scholar of rare books. He married a German princess. They had no children.
He died at 42 in a country house in Twickenham, suffocating from a swollen throat, and his body was shipped back to Lisbon on a British warship that docked at the same square where his father bled to death. Queen Mother Maria Pia of Savoi, Carlos’s mother, suffered a mental collapse after the assassination.
She fled to Italy, saw blood on every surface, and died within a year. At 63, her face turned toward Portugal as she had requested. She was never brought home. Queen Amaly, the woman who struck the assassin with flowers, lived in exile near Versailles for four decades. She developed dementia. She asked who had killed her sons.
She died at 86, begging to be taken back to Portugal. Infante Aphonso, Carlos’s brother, married an American in secret, had his pension cut, and died alone in a rented room in Naples with one Portuguese servant remaining. And the claim to the throne passed to a line no one expected. The descendants of the usurper Miguel I exiled since 1834.
Dwarte Nuno, born on Portuguese soil, placed under a bed in an Austrian castle, spent 40 years waiting in exile before he was permitted to return to a country that no longer wanted a king. His son, Darte Pio, is alive today. He lives in Lisbon. His daughter was married in 2023 at the Palace of Mafra, the same palace from which the last king ran out of soldiers and ran out of time.
If you’re enjoying this, subscribing is the best way to support the channel. It’s free and it helps us keep going. The house of Braganza ruled Portugal for 270 years. From the restoration of independence in 1640 when the eighth Duke of Braganza was acclaimed King Jan IV and ended 60 years of Spanish Habsburg rule to the revolution that expelled Manuel II in 1910.
15 Banza monarchs sat on the Portuguese throne. Two more governed an independent Brazil. At its greatest territorial extent around 1820, the Portuguese Empire under Braanza rule covered approximately 5 and a half million square kilometers across four continents. Angola, Mosambique, Guinea, Bisau, Cap Verde, Stoé and Principe, Goa, Macau, East Timor, the Azors, Madera, and until 1822, Brazil, a territory larger than continental Europe.
Katherine of Bananaza’s marriage to Charles II of England in 1662 brought Bombay and Tangier into the British Empire as dowry and is credited with introducing the custom of tea drinking to the English court. The Braanzas presided over the largest gold rush in history when Brazilian deposits were discovered in the 1690s, flooding Lisbon with wealth that built churches, palaces, and libraries across the empire.
The dynasty built the palace of Mafra with its 36,000 volumes in a racoo library that stretches 70 m. It filled the Azuda palace with 18,000 documented diamonds. It commissioned the Francois Tumar German sterling silver service, the only complete set of its kind surviving anywhere in the world. The jugal palace of Villa Vichosa, the family’s ancestral seat in the Alentejo held the private art collection, the chapel silver, the carriages, and the hunting grounds where Carlos spent his last peaceful days before the train
derailed and the carriage entered the square. The palace at Villa Vishosa alone contained over 2,000 rooms. The empire’s revenues flowed from Brazilian gold, African ivory, and Asian spice. 270 years of accumulated power, territory, treasure, and architecture. The revolution of 1910 would attempt to erase all of it in a single week.
Manuel II was not supposed to be king. He was the second son. His older brother, Luis Filipe, had been groomed for the throne since birth. Educated in constitutional law, diplomacy, and military affairs, presented to the courts of Europe as the future sovereign, Manuel had been educated for a career in the Navy.
The assassination changed everything in 60 seconds. On the 4th of February 1908, 3 days after watching his father and brother die, the 18-year-old dismissed Prime Minister Joam Franco, the authoritarian whose dictatorial rule had provoked the crisis that armed the assassins. It was Manuel’s first act as king.
He adopted the principle of reigning but not governing, and he meant it. He would appoint seven successive governments in 24 months, each weaker than the last, each unable to contain the Republican movement that had already decided the monarchy’s fate. At the Satubal Congress of April 1909, the Portuguese Republican Party’s Directorate received an imperative mandate from its membership to overthrow the monarchy by force.
The question was not whether, but when. Manuel knew. Everyone knew he was governing a country that had already decided to replace him. The revolution came on the night of the 3rd of October 1910. That evening, Manuel dined with the visiting Brazilian president-elect Hermes defense at the Palace of Necessidades. Hours later, Antonio Machado Santos triggered a military rebellion at the 16th Infantry Regiment.
By 1:00 in the morning, revolutionaries had seized the naval corps barracks at Alcantara. By 5 in the morning, approximately 200 soldiers and 200 armed civilians from the Carbonaria Sacred Society had entrenched at the Rotunda, the traffic circle at the top of the Aanida Dali Berdad, now known as Marquez de Pombal Square.
The naval mutiny decided everything. Lieutenant Jose Menddees Kabisardas seized the cruiser Adam. The crews aboard the San Rafael and the Dom Carlos I also mutined. Around midday on the 4th of October, three warships began shelling the palace of Nessidardes from the Taros. One shell reached the king’s private quarters on the first floor, cracking a mirror in the Renaissance room.
That mirror is still there. When his prime minister telephoned to advise fleeing to Mafra or CRA, Manuel refused. He said that since the constitution did not appoint him any role other than letting himself be killed, he would abide by it. By 2:00 in the afternoon, the position was no longer tenable.
Manuel departed for the palace of Mafra, arriving at 4 to find 100 soldiers instead of the 800 he expected. The rest were on holiday. On the morning of the 5th of October, Jose Relvis walked onto the balcony of Lisbon City Hall and proclaimed the Portuguese Republic. The provisional government formed under Teopilo Brager, the monarchy was over.
It had taken less than 36 hours. Of all the royal families expelled by revolution, the Romanoffs, the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, which do you think adapted best to exile? I’m curious. Let me know in the comments. At Mafra, with 100 soldiers and no prospect of reinforcement, the decision was made to leave. The royal yacht Amelia IVth, a 70m vessel built in 1900 by Ramage and Ferguson of Leth sailed from Cascas.
It collected Manuel’s uncle, Infante Aonso, from the Casai Citadel, then continued to the fishing village of Erica, the nearest anchorage to Mafra. Queen Amalei and Maria Pia joined from Cra. The royal family boarded via two fishing boats transferring across open water while armed Republicans arrived by automobile on the shore.
Manuel wanted to sail north to Porto to organize a counterrevolution. The yacht’s captain argued they did not carry enough fuel to reach Porto and return to open sea if the city had already fallen. It had. Porto declared for the republic on the same day. Manuel wrote a farewell letter. He declared himself Portuguese and said he always would be.
He expressed his conviction that he had fulfilled his duties as king in all circumstances and had put his heart and his life in the service of his country. Then he ordered the yacht returned to Lisbon as state property. It was uh renamed Chinko de Alubro and served in the Portuguese Navy until 1937. The republic moved immediately.
Noble titles were abolished. Church property was confiscated. Religious orders were expelled. Royal palaces were nationalized. The law of banishment of the 15th of October 1910 prohibited all members of the constitutional brag line from entering Portugal. This supplemented the older law of 1834 that had already banished the Miguelist branch.
Every banza of every line was now legally excluded from the country their family had governed for nearly three centuries. The revolution produced 37 confirmed dead and dozens more wounded. The Ajudah Palace became a state building. The Necessidades Palace with the cracked mirror and the shell holes became government offices. The Pina Palace became a monument.
The palace of Mafra became a museum. The crown jewels 18,000 diamonds. The crown of Joan V 6th. The German silver, the rubies, the sapphires remained locked in vaults as property of the republic. The wealthiest dynasty in Iberia became, in the stroke of a decree, exiled without a palace, without income, without a country, and without the yacht they had escaped on.
They left behind paintings by Kranak, tapestries from Flanders, porcelain from Sera and from China, carriages built for coronations that would never happen again, and the sacred objects of the royal chapel that had been consecrated for kings who no longer existed. Manuel sailed from Gibraltar to England on the 16th of October, 1910.
He was 20 years old. He would never see Portugal again. He settled first at Abacorn House in Richmond, then purchased Fullwell Park in Twickenham in 1913. The property was a Georgian mansion built in 1623 set on 50 acres with a 9-hole private golf course, tennis courts, fishing and boating on the river crane, and flower gardens that he maintained himself.
He had an aversion to the color blue and redecorated the entire house to avoid it. [sighs and gasps] On the 4th of September 1913, he married Princess Augusta Victoria of Hoen Solen Ziggmaringan at the Chapel of Sigmaringan Castle in Germany. The exiled king stood on a crate of Portuguese soil during the ceremony so that his feet would touch his country one more time.
Cardinal Joseé Nato, the same cleric who had christened the groom, officiated. King Alfonso I 13th of Spain attended. The Prince of Wales attended. The marriage produced no children. It would never produce children. The last king of the constitutional line would leave no heir. Manuel filled his exile with scholarship.
He became known as the biblophile, the studious one. His masterwork, Livos Antigos Portuguesees, cataloged every Portuguese book printed between 1489 and 1600. Three volumes published by Cambridge University Press and Mags Brothers of London. Volume one appeared in 1929 covering works from 1489 to 1539. Volume two in 1932 covering 1540 to 1569.
Volume 3ostumously in 1934 69. Volume three postumously in 1935 completed by his librarian Marjgerie Withers. The limited edition comprised 650 standard copies and 45 special copies signed by the king. Encyclopedia Britannica called the work indispensable. It remains the most complete bibliography of early Portuguese printing ever assembled.
He personally delivered a copy to King George V at Windsor Castle. His collection included a first edition of Camois’s Os Lucieras, the national epic of Portugal, the poem that defined what it meant to be Portuguese. After his death, the entire library was sent to the Museu Biblioteka at the Ducal Palace of Villa Vichosa.
When the first world war began, Manuel asked Monarchists to cease all restoration efforts and advocated Portugal’s entry on the Allied side. Refusing a military role, he devoted himself to the British Red Cross. He created the orthopedic department at Shepherd’s Bush Hospital, later Hammersmith Hospital.
He financed a convolescent home for officers at Brighton. He funded the operating room in the Portuguese hospital in Paris. The plaque read only from a Portuguese in London. He remarked bitterly to journalist Antonio Pharaoh about the slight. George V invited him to share the victory podium during the 1919 victory parade.
In 1922, the pact of Paris reconciled the constitutional and Miguelist branches of the dynasty. Manuel recognized Darte Nuno as his eventual successor. He had accepted that the throne would never be his again. He had accepted that his line would end with him. On the 2nd of July 1932, Manuel died suddenly at Fullwell Park. He was 42 years old.
The cause was acute edema of the glauus, a rapid swelling of the tissues around the larynx that caused suffocation. He had attended Wimbledon days earlier and appeared in perfect health. A reququum mass was held at Westminster Cathedral. On the 2nd of August, his body was transferred to Lisbon aboard the British cruiser HMS Concord.
The ship docked at the Prasadoc Commercio, the same square, the same waterfront 24 years after his father’s blood stained the cobblestones. Crowds lined the route as the coffin was carried to the royal pantheon at Sao Vicente Deora. In his will written in 1915, Manuel had declared his wish to be buried in Portugal and to transfer his possessions to the Portuguese state.
The Fund Dasa de Bragansa was established in 1933 to manage all private Braanza assets. He died a king without a kingdom, a husband without children, a scholar whose greatest work was a catalog of books printed in a country he could never return to. aged 42, buried at Sao Vicente Deora, beside his father and his brother in the city that had expelled him.
Queen Mother Maria Pierre of Savoy did not survive the exile by long. She had married King Louise I at the age of 15, bore him two sons, and watched the Portuguese court from the inside for over four decades. She had lost her husband Luis in 1889, her son Carlos and her grandson Luis Filipe in a single minute in the Terrero Dopat.
The assassination broke something in her that could not be repaired. She began seeing blood on walls and floors. She could not sleep. She left Portugal on the 18th of October 1910. Escorted by her nephew, King Victor Emanuel III of Italy. She reached Stupinigi Palace near Turin, she never recovered.
She died on the 5th of July 1911, aged 63. Her face was turned toward Portugal as she had instructed. She was buried in the Basilica of Superga with the House of Seavoi. She’s one of the very few Portuguese consorts, never returned to Lisbon. She had been queen for 20 years and widow for 23. Queen Ameli, the woman who stood in the carriage and struck the assassin with flowers, outlived everyone.
She was born a princess of the house of Orleon, the granddaughter of King Louie Phillip of France. She had married Carlos in 1886 and thrown herself into charitable work, founding an anti-tuberculosis league, funding hospitals, earning a reputation as the most active queen consort in Portuguese history. Now she was a widow in a foreign country with nothing.
She moved to France acquiring the chateau de Bellev in Lucene near Versailles in 1921. She lived in reduced circumstances for decades, supported partly by the French branch of her Orleon family. In 1945, she visited Portugal for the first time since her exile 35 years after fleeing on a fishing boat at Erasher. She visited the tombs of her husband and sons at S Vicente Deora.
In her final years, dementia took what exile had not. She forgot that she had been expelled. She asked why she was in France. She asked who had killed her family. She died on the 25th of October 1951 at Leenne, aged 86 of kidney failure. Among her last words spoken to her attendants, I suffer so much. God is with me. Goodbye. Take me to Portugal.
The Salazar regime ordered a state funeral. Her body was transferred by the frigot Baromeo Das to the royal pantheon at Sala Vicente Deora. She had been queen for 2 years and exile for 41. Infante Aonso, Duke of Porto, was Carlos’s younger brother. He left on the yacht with the rest of the family. He went first to Gibraltar, then to Italy with his mother, Maria Pia.
After her death in 1911, he drifted to Rome, then Naples. In 1917, he secretly married Nevada Study Hayes, an American woman in a morganatic marriage that scandalized the exiled court. Manuel cut his pension, the brother of a king, the uncle of a king, the Duke of Porto, died alone in Naples on the 21st of February, 1920, with one Portuguese servant still at his side. He was 54 years old.
He left no recognized heirs. He had been the spare to a king who was murdered, the uncle to a king who was exiled. And in the end, he was a man in a rented room in a city that was not his own with no one from his family beside him. Manuel died childless in 1932. The constitutional braza line was extinct.
The claim to the headship of the royal house passed the Miguelis branch. Descendants of Miguel I who had usurped the throne in 1828 fought a civil war against his own brother Pedro IV lost and been exiled under the law of banishment of 1834. The Miguelists had been excluded from Portugal for 76 years before the republic excluded everyone else.
Now they were the only braganzas left. The man who inherited the claim was Dwarte Nuno. He was born on the 23rd of September 1907 at Sebenstein Castle in Lower Austria. His birth was surrounded by a piece of dynastic theater that would define his life. Emperor France Joseph of Austria permitted Portuguese earth to be placed beneath the bed so that the child would be symbolically born on the soil of a country he was forbidden to enter.
His father Miguel Hanuario abdicated the Miguelist claim in his favor on the 31st of July 1920 when Dwarte Nuno was 12 years old. The pact of Paris of the 17th of April 1922 reconciled the two branches. After Manuel’s death a decade later, the majority of Portuguese monarchists accepted Dwarte Nuno as the sole claimment.
He was educated at the Benedicting Abbey of Etal in Bavaria and studied agricultural sciences at the University of Tulus. On the 15th of October 1942, he married Princess Maria Francisca of Orleon Bragansza at the Cathedral of Petropolis in Brazil. This marriage was more than personal. It united the Miguelist line descended from the usurper Miguel I with the Brazilian imperial line descended from Emperor Pedro II.
It healed a dynastic rift that dated to the war of two brothers in the 1830s. A century of hostility between two branches of the same family closed by a wedding in a Brazilian cathedral. Maria Francisca brought with her a connection to the house of Oleon and to the lost Brazilian throne, giving the Miguelis line a legitimacy it had lacked since the civil war.
The couple had three sons, all born in exile. Darti Pio born on the 15th of May 1945 in Burn Switzerland. Miguel Raphael born in 1946. Henrik Nuno born in 1949. On the 27th of May 1950, the Portuguese National Assembly repealed both laws of banishment, the 1834 law against the Miguelists and the 1910 law against the constitutional line.
For the first time in over a century, every Bganza was legally permitted to set foot in Portugal. The family moved permanently to the country in 1952. They were the first Braganzas to live in Portugal since 1910. Antonio de Olivera Salazar, the authoritarian prime minister, briefly considered restoring the monarchy after President Oscar Carmona died in 1951.
He chose instead to hold a controlled election. Monarchists considered it a betrayal. Salazar allowed the braanzas to return but ensured they remained invisible. When Darte Pio appeared in official photographs, the regime’s press sensors removed him. Years later, Darte Pio recalled the experience with precision.
There was a photo call for the newspapers, he said. And the next day, I saw they had pulled me clean out of the picture. Darte Nuno spent his remaining decades attempting to recover Bganza assets and promote a restoration that never came. His wife Maria Franciscoca died on the 15th of January 1968. He donated his residence, the Palasio de San Marcos, to the University of Kimra in 1974, the year the Carnian Revolution overthrew the Estadon Noo and established democracy.
The new democratic constitution consolidated the republican form of government. No serious restoration discussion occurred. Dwarte Nuno died on the 24th of December 1976 age 69 and was buried at the Augustinian monastery in Villa Vichosa beside the ancestral seat his family had built and lost and been returned to and never ruled from again.
His son inherited the claim and the question of what to do with it. Dwarte Pio Hu Miguel Gabrielle Raphael Debraansa was born on the 15th of May 1945 in burn Switzerland. His godparents were Pope Pius I 12th and Queen Emily of Portugal. The same Queen Emily who had struck the assassin with flowers in the Terrero deo 37 years earlier.
He holds both Portuguese and East Tim’s citizenship. After the family’s return to Portugal, he attended the colesio militar in Lisbon and studied at the Institut Superior Di Agronomia. He served as a helicopter pilot in the Portuguese Air Force in Angola between 1968 and 1971 during the Colonial War. He was expelled from Angola by Prime Minister Marcelo Kitano for political outspokenness.
A braganza removed from yet another Portuguese territory by yet another Portuguese government. The pattern was by now familiar. Every generation a different authority found a reason to push the family further from the center of power. On the 13th of May 1995, the feast of our lady of Fatima, Dwarte Peio married Isabel Ines de Castro Curvello de Heredia at a ceremony in Lisbon.
It was the first it marriage of a Portuguese royal on Portuguese soil since Carlos I married Ami of Orleon in 1886, 109 years between royal weddings in a country that no longer recognized royalty. President Mario Suarez attended. Prime Minister Anibal Kavako Silva attended. Three children followed. Alphonso, Prince of Bayra, born on the 25th of March 1996, the heir to a throne that does not exist.
He studied political science at the Catholic University of Portugal and is completing a master’s degree in marine economics. Maria Franciscoca born on the 3rd of March 1997 studied social and cultural communication. On the 7th of October 2023 she married Darte Dusa Arojo Martins a Lisbon lawyer at the Basilica of the Palace of Mafra before approximately 1,200 guests.
She wore the King Louise diamond tiara, an 1880s piece set with 800 diamonds, originally a gift from King Louis I to Princess Amilee. Foreign royal representatives attended, the president of Portugal attended. The wedding took place at the same palace where Manuel II arrived in October 1910 to find 100 soldiers instead of 800 before fleeing to a fishing boat at Erica.
Dinis, Duke of Porto, the youngest, was born on the 25th of November, 1999. He maintains the lowest public profile of the three. None of the children have produced heirs as of 2025. The next generation of the dynasty remains unwritten. Dwarte Pio serves today in a space the Portuguese state has never formally defined.
He attends state functions as an honor guest. He represents Portuguese heritage in relations with lucifone nations through the community of Portuguese language countries. He campaigned for East Tim’s independence before the cause gained international prominence and in 2012, President Jose Ramos Horta conferred Tim’s citizenship and the order of merit upon him.
In May 2006, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs referred to him as Duke of Braganza, then issued a clarification that this was merely a polite courtesy. He is recognized and unrecognized simultaneously. He holds a title the state does not officially acknowledge in a country where 19.7% of the population told pollsters in 2025 that they would prefer a monarchy.
The People’s Monarchist Party, founded shortly after the Carnation Revolution, consistently polls below 1%. The Portuguese Constitution prohibits referendums on constitutional amendments. There is no legal mechanism to restore what was abolished. The question is permanently open and permanently closed. The palaces that the Banzas built and lost now belong to the republic that took them.
The Ajuda Palace is a national museum. Its western wing, completed in 2021, houses the royal treasure museum, which opened in June 2022 with a 31 million euro investment. Inside a vault with two 5tonon doors spanning 775 square meters across three floors, over 1,000 pieces are displayed, including approximately 18,000 documented diamonds.
The Nessidiadis Palace where Manuel sheltered while warships shelled it from the Tagus became the headquarters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1952. Nessa Sedades is now shortorthhand for Portuguese diplomacy the way Whiteall is for the British government. The Paina Palace in Cra, a UNESCO world heritage site since 1995 receives millions of visitors each year.
The palace of Mafra from which the last king fled earned its own UNESCO designation in 2019. The crown jewels, the crown of Jon V 6th, a 35.8 karat rough diamond from Brazil. A 45B gold nugget. The German silver sit behind vault. Doors in a museum that won an international award in 2024. In 2002, six of the most valuable pieces were stolen during a loan exhibition at the museum in the Hague.
The Dutch government paid €6 million in compensation. The jewels were never recovered. The jugal palace of Villa Vichosa followed a different path. Because it was private Braanza property rather than crown property, it was never nationalized. Manuel II’s will placed it under the Fund Casa de Bragansa which opened it as a public museum in 1959.
It is still managed by the foundation today. The palace where Carlos I ate his last dinner before boarding the train that derailed before entering the carriage that crossed the square. Before the rifle shot that ended the dynasty’s hold on power. That palace still belongs to the family. Not to the family as rulers, to the family as a foundation.
The distinction contains the entire arc of the story. The jugal palace of Villa Vittosa is open to the public. Visitors walk the halls where brags kings dressed for coronations and undressed for bed. They see the private chapel. They see the hunting collection. They see the library that Manuel II’s rare books were sent back to after his death in Twickenham.
The last thing Manuel saw of Portugal was the coast of Erica from the deck of a yacht he had to return. His great niece was married in 2023 at the Palace of Mafra, wearing 800 diamonds that once belonged to the queen who struck an assassin with flowers. The crown never came back. The family did. And the Banana name which 15 kings carried across 270 years and four continents is now carried by a generation that has never known the empire, never seen the throne and will never sit on it.
In a country that erased the monarchy from its constitution, but still invites the Duke to dinner. The Banzas lost their throne. But they were not the only dynasty expelled by revolution in the early 20th century. The Ottomans ruled for 623 years, longer than any European dynasty in history. When Turkey abolished the caliphate in 1924, every member of the imperial family was given 24 hours to leave the country.
What happened to them is a story of exile on a scale the Bragzas never experienced. That story is next.