The House of Sansinger

A fair number of alt-histories try to establish an American royal family. I've seen people save the Iturbides, the Habsburgs, the Braganzas... and I've seen a fair number of attempts at dynasties too. (Even though it's much more likely that Washington would've set himself up as President-for-life, the House of Washington seems to be a relatively popular one.)

The hard part is establishing a New World royal dynasty - in the first concept sketch, I was actually playing with a New World House of Bonaparte, which got butterflied away once I realized just how errant a Moorish survival TL would be after that many centuries. The House of Bonaparte (tracing from both Napoleon and Lucien) gave rise to "Bonapartist" (which remains a fair enough description)... until, eventually, my writing on Güntheritism and *Prussia (and the vast Hohenzollern-shaped hole that I still feel in Andalusada's political landscape) congealed, and everything clicked into four words: "The House of Sansinger."

The House of Sansinger's origin and rise

During the Livonian Revolt, Günther's generals [who?] faced the task of turning a disorganized peasant rabble into a fighting force that could stand against the Teutonic Knights (and, later on, everybody else.) Part of that problem involved arming them; the solution involved weaponized farm tools. In the Low German of Pomerania, the scythe-sword was quickly named the Sansing, and the rebels who used them Sansingers.

The name stuck. Being an unstoppable military juggernaut can make that happen. By the time Pomerania was partitioned, "Sansinger" had become a stereotypical Pomeranian family name, cutting across lines of ethnicity and, to an extent, class. To be a Sansinger meant that you weren't part of the royal families, because they had names of their own - but it meant that one of your forefathers had marched and fought and prayed in one of the most formidable forces Europe had ever seen. It also meant that you were associated with some very distinctive political ideals, and (if you were somebody notable) were probably involved with the (by then much less impressive, if no less proud and storied) Pomeranian military.

The Pomeranian partition drove a lot of those figures to flee Pomerania rather than living under Polish Papist tyranny. Some of them became freelancers, serving as far away as Persia. Some of them were quickly snatched up by foreign militaries. Some of them emigrated to the New World, where Umayyad Seville (which had just finished mopping up the Sodalites) had almost depopulated a huge swath of Thagr ash-Shamal and wanted a non-Catholic plantation that could keep the rest of the region in line.

Two such figures are as follows:

• Kaspar Sansinger, an expat living in the Portuguese New World, who became the first princeps senatus of Cabralia (and was probably instrumental in naming it a "Grand Principality"; he was against the idea of it being a monarchy); and
• Oskar Sansinger, one of the major generals of insurgent Mexico, and an in-law of the first Grand Prince [who?].

The descendents of these two men, noble and otherwise, are styled as "the House of Sansinger" today.

The House of Sansinger's noble claims

Strictly speaking, the House of Sansinger's claims to nobility all derive from the one person in the family who wasn't a Sansinger at all: Oskar's wife Teresa Maria, Grand Princess of Mexico. Her father styled himself "Grand Prince" because he couldn't even jokingly pretend to be aristocratic, and nobody in the world took it very seriously - nobody, that is, except for the Pope [who?], who formally acknowledged it. (Oscar I, who by that point was starting to worry about successions, grudgingly accepted being "Prince Consort," simply because a fair number of Old World families considered him a mudblood whose children, courtesy of a morganatic marriage, were also mudbloods.)

• The Cabralian succession: The oldest of Teresa Maria's daughters, in turn, was married in the early 1800s [when?] to the (by then twice-widowed) Kaspar Sansinger himself. In this manner, the Cabralian Sansinger family was incorporated into the New World Sansinger House, implicitly making them royalty as well.
• The Guise inheritance: Oskar's son [who?] was the first to inherit an Old World royal claim, after he married the daughter of the last Guise pretender. From that point onward, the Mexican branch of the House of Sansinger (though significantly not the Cabralian one) has been recognized as royalty in Europe. (Given what started at his wedding reception, it very likely wasn't worth the trouble.)

These claims notwithstanding, the House of Sansinger is very much a New World dynasty, in at least two significant respects:

• Both the Cabralian and Mexican Sansinger families were born Güntherite and converted, in their main lines at least, to Catholicism for political reasons. (The closest equivalent IRL would be the Swabian Hohenzollern families, but those were very much separate from the Prussian Hohenzollerns, whereas the Catholic and Güntherite branches of the Sansingers are at most third cousins.)
• The Cabralian Sansingers, in fact, still have Güntherite lineages; Mrs. Kaspar Sansinger [who?] adopted his children from other marriages, who have as much claim to royalty as, say, the adopted Iturbides do. Some of them probably married into the Scandinavian royalty or some such.
• Because the Sansingers are still very much a recent dynasty, morganatic marriages are very frequent in both Cabralia and Mexico. It's perfectly normal for the Grand Princes to buy the loyalty of their inner circles by marrying the single ones off to their cousins. The net effect had made the New World upper class much more consciously aristocratic, in a way that's almost unimaginable for Americans IRL.