As Elisabeth had no surviving children, she sold Luxembourg to Philip III, Duke of Burgundy in 1441, but only to succeed upon her death. Philip captured the city of Luxembourg in 1443, but did not assume the ducal title because of conflicting claims by Anne of Austria, the closest Luxembourg relative.
In 1482, Luxembourg passed to the House of Habsburg. After the abdication of Emperor Charles V, the duchy of Luxembourg fell to the Spanish line of the House of Habsburg.
Luxembourg was occupied by French revolutionaries between 1794 and 1813. At the Vienna Congress, it was elevated to a grand duchy and given in personal union to William I of the Netherlands.
The Grand Duke of Luxembourg (or Grand Duchess in the case of a female monarch) is the head of state of Luxembourg. Luxembourg is the world's only extant sovereign grand duchy, a status to which Luxembourg was promoted in 1815 upon its unification with the Netherlands under the House of Orange-Nassau.
The grand duke is the head of state, symbol of its unity, and guarantor of national independence. He exercises executive power in accordance with the Constitution and the laws of the country.[2]
Originally, the constitution vested the grand duke with considerable executive power. In practice, however, since the end of the personal union with the Netherlands in 1890, he has usually limited himself to a mostly representative role, acting on the advice of the government. Amendments in 1919 significantly curbed the grand duke's powers, thus codifying two decades of constitutional practice.
House of Orange-Nassau
Image
Name
Date of birth
Date of death
Reign
Relationship with predecessor
Willem I Willem Frederik (Prince William VI of Orange)
24 August 1772
12 December 1843
15 March 1815 to 7 October 1840
Francis' third cousin and Anne's direct descendant
Willem III Willem Alexander Paul Frederik Lodewijk
17 February 1817
23 November 1890
17 March 1849 to 23 November 1890
Son
House of Nassau-Weilburg
Under the 1783 Nassau Family Pact, those territories of the Nassau family in the Holy Roman Empire at the time of the Pact (Luxembourg and Nassau) were bound by semi-Salic law, which allowed inheritance by females or through the female line only upon extinction of male members of the dynasty. When William III died leaving only his daughter Wilhelmina as an heir, the crown of the Netherlands, not being bound by the family pact, passed to Wilhelmina. However, the crown of Luxembourg passed to a male of another branch of the House of Nassau: Adolphe, the dispossessed Duke of Nassau and head of the branch of Nassau-Weilburg.
In 1905, Grand Duke Adolphe's younger half-brother, Prince Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau, died, having left a son Georg Nikolaus, Count von Merenberg who was, however, the product of a morganatic marriage, and therefore not legally a member of the House of Nassau. In 1907, Adolphe's only son, William IV, Grand Duke of Luxembourg, obtained passage of a law confirming the right of his eldest daughter, Marie-Adélaïde, to succeed to the throne in virtue of the absence of any remaining dynastic males of the House of Nassau, as originally stipulated in the Nassau Family Pact. She became the grand duchy's first reigning female monarch upon her father's death in 1912, and upon her own abdication in 1919, was succeeded by her younger sister Charlotte, who married Felix of Bourbon-Parma, a prince of the former Duchy of Parma. Charlotte's descendants have since reigned as the continued dynasty of Nassau.