Cantacuzino family

The House of Cantacuzino (French: Cantacuzène; Russian: Кантакузен, romanized: Kantakuzen) is a Romanian aristocratic family of Greek origin.

[6] The first member of the family to publicly stress his imperial descent on an international level was the adventurer and pretender Radu Cantacuzino (1699–1761), who produced a genealogy linking himself to Emperor John VI Kantakouzenos, though it contained several invented figures.

[7][8][9] The eminent Byzantinist Steven Runciman considered the latter-day Kantakouzenoi "perhaps the only family whose claim to be in the direct line from Byzantine Emperors, as authentic",[10] but according to the historian Donald Nicol, "Patriotic Rumanian historians have indeed labored to show that ... of all the Byzantine imperial families that of the Kantakouzenos is the only one which can truthfully be said to have survived to this day; but the line of succession after the middle of the fifteenth century is, to say the least, uncertain.

The Greek scholar Konstantinos Amantos suggested that "Kantakouzenos" derives from κατὰ-κουζηνᾶν or κατὰ-κουζηνόν, ultimately from the locality of Kouzenas, a name for the southern part of Mount Sipylon near Smyrna.

As a consequence of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet occupation of Romania after World War II, (between 1944 and 1947) the last two branches now mostly live in Western Europe and North America.