Count of Merenberg
hereditary title of nobility
Count of Merenberg (German: Graf von Merenberg) is a hereditary title of nobility that was bestowed in 1868 by the reigning Prince of Waldeck and Pyrmont, George Victor, upon the morganatic wife and male-line descendants of Prince Nikolaus Wilhelm of Nassau (1832–1905), who married Natalia Alexandrovna Pushkina (1836–1913), former wife of Russian general Mikhail Leontievich von Dubelt.
Background
Nikolaus was a son of William, Duke of Nassau, and his second wife, Princess Pauline of Württemberg. He was also a younger half-brother of Adolphe, who was deposed by Prussia as last reigning Duke of Nassau in 1866 but succeeded as Grand Duke of Luxembourg in 1890.
Natalia was a daughter of Alexander Pushkin, the most renowned Russian writer. However, he ranked only as a stolbovoy dvoryanin, an untitled member of the ancient landed nobility. As such, she was not legally permitted to share her husband's princely title or rank, even though his family had ceased to be hereditary rulers when the kingdom of Prussia annexed Nassau. By family law, members of the Nassau family could only marry into the reigning or former reigning families of Europe. Therefore, Natalia was created Gräfin von Merenberg (Countess of Merenberg), a title without any territory. The name refers to the community of Merenberg in what is now Hesse, Germany.
Through Pushkin, Natalia descended from Peter the Great's African protégé, Abram Petrovich Gannibal.
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This entry incorporates text from “Count of Merenberg” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.