William Gustav of Anhalt-Dessau
German prince of the House of Ascania
William Gustav of Anhalt-Dessau (20 June 1699 – 16 December 1737) was a German prince of the House of Ascania and heir to the principality of Anhalt-Dessau.
He was born in Dessau, the eldest son of Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau, by his morganatic wife Anna Louise Föhse.
Life
In 1706, the eight-year-old William Gustav was appointed a captain and accompanied his father in his campaign against France in 1712. In 1713, he obtained the post of chief of the Prussian regiment of gene d'armes. In 1719, he participated in the Turk's War in Hungary. Between 1734 and 1735, he served under Prince Eugene of Savoy as a volunteer in the war against France.
Marriage and issue
William Gustav fell in love with Johanna Sophia Herre (surname Herr or Herrin according to some sources) (b. Dessau, 8 July 1706 - d. Dessau, 5 June 1795), a commoner. They married secretly in Dessau on the night of 14 March 1726, after which she lived in Kleckewitz.
“William Gustav of Anhalt-Dessau” enters the record as german prince of the House of Ascania. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Gustav and Anhalt-Dessau can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q318224. VIAF identifies the subject as 28210634. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1699, 1737, 1706 and 1712.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Gustav of Anhalt-Dessau” 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.