In the beginning there was an unseemly love marriage. And today their descendants sit on European royal thrones, the Battenbergs - also known as Mountbattens - whose ancestral seat is in Seeheim-Jugenheim on the Bergstrasse, were and are related to just about every European royal house of the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, the tsars Alexander II and Nicholas II sought out Heiligenberg Castle as a summer retreat until 1910; their world empire was ruled from there during that time. In this book, 13 historians from Germany, England and Bulgaria trace the surprising success story of this family. A detailed family tree, numerous historical illustrations and current photographs of the ancestral seat make the accounts additionally vivid.