Who was the mother of Helen Dragash?

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Daniel MacGregor

Who was the mother of Helen Dragash?

Legg inn av Daniel MacGregor » 10 nov 2004 22:35:08

Following the copyright of "Brooke's Book: Ancestry of Brooke Shields"
in 1986, I made a research trip to the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.

There, I found a copy of "Familiiata na Asenevtsi (1186-1460):
genealogiia i prosopografiia," by Ivan Bozhilov, published in Sofia,
Bulgaria in 1985.

In dealing with the descendants of Bulgaria's Asen Dynasty, we get to
the Shishman dynasty. There, Tamara, sister of Tsar Ivan Shishman, is
identified as the wife of Constantine Dragash (or Dragases), and
mother of his daughter, Helen, wife of Emperor Manuel II Paleologos.
Helen is the mother of the last Roman Emperor, Constantine XI. One of
Constantine's younger brothers, the father-in-law of Russia's Ivan the
Great, is Brooke's ancestor.

The information also appears in the biographical article for
Constantine Dragash in the last, incomplete, encyclopaedia published
by Soviet Bulgaria.

Now, if you go to the "Europaische Stammtafeln"'s tables covering the
Shishman dynasty and the Dragash family, you won't find confirmation
of Bozhilov's information. Constantine's first wife is unknown.
Tamara is shown as being unmarried.

Turning to history, the Ottoman Sultan Murad I defeated a coalition of
Balkan magnates, including Ivan Shishman and Constantine Dragash, at
the Battle of Marica in 1371. As the result of the Ottoman victory,
Tamara had to enter Murad's harem.

Now, I haven't ruled out the possibility that this story was simply
propaganda designed to bolster Bulgarian claims to Yugoslav and/or
Greek Macedonia.

Besides that, of course, is a major ethical stumbling block: while I
can see this happening to an unmarried woman, would Islam permit a
ruler to claim another man's wife for his harem? For that matter,
would Orthodox Christianity?

Or did Dragash divorce his first wife sometime before 1371?

Does anyone have any further information on this question?

Daniel MacGregor

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