Without the Right to the Throne. How Five Great Dynasties Flourished and Fell

Regularities, cause-and-effect relationships, plans or coincidences, luck, black swans: what governs the history of states and each of us? Can the choice of one ruler determine the future of generations? Or is it an illusion? In her new book "Without the Right to the Throne", screenwriter and historian Irina Belova-Flierya takes us into the history of five great European dynasties, whose fates are connected by invisible threads much stronger than we remember from the school history course. Ivan the Terrible, Elizabeth I, Mary Stuart, Philip II, Catherine de' Medici, Francis II Valois - all of them contemporaries who left a vivid mark on history, but mysteriously left no descendants. None of the heroes of this book managed to leave behind heirs who could truly continue the lineage for hundreds and hundreds of years. Why did the dynasties fade into oblivion one after another almost immediately after their peak of glory? Why did they have no future? Or was there still a chance and they missed it? Looking together with the author into the intertwining of fates, into the parallel lives of rulers of the brightest era in history, into their hopes and how they chose and erred, we will be able to recreate the past as a three-dimensional reality and, perhaps, unravel the mystery of choice, the mystery of the fate of rulers and the mystery of the fate of each person.