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Léopold-Engelbert d'Arenberg (born 1956) is the thirteenth Duke of Arenberg, nineteenth Duke of Aarschot, eighth Duke of Meppen and eighth Prince of Recklinghausen [1]. He is the head of the House of Arenberg, one of the houses covered in GOTHA's guide to the mediatized houses. This page uses only the information published by the Arenberg Foundation and a press profile.
Training and career
The Foundation lists him as a law graduate (lic. jur.) with an MBA, a former ambassador of the Sovereign Order of Malta to Portugal and a company director [1]. A 2024 profile adds that he studied law at the Catholic University of Louvain and took his MBA at the University of Lausanne, and that the Order of Malta had earlier appointed him First Secretary in Chad [3].
The Arenberg Foundation
He is chief executive (administrateur-délégué) of the Arenberg Foundation, based in Enghien, Belgium, whose stated mission is to promote European history and culture [2]. He also chairs the board of the Arenberg Archives and Cultural Centre in Enghien [2]. The 2024 profile dates the Foundation's creation in its present form to 2010 [3].
The house
According to the Foundation, the house moved the centre of its power to the southern Netherlands in the sixteenth century, and its loyalty to the Habsburgs was rewarded with princely rank in 1576 and ducal rank in 1644 [1]. The Foundation lists the sovereign dukes of Arenberg from Philippe-François (1625–1674), the first, and notes that Prosper-Louis, the seventh, lost the old duchy on the left bank of the Rhine in 1801 and received a larger duchy on the right bank in 1803, which was in turn lost in 1815 [1]. His father, Jean-Engelbert, twelfth Duke, married Princess Sophie of Bavaria in 1955 [1].
Licence: this article is original GOTHA text, released under CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Its sources are summarised or briefly quoted.