GOTHA is an independent directory of royal and noble families. It is not affiliated with, and does not represent, the Almanach de Gotha or its publishers. The order of the GOTHA ranking is GOTHA's own editorial order of precedence. It is not an official order of precedence, of rank or of succession, and no court or house has endorsed it.

How the GOTHA ranking works

The GOTHA ranking lists people in an editorial order of precedence chosen by GOTHA. This page sets out that order key by key, and explains where its historical elements come from.

The order, key by key

People are compared on the first key; only when they are equal does the next key decide [1]. A value that is not known sorts last within its key and is shown as "unknown"; nothing is inferred [1].

Reigning monarchs first. The ten current reigning monarchs come first in the ranking, ahead of everyone else [1]. Among themselves they are ordered by title rank, then by accession date, earliest first [1]. The accession date is the start time recorded on the monarch's "position held" statement in Wikidata, cited for each monarch [1][6]; for Norway, the 28 August 2026 accession of Haakon VIII is taken from the Norwegian government's record of the Council of State [1]. A monarch whose accession date is unknown sorts last among the monarchs; nothing is inferred [1]. Everyone else then follows the keys below.

1. Title tier, highest first: emperor or empress, king or queen, grand duke or duchess, sovereign prince or princess, duke or duchess, prince or princess, count or countess. A person's tier is the highest among their recorded noble titles and positions held. Sovereign prince applies only to holders of the head-of-state position of Monaco or Liechtenstein; other princes rank as prince. Titles outside this list, such as archduke, margrave, elector or baron, count as unknown [1]. See GOTHA's guide to royal and noble ranks.
2. Reigning house before non-reigning. Reigning is decided at house level: a person ranks as reigning when their birth house is on GOTHA's cited list of houses that reign today (the United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Monaco and Liechtenstein) [1]. This applies only to living people: within it the current sovereign comes first, then other living members of the house. People who have died are never counted as reigning and are ordered by title rank and house category instead [1].
3. House category: GOTHA's own three categories, in this order: Reigning house, then Formerly reigning / mediatised house, then Other princely and ducal house. The category comes from where the historical Almanach editions printed the birth house: a house printed in Part I falls in the first category, Part II in the second and Part III in the third (see below). The category names are GOTHA's, not the Almanach's. A house that never appears in the editions has an unknown category [1].
4. Line of succession: the place in the line of succession exactly as published by the court, with the date it was read. It is never inferred; where no court list has been recorded, this key is unknown [1]. See for example the British line of succession.
5. Birth year, earliest first.
6. Name, then Wikidata identifier (QID), as tie-breakers, so that the order is always stable [1].

Living people and the default view. A person counts as living when no death date is recorded and they were born in 1910 or later. By default the ranking lists living people only; the All eras view (?eras=all) applies the same order to everyone, living and dead [1]. Descendant counts remain visible as a secondary column but do not affect the order [1].

Mediatised houses. Houses printed in Part II of the historical Almanach are placed in GOTHA's "Formerly reigning / mediatised house" category. Where Wikidata classifies a house differently, the disagreement is shown in the explanation given for each person [1].

Where the historical elements come from

The historical parts of the Almanach de Gotha

From the nineteenth century the genealogical section of the Almanach de Gotha (the Annuaire généalogique) was printed in three parts, and their scope changed over time:

The 1910 preface explains that Part II "cannot grow, since it contains only the German princely and comital families, formerly sovereign, mediatized at the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire", while new families were admitted to Part III [3]. The status of the mediatized houses goes back to Article 14 of the German Federal Act of 1815, which counted them among the high nobility and recognised their equality of birth with the sovereign houses [5]. Within each part, the 1910 and 1924 tables of contents list the houses in alphabetical order [3][4].

Note on sources. The three parts did not mean the same thing in every edition: in 1871 Part II held non-sovereign princely families and Part III comital houses [2], whereas by 1910 Part II was reserved for the mediatized houses [3]. GOTHA does not merge these different schemes into one.

GOTHA records these parts for each matched house: the edition year, the part number and a citation of the archive.org scan, shown on house pages [1]. Because the scope of each part changed between editions, the part that sets the house category is the one recorded most often for the house across editions, preferring high-confidence matches [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.