Dona (gender)

Don ( Dohna ) - one of the oldest genera of Saxony , according to family tradition, who owned the town of Don and its environs from the VIII century. Subsequently, he acquired estates on the territory of modern Poland and the Czech Republic , and from the end of the 17th century he took one of the most prominent places at the Prussian royal court .

Don
Coat of arms of the Don clan in the coat of arms of the 15th century
Nationality
Kingdom of Prussia

The first burggraphs of the Don are documented from the middle of the XII century. In the XIV century, the clan was divided into three branches, which chose Don, Grafenstein , Muskau and Zheguszyce as their residences. In the XVII century, only the first one continued to exist, which, in turn, broke up on the Dona-Lauk, Dona-Schlobitten (owned by the Slobites in Warmia ), Dona-Schlodien (owned the town of Gladisch near Olsztyn ) and Dona-Korvinden ^[1] . The first three lines continue, and the Corvinden branch, which was related to the Oksensher in service to the Swedish king, faded in 1803.

Prince Frederick Heinrich of Orange and Count Christoph von Don (1583–1637) were married to their own sisters. The last 7 years of his life, Count Don, on behalf of the Oran dynasty, ruled their ancestral principality . Then this position was performed by his son Friedrich, who settled in Copp , an enclave of the Principality of Orange on the shores of Lake Geneva . His brother Albrecht occupied a prominent position at the Berlin court and built the Schönhausen palace in this city, which he later redeemed from his heirs in the treasury.

Friedrich entrusted the education of his sons Alexander and Christoph to the famous philosopher Beyl in Copp . From the first of them (who became the educator of the first king of Prussia ), the Schlobitten line of the clan comes from the second - Schlodinsky ^[1] . The eldest branch of the Schlobitten line ended on Alexander’s granddaughter, Countess Frederick (1738–86) ^[2] . Of the Slodin line, General Christophe II Dona-Schlodin (one of the generals of the Seven Years War ) and Count Nikolaus zu Dona-Schlodin (captain of the German fleet during the First World War ) are noteworthy.

Friedrich Johann, brother of Alexander and Christoph, inherited from his mother the French title of Marquis de Ferassiere. He was killed under Denin , from a marriage with the Irish milady, leaving three daughters. Of these, the average in 1715 became the wife of a Russian diplomat A. G. Golovkin . This was the first marriage between the Russian and Western European aristocracy. The descendant of this marriage, Count Yu. A. Golovkin , occupied a prominent place in the Russian imperial court.

Although Don’s clan was not mediated and, as a result, in the 19th century it sank into an aristocratic table of ranks compared to earlier times, legends circulated about the puffiness of its representatives in Germany. Some of them, by antiquity of the genus, placed themselves above the Hohenzollerns themselves ^[3] . In 1900, for his services to the Prussian crown, the head of the Schlobitten branch was finally awarded the princely title .

At the end of World War II, the estates of the Don clan in East Prussia were ruined and have not been restored since then. Among them is the Finkenstein Palace , where Emperor Napoleon lived in 1807 with Maria Walewski and where he signed the Finkenstein Agreement with the Persian ambassadors.