their more-powerful neighboring principality.

As the family-story goes, she was not in love with him, but we all know that’s not how things worked back then, especially among royal families. She had carried over a girlhood crush on one of her father’s servants and wasn’t grown-up enough to get over it and face her real-world responsibilities.

Anyway, she ends up getting kidnapped before the wedding… TWICE!

Here’s where it gets crazy and which story you get depends on which political history you look into. According to her family’s accounting of events, the first kidnapping was a political machination by the larger principality (ie, the principality she was marrying into!!!) to frame and blame a third-party royal family for it! They wanted to use it as a pretext to invade that country and to absorb the other in “protection”.

So by that theory, the second kidnapping was, in a sense, more of a rescue from the first kidnapping (and probably murder, though we’ll never know what the ultimate intention was). The first kidnappers were from a totally separate island community and so no one can really prove their connection to the fiancé in the larger principality or to the third-party country, but it’s not incomprehensible that he could have solicited the islanders to steal his fiancée for this purpose, given his history of expansion via violence and intrigue.

Rescuer/kidnapper was, of course, seen as a hero by my ancestor and her family, and she actually married him!!!! So I come from the line of a kidnapper.

Like I said, depends on which national history you believe, but he was either a hero who saved her and earned her love, or just a kidnapper who benefitted from her Stockholm Syndrome.

Who’s to say?