Heredity

Theah doesn't know about genetics yet. People do know that there's something about bloodlines that's important - sorcery, for example, in inherited and if the noble sorcerous blood is thinned out too much with common blood, the sorcery goes away. Since sorcery and nobility have been tied together in Theah for 1700 years, the idea of literal noble blood, whether or not it's sorcerous, has a long history.

That's literal bloodlines, of course. The daughter of a Full-Blooded Portier and a Full-Blooded strega might be Half-Blooded in each, but she's fully a member of the Fufu du Charouse family. Her brother, half-Vodacce and half-Montaigne, will inherit the Fufu lands one day as Lord Fufu and his sons will be Fufu as well. It has nothing to do with whether or not their father married a foreigner or not.

You might say this is the distinction between ancestry and inheritance. Your ancestors influence the physical (or metaphysical, in the case of sorcerers) matters of your genetics. You can inherit a family name, though. Our young Lord and Lady Fufu are 100% Fufu family, even if they are only 50% Fufu in their ancestry.

In days of old, the Lorenzo family only cared about inheritance. They were Kings of Vodacce! Any son of a Lorenzo was a Lorenzo, and who cared about his mother? The infamous Marietta Lorenzo would be, one expects, Lorenzo by marriage and not by birth, yet she is frequently held up as an example of the worst of the family! They defined what Lorenzo was; there was no worry about "pure blood" or any such nonsense.

The different families who have been drawn into the "Lorenzo revival" - including the Donati, the Blanchards and St-Laurents, and the Lockes - are more obsessed, to different degrees, with counting their Lorenzo ancestry, their Lorenzo inheritance, or both. They tend to count their heritage in different ways, depending on what gives them the best advantage. The St-Laurents claim direct and unbroken descent through the male line from a Lorenzo warrior-prince who went to the lands of Montaigne in the seventh century, during the time of the Imperator Carleman, to win himself fame, fortune and renown. They have an excellent claim to high status in the family via their spotless inheritance. However, in the intervening 1000 years, the family has married so much into the local area that they have long had Full-Blooded Portiers among them. They may have the claim to the oldest pedigree, but their literal blood has little of the Lorenzo in it. Their ancestry is weak - just a few Lorenzos a long time ago. But by inheritance standards, lord Adrian St-Laurent is 100% royal Lorenzo.

The Donati, on the other hand, are a younger family, formed from the remnants of the Lorenzo noble line at its fall in 1088. The St-Laurents descend from a king's brother; the Donati from a king's brother's son. But the patriarchs of the Donati family worked through the years to maintain a robust level of actual Lorenzo ancestors in their family tree. To keep the family vital, they tried to look for wives with some amount of mixed blood, or else members (or descendants of members) of the two broken and scattered cadet families, the Bianco and Serrano. Their ancestry is stronger, even if their claim via inheritance puts them lower on the family status tree.

Who has the better claim to the Lorenzo throne? At the moment, Countess Odessa Blanchard (nee St-Laurent) is a favorite of l'Empeurer while Don Antonio Donati is a small landholding noble of the sleepiest Vodacce Prince. In the oldest tradition of the Lorenzo, the more powerful countess currently has the better claim, simply because she has the better power to support it.