Otto von Habsburg

Born third in line in 1912 with eight given names, Otto became likely heir when his father ascended in 1916, then pretender to dissolved thrones when his father died in 1922. Exiled at six, raised by his devout mother across Spain, Switzerland, and half a dozen other countries on curricula for a Catholic emperor who would never reign, he was stateless for decades, traveling on Maltese and Spanish papers. He spent the 1930s pushing for Habsburg restoration, fled a Nazi death sentence after the Anschluss, and emerged as Vice President then President of the Paneuropean Union movement from 1957 to 2004. As a CSU member of the European Parliament for two decades, he kept an empty chair for countries behind the Iron Curtain and co-initiated the 1989 Pan-European Picnic, a border opening that prefigured the fall of the Berlin Wall. He resigned as head of his house in 2007, four years before his funeral drew crowds to St. Stephen's Cathedral and a burial that split him between Vienna's Imperial Crypt and a Hungarian abbey.