of Georgia, while retaining its autonomy and its ancient monarchy was placed under the protection of the Russian Empire. In 1801 after the death of George XII, the last King of Georgia, Emperor Alexander I of Russia in violation of the treaty, annexed the kingdom of Georgia and the Bagration dynasty lost its throne. The Bagrations became a leading family of the Russian nobility, serving in the Tsar's army and at court in Saint Petersburg. The former ruling branch became extinct in the late 19th century , when it passed its succession rights to the branch to which Grand Duchess Leonida belonged, but this too is disputed. As his consort she used the title Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna. By him, she had another daughter, Maria Vladimirovna, who claims to have succeeded her father upon his death in 1992. In 1946, Leonida's brother, Prince Irakly, married King Alfonso XIII of Spain's maternal niece, Princess Doña María de las Mercedes de Baviera y Borbon (1911–1953), obtaining Vladimir's recommendation that the Spanish pretender, Don Juan, Count of Barcelona, accept the marriage as dynastic, which he did not. The Count of Barcelona, then Head of the Royal House of Spain, considered the issue of this marriage to be disqualified from the Spanish succession. The only son of this marriage was sponsored at his baptism by the Count of Barcelona but the latter's refusal to recognize his god-son as a Spanish dynast led to the Bagrations' alienation from the Spanish Royal Family according to Guy Stair Sainty. In 1948 Vladimir, relying on his own earlier advice on the Bagrations' historically royal status, chose to wed Leonida dynastically in Lausanne, Switzerland. Controversy The Grand Duke's marriage to Leonida Bagration remained controversial; some considered it to be morganatic. Although the princess descended from the Bagrationi dynasty which had ruled as kings of Georgia since the early Middle Ages, it had been deposed and reduced to the status of Russian nobility for more than a century prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917. Leonida belonged to the senior surviving branch of that family , but the last Georgian king from whom she descended in the male line was Constantine II who died in 1505, although other branches of the family continued to reign in the Caucasus as late as 1810. Besides, according to the Almanach de Gotha, as per the decision of Emperor Nicholas II made in 1911,