The succession to the position of Grand Master of the Order is unique among Catholic orders of chivalry, in that it passes by male primogeniture within the Royal House of Bourbon (as heirs of the Farnese family).
In 1698, the grand mastership of the Order was acquired by Francesco Farnese, Duke of Parma. Pope Innocent XII’s apostolic brief Sincerae Fidei in 1699 and Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I’s imperial decree Agnoscimus et notum facimus of the same year confirmed to Francesco Farnese and his heirs the position of Grand Master, as a dignity separate and apart from the House of Farnese’s sovereignty over the Duchy of Parma.
In 1705, the Farnese grand master granted the Order new statutes, approved the following year by the Pope, which established the grand mastership as an ecclesiastical office passed by primogeniture among the male heirs of the Farnese family, a requirement confirmed again in the 1718 papal bull Militantis Ecclesiae.
In 1731, the House of Farnese died out in the male line. The positions both of Grand Master of the Constantinian Order and Duke of Parma then passed, as separate dignities, to Prince Charles of Bourbon, Infante of Spain, who was considered the heir of the House of Farnese as the eldest son of Elisabeth Farnese and King Philip V of Spain. Charles was forced to surrender the Duchy of Parma in 1736, but he retained the separate position of Grand Master of the Constantinian Order and continued to administer the Constantinian Order’s Parma estates and membership, despite no longer being Parma’s sovereign duke.
Charles’s succession as Grand Master of the Constantinian Order occurred in 1731. He subsequently became King of Naples and Sicily in 1734.
In 1759, the same Charles, still King of Naples and Sicily, inherited the throne of Spain in succession to his childless elder half-brother. Two months later, he abdicated the thrones of Naples and Sicily to his second surviving son, Ferdinand. (Ferdinand then became King Ferdinand IV of Naples and King Ferdinand III of Sicily. In 1816, after the two kingdoms were joined, he became King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to him here as King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies). Some ten days after abdicating the thrones of Naples and Sicily, Charles abdicated the position of Constantinian Grand Master to the same Ferdinand. Thus, Charles remained Constantinian grand master after ascending the Spanish throne and after abdicating the thrones of Naples and Sicily. In his Constantinian abdication, he delegated to his son Ferdinand the position of “first born Farnese heir”, as this was a necessary condition of Ferdinand’s becoming Grand Master.
These separate abdications in 1759 underlined the fact that the Constantinian Order and its grand mastership were separate from the Crowns of Naples and Sicily (later the Crown of the Two Sicilies). Charles’s abdication of the thrones of Naples and Sicily when he became King of Spain was in execution of the Pragmatic Decree of 1759, which specified that the Crown of Naples and the Crown of Spain must not be united and held by the same monarch. The Pragmatic Decree was intended to address questions concerning the balance of power in Europe and was enacted under the provisions of two international treaties (in 1737 and 1759).
For his part, King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies confirmed the independence of the Constantinian Order from the Crowns of Naples and Sicily in a 1796 decree, which stated in part: In his (Ferdinand’s) royal person there exists two very distinct qualities, the one of monarch of the Two Sicilies, and the other of grand master of the illustrious, royal and military Constantinian Order, which though united gloriously in the same person form nonetheless at the same time two separate independent lordships.
At the time Ferdinand became Constantinian grand master, the Holy See fully recognized that succession to the position of Constantinian grand master, a dignity based in canon law, was separate from other positions, such as the secular position of King of Naples and Sicily. The Holy See recognized this again in 1861, when the Two Sicilies dynasty lost its crown. Indeed, the Holy See continued to accord privileges and recognition to the Constantinian Order for decades after the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies had ceased to exist.
The Order’s Statutes of 1919, confirmed by the Holy See, and the revised Statutes of 1934-1943 (in the articles governing the succession to the grand mastership) state explicitly that the “dignity of Grand Master, reserved to the House of Bourbon, as heirs of the House of Farnese, is transmitted by male primogeniture.”
The Order’s Royal Deputation in 1935 issued a lengthy historical statement in which the separate nature of the Order from the Crown of the Two Sicilies was emphasized.
It is worth emphasizing too that succession to the Constantinian grand mastership and succession to the dignity of head of the Bourbon Two Sicilies dynasty are governed by two very different sets of laws. Under canon law, because the dignity of Constantinian grand master is an ecclesiastical office with episcopal powers (powers delegated to the Order’s Grand Prior, now Cardinal Müller), the grand mastership can only be held by males. If the male dynasts of the House of the Two Sicilies were to die out, the grand mastership would pass to the senior male of the next line of descent from Elisabeth Farnese, the House of Bourbon-Parma. In contrast, under the Two Sicilies dynastic laws, in the event the male dynasts of the House of the Two Sicilies were to die out, the succession to the dignity of head of the dynasty would pass to the female dynast most closely related to the last dynastic head.
Since the accession of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to the position of Constantinian grand master in 1759, the Constantinian grand mastership has passed by strict male primogeniture among his direct descendants in the male line of the House of Bourbon.
The present Grand Master, HRH Prince Pedro of Bourbon, Prince of the Two Sicilies, Duke of Calabria succeeded his father as Grand Master in 2015. Prince Pedro is the senior living descendant of King Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies by male primogeniture. The Grand Master’s heir is his eldest son, HRH Prince Jaime, Duke of Noto and Grand Prefect of the Constantinian Order.