The House of Galahad-Canossa is known to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest European noble family. The legend tells that they would descend from a sacred union of the Knight of the Round Table, Sir Galahad and a green-haired Celtic Goddess that he had met during the Quest of the Holy Grail. Though this is the legent, even the most skeptical historians have never been able to track down the real origins of the dynasty. All is known is that the first records of this lineage date back to the 6th Century AD and talk about nobles of the court of the legendary King Arthur I of Britannia whom, in the Invasions Era, led the Roman-Britannian forces against the invading Saxons and Angles.
Though always influential at court, this Dynasty achieved a first peak during the 9th Century, when Lord Caradoc verch Galahad led a victorious Britannian Army in the Conquest of Brittany, against the Kindgom of West Francia. Upon receiving Brittany as a fief, with the title of Princes of Brittany, the then House of Galahad settled in Continental Europe, where they were to remain for the centuries to come.
Their rule over Brittany however was to last only for slightly more than a century, once that the 10th century saw the Norse invading this Britannian fief, eventually conquering it after two decades of war, forcing the Galahad Dynasty to flee, this time no longer back to Britannia, where their position was now too weak, but to Italy, where they became leaders of mercenary bands and for generations offered their services to the local lords and cities. Finally, however, in 1069, now a powerful house of Capitani di Ventura, they came to regain the noble status, thanks to the marriage between Goffredo de' Galeasso and Matilde di Canossa returned the family to the ranks of the Italian landed nobility, making them the heirs of one of the most powerful Italian dynasties.
As was the norm in Medieval Italy, the House of Galeassi di Canossa, as they became known, saw its fortune turning multiple times, at times being nearly wiped out, other times conquering important territories and growing more and more powerful. By the end of the Middle Ages, however, after many military defeats had deprived them of the richest and most important estates, they had found a new source of power: trade and banking. With their new activity, these nobles of such an ancient lineage soon found out that they could extend their influence well beyond the borders of their now reduced fiefs and even beyond the court of Ferrara (and later Modena), where they now resided, serving the House of Este. Instead, now with their banks and trading companies, they could control the flow of wealth not only across Italy, but across the whole Mediterranean and later, when the Europeans began to set sail towards Africa and Asia and to colonise the New World, also towards those remote lands.
Thus, by the mid-18th century, the House of Galahad-Canossa (they replaced the italianisation Galeassi with the original Galahad) had reached a new apogeum. Their bank, among the very few Italian banks to survive past the Renaissance, with its offices on all the continents, controlled the flow of gold and silver, provided funds to colonial ventures, funded the wars of the European states and borrowed money with abusive interest rates to the rulers of Asian and African States. Their trade company, was responsible for moving all types of commodities, including hundreds of thousands of slaves, across the oceans, while its mercenary troops and fleets, secured that the interests of the family would never be threatened.
Even this Golden Age, however, came to an end. In 1789, the French people, led by the bourgeoisie, rebelled against their King, unchaining a response of the European monarchies that led to the Revolutionary Wars first and later to the Napoleonic Wars. In this context, the House of Galahad-Canossa stood firmly by the Duke of Modena and the Holy Roman Empire, devouting their resources to the destruction of Revolutionary France. Moreover, it was at this point that a member of the House rose to great fame: Marquess Federigo Galahad-Canossa, XV Marquess of Canossa, who led the Modenese and Imperial Armies to many victories against France, even managing, on more than one occasion, to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte himself. However, nothing, not even Marquess Federigo's ingenuity, could stop the inhexorability of the French Revolution, whose forces, by 1815, had conquered most of Western and Central Europe, including the British Isles.
The events of the Old World and the misfortune that befell over their camp, saw the descendants of Sir Galahad forced to leave the land that for century had been their homeland. First, in a twist of fate, they resettled in London in the Holy Empire of Britannia, but then, as even Britannia succumbed to the armies of Napoleon, they followed Britannia's royalty and nobility across the Atlantic Ocean, to the New World.
There is where, two centuries later, our story begins...