And Every One Was A Henry (Henry!)

Louis XVIII of France, Alfosno XIII of Spain, Carl XVI of Sweden, once a particular monarch name becomes more popular than the others, the regnal numbering can get a bit cumbersome.  The Papacy even skipped Pope John XX and moved right on to Pope John XXI because they lost track of just how many Pope Johns there had been.

But one family decided to take things even further.  For 800 years the Reuss family ruled an oddly shaped patch of land in central Germany (as pictured).  At the end of the 12th century, Emperor Henry VI (Heinrich in German) did them a solid and granted them a few minor titles.  The family decided to repay him by naming their son Heinrich in his honor, which seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

It quickly transitioned into unreasonable territory, however, when they decided that naming one son Heinrich was not enough to show just how thankful they were for their new titles.  In order to show the true extent of their gratitude, they started naming every male child Heinrich.  And they kept doing it. For hundreds and hundreds of years.

To tell all the Heinrichs apart, each one got a number, and unlike normal regnal numbering, they numbered the ones who never got to be Count of Reuss.  So you'd have, say, Heinrich VII, and his younger brothers Heinrich VIII and Heinrich IX.  An endless stream of numerically increasing Heinrichs.  But the Reuss family wasn't crazy, of course.  They weren't going to let these numbers just grow out of control.  They decided that after they reached 100 (Heinrich C, I suppose), they'd reset back to Heinrich I.  Another branch of the family decided to start resetting at the turn of each century.

The current head of the family is Heinrich XIV, son of Heinrich IV, son of Heinrich XXXIX, son of Heinrich XXIV, son Heinrich IV, son of Heinrich LXIII, and so on and so on, stretching back through centuries and centuries of absurdly numbered Heinrichs.  All because the Emperor granted them some piddly honors way back when.