Name Eugenio Lascorz | Died June 1, 1952 | |
Eugenio Lascorz y Labastida (26 March 1886 - 1 June 1962) was a pretender who claimed connection to several dynasties of the Byzantine Empire. Eugenio Lascorz was born in Zaragoza. His father was a laborer.
The Aragonese family name Lascorz may be connected to counts of Ribargorza who were Lords of Lascorz in the 12th century. However, Eugenio Lascorz decided that Lascorz was a bastardized form of Lascaris, a family that provided the Byzantine emperors in exile (the so-called Nicaean Empire) in 1204–61, and began to claim that he was descended from them. There is no evidence of that kind of connection.
On 16 March 1917 Lascorz substituted the name Lascaris on his father's birth records. He began to call himself Eugenio Lascaris and in 1923 issued a manifesto to the Greeks, calling himself Eugenio Lascaris Comneno, adding another imperial dynasty, the Comnenus family, to his supposed pedigree.
During the Spanish Republic, Lascorz became a prosecutor and in August 1935 used his influence to modify the birth records of his sister and grandparents to show the name Lascaris. He also published a genealogy in which he claimed that his grandfather immigrated from Greece. He also changed the names of his father and grandfather.
In 1943 Lascorz called himself Prince Eugene Lascaris Comnenus Paleologus, Duke of Athens. In 1947 he published the new genealogy that contradicted the previous one. In 1953 he published yet another one. The latest incarnation claims that his father was not a laborer Manuel Lascorz y Serveto but a nobleman Alexios VI Emmanouil.
Eugenio Lascorz's descendants still maintain his claim.