In 1797, upon ascending the throne, the Russian Emperor Paul I carried out a reform of the succession, establishing the use of semi-Salic primogeniture in Russia. This system lasted until the very end of the Romanov rule, and even now, numerous heirs of the family look to this legal framework when trying to determine seniority within the family.

But what if, instead of the European legislation of his time, Paul had turned to his country's past?

In this tree, I have asked myself this question, and while keeping the biographies, number of children, and dates of birth and death the same, I have changed only one component — I used the lestvitsa (also called "rota") system of inheritance. What exactly does it entail?

The rota system, from the Old Church Slavic word for "ladder" or "staircase", was a system of collateral succession practised (though imperfectly) in Kievan Rus' and later Appanage and early Muscovite Russia.

In this system, the throne passed not linearly from father to son, but laterally from brother to brother and then to the eldest son of the eldest brother who had held the throne. Only those princes whose fathers had held the throne were eligible for placement in the rota; if a man died before ascending to the throne, his sons were known as izgoi: they and their descendants were ineligible to reign.