Petar II Petrović-Njegoš
Petar II Petrović-Njegoš was born Radivoje "Rade" Petrović on in the mountain village of Njeguši, near Cetinje. His father, Tomislav "Tomo" Petrović (b. 1762–63), was a member of the Petrović clan of the Njeguši tribe of Katuni "nahiya". Njegoš's mother, Ivana Proroković, hailed from the hamlet of Mali Zalaz and was the daughter of Njeguši captain Lazo Proroković. There is no reliable information about her exact year of birth, but it is believed that she was about ten years younger than her husband. Tomo and Ivana had five children; their eldest son was Petar ("Pero"), Rade was their middle son and Jovan ("Joko") was their youngest. The couple's daughters were named Marija and Stana; Marija was married to a Montenegrin chieftain named Andrija Perović, the "serdar" (count) of Cuce, while Stana was married to Filip Đurašković, the "serdar" of Rijeka Crnojevića.
Nicolae Petrescu-Comnen
Nicolae Petrescu was born in Bucharest on August 24, 1884, the son of a public servant (or magistrate) and his schoolteacher wife. Baptized Romanian Orthodox, he was part-Greek: his maternal grandmother, Ecaterina, was the last descendant of the Greek family Comninò. Also through his mother, hailing from the Cernovodeanu clan, the future diplomat belonged to the boyar nobility, and was an uncle of the historian Dan Cernovodeanu. His collaborator and subordinate Noti Constantinide further argues that Petrescu was of Romany descent, "a true, purebred, Gypsy" and "highly unusual character". Having studied at the University of Bucharest and the University of Paris, he took a doctorate in Law and Political Science at the latter, and began his career as an Ilfov County judge in 1906. He worked as a lawyer from 1911 to 1916, while also teaching economics at Bucharest University. He was at the center of political life from his Paris years, when he joined the Romanian Students' Circle. He lectured with the latter at Voltaire Coffeehouse, appearing alongside some of the country's future statesmen and scholars: Nicolae Titulescu, Ion G. Duca, Dimitrie Drăghicescu, and Toma Dragu.
During that period, he changed his surname to "Petrescu-Comnen", thus claiming lineage from the Komnenos family of Byzantine Emperors (he also claimed to be related to the Bonapartes). The change was made official by his father in 1903, and later backed by a questionable family tree and heraldry, but recognized during his induction into the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George. Petrescu's views on his family's heritage were a frequent topic of ridicule among foreign diplomats (puns on his name included the French-language "Petrescu-Quand même"—"Petrescu-All the Same", and the generic "Nicolae Perhaps-Comnen"). Historian Andrei Pippidi sees the Byzantine claim as entirely spurious, "snobbish", "unjustly decreasing the value of [his] character." Genealogist Dumitru Năstase proposes that the Petrescus were in fact only attached to the village of Comeni, a name later corrupted into "Comneni", then "Comnen". The "bewildering" Byzantine pedigree was also ridiculed by the left-wing satirist Petre Pandrea, who noted that, beyond his "princely obsession", Comnen was a "fundamentally decent man."