In 2000, Karl Emich began the final round of a lawsuit to inherit £100 million worth of castles, property, and a Mediterranean island that had been denied him by his family because he chose to marry Thyssen. Karl Emich was disinherited shortly after his 1991 wedding, as his mother, father, and brother Andreas withheld approval, contending that the bride did not meet the mediatized family's traditional standard for aristocratic lineage. The marriage was therefore deemed to constitute a violation of an 1897 Leiningen family edict requiring that dynastically valid marriages be authorised by the head of the Leiningen family (or by successful appeal to a panel of mediatized nobles), such permission historically being granted for brides descended from royalty or the titled nobility. Karl remarked about the whole affair,