Prince Philip , the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II , has died at age 99, the royal family announced Friday.

Philip and the queen were married for more than 70 years, making him the longest-serving spouse of a reigning British monarch. He was the oldest-ever male member of the British royal family.

Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, to Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg.

His family belonged to the royal Danish House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, which had been installed on the Greek throne at the end of the 19th century . They were exiled from Greece after a revolutionary, anti-monarchy court banished Philips father for life . The family fled on a British Royal Navy warship in which the young prince reportedly slept in a crib that had been fashioned from an old orange box.

Philip was later sent to Great Britain, where he attended the Cheam Preparatory and Gordonstoun boarding schools.

The Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where the prince enrolled at age 17, was the first place he spent significant time with his future wife, a distant cousin who was then 13 years old. (The two had the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert .) Then-Princess Elizabeth and her family visited the college in 1939 and, shortly after, she and Philip began exchanging letters.

During a visit to Balmoral Castle in Scotland in 1946, they decided to get married. The king agreed to the marriage but asked that they keep the engagement secret until after Elizabeths 21st birthday.