The Habsburgs lost the throne in Spain thanks to the very process that they had hoped would preserve it. They thought keeping power within the family would keep them strong, but it ultimately made them weak. His body finally gave out and he died in 1700 when he was just 38 years old - the accumulation of two centuries’ worth of harmful traits being passed down to a single body. Due to the centuries of consanguineous marriages that led up to the birth of the final heir, modern researchers have found that the inbreeding coefficient (the likelihood that someone will have two identical genes due to their parents level of relation) was almost as high as that of a child born of an incestuous relationship.Ĭharles II, Habsburg jaw and all, was not able to produce any children of his own researchers speculate that he may also have been infertile. Wikimedia Commons Philip IV of Spain, who passed his Habsburg jaw down to his son, Charles II, along with his crown.Ĭharles II’s father, Philip IV, had married his own sister’s daughter, a dangerously close relationship that made him both Charles’s father and great-uncle. Marriage between close family members also increases the chance that harmful recessive genes - which would normally peter out thanks to healthy dominant genes from non-related parents - will continue to be passed down (Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom unwittingly spread recessive hemophilia across the entire continent thanks to the continued inter-marrying of the European royal families).įor the Habsburgs, the most well-known trait that was passed down was the Habsburg jaw. In addition to being socially and culturally taboo, incestuous marriages are harmful in that they lead to higher rates of miscarriages, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths (only half of the Habsburg children survived to the age of 10, compared with the 80 percent survival rate of children from other Spanish families of the same time period). It wasn’t just the crown that was passed down from generation to generation, but a series of genes that produced birth defects. The Cost Of Generations Of Inbreedingīesides ensuring that the throne remained in the grip of the Habsburgs, this inbreeding also had unintended consequences that would eventually lead to the dynasty’s downfall. In their determination to keep the Spanish monarchy within the family, they began to look for royal spouses only within their own family. However, just as these Spanish Habsburgs themselves had received the crown through marriage, they knew that it easily pass out of their hands in the same way. Their Spanish reign was set into motion when Habsburg ruler Philip I of Burgundy (including pieces of present-day Luxembourg, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands) married Joanna of Castile, the female heir to the throne of what’s now much of Spain, in 1496.Īfter a decade of political wrangling and skirmishes with competitors for power in Spain, Philip I took the throne of Castile in 1506, six years after having fathered Charles V, who himself took the Spanish throne in 1516. Their rule in Spain may have officially begun in 1516, but the Habsburgs, originally of German and Austrian extraction, had been controlling various regions of Europe since the 13th century. Wikimedia Commons Artists did not fail to capture Charles V of Spain’s Habsburg jaw.
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