When the Tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun was unearthed in 1922, it was found to have contained over
one hundred walking sticks that were presumably made for King Tut himself. In the ancient
religious tradition of Egypt, it was thought that rulers passing into the afterlife needed to be
buried with counterparts of their possessions in order to take them on to the afterlife.
Scientists tested the remains of the boy Pharaoh in order to find out if the king
required these sticks as walking aids. While his death was spurred on by malaria,
the results of many tests showed that Tutankhamun may have had a
clubbed foot from birth that was further fractured in his life due to weak bones.
King Tut would likely have inherited this genetic deformity due to the results of
inbreeding in his bloodline, and unfortunately, he was far from the only noble ruler in history
who was a product of incestuous marriage. The royal families of Europe famously boasted some
of the most closely related bloodlines this side of Alabama. Not content with
intermingling with commoners or distant noble lineages, the options for marriage among these
monarchs shrank as rapidly as the number of chairs they needed for family gatherings. And
much like a copy printer running out of ink, filtering the same familiar genes through an
increasingly smaller group of parents leads to rapidly diminishing returns.
In this thankfully distant past, the practice of inbreeding led to the birth of many individuals
who had the privileged of being royals but cursed with physical defects that made their sometimes
brief and painful lives far more difficult than expected. For these reasons and many others,
inbreeding is frowned upon and no longer viable as a method of consolidating political power.
But during the time that it was common practice, those who sought to maintain
their power took it to the absolute extreme. Much like corporations in the modern day,
holding on to stock and property was the name of the game - and in the case of
the royal products of inbreeding - these offspring were holding on for dear life.
Welcome to the sideshow of history, where all of the most powerful members of medieval
royalty reside. We’ll begin by looking at the House of Habsburg - an Austrian and Spanish
royal dynasty whose offspring would rule over many regions across Europe. And yet,
with all the diverse population and ethnic groups that they could have married into,
the Habsburgs were content to make siring heirs to their various seats of authority a family affair.
Leopold the 1st, a 17th-century emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,
was one of the first poster children for the ongoing effects of Habsburg inbreeding.
He boasted a prominent lower jaw that clearly denoted him as part of the Habsburg phenotype.
According to a team of geneticists from the University of Santiago De Compostela,
the so-called Habsburg Jaw might have been a recessive trait, as a dominant trait only
requires one parent to have the gene in order to pass it on, while a recessive
trait requires both parents to have the same gene. Though considering how increasingly rare
marriage outside of the family became with the Hapsburgs, it’s difficult to confirm.
What was confirmed by the university’s study was that the members of the family
with the most prominent Habsburg’s Jaws tended towards having higher
inbreeding coefficients. Though again, the direct correlation is speculative.
Leopold’s own mandible was so well-known, in fact, that when his image was printed on a silver coin,
the people of the Holy Roman Empire couldn’t help but remark on it.
The chin-having Emperor was given the nickname “Hogmouth” for his famous jawline,
and was once described during his lifetime as a cultivated man of extreme ugliness. Despite the
shocking details of his royal face, Leopold was known for taking part in hunts as a way
of getting fresh air. Among other games, the Hogmouth frequently hunted wild boars,
apparently unbothered by the uncanny resemblance to himself.
He was unbothered by many things, including the most infamous Habsburg family tradition - which
is also the subject of this family. His first marriage was with Margeret Theresa of Spain,
an infanta who was both Leopold’s first cousin on her father’s side and niece
on his mother’s side. Creepy uncle that he was, Leopold first laid eyes on his
future bride when he received paintings from Madrid of Margaret - depicted in art
when she was only 8 years old. He waited in Vienna for his fiance to come of age,
which sounds like the worst context in which to imagine the Billy Joel song of the same name.
Once the couple of cousins were wed, they produced four children, only one of which survived longer
than a year. The health complications of incest caused a rise in infant mortality, and
over several generations, this made the Habsburg line all but go extinct. This surviving daughter,
the verbosely named Maria Antonia Josepha Benedicta Rosalia Petronella of Austria,
lived 23 years - which was, fun fact: two years longer than her mother’s life. We
suppose that’s not really fun at all, though it’s, sadly, a fact.
Maria Antonia is notable for having the highest coefficient of inbreeding within the House of
Habsburg, as she was the child of two generations of uncle and niece pairings. For comparison,
this made her less genetically distinct from her parents than the child of a parent and
their own previous child. Despite the fact that the branches of her family tree were ingrowing,
Maria Antonia was, by all accounts, a woman of decent health for the time period.
The same could not be said for the man she was nearly betrothed to for political maneuvering:
a man who was also the younger brother of her mother, Margaret Theresa of Spain. For
those keeping score at home - yes, the same Margeret Theresa who was married to Leopold I.
He was the remaining member of the purebred Habsburg kings who ruled the
Spanish Empire - King Charles the Second, whose compounding health problems were so
awe-inspiringly severe that he was known as “El Hechizado” or “The Bewitched.”
It was almost fitting that eleven incestuous marriages within a relatively short period
of time would culminate in the life of a man so disturbingly fragile that it was a miracle
Charles II survived as long as he did. As a child, El Hechizado was constantly plagued
by illness - including many kinds of pox and measles. He suffered from epileptic seizures
and had difficulty walking unaided throughout much of his early childhood due to rickets.
The Habsburg Jaw was especially pronounced on Charles II, and he had difficulty both speaking
and eating due to his unusual mouth shape and oversized tongue. This wasn’t for lack of trying,
as one royal letter from the time described him his eating habits:
“he has a ravenous stomach, and swallows all he eats whole,
for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet.”
Altogether, his body was a wreck, and his mind seemed to have suffered
as well - though hard data on the king’s intelligence is hard to verify. Many nobles
of the time saw the reign of Charles as a difficult and unproductive one,
and an overall sign of decay for the monarchy. Even so, the troubled king
struggled on through life with the divinely mandated purpose of one day producing an heir.
As the Habsburgs and many other royal families had similar priorities,
the continuation of the bloodline took priority over Charles the Second’s life,
especially as it seemed that he was battling to keep it every waking moment. His royal governess
even instructed him to sleep next to the body of his late father, in the hopes that some of
the deceased man’s lust for life would improve his son’s chances of fertility from beyond the
grave. We can guarantee that this is one sentence you never thought you’d hear.
People didn't know much about corpses back then, and it’s hard to imagine that this period
of posthumous father-son bonding helped with Charles’ already questionable health. Not at
all surprisingly, it didn’t help with the other thing either. Charles was married twice, first
to Her Royal Highness Marie Louise D’orleans. Mademoiselle D’Orleans who was said to have
wept profusely about the prospect of being married to Charles, not due to his deformities mind you,
but due to the fact that she was already madly in love with one of her own cousins.
Marie was married to Charles for ten years up until her untimely death, and during that time,
the couple was unable to produce a child. Charles' second wife, Maria Anna of Neuburg,
had similar rotten luck conceiving a child with the king. Despite this, the queen consort
frequently claimed to be pregnant with Charles' child while also insisting that the King undergo
various treatments to increase his fertility. Her best efforts would prove insufficient,
and when the king passed away, there was little doubt that he had been impotent his entire life.
The autopsy of King Charles the Second revealed many disquieting things about his anatomy,
most infamously the following description: “his body did not contain a single drop of blood,
his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous;
he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water."
The revelation that El Hechizado had lived 39 years with a barely functioning body is
both inspiring and deeply horrifying. Charle the Second’s death marked the termination of
the Habsburg line in Spain, kicking off a war of succession that lasted twelve years.
One might expect that the dangers of inbreeding were well-known at this point,
but for royal families across Europe, the benefits of retaining property outweighed
the severe physical cost. Which is how it came to be that Ferdinand I - the spawn
of a pair of cousins who also shared two sets of the same grandparents - became the
Emperor of Austria despite suffering many inbreeding-related ailments.
His condition of hydrocephalus caused him to have an enlarged cranium,
which was filled with an excess of liquid from birth. Complications related to hydrocephalus
include constant headaches, double vision, mood swings, balance issues, and seizures.
Emperor Ferdinand most certainly experienced at least some of these symptoms, which,
when compounded with his extreme case of epilepsy, resulted in the Austrian royal having as many as
twenty seizures a day. Most of the actual responsibilities of ruling were left to his
regent’s council, but Ferdinand was still treated as the head of state. And what a head it was.
He came to be known as Ferdinand the Benign,
which is certainly a kinder way of putting the Emperor’s lack of agency over his own country.
Though not much of an active ruler of Austria,
Ferdinand was most certainly the tyrant of the royal kitchen - famously demanding
apricot dumplings from his chef when the fruit itself was out of season.
To quote Ferdinand: “Ich bin der Kaiser und ich will Knödel!” or translated from German:
"I am the Emperor, and I want dumplings!"
Emperor Ferdinand may or may not have gotten those dumplings, but we do hope his chef wasn’t
punished because he couldn’t control the seasons. The picky king did get married to
Princess Maria Anna of Savoy, who came to see herself more as a nurse and caretaker than a
wife. While an attempt was made to consummate the marriage and potentially produce an heir,
one court physician warned the Emperor against such activity due to his weak
constitution. Sure enough, Ferdinand’s attempt to bed his princess bride resulted in five
seizures. Their marriage would be a childless one, which was undoubtedly for the best.
The royals of England had their own share of complications when it came to inbreeding,
and chief among them was the so-called “royal disease”: hemophilia. Hemophilia
is a rare blood-borne condition that causes bleeding to be more severe by limiting the
blood's ability to clot. It’s an extremely uncommon condition, and a person is unlikely
to develop it later in life unless it was inherited at birth through a recessive gene.
It’s believed that Queen Victoria was a carrier of hemophilia, and introduced it into the royal
bloodline through her incestuous marriage to her first cousin, Prince Albert. The effects
of the disease ravaged her children and grandchildren, and many of them died from
blood loss caused by this inherited condition. Naturally, the royal disease extended beyond the
borders of England and into the other countries of Europe as marriage between nobles continued.
Each of Victoria’s surviving daughters married into another royal family,
making the disease a recurring feature of royalty. Along with Hemophilia,
it’s thought that Queen Victoria’s line also carried another recessive disease
known as porphyria - which negatively affects the skin, nervous system,
and gastrointestinal system - though the Queen never showed any signs of having these illnesses.
On the other hand, King George III suffered extensively from the distressing symptoms of
this condition, inherited through his blood. The most shocking physical manifestation of
porphyria was the King’s blue urine, an ironic and brutal reflection of the consequences of
blue blood. George was thought to have gotten increasingly mentally ill, especially after losing
the Revolutionary War and England’s claim to the United States of America. The king was prone to
stringing together incredibly long and repetitive sentences during bouts of lapsed judgment.
He would continue to speak until foam spilled from his mouth,
and he would often collapse from convulsions, apparently determined to continue his manic
ramblings. While it has been suggested by more contemporary research that other less
recognizable mental illnesses may have played a factor in the King’s erratic
behavior - the reputation of him being a mad king stuck and was seen as an example of how
certain negative personality traits can damage a royal’s credibility.
Since members of the German royal line descended from both Queen Victoria and King George I,
similar problems cropped up in the German House of Hohenzollern. Kaiser
Wilhelm II was thought to have been a product of inherited illnesses,
the sum total of which might have influenced his behavior towards the start of World War I.
This has caused some modern historians to speculate that the practice of inbreeding
may have inadvertently led to some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.
A courtier by the name of Reginald Brett feared as much about Kaiser Wilhelm at the time,
confiding in King Edward VII that he was “sure the taint of George III was
in his blood.” His sister Princess Charlotte was equally ill-tempered:
a heavy smoker and drinker as well as a notorious gossip. She was widely believed to
have been the culprit behind a scandalous series of anonymous letters circulated in the year 1891,
all written in the same handwriting and featuring some of the most disastrous and
personal secrets of the Berlin elite. There were royal photographs included among these letters,
upon which were drawn lewd illustrations that further humiliated the subjects of the pictures.
Apart from having a demeanor that would make her fit in perfectly at a college fraternity,
Princess Charlotte was riddled with never-before-seen mutations of the various
royal ailments. She suffered near-constant abdominal pain, persistent facial blisters,
and her urine was dark red throughout her entire life. No formal diagnosis for her condition was
ever made, though another strain of porphyria was thought to be the most likely cause. This
unnamed and incurable condition was passed down to Charlotte’s daughter Feodora - who lived a short
and miserable life, constantly bickering with her controlling and scheming mother.
Feodora had no children of her own, and thus,
this new mutant form of porphyria was never passed on to another generation.
There are still quirks in the royal bloodline of many countries that
owe themselves to the disreputable legacy of inbreeding, but thankfully,
the time of the most inbred royals in history appears to be far behind us.
And let’s all just hope, for the sake of the gene pool, it stays that way.
For more examples of royal inbreeding check out
“When Royal Inbreeding Went Horribly Wrong” Or watch this video instead!