When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the nineteen eighties ABC primetime soap opera Dynasty. The series centered on the wealthy Carrington family of Denver, Colorado, a patriarch oil tycoon, and a cast of feuding family members. Let's just say that I feel as I do because we have so much in common, such as what our blood,
our teens. But that dynasty, for all its drama and dysfunction, had nothing on the real life dynasties we're going to talk about today, like the Habsburgs, the family that ruled much of Europe for centuries.
These people are so powerful, I mean power over tens of millions of people and gazillions of acres of land.
This royal family, however, was a little too close. The final Habsburg, ruler of Spain, who died in seventeen hundred, is considered to be the most inbred royal ever.
His Habsburg jaw was so pronounced that his two sets of teeth couldn't touch at all. He couldn't keep food in his mouth.
In this episode, we're going to look at the practices of intermarriage and inbreeding among several major royal families and how these practices built and in some cases led to the unraveling of their respective empires.
The strategy for survival and for enhancement of power becomes, especially in the Habsburg case, the recipe for its undoing.
From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Moacca and this is mobituaries, this moment, the Habsburg jaw and the death of a dynasty. Royal families and inbreeding are they kind of like peanut butter and jelly.
There are two great tastes that went great together mo for a really long time.
I'm talking with my friend Caroline Weber. Carries a professor of French and comparative literature at Barnard College and a best selling author.
At the moment, I'm working on a book on royalty around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And one of the amazing things to underscore is that this kind of royal intermarriage really continued for a very long time. Even though it led to the end of some dynasties, It's persisted among a number of especially European dynasties.
And the most recent example, I think, in kind of contemporary collective memory is the late Queen Elizabeth I and Prince Philip who are cousins, Who.
Were cousins, and how close were their cousins.
They were third cousins, so not super close by royal standards. They shared a common great great grandmother in Queen Victoria.
Marriage between royal relatives has many precedents. For example, scientists believe that the parents of boy King Tutan, common in ancient Egypt, were brother and sister. In ancient Rome, Emperor Claudius married his niece Agrippina the Younger. But this practice became super charged throughout Europe from the Late Middle Ages around the year fifteen hundred all the way until the
outbreak of World War One in nineteen fourteen. Now, before we get into it, let's define one word that's central to this topic, consanguinity.
Consanguinity is a word that describes blood relatedness between people who marry. If you were a king and you wanted your children to be recognized as a king, you would want to marry somebody who was perceived also to be of royal blood, and that royal blood often meant that they were in some way, shape or form related to you.
Wow, So consanguinity inter marriage equaled stability.
Yeah, it did. It represented a few things. I mean, on the one hand, consanguinity did mean concentrating family resources and territories and keeping them as it were in the family. So that was a big part of consanguinous marriages, this idea that you weren't going to let hard won territories in your kingdom potentially pass into the hands of a
rival king somewhere else. But the disadvantage, politically speaking, was that consanguinity meant that you missed an opportunity to form an alliance with a rival king who was not already related to you.
So for a good stretch of history, the incentives to intermarry were greater than the disincentives.
Yes, especially because the disincentives weren't very well known. I think just the idea of genetics as an actual science that didn't even start to come into being really until the nineteenth century. So for hundreds of years when you intermarried, the big incentive was this purity of your bloodline and this kind of reinforced intrafamilial connection, which became more and more meaningful as your family expanded its territory more and more.
And this is why the Hobsburgs are such a good example or bad example of inbreeding.
Who were the Hobsburgs.
So the Hobsburgs were a royal family who traced their origins to the early Middle Ages in Central and Eastern Europe what we would call today Austria and Hungary.
The Habsburgs held some of their power through their relationship with what was known as the Holy Roman Empire, a vast Christian political entity in Europe modeled on the original Roman Empire.
Since Charlemagne in the ninth century, Europe had had an elected Holy Roman Emperor who was the defender of the faith for all Catholics, but essentially the Habsburgs kept becoming Holy Roman Emperor.
Enter Maximilian the First. He was a Habsburg and put the family on the map quite literally with his election as Holy Roman Emperor and by his marriage to Mary of Burgundy.
Marie of Burgundy basically through her father had inherited much of Burgundy in France, but also the Netherlands and some territories kind of stretching into what we would today consider to be Belgium. And when she married a member of the Habsburg royal family, the Austrian Habsburgs then sort of took over that whole swath of land as well.
Maximilian the First and Mary of Burgundy, who were not closely related, had one surviving son. This son would expand the Habsburg's influence even further than his father did.
This guy's son was known as Philip the Handsome Philippe Leubel we called him in French. Philippe Leubel then crucially married the last offshoot of a Spanish royal family known as aragon and Castile. So most Americans have heard of Ferdinand and Isabella. They sponsored Christopher Columbus's trip to the
New World. They had a daughter known as Juana the Crazy Juana la Looca, and so some of the I think the lunacy that the Habsburg's later evinced was actually inherited from this woman, who was born a Castilian an Aragonese princess. But she married a son of this Habsburg Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor called Philippe Leubel.
To recap Philip the Handsome, the only surviving son of the Habsburg Emperor, marries Juana the Crazy, the heir to the Spanish throne. This meant their descent and so would inherit both the Habsburg and Spanish territories, and Guana la Loca would be an amazing telenovellah I Love Betty leafea which became Ugly Betty in the United States. It was originally a Colombian telenovela. And yeah, and one on La Loca would be amazing. It's just a great title already.
And she, by most accounts, really was insane.
But Juana and Philip's son had some sense. He ruled as Charles the First of Spain and Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire.
When Charles came of age, he made the very smart decision that he wasn't going to try to be in control of both Austria, Central Europe, Northern Europe and also Spain. So he essentially split the Habsburgs into two branches, and he founded the dynasty of Spanish Habsburgs as separate from his Austrian Habsburg cousins.
The likeness of Charles quint as he's known has been to pay did by a number of painters. They all show him with a distinctive mandible.
So he did have what became known as the as the Habsburg jaw, this very protuberant lower jaw, that kind of jutted out. If you see there's a famous painting of him by Titian where you can kind of see he's got very sickly looking skin. He suffered from gout. He may have suffered from epilepsy, which became a kind of a hereditary habsburg condition. But the main thing is the jaw, and the jaw kind of was often associated with something that modern scientists call maxillary deficiency, where the
upper jaw kind of was sunken in. And the Titian portrait of Charles Quint really shows a head that almost looks like a cashew. It's kind of collapsed in the center, with a bulbous forehead up top, and then this really outwardly jutting jaw and underbite at the bottom.
An Italian writer named Antonio de Biats, who met Charles Quint, wrote in fifteen seventeen that he had a long, avarice face and a lopsided mouth which drops open when he is not on his guard. So this King Charles wasn't exactly Prince Charming, but his decision to divide the dynasty between Spain and Austria would guarantee that his descendants would be even less portrait Jenic.
His parents were not that closely interrelated. Charles quint was not really the product of significant inbreeding, but because it was his decision essentially to try to split the Habsburg family into two branches of a royal family that together
ruled so much of Europe. His son became the Spanish Habsburg King, who was really just in charge of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, and his younger brother, Charles Quint's younger brother, Ferdinand I, became the head of the Austrian branch of the family and ruling over Austria and
its associated territories. He really instituted, I think the policy of significant innermarriage tween and among so what you then have after Charles Quint is generations of Spanish Habsburg's marrying Austrian habsburg to keep it, keep it all together.
Keep it all together. Yeah, by splitting the empire, he actually encouraged incentivized intermarriage.
That's right, and that's why I think you find so much more intermarriage in the Habsburg family than in other European royal families.
So much so that a Latin motto was coined in connection with the Habsburgs.
There's no evidence that they invented it themselves, but it became one that was cited every time you saw news of yet another Habsburg marriage. It would say, let other nations wage war, You happy Austria conquer through marriage. Jamie and I are more than brother and sister.
We shed a wound, came into this world together, we belonged together. Contrary to what the Game of Thrones extended universe might have you believe, Incest wasn't a personal preference as much as it was a political strategy.
Because he really was trying to manage an empire that was so vast. People forget that actually Mexico was part of Charles Quint's empire. I mean, he claimed Mexico in that obviously dubious and problematic colonialius way. He claimed the Philippines, and so his empire really covered so much of the globe that it didn't make sense for all of that
to be concentrated into one branch of one family. And so by creating this kind of separate but equal branch of the Austrian Habsburgs, he had a kind of a constant pool of intermarriage where none of these territories would go outside of the family.
Wow, they had so much power, and they were trying to maintain that power.
That's right.
Is there any family today that's the equivalent God the Kardashians. I was going to say, are they as powerful as the Kardashians.
I think it's hard to tell, because, yeah, their brand wasn't as beloved apparently as the Kardashians. But yeah, in terms of ubiquity and everywhere you look, there they are. There is a kind of a Kardashian effect that you see, we haven't yet lived long enough and the Kardashians haven't lived long enough for us to see what happens with the children of Kim and Chloe and Courtney.
Well they do.
They have their own TV shows, those kids.
They will by the time this airs, and they have delightful charles. They look great.
Oh right, yeah, well I do feel like that. Yeah, the Kardashians have done a much better job of kind of diversification in.
Marriage, and that's why the Kardashian dynasty will last even centuries longer than the Hopspurs.
Yeah. Now, I want you guys to be able to do this. Tell you're my age and one of your kids takes over, that's a whole that's the Joy.
Charles quint had a son who became Philip the Second of Spain, who had a son called Philip the Third, who had a son called Philip the.
Fourth, and they all interestingly and importantly married Austrian either nieces or cousins.
And as the consanguinity picks up in pace, so do its consequences.
Because the hobsburg is what you really see is just generation after generation, the problems that we now either know or suspect were genetically transmitted just get more and more pronounced.
Philip the Fourth and his niece slash wife had one surviving son, who would be known as Charles the Second or Charles the Bewitched due to his many infirmities.
Well, Charles the Second is important because he really represents the worst of what can happen with these successive consanguineous marriages from one generation to the next. His habsburg jaw was so pronounced that his two sets of teeth couldn't touch at all, he couldn't keep food in his mouth. He never really mentally developed beyond the age of about ten years old.
Charles was unable to speak until the age of four, and he couldn't walk until the age of eight. He looked elderly when he was only thirty years old, suffering from edemas on his feet, legs, abdomen, and face in his teeth not meeting his inability to chew. And this is centuries before protein shakes. Like, there's right, I mean the thunder straw has been invented probably at that point.
Yeah, how did he eat not well? And it wasn't pretty. This is one of the fun things about studying royalty is if you're in a Storian like me and you're trying to read contemporary accounts, nobody wants ever to say anything bad about the king, so you get a lot of euphemisms like his majesty did not eat well tonight, and you think, okay, does that mean that he could barely get the food in or was it just a
disgusting spectacle? And these euphemisms you can never say definitively what they mean, but you suspect that they hide a thousand embarrassments.
Genetic analysis has determined that in the average Spanish Habsburg, about ten percent of maternal and paternal genes were identical, which means they were more closely inbread than the child of two first cousins. By the time Charles the Bewitched was born, the problem was even worse.
One of the takeaways from one of these scientific reports was that even though Charles the Second's parents were quote primarily or only uncle and niece, they were so closely related already by the previous generations of inbreeding that they were as closely related as brother and sister. So Charles the Second really was the product of so much inbreeding that essentially it was like his parents were siblings.
Oh my goodness. They tried to marry him off.
They tried to marry Charles the Second off, and it did not go well because generally, one of the functions of slightly idealized royal portraiture was that you could send the equivalent of a photo to a foreign court and say this is who you'll be marrying. And there are countless stories throughout European history, at least, of massive dissipate ointments and temper tantrums when the person actually shows up.
Some things never changed, some things never changed.
Yeah, now, I mean, I guess it's like what does your Tinder photo look like? And how much have you tinkered with it? But in the case of Charles the second whatever miniature portrait of him was sent to the court of France where he got his first bride, did not reveal the full effect. So his first wife, Marie Luise of.
Orleans, she swiped right.
She swiped right, or her parents swiped right for her. When she got to Madrid and saw who her husband was, apparently she had a nervous breakdown. Of course it had to be restrained, and like dragged up to the altar screaming, and.
Did anyone say to her, honey, but his personality haha?
Well, sadly, because he couldn't really talk, we don't know what his personality was. He didn't even have that going for. He couldn't even cultivate the personality ride. He couldn't make himself understood.
I'm suddenly reminded of Paul Rubens's bravura performance in the sitcom Thirty Rock as the genetically compromised European Prince Gerhart Habsburg.
Thank you, all, dear friends, fuck on it to my bad day.
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Yeah, would he like to dance? Sadly, because my body does not produce joint fluid, I cannot but I would enjoy watching you dance moonbi Um, that depiction may not have been so far off from reality. During the last years of his life, Charles could barely stand up and suffered from hallucinations and convulsive episodes. Charles the Bewitched died in seventeen
hundred at the age of thirty eight. According to his autopsy, his corpse 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 water.
So he really became a poster child for what can go wrong with interbreeding, and the line died with him because he couldn't conceive a child by either one of his wives.
And that has real repercussions. Yes, yeah, I.
Mean it basically threw the Spanish monarchy into a succession crisis, and yeah, and a war, the War of that's known as the War of Spanish Succession. There were claimants from the Austrian side who said, well, we're Hafsburgs too, and then you had the French who had a claim on the throne of Spain.
The war of Spanish succession began in seventeen oh one and went on for more than a decade, claiming more than four hundred thousand lives in combat.
It was almost a generation of young people just grew up with this war where it was unclear where the throne was going to land, and so in terms of drawbacks to consanguineous marriage and the genetic effects of that, this is another one. Right, the dynasty, which has drawn its legitimacy from a bloodline, dies out.
But while the Spanish Habsburg line died out with Charles the Bewitched in seventeen hundred, the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs kept going. After a short break. We'll meet one Austrian Habsburg who could make this unsightly jaw look chic.
Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg. Can we go to Marintoinette?
Notte? When I went to the Queen the pot take no bread for you know what? We fred let them eat cake.
That's such nonsense. I would never say that. Marie Antoinette, portrayed here by Kirsten Dunst in Sophia Coppola's twenty oh six film, is probably the most famous Habsburg in history, a product of the Austrian branch of the family. In seventeen seventy, she was married off to the air to the French throne, the future King Louis the sixteenth.
And he had significant Habsburg blood himself, because both Louis the fourteenth and Louis the thirteenth had been married to Habsburg first cousins of theirs.
I'm back with author and professor Caroline Webber.
So both she and her husband had this Habsburg blood line. But she was the one who really visibly had something of a Habsburg underbite, a kind of protuberant lower jaw that I think people who didn't like her took to be some kind of equivalent of resting bitch face. You know that she always had this kind of haughty set to her face because she also had a pendulous lower lip, which was associated with the Habsburg jaw.
It was the pendulous lower lip.
The pendulous lower lip was basically just a lip that would kind of hang low over the protuberant chin, and she had something of that according to contemporary reports. By most accounts, Marie Antoinette's version of these trees was not crazily exacerbated. Her mother an Austrian princess and empress had married a little bit outside of the bloodline into the ducal House of Lorraine, and so Marie Antoinette got a
little bit of variety in the bloodline there. When she came to France as an almost fifteen year old girl in seventeen seventy, it had been a long time since the French people had seen kind of a fresh faced, young, pretty, fun loving teenage girl who was heir to the whole thing by dint of being married to the future king.
And she became one of the first fashion celebrities in eighteenth century Europe, realiant in the history of all of Europe, and she was the first European royal whose likeness was reproduced in kind of a primitive early version of fashion magazines, which were these fashion illustrations. Those were generally quite idealizing when they depicted her face. It didn't have a super
pronounced Hapsburg jaw. You'd maybe see a little hint of it, and people who admired her and thought she was elegant and liked the kind of crazy new way she liked to dress wanted to look like her, So you might see people kind of doing a poudy lip to try to vaguely affect. Yeah, but they didn't have plastic surgery back then, so there was no surgical method for making
your lower lip puff out a little bit. There is a really funny story, for instance, of Marie Antoinette loved experimental hairstyles, and we all know the kind of the fashion plates and the portraits of her with like the three foot high beehive headdress sometimes that had like a fully rigged sailing ship ensconced in the in the coils of her hair.
Yeah.
Yeah, I wrote a book about this year's ago, but I mentioned it just to say anybody who wants to see the pictures I did reproduce as many as I
could in Queen of Fashion. But one thing that that I thought was so funny and really captures this kind of contemporary aspirational celebrity culture that could have some relationship to like the card today where the King and Queen are the ones who everybody knows about, who have all the money, who have all the power, who are everywhere all the time, and this invitation frenzy Marie Antoinette with these crazy hairstyles apparently spawned tens of thousands of copycats,
both in the upper classes where they could really afford to have somebody spend six hours on their hair teasing it into a cathedral shape, or little working girls in Paris who would just try to do what they could with,
like teasing in a comb. But one woman famously at court, some kind of rich woman saw Marie Antoinette in a headdress that, instead of having flowers and pearls and ribbons, like the sort of standard way would have been at Bearsies at that time, Marie Antoinette had a cabbage and some carrots and like maybe a cucumber some other vegetables in it, and was called her pouf a lajardigne, a gardener's poof. And this woman said, never again, where will
I wear anything but vegetables in my hair? It looked so beautiful, your majesty, And this idea was people were desperate to look like the queen. So I think even if she had a bit of a Habsburg jaw and a bit of a Habsburg pendulous lip, she did become this kind of fashion icon who people wanted to resemble.
And what do you think she saw when she looked in the mirror.
That's a great question, and you know Versailles was not lacking in mirrors. Well, you know, the royal family had to walk through that huge hall of mirrors every day on their way to lunch. So she I don't know. I mean, she did complain that she felt like most portraits painted of her didn't capture her her essence, But I don't know if that's because the paintings were too idealized or not idealized enough. You know, we really don't know.
And because she was such a controversial figure, you know, France and Austria hadn't been allies for a really long time in European history, and so when she came and married the future Louis the sixteenth, there were a number of people at court who were just opposed to her
presence there because she represented an alliance with Austria. So they would be the ones who would maybe go a little bit farther in talking about how ugly she was with this habsburg jaw, and the people who were partisans of her and the alliance she represented would talk about how beautiful she was with all that in her hair, with all that rough dinner hair. Kept her young. I mean, she died at thirty seven. But who's to say how long she would have survived otherwise?
Right head of Lettuce And then there's something there. Okay, no, but you know, boy, that confidence she shows up in France. She's Austrian and she's like, this is how I'm gonna dress, wear my hair.
Yeah, and that she actually sort of not only presumed to dictate fashion to the French, but she kind of pioneered the concept of the French being the ones who were the people to beat when it came to fashion.
Is that where we get it from here? Yeah?
I mean from her and from her and her husband's shared ancestor, Louis the fourteenth, He really kind of invented peacocking and power dressing for men, you know, the high heels, the red souls, the kind of early Christian lubautint, the big wigs and the big hair and the ribbons and
the lace. And Louis the fourteenth became a walking billboard for the French luxury industries, and he understood that France, in order to kind of fill its coffers, needed to have these these luxury exports that it could do better than anyone else, like lace, like silk. But he really kind of took the fashion plate concept to an extreme in terms of how kings could power dress and show you just how much money they had. But he wasn't
interested in trends per se. Marie Antoinette when she came to France in seventeen seventy, Paris was just starting to become a place where what we now know is fast fashion was coming into being, where there was a whole sub industry of women who weren't allowed by guild law to make dresses or make hats, but they could make the trimmings that you put on dresses and the trimmings you put on hats, and those became the trends that you could wear and kind of change every day to
change your look all the time. And Marie Antoinette really became the royal god parent of that phenomenon and spawned the French fashion industry as we still know it today.
The queen eventually fell out of fashion with her French subjects. Here she is portrayed in nineteen thirty eight by film actress Norma Shearer.
People threw stones at the carriage. They threw stones and shall have ill sums. I'm trembling still. Those pale faces full of hatreds shouting what's being shouted all over front for an Austrian leech.
I suppose you can only speculate, But do you think that when she looked in the mirror that the hair, the clothes, everything around it was I don't know. I don't want to say a way of compensating for the jah on the lip, but a way of like anyone would like I would if I looked and I saw I don't like that about me. Yeah, I'll do this to balance it out, to draw attention.
Indeed, if you wear a three foot high headdress on your head, you are going to kind of direct the eye away from your pendulous lower lip and you're extruding habsbrug jaw. And it would explain why she gravitated toward
that trend. Of all possible trends, I mean, there are all kinds of crazy things that she could do in the name of fashion, but to choose specifically as your signature hairstyle, this gigantic, bulbous, three foot high construction, you do think that that must have really softened the chin.
In the end, of course, Marie Antoinette took it on the chin and much more when she and her husband were beheaded On the other side of the break. Did centuries of royal inbreeding lead to World War One? The downfall of more defective and despotic dynasties coming up next? Europeans throughout these centuries, did they not imagine another way of doing things other than dynastic rule?
I mean, I think so much of the symbolic strength of monarchy in Europe from the Middle Ages too, maybe even to today, but certainly from the Middle Ages until World War One rested on this mythology that the older and the purer your bloodline, the better.
But as early as the nineteenth century, questions were being raised about the wisdom of royal relatives marrying each other. In eighteen seventy, Charles Darwin wrote that consanguineous marriages lead to deafness, and dumbness and blindness. Darwin, for what it's worth, married and had ten children with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood. In the US, concerns over so called cousin marriage were
growing rapidly. At the ninth Annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in eighteen fifty five, a Boston clergyman named Charles Brooks delivered a fiery lecture warning against the health consequences of consanguineous reproduction, and by the end of the nineteenth century, more than a dozen states had passed laws banning such marriages.
And nowadays people are envisioning another way the crown, so that the heir to the throne of England now is married to a woman with no obvious or known royal blood. So royals today, I think, do understand that there are some advantages beyond just getting to marry a person you love, to marrying outside of the gene pool.
The tradition of European royals marrying each other also meant that a disorder carried by one royal line was likely to be carried over to other royal lines, since all these lines were tangled up. Take the blood clotting disorder hemophilia, which is often described as the royal disease.
Because it was something that was genetically transmitted, and it's something that really came to flourish in and among European royal houses throughout late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe. Because Queen Victoria was a carrier of the gene and so she had one son who was a hemophiliac, and then she had several grandchildren who were carriers of the disease.
And because she had cast her net wide over Europe, you really see heemophilia taking off in these generations of matches that were made between and among the children and grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
In the case of the royal houses which were beseicked by it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hemophilia wasn't just a family matter. It threatened to upend the world order.
The best example I can think of is Nicholas the Second, the last Czar of Russia, the Romanov, the Romanov who his wife, the Czarina, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Her brother had been hemophiliac and had died young. He fell out a window and basically died of internal bleeding. I mean, basically, you can't be a hemophiliac and a child and have any of the normal bumps and scrapes that a typical child would have growing up. And so her and Nicholas's son, Alexei, who was the Tsarevich, the
heir to the throne, was born a haemophiliac. But essentially they spent the entirety of his life until the whole family was murdered by the Bolsheviks, hiding him from the public and hiding the fact that he was a hemophiliac.
The family drama inside the last Russian monarchy was dramatized on screen in the nineteen seventy one film Nicholas and Alexandra.
There is no doubt of it, no doubt of any kind. It is unquestionably hemophilia. I see, the female is the carrier. The mother gives it to the son. Your mother got it from her mother, Queen Victoria, and passed it on to you.
I see.
A big part of why Zar Nicholas the second was so disliked by the Russian public is because they never saw him. He was invisible to the people of Russia. And it was largely because he and his wife were just consumed by dread that after years and years of not having a son and only having daughters, and they finally had this boy, and then they realized that he can die at any moment from the slightest thing. So
they were constantly in seclusion with their child. Resputant was brought in which is you know, kind of resputant is always invoked as the kind of proof of how crazy and out of touch these Tsars were, And they wanted this Charlatan faith healer, mad priest, sex maniac to come into the heart of their family and run things as he did. But he was perceived by them as the only thing that was standing between their son and death from the complications of hemophilia.
I knew you were going to send for me. I knew the child was sick.
I know what's the matter with him?
You can't I see blood when I shut my eyes.
The blood he may have seen was that of the whole family executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in nineteen eighteen.
So by the time they died, with still a very young Tsarevich and the rest of their children, their daughters, nobody in Russia knew that the boy was a hemophiliac.
Oh, my goodness, But the tsar and Tsarevich's in soelarty and then the entrance of resputen. Both of these things which are to their detriment, are connected to their son's hemophilia.
I intimately connected my only close royal friend, His great great great grandparents were the aunt and uncle of Zar Nicholas the second, and his name is Dimitri of Yugoslavia,
and he's the best storyteller around. And one of the stories that he tells about Rasputin is that one day the Tsarevich was playing inside in one of the big Russian palaces and he was sitting in one of these kind of massive, ornately decorated rooms where there were gigantic chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and Rasputin came running into the room and pushed this little boy kind of out of the way, and a gigantic chandelier came crashing down.
And the thought was that Rasputin really does have these visionary qualities because he saw that this boy was about to be crushed by a chandelier.
Wow. While Resputen's name has gone down in history as a byword for someone who wields deceitful influence, perhaps it should be more celebrated. The euro disco group BONEYM seemed to think so.
The same.
Okay, so you are writing a book now on another dynasty.
I'm writing a book on a number of interrelated dynasties, but the center of gravity is a Bavarian dynasty called the Vittelsbach And who are they? They are an old Bavarian family, so south of Germany, Catholic dynasty. They were already in the nineteenth century one of the oldest royal families in Europe. They could trace their ancestry back to
the eleventh century. They had actually intermarried with both Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs throughout history, sporadically periodically, because they were Catholic royals and Catholic royals tended to like to with each other, and the same for the Protestants. And they really came to the fore as one of the more colorful royal families in the second half of the nineteenth century.
And there are some particularly colorful members of this family.
Yes, I want to call my book Glass Piano Girl and Other Stories of Royal Dysfunction. I'm not sure that's what it will be allowed to be. But the Vittelsbach princess who won my heart was the daughter of a Vittelsbach Bavarian king Ludwig the first. Her name was Alexandra of Bavaria, and she, when she was around eighteen, became thoroughly convinced that she had swallowed two foreign objects that
were threatening to destroy her from within. The largest and most problematic of these objects was a glass grand piano that she thought was lodged in her stomach. And she also believed that there was a miniature sofa that was wedged in her skull, like somewhere in her brain, and she would have these fits of I think what psychoanalyst would call hysterical blindness, where the doctors couldn't find anything
wrong with her optic nerves. There was no as far as we know, prominent genetic Vittelsbach hereditary condition that led to these moments of blindness, and the Vittelsbach themselves had intermarried for generations like so many royal families. But she believed that this little miniature sofa was pressing on her eyes and making her blind.
And can I ask was the sofa in the same room as the piano? Was it like a drawing room or a situation.
Or I don't know how she It's funny because she became a writer in later life, but she never really wrote about the floor plan, the floor plan of her body as a set of different chambers. But I mean, definitely they were distinct scale differences. The piano was a properly sized grand piano, whereas this little sofa was tiny
enough to somehow fit in her skulp. But her doctors finally tricked her out of believing that she had this tiny sofa in her head because they induced vomiting one day, and then in the bucket that they held out to collect her sick they fished out the surreptitiously slipped in piece of dollhouse furniture. They took a little, tiny dollhouse sofa and said, do you see, your highness, Thanks to the emetic that we've prescribed, you've been purged of it now.
But because she was convinced that the piano in her abdomen was full sized, they could never come up with a similar trick, so she really off and on suffered from incredible periods of almost paralyzing terror, where she was afraid that if she moved even the least bit the wrong way, or if she jostled up against a person or a wall, or a door or the arm of a chair, that the whole thing would shatter and shred
her inside. Royal photography was starting to come into vogue in this period, and we do have at least two photographs of her. But the photographs we had of her are of just a woman who looks haunted and hunted and kind of you know, just like a hollow face, because she was afraid to eat too. I mean, eating became a challenge. Everything was a challenge. She saw potential day everywhere and lived a fairly long life by those standards. I think she died when she was around sixty. And
this is Princess Alexandra of Bavaria. Then Ludwig the castle Builder, Ludwig the castle Builder, So Ludwig the Second was Alexandra's nephew. Ludwig the Second was the most flamboyantly eccentric of all the Vittel's Box and probably of all royals in the nineteenth century. He had this kind of also delusional quality to his mental makeup, where, for instance, he believed that he was in constant communion with the ghosts of the royals that he most admired, who weren't even necessarily close
relations of his or related at all. In particular, he would have these kind of spiritual conversations with Marie Antoinette and Louis the fourteenth, and he so firmly believed that they were around him and talking to him and advising him that he would have these elaborate dinner parties served where it was just himself and the bust of Louis the fourteen, the bust of Marie Antoinette, and he would have dish after dish brought in by valets and liveried
valets standing in attendance, and they would clear away the plates of like mounds of pheasant, mounds of suites. He loved sweets that Obviously, these bust statues were not consuming.
But the favorite extravagance of the Ludwig the castle Builder was building castles.
And he built castles all over Bavaria. One of his castles, Neus s Fonstein, was the one that became the basis for the Disney World Castle. So when we think of a cartoon version of a castle with crazy turrets, and it almost looks like it's something out of a fairy tale, this was born of the feverish imagination of Ludwig the Second.
Ludwig believed he ruled by divine right, which meant no checks or balances from his royal cabinet, which meant he ignored all warnings about the disaster his frienzied spending was leading towards.
He bankrupted Bavaria single handedly by building these castles, and was actually caught by his men ministers writing letters to various bankers around Europe offering to sell them Bavaria so that they would advance him the money to keep building his castles. So he was really quite a maniac. But the palaces that he built that were so hard on the Bavarian treasury, in fact, are now huge tourist draws in bavarias if people go to Bavaria, they want to see those castles.
Crazy rich Bavarians.
Crazy rich Bavarians. He didn't know how to spend it fast enough.
How confident are you that this behavior was at least in part due to intermarriage.
The vittels Box intermarried a lot, not as much as the Habsburg's, but it was really a proud tradition and it dated back many many generations, and anecdotally, by the nineteenth century there was a kind of what we would call a meme about something called the Vittelsbach madness. Then the perception really was that Ludwig had inherited this madness from the Vittelsbach side of the family, and so it was seen as this kind of possibly hereditary taint.
Then Ludwig's younger brother.
Oh Auto Ludwig Ludwig was overthrown by his cabinet in eighteen eighty six, who were afraid that he was going to sell the Kingdom of Bavaria. They couldn't get him to stop spending on the castles, and they overthrew him, knowing that his younger brother was even crazier than he was, but thinking that at least the younger brother Otto, who was handed the throne as Otto the first, would be
pliable in their hands. Because Otto basically went through protracted periods where he believed that he was a dog, and so Otto never really even tried to rain. Otto never had the power of the purse. Otto was really run by his one of his dog walkers.
Yeah, and his belief that he was a dog. How did this manifest?
I belief that he was a dog manifested itself in lunging, snarling, biting. He actually he was kept for most of his adult life and most of his reign in one particular kind of out of the way palace that not too many people would risk a visiting. Sometimes his relatives felt bad and went to visit him, and they were the ones who would report that he was like leashed to a wall. And when they would come into the room, you know, and you'd be presented, because he was still the kings.
He'd be presented with all this pomp and like liveried servants, and you'd do your deep curtsies if you were a woman, or your deep ritual bows if you were a man, but you'd see this snarling person on all fours, tethered to the wall and like snapping at you and apparently foaming at the mouth. There are reports also that he would only eat out of like a dog bowl or a bowl on the ground.
Now, Carrie points out that as a young man, Auto had been forced to fight in the Franco Prussian War, where he witnessed atrocities and suffered post traumatic stress disorder.
But the dog delusions had already kind of started with Auto when he was a teenager, before he went off to war, And I think more just sent him over the edge, and.
Just exacerbated and sent him over the edge. Can we draw a line between there and the outbreak of World War One?
I think in many ways we can, because By the time World War One broke out in nineteen fourteen, Europe was still almost entirely ruled by people from old royal families who had varying degrees of inbreeding and varying disadvantages
that attached to that. And so the kingdom of Bavaria, for instance, I mean, I think it's incredible fragility is highlighted by the fact that these two kings, Ludwig the second and Auto the First, were kings, and yet they couldn't govern, They were incapable of governing, and Bavaria is one of the kingdoms that collapsed with World War One. The Romanovs were, you know, autocrat of all. The Russia's
was actually the Bizar's title. And the idea was you ruled by autocracy because you were chosen by God and the people are not supposed to have a voice at all. And when people started wanting to have a voice, Nicholas the second didn't listen to them, partly through his retrograde convictions in the superiority of royal birth and his divine mandate, but partly again also because he was so distracted by his son's chemophilia.
And we can't forget about those Austrian Habsburgs.
The Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph, was himself the product of Habsburg and a Vittelsbach marriage. His wife was twice over of Vittelsbach. Her parents were Vittelsbach cousins.
Their only son, Rudolph, died by suicide after killing his seventeen year old mistress in a hunting lodge in what became known as the Mayrling Incident. It would have a profound effect on European geopolitics, since Rudolph was seen by royals as the great progressive hope.
He was the one who had really had these kind of ambitions to liberalize and modernize the Austro Hungarian Empire and give the people more of a voice, adopt some of the kind of more modern liberal notions of constitutional rule and checks and balances. But his mother was terrified that by dint of being doubly a Vittelsbach on her mother's on her father's side, that she had transmitted this Vittelsbach madness to.
Him, and she felt guilty.
She felt guilty, and she might not have been wrong.
After the prince's death, the line of succession eventually passed to Rudolph's cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose name you may remember from high school European history. His assassination led to the outbreak of World War One.
To draw the line between World War One and in reading it would sound maybe specious or flip, but I think that the reason why these questions about royal intermarriage and what their actual effects were on the human beings who were produced by those systems is that those were the same human beings who governed most of the world through nineteen eighteen.
Bear in mind, in just the Austro Hungarian Empire you had one forgive the expression crazy ass family deciding the fate of more than fifty million people, and.
The fact that World War One seesed the collapse of the Russian Empire, the Prussian Empire, and the Austro Hungarian Empire. It's another death of dynasties in effect, and all of those families had really been mined by problems that seem to correlate with in rereading, even though there were plenty of other geopolitical factors and domestically political factors.
Honestly, folks, this is all a reminder that democracy really remains the best game in town. I hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask you to please rate and review our podcast. You can also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can follow me on the social
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