• PugJesus@piefed.socialOPMEnglish
    17·
    17 days ago

    Explanation: The Habsburgs were an extremely successful royal family of Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were extremely successful by manipulating the more-or-less standard laws of inheritance across Catholic Europe to ensure that numerous juicy titles and holdings passed to members of their family by strategic marriages, especially in preventing others from inheriting titles they already held but who lacked a male heir - a constant problem in European monarchy.

    Strategic marriage to whom, one might ask? Why, each other, of course!

    … this level of inbreeding led to some… interesting results.

    Born 6 November 1661, Charles was the only surviving son of Philip IV of Spain and his second wife, his niece Mariana of Austria. Marriage within the same extended family was then common among the nobility,[c] but the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs were unusual in the extent to which they followed this practice. Of eleven marriages contracted by Spanish monarchs between 1450 and 1661, most contained some element of consanguinity, Philip and Mariana being one of two unions between an uncle and his niece.[2][d] This policy may also have been driven by limpieza de sangre or “blood purity” statutes enacted in the early 16th century, which remained in force until the 1860s.[3]

    He died on 1 November 1700, at age 38. The autopsy records 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.”[50] The latter suggests hydrocephalus, a disease often associated with childhood measles, one of many illnesses contracted by Charles.[9] Philip was proclaimed king of Spain on 16 November 1700, and the War of the Spanish Succession formally began on 9 July 1701.[51]