1700 portrait of King Charles II (1661-1700) of Spain (Carlos II), colloquially known as “The Bewitched”, was the final monarch of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty. Because he had no children, his death in 1700 triggered the War of the Spanish Succession and ended Habsburg rule in Spain...
For generations, the Habsburg family married close relatives (like uncles and nieces) to keep power and land inside the family. His parents were uncle and niece, and they were far from the first close relatives to marry within the dynasty. For generations, the Habsburgs used family marriages to protect their claims to thrones and territories. By Charles’s birth in 1661, those marriages had left him with unusually many shared ancestors.
He experienced serious health problems throughout his life. His prominent jaw became the best-known feature in his portraits, but a painting cannot establish the cause of a medical condition. An extreme overbite and enlarged lower jaw (mandibular prognathism), which made it very hard for him to chew food or speak clearly. Historians and geneticists have studied his family tree to understand how repeated marriages between relatives may have affected the dynasty.
The question of whether Charles could produce an heir mattered far beyond his appearance. He married twice and had no children. As his health declined, Europe’s powers argued over who would inherit the Spanish monarchy and its vast territories. Charles named Philip of Anjou as his successor shortly before his death in 1700. The dispute that followed helped ignite the War of the Spanish Succession.
Scientists estimate his inbreeding coefficient was about 0.254, which is the same genetic level as a child born to a brother and sister.
A 2009 National Geographic report identifies inbreeding as the most significant contributor to the downfall of the Habsburg dynasty based on findings by the University of Santiago de Compostela’s Gonzalo Alvarez.
Alvarez examined the royal line’s history through 16 generations, studying more than 3,000 people for what he called the “inbreeding quotient,” a number that measures the probability that a person with two identical copies of a gene inherited both from the same ancestor.
By the time of Charles II’s birth, Alvarez stated that he would have carried identical copies for more than a quarter of his genes, which may explain why the king had such poor health. Alvarez also suggested that Charles II may have suffered from both combined pituitary hormone deficiency and distal renal tubular acidosis, although these diagnoses are pure speculation.
In any case, Alvarez found that inbreeding would have decreased the Habsburgs’ chances of survival by as much as 18 percent by Charles II’s lifetime. This coincides with another study a decade later, which examined the distinctive “Habsburg jaw” common to monarchs in the family.
The study found a correlation between Habsburgs with higher inbreeding coefficients sporting the signature “Habsburg jaw,” noting that Philip IV, Charles I, and Charles II each exhibited about five of the seven identifiable features of mandibular prognathism, or a protruding jaw.
Charles II was also known to have a rather large tongue, to the degree that it was difficult to understand him when he spoke.
In fact, in Spain Under Charles the Second, British envoy Alexander Stanhope described the king as having “a ravenous stomach” and noted that he “swallows all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet.” Health issues aside, however, it would ultimately be Charles II’s inability to produce an heir that doomed his bloodline.
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