One of the great mysteries of Game of Thrones is not how a pair of infamous hacks somehow landed one of the plum production jobs in television history, but why its heroine, Daenerys Targaryen, wasn’t a deformed, drooling idiot rather than a luminous beauty.
After all, the Targaryen dynasty are famously inbred: story canon makes it clear that the Targaryens had been inbreeding for half a millennium, including at least 11 brother-sister marriages.
This is not without parallel in reality, either: from the Pharaohs of Egypt to the royal houses of Europe, nobility have long had a predilection for keeping it in the family.
Such habits have consequences, for the Kings of the Nile just as much as a Mississippi hillbilly. As studies of Tutankhamen have shown, the noble boy-king immortalised in gold was in reality a hobbling monstrosity.
The Habsburgs of the Holy Roman Empire rivalled the Pharaohs of Egypt, both in persistent inbreeding and the deleterious health effects that followed. But it was the “Spanish” branch of the German monarchs who really went in for family-shagging. Nine out of the 11 marriages during the Habsburgs’ 184-year rule of Spain were incestuous.
Ultimately, the Spanish Habsburgs inbred themselves out of existence. Leopold II may have been described by his contemporaries as “the ugliest Habsburg ever to rule”, but his son, Charles II, was even worse.
Nicknamed El Hechizado (“the hexed one”), Charles II of Spain died at just 38, after suffering lifelong ill-health. These included chronic intestinal problems, stunted growth, mental handicaps and almost certainly sterility. He also had a lower jaw so pronounced he struggled to eat and speak.
Charles’s was perhaps the most extreme manifestation of the distinguishing physical trait of the family: the famous “Habsburg Jaw”.
The Habsburg jaw is an example of a condition called “mandibular prognathism”, marked by a lower jaw significantly larger than the upper. At its most extreme, it interferes with speech and eating, and makes it difficult for the sufferer to close their mouth.
When Charles V, arrived in Spain to claim the throne, it is said that one daring peasant shouted, “Your majesty, shut your mouth! The flies of this country are very insolent.”
The development of the Habsburg jaw can be traced through family portraits. Early Habsburg portraits show strong-jawed individuals with a pronounced underbite. As the centuries of in-breeding progress, the trait gets more and more pronounced, to the point of hideous deformity.
But if the Spanish Habsburgs became deformed to the point of infertility – ultimately ending that line of the dynasty – others, even the beauties of the family, couldn’t entirely escape it.
Marie Antoinette, sister of Habsburg emperor Joseph II of Austria, had a pronounced lower lip that gave her a “perpetual pout”. A similar appearance can be seen in a later Habsburg ruler, Ferdinand I of Austria, son of the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II.
Despite physical ailments that included up to 29 epileptic seizures a day, Ferdinand’s journal shows that he retained his mental faculties. Indeed, he spoke five languages, played piano excellently and studied botany.
But the House of Habsburg’s near thousand years as the pre-eminent dynasty of Central Europe were nearing their end. By Ferdinand II’s time, their empire and influence had been steadily shrinking for a century. The chronic ill-health of emperors like Ferdinand only made things worse. After two more Habsburg rulers in Austria, the dynasty’s ruling days came to an end in the final days of WWI.
One of the modern Habsburg descendants, Ferdinand Zvonomir von Habsburg is an Austrian racing-car driver. Young Ferdinand is a handsome young man who shows only the most residual traces of the Habsburg jaw.
The Austrian Habsburgs eventually surrendered their imperial powers to the changing tides of history and geopolitics. But they have outlasted the Spanish branch of the family by 500 years.
The Spanish Habsburgs, keeping in mind that they had received the crown of Spain through marriage, were determined not to lose it the same way. But their zeal to keep the monarchy within the family rapidly brought the family down.
Nearly two centuries of assiduous inbreeding resulted in the deformed mule that was Charles II of Spain.
They thought keeping power within the family would keep them strong, but it ultimately made them weak. The Habsburgs lost the throne in Spain thanks to the very process that they had hoped would preserve it.
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