Speaker 1: When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties ABC primetime soap opera Dynasty. The series centered
Speaker 1: on the wealthy Carrington family of Denver, Colorado, a patriarch
Speaker 1: oil tycoon, and a cast of feuding family members. Let's
Speaker 1: just say that I feel as I do because we
Speaker 1: have so much in common, such as what our blood,
Speaker 1: our teens. But that dynasty, for all its drama and dysfunction,
Speaker 1: had nothing on the real life dynasties we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about today, like the Habsburgs, the family that ruled
Speaker 1: much of Europe for centuries.
Speaker 2: These people are so powerful, I mean power over tens
Speaker 2: of millions of people and gazillions of acres of land.
Speaker 1: This royal family, however, was a little too close. The
Speaker 1: final Habsburg, ruler of Spain, who died in seventeen hundred,
Speaker 1: is considered to be the most inbred royal ever.
Speaker 2: His Habsburg jaw was so pronounced that his two sets
Speaker 2: of teeth couldn't touch at all. He couldn't keep food
Speaker 2: in his mouth.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're going to look at the practices
Speaker 1: of intermarriage and inbreeding among several major royal families and
Speaker 1: how these practices built and in some cases led to
Speaker 1: the unraveling of their respective empires.
Speaker 2: The strategy for survival and for enhancement of power becomes,
Speaker 2: especially in the Habsburg case, the recipe for its undoing.
Speaker 1: From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Moacca and this
Speaker 1: is mobituaries, this moment, the Habsburg jaw and the death
Speaker 1: of a dynasty. Royal families and inbreeding are they kind
Speaker 1: of like peanut butter and jelly.
Speaker 2: There are two great tastes that went great together mo
Speaker 2: for a really long time.
Speaker 1: I'm talking with my friend Caroline Weber. Carries a professor
Speaker 1: of French and comparative literature at Barnard College and a
Speaker 1: best selling author.
Speaker 2: At the moment, I'm working on a book on royalty
Speaker 2: around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Speaker 2: And one of the amazing things to underscore is that
Speaker 2: this kind of royal intermarriage really continued for a very
Speaker 2: long time. Even though it led to the end of
Speaker 2: some dynasties, It's persisted among a number of especially European dynasties.
Speaker 2: And the most recent example, I think, in kind of
Speaker 2: contemporary collective memory is the late Queen Elizabeth I and
Speaker 2: Prince Philip who are cousins, Who.
Speaker 1: Were cousins, and how close were their cousins.
Speaker 2: They were third cousins, so not super close by royal standards.
Speaker 2: They shared a common great great grandmother in Queen Victoria.
Speaker 1: Marriage between royal relatives has many precedents. For example, scientists
Speaker 1: believe that the parents of boy King Tutan, common in
Speaker 1: ancient Egypt, were brother and sister. In ancient Rome, Emperor
Speaker 1: Claudius married his niece Agrippina the Younger. But this practice
Speaker 1: became super charged throughout Europe from the Late Middle Ages
Speaker 1: around the year fifteen hundred all the way until the
Speaker 1: outbreak of World War One in nineteen fourteen. Now, before
Speaker 1: we get into it, let's define one word that's central
Speaker 1: to this topic, consanguinity.
Speaker 2: Consanguinity is a word that describes blood relatedness between people
Speaker 2: who marry. If you were a king and you wanted
Speaker 2: your children to be recognized as a king, you would
Speaker 2: want to marry somebody who was perceived also to be
Speaker 2: of royal blood, and that royal blood often meant that
Speaker 2: they were in some way, shape or form related to you.
Speaker 1: Wow, So consanguinity inter marriage equaled stability.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it did. It represented a few things. I mean,
Speaker 2: on the one hand, consanguinity did mean concentrating family resources
Speaker 2: and territories and keeping them as it were in the family.
Speaker 2: So that was a big part of consanguinous marriages, this
Speaker 2: idea that you weren't going to let hard won territories
Speaker 2: in your kingdom potentially pass into the hands of a
Speaker 2: rival king somewhere else. But the disadvantage, politically speaking, was
Speaker 2: that consanguinity meant that you missed an opportunity to form
Speaker 2: an alliance with a rival king who was not already
Speaker 2: related to you.
Speaker 1: So for a good stretch of history, the incentives to
Speaker 1: intermarry were greater than the disincentives.
Speaker 2: Yes, especially because the disincentives weren't very well known. I
Speaker 2: think just the idea of genetics as an actual science
Speaker 2: that didn't even start to come into being really until
Speaker 2: the nineteenth century. So for hundreds of years when you intermarried,
Speaker 2: the big incentive was this purity of your bloodline and
Speaker 2: this kind of reinforced intrafamilial connection, which became more and
Speaker 2: more meaningful as your family expanded its territory more and more.
Speaker 2: And this is why the Hobsburgs are such a good
Speaker 2: example or bad example of inbreeding.
Speaker 1: Who were the Hobsburgs.
Speaker 2: So the Hobsburgs were a royal family who traced their
Speaker 2: origins to the early Middle Ages in Central and Eastern
Speaker 2: Europe what we would call today Austria and Hungary.
Speaker 1: The Habsburgs held some of their power through their relationship
Speaker 1: with what was known as the Holy Roman Empire, a
Speaker 1: vast Christian political entity in Europe modeled on the original
Speaker 1: Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: Since Charlemagne in the ninth century, Europe had had an
Speaker 2: elected Holy Roman Emperor who was the defender of the
Speaker 2: faith for all Catholics, but essentially the Habsburgs kept becoming
Speaker 2: Holy Roman Emperor.
Speaker 1: Enter Maximilian the First. He was a Habsburg and put
Speaker 1: the family on the map quite literally with his election
Speaker 1: as Holy Roman Emperor and by his marriage to Mary
Speaker 1: of Burgundy.
Speaker 2: Marie of Burgundy basically through her father had inherited much
Speaker 2: of Burgundy in France, but also the Netherlands and some
Speaker 2: territories kind of stretching into what we would today consider
Speaker 2: to be Belgium. And when she married a member of
Speaker 2: the Habsburg royal family, the Austrian Habsburgs then sort of
Speaker 2: took over that whole swath of land as well.
Speaker 1: Maximilian the First and Mary of Burgundy, who were not
Speaker 1: closely related, had one surviving son. This son would expand
Speaker 1: the Habsburg's influence even further than his father did.
Speaker 2: This guy's son was known as Philip the Handsome Philippe
Speaker 2: Leubel we called him in French. Philippe Leubel then crucially
Speaker 2: married the last offshoot of a Spanish royal family known
Speaker 2: as aragon and Castile. So most Americans have heard of
Speaker 2: Ferdinand and Isabella. They sponsored Christopher Columbus's trip to the
Speaker 2: New World. They had a daughter known as Juana the
Speaker 2: Crazy Juana la Looca, and so some of the I
Speaker 2: think the lunacy that the Habsburg's later evinced was actually
Speaker 2: inherited from this woman, who was born a Castilian an
Speaker 2: Aragonese princess. But she married a son of this Habsburg
Speaker 2: Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor called Philippe Leubel.
Speaker 1: To recap Philip the Handsome, the only surviving son of
Speaker 1: the Habsburg Emperor, marries Juana the Crazy, the heir to
Speaker 1: the Spanish throne. This meant their descent and so would
Speaker 1: inherit both the Habsburg and Spanish territories, and Guana la
Speaker 1: Loca would be an amazing telenovellah I Love Betty leafea
Speaker 1: which became Ugly Betty in the United States. It was
Speaker 1: originally a Colombian telenovela. And yeah, and one on La
Speaker 1: Loca would be amazing. It's just a great title already.
Speaker 2: And she, by most accounts, really was insane.
Speaker 1: But Juana and Philip's son had some sense. He ruled
Speaker 1: as Charles the First of Spain and Charles the Fifth
Speaker 1: of the Holy Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: When Charles came of age, he made the very smart
Speaker 2: decision that he wasn't going to try to be in
Speaker 2: control of both Austria, Central Europe, Northern Europe and also Spain.
Speaker 2: So he essentially split the Habsburgs into two branches, and
Speaker 2: he founded the dynasty of Spanish Habsburgs as separate from
Speaker 2: his Austrian Habsburg cousins.
Speaker 1: The likeness of Charles quint as he's known has been
Speaker 1: to pay did by a number of painters. They all
Speaker 1: show him with a distinctive mandible.
Speaker 2: So he did have what became known as the as
Speaker 2: the Habsburg jaw, this very protuberant lower jaw, that kind
Speaker 2: of jutted out. If you see there's a famous painting
Speaker 2: of him by Titian where you can kind of see
Speaker 2: he's got very sickly looking skin. He suffered from gout.
Speaker 2: He may have suffered from epilepsy, which became a kind
Speaker 2: of a hereditary habsburg condition. But the main thing is
Speaker 2: the jaw, and the jaw kind of was often associated
Speaker 2: with something that modern scientists call maxillary deficiency, where the
Speaker 2: upper jaw kind of was sunken in. And the Titian
Speaker 2: portrait of Charles Quint really shows a head that almost
Speaker 2: looks like a cashew. It's kind of collapsed in the center,
Speaker 2: with a bulbous forehead up top, and then this really
Speaker 2: outwardly jutting jaw and underbite at the bottom.
Speaker 1: An Italian writer named Antonio de Biats, who met Charles Quint,
Speaker 1: wrote in fifteen seventeen that he had a long, avarice
Speaker 1: face and a lopsided mouth which drops open when he
Speaker 1: is not on his guard. So this King Charles wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly Prince Charming, but his decision to divide the dynasty
Speaker 1: between Spain and Austria would guarantee that his descendants would
Speaker 1: be even less portrait Jenic.
Speaker 2: His parents were not that closely interrelated. Charles quint was
Speaker 2: not really the product of significant inbreeding, but because it
Speaker 2: was his decision essentially to try to split the Habsburg
Speaker 2: family into two branches of a royal family that together
Speaker 2: ruled so much of Europe. His son became the Spanish
Speaker 2: Habsburg King, who was really just in charge of Spain
Speaker 2: and the Holy Roman Empire, and his younger brother, Charles
Speaker 2: Quint's younger brother, Ferdinand I, became the head of the
Speaker 2: Austrian branch of the family and ruling over Austria and
Speaker 2: its associated territories. He really instituted, I think the policy
Speaker 2: of significant innermarriage tween and among so what you then
Speaker 2: have after Charles Quint is generations of Spanish Habsburg's marrying
Speaker 2: Austrian habsburg to keep it, keep it all together.
Speaker 1: Keep it all together. Yeah, by splitting the empire, he
Speaker 1: actually encouraged incentivized intermarriage.
Speaker 2: That's right, and that's why I think you find so
Speaker 2: much more intermarriage in the Habsburg family than in other
Speaker 2: European royal families.
Speaker 1: So much so that a Latin motto was coined in
Speaker 1: connection with the Habsburgs.
Speaker 2: There's no evidence that they invented it themselves, but it
Speaker 2: became one that was cited every time you saw news
Speaker 2: of yet another Habsburg marriage. It would say, let other
Speaker 2: nations wage war, You happy Austria conquer through marriage. Jamie
Speaker 2: and I are more than brother and sister.
Speaker 1: We shed a wound, came into this world together, we
Speaker 1: belonged together. Contrary to what the Game of Thrones extended
Speaker 1: universe might have you believe, Incest wasn't a personal preference
Speaker 1: as much as it was a political strategy.
Speaker 2: Because he really was trying to manage an empire that
Speaker 2: was so vast. People forget that actually Mexico was part
Speaker 2: of Charles Quint's empire. I mean, he claimed Mexico in
Speaker 2: that obviously dubious and problematic colonialius way. He claimed the Philippines,
Speaker 2: and so his empire really covered so much of the
Speaker 2: globe that it didn't make sense for all of that
Speaker 2: to be concentrated into one branch of one family. And
Speaker 2: so by creating this kind of separate but equal branch
Speaker 2: of the Austrian Habsburgs, he had a kind of a
Speaker 2: constant pool of intermarriage where none of these territories would
Speaker 2: go outside of the family.
Speaker 1: Wow, they had so much power, and they were trying
Speaker 1: to maintain that power.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: Is there any family today that's the equivalent God the Kardashians.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, are they as powerful as
Speaker 1: the Kardashians.
Speaker 2: I think it's hard to tell, because, yeah, their brand
Speaker 2: wasn't as beloved apparently as the Kardashians. But yeah, in
Speaker 2: terms of ubiquity and everywhere you look, there they are.
Speaker 2: There is a kind of a Kardashian effect that you see,
Speaker 2: we haven't yet lived long enough and the Kardashians haven't
Speaker 2: lived long enough for us to see what happens with
Speaker 2: the children of Kim and Chloe and Courtney.
Speaker 1: Well they do.
Speaker 2: They have their own TV shows, those kids.
Speaker 1: They will by the time this airs, and they have
Speaker 1: delightful charles. They look great.
Speaker 2: Oh right, yeah, well I do feel like that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the Kardashians have done a much better job of kind
Speaker 2: of diversification in.
Speaker 1: Marriage, and that's why the Kardashian dynasty will last even
Speaker 1: centuries longer than the Hopspurs.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, I want you guys to be able to
Speaker 2: do this. Tell you're my age and one of your
Speaker 2: kids takes over, that's a whole that's the Joy.
Speaker 1: Charles quint had a son who became Philip the Second
Speaker 1: of Spain, who had a son called Philip the Third,
Speaker 1: who had a son called Philip the.
Speaker 2: Fourth, and they all interestingly and importantly married Austrian either
Speaker 2: nieces or cousins.
Speaker 1: And as the consanguinity picks up in pace, so do
Speaker 1: its consequences.
Speaker 2: Because the hobsburg is what you really see is just
Speaker 2: generation after generation, the problems that we now either know
Speaker 2: or suspect were genetically transmitted just get more and more pronounced.
Speaker 1: Philip the Fourth and his niece slash wife had one
Speaker 1: surviving son, who would be known as Charles the Second
Speaker 1: or Charles the Bewitched due to his many infirmities.
Speaker 2: Well, Charles the Second is important because he really represents
Speaker 2: the worst of what can happen with these successive consanguineous
Speaker 2: marriages from one generation to the next. His habsburg jaw
Speaker 2: was so pronounced that his two sets of teeth couldn't
Speaker 2: touch at all, he couldn't keep food in his mouth.
Speaker 2: He never really mentally developed beyond the age of about
Speaker 2: ten years old.
Speaker 1: Charles was unable to speak until the age of four,
Speaker 1: and he couldn't walk until the age of eight. He
Speaker 1: looked elderly when he was only thirty years old, suffering
Speaker 1: from edemas on his feet, legs, abdomen, and face in
Speaker 1: his teeth not meeting his inability to chew. And this
Speaker 1: is centuries before protein shakes. Like, there's right, I mean
Speaker 1: the thunder straw has been invented probably at that point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, how did he eat not well? And it wasn't pretty.
Speaker 2: This is one of the fun things about studying royalty
Speaker 2: is if you're in a Storian like me and you're
Speaker 2: trying to read contemporary accounts, nobody wants ever to say
Speaker 2: anything bad about the king, so you get a lot
Speaker 2: of euphemisms like his majesty did not eat well tonight,
Speaker 2: and you think, okay, does that mean that he could
Speaker 2: barely get the food in or was it just a
Speaker 2: disgusting spectacle? And these euphemisms you can never say definitively
Speaker 2: what they mean, but you suspect that they hide a
Speaker 2: thousand embarrassments.
Speaker 1: Genetic analysis has determined that in the average Spanish Habsburg,
Speaker 1: about ten percent of maternal and paternal genes were identical,
Speaker 1: which means they were more closely inbread than the child
Speaker 1: of two first cousins. By the time Charles the Bewitched
Speaker 1: was born, the problem was even worse.
Speaker 2: One of the takeaways from one of these scientific reports
Speaker 2: was that even though Charles the Second's parents were quote
Speaker 2: primarily or only uncle and niece, they were so closely
Speaker 2: related already by the previous generations of inbreeding that they
Speaker 2: were as closely related as brother and sister. So Charles
Speaker 2: the Second really was the product of so much inbreeding
Speaker 2: that essentially it was like his parents were siblings.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. They tried to marry him off.
Speaker 2: They tried to marry Charles the Second off, and it
Speaker 2: did not go well because generally, one of the functions
Speaker 2: of slightly idealized royal portraiture was that you could send
Speaker 2: the equivalent of a photo to a foreign court and
Speaker 2: say this is who you'll be marrying. And there are
Speaker 2: countless stories throughout European history, at least, of massive dissipate
Speaker 2: ointments and temper tantrums when the person actually shows up.
Speaker 1: Some things never changed, some things never changed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, now, I mean, I guess it's like what does
Speaker 2: your Tinder photo look like? And how much have you
Speaker 2: tinkered with it? But in the case of Charles the
Speaker 2: second whatever miniature portrait of him was sent to the
Speaker 2: court of France where he got his first bride, did
Speaker 2: not reveal the full effect. So his first wife, Marie
Speaker 2: Luise of.
Speaker 1: Orleans, she swiped right.
Speaker 2: She swiped right, or her parents swiped right for her.
Speaker 2: When she got to Madrid and saw who her husband was,
Speaker 2: apparently she had a nervous breakdown. Of course it had
Speaker 2: to be restrained, and like dragged up to the altar screaming, and.
Speaker 1: Did anyone say to her, honey, but his personality haha?
Speaker 2: Well, sadly, because he couldn't really talk, we don't know
Speaker 2: what his personality was. He didn't even have that going for.
Speaker 2: He couldn't even cultivate the personality ride. He couldn't make
Speaker 2: himself understood.
Speaker 1: I'm suddenly reminded of Paul Rubens's bravura performance in the
Speaker 1: sitcom Thirty Rock as the genetically compromised European Prince Gerhart Habsburg.
Speaker 3: Thank you, all, dear friends, fuck on it to my
Speaker 3: bad day.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Yeah, would
Speaker 1: he like to dance? Sadly, because my body does not
Speaker 1: produce joint fluid, I cannot but I would enjoy watching
Speaker 1: you dance moonbi Um, that depiction may not have been
Speaker 1: so far off from reality. During the last years of
Speaker 1: his life, Charles could barely stand up and suffered from
Speaker 1: hallucinations and convulsive episodes. Charles the Bewitched died in seventeen
Speaker 1: hundred at the age of thirty eight. According to his autopsy,
Speaker 1: his corpse did not contain a single drop of blood.
Speaker 1: His heart was the size of a peppercorn, his lungs corroded,
Speaker 1: his intestines rotten and gangrenous, He had a single testicle
Speaker 1: black as coal, and his head was water.
Speaker 2: So he really became a poster child for what can
Speaker 2: go wrong with interbreeding, and the line died with him
Speaker 2: because he couldn't conceive a child by either one of
Speaker 2: his wives.
Speaker 1: And that has real repercussions. Yes, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Mean it basically threw the Spanish monarchy into a succession crisis,
Speaker 2: and yeah, and a war, the War of that's known
Speaker 2: as the War of Spanish Succession. There were claimants from
Speaker 2: the Austrian side who said, well, we're Hafsburgs too, and
Speaker 2: then you had the French who had a claim on
Speaker 2: the throne of Spain.
Speaker 1: The war of Spanish succession began in seventeen oh one
Speaker 1: and went on for more than a decade, claiming more
Speaker 1: than four hundred thousand lives in combat.
Speaker 2: It was almost a generation of young people just grew
Speaker 2: up with this war where it was unclear where the
Speaker 2: throne was going to land, and so in terms of
Speaker 2: drawbacks to consanguineous marriage and the genetic effects of that,
Speaker 2: this is another one. Right, the dynasty, which has drawn
Speaker 2: its legitimacy from a bloodline, dies out.
Speaker 1: But while the Spanish Habsburg line died out with Charles
Speaker 1: the Bewitched in seventeen hundred, the Austrian branch of the
Speaker 1: Habsburgs kept going. After a short break. We'll meet one
Speaker 1: Austrian Habsburg who could make this unsightly jaw look chic.
Speaker 2: Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg. Can we go to Marintoinette?
Speaker 3: Notte? When I went to the Queen the pot take
Speaker 3: no bread for you know what? We fred let them
Speaker 3: eat cake.
Speaker 1: That's such nonsense. I would never say that. Marie Antoinette,
Speaker 1: portrayed here by Kirsten Dunst in Sophia Coppola's twenty oh
Speaker 1: six film, is probably the most famous Habsburg in history,
Speaker 1: a product of the Austrian branch of the family. In
Speaker 1: seventeen seventy, she was married off to the air to
Speaker 1: the French throne, the future King Louis the sixteenth.
Speaker 2: And he had significant Habsburg blood himself, because both Louis
Speaker 2: the fourteenth and Louis the thirteenth had been married to
Speaker 2: Habsburg first cousins of theirs.
Speaker 1: I'm back with author and professor Caroline Webber.
Speaker 2: So both she and her husband had this Habsburg blood line.
Speaker 2: But she was the one who really visibly had something
Speaker 2: of a Habsburg underbite, a kind of protuberant lower jaw
Speaker 2: that I think people who didn't like her took to
Speaker 2: be some kind of equivalent of resting bitch face. You
Speaker 2: know that she always had this kind of haughty set
Speaker 2: to her face because she also had a pendulous lower lip,
Speaker 2: which was associated with the Habsburg jaw.
Speaker 1: It was the pendulous lower lip.
Speaker 2: The pendulous lower lip was basically just a lip that
Speaker 2: would kind of hang low over the protuberant chin, and
Speaker 2: she had something of that according to contemporary reports. By
Speaker 2: most accounts, Marie Antoinette's version of these trees was not
Speaker 2: crazily exacerbated. Her mother an Austrian princess and empress had
Speaker 2: married a little bit outside of the bloodline into the
Speaker 2: ducal House of Lorraine, and so Marie Antoinette got a
Speaker 2: little bit of variety in the bloodline there. When she
Speaker 2: came to France as an almost fifteen year old girl
Speaker 2: in seventeen seventy, it had been a long time since
Speaker 2: the French people had seen kind of a fresh faced, young, pretty,
Speaker 2: fun loving teenage girl who was heir to the whole
Speaker 2: thing by dint of being married to the future king.
Speaker 2: And she became one of the first fashion celebrities in
Speaker 2: eighteenth century Europe, realiant in the history of all of Europe,
Speaker 2: and she was the first European royal whose likeness was
Speaker 2: reproduced in kind of a primitive early version of fashion magazines,
Speaker 2: which were these fashion illustrations. Those were generally quite idealizing
Speaker 2: when they depicted her face. It didn't have a super
Speaker 2: pronounced Hapsburg jaw. You'd maybe see a little hint of it,
Speaker 2: and people who admired her and thought she was elegant
Speaker 2: and liked the kind of crazy new way she liked
Speaker 2: to dress wanted to look like her, So you might
Speaker 2: see people kind of doing a poudy lip to try
Speaker 2: to vaguely affect. Yeah, but they didn't have plastic surgery
Speaker 2: back then, so there was no surgical method for making
Speaker 2: your lower lip puff out a little bit. There is
Speaker 2: a really funny story, for instance, of Marie Antoinette loved
Speaker 2: experimental hairstyles, and we all know the kind of the
Speaker 2: fashion plates and the portraits of her with like the
Speaker 2: three foot high beehive headdress sometimes that had like a
Speaker 2: fully rigged sailing ship ensconced in the in the coils
Speaker 2: of her hair.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wrote a book about this year's ago, but
Speaker 2: I mentioned it just to say anybody who wants to
Speaker 2: see the pictures I did reproduce as many as I
Speaker 2: could in Queen of Fashion. But one thing that that
Speaker 2: I thought was so funny and really captures this kind
Speaker 2: of contemporary aspirational celebrity culture that could have some relationship
Speaker 2: to like the card today where the King and Queen
Speaker 2: are the ones who everybody knows about, who have all
Speaker 2: the money, who have all the power, who are everywhere
Speaker 2: all the time, and this invitation frenzy Marie Antoinette with
Speaker 2: these crazy hairstyles apparently spawned tens of thousands of copycats,
Speaker 2: both in the upper classes where they could really afford
Speaker 2: to have somebody spend six hours on their hair teasing
Speaker 2: it into a cathedral shape, or little working girls in
Speaker 2: Paris who would just try to do what they could with,
Speaker 2: like teasing in a comb. But one woman famously at court,
Speaker 2: some kind of rich woman saw Marie Antoinette in a
Speaker 2: headdress that, instead of having flowers and pearls and ribbons,
Speaker 2: like the sort of standard way would have been at
Speaker 2: Bearsies at that time, Marie Antoinette had a cabbage and
Speaker 2: some carrots and like maybe a cucumber some other vegetables
Speaker 2: in it, and was called her pouf a lajardigne, a
Speaker 2: gardener's poof. And this woman said, never again, where will
Speaker 2: I wear anything but vegetables in my hair? It looked
Speaker 2: so beautiful, your majesty, And this idea was people were
Speaker 2: desperate to look like the queen. So I think even
Speaker 2: if she had a bit of a Habsburg jaw and
Speaker 2: a bit of a Habsburg pendulous lip, she did become
Speaker 2: this kind of fashion icon who people wanted to resemble.
Speaker 1: And what do you think she saw when she looked
Speaker 1: in the mirror.
Speaker 2: That's a great question, and you know Versailles was not
Speaker 2: lacking in mirrors. Well, you know, the royal family had
Speaker 2: to walk through that huge hall of mirrors every day
Speaker 2: on their way to lunch. So she I don't know.
Speaker 2: I mean, she did complain that she felt like most
Speaker 2: portraits painted of her didn't capture her her essence, But
Speaker 2: I don't know if that's because the paintings were too
Speaker 2: idealized or not idealized enough. You know, we really don't know.
Speaker 2: And because she was such a controversial figure, you know,
Speaker 2: France and Austria hadn't been allies for a really long
Speaker 2: time in European history, and so when she came and
Speaker 2: married the future Louis the sixteenth, there were a number
Speaker 2: of people at court who were just opposed to her
Speaker 2: presence there because she represented an alliance with Austria. So
Speaker 2: they would be the ones who would maybe go a
Speaker 2: little bit farther in talking about how ugly she was
Speaker 2: with this habsburg jaw, and the people who were partisans
Speaker 2: of her and the alliance she represented would talk about
Speaker 2: how beautiful she was with all that in her hair,
Speaker 2: with all that rough dinner hair. Kept her young. I mean,
Speaker 2: she died at thirty seven. But who's to say how
Speaker 2: long she would have survived otherwise?
Speaker 1: Right head of Lettuce And then there's something there. Okay, no,
Speaker 1: but you know, boy, that confidence she shows up in France.
Speaker 1: She's Austrian and she's like, this is how I'm gonna dress,
Speaker 1: wear my hair.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that she actually sort of not only presumed
Speaker 2: to dictate fashion to the French, but she kind of
Speaker 2: pioneered the concept of the French being the ones who
Speaker 2: were the people to beat when it came to fashion.
Speaker 1: Is that where we get it from here? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I mean from her and from her and her husband's
Speaker 2: shared ancestor, Louis the fourteenth, He really kind of invented
Speaker 2: peacocking and power dressing for men, you know, the high heels,
Speaker 2: the red souls, the kind of early Christian lubautint, the
Speaker 2: big wigs and the big hair and the ribbons and
Speaker 2: the lace. And Louis the fourteenth became a walking billboard
Speaker 2: for the French luxury industries, and he understood that France,
Speaker 2: in order to kind of fill its coffers, needed to
Speaker 2: have these these luxury exports that it could do better
Speaker 2: than anyone else, like lace, like silk. But he really
Speaker 2: kind of took the fashion plate concept to an extreme
Speaker 2: in terms of how kings could power dress and show
Speaker 2: you just how much money they had. But he wasn't
Speaker 2: interested in trends per se. Marie Antoinette when she came
Speaker 2: to France in seventeen seventy, Paris was just starting to
Speaker 2: become a place where what we now know is fast
Speaker 2: fashion was coming into being, where there was a whole
Speaker 2: sub industry of women who weren't allowed by guild law
Speaker 2: to make dresses or make hats, but they could make
Speaker 2: the trimmings that you put on dresses and the trimmings
Speaker 2: you put on hats, and those became the trends that
Speaker 2: you could wear and kind of change every day to
Speaker 2: change your look all the time. And Marie Antoinette really
Speaker 2: became the royal god parent of that phenomenon and spawned
Speaker 2: the French fashion industry as we still know it today.
Speaker 1: The queen eventually fell out of fashion with her French subjects.
Speaker 1: Here she is portrayed in nineteen thirty eight by film
Speaker 1: actress Norma Shearer.
Speaker 3: People threw stones at the carriage. They threw stones and
Speaker 3: shall have ill sums. I'm trembling still. Those pale faces
Speaker 3: full of hatreds shouting what's being shouted all over front
Speaker 3: for an Austrian leech.
Speaker 1: I suppose you can only speculate, But do you think
Speaker 1: that when she looked in the mirror that the hair,
Speaker 1: the clothes, everything around it was I don't know. I
Speaker 1: don't want to say a way of compensating for the
Speaker 1: jah on the lip, but a way of like anyone
Speaker 1: would like I would if I looked and I saw
Speaker 1: I don't like that about me. Yeah, I'll do this
Speaker 1: to balance it out, to draw attention.
Speaker 2: Indeed, if you wear a three foot high headdress on
Speaker 2: your head, you are going to kind of direct the
Speaker 2: eye away from your pendulous lower lip and you're extruding
Speaker 2: habsbrug jaw. And it would explain why she gravitated toward
Speaker 2: that trend. Of all possible trends, I mean, there are
Speaker 2: all kinds of crazy things that she could do in
Speaker 2: the name of fashion, but to choose specifically as your
Speaker 2: signature hairstyle, this gigantic, bulbous, three foot high construction, you
Speaker 2: do think that that must have really softened the chin.
Speaker 1: In the end, of course, Marie Antoinette took it on
Speaker 1: the chin and much more when she and her husband
Speaker 1: were beheaded On the other side of the break. Did
Speaker 1: centuries of royal inbreeding lead to World War One? The
Speaker 1: downfall of more defective and despotic dynasties coming up next?
Speaker 1: Europeans throughout these centuries, did they not imagine another way
Speaker 1: of doing things other than dynastic rule?
Speaker 2: I mean, I think so much of the symbolic strength
Speaker 2: of monarchy in Europe from the Middle Ages too, maybe
Speaker 2: even to today, but certainly from the Middle Ages until
Speaker 2: World War One rested on this mythology that the older
Speaker 2: and the purer your bloodline, the better.
Speaker 1: But as early as the nineteenth century, questions were being
Speaker 1: raised about the wisdom of royal relatives marrying each other.
Speaker 1: In eighteen seventy, Charles Darwin wrote that consanguineous marriages lead
Speaker 1: to deafness, and dumbness and blindness. Darwin, for what it's worth,
Speaker 1: married and had ten children with his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood.
Speaker 1: In the US, concerns over so called cousin marriage were
Speaker 1: growing rapidly. At the ninth Annual meeting of the American
Speaker 1: Association for the Advancement of Science in eighteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: a Boston clergyman named Charles Brooks delivered a fiery lecture
Speaker 1: warning against the health consequences of consanguineous reproduction, and by
Speaker 1: the end of the nineteenth century, more than a dozen
Speaker 1: states had passed laws banning such marriages.
Speaker 2: And nowadays people are envisioning another way the crown, so
Speaker 2: that the heir to the throne of England now is
Speaker 2: married to a woman with no obvious or known royal blood.
Speaker 2: So royals today, I think, do understand that there are
Speaker 2: some advantages beyond just getting to marry a person you love,
Speaker 2: to marrying outside of the gene pool.
Speaker 1: The tradition of European royals marrying each other also meant
Speaker 1: that a disorder carried by one royal line was likely
Speaker 1: to be carried over to other royal lines, since all
Speaker 1: these lines were tangled up. Take the blood clotting disorder hemophilia,
Speaker 1: which is often described as the royal disease.
Speaker 2: Because it was something that was genetically transmitted, and it's
Speaker 2: something that really came to flourish in and among European
Speaker 2: royal houses throughout late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe.
Speaker 2: Because Queen Victoria was a carrier of the gene and
Speaker 2: so she had one son who was a hemophiliac, and
Speaker 2: then she had several grandchildren who were carriers of the disease.
Speaker 2: And because she had cast her net wide over Europe,
Speaker 2: you really see heemophilia taking off in these generations of
Speaker 2: matches that were made between and among the children and
Speaker 2: grandchildren of Queen Victoria.
Speaker 1: In the case of the royal houses which were beseicked
Speaker 1: by it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Speaker 1: hemophilia wasn't just a family matter. It threatened to upend
Speaker 1: the world order.
Speaker 2: The best example I can think of is Nicholas the Second,
Speaker 2: the last Czar of Russia, the Romanov, the Romanov who
Speaker 2: his wife, the Czarina, was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Speaker 2: Her brother had been hemophiliac and had died young. He
Speaker 2: fell out a window and basically died of internal bleeding.
Speaker 2: I mean, basically, you can't be a hemophiliac and a
Speaker 2: child and have any of the normal bumps and scrapes
Speaker 2: that a typical child would have growing up. And so
Speaker 2: her and Nicholas's son, Alexei, who was the Tsarevich, the
Speaker 2: heir to the throne, was born a haemophiliac. But essentially
Speaker 2: they spent the entirety of his life until the whole
Speaker 2: family was murdered by the Bolsheviks, hiding him from the
Speaker 2: public and hiding the fact that he was a hemophiliac.
Speaker 1: The family drama inside the last Russian monarchy was dramatized
Speaker 1: on screen in the nineteen seventy one film Nicholas and Alexandra.
Speaker 4: There is no doubt of it, no doubt of any kind.
Speaker 4: It is unquestionably hemophilia. I see, the female is the carrier.
Speaker 4: The mother gives it to the son. Your mother got
Speaker 4: it from her mother, Queen Victoria, and passed it on
Speaker 4: to you.
Speaker 3: I see.
Speaker 2: A big part of why Zar Nicholas the second was
Speaker 2: so disliked by the Russian public is because they never
Speaker 2: saw him. He was invisible to the people of Russia.
Speaker 2: And it was largely because he and his wife were
Speaker 2: just consumed by dread that after years and years of
Speaker 2: not having a son and only having daughters, and they
Speaker 2: finally had this boy, and then they realized that he
Speaker 2: can die at any moment from the slightest thing. So
Speaker 2: they were constantly in seclusion with their child. Resputant was
Speaker 2: brought in which is you know, kind of resputant is
Speaker 2: always invoked as the kind of proof of how crazy
Speaker 2: and out of touch these Tsars were, And they wanted
Speaker 2: this Charlatan faith healer, mad priest, sex maniac to come
Speaker 2: into the heart of their family and run things as
Speaker 2: he did. But he was perceived by them as the
Speaker 2: only thing that was standing between their son and death
Speaker 2: from the complications of hemophilia.
Speaker 4: I knew you were going to send for me. I
Speaker 4: knew the child was sick.
Speaker 3: I know what's the matter with him?
Speaker 4: You can't I see blood when I shut my eyes.
Speaker 1: The blood he may have seen was that of the
Speaker 1: whole family executed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 2: So by the time they died, with still a very
Speaker 2: young Tsarevich and the rest of their children, their daughters,
Speaker 2: nobody in Russia knew that the boy was a hemophiliac.
Speaker 1: Oh, my goodness, But the tsar and Tsarevich's in soelarty
Speaker 1: and then the entrance of resputen. Both of these things
Speaker 1: which are to their detriment, are connected to their son's hemophilia.
Speaker 2: I intimately connected my only close royal friend, His great
Speaker 2: great great grandparents were the aunt and uncle of Zar
Speaker 2: Nicholas the second, and his name is Dimitri of Yugoslavia,
Speaker 2: and he's the best storyteller around. And one of the
Speaker 2: stories that he tells about Rasputin is that one day
Speaker 2: the Tsarevich was playing inside in one of the big
Speaker 2: Russian palaces and he was sitting in one of these
Speaker 2: kind of massive, ornately decorated rooms where there were gigantic
Speaker 2: chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, and Rasputin came running into
Speaker 2: the room and pushed this little boy kind of out
Speaker 2: of the way, and a gigantic chandelier came crashing down.
Speaker 2: And the thought was that Rasputin really does have these
Speaker 2: visionary qualities because he saw that this boy was about
Speaker 2: to be crushed by a chandelier.
Speaker 1: Wow. While Resputen's name has gone down in history as
Speaker 1: a byword for someone who wields deceitful influence, perhaps it
Speaker 1: should be more celebrated. The euro disco group BONEYM seemed
Speaker 1: to think so.
Speaker 2: The same.
Speaker 1: Okay, so you are writing a book now on another dynasty.
Speaker 2: I'm writing a book on a number of interrelated dynasties,
Speaker 2: but the center of gravity is a Bavarian dynasty called
Speaker 2: the Vittelsbach And who are they? They are an old
Speaker 2: Bavarian family, so south of Germany, Catholic dynasty. They were
Speaker 2: already in the nineteenth century one of the oldest royal
Speaker 2: families in Europe. They could trace their ancestry back to
Speaker 2: the eleventh century. They had actually intermarried with both Spanish
Speaker 2: and Austrian Habsburgs throughout history, sporadically periodically, because they were
Speaker 2: Catholic royals and Catholic royals tended to like to with
Speaker 2: each other, and the same for the Protestants. And they
Speaker 2: really came to the fore as one of the more
Speaker 2: colorful royal families in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: And there are some particularly colorful members of this family.
Speaker 2: Yes, I want to call my book Glass Piano Girl
Speaker 2: and Other Stories of Royal Dysfunction. I'm not sure that's
Speaker 2: what it will be allowed to be. But the Vittelsbach
Speaker 2: princess who won my heart was the daughter of a
Speaker 2: Vittelsbach Bavarian king Ludwig the first. Her name was Alexandra
Speaker 2: of Bavaria, and she, when she was around eighteen, became
Speaker 2: thoroughly convinced that she had swallowed two foreign objects that
Speaker 2: were threatening to destroy her from within. The largest and
Speaker 2: most problematic of these objects was a glass grand piano
Speaker 2: that she thought was lodged in her stomach. And she
Speaker 2: also believed that there was a miniature sofa that was
Speaker 2: wedged in her skull, like somewhere in her brain, and
Speaker 2: she would have these fits of I think what psychoanalyst
Speaker 2: would call hysterical blindness, where the doctors couldn't find anything
Speaker 2: wrong with her optic nerves. There was no as far
Speaker 2: as we know, prominent genetic Vittelsbach hereditary condition that led
Speaker 2: to these moments of blindness, and the Vittelsbach themselves had
Speaker 2: intermarried for generations like so many royal families. But she
Speaker 2: believed that this little miniature sofa was pressing on her
Speaker 2: eyes and making her blind.
Speaker 1: And can I ask was the sofa in the same
Speaker 1: room as the piano? Was it like a drawing room
Speaker 1: or a situation.
Speaker 2: Or I don't know how she It's funny because she
Speaker 2: became a writer in later life, but she never really
Speaker 2: wrote about the floor plan, the floor plan of her
Speaker 2: body as a set of different chambers. But I mean,
Speaker 2: definitely they were distinct scale differences. The piano was a
Speaker 2: properly sized grand piano, whereas this little sofa was tiny
Speaker 2: enough to somehow fit in her skulp. But her doctors
Speaker 2: finally tricked her out of believing that she had this
Speaker 2: tiny sofa in her head because they induced vomiting one day,
Speaker 2: and then in the bucket that they held out to
Speaker 2: collect her sick they fished out the surreptitiously slipped in
Speaker 2: piece of dollhouse furniture. They took a little, tiny dollhouse
Speaker 2: sofa and said, do you see, your highness, Thanks to
Speaker 2: the emetic that we've prescribed, you've been purged of it now.
Speaker 2: But because she was convinced that the piano in her
Speaker 2: abdomen was full sized, they could never come up with
Speaker 2: a similar trick, so she really off and on suffered
Speaker 2: from incredible periods of almost paralyzing terror, where she was
Speaker 2: afraid that if she moved even the least bit the
Speaker 2: wrong way, or if she jostled up against a person
Speaker 2: or a wall, or a door or the arm of
Speaker 2: a chair, that the whole thing would shatter and shred
Speaker 2: her inside. Royal photography was starting to come into vogue
Speaker 2: in this period, and we do have at least two
Speaker 2: photographs of her. But the photographs we had of her
Speaker 2: are of just a woman who looks haunted and hunted
Speaker 2: and kind of you know, just like a hollow face,
Speaker 2: because she was afraid to eat too. I mean, eating
Speaker 2: became a challenge. Everything was a challenge. She saw potential
Speaker 2: day everywhere and lived a fairly long life by those standards.
Speaker 2: I think she died when she was around sixty. And
Speaker 2: this is Princess Alexandra of Bavaria. Then Ludwig the castle Builder,
Speaker 2: Ludwig the castle Builder, So Ludwig the Second was Alexandra's nephew.
Speaker 2: Ludwig the Second was the most flamboyantly eccentric of all
Speaker 2: the Vittel's Box and probably of all royals in the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century. He had this kind of also delusional quality
Speaker 2: to his mental makeup, where, for instance, he believed that
Speaker 2: he was in constant communion with the ghosts of the
Speaker 2: royals that he most admired, who weren't even necessarily close
Speaker 2: relations of his or related at all. In particular, he
Speaker 2: would have these kind of spiritual conversations with Marie Antoinette
Speaker 2: and Louis the fourteenth, and he so firmly believed that
Speaker 2: they were around him and talking to him and advising
Speaker 2: him that he would have these elaborate dinner parties served
Speaker 2: where it was just himself and the bust of Louis
Speaker 2: the fourteen, the bust of Marie Antoinette, and he would
Speaker 2: have dish after dish brought in by valets and liveried
Speaker 2: valets standing in attendance, and they would clear away the
Speaker 2: plates of like mounds of pheasant, mounds of suites. He
Speaker 2: loved sweets that Obviously, these bust statues were not consuming.
Speaker 1: But the favorite extravagance of the Ludwig the castle Builder
Speaker 1: was building castles.
Speaker 2: And he built castles all over Bavaria. One of his castles,
Speaker 2: Neus s Fonstein, was the one that became the basis
Speaker 2: for the Disney World Castle. So when we think of
Speaker 2: a cartoon version of a castle with crazy turrets, and
Speaker 2: it almost looks like it's something out of a fairy tale,
Speaker 2: this was born of the feverish imagination of Ludwig the Second.
Speaker 1: Ludwig believed he ruled by divine right, which meant no
Speaker 1: checks or balances from his royal cabinet, which meant he
Speaker 1: ignored all warnings about the disaster his frienzied spending was
Speaker 1: leading towards.
Speaker 2: He bankrupted Bavaria single handedly by building these castles, and
Speaker 2: was actually caught by his men ministers writing letters to
Speaker 2: various bankers around Europe offering to sell them Bavaria so
Speaker 2: that they would advance him the money to keep building
Speaker 2: his castles. So he was really quite a maniac. But
Speaker 2: the palaces that he built that were so hard on
Speaker 2: the Bavarian treasury, in fact, are now huge tourist draws
Speaker 2: in bavarias if people go to Bavaria, they want to
Speaker 2: see those castles.
Speaker 1: Crazy rich Bavarians.
Speaker 2: Crazy rich Bavarians. He didn't know how to spend it
Speaker 2: fast enough.
Speaker 1: How confident are you that this behavior was at least
Speaker 1: in part due to intermarriage.
Speaker 2: The vittels Box intermarried a lot, not as much as
Speaker 2: the Habsburg's, but it was really a proud tradition and
Speaker 2: it dated back many many generations, and anecdotally, by the
Speaker 2: nineteenth century there was a kind of what we would
Speaker 2: call a meme about something called the Vittelsbach madness. Then
Speaker 2: the perception really was that Ludwig had inherited this madness
Speaker 2: from the Vittelsbach side of the family, and so it
Speaker 2: was seen as this kind of possibly hereditary taint.
Speaker 1: Then Ludwig's younger brother.
Speaker 2: Oh Auto Ludwig Ludwig was overthrown by his cabinet in
Speaker 2: eighteen eighty six, who were afraid that he was going
Speaker 2: to sell the Kingdom of Bavaria. They couldn't get him
Speaker 2: to stop spending on the castles, and they overthrew him,
Speaker 2: knowing that his younger brother was even crazier than he was,
Speaker 2: but thinking that at least the younger brother Otto, who
Speaker 2: was handed the throne as Otto the first, would be
Speaker 2: pliable in their hands. Because Otto basically went through protracted
Speaker 2: periods where he believed that he was a dog, and
Speaker 2: so Otto never really even tried to rain. Otto never
Speaker 2: had the power of the purse. Otto was really run
Speaker 2: by his one of his dog walkers.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and his belief that he was a dog. How
Speaker 1: did this manifest?
Speaker 2: I belief that he was a dog manifested itself in lunging, snarling, biting.
Speaker 2: He actually he was kept for most of his adult
Speaker 2: life and most of his reign in one particular kind
Speaker 2: of out of the way palace that not too many
Speaker 2: people would risk a visiting. Sometimes his relatives felt bad
Speaker 2: and went to visit him, and they were the ones
Speaker 2: who would report that he was like leashed to a wall.
Speaker 2: And when they would come into the room, you know,
Speaker 2: and you'd be presented, because he was still the kings.
Speaker 2: He'd be presented with all this pomp and like liveried servants,
Speaker 2: and you'd do your deep curtsies if you were a woman,
Speaker 2: or your deep ritual bows if you were a man,
Speaker 2: but you'd see this snarling person on all fours, tethered
Speaker 2: to the wall and like snapping at you and apparently
Speaker 2: foaming at the mouth. There are reports also that he
Speaker 2: would only eat out of like a dog bowl or
Speaker 2: a bowl on the ground.
Speaker 1: Now, Carrie points out that as a young man, Auto
Speaker 1: had been forced to fight in the Franco Prussian War,
Speaker 1: where he witnessed atrocities and suffered post traumatic stress disorder.
Speaker 2: But the dog delusions had already kind of started with
Speaker 2: Auto when he was a teenager, before he went off
Speaker 2: to war, And I think more just sent him over
Speaker 2: the edge, and.
Speaker 1: Just exacerbated and sent him over the edge. Can we
Speaker 1: draw a line between there and the outbreak of World
Speaker 1: War One?
Speaker 2: I think in many ways we can, because By the
Speaker 2: time World War One broke out in nineteen fourteen, Europe
Speaker 2: was still almost entirely ruled by people from old royal
Speaker 2: families who had varying degrees of inbreeding and varying disadvantages
Speaker 2: that attached to that. And so the kingdom of Bavaria,
Speaker 2: for instance, I mean, I think it's incredible fragility is
Speaker 2: highlighted by the fact that these two kings, Ludwig the
Speaker 2: second and Auto the First, were kings, and yet they
Speaker 2: couldn't govern, They were incapable of governing, and Bavaria is
Speaker 2: one of the kingdoms that collapsed with World War One.
Speaker 2: The Romanovs were, you know, autocrat of all. The Russia's
Speaker 2: was actually the Bizar's title. And the idea was you
Speaker 2: ruled by autocracy because you were chosen by God and
Speaker 2: the people are not supposed to have a voice at all.
Speaker 2: And when people started wanting to have a voice, Nicholas
Speaker 2: the second didn't listen to them, partly through his retrograde
Speaker 2: convictions in the superiority of royal birth and his divine mandate,
Speaker 2: but partly again also because he was so distracted by
Speaker 2: his son's chemophilia.
Speaker 1: And we can't forget about those Austrian Habsburgs.
Speaker 2: The Emperor of the Austro Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph, was
Speaker 2: himself the product of Habsburg and a Vittelsbach marriage. His
Speaker 2: wife was twice over of Vittelsbach. Her parents were Vittelsbach cousins.
Speaker 1: Their only son, Rudolph, died by suicide after killing his
Speaker 1: seventeen year old mistress in a hunting lodge in what
Speaker 1: became known as the Mayrling Incident. It would have a
Speaker 1: profound effect on European geopolitics, since Rudolph was seen by
Speaker 1: royals as the great progressive hope.
Speaker 2: He was the one who had really had these kind
Speaker 2: of ambitions to liberalize and modernize the Austro Hungarian Empire
Speaker 2: and give the people more of a voice, adopt some
Speaker 2: of the kind of more modern liberal notions of constitutional
Speaker 2: rule and checks and balances. But his mother was terrified
Speaker 2: that by dint of being doubly a Vittelsbach on her
Speaker 2: mother's on her father's side, that she had transmitted this
Speaker 2: Vittelsbach madness to.
Speaker 1: Him, and she felt guilty.
Speaker 2: She felt guilty, and she might not have been wrong.
Speaker 1: After the prince's death, the line of succession eventually passed
Speaker 1: to Rudolph's cousin, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose name you may
Speaker 1: remember from high school European history. His assassination led to
Speaker 1: the outbreak of World War One.
Speaker 2: To draw the line between World War One and in
Speaker 2: reading it would sound maybe specious or flip, but I
Speaker 2: think that the reason why these questions about royal intermarriage
Speaker 2: and what their actual effects were on the human beings
Speaker 2: who were produced by those systems is that those were
Speaker 2: the same human beings who governed most of the world
Speaker 2: through nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: Bear in mind, in just the Austro Hungarian Empire you
Speaker 1: had one forgive the expression crazy ass family deciding the
Speaker 1: fate of more than fifty million people, and.
Speaker 2: The fact that World War One seesed the collapse of
Speaker 2: the Russian Empire, the Prussian Empire, and the Austro Hungarian Empire.
Speaker 2: It's another death of dynasties in effect, and all of
Speaker 2: those families had really been mined by problems that seem
Speaker 2: to correlate with in rereading, even though there were plenty
Speaker 2: of other geopolitical factors and domestically political factors.
Speaker 1: Honestly, folks, this is all a reminder that democracy really
Speaker 1: remains the best game in town. I hope you enjoyed
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Speaker 1: This episode of Obituaries was produced by Aaron Schrank. Our
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