Carlos II was the last, the most degenerate, and the most pathetic victim of the Habsburg inbreeding. These words, from the British historian John Lynch, may seem excessive and somewhat loaded on adjectives. But if we take a look at the medical history of the thirty-five-year king Charles II of Spain maybe we’ll change our minds.
Carlos II, the Bewitched
Charles II was a rather unlucky soul. Born at the end of a long line of inbreeding, he suffered from health problems throughout his life, albeit a short one. Badly disfigured, he was considered incapable of ruling and, during his lifetime, most of the power was in the hands of his mother, Mariana of Austria. He was the last of the Spanish Habsburg rulers and with his time on the throne, Spain fell into decline as an empire. Some of the wild rumors about his health were true, others sheer sensation. However, his tragic life was also full of intrigue, and his death plunged much of Europe into a major war.
Carlos II was the last son of King Felipe IV who was the son of Carlos I and grandson of one of the daughters of the Catholic Monarchs, Juana la Loca. To the delight of the monarchthe only legitimate male. It seems that Felipe himself had confessed that this son was the product of the last intercourse he managed to maintain with his second wife. Marian of Austriawhich gave rise to a certain mockery in the Court of the time, one of the monarch’s doctors daring to tell him that “his majesty left for the queen only the drippings”.
The health of Charles II
Be that as it may, Carlos II suffered throughout his life frequent colds, intestinal disorders, prognathism (characteristic feature of the Austrias), motor retardation, hydrocephalus, rickets, oligophrenia, measles, chickenpox, rubella, smallpox, chronic swelling of the extremities, epilepsy, sterility and a more than certain impotence.
Until he was 4 years old he couldn’t stand up and could only walk at 6 years old. He did not manage to make his language intelligible until he was 10 years old and only a year later he took up reading and writing, activities that, it seems, were never to his liking nor did he master them. When he was already 25 years old, the papal nuncio related in one of his reports to the Holy See that the king could not stand upright unless he leaned on a wall, a table or another person.
To all of the above it is possible to add the most notable facial deformity of Carlos II which was in an extremely pronounced bite, which has since been called Habsburg lip due to its prominence in the Habsburg dynasty of European monarchs. His bite was so severe that for a long time Charles II had difficulty learning to speak. All his life he remained quite silent and he ate little because the deformed jaw caused him so much trouble.
The nickname of the “Bewitched”
His contemporaries ended up attribute all these evils to a certain spell that had fallen on the monarch, even giving names and surnames to those guilty of such enchantment. We, who recognize the literary charm that the nickname of the bewitched Given the painful life of Carlos, we rather believe that any virus or bacteria that visited the Court found refuge in its weak nature.
Marriage with Maria Luisa of Orleans
Charles II married Maria Luisa of Orleansin 1679 when the king was 18, though by all accounts their marriage wasn’t exactly full of love. Although Carlos was certainly in love with Maria Luisa, the feelings were not necessarily reciprocal. The marriage was mainly political, intended to strengthen ties between France and Spain. Apparently, the French ambassador who was sent to arrange the marriage told Marie Louise: “The Catholic King is so ugly that it causes fear and looks sick«. Unsurprisingly, she wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect, but her marriage went ahead and Maria Luisa d’Orléans was queen consort between 1679 and 1689.
Marriage with Mariana de Neoburgo
After the death of his first wife in 1689, Carlos II married Mariana de Neoburgo in that same year. The king’s Council of State was desperate to continue the Hispanic dynasty. His marriage to Maria Luisa de Orleans did not produce children, so he desperately looked for a second wife and the chosen one was Mariana de Neoburgo, who was actually his second cousin (both were children of first cousins), but with whom he also had no children.
The reign and succession of Charles II
The Austrians’ obsession with family marriages and a misunderstood principle of legitimacy in the succession to the Crown made it possible for this man, whose only known hobby was to frequent the palace pastry shop, to come to reign. His reign, in whose government the monarch had no participation, was neither better nor worse than that of his immediate predecessors and his greatest feat was to stamp the signature on the testament that would open the doors of Spain to the Bourbons Yet the War of succession.
The Charles’s reign began with a 10-year regency under the queen mother, during which the government was preoccupied with combating the ambitions of French King Louis XIV in the Netherlands and with intrigues at court involving the Queen, her Jesuit confessor Juan Everardo Nithard, her later favourite, Fernando de Valenzuela, and the natural half-brother of the king, Juan José of Austria (1629-1679). were produced two phases in the King’s government, the first, related to the resistance to French imperialism of Louis XIV, ended with the peace of Rijswijk in 1697; the second, the last three years of the reign, was dominated by the problem of successionbecause by then it was clear that Carlos II would have no children.
At the height of the succession problem, when the Austrian and French parties at the Spanish court were prepared to use any means to gain the support of the miserable king, Charles II stubbornly defended the majesty of the crown and was determined to preserve its territorial integrity. In this last objective he failed, because his death led to the War of the Spanish Succession and the dismemberment of Spain’s European possessions.
In this way, as throughout his reign, Carlos II never succeeded in having an heir to the throne of Spain, he named Philip of Anjou as his successor. Philip was his half-great-grandson: he was the grandson of his half-sister Maria Theresa. This distance from the royal throne caused a great dispute and when Charles II died, his election basically caused the aforementioned War of the Spanish Succession.
On November 1, 1700, at the age of 38, Carlos II died after weeks of agony. Two days later an autopsy was performed, from which the Marquis Ariberti leaked that “The corpse did not have a drop of blood; her heart appeared the size of a peppercorn; the lungs, corroded; the intestines, rotten and gangrenous; a single testicle, black as coal, and the head filled with water”.
Modern research has concluded that Carlos II suffered from Klinefelter syndrome. We are sure that the man must have suffered a lot, as much as Spain had to suffer the king.
Recommended bibliography:
- History of SpainJohn Lynch.
- History of Kings and QueensCarlos Fisas.
- From Carlos I Emperor to Carlos II the Bewitched, human history of a dynastyJeronimo Moragas.