Consanguinity in the Spanish royal family

[cimbrio]

Also quite interesting is the story of Princess Laetitia Napoléon Bonaparte. She was the daughter of Princess Clotilde of Savoy and napoléon Bonaparte and Wurttemberg. Clotilde had a brother, Amadeo, whoa s you know became King of Spain for a brief time. When his wife died, his own son Emanuel (Manolo within the family circle) wanted to marry his cousin Laetitia. His father thanked his son for worrying for his cousin, but said he'd deal with ehr situation..and did he! He actually married her himself! So another uncle-niece marriage... when he announced his forthcoming wedding, he severely looked at his son, who astounded, answered "Contento Lei, Contenti Tutti"... Amadeo and Laetitia had one son who died childless...

I've read that King Alfonso XII had a consanguinity level of 25%, the highest I've ever seen at least.... Thank God he married a Habsburg and his son a Battenberg...

D...

[YaBB_Jose]

Benedicta & Maria I were the only two of their 4 sisters to marry.

Talking about consaguinity:
They had a younger sister Infanta D. Maria Ana (1768-1788 ) who married her 1st cousin Pr. Gabriel of Spain (1752-88 ), son of Carlos III and brother of Queen Maria Ana Victória, the mother of the 3 princesses.
The couple had an only child Pr. Pedro (1786-1812) who married his 1st cousin   Infanta D. Maria Teresa .
D. Maria Teresa was the daughter of D. João VI and his 1st cousin   Carlota Joaquina (daughter of Carlos IV and his 1st cousin   the infamous Luisa de Parma).

D.Maria Teresa's sisters, D. Maria isabel and D. Maria Francisca both married their uncles   king Fernando VII and D. Carlos count of Molina, brothers of their mother Carlota Joaquina.

When D. Maria Francisca died, D. Maria Teresa married her uncle and former brother-in-law D. Carlos  

[YaBB_Jose]

On what concerns consaguinity, no one beats the Orléans.
Louis-Philippe had 10 children.
The eldest, Ferdinand dk.Orléans, had a son Philip count of Paris, who married his 1st cousin Isabelle, a daughter of the youngest , Antoine dk Montpensier.
Philip had a younger brother Robert, dk of Chartres who married his 1st cousin Françoise, daughter of François, pr.Joinville.
Robert and Françoise had a son , Jean duke of Guise, who married his 1st cousin Isabelle, daughter of Philip of Paris and Isabelle Montpensier.
Jean and Isabelle had a son Henri, count of Paris, who  married Isabelle d'Orléans Bragance, a descendant from Louis dk of Nemours.
And they had 11 children  
Their eldest son, the present Count of Paris married Maria Theresa of Wurttemberg, a descendant of Marie d'Orléans (and his sister Diane married her brother-in-law Karl dk of Wurttemberg).
To close the gap, their son Jean dk Vendôme should marry a descendant of tante Clémentine, the only descendant of Louis-Philippe who is not his ancestor .

However   Clementine's gr.daughter Dorothea of Habsburg made a disastrous marriage to her 2nd cousin  Philip dk of Orléans (son of Philip of Paris and Isabelle Montpensier) .
Philip of Orléans's sister Hélène married Emmanuel Philibert dk of Aosta. Their son Amadeo married Anne, daughter of the duke of Guise.
Hélène's grandson Amadeo married Claude d'Orléans, daughter of the former Count of Paris.

What a family.
No wonder most of them don't speak to each other.

José

[Bernardino]

Of course these marriages are dangerous...but when you have Iberian, French, German, Scandinavian, Russian, Polish, Greek, British, Hungarian, Italian... (even Muslim and Hebraic)...genes I believe it is far less dangerous than if you marry a girl or a boy from your small village on the Alps, for instance...

This might be silly...but Royals are tremendously 'mestiços / mestizos', and most people of Europe, say for instance the Scandinavian or the German folk people are much much less mixed...Most people have always married to their neighbours, if not from this town from a not so far another town...of course in big cities genes mix up much more, but big cities exist only for 200 years I believe   ...

There are few cases where this mixture gave bad results (e.g. the Spanish Habsburgs)...

P.s. me myself have not egocentric interest on defending this marriages...I have no consanguineous blood that I know (at least not as far 300 years)   ...We shouldn't judge them for this practice...it was common and acceptable...

[Prince_Lieven]

I agree, Bernardino! But we all have some inbred blood!   We would each have 1.1 billion ancestors alive in 1066 if there had been no intermarriage among them, and there definitely wasn't 1.1 billion people in the world in 1066!  

[ilyala]

true, and the whole humanity is proven to descend from only seven mothers.

still, there's a difference between marrying your second cousin or your seventh, eleventh, thousandth cousin....

[Bernardino]

Those consaguineous persons don't seem degenerated to me... If that practice was so malignous by now every royal, except Albanians, would be completely handicaped and infertile...but they aren't...

It's better though not to mess to much with Mother Nature...I agree...

There is a saying:

'God forgives always, Men forgive sometimes, Nature never forgives'

[ilyala]

you don't have to be handicaped if your parents are cousins. but it's more likely for a consanguineos marriage to result in handicaped children, then the other way around. the more consanguineos the marriage is, the bigger the chances.

[basilforever]

While over in-breeding obviously isn't a good idea, like the Bourbons and Habsburgs did it, it must also be remembered that the products of first cousins marrying - for example King Edward VII and his siblings, King Olav V, etc. did not turn out to be inbred, disabled "monsters", as so many people ridiculously write whenever the subject of a modern royal such as Prince William marrying another royal who is like his 4th cousin is mentioned.

[Duke of New Jersey]

Among the Habsburgs uncle/niece matches were very common. Most of the Kings of Spain married their "Austrian" nieces.

I would post the family tree I have been working on but it is an Excel document so I don't know how that would work. 

-Duke of NJ

[Romanov_fan]

I would post the family tree I have been working on but it is an Excel document so I don't know how that would work. 

-Duke of NJ

I would love it if you would post this! I understand it is hard for you though. I have tried to do it, but only because I was reading a book awhile back about the Philip IV's family and I was really confused about how related they really were. I am not even sure I still have it. It's hard to keep it straight, but the level of inbreeding it reveals is very fascinating. I would be curious how much or not that accounts for the last really Habsburg king of Spain, Charles II, I believe being the way he was.

[Rudolf_II]

I did this family tree for Wikipedia to show how inbred the Habsburgs and the Bourbons were.  You wouldn't want to know how long it took to draw it.

[Duke of New Jersey]

That is great!  I would not even be able to imagine something so complicated and confusing. 

Have any others!?

-Duke of NJ

[Rudolf_II]

That is great!  I would not even be able to imagine something so complicated and confusing. 

Have any others!?

Please, my sanity has only just recovered from doing that one.  My only previous effort was one showing the ancestry of Charles II of Spain, one of the classic inbreeding cases.

[basilforever]

I really don't know whether in-breeding contributed to the high-death rate, or genetic defects very much at all. It was so common for so many royalty to experience this. Consider William IV and Queen Adelaide - they had seven children/pregnancies, none survived. They were not inbred. Charles II could just have sufferred mental and physical handicaps/disabilities, and coupled with being as inbred as he was, it led to him being in his state.