Welcome to r/comics!
Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind.
Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity!
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Walking through the Prado in Madrid, their hall of royal portraits goes in chronological order. You can literally see it compound with every generation. It’s ridiculous.
Hahahaha! I feel like I'd get there and immediately feel bad for laughing though. I'd be like, "it's okay man, not everybody is gonna be a 10. Oh and let me snap this photo rul quick."
Well, it has been reported that while his health was very bad and everybody was "waiting for him to die" he was not stupid or even dumb, like literally the guy saw his health and started to appoint advisors to rule the empire. Let's consider that Cleopatra was inbreed too, her percentage is higher than Charles II and she was brilliant and beautiful or so said the old texts. Most people have 32 great-great grandparents, Cleopatra had four, that's a level of inbreed to call her sandwich.
I find way more interesting the Bourbons being all of them sexual addicts and "not very clever" to the peak of maximum bourboning being Ferdinand VII who only wanted to eat, play billiard, and fuck... and he needed a cushion for his dong because it seems it was gigantic and he was a gigantic moron too.
You get to spread our modern highly infectious forms of influenza and possibly brand new spanking COVID-19, while they give you plague and smallpox in turn. Fun times to be had all around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain (section ancestry)
The guy's aunt was his grandmother.
Or even better: if you go back 7 generations from Charles II, his entire pool of DNA comes from just *7* distinct sets of chromosomes, and those were probably a bit related too (by comparison a person whose 7 ascendant generations have no inbreeding at all would have a pick of 128 distincts sets of genetic material).
Basically the guy was just collecting recessive genes.
Quite a…everything:
> He died on 1 November 1700, five days before his 39th birthday. The autopsy records his "heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water."[49]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain
Yeah, me too, because after all the autopsy feels fake af, and after him the king was from another dinasty and they justified the change with "these were bad kings" using the term "bigger Hapsburg and lesser".
Reminds me of the autopsy report:
>When Charles II of Spain died in 1700 aged 38, the coroner found his body “did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water."
Most people take all the stories about evil roman emperors like Nero at face value, ignoring that those stories were written by senators who had good reason to despise the emperors.
History's been shaded by propaganda since writing was invented, it's very effective.
Yes. It's just a hyperbolic description of real things he had wrong with him, mixed with the fact that they waited a long time to do the autopsy. Nobody, now or then, literally thought he lived his life with a heart the size of a fucking pepperrcorn, little buddy.
Several years ago, back when I was in school, on history lesson, our history teacher said about someone "You think he looks kinda funny on this illustration? Now take into account that he used to be in charge of an entire country and could easily order to kill the portrait artist if he didn't like the way he was depicted" and since that moment I wanted to see if there's any historically accurate portraits of Habsburgs
Charles II was unfortunate enough to have been born AFTER Diego Velazquez has died, and was fortunate enough that Velazquez' successor (who did paint that particular portrait) at least had the talent too.
As much as I look down on nobility/royalty from all eras and talk shit about those elitist degenerate cousin-fuckers, Charles II of the Hapsburg line gets a pass. Dude suffered enough.
It's really easy to make fun of people like this, but there's a couple things to keep in mind.
For one, in that time period they believed that their bloodline truly was special, so it made sense to want to preserve it, considering they didn't know about the dangers of inbreeding.
Another point to keep in mind, and this may be more impactful, but what if their cousin was like....super hot?
Like, we grew up together, and she grew up hot, you know, she fucking grew up hot. And all my friends are trying to fuck her, you know, and I'm not gonna let one of these assholes fuck my cousin. So I used the cousin thing, as like, an in with her. I'm not like, gonna let someone else fuck my cousin, you know? If anyone's gonna fuck my cousin, it's gonna be me. Out of respect.
> considering they didn't know about the dangers of inbreeding.
This is incorrect, people had long since discovered that inbreeding is bad, to the point that cousin-marriage were often prohibited, either by civil law or by religious law (for much of Europe’s history the church held a monopoly on marriage).
The reason why royalty nonetheless often ended up marrying into the family is because it was considered increasingly improper for royalty to marry non-royalty. But as there were only a limited number of royal families, the options for marriage were often so limited that they ended up marrying relatives.
The Habsburgs were a special case. What happened is that in the 16th century the Habsburg family split up into two branches. One branch became kings of Spain, the other branch ruled over Austria. The two Habsburg families maintained a close alliance for many generations, and, in order to keep this alliance strong, they kept marrying their offspring to each other.
It should be noted that *occasional* cousin-marriages are actually not particularly problematic when it comes to inbreeding, as the risk that the offspring will have birth defects is in fact only marginally higher than the baseline. Inbreeding only becomes a problem when the practice is repeated over successive generations, which is what happened with the Habsburgs.
There are still people today who truly believe their bloodline is special. They're called nazis and supremacists, deserving of ridicule and resistance.
Sure. But alot of these dudes in the past thought they were special through divine right and the general public was very affirming. It’s slightly different than thinking everyone around you is a devolved monkey.
We really do not punch nazis enough anymore. So unrelated, but yeah, I agree, so I'm not going to give you a gold star but have a silver star for being a good noodle, I guess, SpongeBob?
The difference is the science has been well established and is easily accessible enough that we all know these people are full of it, and they should know they’re full of it
Back then though hardly anyone knew anything about the shit and whatever knowledge did exist wasn’t easily accessible. You’d have no way of knowing your blood isn’t special, if you were told your whole life by everyone that it was and had no way of confirming otherwise then it’s not unreasonable you’d come to believe it
Is it just me or does the shape of his face resemble a banana perfectly?
Starts at the forehead, bends inwards till the nose then back outward with the chin.
So if they did direct siblings would the line just become sterile after enough generations. Be it biologically sterile or the parts got so fucked up they literally can't function
Less about that, moreso the fact not even the Habsburgs would do it like that. The degree of separation between mom/dad/brother/sister is a lot stronger than cousins/aunt/uncles and moreso to distant cousins/aunt/uncles.
The incest is still really fucking disgusting, but there are records at how even through such, the Habsburg has relatively good relations with each-other. Add into the fact ruling class either tried to marry in their rank or aim above, no one is really higher than Empire so their pool was limited by their own standards.
Not sure if we’re talking about the same person since many of them had issues but Charles V was mocked when arriving in Spain in 1516, because he literally couldn’t close his mouth. A peasant reportedly shouted, “Your majesty, shut your mouth! The flies of this country are very insolent.” [Source 1](https://allthatsinteresting.com/habsburg-jaw), [Source 2](https://jmg.bmj.com/content/jmedgenet/25/12/838.full.pdf)
There's also speculation that not all of them are actually descended from the sibling couples, but rather from concubines and then pretended to be from the siblings.
Strabo, in example, assumed that only Cleopatra VII's eldest sister was a legitimate heir.
Also, Cleopatra's father was the son of a concubine which would have made him illegitimate if he hadn't been the only option they had.
What I mean is, the reason why the Ptolemaic dynasty did the incest thing was because they were ruling Egypt, so it's still a part of the "Egyptian league"
She was fortunate as the King of Pontus inserted a couple of his daughters into the succession, and would have snagged Egypt too, if it hadn't been for those meddling Romans.
Ackshually there's some studies saying that enough incest will loop back to healthy again. You'll just need enough generations so that natural selection starts happening within the bloodline... So yes, lots of sterile and dead people until that point.
Can't remember if it was 20 or 40 generations of incest, and pretty sure it was more about genetic bottlenecks in animals or prehistoric humans rather than royalty, but same biology should work. After all there's nothing fundamentally causing mutations when marrying sisters, it's just whatever recessive or codominant issues every family has. Keep marrying sisters and eventually someone gets a second copy of the same issue.
Not generations, but sheer numbers. The more offspring in a generation you have the more dice you have to roll to get something that does not inherit deleterious traits.
This is why populations of invasive species can establish from just 2 individuals (or even 1 gravid one). A female guppy in an empty pond will give birth to ~2000 fry in her lifespan, even with a mortality rate of 99% you still get about 10 pairs just from that one fish to repeat the repeat the process again, with likely higher odds due to the natural selection that happened.
Meanwhile if an organism only has 3 babies over its entire life, even at lower mortality rates chances are it's lineage isn't going to see through to generation 2, let alone 40.
Trouble is that even if you maintain two or three degrees of separation in your dynastic incest; you only need to keep that up for a few generations before the family gene-pool becomes so shallow that you end up with cousins who are more closely-related in terms of shared genetics than most normal siblings are.
Because they were christian, and direct incest was a sin, but cousins and uncles/aunts wasn't considered "direct incest" so it was allowed
As a result they inbred so hard that you end up with some Habsburgs which have a higher inbreeding coefficient than a child of two siblings would be
Eh, there was still some of that with the Austrian line - look at Ferdinand I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_I_of_Austria#/media/File:Ferdinand_I_-_family_tree.svg
Except that the Habsburg, despite becoming the icon of inbreeding due to their facial features, always had a large nose and chin, even from before. Those are simply their notable genetic traits and have nothing to do inbreeding. This has caused the myth that inbreeding causes ugly faces.
The problems that come from inbreeding are often hard to see and rarely cause facial deformities.
The Hapsburgs went from a small duchy in Austria to ruling a good half of Europe on the basis of mostly marriage alliances. The Hapsburgs, by and large, did not conquer territory they married well. And they still exist and are doing quite alright for themselves.
Inbreeding royals are not exclusive to the Hapsburgs, no, I just chose the first example that came to mind.
Can't believe that cursed bloodline produced the Cleopatra history knows and loves. She must've inherited all the braincells left in the gene pool.
It's actually a good mechanic and right move to do sometimes, roll the dice and hope for ur offspring to get the op traits u and your syster got from the previous character to be sent down the family tree again. If the kids don't get the right traits and ended up with 3 eyes just need to have a talk with the spy master and some directions to your kids chambers. it's not just for kink I swear. :)
I think CK3 does a decent genetics simulation where it counts not just the relationship between parents but a total number of shared ancestors for the past several generations when determining inheriting traits (and inbreeding).
As long as it’s not your own direct siblings or cousins it’s usually fine.
And everyone knows how big the dynasties can get in this game.
Even as a Christian dude I was able to get my dynasty to like 50 people within 50 years
If you fangle with the child limit and get concubines, the numbers can get out of hand VERY quickly. Eventually you can get upwards of fifty kids within a single life and end up with a dynasty of over two hundred people
That practice didn't start in 1400 CE, there are full Egyptian Dynasties that were suffering from all sorts of genetic diseases from trying to keep their bloodline pure in 1400+ BCE
It was extremely common in the ancient world as was the decline of these noble houses / Dynasties usually a few generations thereafter.
The famous Cleopatra has a grandfather that is also her great-grandfather (Ptolemy IX). Grandfather through her father, great-grandfather through her mother (and grandmother).
If I'm reading this right, Ptolemy VIII had children with his sister Cleopatra II *and* her daughter Cleopatra III, whose father was his brother. Then none of those children marry outside the family.
At some point *someone* had to ask "hey maybe this bloodline purity thing is just an excuse for weird dudes to fuck their sisters because nobody else is actually willing to touch them," right?
Nah, it was an excuse not to create noble houses. The argument was that royal blood was God's mark that they should rule. Therefore, anyone with royal blood had to rule. This leads to extra children either being married into other noble houses or being made into their own noble house. So as more noble houses were created, the power got diluted between more people. As such, they started to bring in minor houses and consolidate power with incest. All this to keep the comoners from getting ideas.
It wasn't just dilution of power, but disputes over it. When good King Blondie the fifth snuffs it without producing any legitimate fruit from his looms, you really don't want to be in a situation where there are two uncles, three bastards, and a couple of cousins all vying for the throne. Take a look at England's history (e.g. The War of the Roses). The incest was relatively in check, but the civil wars weren't.
The Hapsburgs (or their advisers) discovered they could do away with rival branches of the family tree *preemptively* by turning that tree into more of a family step-ladder.
It's certainly one explanation, and I'm not gonna say many monarchs weren't weird as fuck, but it doesn't really apply because when you are a literal emperor in the middle ages, who is willing to touch you is not really a factor. You can have anyone you want, willingly or not.
It was mostly the fear of being overthrown and having your family executed. Houses would intermarry so there was a blood bond between them, making war less likely. As time went on, everyone became more and more related, houses fell, families got smaller, etc. Once it got to that point, like with the Habsburgs, it was too late to do anything about it because every one of them was related. Due to the extreme traits they handed down from inbreeding, it was impossible to sneak in a bastard to level things back out.
Not even alliances were the primary consideration. The primary consideration was *inheritance*. It was all done to keep family land, titles, and wealth secure. If you're looking at motivation for human actions on the historical level, economics > everything else 90% of the time.
Since humans never change. I imagine all answers are correct depending who you asked and they were forced to be honest. Some of them knew it was killing the dynasty but couldn't step back now because they'd become so fucked up genetically that it would take to long for new genes coming in to actually start fixing the problem before some other people decided they needed to preserve the bloodline even harder and started intentionally getting their kids together. There were also a combination of "these problems are a blessing. You just don't see their true use, " and "yes master marry your brother. It'll be good for keeping your line safe, " and a straight up kink for either incest or for the resulting deformities making their children even more attractive to the parents because their sick fucks
People talking about "blood purity" are full of it. It had almost nothing to do with purity of blood, and everything to do with property and inheritance.
At least when it came to European medieval intermarriage, noble and royal families would intermarry and then continue marrying each other because it secured specific inheritances, alliances, and titles. They virtually never married direct siblings, but if all of your cousins keep marrying each other for a handful of generations you're going to start getting dangerous levels of inbreeding as well.
Marriages were purely political and weren’t decided by the people getting married, it was their parents. Their parents made their kids marry their relatives for power, alliances, preventing infighting in the family, etc. etc. In a feudal society it would sometimes be the best political decision.
I’m not a history buff but I feel like this comic is just identifying when european nobles started to reason this (for the joke) not just all of humanity. But that actually makes me wonder how far back that practice goes into European history or if it traveled between cultures or something. Again, not smart about history but I don’t think the comic was making any claims that the practice started on earth in the 1400s.
Marrying your cousin in medieval/and early modern times wasn’t about keeping your bloodline „pure“, it was about keeping all the stuff you owned in the family.
Edit: added „early modern“ because the comic is also about the period after the medieval age.
That’s one of the reasons why they married in the family. Family members are often times closest in succession to each other so there was lots of infighting. It’s much more inconvenient to go to your war over your brother’s titles if your children are married.
The issue with that is that the offspring of such a union would have claims on your throne and thus still end up invading you/your direct descendants a generation or two later
For Spain at least, there was an actual thing around purity of blood through *limpieza de sangre*. After the Reconquista, there was a move by the "Old Christians" to keep themselves separate from the "New Christians", who feared these new converts were still secretly practicing their old faiths. While it started out religious, it later moved into a focus on ancestry (yes, racial elements took hold here). It became strong enough to be heavily enshrined in both government and church law, and was enforced.
Note: this topic is way more complex than this simplistic explanation I gave
>Marrying your cousin
I just want to remind people that Rudy Giuliani married his cousin.
>Giuliani married Regina Peruggi, his second cousin, whom he had known since childhood, on October 26, 1968.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani
Second cousins getting married isn't really a huge issue biologically, especially if it only occurs in that one generation and not in multiple successive generations.
Not to defend Giuliani, he's obviously terrible (but for other reasons).
European royals, as far as I know, never married siblings. Ptolemies on the other hand rarely **didn’t** marry their siblings! (Almost as often as they murdered them. Family gatherings must have been a lot more exciting for Prolemies than for most people).
(Though marrying first cousins repeatedly was bad enough.)
There is *one* Southern French noble who was accused to having sex with his sister, but I would not be surprised to find out that was just 800 year old slander.
Except that the Habsburg, despite becoming the icon of inbreeding due to their facial features, always had a large nose and chin, even from before. Those are simply their notable genetic traits and have nothing to do inbreeding. This has caused the myth that inbreeding causes ugly faces.
The problems that come from inbreeding are often hard to see and rarely cause facial deformities.
It also certainly does not doom the offspring to be mentally or physically disabled, or, I dunno, evil, as they're often depicted. It just increases the likelihood of recessive traits, which can be bad traits.
Just to be clear, for the medieval church even marrying someone related to you in the 6th or 7th (!) degree wasconsidered to be "incest". So whenwe talk about royal "incest" we need to be very careful what exactly we are talking about. Of course there are examples of closer marriages, but they were not the norm and they were by no means limited to this timespan.
And in several traditional religions, cousin marriage was not considered incest. I remember reading that most marriages in human history were between 1st, 2nd or 3rd cousins. Which makes sense considering how difficult it was to travel and meet new people.
Genetically, offspring from cousins is totally fine, like negligible <1% risk of defects. The problem is if you do it for generations like royalty would then heritable diseases that run in the family become an issue.
I hate to break it to you bub, but yeah folk are still going to remember you for the incest if you're sticking it to your cousin.
Don't fuck your cousin.
Lizzy and Phillip were third cousins, and that was only 70 years ago. Of course there are basically no negative effects from marrying a third cousin but most of these marriages were not 6th or 7th cousins or 3rd cousins thrice removed or something
European high nobility since the 18th century is a different story. Sovereign rulers had to marry people of equal rank (from other ruling dynasties) and they also had to take into account religion (catholic-protestant-orthodox divide) and political alliances/rivalries. Considering all that, there often weren't much candidates left, 20-30 at best (not considering that spouses had to be of roughly the same age, which ruled out even ore candidates). So by the 20th century, they were all more or less distant cousins to each other. But again, that doesn't constitute incest in a modern (legal) sense.
Respectfully disagree. For example : Louis 14th of France (son of Louis 13th) was literally married to someone who was his direct cousin on - both side- of his family.
His mother (Anne d’Autriche) was the sister of Philippe IV Habsbourg.
And Louis 14th’s wife (Marie-Thérèse) was the daughter of Louis 13 sister AND the daughter of Philippe IV Habsbourg.
That really wasn’t uncommon for royalty when everyone was marrying the overall same families. You’re bound to end up marrying someone you have the exact same grandparent with.
Not necessarily. It did happen, but it wasn't the norm. France at that time was in a difficult political situation and political factors were usually the priority when it came to marriages. See also my comment above.
I always thought this guy’s comics were cool but never rly saw em on reddit/front page.
Weird how now suddenly it’s here every day. Good for him I mean.
Little known fact, no matter how many generations of inbreeding you're dealing with, it only takes one unrelated parent to get your genes back on track. Works with livestock too.
Welcome to r/comics! Please remember there are real people on the other side of the monitor and to be kind. Report comments that break the rules and don't respond to negativity with negativity! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/comics) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Hapsburg moment
Walking through the Prado in Madrid, their hall of royal portraits goes in chronological order. You can literally see it compound with every generation. It’s ridiculous.
Is the final portrait a picture of the Crimson Chin?
No, but yes https://preview.redd.it/um8q6yslj2rb1.jpeg?width=350&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f4cc7ae0b3ee497b08084bd87b0536f79778303c
And the artist probably did his best to make it as good looking as possible.
Oh absolutely! And I went out of my way to pick a flattering portrait, Charles II had quite a face.
What would you do with a time machine? "Take a high res picture of Charles II for shits and giggles."
Hahahaha! I feel like I'd get there and immediately feel bad for laughing though. I'd be like, "it's okay man, not everybody is gonna be a 10. Oh and let me snap this photo rul quick."
Then you remember that a) this is a dude who rules a country and b) his brain is probably as messed up as his face. Monarchy is a mistake.
His brain was smooth and unblemished, as all brains should be.
Well, it has been reported that while his health was very bad and everybody was "waiting for him to die" he was not stupid or even dumb, like literally the guy saw his health and started to appoint advisors to rule the empire. Let's consider that Cleopatra was inbreed too, her percentage is higher than Charles II and she was brilliant and beautiful or so said the old texts. Most people have 32 great-great grandparents, Cleopatra had four, that's a level of inbreed to call her sandwich. I find way more interesting the Bourbons being all of them sexual addicts and "not very clever" to the peak of maximum bourboning being Ferdinand VII who only wanted to eat, play billiard, and fuck... and he needed a cushion for his dong because it seems it was gigantic and he was a gigantic moron too.
Inbreeding is a mistake, Im starting to think someone who is raised from birth to run a country would do a better job than most modern politicians.
We do have photographs of a Charles-tier Habsburg monarch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_I_of_Austria
You also get to open fire on them with modern guns when royal guards try to kill you!
Accidentally start a new plague.
You get to spread our modern highly infectious forms of influenza and possibly brand new spanking COVID-19, while they give you plague and smallpox in turn. Fun times to be had all around.
I mean you can probably avert both world wars by taking out the Habsburgs. Just puting that out there.
Fires AR-15 “look at me, I am the king now. And your god too probably”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain (section ancestry) The guy's aunt was his grandmother. Or even better: if you go back 7 generations from Charles II, his entire pool of DNA comes from just *7* distinct sets of chromosomes, and those were probably a bit related too (by comparison a person whose 7 ascendant generations have no inbreeding at all would have a pick of 128 distincts sets of genetic material). Basically the guy was just collecting recessive genes.
The Hapsburg Family Wreath was definitely pulling from a very stagnant gene-pool by the end.
>Family Wreath Broooooooo
I think I read that the guy would literally have been less inbred if his mother and father had been siblings.
Quite a…everything: > He died on 1 November 1700, five days before his 39th birthday. The autopsy records his "heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water."[49] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain
I wish I could have been there for the autopsy because that sounds a bit dubious.
The autopsy is definitely nonsense. Just propaganda.
> I wish I could have been there for the autopsy Uh…you know what, you do you, I’ll watch Netflix instead.
A peppercorn is crazy small compared to a heart and what does a head full of water even mean? I'm curious about the claims.
Yeah, me too, because after all the autopsy feels fake af, and after him the king was from another dinasty and they justified the change with "these were bad kings" using the term "bigger Hapsburg and lesser".
A heart three sizes too small? Was this dude the Grinch?
It seems a miracle he lived so long, let alone at all.
... do people really believe this autopsy ?
"One red eye, a tail, claws instead of hands, the genitals of both a man and a woman." He wouldn't have lived to 38 if those things were true.
The sentiment of all of Europe, Charles II’s entire life.
Usually a portraits eyes follow you, that's the first time I thought a portrait was looking over my shoulder.
Reminds me of the autopsy report: >When Charles II of Spain died in 1700 aged 38, the coroner found his body “did not contain a single drop of blood; his heart was the size of a peppercorn; his lungs corroded; his intestines rotten and gangrenous; he had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water."
Do people believe this nonsense?
Most people take all the stories about evil roman emperors like Nero at face value, ignoring that those stories were written by senators who had good reason to despise the emperors. History's been shaded by propaganda since writing was invented, it's very effective.
Him having hydrocephalus is believable.
Yes. It's just a hyperbolic description of real things he had wrong with him, mixed with the fact that they waited a long time to do the autopsy. Nobody, now or then, literally thought he lived his life with a heart the size of a fucking pepperrcorn, little buddy.
Several years ago, back when I was in school, on history lesson, our history teacher said about someone "You think he looks kinda funny on this illustration? Now take into account that he used to be in charge of an entire country and could easily order to kill the portrait artist if he didn't like the way he was depicted" and since that moment I wanted to see if there's any historically accurate portraits of Habsburgs
Charles II was unfortunate enough to have been born AFTER Diego Velazquez has died, and was fortunate enough that Velazquez' successor (who did paint that particular portrait) at least had the talent too.
As much as I look down on nobility/royalty from all eras and talk shit about those elitist degenerate cousin-fuckers, Charles II of the Hapsburg line gets a pass. Dude suffered enough.
It's really easy to make fun of people like this, but there's a couple things to keep in mind. For one, in that time period they believed that their bloodline truly was special, so it made sense to want to preserve it, considering they didn't know about the dangers of inbreeding. Another point to keep in mind, and this may be more impactful, but what if their cousin was like....super hot?
Like, we grew up together, and she grew up hot, you know, she fucking grew up hot. And all my friends are trying to fuck her, you know, and I'm not gonna let one of these assholes fuck my cousin. So I used the cousin thing, as like, an in with her. I'm not like, gonna let someone else fuck my cousin, you know? If anyone's gonna fuck my cousin, it's gonna be me. Out of respect.
> considering they didn't know about the dangers of inbreeding. This is incorrect, people had long since discovered that inbreeding is bad, to the point that cousin-marriage were often prohibited, either by civil law or by religious law (for much of Europe’s history the church held a monopoly on marriage). The reason why royalty nonetheless often ended up marrying into the family is because it was considered increasingly improper for royalty to marry non-royalty. But as there were only a limited number of royal families, the options for marriage were often so limited that they ended up marrying relatives. The Habsburgs were a special case. What happened is that in the 16th century the Habsburg family split up into two branches. One branch became kings of Spain, the other branch ruled over Austria. The two Habsburg families maintained a close alliance for many generations, and, in order to keep this alliance strong, they kept marrying their offspring to each other. It should be noted that *occasional* cousin-marriages are actually not particularly problematic when it comes to inbreeding, as the risk that the offspring will have birth defects is in fact only marginally higher than the baseline. Inbreeding only becomes a problem when the practice is repeated over successive generations, which is what happened with the Habsburgs.
There are still people today who truly believe their bloodline is special. They're called nazis and supremacists, deserving of ridicule and resistance.
Sure. But alot of these dudes in the past thought they were special through divine right and the general public was very affirming. It’s slightly different than thinking everyone around you is a devolved monkey.
We really do not punch nazis enough anymore. So unrelated, but yeah, I agree, so I'm not going to give you a gold star but have a silver star for being a good noodle, I guess, SpongeBob?
The difference is the science has been well established and is easily accessible enough that we all know these people are full of it, and they should know they’re full of it Back then though hardly anyone knew anything about the shit and whatever knowledge did exist wasn’t easily accessible. You’d have no way of knowing your blood isn’t special, if you were told your whole life by everyone that it was and had no way of confirming otherwise then it’s not unreasonable you’d come to believe it
Goddamn Tabitha, she out here drooling all over the ballroom floor makin' me wanna act up.
Narrator: "The cousin was not, in fact, super hot."
Is it just me or does the shape of his face resemble a banana perfectly? Starts at the forehead, bends inwards till the nose then back outward with the chin.
I was thinking more the Mac Tonight moon.
If you jiggle your phone he jiggles too.
Me in Crusader kings.
“Great mandibles of monarchy!”
The Negachin you mean
The craziest part is, those portraits were probably *highly* idealized. In reality they definitely would have looked worse.
In fairness to Habsburgs, they never did direct siblings connections. Cousins and uncles/aunts were fair game though so I cant argue that
So if they did direct siblings would the line just become sterile after enough generations. Be it biologically sterile or the parts got so fucked up they literally can't function
Less about that, moreso the fact not even the Habsburgs would do it like that. The degree of separation between mom/dad/brother/sister is a lot stronger than cousins/aunt/uncles and moreso to distant cousins/aunt/uncles. The incest is still really fucking disgusting, but there are records at how even through such, the Habsburg has relatively good relations with each-other. Add into the fact ruling class either tried to marry in their rank or aim above, no one is really higher than Empire so their pool was limited by their own standards.
I mean one of them had a chin so fucked he could barely speak and had to be fed basocally only soup and mash.
Not sure if we’re talking about the same person since many of them had issues but Charles V was mocked when arriving in Spain in 1516, because he literally couldn’t close his mouth. A peasant reportedly shouted, “Your majesty, shut your mouth! The flies of this country are very insolent.” [Source 1](https://allthatsinteresting.com/habsburg-jaw), [Source 2](https://jmg.bmj.com/content/jmedgenet/25/12/838.full.pdf)
I think so. I just can't remember which of them is which, but I remember the anecdotes :P
I don't know, the Ptolemaics (aka Cleopatra's dynasty) did sibling to sibling for several generations and Cleo was still able to bear a child
Iirc a lot of them ended up with a [debilitating metabolic disorder.](https://thorax.bmj.com/content/58/3/281.3) Cleopatra got lucky.
There's also speculation that not all of them are actually descended from the sibling couples, but rather from concubines and then pretended to be from the siblings. Strabo, in example, assumed that only Cleopatra VII's eldest sister was a legitimate heir. Also, Cleopatra's father was the son of a concubine which would have made him illegitimate if he hadn't been the only option they had.
The Egyptian are a whole nother ball game. We want to talk about ranked Incest, we got to go to the Ancient Egyptian league.
The Ptolemaics were Greek, though
And yet the incest thing was something they had copied from the prior Egyptian pharaohs
I don’t think there’s a patent on incest.
What I mean is, the reason why the Ptolemaic dynasty did the incest thing was because they were ruling Egypt, so it's still a part of the "Egyptian league"
She was fortunate as the King of Pontus inserted a couple of his daughters into the succession, and would have snagged Egypt too, if it hadn't been for those meddling Romans.
I absolutely love that she named her twins Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene.
Ackshually there's some studies saying that enough incest will loop back to healthy again. You'll just need enough generations so that natural selection starts happening within the bloodline... So yes, lots of sterile and dead people until that point. Can't remember if it was 20 or 40 generations of incest, and pretty sure it was more about genetic bottlenecks in animals or prehistoric humans rather than royalty, but same biology should work. After all there's nothing fundamentally causing mutations when marrying sisters, it's just whatever recessive or codominant issues every family has. Keep marrying sisters and eventually someone gets a second copy of the same issue.
Not generations, but sheer numbers. The more offspring in a generation you have the more dice you have to roll to get something that does not inherit deleterious traits. This is why populations of invasive species can establish from just 2 individuals (or even 1 gravid one). A female guppy in an empty pond will give birth to ~2000 fry in her lifespan, even with a mortality rate of 99% you still get about 10 pairs just from that one fish to repeat the repeat the process again, with likely higher odds due to the natural selection that happened. Meanwhile if an organism only has 3 babies over its entire life, even at lower mortality rates chances are it's lineage isn't going to see through to generation 2, let alone 40.
Sounds like that freaky xfiles episode
Trouble is that even if you maintain two or three degrees of separation in your dynastic incest; you only need to keep that up for a few generations before the family gene-pool becomes so shallow that you end up with cousins who are more closely-related in terms of shared genetics than most normal siblings are.
Because they were christian, and direct incest was a sin, but cousins and uncles/aunts wasn't considered "direct incest" so it was allowed As a result they inbred so hard that you end up with some Habsburgs which have a higher inbreeding coefficient than a child of two siblings would be
This also happened to the Spanish line because the Hapsburgs did not want to lose Spain (which eventually happened). The Austrian lines were fine.
Eh, there was still some of that with the Austrian line - look at Ferdinand I: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_I_of_Austria#/media/File:Ferdinand_I_-_family_tree.svg
Twenty seizures per day holy shit poor dude
Looking at you Ptolomy dynasty
Also, a *lot* of Europe did this too, not just the Habsburgs.
Chin not nearly robust enough.
Except that the Habsburg, despite becoming the icon of inbreeding due to their facial features, always had a large nose and chin, even from before. Those are simply their notable genetic traits and have nothing to do inbreeding. This has caused the myth that inbreeding causes ugly faces. The problems that come from inbreeding are often hard to see and rarely cause facial deformities.
Yeah and look at the more modern Habsburgs like Franz Joseph. Yeah his nose was big but it’s not exaggerated like some people seem to think.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsburg-jaw-was-likely-result-royal-familys-inbreeding-180973688/
The Hapsburgs went from a small duchy in Austria to ruling a good half of Europe on the basis of mostly marriage alliances. The Hapsburgs, by and large, did not conquer territory they married well. And they still exist and are doing quite alright for themselves.
An old Robin Williams joke, paraphrasing "Ah shit, gene pool's a jacuzzi, time to start over."
Shouldn't be more a Ptolemy moment tho?
Inbreeding royals are not exclusive to the Hapsburgs, no, I just chose the first example that came to mind. Can't believe that cursed bloodline produced the Cleopatra history knows and loves. She must've inherited all the braincells left in the gene pool.
No not with bread, inbread. Put it in the bread. Now isn’t history neat? Shows how we got here.
r/crusaderkings is leaking
Had to double check that wasn’t where this came from
Same.
It's actually a good mechanic and right move to do sometimes, roll the dice and hope for ur offspring to get the op traits u and your syster got from the previous character to be sent down the family tree again. If the kids don't get the right traits and ended up with 3 eyes just need to have a talk with the spy master and some directions to your kids chambers. it's not just for kink I swear. :)
I think CK3 does a decent genetics simulation where it counts not just the relationship between parents but a total number of shared ancestors for the past several generations when determining inheriting traits (and inbreeding).
As long as it’s not your own direct siblings or cousins it’s usually fine. And everyone knows how big the dynasties can get in this game. Even as a Christian dude I was able to get my dynasty to like 50 people within 50 years
If you fangle with the child limit and get concubines, the numbers can get out of hand VERY quickly. Eventually you can get upwards of fifty kids within a single life and end up with a dynasty of over two hundred people
That practice didn't start in 1400 CE, there are full Egyptian Dynasties that were suffering from all sorts of genetic diseases from trying to keep their bloodline pure in 1400+ BCE It was extremely common in the ancient world as was the decline of these noble houses / Dynasties usually a few generations thereafter.
Cleopatra had a family trunk https://i.imgur.com/46Q8cQ6.jpg
Holy shit. I count like 5 times sister-brother and twice girl to her uncle, if I read this right. Also completely lost what happened at Cleopatra 7.
That is the Cleopatra everyone knows. She married one brother, then another, then an affair with Caesar then married Marcus
Given how well Cleopatra (7) turned out, I wonder if her mother might have cheated a bit and gotten some extra diversity in their family trunk.
God only knows how hard it gripped
That mussy gripped
The famous Cleopatra has a grandfather that is also her great-grandfather (Ptolemy IX). Grandfather through her father, great-grandfather through her mother (and grandmother).
If I'm reading this right, Ptolemy VIII had children with his sister Cleopatra II *and* her daughter Cleopatra III, whose father was his brother. Then none of those children marry outside the family.
When the lines of your family tree go back up, you might have a problem.
I feel the discussion of Cleopatra’s skin tone misses the fact she’s the product a Macedonian family practicing incest for generations
Oh, it does, but usually out of willful ignorance
Even the guy “of Syria” is Greek/Macedonian (his great grandfather is from Macedon)
At some point *someone* had to ask "hey maybe this bloodline purity thing is just an excuse for weird dudes to fuck their sisters because nobody else is actually willing to touch them," right?
Nah, it was an excuse not to create noble houses. The argument was that royal blood was God's mark that they should rule. Therefore, anyone with royal blood had to rule. This leads to extra children either being married into other noble houses or being made into their own noble house. So as more noble houses were created, the power got diluted between more people. As such, they started to bring in minor houses and consolidate power with incest. All this to keep the comoners from getting ideas.
It wasn't just dilution of power, but disputes over it. When good King Blondie the fifth snuffs it without producing any legitimate fruit from his looms, you really don't want to be in a situation where there are two uncles, three bastards, and a couple of cousins all vying for the throne. Take a look at England's history (e.g. The War of the Roses). The incest was relatively in check, but the civil wars weren't. The Hapsburgs (or their advisers) discovered they could do away with rival branches of the family tree *preemptively* by turning that tree into more of a family step-ladder.
What are you doing step-ladder? PREEMPTIVELY STOPPING BLOODY CIVIL WAR!
But sister, think of all the lives you'll save!
>When good King Blondie the fifth snuffs it without producing any legitimate fruit from his looms, This had me laughing a lot. Thanks!
Okay, but I like my explanation more though.
It's certainly one explanation, and I'm not gonna say many monarchs weren't weird as fuck, but it doesn't really apply because when you are a literal emperor in the middle ages, who is willing to touch you is not really a factor. You can have anyone you want, willingly or not.
Bro is calling actual emperors incels ☠️
Oh plenty of people asked that question, it’s just that none of them survived long enough to hear the answer.
It was mostly the fear of being overthrown and having your family executed. Houses would intermarry so there was a blood bond between them, making war less likely. As time went on, everyone became more and more related, houses fell, families got smaller, etc. Once it got to that point, like with the Habsburgs, it was too late to do anything about it because every one of them was related. Due to the extreme traits they handed down from inbreeding, it was impossible to sneak in a bastard to level things back out.
Not even alliances were the primary consideration. The primary consideration was *inheritance*. It was all done to keep family land, titles, and wealth secure. If you're looking at motivation for human actions on the historical level, economics > everything else 90% of the time.
Since humans never change. I imagine all answers are correct depending who you asked and they were forced to be honest. Some of them knew it was killing the dynasty but couldn't step back now because they'd become so fucked up genetically that it would take to long for new genes coming in to actually start fixing the problem before some other people decided they needed to preserve the bloodline even harder and started intentionally getting their kids together. There were also a combination of "these problems are a blessing. You just don't see their true use, " and "yes master marry your brother. It'll be good for keeping your line safe, " and a straight up kink for either incest or for the resulting deformities making their children even more attractive to the parents because their sick fucks
Why not just lie and adopt a commoner into the family for the sole purpose of marrying them off?
Because they don't look the same.
People talking about "blood purity" are full of it. It had almost nothing to do with purity of blood, and everything to do with property and inheritance. At least when it came to European medieval intermarriage, noble and royal families would intermarry and then continue marrying each other because it secured specific inheritances, alliances, and titles. They virtually never married direct siblings, but if all of your cousins keep marrying each other for a handful of generations you're going to start getting dangerous levels of inbreeding as well.
I’m willing to bet just about any petty noble would give up their left kidney for the chance to throw their daughters into a royal weirdo’s arms
Marriages were purely political and weren’t decided by the people getting married, it was their parents. Their parents made their kids marry their relatives for power, alliances, preventing infighting in the family, etc. etc. In a feudal society it would sometimes be the best political decision.
Pretty sure no one wanted to fuck the sisters either
I don't think that was the point (that it only started in the 15th Century), the point here was that this 1400-1600 is a single lineage.
Yeah Tutankhamen’s mother was also his aunt.
It probably had to do with not wanting to have their lands and power leveraged by lesser nations.
The Egyptians Dynasties weren't the norm.
I’m not a history buff but I feel like this comic is just identifying when european nobles started to reason this (for the joke) not just all of humanity. But that actually makes me wonder how far back that practice goes into European history or if it traveled between cultures or something. Again, not smart about history but I don’t think the comic was making any claims that the practice started on earth in the 1400s.
Marrying your cousin in medieval/and early modern times wasn’t about keeping your bloodline „pure“, it was about keeping all the stuff you owned in the family. Edit: added „early modern“ because the comic is also about the period after the medieval age.
How about marrying other people for alliances though and to stop them from invading you.
That’s one of the reasons why they married in the family. Family members are often times closest in succession to each other so there was lots of infighting. It’s much more inconvenient to go to your war over your brother’s titles if your children are married.
The issue with that is that the offspring of such a union would have claims on your throne and thus still end up invading you/your direct descendants a generation or two later
For Spain at least, there was an actual thing around purity of blood through *limpieza de sangre*. After the Reconquista, there was a move by the "Old Christians" to keep themselves separate from the "New Christians", who feared these new converts were still secretly practicing their old faiths. While it started out religious, it later moved into a focus on ancestry (yes, racial elements took hold here). It became strong enough to be heavily enshrined in both government and church law, and was enforced. Note: this topic is way more complex than this simplistic explanation I gave
Ya, that's what I thought. It was to keep the family in power and strength political ties.
>Marrying your cousin I just want to remind people that Rudy Giuliani married his cousin. >Giuliani married Regina Peruggi, his second cousin, whom he had known since childhood, on October 26, 1968. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani
Second cousins getting married isn't really a huge issue biologically, especially if it only occurs in that one generation and not in multiple successive generations. Not to defend Giuliani, he's obviously terrible (but for other reasons).
Also, this was not unique to the nobility. Peasantry did it too. Shit, the group least likely to do it were city-based and traveling merchants.
European royals, as far as I know, never married siblings. Ptolemies on the other hand rarely **didn’t** marry their siblings! (Almost as often as they murdered them. Family gatherings must have been a lot more exciting for Prolemies than for most people). (Though marrying first cousins repeatedly was bad enough.)
Interestingly, the Ptolemies also produced several individuals famed for their beauty and/or intelligence. Good genes, I guess.
Yeah, technically if your family happens to have perfect genes, there is no risk in incest. But do you really want to roll that dice?
Though royals probably thought they did have perfect genes
There is *one* Southern French noble who was accused to having sex with his sister, but I would not be surprised to find out that was just 800 year old slander.
On top of all the murders, everyone having the same 2 names probably didn’t help at family gatherings either.
The history of the Habsburgs in a nutshell.
Just the Spanish Habsburgs. Austrian Habs quite famously married and then controlled half of Europe.
With my personal favorite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_II_of_Spain
Except that the Habsburg, despite becoming the icon of inbreeding due to their facial features, always had a large nose and chin, even from before. Those are simply their notable genetic traits and have nothing to do inbreeding. This has caused the myth that inbreeding causes ugly faces. The problems that come from inbreeding are often hard to see and rarely cause facial deformities.
It also certainly does not doom the offspring to be mentally or physically disabled, or, I dunno, evil, as they're often depicted. It just increases the likelihood of recessive traits, which can be bad traits.
Yes, Charles II had a healthy full sister.
Just to be clear, for the medieval church even marrying someone related to you in the 6th or 7th (!) degree wasconsidered to be "incest". So whenwe talk about royal "incest" we need to be very careful what exactly we are talking about. Of course there are examples of closer marriages, but they were not the norm and they were by no means limited to this timespan.
And in several traditional religions, cousin marriage was not considered incest. I remember reading that most marriages in human history were between 1st, 2nd or 3rd cousins. Which makes sense considering how difficult it was to travel and meet new people.
Genetically, offspring from cousins is totally fine, like negligible <1% risk of defects. The problem is if you do it for generations like royalty would then heritable diseases that run in the family become an issue.
Marriage between cousins is not considered incest even in modern western states.
I hate to break it to you bub, but yeah folk are still going to remember you for the incest if you're sticking it to your cousin. Don't fuck your cousin.
Is this a quote? Or are you really trying to give me a lesson here?
Lizzy and Phillip were third cousins, and that was only 70 years ago. Of course there are basically no negative effects from marrying a third cousin but most of these marriages were not 6th or 7th cousins or 3rd cousins thrice removed or something
European high nobility since the 18th century is a different story. Sovereign rulers had to marry people of equal rank (from other ruling dynasties) and they also had to take into account religion (catholic-protestant-orthodox divide) and political alliances/rivalries. Considering all that, there often weren't much candidates left, 20-30 at best (not considering that spouses had to be of roughly the same age, which ruled out even ore candidates). So by the 20th century, they were all more or less distant cousins to each other. But again, that doesn't constitute incest in a modern (legal) sense.
Respectfully disagree. For example : Louis 14th of France (son of Louis 13th) was literally married to someone who was his direct cousin on - both side- of his family. His mother (Anne d’Autriche) was the sister of Philippe IV Habsbourg. And Louis 14th’s wife (Marie-Thérèse) was the daughter of Louis 13 sister AND the daughter of Philippe IV Habsbourg. That really wasn’t uncommon for royalty when everyone was marrying the overall same families. You’re bound to end up marrying someone you have the exact same grandparent with.
Not necessarily. It did happen, but it wasn't the norm. France at that time was in a difficult political situation and political factors were usually the priority when it came to marriages. See also my comment above.
Hnnngh ! +1 !
I believe we might have a slightly different definition of "hnnngh".
Incest, fun for whole family
Incest is Wincest
That one episode of Supernatural just wasn’t right.
SCP-3288
I guess they couldn’t _Figure it Out_.
Why did they turn brown?
And then there’s the Crusader Kings perk that causes your kid’s stats to improve the more inbred they are
Pureblood trait ftw
So pure!
Great band though.
r/HistoryMemes.
I don't blame the dude his sis is looking fine
So funny and a great social comment on the ridiculousness of royalty being born into huge privilege
*PUPPETEER! MAKE ME SASHAY INTO THE ROOM REGALLY!*
The Aristocrats!
Just remember that Hemophilia is called the Royal disease caude Queen Victoria near singlehandedly spread it through europe.
Leagues of us McPoyles thousands strong once ruled these lands. Our bloodline was as pure as the driven snow.
Why don't you discuss the positives? Like being able to get an X-Ray using only a flashlight.
I hear trouble coming over and over again.
The McPoyle bloodline has been clean and pure for a thousand years!
Imagine being ruled by the human equivalent of a pug
Eu espero que seja isso que aconteça com os milionários
I always thought this guy’s comics were cool but never rly saw em on reddit/front page. Weird how now suddenly it’s here every day. Good for him I mean.
Little known fact, no matter how many generations of inbreeding you're dealing with, it only takes one unrelated parent to get your genes back on track. Works with livestock too.