Funky Jaws and Other Problems

 

Back in the day, if you were a king, or a ruler of any kind, the idea of marrying your children off to the offspring of another kingdom was a common practice. That’s how alliances were formed. If you were worried about country “A” invading you, you could marry your daughter off to the prince of country “A”. A show of kinship. Attacking your in-laws was frowned upon (that was the theory, but it didn’t always work out that way in practice). Also, countries "B" and "C" might think twice about invading you. This intermixing was so commonplace in European history that no one thought twice about it. There was also the prejudice that only someone of noble blood was worthy of another with noble blood. Royal children were pawns in a royal chess game.

Take the case of Lucrezia Borgia. She was royal in some sense of the word since her father was the Pope (Alexander VI). We all know that priests and popes were not supposed to have children, but such things were winked at in certain parts of history. Alexander VI (Roderigo Borgia) had several children that we know of. The Pope was not only the head of Christianity world-wide, but also the leader of the Papal States at a time when control of those lands was anything but secure. The Pope had his daughter Lucrezia marry Giovanni Sforza a member of the powerful House of Sforza who controlled the city-state of Milan. But politics soon made this marriage less useful to the Pope, so a charge of impotence was made against Giovanni and the marriage annulled. Then she was married off to Alfonso of Aragon, Duke of Biscegle and prince of Salerno. Alfonso was murdered two years later. Then she was married off to the Duke of Ferrara. This was typical of what could be expected of a royal daughter. Her name was dragged through the mud, but it was largely due to the unpopularity of her father rather than anything she did.

One result of all this intermarrying between neighboring kingdoms was a fair amount of inbreeding. Far from the expected outcome from breeding with only the best, the offspring often exhibited congenital defects. Of course, no one knew much about genetics in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. They did know something about breeding. They knew breeding animals with similar traits would produce offspring that would be more likely to have those traits. That is how domesticated animals and cultivated plants came about. But breeding the offspring of a wise king to the offspring of a strong king did not usually result in a child who was to become a wise strong king. It was just as likely to produce a babbling idiot.

The Hapsburg jaw is but one example. The Hapsburgs were one of the most powerful families in Europe for generations. They produced a number of Holy Roman Emperors and ruled as kings in various thrones all around Europe from 1273 to 1918. Not only did they marry royalty from other European kingdoms, but they also doubled down on mingling with branches of their own family. One marked characteristic of the family was their jutting jaw. Inbreeding was common in the Hapsburg line with first cousins quite often marrying each other. One of the consequences of this inbreeding was what turned from a firm jaw, in earlier generations, to a very prominent jaw, to eventually a deformity called mandibular prognathism. The final Hapsburg king of Spain was Charles II. All eight of Charles great-grandparents were descendants of the same couple. That is never a good thing. He had a lower jaw that was so big it was hard for him to eat and speak properly. That was not the only problem Charles had. He had mental deficiencies and was in poor health for most of his life. He was also apparently impotent and fathered no children to succeed him on the throne. You might think that this was a good thing, but the lack of an heir led to the War of the Spanish Succession which raged for twelve years.

Hemophilia was common in the royal lines of Europe. Queen Victoria had one son, three grandsons, and six great-grandsons with hemophilia. The most famous of these was probably Alexis, son of Czar Nicholas and Alexandria of Russia, whose ailment caused his mother to give power to Rasputin, whom she believed could heal her son. The rise of Rasputin was one of the many factors that led to the weakening of the Czar’s power and the strengthening of the calls for revolution.

Genetics is all about odds. You get one set of genes from your mother and one set of genes from your father. Those genes are the blueprint to construct your body. If you get a defective gene from your father, that bad trait can be masked by the corresponding good gene from your mother, or vice versa. Because of this, the defective trait may not show up in the child. But that child could be a carrier of that gene that then gets passed on to the next generation. As long as there is good diversity in the gene pool, the odds are in favor of not exhibiting defects. But when related people start marrying, the odds of getting matching defective genes gets better. So, marrying your second cousin is not good. Marrying your first cousin is a very bad idea. Marrying your sibling is not only a terrible idea, but is outlawed in most places.

We would hope that in the age of modern science, royalty (and everyone else) knows better now and would not do this. But even Albert Einstein married his cousin, so intelligence is no guarantee of good gene sense.