If you have ever wondered why marrying your uncle is inadvisable, the Habsburgs can enlighten you
Allen Lane; 416 pages; £30. To be published in America by Basic Books in August; $32.early hints that the union of Philip of Habsburg with Juana the Mad in 1496 might not be a happy one.
Martyn Rady’s new book is billed as “the definitive history” of the clan. Not, it must be said, a hotly contested title. Once the names of Europe’s most powerful families—the Bourbons and Battenbergs and Garibaldis—were known across the world. Today, beyond the biscuit tin, they are largely forgotten.
The result was less a family tree, branching and widening, than a convoluted web. At one point the mortality rate of Habsburg children reached 80%, four times the average of the time. Of those who lived, many were hideously misshapen, with the infamous drooping lip and jutting Habsburg jaw. It is one of the abiding puzzles of European history that its aristocrats, so good at breeding horses, should have been so bad at breeding themselves.
Like a glacier, their rule could have a chilling effect on the lands beneath it. Voltaire famously pointed out that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire; but the Habsburgs, who presided over it for more than 300 years, often had other ideas. In the 16th century Philip II, convinced he had a divine mission to preserve Catholicism, exported the Spanish Inquisition to the New World. It did its job so effectively that even tattoos were censored.
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