In Vienna in March of 1673, the Holy Roman Empress lay dying in the Hofburg. She was twenty-one years old and pregnant for the seventh time in barely six years of marriage. A chest infection had settled on top of an old swelling in her neck, and on the twelfth of March, she died. A Swedish envoy named Esaias Pufendorf, who had been reporting on the imperial court for two years, sent home a cold summary of what people in Vienna were saying.

It was commonly held to be a piece of luck for the German Austrian line that God had taken this lady in the twenty-first year of her age. The dead empress was the little girl in the center of the most famous painting in the history of Spanish art. Her name was Margarita. To understand how she ended up dead in Vienna at twenty-one, the story has to begin in Madrid, with a king who had run out of sons.

In 1646, Philip IV of Spain lost his only legitimate son and heir, a teenage prince named Baltasar Carlos. Philip still had a daughter from his first marriage, the Infanta Maria Teresa, but a daughter was not what a Spanish king wanted on the throne. He needed a new wife, and he needed sons. So he married his niece, a girl named Mariana of Austria, the daughter of Philip’s own sister and the Holy Roman Emperor.

She was nearly thirty years younger than her husband, and when the marriage took place in 1649, she was fourteen years old. That kind of marriage was not a scandal at the Spanish court. It was policy. The Habsburgs ruled two great blocks of Europe through two branches of the same family, one in Madrid and one in Vienna, and for generations those branches had married each other again and again so that crowns and claims stayed inside the house.

Uncles married nieces. Cousins married cousins. Nobody in the royal correspondence treated it as a problem worth discussing. Mariana did what she had been brought to Madrid to do.

On the twelfth of July 1651, in the royal Alcázar, she gave birth to her first child. It was a girl. Over the next ten years, she gave birth to four more children, and only one of them lived to grow up. That one was named Margarita María Teresa.

She was not the son the kingdom was waiting for, and in a court obsessed with succession that mattered. Yet everything known about her early years suggests she was adored. Her father, a king in his mid-forties who had already buried an heir, wrote about her in his private letters, calling her “my joy. ” Her parents and those close to the family called her their “little angel.

” Even her maternal grandfather, the emperor Ferdinand III in Vienna, is said to have doted on her from a distance. She grew up in the queen’s apartments of the Alcázar, raised under the rigid etiquette of the Spanish court and given a good education. She survived at least one serious childhood illness. Contemporaries described her as pretty and lively, and despite her parents’ close blood relationship, she did not show the serious health problems that would mark her younger brother from birth.

But this was a loved child in a particular kind of love. In Spain, a woman could inherit the crown, which meant every royal daughter was a reserve heir. In 1651, Philip had no legitimate son at all. The only children who could inherit were two girls: Maria Teresa, who was thirteen years older, and the new baby.

That made little Margarita far more than a beloved daughter. She was a piece in the inheritance of the Spanish crown itself. Whoever married her might one day have a claim to Spain. Her parents understood that from the start.

While she was still a small child, they decided Margarita would marry a relative from the Austrian branch of the family, so that if her rights to the Spanish crown ever became real, they would pass to another Habsburg and not to a French or English rival. The joy of the family was also its insurance policy. The decision about her husband was made while she was still in the nursery. The obvious Austrian husband was a young man in Vienna named Leopold.

He was Mariana’s younger brother, which made him Margarita’s uncle. His mother had been Philip’s sister, which also made him her first cousin. He was eleven years older than she was. None of that seemed to bother anyone involved.

What happened next was not a wedding but something slower and stranger. For years, the court in Madrid kept commissioning pictures of this little girl, and some of those pictures were sent across Europe to Vienna, so that the man she was meant to marry could watch her grow up. The man painting those pictures was Diego Velázquez, the king’s court painter. His first known portrait of Margarita dates from around 1653, when she was about two, already posed in full court dress like a miniature adult.

That portrait was sent to Vienna, and it still hangs there today in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Then in 1656, when Margarita was five, Velázquez painted the picture that would make her face one of the most recognizable in the history of art. It is a huge canvas, more than three meters tall. The scene is a real room in the Alcázar, the Cuarto del Príncipe.

In the middle stands Margarita, small, pale, and blonde, in a wide court dress. Two young ladies of the queen’s household bend toward her, María Agustina Sarmiento and Isabel de Velasco, the queen’s maids of honor. In the Spanish of the court, a maid of honor was called a menina. Around her is a whole little world of palace life.

On the right stand two court dwarfs, Maribárbola and Nicolasito Pertusato, the boy teasing a great mastiff that lies patiently. Behind them the lady in waiting Marcela de Ulloa stands beside an attendant. At the back, in an open doorway, the chamberlain José Nieto is caught on the threshold. On the left, holding his brush in front of an enormous canvas whose front we never see, stands Velázquez himself.

On the back wall hangs a small mirror, and in it are two faces: King Philip and Queen Mariana. Her parents are not really in the painting at all. They are a reflection, as if standing exactly where the viewer stands. Art historians have spent centuries arguing about what the painting means.

One line of study has focused on something simpler: the royal status of the little girl in the center. The whole room is organized around her. That matters because of what this child was for. The same year Velázquez painted Las Meninas, he produced another portrait of Margarita, this time in a dress of white and silver.

It went to Vienna too. Three years later, in 1659, he painted her again, now eight years old, posed in a deep blue dress. Historians see a change between these images: the later ones show a more mature and formal child, a little girl being presented as a future empress. That portrait was made for Leopold, together with a portrait of her baby brother, and it too went to Vienna.

The purpose of the series was plain. The portraits were intended to document the development of the imperial bride. Leopold was receiving progress reports in oil paint on his niece. For royal families who might not meet their future spouses for years, portraits did real diplomatic work.

They showed health, growth, rank, and suitability. In this family, that was never something anyone could take for granted. After Margarita, Mariana kept having children. Between 1655 and 1661 she gave birth to four more, a daughter and three sons.

Only one survived to adulthood. In November 1657 she finally gave Philip the son he had been waiting for, a boy named Felipe Próspero. But the little prince was sickly for much of his short life, and in his portrait by Velázquez he looks small and delicate. Geneticists have since tried to measure what generations of close marriages did to this family.

In 2009, a team of Spanish researchers calculated an inbreeding coefficient for Margarita’s younger brother, the future King Charles II, and arrived at a figure of 0. 254, close to the level expected in the child of a brother and sister. The same researchers estimated that Mariana herself had the highest figure of any Spanish Habsburg queen they studied. Because Margarita had exactly the same parents, that calculation applies to her family background as well.

But careful: the study did not examine Margarita herself, and nothing in it proves that her later health problems came from inbreeding. What the researchers did find was a pattern across the dynasty: of thirty-four children born to Spanish royal families between 1527 and 1661, half died before the age of ten. So every portrait sent to Vienna carried a quiet message. She is still alive.

She is still growing. The bargain still holds. Velázquez died in 1660, the same year the question of whom Margarita would marry was finally settled. Margarita was not Vienna’s first choice.

The original plan had been to marry Leopold to her older half-sister Maria Teresa. But Spain was also trying to end a long war with France, and the Treaty of the Pyrenees came with a marriage attached. In 1660, Maria Teresa was married to the young King Louis XIV of France instead. As part of that deal, she renounced her claims to the Spanish throne, and Spain promised France a dowry.

It was never paid. That detail would matter enormously decades after everyone in this chapter was dead. With the older sister gone to Paris, Vienna turned to the younger one. In February 1660, Leopold formally asked Philip and Mariana for Margarita’s hand.

In April, they accepted. Margarita was eight years old. Leopold was already nineteen. So who was the man waiting on the other end of all those portraits?

Leopold had never been meant to rule. He was a youngest son, raised and educated for a career in the church. Then in 1654 his older brother, the heir to the imperial throne, died. Leopold was pulled out of his religious training and pushed into the line of succession.

In 1658, at eighteen, he was elected Holy Roman Emperor. He was pious and passionately musical, a ruler who would later compose music for his own court festivities. Historians who have worked through the family letters and diplomatic reports note that the Habsburgs, the foreign ambassadors, and the Spanish ministers all discussed this match without any sign of unease. To them it was simply the best match available.

The Holy Roman Emperor held one of the most prestigious titles in Europe, and Philip and Mariana wanted it badly. Their private correspondence with Sor María de Ágreda, a longtime confidante of the king, shows how strongly they wished for it. There was still uncertainty. Even after the engagement, rumors circulated, recorded in the diaries of a cardinal at the imperial court, that Margarita might instead marry Leopold’s younger brother, Archduke Charles Joseph.

Under that scenario, if Spain’s own heir died, the couple might end up ruling Spain together. The rumors came to nothing, but their existence shows how people thought about her. Margarita was a route to the Spanish crown, and the only question was which Habsburg would travel down it. Then in November 1661 the family suffered a double shock.

On the first of November, the frail little prince Felipe Próspero died at three years old. Five days later, on the sixth, Mariana gave birth to another son, the future Charles II. In less than a week the queen buried one heir and delivered another. The new baby was weak from the start.

That made Margarita’s position even more delicate. If this sickly boy did not survive, she could be the next ruler of Spain. In 1662, Leopold sent a new ambassador to Madrid, Count Pötting, whose main task was to bring this marriage home. On the sixth of April 1663, the engagement was officially announced.

A month later Philip wrote again to Sor María describing his happiness. Margarita was eleven. The marriage contract was signed in Madrid on the eighteenth of December 1663, concluded, according to her modern biographer, for the preservation and growth of the Catholic cause. It promised a dowry.

Like her sister’s, that dowry was never paid. But there was one huge difference between the two sisters’ contracts. Unlike Maria Teresa, Margarita was not asked to give up her rights to the Spanish throne. Her biographer calls this a political sensation across Europe.

The Spanish branch of the family now hung on one sickly little boy. Behind him stood his sister, and behind her, through marriage, stood Vienna. Then Spain stalled. Leopold kept pressing for his bride to be sent.

Madrid kept finding reasons to wait. Part of it was her age, but part of it, as historians have argued, was the obvious problem: if Charles died and Margarita was already in Vienna, Spain’s heir would be living in a foreign court. On the seventeenth of September 1665, Philip IV died. His will confirmed the marriage to Leopold, and it said something remarkable.

If young Charles died, Margarita would inherit the Spanish crown. If she and her husband were abroad, Mariana would govern for them. Charles was now king at three years old, and Mariana became regent. Her German confessor, a Jesuit named Johann Eberhard Nidhard, pushed hard for the wedding to go ahead, and the government confirmed it.

Before Margarita left, the court painter Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo painted her one more time. She is dressed in black, in mourning for her father. Scholars think the portrait was made so that Madrid would keep an image of her as she looked just before she left forever. She was fourteen.

On the twenty-fifth of April 1666, Margarita was married in the Alcázar in Madrid. The groom was not even there. This was a marriage by proxy, a common arrangement for royal brides who lived far from their husbands. Leopold’s stand-in was a Spanish nobleman, the Duke of Medinaceli.

The ceremony was attended by the widowed queen Mariana, the little king Charles, the imperial ambassador, and the nobility of the court. Margarita’s birthday was in July, so when she was legally married to her uncle, she was still fourteen. She would turn fifteen on the road, and she would be fifteen when she finally stood beside him. Three days after the ceremony, on the twenty-eighth of April, she left Madrid with her personal household.

As far as the record shows, she would never see the city again. She would never again see her mother or her little brother, the king. The journey to Vienna took seven months. The first stage took her east to the port of Denia on the Mediterranean coast, where she stayed for weeks while the fleet was prepared.

On the twelfth of July, still waiting at Denia, she turned fifteen. Four days later she boarded the Spanish royal fleet, escorted by ships from the Knights of Malta and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It was not a smooth start. The fleet made a short stop at Barcelona because Margarita was unwell, but the city still put on celebrations for her, and an account of the festivities was printed and sold that same year.

On the twentieth of August, the fleet reached Finale, a Spanish-controlled port on the coast of northern Italy, where she was received by the governor of Milan. On the first of September the procession set out overland, reaching Milan ten days later. Her official entry into the city was staged on the fifteenth, and she spent most of that month there. Then the procession moved through Venetian territory, and in early October it reached Trento in the mountains.

At every stop there were ceremonies, receptions, and festivities. She had grown up almost entirely inside the Alcázar. Now whole cities were turning out for her. But from here on, Spain started falling away.

On the eighth of October, at the town of Rovereto, the Duke of Alburquerque, who had led her Spanish escort, formally handed Margarita over to Leopold’s representatives: Prince Dietrichstein and Cardinal Harrach, the Prince-Bishop of Trent. Spain gave her up, and the emperor’s people received her. On the twentieth of October, the Austrian procession left Rovereto and began the long crossing of the Alps toward Vienna, through the Tyrol, Carinthia, and Styria, over the Semmering Pass. Autumn was turning into winter.

In late November the procession reached the small town of Schottwien, not far from Vienna. And there the emperor himself rode out to meet his bride. For six years Leopold had known Margarita as a series of paintings. He had watched her grow from a toddler into a girl in a blue dress.

The traffic in pictures had gone the other way too: Leopold had sent his own court painter, the Brussels-born Gerard du Chateau, to Madrid, and du Chateau painted Margarita there. One portrait shows her holding a small medallion bearing her future husband’s image. That was likely the closest she had come to him. Now she was fifteen, standing in front of him.

He was twenty-six. We do not have a reliable description of what was said or how either of them reacted at Schottwien. What we do have is what happened next. On the fifth of December 1666, Margarita made her formal entry into Vienna.

Sources disagree on whether the church ceremony confirming the marriage took place that same day or a week later. In early December in the imperial capital, in any case, the girl from Las Meninas was married in person to her uncle. Accounts of her entry were printed for audiences far beyond Austria. One was published that same year in Granada, in the south of Spain.

The procession was engraved in enormous detail, numbered figure by figure, so people could study who rode where. And then came the fireworks. The wedding festivities opened with a fireworks display accompanied by cannon fire. Glittering hearts surrounded the initials L and M for Leopold and Margarita.

Then three hundred rockets lit up the sky to spell out the letters A, E, I, O, U, an old Habsburg motto whose exact meaning people still debate, but whose message that night was obvious enough: this family and this marriage were meant to last. It is very easy from where we sit to find all of this deeply disturbing. A teenage girl legally married at fourteen, handed across a border like a treaty, delivered to her mother’s younger brother. Every part of that is real.

But here is the complication. When you look at what survives from the years right after the wedding, the picture that emerges is not one of misery. By most accounts, the marriage worked. And Vienna was about to throw a party that would last for almost two years.

Throughout their marriage, Margarita called Leopold “uncle,” using the German word. He called her “Gretl,” a homely German nickname for Margaret. They shared a language, and it was not German. Leopold had learned Castilian Spanish out of consideration for his future wife, and the two of them communicated in it privately.

They shared a passion for music and theater. Leopold was a composer as well as an emperor, and the court he was building around his bride was meant to be a stage. On the twenty-fourth of January 1667, it literally became one. The great courtyard of the Hofburg was turned into an arena for a horse ballet called The Contest of Air and Water, a huge choreographed performance with music, costumes, and elaborate stage machinery, intended to outshine the great festivities at Versailles.

Leopold himself took part, riding his horse Speranza. Ingenious machinery made it look as if horses and carriages were floating into the air. But the most important news of that spring was much quieter. At the end of March 1667, Margarita appeared in public to go to mass.

She was carried in a sedan chair, and she was not wearing her guardainfante, the enormous hooped frame that gave Spanish court dresses their famous width. The message was unmistakable. She was pregnant. A Spanish noblewoman, the Countess of Castellar, described the outing in a letter written on the twenty-eighth of March, and two days later Leopold himself wrote to his ambassador in Madrid describing the same appearance.

He wanted the news in Madrid. An empress’s position at court was secured once she proved she could conceive legitimate heirs. For Margarita at fifteen, this was the first real proof of her value in Vienna. In early July, another letter to Madrid reported her delight at having felt the baby move.

Then, around her sixteenth birthday on the twelfth of July 1667, Margarita wrote Leopold a note that survives today in the Habsburg family archives in Vienna. It is the most intimate document we have from her. She did not write it in her own voice. She wrote it in the voice of the unborn baby.

The note opens with the words “Lord and my father. ” The writer explains that although his father does not know him yet, he has heard the news of what is happening in Vienna, that the emperor is about to celebrate his mother’s birthday. The baby says he is envious that he cannot attend the party himself, so he asks the emperor to let Margarita take part in the choir in his name. Then comes a small, very human line.

The baby assures his father that the color of a sash his mother wore was not a sign of jealousy, but simply chosen to match the emperor’s own clothes. In Spanish court theater, blue was the color of jealousy, so even this playful little letter was smoothing over some tiny marital misunderstanding about a ribbon. The baby admits he does not yet have a courtier’s polished speech, but promises he will be born speaking like a good son. He prays that God will keep the emperor safe, as his mother and he both need.

And he signs off, roughly: “From my lodging, and your majesty’s son, who kisses your feet. ”

It is a funny, clever, flirtatious note from a sixteen-year-old wife who was clearly enjoying her pregnancy and enjoying teasing her husband. The historian who published it sees in these few lines a warm and intimate bond between uncle and niece. On the twenty-eighth of September 1667, Margarita gave birth to a son.

They named him Ferdinand Wenzel. After all the portraits, contracts, treaties, and journeys, the marriage had produced exactly what it was supposed to produce: an heir. He lived for less than four months. In January 1668, the little archduke died.

The boy who had written to his father from inside his mother, at least in her imagination, was gone. And here is what makes that little letter so affecting: it was kept. It survived the death of the son who supposedly wrote it. It survived the death of the mother who actually wrote it.

Someone in that family held on to it. Only weeks later, on the twenty-third of February 1668, a fire broke out in the new wing of the Hofburg, the part of the palace Leopold had been building. The fire was serious enough that the emperor himself had to be rescued, and the wing had to be rebuilt. For Margarita, her first fourteen months in Vienna had brought a wedding, a party, a son, a grave, and a fire.

She was sixteen. The court’s answer to grief was more spectacle, and the biggest spectacle of all was being prepared for her next birthday. The opera was called Il pomo d’oro, The Golden Apple. It had originally been planned for the wedding itself, but a production this ambitious took time.

It finally premiered in July 1668, staged across two days in the middle of the month to celebrate Margarita’s seventeenth birthday. The music was by the Italian composer Antonio Cesti, with additional music written by Leopold himself. The sets were designed by the court’s theatrical architect, Ludovico Burnacini. Leopold had a brand new opera house built on the Cortina, a stretch of the city walls near the imperial palace, that could hold up to five thousand people.

There were crowd scenes and even live elephants. Contemporaries called it the staging of the century. One modern German account puts the cost at a hundred thousand gulden and the running time at around nine hours. All of that for a seventeen-year-old girl who six months earlier had buried her first child.

It would be easy to read the opera only as a distraction from grief, and it may partly have been. But it was also politics. Spectacle like this told Europe that the Habsburgs in Vienna were rich, cultured, and permanent. And it told everyone at court where the emperor stood at the center.

Six months later she gave that court something it valued even more than opera. On the eighteenth of January 1669, Margarita gave birth to a daughter. They named her Maria Antonia, and this baby lived. For the first time, Margarita had a child who survived infancy.

In the end, that girl would be the only one of her children to grow up. By now Margarita was a wife, an empress, a mother, and a patron of the most lavish court theater in Europe. She was also, according to her modern biographer, a spirited and intelligent young woman. Diplomatic reports suggest she surprised people in Vienna with her poise.

One Spanish historian titled her study of these years with an Italian phrase: “Young in years, but old in judgment. ”

But underneath all that, a problem had been building since the day she arrived. Margarita had come to Vienna, but she had never really left Spain. She was surrounded almost entirely by Spaniards.

Her secretaries were Spanish. Her confessors were Spanish. Her doctors were Spanish. She loved Spanish music and Spanish ballet.

She barely learned German. With Leopold she spoke Spanish. At court the common language was Italian. Hers was a household within the imperial household, a little piece of Madrid sitting inside the Hofburg.

Later Austrian historians say the Spanish entourage was seen at court as aloof and arrogant. Resentment against them grew into a broader anti-Spanish mood, and that mood spread to the empress herself. To many in Vienna, the empress and her people looked like foreigners with no intention of becoming anything else. There was also the question of her health.

Her modern biographer records that Margarita had suffered since her youth from a struma, an old medical word for a goiter, a swelling of the thyroid gland in the neck. One Austrian reference work goes further and says that by the end of her life she was visibly disfigured by it. No source links that goiter to her parents’ close relationship. A thyroid swelling can have many causes, and nobody ever recorded which one applied to her.

Keep it in mind, because it will matter at the end. And then there is one more detail that changes how all those years of fireworks and operas look. According to the same modern biographer, even while Margarita was alive, Leopold kept open the option of marrying another relative, Archduchess Claudia Felicitas from the Tyrolean branch of the Habsburg family. The reason given is blunt.

Apart from one daughter, Margarita had not given him children who could survive, and an emperor without a son was a dynasty in danger. That does not mean Leopold did not love his wife. Everything else suggests he did. It does not mean there was a formal agreement or that anyone told Margarita.

It means the dynasty had a backup plan, a second bride waiting in the wings in case the first one failed. For a young woman whose whole life had been organized around being someone’s backup plan, there is a bitter symmetry in that. She had been Spain’s insurance policy as a child. Now Vienna had taken out insurance against her.

In the summer of 1669, Margarita was eighteen. She had one living daughter, a dead son, a husband who by all accounts loved her, and a court that increasingly resented her. Soon she was pregnant again. That pregnancy ended in February 1670, and what Margarita did in the days around it is the part of her story almost never told alongside the pretty little girl in Las Meninas.

On the twentieth of February 1670, she went into labor far too early. The baby was a boy. They named him Johann Leopold. He was born and died on the same day.

That was her second son lost in two years, and the birth itself was dangerous for her too. According to her modern biographer, writing in Germany’s National Biographical Dictionary, it was during this premature delivery that Margarita made a vow. If she survived, she would have the Jews expelled from the city and from the land. Another major reference work, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, tells a closely related story.

According to its entry on Leopold, Margarita saw the toleration of Jews in Vienna as the reason her firstborn son had died in 1668. The two accounts differ on the exact moment that turned her grief into a demand. They agree on the demand. To understand it, you need context.

Vienna had a Jewish community that had lived for decades in a separate quarter across an arm of the Danube, in an area called the Unterer Werd. Back in 1624, Jews had been ordered to move their homes there. By 1670 it held hundreds of families with their own houses and synagogues. They lived there because the emperors permitted it, and that permission could be withdrawn.

Leopold had actually confirmed Jewish protections earlier in his reign, ordering in 1660, 1665, and even 1669 that Jewish lives and property be protected. In 1670, under pressure, he withdrew the protection completely. It would be too simple to say that Margarita alone caused what happened next. Several forces pushed in the same direction.

The city of Vienna asked for the Jews to be expelled. Students had been rioting against the Jewish community. A powerful churchman, Bishop Leopold Karl von Kollonitsch, agitated against them. Various misfortunes in the city were unjustly blamed on Jews, and Leopold himself, raised for a career in the church, held deeply ultra-Catholic views.

The Encyclopaedia Judaica also says the pope intervened against the expulsion. It went ahead anyway. In 2020, the Archdiocese of Vienna marked the 350th anniversary of these events. In its statement, it listed the causes behind the emperor’s decision: student riots, the agitation of clergy and of Bishop Kollonitsch, misfortunes unjustly blamed on Jews, and the anti-Jewish attitude of Leopold’s wife, Margarita Theresa.

She was not the only reason, but she is named again and again by historians and by the church itself as one of the reasons. The decree was harsh and simple. Every Jew in Vienna had to leave, with the deadline set for the twenty-sixth of July 1670. Families who had lived in the quarter for generations had to sell or abandon whatever they could not take with them.

Leopold, according to that encyclopedia, swore an oath never to let them back. The great synagogue was torn down, and on its site a Catholic church was built and dedicated to St. Leopold, the emperor’s own patron saint. The district itself was renamed.

The Unterer Werd became the Leopoldstadt, Leopold’s town. It still carries that name today, as Vienna’s second district. Think about who we are talking about. The girl at the center of Las Meninas, the one her father called his joy, the empress who wrote a playful birthday note to her husband in the voice of their unborn baby, was eighteen years old in 1670.

She had lost two sons. She was a devout Catholic raised in Spain, the kingdom whose rulers had expelled its own Jews in 1492. And by the account of her own biographer, she turned her grief and her fear into a vow that cost hundreds of families their homes. Both of those things are true at the same time.

She was a teenager who had been married off as a child, who kept losing babies, and who lived in a court that resented her. And she was also, by the weight of the evidence, one of the people who pushed for a mass expulsion of innocent people from their city. Her own suffering does not cancel out theirs. The expulsion does not erase what happened to her.

There is a coda, and it shows how quickly the oath bent when money was involved. Within a few years, wealthy Jewish financiers were allowed back to serve the court. Samuel Oppenheimer was readmitted in 1676 and went on to help finance Leopold’s wars. As for the emperor’s sworn oath never to readmit Jews, the Encyclopaedia Judaica notes that theologians were found to solve that problem for him.

The ordinary families of the old quarter did not get the same treatment. They had to rebuild their lives somewhere else, and their names almost never appear in the story of the girl from the painting. For Margarita herself, the vow brought nothing that she had prayed for. There was no healthy son.

The expulsion did not change her luck in childbirth, her health, or her standing at court. If anything, the next two years would make all three worse. To see why her pregnancies mattered so much, you have to look back to Madrid. Her little brother, King Charles II, was now nine years old, and their mother Mariana was ruling Spain as regent in his name.

He had been weak since birth, and his health was a constant worry. If he died without children, the Spanish crown would not simply vanish. According to her father’s will, and to the marriage contract that had never asked her to give up her rights, it would pass to Margarita, and through her to her children. Every pregnancy in Vienna was being watched far beyond Vienna.

News and rumors about the imperial pregnancies crossed back and forth between the courts of Spain, France, and Austria. Louis XIV in Paris was married to Margarita’s older sister and had his own interest in the Spanish inheritance. Every baby Margarita carried was potentially a future king or queen of Spain. That is an enormous amount of pressure to place on a young woman’s body, and her body was not cooperating.

She was repeating a pattern she had seen before she could understand it. A scholarly journal that studies this court has described her mother Mariana’s first twelve years of marriage in Madrid as an unbroken chain of conceptions, miscarriages, and care for sickly children. Now the daughter was living through the same thing in a foreign city, at the same age her mother had been. Meanwhile the court around her was changing in a way that would shape how she was remembered.

In 1671, a new diplomat arrived in Vienna, Esaias Pufendorf, sent by the king of Sweden. He would stay until 1674, writing detailed reports home about Leopold, his court, and his politics. He was the older brother of the famous legal philosopher Samuel Pufendorf, and in Vienna he was an outsider, a Protestant diplomat at a fiercely Catholic court writing for a foreign king who wanted to know how things really stood. He is the one who would later write the sentence quoted at the very start of this story.

What did Margarita do in those years? She did what devout Habsburg women were expected to do, and she did it in a very Spanish way. In 1672, she introduced into Vienna the veneration of a Spanish saint, Peter of Alcántara, a Franciscan reformer who had been declared a saint only three years earlier. At the Franciscan church in Vienna, she founded a chapel in his honor with an altarpiece by the painter Mattheus Mayr.

In that painting she appears herself, together with Leopold and their daughter Maria Antonia. It is a family portrait placed inside a religious one, and the saint at its heart was imported from home, in a city where her Spanish household was already resented. That was not exactly a gesture of blending in. In February 1672, Margarita gave birth again.

On the ninth of February she had another daughter, named Maria Anna. For two weeks the imperial family had two little girls. On the twenty-third of February, the baby died. Stop and count, because the numbers are the story.

Margarita had arrived in Vienna in December 1666. By early 1672, a little over five years later, she had given birth to four children: Ferdinand Wenzel, Maria Antonia, Johann Leopold, and Maria Anna. She had also suffered two miscarriages, though their dates are not recorded in the sources we have. Counting those, she had been pregnant six times since her wedding.

Of the four children born alive, only one survived. The children she lost had lived less than four months, a single day, and two weeks. Margarita was still only twenty years old, and this was happening while her health was getting worse. The old goiter in her neck, according to the Austrian reference work, was making her visibly weaker and was disfiguring her.

Now comes the ugliest part of court life in these years. According to later Austrian historians, the hostility toward Margarita’s Spanish household had spread so far that courtiers no longer hid their feelings. They openly expressed the hope that the sickly empress would die soon, so that Leopold could marry again. One reference work names the bride they had in mind: Claudia Felicitas of the Tyrol, the same archduchess Leopold had quietly kept in reserve.

The claim rests on modern historians summarizing the atmosphere at court, not on a single quoted conversation we can check, but it fits what Pufendorf would later write and it fits what Leopold would later do. Think about Margarita’s position by the end of 1672. To Madrid, she was the next heir in line after a sickly little king. To Paris, she was a rival claimant to an empire.

To Vienna’s dynasty, she was the woman who had to produce a son. To many of Vienna’s courtiers, she was a foreigner who stood in the way of a better match. To her husband, as far as the evidence shows, she was his beloved Gretl. All of those things were true at once, and all of them depended entirely on what happened in her body.

Late in 1672, Margarita was pregnant again. It was her seventh known pregnancy in six years of marriage. If it produced a healthy son, everything might change. Vienna would have its heir, the whispers might fade, and the claim to Spain would pass to a living, healthy boy.

If it did not, many at court already had a replacement in mind. She was twenty-one years old when the new year began. Early in 1673, by March, she was about four months along. Then she fell ill.

According to her modern biographer, she caught bronchitis, an infection of the airways in the chest. On its own, that might have been something a young woman could survive. But Margarita was already weakened by six pregnancies in six years, and she had that old swelling in her neck, the goiter that had followed her since her youth. Her biographer’s account of the end is brief and blunt.

With the infection on top of everything else, he writes, she suffocated. We have no surviving doctor’s report to fill in the gaps. Doctors today know that a large goiter can narrow the windpipe, but whether that happened to Margarita, nobody can say from what survives. The honest version is this: a pregnant woman with a long-standing thyroid swelling caught a serious chest infection, and she could not breathe her way through it.

On the twelfth of March 1673, in the Hofburg in Vienna, Margarita died. She was twenty-one years old, four months short of her twenty-second birthday. The child she was carrying died with her. Other versions of her death exist.

Some popular accounts say she died in childbirth. Others say she died after a miscarriage. One scholar writing in passing in 2022 describes complications after her fourth delivery. But her biographer in Germany’s National Biographical Dictionary and the Imperial Crypt, where she is buried, both describe the same basic sequence: an illness during her seventh pregnancy.

That is the version with the strongest support. Some uncertainty remains, and it is only fair to say so plainly. Now remember the sentence from the beginning. Esaias Pufendorf, the Swedish envoy who had arrived in Vienna two years earlier, reported on what people were saying after her death in these words: “It was commonly held to be a piece of luck for the German Austrian line that God had taken this lady in the 21st year of her age.

”

The German Austrian line meant the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. The logic behind that cold sentence is not hard to follow. Margarita had not given the dynasty a living son. She had surrounded herself with Spaniards.

She was the reason a Spanish claim hung over Vienna. Now the emperor was free to marry again. Consider who wrote this. Pufendorf was a foreign diplomat reporting the mood at court, not the emperor’s private feelings.

He tells us what was being said in Vienna, not what was said in Leopold’s rooms. And on that, we have a very different picture. According to her biographer, Leopold suffered deeply over her death. He mourned her as his unica Margarita, his “only Margarita.

” The emperor who had watched her grow up in paintings, who had learned Spanish for her, who had staged the greatest opera of the age for her seventeenth birthday, was now a widower at thirty-two with a four-year-old daughter. Both of those things can be true. A husband can grieve sincerely, and the dynasty around him can see the same death as an opportunity. Margarita was laid to rest in the Imperial Crypt, the burial vault of the Habsburgs beneath the Capuchin church in Vienna.

She was also one of the family members whose heart and inner organs were buried separately from the body, in keeping with an old Habsburg custom that divided a royal corpse between three different sacred places in the city. Then the dynasty moved on, and it moved quickly. About four months after her death, Leopold announced his decision to remarry. The bride was Claudia Felicitas of the Tyrol, the same Habsburg relative who had been kept in reserve while Margarita was still alive.

That October, Leopold married her. Margarita had been dead for barely seven months. Royal widowers in this period often remarried quickly as a matter of duty, because without a son the dynasty itself was in danger, but it does show how little space there was in this world for her death to be anything other than a problem to be solved. There is one more question that needs a careful answer.

Did inbreeding actually kill her? That claim gets made a lot. Geneticists have calculated very high inbreeding levels in her family and have linked inbreeding in the Spanish Habsburg dynasty to unusually high child mortality across generations. It is reasonable to wonder whether that background affected her children.

But no study has examined Margarita herself, and nothing in the sources proves that inbreeding caused her goiter, her miscarriages, or her death. What the sources do show is enough: six pregnancies in six years beginning at fifteen, four children born, three dead in infancy, a thyroid swelling, a chest infection while pregnant again. That is a documented path to an early grave without inventing anything. Her death did not just end a marriage.

It moved a claim. Under her father’s will and her marriage contract, Margarita had kept her rights to the Spanish throne. When she died, those rights did not die with her. According to her biographer, they passed to Leopold.

And through her, they passed to the one child she left behind, her four-year-old daughter, Maria Antonia. And that playful little note from 1667, written in the voice of an unborn son to his father, was kept. It survived the death of the son and the mother. Someone in that family held on to it.

The story should end there, with a young empress dead at twenty-one. It does not, because she left a daughter, and that daughter inherited far more than her mother’s claim. Maria Antonia grew up in Vienna as the only surviving child of Leopold’s first marriage. Through her mother she carried a claim to the Spanish throne, which made her one of the most valuable brides in Europe.

In 1685, at sixteen, she was married to Max Emanuel, the Elector of Bavaria, one of the most powerful princes in the empire. On paper it was a brilliant political match. It was not a fortunate one for her. Her first son was born in May 1689 and died two days later.

Another child, born in November 1690, died immediately after birth. Then in 1692 her husband was made governor of the Spanish Netherlands and went to Brussels. The pregnant Maria Antonia did not follow him. She went home to her father in Vienna instead.

There in the Hofburg, on the twenty-eighth of October 1692, she gave birth to a son. They named him Joseph Ferdinand. He survived. His mother did not.

On the twenty-fourth of December 1692, about two months after the birth, Maria Antonia died in the Hofburg. It was Christmas Eve. She was twenty-three. She was buried in the Imperial Crypt like her mother.

Pause on that for a moment, because the pattern is hard to miss. Mariana was married to her uncle at fourteen. Her daughter Margarita was married to her uncle at fourteen by proxy and fifteen in person, and died in the Hofburg at twenty-one while pregnant. Margarita’s daughter Maria Antonia died in the same palace at twenty-three, weeks after giving birth.

Three generations of women, each one a link in a chain of inheritance, and the chain kept wearing them out. But the inheritance itself was still alive in the baby. Little Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria now carried Margarita’s claim to Spain. In Madrid, her brother King Charles II still had no children from either of his two marriages.

As Charles’s health failed, the boy from Bavaria became one of the leading candidates for his throne, and he was named the designated heir to the Spanish monarchy. On the sixth of February 1699, in Brussels, Joseph Ferdinand died. He was six years old. With him went the last chance that Margarita’s line would ever wear the Spanish crown.

Charles II died on the first of November 1700. In his will he named as his successor Philip of Bourbon, a French prince. And Philip was the grandson of Louis XIV and of Maria Theresa, Margarita’s older half-sister, the sister who had renounced her rights to Spain. Leopold refused to accept it.

He claimed Spain for his own family, pointing to his marriage with Margarita and the rights she had never given up. He pressed that claim for himself and for his sons from his third marriage. Margarita’s rights were now being used on behalf of another woman’s children. The result was the War of the Spanish Succession, which tore across Europe from 1701 to 1714.

When it was over, the Bourbon prince kept the throne as Philip V. His family still reigns in Spain today. Here is the final irony of the two sisters. The one who signed her rights away founded the next dynasty of Spain.

The one who kept her rights, the girl at the center of Las Meninas, left no line to carry them. And that brings us back to the painting. When Charles II died, the royal officials made a careful inventory of everything in the palace. The record compiled between 1701 and 1703 describes Las Meninas as a portrait of “the lady empress infanta of Spain with her ladies and servants and a dwarf, painted by Diego Velázquez who portrayed himself painting.

” They valued it at ten thousand doubloons. That entry knew exactly who she was: the empress, the infanta, who had left Madrid at fourteen and died in Vienna at twenty-one. Then the Bourbons took over. In 1747, after Philip V’s death, his collection in the new royal palace was inventoried again.

This time the same painting was recorded as a portrait of “Maria Teresa, Infanta of Spain, Queen of France, shown by Velázquez with the ladies who accompanied her. ” They had given the little girl at the center of the painting her sister’s name. And not just any sister: the inventory identified the girl as the grandmother of the late king, the woman whose renunciation had not stopped her grandson from taking Spain. Whether it was a simple mistake or something more convenient, the record does not say.

A quarter of a century later, in 1772, under King Charles III, the inventory repeated the same error: Maria Teresa, Queen of France. By the early nineteenth century, palace records simply called it “the family of Philip IV. ” Eventually the painting moved into the new Prado Museum. In the museum’s inventory of 1857, the description correctly named the girl at the center as the Infanta Margarita, but the title had changed.

It was now described as “the picture called Las Meninas,” named not for her, but for the maids of honor bending toward her. Today the Prado identifies her properly, and crowds stand in front of that canvas every day. Most of them know her face. Far fewer know her name.

Fewer still know that she married her uncle, that she buried three of her children, that she is tied to the expulsion of Vienna’s Jews, or that the court she lived in called her death a piece of luck. Her childhood portraits are still in Vienna, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. They arrived in that city long before she did, sent so that a young emperor could watch his niece grow up. They are still there.

She stayed only six years.