The devil named her. In 1698, in a convent high in the mountains of Asturias, a handful of friars knelt before the Blessed Sacrament with a possessed nun held between them, and a question was put to whatever was speaking through her. They wanted to know whether the king of Spain had been bewitched. The answer came back: yes.

They kept going. How was it done, and by whom? The answer, written down and sent to Madrid, was that a cup of chocolate had been handed to the king on the 3rd of April 1675, when he was fourteen years old. Dissolved into that chocolate was the brain of an executed criminal, to take away his reason; the dead man’s intestines, to take away his health; and his kidneys, to spoil the king’s seed so that he could never father a child.

The person who had arranged it all, the devil said, was the king’s own mother. She wanted to stay in power. By the time that accusation was being copied out in Asturias, the woman it named had been dead for two years. She had died in a palace in Madrid with a tumor on her chest that her doctors compared to the head of a newborn baby.

Half a century before that, she had come into Spain as a fourteen-year-old girl who shrieked with laughter at the king’s dwarfs and was reproved for it by the mistress of the robes before she even reached the capital. Somewhere between the girl on the road up from Valencia and the dead widow accused of poisoning her son’s chocolate lies a whole life. She was born on Christmas Eve 1634, in Wiener Neustadt, a little south of Vienna, the second child of Ferdinand III and his wife Maria Anna of Spain. Her father would be elected Holy Roman Emperor three years later.

Her mother was a Spanish infanta, a daughter of Philip III of Spain. And here is the fact that governed everything after it: that mother was the full sister of the man then sitting on the Spanish throne, Philip IV. The baby born that Christmas Eve was Philip’s niece. Her own parents were first cousins.

Both halves of her family had been marrying each other for over a century, and nobody in Vienna or Madrid saw a problem with it. Keeping the blood inside the family was the whole idea. The family had two branches, one ruling in Vienna and one in Madrid, and for generations they had traded daughters back and forth. A Spanish princess would go north, an Austrian archduchess would come south, and the children of those marriages would marry each other’s children.

Of the marriages contracted by the Spanish Habsburg kings over roughly two centuries, nearly everyone involved relatives at the level of third cousins or closer, and two were between an uncle and his niece. Mariana’s would be the second. The first had been Philip II marrying his niece Anna of Austria in 1570. The pope at the time hesitated over the dispensation and is supposed to have said the church had already seen the unhappy consequences of such marriages.

He granted it anyway. Geneticists have gone through this family tree in more detail than the Habsburgs ever bothered to. A study published in Spain in 2009 built a pedigree of more than three thousand people across sixteen generations and put a number on each king. The number is called an inbreeding coefficient.

In plain terms, it measures the odds that a person got the same faulty copy of a gene from both parents because both parents inherited it from the same ancestor. For the first Habsburg king of Spain, it came out around two and a half percent. For Mariana’s son, the last one, it came out just over twenty-five percent. A child born to a brother and sister carries a coefficient of twenty-five percent.

Same for a child born to a father and his own daughter. Charles II, born of an uncle and a niece who were themselves the products of generation after generation of cousin marriage, carried the same genetic load as if his parents had been siblings. Mariana herself had the highest coefficient of any Habsburg queen in the study, about fifteen percent, more than double the average for the women who married into that family. On the day she was born, by the numbers, she was already one of the most inbred people in Europe.

The family paid for it in dead children. Across the period the study covered, only about half the babies born into the Spanish Habsburg line lived to see a first birthday. Out in the villages beyond the palace walls, among peasants with no physicians and no clean linen, roughly four in five infants got through that first year. The royal children had wet nurses and doctors and rooms hung with relics, and they died at double the rate of farm children.

The researchers reckoned that inbreeding at the level of first cousins on its own cut survival to age ten by something close to eighteen percent. Mariana would bury three of her five. For the family she was born into, that was about average. The jaw, too, had been recognized in portraits for generations without anyone quite knowing what they were looking at.

In the Habsburgs, the lower jaw grew out past the upper one generation on generation until in the later kings the mouth would not properly shut. A second study in 2019 went through the portraits and scored the jaw of each sitter against how inbred they were. The more concentrated the blood, the further the chin pushed forward. Mariana had a mild version.

Her son would have the worst version anyone had ever painted. None of that was visible in the nursery at Wiener Neustadt. Her early years at the Vienna court seemed the usual thing for an archduchess: prayers, Spanish tutors, a household of her own. She had two brothers who lived, Ferdinand and Leopold.

The younger one, Leopold, would later marry Mariana’s own daughter. Her mother died in May of 1646, when Mariana was eleven, at thirty-nine, pregnant for the sixth time. She had been unwell through the pregnancy, and at Linz, with the baby still months from term, she collapsed and died. The physicians then did what physicians did to a dead royal mother: they cut her open on the bed to get the child out, in the hope that it could be baptized before it followed her.

The baby, a girl, came out alive, was christened Maria, and lived for a few hours. Mother and daughter were buried together. Mariana was old enough to understand all of it, and old enough to understand that she was expected one day to take her turn on the same bed. In that same year, the girl was formally promised to her first cousin in Madrid, Balthasar Charles, the prince of Asturias.

He was sixteen, the only legitimate son Philip IV had, heir to Spain and Naples and Sicily and the Netherlands and the whole of the Americas, and by every account a good-looking, energetic boy who lived for hunting. Velázquez painted him on a pony at full gallop with his hair blown back. Marrying him would have made Mariana queen of Spain in the ordinary way, in due course, as a grown woman beside a husband close to her own age. That October, the prince went with his father to Zaragoza for the Cortes of Aragon.

Part of the visit involved a public ceremony marking two years since his mother’s death. He got through it, went back to his rooms that evening, and fell ill in the night. By morning, the doctors had their diagnosis: smallpox. Seventeenth-century smallpox started with a fever and a backache so violent that patients believed their spine was splitting.

Then came the rash, beginning as small red spots in the mouth and throat, spreading to the face and working down the arms and chest over two or three days. The spots filled with clear fluid, then with pus, and hardened into raised, dense pustules that felt like pebbles set under the skin. In a bad case they ran together until the face was one continuous scab. The pustules inside the throat turned swallowing into torture.

The eyes could crust shut. In the hemorrhagic form, the patient bled under the skin and from the nose and gums, and those patients died almost without exception inside a week. Balthasar Charles lasted about that long. He died at nine in the evening on the 9th of October 1646, aged sixteen.

His body was carried to the Escorial and put down in the crypt among his grandfathers. His father was suddenly a widower of forty-one with no son at all. Philip had gone to Aragon with the boy and was in Zaragoza when it happened. He wrote to his nun within days, and the letter is one of the few places where you see the man rather than the king.

He had lost, he said, the only son God had given him, the one on whom all his hopes had rested, and he had lost him in the middle of a war with the Portuguese and the Catalans and the French, so that the punishment felt like a judgment. He asked her to tell him plainly whether God was angry with him. He did not go back to Madrid for weeks. The prince’s rooms were shut up.

The pony and the hunting dogs were given away. And somewhere in those weeks, before he had left Zaragoza, the king had already decided what to do about the girl in Vienna. The widower part had happened two years earlier. Philip’s first wife, Elizabeth of France, had been worn down by pregnancy after pregnancy, and the last one, a miscarriage in the autumn of 1644, finished her.

On her deathbed she would not let Balthasar Charles or her daughter come near her. Her words, as they were passed down, were that Spain had plenty of queens to spare, but princes and princesses were rare, and she would not risk infecting the two that remained. The prince kept away from his dying mother, and two years later he was in the crypt beside her, which left the king with a problem and a solution sitting right next to each other. The Austrian alliance had been built around the marriage of his son to his niece.

The son was dead. The niece was alive, eleven years old, and already promised to Madrid. Rather than lose the match, Philip took it for himself. The girl who had been engaged to his boy would now marry the father.

Nobody at either court appears to have found this remarkable. The only concession to her age was a delay: the wedding would wait until she was fourteen. Philip IV had been king since 1621, when he was fifteen, and by the late 1640s he had been on the throne for close to thirty years. People called him the Planet King, after the sun which sat at the center of everything.

He had built a court that produced some of the finest painting and theater Europe has ever seen. Velázquez was his man. Calderón wrote for his stage. He hunted, he collected, and he went through more books than most kings of his time.

But Velázquez, who knew him better than almost anyone, once put his finger on the flaw: the king mistrusted himself. And so he deferred—to his ministers, to his favorites, and later to a nun in a convent on the border of Aragon. He also could not keep his hands to himself. The usual count for Philip’s illegitimate children runs to about thirty, and some contemporaries said more.

Most he never acknowledged. One he did. In 1629, an actress named María Calderón, known on the Madrid stage as La Calderona, gave birth to the king’s son. The baby was taken from her, and she was put into a convent more or less straight from the childbed, where she stayed for the rest of her life.

The boy was raised away from court, and in 1642, when his father needed him, he was formally recognized and given a household and a title: Juan José de Austria. He becomes the other half of Mariana’s life—a bastard prince with real military talent, a real following, and a lifelong grievance about being kept out of the room where decisions were made. He was five years older than the girl who would become his stepmother. From about 1643 until the year they both died, Philip carried on a correspondence with Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, the prioress of a small Franciscan convent in Soria.

She was already famous. She was said to have appeared, without ever leaving her cell, to native people in what is now New Mexico and Texas, preaching to them in a language they understood, and the friars out there reported meeting Indians who described a lady in blue who had visited them. The king went to see her in person once, on his way to the war in Aragon, and after that the letters started. He wrote on one half of the sheet; she answered on the other half.

The sheet went back and forth across Spain by courier. Depending on which edition you look at, there are somewhere between three hundred and six hundred of these letters over twenty-two years. He confessed his sins to her. He told her about the defeats.

He asked her to pray that God would stop punishing Spain for his adulteries. And he clearly believed that the loss of Portugal and the revolt in Catalonia and the deaths of his children were the wages of his own bedroom. This is the man Mariana was being sent to: forty-four years old, guilt-ridden, exhausted, surrounded by the paintings of his own dead son, writing to a nun about his sins by candlelight. She left Vienna on the 13th of November 1648, a few weeks short of her fourteenth birthday, in a train of coaches with her elder brother Ferdinand, the king of Hungary, riding beside her to hand her over.

Before she left, there had been a proxy wedding in Vienna, with her brother standing in for the groom, so on paper she was already queen of Spain when the coaches rolled out of the city. The journey took the better part of a year: over the Alps to Trent, where the Spanish delegation took charge of her; down through the Italian cities, each one insisting on days of banquets and speeches; to the coast; then by galley along the Mediterranean to Spain. She did not step onto Spanish soil until the 4th of September 1649, at Denia on the coast of Valencia, ten months after leaving home. The Spanish household waiting for her ran to 160 nobles.

The people who saw her at Denia and on the road inland left descriptions, and they all agree on one thing: she was a lively girl, red cheeks and dark eyes, full of energy, carrying what one writer called an insatiable ambition to enjoy life and make the most of it. She was fourteen. She had just spent ten months being cheered through Italy, and she was on her way to be a queen. Then came the dwarves.

At one of the stops on the road after dinner, some of the king’s dwarves and buffoons were brought in to entertain her. They did their act, and the new queen of Spain screamed with laughter at it. Afterwards, the mistress of the robes, the countess of Medellín, took her aside and reproached her. A queen of Spain did not laugh out loud at buffoons.

A queen of Spain, the countess went on, did not walk in public either, or show her feet, or do a great many other things, and she began to explain the rules. Mariana, by the same account, made light of all this prudery. She was fourteen. She had no idea yet that the countess was describing the rest of her life.

The wedding party reached Navalcarnero, a village about fifteen miles outside Madrid, on the 6th of October 1649. The king was waiting. The next day, the 7th, they were married there in the parish church by the Archbishop of Toledo. She was fourteen years and nine months old.

He was forty-four. He had been married to his first wife for twenty-nine years, which was more than twice the bride’s age. Philip chose Navalcarnero on purpose: when a royal wedding was celebrated inside a town, that town was granted exemption from certain taxes, and the king did not want to give that away to a big city. So a village of a few hundred people got the wedding of the century and the tax break with it, and Madrid got nothing.

Some accounts have the couple spending their wedding night at the Escorial. If that is right—and it may well be—then the fourteen-year-old bride was bedded by her uncle in a building that was half palace and half monastery, whose foundations held a crypt full of embalmed Habsburgs, and where the boy she had been engaged to three years earlier was lying in his coffin a few floors below. A month later, she made her formal entry into Madrid under triumphal arches, and the city gave her a show of bullfights and fireworks, and then closed its doors behind her. The king wrote to Soria about her that autumn.

He was, he said, content with the queen. He found her agreeable and well disposed, and he had married her, he wanted the nun to understand, for the good of the monarchy and the succession rather than for any pleasure of his own—the thing a guilty man of forty-four told a nun about his fourteen-year-old bride. The nun wrote back with advice about the marriage bed. She had opinions about how often a king should visit his wife and about the state of mind he should bring to it, and Philip took them.

The correspondence for the next ten years is in part a running report from the king to a Franciscan prioress on the progress of his efforts to get his niece pregnant, because that is what the Spanish court did to its queens. What her days were actually like explains a good deal of what happened to her over the next fifteen years. The laughing girl on the road turned into the woman in the black habit, and the building where it happened was the Alcázar of Madrid, an old Moorish fortress that had been built over and added to for five hundred years, standing on the site where the royal palace stands now. It was dark, cold in winter and airless in summer, so cramped and gloomy that the king’s minister Olivares had built the Buen Retiro on the other side of town as a pleasure palace to escape it, with gardens and a lake.

Even so, the court spent most of its time in the fortress. The queen’s apartments were upstairs, looking over the courtyards. She did not leave them without an escort of ladies and guards. She did not, as the countess had warned her, walk in the streets of her own capital.

She rode in a closed coach or was carried in a chair. Nobody touched her, since touching the queen was forbidden to anyone below a certain rank. And the whole household was organized around making sure that she never had to do anything for herself and never got the chance to do anything she wanted. The daily ceremony was the thing foreign visitors always wrote home about.

Every meal was a ritual. Every dish carried by a specific official, tasted by another, handed to the queen by a third, with everyone kneeling at the right moment. The meals took hours, and the food arrived cold. A queen ate alone or with the king in silence, watched by a room full of people who were not allowed to sit.

Her dressing was a ceremony. Her going to bed was a ceremony. The ladies who attended her slept on pallets in her room. The rules of precedence were so detailed that a queen could go a week without being addressed by anyone except through the proper intermediary, and the king himself was subject to it.

Philip was famous for never changing his expression in public. Foreign ambassadors said he moved like a statue that had been taught to walk. And it stank. That is not a figure of speech.

The Alcázar had no plumbing worth the name, a household of a thousand people and stables and kitchens built into the same block, and the smell of the place is mentioned by nearly every foreigner who wrote about it. Madrid itself was worse. The city had no sewers, and the accepted method of disposing of a night’s waste was to open the window after dark, shout a warning, and throw it into the street, where it lay until the rain or the pigs dealt with it. The stench came up over the palace walls in summer.

Mariana’s rooms, with their tapestries and their kneeling ladies, sat on top of that, and the queen who was not allowed to walk in the street breathed the street every night through the shutters. The physicians blamed the air for half the illnesses in the family. They may have had a point. Into that came the dwarfs and jesters.

It is one of the stranger facts of this court that the same etiquette which forbade a queen to laugh also employed a staff of people whose entire job was to be laughed at. Velázquez painted them by the dozen: men and women of restricted growth, or with visible disabilities, or simply people the court had decided were fools, kept in the royal household and given a license to say things nobody else could. They were fed and clothed and sometimes loved, and they were also the palace’s toys. Two of them stand at the edge of the most famous painting in Spain, beside Mariana’s daughter.

So the girl who had shrieked at the buffoons learned quite quickly to stop. What she turned to instead was religion. The queen’s confessor, an Austrian Jesuit who had come with her from Vienna, saw her every day. She heard several masses.

She collected relics. She began the long process of becoming what the court needed her to be. And what the court needed her to be above everything else was pregnant with a son. Philip, to give him his due, tried.

He was a man who had spent his whole life in that etiquette and who knew what it did to people. In the first years he took his young wife out of it as often as the rules allowed. He took her to the Pardo, the hunting lodge in the oak woods north of the city, where she could ride. He took her to the theater at the Buen Retiro, the Coliseo, the finest stage in Europe, where the machinery could sink a ship or fly a god down from the ceiling.

Calderón wrote the plays, and she sat beside him in the royal box, and by the accounts of the people who watched her, enjoyed it more than he did. He gave her jewels she had no occasion to wear. And he kept on in his letters to the nun, confessing what he called his weakness, since the mistresses had not stopped with the wedding, and the city knew it before the queen did. Whatever she felt about that, she left no record of it.

Queens of Spain did not. She managed it faster than anyone had a right to expect from a fifteen-year-old. Within about six months of the wedding, she was pregnant. On the 12th of July 1651, in the Alcázar, she gave birth to a girl, Margaret Teresa—Margarita to the Spanish—a healthy, pretty child with fair hair and her mother’s coloring.

The whole country breathed out. A girl was not what the king needed, but a living child was proof that the queen could produce one. Margarita is the child everyone knows, even if they do not know her name: the little girl at the center of Las Meninas, five years old, in a white dress that stands out sideways on its hoops, being offered a cup of water by a kneeling lady while the dwarfs stand to one side and the painter watches from behind his canvas. She was betrothed at the age of eight to her mother’s brother Leopold, the emperor in Vienna, who was both her uncle and her first cousin.

At fifteen, she was sent north to marry him. They seemed fond of each other. She called him uncle. He called her Grethel, a pet name, and he loved her with the special enthusiasm of a man who had been sent a bride with exactly the right blood.

She was pregnant almost immediately, and by the following spring she was too weak to walk and was being carried around the Hofburg in a litter. That set the pattern of her whole married life: six pregnancies in six years, four babies born alive and two miscarried, and of the four, three died in infancy. One after another: a boy at a year old, another boy on the day he was born, a girl who lasted two weeks. Only one daughter, Maria Antonia, lived to grow up.

Each pregnancy left Margarita weaker than the last. In the winter of 1673, four months into her seventh, she caught a severe chest infection, bronchitis with a high fever, and she spent eight days drowning slowly in her own lungs while the Vienna doctors bled her. She died at the Hofburg on the 12th of March 1673, twenty-one years old. Her mother was in Madrid, seven hundred miles away, and heard about it by courier weeks later.

Leopold, within months, was looking for another wife. Back in Madrid and the fifties: after Margarita, there was a long gap, four years. Nobody knows exactly how many pregnancies Mariana lost in that time, since miscarriages were not always recorded, but the letters from the king to Sor María are full of anxiety about it and full of prayers. Then, in December of 1655, she gave birth to a second daughter, Christina Maria Ambrosia de la Concepción.

Born on the 7th, she died on the 21st, fifteen days old. The records do not say what killed her, which usually means it was the ordinary thing: an infant who failed to thrive, could not feed, turned gray, and stopped. The child was taken down to the Escorial and put into the crypt for infants, and the king wrote to his nun about the will of God. By this point, the pressure on Mariana was open.

Philip was past fifty. He had no son. His only surviving legitimate child was a girl. And the succession to the largest empire in the world was going to pass, if nothing changed, either to the Austrian cousins or to the French, since his elder daughter from his first marriage was about to be married to Louis XIV.

The court astrologers were consulted. The relics were brought out. And the king, for his part, took to fasting. In the run-up to Mariana’s next confinement, on the vigil of one of the feasts of the Virgin, he ate nothing but eggs for a full day, in the belief that this would produce a boy.

The astrologers had already told him that a son was coming who would live. He wanted to help. Mariana gave birth to that son on the 28th of November 1657, at half past eleven in the morning: Philip Prospero. The name was a prayer.

Madrid went insane with relief—bonfires and bullfights for days—and the king wrote that God had finally forgiven him. The queen, meanwhile, was in serious trouble. Within a day or two of the birth, she developed childbed fever, the infection of the womb that killed more mothers than anything else in that century, with the high temperature and the foul discharge and the racing pulse. For a while, it looked as though the queen would die and leave the new prince motherless.

She was twenty-two. She pulled through. Nobody wrote down how. Given the medicine of the day, it was probably in spite of the doctors rather than because of them.

Philip Prospero was never well. He had convulsions from infancy, violent epileptic seizures that nobody could explain or stop, and the whole apparatus of the court was turned toward keeping him alive. Velázquez painted what that looked like. The boy is about two.

He is standing in a pink dress with silver trim, one hand on the back of a chair because at two he still needed something to hold. His face is pale and puffy, his eyes enormous. Hanging from his sash, from his shoulders, pinned to his clothes wherever there was room, are amulets: a bell to scare away the evil eye, a jet hand, a little amber ball thought to keep off infection, small bags of relics, charms against the falling sickness. He is wearing them the way another child might wear ribbons.

The painter, who had watched this family lose child after child, knew exactly what he was looking at. Thirteen months after Philip Prospero, in December of 1658, Mariana had another boy, Ferdinand Thomas. Two sons now. For about ten months, the king had a spare.

Then, on the 22nd of October 1659, the younger boy died, not yet a year old, of the usual unrecorded infant thing—another small coffin to the Escorial. Mariana was twenty-four and had now delivered four children and buried two of them. In the middle of all this, the household lost its other daughter—the king’s daughter. Philip had a surviving child from his first marriage, the infanta María Teresa, born in 1638, four years younger than her stepmother.

The two of them had lived under one roof for a decade, a queen of twenty-four and a princess of twenty-one, both raised in that etiquette, both painted by Velázquez. There is almost nothing in the record about what they made of each other. In 1660, María Teresa was married to Louis XIV. The handover took place on an island in the river at the French border, with the two courts facing each other across a hall built for the purpose—Spain in black, France in color.

And Velázquez, who had organized the Spanish side of the ceremony down to the tapestries, went home to Madrid afterwards and died of a fever within weeks. He was sixty-one. Mariana had lost her painter and her stepdaughter in the same summer. María Teresa went to Versailles, produced six children of whom one lived, was ignored by her husband in favor of a procession of mistresses, and died in 1683.

Her marriage contract had renounced all claim to the Spanish throne. That renunciation had a price attached: a dowry of 500,000 gold crowns, which Spain never paid. Louis XIV would spend the next forty years using the unpaid dowry as his lawyer’s excuse for why the empire of Mariana’s son really belonged to France. The next two years were about keeping Philip Prospero breathing.

He was fed, watched, prayed over, carried to shrines, dosed with the powders and syrups of the day. In the autumn of 1661, with his mother heavily pregnant again, the seizures got worse. The records describe a series of convulsions over some days, one after another: the child’s body arching and jerking, his jaw locking, foam at the mouth, his breathing stopping and restarting. On the 1st of November 1661, All Saints’ Day, one of those seizures did not end.

Philip Prospero died, three years and eleven months old. His father was fifty-six. His mother, in her final days of pregnancy, could not attend the body when it was taken down to the crypt. Five days later, she gave birth to Charles.

The palace had been hung with black for the prince. The court was in mourning dress. The bells had been tolling. The funeral procession to the Escorial had only just come back along the road.

Now the same building had to turn around and celebrate. The black cloth came down off the walls. The bells rang the other way. Philip wrote to the nun that God, who had taken one son with one hand, had given another with the other, and that he did not know whether he was supposed to weep or give thanks.

He seems to have done both. Mariana, who had delivered a child five days after burying one, was not well enough to be at either the funeral or the christening. The baby was carried to the font and shown to the court from a window, and the ladies who had dressed the dead prince for his coffin dressed the new one for his baptism. Charles was born on the 6th of November 1661 in the Alcázar.

The official gazette announced him in the way you would expect: a robust male, handsome of face, a well-proportioned head, black hair, and somewhat pudgy. That was the public version. In private, Madrid was already whispering, and so were Paris and Vienna. The whisper was about what exactly had been born.

The imperial ambassador in Madrid received a letter from Vienna within weeks that put it bluntly: people at the Austrian court did not believe Spain had a prince at all, because the child was not male but female. It is the first sign, in the very first weeks of Charles’s life, of the problem that would define him. Something about the baby’s genitals looked wrong to the people who had seen them. Louis XIV wanted his own report.

He sent an envoy, a man named Sanguin, to congratulate the family and to have a look, and Philip allowed him to see the baby dressed in his cradle. The report that went back to Versailles has survived. The prince, it said, seemed extremely weak. Both cheeks were covered in a rash like herpes.

The head was covered in scabs, and below the right ear a suppurating duct of some sort had opened—an abscess draining onto the baby’s neck. This was the heir to the Spanish Empire at a few weeks old. His mother was twenty-six. She had now produced five children in ten years, buried three, and the fifth was already leaking pus from behind his ear.

Everything she would be for the next thirty-five years—regent and mother, and the woman the devil would later name—was going to be built on keeping that child alive. Which she did. Whatever else you say about Mariana, and people have said a great deal, she kept him alive for thirty-eight years in a family where half the children did not see a first birthday. The first four years of Charles’s life were the nursery years.

He was put to the breast and stayed on the breast. He was not weaned at one, or at two, or at three. He was still being breastfed at four years old, when his father died and he became king. In those four years, he went through fourteen wet nurses.

Part of that was the ordinary churn of a royal nursery. But part of it—and the sources are specific about this—was that the child bit. The Habsburg jaw was already there, and when he clamped down on a nurse, she bled, and after a certain number of bitten nipples, a woman asked to be replaced. He did not walk.

At three, his skull had not closed. The soft spot at the top of a baby’s head, which normally fuses within the first couple of years, was still open, and his doctors were still feeling it. He could not stand unaided at three. He was fitted with braces on his legs, iron and leather, and carried about the palace by his household when the braces failed.

Depending on which account you follow, he took his first unsupported steps somewhere between four and six years old. At nine, he still walked badly and fell often. He did not talk properly until around four either. The reports from the nursery describe a child slow to do everything, kept wrapped and indoors, passed from woman to woman like a parcel that might break.

The childhood illnesses came for him one after another: measles and chickenpox at six in the same year; rubella at ten; smallpox at eleven, the disease that had killed his half-brother Balthasar Charles twenty-six years before. He survived it scarred, when it might easily have finished him. He had chronic bronchial infections, constant trouble with his teeth, which came in crooked in a jaw that did not meet, abscessed, and had to be pulled. He had diarrhea on and off for his entire life, and the doctors of his childhood blamed it correctly on the jaw.

He could not chew. The lower teeth were so far in front of the upper ones that they never met. So food went down half crushed, and the boy who was greedy, and who was fed constantly by people terrified he would waste away, swallowed his meals whole. The result was a permanent stomach complaint that the doctors treated with purges, which produced more diarrhea, which they treated with more purges.

From about the age of eight, he started passing blood in his urine, in bouts that came with fever and that never entirely stopped. He drooled. His tongue was too large for his mouth, so his speech was thick and hard to follow, and when he ate, the saliva ran down his chin and had to be wiped by an attendant standing beside him for the purpose. The other side of this exists, too, and Mariana’s whole political life depended on it.

The image of a drooling idiot on the throne comes mostly from later writers, many of them French, who had reasons to paint it that way. The record from his own lifetime is more mixed. He rode and hunted enthusiastically for most of his life. He was given tutors from the age of six, a serious jurist from Salamanca among them, and lessons in mathematics and music from twelve.

Diplomats who met him as an adult described a man who was shy and easily frightened and lacking in any confidence, but also affable and generous and perfectly capable of following a conversation. He was, in other words, a physically wrecked young man with an ordinary mind trapped inside a body that was falling apart from the day he was born. And the people who loved him—his mother, and almost nobody else—spent their lives trying to hold the body together. Holding the body together was soon her job alone, because the king was going.

Philip had been in decline for years: the family gout, kidney trouble, a chronic flux of the bowels that came and went. By 1665 he was sixty years old and looked eighty. The portraits from those last years show a man whose face had sagged off the bone, the famous jaw hanging, the eyes red-rimmed and wet. His nun died in May of that year, and the letters stopped, and something in him seems to have stopped with them.

Through the summer, the flux got worse—dysentery, in effect, with the cramps and the bloody stool and the fever, in a man too weak to fight it. In September, the doctors gave up. The body of San Isidro, the patron saint of Madrid, an incorrupt corpse that had lain in a glass case in a church across town for five hundred years, was carried through the streets into the Alcázar and set down in the king’s bedchamber, so that the dying man could look at it. That was the custom.

When a Spanish king was past medicine, they brought him a dead farmer to pray to. Philip died on the 17th of September 1665 at nine in the morning. Among the last things he is recorded as saying was the hope that his son would be luckier than he had been. He had good reason to hope it: he was leaving the boy an empire at war with Portugal, bankrupt, losing ground to France, ruled by a child of three years and ten months who could not yet stand up on his own.

The surgeons opened him on the day he died. The organs came out and went into a separate box. The cavity was washed with wine and vinegar and packed with aromatic herbs and salt, and the whole thing sewn up, dressed for burial, and laid in a metal-lined coffin with a glass panel over the face. Then it was set out in the great hall of the Alcázar under a canopy with candles.

The court filed past, and the people of Madrid were let in behind them, and the corpse of Philip IV lay on display in the September heat for three days while the city looked at it. On the fourth day, the coffin went out along the road to the Escorial in a procession that took most of the night, torches the whole way, and the monks carried it down into the round marble chamber under the high altar—the pantheon Philip himself had finished eleven years earlier, with twenty-six niches in the walls for twenty-six kings and queens—and slid him into his. Mariana did not go. Queens did not follow coffins.

She stayed in the Alcázar with the boy, and the palace was hung in black, and it stayed that way, and so did she. The boy had to be proclaimed. A few days after the funeral, the councils and the grandees came to the Alcázar to kiss the hand of their new king. The new king was three years and ten months old, could not stand, and was still being nursed.

He was dressed in black and carried in, set on a chair with a cushion. One by one, the greatest men in Spain—dukes whose families went back to the Reconquista—knelt on the floor in front of a toddler who could not yet say his own name and put their lips to his hand, while his mother stood behind the chair in her widow’s wimple. Somebody had to hold his arm out for him. That was the day Mariana decided that the king of Spain could no longer be seen at the breast.

The fourteenth and last wet nurse was sent away, and the child who had been fed on nothing but milk for four years was put onto solid food that he could not chew. The will had been drawn up carefully. Philip named Mariana regent with full royal authority until Charles reached fourteen. She was to govern with the advice of a committee, a junta de gobierno of six men: the president of Castile, the archbishop of Toledo, the inquisitor general, and a few others.

And the will pointedly left one name off that committee: Juan José de Austria. The king’s eldest son, the general, the only bastard he had ever recognized, was given no place in the government of his little brother. Philip had trusted him with armies, but not with the boy. Whether that was wisdom or the last of his jealousies is hard to say, but it guaranteed a fight, and the fight would be with Mariana.

She was thirty years old. She had been married for sixteen years to a man who had been fifty when she was twenty. And now he was in the crypt with three of her children. From that September until the day she died, she wore the dress of a widow.

In Spain, that meant something very particular: the toca de viuda, the widow’s wimple, a white cloth bound close around the face and under the chin so that only the face showed, and over it a black robe cut like a nun’s, with a black veil down the back and nothing on her hands. She looked, for the remaining thirty-one years of her life, exactly like a Franciscan nun. If you put the Velázquez portrait of the teenage queen beside the later ones—the girl in the vast hooped skirt with the red bows and the pearls, the plumes stuck in her hair, and then the woman in the black habit with the folded hands—you are looking at the same face in the two halves of a life, and the border between them is the morning of the 17th of September 1665. She had the empire now, and she did not have long to learn how to hold it.

Spain in 1665 had declared bankruptcy four times in the previous twenty years. The population of Castile had fallen by something like a quarter over the century, from war and plague. The silver from the Americas was arriving in smaller and smaller quantities and was spent before it landed. The army in Portugal was losing.

The army in Flanders was unpaid. And across the Pyrenees, Louis XIV, married to Mariana’s stepdaughter, was already going through his lawyers’ arguments for why the Spanish Netherlands legally belonged to him. Mariana had been trained to pray and to produce heirs. Nobody had trained her to run this.

So she did what her husband had done, and what every Spanish monarch for a century had done: she found a man to run it for her. Her choice was the obvious one, and it went badly for reasons that had as much to do with Spain as with the man. The man was her confessor, Juan Everardo Nithard, born Johann Eberhard Nithard, an Austrian Jesuit who had been appointed by her father back in Vienna to teach the young archduchess and her brother their catechism, and who had come to Spain with her in 1649 as her confessor. He had been hearing her sins every day for sixteen years.

He was pious, capable, hardworking, and almost universally loathed. He was a foreigner. His grandparents had been Lutheran. He was a Jesuit, and half the Spanish church hated the Jesuits.

And he was, in the eyes of the grandees who thought they should be running the country, a nobody: a priest with a German accent who had got where he was by listening to a lonely woman’s confession. Mariana wanted him on the governing committee, but the will forbade foreigners. So she had him naturalized as a Castilian. Then, since the inquisitor general had a seat on the committee by right, she wrote to the pope to have Nithard released from his Jesuit vows and made him inquisitor general of Spain.

That was 1666. Within a year, the queen’s Austrian confessor was head of the Inquisition and, in everything but name, prime minister. Then the war went wrong. In May of 1667, Louis XIV’s armies marched into the Spanish Netherlands, in what the French called a War of Devolution, on the theory that the provinces had passed to Louis’s wife on her father’s death.

The Spanish garrisons were hollow. Town after town surrendered. The following winter, the French took Franche-Comté in about three weeks. Mariana’s government could do nothing.

In the spring of 1668, it signed the two treaties that Nithard is remembered for: one with Portugal at Lisbon, finally admitting that the Portuguese had won their independence after twenty-eight years of war Spain could no longer afford; one with France at Aix-la-Chapelle, which got back most of the lost towns but conceded a line of fortresses in Flanders that Spain would never recover. Both were probably the right decision. Both were a humiliation, and in Madrid the humiliation had a German face. That same year, 1668, an Aragonese captain named José Malladas was arrested in Madrid on a charge of plotting to murder Nithard.

He was taken to a prison cell and, within hours, without a public trial, he was garroted—a rope around the neck tightened from behind with a stick. The court was told the plot had been on behalf of Juan José de Austria. Whether or not that was true, and Juan José denied it, the speed of the execution horrified the city. It looked like a regent and her confessor strangling a man in the dark to protect themselves.

It turned the whispering about Nithard into something louder. Juan José, who had been posted to Flanders and then to Aragon and kept at arm’s length from the capital, started to move. Somewhere in these same years, a small piece of Mariana went to the other side of the world, and it is still there on the map. In 1668, a Jesuit called Diego Luis de Sanvitores founded a mission on a chain of islands in the western Pacific that the Spanish had been calling the Ladrones, the Islands of Thieves, since Magellan.

The queen regent had backed the mission with money and letters, and Sanvitores renamed the islands in her honor: the Marianas. Guam is one of them. The mission did not go well. Within four years, Sanvitores had baptized the infant daughter of a local chief without the father’s consent, and the chief killed him on the beach.

What followed was thirty years of war and epidemic that reduced the native population of the islands by something like ninety percent. The islands still carry her name. Hardly anyone who lives there knows whose it was. Back in Madrid, the confessor’s time was running out, and the man ending it is going to keep coming back.

Juan José de Austria was forty in 1669. He was tall, dark, with the Habsburg face only lightly stamped on him, and he carried himself like what he was: a man who had commanded armies since his early twenties. He had retaken Naples from the rebels at nineteen. He had fought in Catalonia and in Flanders, and he had lost badly to the Portuguese, and none of that mattered to Madrid, which adored him.

He was a Spaniard, a soldier, a grown man, and a son of the old king. The pamphlets that circulated in the taverns said openly what the grandees said in private: that if the child in the Alcázar died, Spain could do worse than a bastard with a sword. He knew that he was hated by the Austrian widow and her Austrian priest with a patience that had been building since his father’s will was opened. In early 1669, he came down from Aragon at the head of a few hundred armed men, gathering supporters as he went, and stopped just outside the capital.

He did not need to attack. The city was with him. The grandees were with him. Even the Council of Castile, the queen’s own government, told her that the Jesuit had to go.

Mariana held out for days, then gave in. On the 25th of February 1669, she signed the order. Two days later, Nithard climbed into a coach and left Madrid for Rome, with the crowd jeering him through the streets. He never came back.

Rome made him a cardinal. Spain used him as an ambassador. He died there in 1681, having outlived his enemy Juan José by two years, about the only satisfaction he ever got out of any of this. For Mariana, it was a public defeat and a private one.

The man who had heard her confession since she was a child had been driven out of the country by her husband’s bastard, and the whole of Madrid had cheered. She was thirty-four. She had five years of regency left before her son came of age, and she had learned something about how power worked in Spain: a regent could not rule through a priest. Her next choice was a different sort of man, and that went worse, though not straight away.

The years between the confessor and the favorite who followed him were the ones in which Mariana actually governed. Nobody was marching on Madrid, so they tend to get skipped. She worked. The portraits from this period show her sitting at a writing desk in the black habit with a paper in one hand.

And that was the pose she chose: a widow doing the paperwork of an empire. The paperwork was endless. Every decision in the Spanish system passed up through councils that met and argued and wrote a consulta, an opinion. The consultas came to the regent, and she wrote her answer in the margin, and the answer went back down—thousands of them.

She dealt with the appointment of viceroys and bishops, with the fleets to the Indies, with the pay of the garrisons in Flanders, with the price of bread in Madrid. And she did it with a boy king in the next room who could not yet write his own name. The boy was her other job. Charles was eight when Nithard left, and the regency’s greatest fear—above France, above Juan José—was that the child would die and the whole business of keeping the empire in the family would collapse.

He was kept indoors. He was kept away from crowds, since crowds carried disease. His first public appearances were carefully managed things: the king shown at a window, or carried in a chair through a church wrapped against the cold in July. And in 1672, when he was eleven, the thing they had feared arrived.

He got smallpox. The fever again, the backache, the rash in the throat, and then the face, the pustules filling and hardening. He was a small, frail eleven-year-old with a body that had never once been fully well, and the court doctors, who had watched smallpox take his half-brother at sixteen, prepared for the worst. His mother did not leave him.

The relics were brought in. The body of San Isidro again, the Virgin of Atocha again. The councils met to discuss what would happen if the king died—which meant discussing whether the Austrian cousins or the French would take Spain—and they did it in whispers while the regent sat with her son. He lived.

He came out of it scarred and thinner, and by some accounts more frightened of everything than he had been before. And his mother came out of it with the knowledge that the entire structure of her life rested on the breathing of one sick child, and that she had been within a day or two of losing all of it. Meanwhile, France came again. In 1672, Louis XIV attacked the Dutch, and within a year Spain had been dragged in on the Dutch side, since if Holland fell, the Spanish Netherlands would be next.

Mariana’s government found itself fighting a war it could not pay for against the most powerful army in Europe. The Spanish regiments in Flanders went unpaid for months at a time and mutinied. In the south, the Sicilians rose in revolt at Messina with French help. In Madrid, the treasury borrowed against silver fleets that had not yet sailed.

Mariana’s letters to her brother the emperor from these years are the letters of a woman begging for troops from a relative who had his own war with the Turks to think about—and mostly not getting them. And behind it all, in Zaragoza, Juan José sat as viceroy of Aragon, writing to the grandees, waiting for the king to turn fourteen. The different sort of man had by then been in the palace for years. His name was Fernando de Valenzuela, and he came from nowhere.

Born in Naples in 1636 to a minor Andalusian family—the sort of gentleman who had a coat of arms and no money—he had drifted to Madrid as a young man looking for a position and had found one the way such men usually did, by marrying into the household. In 1661, he married a woman named María de Ucedo, one of the queen’s chamber servants, a woman who dressed Mariana and was in her rooms at hours when nobody else was. Through his wife, Valenzuela got access. After the king died, access became something more.

He started carrying messages for the regent. Then he started carrying her opinions. Then, after Nithard’s coach had rolled out of the city, he found himself the only man in Madrid the queen entirely trusted. He was handsome—everyone agreed on that, including the people who hated him.

He was clever, quick with a compliment, fond of the theater, and he had a talent for getting things done in a court where nothing got done. He was also, in the eyes of the grandees, filth: a nobody from Naples whose wife laced the queen’s bodice, walking through the palace at night as though he owned it. What caught everyone’s attention with Valenzuela was the hours. The doors of the Alcázar were open to him at all times and by preference.

One contemporary wrote “at unusual times”; courtiers who had to wait weeks for an audience with the regent learned that this man came and went from her apartments after dark without being announced. Madrid gave him a nickname: the duende de palacio—the palace goblin, or the palace ghost, depending on how you translate it. A duende is a house spirit in Spanish folklore, the thing that moves objects in the night and is never seen in daylight. And the joke was that the queen had one.

What exactly went on behind those doors, nobody knows. And nobody knew then either. What they said is a matter of record. It was said that the widow in the nun’s habit had taken a lover thirty years younger than her dead husband and a year younger than herself.

It was said in the streets, in verses passed hand to hand, and said more carefully in the palace. The cardinal of Aragon, one of the most senior churchmen in the country and a member of the governing committee, went to Mariana in person and warned her. Even if the relationship stayed within the bounds of honesty, the cardinal said, it was contrary to sound politics and to royal decorum. That is a churchman telling a queen regent to her face that the whole court thought she was sleeping with her chambermaid’s husband.

She ignored him. The evidence does not settle whether the accusation was true. She was a woman in her late thirties who had been married at fourteen to a man of forty-four and had spent sixteen years in a bed she had not chosen. He was a charming man who made himself indispensable.

The rise, once it started, was absurd. Valenzuela was made a knight of Santiago. He was given the running of the Escorial, the royal works, the royal theaters. He was given the post of master of the horse.

In 1675, out hunting at the Escorial, the young king, who was fourteen and not a good shot, hit him by accident, and the injury became the excuse for the last step. Charles—or Charles’s mother in Charles’s name—made him a grandee of Spain, the highest rank in the nobility, a rank that let a man keep his hat on in the presence of the king. Valenzuela became the Marquis of Villasierra, and in 1676, prime minister of Spain. The old families, the Albas and the Medina Sidonias, whose ancestors had been grandees when Valenzuelas had been nobody at all, watched a man whose wife dressed the queen walk past them with his hat on his head.

A complication was running under all this, and it was the calendar. Charles turned fourteen on the 6th of November 1675. Under his father’s will, that was the day the regency ended and the king ruled in his own right. Mariana had no intention of letting that happen.

The boy was fourteen and could barely write his own name. He had a committee of grandees around him who hated her favorite, and a half-brother in Aragon who hated her. So in the weeks before the birthday, she went to work. She had the councils declare that the king’s health required a further period of regency.

She had Valenzuela removed from court for a few months to calm things down, then brought back once the danger had passed. On the birthday itself, Charles was supposed to make a speech to the Council of State, taking up his powers. Instead, on the day, he did as his mother told him and postponed it. She had bought herself two more years.

It cost her the boy. The next two years showed the price. Charles at fourteen and fifteen was a frightened, lonely child king who had been raised entirely by his mother and her creatures, and around him were people who saw an opportunity. They told him he was being kept on a leash.

They told him the goblin had his mother in his pocket. And they told him that his big brother, the general, the hero of the wars, the tall, handsome man with the famous father, was waiting outside the capital to set him free. At fifteen, the boy chose the brother. Juan José de Austria moved on Madrid on the 1st of January 1677, the second time in his life, and this time he did not stop outside it.

He had support from most of the great houses and a small army behind him. Inside the palace, the plan had already been made. On the night of the 14th of January, the fifteen-year-old king, who had never in his life gone anywhere without a household of dozens, was taken out of the Alcázar in secret by a handful of courtiers and driven across town to the Buen Retiro, the pleasure palace on the other side of the city, out of his mother’s reach. From there, he issued three orders in his own name.

The first banished Valenzuela. The second summoned Juan José to court. The third instructed the Queen Mother to leave Madrid. A woman of forty-two, widowed twelve years, who had been regent of Spain since her son was three, woke up to find that the boy had been taken out of the building in the night and was now sending her letters from across town telling her to pack.

She was ordered, on the 17th of February, to withdraw to Toledo, to live in the old Alcázar there—a fortress on a hill forty miles south of Madrid that had not been used as a residence in a generation. She was given two weeks. She left the capital on the 2nd of March 1677, going first to Aranjuez while the rooms in Toledo were made habitable, and her letters from those weeks have survived. They are the letters of a woman who cannot quite believe it.

Disgust, mostly—disgust at the men around her son, at the manner of it, at being sent away like a discarded mistress by a child she had nursed through fourteen wet nurses and every disease in the pharmacopoeia—and helplessness. She had no army. She had no faction left. Her favorite was on the run, and her son was writing to her in someone else’s words.

Toledo was a demotion dressed as a residence. The Alcázar there stands on the highest point of a city built on a rock in a bend of the river, a great square fortress with a tower at each corner. Charles V had rebuilt it as a palace a century before, but no monarch had lived in it for two generations, and it had gone to damp and pigeons. Her household was cut to a fraction.

The ambassadors stopped coming. The councils stopped sending her their consultas. A woman who had spent twelve years answering the paperwork of an empire found herself with nothing to answer and no one who needed her, in a cold building on a hill forty miles from the son she had raised, with the whole of Spain celebrating her absence. She heard mass.

She wrote to Vienna. And she waited. In the capital, her son, who had been told he was now free, was being governed by his brother as completely as he had ever been governed by his mother—only without the visits. The favorite did not get far.

Valenzuela fled to the Escorial, to the monastery, and claimed sanctuary. He hid in the monks’ quarters, and the monks who had known him for years as the man in charge of the royal works there hid him. It did not save him. A party of nobles came out from Madrid under the Duke of Medina Sidonia and Antonio de Toledo, the son of the Duke of Alba, with soldiers, and they went into the monastery after him.

Sanctuary was one of the oldest protections in Christendom: a man inside a church could not be seized. These men seized him anyway, dragged him out of a building that Philip II had built as the holiest place in Spain. The Hieronymite monks fell on their knees in the cloister and cried out to heaven for justice. The prior excommunicated the whole party on the spot.

Nobody cared. Valenzuela was stripped of his grandeeship, stripped of the marquisate, stripped of his property, and shipped out of Cádiz in chains. The official destination was the Canary Islands. The actual one was the Philippines, on the far side of the world—a voyage of the better part of a year by way of Mexico.

He was held in Manila for a decade, released in 1689, and made his way back as far as Mexico City, where in 1692, according to the accounts that reached Spain, he was kicked by a horse and died of it. His wife had long since been sent to a convent. The goblin had been in the palace for about eight years. At some point in the years that followed, as the question of an heir became urgent and the doctors began to be consulted about the king’s chances of producing one, Charles was advised to sleep beside his father’s corpse.

The advice, according to a recent biographer of Mariana who has gone through the archives, came from the Queen Mother’s own physicians. The reasoning was a piece of sympathetic medicine of the sort that the age took seriously: that the virtue of the dead king, who had fathered thirty children, might pass into the living one. The coffin of Philip IV, who had been in the crypt at the Escorial for over a decade, was brought up and opened, and the young king lay down next to the body. Spanish royal corpses were embalmed, the organs removed and the cavity packed, but embalming in the 1660s was a rough business, and a body a dozen years in a stone crypt would have been dark and shrunken, the face collapsed onto the skull, the smell of it still there under the aromatics.

Charles lay beside that on his doctor’s orders, in the hope that it would help him get a child. It did not. Juan José, meanwhile, had won. He entered Madrid at the end of January 1677, took over the government, and for two and a half years ran Spain as its first minister with his brother’s entire confidence.

He was competent. He signed the peace at Nijmegen in 1678, giving Louis XIV Franche-Comté for good along with more of Flanders, and he set about the reforms everyone had been demanding for a generation. The reforms went nowhere, because the treasury was empty and the grandees who had put him in power had no intention of paying for anything. Madrid, which had cheered him in, was booing him within a year.

His great project—the one he did finish—was a wife for his brother. He negotiated a marriage with France, with a niece of Louis XIV, a seventeen-year-old girl named Marie Louise. In the summer of 1679, the contracts were signed. He never saw the bride.

In the late summer of 1679, he fell ill with a fever the doctors could not name and could not break, and he died on the 17th of September—the date his father had died fourteen years earlier, to the day. He was fifty. Madrid said poison, since Madrid always said poison, and the suspects ranged from the queen mother’s friends to the French to the grandees he had disappointed. The physicians said a putrid fever, which probably means typhus.

The body was taken to the Escorial and put in the crypt among the legitimate children, near the father who had never let him into the government. The brother was dead, and the boy went to get his mother. Within days of Juan José’s funeral, the eighteen-year-old king rode to Toledo in person, to the old fortress where she had been living for two and a half years, and he brought her back himself. On the 27th of September 1679, ten days after his brother died, Charles entered Madrid with Mariana beside him.

She was forty-four. She would never be regent again on paper, and she would never be out of the room again either. From that day until the day she died, she was the power behind her son’s chair, and everyone in Europe who wanted anything from Spain knew who to write to. The first thing she came back to was a wedding.

The French bride Juan José had arranged was already on her way, and Mariana, who had spent her whole life inside the Austrian alliance, was now going to have a daughter-in-law from Versailles. Marie Louise of Orléans was seventeen. She had been born at the Palais Royal in Paris in March of 1662, the eldest daughter of Louis XIV’s brother, and she had grown up in the most glittering court in the world, with hunting and ballet and a freedom a French princess took for granted. She had also, by the accounts of the people around her, been in love with the Dauphin, her first cousin, and had expected to marry him and become queen of France.

Instead, her uncle gave her to Spain. When she was told, she is supposed to have said she would rather have been the Dauphin’s wife, and the king answered that he could hardly have done more for his own daughter. That was that. In the summer of 1679 she was married by proxy at Fontainebleau, and in the autumn she was sent south across the Pyrenees in a train of coaches, weeping.

She had been told what she was marrying. The French ambassador in Madrid, the Marquis de Villars, had sent a description of the king of Spain back to Versailles that the whole French court had passed around. The Catholic king, Villars wrote, was so ugly as to cause fear, and he looked ill. Charles was eighteen: thin, with a long pale face, the jaw so far forward that his mouth could not close over his teeth, the lower lip hanging, the tongue visible, drool at the corners of his mouth that had to be wiped, and a way of standing that suggested he might fall.

He was also, by every report, beside himself with excitement about the girl. He had seen a portrait. He had it carried around with him. When she finally crossed the border in November, he rode out to meet her at a village near Burgos called Quintanapalla, and the two of them were married there in a hurry on the 19th of November 1679, in a ceremony that was over almost before the bride had taken off her traveling cloak.

For a few weeks, it looked as though it might go well. Her formal entry into Madrid came in January of 1680, and she made it on horseback, which no queen of Spain had done in living memory, riding under the arches along the Calle Mayor past Mariana’s palace, with the king waiting at the end of the route and the city hanging out of every window to look at the French girl. Madrid liked the look of her. Bullfights followed, and plays at the Buen Retiro, and the king, according to the ambassadors, could barely take his eyes off her.

The French reports from those first weeks are, for once, cheerful. She was seventeen, and she had decided to make the best of it. Then Madrid did to Marie Louise what it had done to Mariana thirty years earlier—only faster, and with less patience. She was French, and the court hated the French.

Her French servants were sent home within months on the orders of the Queen Mother’s party, until she had almost nobody left who spoke her language. She was put into the Alcázar and the etiquette. Madame d’Aulnoy, a French writer who was in Spain in these years and collected court gossip the way other people collected shells, tells a story that has followed Marie Louise ever since. The young queen, who loved horses, went riding in the grounds of the Buen Retiro.

Her horse bolted. She fell, and her foot caught in the stirrup, and she was dragged. The courtiers watching could not touch her—etiquette forbade any man to lay hands on the queen of Spain, and above all forbade anyone to touch her foot—and so they stood there. Two young noblemen finally ran in, stopped the horse, and got her loose.

And then, having saved the queen’s life by touching her, they fled the country to escape punishment. Madame d’Aulnoy was not above improving a story. She may well have improved this one. But nobody who knew that court found it hard to believe.

Mariana in all this had settled into a new address. After Toledo, she did not go back to her old apartments in the Alcázar. She took a palace of her own, a few hundred yards along the Calle Mayor: the Uceda Palace, a big square building that also housed several of the royal councils, so that the queen mother lived upstairs from the men who ran the country and could have any of them sent up whenever she liked. Her day was set: mass early, several of them; audiences with ambassadors, who learned quickly that the road to the king of Spain ran through his mother’s parlor; letters to Vienna, to her brother the emperor, in a correspondence that kept the Austrian party in Madrid supplied with instructions.

And every day, the king Charles walked, or was carried, across from the Alcázar to see her, and by the accounts of the diplomats he did almost nothing of importance without asking her first. The boy who had fled to the Buen Retiro in the night had come back to her entirely. He was nineteen and she was forty-five, and for the next seventeen years the two of them were, for practical purposes, one person. The year after the wedding gave the new French queen her first proper look at what she had married into.

On the 30th of June 1680, the Inquisition held an auto-da-fé in the Plaza Mayor of Madrid—the largest anyone could remember, staged in honor of the royal marriage. The king and queen watched it from a balcony of the Bakers’ Guild House on the north side of the square. The thing began at dawn and ran for fourteen hours. About 120 prisoners were marched in under guard, most of them Portuguese converts accused of secretly keeping the Jewish faith, wearing yellow penitential sacks painted with flames and devils and carrying green candles.

Before any of that, the king had to swear. An inquisitor came up to the balcony with a missal and a cross, and Charles, nineteen years old, put his hand on the book and swore before the whole square to defend the faith and support the Holy Office in everything it did that day. The crowd below roared at it. The young French queen beside him had to sit through what he had just promised.

Then the sentences were declared one by one from a platform, through the morning and into the afternoon, while the royal family sat in the heat. Effigies of the people who had escaped were carried past, along with boxes containing the dug-up bones of the ones who had died in prison, so that those could be burned too. The killing itself happened after dark, outside the city, at the burning ground beyond the Fuencarral gate, where the condemned were tied to posts on a raised platform. Those who repented at the last minute were strangled first and their bodies burned.

Those who would not were burned alive. The number put to the flames that night is usually given as about twenty. A painter named Francisco Rizi made an enormous canvas of the ceremony, with the king’s balcony in the middle and the sacks and the candles and the crowd filling the square, and it hangs in the Prado now, about the size of a wall. Marie Louise, by the French reports, was ill afterwards.

Mariana had seen it all before. The years that followed were among the worst Spain had in that whole miserable century, and the Queen Mother’s people were the ones trying to govern through them. In 1680, the treasury, unable to pay for anything, cut the value of the copper coinage by three quarters in a single decree. Every shopkeeper and laborer in Castile woke up with a purse worth a quarter of what it had been the night before.

Prices collapsed. Then trade collapsed. Then there were riots. Then the countryside stopped sending food to the cities, because nobody in the cities had money that was worth taking.

On top of that, the plague came back. It had started in the south a few years earlier, in Andalusia and Murcia, and through the early 1680s it worked its way up through the kingdom, emptying whole towns, with the dead carried out to pits at the edge of the villages on carts. The estimates for the total run to a quarter of a million people. The harvests failed in the late 1680s and the 1690s.

The cold years came, the years the climate historians call the Little Ice Age, and there was famine in Castile and famine across half of Europe. Madrid had children begging in the streets in numbers the friars could not feed. That was the country Mariana’s son nominally ruled, from a palace where the meals still took three hours and arrived cold. Next, the bedroom.

The whole point of the marriage was an heir, and the whole court was watching for one, and within a year or two it was obvious that nothing was happening. Marie Louise confided in the French ambassador, and in one of her ladies, and what she told them went straight back to Versailles in cipher. The king was eager—the king was in fact very eager, and got into bed with her most nights. The trouble was what happened once he was there.

He suffered, the ambassador reported, from premature ejaculation so severe that the act was over before it had begun, and the queen could not conceive from it. The ambassador, being a diplomat, wanted proof. He bribed a palace laundry woman to bring him the king’s underwear and the queen’s bed linen, so that he could examine the stains and report to his master on the exact state of the king of Spain’s fertility. The Royal Society in London had recently announced the discovery of spermatozoa under the microscope, and the French were curious to know whether the Spanish king had any.

What the laundry showed, if anything, did not get written down. What did get written down was that the king of Spain could not father a child, and that everyone who mattered in Europe knew it by the early 1680s. The Spanish naturally blamed the wife. She was subjected to fertility treatments—potions, purges, pessaries, relics applied to the belly, pilgrimages, the whole armory of a medicine that had no idea what it was doing.

The potions gave her, according to the French reports, severe and lasting intestinal trouble. She got fat. She had been a slim, pretty girl when she crossed the Pyrenees, and within a few years she was heavy, eating from boredom and misery, and she developed a passion for a sweet drink of lemon and cinnamon that the palace kitchen made for her by the barrel. The recipe for one batch called for thirty-two pounds of sugar.

She spent her days indoors, watched, childless, homesick, and hated, married to a man who adored her and could not give her the one thing that would have made the court leave her alone. And she began to say to the few people she still trusted that she was afraid of being poisoned. She went riding on the 11th of February 1689. Some accounts say she fell and took a blow to the stomach.

Others say she simply came back from the ride and was seized with pain. Either way, by the afternoon she had a severe pain in the belly, low down on the right side, and by the evening she was vomiting violently and had gone into convulsions. The doctors were called. Overnight, the pain spread across the whole abdomen, and the vomiting turned to a bloody flux—dysentery, in the language of the day—and she went gray and cold and could not keep down water.

By the morning of the 12th, she knew she was dying. The priests were sent for and she was given the last rites. Her confessor asked if anything was troubling her conscience, and she said she was at peace, and very glad to die. To her husband, who was at the bedside in a state nobody described, she said that many women might be with his majesty after her, but none would love him more than she had.

She died that morning, the 12th of February 1689, in the Alcázar, so quietly, her confessor wrote, that they hardly noticed her go. She was twenty-six years old. She had been in Spain nine years and three months. Madrid said poison before the body was cold.

The candidates were the usual ones: the Austrian party at court, who wanted a fertile German bride in her place; the Queen Mother herself, whose relations with her daughter-in-law had never been warm and who, according to the palace records, had barely communicated with her in months; and a more exotic suspect, Olympe Mancini, the countess of Soissons, one of Cardinal Mazarin’s nieces, who had fled France a decade earlier under suspicion in the great poisoning scandal at Louis’s court and had turned up in Madrid, where she had been seen with the young queen shortly before the ride. The story went that she had handed Marie Louise a cup of iced milk. To stop the rumors, the court did something it almost never did: it ordered an autopsy on the body of a queen. The surgeons opened her, and what they found, described in the terms of the time, is consistent with what a modern doctor would call a burst appendix and the peritonitis that follows it: an infection that spreads through the whole abdominal cavity in hours and kills in a day or two, exactly as she had died.

Her treatment, such as it was, had consisted mainly of laying slices of bread soaked in Lucena wine across her belly. The autopsy quieted nobody. Charles is said to have believed she was poisoned for the rest of his life. Her burial made the point one final time: a queen who had produced no king was not entitled to the Pantheon of Kings at the Escorial.

So she went into the Pantheon of the Infantes, the crypt for the children and the childless consorts, a few steps along the corridor from her husband’s dead brothers and sisters. Charles was destroyed by it. He was twenty-seven, and the only person who had ever loved him as a man rather than as a patient or a throne was in a box under the Escorial. For weeks he would not be dressed.

He shut himself in his rooms in the Alcázar with the shutters closed. The reports from the palace describe a man who wept at any mention of her, who kept her things around him, and who went across the Calle Mayor to his mother’s palace every day and sat with her for hours, saying nothing. Mariana was fifty-four. She had lost her husband and four of her five children and been thrown out of her own capital.

She now had a son of twenty-seven who could not stop crying, and who had to be got back into a bed with a new wife as soon as possible. And she was the only person in Spain with the authority to make him do it. So she went looking for a replacement. The replacement was chosen with a single criterion, and the criterion was breeding.

Mariana wanted a bride from a family that produced children the way orchards produce apples, and she found one in the Palatinate, in the house of Neuburg. Maria Anna of Neuburg was twenty-two, one of seventeen children, sister-in-law to Mariana’s brother the emperor, and aunt to the next two emperors after him, from a family that had not had a childless marriage in living memory and that was reliably hostile to France. She was married to Charles by proxy in August of 1689, six months after Marie Louise’s death. Mariana handled the negotiation herself, through her brother in Vienna, and she handled it fast.

The sending was a small horror of its own. Spain was at war with France, so the bride could not come overland. She was put on a squadron of Dutch and English warships in the North Sea in the dead of winter, and the ships were held in port by storms for weeks, then went out into the Atlantic in weather that had sailors lashed to the rigging. The bride, who had never seen the sea, spent the crossing in a cabin being sick.

They meant to land her in the south. The weather drove them to Ferrol, at the far northwestern corner of Spain, in March of 1690. From there she had to be brought overland through the Galician mountains in the rain, in a country with no roads to speak of, for the better part of two months, to meet her husband whose portrait she had already seen. The wedding took place in person on the 14th of May 1690, at a monastery outside Valladolid.

She was tall and fair and healthy. She came from a family that bred, and she was going to a man who could not get her pregnant and who the whole of Europe already knew could not get anyone pregnant. And everyone involved in the arrangement, including the bride, had to have understood that. She understood it.

By the accounts from her first years in Spain, Maria Anna of Neuburg was a hard and quick woman who took the measure of her husband within weeks and never afterwards pretended otherwise. One observer wrote that there was little or no pretense of affection on either side; that from the first she took charge and imposed her will on the king; and that she was determined, whatever happened to Spain, to make the best of her opportunities for her own advantage. She had fits. When she was contradicted, she went into what the courtiers called hysterical crises, screaming and collapsing until everyone around her, from her husband downward, went in mortal fear of setting one off.

She brought German servants and German relatives, and she used them to take money out of the treasury and jobs out of the hands of the Spanish. Madrid, which had hated the French queen for being French, discovered that it hated the German one more. And she faked pregnancies. The diplomatic reports record it.

Several times in the 1690s the queen announced that she was expecting; the court prepared; the bells were readied; and then the pregnancy quietly vanished. Alongside that, she pushed her husband into the fertility treatments—the potions and the exorcisms that this story started with. It has been suggested, plausibly, that she wanted the court to see the king being treated so that the blame for the empty nursery would fall on him rather than on her. If so, it worked.

Nobody blamed Maria Anna of Neuburg for being childless. They blamed her for everything else. She and Mariana loathed each other. The queen mother had chosen this woman, brought her to Spain, and installed her in the Alcázar, and within a year the two of them were running rival factions in a court that could barely afford one.

Mariana had the king’s heart. The wife had his bed, or what passed for it, and his fear. For six years the palace was divided between an old woman in a nun’s habit and a young one who screamed. And the thin, shaking man between them tried to please both and satisfied neither.

That was the state of Mariana’s household when the doctors were finally allowed to look at her chest. One more loss from the family in Vienna arrived before the chest did. Her daughter Margarita had left one living child, the girl Maria Antonia, raised at the imperial court after her mother died. By the law of the Spanish succession, that girl had the strongest claim to the throne after Charles himself: Mariana’s granddaughter, the last living piece of the child from the painting.

In 1685, she was married to the elector of Bavaria, and she began losing babies the way her mother had—two in the first years. Then, in October of 1692, in Vienna, at twenty-three, she gave birth to a son who lived, Joseph Ferdinand. Then the childbed fever took her, the same fever her grandmother had survived thirty-five years earlier, and she died on the 24th of December 1692, Mariana’s fifty-eighth birthday. The baby, Mariana’s great-grandson, was now the most likely heir to the Spanish Empire, and half the chancelleries of Europe began quietly planning around a child in a cradle in Munich.

That was the last piece of family news Mariana received with her health intact. What killed her had probably been growing for some time before anyone knew about it, and the reason nobody knew is very simple: she would not let anyone look. She had a lump in her left breast. How long she had it, nobody can say.

But by the time she admitted it, it had grown from something she could hide under a habit into something she could not. And the reason she had hidden it was modesty. She was sixty-one years old. She had dressed as a nun for thirty years, and she was not going to let a man put his hands on her chest until she had no choice.

That moment came in the last week of March 1696. She sent for the physicians, and they examined her, and on the 5th of April the senior court doctor wrote up what he had found in a formal certification for the king. It survives. The tumor in the left breast, he wrote, was of the magnitude and size of the head of a newborn child.

It had its root in the ribs, meaning it was fixed to the chest wall and could not be moved. Its surface carried five or six excrescences hard as stones. The whole mass was hard and purplish, the veins across it swollen with what he called bilious blood, and it was marked with livid spots. The pains from it, he wrote, sometimes reached the ribs and prevented her majesty from sleeping all night.

Its shape was irregular and horrible to see. He identified it, from his Galen and his Telesio, as a carcinoma. The Spanish had an older word for a cancer of the breast that had gone this far: zaratan. It meant the thing that eats.

The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons was consulted, since the patient was the king’s mother, and the physicians made a decision that anyone would probably have made in their place. They would not cut. A mastectomy in 1696 meant a woman held down on a table while a surgeon took the whole breast off with a knife and a saw, without anesthetic, and cauterized the cut with hot irons. The survival rate from the operation itself was somewhere around one in two, and with a tumor rooted into the ribs, the surgeon would have had nothing to cut it away from.

So they chose what the record calls the preservative and palliative method: medicines to attenuate and evacuate. That meant purges, bleedings, ointments, and a diet, in the hope of stopping the thing from growing any further. It did not stop. Over the next six weeks, the medicines gave her fever and made her vomit repeatedly, so that she could not keep food down and lost weight off a body that was already old.

Meanwhile, the tumor kept growing. It broke through the skin and ulcerated, as these cancers do when they are left. A breast cancer that has ulcerated is an open, weeping sore that does not heal, that bleeds and smells, and that has to be dressed several times a day by women trying not to gag, and that eats outward and downward at the same time. By May, it was, by the estimate of the people around her, the size of the head of a seven-year-old child.

It had almost certainly spread into her lungs by then. The pain would have been constant. The dressings would have needed changing through the night, and the women doing it were her own ladies, some of whom had been with her since Vienna, kneeling at the bedside of a mistress who had spent forty years refusing to let anyone see her undressed, and now had no say in it. Mariana of Austria, who had not let a doctor see her chest until March, spent April and May lying in the Uceda palace with a hole in her chest while the whole court came in to pray over her.

The relics came. They brought her the body of San Isidro, the same incorrupt farmer they had carried to her husband’s deathbed thirty-one years before, and set it in her room. They brought the image of the Virgin of Atocha, the miracle-working statue from across the city. The king came every day and sat with her.

The queen came, and according to the ambassadors, made sure everyone saw her come. Fifty thousand masses were ordered for the queen mother’s soul—an absurd number, enough to keep every priest in Castile busy for months—and the whole of Madrid understood from that alone that she was not expected to live. She held a crucifix that had belonged to Pope Pius V—the pope who had hesitated over the first Habsburg uncle-niece marriage 126 years earlier, and granted it anyway. She died holding it.

The death came on Wednesday the 16th of May 1696, at a quarter to midnight, in her bed in the Uceda Palace. One of the people who described it, a German baron at the Imperial Embassy, noted that it happened at the very moment when an eclipse of the moon became most visible over Madrid. That may be true; there is no reason to doubt he was looking at the sky. She was sixty-one years old.

She had been in Spain for forty-six years, eight months, and twelve days. At four the next morning, her will was opened, and the body was laid out in state in the palace where she had lived, in the black habit, with the hands folded on the crucifix. Madrid filed past it for three days. On Sunday the 20th of May, the coffin was taken out along the road to the Escorial with, the baron wrote, the customary pomp: the whole apparatus of a Spanish royal funeral, black-draped coaches, the guilds and the friars, the torches for thirty miles of road in May heat.

At the Escorial, the monks received her at the door as they had received her husband, her three dead children, her stepson, and her daughter-in-law, and they carried her down into the Pantheon of Kings. She had produced a king. She got the good crypt. She was put into a niche in the marble wall opposite Philip IV, who had been waiting there for her for thirty-one years, and the boy she had been engaged to before him was a few feet away.

Or rather, she was on her way to that niche, because the Escorial had a stage in between that nobody talked about in the funeral orations. The monks called it the pudridero, the rotting room: a plain chamber off the stairs down to the Pantheon, with a stone bench where the coffins of kings and queens were left, sealed for years, sometimes decades, until what was inside had finished turning to bone and dust and could be moved into the marble urns without embarrassing anyone. The embalming was never good enough to prevent it. It only slowed it.

The black-draped ceremony ended at the door of a room where the queen mother of Spain was set on a shelf to decompose, and the monks locked it and came back when they judged it was time. Every Habsburg in the story went through that room. When her son had her coffin opened for the ambassador three years later, that is where he opened it. The stories started at once.

A dove, the baron wrote, had been seen hovering over the body while it lay in state. A nun who had been paralyzed for years was touched with one of the dead queen’s nightshirts and got up and walked. And there was the matter of her face: when the doctors had opened her shirt to embalm her, the story went, the face of the corpse had suddenly reddened, as though the blood had come back into it, and the surgeons had gone down on their knees. Every royal death in that century produced tales like these from the same sort of witnesses, and you can weigh them as you please.

Her son believed them absolutely. What he did in the weeks after is on record in the dispatches. He collapsed. The king took to his bed, would not eat, and had a run of seizures so severe that the ambassadors began writing home about the succession as though it were a matter of weeks.

The Austrian party in Madrid, which had lived for thirty years on the Queen Mother’s letters to Vienna, found itself without a head overnight. The German queen and her clique moved into the space within days, so that by midsummer the men who had been Mariana’s were out, and the men who were Maria Anna’s were in. The price of a post at court, according to the French, had doubled. And the Uceda palace, where the king had gone every day of his adult life to sit with his mother, was emptied and given over to the councils entirely.

He did not cross the Calle Mayor anymore. He had nowhere on the other side to go. He proved how completely he believed them three years later. In the autumn of 1699, the Austrian ambassador, Count Harrach, was at the Escorial with the king, and Charles took him down into the Pantheon and had his mother’s coffin opened.

He wanted the ambassador to look at her. More than that, he wanted him to touch her, and he urged him to do so that he could write to the emperor in Vienna and report that the flesh of the queen mother’s face and hands was as intact as if she had died that morning. Harrach did as he was asked. What he actually saw, three years after burial in a stone crypt, in a body that had been opened and packed by seventeenth-century embalmers and had died with a rotting cancer in its chest, he was too polite to put in his dispatch.

He wrote that the king was much moved. Charles was thirty-seven. He had a year left himself, and he spent part of it opening coffins. With his mother gone, the king had nobody.

His wife frightened him. His ministers were fighting each other over who would sell Spain to which foreign court once he was dead. And his body, which his mother had held together by force of will for thirty-four years, began to come apart in earnest. The French ambassador, the Marquis d’Harcourt, wrote a description of him to Louis XIV in 1698 that is about as blunt as diplomatic correspondence gets.

The king, he wrote, was so weak that he could not be out of bed for more than an hour or two. He had to be helped into and out of his carriage. His feet were swollen, his legs were swollen, his belly and his face were swollen, and sometimes even his tongue swelled so badly that he could not speak. Fluid was collecting in his tissues—the dropsy of the old physicians, which happens when the heart or the kidneys are failing.

He had fevers that came and went. His diarrhea was permanent now, and he was passing blood. His seizures were more frequent and more violent than they had ever been in childhood, so that he would drop in the middle of an audience and be carried out jerking. He was thirty-six years old.

Alexander Stanhope, the English envoy in Madrid, was sending home reports in the same vein. And so, in 1698, they tried the devil. This is where we came in. The king’s confessor, a Dominican named Fray Juan Díaz, had heard of a convent at Congas de Onís, up in the mountains of Asturias, where several of the nuns were possessed, and where a friar named Antonio Álvarez Argüelles had a reputation as an exorcist.

Díaz wrote to him. Since the exorcist had the devil on hand, would he mind asking it whether the king of Spain had been bewitched, and if so, how and by whom? The answers came back over several months, in letters dictated by demons speaking through the mouths of screaming nuns in a cold stone convent at the top of Spain. Yes, the king was bewitched.

It had been done through a cup of chocolate, on the 3rd of April 1675, when he was fourteen. The chocolate had contained the brain of an executed man, and his intestines, and his kidneys, and the spell had been made to take away the king’s reason, and his health, and his ability to father a child. The person behind it was the queen mother, so that she could keep power. The devil, in some of the letters, also dragged in the palace goblin Valenzuela as the one who had handed over the cup.

The scenes in that convent, as the friar described them in his letters to Madrid, went on for hours at a time. The nuns were brought before the altar one after another. They howled. They spoke in men’s voices.

They threw themselves on the floor and had to be held while the exorcist put his questions, and the answers came out in shrieks and were written down by a brother with a pen. The friar was scrupulous about procedure. He asked each demon its name. He commanded it, in the name of God, to say whether the king of Spain was under a spell, and the demon said yes.

The friar asked where the spell was hidden, and was told that part of it was in the king’s own body and part of it had been buried. The search for the buried part went on for months and turned up nothing. All of this went to the king’s confessor in Madrid in sealed letters. The confessor took it to the king.

And the king, thirty-seven years old, swollen, barely able to stand, listened to a Dominican tell him that the devil in Asturias had named his mother. You can see what that accusation was. April 1675 was the spring before Charles’s fourteenth birthday—the year Mariana had bent the councils to keep him under regency, the year the goblin was at the height of his power. The nuns of Asturias, or the demons, or the friars putting words in their mouths, had picked the exact moment in Charles’s life when a court faction could most plausibly say that his mother had drugged him.

Two years after she died in agony holding a crucifix, her son was told by the church that she had fed him a dead man’s brains to keep him stupid. He believed it—or he believed enough of it to go through with the cure. The prescribed remedy was for the king to drink half a liter of holy oil on an empty stomach while the exorcisms were said over him. He did.

Repeated doses of oil into a gut that was already failing produced what you would expect, and the confessor’s own reports describe the king vomiting and purging and getting visibly worse with each treatment. Alongside the oil went the ordinary medicine of the day: the bleedings and the purges, the powdered vipers, freshly killed pigeons split open and laid warm on his head to draw out the humors, and chickens that had been fed on viper flesh so that their broth would carry the virtue of the snake. Nothing worked, since nothing could. The exorcisms went on for the better part of a year, until the inquisitor general who had authorized them, Rocaberti, died in the summer of 1699, and his successor, a creature of the queen’s German faction, had Fray Juan Díaz arrested for having bewitched the king himself.

The confessor was put on trial by the Inquisition for the crime of trying to cure the man he had been sent to save. That is where Spanish government stood in the last year of the last Habsburg. Two other things happened in 1699, and both of them mattered to the family Mariana had left behind. In February, in Brussels, her great-grandson Joseph Ferdinand, the six-year-old Bavarian boy whom the powers of Europe had more or less agreed on as the heir to Spain, caught smallpox.

He died on the 6th of February 1699, in about the time it had taken smallpox to kill Balthasar Charles fifty-three years before. Madrid said poison, as it always did, and the only difference this time was that Vienna and Versailles said it too, each about the other. With the child gone, the succession came down to a straight choice between a French grandson of Louis XIV and an Austrian grandson of Mariana’s brother, and every party in Madrid took a side, and the dying king was pulled between them like a rope. The second thing happened in the street, in April of 1699, with bread in Madrid at a price nobody could pay.

A crowd formed outside the house of the president of the Council of Castile, the count of Oropesa, and it grew, and it began breaking things. And then it went to the palace: several thousand people in the square below the Alcázar, shouting for bread and for the heads of the ministers. Charles was got out onto a balcony. He was thirty-seven, swollen, barely able to stand, held up on either side, and he showed himself to the crowd and told them—or someone told them for him—that the minister would be dismissed.

The crowd cheered and went home. It was the only time in his reign that the people of Madrid saw their king do something in public that they had asked for, and he could not have done it a year later. Through the summer and autumn of 1700, he was dying, and everybody knew it. The question that had been asked at his cradle in 1661 was finally being answered.

He fell ill in September. By the 28th, he could not eat. The cardinal of Toledo, Portocarrero, who had decided that Spain would go to France, kept the queen out of the sick room as far as he could and brought the lawyers in. On the 3rd of October 1700, the king signed his last will, naming Philip of Anjou, the seventeen-year-old grandson of Louis XIV, heir to the whole of the Spanish Empire.

He is reported to have wept over it, and to have said, when the pen was put into his hand, that God was the one who gave kingdoms, since they were His. Then he asked for the last rites. He lasted four more weeks. The seizures came one after another now, and between them he lay yellow and bloated in the bed where his father had died, with the relics stacked around him and the image of the Virgin of Atocha in the room, and the doctors bleeding what little they could get out of him.

He was thirty-eight, and by the description of the people at the bedside looked seventy. His skin had gone the color of old wax. His belly was distended with fluid while his arms and legs had wasted to sticks. He could not close his mouth.

He died on the 1st of November 1700, All Saints’ Day—the same day of the year on which his brother Philip Prospero had died in a seizure thirty-nine years earlier, five days before his own birth. He was five days short of thirty-nine. Spanish kings were almost never cut open, and this one was—partly because of the bewitchment, since the church wanted to know what a spell did to a body, and partly, it seems, because after thirty-nine years of that body, everybody was curious. The surgeons opened him at the Alcázar the day after he died, and the report has come down to us in several versions that agree on the essentials.

The corpse, they wrote, did not contain a single drop of blood. The heart was the size of a peppercorn. The lungs were corroded. The intestines were rotten and gangrenous.

He had a single testicle, black as coal, and his head was full of water. Three large stones were found in the kidneys. What it describes, in the terms a doctor would use now, is a man who had been in heart failure for years, with fluid on the brain, chronic kidney disease, a bowel destroyed by a lifetime of purges and infection, and genitals that had never properly developed. The single black testicle answers the question that the letter from Vienna had asked in the first weeks of his life.

What had been born in 1661 was a boy—but only just, and never one who could have fathered anybody. He was taken to the Escorial and put down in the Pantheon of Kings, in the niche next to his mother, with his father across the way and his first wife along the corridor in the crypt for the childless. And the story that has always been told about his last months is that before he died, he had the coffins in that Pantheon opened one after another and looked at what was inside: his father, whom he had slept beside as a boy; his mother, whom he had shown to the ambassador; and Marie Louise, the French girl who had been glad to die, whose body, the story goes, was found remarkably preserved, and over whom the king wept until they had to take him away. Whether that happened exactly as told, nobody can now say.

What is certain is that the last Habsburg king of Spain spent an unusual amount of his short life among the dead of his family, and that there were, at the end, a great many of them. The war started within months. Philip of Anjou was proclaimed in Madrid in November. The Austrian claimant refused to accept it, and by the summer of 1701 the armies were moving.

It ran for thirteen years and killed, by the usual estimates, somewhere over a million people. When it was done, the Bourbons had Spain and the Habsburgs had lost it. And the house that had married its own nieces to keep the blood pure had bred itself out of existence in the person of a man with a peppercorn for a heart. The German queen, Maria Anna of Neuburg, was sent by the new regime to live out her exile in the old Alcázar of Toledo—the same fortress Mariana had been banished to in 1677.

She stayed there for five years before being moved to France. She outlived them all. She died in 1740, in Guadalajara, at seventy-two, having been a widow for forty years, and nobody had ever again asked her whether she was expecting. Mariana is still in the marble wall at the Escorial, in the black habit, across from the uncle she married at fourteen.

The islands in the Pacific still carry her name. The portrait of the teenage queen is in the Prado, a few rooms away from the painting of her little daughter in the white dress, and the later portraits of the widow—folded hands, white wimple, black veil—hang near them, so that you can walk from one to the other in about a minute and cover forty years.