The midwives had barely finished their work in the dim chamber of the Royal Palace of Madrid when they knew something was terribly wrong. The infant prince’s head was grotesquely large, his breathing labored, his tiny body struggling against the very act of being alive. And then there was the queen mother. Mariana, the woman who had just given birth to the heir to the Spanish throne, reportedly shuddered at the sight of her own son.

She refused to nurse him. This was not maternal cruelty. It was instinctive horror, the reaction of a woman who had just delivered something her body and mind recognized as profoundly, fundamentally broken. The date was November 6th, 1661.

The baby was Charles, future King of Spain. His own mother was also his cousin and his aunt. His father, Philip IV, had married his niece. If you try to work out that family tree, do not bother.

It is not a tree. It is a circle. The Habsburgs had a saying: “Let others wage war. You, happy Austria, marry.

” It sounds romantic until you realize they meant marrying each other. For nearly two hundred years, the Spanish branch of this powerful family had been uniting cousins, uncles with nieces, double first cousins. They called it maintaining the purity of blood. Scientists now call it genetic suicide.

More than eighty percent of Spanish Habsburg marriages were between close relatives, people who shared grandparents, or in some cases, parents. By the time Charles was born, all eight of his great-grandparents descended from the same couple: Philip I and Joanna of Castile. Every single one. Modern genetic analysis calculated Charles’s inbreeding coefficient at 0.

254. To understand that number, consider this: children of brother-sister incest have an inbreeding coefficient of 0. 25. Charles II of Spain was more inbred than a child born of siblings.

This was not just unlucky. It was the inevitable mathematical result of a dynasty that refused to let fresh blood in. But numbers do not capture the human cost. Baby Charles could not suckle properly.

His mouth was already showing signs of deformity. His skull bones had not fused correctly, leaving his head misshapen and swollen. The court physicians noted he had a weak suck and struggled to feed. In the seventeenth century, before formula and feeding tubes, this was life-threatening.

The wet nurses hired to feed him reported something disturbing. The infant rarely cried. Not because he was content, but because he seemed to lack the energy. He would lie pale and still, his oversized head lolling to one side, his breathing shallow and raspy.

The best physicians in Spain had never seen an infant so fundamentally broken. As months turned to years, the full extent of his condition revealed itself. At age four, Charles still could not walk. Not wouldn’t, could not.

His legs were thin as sticks, bowed from rickets, unable to support even his small body weight. Servants carried him everywhere in specially designed chairs. The future king of Spain had to be transported like an infant. At four years old, he also could not speak.

Not a single word. His tongue, already showing signs of abnormal growth, filled his mouth. His jaw, that infamous Habsburg jaw, was already protruding. When he finally spoke his first words sometime after his fourth birthday, they were slurred, wet, incomprehensible.

The court chroniclers delicately noted that his majesty’s speech required interpretation. What they meant was this. Charles’s tongue was so enlarged it constantly protruded from his mouth. His lower jaw jutted out so severely his lips could not close.

Saliva poured from his mouth when he attempted to speak. Royal attendants stood ready with silk cloths to constantly wipe the drool from the chin of the boy who would be king. The Habsburg jaw. Imagine a normal human skull, then grab the lower jaw and pull it forward several inches.

Now imagine the upper jaw did not grow to match. The result is a mouth that can never fully close, teeth that can never meet, a tongue with nowhere to properly rest. In portraits, artists tried to minimize it, painting Charles with his mouth slightly open as if caught mid-word. In reality, his mouth was always open because it physically could not close.

A French diplomat’s private letters described the shock of meeting the young prince. His appearance defies description. His jaw protrudes so far he appears to have two faces, one stacked in front of the other. When he attempts to eat, food falls from his mouth.

When he speaks, one must stand back to avoid the spray. And eating. Charles could not chew. Every meal, every day, for his entire life.

His upper and lower teeth were separated by such a gap they never met. Court dining became an exercise in creative cuisine. Meats had to be cut into tiny pieces. Vegetables were pureed.

Bread was soaked in wine until it dissolved. The English ambassador, Alexander Stanhope, wrote one of the most visceral descriptions of the king’s condition: “His Catholic majesty swallows all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out that his two rows of teeth cannot meet. To compensate which, he has a prodigious stomach and swallows a whole lamb at two meals. ”

Physical deformity was just the beginning.

Charles suffered from constant illnesses. Measles nearly killed him at age six. Then chickenpox left him covered in scars, then rubella, then smallpox. Each disease that swept through the palace found in Charles an eager host.

His compromised immune system offered little resistance. Smallpox struck when he was nine, and for weeks he lay between life and death. When he finally recovered, the scars joined the catalog of his disfigurements. But the disease left something else.

The physicians noticed fluid building up in his skull. His already large head began to swell further. Today we call it hydrocephalus, water on the brain. In the seventeenth century, they called it another curse upon the prince.

The pressure caused blinding headaches, vision problems, and possibly contributed to the seizures that would plague his later years. By age ten, Charles’s education was a source of palace scandal. Not because he was rebellious or lazy, but because he simply could not learn. Tutors reported that lessons had to be repeated dozens of times.

Basic mathematics was beyond him. Latin, the language of royalty and diplomacy, might as well have been ancient Egyptian. His handwriting, on the rare occasions he attempted it, looked like the scrawl of a much younger child. One tutor’s private notes, discovered centuries later, paint a heartbreaking picture.

“His majesty tries with great effort, but retains nothing. I explain a concept, and by the next day, it is as if he has never heard it. His attention wanders. Sometimes he stares at nothing for long periods.

When asked what he is thinking, he cannot say. ”

As Charles entered what should have been puberty, his body betrayed him in new ways. He grew, but barely. While other royal teenagers shot up in height, Charles remained stunted.

His voice stayed high and thin. Body hair, hardly any. The characteristics that marked a boy becoming a man simply did not happen. The court physicians held hushed conferences, discussing what they observed but dared not put in official records.

The prince showed no interest in women. No interest in men either, for that matter. He seemed to exist in a strange childlike state, neither boy nor man, but something in between. This terrified the court.

Charles had one job above all others: produce an heir. The entire Spanish Empire, stretching from Europe to the Americas to the Philippines, needed the royal bloodline to continue. But how could a man who could not grow a proper beard father children? At age eighteen, they decided to find out.

Charles was married to Marie Louise of Orléans, a seventeen-year-old French princess, beautiful, intelligent, and healthy. The contrast between bride and groom shocked wedding guests. She was radiant. He was ghastly.

She walked gracefully down the aisle. He shuffled, supported by attendants. When it came time for the kiss, observers noted that Marie Louise had to steel herself visibly before leaning in. The wedding night was a disaster.

Not the kind that makes for funny stories later, but the kind that determines the fate of empires. Charles was completely incapable of consummating the marriage. Not unwilling. Incapable.

His body simply did not function as a man should. Marie Louise, raised in the sophisticated French court, tried everything. She was patient. She was kind.

She even, according to palace gossip, tried to instruct her husband in the basics of marital relations. Nothing worked. Years passed. No pregnancy.

The queen underwent humiliating examinations to determine if she was the problem. The physicians declared her perfectly fertile. The problem, everyone knew but no one would say officially, was the king. The pressure was crushing.

Both Charles and Marie Louise were subjected to increasingly desperate fertility treatments. She was forced to drink vile concoctions of herbs and animal organs. He was made to consume potions that included ground pearls and bull’s blood. At one point, the court brought in a specialist who prescribed eating the dried penis of a stag.

Nothing worked, because nothing could work. Charles’s reproductive system was as malformed as the rest of him. Charles’s mother, desperate for a grandchild to continue the Habsburg line, consulted mystics and holy men. One suggested Charles was cursed and that sleeping next to holy relics might break the spell.

When that failed, she escalated to something that still shocks historians. She had her son sleep next to corpses. The Queen Mother arranged for Charles to spend nights lying beside exhumed bodies of saints and former kings, including his own father. The theory was that the holy essence of the dead would somehow cure his impotence.

Picture it. The king of Spain, drooling and malformed, lying next to decomposing corpses in the hope of gaining the ability to father a child. Ten years of marriage. Ten years of failed attempts.

Ten years of humiliation. Then Marie Louise died suddenly at age twenty-six. The official cause was listed as appendicitis, but rumors swirled. Had she been poisoned?

Had the strain driven her to suicide? We will never know. What we do know is that Charles was genuinely devastated. Despite everything, he had grown to love his wife, perhaps the only person who had shown him real kindness.

Within months, the pressure to remarry began. The council selected Maria Anna of Neuburg, a German princess from a famously fertile family. Her parents had produced seventeen children. Surely, the advisers reasoned, such robust genes could overcome even Charles’s deficiencies.

They were wrong. Maria Anna, despite her healthy lineage, never became pregnant. Not once. By this time, Charles’s health had deteriorated further.

Courtiers whispered that he looked like an old man, though he was barely thirty. His hair fell out in patches. His teeth, what few could be seen behind that protruding jaw, rotted and fell out. He shuffled when he walked, when he could walk at all.

The seizures started in his thirties. Without warning, Charles would collapse, his body convulsing, foam mixing with the ever-present drool. When he recovered, he often did not recognize the people around him. He began talking about seeing ghosts, hearing voices, feeling invisible hands touching him.

The court was terrified. Was their king going mad on top of everything else? His nickname, El Hechizado, the Bewitched, took on new meaning. People genuinely believed Charles was under a curse.

The Spanish Inquisition got involved. Exorcists were brought in. At one point, the king’s own confessor was arrested on charges of using witchcraft to worsen the royal condition. The trial was a sensation, though of course no amount of exorcism could cure genetic damage.

Charles himself believed he was cursed. In lucid moments, he would weep and ask what he had done to deserve such punishment. He wore amulets, carried holy relics, and submitted to increasingly bizarre purification rituals. Nothing helped, because nothing could help.

His genetic code was his curse, written into every cell of his body. By age thirty-five, Charles looked ancient. His skin hung loose on his skeletal frame. His famous jaw seemed to grow even more pronounced as the rest of his face wasted away.

He was completely bald, his scalp covered in sores. He could barely walk, shuffling a few steps before needing to rest. His speech, always difficult, became nearly impossible to understand. In his final years, he began to mentally deteriorate rapidly.

He would sit for hours staring at nothing, drool pooling on his clothes. When spoken to, he often did not respond. When he did speak, he rambled about demons and angels, about his dead wife, about children he would never have. The king of one of the world’s greatest empires had become a hollow shell.

The end came in 1700. Charles was thirty-eight years old, not elderly by any standard, but his body was shutting down. He could not eat even his specially prepared mush. He could not stand without help.

He spent his days propped up in bed, gasping for breath, his hydrocephalic head causing unbearable pressure. On November 1st, after days of agony, Charles II died. What happened next would shock even the physicians who had treated him for years. The autopsy.

The royal physicians tasked with embalming their king cut open the body and recoiled. Their report, written in clinical Latin but dripping with barely concealed horror, described a body that should not have been able to sustain life as long as it did. His body did not contain a single drop of blood. This was not poetic exaggeration.

Charles’s circulatory system had essentially shut down. His blood had either clotted or was simply absent. His heart was described as the size of a peppercorn. Not literally that small, but shriveled, blackened, barely recognizable as the organ that should pump life through a body.

His lungs were corroded, their word for what we might now recognize as massive scarring from repeated infections. Lung tissue that looked more like pumice stone than organs meant for breathing. His intestines were described as rotten and gangrenous. Parts of his digestive system had literally died while he was still alive, explaining the horrific pain he endured in his final years.

But the most telling detail, the one that confirmed what everyone had suspected but no one dared say officially: Charles had only one testicle, and it was black as coal. This single atrophied, dead piece of tissue was all that remained of what should have been a functioning reproductive system. No wonder he could not father children. It is a miracle he survived puberty at all.

And his brain. That oversized, fluid-filled head. The physicians found it was indeed full of water. The hydrocephalus had left barely any room for actual brain tissue.

How Charles had managed to function at all, how he had managed to speak and think and rule, however poorly, was a medical mystery. The physicians who performed the autopsy must have stood there, covered in the gore of their dissection, and marveled that this collection of malformed organs had somehow sustained life for nearly four decades. Every system was compromised. Every organ was damaged.

It was as if Charles’s body had been at war with itself from the moment of conception. Modern genetic analysis has given us the why behind this horror. Remember that inbreeding coefficient of 0. 254.

That means a quarter of Charles’s genome consisted of identical copies of genes. In those repeated sequences lurked the instructions for his destruction. Scientists now believe Charles suffered from at least two major genetic disorders. The first was combined pituitary hormone deficiency.

His body could not produce the hormones needed for normal growth and development. This explained his short stature, his inability to sexually mature, his muscle weakness, his cognitive problems. His pituitary gland, the master controller of the endocrine system, was essentially non-functional. The second was likely distal renal tubular acidosis.

His kidneys could not properly regulate his blood chemistry. This caused the rickets that bent his legs, the muscle weakness that left him unable to walk, and possibly contributed to the hydrocephalus that swelled his skull. Either condition alone would have been challenging. Together, they created a cascade of failures throughout his body.

Add in the Habsburg jaw itself, a genetic condition called mandibular prognathism, and you had a perfect storm of genetic disasters. Some researchers have proposed an even rarer possibility, a lysosomal storage disease called aspartylglucosaminuria. Patients with this condition develop normally for their first few years, then begin showing delays. By adulthood, they have coarse facial features, intellectual disability, and shortened lifespans.

The match with Charles’s symptoms is eerily exact. But here is the truly horrifying part. Charles was not uniquely unlucky. He was the inevitable result of systematic inbreeding.

Of the thirty-four children born to Spanish Habsburg monarchs, more than half died before age ten. The dynasty was literally breeding itself to death. Charles was simply the final, most extreme example. When Charles died without an heir, it triggered the War of the Spanish Succession, a conflict that would reshape Europe.

The Spanish Empire, built over centuries, shattered because one man’s body was too broken to produce a single child. The Habsburg line that had ruled Spain for nearly two hundred years ended not with an assassination or a revolution, but with a king so inbred his own flesh betrayed him. The Bourbon dynasty that replaced the Habsburgs learned the lesson. While royal marriages remained political, the extreme inbreeding that created Charles II was never repeated.

In his final letter, dictated because he could no longer hold a pen, Charles wrote about hoping to find peace in death that had eluded him in life. For a man who had endured four decades of physical and mental anguish, who had been propped up on the throne like a grotesque puppet, death must have seemed like mercy. The portrait that hangs now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid shows a man with obvious deformities even the court painter could not fully hide. Charles II of Spain was not cursed by witches or demons.

He was cursed by his own family tree, a tree so tangled it had become a noose.