Why Have So Many World Leaders Married Their Cousins?

A crown. A ring. Your cousin. What else do you need for a royal wedding?

At this point, the fact that so many royals through history wed relatives in what are now termed consanguineous marriages is something of a history joke. But why did they do it in the first place?

Before we begin, an acknowledgement: it wasn’t only royals who wanted to “keep it in the family.” The economist and patriarch of a major manufacturing family, Pierre-Samuel du Pont, wasn’t afraid to admit his plan for his lineage, writing in 1810: “The marriages that I should prefer for our colony would be between the cousins. In that way we should be sure of honesty of soul and purity of blood.” Other magnates were more discrete, but they often shared the same opinion; by refusing to allow his female descendants to inherit his wealth, banking great Mayer Amschel Rothschild guaranteed that for his daughters and granddaughters to find wealthy, suitable husbands, they would have to look among their cousins. (And so they did: four pairs of Rothschild cousins, as well as one uncle-niece pairing, were wed.)

But for royals, to whom intermarriage was often family tradition, generations of marrying a cousin came with consequences. Perhaps the most glaring example is the house of Habsburg, a family of German royals who made up one of the principal dynasties of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century. By marrying members of one branch of the family to members of another, the Habsburgs held on to power for centuries. (This was so obviously their strategy that the family motto was once “Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube!”—in translation, “Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry!”) They also passed down genetic abnormalities that would eventually end their family line.

There were outward illustrations of the Habsburgs’ tendency to marry their own: namely, the Habsburg jaw that is frequently pictured in their royal portraits. Though incestuous marriages were long suspected as the root of these facial deformities—across their 200-year reign, 9 out of 11 Habsburg marriages were between closely related family members—they were all but confirmed to be the culprit in 2019, when a team of researchers investigated the family’s “inbreeding coefficient” (the likelihood that an individual would receive two identical genes because of the relatedness of their parents). The average Habsburg was measured to have a 0.093 inbreeding coefficent, meaning about 9% of their maternal and paternal genes were identical. Charles II, the childless and final Habsburg king, had an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254; he was described by the British envoy Alexander Stanhope as “swallow[ing] all he eats whole, for his nether jaw stands so much out, that his two rows of teeth cannot meet.” In relation to other Habsburgs, though, Charles might be considered extremely lucky: though about 80 percent of Spanish infants at the time survived childhood, only 50 percent of Habsburg children even made it to age 10.

Even royals whose inbreeding coefficient was much lower than the Habsburgs’ faced consequences for intermarriage. Several descendants of first cousins Queen Victoria and Prince Albert suffered from hemophilia, with complications from the disease ultimately claiming one of the couple’s children and two or three grandchildren. George III’s suspected porphyria also may have been passed along through Victoria’s descendants, notably to the German house of Hohenzollern—who, aside from their connection to Victoria, were already descended from George I. When Kaiser Wilhelm II’s temperamental behavior escalated in the early 20th century, a courtier aptly diagnosed him with the “taint of George III.”

At the time that marriages between close relatives were common, the participants didn’t know their descendants would bear the consequences. And (perhaps except in the case of Victoria, who journaled that Albert was “quite charming” and “excessively handsome” upon their first meeting), it is likely that most consanguineous marriages were born out of neither love nor desire. These royal kissing cousins had a clear purpose: to keep power and prestige in the family for as long as possible.

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