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The Bewitched King - Spain's Charles II at the End of an Era · Dirt Nap City - History's Most Interesting Dead People

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: Hello, everybody.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_03: Welcome to another episode of DNC Dirt Knap City.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: The internet show about interesting people who are dead.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_03: Dead people who are interesting.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_03: Is that the same?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: People who are now dead that were interesting.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_03: Or some people that weren't interesting until they were dead.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: Or some people that weren't dead until they got to be interesting.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_03: There's lots of paths you can take to get there.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: Never anybody that's alive, and never anybody that's boring.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_03: Do you think I'll I'll be more interesting when I'm dead?
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_03: Time will tell, man.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully a long time.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_03: I think most of us are more interesting when we're alive.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, that's true.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_03: Less interesting once we pass.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_03: But every now and then you'll get somebody like a Betsy Ross who was kind of a drip until she died, and then people started making up stories about her.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and I guess if you haven't listened to, go back and listen to the Betsy Ross uh fiasco.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it it really was eye-opening in so many ways.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's when this show started getting controversial.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_03: That's when we started tackling, you know, topics that were, you know.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know what they say uh what you reap is what you sow.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: You get it?
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So how does that apply?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Betsy Ross, so oh I get it.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Well, sorry.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Well, what are you gonna talk about today, Alex?
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_03: So today I'm gonna talk about somebody that you probably haven't heard of.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_03: Uh well, maybe you have.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a that's not part of the deal.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: You're supposed to be someone I've heard of but just don't know much about.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: That might be true.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the internet talks about this person uh quite a bit.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they're kind of memes about this guy, but um the reason you might not have heard of him is because um he was a monarch and they kind of all run together in a lot of people's minds.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: But he was a real person.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_03: Hard to keep them all uh you know in track of.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_03: I think the only monarch we've done so far has been King Um Henry VIII, right?
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's the only one that comes to mind.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um have it was he English?
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, no, no.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Was he what what country?
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, uh Spain.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_03: Oh Ferdinand?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: No, but you're he was actually um he was actually related to Ferdinand.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, they they all kind of run together, all these guys.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: But this guy was consequential because if it wasn't for him, I mean he he's kind of the reason that Europe today exists the way it does, you know, in nice, kind of neat little little packaged countries like France and Italy and Germany and and Spain, and um, it wasn't always like that.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: And it wasn't, and you might have thought that all that came to be because of wars, but um it's not necessarily the case.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_03: So we're gonna talk about uh some of that.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_03: This was from a long time ago.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: This is not 20th century stuff for me.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: I'm going outside my comfort zone, and we're talking about um the late 1600s, a long, long time ago.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, did he have something to do with uh with Columbus?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Was was no, that was in the late 1400s.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Right, 1492.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: A couple hundred years after that.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so in between, in between Henry VIII and Columbus.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_03: He was born in 1661 in Madrid.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and he died in 1700 in Madrid in the exact same place, in the same palace, and barely ever got out of the side of that so wait, 1661 to uh to 1700?
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: So so 39 years old.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yep, it didn't even make it to 40.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: Wow, no, and it's a kind of a miracle that he lasted that long because he was a very sickly person, sickly monarch.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, we're gonna talk today about King Charles the Second of Spain.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, very, very first of all, Charles.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe maybe it's Charles.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Charles.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's not a very that's a very English name to me, not a not a Spanish name.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if he went by Carlos, because that would be kind of the the Spanish version of that, okay now, but everything I oversee is that it's King Charles, but it could have been it could have been Carlos actually, yeah.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um but um so the reason that he was so important to us now is because uh monarchies back then were kind of all interrelated, literally interrelated, yeah.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of marriages um for dynasties and lots of inbreeding, let's just say it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um basically imagine if your family tree was a circle, and that's how the uh the monarchies in Europe were back in the day.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: They wanted to keep the bloodline, yeah, dude.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: They wanted to keep the bloodlines pure, so there was a lot of intermarrying, and I'm gonna talk a lot about that okay, because that's interesting to me.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_03: And because of all the inbreeding, we ended up with this person who was very, very um sick.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_03: We're not gonna dwell too much on that part of it.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but he had a very bizarre life, and historians today either even debate whether the guy was cursed or poisoned or just super overbred.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_03: But he was not a healthy person, and because of that, um he ended up kind of ending uh uh the European rule as we know it, reshuffled the cards, and it kind of ended up being what it what we have today.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, like I said, he kind of never left the palace.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_03: He every now and then he'd go out because that was part of his duties, but basically he lived and born, lived, and died in the same palace in Madrid.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, he was like a isn't that veal calves, isn't that what they uh they do?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they try to try to use their muscles as little as possible.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so he his his nickname was El Echizado, El Echizado, um Itchy's son.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: The bewitched.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, okay.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: I did not know that.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_03: And people thought he was possessed.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: He thought he was possessed.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_03: He thought he was specifically, he thought he was possessed by 70,000 devils.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's a lot.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: And the court used to bring in exorcists to try to fix him because he was uh not a well person.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: Um so let's just let's just get into this.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_03: So his dad was Philip IV, and his mom was Mariana of Austria.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_03: So his dad was the king of Spain, his mom was from Austria.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'll explain all that.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_03: How that all how how could you have a dad who's the king of Spain and a mom from Austria?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: I'll explain all that in a second.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: But he couldn't walk or talk until he was four years old.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_03: He had real developmental late late bloomer.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um well, yeah, but developmentally disabled is how we would call it.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_03: Now he had chronic digestive problems and seizures and infections.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: But when he was four years old, his dad died, and all of a sudden he became king at four years old.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: And that's how they rolled back then, barely able to walk at that point.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: They do not care about the monarchies, do not care how old you are, they just care that you're a male, right?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that you're the next in line.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, yeah.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so he and he had two marriages, he never had any children, and because of that, that caused this monarchy crisis and triggered the war of Spanish succession, which set up kind of what we have um today.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_03: If you think about Europe back then, it was like um it's not what we think of today.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: Spain was a big empire, so Spain consisted of Spain and then some of Italy, the Americas, right?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: Like Florida um was part of Spain then, the Philippines, they had a big empire, and then you had Austria, and Austria was the center of the Holy Roman Empire.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: So Spain and Austria kind of ran the world back then, and the um the Austrian part was called the Habsburgs, okay.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_03: I've heard of that, yeah.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_03: And they kind of ran Central Europe, and then at the time, too, that France was starting to be a superpower with Louis XIV.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: So you had Spain, you had Austria, you had France.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Those were the three big superpowers.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: Germany and Italy were just like patchworks of different states, but they weren't their own countries, right?
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: And Britain wasn't really dominant yet in the late 1600s.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so Europe was just a bunch of dynasties and a few like outposts of different countries.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um his face uh has what they call if you've heard Habsburg, you may have heard of the Habsburg jaw.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_03: Have you ever heard of the Habsburg jaw?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Never heard of that one.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is that like a severe severe look than you describe some people as severe?
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_03: Very severe.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: So the Habsburg jaw is a severely protruding jaw and sometimes with a receding upper jaw.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: You mean like a like a kind of Monty Burns kind of chin?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, kind of an under underbite, I guess it would say, and sometimes with an overbite, but really, really severe.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_03: And it's funny because you kind of um used to talk about Mr.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_03: Burns, and sometimes we call it ri we talk about rich people having kind of these things, but that comes that trope becomes from royalty because this Habsburg jaw was something that was common was common, but among royalty.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_03: Uh but it was really not an attractive look, and it was kind of uh almost a deformity, you might say.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: In his case, it was definitely a deformity.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_03: It it was from inbreeding, and he couldn't chew properly, or he couldn't even speak properly because this jaw was so severe.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_03: Um, they they actually use pictures of him in medical textbooks these days when they talk about genetics and when they talk about inbreeding.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, that this is one of the big examples of this this Habsburg jaw.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_03: And people noticed this from right from the start.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_03: Right when he was a baby, he was like too weak to suckle.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: That that's like the ultimate insult, you know.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: That that would be, you know, if you were doing the dozens and you were trying to put somebody down.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're too weak to suckle.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's the title of my new book.
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_03: He uh he was a little odd besides these physical um uh issues that he had.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_03: He he banned people from wearing wigs.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I thought everybody wore wigs.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_03: Everything, everybody wore wigs back then, but he said that God made enough hair.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: We don't need wigs.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: I kind of agree.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_03: I kind of agree.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: I was gonna say that's that's that's very um 2025.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was woke.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: He was he was the woke Habsburg jaw.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_03: So check this out.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: When he died, his autopsy, so you gotta understand, medieval doctors back then were kind of uh known for their uh uh writing nonsense and writing like uh trying to outdo each other.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: So this is this is the official autopsy.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: Again, this is the 1600s.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_03: They said that his heart was the size of a grain of pepper.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and his lungs were corroded, his intestines were rotted, and his testicle was as black as coal, and his blood looked like blood black sludge.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_03: Almost like you're describing the Grinch.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, some sort of goblin or troll or something like that.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's that's awful.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: Now, I'm sure that most of that was uh hyperbole.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: I'm sure his his heart was bigger than a grain of pepper.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: If he was if if he had been alive for any period of time, it had to be, right?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: This is how the how the medical examiners wrote autopsies back then.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_03: So, like I said, the Habsburgs controlled Spain, Austria, the Roman Empire, a little bit of Italy, or a lot of Italy, and then like the Spanish Netherlands, which is like Belgium area.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, but they didn't get all that area by conquests and war, like you might think.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_03: They got all that area by marrying cousins strategically for centuries.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_03: They would they would they would make sure that we that they kept that like you so people were marrying a lot of uncles were marrying nieces, you know?
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, and so so a lot of times the king of Spain and the king of Austria were usually very closely related.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_03: Sometimes they were brothers, sometimes they were like uncle nephew, sometimes they were the same person.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_03: But Spain and Austria, even though those were the two, those were the two parts that ruled Europe, um, they made sure that they were kind of closely aligned.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: That's that goes back to Charles V in 1500.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_03: He kind of inherited Spain and Austria and the Roman Empire.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: It was so much land for him, it was so big that he split it in half and he gave half to his brother Ferdinand.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so his Ferdinand got Austria and um the Roman Empire, and then his son Philip II got Spain.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: So that kind of started with Charles V.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: He split it up, and then you had Austria and Spain.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_03: So now we have two branches of Habsburgs, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_03: The Spanish branch and the Austrian branch, and then that lineage had like uncles and marrying nieces for generations.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: What about nephews and marrying aunts?
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Did that ever happen?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, that didn't happen.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Only what about was older, older men and younger women.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay, okay.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_03: Girls, probably actually.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_03: These so these these two branches just kept marrying each other to keep that bloodline pure.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_03: So Charles's dad was the king of Spain, but his mom was actually his dad's niece, and she was from the Austrian side, so that's how they keep that going.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay, okay, wow.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so geneticists today say that he was more inbred, Charles was, more inbred than if his parents had actually been siblings, because it had been 200 years of doing that cycle of of different kinds of um inbreeding.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, the the different kind of um inbreeding, there's um there's uncle nieces, and then there's cousins marrying cousins, kissing cousins, and then there's and then there's uh double cousin marriages.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know what a double cousin marriage is?
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_03: Uh is that like seven brides for seven brothers?
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: Dude, so check this out.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_03: So you have two siblings from one family, marry two siblings from another family.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so I marry your sister and you marry my sister, okay?
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_03: And then we both have kids, and then those kids marry each other.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, wow.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: Now you've got a double cousin marriage, and that and hence the kids the kids share both sets of grandparents.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_03: Hence the too weak to suckle part.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_03: So this was going on for 16 generations before Charles came along, and all of the genetic abnormal that we didn't know about that back then, but all the genetic abnormalities.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like the heart, the size of a pepper, yeah, all that kind of stuff.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: Shriveled, shrunken testicles, all of that.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: He would basically get the same piece of DNA from both sides of the family dozens of times.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_03: So it wasn't good everything we know about probably why genetics now.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Probably why he couldn't reproduce, right?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: That's probably that's probably uh good thing that he couldn't reproduce.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, at some time nature had to catch up and say, enough.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: Enough, yeah, stop.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: This ain't the brain.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_03: So, like I so like I said, it's 1665, his dad dies suddenly, and he's four years old, and he can't walk or talk, he becomes king.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_03: So his mom ruled in his name until he was about 14.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_03: She really kept doing it into his adulthood, and she was very controlling, kind of like a helicopter mom, I suppose.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but uh, and she thought Charles was cursed by the devil, and they kept bringing in all these exorcists, but um but realize the people in Spain were really worried because they see this this weakened king, and they know that the empire can weaken, and then that makes them vulnerable to so it was very uh kind of a uh tough time in Spain when you've got this leader, and that's probably why they were ripe to you know kind of get um um to collapse, is because they just didn't have a very strong leader.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_03: Now you might wonder what language these people spoke, right?
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_03: You got Spanish and Austrian, and so the Spanish ones would speak like Castilian Spanish, okay, and the Austrians would speak German, right?
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_03: And then whenever they get together to talk, they would speak Latin.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah, of course.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_03: Um I guess that's the commonality.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_03: I suppose.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, they didn't have that, was kind of the equivalent of English today, wherever that's kind of the universal language that a lot of people rely on.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: But back then it was it was Latin that they all learned.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: Um now in the royal the royal people, I mean the the common people didn't do this, but they didn't have any reason to, you know, speak the other languages.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_03: But the royals had to kind of speak a lot of different languages and dialects, and so there was traces of Italian and um you know uh German and all the different dialects and Czech and all these different things uh coming out, but basically they would speak to each other in Latin.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: Kind of kind of the same sort of inbreeding going on with the language.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, exactly.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_03: So so he starts walking and talking, and he's the king now, but he has no real formal schooling.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_03: They keep him isolated because he's so damn sick, he's not allowed to play with other kids.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_03: All he it's just a parade of doctors and priests and weird remedies and exorcisms going on, and yeah, exorcists coming in, and it's just that's his life.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: Spain's starting to panic about his future.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_03: He is 18 years old and he marries Marie Luis Dorlez, the niece of Louis XIV.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_03: So now we're bringing the French part.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_03: Remember, I mentioned they were a third country, right?
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: And and and at least that's some fresh blood, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: Now she's really charismatic, really um beautiful.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: Um, but she comes to Spain and she's horrified at Spanish, the Spanish life, the court life in Spanish, and she realizes this husband she's got is way too sick to father a child.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and she gets so stressed out about it that she dies at 26 years old from stress, and they say like anorexia, even.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: What what did the what did the uh coroner or the autopsy have to say about that, about her?
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: What are her bowels look like?
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_03: The the fact that she her heart, the fact that they say that she was 26 and she died of stress tells you, you know, all you need to know about yeah, true.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_03: She probably had, you know, compared to other people in the country, she probably had a pretty great life, other than um, you know, the pressure of having to father a child with this sick guy.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_00: I mean yeah, their husband was too too weak to suckle.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_03: True.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so now the citizens of Spain are really worried.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: Maybe this guy's gonna go childless.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and then what happens to us as a country?
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because it's one thing if you can't have any boys, but if you can't have any kids, it puts your whole country in in crisis.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_03: The monarchy's a strange thing, man.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_03: So in the 1680s, now um he starts developing chronic stomach issues.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_03: He's going blind intermittently now, too.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_03: And again, this isn't his fault, man.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_03: This is just the he's the victim of this this uh inbreeding, this hundreds of years of yeah, inbreeding.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_03: He's just kind of a uh uh you'll see a lot of stuff of people making fun of him on the internet because of the way.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: looked and everything and I didn't I didn't feel like that was right to to bring to the to the table here because I mean it wasn't just that he was a weirdo I mean he was a he was really disabled in a lot of ways and he was totally a victim of of just you know this this system that they had I feel really bad for the guy well they keep bringing in exorcist they're convinced that he's cursed Spain is starting to get bankrupt militarily they're pretty weak because they just don't have really anybody in charge and they fix him up with another woman named Maria Anna of Newburgh which is Newburgh is a famously I mean I didn't know it was famous but back then it was a famously fertile German family.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: Okay like rabbits famously fertile hashtag famously fertile right right I think that'd be a good name for like a uh some sort of clinic like a famously fertile right right welcome to the famously fertile clinic uh like I mean if it's good enough for famous footwear right isn't that a place yeah sure famous and fabulous Maria Anna is his new wife and like I say they bring in she's basically like the most fertile family I mean she they don't know if she's fertile obviously but her family's very fertile she comes from a long line well he just can't she doesn't take her long to figure out this guy can't reproduce but she kind of becomes a political operator kind of behind the scenes she's you know pulling the strings and running the running the country and kind of enjoys that but but by 1699 he's 38 years old he can barely walk he's nearly blind swollen he's emaciated he's vomiting all the time he thinks he's possessed by demons his teeth are falling out his hair is falling out he can't digest food yeah my good you've only had some of those things on that list but uh he had all of them yeah that's a rough life so the next year he dies and he wills the entire Spanish empire to a French prince uh from the bourbon family oh will smith the French prince of Prince of Bel Air French French French prince it's not a French prince oh okay okay and this guy was Philip of Anjou Anjou Philip now that's a that's a sauce right it's like it's like you dip your meat in it that's anjou anjou this is anjou oh similar so this was his decision like he had to figure out all right there right basically there were two dynasties ruling Spain it was the Austrian Habsburgs that was his mom's family and then the French Bourbons or Barbons and that was Louis the fourteenth's family and the really the only Habsburg option was this guy uh King Charles of Austria and Spain didn't want any more Austrian control so really the only option left was Louis the fourteenth's guy um Philippe uh France was the strongest power in Europe by now and Louis the fourteenth was actually married to Charles's sister of course yeah yeah we just keep going around and around imagine what imagine what uh Christmas was like or Thanksgiving you know around that table yet they have to speak Latin because none of them speak the same language that's the funny part they're all related to each other but uh Philippe Vanjou's grandma was Charles's aunt okay this is why it's so can you imagine going to school and trying to learn about all trying to draw the family tree out of this yes and the and to this day though the bourbons are still part of the sp the the Spanish monarchy like there's a there's a king of Spain now um and he's he's a bourbon he's from that so that succession has gone down um to this day well this triggered what we call the war of span Spanish succession it lasted 13 years and um it was basically everybody was fighting in Europe it was France and Austria and Britain and the Netherlands and they were all fighting to kind of redraw the European map which looks remarkably similar to what it does today other than places that it was maybe redrawn after World War uh one and two but basically it we it's recognizable where it wouldn't have been recognizable prior to um Charles uh dying so that was the big contribution that this guy made by his dying it kind of shook up the whole thing also it kind of made the rest of the world look at or the the other monarchies in the world look at inbreeding taking another look at it and so they started to put two and two together about that at this point.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: They were realizing they didn't really know about genetics but they knew that something might not be right.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: Um there are other examples in other monarchies of you know things like hemophilia for example and they call that the royal disease have you ever heard that called the royal disease no it's something to do with your blood right right it's a blood disorder and in the UK all the royals had it and I think there was another country I can't remember which one um maybe the I don't remember that also had hemophilia in the royal line but that's not from inbreeding that's just a genetic trait that's passed down through generations they call it like it's just royals with boils.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah no no no no it's not but so that wasn't that wasn't like Charles where it was actually like a consequence of inbreeding those are just like diseases that you get that are passed down.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_03: And there's some of those that are that you know royals have that pass down but you know Spain had it the worst because they had all those double cousin marriages and uncle niece marriages and for 16 generations they were they were having that passed down.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_03: But for the most part um in the last century these monarch places that still have monarchies would go outside the family to marry now.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_03: So if you look at like you know Meghan Markle and places people like that that are just like sometimes commoners or princess Diana right like she was a I mean she wasn't a commoner yeah she was still like but she wasn't she wasn't part of the royal family right yeah right exactly now in our own country we had um the Roosevelts were cousins remember oh yeah yeah there's lots of them yeah but um and then um I'd be surprised if some of the Kennedys weren't um weren't that way also true um so there's there's there's always a sense for exclusivity of uh people that are in the upper crust um to keep the bloodlines pure but the Targaryens on Game of Thrones really um there's is that is that that's that's fiction though right they were the dragon people yeah but they all inbred yeah I guess there's a pull to keep the bloodlines pure and when you do that you have nature saying wait a minute you shouldn't be doing that and here's the consequences of that so it's there's lessons to be learned from all that but I thought it was interesting that because of this genetic malady we ended up redrawing the entire world you know power map yeah yeah Charles so which Charles Charles the Fifth Charles the second the one we've been talking about for the last half of Charles the second Charles II okay yeah yeah Carlos Carlos II oh man that's a rough life and I agree with you he probably was more of a victim than than the perpetrator of this and and unfortunately you know I think it's pretty easy for people to dislike people in power right away just because you know they see them as almost not human and back then they were considered almost uh part of chosen by God right and so why did God choose this this weak weak teeth of a man yeah yeah it just makes you realize how lucky we are to live when we do and and we don't aren't ruled by things like that where people are just like we don't know why this person's in charge they're four years old but that's just the rules that's just the way it goes be a newborn you could be a newborn and you're the king and that's just the way it is.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_03: Or or you could have the opposite problem of of uh too old sure sure yeah that some somebody's just like senile and they won't go away and well we have to wait until they die and then we have to see what male heirs they have and it seems a lot of pressure too for um we talked about this a little with King Henry the Eighth I mean it it just all becomes about breeding yeah and having offspring and those poor women who um have that kind of stress that I have to give him um a son and if I don't he's gonna chop my head off.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah yeah um I mean it's a different different time I suppose huh?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_03: Too too weak to suckle well that's all I have really for uh for this character Charles II I thought that it wouldn't be that our our uh kind of our our canon wouldn't be complete without learning a little bit about uh somebody who changed the course of uh the world uh geography yeah yeah no that was interesting and and uh lots of things to consider lots to unpack Alex so thank you for sharing little Charles in the cradle cradle too big for his brother says a whisper in the shadows is he strong will he stand will he ever take a look so heavily