The Habsburg Princess who Cursed her Lineage

In May 1570, twenty-year-old Anna of Austria married King Philip II of Spain, a monarch whose vast empire stretched across continents. It was a union that shocked Europe, one so controversial that even the Pope tried to prevent it. The scandal was not merely the 23-year age gap but something far more disturbing: Phillip was her uncle.

The marriage set a dangerous precedent, deepening the web of inbreeding that would one day haunt the mighty Habsburg dynasty. Early Life Anna of Austria was born on the 2nd of November 1549 at Cigales near Valladolid in Spain. Her father was the future Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian II, a son of Ferdinand I, the Archduke of Austria and King of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia who became the Holy Roman Emperor in 1556.

Maximilian would inherit his father’s vast titles upon his death in 1564, cementing his place among Europe’s most powerful rulers. Although Anna was from an Austrian family, she was born in Spain because of an extended visit to the country by her father, who in 1548 had married Maria, a daughter of none other than Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, and the most dominant monarch in all of Europe.

As you might have suspected, Anna’s parents were closely related. They were first cousins as their fathers, Charles V and Ferdinand I were brothers, both members of the illustrious House of Habsburg. Her parents’ marriage marked one of the earliest intermarriages between the Austrian and Spanish branches of the Habsburg dynasty, an alliance forged for political strength, but one that would, over the following century, contribute to the genetic inbreeding that came to plague the family line.

Anna spent her earliest years amid the splendor of the Spanish court, surrounded by ceremony, power, and the grandeur of empire. The eldest of nine children who survived infancy, she quickly became her father’s cherished favourite. During these years, her mother, Maria, governed Spain as Regent alongside her new husband Maximilian, while her own father, the mighty Charles V, was occupied in Central Europe, waging his relentless campaign to suppress the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Maria’s regency lasted until 1551, when her brother, Prince Philip,

returned from Central Europe to assume control as acting ruler in their father’s absence. With Philip now in charge, Anna’s parents were free to return to Austria, where Anna was raised and educated amid the grandeur of Vienna throughout the 1550s. Though she was too young to remember her early years in Spain, those at court never forgot the imperial child who had been born among them, an infant princess whose destiny was already entwined with the great powers of Europe.

Sixteenth Century Europe Before delving deeper into Anna’s life and the strange, fateful marriage that would define it, we need to understand the turbulent world in which her story unfolded. Sixteenth-century Europe looked very different than today, with competing powers, shifting alliances and dramatic politics.

Germany was not yet a single nation but a mix of hundreds of small states, duchies and free cities under the loose framework of the Holy Roman Empire. To the east stretched the vast Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, while Italy was divided into dozens of rival states, including the Papal States, the Republic of Venice, and a host of other duchies constantly fighting for dominance.

Amid this fragmented landscape, two titans stood out from the rest: the Kingdoms of Spain and France. Locked in a bitter struggle for European supremacy, they had waged a relentless series of wars from 1494 to 1559 over control of Italy. For Spain, maintaining a close bond with the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family was vital in keeping French ambitions in check.

By the late 1560s, this alliance had become more crucial than ever. A fierce revolt had erupted in the Low Countries around modern-day Belgium and the Netherlands, threatening Spanish control of one of its richest territories. As King Philip II sought to preserve this piece of his empire, he looked to strengthen ties with his Austrian kin.

And out of this web of dynastic necessity and political strategy would emerge the marriage that shaped Anna’s destiny. Don Carlos of Spain Initially, Anna never meant to marry Philip at all, so how did this come about. The Habsburg courts of Madrid and Vienna had a different union in mind, one that would strengthen family and empire alike.

The plan was for Anna to wed her first cousin, Don Carlos, Prince of Asturias, the only son of King Philip II and his first wife, Maria Manuela of Portugal. By the standards of royal Europe, such a match was hardly shocking. Marriages between cousins were common tools of diplomacy, designed to bind kingdoms together in loyalty and blood, a tradition that would persist in European royalty well into the twentieth century.

Don Carlos and Anna were even close in age, with Carlos only being four years her senior, a pairing that seemed, on paper at least, both politically and personally well-matched. Anna, however, was far from Don Carlos’s only prospect. As early as 1559, while Spain and France were negotiating to end the long Italian Wars, plans were made for Carlos to marry a French princess.

That same year, he became engaged to Elizabeth of Valois, the eldest daughter of King Henry II of France. Yet in a twist of dynastic diplomacy, Elizabeth was hastily married to Philip himself, as part of a broader effort to secure peace between the two rival kingdoms. Three other brides were then proposed for the young prince, including another French candidate, but France soon descended into the Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants, causing those plans to collapse.

By the mid-1560s, with foreign matches no longer viable, it was finally agreed that Don Carlos would marry his cousin Anna. All was not well in Spain though. While Anna grew into her teenage years in Vienna believing that she would marry her cousin in a few years’ time, events hundreds of kilometres away were taking a darker turn.

Don Carlos, once a promising heir, had been plagued by fevers and mysterious health problems since his mid-teens. Then in 1562 he suffered a head injury after falling down a staircase and despite a series of bizarre and often brutal medical treatments, his psychological state began to deteriorate. By the time he reached his twenties, Don Carlos was infamous for violent emotional outbursts, erratic behaviour, and alarming instability.

His actions became ever more dangerous: he secretly reached out to opponents of his father’s rule, including the Dutch rebels in the Low Countries. Alarmed by his reckless defiance, Philip II took drastic action and had his own son arrested in early 1568. With that, any hope of a marriage between Anna and Don Carlos was abruptly and irrevocably shattered.

Marriage to her Uncle On the 24th of July 1568, Don Carlos died while imprisoned. To this day, suspicions linger on, with many believing his father starved him to death, determined to prevent his son from becoming a rallying point for rebellion. Yet while this disaster ended one potential union, it did not extinguish the idea of Anna marrying within her Habsburg family.

Instead, the plan would take a dark and unexpected turn, setting the stage for one of the most extraordinary marriages of the era. When Don Carlos died in the summer of 1568, Philip II was a married man, though his current wife was his third. His first wife, Don Carlos’ mother, Maria Manuela of Portugal, had died four days after giving birth to him from severe bleeding following labour.

Philip’s second wife, Mary Tudor, Queen of England and Ireland, had died from suspected stomach or uterine cancer in 1558 and they had no children. He then married Elizabeth of Valois, a French princess, in 1560. After a complex natal history, she died after a stillbirth on the 3rd of October 1568, ten weeks after Don Carlos’ death. All of this left Philip II in a desperate position: he had lost both his heir and his wife.

His third marriage had produced only daughters, and with the deaths of Don Carlos and Elizabeth of Valois in quick succession, the king found himself without a male successor. And so, in a move that shocked Europe, Philip proposed the unthinkable: if Don Carlos could no longer marry Anna, then perhaps he himself should marry his niece. Astonishingly, Anna’s father agreed.

Thus, 20-year-old Anna married her 43-year-old uncle by proxy in May 1570 while she was still in Vienna, defying not only convention but also the objections of Pope Pius V, who was appalled by Philip’s plans to marry his niece. The Trip to Spain Until now, Anna’s union with Philip had existed only on paper, married by proxy while she remained in Austria and he ruled from Spain.

In the autumn of 1570 though, it was finally time for her to travel to the Iberian Peninsula, where a grand, formal ceremony awaited. She travelled with a large retinue, a mix of familiar faces from Vienna who would now accompany her to Spain and remain by her side, a common practice among royal courts to provide continuity and comfort for brides whose lives were suddenly uprooted and sent to live in a foreign land.

The journey to Spain was long and fraught with tension. Anna’s party travelled overland through the Low Countries before taking ship to the Iberian Peninsula. They were met with jeers and hostility from the Dutch along the way, an ominous start to a marriage that was already steeped in political intrigue.

The voyage unfolded against the backdrop of the recently ignited Dutch Revolt, which had erupted in 1568 after years of simmering unrest in the Spanish Habsburg territories. Along the way, the princess became embroiled in a diplomatic controversy when relatives of Floris of Montmorency, a Dutch noble imprisoned in Spain for his role in the revolt, petitioned Anna to intervene on his behalf.

After weeks at sea, she arrived in Spain on 3rd of October 1570 and formally requested that his life be spared. But before she could reach the king, Floris was secretly executed on October 16th, strangled to death, most historians believe, on Philip’s orders. Life in Spain & Children By all accounts, Anna settled into life in Spain surprisingly well.

She was greeted by many who remembered her as an infant, and her presence brought a spark of life to the rigid and often solemn Spanish court. Bright, cheerful, and vivacious, she eased some of the stifling formality that had long defined Philip’s reign. Anna also became Philip’s most beloved wife. Diplomats reported that the king was genuinely in love with his young wife, and unlike many of his predecessors, there are no records of him taking mistresses during their marriage.

Philip was said to visit her bedchambers daily and the couple were very close and also had similar personalities. Soon she was pregnant and in December 1571 the hoped-for son arrived. He was named Ferdinand after Anna’s grandfather and was given the title of Prince of Asturias which Don Carlos had held until his suspicious death a few years earlier.

However, he did not survive into adulthood. In October 1578 he died from a possible case of dysentery. Unfortunately, Ferdinand’s fate set the pattern for Anna and Philip’s future children. Another son named Carlos was born in 1573 but died less than two years later in 1575. Another boy named Diego was born in 1575.

As Ferdinand was still alive at this time, this seemed to cement the succession, as there were briefly two healthy sons in the line to the throne. But, once Ferdinand died in 1578, Diego became the heir apparent. He would outlive his mother, though he too ultimately died young from smallpox in 1582. The couple’s only daughter, named Maria and born in 1580, died in 1583.

This meant that only one of their five children, a boy named Philip after his father, would survive into his adult years. He was born in 1578 and would become the heir that Philip II had wished for, even to the point of marrying his own niece. Death in Portugal As mentioned, Philip and Anna had a very good relationship despite their age difference and family ties and she even acted as a loving mother to her stepdaughters from Philip’s marriage to Elizabeth of Valois.

However, Anna soon became the fourth of Philip’s wives to die prematurely. In 1578, King Sebastian I of Portugal had died in North Africa while campaigning against the Muslims of Morocco. He was only 24 years old and did not have any children.

He was briefly succeeded by Henry I of Portugal, but Henry was a cardinal of the church who did not have any children either. When he died in 1580 a succession crisis ensued, and Philip claimed the throne of Portugal. This was disputed and in order to solidify his claim, Philip, Anna and the Spanish court set off for Portugal in September 1580. In theory Anna was briefly Queen Consort of Portugal for a few weeks in the late autumn of 1580. It would be a short stint though.

During the journey to Portugal or after arriving there she contracted an aggressive form of influenza, and she became seriously ill. She died from the condition in the city of Badajoz on the 26th of October 1580 a week short of her 31st birthday. Although she was initially buried in Portugal, her remains were later taken back to Spain and interred in the royal crypt at the Escorial Palace. Her husband Phillip would never remarry and he lived down to 1598.

Habsburg Inbreeding When looking at Anna’s marriage to Philip purely from the perspective of maintaining the royal succession, it was successful, no matter how unsettling we might think it is today. It resulted in several sons and although three of the four died young, Prince Philip lived long enough to succeed his father as King Philip III in 1598. However, it set an unpleasant precedent.

The Austrian and Spanish Habsburgs continued to marry each other over the next century. One of these arrangements mirrored what happened with Anna to a tee. In 1646, Mariana of Austria, a member of the Austrian branch of the family was betrothed to her Spanish cousin, Balthasar Charles, Prince of Asturias, the son and heir of King Philip IV, Anna’s grandson.

When Balthasar died in October 1646 before the marriage was entered into, Philip IV decided to marry Mariana himself in order to secure the Spanish line. Mariana was his niece. This was the exact same thing that had happened eighty years earlier. Yet, in the middle of the seventeenth century it had much more tragic consequences.

Mariana produced a male heir, the future King Carlos II. But he ended up severely ill and cognitively challenged for his entire life owing to severe inbreeding. He was unable to have children and the Spanish royal line died out in 1700. So, in a way, the intermarriage and inbreeding which started with Anna back in 1570 as a way of maintaining the Spanish royal line was the thing which led to the Spanish Habsburgs dying out 130 years later.

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