The child who ascended Spain's throne that summer morning was so deformed that courtiers crossed themselves at his approach.

The Coronation That Cursed a Dynasty: Charles II Takes Spain's Throne

A sickly child, a crumbling empire, and the last breath of the Habsburgs

A genetically devastated child became Spain's last Habsburg king, and his cursed bloodline triggered a continental war.

The bells of Madrid tolled with hollow ceremony on June 2, 1665, as a four-year-old boy with an oversized jaw and vacant eyes was proclaimed King of Spain. Charles II — Carlos Segundo — sat upon a throne he could barely comprehend, inheriting an empire stretching from the Philippines to Peru. But those who lifted the crown onto his misshapen head already whispered what physicians dared not say: this child was cursed by his own blood.

The Spanish Habsburgs had pursued dynastic purity with religious fervor for two centuries. Charles's family tree was less a tree than a wreath — his father Philip IV had married his own niece, and generations of uncle-niece and cousin marriages had concentrated genetic defects like sediment in stagnant water. The new king's great-grandmother appeared in his ancestry no fewer than fourteen times.

Witnesses to the coronation described a boy who could not walk unaided until age eight, who drooled constantly, and whose tongue was so enlarged he could barely chew food or speak clearly. Court physicians attributed his ailments to bewitchment — hence his eventual epithet, 'El Hechizado,' The Bewitched. The Inquisition would later conduct exorcisms on the ki…

💡 Modern geneticists calculated Charles II's 'inbreeding coefficient' at 0.254 — higher than the offspring of a brother-sister union — making him more inbred than any known royal in history.