How Messed Up the Habsburgs Really Looked (The Portraits Were Flattering)

Описание: The portraits of the Habsburgs were lies. Royal painters were paid to make these people look good. So if THIS is the flattering version... how messed up did they really look?That's not rhetorical. We have answers. Contemporary written descriptions from diplomats who saw these people with their own eyes. Medical analyses of their conditions. Autopsy reports that read like horror fiction. And all of it contradicts the paintings you've probably seen a hundred times.So let's do something different today. Let's put the portraits on trial. Because the gap between what painters showed and what ambassadors wrote home about isn't just interesting—it's evidence of a dynasty-wide cover-up. One that everyone at court participated in. One that peasants could see through from a mile away. And one that the Habsburgs maintained for two centuries while their faces literally collapsed.Here's where we start: a 2009 study published in PLOS ONE by researchers at the University of Santiago de Compostela. They analyzed sixteen generations of Habsburg genealogy—more than three thousand individuals—and calculated something called an inbreeding coefficient for each one. That coefficient measures the probability that you inherited identical gene copies from both parents because those parents share ancestors. For the early Habsburgs, it was near zero. Normal.For the last Habsburg king of Spain? Zero point two five four.