Someone in the comments of the last video called it a silly question. They actually typed those words out. Silly question to ask if Hapsburgs still exist. As if a dynasty that ruled half of Europe for six centuries simply evaporated into mist when their most deformed king finally stopped breathing in 1,700. Like they just poof gone.

 The answer to that allegedly silly question involves faces you can photograph today. And I’m going to show you exactly what happened to that famous jaw across 300 years of portraits, paintings, and eventually photographs of people who are very much alive right now. Every image you’re about to see is a real historical portrait or a real photograph.

 No AI generation, no artistic interpretation, just actual faces from actual Hapsburgs tracked generation by generation. But first, we need to establish our baseline. We need to stare directly at the worst of it. Charles II of Spain was born on November 6th, 1661. And the court physicians knew immediately that something had gone terribly wrong.

He didn’t walk until he was nearly four. He couldn’t speak intelligably until around age six. The famous Hapsburg jaw, that distinctive mandibular prognithism that had been accumulating for generations, had reached such severity in Charles that he could barely chew his own food.

 His tongue was reportedly so large for his mouth that people struggled to understand his speech. His lower jaw jutted so far forward that his upper and lower teeth couldn’t meet. Eating was laborious, painful, a daily struggle for his entire 38 years of life. And here’s what the portraits don’t show you. The French ambassador to Spain wrote descriptions of Charles that contradict the relatively dignified images we have.

 He described the king as having a body as weak as his mind, noting his constant drooling and his difficulty completing even simple sentences. The papal nunio observed that Charles seemed perpetually exhausted, unable to sustain activities other men performed without thought. Contemporary accounts describe a man who suffered from epileptic seizures, who struggled to stand for extended periods, whose facial expressions suggested profound disturbance to visitors who met him in person.

 When Charles died on November 1st, 1700, 5 days before his 39th birthday, the autopsy reportedly found horrors. A heart the size of a peppercorn, intestines riddled with gangrine, a single shriveled testicle as black as coal, and a head full of water where brain matter should have been. Some details may be exaggerated through three centuries of retelling, but the overall picture is clear.

 This is what 16 generations of strategic inbreeding produced. A man who suffered from birth to death. Now look at those portraits again. Look at the jutting jaw, the heavy-litted eyes, the slack expression captured by court painter Juan Kareno de Miranda. Remember something crucial. Miranda worked for a man who could have him imprisoned or executed.

 His job security depended on making the king look acceptable. These were official court portraits commissioned by a crown that needed to project strength and legitimacy to rival nations. If this is the flattering [clears throat] version, imagine what they were hiding. Written accounts from ambassadors and travelers who actually met Charles describe something much worse than any portrait shows.

 A Venetian ambassador wrote of a king barely able to stand, his body racked with convulsions, his face marked by expressions suggesting profound disturbance. The portraits show a solemn young king, unusual looking certainly, but composed and royal. The reality was worse. It was always worse. Here’s the fact that should make you pause.

 Charles II of Spain had only four great grandparents instead of the normal eight. Trace his family tree back three generations and you find the same people appearing multiple times in different positions. His grandmother, Mariana of Austria, was simultaneously his aunt. His father, Philip IV, married his own niece.

 Philip II of Spain was related to his fourth wife, Anna of Austria, in multiple ways simultaneously. She was his niece through one line and his cousin through another. The family tree wasn’t a tree at all. It was a vine that kept curling back on itself. When genealogologists draw Hapsburg family trees, they have to use dotted lines, circles, and annotations that would make a conspiracy theorist’s corkboard look organized.

 At family gatherings, the question of how exactly people were related to each other would have required a mathematician to unravel. Researchers calculated Charles II’s inbreeding coefficient at approximately 0.254. That means about a quarter of his genome consisted of identical alals inherited from both parents. For context, the child of two first cousins would score about 0.0625. 0625.

The child of a brother and sister would score 0.25. Charles II exceeded the theoretical inbreeding level of brother sister incest. Not because his parents were siblings, they weren’t, but because his ancestors had been marrying relatives for so long that the cumulative damage surpassed what even a single generation catastrophe could produce.

The 2019 study published in the Annals of Human Biology examined 15 generations of Hapsburg portraits and skulls analyzing jaw severity across the dynasty. They found a direct correlation between inbreeding coefficients and deformity. Charles II scored highest on both measures, peak Hapsburg, peak damage. and the supreme absurdity.

 They did this deliberately. The Hapsburgs maintained detailed genealogical records and knew exactly who was related to whom. They married relatives not out of ignorance but out of policy. Believing that keeping power within the family was more important than physical consequences. Every Hapsburg marriage contract was negotiated by lawyers who understood the family connections perfectly.

 They saw the jaws. They buried the children who died young. They nursed the invalids who survived. And they kept doing it anyway for 200 years. When Charles died without an heir, everyone assumed the story was over. But here’s the thing. The Spanish Hapsburg line was extinct. The dynasty itself was very much alive.

 To understand what happened next, you need to understand what happened in 1556. That’s the year Emperor Charles V, the most powerful monarch in European history up to that point, ruler of Spain, the Netherlands, much of Italy, the Holy Roman Empire, and virtually the entire New World decided his empire was too vast for any single heir to manage.

He split it. His son, Philip II, got Spain, all of it, plus the Netherlands, chunks of Italy, and every concistador claim from Mexico to Peru. His brother Ferdinand I got Austria, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Holy Roman Empire. From that moment, there were two Hapsburg branches, two parallel experiments in royal genetics, two lines that would develop along different trajectories, though not different enough to prevent disaster.

 The Spanish branch became the more aggressive inbreeders. Philip II married four times and his fourth wife Anna of Austria was both his niece and his cousin simultaneously. His grandson Philip IVth married his own niece Mariana of Austria. The pattern repeated with each generation, concentrating the genetic damage until Charles II represented its logical end point.

 But what about the Austrian branch? Here’s what most people don’t realize. The Austrians were doing the same thing, just slightly less intensively. Ferdinand the first descendants married Hapsburgs, too. Often the daughters and nieces sent from Spain in carefully negotiated exchanges. The two branches kept feeding genetic material back and forth, attempting to maintain what they called the purity of the blood.

 while positioning themselves to potentially reunite the empire if either line failed. The Austrian Hapsburgs had their own tragedies. Emperor Rudolph II, who ruled from 1576 to 1612, was so mentally unstable that he spent the last decade of his reign essentially imprisoned in Prague Castle, refusing to govern, obsessing over alchemy and astrology, making decisions so erratic that his own family had to strip him of power before he destroyed the dynasty.

 His brother Matias eventually forced him to hand over Hungary and Austria while Rudolph raved about conspiracies and locked himself away with his occult experiments. Rudolph II never married, never produced an heir. The succession crisis his instability caused nearly tore the Austrian branch apart decades before Charles II’s death ended the Spanish line.

 Emperor Ferdinand II, who ruled during the catastrophic 30 Years War, married his first cousin, Maria Anna of Bavaria. Their son, Ferdinand III, married Maria Anna of Spain, his first cousin on both sides, since her mother was Ferdinand II’s sister. When she died, Ferdinand III married another cousin, the pattern held. But the Austrian line had one crucial advantage.

They occasionally made mistakes. They occasionally married outside the family, not by choice, but by necessity when suitable Hapsburg brides weren’t available or when political circumstances forced their hand. These accidents injected just enough genetic diversity to keep the Austrian line functional while the Spanish line spiraled toward extinction.

 By 1700, when Charles II finally died, his cousin Leupold I had already been Holy Roman Emperor for 42 years. Leopold displayed the characteristic Hapsburg features. Contemporary portraits show the protruding lower lip, the prominent jaw, the distinctive facial structure. His first wife was his own niece, Margarita Teresa, daughter of Philip IV of Spain.

His second wife was a cousin, Claudia Felichittas of Austria. But his third wife, Eleanor Magdalene of the Palatinate Newberg, was from a different family entirely. And this is where the genetic story starts to shift, slowly, almost imperceptibly at first. Liupold’s son, Joseph I became emperor in 1705, but died of smallpox in 1711 without a male heir, bringing his younger brother, Charles V 6th, to the throne.

 Charles V 6th is crucial to our story. Not for what he looked like, though portraits show him with a notably less severe jaw than his Spanish cousins, but for what he didn’t have, a surviving son. Charles V 6th’s only male heir died in infancy in November 1716. From that moment, the emperor faced a succession crisis that would consume the rest of his reign.

 He spent years pushing the pragmatic sanction through the courts of Europe, a legal document that would allow his daughter, Maria Teresa, to inherit Hapsburg lands despite being female. What matters for our genetic timeline is simple. Maria Teresa would marry outside the immediate Hapsburg family, bringing the first truly significant injection of new blood in generations.

On February 12th, 1736, Maria Teresa married Francis Steven, Duke of Lraine. She was 18, he was 27. And while this might seem like just another arranged aristocratic marriage, it represents the single most important genetic event in Hapsburg history since the dynasty began. Francis Steven was not a Hapsburg.

 His family, the House of Lraine, had ruled their duche in what is now northeastern France for centuries. They were nobility. Certainly, you didn’t marry an arch duchess by being a commoner, but their bloodline was distinct from the tangled mess of Hapsburg genetics. When Francis married Maria Teresa, he essentially rebooted half of their children’s DNA.

 From 1736 onward, the dynasty would technically be called Hapsburg Lraine. Most people kept calling them simply Hapsburgs, but genetically everything changed. What did Francis Steven look like? This is crucial for understanding the visual transformation that would follow. Portraits of Francis show a man with what we’d recognize as a normal face.

His jaw sits where jaws are supposed to sit. His lips don’t protrude dramatically. He’s not particularly handsome by modern standards. Contemporary accounts describe him as pleasantl looking rather than striking, but he’s normallooking. And after six centuries of Hapsburg inbreeding, normal was revolutionary.

Francis Steven was also by all accounts intelligent and capable. He had a particular talent for finance and investment, managing to grow the Hapsburg treasury through shrewd economic decisions. He fathered 16 children and appears to have been a devoted father. The man was in short everything Charles II of Spain was not functional, fertile, and free from the genetic burden that had crippled the Spanish line.

 Maria Teresa herself still displayed some family features. Her portraits show the fuller lower lip, the distinctive facial structure marking her as unmistakably Hapsburg. She was the daughter of Charles V 6th and Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick Wolfenbutil, and she carried the accumulated genetic legacy of her ancestors.

 But when her genes combined with Francis Stevens relatively unrelated DNA, their children represented something new. Hapsburgs who were only half Hapsburg. Maria Teresa and Francis had 16 children. 13 survived to adulthood. An extraordinary survival rate for the 18th century. That might itself suggest the benefits of genetic diversity.

 Compare that to the Spanish Hapsburgs who buried child after child who watched their heirs die in infancy with heartbreaking regularity. The Hapsburg Lraine children lived. Their children included the future emperors Joseph II and Liupold II as well as Maria and Twinette who became Queen of France and eventually lost her head to the revolution.

 Looking at portraits of these children reveals the first generation of visible change. Joseph II, who became emperor after his mother’s death in 1780, has a face noticeably different from his great great uncle Charles II. His jaw is present, visible, but not grotesqually protruding. His portraits show a man who could eat without difficulty, speak without impediment, and was by all accounts intellectually brilliant, one of the enlightened despots who attempted major reforms of education, religion, and surfom across his domains. He abolished

torture, established religious tolerance, and reformed the legal system. Try to imagine Charles II doing any of that. You can’t. The jaw had diluted in a single generation. Not disappeared, but softened. Reduced from a medical condition to a family characteristic. But then the Hapsburgs made a mistake. Because of course they did.

 France II, the last Holy Roman Emperor who dissolved the ancient Empire in 1806 rather than let Napoleon claim it, couldn’t resist the old family habits when choosing his son’s mother. His second wife, Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, was his double first cousin. Her mother, Maria Karolina, was the sister of Fran’s father, Leopold II.

 Her father, Ferdinand I of the two Sicilles, was the brother of Fran’s mother, Maria Louisa. Let me make that clearer. Fron II’s father and his wife’s mother were siblings. Fron II’s mother and his wife’s father were also siblings. The couple shared all four grandparents. They were as closely related as half siblings while technically being first cousins twice over.

 The child of this union would demonstrate exactly what happened when Hapsburgs relapsed into their old patterns. Ferdinand I of Austria who ruled from 1835 to 1848 represents a genetic regression in stark terms. He suffered from epilepsy experiencing seizures throughout his life. He had a pronounced skull shape that was visible even in flattering portraits.

 He was by virtually all accounts mentally handicapped, unable to make complex decisions, easily confused and prone to childlike outbursts. The legend goes that he once declared, “I am the emperor and I want dumplings.” A quote repeated for nearly two centuries as evidence of his limited capacity. Some historians question its authenticity.

Nobody questions that Ferdinand couldn’t rule effectively. And here’s where the story gets darkly fascinating. Austria didn’t collapse. It didn’t fall apart because the people around Ferdinand created a system to govern without him. The conference, a council of regency, actually ran the empire.

 Prince Meterik, the legendary diplomat, pulled the strings of foreign policy. Archduke Ludvig, Ferdinand’s uncle, handled domestic matters. Archduke France Carl, Ferdinand’s younger brother, stood ready as a backup. The emperor himself was essentially a figurehead, trotted out for ceremonial occasions, kept away from actual governance.

 They dressed him up for state functions. They put words in his mouth for official proclamations. They built an entire shadow government because the actual emperor was too damaged to rule. And nobody said it out loud because saying it out loud would have been treason. This arrangement held for 13 years. Then 1848 happened. Revolutions swept across Europe that spring like a fever.

 Paris first, then Vienna, then Budapest, Prague, Milan. By March 1848, protesters were in the streets of Vienna demanding constitutional government, demanding Metik’s resignation, demanding change. The old system that had propped up Ferdinand suddenly cracked. Meternick fled to England. The protests grew violent.

 And in the Archbishop’s palace in Olamuts, a city in Moravia, where the imperial family had retreated from the chaos, a plan was set in motion. The architect of what happened next was Arch Duchess Sophie of Bavaria. Sophie had married into the Habsburgs, had watched Ferdinand’s incapacity from inside the court for over a decade, and understood exactly what had caused it.

 She was ambitious, intelligent, and utterly convinced that her own son, France Joseph, 18 years old in 1848, was the answer to the dynasty’s problems. Sophie orchestrated what was essentially a palace coup disguised as a family decision. She convinced Ferdinand’s younger brother, France Carl, to renounce his own claim to the throne.

 She maneuvered the family into presenting Ferdinand with an abdication document. She staged the entire thing to look like Ferdinand’s own choice. On December 2nd, 1848, in a ceremony at the Archbishop’s Palace, Ferdinand was brought into a room with his family, the new prime minister, and a handful of witnesses. He was handed a document.

 He signed it. By all accounts, he didn’t fully understand what he was doing. Then came the line that has echoed through Hapsburg history ever since. Ferdinand turned to his nephew, the 18-year-old who was about to become emperor, and said, “God bless you. Be brave. God will protect you. It’s gladly done. Gladly done.

” As if he were handing off an unpleasant chore, rather than abdicating a throne his family had held for centuries. Ferdinand lived another 27 years in comfortable retirement, tending gardens and collecting butterflies, apparently far happier as a private citizen than he had ever been as emperor. He died in Prague in 1875, having outlived most of the people who had engineered his removal.

 But the woman who understood the lesson of his reign most clearly was Sophie. She had seen what one generation of double first cousin marriage had produced. she would make certain it never happened again. When Sophie looked for a wife for her son Fron Joseph, she looked outside the Hapsburg bloodline entirely.

 Elizabeth of Bavaria, known to history as Cece, was Sophie’s own niece, a Viddlesbach from a completely different royal house. She was beautiful, intelligent, and most importantly, not a Hapsburg. When France Joseph married her in 1854, it was a love match by royal standards, he was genuinely smitten with her, but it was also a genetic course correction.

 France Joseph I ruled for an astonishing 68 years from 1848 to 1916. His face, preserved in countless photographs from his long reign, is unmistakably normal. He has a strong jaw, but it’s a masculine jaw, not a pathological one. His famous mutton chop whiskers frame a face that could belong to any European aristocrat of the era.

And this is where our visual evidence shifts from portraits to photographs. No more flattering painters, no more artistic interpretation, just the mechanical truth of the camera. Look at France Joseph in his military uniform photographed in his later years. A dignified elderly man with no trace of the deformity that crippled Charles II centuries earlier. None whatsoever.

 If you showed someone that photograph without context, they’d never guess his family had once been the most inbred royal house in Europe. When Fron Joseph died in 1916, the empire needed a new ruler. They went to Charles Fron Joseph’s grand nephew. Charles I became the last Hapsburg emperor ruling for just two years before the empire collapsed at the end of World War I.

Photographs of Charles show a young man with a long face, prominent ears, and what might be described as a slightly receding chin, the opposite of the protruding Hapsburg jaw. His wife Zeta of Bourban Parma came from a completely different royal house. They had eight children together, all of whom would survive to adulthood.

 When the empire collapsed in November 1918, Charles went into exile. He died in Madiraa in 1922, just 34 years old, from pneumonia. But before he died, he left a legacy more important than any crown. His son Otto. Now we answer the silly question. Otto von Hapsburg was born on November 20th, 1912 in Austria.

 He was four years old when his father became emperor. Six when the empire fell. Nine when his father died in exile. He grew up stateless, moved between countries and watched the world his family had ruled for six centuries reorganize itself around principles that had no place for hereditary monarchy. And then came the Nazis.

 In 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria in the Anloo, Ottovon Habsburg became enemy number one. The Nazis didn’t just dislike him. They sentenced him to death in absentia, an actual death warrant issued by the regime that now controlled his family’s former homeland. The Habsburggs represented the old legitimacy that the Nazis claimed to replace.

 Otto represented a potential rallying point for resistance. He had to be eliminated. Otto fled first to Belgium, then to France. Then as the Vermacht rolled across Europe to Portugal and finally to the United States, he arrived in Washington DC in 1940. A 27-year-old pretender to a throne that no longer existed.

 Armed with nothing but his family name and a burning conviction that fascism had to be stopped. What he did in America would have been impossible for any of his inbred ancestors. Otto lobbied. He wrote, he gave speeches. He met with President Franklin Roosevelt personally, urging American intervention in Europe, making the case for the liberation of Austria as a distinct nation rather than a province of Germany.

 He worked with the State Department on plans for postwar Europe. He testified before Congress. He helped organize resistance networks that smuggled intelligence out of occupied Austria. And he saved lives. Otto used his connections, his family name, and his personal funds to help Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution. He issued fake documents claiming Hapsburg protection.

 He personally intervened in individual cases, writing letters, making phone calls, leveraging whatever influence a dethroned Archduke could muster. The exact number of people he helped escape is unknown, but historians have documented cases where his intervention made the difference between life and death. Try to imagine Charles II of Spain doing any of that.

 Try to imagine Ferdinand I lobbying a foreign government, organizing resistance networks, saving refugees. You can’t because the genetic burden that crippled those men was gone. After the war, Otto remained in exile. Austria’s post-war government banned the Hapsburgs from returning for decades. He became a political philosopher, a panuropean activist, eventually a member of the European Parliament representing Germany from 1979 to 1999.

20 years of elected democratic service. He wrote over 30 books on European history and politics. He spoke eight languages fluently. He earned a doctorate in political science. Otto’s most famous political moment came on August 19th, 1989 when he helped organize the panuropean picnic on the Austrian Hungarian border.

 The event was ostensibly a peace demonstration, but its real purpose was to allow East Germans to escape to the west through a temporarily opened border gate. Over 600 people fled that day. It was one of the early cracks that would bring down the Berlin Wall 3 months later. A Hapsburg helped end the Cold War.

 Let that sink in. Otto lived until July 4th, 2011, 98 years old. He died in his home in Pooking, Bavaria, having outlived the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall, and most of the political order that had replaced his family’s empire. Photographs of Otto across his life show a tall man with a strong profile and dignified bearing.

 No trace whatsoever of the jaw that defined his ancestors. Otto renounced his role as head of the Hapsburg family in 2007, passing leadership to his son Carl von Hapsburg, born in 1961. Carl von Hapsburg is alive right now. You can find photographs of him from the 2000s with a simple internet search. He’s a businessman, a former politician who served in the Austrian army, a man who gives interviews and appears at charity events and lives an ordinary, wealthy aristocrats life.

 He’s worked in media and broadcasting. He advocates for environmental causes. Look at his face. Normal, handsome, even if you’re into that distinguished European aristocrat aesthetic. Strong jaw, but positioned exactly where a jaw should be. No protrusion, no deformity, no echo of Charles II’s suffering.

 The genetics of this recovery aren’t mysterious. Mandibular prognithism isn’t caused by a single gene, but by multiple genes working together with expression amplified by inbreeding. When inbreeding stops, the process reverses. Each generation of outbreeding cuts the odds of inheriting two copies of problematic variants. Within three to four generations, rare recessive traits become unlikely to manifest.

Maria Teresa married Francis Steven of Lraine in 1736. Almost 300 years ago, 10 12 generations since then, the Hapsburg jaw had no chance of surviving that kind of genetic dilution. So, here’s your answer, commenter who called this a silly question. Yes, the Hapsburgs still exist. They’re walking around Europe right now, attending events, giving interviews, living lives.

Carl von Hapsburg has social media accounts. You could theoretically meet him at a charity function and shake his hand. And no, they don’t have the jaw anymore. 300 years of not marrying their relatives fixed what 200 years of deliberate inbreeding broke. Look at Charles II in 1680. Barely functional. His inbreeding coefficient exceeding brother sister incest.

 Look at Carl von Hapsburg in 2024. Normal, unremarkable, indistinguishable from any other wealthy European man. That’s what happens when you finally, mercifully, stop marrying your cousins. The family that once produced a man whose autopsy found a heart the size of a peppercorn now produces faces you’d never look twice at.

 The jaw that became a medical case study has been diluted into nothing. The genetic damage that accumulated over two centuries unwound itself in less time. Which is, when you think about it, the best possible ending to this story. Not the dynasty dying out, but something quieter. The gradual healing of a genetic wound that never should have been inflicted.

 Generations of children who could eat without pain, speak without impediment, think without limitation. All because their ancestors finally stopped doing the thing that had been destroying them. The Hapsburgs are still here. They just look like everyone else now. And honestly, that’s more remarkable than any crown they ever wore. Subscribe for more stories like