Today’s Deformed Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Spanish royalty suffered more than most from the genetic mutation of inbreeding. Although the royal line was predominantly Bourbon, the debilitated Habsburg blood also ran profusely through the veins of the Spanish royal family. King Philip IV fathered fifteen children by his two wives. All of these Spanish Princes and Princesses, unlike his numerous healthy bastard offspring, were born physically degenerate and most did not live to see their fourth birthdays. In his successor, Charles II, centuries of inbred Habsburg physical and mental abnormality combined to reveal the laws of genetics at their cruelest. A sickly four-year-old when he succeeded his father, he reigned for thirty-five-years, mad, illiterate, incapable of governing, living his life in complete ignorance of even the basic geography of the empire he ruled. He had been a virtual invalid from the day he was born. When he came to the throne he was still being breast-fed by relays of fourteen wet nurses. His Habsburg underbite was so enormously pronounced that he could barely use his jaws to chew food; his tongue was so big that his speech was unintelligible. The King’s condition was also degenerative: by the time he was in his late thirties his legs were too weak to carry him, and he was an emaciated, mentally ill wreck. As he grew older he also succumbed to bouts of madness with increasing frequency. He had himself exorcised as it was believed he was possessed by a devil, hence he became known as Charles “The Bewitched”. These exorcisms apparently gave him some temporary relief. As the attacks grew worse the whole Spanish court became preoccupied with witchcraft, to the great amusement of Spain’s neighbors.
A generous portrait of Charles
In spite of his physical and mental incapacity, his station naturally required that he should be married and sire children to secure the future of the Spanish state. A “volunteer” was found in the French Princess Marie Louise, a niece of Louis XIV. It seems that Louis had been forewarned that the King of Spain was physically monstrous and that his poor seventeen-year-old niece was in for a nasty surprise, but the Sun King gave his blessing to the marriage anyway because he thought the union would favor French interests. Marie Louise did her best as a dutiful wife, but Charles was incapable of fatherhood. In 1689 she died, childless, after a riding accident. When she had been dead for about ten years he insisted on seeing her corpse. He descended by torchlight into the royal vaults beneath the church where several generations of Spanish kings and queens lay. He took one look at his first wife’s remains and ran screaming from the vault, and it was said that he was permanently crazed from that day on. The King spent the rest of his reign being led like a prize chimpanzee from one ceremonial function to another.
The unfortunate Marie Louise…
In 1770 Charles II died heirless and the Spanish Empire passed to Philip Anjou, the grandson of Louis XIV of France, thus plunging Europe into thirteen years of bloody war. Thousands died on the battlefields of Europe before the great powers finally accepted him as Philip V of Spain by the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713.
Culled from: Royal Babylon
Sideshow “Freaks” Du Jour!
Piebald Black Boys
Ashbury Benjamin, c 1885
There were a number of piebald blacks on the exhibition circuit late in the nineteenth century. Most came from the Caribbean. Piebaldism or localized depigmentation is inherited through an autosomal (non-sex-linked) dominant and is permanent from birth. Ashbury Benjamin, the boy with the machete, exhibits the most common form of piebaldism — a white frontal patch on the forehead accompanied by a white forelock. The Williams family who toured in later years with Barnum & Bailey were of this type. During the nineteenth century piebald blacks were usually called “Leopard boys” or, more ominously, “negroes turning white.”
Piebald Black Boy c 1885
Ashbury Benjamin is fourteen in Eisenmann’s picture. He was born in Cape Town, South Africa, and was exhibited from early childhood as “The Leopard Boy”. He is known to have played Drew’s Dime Museum, Cleveland, in December 1884.
Culled from: Monsters: Human Freaks in America’s Gilded Age