Incest Ain’t Pretty

SPEAKER_01: You are listening to the Kobi One Podcast. A new poem every Thursday. A new article every Sunday.

SPEAKER_01: The very first king of a centralized Spain was a Gentian-born man named Philip the Handsome. He was of the Habsburg dynasty so, of course, it was not extremely difficult to be handsome in comparison. The Habsburgs are today mostly remembered for their generational inbreeding and the resulting deformities. The list could be quite long, but I will add some pictures to the article version instead. They do sometimes speak more clearly than words.

SPEAKER_01: Then again, where would we be without at least a few examples, right? Let's focus on one man in particular. Carlos Dos El Hechisado Or in English, Charles II, also known as Charles the Bewitched. Now the people only listening to the podcast version of this article, you're not seeing his portrait, but he's not mother's finest, let us just leave it at that. He was the last within the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, the end of the line. Until the age of five, he fed on naught but breast milk, supplied by fourteen different wet nurses.

SPEAKER_01: His tongue was so thick, and his Habsburg jaw so misaligned and crooked, he learned only to speak at the age of eight. Unable to chew his own food, he either ate it whole, oftentimes vomiting it back up, or had it pre-chewed instead. He suffered from epilepsy, rashes, dizziness, poor eyesight, ulcers on his legs. The list went on and on. Worst of all was his autopsy report. If to be believed, he had a heart the size of a peppercorn. Corroded lungs Gangrenous and rotten intestines A single testicle that was black as coal And a head full of water He was the pinnacle of inbreeding on a stupendous scale His inbreeding coefficient was 0.254 Which is as if being the child of a brother and sister Now, our main man, Philip the Handsome, had an inbreeding coefficient of only 0.025, which is really a considerable amount less.

SPEAKER_01: Philip the Handsome was, by all accounts, in fact, actually really a handsome man. Vincenzo Quirini, the Venetian ambassador, described him as physically beautiful, vigorous, and rich. In the original Italian, Bello di Corpo, Gagliardo e Prospero, which I probably just butchered. And Louis II, the twelfth, of France, upon seeing him, remarked totally unprompted, What a handsome prince! Que voilà un bon prince!

SPEAKER_01: He was married to a woman known forevermore as Joanna the Mad. Juana La Locca I believe, much like many scholars do today, that history, and mostly her Habsburg husband, dealt her a bad hand. The life of Joanna and her marriage to Philip are a wild ride in and of themselves and deserve their own proper article. In fact... For this week's Sunday article, I will release my third installation of Chronicle of Crowns dedicated to the life of Juana Lalocca. For the moment, a noteworthy detail Philip rather conveniently gave credence to her being absolutely mental, effectively plotting to steal power from his own wife.

SPEAKER_01: But the important part here is that, through her, Philip grabs hold of the Spanish throne and becomes the first man in the history of the world to exercise power over a centralized Spain, albeit through his wife. But to claim this throne,

SPEAKER_01: Philip assembled his court in the Low Countries in late 1505 and set sail for Spain in January of 1506.

SPEAKER_01: The Burgundian Habsburg Chapel was considered the finest musical institution in Europe.

SPEAKER_01: On a level with the Papal Chapel. Oh, that sounds delicious. With the Papal Chapel in Rome. They too joined our Philip, so off to Spain. Or maybe England first. En route in January 1506, Philip's ship was caught in a storm and wrecked off the Dorset coast. He made some deals with Henry VII of England, including proposed marriages and trade agreements. Depending on which texts you read, this was either an amicable event or Philip was actually taken hostage until he signed something called the Malus Intercursus Treaty.

SPEAKER_01: Much to the detriment of the Flemish and mostly the Gentians

SPEAKER_01: When peace returned once more to the northern sea the entourage set sail yet again Now the ocean was so calm that Philip ordered the vessel with the musicians to sail in parallel with his own boat over the open ocean purely for the sake of being accompanied by music during his voyage Castilla Castilla

SPEAKER_01: One man had to carry the wooden organ, brought with them all the way from Flanders, on his back for the whole walk.

SPEAKER_01: After finally arriving, Philip is coronated and there we have it. Oh, actually no. Reading this out loud here in the article, Philip wasn't coronated, I have to... Set the record straight. To hear the full detail, Chronicle of Crowns number three is coming, and I'll lay it out cleanly for you. He wasn't coronated, but he was named king in name. The very first king of a centralized Spain. He didn't get to rule for very long, however. What is the proverb about karma being some type of a female dog?

SPEAKER_01: What was that again? Comment if you want me to elaborate any further.

SPEAKER_01: Being overheated from the game, from the game, he drank a glass of cold river water and immediately felt unwell. He died 11 days later on September 25, sorry, September the 25th, aged 28, the exact cause of death still being debated. His musicians were now stranded 700 kilometers into the heart of Castilla. No king, no money, no passage home. The Flemish court he brought to Spain, the archers, the musicians, the noblemen, they became known as Los Flamencos, the Flemish. They developed a reputation for being wild, drinking too much, living outside normal social rules, which in the Spain of those days were rigid beyond belief.

SPEAKER_01: The Spanish began using flamenco as a general term for people of a rowdy and foreign persuasion. The art form that emerged from Roma and Andalusian culture about two centuries later absorbed that label and is until today known as flamenco. A Gentian man goes to Spain to be the king, drinks water, rookie mistake, a wise Flemish man from those days would have had beer, dies, reason actually still unclear, and then sets off a chain reaction that leads an Andalusian art form to be mistakenly called Flemish, flamenco, until the end of time.

SPEAKER_01: Strange origins, indeed.

SPEAKER_01: Almost every day I pass by the place where once Charles V of Spain was born. The son of Philip the Thirsty. Sorry, Philip the Handsome, of course. When Philip dies, confusion and tomfoolery take hold of the European continent until Charles V comes of age in 1516.

SPEAKER_01: Charles' hand did the crown. Unlike his father, Charles was a typical Habsburg, ugly as the night. Many Habsburg deficiencies plagued him, but right now I want to focus on the most commonly known deformity of the Habsburgs, the jaw. Charles V had such a troublesome Habsburg jawline and chin that eating and speaking were very difficult and did not come naturally. He grew up speaking French and Flemish as his first languages, only beginning to learn Spanish after inheriting the crown at age 16.

SPEAKER_01: He was taught by tutors but never fully shed his foreign accent and his Habsburg jaw gave his Spanish a distinctive halting quality. To the irritation of his Spanish subjects, he never truly mastered the language. In any or all languages he spoke he had a distinct lisp. Now, I have often heard the theory that the distinctive sound in Spanish, the one that makes the sound gracias, sound as if pronounced with a lisp, this sound supposedly happened due to a lisping king. I had always assumed that this king was Charles V. When I researched the myth only the other day, I found it debunked in a rather peculiar fashion, however.

SPEAKER_01: The technical explanation goes like this. Medieval Spanish had an overcrowded set of hissing sounds. Linguists call them sibilants, as many as seven or eight of them. All slightly different, all easily confused. During the 15th and 16th centuries, the language simplified this overloaded system. In Castilla, the simplification went one way, producing the distinctive th sound. In Andalusia and the Canary Islands, it went another, producing what became Latin American Spanish. Linguists call this natural internal pressure.

SPEAKER_01: The debunking then points, as its smoking gun, to a chronicle of one Pedro of Castilla, a 14th century king who, it is recorded, lisped a little. Since Pedro reigned 200 years before the shift, the debunking concludes, the Lisping King myth is false. Now, of course, I am left utterly confused. The debunking refers to a 14th century king with a lisp to dismiss the story whilst neglecting entirely the fact that in the exact era when the shift occurred, a lisping non-native Spanish king sat on the throne.

SPEAKER_01: The man whose jaw made eating difficult, who learned Spanish as a foreign language at 16, whose court spoke Flemish and French, and whose distinctive way of speaking would have surrounded every courtier in Spain for decades. Nobody in the academic literature directly addresses this. So, here is me, Kobi One, posing the following. The linguists probably have it right when it comes to all the technical baloney. But wouldn't a long line of speech-impaired Spanish kings and queens taking the throne in the exact same time period where the S became eighth within the language have something to do with this sudden change?

SPEAKER_01: And how come, moreover, that this theory was never investigated? I can't be the only kobi one that ever thought of this, now can I? Either way, I consider my point made. And I will give my theory To the world of scholars and linguists To poke and prod at their leisure What strange origins

SPEAKER_00: What next will keep us the right edge? What will the top rope be far tied out?

The Story