The Tragic Life of the Habsburg Princess Who Was 'Bred to Death'

The Tragic Life of the Habsburg Princess Who Was 'Bred to Death' Maria Antonia of Austria was the daughter of Emperor Leopold I and Margarita Teresa of Spain, the little princess at the center of Velázquez's Las Meninas. A 2013 genetic study of the Habsburg dynasty later found her inbreeding coefficient was the highest of anyone in the family, above the figure expected for a child of incest. This documentary follows her from her birth in the Hofburg in 1669 through a childhood shaped by Spanish succession politics. At seven she was promised to her own uncle, King Charles II of Spain. At sixteen she married Max Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria and hero of the Siege of Vienna, and that same day, under pressure from her father, she secretly signed away her claim to the Spanish throne. Drawing on the Bavarian State Archives, contemporary diplomatic reports, the inscriptions on her coffin and modern genetic research, the film traces an unhappy marriage, the loss of two infant sons, and her decision to defy her husband and return to Vienna to give birth. She died there on Christmas Eve 1692 at the age of twenty-three, weeks after delivering Joseph Ferdinand, the boy who would be named heir to the entire Spanish empire. Her last will disinherited her husband, and she asked to be buried beside her mother in the Capuchin Crypt. The video weighs both meanings of "bred to death," generations of close-kin marriage and the relentless pressure on royal women to produce heirs. It also separates what the sources actually say from the speculation that has grown up around her.