Word: habsburgs
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...obsessive human presences of 17th century painting: Philip IV of Spain, growing older in the long succession of Diego Velásquez's court portraits. This one was painted late in the monarch's life, around 1653. The King's features-the bulbed Habsburg lip, the forehead's waxy promontory, the thick ball of a chin, the upswept mustache that Salvador Dali would appropriate and vulgarize-must have been more familiar to Velásquez than the map of Spain itself (see color overleaf...
Hemophilia is thought of as a disease of the monarchy because England's Queen Victoria, a carrier, passed the trait along to some of her children and had two granddaughters marry respectively a Romanov and Spanish Habsburg. Yet the disease is anything but royal and far from rare. It affects one out of every 20,000 males and can strike anyone-even those with no previous hemophilia history-who inherits the genetic defect preventing the production of certain blood fractions involved in the clotting process. Hemophiliacs do not bleed more easily than others; they merely bleed longer. They...
Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire for 68 years, succumbing at last at age 86, two years after the start of World War I. When Franz Joseph succeeded to its command, the Habsburg holdings included Milan and Venice, Prague and Cracow, as well as Vienna and Budapest. Within two years of his death, the empire had been reduced to the small country, centered on Vienna, that it essentially is today. The Eagles Die is the story of that Habsburg sunset, and of the golden light that Viennese culture shed in the waning days of empire...
Vienna-born Author Marek takes the biographical tack in The Eagles Die, concentrating upon Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, obviously hoping that it might do for Habsburg Austria what Nicholas and Alexandra did for Romanov Russia. He only partly succeeds, mainly because his principal characters were intensely private, imperial strangers both to their subjects and to each other...
...just as funny (though its humor is soaked in pain); Barnes even manages to get away with burlesque and still wind up with a powerful treatment of issues that really matter. His centerpiece is the misshapen, epileptic King Carlos V of Spain, the pitiful result of centuries of Habsburg inbreeding. For 35 years after his accession in 1665 he was expected to die at any moment, and all Europe was armed for the struggle that would follow his death, since, in addition to his other troubles, he was importent and could leave no heirs. In his bizarre court, where obeisance...