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Juana Of Castile: A VERY Devoted Wife

AnonyJ

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I find her story fascinating but rather sad, Juana/Joanna of Castile was the elder sister of Katharine of Aragon and she was married off to Philip The Handsome of the Habsburg empire.

She was enthralled by her husband and utterly devoted to him, contemporary reports say literally to the point of madness. He was a notorious womaniser and even after he died when she was pregnant with their sixth child she refused to let him be buried, and travelled for several years with his coffin. She was reported to have periodically opened it to embrace and kiss his corpse and slept next to it. Her cortege only travelled at night and she refused to lodge at nunneries so that other women would not see his dead body and/or fall in love with him.

She has been known as Juana La Loca (Joanna The Mad) but more recent scholarship has questioned whether she was really 'mad' apart from her very extreme devotion to Philip The Handsome.

More here: http://www.historyisnowmagazine.com...-pawn-for-the-men-in-her-family#.XKpX59h7nX4=
 
Handsome? He looked a bit like a young Jeremy Clarkson.
 
The young Henry VIII and Francois I were meant to be very handsome. Maybe it's what all the others looked like? *shudder* Here's Henry... And Francois... and finally the lovely Philip himself!

Do you think that Henry and Phi;ip were done by the same person? You can see why Holbein made such a stir!
 
Juana / Joanna was essentially kept as a prisoner by her father and / or other powerful figures once her husband Philip died. She didn't do a lot of traveling at all.

Her life of unrelenting exploitation would certainly provide cause for going insane. However, some scholars suggest the lurid stories of her madness may - at least in part - have been propaganda spread to support others' grabbing and executing the power that should have been hers in principle.

For an overview, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joanna_of_Castile
 
The young Henry VIII and Francois I were meant to be very handsome. Maybe it's what all the others looked like? *shudder* Here's Henry... And Francois... and finally the lovely Philip himself!

Do you think that Henry and Phi;ip were done by the same person? You can see why Holbein made such a stir!

Francois is defo quite sexy (despite the beard and reportedly pox-ridden state) but as for Henry & Philip, the Purdey page-boy haircut kills it for me!
 
Francois is defo quite sexy (despite the beard and reportedly pox-ridden state) but as for Henry & Philip, the Purdey page-boy haircut kills it for me!
Agree on Francois. Philip is okay. I feel sure I have heard that merely being free of smallpox scars was enough to earn the description "fair" back in those days so clear skin + reasonable looks = height of gorgeousness.

As for Joanna, well after the treatment she endured, I am not surprised she was "mad". I also find the stories of carrying the body dubious. She either carried it about for years OR was walled up in a convent after giving birth to Catalina. Which is it?
 
Agree on Francois. Philip is okay. I feel sure I have heard that merely being free of smallpox scars was enough to earn the description "fair" back in those days so clear skin + reasonable looks = height of gorgeousness.

As for Joanna, well after the treatment she endured, I am not surprised she was "mad". I also find the stories of carrying the body dubious. She either carried it about for years OR was walled up in a convent after giving birth to Catalina. Which is it?

A bit of both - after he was finally buried in Granada the ensuing power struggle meant her 'madness' was a good excuse to imprision her, I think.
 
OK, just don't inbreed. Problem solved.

The Habsburgs perfected inbreeding to a stupidly fine art. The final heir to the Spanish Habsburg empire was so inbred and disabled by it that it was probably a merciful death when he popped off - Carlos II (1661 – 1700). Juana was his great-great-great grandmother (I think).

The scientific journal community PLOS ONE has an interesting scholarly article about how few generations [16] it took for recessive inbreeding to kill off an entire gene-line here: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005174

The article here at https://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscience/2009/04/14/how-inbreeding-killed-off-a-line-of-kings gives a good 'translation' of the article:

"Gonzalo Alvarez ... traced the pedigree of the entire line back through 16 generations, including over 3,000 people.

For each person, he calculated a figure called the "inbreeding coefficient", symbolised by the letter F. It measures the probability that a person with two identical copies of a gene inherited both from the same ancestor. For example, a child born to cousins has an F value of 0.0625, but it becomes much higher if the parents come from a long line of inbred couples. The higher the value, the greater the degree of inbreeding in that lineage.

Alvarez found that the first Spanish Habsburg king, Philip I, had a relatively low F-value of 0.025. But after just five generations, his descendant Charles II had an F-value of 0.254, more than ten times that of his great-great-great-grandfather. This figure is even twice as high as the expected value for the child of an uncle-niece marriage, which reflects just how pervasive inbreeding was in this family tree. It also means that Charles II would have carried identical copies for more than quarter of his genes (his genome was 25% homozygous, in the parlance of geneticists)."

The result:

Juan_de_Miranda_Carreno_002 (Copy).jpg
 
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