Margaret Theresa of Spain was born on the 12th of July 1651, inside the Royal Alcazar Palace in Madrid, into a family that had spent centuries destroying itself. Her father was King Philip IV, ruler of Spain since 1621, a monarch known as the Planet King because his empire circled the globe, stretching across most of Central and South America, the Caribbean, the Philippines, and parts of West Africa. Her mother was Mariana of Austria, a daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III. Both parents belonged to the House of Habsburg, a dynasty that had risen from the borderlands of Switzerland and Austria in the Middle Ages and had conquered much of Europe not primarily through warfare but through the strategic mastery of dynastic marriage.
That marriage strategy had a catastrophic flaw. Generation after generation, the Habsburgs married within their own bloodline, sealing alliances at the cost of their own health. Margaret’s parents were uncle and niece. Of their five children, three died in infancy.
Only Margaret and her younger brother Charles survived, and survival offered no salvation. By his twenties, Charles was prematurely aged, plagued by a grotesquely deformed jaw, and showing signs of early dementia. Contemporaries nicknamed him the Bewitched, believing his physical and intellectual collapse was the work of sorcery. Margaret was luckier physically than her brother, but she carried the Habsburg curse in her own way.
She grew up in the opulent world of the Alcazar, where her every need was met by an army of maids and servants, where she hid sweets and chocolates from the court physicians, and where every word and glance was governed by unyielding royal etiquette. She received the finest education available, learning German to converse with the Austrian Habsburgs and some Latin, the language of scholarship and the Church. Her parents adored her. She was their prized jewel, the only truly healthy child their union had produced, a little angel with delicate features and a lively spirit.
When she was five years old, they commissioned one of Europe’s greatest painters, Diego Velazquez, to immortalize her in a portrait. That painting, once known as the Family, is today called Las Meninas, and it shows Margaret being attended by the ladies in waiting, along with Marie Barbola, a courtier with dwarfism whom Velazquez portrayed with dignity and a piercing gaze rather than as mere entertainment. In the masterpiece, Velazquez himself appears, a silent observer of the lavish but rigid Spanish court. The painter produced no fewer than five portraits of Margaret in her youth, making her one of the most painted young people in early modern Europe.
Even before Las Meninas was completed in 1656, there was already discussion at court about whom she would marry. In royal politics, marriage was never about love. It was about power. At one point, there was a suggestion that Margaret could marry Charles Stuart, later King Charles II of England, an alliance that would have been used to balance the rivalry between France and Spain.
In the end, Charles married a Portuguese bride instead, and King Philip opposed the match. He wanted his daughter married to the Austrian branch of the Habsburg family, showing no concern that this would deepen the inbreeding. It was simply how the Habsburgs kept power in their grip. Margaret had no say in her fate.
She was eleven years old when it was announced at the Royal Court that she would marry Leopold of the House of Habsburg, a man who was both her first cousin and her uncle, the younger brother of her mother. Leopold had recently succeeded as Archduke of Austria, King of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, and Holy Roman Emperor. Margaret was deemed too young for the marriage in early 1663, when the betrothal was made. In April 1666, nearing her fifteenth birthday, she set off from Madrid for Vienna.
The journey took six months, and the Spanish royal party only arrived in December. The marriage ceremony took place on the 12th of December 1666, a magnificent event attended by many of Europe’s most powerful royals, and the celebrations continued throughout 1667. Life in Vienna was strange and difficult for Margaret at first. She and Leopold had an unusual marriage.
They did not try to ignore their close blood relationship, and she actually called him Uncle. Despite that, they got along well, sharing tastes in art and music, and Leopold did his best to make her comfortable in her new surroundings. Like many royal brides, Margaret had brought members of her old household staff with her, so familiar faces surrounded her as she adjusted to her new life. But she remained deeply homesick, clinging to her Spanish roots and doing little to improve her German.
As time passed, her delicate beauty began to fade. Her complexion grew paler, her features more fatigued, and the characteristic Habsburg jaw became more pronounced. The marriage was troubled in other ways. Margaret became pregnant almost immediately after arriving in Vienna.
She gave birth to a boy named Ferdinand in September 1667, but he survived only three and a half months, dying in January 1668. Their luck seemed to change with the birth of their daughter Maria Antonia in January 1669, who would be the only one of Margaret’s children to survive. A son, John Leopold, was born on the 20th of February 1670 and died within hours. A daughter, Maria Anna, lived just two weeks before passing away in February 1672.
In six years, Margaret endured six pregnancies, including four live births and two miscarriages, each leaving her weaker and more depressed. Her frequent illnesses were noticed when she arrived in Vienna, and observers put them down to the strain of pregnancy. But it became clear that something more serious was at play. Margaret was often confined to bed even when she was not pregnant.
Physicians diagnosed her with an enlarged thyroid gland, but seventeenth-century medicine had no cure, and her condition only worsened. In the early spring of 1673, she suffered a three-week-long attack of stomach pains, then developed a fever. Documents written by foreign ambassadors at the court in Vienna indicate that many seriously believed she would die. By early March, she had difficulty breathing.
On the 10th of March, a confessor was called to hear her last confession and give her the sacrament. Two days later, on the 12th of March, Margaret died at the age of twenty-one. An autopsy revealed a heartbreaking truth. She had been carrying another baby boy at the time of her death.
She was laid to rest in the Imperial Crypt in Vienna. The Austrian court entered a lengthy mourning period, with funeral services stretching for weeks into April. Leopold was devastated by her death, but it did not stop him from marrying again by the end of the year. His new wife was Archduchess Claudia Felicitas of Austria, a member of the Tyrolean branch of the Habsburgs.
The marriage was not about love. It was about survival. The dynastic game had to continue, and more heirs were desperately needed, preferably male, to ensure the Habsburg reign could endure. After Margaret’s death, her rights to the Spanish throne passed to her only surviving daughter, Maria Antonia.
When Maria Antonia died in 1692, those rights were inherited by her only surviving son, Prince Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria. His untimely death in 1699, coupled with the failure of King Charles II to produce an heir, triggered a succession crisis that plunged Spain and all of Europe into a brutal war lasting nearly fifteen years. It was a crisis that perhaps could have been avoided if the Habsburgs had not destroyed themselves from within through their incestuous practices.
Margaret Theresa, a princess who was never asked what she wanted, became another link in that long chain of ruin, her short life another consequence of a dynasty that valued power over everything else, including its own survival.