Fertility as a political weapon: Mariana de Austria

I Procreation

In the Early Modern period, the perceived fertility of royal women was used as a very useful political weapon. If a dynasty was able to offer the hand of a young princess, that was already old enough to have children, to a marriageable prince, they had a very clear diplomatic advantage. At the same time, when several dynasties wanted to marry one of their princesses to a particular sovereign, a potential bride can be criticized for being too young, with the goal that the king would disregard her candidacy because of that. This is what happened when king Philip IV of Spain was looking for a second wife, after the sudden death of his only son and heir, prince Balthasar Charles, in 1646. The princess who was regarded as the favoured candidate was the fiancée of the king’s late heir, archduchess Mariana of Austria, who was twelve years old at that time. But there was other two candidates who were very well regarded by some important members of Madrid’s government, the two so-called archduchesses of Innsbruck, Isabella Clara and Marie Leopoldine of Austria.

Their mother and regent of the territories of Austria-Tyrol, Claudia of Médici, desired the position of queen of Spain Monarchy for one of her daughters. But she was aware that their candidacy was politically less attractive than the archduchess’one, so her strategy was to focus on the fact that both her daughters were already old enough to become pregnant, unlike Mariana of Austria, who was too young to consummate the marriage. This was a good strategy in a moment in which Philip IV needed desperately to assure the succession to the throne of the Spanish Monarchy as soon as possible. Thus, Claudia of Medici’s envoy to the Spanish court, Eustachio Pagano, presented an official memorial in which he extensively argued that those women who married too young usually had problems to give birth to healthy male children and had a greater chance to die during childbirth, at the same time he continuously reminded the monarch of his need to marry a woman who could give him heirs right away. Even more, he suggested that the archduchess was less physically developed than the emperor said, suggesting that the most recent portrait that Ferdinand III had sent him from Vienna (the one we show here, painted by Frans Luycks) was made to make him believe that she was taller and more mature than she really was, putting his succession at risk for his own hereditary purposes. 

However, this strategy was not successful, and Philip IV ended up marrying Mariana of Austria soon after.  [Rocío Martínez]