The historical inspiration for incest on Game of Thrones
As season seven of Game of Thrones thunders on, the slight simmering romantic tension between Daenerys Targaryen and Jon Snow is beginning to bubble over. On the pop-culture romance timeline, the two are currently in the surly Darcy and headstrong Elizabeth Bennet kind-of-fancy-but-also-hate stage. Even Davos is shipping the pair, along with half the internet. There’s just one slight hitch with this burgeoning romance, and it’s not that Jon refuses to bend the knee. If Bran’s visions are to be trusted, Daenerys is actually Jon Snow’s aunt.
Can an aunt and her nephew get married?
Short answer? No. It’s illegal. It is in UK law, anyway. It’s also prohibited by many world religions including Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.
But while it might seem icky to us, avunculate marriages (those between an uncle and a niece or an aunt and a nephew) have actually happened throughout history. In fact, they were once frequent among of the royal houses of Europe. More often than not, this was to consolidate alliances between countries. The religious questions this raised were circumvented by receiving spemore cial permission from the pope in the form as a dispensation.
When she was 17 years old, Joanna of Naples married her 27-year-old nephew, Ferdinand II, in 1496. He was the son of Joanna’s half-brother, Alfonso II. The marriage was shortlived, with Ferdinand dying later that year, childless.
Philip II of Spain — you know, the one with the Armada — had a bit luck when he married his niece Anna of Austria in 1570. Anna was Philip’s fourth and final wife. She was also his favourite, which might bode well for Jon and Daenerys. Phil, much like the rest of his Hapsburg house, tended to keep it in the family. He’d already been married to his cousin Maria Manuela of Portugal, followed by his cousin Mary I of England (aka Bloody Mary) and Elisabeth of Valois — who bucked the trend by not being related to Philip.
The marriage wasn’t without opposition, though. Even Pope Pius V initially opposed the marriage — problematic when a dispensation from the Catholic Church was required for wedding your relatives. The children from Philip’s incestuous marriages also suffered as a consequence of these politically convenient alliances. Prince Carlos, the product of Philip’s first marriage to a fellow Hapsburg, was plagued by deformity and psychological afflictions to such an extent that his dad locked him up until Carlos’s death a few months later. Deformity was common in the Hapsburg family, who were one of the most powerful dynasties in Europe, thanks to years of consanguineous marriages.
Carlos wasn’t the only one who suffered, either: the family were so inbred that they even had a deformity, the “Hapsburg Jaw”, named after them. King Charles II of Spain’s prominent jaw was immortalised in portraits by Titian and Velazquez, and his tongue was said to be so big for his mouth that he struggled to speak and drooled when he did manage to talk. Scientists have since concluded that Charles’s many symptoms (including impotence, an oversized head, and edemas all over his body) indicate he had two genetic disorders: thyroid deficiency and renal tubular acidosis.
What about brother and sister?
As Cersei frequently states in a vague attempt to justify her sordid relationship with brother Jaime, the Targaryens wed brother and sister for hundreds of years. Like all marriages, these weren’t without their problems (granted, of a slightly different ilk) and it is often hinted that the years of incestuous Targaryen marriages resulted in a series of mad kings — the most famous being Aerys II, Daenerys’s father. We had a hint of the famous Targaryen mental instability through Dany’s brother, Viserys, whose petulant temper ensured a gold-infused demise. The Lannisters didn’t exactly get off lightly, either, with Joffrey being so vicious that fans universally cheered when he was murdered on his wedding day.
Sibling incest has pretty much always been a taboo. However, there have been a few examples of royal sibling marriages. Most famous of all were the Ptolemaic royal family of Egypt. Cleopatra VII (the one from Shakespeare) was married to her younger brother Ptolemy XIII. As if that wasn’t narrowing the gene pool enough, her parents were uncle and niece as well as cousins. Similarly, Tutankhamun’s parents were siblings, and he was married to his own half-sister Ankhesenamun. Scientists have proven from King Tut’s remains that he suffered from a cleft palate and club foot, congenital defects which may well have been brought about through his incestuous ancestry.
These ancient royal marriages were often “justified” by the fact their gods married their siblings. In the Egyptian’s case this was Osiris and Iris. The Egyptian royal family believed they were descendants of the gods and needed to keep the bloodline pure. However the same also goes for the Greek gods Zeus and Hera, who were siblings.
As recently as the late nineteenth century, King Chulalongkorn of Thailand married four of his halfsisters. These types of marriages were usually a move to assert that only those of equal birth were worthy of marriage to the king. Even more recently, following Whitney Houston’s death, it emerged that her daughter Bobbi Kristina was engaged to her adopted brother Nick Gordon. While it wasn’t technically incest, as Gordon was never officially adopted by Houston, the dalliance did raise a few eyebrows.
Interestingly in Game of Thrones, a marriage between former brothers and sisters-in-law doesn’t seem to be a problem. After Joffrey’s traumatic purple-infused death, the freshly widowed Margaery was hitched to Joffrey’s brother Tommen. When Henry VIII wanted to marry his dead brother’s wife Catherine of Aragon, he had to get a special dispensation from the Pope because, according to Leviticus, “if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” Later Henry decided that the marriage was cursed because it was incestuous — and that was why he and Catherine had failed to produce a male heir. Funny that this epiphany happened around the same time Anne Boleyn came on the scene.
All in all, history teaches us that Jon and Daenerys’s prospective match wouldn’t be too unfeasible — and, as relationships go, far less taboo than Jaime and Cersei’s. We just have to wait and see whether Jon will bend the knee.