15 Families That Would Win Gold at the Inbreeding Olympics

The Habsburg dynasty ruled most of Europe from the 15th to 18th centuries, and kept the power in the family to the extent that they got reeeeeeeal funny-lookin’, eventually sporting deeply unusual jaws, learning difficulties and genetic disorders. Don’t inbreed!

An offshoot of the primary Habsburg line, the Spanish Habsburgs (aka the House of Austria) also didn’t like to stray from the primary bloodline, meaning a child born to cousins was as inbred as one born to siblings. Bleak!

It’s not just royalty that does it. While Jackass star Johnny Knoxville (real name: PJ Clapp) is less inbred than most people on this list, he’s significantly more inbred than most regular folks. Might explain the whole “seemingly unkillable” thing.

Inbreeding may have led to the Russian Revolution — Alexei Nikolaevich, the last of the Romanovs, had hemophilia, at least partially caused by generations of excessive closeness. The family employed mysterious monk Rasputin to help, and it all went down from there. 

Hawaiian princess Nāhiʻenaʻena was a victim of unfortunate timing — a union with her brother was in keeping with ancient tradition, but missionaries had just converted the population to Christianity. She was excommunicated, only welcomed back shortly before her death.

Marriages between siblings were very common in the Ptolemaic dynasty of ancient Egypt, of which Cleopatra is the best-known member. Where most people would have 16 great-great-grandparents, she had six. Until Caesar showed up, she was married to her brother.

1,200 years before Cleopatra, fellow A-list pharoah Tutankhamun was the product of inbreeding: His mom and dad were brother and sister, i.e. also his aunt and uncle. He was weak, frail and sickly. You know, because of inbreeding.

Odd, West Virginia is home to the Whittaker family, an extremely inbred family, several members of which communicate exclusively in grunts. Asked why their eyes point in different directions, one remarked it was probably due to coal mining. Nope! Incest!

The Fugate family of Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, were blue. Not sad, blue. They carried the genes for the recessive blueness-inducing blood condition methemoglobinemia, but due to keeping it local, it never receded, and several generations were born Smurf-like.

One of the grimmer elements of the Biblical tale of Lot fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah involves his two daughters getting him drunk and fucking him. Their offspring began the Ammonites and Moabites, two long-lasting tribes, but goddamn, that’s unacceptable.

Infamously useless violin-playing Roman emperor Nero may have owed some of his legendary insanity to a shallow gene pool — his parents Claudio and Aggripina were uncle and niece, neither of whom were particularly non-inbred themselves. 

Manco Cápac is a figure shrouded in mystery — the founder of the Inca Empire may be conflated from multiple figures. However, the story goes that he married his older sister, Mama Uqllu, and all subsequent Inca rulers descended from them.

George III, known as the mad king, was for decades thought to suffer from porphyria, a condition exacerbated by inbreeding, that causes blue urine, mania and erratic behavior. Current thinking is that he was actually bipolar. The inbreeding? Pure coincidence.

Maria I of Portugal — Maria the Pious or the Mad depending on whether you liked her — married her uncle Peter III, making her seven children also her cousins. Later in life she would send bloodcurdling screams through the palace. Unsettling! 

The noble German House of Wittelsbach — who married into the Habsburgs at several points — got up to plenty of unusualness, potentially due to inbreeding. Empress Elisabeth exercised obsessively while refusing to speak, while King Ludwig was eventually deposed for “insanity.”