The Entire Story of The Habsburg Family Explained

On the twentieth of October, fourteen ninety six, in a small Flemish town near the city of Antwerp in the Low Countries, one of the most consequential events in history took place. A sixteen year old Spanish princess stepped off a ship, met a duke she had never seen before, and married him the same day. The ceremony was unremarkable by the standards of the age. Dynastic marriages happened constantly across Europe, sealed by candlelight in cold stone churches, witnessed by courtiers who had traveled too far and eaten too well. Nobody in that church could have known what they were watching.