The Inbred Habsburg Emperor Born With Water on His Brain

追加: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]He spoke five languages. He played piano. He kept a diary that scholars describe as coherent and sharp-witted.

[00:00:07]He commuted his own assassin's death sentence. And for 150 years, the dominant historical take on this man has been that he was an imbecile. His name was Ferdinand and he was the emperor of Austria from 1835 to 1848. His parents were double first cousins. He was born with water on his brain. He had up to 20 seizures a day. And when the revolution came and they took his crown away, he went home and according to his own diary, he and his dear wife packed their bags. This is a man the vianese mocked as Nandal the idiot. Gutinan the finished, the punchline of an empire. So how did this same person end up richer than the emperor who replaced him, bankrolling the Habsburg dynasty from a castle in Bohemia while France Joseph came begging for loans? That gap between the legend and the life is where this gets interesting. Ferdinand arrived on April 19th, 1793 in Vienna. 6 months earlier, his great aunt Maruinette had lost her head in Paris. His father, Emperor Francis II, announced the birth of a healthy prince, which was generous.

[00:01:09]The baby's skull was visibly wrong, too large, disproportionate to the body. A high forehead flattened at the back of the cranium. The court physicians had a clinical term for this. They called it a skewed water head. In modern language, that translates to hydrophilis, a buildup of cerebral spinal fluid inside the skull. The fact that Ferdinand survived to age 82 tells us this was probably the arrested communicating type where the pressure stabilized in infancy rather than building to the point of killing him. No autopsy of the brain was ever published. Modern retrospective guesses have included tuberous sclerosis and chiari malfformation, but nothing peer-reviewed backs any of them. The working label remains hydrophilis and epilepsy. His body told the rest of the story, macroephily.

[00:01:58]The classic Habsburg jaw, mandibular prognithism, pushed forward beyond the lip. A protruding nose above it. Frontal bossing meaning the forehead bulged disproportionately while the back of the skull stayed flat. Rickets which is explicitly listed in German sources but curiously absent from most English summaries. stiff limbs, tremors, weak muscles, and a speech impediment.

[00:02:22]Contemporary descriptions paint a consistent picture. An enormous head on a puny frame. At age nine, Ferdinand could not pour water from a jug, open a door, or climb stairs without someone helping him. That detail comes from Breijgitan, and it says everything about how this child moved through the world.

[00:02:40]Not with independence or ease, but with assistance always. Some popular sources claim he wore a padded helmet beneath his ceremonial hats that appears nowhere in primary documentation. Others mention macro glossia, an enlarged tongue.

[00:02:55]Again, no primary corroboration. The verified symptoms are bad enough without embellishment. The why of all this is genetic and it is not subtle.

[00:03:04]Ferdinand's father, Francis, married his own double first cousin, Maria Theresa, of Naples and Sicily. Their mothers were sisters. Their fathers were brothers.

[00:03:14]They shared all four grandparents.

[00:03:16]Emperor Francis Ist of Lraine and Empress Maria Theresa on one side, Charles III of Spain, and Maria Amelia of Saxony on the other. Ferdinand had only four great-grandparents instead of the expected eight. German genealogologists have a word for this, Anand Schwund, loss of ancestors. The peer-reviewed Alvarez and Sabalos studies mapped inbreeding coefficients across the Habsburg family tree. And while they stopped their published numbers at Charles V 6th, a child of double first cousin starts at a coefficient of at least 0.125 before you even factor in the accumulated consanguinity of previous generations. For reference, Charles II of Spain clocked in at 0.254.

[00:03:59]Ferdinand almost certainly exceeded the Austrian Habsburg average and may have approached the Spanish line. Of his parents' 12 children, four were severely disabled. He was the eldest surviving son. His childhood was a strange sheltered capsule. His father, described by biographers as looking with his heart rather than his head, publicly announced a healthy prince and then kept the boy hidden. His mother, Maria Teresa of Naples, maintained him in exclusively female care until he was 9 years old, which broke with Habsburg tradition.

[00:04:31]Normally, a prince transferred to a male tutor called an aou at age six. When an effective teacher named France Maria Fona Stephano was brought in and actually started making progress with the boy, Ferdinand's mother dismissed him. No explanation survives for why you would fire the one person getting results. She died in 1807 during childbirth when Ferdinand was 14. His stepmother Maria Ludvika of Mona replaced all his teachers and installed Baron Yusf Kalisans von Bberg, a botonist and art collector serving as Chamberlain.

[00:05:07]Bberg was an unusual choice for a royal tutor. He was not a military man, not a courtier in the traditional sense, but a collector and naturalist. He and his wife, Countest Josephine von Adams, ran Ferdinand through a curriculum that reads more like finishing school for an eccentric aristocrat than training for an emperor. Reading, writing, riding, dancing, fencing, piano, drawing, gardening, and bot. No medical interventions are documented from this period. No leeches, no skull treponation, no bleeding, no purging, nothing from the standard horror kit of early 19th century medicine. The approach was educational rehabilitation and in the context of its time it was strikingly humane and it worked or at least it worked far better than the legend admits. Ferdinand became conversant in five languages German, Hungarian, Czech, Italian and French with Latin as a sixth liturggical competence. He played piano and at least one other instrument. He drew well, especially nature and his pets. He could ride, fence, and shoot. He kept a diary his entire adult life held now in the House Hoff's archive in Vienna. Multiple scholars who have read it described the writing as coherent and legible and occasionally laced with sharp wit. He collected clocks obsessively. He was fascinated by mechanical curiosities, locks and cryptography and worked as a competent amateur cipher cracker. He followed the development of railway technology with genuine interest.

[00:06:39]Austria's first steam railway, the Kaiser Ferdinand's Nordban running from Fidorf to Deutsch Varram and financed by Salomon Meron Rothschild opened on November the 13th, 1837 and it carried his name. So why was he never taken seriously? The epilepsy, it overwhelmed everything else. In young adulthood, Ferdinand suffered up to 20 generalized tonicclonic seizures per day. 20. These numbers come from the diaries of Count Hartig and Baron Cubck who were close enough to the court to know. The triggers were stress, ceremony, emotional excitement, which is to say everything a Habsburg emperor is expected to do in public. The court kept a physician constantly at his side.

[00:07:22]Public appearances were kept to a minimum. The seizures were likely a mix of tonic, clonic, and absence types, meaning some were violent full body convulsions, and others were brief windows where he simply vanished from the room inside his own skull. You can speak five languages and play piano and keep a witty diary, and none of that matters to the people watching you collapse on a marble floor.

[00:07:45]The disability was visible, public, and uncontrollable. It defined him in the eyes of everyone who had power.

[00:07:53]Revisionist historians have tried to correct this. Anatol Murad's 1968 biography, the standard angophone rehabilitation source, pushed back against the caricature. Hinrich Ritter Fonzeric and Victor Bible did similar work in German. Sebastian Bruner's primary sourcerich defense is available on archive.org.

[00:08:12]These efforts have dented the popular narrative, but not broken it. Ferdinand is still the dumplings guy in most people's minds. Which brings us to the question the family had to answer when his father was dying in the early 1835.

[00:08:25]Why not skip Ferdinand and hand the crown to his younger brother France Carl who was healthy and ordinary? The answer is that nobody with real power wanted that.

[00:08:35]Francis I was a legitimist to his bones.

[00:08:38]The 1713 pragmatic sanction established primogenature and Francis believed it was inviable. Changing the succession meant admitting the dynasty had produced a defective heir and that admission carried political consequences across every court in Europe. You could not quietly swap out an eldest son without every other succession on the continent being called into question. Metane who had spent decades building a system in which he was the indispensable man understood something sharper. A weak emperor preserved a regency by committee and a regency by committee meant Metanik stayed in charge. He invoked the principle of legitimacy as his justification, which was both sincere and self-erving in exactly the proportions you would expect. According to tradition, the dying emperor's instructions to his son were blunt. Rule and change nothing. Hold fast to the unity of the family and consult Archduke Ludvig on domestic policy and Prince Metanik on foreign affairs. Ferdinand was not inheriting an empire. He was inheriting a seat. The actual command structure had been arranged around him before he even took the oath. The one person who understood this with perfect clarity was Arch Duchess Sophie of Bavaria, Ferdinand's sister-in-law. She had married France Carl, a healthy but unambitious younger brother, and she recognized almost immediately that her husband would never reach the throne on his own merits. So, she began raising her son France Joseph from birth as the future emperor. Habsburg historioggraphy calls her the only man at court. She was the engine behind every succession conversation for the next 13 years.

[00:10:15]Ferdinand was crowned three times and each coronation was the last of its kind. This is the sort of fact that sounds invented, but it checks out across every source. On September 28th, 1830, he was crowned King of Hungary in St. Martin's Cathedral at Presburg using the crown of St. Steven. It was the last coronation ever held in that city after 10 kings, one reigning queen, and seven royal consorts had been crowned there stretching back to 1563.

[00:10:45]Despite his motor difficulties, Ferdinand completed the coronation hill ceremony. This was not a symbolic wave from a balcony. He had to ride a horse up an artificial mound and swing the sword of St. Steven toward the four cardinal points, demonstrating the monarch's readiness to defend the kingdom from all directions. A man who could not climb stairs unaded at 9 years old sat a horse and swung a sword in front of the assembled Hungarian nobility. He took the coronation oath in Hungarian which was politically loaded and which he could actually do because he spoke the language fluently.

[00:11:19]According to one account, he received 50,000 duckets in coronation gifts and donated the entire sum to the poor. On September 7th, 1836, he was crowned king of Bohemia in St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague wearing the crown of St. Weslas.

[00:11:35]The ceremony included a hereditary homage of the Bohemian estates held in the Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle.

[00:11:43]Edward Girk produced a printed festival book with color lithographs to commemorate the event. It was the last Bohemian coronation in history. France Joseph promised repeatedly to hold his own coronation at St. Vitus. He never did. Charles I ran out of time. The crown has not been used since Ferdinand wore it. On September 6th, 1838 at Milan Cathedral, he was crowned king of Lombodi, Venicia with the iron crown of Lombodi. That was the very last coronation of a living monarch with the iron crown. Ferdinand ruled this territory for only 21 more years before the resimento ripped it away. After 1859, the Habsburgs took the crown to Vienna. It returned to Italy in 1866.

[00:12:27]Nobody has been crowned with it since.

[00:12:29]Three crowns, three traditions reaching back centuries. All of them ended with Ferdinand. His marriage tells you everything about how the dynasty treated him. In February 1831, Ferdinand married Maria Anna of Seavoi by proxy and Trin followed by an imperson ceremony at the Hofberg Chapel in Vienna on February 27th. Maria Anna was 27, which was unusually old for a royal bride. She was chosen because she was considered settled, religious, and easier to manage. Court physicians had warned in advance that consummation was unlikely.

[00:13:03]According to one account, Maria Anna wept when she first saw Ferdinand. She could not look at him without crying.

[00:13:09]During the wedding ceremony itself, Ferdinand suffered a seizure in front of the assembled court. His father, Emperor Francis, reportedly said, "May God have mercy." That detail traces to a single source, habsburgger.net, net citing Breijgit Hammond. Court tradition as recorded by Habsburg historian Anatol Murad holds that Ferdinand had five seizures when he attempted to consummate the marriage on the wedding night. No primary source, no diary entry, no physicians note has ever been published to confirm that specific number. What is confirmed is that the marriage was never consumated. They had no children. The 1839 family statute, the House Gazettes, was enacted specifically because Ferdinand was expected to remain childless. And yet, the marriage became something nobody planned for. They became genuinely devoted. Maria Anna called herself his nurse. She never learned to speak German. She spent her entire time as empress conversing in French, a savard woman in the capital of a German-speaking empire who literally could not address her subjects in their language. They attended mass daily at the Chapel of the Holy Rude inside their apartments, a routine they maintained for decades. Maria Anna received the golden rose from Pope Gregory V 16th, one of the highest papal honors that could be given to a Catholic woman. She later donated it to St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague where it remains today.

[00:14:34]Ferdinand for his part wrote a letter to Pope Gregory V 16th on January 30th 1839.

[00:14:40]Composed entirely in Italian and signed Figlio obedient most obedient son. It survives in the Austrian state archives.

[00:14:49]The man the vianese mocked was corresponding with the pope in a third language. Ferdinand donated his entire wedding gift collection to fund the Kaiser Ferdinand's Vaselon, the imperial aqueduct that supplied Vienna's water.

[00:15:02]His wedding presence built a city's plumbing. That fact appears in almost no English language source. On the morning of August 9th, 1832, Ferdinand was still crown prince. He was walking down the Burgessa in Bard Bay, a spar town south of the capital, accompanied by his agitant, General Rudolph Graph Fonalisers.

[00:15:23]A darkly clothed man stepped out of the crowd and fired a pistol at point blank range. The bullet lodged in the fabric of Ferdinand's coat, bruise only, no penetrating wound. The shooter was a retired army captain named France Reindel, born around 1787 in Prague. He had been pensioned in 1828 for alcoholism, had sunk into gambling debts, and had petitioned Ferdinand for 900 golden. He received 100. He was formally banned from entering Vienna.

[00:15:51]What happened next moved fast. A gardener's assistant named France Tousher tackled Rindle before he could draw a second pistol, which Rindle had brought to kill himself. Rindle pulled out a third pistol and aimed it at Taer.

[00:16:04]It misfired. Rindle then drew a stiletto and slashed at the gardener unsuccessfully. A second servant tied Rindle up using a necktie. Three firearms, a blade, and the man was subdued by a gardener and a strip of cloth. Tasha was rewarded with a promotion to doorkeeper of the empress.

[00:16:22]The court marshal came on September 1st, 1832. Death sentence.

[00:16:28]Ferdinand personally petitioned his father to commute it. Francis agreed.

[00:16:32]Rindle was sentenced to life imprisonment in chains at the fortress of Monkas, which today is Mukachevo in western Ukraine. He died there on August 19th, 1846 after nearly 15 years in irons. Ferdinand's act of clemency became one of the foundations for his later epithet deutig the benign. The man who could not pour a glass of water at age nine saved the life of the man who tried to murder him. The actual governing of the empire during Ferdinand's reign was done by a committee and the committee was a disaster. The secret state conference was formally constituted on December 12th, 1836. It had four members.

[00:17:11]Archduke Ludvig, Ferdinand's uncle, served as chairman. He was ultra-conservative and his default mode was in action. Archduke France Carl, Ferdinand's brother, was politically passive and dominated by his wife Sophie. Prince Metanik ran foreign affairs. Count France Anton Leapsteinsky, a Bohemian aristocrat, handled the interior and finances.

[00:17:35]Kolerat and Metanik loathed each other.

[00:17:37]Metanik called Kolerat the agent of Bohemian feudal interests. Kolerat saw Metanik as a vain bureaucratic tyrant.

[00:17:45]Kolerat occasionally favored mild liberalizations, mostly despite his colleague. Their rivalry produced a permanent stalemate and Archduke Ludvig's response to every deadlock was to do nothing. This is why the empire entered 1848 without any coherent reform of finance, censorship or constitutional structure. Not because of a single dictator, but because of an institutionalized veto system where everyone canled everyone else out and the nominal emperor could not intervene.

[00:18:14]Sophie increasingly attended and influenced the conference from the late 1830s onward, though she held no formal seat. The Galatian slaughter of 1846 happened under Ferdinand's nominal sovereignty, though not his personal direction. In February and March of that year, Polish nobles in Galichia attempted an uprising. The Austrian district officer Johan Brindle Fonvon Valstein allegedly channeled payments in Sultan money to peasants through a leader named Yakub Zella, turning rural fury against the noble class. Between 1 and 2,000 people died, around 500 manners were destroyed, 90% of them in the Tano district. The violence was extraordinary, even by the standards of a continent used to political bloodshed.

[00:18:58]The episode horrified liberal opinion across Europe and discredited the Austrian regime at exactly the moment it could least afford the scrutiny.

[00:19:06]Ferdinand signed the formal annexation of the free city of Kov later that November, one of the very few significant political acts that can actually be traced to him. The annexation was a land grab dressed up in diplomatic language and it made the empire even more unpopular with the liberals who were already sharpening their arguments for 1848.

[00:19:25]Yet under his reign, or more accurately, despite the paralysis of his government, the empire's industrial base was expanding rapidly. Cotton output tripled between 1831 and 1845.

[00:19:38]Coal production quadrupled between 1827 and 1847.

[00:19:42]Bohemia's heavy industry and Moravia's textile mills were driving modernization regardless of what the government did or failed to do. The economy moved because private capital moved. The state locked in its veto deadlock simply watched.

[00:19:56]Then came 1848 and everything broke. On March 13th, the lower Austrian estates met in the Herendas in Vienna. Crowds gathered outside. Troops fired into them and people died. Metanik resigned that evening and fled the country, eventually reaching England. The man who had spent over three decades as the architect of European order was gone in a single night. After Metanik fled, Ferdinand appointed Colorado's Austria's first prime minister, making him very briefly the man who had been waiting 12 years.

[00:20:29]It did not matter. The situation was already past the point where any single appointment could contain it. Within 2 days of the March violence, Ferdinand promised a constitution and freedom of the press. According to the wellestablished tradition, his response to watching the revolutionary crowds from his window was delivered in vianese dialect. Ja Deran's Dendez. Are they allowed to do that? The line is recorded in Hartig's memoirs. It is the single most quoted Ferdinand sentence in German language history. Whether or not the wording is perfectly verbatim, it captures something real about a man who had been told his whole life what was happening around him without ever being trained to think about why. The Pillarsdorf constitution was issued in Ferdinand's name on April 25th, 1848. a bameal legislature, property qualifications, a strong monarchical center. Liberals were disappointed immediately. By May 15th, renewed unrest in Vienna forced a concession to a unicameal constituent assembly. 2 days later, the imperial family fled to Innsbrook where the Tyleans received Ferdinand with open enthusiasm. He returned to Vienna on August 12th. On October 6th and 7th, the situation detonated again. A mob lynched war minister Theodore Lau. Street fighting erupted across the capital. The imperial family fled a second time now to Olmutz in Moravia. Field Marshall Vindeskrats besieged and recaptured Vienna from the outside. On November 21st, 1848, Prince Felix Schwartzenberg was appointed minister President. Schwartzenberg was the political brain behind what came next. Sophie was the iron will. Empress Maria Anna supported the plan. Field Marshall Vindeskrat supplied military weight. Together they orchestrated a succession that was less a transfer of power than a controlled demolition.

[00:22:19]France Carl, who was technically the proper next in line, was persuaded by his wife Sophie to renounce the succession in favor of their 18-year-old son, France Joseph. The reasoning was clean slate legitimacy. Ferdinand had made constitutional promises under duress. He had granted a parliament, conceded press freedom, issued the pillars dorf constitution. France Joseph, as a new emperor who had personally committed to none of these, could claim he was not bound by them.

[00:22:48]The whole point of the abdication was to wipe the slate clean and start the crackdown from a position of legal deniability.

[00:22:56]On December the 2nd, 1848 at Olmutz, Ferdinand abdicated. His diary entry from that day survives, and it is one of the most extraordinary documents in Habsburg history, not because of what it says about politics, but because of what it says about the man holding the pen.

[00:23:13]The affair ended with the new emperor kneeling before his old emperor and lord, that is to say, me, and asking for a blessing, which I gave him, laying both hands on his head and making the sign of the holy cross. Then I embraced him and kissed our new master, and then we went to our room. Afterwards, I and my dear wife heard holy mass. After that, I and my dear wife packed our bags. Look at that sequence. The blessing, the mass, the packing. There is no anger, no self-pity, no bewilderment, no bitterness. He refers to the teenage nephew who just took his crown as our new master with what sounds like perfect sincerity. The abdication blessing he gave France Ysef is the most reliably attested quote of his life. God bless you. Be good. It was gladly done.

[00:23:56]The looser English version runs, "Don't mention it, Franzel. It was a real pleasure. Did Ferdinand understand what he had signed?" His diary entries about 1848 are coherent, but read like someone reporting what was done to him, not by him. His bewilderment in March is consistent with a man who was told who his ministers were, but never taught to think politically. Here is where the story takes a turn that nobody who knows Ferdinand only from the jokes would expect. After abdication, he retained his personal fortune. He had renounced the throne, not his private wealth. He and Maria Anna moved permanently into the royal apartments at Prague Castle.

[00:24:35]He took control of his Bohemian estates Reichstat, which is now Zakupi Castle, inherited in 1847 from his sister and previously owned by Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstat, who had died there in 1832.

[00:24:50]That is worth pausing on. The disabled Habsburg emperor spent his retirement in the same castle where Napoleon's tubercular son had wasted away two decades earlier. Plus shadow was extensively renovated in 1852 and 1853 expressly for Ferdinand and Maria Anna and became their summer residence from 1854 onward. Surviving inventories at record many clocks of various styles, the remnants of Ferdinand's lifelong obsession with mechanical time pieces.

[00:25:20]He also kept up his interest in locks and ciphers, working through puzzles that would bore most people senseless.

[00:25:26]His estates also included Borad and others. He became one of the largest private land owners in Bohemia. He proved astonishingly good at managing it. Far from the financial incompetent the legend describes, Ferdinand multiplied his assets through land management, forestry, and rentals. This was not passive inheritance. He made active decisions about his properties and he made money, a lot of it. France Ysef, who had inherited a bankrupt empire and almost no personal capital, made repeated clandestine trips to Bohemia to ask his uncle for funds. The man the vianese had mocked as a half-wit was richer than the reigning emperor and was quietly keeping the dynasty solvent.

[00:26:06]His estate at death in 1875 was estimated at 20 to 24 million golden equivalent to several hundred million today.

[00:26:16]The bulk path to France Joseph as principal heir. That fortune became the foundation for Habsburg Lothing and private wealth into the 20th century.

[00:26:26]The checks loved him genuinely. His epithet in Czech is dovi which means benign or good-hearted and it was not a formality. He lived among them for 27 years from 1848 until his death. He's uniquely popular among checks for any 19th century Habsburg, which given what the Habsburgs did to Bohemia is saying something. Tradition recorded in 19th century Prague memoirs holds that he walked the streets giving sweets to children and money to beggars. After 1848, he reportedly used Czech phrases when greeting people on Prague streets, which was both endearing and politically symbolic. Czech crowds would greet him ostentatiously in public, and this was understood by everyone as a quiet act of resistance to Vienna. Loving Ferdinand cost the loyalist France Joseph nothing in direct political terms, but it sent a clear signal. We wish we still had our king. He and Maria Anna founded multiple Prague charities, most notably the Maria Anna Kinder Spittle, a children's hospital that still exists in modern Prague. A 2020 exhibition at Prague Castle was titled Ferdinand V, the last crowned king of Bohemia, and it framed him as capable, devout, and unfairly maligned. He died on June 29th, 1875 at Prague Castle on the feast of Saints Peter and Paul. He was 82. The cause was pneumonia after a chill. Cardinal Bedrik Schwarzenberg, the Archbishop of Prague, administered last rights. The Schwarzenberg name is worth pausing on.

[00:27:59]It was Felix Dwartzenberg who had orchestrated the abdication in 1848.

[00:28:05]The family bookended his reign, beginning and end. His body was transported to Vienna by special train on the Kaiser Ferdinand Nordbn, his own railway. The line he had granted concession for in 1836, the one that carried his name, carried his body home.

[00:28:22]He received the traditional Habsburg three-way burial, the Grena Bistatong, the separated burial. His body went to the capina grift, the imperial crypt, sarcophagus number 62 in the Ferdinand vault. The vault had been designed by Johan Honer and built in 1842, 33 years before Ferdinand died. He had approved the design himself. It contains roughly one quarter of all imperial crypt interments. Most of them walled into corner peers with only two sarcophagi visible his and Maria Anna added in 1884.

[00:28:57]His sarcophagus is planer than most of the crypts ornate displays. Bronze on iron restrained beer ornament. The Latin inscription begins Ferdinand vermy's astria imperata with regnal years 1835 to 1848. His heart went to the lord to capel of the augustinino kersha in a silver ern. His intestines went to the herzog scruff beneath the stephenum.

[00:29:23]Three pieces of a man in three churches across one city. The Habsburgs were thorough even in death. Maria Anna survived him by 9 years. She died on May 4th, 1884 in Prague and was buried beside him. She was the last surviving member of the main branch of the house of Seavoi. France Joseph attended the funeral and was reportedly visibly moved. Ferdinand had been the closest thing to a father figure he had left.

[00:29:48]The legend says Ferdinand was an idiot who wanted dumplings. That particular story, credited to Edward Crankshaw's 1963 book, goes like this. The imperial cook told Ferdinand that Marilyn Nodal apricot dumplings could not be served because apricots were out of season.

[00:30:05]Ferdinand supposedly replied, "I am the emperor and I want dumplings." No cook is named in any source. No contemporary diary records the exchange. It is almost certainly invented. There is also the eagle story.

[00:30:19]Someone showed Ferdinand a freshly shot eagle and he reportedly refused to believe it was one because the only eagles he knew were the two-headed ones on his coat of arms. Habsburgger.net itself flags that story as alleged.

[00:30:31]These anecdotes are charming and they have survived because they reinforce a comfortable picture. The harmless fool on the throne. too simple to be dangerous, too dim to be tragic. The record says something harder to laugh at. He was a disabled man, profoundly damaged by generations of deliberate inbreeding, who was sheltered and manipulated and placed on a throne he never asked for, and who responded to every cruelty with clemency, every humiliation with patience, and the loss of an empire with the words, "It was gladly done." Then he packed his bags, moved to Prague, made more money than the man who replaced him, and died beloved in a country that was not his own. No major feature film has ever been made about him. That seems like an oversight.