“To the double wedding ceremony”

Colored copperplate engraving by Quirin Mark, 1790

In 1790, Vienna was the scene of one of the last dynastic spectacles of the Ancien Régime, while at the same time the French Revolution heralded the beginning of a new era: the sensational triple wedding between members of the Austrian imperial family and the Neapolitan royal family.

This dynastic mass wedding was also remembered by posterity because extremely closely related people married here. Three children from Emperor Leopold II's marriage to Maria Ludovica of Bourbon married three children of King Ferdinand of Naples-Sicily from his marriage to Archduchess Maria Karolina of Austria.

The bride and groom were first cousins on both their father's and mother's sides: their parents were siblings from the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty and the Bourbons ruling in Naples and Sicily, who were married to each other as part of Maria Theresa's alliance policy.

Such an extreme case of relative marriages was a rarity even in the world of the old European feudal nobility.