BOURBON-ANJOU-SPAIN, ALFONSO CARLO FERDINANDO GIUSEPPE GIOVANNI PIO. - Infante of Spain, duke of S. Giacomo, knight of the Order of St. Hubert, b. in London on 12 Sept. 1849 to Prince John (1822-87) and to Archduchess Maria Beatrice of Austria-Este (1824-1906), and d. in Vienna from a car accident at the end of Sept. 1936. He was the last representative of Carlism as the nephew of don Carlos (1788-1855). Proposed in 1861 to succeed his uncle Francis V of Modena, who was to have assumed the imperial crown of Mexico, at barely twenty years of age, on the morrow of Mentana, on 6 June 1868 he offered himself to Pius IX as a simple Swabian.
On 20 Sept. 1870, while Rome was about to be attacked, he entered with his men into the line, garrisoning the Aurelian Walls from Porta Pia to the re-entrant of the Castro Pretorio, and then succeeded in falling back to St. Peter's Square: the next day, after Pius IX's unforgettable final blessing to the army, he marched past at Porta S. Pancrazio, while the royal troops rendered military honors, to return to Austria, and on 26 Apr. 1871 to marry the infanta Maria de las Nieves, of the legitimate branch of the kings of Portugal, in the Bavarian manor of Heubach.
When the three-year Carlist conflict broke out in 1872, he immediately placed himself in the service of the pretender, his brother Carlos (1848-1909). Having devoted himself after 1876 to long and risky voyages of exploration in wild and distant lands, he initiated in 1900, following a sensational affair of honor between two Austrian officers, that vast anti-dueling movement which, through a veritable international League, had so much influence on the decline of the barbarous and absurd custom, especially among military men and aristocrats.
The World War caught him in 1914 in Austria, where, also because he was the uncle and at one time the guardian of the future empress Zita, he had occasion to take part in it with great charitable works, which culminated in the conversion into a hospital for the wounded of the stately residence of Ebenzweier near Altmünster. Profoundly fond of Italy, whose language he spoke fluently and to which so many memories of childhood and youth bound him, A. di B. returned for the last time to the Peninsula, as a guest of the Bourbon villa of Le Pianore near Viareggio, to attend the funeral of his nephew don Jaime (d. 2 Oct. 1931), the Carlist pretender, and to assume his family rights also with regard to the Orléans and the legitimist succession to the crown of Spain, as well as to receive there, as king, an act of allegiance from the representatives of Carlism, before, he dying without heirs, the centuries-old dispute with the branch of Isabella, then represented by Alfonso XIII, came to an end.
Bibliography3 works
Paolo Dalla Torre