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If you know anything about hemophilia, it\u2019s probably that the condition<\/a> was rampant in the British royal family in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Queen Victoria, who had nine kids, was highly likely to have been a carrier, passing it down through her enormous clan as she arranged advantageous aristocratic marriages all over Europe for her children and grandchildren.<\/p>\n The clotting disorder\u2014if someone had severe disease, bleeding could not be controlled even after minor injuries\u2014killed her son Leopold, Duke of Albany, at age 30 after he slipped and fell. Two of Queen Victoria\u2019s daughters were carriers (the disease is carried by women<\/a> and manifests mostly in men), and her 2-year-old grandson, Friedrich, took a fall and died from internal bleeding. The disease showed up in her great-grandchildren as well, in at least nine royal descendants in total, per an article in the Journal of Thrombosis and Haemostasis<\/a>. \u201cThe affliction, commonly known as the \u2018Royal disease,\u2019 spread as Victoria\u2019s heirs married into royal families across Europe, decimating the thrones of Britain, Germany, Russia, and Spain,\u201d Science Magazine<\/a> wrote.<\/p>\n While doctors figured out it was hemophilia, the exact type was finally confirmed in 2009. First, a team of Russian geneticists published a DNA analysis<\/a> of burnt bones found in a grave. They compared it to 117-year-old blood known to belong to the Romanovs, the Russian royal family who were murdered and tossed into a pit in 1918 during the Russian Revolution. The remains were those of Prince Alexei and his sister Princess Maria, the two children of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Empress Alexandra, whose bodies had never been recovered. Alexandra was a granddaughter of the queen.<\/p>\n