In my last post, I described Silva in Verdi's Ernani as Elvira's incestuous Hapsburg uncle. Ernani is set in 16th Century Spain, which during the reign of the Hapsburg kings. And given the incestuous marriages within the Hapsburg dynasty, Silva's advances toward Elvira in the opera don't come as much of a surprise.
Royal incest was (and probably still might be), a common problem among many cultures. The wife of the Inca Emperor was always his sister, and the same was generally true in Ancient Egypt. The Spanish Hapsburgs married their nieces, nephews, and first cousins. The idea was to keep the wealth within the family.
The problem with incest is that when someone has sex with someone whose a direct blood relative, the chances of genetic defects being passed down to the offspring is extremely high. That's what happened to Tutankhamen (thank you National Geographic). His father, Akhenaten, had sex with his own blood sister. And it didn't help that the Pharaohs had incest as a tradition for hundreds of years. The result was that Tut was in weak health all his life, had a deformed foot, and the two children born to him were premature and stillborn.
With the Spanish Hapsburgs, the royal line was so far inbred that Charles II was unable to even eat. His ancestor Philip II had a jutting chin, which isn't bad. But as the royal family continued to marry their relatives, the jutting chin became more and more pronounced, and when Charles II was born, his chin jutted so far out that it was a deformity. He couldn't eat because of it, and his IQ was pretty far down.
And eventually it got to a point where the Spanish Hapsburg were so far inbred that the royal line became extinct.
So Silva's behavior was quite common for those of royal or noble blood from that time. And it led to the Spanish Hapsburgs dying out altogether.
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