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New vedan wrote:

The hapsburgs were a historical oddity, a worse case scenario where one family refused to marry anyone outside there own bloodline for several generations until it devolved them into kind charles 2 of Spain. The vast majority of cousin marriages are not apart of some longstanding royal empire building scheme.

I gave a commonly known example, the fact of the matter is that incest often causes issues in genetic inheritance. When you have two distant people breeding, the chances of genetic overlap are incredibly low, and as such genetic defects are low. When incest is involved these issues are amplified in their chances of appearing. These defects only need to show in one person to then spawn an entire bloodline of people with these defects, and when you consider the fact that this is someones entire life, it shouldn't be taken lightly, and the chances of defects like this that are easily avoidable should be avoided.