House of Habsburg

House of Habsburg, royal German family, one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century.

Origins

The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg, or Habichtsburg (“Hawk’s Castle”), built in 1020 by Werner, bishop of Strasbourg, and his brother-in-law, Count Radbot, in the Aargau overlooking the Aar River, in what is now Switzerland. Radbot’s grandfather, Guntram the Rich, the earliest traceable ancestor of the house, may perhaps be identified with a Count Guntram who rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950. Radbot’s son Werner I (died 1096) bore the title count of Habsburg and was the grandfather of Albert III (died c. 1200), who was count of Zürich and landgrave of Upper Alsace. Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232) acquired Laufenburg and the “Waldstätte” (Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden, and Lucerne), but on his death his sons Albert IV and Rudolf III partitioned the inheritance. Rudolf III’s descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IV’s descendants before dying out in 1408.

Austria and the rise of the Habsburgs in Germany

Albert IV’s son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From that date the agelong identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins (see Austria: Accession of the Habsburgs). The family’s custom, however, was to vest the government of its hereditary domains not in individuals but in all male members of the family in common, and, though Rudolf II renounced his share in 1283, difficulties arose again when King Albert I died (1308). After a system of condominium had been tried, Rudolf IV of Austria in 1364 made a compact with his younger brothers that acknowledged the principle of equal rights but secured de facto supremacy for the head of the house. Even so, after his death the brothers Albert III and Leopold III of Austria agreed on a partition (Treaty of Neuberg, 1379): Albert took Austria, and Leopold took Styria, Carinthia, and Tirol.

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King Albert I’s son Rudolf III of Austria had been king of Bohemia from 1306 to 1307, and his brother Frederick I had been German king as Frederick III (in rivalry or conjointly with Louis IV the Bavarian) from 1314 to 1330. Albert V of Austria was in 1438 elected king of Hungary, German king (as Albert II), and king of Bohemia; his only surviving son, Ladislas Posthumus, was also king of Hungary from 1446 (assuming power in 1452) and of Bohemia from 1453. With Ladislas the male descendants of Albert III of Austria died out in 1457. Meanwhile the Styrian line descended from Leopold III had been subdivided into Inner Austrian and Tirolean branches.

Frederick V, senior representative of the Inner Austrian line, was elected German king in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman emperor, as Frederick III, in 1452—the last such emperor to be crowned in Rome. A Habsburg having thus attained the Western world’s most exalted secular dignity, a word may be said about the dynasty’s major titles. The imperial title at that time was, for practical purposes, hardly more than a glorification of the title of German king, and the German kingship was, like the Bohemian and the Hungarian, elective. If Habsburg was to succeed Habsburg as emperor continuously from Frederick’s death in 1493 to Charles VI’s accession in 1711, the principal reason was that the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs formed an aggregate large enough and rich enough to enable the dynasty to impose its candidate on the other German electors (the Habsburgs themselves had an electoral vote only in so far as they were kings of Bohemia).

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For the greater part of Frederick’s reign it was scarcely foreseeable that his descendants would monopolize the imperial succession so long as they did. The Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms were lost to the Habsburgs for nearly 70 years from the death of Ladislas Posthumus in 1457; the Swiss territories, lost in reality from 1315 onward (see Switzerland: Expansion and Position of Power), were finally renounced in 1474; and Frederick’s control over the Austrian inheritance itself was long precarious, not only because of aggression from Hungary but also because of dissension between him and his Habsburg kinsmen. Yet Frederick, one of whose earliest acts in his capacity as emperor had been to ratify, in 1453, the Habsburgs’ use of the unique title of “archduke of Austria” (first arrogated for them by Rudolf IV in 1358–59), may have had some prescient aspiration toward worldwide empire for the house of Austria: the motto A.E.I.O.U., which he occasionally used, is generally interpreted as meaning Austriae est imperare orbi universo (“Austria is destined to rule the world”) or Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan (“The whole world is subject to Austria”). He lived long enough to see his son Maximilian make the most momentous marriage in European history, and three years before his death he also saw the Austrian hereditary lands reunited when Sigismund of Tirol abdicated in Maximilian’s favour (1490).

Before explaining what the Habsburgs owed dynastically to Maximilian, mention can be made of a physical peculiarity characteristic of the house of Habsburg from the emperor Frederick III onward: his jaw and his lower lip were prominent, a feature supposed to have been inherited by him from his mother, the Mazovian princess Cymbarka. Later intermarriage reproduced the “Habsburg lip” more and more markedly, especially among the last Habsburg kings of Spain.

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