House of Habsburg
The House of Habsburg, also known as the House of Austria, was one of the most powerful dynasties in the history of Europe and European influenced polities. They were best known for ruling vast realms throughout Europe and the Americas during the Middle Ages and early modern period, including the Holy Roman Empire and Spain.
The house takes its name from Habsburg Castle, a fortress built in the 1020s in present-day Switzerland by Radbot of Klettgau, who named his fortress Habsburg. His grandson Otto II was the first to take the fortress name as his own, adding "Count of Habsburg" to his title. In 1273, Count Radbot's seventh-generation descendant, Rudolph, was elected King of the Romans. Taking advantage of the extinction of the Babenbergs and of his victory over Ottokar II of Bohemia at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278, he appointed his sons as Dukes of Austria and moved the family's power base to Vienna, where the Habsburg dynasty gained the name of "House of Austria" and ruled until 1918.
The throne of the Holy Roman Empire was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs from 1440 until their extinction in the male line in 1740, and, as the Habsburg-Lorraines from 1765 until its dissolution in 1806. This resulted from a combination of factors, chief among them Napoleon’s military victories in Germany. The empire’s authority had steadily weakened, while political fragmentation among the German states further eroded central control. Economic strains and intensifying regional rivalries compounded these challenges, ultimately destabilizing the Holy Roman Empire. The house also produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Spain, Portugal, Sicily, Lombardy-Venetia and Galicia-Lodomeria, with their respective colonies; rulers of several principalities in the Low Countries and Italy; numerous prince-bishoprics in the Holy Roman Empire, and in the 19th century, emperors of Austria and of Austria-Hungary, as well as one emperor of Mexico. The family split several times into parallel branches, most consequentially in the mid-16th century between its Spanish and German-Austrian branches following the abdication of Emperor Charles V in 1556. Although they ruled distinct territories, the different branches nevertheless maintained close relations and frequently intermarried.
Members of the Habsburg family oversee the Austrian branch of the Order of the Golden Fleece, the Order of the Starry Cross and the Imperial and Royal Order of Saint George. The current head of the family is Karl von Habsburg.
Name
The origins of Habsburg Castle's name are uncertain. There is disagreement on whether the name is derived from the High German Habichtsburg, or from the Middle High German word hab/hap meaning literally ford, as there is a river with a ford nearby. The first documented use of the name by the dynasty itself has been traced to the year 1108.The Habsburg name was not continuously used by the family members, since they often emphasized their more prestigious princely titles. The dynasty was thus long known as the "House of Austria". Complementary, in some circumstances the family members were identified by their place of birth. Charles V was known in his youth after his birthplace as Charles of Ghent. When he became king of Spain he was known as Charles of Spain, and after he was elected emperor, as Charles V.
In Spain, the dynasty was known as the Casa de Austria, including illegitimate sons such as John of Austria and John Joseph of Austria. The arms displayed in their simplest form were those of Austria, which the Habsburgs had made their own, at times impaled with the arms of the Duchy of Burgundy.
After Maria Theresa married Duke Francis Stephen of Lorraine, the idea of "Habsburg" as associated with ancestral Austrian rulership was used to show that the old dynasty continued as did all its inherited rights. Some younger sons who had no prospects of the throne were given the personal title of "count of Habsburg".
The surname of more recent members of the family such as Otto von Habsburg and Karl von Habsburg is taken to be "von Habsburg" or more completely "von Habsburg-Lothringen". Princes and members of the house use the tripartite arms adopted in the 18th century by Francis Stephen.
The name of the dynasty is sometimes spelled in English publications as Hapsburg.
History
Counts of Habsburg
The progenitor of the House of Habsburg may have been Guntram the Rich, a count in the Breisgau who lived in the 10th century, and forthwith farther back as the medieval Adalrich, Duke of Alsace, from the Etichonids from which Habsburg derives. His grandson Radbot of Klettgau founded the Habsburg Castle.That castle was the family seat during most of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. Giovanni Thomas Marnavich in his book "Regiae Sanctitatis Illyricanae Faecunditas" dedicated to Ferdinand III, wrote that the House of Habsburg is descended from the Roman emperor Constantine the Great, an invention common in ruling dynasties at the time.
In the 12th century, the Habsburgs became increasingly associated with the Staufer emperors, participating in the imperial court and the emperor's military expeditions; Werner II, Count of Habsburg died fighting for Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa in Italy. This association helped them to inherit many domains as the Staufers caused the extinction of many dynasties, some of which the Habsburgs were heirs to. In 1198, Rudolf II, Count of Habsburg fully dedicated the dynasty to the Staufer cause by joining the Ghibellines and funded the Staufer emperor Frederick II's war for the throne in 1211. The emperor was made godfather to his newly born grandson, the future King Rudolf.
The Habsburgs expanded their influence through arranged marriages and by gaining political privileges, especially countship rights in Zürichgau, Aargau and Thurgau. In the 13th century, the house aimed its marriage policy at families in Upper Alsace and Swabia. They were also able to gain high positions in the church hierarchy for their members. Territorially, they often profited from the extinction of other noble families such as the House of Kyburg.
Pivot to Eastern Alpine Duchies
By the second half of the 13th century, Count Rudolph I had become an influential territorial lord in the area between the Vosges Mountains and Lake Constance. On 1 October 1273, he was elected as a compromise candidate as King of the Romans and received the name Rudolph I of Germany. He then led a coalition against King Ottokar II of Bohemia who had taken advantage of the Great Interregnum in order to expand southwards, taking over the respective inheritances of the Babenberg and of the Spanheim. In 1278, Rudolph and his allies defeated and killed Ottokar at the Battle of Marchfeld, and the lands he had acquired reverted to the German crown. With the Georgenberg Pact of 1286, Rudolph secured for his family the duchies of Austria and Styria. The southern portions of Ottokar's former realm, Carinthia, Carniola, and Savinja, went to Rudolph's allies from the House of Gorizia.Following Rudolph's death in 1291, Albert I's assassination in 1308, and Frederick the Fair's failure to secure the German/Imperial crown for himself, the Habsburgs temporarily lost their supremacy in the Empire. In the early 14th century, they also focused on the Kingdom of Bohemia. After Václav III's death on 4 August 1306, there were no male heirs remaining in the Přemyslid dynasty. Habsburg scion Rudolph I was then elected but only lasted a year. The Bohemian kingship was an elected position, and the Habsburgs were only able to secure it on a hereditary basis much later in 1626, following their reconquest of the Czech lands during the Thirty Years' War. After 1307, subsequent Habsburg attempts to gain the Bohemian crown were frustrated first by Henry of Bohemia and then by the House of Luxembourg.
Instead, they were able to expand southwards: in 1311, they took over Savinja; after the death of Henry in 1335, they assumed power in Carniola and Carinthia; and in 1369, they succeeded his daughter Margaret in Tyrol. After the death of Albert III of Gorizia in 1374, they gained a foothold at Pazin in central Istria, followed by Trieste in 1382. Meanwhile, the original home territories of the Habsburgs in what is now Switzerland, including the Aargau with Habsburg Castle, were lost in the 14th century to the expanding Swiss Confederacy after the battles of Morgarten and Sempach. Habsburg Castle itself was finally lost to the Swiss in 1415.
Albertinian / Leopoldian split and Imperial elections
's brothers Albert III and Leopold III ignored his efforts to preserve the integrity of the family domains and enacted the separation of the so-called Albertinian and Leopoldian family lines on 25 September 1379 by the Treaty of Neuberg. The former would maintain Austria proper, while the latter would rule over lands then labeled Oberösterreich, namely Inner Austria comprising Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and Further Austria consisting of Tyrol and the western Habsburg lands in Alsace and Swabia.By marrying Elisabeth of Luxembourg, the daughter of Emperor Sigismund, in 1437 Duke Albert V of the Albertine line became the ruler of Bohemia and Hungary, again expanding the family's political horizons. The next year Albert was crowned King of the Romans, known as such as Albert II. Following his early death in a battle against the Ottomans in 1439 and that of his son Ladislaus Postumus in 1457, the Habsburgs lost Bohemia once more as well as Hungary for several decades. However, with the extinction of the House of Celje in 1456 and the House of Wallsee-Enns in 1466/1483, they managed to absorb significant secular enclaves into their territories and create a contiguous domain stretching from the border with Bohemia to the Adriatic Sea.
After the death of Leopold's eldest son, William, in 1406 the Leopoldian line was further split among his brothers into the Inner Austrian territory under Ernest the Iron and a Tyrolean/Further Austrian line under Frederick of the Empty Pockets. In 1440 Ernest's son Frederick III was chosen by the electoral college to succeed Albert II as the king. Several Habsburg kings had attempted to gain the imperial dignity over the years, but success finally arrived on 19 March 1452, when Pope Nicholas V crowned Frederick III as the Holy Roman Emperor in a grand ceremony held in Rome. In Frederick III the Pope found an important political ally with whose help he was able to counter the conciliar movement.
While in Rome Frederick III married Eleanor of Portugal, enabling him to build a network of connections with dynasties in the west and southeast of Europe. Frederick was rather distant to his family; Eleanor, by contrast, had a great influence on the raising and education of Frederick's children and therefore played an important role in the family's rise to prominence. After Frederick III's coronation the Habsburgs were able to hold the imperial throne almost continuously until 1806.