The House of Habsburg ( German: [ˈhaːpsbʊʁk]; alternatively spelled Hapsburg in English), also officially called the House of Austria (Haus Österreich in German, Casa de Austria in Spanish), was one of the most influential and distinguished royal houses of Europe. The throne of the Holy Roman Empire {!?} was continuously occupied by the Habsburgs from 1438 until their extinction in the male line in 1740. The house also produced kings of Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Galicia, Portugal and Spain with their respective colonies, as well as rulers of several principalities in the Netherlands and Italy. From the 16th century, following the reign of Charles V, the dynasty was split between its Austrian and Spanish branches. Although they ruled distinct territories, they nevertheless maintained close relations and frequently intermarried.

The House takes its name from Habsburg Castle, a fortress built in the 1020s in present-day Switzerland, in the canton of Aargau, by Count 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. The House of Habsburg gathered dynastic momentum through the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries. In 1273, Count Radbot's seventh generation descendant Rudolph of Habsburg became Roman-German King. He moved the family's power base to the Duchy of Austria, which the Habsburgs ruled until 1918.

The House of Habsburg became extinct in the male line in the 18th century. The senior Spanish branch ended upon the death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and was replaced by the House of Bourbon. The remaining Austrian branch became extinct in the male line in 1740 with the death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI. It was succeeded by the descendants of his eldest daughter Maria Theresa’s marriage to Francis III, Duke of Lorraine. The successor house styled itself formally as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine (German: Habsburg-Lothringen); because it was often still referred to as the House of Habsburg, historians use the appellation of the Habsburg Monarchy for the countries and provinces that were ruled by the family until 1918. The House of Habsburg-Lorraine continues to exist to this day and its members use the Habsburg name, for example Karl von Habsburg.

The Habsburg Empire had the advantage of size, but multiple disadvantages. There were rivals on four sides, its finances were unstable, the population was fragmented into multiple ethnicities, and its industrial base was thin. Its naval resources were so minimal that it did not attempt to build an overseas empire. It did have the advantage of good diplomats, typified by Prince Metternich; they had a grand strategy for survival that kept the empire going despite

• wars with the Ottomans,
• Frederick the Great,
• Napoleon and
• Bismarck,

until the final disaster of the First World War. Along with the Capetian dynasty, it was one of the two most powerful continental European royal families, dominating European politics for nearly five centuries.

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.

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 Habsburg). 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, Leopold took Styria, Carinthia, and Tirol.

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).

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.

Even before Frederick III’s time the House of Habsburg had won much of its standing in Germany and in central Europe through marriages to heiresses. Frederick’s son Maximilian carried that matrimonial policy to heights of unequalled brilliance. First he himself in 1477 married the heiress of Burgundy, Charles the Bold’s daughter Mary, with the result that the House of Habsburg, in the person of their son Philip, inherited the greater part of Charles the Bold’s widespread dominions: not the duchy of Burgundy itself, which the French seized, but Artois, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the County of Burgundy or Franche Comté. Secondly, though he failed after Mary’s death in 1482 to secure Brittany also by a similar coup ( France frustrated his proxy marriage to the Breton heiress Anne), he procured Philip’s marriage, in 1496, to Joan, prospective heiress of Castile and Aragon: thus securing for his family not only Spain, with Naples-Sicily and Sardinia, but also the immense dominions the Spaniards were about to conquer in America. Maximilian’s matrimonial achievements were the occasion of the famous hexameter Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”).

Since Philip I of Castile died prematurely, his son was already ruler of the Burgundian heritage and of Spain when, in 1519, he succeeded Maximilian as ruler of the Habsburgs’ Austrian territories. In the same year, he was elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V.

The threat of force as well as an enormous expenditure in bribes was necessary to secure Charles’s election. Besides the fact that many of the German princes were reluctant to saddle themselves with so mighty a sovereign, there was the opposition of France, which saw itself already half-encircled, from the northeast clockwise to the southwest, by Charles’s possessions. Dating from Maximilian’s Burgundian marriage, antagonism between the French kings and the Habsburgs was to persist, to the progressive detriment of the latter, until the middle of the 18th century, and until the second half of the 17th the other European powers would mostly sympathize with France. The Habsburgs in the 16th century were too formidable not to provoke envy and anxiety.

Charles V’s responsibilities at the time of his becoming emperor were moreover too great for one man to assume, as he himself could acknowledge: they had to be divided. By the Treaty of Brussels (1522) he assigned the Habsburg-Austrian hereditary lands to his brother, the future emperor Ferdinand I. In 1521 Ferdinand had married Anna, daughter of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; and Louis II’s untimely death in 1526, after his defeat by the Turks in the Battle of Mohács, prompted Ferdinand to stand as candidate for his succession, to which, despite rivals, he was elected.

Power and weakness

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The Habsburgs reached the zenith of their power before the end of the 16th century: the duchy of Milan, annexed by Charles V in 1535, was assigned by him to his son, the future Philip II of Spain, in 1540; Philip II conquered Portugal in 1580; and the Spanish dominions in America were ever expanding. There were, however, three faults in the power structure — two of them historical accidents, the third an effect of the Habsburg dynasty’s own measures for self-preservation.

In the first place, the ascendancy of Charles V coincided with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, which was to spread turmoil for decades over Europe from the Netherlands to Hungary. As Charles, from his Spanish upbringing, was imbued with ideas of Catholic uniformity and as his successors, with the exception of the enigmatic Maximilian II, sought also to realize those ideas, religious resistance to the Habsburgs’ authority came to aggravate or to camouflage political resistance. At the same time, the papacy, overawed though it was by the Spanish military presence in Italy, did not always subscribe to the Habsburg’s special policy for Catholicism.

Secondly, Ferdinand’s accession to Hungary meant that the Habsburgs had to bear the brunt of the Ottoman Turkish drive from the Balkans into central Europe, just as Habsburg Spain had to confront Turkish incursions into the western Mediterranean. The great victory of Lepanto (1571), won by Charles V’s natural son, Juan de Austria. did not end those troubles, which were exploited, against the dynasty, by Hungarian dissidents and, more covertly, by France.

The third flaw in the Habsburg edifice was latent in the 16th century. Mindful of what they had won by marriages, the Habsburgs sought to preclude rival dynasties from turning the tables on them by the same means: to keep their heritage in their own hands, they began to intermarry more and more frequently among themselves. The result, in a few generations, was a fatal inbreeding that brought the male line of Charles V to extinction.

By a series of abdications toward the end of his life, Charles V transferred his Burgundian, Spanish, and Italian possessions to his son Philip II and his functions as emperor to his brother Ferdinand, who succeeded him formally as such after his death (1558). That division of the dynasty between imperial and Spanish lines was definitive: Ferdinand’s male descendants were Holy Roman emperors until 1740, Philip’s were kings of Spain until 1700. The imperial line was inevitably concerned to maintain its position in Bohemia and to assert itself against the Turks in divided Hungary, because the loss of the two kingdoms would have meant the reduction of its possessions to what the Habsburgs had had hereditarily before Frederick III’s time (the Austrian duchies and scattered holdings in Swabia and in Alsace) — a reduction that in turn would have compromised its chances of continuing to be elected to the German kingship. Philip II of Spain remained territorially the greatest sovereign in the Western world until his death in 1598; but the Revolt of the Netherlands (see Low Countries, history of), which he proved unable to subdue, was an irritation that his English and French enemies did their worst to inflame.

Cooperation between imperial and Spanish Habsburgs in the 17th century failed to maintain the hegemony that the dynasty had enjoyed in the 16th. For the imperial line, religious troubles in Germany and in central Europe went on even when the domestic conflict between the insane emperor Rudolf II and his brothers was over (1612); and the Bohemian insurrection of 1618 gave rise to that chain of wars involving the Austrian Habsburgs that, because it was prolonged until 1648, is known conventionally as the Thirty Years’ War. For the Spanish Habsburgs, their truce of 1609 with the Dutch ended in 1621, whereupon the renewed conflict in the Netherlands became merged with the struggles of their Austrian cousins. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) finally abolished Habsburg sovereignty over the northern Netherlands, severely restricted the emperor’s authority over the other German princes, and transferred the Habsburg lands in Alsace to France; however, the ordinance of 1627, whereby the Bohemian crown had been converted into a hereditary one for the Habsburgs, was permitted to stand.

France from the late 1620s had made the most of the Thirty Years’ War to distress the Habsburgs of both lines, and peace with the imperial line did not prevent France from continuing its war against the Spanish until 1659, when by the Peace of the Pyrenees it obtained Gravelines, most of Artois, and part of Hainaut, together with some places south of Luxembourg.

The next 30 years saw the end of the Habsburg dynasty’s claim to European hegemony in any real sense. The aggressions of Louis XIV of France, from 1667 onward, took territory after territory from the Spanish Habsburgs — large parts of Flanders, the rest of Artois, and other areas in the Netherlands, as well as the whole Franche Comté and, in 1684, the stronghold of Luxembourg — and demonstrated at the same time that the imperial Habsburgs, preoccupied as they were with the Turkish assault from Hungary, could not effectively defend the German frontier west of the Rhine. After being saved from the crisis of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, the imperial Habsburgs did indeed obtain one dynastically significant success — the conversion, in 1687, of the Hungarian crown into an hereditary one for themselves — but by that time it was plain to Europe that the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (1689-97) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spain’s principal enemies and feeble France’s most fluent encouragers, the Dutch and English, led those supporting the Habsburgs against Louis XIV.

Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy, there was a further reason for other powers to watch with jealous solicitude over the fate of Spain. The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him, and the question of his succession was one of great concern to the European powers. Up to 1699 it was understood that his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I. That arrangement was generally acceptable because, by transferring the Spanish inheritance to the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, it would not necessarily upset the balance of power between the imperial Habsburgs and Bourbon France. In 1699, however, when Joseph Ferdinand died, the moribund Charles II’s next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his father’s two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIV’s mother and the other the emperor Leopold I’s. Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemy’s acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance; on the other neither Bourbon France nor its British and Dutch enemies wanted to see an imperial Habsburg reunite in one pair of hands most of what the emperor Charles V had had in 1519. Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIV’s grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued.

To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Joseph’s brother Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial; but when Joseph I died, leaving only daughters, in 1711, and was succeeded by his brother as emperor ( Charles VI) and as ruler of the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands, the British and the Dutch lost interest in making him king of Spain and together began serious negotiations with France. Their Treaties of Utrecht (1713), which recognized the Bourbon accession to Spain and to Spanish America, virtually forced the hand of the reluctant Charles, who made peace with France by the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714: out of the whole inheritance of the Spanish Habsburgs, he had finally to content himself with the southern Netherlands and with the former Spanish possessions on the mainland of Italy, together with Mantua (annexed by him in 1708) and Sardinia. Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy. With characteristic obstinacy, Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720, when an armistice was declared (formal recognition of the Bourbon accession came only in 1725).

Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs’ male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line. In order, therefore, to secure the indivisibility of his Habsburg inheritance he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brother’s daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces’ line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts. The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VI’s main concern from 1716 onward (his baby son died in that year). By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza for the Habsburgs in compensation), he seemed to have won his point: Saxony, Bavaria (grudgingly and with an express reservation), Spain, Russia, Prussia, Hanover-England, and finally France (with a reservation about third-party rights) had all, in one way or another, acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession. Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and France’s support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy. Great Britain came, late enough, to support Maria Theresa rather out of hostility toward France than out of loyalty to the Pragmatic Sanction.

The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her father’s hereditary lands. Moreover, her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs.

The peace of 1748 did not last long. Prussia was not satiated by the seizure of Silesia from the Habsburgs, and they in turn were even more determined to recover Silesia than anxious to ensure the protection of their outlying possessions in the Netherlands against the continuing danger of French attack. The so-called Diplomatic Revolution, which preceded the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63, was the product, basically, of those situations: finding that their former British friends were more interested in conciliating Prussia than in abetting Austro-Russian plans for destroying it, the Habsburgs played their part in the “reversal of alliances” by achieving—without territorial profit—a reconciliation with France, hitherto their longest-standing enemy. An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it.

To secure their imperial status in Germany against Prussian enterprises, the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory. For that purpose Tuscany and the Netherlands were practically irrelevant. Tuscany in fact was kept separate from the ancient Habsburg inheritance: when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Joseph’s brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany. Similarly, when Leopold succeeded to Joseph’s titles (1790), his own second son succeeded to Tuscany as Ferdinand III. Thereafter the Tuscan branch of the Habsburgs remained distinct from the senior or imperial line.

The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph II’s time, was a result not so much of Joseph’s initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772), which gave him Galicia and Lodomeria, was a Russo-Prussian arrangement disgusting to his conscientious mother, who remembered Silesia; and his subsequent acquisition of Bukovina (1775), geopolitically logical though it was as bridging a gap between his Transylvanian and his new Galician lands, was a side effect of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774).

Joseph II was considerably more interested in westward expansion, over Bavaria, which would have both strengthened his western frontier strategically and enhanced his status among the German princes politically. Prussia’s forceful opposition, however, reduced his gains in the War of the Bavarian Succession to the Innviertel (1779) and frustrated his plan for ceding the Netherlands to the House of Wittelsbach in exchange for Bavaria five years later (1784).

The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes. Three were clearly significant for the future of the House of Habsburg: (1) the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, in anticipation of which Leopold II’s successor Francis II had in 1804 begun to style himself “hereditary emperor of Austria,” a title that, as Francis I, he could retain come what might; (2) the definitive renunciation of the southern Netherlands by the Habsburgs in 1797; and (3) the awakening of the spirit of nationalism in the modern sense.

On Napoleon’s downfall the Congress of Vienna (1814-15) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted. Francis I of Austria recovered Lombardy (lost in 1797), Venetia and Dalmatia (both of them acquired in 1797 but lost in 1809), and Tirol (lost also in 1809); Ferdinand III of Tuscany recovered his grand duchy; another Habsburg was recognized as sovereign duke of Modena, because his father, a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleon’s Habsburg consort, Marie Louise, received the duchies of Parma and Piacenza for her lifetime (after which they were to revert to the Bourbons). The territory of Salzburg, which the Habsburgs had acquired in 1803 but lost to Bavaria in 1809, was finally restored to Austria in 1816. Though the Congress of Vienna did not restore Austrian rule over “Western Galicia” (the Habsburgs’ share under the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, lost likewise in 1809), a small part of that area, namely the territory of Cracow, was annexed by Austria in 1846.

The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire, a bastion of monarchical conservatism that the forces of nationalism—German, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian—gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to Sardinia-Piedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy, and could do nothing to prevent the same power from dispossessing the Habsburgs of Tuscany and of Modena. Next, the Seven Weeks’ War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia. After that disaster the Habsburg emperor Franz Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his “multinational empire”: in 1867, to conciliate Hungary, he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The result, however, was that the Magyars, jealous of their unique parity with the Germans and of their superiority over the non-Magyar peoples of their kingdom, rejected any suggestion of conciliating the Slavs and the Romanians of the Dual Monarchy by similar measures. The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars.

Remote from Austria’s national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Franz Joseph’s brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864, he was executed by a Mexican firing squad in 1867. No less grievous to the dynasty and of more concern to Austria-Hungary was the suicide of the crown prince Rudolf in 1889, though his fitness for the imperial and royal succession was questionable; and the scandalous misconduct of certain archdukes and archduchesses, in the imperial and in the Tuscan lines alike, further impaired the Habsburgs’ personal prestige. The assassination of Franz Joseph's Wittelsbach consort Elizabeth in 1898 was to be followed in less than two decades by an assassination of far greater consequence.

In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had “occupied” Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey. In 1908 that territory had been formally annexed to Austria-Hungary, in a manner that was outrageous not only to Serbia (which coveted Bosnia for itself) but also to Serbia’s patron, Russia. Visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in 1914, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Dual Monarchy (and incidentally legatee, from 1875, of the rights of the House of Austria-Este to Modena), was shot to death by a nationalist Serb. A month later the First World War was beginning.

World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but “German” Austria and Hungary proper. On November 11, 1918, he issued a proclamation recognizing Austria’s right to determine the future form of the state and renouncing for himself any share in affairs of state, and on November 13 he issued a similar proclamation to Hungary. Even so, he did not abdicate his hereditary titles either for himself or for the Habsburg dynasty. Consequently the national assembly of the Austrian Republic passed the “Habsburg Law” of April 3, 1919, banishing all Habsburgs from Austrian territory unless they renounced all dynastic pretensions and loyally accepted the status of private citizens. In Hungary, however, the collapse of the republican regime at the end of 1919 raised strong royalist hopes of a Habsburg restoration, and after the conclusion of the Treaty of Trianon (June 1920) Charles twice tried to return (March and October 1921). Under pressure from the other European powers, especially those of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania), the Hungarian parliament on November 3, 1921, decreed the abrogation of Charles’s sovereign rights and of the Pragmatic Sanction.

Habsburg property rights in Austria, forfeited under the law of 1919, were restored in 1935 but withdrawn again by the German chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1938. After World War II the Allied Control Council in Austria in January 1946 declared that it would support the Austrian government in measures to prevent any return of the Habsburgs, and the law of 1919 was written into the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. In June 1961 the Austrian government rejected an application by the archduke Otto, head of the House of Habsburg, to be allowed to return to Austria as a private citizen, but in 1963 the administrative court of Austria ruled that Otto’s application was legal. Because of Socialist opposition to his return, however, he was not granted a visa until June 1966 after the People’s Party had won a majority in that year’s general election. Under Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (1970-83), tensions between the Austrian government and the Habsburgs eased, although some family members continued to demand the restitution of the Habsburg assets.

Charles V with Armor by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz (1605), copying Titian

Charles V (24 February 1500 - 21 September 1558) was Holy Roman Emperor and Archduke of Austria from 1519, King of Spain (Castile and Aragon) from 1516, and Lord of the Netherlands as titular Duke of Burgundy from 1506. As head of the rising House of Habsburg during the first half of the 16th century, his dominions in Europe included the Holy Roman Empire, extending from Germany to northern Italy with direct rule over the Austrian hereditary lands and the Burgundian Low Countries, and a unified Spain with its southern Italian kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Furthermore, his reign encompassed both the long-lasting Spanish and short-lived German colonizations of the Americas. The personal union of the European and American territories of Charles V was the first collection of realms labelled “the empire on which the sun never sets.”

Born in Flanders to Philip the Handsome of the Austrian House of Habsburg (son of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Mary of Burgundy) and Joanna the Mad of the Spanish House of Trastámara (daughter of Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon), Charles inherited all of his family dominions at a young age, due to the premature death of his father and the mental illness of his mother.

After the death of Philip in 1506, he inherited the Burgundian Netherlands, originally held by his paternal grandmother Mary. In 1516, he became co-monarch of Spain with his mother Joanna, and as such he was the first king of Spain to inherit the country as dynastically unified by the Catholic Monarchs, his maternal grandparents. The Spanish possessions at his accession also included the Castilian West Indies and the Aragonese Kingdoms of Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. At the death of his paternal grandfather Maximilian in 1519, he inherited Austria and was elected to succeed him as Holy Roman Emperor. He adopted the Imperial name of Charles V as his main title, and styled himself as a new Charlemagne.

Charles V revitalized the medieval concept of the universal monarchy and spent most of his life defending the integrity of the Holy Roman Empire from the Protestant Reformation, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and a series of wars with France.

With no fixed capital city, he made 40 journeys, travelling from country to country, and it is estimated that he spent a quarter of his reign on the road. In order to finance the Imperial wars and maintain his armies of German Landsknechte, Spanish tercios, Burgundian knights, and Italian condottieri, Charles V relied on the economic productivity of the Habsburg Netherlands (birthplace of capitalism) and the flow of precious metals (the chief source of his wealth) from South America to Spain. Charles ratified the Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires by the Spanish Conquistadores Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro, the establishment of Klein-Venedig by the German Welser family in search of the legendary El Dorado, and the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan around the globe. In order to consolidate power in his early reign, Charles suppressed two Spanish insurrections (Comuneros' Revolt and Brotherhoods' Revolt) and two German rebellions (Knights' Revolt and Great Peasants' Revolt).

Crowned King in Germany, Charles sided with Pope Leo X and declared Martin Luther an outlaw at the Diet of Worms. The same year Francis I of France, surrounded by the Habsburg possessions, started a conflict in Lombardy that lasted until the Battle of Pavia (1525) led to his temporary imprisonment. In 1527, Rome was sacked by Charles's Spanish troops and German mercenaries. After ordering the retreat of the troops from the Papal States, Charles V defended Vienna from the Turks and obtained the coronation as King in Italy by Pope Clement VII. In 1535, he annexed the vacant Duchy of Milan and captured Tunis. Nevertheless, the Algiers expedition and the loss of Buda in the early 40s frustrated his anti-Ottoman policies. Meanwhile, Charles V had come to an agreement with Pope Paul III for the organisation of the Council of Trent (1545). The refusal of the Lutheran Schmalkaldic League to take part in the Council led to a war, won by Charles V with the imprisonment of the Protestant princes. However, Henry II of France offered new support to the Lutheran cause and strengthened a close alliance with the sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire since 1520.

After thirty-five years of incessant warfare and facing the prospect of an alliance between all of his enemies, Charles V conceded the Peace of Augsburg and abandoned his multi-national project with a series of abdications in 1556 that divided his hereditary and imperial domains between the Spanish Habsburgs headed by his son Philip II of Spain and the Austrian Habsburgs headed by his brother Ferdinand, who was Archduke of Austria in Charles's name since 1521 and the designated successor as emperor since 1531. The Duchy of Milan and the Habsburg Netherlands were left in personal union to the King of Spain, but remained part of the Holy Roman Empire. The two Habsburg dynasties remained allied until the extinction of the Spanish line. In 1557, Charles retired to the Monastery of Yuste in Extremadura and there died a year later.

The Holy Roman Emperor, officially the Emperor of the Romans (Latin: Imperator Romanorum), and also the German-Roman Emperor (German: Römisch-deutscher Kaiser, lit. 'Roman-German emperor'), was the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. The Empire was considered by the Roman Catholic Church to be the only legal successor of the Roman Empire during the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The title was held in conjunction with the title of King of Italy (Rex Italiae) from the 8th to the 16th century, and, almost without interruption, with the title of King of Germany (Rex Teutonicorum, lit. ‘King of the Germans’) throughout the 12th to 18th centuries.

In theory, the Emperor was primus inter pares (first among equals) among other European Catholic monarchs. In practice, an emperor was only as strong as his army and alliances, including marriage alliances, made him.

From an autocracy in Carolingian times (AD 800-924) the title by the 13th century evolved into an elective monarchy, with the Emperor chosen by the Prince-Electors. Various royal houses of Europe, at different times, became de facto hereditary holders of the title, notably the Ottonians (962-1024) and the Salians (1027-1125). Following the late medieval crisis of government, the Habsburgs kept possession of the title without interruption from 1440-1740. The final emperors were from the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, from 1765-1806. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved by Francis II, after a devastating defeat to Napoleon at the Battle of Austerlitz.

The Emperor was widely perceived to rule by divine right, though he often contradicted or rivaled the Pope, most notably during the Investiture controversy. The Holy Roman Empire never had an empress regnant, though women such as Theophanu and Maria Theresa exerted strong influence. Throughout its history, the position was viewed as a defender of the Roman Catholic faith. Until Maximilian I in 1508, the Emperor-elect (Imperator electus) was required to be crowned by the Pope before assuming the imperial title. Charles V was the last to be crowned by the Pope in 1530. Even after the Reformation, the elected Emperor was always a Roman Catholic. There were short periods in history when the electoral college was dominated by Protestants, and the electors usually voted in their own political interest.