Austrian Habsburgs

Succession of rulers

1. 1.Rudolf Ir. 1273 – 1291
2. 2.Frederick IIIr. 1452 – 1493
3. 3.Maximilian Ir. 1508 – 1519
4. 4.Ferdinand Ir. 1556 – 1564
5. 5.Maximilian IIr. 1564 – 1576
6. 6.Rudolf IIr. 1576 – 1612
7. 7.Matthiasr. 1612 – 1619
8. 8.Ferdinand IIr. 1619 – 1637
9. 9.Ferdinand IIIr. 1637 – 1657
10. 10.Leopold Ir. 1658 – 1705
11. 11.Joseph Ir. 1705 – 1711
12. 12.Charles VIr. 1711 – 1740
13. 13.Maria Theresar. 1740 – 1780
14. 14.Francis I Stephenr. 1745 – 1765
15. 15.Joseph IIr. 1780 – 1790
16. 16.Leopold IIr. 1790 – 1792
17. 17.Francis IIr. 1792 – 1835
18. 18.Ferdinand I of Austriar. 1835 – 1848
19. 19.Franz Joseph Ir. 1848 – 1916
20. 20.Karl Ir. 1916 – 1918

Rulers of the Austrian Habsburgs in order of accession.

All figures

• Rudolf I1218 – 1291
• Frederick III1415 – 1493
• Maximilian I1459 – 1519
• Philip the Handsome1478 – 1506
• Ferdinand I1503 – 1564
• Maximilian II1527 – 1576
• Rudolf II1552 – 1612
• Matthias1557 – 1619
• Ferdinand II1578 – 1637
• Ferdinand III1608 – 1657
• Leopold I1640 – 1705
• Joseph I1678 – 1711
• Charles VI1685 – 1740
• Francis I Stephen1708 – 1765
• Maria Theresa1717 – 1780
• Joseph II1741 – 1790
• Leopold II1747 – 1792
• Francis II1768 – 1835
• Ferdinand I of Austria1793 – 1875
• Franz Karl1802 – 1878
• Franz Joseph I1830 – 1916
• Maximilian I of Mexico1832 – 1867
• Elisabeth of Austria1837 – 1898
• Karl I1887 – 1922

See who ruled alongside the Austrian Habsburgs →

Related events

• Conflict

  Battle of Mohács

  1526· this dynasty: Claimed the vacant Bohemian and Hungarian crowns

  On 29 August 1526 the Ottoman army under Süleyman I destroyed the army of the Kingdom of Hungary on the plain of Mohács, near the Danube in the country's south. Süleyman had opened the road in 1521 by taking Belgrade, the key fortress of Hungary's southern defenses, and marched north in 1526 with a large, artillery-rich force. The young king Louis II, who ruled both Hungary and Bohemia, met him with an army of roughly 25,000, assembled hastily and without the substantial contingents of Transylvania under John Zápolya and of Croatia, which had not arrived. The battle lasted only a few hours. Hungarian heavy cavalry charges achieved initial momentum but broke against the Ottoman center, where chained guns and janissary volleys shattered the attack, and the army disintegrated. Most of the Hungarian high command, including both archbishops and a large part of the episcopate and baronage, died on the field or in the rout. Louis II drowned in a swollen stream during the flight, leaving no legitimate heir. Süleyman occupied and burned Buda but withdrew that autumn without garrisoning central Hungary. The succession crisis proved as consequential as the battle. By treaties of 1515 between the Habsburgs and the Jagiellonians, and through his marriage to Louis's sister Anna, Ferdinand I of Habsburg, brother of the emperor Charles V, claimed the vacant crowns. He was elected king of Bohemia in October 1526, while in Hungary rival diets elected both Ferdinand and John Zápolya, beginning a civil war that ended with the country partitioned among Habsburg "Royal Hungary," the Ottoman-held center after 1541, and an Ottoman-vassal principality in Transylvania. The Habsburg acquisition of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in 1526 assembled the Danubian composite monarchy that the dynasty would rule until 1918.

  Also involved: Ottoman Empire (Victorious power; later occupied central Hungary)

• Succession

  Abdication of Charles V

  1556· this dynasty: received the imperial and Austrian inheritance

  Between 1554 and 1556 Charles V, exhausted by four decades of universal war, partitioned the empire he had inherited intact. His son Philip received Spain, the Indies, the Italian possessions, and the Low Countries; his brother Ferdinand received Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and ultimately the imperial title. The split divided the Habsburgs into Spanish and Austrian branches that would remain cousin powers for the next century and a half. Charles retired to a monastery in Yuste and died there in 1558.

  Also involved: Spanish Habsburgs (received Spain and the global empire)

• Event

  Defenestration of Prague

  1618

  On 23 May 1618 a delegation of Bohemian Protestant nobles threw two imperial regents and their secretary out of a third-story window of Prague Castle. All three survived the seventy-foot fall, landing in a dung heap. The act was the opening provocation of the Thirty Years' War — Europe's longest, most destructive religious conflict, which killed perhaps a quarter of the population of Germany.

• Alliance

  Peace of Westphalia

  1648· this dynasty: signatory

  The series of treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in October 1648 ended the Thirty Years' War in the Empire and the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic. The settlement recognized the sovereignty of the German princes, granted formal independence to the Dutch and the Swiss, and established the principle of cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion) on a durable basis. Conventionally cited as the foundation of the modern European state system.

• Succession

  Pragmatic Sanction

  1713

  Charles VI, last male Habsburg in the senior line, issued an edict on 19 April 1713 declaring that the Habsburg hereditary lands were indivisible and could pass to a female heir if no male existed. He spent the next twenty-seven years securing the recognition of every European court for the eventual succession of his daughter Maria Theresa. Most of those guarantees were violated within months of his death, plunging Europe into the War of the Austrian Succession.

• Event

  Assassination at Sarajevo

  1914· this dynasty: Lost the heir to the throne; the ensuing war destroyed the monarchy

  On 28 June 1914 the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb. The archduke was in Bosnia, annexed by Austria-Hungary in 1908, to observe army maneuvers. Princip belonged to a group of young conspirators associated with the Yugoslavist movement in Bosnia, armed and trained with the involvement of officers of the Serbian secret society known as the Black Hand; the degree of the Serbian government's own knowledge has been debated ever since. The first attempt that morning, a thrown bomb, wounded members of the entourage; the fatal shots came when the archduke's car, on a changed route to visit the wounded, stopped and reversed within feet of Princip. For the house of Habsburg the murder compounded a succession already strained. Franz Joseph I, then eighty-three and on the throne since 1848, had lost his only son Rudolf by suicide in 1889; Franz Ferdinand's children were excluded from the succession by his morganatic marriage, so the heirship passed to the emperor's young great-nephew, the Archduke Karl. The diplomatic consequences unfolded over the following month. Vienna's leadership, with an unconditional assurance of German support, resolved to use the crime to settle accounts with Serbia, and on 23 July presented an ultimatum framed to be refused. Serbia's reply accepted most demands; Austria-Hungary judged it insufficient and declared war on 28 July, with Franz Joseph's manifesto "To my peoples" announcing the decision. The mobilization of Russia in Serbia's defense drew in Germany and France within days, and Britain followed upon the invasion of Belgium. Franz Joseph died in 1916, and Karl, the last Habsburg emperor, could not extract the monarchy from the war that the July crisis had begun; it dissolved in 1918.

• Succession

  Fall of Austria-Hungary

  1918

  The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy at the end of the First World War. By October 1918 the constituent nationalities of Austria-Hungary were declaring independent states; on 11 November Emperor Karl I issued a proclamation renouncing participation in state affairs, though he never formally abdicated. The empire dissolved into the new Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and parts of Poland, Italy, and Romania — ending six centuries of Habsburg rule.

See also