Austrian Habsburgs

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

Related events

• 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.

• 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