Rudolf II

Prague, rather than Vienna, became the center of the Habsburg world under Rudolf II, who moved his court there in 1583 and made the city one of the foremost cultural capitals of Europe. Born in Vienna in 1552, the eldest surviving son of Emperor Maximilian II and Maria of Spain, he spent his adolescence at the rigorously Catholic court of his uncle Philip II in Spain, an upbringing that shaped his formal manner and his religious outlook. He was crowned King of Hungary in 1572 and King of Bohemia in 1575, and succeeded his father as Holy Roman Emperor in 1576.

Rudolf is remembered above all as a collector and patron. His court attracted the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, painters such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Bartholomeus Spranger, and a host of alchemists, instrument makers, and scholars. His Kunstkammer, an encyclopedic collection of art and curiosities, was among the most celebrated in Europe. At the same time he showed limited appetite for the routine business of government, and his reluctance ever to marry, despite a long-standing engagement to his cousin the Spanish infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, left the succession unsettled and his brothers increasingly assertive.

The Long Turkish War against the Ottoman Empire, fought from 1593 to 1606 mainly on Hungarian territory, drained his resources and provoked revolt in Hungary. The peace settlements of 1606 were negotiated largely by his brother Matthias, around whom discontented members of the dynasty and the estates gathered. In 1608 Rudolf was compelled to cede Hungary, Austria, and Moravia to Matthias. To retain Bohemian loyalty he issued the Letter of Majesty in 1609, granting broad religious freedoms to the Bohemian estates, but the ill-judged invasion of Bohemia by troops of his cousin Archduke Leopold in 1611 destroyed his remaining authority, and he was forced to surrender the Bohemian crown to Matthias as well.

Rudolf died in Prague in January 1612, retaining only the imperial title, and was buried in St. Vitus Cathedral. Matthias succeeded him as emperor. The unresolved religious and constitutional tensions of his reign in Bohemia erupted six years after his death into the conflict that became the Thirty Years' War.