Dynasties of Frankish & Holy Roman

The Carolingian and Holy Roman Empire lineages of Continental Europe.

3 dynasties

Carolingian

Frankish Empire / Holy Roman Empire · 751 – 987

The Carolingian dynasty ended the Merovingian rule of the Franks in 751 and held the imperial crown of the West, with brief interruptions, until 887. Their rise was the work of three generations of mayors of the palace — court officials whose constitutional position had been ceremonial but who, under Pepin of Herstal, Charles Martel, and Pepin the Short, accumulated such overwhelming military and territorial power that the Merovingian kings became functionally irrelevant. In 751 Pepin the Short asked Pope Zachary whether it would not be better for the man who actually ruled the Franks to also wear the crown; the Pope agreed, the last Merovingian was deposed and tonsured, and Pepin became the first Carolingian king. His son Charlemagne (768–814) is the dominant figure of the entire early medieval period. In a forty-six-year reign he conquered the Lombards, the Saxons, the Bavarians, and most of central Europe; founded an empire larger than anything seen in the West since Rome; was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800, formally reviving the imperial title in the Latin West; and inaugurated the Carolingian Renaissance, the first systematic recovery of classical learning in five centuries. The political and cultural framework of medieval Europe was largely his creation. The empire proved indivisible only as long as Charlemagne lived. His son Louis the Pious inherited it intact but spent his reign tangled in civil wars among his own sons over its eventual division. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 settled the question by tripartition: Lothair I retained the imperial title and a long, narrow Middle Francia stretching from the Low Countries to Italy; Louis the German received East Francia (the kernel of medieval Germany); Charles the Bald received West Francia (the kernel of France). The borders sketched at Verdun shaped European politics for the next millennium. The senior Carolingian line collapsed in West Francia in 987 when Louis V died childless and the magnates elected the Robertian Hugh Capet king. The East Frankish branch had already given way to the Ottonian Saxons in 919. But the Carolingian genealogical legacy is uniquely durable: nearly every later European royal house traces ancestry to Charlemagne through cadet branches, female lines, or both. The Capetian, Plantagenet, Habsburg, and Wittelsbach houses — and through them most of the reigning European monarchs of the modern period — descend from him.

13 figures

Austrian Habsburgs

Austria / Holy Roman Empire · 1273 – 1918

The Habsburg house emerged in the eleventh century as obscure Swiss counts whose hereditary patrimony was a single hill-fort in Aargau. By the early fourteenth century they had risen to ducal rank in Austria; by the fifteenth they held the imperial crown of the Holy Roman Empire almost continuously; by the early sixteenth, through the marriage of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy and the subsequent marriages of their children, they controlled the largest European patrimony assembled since Charlemagne — Spain, the Indies, Burgundy, the Low Countries, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, the imperial title, and parts of Italy, all under one ruler in Charles V. The empire Charles inherited proved unmanageable as a single entity. His abdication in 1556 split the dynasty into Spanish and Austrian branches. The Spanish Habsburgs took the global empire and reigned until their extinction in 1700; the Austrian Habsburgs took the imperial succession, the central European territories, and would reign in Vienna until 1918. The Austrian line endured a Reformation that nearly destroyed the religious unity of central Europe, a Thirty Years' War that killed perhaps a quarter of Germany's population, and the gradual erosion of imperial authority over the German princes. The dynasty's last truly great moment was the long reign of Maria Theresa (1740–1780), the only female ruler of the Habsburg lands. Her accession was nearly catastrophic — the Pragmatic Sanction her father Charles VI had spent decades negotiating across Europe was violated within weeks of her accession, plunging her into the War of the Austrian Succession with Frederick the Great of Prussia. She lost Silesia but preserved everything else, bore sixteen children including two emperors and Marie Antoinette of France, and reformed the army, education system, and bureaucracy of her composite monarchy. The dynasty ended in 1918 with the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the close of the First World War. Emperor Karl I renounced participation in state affairs in November 1918 and went into exile; the empire dissolved into Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and parts of Poland and Italy. The Habsburg-Lorraine family continues as a private house; the current head is Karl von Habsburg (b. 1961), great-grandson of the last reigning Emperor of Austria.

24 figures

Spanish Habsburgs

Spain / Holy Roman Empire · 1516 – 1700

The Spanish Habsburg dynasty inherited, at a single moment in 1516, the largest territorial state in the world. Charles V was simultaneously king of Castile and Aragon through his mother Joanna; king of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia through his Aragonese inheritance; ruler of Spanish America through the same; Duke of Burgundy and Lord of the Netherlands through his grandmother Mary of Burgundy; and from 1519 Holy Roman Emperor, archduke of Austria, and king of the Romans through his Habsburg patrimony. He was nineteen years old. Charles abdicated forty years later in stages between 1554 and 1556, exhausted by four decades of universal war and convinced no successor could manage the whole inheritance. His son Philip II received Spain, the Indies, the Italian possessions, and the Low Countries; his brother Ferdinand received the Austrian lands and ultimately the imperial title. The Spanish branch would reign in Madrid for the next century and a half, defending a global empire against the rising powers of England, France, the Netherlands, and the Ottomans. The reign of Philip II (1556–1598) is the apex of Spanish Habsburg power. The Spanish silver fleets brought back the wealth of the Americas; the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 broke Ottoman naval supremacy in the Mediterranean; in 1580 Philip inherited the throne of Portugal, briefly uniting the two Iberian empires. The reign also saw the catastrophic Dutch Revolt, the failed Armada against Elizabethan England (1588), and the religious wars of the French Reformation in which Philip backed the losing Catholic League. The dynasty entered visible decline under his successors. Repeated cousin marriages — designed to keep the inheritance within the Habsburg family — produced increasingly inbred offspring; the last Spanish Habsburg, Carlos II, was so disabled by genetic damage that he could not chew solid food, walk unaided, or father an heir. His death in 1700 without issue triggered the War of the Spanish Succession, which ended the dynasty and brought the French Bourbons to the Spanish throne under the Treaty of Utrecht.

5 figures