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 dynasty that ended Merovingian rule of the Franks in 751, built under Charlemagne the largest empire in western Europe since Rome, and held the imperial throne for the next two centuries. The Treaty of Verdun in 843 split the empire among Charlemagne's three grandsons into kernels of modern France, Germany, and the Low Countries. The senior West Frankish line ended with the death of Louis V in 987, when the magnates elected the Robertian Hugh Capet king — opening the Capetian century.

13 figures

Austrian Habsburgs

Austria / Holy Roman Empire · 1273 – 1918

The senior Habsburg line, ruling from a single Swiss county at the time of Rudolf I's imperial election in 1273 to the abdication of Karl I in 1918. Between those endpoints they wore the Holy Roman crown almost continuously from 1438, brought Hungary and Bohemia into a single hereditary inheritance, weathered the Thirty Years' War and the Napoleonic dissolution of the Empire, and ruled the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy until the First World War destroyed it. Their continental dominance was built less by conquest than by marriage — bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube.

24 figures

Spanish Habsburgs

Spain / Holy Roman Empire · 1516 – 1700

A dominant European royal house known for controlling a vast global empire, and notorious for their strategic, yet ultimately catastrophic, generations of close intermarriage which led to the dynasty's genetic collapse.

5 figures