Late Middle Ages

The rise of the Habsburg dynasty

The Habsburg dynasty is the longest continuous ruling house in modern European history. Its origin, as far as the imperial history of the dynasty is concerned, is conventionally dated to 1 October 1273, when Rudolf I was elected King of the Romans at Frankfurt. Its end, as far as the male line is concerned, is conventionally dated to 1740, when Charles VI, the last of the Spanish-Habsburg line, died. The Austrian line continued to 1780, when Maria Theresa, the last of the female-line Habsburgs, died. The Habsburgs, in the conventional sense, were thus the ruling dynasty of central Europe for almost 470 years. The late medieval period — the period from the election of Rudolf I in 1273 to the death of Maximilian I in 1519 — was the seedbed of the dynasty’s later greatness. It is in this period that the dynasty acquired the Austrian lands, married into the Burgundian inheritance, and laid the foundation of the Spanish claim that would make Charles V the most powerful monarch in Europe. This article treats the late medieval origins and growth of the Habsburg dynasty, with particular attention to the period 1438–1519.

The early Habsburgs, 1273–1438

The early Habsburgs were a minor family of the Aargau in what is now Switzerland. The original Habsburg, a fortress on the Aar, was built in the early eleventh century; the family took its name from the castle. The first great figure of the dynasty was Rudolf I, who was elected King of the Romans in 1273, in the interregnum that followed the end of the Hohenstaufen line. Rudolf was a relatively minor figure, but he was acceptable to the electors, and he used the imperial title to good effect. The Battle of Marchfeld on 26 August 1278, in which Ottokar II of Bohemia, the most powerful of Rudolf’s opponents, was killed, gave the Habsburgs the duchies of Austria and Styria, the territorial core of the dynasty. The Austrian lands would remain the basis of Habsburg power until 1918.

The early Habsburgs, in the century after Rudolf, were preoccupied with the territorial defence of the Austrian lands. The dynasty divided into the Albertine and the Leopoldine lines after the death of Rudolf’s son Albert I in 1308; the two lines were reunited in 1395 by the Treaty of Haimberg. The Albertine line, which was to provide the imperial line in the fifteenth century, acquired the Bohemian crown in 1526; the early Albertines, however, were a relatively modest family. The reign of Albert II (1397–1439), the first Habsburg king of Hungary, Bohemia, and Germany, is a useful benchmark. Albert was elected King of the Romans in March 1438; he was crowned king of Hungary at Székesfehérvár on 1 January 1438; he was killed at the Battle of Neszmély on 27 October 1439, fighting against the Ottoman Turks. Albert’s reign is the beginning of the long Habsburg-Ottoman confrontation, and it is also the beginning of the Habsburg connection with Hungary and Bohemia that would dominate the dynasty’s eastern policy until 1918.

Frederick III and the survival of the dynasty

The reign of Frederick III, treated in detail in the article on his life, is the key to the late medieval history of the dynasty. Frederick was the last of the Albertine line in the strict sense; his successors, Maximilian I and Charles V, were the result of the dynastic marriages of the 1470s and 1490s. The detail of the reign is important. Frederick was elected King of the Romans on 2 February 1440, at the age of 24, by all seven electors — an unanimity that would be denied to his successors for the rest of the Middle Ages. He was crowned emperor by Pope Nicholas V at Rome on 16 March 1452, the last papal-imperial coronation in history. He died at Linz on 19 August 1493, having secured the succession of his son Maximilian.

Frederick’s reign was, in many respects, a difficult one. The Austrian lands were invaded by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus in 1485, and Vienna was held by the Hungarians until 1490. The long working of the imperial reform programme, which was the central constitutional business of the reign, was, in effect, a series of measures by which the great princes consolidated their position at the expense of the crown. The imperial reform of 1486–1495, the work of the Diet of Augsburg, the Diet of Worms, and the Diet of Cologne, was the constitutional work of the late medieval Empire. It was the work of the great princes — the electors, the dukes, the counts — rather than the king. Frederick’s contribution was to keep the institution of the Diet alive and to secure the succession of his son.

The Burgundian inheritance, 1477

The most important dynastic event of the late medieval period for the Habsburgs was the marriage of Maximilian I to Mary of Burgundy in 1477. Mary was the daughter of Charles the Bold (Charles le Téméraire), duke of Burgundy, who was killed at the Battle of Nancy on 5 January 1477. Charles the Bold was the most ambitious of the late medieval territorial princes. He had built a state that stretched from the Low Countries to the Franche-Comté, and that had been the centre of a magnificent court and a serious military effort. Charles had been married to Isabella of Bourbon and to Margaret of York, the sister of Edward IV of England; he had hoped to make Burgundy an independent kingdom, and to expand his state at the expense of the Empire, the French crown, and the Swiss. His death at Nancy, in the snow of a January morning, was the end of the great Burgundian project.

The Burgundian inheritance was divided. The duchy of Burgundy proper, with its apanage, reverted to the French crown; the duchy of Burgundy, as a fief of the Empire, was disputed. The Low Countries — the seventeen provinces that Charles had gathered together by inheritance and conquest — were the most valuable part of the inheritance, and they passed to Mary. The Franche-Comté and the duchy of Gelderland were to be the subject of long disputes. Mary was the heiress, and she needed a husband who could defend her. The Treaty of Ghent of 11 April 1477, in which Mary and the estates of the Low Countries agreed to a marriage of mutual defence, was the first step. Maximilian, the son of Frederick III, was the candidate. The marriage took place at Ghent on 19 August 1477.

The Burgundian inheritance, as it was eventually consolidated, included the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries, the Franche-Comté, the duchy of Luxembourg, the duchy of Brabant, the county of Holland, the county of Flanders, and a number of smaller principalities. The inheritance was the largest single block of territory that the Habsburgs had ever controlled, and it was the basis of the dynasty’s western policy for the next three centuries. The Low Countries were the wealthiest region in western Europe, and they were to be the financial basis of the Spanish-Habsburg monarchy until the Dutch Revolt of the 1560s and 1570s.

Marriage diplomacy and the Spanish connection

The second great dynastic event was the marriage of Maximilian’s son, Philip the Handsome, to Joanna of Castile, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1496. The marriage was the result of a long negotiation, complicated by the politics of the Italian peninsula and by the changing French position. The first treaty of Medina del Campo (27 March 1489) was a marriage treaty between the Catholic Monarchs and Maximilian; the second treaty (26 May 1496) was a renewal and expansion of the first, by which the marriage was actually concluded. The marriage took place at Lier on 20 October 1496.

The Spanish inheritance was the second great territorial acquisition of the dynasty. The marriage of Philip and Joanna produced Charles V (born 24 February 1500) and Ferdinand I (born 10 March 1503), the two brothers who would divide the dynasty between them. The Spanish inheritance was the basis of the dynasty’s western policy for the next 200 years. The marriage of Charles V to Isabella of Portugal in 1526 produced Philip II, who would inherit the Spanish kingdoms; the marriage of Ferdinand I to Anna of Bohemia and Hungary in 1521 produced the Austrian-Habsburg line. The dynastic politics of the late medieval period, in this sense, was the politics of the two marriages of 1477 and 1496.

The reign of Maximilian I, 1493–1519

The reign of Maximilian I, treated in detail in the related article, was the consolidation of the dynasty’s late medieval inheritance. Maximilian was elected King of the Romans in 1486, in his father’s lifetime; he was crowned emperor at Trent on 4 February 1508, by Pope Julius II, in a ceremony that marked the end of the requirement that the emperor should be crowned at Rome. Maximilian’s reign was the period in which the dynastic marriages were consolidated: the marriage of his son Philip to Joanna of Castile in 1496, the marriage of his daughter Margaret to John, prince of Asturias, in 1497 (a marriage that ended with John’s death in 1497, leaving Catherine of Aragon, who would become the first wife of Henry VIII of England), the marriage of his granddaughter Mary of Hungary to Louis II of Hungary in 1522. The reign was also the period in which the imperial reform programme was carried through: the Imperial Chamber Court, the Imperial Council, the imperial circles, the Matrikel. The reign was, in short, the working-out of the late medieval inheritance into the early modern form.

The verdict on the late medieval Habsburgs is mixed. The dynasty acquired the Austrian lands, the Burgundian inheritance, the Spanish inheritance, the imperial title, and a long working theory of dynastic politics. The dynasty lost, in the same period, the Hungarian crown, the Italian ambitions, and the long-running contest with France. The dynasty survived the crises of the early sixteenth century — the Ottoman pressure, the French invasions of Italy, the German Reformation — by virtue of the slow accumulation of the late medieval inheritance, and by virtue of the institutional arrangements of the Empire. The historiography of the dynasty has been transformed by the work of the 1980s and 1990s: Brady, Obersteiner, the late Bérenger, Evans, Whaley. The older nationalist verdict of a Habsburg empire as a “prison of nations” has been replaced by the more considered reading of a dynasty that, in the late medieval period, was the most successful in Europe.

References and further reading

  • Robert J. W. Evans, The Coming of the Three Kings (Cambridge, 2012).
  • Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806 (London, 2011).
  • Jean Bérenger, The Habsburgs: The History of a Dynasty, trans. Daniel Ringrose (London, 1994).
  • Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (2 vols, Oxford, 2012).
  • H. C. Erik Midelfort, Bureaucracy and Aristocracy in the German Polity (Charlottesville, 1980).