The House of Austria

Counts who did not attain their height by fraud

formationDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

The family that would rule Austria for more than six centuries began as minor counts in Alsace and Switzerland, holding a castle - built, by the family's own foundation records, by a bishop of Strasbourg named Werner in 1027 - on a hill above the village of Windisch that gave the line its name: Habsburg. Werner's descendants added to their modest inheritance through marriage, imperial grants, and appointment as advocates over neighbouring abbeys and towns, an office that carried real revenue and authority and, over generations, tended to become both permanent and hereditary. Rudolf, born in 1218 and presented at the baptismal font by the Emperor Frederick II himself, grew up at Frederick's own court and camp, trained from boyhood in wrestling, horsemanship and the javelin, and inherited on his father's death in 1240 only a modest landgraviate, a burgraviate, and a share of the family's original county - territories confined enough that, in Coxe's own telling, Rudolf spent much of his youth doing what German princes of his rank did: fighting his neighbours.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Schuetze75 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A count who kept his word

His early wars were unglamorous and local - a fortress stormed from a resentful young baron in 1242, a feud with his own guardian uncle over an inheritance, an extortionate dispute with another uncle's family over the county of Kyburg - the ordinary business of a minor lord building his position through opportunism and force. What set him apart, in the source's telling, was less restraint than reliability: when a delegation of would-be assassins offered to kill his rival Ottokar of Bohemia for him decades later, Rudolf refused and warned Ottokar instead, a decision consistent with the values his own father had left him at the family's ancestral convent of Muri before departing on crusade - to act with intrepidity once committed to a cause, but never to seek advantage through fraud or treachery. It was this reputation, combined with the modesty of his actual territory, that would make him acceptable to the very electors most anxious not to crown a master.

An emperor, but not a master

formationDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

The imperial throne had sat vacant through decades of interregnum by 1273, and when the seven electors met at Frankfurt that September, the two candidates most expected to succeed were King Ottokar of Bohemia and King Alfonso of Castile. Instead the nomination fell, against every expectation, on Rudolf, Count of Habsburg - a choice engineered above all by Werner of Eppenstein, the Archbishop-Elector of Mainz, who had once been personally escorted across the Alps by Rudolf on a dangerous road and had long wished to repay the favour. Werner secured two more clerical votes quietly and won over the secular electors through a simpler mechanism: Rudolf had six unmarried daughters, and the promise of a royal marriage alliance proved persuasive to more than one prince weighing his own succession. Bohemia's ambassadors protested, but the election was declared unanimous, and Rudolf was crowned at Aachen with Charlemagne's own ancient crown.

Why the electors chose him

The reasoning behind the choice, as Coxe lays it out, was almost entirely calculating rather than complimentary: Rudolf's civil and military talents suited him to govern, but the modest scale of his own territories meant he lacked the means to claim back the fiefs the electors had quietly appropriated for themselves during the long vacancy, or to rule with the heavy hand the great imperial houses of Franconia and Swabia once had. The electors, in the source's own phrase, "desired an emperor, but dreaded a master." Rudolf, fifty-five years old and untested on this scale, proved them only half right: the change of station neither altered his character nor corrupted it, but it opened, at last, a field large enough for the abilities that thirty years of provincial feuding had never fully tested. His first and most urgent task was securing the new Pope's recognition against the rival claims of both Ottokar and the deposed anti-king Alfonso - a diplomatic contest that would, within two years, turn into an open war with Bohemia itself.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · José Luiz · CC BY-SA 4.0

The most powerful prince in Europe

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Ottokar of Bohemia had spent decades assembling, through inheritance, war, purchase and a canny sequence of dynastic marriages, the largest territory of any prince in Europe - Bohemia and Moravia by hereditary right, Austria and Styria seized from a tangle of rival claimants after the old Babenberg ducal line died out, and Carinthia and Carniola bought outright from a dying, childless duke over his own brother's prior claim. His dominions by the 1270s ran from the borders of Bavaria to Raab in Hungary, and from the Adriatic to the Baltic. Beside this, Rudolf's own hereditary lands - scattered fragments of Alsace, Swabia and the Alpine foothills - looked almost trivial, and Rudolf sat on what Coxe calls "a tottering throne," raised to the imperial dignity by princes who meant him to be their chief in name more than in power. When Rudolf's diet declared Ottokar guilty of contumacy for refusing to surrender the disputed duchies and do homage for the rest, open war followed.

Bavarian State Library, Munich · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Jörg Breu the Younger · Public domain

A kneeling king, and a legend refuted

Rudolf's campaign succeeded faster than anyone expected - the city of Vienna itself opened its gates to him - and by November 1276 Ottokar was forced to terms: he renounced every claim to Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and on 25 November crossed the Danube to Rudolf's camp to kneel and do homage for what remained to him, receiving in return the investiture of Bohemia and Moravia alone. A popular story, repeated by many historians, held that Rudolf agreed to let Ottokar perform this humiliating ceremony privately inside his own tent, then had the tent's sides thrown open at the crucial moment to expose the kneeling king to both watching armies - the calculated public insult that supposedly drove Ottokar to break the peace soon after. Coxe, citing a scholar who wrote a treatise specifically to refute it, calls the story "idle and improbable" and rejects it outright; whatever actually turned Ottokar back to war, it was not stage-managed humiliation. Rudolf, having secured the disputed duchies as fiefs reverted to the empire, moved his own family's household to Vienna and set about winning the loyalty of the Austrian nobility by confirming their privileges and letting them rebuild the fortresses Ottokar had torn down.

The battle by the March

The peace held for less than two years. Ottokar broke camp and advanced with a large army in August 1278, and at dawn on the 26th Rudolf's own forces crossed the stream near Weidendorf and attacked in a crescent formation against both of Ottokar's flanks at once. The fighting was desperate on both sides - at one point Rudolf himself was unhorsed and nearly killed, saved only by the timely charge of his own reserve commander - but the imperial army eventually broke Ottokar's lines and drove the fleeing Bohemians into the river, where more than fourteen thousand were killed, drowned or captured. Ottokar refused to leave the field even after his army's total collapse, fighting alone until he was overpowered, unhorsed and killed on the spot by Austrian and Styrian nobles avenging relatives he had put to death. Rudolf, who had tried and failed to send help in time to spare his rival's life, praised Ottokar's courage afterward in his own letter to the Pope - "that magnanimous monarch lost his life at the same time with the victory" - and took possession of Moravia without a fight, though he left the Bohemian throne itself to Ottokar's eight-year-old son under a regency, having gotten what he actually wanted: undisputed mastery of Austria and Styria.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Anton Petter · Public domain

The century of contested elections

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Rudolf died in 1291 still trying to get the electors to break their own habit and confirm his son Albert while he lived; they refused, on the reasoning that the empire could not maintain two kings at once, and let the question lapse until he was gone. It was a lesson the family would keep learning for the next hundred years: the same calculation that had put a minor Swabian count on the throne kept reproducing itself every time a Habsburg looked strong enough to make the crown hereditary. Albert, confident enough of his own claim to seize the imperial regalia before a single vote had been cast, watched the Archbishop of Mainz maneuver the college toward a weaker cousin, Adolf of Nassau, instead - the electors "desired an emperor, but dreaded a master," and Albert's own arrogance had done nothing to change their minds.

Yield your life and your crown

Adolf's reign gave Albert his opening. Arbitrary and grasping enough to alienate the very archbishop who had made him king, Adolf was deposed for contumacy by a diet Albert had spent a year quietly assembling, and the two rival kings met in battle at Göllheim on 2 July 1298. Albert had armed picked infantry with poniards made specifically to strike at horses, and when Adolf cut his way through the melee toward him shouting "Yield your life and your crown! The event is in the hand of Providence!" Albert drove a lance into his face and had him cut down where he fell. Wary of holding a throne people might call a battlefield prize, Albert had the electors formally renounce his own earlier deposition of Adolf and re-elect him clean - a legal fiction that gave him the crown his father had wanted for him, at the cost of a rival's life rather than a peaceful succession.

Albert's own ambitions reached further than his father's had: a brief, disastrous bid to put his eldest son Rudolph on Bohemia's throne ended in Rudolph's death within a year, and a second attempt to install another son was shouted down in the Prague assembly itself - "We will have no Austrian king!" - the crowd killing three Austrian partisans rather than accept the nomination. Passed over for Bohemia twice, Albert was still planning a larger campaign to force the issue when an entirely different grievance ended his reign for good. His own nephew John, denied the share of the family's Swiss and Alsatian lands he believed was owed him, had been humiliated once too often - offered a garland of flowers instead of his inheritance, with the remark that it suited his years better than the cares of government. Days later, crossing the river opposite the family's own ancestral castle, John and four confederates ambushed Albert with a single attendant at his side, cut him down within sight of the walls his family took its name from, and left him to bleed out in a peasant woman's arms before his own son could reach him.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Two crowns in a fortnight

Passed over yet again for the German throne after Albert's murder - the electors, still wary of the family, chose Henry of Luxembourg instead, who moved fast enough to install his own son John on Bohemia's throne within four years - the Habsburgs spent the next decade watching a Luxembourg foothold harden next door into exactly the rival dynasty their own repeated exclusions from Bohemia had been meant to prevent. When Henry died in 1313, the empire's tangled electoral system produced the deadlock it seemed built to invite: on 9 October 1314 the Austrian electors chose Frederick the Handsome at Sachsenhausen, and within days the Luxembourg party crowned Louis of Bavaria at Frankfurt instead. Two kings, each with a legitimate- looking coronation, prepared for war.

Looking for a quicker way to weaken the Bavarian coalition, Frederick's brother Leopold marched against three Swiss cantons that had sided with Louis, boasting he would trample the "audacious rustics" underfoot. Fourteen hundred Swiss met his fifteen-thousand-strong column in the narrow pass of Morgarten on 16 November 1315, rolling logs and boulders down onto cavalry too cramped to maneuver before charging into infantry too tightly packed to defend itself. More than fifteen hundred Austrians died, most of them titled nobility, and Leopold escaped only with a peasant's help - a defeat that cost the family more than the war it was meant to help win, and the first of several the Swiss mountains would deal the House of Austria over the following seventy years.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Diebold Schilling the Elder · Public domain

A brother's late arrival

The wider war ground on for seven more years before Frederick, waiting at Mühldorf in 1322 for Leopold's own army to arrive, abandoned a sound defensive position to give battle alone - and lost, when a disguised flanking force broke his exhausted line in the day's final hour and took him prisoner. Louis, unexpectedly gracious in victory, confined rather than executed his rival, and when Leopold's continued resistance and the Pope's own hostility wore Louis down, Frederick did something almost without precedent in the family's history: bound by a parole he alone had sworn, he returned to captivity of his own accord once his brothers refused to honor the terms he had agreed to on their behalf. Louis, moved by "this rare instance of probity," treated his returned prisoner as a guest rather than an enemy - the two men, by one contemporary account, ate at the same table and slept in the same bed - and eventually offered him joint rule of the empire outright, an arrangement without precedent that the electors and the Pope both rejected the moment it became public.

The partnership never had the chance to prove itself. Leopold, who had never forgiven himself for arriving too late at Mühldorf, died at Strasbourg in 1326; their brother Henry, broken by six months as a prisoner of his own, followed within the year; and Frederick, stripped of the joint authority he had briefly held, died in 1330 - a king twice crowned, one battle short of the throne he had spent his adult life reaching for. It was, paradoxically, his death and Leopold's that finally steadied the family: with no more Habsburg pretender left to contest the crown, the surviving brothers Albert and Otho made peace with Louis at Hagenau that same year, ending sixteen years of a war that had cost the dynasty a king's freedom, three princes' lives, and its last real claim on the German throne for more than a century.

A duchess who outlived two husbands' claims

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Carinthia's own duke died in 1335 without a son, leaving his territories to an only daughter, Margaret, nicknamed Maultasch for the size of her mouth - and touching off a dispute over Carinthia and Tyrol together that would run, on and off, for three decades and two generations of Habsburg dukes. John of Bohemia had already secured Margaret's hand for his own eight-year-old son, expecting both duchies to pass to his family along with her; Emperor Louis of Bavaria, newly reconciled with his old Austrian rivals, simply revoked the decree allowing female inheritance and granted Carinthia to Albert and Otho of Austria instead. Austria took it without much resistance. Tyrol's own nobles refused the transfer outright, and John, furious at losing what he had already paid for, ravaged Austrian territory until a negotiated peace left Carinthia in Habsburg hands for good and Tyrol with Margaret - the family's second permanent territorial gain, and proof, a generation after Rudolf's own conquest of Austria and Styria, that the dynasty could hold what it won.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Wilfredor · CC0

A marriage dissolved by decree

Margaret's own marriage curdled into open hatred within a few years; she had her husband imprisoned, escaped her own confinement, and threw herself on Louis's protection instead. Louis, eager for Tyrol on his family's behalf now, accepted her, betrothed her to his own son, and - over the Pope's furious objections - dissolved her first marriage by imperial decree. King John, blind, aging, and never reconciled to the insult, spent his last years building the coalition that would put his own eldest son on the imperial throne, and died fighting for the French crown at Crécy without ever recovering the province he considered stolen from his family.

Two decades later, the province came to Austria not by war but by a death that Rudolf IV moved fast to exploit. Margaret's second marriage had never won papal approval, leaving her son Meinhard's own legitimacy in doubt; Rudolf secured the pope's recognition for the boy, married him to his own sister, and in return won Margaret's promise that Austria would inherit Tyrol outright should her husband and son both die without heirs. They did, within two years of each other, and Rudolf crossed the Alps in the depths of winter to secure her agreement in person before anyone could reconsider - pressing for immediate possession, well aware how changeable her temper could be, and dazzling her with enough of his own court's splendor at Vienna that she agreed to leave her mountain duchy behind for good.

Confirmed twice over

Securing the emperor's own approval proved harder than securing Margaret's, since Rudolf and his brothers were, at that very moment, allied against Charles IV in his capacity as King of Bohemia - old rivalry outliving the marriage tie meant to end it. It was Rudolf's own wife, Charles's daughter, who arranged the peace: a meeting at Brünn in 1364 where Charles confirmed Margaret's grant and formally invested Rudolf with a province no Habsburg duke had ruled before. The house of Lower Bavaria, cut out of an inheritance it had once expected, contested the transfer by force until the Pope - more interested in German troops for his own Italian war than in one Alpine province - brokered a truce that left Tyrol in Habsburg hands. Bavaria renewed the claim once more after Margaret's own death in 1366, seizing several towns before three years of negotiation produced a final settlement at Scharding in 1369: Bavaria renounced Tyrol for good in exchange for a cash payment, and Austria kept undisputed mastery of a duchy rich in silver mines and command of the roads into Italy - a childless heiress's inheritance, fought over by two rival dynasties across two Habsburg generations, settled at last by a treaty neither original claimant lived to see.

Hoc est verum

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Rudolf IV, who won Tyrol for his family by moving faster than anyone else expected, spent much of the rest of his short reign on an ambition no treaty could satisfy: making his own family look, on parchment and in seal-wax, as ancient and exalted as it had just become in fact. He combed the "musty records" of Austria's earlier dukes and revived every privilege and title any predecessor had ever held or merely claimed, commissioning seals stamped with invented hieroglyphs and occult characters - one showed a man's head with five faces - and an alphabet mixing Greek, Runic, Roman and Arabic letters for the mottoes cut into them. He rarely signed his own letters with his name, closing them instead with his age, his regnal year, and the phrase Hoc est verum - this is true.

Dom Museum, Vienna · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A title too far

What actually provoked the emperor was wounded pride rather than any of the antiquarian invention itself. Charles IV's own recent Golden Bull had ranked the seven electors above every other prince in the empire, and Rudolf, denied a vote he had no real claim to, answered by assuming the title Archduke Palatine, citing an old grant supposedly made by Frederick I to the earlier Babenberg dukes of Austria - a document no source outside Rudolf's own chancery had ever seen. Charles at first dismissed the whole affair as antiquarian eccentricity, but Rudolf's growing ostentation eventually forced his hand: he summoned his own son-in-law before the diet repeatedly and ordered him to drop the invented arms and return to those his father had actually borne. Rudolf gave up the fanciful seals and the "Palatine" in public use, but never fully let go of "Archduke" itself.

The title outlived the rebuke that tried to kill it. Confirmed for the House of Austria in earnest by a later emperor, Frederick III, decades after Rudolf's own death, it became the family's own standing style - a fabrication invented to answer one Golden Bull's insult that ended up outlasting the document that provoked it.

What else the same reign left behind

Rudolf's shorter-lived successes were more conventional. A dispute with the Patriarch of Aquileia over contested fiefs in Styria, Carinthia and Carniola ended in an imperial ban against the patriarch, several fortresses taken by force, and a peace that installed an Austrian judge and garrison in Friuli. And in Vienna he founded a university meant to rival Prague's own - which within a few years became the second such institution in Germany, and outlasted every invented seal and disputed title from the same reign as the one genuine monument Rudolf left behind. He died of a fever in Italy in 1365, twenty-six years old and without an heir, having spent a brief reign trying to manufacture on parchment the standing his own conquest of Tyrol had already won him in fact.

The name of a Swiss

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Every Habsburg loss to the Swiss cantons over the following seventy years ran on the same mechanism Morgarten had already shown once: overconfident nobles, certain that a peasant militia could not stand against armored cavalry, marched into terrain that neutralized the cavalry entirely and met a smaller force using the high ground against them. The pattern repeated at Näfels, it repeated in the countryside around Sempach, and by the time it had run its course the family's own Swiss patrimony - towns, tolls, advocacies over abbeys, and a military reputation two centuries in the making - was gone.

Lucerne went first, worn down by border warfare and factional strife between Austrian loyalists and everyone else; its citizens secured imperial protection and a truce with the Swiss cantons, beat back an Austrian attempt to retake the town by surprise, and joined the confederacy without repudiating any of Austria's existing rights - carefully, but joined all the same. Zurich followed through its own revolution: a popular government under the burgomaster Rudolf Brun crushed an attempted noble counter-coup backed by a Habsburg kinsman, and, fearing Duke Albert's revenge, brought the city into the confederacy itself in 1351. Albert marched sixteen thousand men against it and won an arbitration on paper, but when he tried to enforce the harshest terms against the smaller cantons, Schwyz answered under the same banner that had broken his brother Leopold at Morgarten a generation before, and Glarus went the same way soon after - a relief force expelling its Austrian governor in the dead of winter, then joining the confederacy it had just helped defend.

An old man's despair, a young man's truce

Albert, aging and crippled by the paralysis that had afflicted him since his thirties, finally gave up the contest in such disgust that his own household learned never to mention the Swiss in his presence again. He died in 1358 having earned, for everything except this one failure, the name "the Wise." His son Rudolf, by his father's own measure the most gifted of all the Austrian princes so far, inherited a war he judged unwinnable the moment he actually looked at the ground it was being fought on - the mountain terrain gave the confederates an advantage no cavalry charge could answer - and did what his father never could: he negotiated a truce instead of reaching for one more defeat, and held to it faithfully for the rest of his short reign. It bought the family twenty years of quiet on its Swiss frontier, and it was the last time for a generation that a Habsburg duke chose to cut Austria's losses there rather than reopen a fight the family had already spent decades losing, piece by piece, to a people its own dukes had once dismissed as rustics.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Karl Lind · Public domain

This very noon

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Leopold III, who took Styria, Carinthia, Tyrol and the family's Swabian and Alsatian holdings in a division that broke the indivisibility every earlier Habsburg generation had preserved, spent the 1370s and early 1380s absorbing territory faster than any duke before him - and spent it just as fast on two humiliations that left him desperate enough, by 1386, to gamble everything on a single battle. An invading army of unemployed mercenaries under his own cousin, the famous soldier Enguerrand de Coucy, was broken not by Leopold's own diplomacy but by Swiss peasants fighting on their own account - the very cantons he considered his family's oldest enemies rescuing him almost by accident. And a marriage arranged to bring his son William the Polish crown collapsed when the Polish nobles, dazzled by a rival suitor's promise to convert an entire pagan duchy to Christianity, overruled their own queen's declared wish to marry no one but the Austrian match and shut William out of Kraków for good. The loss struck Leopold harder than any battlefield reverse

• he sank into a depression that let his own bailiffs' extortions run unchecked, and the resulting unrest drew his oldest enemies, the Swabian towns and the Swiss cantons together, into exactly the alliance his own governance should have prevented.

A mock breakfast invitation

War broke out in earnest once Austrian troops retook and burned the town of Richensee, killing every inhabitant regardless of age or sex. Leopold massed his army at Baden and sent a diversionary force toward Zurich to mask his real target, Lucerne, but the Forest Cantons saw through the feint and marched to Sempach instead. Leopold reached the town at dawn on 9 July 1386 with four thousand horse and fourteen hundred foot, confident enough of an easy victory that his own troops rode up to the walls to taunt the defenders with a mock breakfast invitation for the "reapers" in the fields outside. The burgomaster answered simply: "My masters of Lucern, and their allies, will bring it."

Surprised to find the confederates already drawn up in the woods above the lake, Leopold called a council to weigh waiting for reinforcements - and was shouted down by his own nobles, who declared it shameful to delay against what they dismissed as an "ill-armed and almost naked rabble." One veteran urging caution was mocked as a coward by a younger knight who bragged the peasants would be delivered up "this very noon." The knights dismounted in ground too rough for cavalry, formed a dense phalanx bristling with spears, and advanced; the Swiss knelt first in prayer, prompting some Austrians to mistake the gesture for a plea for mercy, before the confederates surged down out of the trees in a wedge that broke against the Austrian line without effect - sixty of the attackers' best fighters dead before a single Austrian fell.

Winkelried

At that moment a knight of Unterwalden named Arnold von Winkelried broke from the Swiss ranks. "I will open a passage into the line," he is said to have called out. "Protect, dear countrymen and confederates, my wife and children!" He threw himself onto the Austrian spears, gathered as many as he could reach in his own arms, and bore them down with his weight as he died - and his companions poured through the gap his body opened. Weighed down by their own armor and unable to recover formation in the crush, the Austrian knights broke; their own servants, seeing the battle turning, mounted their masters' horses and fled, cutting off any hope of escape for the men they had served. Roughly two thousand Austrians died, nearly a third of them titled nobility, against perhaps two hundred confederate dead.

Swiss National Museum, Zurich · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Leopold fought to the end rather than flee, seizing the family standard himself after two bearers fell in succession and rallying his remaining knights for one final charge before he was cut down by an unknown hand. He was thirty-six. His body and those of twenty-seven of his noblest followers were carried to the family's own abbey at Königsfelden; the Swiss buried their two hundred dead with full honors at Lucerne and established an annual memorial for the victory to stand alongside the one already kept for Morgarten, seventy years before.

The war that finally closed

Sempach settled nothing on its own. Fresh declarations of war arrived within a week, and the fighting that followed went no better: Bern joined the confederacy, and Austrian subjects around Gaster and Sargans switched their allegiance outright. When the truce that followed expired in 1388, Austrian troops massacred the garrison at Weesen and pushed on to Näfels, where the same mechanism that had broken Leopold at Morgarten broke his army a second time - boulders rolled down onto an advancing column, followed by a charge from the heights that drowned hundreds of fleeing soldiers when the bridge at Weesen collapsed under their own weight. A hundred and eighty knights and roughly two thousand common soldiers died, and eleven captured banners went home as trophies. With the Aargau itself now threatened, the Austrian princes gave up the war for good that year, and when the resulting truce came up for renewal, Leopold's own son chose not to test the confederates again: he renounced any remaining claim to their conquests and extended the peace for twenty years. A war that had cost the House of Austria a duke, two army-shattering defeats, and most of its remaining Swiss possessions closed at last not with victory for either side, but with Austria formally accepting a border it could no longer move.

Burgerbibliothek, Bern · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Diebold Schilling · Public domain

Our true father

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

While his brother Leopold fought and died against the Swiss, Albert III governed the Austrian heartland in a wholly different register: suppressing banditti, restraining nobles who mistook his mildness for weakness, and pouring his real energy into the university his own brother Rudolf had founded, endowing new chairs and deepening its rivalry with Prague. He showed almost none of his predecessors' appetite for war - a single expedition to Prussia alongside the Teutonic Knights stands out precisely because it was so unlike him - and kept his main residence at Laxenburg specifically to escape the pomp of court life, gardening with his own hands and studying classical treatises on rural economy for pleasure.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Age did not change that pattern until, in 1395, Bohemia's collapsing politics pulled him in regardless: King Wenceslas IV's erratic rule had driven a faction of nobles to seize and imprison him, and Albert led an army into the kingdom on their behalf, his first real campaign in nearly two decades of peaceful rule. He fell mortally ill in camp before the fighting resolved anything, and died at Laxenburg on 29 August 1395, forty-six years old.

"Our true father"

Vienna mourned him as it had mourned no Habsburg duke before: crowds gathered around his body crying "We have lost our friend, our true father!" A contemporary chronicler remembered him as "a lover of peace, a pious and meek prince," and he earned two lasting nicknames from his own subjects - "the Astrologer," for a genuine fascination with judicial astrology, and "Albert with the Tress," for a lock of hair he wore braided into his own and used to found a chivalric society modeled on the gesture. An oddly gentle set of epitaphs for a family whose dukes were more often remembered for the battles that killed them.

Ambras Castle, Innsbruck · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Ermione 13 · CC BY-SA 4.0

A family that kept dividing itself

expansionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Albert IV, sixteen when his father died, spent his short reign yielding ground rather than fighting for it - content to let his cousin Leopold's branch of the family absorb every Habsburg territory but Austria itself in the interest of peace, and settling a disputed succession with his own cousin William on joint rule for life rather than contest it. What his own reign is chiefly remembered for is a pilgrimage: he traveled to Jerusalem and came home with the epithet "the Wonder of the World," even though Coxe notes dryly that the actual business of his rule offered "few remarkable events in the sober pages of history." One campaign did reach him regardless - an alliance with King Sigismund of Hungary against a Moravian warlord ended in a surrender feast that turned out to be a poisoning; Albert died of it at Klosterneuburg in 1404, twenty-seven years old, leaving the Austrian succession, once again, to a child too young to rule.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Anton Boys · Public domain

Four Habsburg administrations at once

That child, Albert V, was seven, and the cousin who took over his guardianship, William, governed competently until his own sudden, childless death in 1406 - the moment that actually broke the family apart. An old prediction of Emperor Charles IV's, that the Habsburgs would one day humble themselves by dividing their own inheritance, played out in full: the house split permanently into an Albertine line holding Austria for the child Albert V, and a Leopoldine line descended from Leopold III, itself split three ways among his surviving sons - Leopold the elder keeping Switzerland, Alsace and Swabia, Ernest taking Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, and Frederick receiving Tyrol. Four separate Habsburg administrations now governed what had once been, however imperfectly, a single family patrimony. Leopold the elder had already had his own costly adventure abroad, losing an entire army at Lake Garda in 1401 and buying his own freedom from Milanese captivity only by promising to abandon the campaign; he returned to ordinary administration until William's death called him back to Vienna to share young Albert V's guardianship with his brother Ernest - a co-regency neither man wanted and neither could make work.

A country left to banditry

The result was exactly what a shared, contested guardianship over a distant child-heir usually produces: two rival factions, power swinging back and forth between them as each gained temporary advantage, and both using every swing to enrich themselves and punish the other's supporters through what Coxe calls "a species of legal tyranny." With no strong hand actually running the country, the nobility reverted to the lawlessness earlier dukes had spent generations suppressing - robbers again infested the roads, towns were plundered with impunity, and Austria fell, in Coxe's judgment, into a state of disorder worse than at any point since the House of Habsburg had first taken possession of it more than a century earlier. Leopold died in 1411, forty years old and childless, leaving Austria's disorder to whichever of his brothers, or his own young ward, could finally impose the order four generations of dividing and subdividing the family's own inheritance had made impossible to keep.

Three kingdoms and a crown

peakDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Albert V's own guardians, uncles Leopold and Ernest, had actively encouraged him toward hunting and idle amusement rather than government - a young ward kept distracted was a young ward who did not ask why his own inheritance was being plundered. His tutors thought otherwise, giving him a genuine education in the sciences, statecraft and religion despite his guardians' preferences, and when Leopold died in 1411, Emperor Sigismund declared the fourteen-year-old of age early rather than let Ernest's own misrule continue unchecked. Vienna greeted him as a deliverer. Albert, who had watched his uncles' feuding wreck the country for a decade, answered that welcome by abandoning the hunting and amusements that had defined his childhood and applying himself seriously to government - sound laws, close attention to justice, a sustained campaign against the banditry that had run unchecked through his uncles' chaotic regency. Austria, by its own chroniclers' proud account, became an island of order while its neighbors tore themselves apart, a striking reversal for a duchy that only a few years earlier had been in what Coxe calls a "deplorable state."

Alone successful

Much of that transformation rested on one relationship: Albert's bond with his father-in-law, Sigismund, King of Hungary and Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, whose own turbulent path to three crowns had taught him exactly how much a stable, capable ally was worth. Bohemia's religious wars became Albert's proving ground. During Sigismund's third campaign against the Hussites in 1431, the main German army broke and fled the moment the Hussites appeared, while Albert turned his own Austrian troops into Moravia instead, drove out the raiding Taborites, and held the province securely for the rest of the war - Coxe's own verdict blunt: while every other German contingent panicked at the mere name of the Hussites, Albert "at the head of his brave Austrians, was alone successful."

Sigismund's gratitude went further than praise. Over the opposition of his own wife - who wanted her daughter's inheritance to go instead to the King of Poland, whom she hoped to marry herself despite a forty-year age gap - Sigismund worked to secure Albert the succession to Hungary and Bohemia outright, arresting the empress when her scheming grew too dangerous to ignore. Dying and thwarted at every turn but this one, Sigismund summoned the nobles of both kingdoms to his deathbed in 1437 and delivered what Coxe records as a direct plea rather than a formal decree: "I give him my kingdom, or rather I give him to my kingdoms, to whom I can give or wish nothing better." Those present seized Albert's hand in tears and swore allegiance on the spot. Sigismund died the next day.

The crown his family had wanted for a century and a half

Hungary accepted him without real difficulty. Bohemia proved harder - the Hussites rejected the succession outright, preferring a Polish candidate they could "converse with... without an interpreter" to another German ruler, and brought in Polish cavalry to back the claim

• but Albert moved faster than his rivals, was crowned at Prague amid genuine celebration, and forced a truce that closed the contest for good. In the midst of this fighting, the German electors turned to him as well, judging his extensive territories and proven talents the best available answer to the empire's own disorder and the rising Ottoman threat together. He was never formally crowned emperor, but Coxe judges he "obtained and deserved a place among the emperors" all the same: for the first time since Rudolf I founded the House of Austria on the imperial throne a century and a half earlier, and the first time ever, a Habsburg duke held Austria, Hungary, Bohemia and the German crown all at once.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Karl Russ · Public domain

He governed the empire itself with the same competence he had already shown in Austria - reforming corrupt courts, curbing the secret tribunals of Westphalia, sketching an early version of the public peace and administrative "circles" system a later Habsburg emperor would finish building. But the crisis that ended his reign came from the east, where Sultan Murad II's armies, already masters of Smyrna, Thessalonica and much of Greece, saw Sigismund's death as their opening to strike before Albert could consolidate what he had just inherited. He hurried to defend the Serbian fortress of Smederevo and was still in the field when it fell and its garrison was massacred; dysentery tore through both camps before the armies could properly engage, forcing the Ottomans to retreat - and striking Albert just as hard. Advised to rest, he pressed on toward Vienna anyway, repeating "I shall recover if I can only once more behold the walls of Vienna," and worsened his own condition further by eating melons on the journey. He died short of the city, in a village near Esztergom, on 17 October 1439 - forty-three years old, and not even two full years into the reign that had, for one brief moment, reunited under a single Habsburg ruler more territory than his family had ever held before or would hold again for generations.

Crowned on his mother's bosom

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Albert V died leaving a pregnant widow and three thrones with three different rules for succession: Austria passed only through male heirs, while Hungary and Bohemia were both elective kingdoms whose estates could, in principle, choose anyone. Hungary's nobles, dreading a long regency with the Ottomans pressing their southern frontier, pushed Elizabeth toward marrying the King of Poland and handing him the crown outright - and the ambassadors carrying that offer had barely left when Elizabeth gave birth to a son, baptized Ladislaus and known ever after as Ladislaus Posthumus. Too late to recall the embassy, she answered with audacity instead: in May 1440 she carried the infant to Székesfehérvár, where the Archbishop of Esztergom crowned him king of Hungary on his own mother's chest. Hungary split into two camps, one behind the adult Polish claimant and his ablest general John Hunyadi, the other loyal to the infant and his widowed mother - strong enough to hold Upper Hungary but too weak to dislodge Hunyadi's party from the rest of the kingdom. Elizabeth retreated to Vienna, placed her son under Frederick of Styria's guardianship, and mortgaged both a border city and the sacred Crown of St. Stephen itself to secure his support; she died at Győr in December 1442, "not without suspicions of poison," and the Polish claimant simply assumed full royal title in the vacuum her death left behind.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Bohemia handled the same problem with a Habsburg twist of its own. Elizabeth had claimed the crown for her infant son immediately, but the Calixtin party balked - "a child cannot govern a kingdom" - and offered it first to a Bavarian duke, who declined it as belonging to Ladislaus by right, then to Frederick himself, who answered with the same principle in almost the same words: "I will not rob my relation of his right." The Bohemians named Ladislaus king in absentia and governed through two rival co-regents until factional infighting delivered sole power, in practice if not in name, to a rising figure named George of Poděbrady. Hungary, meanwhile, was handed back to Ladislaus by circumstance rather than negotiation once his Polish rival died fighting the Ottomans at Varna in 1444 - though Frederick still refused to surrender either the boy or the Hungarian crown he held, leaving the kingdom to Hunyadi's regency instead.

A ransom by siege

Frederick's reluctance hardened once his own fortunes rose: he took Ladislaus to Rome for his own imperial coronation rather than release him to any of the three kingdoms clamoring for his return, and left him in papal custody afterward when he continued on to Naples. An attempt by deputies from all three nations to help the boy escape was discovered and blocked. Frustrated nobles finally gave up on negotiation entirely: an Austrian noble named Ulrich Eyczing raised an army of sixteen thousand men and laid siege to Frederick's own residence at Wiener Neustadt, and in 1452, with no real choice left, Frederick gave up his ward. Ladislaus entered Vienna to genuine public celebration under a new three-way regency - Hunyadi governing Hungary, Poděbrady governing Bohemia, and the boy's own maternal uncle, the Count of Cilli, taking Austria - that finally gave each kingdom the local authority it had been demanding for over a decade, even without their sovereign's full attention. Cilli used his privileged access to purge Austrian nobles from office and seed the young king's mind with suspicion of both Hunyadi and Poděbrady, until Eyczing - the very man who had freed Ladislaus from Frederick in the first place - turned on Cilli in turn and drove him from court under threat from an angry crowd. Ladislaus was crowned king of Bohemia that October, guided entirely by Poděbrady's counsel, though his religious sympathies, shaped by years among Catholic tutors, already ran against the Calixtin majority he was now expected to rule.

I pardon the eldest

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Ladislaus's own dependence on his regents met its sternest test at Belgrade, the fortress guarding Hungary's southern approach, where Sultan Mehmed II laid siege with an army and a river flotilla in 1456. John Hunyadi, still regent in all but title, broke the Ottoman ships blocking the Danube and Sava and reached the garrison in time to resupply it before the sultan's main assault came - an assault that nearly succeeded anyway, Ottoman troops planting their own banners on the ramparts before Hunyadi's presence turned a collapsing defense into a counterattack that drove the Turks out with heavy losses and wounded Mehmed himself. The siege broke after a day and a night of fighting, and the Ottoman army withdrew having lost some thirty thousand men. Hunyadi did not long survive his own greatest victory - a fever brought on by the exertions of the siege killed him at Zemun that August, leaving two sons, Ladislaus and Matthias, whom Coxe credits with promise to match their father's fame.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

A murder, a pardon, a betrayal

Ladislaus Posthumus felt the loss chiefly as relief: freed from a regent more powerful than the king himself, he transferred his patronage to Count Cilli, his own maternal uncle, and nominated him governor of Hungary - inflaming the nobles who had idolized Hunyadi's memory. The mutual suspicion broke into open violence in March 1457, when Cilli and the elder Hunyadi brother met by chance, traded bitter accusations, and Cilli seized a sword from a bystander and wounded Ladislaus Hunyadi in the head; Ladislaus's own followers rushed to his defense, and Cilli was mortally wounded in the brawl that followed.

Hunyadi's widow met the king soon after, dressed in mourning with her younger son Matthias at her side, and threw herself at his feet begging forgiveness for her elder son's act. Ladislaus raised her up himself, promised to treat her as a mother and her sons as brothers, pardoned the elder Hunyadi outright, and sent the family away laden with gifts after a day of shared festivity. Reassured, both brothers followed the king back to Buda - where, once they had let their guard down completely, German troops sealed the palace gates, arrested both young men, and beheaded Ladislaus Hunyadi on the spot. The betrayal of a solemn pardon turned Hungary against its own king outright: Hunyadi's widow rallied her husband's old supporters and threatened to hand Hungary's border fortresses to the Ottomans unless Matthias was freed, forcing Ladislaus to flee the kingdom under public curses, taking the surviving brother with him to Vienna as a hostage.

Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Gyula Benczúr · Public domain

Deliver us from evil

Ladislaus's own reign ended before the consequences could fully play out. He traveled to Prague to marry a French princess, fell suddenly and mortally ill in the midst of the wedding preparations, and died within thirty-six hours, seventeen years old, reciting the Lord's Prayer and asking, as a final renunciation of worldly vanity, that his own prized golden hair be cut off. Coxe's own verdict on his short life is far less generous than the mourning that followed it: a "feeble and irresolute character" who never once showed the courage his father had displayed at the same age, and whose betrayal of the Hunyadi family would, had he lived, likely have kept Hungary in open revolt. German rumor blamed his sudden death on poison and pointed directly at Poděbrady, who went on to claim the Bohemian throne once it fell vacant; Coxe sides with the Bohemian historians who investigated the charge and concluded the actual cause was plague - though the accusation outlived any proof for it, and the fight over what Ladislaus left behind was only just beginning.

An unnatural contest

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

The 1458 partition of Austria - Lower Austria to Frederick, Upper Austria to his brother Albert VI, a slice of Carinthia to their cousin Sigismund, with all three sharing Vienna as a joint residence - solved nothing. Frederick's own indolence made him unpopular with the capital's citizens, and Albert, never satisfied with his own share of the inheritance, fanned that discontent into open war. Vienna split into factions, the senate backing the emperor and the populace rallying behind a demagogue named Wolfgang Holzer in Albert's cause. Frederick sheltered in the citadel with barely two hundred men, resolved, in his own words, to be buried under its ruins before he would surrender to his own rebellious subjects - and when a messenger reached the empire's assembled princes warning that the garrison had only three weeks of food left, they voted to send help too slowly, as always, to matter. What actually saved him was faster and closer to home: George of Poděbrady, King of Bohemia, marched thirteen thousand troops to break the siege in person and then personally arbitrated a settlement between the warring brothers.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Hans Burgkmair the Elder · Public domain

The end of the feud

The arbitration lasted no longer than any earlier settlement between them. Albert soon tried to claim Lower Austria outright and took Vienna's own oath of allegiance; Frederick answered by securing both the imperial ban and a papal excommunication against his own brother. Mediators from every direction tried to stop what Coxe calls an "unnatural contest" between siblings, and Albert's own governance in the interval did more to undo him than Frederick's diplomacy ever managed - arbitrary rule and constant exactions alienated the very Viennese who had once backed him, and even Holzer, the demagogue who had led the earlier revolt against Frederick, switched sides and began working for the emperor's restoration. Albert discovered the plot, had Holzer executed, and confiscated the property of everyone connected to it - a final, vindictive act before he died suddenly on 4 December 1463, in the middle of preparing to renew the war one more time. With his death Frederick lost an "active and turbulent rival," in Coxe's own phrase, without having to defeat him outright - a war that had cost Vienna two sieges and dragged in a Bohemian king as arbitrator, closed not by a settlement either brother had wanted, but simply because one of them stopped living long enough to keep fighting it.

Enemies nearer home than the Turks

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

While Frederick fought his own brother for Austria, a separate crisis in Germany threatened his hold on the imperial crown itself. Frederick the Victorious, regent of the Palatinate, had assumed full electoral authority with the estates' approval and the pope's confirmation - approval the emperor alone withheld, earning himself a formidable enemy. The elector spent years building a coalition against him, drawing in two archbishop-electors, a landgrave, and - most damaging of all - Frederick's own brother Albert and cousin Sigismund, and won George of Poděbrady's support outright with the offer of the imperial crown itself. In 1461 the confederates convened rival diets without the emperor's consent and moved toward formal deposition, sending Frederick a scathing letter blaming Germany's disorder squarely on his own weakness and fifteen years of absence from the diets he was supposed to preside over.

Threatened with the loss of everything his family had spent nearly two centuries reclaiming, Frederick abandoned his usual indolence and fought back with intrigue rather than arms - splitting his enemies apart one ambassador and circular letter at a time, holding Brandenburg through its own distrust of the Palatinate, securing Saxony despite its ties to Bavaria, and even peeling away Poděbrady himself by offering to mediate the Bohemian king's worsening quarrel with Rome. His strongest ally proved to be Pope Pius II, who had every personal reason to keep his own benefactor on the throne. A related war over the archbishopric of Mainz spilled into open battle - the Elector Palatine crushed a rival coalition at Seckingen, taking a bishop and a margrave prisoner - but battlefield losses proved almost irrelevant next to the diplomatic collapse of the league itself. One by one the confederates made separate peace, and the Elector Palatine abandoned the deposition scheme entirely in exchange for narrower territorial gains of his own.

Piccolomini Library, Siena · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Pinturicchio · Public domain

An empire too divided to fight the Turks

Frederick kept his crown, but Coxe's own verdict on the whole affair is withering: the constant infighting among German princes left the empire unable to answer a genuine external threat, as Ottoman armies - already masters of Constantinople - made their first incursions into German territory during Frederick's own reign. The Elector Palatine spoke for most of his peers when he said he had "enemies nearer home than the Turks," and Frederick himself, Coxe notes with open disapproval, often treated Ottoman pressure on Hungary as a convenient check on his own rival there rather than a danger worth uniting against. Even Pius II's own zeal for a crusade collapsed into factionalism: when Poděbrady offered to lead an army against the Turks himself, the papal legate argued it would serve Christendom better to turn German arms against the "heretic" Bohemian king instead - the same preference Pius's successor pursued even harder against the very ally who had just helped save Frederick's own throne.

No compact with heretics

The gratitude Frederick owed Poděbrady lasted only a few years before papal politics pulled him into an alliance against his own rescuer. Pope Pius II, who as a cardinal had helped negotiate the compacts protecting Bohemia's Calixtin majority, reversed course completely once he held the tiara himself, reviving the church's old claim to total authority over Bohemian religious practice. When Bohemia's Catholics demanded Poděbrady go further than concession and annul the compacts entirely, and Pius refused even to reconfirm an agreement his own predecessors had already approved, Poděbrady summoned a diet and spoke plainly: the compacts were the only thing that had ended Bohemia's religious civil war, and "I and my wife have followed them from our childhood, and I am determined to maintain them till my death." When the papal legate answered with a tirade, Poděbrady had him thrown out and imprisoned on bread and water. Pius annulled the compacts outright in 1463 and threatened excommunication - a crisis defused only when Poděbrady apologized and Frederick, still mindful of his own debt, personally interceded to suspend the sentence.

Frederick's gratitude did not survive Pius's own death the following year. His successor pursued Poděbrady with even greater hostility, and by 1467 imperial ambassadors were openly backing a papal call for a crusade against Bohemia; though the diet itself refused the proposal, the pope formally deposed Poděbrady anyway and let crusade preachers operate freely across German and Austrian territory. Poděbrady, furious at being betrayed by the very ally his own troops had once saved from starvation, declared war outright and invaded Austria as far as the Danube.

A mock diet at Olomouc

Unable to muster real support from the empire's own princes, Frederick turned to a more dangerous solution: he offered the Bohemian crown itself to Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, in exchange for turning against the man who had once ransomed him from Bohemian captivity and made him king in the first place. Matthias, dazzled despite everything he owed Poděbrady, invaded Bohemia while papal intrigue simultaneously stirred the kingdom's Catholic minority into open revolt - but Poděbrady, still capable at defending his own throne even as an old man, crushed the uprising and threw back the invasion, forcing a peace in 1469. It lasted barely any time: persuaded that no agreement with a "heretic" king carried any real obligation, Matthias resumed the war, overran Moravia and Silesia, and staged what Coxe pointedly calls a "mock diet" at Olomouc, where a hand-picked assembly of Catholic loyalists elected him King of Bohemia on the spot - acting for all purposes as its rightful sovereign even while Poděbrady still held Prague and the loyalty of most of the kingdom. Frederick, who had handed Matthias the pretext for the whole campaign, now got cold feet at the thought of a single ambitious rival ruling both Hungary and Bohemia together, and quietly withheld the support he had promised, disguising his retreat as a pilgrimage to Rome.

A sovereign conversant with their language

Poděbrady answered both rivals with a single stroke, proposing as his own successor Vladislaus of Poland, a candidate who satisfied nearly everyone: Bohemia's Catholics welcomed a prince of their own faith, the Calixtins saw the surest way to keep both Frederick and Matthias off the throne, and the wider nation liked the idea of a king who actually spoke their language. The estates approved the nomination without real opposition. Matthias, furious at being passed over so completely, kept fighting until the two armies - each led personally by a capable and experienced king - fought each other to exhaustion and agreed to a truce in July 1470. Poděbrady did not live to see it hold for long, dying the following year; Frederick, sensing one more opportunity, put himself forward as a candidate a second time and found even less support than before. Vladislaus was duly elected, and Frederick, unable to win the crown himself, settled for backing him over Matthias instead - a policy that would keep stoking Hungarian unrest for years, even as it settled nothing of Frederick's own much larger ambitions.

The frogs and the stork

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Matthias Corvinus had every reason to hate Frederick by the mid-1470s: after being egged into war against Poděbrady and then abandoned mid-campaign, refused the Bohemian crown he had been promised, watched Frederick formally invest a rival with it instead, had his own marriage proposal for the emperor's daughter dismissed outright, and saw Frederick shelter a rebellious Hungarian archbishop - any one of which, Coxe notes, would have justified a hostile prince's outrage. Matthias first survived a war on two fronts of his own, defeating a Polish-Bohemian coalition and then smashing an Ottoman army supporting Wallachia's breakaway prince, before declaring formal war on Frederick and invading Austria outright.

An emperor humiliated, then humiliated again

The first invasion was swift and total: within a month Matthias had overrun most of Lower Austria, besieged Vienna itself, and taken every fortress along the Danube as far as Krems. Frederick fled to Linz and bought back his own capital for a hundred thousand ducats he then simply refused to pay once Matthias got tied up in fresh wars elsewhere. Furious, Matthias made peace with Bohemia instead and invaded a second time; this campaign took four hard years of siege warfare rather than one swift month, but ended even more completely, with Vienna's own capture and the fall of Wiener Neustadt, Frederick's favorite residence.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain

Driven from his own hereditary lands, Frederick wandered from city to city and convent to convent for years, met everywhere with sympathy and nowhere with real help. He bore the humiliation with a strange, almost theatrical calm, repeating the maxim that "to forget what cannot be recovered is supreme felicity," and took his revenge on Vienna's citizens in words rather than arms - comparing them, for their long history of turning against him, to the frogs in the fable who rejected a harmless log as king and got a stork that devoured them instead. Years of personal appeals finally produced only a token force under Duke Albert of Saxony, who managed to slow Matthias's advance through skillful maneuvering but was forced to an armistice without real reinforcement from either the empire or Frederick himself. Austria was formally ceded to Matthias's occupation in November 1487, to be returned only once Frederick paid off his old debts in full - or reverted outright, the treaty specified, should Matthias die first.

A stork of Frederick's own

Astrologers had promised Frederick his rival would die within the year, and for once they were right: Matthias Corvinus died in April 1490 after a prolonged illness, opening the way for Habsburg Austria's recovery after more than a decade under Hungarian occupation and reopening, at the same time, an immediate contest for Hungary's own vacant throne. Frederick and Maximilian put themselves forward as candidates, citing an old succession compact already agreed with Matthias, but the Hungarian diet chose a rival claimant instead on 15 July - and Maximilian refused to accept the rejection quietly. Rallying his father's own Austrian subjects, he drove the occupying Hungarian garrisons out of Austria in six weeks and pushed on into Hungary itself, exploiting the usual factional chaos that followed any new king's accession. He captured Székesfehérvár, the traditional coronation city of Hungary's own kings, and was preparing to march on Buda when a mutiny among his own troops forced him to fall back into Austria.

Neither side could press its advantage further, and the two met at Bratislava and settled generous terms: the rival king kept the Hungarian crown and formally renounced any claim to the Austrian territory Matthias had once conquered, while Maximilian received the honorary title of King of Hungary, a payment of a hundred thousand ducats toward his own war costs, and a renewed family compact entailing the Hungarian succession on Frederick's own line should the new king die without a son. Between Matthias's death and Maximilian's own energy and skill, Frederick recovered the Austrian homeland he had lost for more than a decade, gained financial compensation on top of it, and was finally relieved of a crisis his own obstinacy and indolence had done so much to create in the first place.

The letter and the ring

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

While Frederick wandered Germany as a landless exile, he pursued a diplomatic project that would ultimately matter more to his family's future than anything he lost to Matthias: a marriage between his son Maximilian and Mary, heiress of Burgundy - by then the richest territorial bloc in Western Europe, stretching from Provence to the North Sea through generations of dukes who had accumulated Flanders, Artois, Holland, Brabant and more through purchase, inheritance and outright extortion. Duke Charles the Bold offered a bargain: his only daughter and heiress for Maximilian, if Frederick would elevate Burgundy into a kingdom in its own right. Frederick traveled to Trier with the fourteen-year-old Maximilian, formally invested Charles with several imperial territories, and watched Charles prepare every regalia for a royal coronation - a throne built in the cathedral, the princess already affianced - before abruptly leaving under a flimsy excuse. The real cause, Coxe explains, was French interference: Louis XI had worked on Frederick's own naturally suspicious temperament, warning that a crowned Charles would never be satisfied and would soon revive his old ambitions for the imperial crown itself. Neither side fully trusted the other to begin with, and the standoff collapsed the arrangement without a wedding or a coronation.

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Rogier van der Weyden · Public domain

Charles the Bold died in battle at Nancy on 5 January 1477, and his death threatened to unravel everything at once. Louis XI moved immediately, claiming Mary's hand for his own son while seizing Burgundy and parts of Artois and Flanders outright; Mary's own counselors, bought or terrified, urged her to accept the French match, while the people of Ghent rose in revolt and effectively held their own sovereign hostage to extract political concessions. By every practical measure, Maximilian's cause had no real support anywhere in Mary's own court or country.

A letter and a ring, kept

What saved the match was the impression Maximilian had made at Trier: Charles had returned from that failed ceremony full of praise for his prospective son-in-law, calling him the most promising prince in Europe - words that had lodged deeply enough in Mary's own memory that when she became free to choose for herself, they mattered more than any councilor's advice. When the Elector of Mainz presented the letter and ring she had once sent Maximilian at her own father's direction, she recognized them as tokens of a promise she intended to keep, and no amount of protest from her own advisors could move her. The marriage was solemnized by proxy in April 1477.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Niklas Reiser · Public domain

Maximilian arrived in person that August, and it was what he did next that secured his position for good. Only eighteen, with no army of his own, he rallied the Burgundian Netherlands' defense, held off the French advance, and won his new subjects' loyalty by confirming their traditional privileges rather than ruling by force; pressure from the German diet forced Louis to restore several imperial territories he had seized, freeing Maximilian to besiege Thérouanne and win a bloody, decisive victory at Guinegate on 7 August 1479 that stabilized Burgundian rule over the Low Countries for good - proof, delivered on a battlefield rather than in a marriage contract, that the Habsburg claim to Burgundy could actually be defended.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Wolf Traut · Public domain

Reducing Ghent

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Mary of Burgundy's death on 26 March 1482, still young and leaving two infant children, undid much of what her marriage had secured. Flanders's own turbulent population had never fully accepted Maximilian as anything but a foreign consort, and once Mary was gone they treated his continued war against France as personal ambition rather than a defense of their own interests. The Flemish estates seized custody of the young Philip, appointed his guardians themselves, and shut Maximilian out of his own son's upbringing entirely - a dispute Louis XI exploited immediately, negotiating directly with the Flemish states over Maximilian's head. The resulting Treaty of Arras, concluded that December, forced terms Maximilian had no real power to refuse: his infant daughter Margaret was betrothed to the French dauphin and sent to France as his intended bride, carrying Franche-Comté and Artois as her dowry, while Philip's guardianship remained with the Flemish estates alone.

The estates' own suspicion of Maximilian only deepened from there - his continued presence nearby, his preference for foreign advisors, his resentment at losing any share in governing Flanders. War followed, with Flemish rebels backed openly by France, but Maximilian pressed his own military advantage hard enough that by July 1485 Ghent itself submitted, its burghers forced to recognize him as guardian of his son and governor of Flanders in exchange for his promise not to remove Philip from the Netherlands. With Flanders reasserted, Maximilian turned toward France itself, allying with the Duke of Orléans and the Duke of Brittany against the French regency - a coalition that collapsed entirely once the young King Charles VIII took the field in person, recovered Thérouanne, overran Brittany, and crushed the rebels outright at Saint-Aubin. Orléans was captured, and on 28 August 1488 the Duke of Brittany signed a peace reducing his own duchy to French vassalage.

A city rises against its own king

Ghent's own submission proved no more permanent than any earlier peace. Foreign garrisons, the misconduct of German troops Maximilian had brought in, and fresh demands for money on top of what he already refused to account for turned discontent into open insurrection once again. When the people of Bruges summoned him, he went in person, trusting a governor's promise that thousands of loyal burghers stood ready to back him. Instead, the morning after his ceremonial entry on 9 February 1488, word arrived that Ghent's own rebels had taken Ypres and Courtrai; as Maximilian tried to leave the city, the population rose as one, seized the gates and market square, and demanded he dismiss his foreign troops and hand over the counselors they accused of corruption.

A false rumor that an avenging army was already marching on Bruges tipped the crowd into open fury: they rang the alarm bell, raised the banner of Brabant, and very nearly stormed the palace to kill Maximilian outright before their own leaders talked them down. When Maximilian addressed the crowd directly the next day - "Here I am, behold me ready to live and die with you" - the majority dragged him instead to an apothecary's shop and held him there for days while torturing, beheading or exiling his own ministers in the market square outside. Ghent executed thirteen more of his supporters and, together with Bruges, formally stripped him of his son's guardianship, setting up a new government in Philip's name with the King of France recognized as its overlord. Moved afterward to a nobleman's house and confined like a common criminal, Maximilian was at least spared delivery into French hands by the people of Bruges themselves, who resisted Ghent's own demands to hand him over - and throughout the ordeal, Coxe records, he bore himself with a courage and dignity that did more than any army to cool his captors' rage.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Pratyeka · CC BY-SA 3.0

No trace of resentment

Neighboring provinces petitioned for his release, but it was Frederick who finally forced the issue - abandoning, for once, the indolence that had defined most of his own reign to fight for his son with real urgency. He assembled fifteen thousand men at Cologne within weeks and pushed into Brabant, terrifying the Flemings into releasing Maximilian on 16 May 1488, though only after extracting a renewed promise to honor the Treaty of Arras in full and withdraw every foreign soldier from the country.

Maximilian showed no anger at any of it. He went straight to church to give thanks, telling the crowd outside, "We are now at peace," then visited the very shop where his captivity had begun and read an insulting inscription scrawled on its walls without any visible reaction, forgiving the people who now knelt before him begging pardon. Back with his father, he quietly talked Frederick out of further war against the rebels; when Frederick pressed on regardless, besieging Ghent for three months before handing the campaign off and returning home, it was diplomacy rather than the siege that finally closed the conflict. King Charles VIII, eager to pursue his own designs on a newly vulnerable Brittany, concluded the Peace of Frankfurt in July 1489 - restoring Breton conquests, confirming the Arras settlement, and pressing the Flemish rebels into finally accepting Maximilian's guardianship of his own son.

Stolen from the altar

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

While Maximilian fought for Austria and Hungary, a second inheritance dispute in Brittany would test his family's fortunes just as severely. Duke Francis II died in September 1488 leaving only two daughters, with thirteen-year-old Anne inheriting a duchy immediately torn between pro-French and pro-English factions. Like Mary of Burgundy before her, Anne became the object of intense competition, and Maximilian - whose interest in the match was as much about checking French power as securing the duchy outright - opened negotiations even before her father's death, pursuing the courtship in careful secrecy to avoid provoking French intervention. Anne, won over as much by Maximilian's own reputation as by any rival's qualities, agreed to a prince whose rank and alliances seemed capable of actually protecting her duchy; the marriage was solemnized by proxy, without Maximilian himself present, sometime around the start of 1490. The secrecy that protected the negotiation could not protect what came next.

Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Jean Bourdichon · Public domain

A mock treaty

Charles VIII, having just turned nineteen and taken the reins of government himself, moved against Brittany with a duplicity Coxe traces straight back to his own tutelage under the regent Anne of Beaujeu. Recognizing that conquering the duchy outright would be brutally difficult against a duchess backed by the empire and England both, he pivoted to a subtler plan: marrying Anne himself, despite his own existing marriage contract with Maximilian's own daughter Margaret, who had lived at the French court as queen-in-waiting for seven years already. He kept faith scrupulously with the Peace of Frankfurt's terms regarding Flanders to lull Maximilian's suspicions, stalled on the Brittany provisions with excuses about English troops still in Breton service, and when the marriage between Maximilian and Anne was formally announced, used the shock of it to peel away her remaining allies - buying off one rival suitor with the surrender of Nantes and pressing French troops forward against Rennes, the last stronghold left to the duchy.

Maximilian scrambled for help but moved far too slowly against a French court working with speed and total secrecy. Anne, who still detested the French for the suffering they had brought her country and found Charles himself personally repellent, held out until her own generals and counselors, bought or intimidated, left her without hope of relief and her capital under blockade. She finally agreed to terms that looked generous - French withdrawal, arbitration, safe passage into Germany - terms the French honored to the letter, right up until Maximilian's own ambassadors, sent to escort their new queen home, learned instead that she had gone to Langeais and married Charles VIII there. Brittany was absorbed into the French crown in the same stroke.

An indemnity, not a victory

Maximilian's fury was total - his own daughter publicly humiliated after seven years as France's presumptive queen, and his own wife taken from him after their marriage had already been solemnized. He built a coalition with England and Aragon, but found exactly the kind of half-hearted support that had failed him at Bruges: the Swiss offered only mediation, German troops arrived too slowly, and England's Henry VII sold his own neutrality to France for cash and a pension rather than fight, while Aragon's Ferdinand accepted a territorial bribe to abandon the coalition as well. The resulting Treaty of Senlis returned Margaret and compensated Maximilian with Franche-Comté, Artois and several lesser territories in place of Brittany - honorable terms, in Coxe's own judgment, but a settlement that could not undo the personal insult of losing a wife to the very kingdom he had spent a decade fighting. It was, Coxe notes, the moment a rivalry with no natural cause - France and Austria had shared no real border and no real quarrel before Maximilian's marriage to Mary of Burgundy planted the two powers against each other - hardened into a hostility between the houses of Habsburg and Valois that would go on soaking Europe in blood for more than three centuries.

The confederacy of St. George

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Frederick's record as emperor came, by the end of his reign, in for a harder-edged assessment than his own passivity in most crises might suggest. Coxe judges him unfairly blamed for every civil war that afflicted Germany during his decades on the throne - languid and inactive by temperament, certainly, but the same reign also produced real, lasting reforms to how the empire actually governed itself. Frederick's own government laid out, for the first time, a genuine system for raising military contingents from the empire's princes and states rather than leaving the matter to whatever power and self-interest happened to apply in a given crisis, funded by fixed assessments collected through imperial commissaries - about the most workable system, Coxe judges, the empire's own patchwork of jealous, semi-independent territories could realistically support.

The right of private warfare proved harder to solve: under it, any noble, town or even guild could formally declare feud against any other party over a grievance real or imagined, with no higher authority required to approve it, and the abuse reached genuinely absurd extremes - associations of tradesmen and household servants exchanging formal declarations of war "on the most ridiculous pretences." One surviving challenge came from a private individual addressed directly to Frederick himself: "I will no longer obey your grace, but will be the enemy of your country, and your subjects, and will do them as much harm as possible." Frederick's own early instinct had been to suppress the regional leagues that towns and nobles formed for mutual defense, on the theory that any organized association not answerable to the emperor was a threat to his own authority - he had personally worked to dissolve the Swiss confederacy on exactly this reasoning. Decades of failure eventually pushed him toward the opposite strategy: build a confederacy loyal to the crown instead.

Built on an old shield

Swabia offered the ideal testing ground, dense with imperial towns and countless small lordships answerable to nobody but the emperor himself. Frederick proclaimed a ten-year public peace and convened the Swabian states around an old noble league called the Shield of St. George, widened far beyond nobility alone to include princes, towns and vassals together. It began modestly and grew fast, reaching twenty-two towns, thirteen prelates, twelve counts and three hundred fifty knights within a year, helped along by the threat of fines and the imperial ban for anyone who refused to join; powerful princes followed, and the league's own combined weight finally gave Frederick something his personal authority had never managed alone - the strongholds of robber-nobles came down by the hundred, and even the feuding House of Bavaria was forced into line.

That new authority let Frederick settle a personal grievance he could never have pressed alone. In 1485 Albert of Munich seized Regensburg, a city his own ancestors had once held, and - without so much as informing Frederick - married the emperor's own daughter Cunegunda, securing through her a claim on the reversion of Tyrol. Maximilian brokered a first reconciliation, but Albert simply refused to honor his own promise to restore the city, and Frederick, now backed by the full strength of the empire and the Swabian League, published the ban against both Albert and Regensburg outright. An army of more than twenty thousand assembled with unusual speed, more than a third of it supplied by the league itself, and once again it was Maximilian's mediation rather than the army's presence that actually settled the matter: Albert restored Regensburg, reaffirmed his renunciation of Tyrol, and brought his wife and daughters to visit Frederick at Linz, where the aging emperor, his own health failing, found real comfort in a reconciliation that finally brought both family peace and public order to his final years.

A sound peasant

The reconciliation with Albert of Munich was very nearly Frederick's last act as a ruling sovereign. Soon after returning to Austria he handed over administration of both his hereditary lands and the empire entirely to Maximilian, retiring to Linz to pursue his own favorite studies and enjoy, for the first time in a long and turbulent reign, real tranquility. He was seventy-eight, and had for some time suffered from a cancerous ulcer in his leg; amputation was the only remedy his surgeons could offer, and when the operation had to be repeated a second time due to their own inexperience, Frederick bore both procedures with the same characteristic calm that had carried him through decades of political humiliation. Holding up his own severed limb afterward, he told those present, "What difference is there between an emperor and a peasant? or rather, is not a sound peasant better than a sick emperor? yet I hope to enjoy the greatest good which can happen to man; a happy exit from this transitory life."

He seemed at first to be recovering, but a rigidly kept religious fast combined with an excessive appetite for melons - the same indulgence that had already killed his own son Albert V decades earlier - brought on a dysentery his weakened body could not survive. He died at Linz on 19 August 1493, seventy-eight years old, having reigned fifty-three years - longer, Coxe notes, than any emperor since Augustus himself.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Uoaei1 · CC BY-SA 3.0

Frederick was tall and handsome, plain in his everyday dress but genuinely fond of jewels and splendor on ceremonial occasions; religious, chaste, faithful to his word, and warmly affectionate toward his own family and household. His defining trait, though, was the same one that had shaped his entire reign for better and worse: an almost stoic imperturbability in the face of injury and insult, which Coxe judges too often invited exactly the contempt and fresh aggression it was meant to absorb. It was this same unshakeable calm that let him survive exile, siege, imprisonment of his own son, and the loss of an entire kingdom without ever losing his throne outright

• the very passivity his critics condemned was also, in the end, the quality that outlasted every crisis it failed to prevent.

The deliverer of his country

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

Maximilian was at Innsbruck when news of his father's death reached him, and he opened his reign in a manner that immediately set him apart from Frederick's own decades of caution: rather than leave frontier defense to his generals, as his father almost always had, he personally raised fifteen thousand men on short notice and marched against an Ottoman raiding party that had pushed into Styria and Carniola. The Turks retreated before he even reached them, and Maximilian arrived in Vienna to genuine acclaim as the deliverer of his own country - a striking contrast to the humiliations Vienna had inflicted on his father within living memory. His own name was itself a novelty: no earlier Habsburg had ever been called Maximilian, and Coxe credits the choice to Frederick's own fondness for astrology, supposedly built by combining the names of the Roman generals Fabius Maximus and Paulus Aemilius rather than any inherited family tradition.

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Albrecht Dürer · Public domain

After formally taking charge of the family's hereditary lands, Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, sister of Milan's own reigning duke, on 16 March 1494 - a match driven by a substantial dowry and the promise of leverage in Italian affairs, though Germany's nobility took it as an insult to the family's dignity, denouncing the Sforzas as a low-born house unworthy of an emperor's alliance. With his marriage settled, Maximilian handed government of the Low Countries to his own sixteen-year-old son Philip and turned to suppressing a revolt in Guelderland led by a young pretender who had escaped his own court after years spent as a virtual hostage there - a campaign soon left to Duke Albert of Saxony once events in Italy pulled Maximilian away entirely.

National Gallery of Art, Washington · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Ambrogio de Predis · CC0

A new rival in the south

At the same moment, a new power was consolidating itself on Europe's southwestern edge. Castile and Aragon, united since 1469 by the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, had spent their reign curbing an overmighty nobility and building the disciplined army and navy that decades of war against Granada's Moors had hardened into genuine professional forces; their conquest of Granada finally freed them from that centuries-old threat, and in 1492 Ferdinand added Sicily to his own crown as well, transforming Spain, within the span of Maximilian's own accession, into a power capable of shaping the rest of Europe rather than merely defending its own peninsula - one the House of Austria would, in time, find far more useful as a marriage partner than as a rival.

A conqueror by torchlight

The event that pulled Maximilian away from Guelderland was a conquest so fast it left the whole of Europe stunned: Charles VIII of France, pursuing his own house's old dormant claim to Naples, secured his passage through the Alps with the help of Savoy and Ludovico Sforza, crossed in July 1494 with twenty-two thousand men, and swept through Milanese territory into Tuscany, driving the Medici into exile and freeing Florence from their rule. He entered Rome itself on the night of 31 December, marching in by torchlight in full armor like a conqueror, and forced the Pope, who had taken refuge in the Castel Sant'Angelo, to surrender his own fortresses and hand over his own son as a hostage. By May, Charles was riding into Naples in triumph as its king, mounted on a white horse and dressed in the trappings of imperial authority, while the reigning Neapolitan king fled to the island of Ischia rather than fight.

The speed of the conquest terrified every power with a stake in Italy, Maximilian not least - he took Charles's adoption of imperial-style regalia as a direct affront to his own office. Even Ludovico Sforza, who had helped clear Charles's own path into Italy in the first place, was the first Italian ruler to move against him, helping assemble a secret league joining the emperor, the Pope, Milan, Florence and Aragon in a twenty-two-year alliance meant to restore the deposed Neapolitan king and drive the French out of Italy entirely.

The diet of Worms

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

To rally German support for the league against France, Maximilian broke with tradition by summoning the empire's diet not to Nuremberg, the customary site for the first assembly of a new reign, but to Worms, closer to both the Netherlands and the Italian theater of war. The gathering that opened on 26 May 1496 drew more princes and nobles than any diet in memory, and Maximilian pressed two demands with everything his own eloquence could muster: a nominal request for help against renewed Ottoman raids into Croatia, and his real object, an appeal for troops to drive the French out of Italy altogether. He warned the assembled princes that French control of both Brittany and Naples would let Charles VIII crush the church's and the empire's own liberties outright, paraded ambassadors from Naples's exiled king as living proof, and let a papal legate describe the Pope's own flight from Rome in vivid detail. Coxe judges this the one moment when direct imperial intervention might genuinely have driven France from Italy for good - a rare alignment of motive, moral case and opportunity all at once. None of it worked. The German states had grown numb to complaints about Turkish incursions after decades of hearing them, and proved no more moved by arguments about the European balance of power than they had been by any of Frederick's own earlier appeals - an empire that had learned, across generations of unanswered requests, to treat its own emperor's foreign wars as somebody else's problem.

A court that could not be dismissed

What the German states actually wanted, after generations of failed attempts by earlier emperors, was a permanent end to private warfare and a real tribunal to enforce it - and they used the leverage of Maximilian's own urgent need for troops to finally extract concessions no predecessor had managed to win from them. Maximilian, eager enough for their support to accept the trade, agreed with unusual speed: by 7 August the ordinances establishing a perpetual public peace and a new supreme tribunal, the Imperial Chamber Court, had his signature and the diet's own approval. Private warfare was formally abolished, with a heavy fine and the imperial ban threatened against any noble or town that dared declare it again. The new court broke real ground in its own design - a president and sixteen assessors split evenly between knights and trained jurists, chosen by the emperor from candidates the states themselves nominated, and, for the first time in any German institution of this kind, members who could not be removed from office once appointed. Its authority was limited at first, and it struggled in its early years for members, funding and any real means of enforcing its own rulings, but the foundation held: moved successively through half a dozen German cities before finally settling at Wetzlar in 1698, it grew into one of the empire's most durable institutions - a genuine, lasting achievement born from a diet Maximilian had convened for an entirely different purpose.

Money that never came

The gratitude Maximilian expected in return for these concessions never translated into the war funding he actually needed. The diet, after long hesitation, voted a standing army grandly described as "sufficient to check the progress of the French" and funded it with just a hundred fifty thousand florins, a third from the Habsburgs' own hereditary lands and the rest raised through a new levy called the common penny - wrapped in conditions that bound Maximilian's own hands as tightly as the tax bound the states'. The law was precise; the collection was not. Suabia and Franconia's own states simply withheld or delayed payment, and after repeated new ordinances trying to force compliance, barely half the promised sum was ever actually collected - and even that arrived so slowly that Charles VIII could have conquered the whole of Italy before German gold reached anyone capable of raising troops with it. Rather than leading nine thousand men into Italy as he had promised, Maximilian could scrape together only three thousand - a fraction of what the diet had voted, and nowhere near enough to let him take personal command of the war he had spent so much political capital convening the diet to fight.

A romantic expedition

Germany's own paralysis at Worms turned out not to matter as much as Maximilian feared: Charles VIII abandoned Naples almost as fast as he had taken it, the moment he learned of the league forming against him and, worse, Ludovico Sforza's own defection to it. Leaving a viceroy to hold what he could, Charles marched north with eight thousand troops, passed again through a Rome now abandoned by the Pope, and crossed the Apennines toward Parma - only to find the league's own combined army waiting for him at Fornovo, on the Taro river. Despite commanding the smaller force, Charles attacked on 6 July 1495 and, after a hard-fought engagement, forced his own way through the confederate line and reached the safety of Asti, making peace with Sforza on the spot. Naples turned against its French occupiers almost as soon as Charles was gone, and the exiled Neapolitan king, returning with Spanish reinforcements under Gonzalo de Córdoba, reclaimed his kingdom - though he did not live to enjoy it long. Charles, undeterred, was already planning a second Italian expedition before the year was out, this time aimed at Milan itself.

National Gallery of Art, Washington · Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Master of the Battle of Fornovo · CC0

Ludovico Sforza's own alarm at the threatened invasion was enough to draw Maximilian back into Italy himself, though with a force of only five hundred horse and eight companies of foot - a fraction of what his own hopes for German reinforcement had led him to expect. He crossed the Alps only to discover Charles had already postponed the expedition that supposedly justified the trip; no German troops joined him, and his own allies, no longer needing his presence, began hinting broadly that he should go home. Unwilling to leave without some visible achievement, Maximilian was eventually permitted only a lesser consolation: a siege of Livorno, meant to pry Florence loose from its French alliance. He blockaded the port by sea, but could not actually stop supplies reaching the defenders, and when a storm scattered his own ships he was forced into a land siege his allies undermined at every turn - the Venetian generals in particular slowing the effort until Maximilian, recognizing his coalition partners had no real interest in his success, vented his fury on their ambassadors and abandoned the whole enterprise in December 1496. Coxe judges the episode harshly: a "precipitate and romantic" venture that cost Maximilian real standing as both head of the empire and a prince of genuine ability - the second time in two years his own Italian ambitions had collapsed for want of the resources needed to match them.

Curbing the Swiss

contractionDrafted from Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847)

The Treaty of Senlis had left one piece of business deliberately unresolved: France was to hold Burgundy itself until its rival claims were settled, returning three named towns once Philip, Maximilian's own son, turned twenty. Philip, reaching that age, demanded not just the towns but every territory France had carved from the old Burgundian inheritance, and Charles VIII simply stalled until his own death in 1498 left the question to his successor, Louis XII - who divorced his own wife to marry Anne of Brittany, the same woman Maximilian had once wed before she was taken from him. Philip's renewed appeals went no better than before, and a mixed force of Austrian soldiers and Swiss mercenaries sent into Burgundy collapsed once the Swiss contingent mutinied over unpaid wages; Louis XII, whose own ambitions had already turned toward conquering Milan, offered peace on terms Philip accepted readily - the three towns restored, and any further claim to Burgundy itself abandoned to the judgment of a French court that was never going to rule against its own king.

Guelderland and Friesland, meanwhile, reopened almost as soon as they seemed settled. The young pretender Charles of Egmont, driven out once already, took up arms again when the new tax established at Worms provoked real discontent among his own former subjects, and recovered most of the duchy with quiet French backing; Friesland's own people, encouraged by their neighbors' success, mounted a parallel resistance and placed themselves under Guelderland's protection instead. Duke Albert of Saxony struggled to suppress both uprisings at once, and once Maximilian's own dispute with France was finally resolved, he marched into Guelderland himself only to find Egmont's French backing too strong to overcome - another regional conflict that ended not in victory, but in a settlement France had quietly shaped from the start.

Excommunication and the ban

Facing constant French pressure over Burgundy, Naples and Milan alike, Maximilian recognized how much the Swiss cantons' own military reputation could matter as allies, and worked to pry them away from their existing alignment with France - demanding, as head of the empire rather than as a neighboring rival, contingents for the Burgundian war, formal submission to the new Imperial Chamber Court, and contributions to the taxes that funded it. The Swiss refused every demand and declined to acknowledge themselves subjects of the empire at all. Maximilian escalated in response: he had the Pope excommunicate them as French collaborators and let the Imperial Chamber turn its full coercive weight against them, placing two Rhaetian nobles under the imperial ban. Rather than intimidating the cantons into submission, the pressure drove the whole confederacy together - seven of the old cantons allying with two Rhaetian leagues, themselves already alienated by separate disputes with Tyrol's own government, leaving only Bern still working to avoid an open break with Austria. Into this already volatile standoff, Louis XII assumed the title Duke of Milan and began preparing to conquer the duchy outright; Maximilian warned the Swiss against aiding the move and demanded six thousand men to back his own son's claims in Burgundy, a request they refused outright until the Chamber's pressure on them was lifted, promising strict neutrality in the meantime. Both sides stood in a state of mutual irritation that needed only a spark.

Coxe, History of the House of Austria, from the Foundation of the Monarchy by Rhodolph of Hapsburgh to the Death of Leopold the Second, 1218-1792 (1847) · Unknown artist · Public domain