Page:EB1911 - Volume 12.djvu/813

Rh bestowed it upon his eldest son, Rudolph, and married this prince to Elizabeth, widow of Wenceslas II. and stepmother of Wenceslas III. But Rudolph died in 1307, and his father’s attempt to keep the country in his own hands was ended by his murder in 1308.

Albert’s successor as German king was Henry of Luxemburg (the emperor Henry VII.), and this election may be said to initiate the long rivalry between the houses of Habsburg and Luxemburg. But the immediate enemy of the Habsburgs was not a Luxemburg but a Wittelsbach. Without making any definite partition, Albert’s five remaining sons spent their time in governing their lands until 1314, when one of them, Frederick called the Fair, forsook this comparatively uneventful occupation and was chosen by a minority of the electors German king in succession to Henry VII. At the same time the Wittelsbach duke of Bavaria, Louis, known to history as the emperor Louis the Bavarian, was also chosen. War was inevitable, and the battle of Mühldorf, fought in September 1322, sealed the fate of Frederick. Louis was victorious: his rival went into an honourable captivity, and the rising Habsburg sun underwent a temporary eclipse.

For more than a century after Frederick’s death in 1330 the Habsburgs were exiles from the German throne. But they were not inactive. In 1335 his two surviving brothers, Albert and Otto, inherited Carinthia and part of Carniola by right of their mother, Elizabeth; in 1363 Albert’s son Rudolph received Tirol; and during the same century part of Istria, Trieste and other districts were acquired. All King Albert’s six sons had died without leaving male issue save Otto, whose family became extinct in 1344, and Albert, the ancestor of all the later Habsburgs. Of Albert’s four sons two also left no male heirs, but the remaining two, Albert III. and Leopold III., were responsible for a division of the family which is of some importance. By virtue of a partition made upon their brother Rudolph’s death in 1365 Albert and his descendants ruled over Austria, while Leopold and his sons took Styria, Carinthia and Tirol, Alsace remaining undivided as heretofore.

Towards the middle of the 15th century the German throne had been occupied for nearly a hundred years by members of the Luxemburg family. The reigning emperor Sigismund, who was also king of Hungary and Bohemia, was without sons, and his daughter Elizabeth was the wife of Albert of Habsburg, the grandson and heir of Duke Albert III., who had died in 1395. Sigismund died in December 1437, leaving his two kingdoms to his son-in-law, who was crowned king of Hungary in January 1438 and king of Bohemia in the following June. Albert was also chosen and crowned German king in succession to Sigismund, thus beginning the long and uninterrupted connexion of his family with the imperial throne, a connexion which lasted until the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. He did not, however, enjoy his new dignities for long, as he died in October 1439 while engaged in a struggle with the Turks. Albert left no sons, but soon after his death one was born to him, called Ladislaus, who became duke of Austria and king of Hungary and Bohemia. Under the guardianship of his kinsman, the emperor Frederick III., the young prince’s reign was a troubled one, and when he died unmarried in 1457 his branch of the family became extinct, and Hungary and Bohemia passed away from the Habsburgs, who managed, however, to retain Austria.

Leopold III., duke of Carinthia and Styria, who was killed in 1386 at the battle of Sempach, had four sons, of whom two only, Frederick and Ernest, left male issue. Frederick and his only son, Sigismund, confined their attention mainly to Tirol and Alsace, leaving the larger destinies of the family in the hands of Ernest of Carinthia and Styria (d. 1424) and his sons, Frederick and Albert and after the death of King Ladislaus in 1457 these two princes and their cousin Sigismund were the only representatives of the Habsburgs. In February 1440 Frederick of Styria was chosen German king in succession to his kinsman Albert. He was a weak and incompetent ruler, but a stronger and abler man might have shrunk from the task of administering his heterogeneous and unruly realm. Although very important in the history of the house of Habsburg, Frederick’s long reign was a period of misfortune, and the motto which he assumed, A.E.I.O.U. (Austriae est imperare orbi universo ), seemed at the time a particularly foolish boast. He acted as guardian both to Ladislaus of Hungary, Bohemia and Austria, and to Sigismund of Tirol, and in all these countries his difficulties were increased by the hostility of his brother Albert. Having disgusted the Tirolese he gave up the guardianship of their prince in 1446, while in Hungary and Bohemia he did absolutely nothing to establish the authority of his ward; in 1452 the Austrians besieged him in Vienna Neustadt and compelled him to surrender the person of Ladislaus, thus ending even his nominal authority. When the young king died in 1457 the Habsburgs lost Hungary and Bohemia, but they retained Austria, which, after some disputing, Frederick and Albert divided between themselves, the former taking lower and the latter upper Austria. This arrangement was of short duration. In 1461 Albert made war upon his brother and forced him to resign lower Austria, which, however, he recovered after Albert’s death in December 1463. Still more unfortunate was the German king in Switzerland. For many years the Swiss had chafed under the rule of the Habsburgs; during the reign of Rudolph I. they had shown signs of resentment as the kingly power increased; and the struggle which had been carried on for nearly two centuries had been almost uniformly in their favour. It was marked by the victory of Morgarten over Duke Leopold I. in 1315, and by that of Sempach over Leopold III. in 1386, by the conquest of Aargau at the instigation of the emperor Sigismund early in the 15th century, and by the final struggle for freedom against Frederick III. and Sigismund of Tirol. Taking advantage of some dissensions among the Swiss, the king saw an opportunity to recover his lost lands, and in 1443 war broke out. But his allies, the men of Zürich, were defeated, and when in August 1444 some French mercenaries, who had advanced to his aid, suffered the same fate at St Jakob, he was compelled to give up the struggle. A few years later Sigismund became involved in a war with the same formidable foemen; he too was worsted, and the “Perpetual Peace” of 1474 ended the rule of the Habsburgs in Switzerland. This humiliation was the second great step in the process of removing the Habsburgs from western to eastern Europe. In 1453, just after his coronation as emperor at Rome, Frederick legalized the use of the title archduke, which had been claimed spasmodically by the Habsburgs since 1361. This title is now peculiar to the house of Habsburg.

The reverses suffered by the Habsburgs during the reign of Frederick III. were many and serious, but an improvement was at hand. The emperor died in August 1493, and was followed on the imperial throne by his son Maximilian I., perhaps the most versatile and interesting member of the family. Before his father’s death Maximilian had been chosen German king, or king of the Romans, and had begun to repair the fortunes of his house. He had married Mary, daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy; he had driven the Hungarians from Vienna and the Austrian archduchies, which Frederick had, perforce, allowed them to occupy; and he had received Tirol on the abdication of Sigismund in 1490. True it is that upon Mary’s death in 1482 part of her inheritance, the rich and prosperous Netherlands, held that her husband’s authority was at an end, while another part, the two Burgundies and Artois, had been seized by the king of France; nevertheless, after a protracted struggle the German king secured almost the whole of Charles the Bold’s lands for his son, the archduke Philip, the duchy of Burgundy alone remaining in the power of France after the conclusion of the peace of Senlis in 1493. Maximilian completed his work by adding a piece of Bavaria, Görz and then Gradiska to the Habsburg lands.

After Sigismund’s death in 1496 Maximilian and Philip were the only living male members of the family. Philip married Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, and died in 1506 leaving two sons, Charles and Ferdinand. Charles succeeded his father in the Netherlands; he followed one grandfather, Ferdinand, as king of Spain in 1516, and when the other,