Habsburg Family Tree - The House of Habsburg Family Tree

Elisabeth of Bavaria, universally known as Sisi, was a daughter of Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria and married her cousin Franz Joseph I in Vienna in 1854 at the age of sixteen. She never reconciled herself to the rigid ceremony of the Habsburg court and spent much of her life travelling, in Hungary, England, Ireland, Corfu and Greece, where she built the Achilleion palace. Her one great political intervention was decisive: a genuine attachment to Hungary and friendship with Gyula Andrassy helped bring about the Compromise of 1867, and she was crowned Queen of Hungary alongside her husband. She was the mother of Crown Prince Rudolf, Gisela and Marie Valerie, and died in Geneva in 1898.

Francis Stephen of Lorraine was raised at the Viennese court and married Maria Theresa in 1736, a love match rare among eighteenth-century sovereigns. As a condition of the marriage and of the settlement of the War of the Polish Succession he gave up his ancestral duchy of Lorraine to France, receiving the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in exchange in 1737. Elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1745, he left political direction to his wife and concentrated on finance, industry and the natural sciences, restoring the treasury through shrewd investment and founding collections that became the basis of Vienna's natural history museum. He and Maria Theresa founded the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, which ruled Austria until 1918.

Isabella of Portugal was a daughter of King Manuel I of Portugal and Maria of Aragon, and thus a first cousin of the man she married in Seville in 1526, Charles V. Highly educated and politically capable, she served repeatedly as regent of Spain during her husband's long absences in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, presiding over the Castilian councils and managing the finances of his campaigns with a firmness contemporaries noted. Charles never remarried after her death in 1539 and wore mourning for the rest of his life. Her portrait by Titian, painted from earlier likenesses, became one of the defining images of the Habsburg court. She was the mother of Philip II of Spain.

Joanna of Castile was the third child of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, and the woman through whom the Spanish crowns passed to the Habsburgs. Married in 1496 to Philip the Handsome, she became heiress after the deaths of her brother John and her elder sister Isabella, and succeeded her mother as Queen of Castile in 1504 and her father as Queen of Aragon in 1516. From 1509 she lived at Tordesillas in Castile, and although she remained the legal sovereign until her death in 1555, government was exercised first by her father, then by her son Charles V. She is traditionally known in Spain as Juana la Loca. She was the mother of two emperors and four queens.

Mary of Burgundy was the only child of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, and Isabella of Bourbon, and on her father's death in 1477 she inherited the richest collection of territories in northern Europe, including Flanders, Brabant, Holland and Franche-Comte. Facing immediate French invasion and revolt in her own cities, she granted the Great Privilege, a charter restoring the liberties of the Netherlandish provinces, and then married Maximilian of Austria in the same year, an alliance that saved her inheritance from partition and tied the Low Countries to the Habsburgs for three centuries. She died in 1482 at the age of twenty-five, mother of Philip the Handsome and of Margaret of Austria.

Rudolf I of Habsburg was the first member of his family to be elected King of the Romans, ruling the German kingdom from 1273 until 1291. Born into a comital family with scattered lands in the Aargau, Swabia and Alsace, he was chosen by the prince-electors partly because he seemed a modest, unthreatening figure after the long interregnum that followed the collapse of Hohenstaufen power. He proved otherwise. After defeating Ottokar II of Bohemia on the Marchfeld in 1278 he took possession of Austria and Styria and, in 1282, granted them to his sons, shifting the family's centre of gravity from the Swiss lands to the Danube. Married to Gertrude of Hohenberg, he was the father of Albert I and the ancestor of every later Habsburg ruler.

Sophie Chotek was born into an old but not sovereign Bohemian noble family, the Chotek von Chotkowa, and was serving as lady-in-waiting in the household of an archduchess in Prague when Franz Ferdinand fell in love with her. Because her family did not rank as royal, Emperor Franz Joseph consented to the marriage in 1900 only on the condition that it be morganatic: Sophie could not share her husband's rank, precedence or titles, and their three children were barred from the throne. She was created Princess and later Duchess of Hohenberg. The couple's private life at Konopiste was widely regarded as a happy one. She accompanied her husband to Bosnia and was assassinated with him at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Zita was a daughter of Robert I, the deposed Duke of Parma, and Maria Antonia of Portugal, and married Archduke Charles of Austria in 1911. She became Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary in 1916 and was closely involved in her husband's attempts to reach a separate peace during the First World War, working through her brothers Sixtus and Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, who were serving in the Belgian army. After 1918 she shared his exile and, widowed in 1922 with eight children, brought them up in Spain, Belgium, France, the United States and Canada while refusing to renounce the family's position. She was allowed to return to Austria in 1982 and died in Switzerland in 1989.

Albert I was the eldest son of Rudolf I of Habsburg and Gertrude of Hohenberg, and the second Habsburg to wear the German crown. He governed Austria and Styria as duke from 1282, imposing firm and often resented rule on the Austrian nobility, and was passed over for the kingship in 1292 in favour of Adolf of Nassau. He pressed his claim, was elected King of the Romans in 1298, and spent his reign consolidating royal rights, curbing the Rhineland princes and attempting, without success, to bring Bohemia into the family's grasp. Married to Elizabeth of Gorizia-Tyrol, he was the father of Frederick the Fair, Leopold I and Albert II, through whom the Austrian line continued.

Charles V, eldest son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Castile, ruled the largest collection of territories any European sovereign had yet held: the Burgundian Netherlands from 1506, Spain with Naples, Sicily and the American possessions from 1516 as Charles I, the Austrian hereditary lands from 1519, and the Holy Roman Empire from his election in the same year. His reign was defined by wars with France over Italy, by the Ottoman advance on Vienna and the Mediterranean, and by the Protestant Reformation, which he confronted at the Diet of Worms in 1521 and failed to reverse. Exhausted, he abdicated between 1555 and 1556, dividing his inheritance between his son Philip II and his brother Ferdinand I, and retired to the monastery of Yuste.

Ferdinand I, younger brother of Charles V and second son of Philip the Handsome and Joanna of Castile, was raised in Spain but became the founder of the Austrian Habsburg line. Granted the Austrian hereditary lands by his brother in 1521, he married Anna of Bohemia and Hungary the same year, and when her brother Louis II was killed at Mohacs in 1526 Ferdinand claimed both crowns, uniting Austria, Bohemia and royal Hungary in the composite monarchy that lasted until 1918. He spent decades resisting Ottoman expansion, negotiated the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 that allowed German princes to choose their confession, and succeeded Charles as Holy Roman Emperor in 1558.

Joseph II, eldest son of Maria Theresa and Francis I Stephen, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1765 and co-regent of the Habsburg lands with his mother, ruling alone from her death in 1780 until his own in 1790. He is the archetype of the enlightened absolutist: in a decade he issued thousands of decrees, granting toleration to Protestants, Orthodox Christians and Jews in 1781, abolishing serfdom in the same year, dissolving contemplative monasteries, ending censorship of much of the press, and replacing Latin with German as the language of administration. The pace and centralism of the reforms provoked revolt in the Netherlands and Hungary, and several were withdrawn. He was the elder brother of Leopold II and of Marie Antoinette.

Leopold II, a younger son of Maria Theresa and Francis I Stephen, governed Tuscany as grand duke from 1765 for twenty-five years, and made it one of the most carefully reformed states in Europe: he reorganised taxation and the guilds, drained the Maremma marshes, and in 1786 made Tuscany the first state anywhere to abolish capital punishment. Succeeding his brother Joseph II as emperor in 1790, he inherited a monarchy in open unrest and calmed it quickly, restoring the Hungarian constitution and withdrawing the most contentious decrees while keeping the substance of toleration and peasant reform. He died after a reign of two years. He was the father of Francis II and a brother of Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette was the youngest daughter of Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I Stephen, and a sister of Joseph II and Leopold II. Married in 1770 at fourteen to the future Louis XVI to seal the alliance between Austria and France, she became Queen of France on his accession in 1774. Her taste in music, theatre, dress and garden design shaped the style of the late French court, centred on the Petit Trianon at Versailles, and her spending and Austrian birth made her a focus of hostile pamphlets long before the Revolution. The royal family was brought from Versailles to Paris in 1789 and the monarchy abolished in 1792. She remains one of the most written-about women of the eighteenth century.

Otto von Habsburg was the eldest son of Emperor Charles I and Empress Zita, and the last crown prince of Austria-Hungary, aged six when the monarchy ended in 1918. Raised in exile, he became an outspoken opponent of National Socialism in the 1930s, worked from the United States during the Second World War on behalf of Austrian independence, and was barred from his homeland until he renounced all claim to the throne in 1961. He then made a second career as a European politician and writer, serving as a member of the European Parliament for Bavaria from 1979 to 1999, presiding over the International Paneuropean Union, and helping to organise the Pan-European Picnic of 1989 at the Hungarian border.

Philip the Handsome, son of Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy, ruled the Burgundian Netherlands from 1482 and became the first Habsburg king in Spain. His marriage in 1496 to Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, was intended only as an anti-French alliance, but the deaths of Joanna's brother and elder sister made her heiress of Castile, and in 1506 Philip was proclaimed king alongside her as Philip I. His Spanish reign lasted a matter of months before his death at Burgos in the same year, at the age of twenty-eight. Through his sons Charles V and Ferdinand I, he stands at the point where the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg lines both begin.

Philip II, son of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal, ruled Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Sicily, Milan and the Spanish empire in the Americas and the Philippines from 1556, and added Portugal and its possessions in 1580, briefly uniting the whole Iberian peninsula under one crown. Working from the vast monastery-palace of El Escorial that he built outside Madrid, he governed through paper and councils in an age of Spanish cultural ascendancy. His reign saw the naval victory over the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571, the long revolt of the Dutch provinces, and the failure of the Armada sent against England in 1588. He married four times, and by his last wife, Anna of Austria, was the father of Philip III.

Crown Prince Rudolf was the only son of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth, and heir to Austria-Hungary from birth. Educated by liberal tutors, he grew into a serious amateur scientist and a prolific anonymous journalist, publishing on ornithology, travel and politics, and directing the vast illustrated survey of the empire known as the Crown Prince's Work. His pro-French, anti-Prussian and constitutionalist opinions put him at odds with his father, who excluded him from real influence. He married Princess Stephanie of Belgium in 1881, and their daughter Elisabeth Marie was born in 1883. He died at the hunting lodge of Mayerling in January 1889, an event that changed the succession of the monarchy.

Albert II, known as Albert the Wise, was a son of King Albert I and ruled the Habsburg hereditary lands as Duke of Austria and Styria from 1330. A careful and conciliatory ruler after decades of family conflict, he restored the dynasty's finances, issued a body of territorial law for Austria, and in 1335 secured Carinthia and Carniola for the Habsburgs, a decisive addition that anchored their power in the south-eastern Alps. He kept Austria largely out of the wars between the Empire and the papacy in his day. By his marriage to Joanna of Pfirt he had four sons who survived him, among them Rudolf IV, the founder of the University of Vienna, and Leopold III, from whom all later Habsburg emperors descend.

Charles II was the youngest son of Emperor Ferdinand I and Anna of Bohemia and Hungary. When his father's lands were divided in 1564 he received Inner Austria, comprising Styria, Carinthia, Carniola and the Adriatic ports, and ruled them from Graz. He organised the Military Frontier against Ottoman raids, founded the fortress town of Karlovac in Croatia in 1579, and in 1580 established the imperial stud at Lipica that gave the Lipizzaner horses of the Spanish Riding School their name. A committed patron of the Counter-Reformation, he brought the Jesuits to Graz and founded its university. By his marriage to Maria Anna of Bavaria he was the father of Emperor Ferdinand II and of Margaret of Austria, queen of Philip III of Spain.

Francis II, son of Leopold II, was the last Holy Roman Emperor and the first Emperor of Austria. Elected in 1792 as the French revolutionary wars began, he fought France for more than twenty years, losing at Austerlitz in 1805 and Wagram in 1809. Anticipating the end of the old empire, he proclaimed himself hereditary Emperor of Austria as Francis I in 1804, and in 1806, after the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, laid down the imperial crown that his house had held almost continuously since 1438. His daughter Marie Louise married Napoleon in 1810. Guided by Metternich, he presided over the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815, which restored Austria as a leading power in Europe.

Philip III was the son of Philip II of Spain and Anna of Austria, herself a Habsburg and a daughter of Emperor Maximilian II. Succeeding in 1598, he was the first Spanish king to govern largely through a favourite, entrusting affairs to the Duke of Lerma, who moved the court briefly to Valladolid and presided over a period of costly peace. His reign brought the Treaty of London with England in 1604 and the Twelve Years' Truce with the Dutch in 1609, easing the wars his father had left, while Castile's finances continued to decline. He married Margaret of Austria, of the Inner Austrian branch of the family, and was the father of Philip IV and of Anne of Austria, queen of Louis XIII of France.

Ferdinand II, son of Archduke Charles II of Inner Austria and Maria Anna of Bavaria, was educated by the Jesuits at Ingolstadt and ruled Inner Austria from 1590 before becoming King of Bohemia and Hungary and, in 1619, Holy Roman Emperor. His determination to restore Catholicism in his lands provoked the Bohemian revolt of 1618 that opened the Thirty Years' War; his victory at the White Mountain in 1620 broke the Bohemian estates and made the crown hereditary in his house. Relying on the armies of Wallenstein and the Catholic League, he issued the Edict of Restitution in 1629 at the height of his power, then saw the war turn with Swedish and French intervention. He was the father of Ferdinand III.

Archduke Franz Karl was a son of Emperor Francis II and his third wife Maria Teresa of Naples and Sicily, and a younger brother of Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria. Because his brother had no children, he stood next in line to the Austrian throne for more than a decade, and he sat on the state conference that governed in Ferdinand's name during the 1830s and 1840s. In the revolutionary year of 1848, when Ferdinand abdicated at Olomouc, Franz Karl renounced his own right of succession in favour of his eldest son, who became Franz Joseph I at eighteen. He lived another thirty years as a private archduke. By his marriage to Princess Sophie of Bavaria he was also the father of Maximilian of Mexico and of Karl Ludwig.