Public Family Trees/Habsburg/Rudolf I of Habsburg
1218 - 1291 · Male · Breisgau, Duchy of Swabia
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Rudolf I of Habsburg
1218 - 1291
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 def…
Born1218
The beginning of Rudolf I of Habsburg's recorded life.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Habsburg family.
Died1291
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 4 · 1351 - 1386
Leopold III was a younger son of Duke Albert II of Austria and Joanna of Pfirt, and the founder of the Leopoldian line of the Habsburgs. Under the Treaty of Neuberg in 1379 he divided the family lands with his elder brother Albert III, taking Inner Austria, that is Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, together with Tyrol and the family's older possessions in Swabia and Alsace. He pushed Habsburg influence westward into the Swiss and south German territories, acquiring Trieste in 1382 and giving the dynasty its first Adriatic port. His campaigns against the Swiss Confederation ended with the Habsburg defeat at Sempach in 1386. Married to Viridis Visconti of Milan, he was the father of Ernest the Iron.
Gen 5 · 1377 - 1424
Ernest, called Ernest the Iron, was a son of Duke Leopold III and Viridis Visconti, and ruled Inner Austria, the Styrian, Carinthian and Carniolan lands, from Graz. He was the last Habsburg to be enthroned in the old Carinthian ceremony at the Prince's Stone in 1414, and he was among the first of the family to use the title Archduke of Austria consistently, a rank the dynasty asserted to place itself above the ordinary princes of the Empire. He spent much of his rule defending the southern frontier and containing his brothers' rival claims. By his second wife, Cymburgis of Masovia, he was the father of Frederick III, the first Habsburg to hold the imperial title without interruption in the family thereafter.
Gen 6 · 1415 - 1493
Frederick III, son of Ernest the Iron and Cymburgis of Masovia, reigned as German king from 1440 and as Holy Roman Emperor from 1452, the longest tenure of any emperor and the last imperial coronation performed by a pope in Rome. Slow, patient and famously unhurried, he lost ground in Hungary and Bohemia during his lifetime but secured the imperial dignity permanently for his house and elevated Austria to an archduchy in law. He is remembered for the enigmatic device AEIOU that he inscribed on his buildings and possessions. His greatest achievement was diplomatic: the marriage he arranged in 1477 between his son Maximilian I and Mary of Burgundy, which brought the Burgundian inheritance to the Habsburgs.
Gen 7 · 1459 - 1519
Maximilian I, the only surviving son of Emperor Frederick III and Eleanor of Portugal, transformed the Habsburgs from an Alpine dynasty into the leading power of Europe. His marriage in 1477 to Mary of Burgundy, heiress of Charles the Bold, brought him the wealthy Low Countries and Franche-Comte, which he defended against France for the rest of his life. German king from 1486 and emperor from 1508, he reformed imperial administration and the army, and was a lavish patron of art and printing. Above all he was a matchmaker: the marriages he arranged for his son Philip the Handsome and his grandchildren with the ruling houses of Spain, Bohemia and Hungary delivered Spain and central Europe to his descendants.
Gen 8 · 1478 - 1506
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.
Gen 9 · 1500 - 1558
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.
Gen 10 · 1527 - 1598
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.
Gen 11 · 1578 - 1637
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.
Gen 13 · 1605 - 1665
Philip IV ruled Spain from 1621 to 1665, through the years in which Spanish military power was broken and Spanish art reached its height. Guided for two decades by the Count-Duke of Olivares, he committed Spain to the Thirty Years' War, and the reign brought the loss of Portugal in 1640, revolt in Catalonia, recognition of Dutch independence at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and the surrender of border territories to France at the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. He was the most discerning royal patron of his century, employing Diego Velazquez as court painter for more than thirty years. Son of Philip III, he married first Elisabeth of France and then his niece Mariana of Austria, and was the father of Charles II.
Gen 12 · 1608 - 1657
Ferdinand III, son of Emperor Ferdinand II and Maria Anna of Bavaria, took command of the imperial armies in 1634 and won the battle of Nordlingen in the same year before succeeding his father as emperor in 1637. Less doctrinaire than his father and convinced that the Thirty Years' War could not be won, he opened negotiations that produced the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, accepting a settlement that confirmed the religious division of Germany and limited imperial authority over the princes, but preserved Habsburg rule in Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. He was a trained composer whose works were performed at court. By Maria Anna of Spain he was the father of Leopold I and of Mariana of Austria, queen of Spain.
Gen 14 · 1661 - 1700
Charles II was the last Habsburg king of Spain, the only surviving son of Philip IV and Mariana of Austria. He succeeded at the age of three in 1665 under his mother's regency and reigned in his own name from 1675 until 1700, over an empire still vast in extent but weakened by decades of war with France, in which Spain lost Franche-Comte and further ground in the Netherlands. Government rested largely with ministers and with a court split into French and Austrian parties over who should inherit. He married Marie Louise of Orleans and then Maria Anna of Neuburg, and left no children; his will naming Philip of Anjou as heir brought on the War of the Spanish Succession and ended Habsburg rule in Spain.
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
The House of Hohenzollern is the German dynasty that ruled Brandenburg from 1415, held the Prussian crown from 1701, and gave Germany its three emperors between 1871 and the fall of the monarchy in 1918. This tree follows the senior Prussian line in one unbroken descent, from Frederick William the Great Elector, through the kings of Prussia and the German Emperors, down to Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, the present head of the house. ## Origins The family takes its name from Hohenzollern Castle on a hill in the Swabian Alb, where a line of counts is recorded from the eleventh century. A Swabian Zollern married into the burgraviate of Nuremberg in 1192, and the Franconian branch that grew from it spent two centuries accumulating lands and credit with the Holy Roman Emperors. The decisive moment came in 1415, when Emperor Sigismund invested Frederick VI of Nuremberg as Elector of Brandenburg in return for his political and financial support. The Duchy of Prussia, a separate inheritance lying outside the Empire, passed to the Brandenburg electors in 1618, and Frederick William, the Great Elector, welded the two into a single functioning state after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. ## Notable members Frederick I turned the electorate into a kingdom in 1701. His son Frederick William I, the Soldier King, built the army and the treasury that his own son, **Frederick the Great**, used to seize Silesia and to make Prussia a European power, while also composing music, building Sanssouci and corresponding with Voltaire. **Queen Louise** became the emotional centre of Prussian resistance to Napoleon. **Wilhelm I**, with Otto von Bismarck as his minister president, was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles in 1871. His son **Frederick III** and the liberal English princess he married, Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, reigned for only ninety nine days. **Wilhelm II**, the last Kaiser, abdicated in 1918 and died in Dutch exile in 1941. ## Significance No other German family shaped the modern state so directly. Hohenzollern rulers created the Prussian civil service, compulsory schooling and the general staff, sponsored the Berlin academies and the Humboldt university model, and then used Prussian power to unify Germany around themselves. The monarchy ended with the revolution of November 1918, but the house continues as a private family: the headship passed from Wilhelm II to his eldest son, then to Louis Ferdinand, and in 1994 to Georg Friedrich, whose own father and uncles are part of the succession story told in this tree. ## Quick facts | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Family name | Hohenzollern | | Place of origin | Hohenzollern Castle, Swabia, southern Germany | | Ruled | Brandenburg from 1415, Prussia from 1618, Germany from 1871 | | Royal title | King in Prussia from 1701, King of Prussia from 1772 | | Imperial title | German Emperor, 1871 to 1918 | | German Emperors | Wilhelm I, Frederick III, Wilhelm II | | Monarchy ended | 9 November 1918 | | Present head of the house | Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, since 1994 | | Principal residences | Berlin City Palace, Sanssouci and Cecilienhof at Potsdam, Charlottenburg | | Branch shown here | The senior Prussian line only, not Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen |
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
Rudolf I of Habsburg has 1 recorded child: Albert I of Habsburg.
Rudolf I of Habsburg is recorded as King of the Romans in the Habsburg family tree.
Rudolf I of Habsburg's recorded native place is Breisgau, Duchy of Swabia.
0 ancestors and 32 descendants of Rudolf I of Habsburg are recorded so far, within a tree of 40 people.
Rudolf I of Habsburg is recorded in the Habsburg family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 39 other people.
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