History of the Habsburgs: And in the end, the Peace Emperor staggered into the Great War

Since the late tenth century, the Habsburg family of knights, wealthy on the Upper Rhine and in what is now northern Switzerland, had attained considerable power.

Rudolf von Habsburg eventually even became Roman-German king from 1273 to 1291.

Under him, the Habsburgs also came into possession of the duchy of Austria and other areas on the south-eastern edge of the empire.

While most of the Swabian possessions were lost in the course of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, the Austrian territories became their new ancestral lands.

In the first half of the fourteenth century they moved their court to the Old Castle in Vienna.

The family then presented itself as the "House of Austria".

Swabia became Austrians.

However, Vienna and the Austrian lands were soon to play a subordinate role for the dynasty to which Martyn Rady dedicated a depiction.

In the transition to the sixteenth century, the Habsburgs came into possession of large parts of the Burgundian Netherlands and then all of Spain via marriage and inheritance contracts.

The Spanish "acquisitions" in America came into the hands of the Habsburg rulers as a result of the Spanish conquistadores' undertakings.

Charles of Ghent, Maximilian's grandson who grew up in the Netherlands and who also reigned as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire as Charles V from 1520 to 1558, saw himself as the "ruler of the world" with good reason.

Habsburg history took place, and the reference to Charles V makes this clear, in larger European and often global contexts.

An East Central European empire

By making generation after generation of Habsburg rulers and selected family members, wives, companions, comrades-in-arms and enemies the subject of his anecdotal stories, the reader takes part in a tour de force through almost a millennium of European history.

The first six chapters deal with the Habsburgs in medieval regional and imperial history.

The following ten chapters deal with the time of the emerging religious controversy.

Between 1500 and 1700, the two Habsburg dynastic lines - the Spanish and the Central European - produced personalities who became central champions of the Catholic cause.

This initially affected the Spanish rulers more strongly, who, like Philip II, granted the Inquisition in Spain (and overseas) enormous powers to persecute those who thought differently.

Various Habsburgs of the Central European line, who from the early sixteenth century had to do with fending off a threatening Ottoman expansion into their own homeland, were initially more pragmatic here.

At the latest with the Thirty Years' War this was over.

"The Thirty Years World War", as Rady describes it, not only devastated many regions in Europe, but was also carried far into the world outside Europe - to the Congo, the Philippines or South and Central America.

In 1700, the Spanish line of the Habsburgs ended with the heirless death of the Spanish King Charles II, and with it the Spanish-Habsburg focus of the narrative in Rady's book.

Now the "House of Austria" in Central Europe is once again the focus of attention.

In the fifteen chapters that make up the second half of the book, Rady places the Habsburgs in the changing world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

With the “victory over the Turks”, however, their empire expanded into an East Central European empire.

The gains from the "Turkish wars" made possible the "baroque triumph" in Vienna, which had once again become the undisputed center of their dynastic thinking.