The House of Habsburg
One name, a thousand years
Thirty generations. Nine hundred and forty years. The last five hundred of them spent doing nothing at all — on purpose.
The family took its name from a castle above the Aare, in what is now the Swiss canton of Aargau. This is that family’s history in its own words — the centuries everyone has heard of, and the five hundred years afterwards that almost nobody has.
Habsburg Castle, Aargau
The line
Ancestry
Thirty generations, one person to each, from the ridge above the Aare to the family living now.
Stories
Charles V
The man who inherited more of the earth than anyone since Rome, and then handed it back.
Stories
John of Austria
Charles V’s son, commander at Lepanto, and the point from which this family’s line continues.
The part nobody tells
Five hundred quiet years
After 1578 the line leaves the histories and lives quietly in the Low Countries. There are no battles in this stretch and no palaces. There are births, marriages, trades and burials, in a country where being noticed was not an advantage.
It is the same line. It simply stops being written about.
The family
Women of the House
The women who held the family together, and governed its lands while they did it.
The gazetteer
The Map
Four hundred and ninety-three places the family touched, on the ground where it happened.
Have a go
Great Stories
Thirteen legends, each told twice: the version everybody knows, and what the record says.
The arms
Carried, not claimed
The family makes no claim to any former land or domain. Those places belong to the people who live in them now, and the family says so plainly rather than leaving it to be guessed at.
What it does carry is a name, an eight-hundred-year record of the people who bore it, and the duty of keeping that record straight.