History · about 1020 to 1273
The castle and the county
Two and a half centuries of being nobody in particular
The family name begins as an address. A stone keep goes up on a ridge above the Aare, the men who hold it are called after it, and for the next eight generations almost nothing happens that anyone outside the Aargau would have noticed. That is the normal condition of the house. The century of emperors is the strange part.
Radbot, Ita, and a monastery
Radbot (about 985–1045) was one of Lanzelin’s sons. He built the castle, and with his wife Ita he founded the Benedictine abbey at Muri, some twenty-five kilometres away, in the 1020s.
The abbey matters more than the castle. A castle held a valley; an abbey held a family’s memory. Muri became the house monastery, its burial place, and the institution that eventually wrote down who these people had been. Without Muri there is no Acta Murensia, and without the Acta Murensia there is very little indeed.
Where the name comes from
The castle is Habichtsburg in the earliest forms, which is usually read as hawk’s castle. A competing reading takes the first element from a word for a river crossing or ford. Both are defensible; neither is settled; and the family has never needed the hawk to be true in order to use it.
What is certain is the direction of travel. The place named the family, not the other way round. These were counts of a modest district who came to be called after their principal seat, exactly as hundreds of other families were, and the name stuck because the family outlasted the district.
Slow accumulation
Through the eleventh and twelfth centuries the counts of Habsburg did what successful minor nobility did: they married carefully, held advocacies over church lands, picked the winning side often enough, and inherited from relatives who ran out of sons. By the middle of the thirteenth century they had gathered scattered rights and properties across the Aargau, Alsace and the upper Rhine.
It was not a principality. It was a patchwork — a valley here, a toll there, a monastery’s protection somewhere else. Nothing about it announced what came next.
The moment it stops being ordinary
In 1273 the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire, after an interregnum in which they had failed to agree on anyone at all, chose a count from this family. They chose him in part because he was not frightening: a man with no great power base could be elected without alarming anybody.
They were wrong about him, and the next page is what that cost them.
- Kings of the Romans
1273 to 1438: a crown, a war in the east, and the loss of the homeland. - Before the castle
What lies behind Lanzelin, and why we say plainly that it cannot be verified.
Sources
- Acta Murensia, the house chronicle of Muri Abbey, twelfth century. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Aargau.
- Martyn Rady, The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (Basic Books, 2020), chapter 1.
- Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (Allen Lane, 2016).
- Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, entries for Habsburg (Herrschaft) and Muri (Kloster).