The Burgundian inheritance

Frederick III, who outlived everyone

Frederick III was crowned in 1440 and reigned fifty-three years, the longest of any ruler of the Empire. Contemporaries found him slow, indecisive and maddening. He lost Vienna to the Hungarians and spent years wandering his own dominions.

He also outlasted every rival he had, and he understood one thing entirely: that a marriage is cheaper than a war and lasts longer. In 1473 he opened negotiations to marry his son to the heiress of Burgundy. It took four years and a battlefield death to close.

Maximilian and Mary, 1477

Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was killed at Nancy in January 1477. He left one child: Mary of Burgundy, twenty years old, and heiress to the richest territories in northern Europe — Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, Hainaut, Artois and the rest of the Low Countries. Half the princes of Europe wanted her, and the King of France wanted her lands.

She married Maximilian of Habsburg in Ghent in August 1477. By every account it was a genuinely happy marriage, and it was short: Mary died in 1482 after a fall from a horse while hawking. She was twenty-five.

What she left behind was decisive. The Low Countries stayed with her children, and they stayed Habsburg. Every part of this family’s later history — Ghent, Mechelen, Brussels, the Netherlands, and the line that continues there — runs through Mary of Burgundy.

Philip and Joanna, 1496

Maximilian and Mary’s son Philip, called the Handsome, grew up in the Netherlands and thought of himself as Burgundian, not German. In 1496 he married Joanna, daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

It was a diplomatic marriage against France and nothing more. Joanna had two elder siblings and a nephew ahead of her; she was never meant to inherit Spain. Between 1497 and 1500 all three of them died. By 1504 Joanna was Queen of Castile, and a Habsburg was king-consort in Spain.

Philip died in 1506, at twenty-eight. Joanna outlived him by nearly fifty years, confined for most of them at Tordesillas, called mad by the men who profited from calling her so. Historians have argued about her condition for five centuries and the argument is not settled. What is not in doubt is that she was Queen of Castile in her own right, and that her confinement suited her father, her husband and her son in turn.

The boy in Ghent

Their eldest son was born in Ghent on 24 February 1500 and named Charles. Through his father he would inherit the Low Countries and the Habsburg lands; through his mother, Castile, Aragon, Naples, Sicily and the Indies; and in 1519 the electors gave him the Empire as well.

He was nineteen, and he held more of the earth than anyone since Rome.