The House of Habsburg
One name, a thousand years
Thirty generations, from 985 to the present day.
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 — from the counts of the Aargau to the courts of Europe, and on through the Low Countries to the present day.
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 ancestor from whom this family descends.
The Low Countries
The Quiet Centuries
From 1576 the family made its home in the Low Countries: in Vianen, Leerdam and the villages of the Vijfheerenlanden, through the Dutch Republic and the kingdom that followed it. There are no battles in this stretch and no palaces. There are births, marriages, trades and burials, father to son, in the river country between the Lek and the Linge.
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.
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.