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Austria RISE OF THE HABSBURG EMPIRE
The Habsburg Dynasty in the Late Medieval Era
Although the Duchy of Austria was just one of the duchies and
lands that the Habsburgs eventually acquired in the eastern
Alpine-Danubian region, the Habsburgs became known as the House
of Austria after the Swiss peasantry ousted them from their
original family seat in Habichtsburg in the Swiss canton of
Aargau in 1386. The name Austria subsequently became an
informal way to refer to all the lands possessed by the House of
Austria, even though it also remained the proper, formal name of
a specific region. Thus, through the legacy of common rule by the
House of Austria, the lands that constitute the modern state of
Austria indirectly adopted the name of one region of the country
as the formal national name in the early twentieth century.
Because the elector-princes of the Holy Roman Empire
generally preferred a weak, dependent emperor, the powerful
Habsburg Dynasty only occasionally held the imperial title in the
150 years after Rudolf's death in 1291. After the election of
Frederick III in 1452 (r. 1452-93), however, the dynasty came to
enjoy such a dominant position among the German nobility that
only one non-Habsburg was elected emperor in the remaining 354-
year history of the Holy Roman Empire.
The Habsburgs' near monopoly of the imperial title, however,
did not make the Habsburg Empire and the Holy Roman Empire
synonymous. The Habsburg Empire was a supernational collection of
territories united only through the accident of common rule by
the Habsburgs, and many of the territories were not part of the
Holy Roman Empire. In contrast, the Holy Roman Empire was a
defined political and territorial entity that became identified
with the German nation as the nation-state assumed greater
importance in European politics.
Although the succession of Holy Roman Emperors from the
Habsburg line gave the House of Austria great prestige in Germany
and Europe, the family's real power base was the lands in its
possession, that is, the Habsburg Empire. This was because the
Holy Roman Empire was a loosely organized feudal state in which
the power of the emperor was counterbalanced by the rights and
privileges of the empire's other princes, lords, and
institutions, both secular and ecclesiastical.
Habsburg power was significantly enhanced in 1453, when
Emperor Frederick III confirmed a set of rights and privileges,
dubiously claimed by the Habsburgs, that paralleled those of the
elector-princes, in whose ranks the family did not yet sit. In
addition, the lands the Habsburgs' possessed in 1453 were made
inheritable through both the male and the female line. Because
feudal holdings usually reverted to the emperor to dispose of as
he wished when the holder of the fief died, the right of
inheritable succession measurably strengthened the Habsburgs. The
lands they held in 1453 became known collectively as the
Hereditary Lands, and--with the exception of territories
possessed by the archbishops of Salzburg and Brixen--encompassed
most of modern Austria and portions of Germany, France, Italy,
Croatia, and Slovenia.
Data as of December 1993
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