The first Habsburg of whom we have definite knowledge was a certain Kanzelin (sometimes given as Lanzelin), who is associated in later accounts with a small fort at Altenburg, near the town of Brugg in the Swiss Aargau. All this territory constituted a part of the Holy Roman Empire, belonging to the duchy of Swabia, and was divided into largely self-governing counties or gaus, each with several counts. In fact, the earliest Habsburgs can only be tracked back to the late tenth century, when they lived in the region of the Upper Rhine and Alsace, on the present border between France and Germany, and in the Aargau, in today’s northern Switzerland. By the tenth century, the ancestry of the Habsburgs contracts from, in theory, the hundreds of thousands to, in practice, just a few shadowy individuals.īooks on early Habsburg history often read like mystery thrillers, with speculations that trace a Habsburg bloodline back through the shadowy Etichonid family of Alsatian counts to the French Merovingian kings, whose mythical fifth-century progenitor was a quinotaur, or bull with five horns. Even so, our student’s task would in some ways have been made easier the further back he dug, for the written record becomes correspondingly sparser and the blanks accumulate. But had he tried to track the archduke’s descent back to the eleventh century, he would have had to fill in the names of several hundred thousand ancestors, for every generation back yields double the number of forebears.

He also apologized that he had been unable to take his investigations further back into the Middle Ages.

1ĭedicating his research to Franz Ferdinand, the student glossed over the extent of Habsburg intermarriage by demonstrating statistically that all the ruling families of Europe had in the past been equally incestuous. So Franz Ferdinand was related to the sixteenth-century Emperor Ferdinand I through more than a hundred separate descents and to Ferdinand’s distant cousin, the unmemorable but deeply pious Renate of Lorraine, by twenty-five. On account of intermarriage, however, there were so many overlaps that the student found only 1,500 separate individuals, for many husbands were also cousins, and wives were often nieces several times over. The genealogy he established ran to thirty-three tables and listed more than 4,000 of Franz Ferdinand’s ancestors, going back to the sixteenth century. 1 CASTLE HABSBURG AND THE ‘FORTINBRAS EFFECT’Īt the beginning of the last century, an unusually diligent student set himself the task of establishing the descent of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was at that time Emperor Franz Joseph’s heir.

The habsburgs martyn rady