Habsburg
Chief royal family of Europe from the 5th to the 20th centuries. Its name derived from the 11th-century ancestral castle on the River Area in what is now Switzerland. Rudolf, Count of Habsburg, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1273 and under him Austria became a hereditary possession. From 1438 to 1806, excluding 1740-45, all the Holy Roman Emperors came from the Habsburg house. Under Emperor Charles V the Spanish crown was acquired by the Habsburgs (1516). Their domains were divided, Spain passing to Charles’s son, Philip II, and the Austrian possessions to his brother, Ferdinand I. The Spanish line died out in 1700 but the Austrian Habsburgs became emperors of Austria in 1804 and of Austria-Hungary in 1848. They were deposed after World War I.
