House of Habsburg

Trace the House of Habsburg — Holy Roman Emperors, kings of Spain and rulers of Austria — whose marriages built an empire across Europe, mapped through births, weddings and migrations on RootsLore.

People in this family tree

• Philip I the Handsome · 07/22/1478–09/25/1506 · Bruges, Belgium → Burgos, Spain — Duke of Burgundy and, by his marriage to Joanna of Castile, the first Habsburg to wear a Spanish crown — joining the vast Burgundian inheritance to that of Spain. Handsome and pleasure-loving, he reigned in Castile only months before his sudden death at twenty-eight in 1506, a loss said to have unhinged his wife, leaving their son Charles heir to an empire.
• Joanna of Castile · 11/06/1479–04/12/1555 · Toledo, Spain → Tordesillas, Spain — Queen of Castile and Aragon in her own right, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, remembered as Joanna the Mad. Devastated by the early death of her husband Philip I, she was declared unfit and confined for nearly half a century at Tordesillas while others ruled in her name; she was mother of the emperors Charles V and Ferdinand I, and died in 1555.
• Charles V · 02/24/1500–09/21/1558 · Ghent, Belgium → Yuste, Spain — Holy Roman Emperor and, as Charles I, the first Habsburg king of a united Spain, who ruled the largest European empire since Charlemagne — “the empire on which the sun never set”. He spent his reign fighting France, the Ottomans and the Protestant Reformation, then, exhausted, abdicated his crowns in 1556 and retired to the monastery of Yuste, where he died in 1558.
• Ferdinand I · 03/10/1503–07/25/1564 · Alcala de Henares, Spain → Vienna, Austria — Younger brother of Charles V, who governed the Austrian lands as his deputy and succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor in 1558. His marriage to Anna of Bohemia and Hungary brought those crowns to the family, and he became founder of the Austrian Habsburg line that would rule central Europe for centuries; he died in 1564.
• Isabella of Portugal · 10/24/1503–05/01/1539 · Lisbon, Portugal → Toledo, Spain — Empress and Queen of Spain, a Portuguese infanta who married her first cousin Charles V in 1526 in a union of deep mutual devotion. A capable regent of Spain during the emperor’s long absences and mother of Philip II, she died in 1539 after a miscarriage — a loss Charles mourned for the rest of his life.
• Anna of Bohemia and Hungary · 07/23/1503–01/27/1547 · Budapest, Hungary → Prague, Czechia — Wife of Ferdinand I, whose inheritance carried the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary into Habsburg hands on the death of her brother King Louis II in 1526. The mother of fifteen children, including the future Emperor Maximilian II, she secured the dynasty’s hold on central Europe before her death in 1547.
• Philip II of Spain · 05/21/1527–09/13/1598 · Valladolid, Spain → El Escorial, Spain — King of Spain at the zenith of its empire — master of Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, Portugal and a New World realm. A devout champion of the Counter-Reformation, he built the Escorial, faced the long revolt of the Dutch and saw the failure of his Armada against England in 1588, and married four times — last to his own niece, Anna of Austria. He died in 1598.
• Maximilian II · 07/31/1527–10/12/1576 · Vienna, Austria → Regensburg, Germany — Holy Roman Emperor, son of Ferdinand I, who married his first cousin Maria of Spain. Personally drawn to the Protestant reformers and a policy of religious compromise, he kept an uneasy peace within the Empire during the years before the great confessional wars, and died in 1576.
• Maria of Spain · 06/21/1528–02/26/1603 · Madrid, Spain → Madrid, Spain — Daughter of Charles V and Holy Roman Empress as wife of her first cousin Maximilian II — one of the close-kin marriages that bound the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs together. A pious, strong-willed woman who served as regent of Spain for her brother Philip II, she bore sixteen children and ended her days in a Madrid convent, dying in 1603.
• Anna of Austria · 11/02/1549–10/26/1580 · Valladolid, Spain → Badajoz, Spain — Queen of Spain, daughter of Maximilian II, who in 1570 married her own uncle Philip II as the last of his four wives — the marriage that at last produced a surviving heir, the future Philip III. She died young in 1580, but through her the close inbreeding of the two Habsburg branches passed into the Spanish royal line.
• Philip III of Spain · 04/14/1578–03/31/1621 · Madrid, Spain → Madrid, Spain — King of Spain, son of Philip II and his niece-bride Anna of Austria, a pious and indolent monarch who left government to his favourite, the Duke of Lerma. His reign saw the costly expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609 and the slow erosion of Spanish power, masked by a brilliant cultural golden age; he died in 1621.
• Margaret of Austria · 12/25/1584–10/03/1611 · Graz, Austria → El Escorial, Spain — Queen of Spain, an Austrian Habsburg archduchess who married Philip III in 1599 and bore him the future Philip IV and Maria Anna. Pious and influential at court, she championed the interests of the Austrian branch against the favourite Lerma before her death in childbirth in 1611.
• Philip IV of Spain · 04/08/1605–09/17/1665 · Valladolid, Spain → Madrid, Spain — King of Spain through its long decline, a great patron of the arts who employed Velázquez and presided over a literary golden age even as Spain lost its supremacy in Europe. After the death of his first wife he married his own niece, Mariana of Austria, in search of an heir; he died in 1665, the monarchy exhausted by war.
• Maria Anna of Spain · 08/18/1606–05/13/1646 · El Escorial, Spain → Linz, Austria — Daughter of Philip III and Holy Roman Empress as wife of Ferdinand III, one more strand in the web of Spanish-Austrian intermarriage. Her daughter Mariana would return to Spain to marry her own uncle Philip IV, making Maria Anna grandmother of the tragic last Spanish Habsburg, Charles II; she died in 1646.
• Ferdinand III · 07/13/1608–04/02/1657 · Graz, Austria → Vienna, Austria — Holy Roman Emperor who inherited the Thirty Years’ War from his father and, after years of further bloodshed, brought it to an end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 — accepting a much-weakened imperial authority for the sake of peace. A cultivated and conciliatory ruler, he died in 1657.
• Mariana of Austria · 12/24/1634–05/16/1696 · Wiener Neustadt, Austria → Madrid, Spain — Queen of Spain, daughter of Ferdinand III and Maria Anna, who in 1649 married her own uncle Philip IV — the last of the close Habsburg unions whose inbreeding crippled their son. After Philip’s death she governed Spain as regent for the sickly child-king Charles II, leaning on unpopular favourites, and died in 1696.
• Charles II of Spain · 11/06/1661–11/01/1700 · Madrid, Spain → Madrid, Spain — The last Habsburg King of Spain, so disabled by generations of inbreeding — the culmination of the dynasty’s cousin- and uncle-marriages — that he was sickly, infertile and barely able to rule. Childless at his death in 1700, he left his crown by will to a French Bourbon prince, igniting the great War of the Spanish Succession and ending the Spanish Habsburg line.