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The Habsburgs were the princely family that provided the dukes and archdukes of Austria starting in 1282, the kings of Hungary and Bohemia from 1526 onward, and the emperors of Austria from 1804 to 1918. From 1438 to 1806 (with one interruption, 1742–1745) the Habsburgs were emperors of the Holy Roman Empire and from 1516 to 1700 kings of Spain. All dynastic politics hinge on fertile marriages. Without legitimate heirs, dynasties regularly fall into civil war or foreign conquest. While this was true for all the early modern monarchies, the House of Habsburg seemed for a time to have perfected dynastic practice. Emperor Maximilian I (ruled 1493–1519) cultivated the motto, "Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube" (What others achieve by war, let you, happy Austria, achieve by marriage). This policy was most evident in the arrangements made by Emperor Frederick III (ruled 1440–1493) for his son Maximilian I, who first married Mary of Burgundy (1457–1482) in 1477 and produced a son, Philip I (called "The Handsome," ruled Castile 1504–1506). Maximilian's marriage to Mary created claims to the Burgundian inheritance intheLow Countries as well as the duchy of Burgundy itself. After Mary's death in 1482, Maximilian married Anne of Brittany (1477–1514) by proxy in 1490, but this marriage was never consummated because in 1491 King Charles VIII of France (ruled 1483–1498) took Anne for himself. So in 1493 Maximilian married Bianca Maria Sforza, niece of Lodovico Sforza of Milan (1452–1508).

In all of these efforts one sees evidence of careful dynastic planning, which is even more obvious in the advantageous marriage Maximilian I arranged in 1496 for his son Philip I to Joanna (Juana) of Castile (ruled Castile 1504–1555; Aragón 1516–1555), the daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragón (ruled Sicily 1468–1516; Castile 1474–1504; Aragón 1479–1516; Naples 1504–1516) and Isabella of Castile (ruled 1474–1504). Although the unfortunate Joanna became mentally disordered in the early sixteenth century and was queen in name only, she bore six children, including the future Emperor Charles V (ruled 1519–1556; Charles I of Spain 1516–1556), who continued his family's dynastic planning by marrying Isabel of Portugal (1503–1539) in 1526. Thus it was that, without major military conquests, Charles V came to inherit the Austrian and southwest German homelands of the Habsburgs, the Low Countries, Burgundy, Spain, and all the Spanish possessions (including Spain's New World colonies and the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily). In 1519, after intense lobbying, he was also elected Holy Roman emperor, bringing sovereignty over most of the German lands. Such a family empire was obviously too large to control, and Charles spent much of his life fighting the kingdom of France and the Turks in the Mediterranean. He turned his Austrian homelands over to his brother Ferdinand I (ruled 1558–1564), who pursued his own dynastic politics by marrying Anne, the daughter of Wladislav II, king of Hungary and Bohemia. Meanwhile his sister Mary married the son of Wladislav, King Louis II (ruled 1516–1526), who died childless at the battle of Mohács in 1526. This left Ferdinand I with a legitimate claim to both kingdoms, and from then until 1918 the Habsburgs were rulers of Austria, Bohemia, and those parts of Hungary not controlled by the Ottoman Turks.

What marriage could assemble, however, its failures could also destroy. This first became clear with Emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576–1612), who failed to marry and was succeeded by his brother Matthias (ruled 1612–1619). Matthias married late in life but did not have children. When Matthias died, the stage was set for a bitter controversy over succession, especially in the Bohemian lands, where the crisis marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648). Habsburg dynastic policy ran into another snag when Emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) died with no surviving male heirs in 1740. Using a "Pragmatic Sanction," he had arranged that his hereditary lands should go to his daughter, Maria Theresa (1717–1780), but this international agreement did not restrain King Frederick II of Prussia (ruled 1740–1786) from seizing Silesia and exciting the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748). Although Silesia was lost for good, Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine (Emperor Francis I, ruled 1745–1765), reestablished Habsburg rule over the Holy Roman Empire as well as in the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian hereditary lands. Thus despite dynastic crises, strategic marriages decisively shaped the history of central Europe and nowhere more than among the Habsburgs.

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