House of Habsburg Primary Contributor: John Graham Royde-Smith ARTICLE from theEncyclopdia Britannica House of Habsburg, also spelled

Hapsburg, also called House of Austria, royal German family, one of the principal sovereign dynasties of Europe from the 15th to the 20th century.

Origins The name Habsburg is derived from the castle of Habsburg, or Habichtsburg (Hawks Castle), built in 1020 by Werner, bishop of Strasbourg, and his brother-in-law, Count Radbot, in the Aargau overlooking the Aar River, in what is now Switzerland. Radbots grandfather, Guntram the Rich, the earliest traceable ancestor of the house, may perhaps be identified with a Count Guntram who rebelled against the German king Otto I in 950. Radbots son Werner I (died 1096) bore the title count of Habsburg and was the grandfather of Albert III (died c. 1200), who was count of Zrich and landgrave of Upper Alsace. Rudolf II of Habsburg (died 1232) acquired Laufenburg and the Waldsttte (Schwyz, Uri, Unterwalden, and Lucerne), but on his death his sons Albert IV and Rudolf III partitioned the inheritance. Rudolf IIIs descendants, however, sold their portion, including Laufenburg, to Albert IVs descendants before dying out in 1408.

Austria and the rise of the Habsburgs in Germany Albert IVs son Rudolf IV of Habsburg was elected German king as Rudolf I in 1273. It was he who, in 1282, bestowed Austria and Styria on his two sons Albert (the future German king Albert I) and Rudolf (reckoned as Rudolf II of Austria). From this date the age-long identification of the Habsburgs with Austria begins (see Austria, history of). The familys custom, however, was to vest the government of its hereditary domains not in individuals but in all male members of the family in common, and, though Rudolf II renounced his share in 1283, difficulties arose again when King Albert I died (1308). After a system of condominium had been tried, Rudolf IV of Austria in 1364 made a compact with his younger brothers that acknowledged the principle of equal rights but secured de facto supremacy for the head of the house. Even so, after his death the brothers Albert III and Leopold III of Austria agreed on a partition (Treaty of Neuberg, 1379): Albert took Austria, Leopold took Styria, Carinthia, and Tirol. King Albert Is son Rudolf III of Austria had been king of Bohemia from 1306 to 1307, and his brother Frederick I had been German king as Frederick III (in rivalry or conjointly with Louis IV the Bavarian) from 1314 to 1330. Albert V of Austria was in 1438 elected king of Hungary, German king (as Albert II), and king of Bohemia; his only surviving son, Ladislas Posthumus, was also king of Hungary from 1446 (assuming power in 1452) and of Bohemia from 1453. With Ladislas the male descendants of

Albert III of Austria died out in 1457. Meanwhile the Styrian line descended from Leopold III had been subdivided into Inner Austrian and Tirolean branches. Frederick V, senior representative of the Inner Austrian line, was elected German king in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman emperor, as Frederick III, in 1452the last such emperor to be crowned in Rome. A Habsburg having thus attained the Western worlds most exalted secular dignity, a word may be said about the dynastys major titles. The imperial title at this time was, for practical purposes, hardly more than a glorification of the title of German king; and the German kingship was, like the Bohemian and the Hungarian, elective. If Habsburg was to succeed Habsburg as emperor continuously from Fredericks death in 1493 to Charles VIs accession in 1711, the principal reason was that the hereditary lands of the Habsburgs formed an aggregate large enough and rich enough to enable the dynasty to impose its candidate on the other German electors (the Habsburgs themselves had an electoral vote only in so far as they were kings of Bohemia). For the greater part of Fredericks reign it was scarcely foreseeable that his descendants would monopolize the imperial succession so long as they did. The Bohemian and Hungarian kingdoms were lost to the Habsburgs for nearly 70 years from the death of Ladislas Posthumus in 1457; the Swiss territories, lost in reality from 1315 onward (see Switzerland, history of), were finally renounced in 1474; and Fredericks control over the Austrian inheritance itself was long precarious, not only because of aggression from Hungary but also because of dissension between him and his Habsburg kinsmen. Yet Frederick, one of whose earliest acts in his capacity as emperor had been to ratify, in 1453, the Habsburgs use of the unique title of archduke of Austria (first arrogated for them by Rudolf IV in 135859), may have had some prescient aspiration toward worldwide empire for the House of Austria: the motto A.E.I.O.U., which he occasionally used, is generally interpreted as meaning Austriae est imperare orbi universo (Austria is destined to rule the world), or Alles Erdreich ist sterreich untertan (The whole world is subject to Austria). He lived long enough to see his son Maximilian make the most momentous marriage in European history (see below); and three years before his death he also saw the Austrian hereditary lands reunited when Sigismund of Tirol abdicated in Maximilians favour (1490). Before explaining what the Habsburgs owed dynastically to Maximilian, mention can be made of a physical peculiarity characteristic of the House of Habsburg from the emperor Frederick III onward: his jaw and his lower lip were prominent, a feature supposed to have been inherited by him from his mother, the Mazovian princess Cymbarka. Later intermarriage reproduced the Habsburg lip more and more markedly, especially among the last Habsburg kings of Spain.

The world power of the Habsburgs Even before Frederick IIIs time the House of Habsburg had won much of its standing in Germany and in central Europe through marriages to heiresses. Fredericks son Maximilian carried this matrimonial policy to heights of unequalled brilliance. First he himself in 1477 married the heiress of Burgundy, Charles the Bolds daughter Mary,

with the result that the House of Habsburg, in the person of their son Philip, inherited the greater part of Charles the Bolds widespread dominions: not the duchy of Burgundy itself, which the French seized, but Artois, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the County of Burgundy or Franche Comt. Secondly, though he failed after Marys death in 1482 to secure Brittany also by a similar coup (France frustrated his proxy marriage to the Breton heiress Anne), he procured Philips marriage, in 1496, to Joan, prospective heiress of Castile and Aragon: thus securing for his family not only Spain, with NaplesSicily and Sardinia, but also the immense dominions the Spaniards were about to conquer in America. Maximilians matrimonial achievements were the occasion of the famous hexameter Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry). Since Philip I of Castile died prematurely, his son was already ruler of the Burgundian heritage and of Spain when, in 1519, he succeeded Maximilian as ruler of the Habsburgs Austrian territories. In the same year he was elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V. The threat of force as well as an enormous expenditure in bribes was necessary to secure Charless election. Besides the fact that many of the German princes were reluctant to saddle themselves with so mighty a sovereign, there was the opposition of France, which saw itself already half-encircled, from the northeast clockwise to the southwest, by Charless possessions. Dating from Maximilians Burgundian marriage, antagonism between the French kings and the Habsburgs was to persist, to the progressive detriment of the latter, until the middle of the 18th century, and until the second half of the 17th the other European powers would mostly sympathize with France. The Habsburgs in the 16th century were too formidable not to provoke envy and anxiety. Charles Vs responsibilities at the time of his becoming emperor were moreover too great for one man to assume, as he himself could acknowledge: they had to be divided. By the Treaty of Brussels (1522) he assigned the Habsburg-Austrian hereditary lands to his brother, the future emperor Ferdinand I. In 1521 Ferdinand had married Anna, daughter of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; and Louis IIs untimely death in 1526, after his defeat by the Turks in the Battle of Mohcs, prompted Ferdinand to stand as candidate for his succession, to which, despite rivals, he was elected. Power and weaknessThe Habsburgs reached the zenith of their power before the end of the 16th century: the duchy of Milan, annexed by Charles V in 1535, was assigned by him to his son, the future Philip II of Spain, in 1540; Philip II conquered Portugal in 1580; and the Spanish dominions in America were ever expanding. There were, however, three faults in the power structuretwo of them historical accidents, the third an effect of the Habsburg dynastys own measures for self-preservation. In the first place, the ascendancy of Charles V coincided with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, which was to spread turmoil for decades over Europe from the Netherlands to Hungary. As Charles, from his Spanish upbringing, was imbued with ideas of Catholic uniformity and as his successors, with the exception of the enigmatic Maximilian II, sought also to realize those ideas, religious resistance to

the Habsburgs authority came to aggravate or to camouflage political resistance. At the same time, the papacy, overawed though it was by the Spanish military presence in Italy, did not always subscribe to the Habsburgs special policy for Catholicism. Secondly, Ferdinands accession to Hungary meant that the Habsburgs had to bear the brunt of the Ottoman Turkish drive from the Balkans into central Europe, just as Habsburg Spain had to confront Turkish incursions into the western Mediterranean. The great victory of Lepanto (1571), won by a Habsburg bastard, did not end these troubles, which were exploited, against the dynasty, by Hungarian dissidents and, more covertly, by France. The third flaw in the Habsburg edifice was latent in the 16th century. Mindful of what they had won by marriages, the Habsburgs sought to preclude rival dynasties from turning the tables on them by the same means: to keep their heritage in their own hands, they began to intermarry more and more frequently among themselves. The result, in a few generations, was a fatal inbreeding that brought the male line of Charles V to extinction. Bloodlines and conflictBy a series of abdications toward the end of his life Charles V transferred his Burgundian, Spanish, and Italian possessions to his son Philip II and his functions as emperor to his brother Ferdinand, who succeeded him formally as such after his death (1558). This division of the dynasty between imperial and Spanish lines was definitive: Ferdinands male descendants were Holy Roman emperors until 1740, Philips were kings of Spain until 1700. The imperial line was inevitably concerned to maintain its position in Bohemia and to assert itself against the Turks in divided Hungary, because the loss of the two kingdoms would have meant the reduction of its possessions to what the Habsburgs had had hereditarily before Frederick IIIs time (the Austrian duchies and scattered holdings in Swabia and in Alsace)a reduction that in turn would have compromised its chances of continuing to be elected to the German kingship. Philip II of Spain remained territorially the greatest sovereign in the Western world until his death in 1598; but the Revolt of the Netherlands (see Low Countries, history of), which he proved unable to subdue, was an irritation that his English and French enemies did their worst to inflame. Cooperation between imperial and Spanish Habsburgs in the 17th century failed to maintain the hegemony that the dynasty had enjoyed in the 16th. For the imperial line, religious troubles in Germany and in central Europe went on even when the domestic conflict between the insane emperor Rudolf II and his brothers was over (1612); and the Bohemian insurrection of 1618 gave rise to that chain of wars involving the Austrian Habsburgs that, because it was prolonged until 1648, is known conventionally as the Thirty Years War. For the Spanish Habsburgs, their truce of 1609 with the Dutch ended in 1621, whereupon the renewed conflict in the Netherlands became merged with the struggles of their Austrian cousins. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) finally abolished Habsburg sovereignty over the northern Netherlands, severely restricted the emperors authority over the other German princes, and transferred the Habsburg lands in Alsace to France; however, the ordinance of 1627, whereby the Bohemian crown had been converted into a hereditary one for the Habsburgs, was permitted to stand.

France from the late 1620s had made the most of the Thirty Years War to distress the Habsburgs of both lines, and peace with the imperial line did not prevent France from continuing its war against the Spanish until 1659, when by the Peace of the Pyrenees it obtained Gravelines, most of Artois, and part of Hainaut, together with some places south of Luxembourg. The next 30 years saw the end of the Habsburg dynastys claim to European hegemony in any real sense. The aggressions of Louis XIV of France, from 1667 onward, took territory after territory from the Spanish Habsburgslarge parts of Flanders, the rest of Artois, and other areas in the Netherlands, as well as the whole Franche Comt and, in 1684, the stronghold of Luxembourgand demonstrated at the same time that the imperial Habsburgs, preoccupied as they were with the Turkish assault from Hungary, could not effectively defend the German frontier west of the Rhine. After being saved from the crisis of the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, the imperial Habsburgs did indeed obtain one dynastically significant successthe conversion, in 1687, of the Hungarian crown into an hereditary one for themselvesbut by this time it was plain to Europe that the most formidable dynasty was no longer the Habsburg but the Bourbon. In the War of the Grand Alliance (168997) the rising powers that 100 years earlier had been Habsburg Spains principal enemies and feeble Frances most fluent encouragers, the Dutch and English, led those supporting the Habsburgs against Louis XIV. Apart from the Bourbon ascendancy, there was a further reason for other powers to watch with jealous solicitude over the fate of Spain. The physical debility of Charles II of Spain was such that no male heir could be expected to be born to him, and the question of his succession was one of great concern to the European powers. Up to 1699 it was understood that his crowns would pass to the electoral prince of Bavaria, Joseph Ferdinand, son of his niece Maria Antonia, daughter of the emperor Leopold I; and this arrangement was generally acceptable because, by transferring the Spanish inheritance to the Bavarian House of Wittelsbach, it would not necessarily upset the balance of power between the imperial Habsburgs and Bourbon France. In 1699, however, when Joseph Ferdinand died, the moribund Charles IIs next natural heirs were the descendants (1) of his half-sister, who had married Louis XIV of France, and (2) of his fathers two sisters, of whom one had been Louis XIVs mother and the other the emperor Leopold Is. Critical tension developed: on the one hand neither the imperial Habsburgs nor their British and Dutch friends could consent to their Bourbon enemys acquiring the whole Spanish inheritance; on the other neither Bourbon France nor its British and Dutch enemies wanted to see an imperial Habsburg reunite in one pair of hands most of what the emperor Charles V had had in 1519. Charles II in the meantime regarded any partition of his inheritance as a humiliation to Spain: dying in 1700, he named as his sole heir a Bourbon prince, Philip of Anjou, the second of Louis XIVs grandsons. The War of the Spanish Succession ensued.

The Habsburg succession in the 18th century To allay British and Dutch misgivings, Leopold I and his elder son, the future emperor Joseph I, in 1703 renounced their own claims to Spain in favour of Josephs brother

Charles, so that he might found a second line of Spanish Habsburgs distinct from the imperial; but when Joseph I died, leaving only daughters, in 1711, and was succeeded by his brother as emperor (Charles VI) and as ruler of the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian lands, the British and the Dutch lost interest in making him king of Spain and together began serious negotiations with France. Their Treaties of Utrecht (1713), which recognized the Bourbon accession to Spain and to Spanish America, virtually forced the hand of the reluctant Charles, who made peace with France by the Treaty of Rastatt in 1714: out of the whole inheritance of the Spanish Habsburgs, he had finally to content himself with the southern Netherlands and with the former Spanish possessions on the mainland of Italy, together with Mantua (annexed by him in 1708) and Sardinia. Sardinia, however, was exchanged by him in 1717 for Sicily, which the peacemakers of Utrecht had assigned to the House of Savoy. With characteristic obstinacy, Charles remained technically at war with Bourbon Spain until 1720, when an armistice was declared (formal recognition of the Bourbon accession came only in 1725). Meanwhile the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs male line and the death of his brother Joseph left Charles, in 1711, as the last male Habsburg. He had therefore to consider what should happen after his death. No woman could rule the Holy Roman Empire, and furthermore the Habsburg succession in some of the hereditary lands was assured only to the male line. In order, therefore, to secure the indivisibility of his Habsburg inheritance he issued his famous Pragmatic Sanction of April 19, 1713, prescribing that, in the event of his dying sonless, the whole inheritance should pass (1) to a daughter of his, according to the rule of primogeniture, and thence to her descendants; next (2) if he himself left no daughter, to his late brothers daughters, under the same conditions; and finally (3) if his nieces line was extinct, to the heirs of his paternal aunts. The attempt to win general recognition for his Pragmatic Sanction was Charles VIs main concern from 1716 onward (his baby son died in that year). By 1738, at the end of the War of the Polish Succession (in which he lost both Naples and Sicily to a Spanish Bourbon but got Parma and Piacenza for the Habsburgs in compensation), he seemed to have won his point: Saxony, Bavaria (grudgingly and with an express reservation), Spain, Russia, Prussia, Hanover-England, and finally France (with a reservation about third-party rights) had all, in one way or another, acknowledged the Pragmatic Sanction. His hopes were illusory: less than two months after his death, in 1740, his daughter Maria Theresa had to face a Prussian invasion of Silesia, which unleashed the War of the Austrian Succession. Bavaria then promptly challenged the Habsburg position in Germany; and Frances support of Bavaria encouraged Saxony to follow suit and Spain to try to oust the Habsburgs from Lombardy. Great Britain came, late enough, to support Maria Theresa rather out of hostility toward France than out of loyalty to the Pragmatic Sanction.

HabsburgLorraine The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa most of Silesia, part of Lombardy, and the duchies of Parma and Piacenza (Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748) but left her in possession of the rest of her fathers hereditary lands. Moreover, her husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, who in 1737 had become hereditary grand duke

of Tuscany, was finally recognized as Holy Roman emperor, with the title of Francis I. He and his descendants, of the House of HabsburgLorraine, are the dynastic continuators of the original Habsburgs. The peace of 1748 did not last long. Prussia was not satiated by the seizure of Silesia from the Habsburgs, and they in turn were even more determined to recover Silesia than anxious to ensure the protection of their outlying possessions in the Netherlands against the continuing danger of French attack. The so-called Diplomatic Revolution, which preceded the Seven Years War of 175663, was the product, basically, of these situations: finding that their former British friends were more interested in conciliating Prussia than in abetting Austro-Russian plans for destroying it, the Habsburgs played their part in the reversal of alliances by achievingwithout territorial profita reconciliation with France, hitherto their longest-standing enemy. An Austro-French entente was subsequently maintained until 1792: the marriage of the archduchess Marie-Antoinette to the future Louis XVI of France (1770) was intended to confirm it. To secure their imperial status in Germany against Prussian enterprises, the Habsburgs exerted themselves to consolidate and to expand their central European bloc of territory. For this purpose Tuscany and the Netherlands were practically irrelevant. Tuscany in fact was kept separate from the ancient Habsburg inheritance: when the emperor Francis I died (1765), his eldest son, the emperor Joseph II, became coregent with his mother of the Austrian dominions, but Josephs brother Leopold became grand duke of Tuscany; and similarly when Leopold succeeded to Josephs titles (1790), his own second son succeeded to Tuscany as Ferdinand III. Thereafter the Tuscan branch of the Habsburgs remained distinct from the senior or imperial line. The northeastward expansion of Habsburg central Europe, which came about in Joseph IIs time, was a result not so much of Josephs initiative as of external events: the First Partition of Poland (1772), which gave him Galicia and Lodomeria, was a RussoPrussian arrangement disgusting to his conscientious mother, who remembered Silesia; and his subsequent acquisition of Bukovina (1775), geopolitically logical though it was as bridging a gap between his Transylvanian and his new Galician lands, was a side effect of the Russo-Turkish Treaty of Kk Kaynarca (1774). Joseph II was considerably more interested in westward expansion, over Bavaria, which would have both strengthened his western frontier strategically and enhanced his status among the German princes politically. Prussias forceful opposition, however, reduced his gains in the War of the Bavarian Succession to the Innviertel (1779) and frustrated his plan for ceding the Netherlands to the House of Wittelsbach in exchange for Bavaria five years later (1784). The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars brought a kaleidoscopic series of changes. Three were clearly significant for the future of the House of Habsburg: (1) the formal dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, in anticipation of which Leopold IIs successor Francis II had in 1804 begun to style himself hereditary emperor of Austria, a title that, as Francis I, he could retain come what might; (2) the definitive renunciation of the southern Netherlands by the Habsburgs in 1797; and (3) the awakening of the spirit of nationalism in the modern sense.

On Napoleons downfall the Congress of Vienna (181415) inaugurated the Restoration, from which the battered House of Habsburg naturally benefitted. Francis I of Austria recovered Lombardy (lost in 1797), Venetia and Dalmatia (both of them acquired in 1797 but lost in 1809), and Tirol (lost also in 1809); Ferdinand III of Tuscany recovered his grand duchy; another Habsburg was recognized as sovereign duke of Modena, because his father, a brother of the Holy Roman emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, had in 1771 married the heiress of the House of Este; and Napoleons Habsburg consort, Marie Louise, received the duchies of Parma and Piacenza for her lifetime (after which they were to revert to the Bourbons). The territory of Salzburg, which the Habsburgs had acquired in 1803 but lost to Bavaria in 1809, was finally restored to Austria in 1816. Though the Congress of Vienna did not restore Austrian rule over Western Galicia (the Habsburgs share under the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, lost likewise in 1809), a small part of that area, namely the territory of Cracow, was annexed by Austria in 1846. The history of the House of Habsburg for the century following the Congress of Vienna is inseparable from that of the Austrian Empire, a bastion of monarchical conservatism that the forces of nationalismGerman, Italian, Hungarian, Slav, and Romanian gradually eroded. The first territorial losses came in 1859, when Austria had to cede Lombardy to SardiniaPiedmont, nucleus of the emergent kingdom of Italy, and could do nothing to prevent the same power from dispossessing the Habsburgs of Tuscany and of Modena. Next, the Seven Weeks War of 1866, in which Prussia, exploiting German nationalism, was in alliance with Italy, forced Austria both to renounce its hopes of reviving its ancient hegemony in Germany and to cede Venetia. After this disaster the Habsburg emperor Francis Joseph took a step intended to consolidate his multinational empire: in 1867, to conciliate Hungary, he granted to that kingdom equal status with the Austrian Empire in what was henceforth to be the Dual Monarchy of AustriaHungary. The result, however, was that the Magyars, jealous of their unique parity with the Germans and of their superiority over the non-Magyar peoples of their kingdom, rejected any suggestion of conciliating the Slavs and the Romanians of the Dual Monarchy by similar measures. The ardent German nationalists of the Austrian Empire, as opposed to the Germans who were simply loyal to the Habsburgs, took the same attitude as did the Magyars. Remote from Austrias national concerns but still wounding to the House of Habsburg was the fate of Francis Josephs brother Maximilian: set up by the French as emperor of Mexico in 1864, he was executed by a Mexican firing squad in 1867. No less grievous to the dynasty and of more concern to AustriaHungary was the suicide of the crown prince Rudolf in 1889, though his fitness for the imperial and royal succession was questionable; and the scandalous misconduct of certain archdukes and archduchesses, in the imperial and in the Tuscan lines alike, further impaired the Habsburgs personal prestige. The assassination of Francis Josephs Wittelsbach consort Elizabeth in 1898 was to be followed in less than two decades by an assassination of far greater consequence. In 1878 Austro-Hungarian forces had occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina, which belonged to declining Turkey. In 1908 that territory had been formally annexed to

AustriaHungary, in a manner that was outrageous not only to Serbia (which coveted Bosnia for itself) but also to Serbias patron, Russia. Visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, in 1914, the archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Dual Monarchy (and incidentally legatee, from 1875, of the rights of the House of Austria Este to Modena), was shot to death by a nationalist Serb. A month later the First World War was beginning. World War I led to the dismemberment of the Habsburg Empire. While Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians, Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Italians were all claiming their share of the spoil, nothing remained to Charles, the last emperor and king, but German Austria and Hungary proper. On November 11, 1918, he issued a proclamation recognizing Austrias right to determine the future form of the state and renouncing for himself any share in affairs of state, and on November 13 he issued a similar proclamation to Hungary. Even so, he did not abdicate his hereditary titles either for himself or for the Habsburg dynasty. Consequently the national assembly of the Austrian Republic passed the Habsburg Law of April 3, 1919, banishing all Habsburgs from Austrian territory unless they renounced all dynastic pretensions and loyally accepted the status of private citizens. In Hungary, however, the collapse of the republican regime at the end of 1919 raised strong royalist hopes of a Habsburg restoration, and after the conclusion of the Treaty of Trianon (June 1920) Charles twice tried to return (March and October 1921). Under pressure from the other European powers, especially those of the Little Entente (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Romania), the Hungarian parliament on November 3, 1921, decreed the abrogation of Charless sovereign rights and of the Pragmatic Sanction. Habsburg property rights in Austria, forfeited under the law of 1919, were restored in 1935 but withdrawn again by the German chancellor Adolf Hitler in 1938. After World War II the Allied Control Council in Austria in January 1946 declared that it would support the Austrian government in measures to prevent any return of the Habsburgs, and the law of 1919 was written into the Austrian State Treaty of 1955. In June 1961 the Austrian government rejected an application by the archduke Otto, head of the House of Habsburg, to be allowed to return to Austria as a private citizen, but in 1963 the administrative court of Austria ruled that Ottos application was legal. Because of Socialist opposition to his return, however, he was not granted a visa until June 1966 after the Peoples Party had won a majority in that years general election. Under Chancellor Bruno Kreisky (197083), tensions between the Austrian government and the Habsburgs eased, although some family members continued to demand the restitution of the Habsburg assets.