From Spear's Magazine:
How the Habsburg dynasty stayed so powerful for so long
A history of the Habsburg family – one of Europe’s great dynasties – reveals the machinations required to keep a family on top
The first of the Habsburgs who can be identified was Kanzelin, a count in the Swiss Aargau, who died circa 990, while the last to wield power as a crowned ruler was Emperor Karl, who was ushered out of Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace in November 1918 by another Karl, Austrian socialist leader Karl Renner, with the words: ‘Herr Habsburg, the taxi is waiting.’
Initially their income derived from tolls levied at bridge crossings and fines and confiscations imposed as punishments for theft and violence. From this they acquired a patchwork of landholdings. Martyn Rady, a sure guide to this extraordinary dynasty, argues that their success over time owed much to ‘genealogical endurance’ and what he calls ‘the Fortinbras effect’. You may remember that Prince of Fortinbras of Norway turns up at the end of Hamlet to claim the vacant throne of Denmark, a claim based on ‘some rights of memory’.
The Habsburgs intermarried with other noble families and when these other families had died out in the male line, they swept up the leavings. ‘Generation after generation, they produce heirs; if sons were missing, then cousins and nephews were always at hand,’ Rady explains. ‘With longevity came the opportunity to take the wealth of the less enduring families into which they had married.’
Thus, Count Rudolf of Habsburg (lived 1218-91), whose mother was a Kiburg, took the large part of the Kiburg patrimony when their male line expired. As the most powerful family in the duchy of Swabia, they set their sights on the Holy Roman Empire. Rudolf captured lands in Austria and became king of Bohemia, but the title of emperor eluded him. The Habsburgs then went into a temporary decline.....MUCH MORE
A bold stroke was required and it was this: they decided ‘to jettison their Swabian past and became instead Austrians and Romans’. It was another Rudolf of Habsburg (1339-65) who restored the family’s fortunes ‘with an energy, pace, and imagination that belied his youth and confounded his rivals’....
