The oldest spelling anyone has found is Havichsberch, in a document of 1108. That can be read as the hawk — or it can be read from hab, an old word for a ford.

And there is the joke, which is the real reason the argument matters. A hawk's castle is a piece of noble leisure: a nobleman, a bird, a hill, a whim. A ford castle is a toll booth. It sits above a river crossing and it takes a cut of everything that passes.

Philologists have gone round this for two centuries without settling it, so the family cannot prove it was the romantic one — and, on the evidence of how these counts actually operated for the next three hundred years, the toll booth is the safer bet.

Where this comes from: the 1108 spelling is in the charter that also carries the first person ever called “of Habsburg”. The etymology is unresolved in the specialist literature and the family's own live pages already say historians cannot confirm which reading is right.

It was written partly as an opinion on inheritance, at a moment when the male line looked likely to die out. The abbey had an interest in who its lands would pass to, and it set the family's descent down on parchment while there was still somebody to write it about.

That is a far better sentence than “written a century later”: a real monastery, a real legal purpose, real institutional memory.

The other charter usually cited beside it, the so-called Testament of Wernher, is a forgery of about 1085 dressed up as a charter of 1027.

Where this comes from: the Acta Murensia survives in the Aargau state archive. The inheritance-opinion reading and the dating of the Wernher charter are both settled points in the specialist literature.

It is a devotional set-piece of a kind that attaches itself to pious rulers all over medieval Europe, and it was recorded and amplified across centuries until it became a standard item of the family's public character.

Painters loved it. There is a version by Rubens and Jan Wildens in the Prado, another by Franz Pforr in 1810, another by Johann Peter Krafft. A story painted that often has usually been doing a job.

What survives the scepticism is the reputation underneath it: Rudolf's plain manners and his sense of humour are accepted, and they are consistent with how he presented himself. He was elected precisely because he was not frightening.

Where this comes from: the anecdote is a recurring topos in the literature on Habsburg piety; the paintings are catalogued and datable. A kernel is plausible; the polish is certain.

Emperor Charles IV did not simply refuse them. He sent them to Petrarch. The greatest scholar in Europe read the file and declared them forgeries, and the recognition never came.

And then the remarkable part. The invented title stuck anyway. Archduke passed into general use in the family through the fifteenth century, and in 1453 Frederick III — a Habsburg emperor — formally validated the rank his ancestor had made up.

A study published in 2025 revisits the dating and argues the forgery was spotted almost at once, and that Petrarch may not even have been the first to notice.

This is on the site because it is true, and because a family history that only prints the flattering documents is not worth reading.

Where this comes from: the Privilegium Maius is one of the best-documented forgeries of the European Middle Ages. Petrarch's judgement, the refusal of recognition and the 1453 validation are all in the standard accounts; the 2025 redating appeared in the Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung.

That is the whole answer, and it has survived every attempt to improve on it.

A note in his notebook, written in a later hand and not by him, glosses it as Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan — all the earth is subject to Austria — or the Latin equivalent. It is the reading everyone repeats. It is also somebody else's guess, written down after the fact.

Dozens of other expansions have been proposed over five hundred years. The standard scholarly treatment, published in 1952, examines the notebook and leaves the question open, which is where it remains.

Frederick's reputation is for slowness. The settled judgement of historians is that he overcame his opponents mainly by outliving them. A man who kept a private joke going for half a millennium after his death is not, on reflection, slow.

Where this comes from: Alphons Lhotsky's study of the device and Frederick's notebook, MIÖG 60 (1952), remains the reference.

Maximilian I planned forty large bronzes and a hundred statuettes. Eleven were finished when he died in 1519. Twenty-eight survive.

He is not in the tomb because he asked to be buried at Wiener Neustadt, and he is. The church at Innsbruck was built by his grandson Ferdinand I, finished around 1553, because the monument had become far too heavy to move to where the man actually lies.

So the greatest memorial the family ever commissioned stands in the wrong town, around an empty cenotaph, unfinished — and it is still one of the most extraordinary rooms in Europe.

Where this comes from: the emptiness of the cenotaph and the burial at Wiener Neustadt are established fact; the figures for the planned and surviving bronzes are the standard ones.

His confessor, Gregor Reisch, disobeyed him.

He put a rosary in the emperor's hand instead, and that was the end of it.

The instructions are genuine and well documented. The penance never happened. A man who had spent his life curating his own memory — the illustrated autobiographies, the hundred bronzes, the whole vast machinery of being remembered — wrote a final scene of total self-abasement, and the priest at his bedside decided, on the spot and on his own authority, that it was not going to be performed.

Where this comes from: the instructions and the confessor's substitution are both documented, and were set out in the scholarship around the Metropolitan Museum's 2019 exhibition on Maximilian.

The marriages were real and they were shrewd. But the inheritances landed on Charles because of a run of early deaths nobody could have planned — and this family fought a very great many wars regardless, before, during and after.

Historians now read the verse as an elegant simplification of a strategy that depended heavily on luck and on force as well as on matchmaking.

It is quoted here anyway, because it is a marvellous line and because the family has been happily repeating it for four hundred years without checking.

Where this comes from: the verse is genuinely early and genuinely famous; the modern assessment of it as simplification is the standard one.

The medically favoured explanation is an infectious fever — typhoid or plague — and plague was active in Burgos in 1505 and 1506. His modern biographer favours plague.

The poisoning rumour started immediately, for the obvious reason: Ferdinand of Aragon was the political beneficiary of his son-in-law's death, and everybody could see it. Philip's own physician heard the rumours at the time and dismissed them. Nothing has substantiated them since.

The cold water survives because it is the kind of detail that sounds like an eyewitness. It may even have happened. It just did not cause anything.

Where this comes from: Jean-Marie Cauchies, Philippe le Beau (Brepols, 2003), and the contemporary testimony of Philip's physician Luigi Marliano.

The modern archival work on Juana — drawing on the Burgundian records in Brussels, Ghent and Lille — argues that her incapacity was substantially a political construction. Her father Ferdinand, her husband Philip and her son Charles each ruled in her name, and each of them needed her to be incapable.

On the famous coffin: only one chronicler describes her opening it. And the reading that fits the evidence is not morbid obsession but dynastic anxiety — confirming that the body was still present, on a journey whose entire purpose was to get it to Granada for burial.

The image everybody carries is largely a creation of the nineteenth century: Pradilla's enormous painting of 1877, a hit play, and the films that followed it.

There is no modern clinical verdict, and the honest position is that there cannot be one. What the archives support is a woman who was sane enough to be a threat, and was neutralised.

Where this comes from: Bethany Aram, Juana the Mad: Sovereignty and Dynasty in Renaissance Europe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

A requiem mass genuinely was held, with a catafalque, as for the dead, and the household genuinely was in mourning. That much is documented.

The theatrical part — the emperor lying in the box — is not. The modern study of the Yuste and Brussels ceremonies concludes there was no such performance.

The lurid version comes from one Hieronymite prior, and it was already being doubted in the sixteenth century by a chronicler who knew the house. It reached the English-speaking world in the nineteenth century, and it has never left.

A note this site owes the reader. One of the books that carried the story furthest was written by William Stirling-Maxwell — the same scholar whose enormous life of Don John of Austria is the backbone of this website's research. Being right about one thing and wrong about another is the ordinary condition of everybody who writes history, including whoever is writing this.

Where this comes from: F. J. Campos y Fernández de Sevilla, “Exequias privadas y funerales de Estado por Carlos I/V: Yuste y Bruselas (1558)”, Boletín de Arte 22 (2001).

The court is real and the menagerie is real — there are documented compensation payments to people the animals attacked, which tells you something about how it was run. Rudolf's patronage of Tycho Brahe and Kepler is real, and so are the alchemists.

The shared horoscope is not documented anywhere contemporary. It is a good story that has been repeated for four centuries, and nobody has produced the source.

One small correction while we are here, because it circulates everywhere: the lion was not called Ottakar. The sources that name him at all call him Oskar, or Mohamed. Ottakar appears to be somebody's slip, endlessly copied.

Where this comes from: R. J. W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World (Oxford, 1973) for the court; the horoscope legend is traced in the popular literature and rests on nothing earlier.

The earliest telling anyone has found is in the White Book of Sarnen, written around 1470. The cruel-bailiff framing hardened into national history in the nineteenth century, when Switzerland needed it.

Swiss scholarship itself moved on long ago from the arch-enemy version to something plainer: a long struggle for supremacy between the Confederate towns and this family, which this family lost. Morgarten in 1315, Sempach in 1386 where Duke Leopold III was killed in the field, Näfels in 1388, and in 1415 the Aargau itself — gone within a fortnight. The claims were formally given up in 1474 and were never pursued again.

We have no quarrel with the Swiss about any of this. It is their founding story, it belongs to them, and a family does not get to edit somebody else's national myth because it comes off badly in it. We note only what the sources say, and when they start saying it.

The family's oldest ground is Swiss ground. It is beautifully kept, and anyone can walk up to it.

Where this comes from: the White Book of Sarnen, c. 1470; and the modern Swiss historiography of the Confederation's origins.