The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

Taylor, “In the Habsburg Empire peoples are a complication in the history of a dynasty ... No other family has endured so long or left so deep a mark upon Europe.” The first Habsburg king was born in 1218, exactly 700 years before the last one, the Emperor Charles, abandoned his throne. Rudolph of Habsburg was a feudal lord whose possessions amounted to a few hundred acres of wooded rolling country on the Swiss plateau, in Alsace, and southern Germany. He descended from an already ancient family whose name derived from a castle built in the eleventh century: the “Habichtsburg” or castle of the hawk. The walls of the ruined keep, six feet thick, still stand and can be visited near Zurich, in Switzerland From his ancestors — one of them was Count of Zurich — Rudolph had inherited the protectorate over the “Waldstatte,” the original Swiss cantons whose struggle against their Habsburg overlords was later dramatized in the legend of Wilhelm Tell.