Frederick III of Habsburg
Frederick III reigned for fifty-three years, the longest of any Holy Roman Emperor, and spent most of it doing nothing in particular. Born in 1415, he was elected in 1440 and crowned in Rome in 1452 — the last emperor to be crowned there by a pope, and the last to make the journey. Contemporaries found him exasperating. He was slow, indecisive, permanently short of money, and given to withdrawing to his gardens and his alchemy while his territories were raided. He lost Vienna to Matthias Corvinus of Hungary in 1485 and spent the next five years wandering among the imperial cities without a capital. His nephew Ladislaus, whose guardian he was, accused him of stealing his inheritance, and the Viennese besieged him in his own castle over it. He nonetheless achieved the one thing that mattered. He kept the crown in the family through decades in which he could not enforce anything, and he arranged the marriage that made the Habsburgs a European power — his son Maximilian to Mary of Burgundy in 1477, which brought the Netherlands, Flanders, Artois and Franche-Comté. The formula attached to him is that others make war while fortunate Austria marries. He adopted the device AEIOU, which he wrote on his books and buildings and never explained, and which is usually read as Austria's empire is last in the world or all the earth is subject to Austria. He died in 1493 after having a leg amputated. Every emperor after him but one was a Habsburg.
- Lived: 1415 CE – 1493 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
