Leopold I of Habsburg
Leopold I reigned for forty-seven years, was trained for the church rather than the throne, and left the Habsburgs a great power. Born in 1640, he was a younger son intended for a bishopric, and was educated in theology and music; he composed all his life and left a considerable body of sacred and dramatic work. His elder brother died of smallpox in 1654, and he became emperor in 1658 at eighteen, after an election in which France spent heavily against him. He was cautious, devout, personally unimpressive and remarkably persistent, and he spent his entire reign fighting on two fronts. In the west, Louis XIV took Alsace, Strasbourg, and whatever the French courts of reunion awarded him, and Leopold fought the Dutch War, the Nine Years' War and finally the War of the Spanish Succession over his own family's claim to Madrid. In the east, the Ottomans besieged Vienna in 1683 with some 150,000 men while he withdrew to Passau, and the city was relieved by a Polish and German army under Jan Sobieski in September — the last Ottoman attempt on central Europe. The counteroffensive that followed was the making of his monarchy: Buda taken in 1686, Hungary reconquered by 1699 after 150 years, Transylvania acquired, and the Hungarian crown made hereditary in his house. He also expelled the Jews of Vienna in 1670 and persecuted Hungarian Protestants hard enough to produce a permanent insurgency. He died in 1705. The reign is the hinge of Habsburg history. Austria entered it as a threatened German dynasty and left it as a Danubian monarchy with Hungary, Transylvania and a claim on Italy, which is the state that survived until 1918.
- Lived: 1640 CE – 1705 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, military_leader
