Matthias of Habsburg
Matthias spent twenty years conspiring to take the throne from his brother and three years failing to hold it. Born in 1557, he was a younger son of the Emperor Maximilian II, and had the standard problem of Habsburg younger sons: no inheritance and no employment. He solved it in 1578 by accepting an invitation from Dutch rebels to become governor of the Netherlands, without telling his brother the emperor or the king of Spain, which was regarded as close to treason and achieved nothing. Rudolf II, his elder brother, meanwhile withdrew to Prague and stopped governing. He collected clocks, paintings, narwhal horns and astronomers — Tycho Brahe and Kepler both worked for him — suffered increasingly from what contemporaries called melancholy, and refused to make decisions or to marry. The family concluded he was incapable. Matthias secured the Habsburg archdukes' agreement in 1606 to treat him as head of the house, raised troops in 1608, and forced Rudolf to cede Hungary, Austria and Moravia. Rudolf tried to recover them with an army of mercenaries in 1611 and lost Bohemia too, and abdicated. Matthias became emperor in 1612 at fifty-five, having spent his energy on getting there. His chief minister Melchior Klesl pursued conciliation between Catholics and Protestants; the hardline archdukes led by Ferdinand had Klesl arrested in 1618. The Bohemian nobles threw royal officials out of a window in Prague that May. Matthias died in March 1619, seven months into the Thirty Years' War. The war he failed to prevent lasted thirty years and killed perhaps a third of the population of Germany.
- Lived: 1557 CE – 1619 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state
