Both realms passed to his grandson and successor, Charles V, who also inherited the Spanish throne and its colonial possessions, and thus came to rule the Habsburg empire at its greatest territorial extent.

The abdication of Charles V in 1556 led to a division within the dynasty between his son Philip II of Spain and his brother Ferdinand I, who had served as his lieutenant and the elected king of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia.

[7] After 1279, the Habsburgs came to rule in the Duchy of Austria, which was part of the elective Kingdom of Germany within the Holy Roman Empire.

King Rudolf I of Germany of the Habsburg family assigned the Duchy of Austria to his sons at the Diet of Augsburg (1282), thus establishing the "Austrian hereditary lands".

The Habsburgs grew to European prominence as a result of the dynastic policy pursued by Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

Their son, Philip the Handsome, married Joanna the Mad of Spain (daughter of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile).

At this point, the Habsburg possessions were so vast that Charles V was constantly travelling throughout his dominions and therefore needed deputies and regents, such as Isabella of Portugal in Spain and Margaret of Austria in the Low Countries, to govern his various realms.

According to the Habsburg compact of Worms (1521), confirmed a year later in Brussels, Ferdinand was made Archduke, as a regent of Charles V in the Austrian hereditary lands.

Following the Battle of Mohács (1687), in which Leopold I reconquered almost all of Ottoman Hungary from the Turks, the emperor held a diet in Pressburg to establish hereditary succession in the Hungarian kingdom.

It became extinct in the male line in 1740, but through the marriage of Queen Maria Theresa with Francis of Lorraine, the dynasty continued as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Serious attempts at centralization began under Maria Theresa and especially her son Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor in the mid to late 18th century, but many of these were abandoned following large scale resistance to Joseph's more radical reform attempts, although a more cautious policy of centralization continued during the revolutionary period and the Metternichian period that followed.

was an equal sovereign with only a personal union and a joint foreign and military policy connecting it to the other Habsburg lands.

During the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, the Austrian territories collapsed under the weight of the various ethnic independence movements that came to the fore with its defeat in World War I.