Free Republic

The young Archduchess of Austria has married her Belgian racing driver boyfriend in a small civil ceremony in Monaco, it has been reported. Eleonore von Habsburg, 26, whose full title is Archduchess of Austria, Royal Princess of Hungary, Bohemia and Croatia, tied the knot with Formula E racer Jérôme d’Ambrosio, 34, on Monday at a registry office, according to Hello! magazine.

Joseph Haydn was born on March 31st, 1732 in the village of Rohrau in Lower Austria, a province of the Habsburg empire. This was arguably the most multinational, multicultural, multilingual and generally diverse great power that Europe had ever seen. Its then ruler, Charles VI, held sway over a great conglomeration of territories stretching from Ostend to Belgrade and from Prague to Palermo. It included all or part of the following present-day countries: Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. As Sir Harold Temperley observed, the Habsburg monarchy was not...

For most of this century, the Hapsburg dynasty has been about as popular as a pork sandwich in a mosque among the intelligentsia. This fact has influenced a great many of the attitudes prevailing in our mass media and what passes for our education system. Thousands of Australians will possess vivid memories of a school textbook that dominated our history lessons: Cyrus Leo Sulzber's(1) Fall of eagles'. Mr Sulzberger, as the very phrase 'fall of eagles' suggests, disliked the Habsburgs even more than the Hohenzollerns and the Romanovs, the other two objects of his wrath. The book is a hymn...

Back in the days of the Hapsburg Empire, there was a town in Bohemia called Budweis. The people in that town were called Budweisers and the town had a brewery which produced beer with the same name -- but different from the American Budweiser. Like many communities in Bohemia during that era, Budweis had people of both Czech and German ancestries, speaking different languages, though many were also bilingual. They got along pretty well and most people there thought of themselves as Budweisers, rather than as Czechs or Germans. But that would later change -- for the worse -- not...