French Kings, Louis III, Louis IV

LOUIS III
Louis III (863/65 – 5 August 882) was the king of West Francia from 879 until his death in 882. The eldest son of king Louis the Stammerer and his first wife Ansgarde of Burgundy, he succeeded his father and ruled jointly with his younger brother Carloman II, who became sole ruler after Louis's death. Louis's short reign was marked by military success.

Louis III

Louis was born while his father was King of Aquitaine and his grandfather Charles the Bald was ruling West Francia. Some doubts were raised about his legitimacy, since his parents had married secretly and Ansgarde was later repudiated at Charles' insistence.

When Charles died in 877 and then Louis the Stammerer died two years later, some Frankish nobles advocated electing Louis as the sole king, but another party favoured each brother ruling a separate part of the kingdom. In September 879 Louis was crowned at Ferrières Abbey.

In March 880 at Amiens the brothers divided their father's kingdom, Louis receiving the northern part, called Neustria or sometimes simply Francia. Duke Boso, one of Charles the Bald's most trusted lieutenants renounced his allegiance to both brothers and was elected King of Provence.

Louis III

In the summer of 880 Carloman II and Louis III marched against him and captured Mâcon and the northern part of Boso's kingdom. They united their forces with those of their cousin Charles the Fat, then ruling East Francia and Kingdom of Italy, and unsuccessfully besieged Vienne from August to November.

In 881 Louis III achieved a momentous victory against Viking riders, whose invasions had been ongoing since his grandfather's reign, at the Battle of Saucourt-en-Vimeu. Within a year of the battle an anonymous poet celebrated it and the king, for both his prowess and piety in a short poem Ludwigslied composed in the Old High German.

Louis III died on 5 August 882 at Saint-Denis in the centre of his realm, having hit his head and fallen from his horse while chasing a girl with amorous intent. He hit the lintel of a door with his head while mounting his horse and fractured his cranium on impact, which led to his death. Since he had no children, his brother Carloman II became the sole king of West Francia and the victor of Saucourt was buried in the royal mausoleum of the Basilica of St Denis.

LOUIS IV
Louis IV (September 920 / September 921 – 10 September 954), called d'Outremer or Transmarinus (both meaning "from overseas"), reigned as king of West Francia from 936 to 954.

Louis IV

 A member of the Carolingian dynasty, he was the only son of king Charles the Simple and Eadgifu of Wessex, daughter of King Edward the Elder of Wessex.

His reign is mostly known thanks to the Annals of Flodoard and the later Historiae of Richerus. The only child of king Charles the Simple and his second wife Eadgifu of Wessex, Louis was born in the heartlands of West Francia's Carolingian lands between Laon and Reims in 920 or 921. From his father's first marriage with Frederuna (d. 917) he had six half-sisters and was the only male heir to the throne.After the dethronement and capture of Charles the Simple in 923, queen Eadgifu and her infant son took refuge in Wessex (for this he received the nickname of d'Outremer) at the court of her father King Edward, and after Edward's death, of her brother King Æthelstan. Young Louis was raised in the Anglo-Saxon court until his teens. During this time he enjoyed legendary stories about Edmund the Martyr, King of East Anglia, an ancestor of his maternal family who had heroically fought against the Vikings.

Louis IV

Louis became the heir to the western branch of the Carolingian dynasty after the death of his captive father in 929, and in 936 was recalled from Wessex by the powerful Hugh the Great, Margrave of Neustria, to succeed the Robertian king Rudolph who had died. Once he took the throne, Louis wanted to free himself from the tutelage of Hugh the Great, who, with his title of Duke of the Franks was the second most powerful man after the King.

In 939 the young monarch attempted to conquer Lotharingia; however, the expedition was a failure and his brother-in-law, king Otto I of East Francia counterattacked and besieged the city of Reims in 940. In 945, following the death of William I Longsword, Duke of Normandy, Louis tried to conquer his lands, but was kidnapped by the men of Hugh the Great. The Synod of Ingelheim in 948 allowed the excommunication of Hugh the Great and released Louis from his long tutelage. From 950 Louis gradually imposed his rule in the northeast of the kingdom, building many alliances (especially with the Counts of Vermandois) and under the protection of the Ottonian kingdom of East Francia.

Louis I, the Pious, Louis II

LOUIS I
Louis the Pious (778 – 20 June 840), also called the Fair, and the Debonaire, was the King of Aquitaine from 781. He was also King of the Franks and co-Emperor (as Louis I) with his father, Charlemagne, from 813. As the only surviving adult son of Charlemagne and Hildegard, he became the sole ruler of the Franks after his father's death in 814, a position which he held until his death, save for the period 833–34, during which he was deposed.

During his reign in Aquitaine, Louis was charged with the defence of the empire's southwestern frontier. He conquered Barcelona from the Muslims in 801 and asserted Frankish authority over Pamplona and the Basques south of the Pyrenees in 812. As emperor he included his adult sons, Lothair, Pepin, and Louis, in the government and sought to establish a suitable division of the realm among them. The first decade of his reign was characterised by several tragedies and embarrassments, notably the brutal treatment of his nephew Bernard of Italy, for which Louis atoned in a public act of self-debasement.

Boy King Louis I

In the 830s his empire was torn by civil war between his sons, only exacerbated by Louis's attempts to include his son Charles by his second wife in the succession plans. Though his reign ended on a high note, with order largely restored to his empire, it was followed by three years of civil war. Louis is generally compared unfavourably to his father, though the problems he faced were of a distinctly different sort. While at his villa of Doué-la-Fontaine, Anjou, Louis received news of his father's death. He rushed to Aachen and crowned himself emperor to shouts of Vivat Imperator Ludovicus by the attending nobles.

From start of his reign, his coinage imitated his father Charlemagne's portrait, which gave it an image of imperial authority and prestige. He quickly sent all of his unmarried sisters to nunneries, to avoid any possible entanglements from overly powerful brothers-in-laws. Sparing his illegitimate half-brothers, he forced his father's cousins, Adalard and Wala to be tonsured, placing them in Noirmoutier and Corbie, respectively, despite the latter's initial loyalty.

His chief counsellors were Bernard, margrave of Septimania, and Ebbo, Archbishop of Reims. The latter, born a serf, was raised by Louis to that office, but betrayed him later. He retained some of his father's ministers, such as Elisachar, abbot of St. Maximin near Trier, and Hildebold, Archbishop of Cologne. Later he replaced Elisachar with Hildwin, abbot of many monasteries. He also employed Benedict of Aniane (the Second Benedict), a Septimanian Visigoth and monastic founder, to help him reform the Frankish church. One of Benedict's primary reforms was to ensure that all religious houses in Louis' realm adhered to the Rule of Saint Benedict, named for its creator, Benedict of Nursia (480–550), the First Benedict.

King Louis I

In 816, Pope Stephen IV, who had succeeded Leo III, visited Reims and again crowned Louis (Sunday 5 October). The Emperor thereby strengthened the papacy by recognising the importance of the pope in imperial coronations.

Louis fell ill soon after his final victorious campaigns and went to his summer hunting lodge on an island in the Rhine, by his palace at Ingelheim. On 20 June 840, he died, at the old age of 62, in the presence of many bishops and clerics and in the arms of his half-brother Drogo, though Charles and Judith were absent in Poitiers.

Soon dispute plunged the surviving brothers into a civil war that was only settled in 843 by the Treaty of Verdun, which split the Frankish realm into three parts, to become the kernels of France and Germany, with Burgundy and the Low Countries between them. The dispute over the kingship of Aquitaine was not fully settled until 860. Louis was buried in the Abbey of Saint-Arnould in Metz.

LOUIS II
Louis the Stammerer (French: Louis le Bègue) (1 November 846 – 10 April 879) was the King of Aquitaine and later the King of West Francia. He was the eldest son of emperor Charles the Bald and Ermentrude of Orléans. Louis the Stammerer was physically weak and outlived his father by only two years. He succeeded his younger brother Charles the Child as the ruler of Aquitaine in 866 and his father in West Francia in 877, but he was never crowned Emperor. In the French monarchial system, he is considered Louis II.

King Louis II

Louis was crowned king on 8 October 877 by Hincmar, archbishop of Reims, at Compiegne and was crowned a second time in August 878 by Pope John VIII at Troyes while the pope was attending a council there. The pope may have even offered him the imperial crown, but it was declined.

Louis had relatively little impact on politics. He was described "a simple and sweet man, a lover of peace, justice, and religion". In 878, he gave the counties of Barcelona, Girona, and Besalú to Wilfred the Hairy.

His final act was to march against the invading Vikings, but he fell ill and died on 9 April or 10 April 879, not long after beginning this final campaign. On his death, his realms were divided between his two sons, Carloman II and Louis III of France.

During the peace negotiations between his father and Erispoe, duke of Brittany, Louis was betrothed to an unnamed daughter of Erispoe in 856. It is not known if this was the same daughter who later married Gurivant. The contract was broken in 857 after Erispoe's murder.

Louis was married twice. His first wife Ansgarde of Burgundy had two sons: Louis (born in 863) and Carloman (born in 866), both of whom became kings of West Francia, and two daughters: Hildegarde (born in 864) and Gisela (865–884).

His second wife Adelaide of Paris had one daughter, Ermentrude (875–914) and a posthumous son, Charles the Simple, who would become, long after his elder brothers' deaths, king of West Francia.

House of Habsburg

The House of Habsburg: The House of Habsburg, also known as House of Austria, is one of the most important royal houses of Europe.

 It is best known for being an origin of all of the formally elected Holy Roman Emperors between 1438 and 1740, as well as rulers of the Austrian Empire and Spanish Empire and several other countries.

The House takes its name from Habsburg Castle, a fortress built around 1020–1030 in present day Switzerland by Count Radbot of Klettgau, who chose to name his fortress Habsburg. His grandson, Otto II, was the first to take the fortress name as his own, adding "von Habsburg" to his title. The House of Habsburg gathered dynastic momentum through the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.

By 1276, Count Radbot's seventh generation descendant, Rudolph of Habsburg, had moved the family's power base from Habsburg Castle to the Archduchy of Austria. Rudolph had become King of Germany/Holy Roman Emperor in 1273, but the dynasty of the House of Habsburg was truly entrenched in 1276 when Rudolph became sovereign ruler of Austria, which the Habsburgs ruled for the next six centuries.

A series of dynastic marriages enabled the family to vastly expand its domains, to include Burgundy, Spain, Bohemia, Hungary, and other territories into the inheritance. In the 16th century, the family separated into the senior Habsburg Spain and the junior Habsburg Monarchy branches, who settled their mutual claims in the Onate treaty.

Eisenberg Family Crest

 As a result of generations of Habsburg inbreeding, the House of Habsburg became extinct in the male line in the 18th century: The Spanish branch ended upon the death of Charles II in 1700 and was replaced by the Anjou branch of the House of Bourbon in the person of his great-nephew Philip V.

The Austrian branch went extinct in the male person in 1740 with the death of Charles VI and in the female person in 1780 with the death of his daughter Maria Theresa and was succeeded by the Vaudemont branch of the House of Lorraine in the person of her son Joseph II. The new successor house styled itself formally as House of Habsburg-Lorraine (German: Habsburg-Lothringen), although it was often referred to as simply the House of Habsburg.

The progenitor of the House of Habsburg may have been Guntram the Rich, a count in the Breisgau who lived in the 10th century, and forewith farther back as ht early medieval Adalrich, Duke of Alsace, father of the Etichonids from which Habsburg derives. His grandson Radbot, Count of Habsburg founded the Habsburg Castle, after which the Habsburgs are named.

Mohrer Family Crest

 The origins of the castle's name, located in what is now the Swiss canton of Aargau, are uncertain.

There is disagreement on whether the name is derived from the High German Habichtsburg (Hawk Castle), or from the Middle High German word "hab/hap" meaning ford, as there is a river with a ford nearby.

The first documented use of the name by the dynasty itself has been traced to the year 1108. The Habsburg Castle was the family seat in the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries.

The Habsburgs expanded their influence through arranged marriages and by gaining political privileges, especially count-ship rights in Zürichgau, Aargau and Thurgau. In the 13th century, the house aimed its marriage policy at families in Upper Alsace and Swabia.

They were also able to gain high positions in the church hierarchy for their members. Territorially, they often profited from the extinction of other noble families such as the House of Kyburg.

After the assignment, on 21 April 1521, of the Austrian lands to Ferdinand I by his brother Emperor Charles V (also King Charles I of Spain) (1516–1556), the dynasty split into the junior branch of the Austrian Habsburgs and the senior branch of the Spanish Habsburgs.

Tucher Family Crest

 The Austrian Habsburgs held the title of Holy Roman Emperor after Charles' death in 1558, as well as the Habsburg Hereditary Lands and the Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary.

The senior Spanish branch ruled over Spain, its Italian possessions and its colonial empire, the Netherlands, and, for a time (1580–1640), Portugal. Hungary was partly under Habsburg rule from 1526. For 150 years most of the country was occupied by the Ottoman Turks but these territories were re-conquered in 1683–1699.

In the secret Oñate treaty, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs settled their mutual claims. The Spanish Habsburgs died out in 1700 (prompting the War of the Spanish Succession), as did the last male of the Austrian Habsburg line in 1740 (prompting the War of the Austrian Succession), and finally the last female of the Habsburg male line in 1780.

Anund Jacob, Magnus I Olafsson

ANUND JACOB
Anund Jacob or James, Swedish: Anund Jakob was King of Sweden from 1022 until around 1050. He is believed to have been born on July 25, in either 1008 or 1010 as Jakob. When the Swedish Thing was to elect him the co-ruler of Sweden, the people objected to his non-Scandinavian name. They then gave him the pronomen Anund.

Anund Jacob

 The line of kings appended to the Westrogothic law says that he was called Kolbränna ("Coal-burner") as he had the habit of burning down the houses of his opponents.

His political agenda included maintaining the balance of power in Scandinavia, which is why he supported the Norwegian kings Olaf II and Magnus I against Denmark's king Cnut the Great during the 1020s and 1030s. At the Battle of the Helgeå, Anund and Olaf were either victorious over or defeated by Cnut.

When Magnus I became king of Norway and Denmark in 1042, Anund Jakob supported him until the death of Magnus in 1047. Anund Jakob's reign has traditionally been dated from 1022 to approximately 1050, but there is a great uncertainty over the year he died. He was probably alive 1049, and his brother and successor Emund is certain to have ruled Sweden in the summer of 1060.

According to Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth of the Swedish Academy, not long after 1024 the king (as Jakun), blind and dressed in a gold suit, led a Swedish expedition eastward to the other side of the Baltic Sea and provided military reinforcements to his brother-in-law Yaroslav I the Wise in a battle against Mstislav of Chernigov.

MAGNUS I
Magnus Olafsson (Old Norse: Magnús Óláfsson, Norwegian and Danish: Magnus Olavsson; c. 1024 – 25 October 1047), better known as Magnus the Good (Old Norse: Magnús góði, Norwegian and Danish: Magnus den gode), was the King of Norway from 1035 and King of Denmark from 1042, ruling over both countries until his death in 1047. He was an illegitimate son of Olaf II of Norway, but fled with his mother when his father was dethroned in 1028.

Magnus I Olafsson

 He returned to Norway in 1035 and was crowned king at the age of 11. In 1042, he was also crowned king of Denmark. Magnus ruled the two countries until 1047, when he died under unclear circumstances. After his death, his kingdom was split between Harald Hardrada in Norway and Sweyn Estridsson in Denmark.

Magnus was an illegitimate son of King Olaf Haraldsson (later St. Olaf), by his English concubine Alfhild, originally a slave (thrall) of Olaf's queen Astrid Olofsdotter. Born prematurely, the child was weak and unable to breathe for the first few minutes, and he was probably not expected to survive. Olaf was not present at the child's birth, and his Icelandic skald Sigvatr Þórðarson became his godfather. In a hasty baptism, Sigvatr named Magnus after the greatest king he knew of, also Olaf's greatest role model, Karla Magnus, or Charlemagne. Against the odds, Magnus went on to grow strong and healthy, and he became of vital importance to Olaf as his only son.

Olaf was dethroned by the Danish king Cnut the Great in 1028, and he went into exile with his family and court, including the young Magnus. They travelled over the mountains and through Eidskog during the winter, entered Värmland, and were given shelter by a chieftain called Sigtrygg in Närke. After a few months, they departed Närke, and by March went eastwards towards Sigtuna, where the Swedish king Anund Jacob had left them a ship. The party thereafter sailed through the Baltic Sea and into the Gulf of Finland, eventually landing in Kievan Rus' (Garðaríki).

 They made their first stop at Staraya Ladoga (Aldeigjuborg) to organise the further journey. From there they travelled southwards to Novgorod (Holmgard), where Olaf sought assistance from Grand Prince Yaroslav the Wise. Yaroslav, however, did not want to become directly involved in the Scandinavian power-struggles, and declined to help. After some time, in early 1030, Olaf learned that the Earl of Lade Håkon Eiriksson, Cnut's regent in Norway, had disappeared at sea, and gathered his men to make a swift return to Norway. Magnus was left to be fostered by Yaroslav and his wife Ingegerd.

In early 1031, a party including Magnus's uncle Harald Sigurdsson (later also to be king and then known as Harald Hardrada) arrived to report the news of his father's death at the Battle of Stiklestad. For the next few years, Magnus was educated in Old Russian and some Greek and was trained as a warrior. After Cnut's death in 1035, the Norwegian noblemen did not want to be under the oppressive rule of his son Svein and his mother Ælfgifu (known as Álfífa in Norway) any longer.

Magnus I Seal

Einar Thambarskelfir and Kalf Arnesson, who had both sought to be appointed regents under Cnut after Olaf's death in 1030 (Cnut instead appointed Svein and Ælfgifu), went together to Kievan Rus' to bring the boy back to rule as the King of Norway. After receiving the approval of Ingegerd, they returned with Magnus to Sigtuna in early 1035, and received backing from the Swedish king, brother of Magnus's stepmother Astrid. Astrid immediately became an important supporter of Magnus, and an army was gathered in Sweden, headed by Einar and Kalf, to place Magnus on the Norwegian throne.

Sweyn increased the pressure on Magnus from his base in Scania, but by late 1046, Magnus had driven Sweyn out of Denmark. However, on October 25, 1047 he died suddenly while in Denmark, either in Zealand or in Jutland, either in an accident or of a disease; accounts vary. Reports include falling overboard from one of the ships he was mustering to invade England and drowning, falling off a horse, and falling ill while on board a ship. He is said to have made Sweyn his heir in Denmark, and Harald in Norway; some say in a deathbed statement. Magnus was buried with his father in the cathedral at Nidaros, modern Trondheim.