From the Encyclopedia Germanica
Otto of Graz
(b. 1301, d. 1379)
Austrian General, Archbishop of Salzburg after 1338
The third son of Gregor III, Count of Graz and patriarch of the Inner Austrian line of Habsburgs, Otto made his fortune on both paths open to third sons in feudal Europe-as a Priest and later Bishop of Graz and as a soldier for the Dukes of Styria and for his cousins the Dukes of Austria Fredrick I, Leopold I, Albert II, Rudolph IV and Albert III.
He was given a nobleman’s education in Latin, history, music, riding and war until he was twelve, when he was squired to an Hungarian Knight, whom he served until at his majority he was duly knighted by King Charles I of Hungary. He served Charles in his wars against Wallachia, a decided defeat in which Otto nevertheless displayed great personal courage and chivalry, both highly prized by the King, and King Louis IV of Germany, who connived to invade Poland and Hungary and disrupt their alliance. In this latter he attained a Captaincy by Merit, and was briefly granted a Colonelcy at the Battle of Gyor, where both Charles and Otto’s wife, Maria, were killed when the city was taken.
Now without a patron and unable to gain employ in either Hungary or the Empire, he entered the clergy and intended to join a monastery, for at the death of his beloved wife and infant daughter he took the vows of celibacy and poverty and honored them for the rest of his life. Here, however, he was helped by his cousin, Albert of Austria, then serving at the Papal Court in Avignon, who recommended he be invested as Bishop of Graz and return to his beautiful and well-missed birthplace.
From 1331 to 1336, Otto presided over his flock with great care and conviction. He reformed the local clergy and, against the opposition of the Pope, enriched the Franciscans over the other, more sumptuous orders. He was mindful of the poor of Styria and, in 1333, endowed a new orphanage in Graz and four ecclesiastical schools throughout the Duchy, including a girl’s school in Leoben. Although he was neither a student nor exponent of Italian humanism, he was an admirer and took a number of its paramount lessons to heart, above all Church reform and education. First at Graz and then in his Archdiocese, to neither of which was he ever again able to devote more than a fraction of his attention, he strove to fulfill the duty entrusted him, and was well loved among the people.
In 1336, his cousin Albert dispatched a letter to him, asking that he bend his parish and his record of war to marshal a force to march upon Vienna and deliver him upon the ducal throne. Although wary of their chances and of using an office of God to make war for personal, familial gain, he nevertheless keenly felt his obligation to Albert, who had secured his investment as Bishop of Graz, and was anyway restless for the battles of his youth. He managed to muster some ten errant Knights, most of them comrades from the campaigns of Charles I, and five hundred men at arms, which were to become the core of Albert’s army, and he marched with them to Austria where he met his cousin who had, to mutual surprise, already been granted his inheritance by the Emperor.
This, however, was a short-lived reprieve. The election of Benedict XII, a firm believer in monastic poverty, gave the Bishop of Graz wide berth to enact his more radical reforms, most especially the promotion of the Franciscans above the other orders of Styria and the requisition of Church funds and properties to advance the Habsburg cause in Germany. Further, the new Pope sanctioned a renewed campaign against Louis IV, long an enemy of Otto himself and of his cousins, and it was to Otto that Albert entrusted this duty. He was charged with raising and financing an Austrian ducal army for three seasons, including the maintenance of eighty Knights and their retainers and some two hundred war horse, and later with leading this force into Salzburg.
Initially, Albert had intended to leave the fighting of his war against the German King to the Duke of Wurrtumberg and the Princely Count of Tyrol, but so impressed was he by Otto’s showing in personal combat and his austerity and energy in organizing Austria’s regiment that he entrusted him with a Colonelcy in the opening years of the war. This choice was affirmed at the Battle of Regensbaurg, but later at Ulm Otto’s column put in no better a showing than the Duke’s. He was not present at Augsburg, nor in the Tyrol, but lifted the King’s siege of Salzburg together with the Count of Baden, and campaigned extensively to clear Imperial troops from the Danube. In 1343 and 1344 he was awarded command of the Habsburg allies and devised a brilliant campaign against Ansbach that, in the fall of 1344, forced the King to make a showing at Munich, where he was badly defeated by the Austrian Knights led in person by Otto, who captured him and his officers and the battle standards of the Empire and the Wittlesbach House.
For this, he was invested as the Archbishop of Salzburg, where he broadened his Styrian reforms throughout Austria, albeit with less success. Albert further rewarded him with the County of Graz and the castle of Hohensalzburg, for the Archbishop’s palace was not secure, neither of which he put to extensive personal use and both of which he restored to the main Habsburg line at his death. Hohensalzburg was, however, to be the staging ground of the Ducal army in the 1349 war against the King, and was often put to use for such purposes by Otto and Rudolph IV.
When Louis IV invaded the Habsburg domains, Albert appointed the Archbishop Oburst (commanding colonel) of Austria, the highest military rank then attainable and considered to be superior to that of other Colonels. He raised an army against Imperial forces, and rapidly secured the Duchy from direct attack by victories at Schwaz and Brenau. Albert then directed him to the Ostmarch, leaving the main body of the war to the allies.
Otto defeated the Bohemian King at Olmutz and Schonberg in 1350, and again at the siege of Brunn in 1351. He was preparing an invasion of Bohemia when Albert secured the Oath of Prague, affirming the King’s personal recognition of the Peace of Munich, but not binding the Kingdom to it following his death. Otto strongly disagreed with the Duke over this light peace, but was assuaged by his personal command at the Battle of Dessau, where he first demonstrated his true tactical genius and won an overwhelming victory over the Emperor, who was killed.
The Diet of Linz was satisfactory to Otto as well as Albert, and he returned to Salzburg. He was, however, now divided in his duties, and was often forced to the frontiers to settle the disputes of petty lords and repel raids by Croats and Dalmatians against Styrian towns. If this nuisance duty troubled him, he did not write of it, but is instead in this period possessed of a cheerfulness not felt since his wife’s death at Gyor. He championed the reformist faction under the Papacies of Benedict XII and Clement VI, who was less favorable, and wrote several lengthy manuals on the importance of supply and discipline in equal measure, most notably the maxim, “Do not feed a soldier better than he behaves; do not expect him to behave better than he is fed.” He deplored the decay of chivalry in Europe and wrote a hymn to John the Good of France, who returned himself to English custody when his oath was violated by his substitutes.
At Albert’s death in 1358 and the repudiation by the Duke of Saxony and German King Rudolf II of his father’s oath at Linz, Rudolph IV, Duke of Austria, recalled Otto to Vienna and ordered him to prepare a new Ducal army. In this, Rudolph was countermanded by Pope Innocent VI, who absolved the German King of his oath and even offered to crown him Emperor, were he to retake Rome for the Holy See. However, in the end Otto’s loyalties to the Habsburg dynasty and Albert’s son outweighed his ecclesiastical commitments, and under excommunication he took command of the Habsburg army.
Otto supported Rudolph’s proclamation of the Archduchy of Austria and crowned him in Salzburg, where, it was written, “neither had time even to join the feast prepared for them, but went immediately to their squires and were fitted for war.” They rode out that very night, and Otto met the Saxons and their Bohemian allies at Pilsen, where he defeated the Bohemians and was narrowly evaded by King Rudolf II. In conference at Pilsen, which he had besieged, Otto persuaded Rudolph to pursue his claim upon the Bohemian throne rather than that of Germany, which had now become politically unattainable. He was forced to abort this project temporarily, however, when the Angevin King Louis I of Poland and Hungary declared war at the side of the King of Bohemia, in exchange for concessions in Ostmark and Moravia.
Greatly outnumbered and now pressed by all sides, Otto was only mildly gratified to learn of the historic Unholy Alliance negotiated by Ludwig II and Rudolph IV between the Houses Habsburg and Hohenzollern, both of which had by then been excommunicated. The Margrave’s troops entered Bohemia and relieved Otto’s siege at Pilsen, whereupon he quit his army and rode swiftly ahead in hopes of raising a new, larger force before the Spring, when Hungarian and Polish troops would arrive in Austria.
He made quarters in the Osterich in mid-November, with some fifty Knights and his cavalry, and there he received forty thousands of silver for the training, equipping and season’s pay of both his new and his Bohemian army, a hopelessly inadequate sum which he and his Knights supplemented as best they could. Otto’s reputation now proved invaluable, and by January he had raised some four thousand men at arms and an additional five hundred light cavalry from western Hungary, which held him in high esteem. He had, then, nearly ten thousand men, of whom sixty were Knights and twelve hundred cavalry, but not the food for them or for their horses.
In desperation, Otto took the greatest risk of his career and without informing anyone, not his allies and not the Archduke, invaded Hungary on January 4th, 1361. He rapidly laid siege to Pressburg and Oldenburg, and then took his Knights and his horse into the Magyar plains, where he surprised the Hungarian army north of Budapest and utterly destroyed it, killing more than a thousand and capturing another three thousand, of whom eleven hundred horseman defected and the rest were freed, for Otto had no means to keep them. He then laid siege to Budapest, and by April, when Louis’ offensive was to commence, all three cities had fallen in surprise.
Louis, who had been at his capital in Crakow, now invaded the Ostmarch, hoping to capture Vienna and the self-styled Archduke while Otto was encamped in Hungary. Rudolph, however, had caught on to his General’s strategy, and had left Austria for Bohemia, where he took charge of one part of the Habsburg allies and marched rapidly through Moravia to cut off Louis’ wagons from Poland, which he did at the Battle of Tarnow in June of 1361. The Poles, now stranded in the Ostmark, retreated, and caught Rudolph at Kresno, destroying his army and nearly capturing the Archduke himself.
Throughout 1361, Otto laid siege and captured cities throughout Hungary, which had been left almost defenseless by Louis’ preparations and the defeat at Budapest. He was empowered in this by many towns and magnates that revolted against Angevin rule in favor of the Habsburgs, on whose behalf Otto made many unauthorized promises. By the fall of 1362, Hungary was almost wholly under the control of the Habsburgs and their partisans, and Otto dispatched to Rudolph a letter of surrender from the Diet of Hungary, convened from November 4th-11th, which dethroned Louis and offered the crown to the Archduke.
Otto made winter quarters at the castle of Pressburg, where he received alarming news of the campaign in Bohemia and the Archduke's intentions for him. Nevertheless, he set out for Bohemia in the spring and first met the Poles at Goding in Moravia. He won victories at Peraur (April 16th) and Weisskertchen (April 25th) before investing the capital of Olmutz for the months of May and June. This was in defiance of Otto's usual policy of speed and deliberation, and it may be that his fear of the Archduke's turn in favor led him to proceed more cautiously than was his preference, or it may be that he even hoped to preserve his army for a political struggle within Austria and leave the Louis to the Margrave. Whatever the case, he accepted the surrender of the City Fathers on July 3rd, and made haste for Prague.
Otto's intention was to invest the city and tempt the Poles and Bohemians into relieving it, whereupon his army would sally forth just as the Margrave struck at their flanks. This conceit, however, was not realized, as he was caught unawares by Louis at Potictka on July 7th, who repulsed him. Louis, however, foolishly proceeded to follow the Austrians into Moravia, where Otto could choose his own ground. At the Battle of Kunstalt (July 8th), Louis' army was annihilated, and in a fearsome display that would be immortalized by his men, Otto, who was six foot nine, reached from the ground where he had been unhorsed, pulled Louis down and took him as his prisoner.
Rudolph reached Czeslau Castle, where Otto had made his camp, on July 21st, and imposed upon Louis a humiliating settlement, although not as harsh as was his power at that time. He wrested from Hungary the cities of Pressburg and Oldenburg and the province of Krain, but he did not insist upon any territories in Poland nor upon the Hungarian Crown, which he had been offered by the Magnates and which neither man mentioned. On July 29th, the Peace of Czeslau was agreed, and Louis was given leave to return to Poland.
Otto was furious, for the Magnates and towns that had acclaimed the Habsburgs would now be punished severely, and their power would be broken in that country. But Rudolph, who was not Albert, gave him no leave to protest, but instead dispatched him immediately to take Prague and to finish the war with Bohemia, which occupied him for the months of August, September and October, when the Peace of Prague was signed and Rudolph revealed his motives at Czeslau. Now, with a far lesser monarch, he gave no quarter, and he demanded the King divest his own son and nominate Rudolph's (in fact the future Albert III) as his successor. He also, to ensure that he would not be betrayed as by the Duke of Saxony, stripped from the Kingdom of Bohemia the Sudentland and Moravia, which would be restored to the crown when it fell into Habsburg hands.
Otto was not present for these negotiations, but marched his tired army against Saxony and the Imperial armies at Dresden and Meissen, which he defeated, imposing upon the German King the white peace dictated by the Archduke. Now, finally, the long war of Rudolph IV was at an end in the summer of 1363, but Otto did not join his liege or return to Vienna in triumph. Instead, he disbanded his army, dismissing all talk of a coup, and retired to Salzburg, where he intended to be the very picture of a priest when the Archduke came for his head.
Rudolph, however, did not come. He quietly abolished Otto's rank of Colonel of Austria and divested him of Graz, but he took no further action but to leave the aging general in his vestments, for the victory at Kunstalt had made him enormously popular among the people and soldiers, and his chivalry and concessions made him a favorite of the nobility within and without Austria. Kunstalt was immortalized as far as Scotland and Romania, and not even Rudolph, in his pride, could ignore its renowned.
Otto spent the next two years as he expected to spend the rest of his life, as the Archbishop of Salzburg and a correspondent of Pope Urban V, who had lifted Otto's excommunication on the second day of his Papacy. The two were of like mind, and they collaborated on many projects that had been shared by Albert II, their mutual friend, chief among them Church reform. This was ultimately to prove fruitless, as was, in Urban's lifetime, the removal of the Papal See to Rome, but nonetheless the men held one another in great esteem, though they had never met, and it was at this time that Otto was made Cardinal and the Diocese of Salzburg became the most important See of ecclesiastical matters in Southern and Central Germany, being eclipsed in the Empire only by Mainz.
Rudolph II unexpectedly died in 1365, however, two years after his great victory and long before he had had an opportunity to secure the Imperial succession of his son, or even, to begin with, a son, and his brother Albert III succeeded to the Archducal throne. He was immediately banned by the King of Germany, who had demanded he renounce the Archduchy and return the Habsburgs to their titles under Albert II. Only nineteen and not particularly well-regarded by anyone, he was expected to promptly comply, but he instead recalled Otto to service, calling his brother's treatment of him shameful, and set about to secure his dominions from enemies within and without.
Now again the Colonel of Austria at sixty five, Otto was wary of yet more war and urged the young Archduke to relent, but here Albert III surprised him. He not only did not relent, but asserted his claim to the Kingdom of Bohemia and repudiated his brother's Peace of Czeslau, on the strength of the Hungarian Diet's election of Rudolph II to their throne., which under Hungary's Law was binding. He gathered to himself the traditional Habsburg allies in Wurzburg, Wurttemburg, Baden, Brandenburg, Styria and Corinthia, and he promised in correspondence to the Hungarian nobility and chief towns to honor all of the promises made by Otto in 1362.
Otto was left to raise a new army against the German King, and this he set chiefly upon his two most trusted lieutenants, the Count von Voralberg and the Hungarian born Captain Adai, who had served as his squire, stable master, supply master and first sergeant, and would ultimately be named to his Colonelcy following his death. Delegation had never been Otto’s preference and may be a first sign of his advancing years and diminishing energies, but in this instance it is safer to attribute it to a responsibility he increasingly felt to safeguard not only the present Habsburg ruler but the House and its possessions for the future. The risks that had been taken, first by Albert II and then the greater risks of his son, had imperiled the normally tranquil, even mundane fortunes of the family. And so the great General now took it upon himself to train the Generals that would come after him and to ensure, in some distant way, that the army at least would not fall away in disgrace.
Voralberg was neither a commander nor a warrior. He had few resources of his own, perhaps a greater commodity in the 14th century than either talent or courage, and was limited by obesity and cataracts in both eyes, as well as being lavish in his expenses and equally so in his demands. He was, however, as Otto often reminded Captain Adai and the successive Dukes of Austria, an invaluable asset, for his ability to charm, cajole, bargain, manipulate, extort and, when necessary, threaten nobles great and small, Knights proud and errant, monasteries of poverty and of wealth, villagers and city fathers was unequalled. Before a campaign, it was he who visited the scions of the petite Habsburg, the Abbots and the Bishops, the landholders and the towns, to remind them of their patriotic duty, their filial commitments and their spiritual responsibilities. It was he who ambled about the camp, collecting donations from the Knights that their great Oburst would never think to ask of them on top of their toil and their blood. And when the campaign set out, he negotiated their supplies with the farms, estates and villages lucky enough to be along their march, and he negotiated the surrender of their enemies. He was also, although it was never officially confirmed outside the Archduke’s very small circle, the army’s, and then the dynasty’s, spymaster. He had come to serve the Cardinal in Rudolph’s War, and served him, with information, after his return to Salzburg, when he was already forty four. He would, however, outlive Otto, Adai, then only twenty-nine, and indeed Albert III, to be so well over one hundred that he was suspected of witchcraft and would’ve been hanged were he not by then as much a fixture of the Empire as the old Imperial Palace itself. He might’ve even still, had he not vanished somewhere in the Black Forest during General Frundsberg’s campaign against the French.
Captain Adai, on the other hand, was a warrior and a commander. Although no equal to Otto of Graz, he was an astute tactician, a loyal servant and an exceptional student of archery, which he put to great use when his own time at the head of the Archduke’s army came. It was to him that Otto entrusted the organization, training and deployment of the army that he, Albert and Voralberg had variously squeezed out of Austria, for even now there were few fighting men and fewer pieces of silver to be had in the Habsburg dominions. He led the army in its march into Hungary and commanded the pivotal left flank, with its Knights and cavalry, at the Battle of Komarom Bridge. His role was diminished in the remainder of the war by an attack of influenza, but it was here that he confirmed himself as Otto’s successor.
Otto and Albert, at council at Hohensalzburg Castle, had chosen Hungary as the first theater of the war because it was Louis the Angevin who posed the greatest threat to Austria, and because the nobility and towns of Hungary, although they felt themselves betrayed by the Habsburg House, were seething at the high taxes and haughty manners of their foreign born and Poland residing King. It was decided that Albert would oversee the defense against King Charles of Bohemia and King Rudolf II of Germany, while Otto attempted to cleave Hungary from Louis’ grasp. He set out on this task in the spring of 1366, the beginning of what was to be the greatest of his campaigns.
At Komarom Bridge on March 29th, 1366, Otto commanded fewer than three thousand men at arms, but his one hundred and fifteen knights and two thousand, mostly Hungarian, horsemen won the day, and on this occasion he was uncharacteristically ruthless. The cavalry were ordered to hunt down the Hungarian Knighthood and officers, who had come out in force, and to leave none alive, and it is estimated that Otto's order claimed the lives of over three hundred members of Hungary's nobility. Although he spared the foot soldiers, as was his habit, and offered the surviving cavalry employ in the Austrian army, for the loyalists and anti-Habsburgs among the great men of the country, he had no mercy.
Komarom Bridge was a decisive victory. The whole of Hungary's army was routed, leaving better than three thousand dead and fifteen hundred wounded, and another four thousand scattered or disarmed. But more than that, Otto's brutality won the country for the Habsburgs in a single stroke. From there, he stripped the estates of the offending nobility and, with Albert's blessing, used the land and titles to make good on his promises to the remainder, and majority, of the Diet that sat in 1362, and the wealth to enrich the towns, which had suffered terribly for Louis' taxation and interminable wars.
By the summer of 1366, Hungary was secure. Budapest capitulated without a siege, and only in the southerly provinces and the Carpathian mountains was any further resistance attempted. Otto had gone so far as to prepare an autumn campaign against Louis in Poland, but was delayed by Albert's insistence on an immediate coronation as King of Hungary by the Diet. Albert calculated, correctly, that the country would rally behind its new master if he wore the crown, and that Louis' power, already tenuous, would be broken.
Otto's own prediction, however, was to prove correct as well. In the immediate aftermath of the coronation, the Habsburg House, all its members and subordinate braches, was banned by the Emperor, and would have been excommunicated were it not for Albert's many promises and Otto's long alliance to Urban V, who nevertheless refused to sanction the new King of Hungary. The Dukes of Hannover, Bavaria, Hesse-Kassel and the former Habsburg allies in Wurtemburg and Wurzburg declared war, to preserve the weak Saxon dynasty and avoid the union of Hungary and the Iron Crown in one person, just as the German princes had long opposed Polish, Bohemian and French candidates. The Swiss Cantons, allied to the Dukes of Burgundy and Savoy, also declared war, to support a rising in the traditional Habsburg fiefs in Switzerland and to seize the Tyrol.
To this, Albert was indifferent. "My uncle Otto," he is reported to have said, "you have done yourself in by never losing a battle. We expect it of you now." He bid his army to make winter quarters in Hungary, and did not even himself return to Austria, but set about with Vorlberg to raise a new regiment for Hungary that would join Otto's spring campaign to Poland. The young Archduke, Otto complained to Captain Adai, believed that Hungary, being wealthier and more numerous than his home, was now the greater source of his power, but of course he was not really King and from the Barons he could only ask so much.
Nevertheless, Otto resumed the war in April, marshaling his army through the treacherous Carpathian mountains rather than, as was expected, occupied Ostmark and Moravia. His Hungarian cavalry now numbered nearly three thousand and he had with him a further six thousand men at arms and two hundred Knights, the flower of the Hungarian nobility. It was an enormously expensive army to maintain and to feed, as much or moreso than the Italian mercenaries now pouring into the service of the German King. Otto knew, as he had known in 1361, that his victory would have to be rapid and complete.
Louis, now, was prepared for him. He had been wary of entering Hungary, for the army there was as likely to fight him as the Habsburg invaders, but in Poland he was truly King. The magnates had supplied him force enough to be the great victor of this war, and to add the Duchy of Austria to his domains before the German King or his Dukes had the opportunity. But again he was outmaneuvered, having prepared for an Austrian march through Ostmark and Moravia in February. His army was camped at Ostrava when, on April 18th, Otto emerged from the mountains and marched swiftly on Krosno and Tarnow, capturing both towns by storm and laying siege to Krakow on April 30th.
This was not necessarily devastating to the Polish position, but Louis, who had been outplayed by the aging German General once before, panicked, broke camp and set out immediately for his capital. Otto, now, lifted his siege and secreted to the small town of Bielsko-Biala, where he chose for his ground an open pasture that would suit his cavalry. Louis, reaching the town, was surprised, and took both heavy losses and terrible blow to morale. Otto followed it up with victories at Opala (May 14th), the Oder (May 27th) and Hradec Kalove (June 8th), where he routed the combined Polish and Bohemian armies. He laid siege to Prague through July and into the first part of August, when by a betrayal of the gatesmen the city was taken.
Otto was active in Poland by early September and defeated Louis again at Lodz on September 25th. By now, however, an Imperial army had entered Austria, and Albert's unconcern had faded. He commanded Adai to invest Krakow and Otto to meet Rudolf before he reached Vienna. Throughout November and the first of December Otto doggedly pursued the various German armies, but was unable to achieve a pitched battle. The destruction of the land was now taking its toll, and Otto was forced into a gambit.
In February, his marched his army into the Tyrol and surprised the Swiss partisans at St. Anton, where he crushed them and held them prisoner. He then marched into the Swiss alps and retook Argua Castle, defeating the Cantons and their Savoyard allies at Bregenz (February 28th) and took Zurich (May 1st). He met a Burgundian army and was repulsed at Neuchatel, but won a crushing victory at Lake Thun on June 7th. He duly invested Bern and Geneva, and led a forced march back to Austria, where he surprised and defeated Rudolf's army investing Vienna. That battle, and engagements at Horn (June 29th) and Holabrum (July 2nd), proved inconclusive, however, and Otto persuaded Albert to make truce with the Emperor at a conference in Vienna in mid-July.
Now freed from the Imperial threat, momentarily, and bolstered by news of Adai's success in taking Krakow and then Lublin, Otto now invaded Burgundy and Savoy, which brought him into conflict with the French King, who was forced by Otto's superior numbers to withdraw in late 1368. By 1370, Burgundy had been defeated and Austria had gained the Franche-Comte, as well as the inheritance of the Duchy of Savoy, and Otto had succeeded in destroying the rebellious Swiss Cantons once and for all.
At the Diet of Deggendorf in the Summer of 1371, the German King was forced by Brandenburg and Austria to lift his ban on the House of Habsburg, and thus ended, temporarily, the prolonged civil war within the Empire. Otto, suffering now from severe arthritis of the hands that finally removed him from personal participation in battle, now achieved the surrender of the Bohemian King, who abdicated in Albert's favor and confirmed to the Habsburgs what was to be their dominion over Bohemia for another four centuries. In the spring of 1372, Otto joined Adai at the conclusive assault of Warsaw, where Louis took his own life without an heir.
Otto effected, by force, the coronation of Albert as King of Poland, a title to which he had the fourth best existing claim. It would be another forty years before a Habsburg was elected by the Magnates, but control of Krakow and the Duchy of Warsaw was achieved by arms. The new Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary, having secured all but one of his inherited claims, now set before the aging Cardinal two final tasks to make way for the last, and grandest, of them. First, he was to severely punish the Dukes of Wurttemburg and Wurzburg for their betrayal, and this he did through 1372 and the beginning of 1373, also incorporating into Habsburg Poland the territories of Volynhia, which were not entirely Christian, by way of the Prince's fealty, sworn on March 25th, 1373. With this base of power, the German King dared not interfere when Albert consolidated his claims in Upper Bavaria, secured his succession to the Bavarian throne and demanded and received suzerainty over Baden, Wurttemburg and Wurzburg. His power thus established against the Electors, and sufficient wealth to out-bribe the Ascanians upon Rudolf's death, he charged Otto to raise the largest army in Austria's history to that point and to secure, firmly and for all time, the Pope's favor of the Habsburg dynasty in German politics.
In this second task, Otto took great joy, for while he had tired of the machinations of his senior Habsburg cousins, the restoration of the Papacy to the Holy See in Rome and the end of the schism, by martial means if necessary, was long a cause dear to his heart and the fulfillment of the hopes of his friend Albert II, who had not the opportunity of his son. He styled the campaign a crusade, and called to his banner nearly four hundred and fifty Knights from all over the Empire. It is often regard as the last great action of German chivalry, and while not the greatest it was to be the last of Otto of Graz's many wars.
Allied to the Republic of Venice, the Austrian army crossed into Italy from the Tyrol and met the Visconti at Bergamo on April 11th, 1376. The Italian cities and communes, and some number of its barons totaling fewer than half, opposed German interference in what they considered an internal matter, and feared the reassertion of Imperial power. Throughout the spring and summer, however, their disorganized and often mutually hostile armies melted away in Lombardy, and the Venetians, with whom Albert desired an alliance, were permitted to invest Milan. This period of the war was what Otto described, "a summer's walk for my old age," but it was to prove short-lived.
In October of 1376, the Kingdom of Sicily, the Kingdom of Sardinia, the Duchy of Tuscany (much maligned and still without Florence), the Republic of Genoa and the Duchy of Sienna declared war on Austria and Venice. They were joined by a rising of Turks and Greeks in the Venetian Balkans in December, and in February 1377 by the King of France, who, in the waning days of the war with England, was wary of yet another powerful foreign Prince on his soil, and had always opposed the restoration of the Avignon Papacy, which he could control, to Rome.
Otto, conscious of his failing health, resolved to ignore the French entirely and to finish the business for which he came. He marched south, along the Adriatic coast where the Venetians kept his vast army in supply, and systematically conquered or laid waste to the Italian countryside. He did not meet an army until he reached Senigallia on May 9th, where he routed the Neapolitans and Anconans, who now surrendered without siege. He won skirmishes at Fermo (May 28th) and Teramo (June 7th) and a major victory at Salerno on August 3rd. Napoli was invested throughout the autumn, until the Venetians won a decisive naval victory over the Genovese at Capri on November 3rd, blockading the city. It capitulated on January 1st, and the King of Sicily sued for peace, paying an indemnity of nearly three hundred thousands of silver, on top of the nearly one million in gold and silver demanded of Italian towns and cities.
The south now secure, and Lombardy, the Peidmonte and Liguria having been achieved by Venice with the help of Austrian troops, Otto made quarters and did not break them until late May, as he had developed the cough that would ultimately kill him. On June 9th, he met the Italian states at Cassino, a mild victory that, according to Captain Adai, would have been a route just six months earlier. From then on, the Italians walled themselves up in their cities and, in the words of a Giovanni d'Medici later, "waited for the old bastard to die." Otto, however, mustered the energy for one last offensive, and he rapidly took Trivoli (June 18th), Siena (August 1st) and Florence (November 23rd). He waited at Florence until March, when he was joined by Pope Urban VI.
They reached the gates of Rome on May 2nd, prepared for a siege, and found the gates were thrown open and the city capitulated. There was a delay for Albert III, who insisted upon being present and had quit the French front in Savoy in late April, but finally, on May 14th, 1379, with nearly two thirds of the Cardinals, first among them Archbishop Otto of Salzburg, Urban VI took his throne and so ended the Western Schism and restored, with a Habsburg hand, the one and universal communion of Christ. The following day, just before evening, Cardinal Otto of Graz died at Rome and was buried in consecrated ground at the Pope's insistence and over the objections of the Archduke, Graz and Salzburg. While many attempts have been made in the intervening years to move his body to Germany, he remains there still.
Otto of Graz was the first of the great Austrian Generals, the last of the great German Knights and among the founders of the Habsburg Imperial dynasty. Much has been written about his campaigns, his chivalry, his tactical manuals and his diocese. Far less is known about Otto himself-he was enormous for his day, standing at six foot nine and reputed to have often fought on foot in full armor to spare his horses. He commanded in person and led his Knights until he was in his late sixties, and was regarded as the most fearsome warrior in Christendom. Beyond that, we know he had a wife, Maria, and an infant daughter who were killed early in his life, and historical sources suggest he never remarried. He favored eccessiastical reform, but was doctrinally conservative, supported the infallible Papacy and the celibate clergy, opposed divorce and the remarriage of widowers, of which he was of course one himself, and was a hard-liner against heretics and agnostics. His pastoral care for the poor, for widows and orphans, his support of universal education, and thereby literacy, and his personal courage and honor made him the most famous and well-loved man of his day, but why he fought, and what he thought of Albert III and his radical reorganization of the Empire and feudal German society, already begun in the 1370’s, is lost to the ages. He believed first and foremost in duty, and always did his. Whatever his personal feelings for his cousins, he did their bidding without hesitation and seems not to have criticized them publically on any matter, not even their (more and more legendary) loose morals.
What can be said with certainty is that without Otto of Graz, Habsburg ascendancy Germany was far from assured and their remarkable accumulation of Kingdoms in the 14th century, the restoration of the Pope, their rise to sit among the great states of Europe owes much to him. He was a principled and often merciful commander in an age of darkness, a capable and dedicated Bishop in an age of gluttony and corruption and, with the Muscowite Prince Dmitri Donskoi, the greatest General of the 14th century.
)
