It was an honour to be joined by Martyn Rady to discuss one of history's most thrilling families, the Habsburgs. Ruling for almost a millennium, their imperial vision was perhaps best realised in Emperor Frederick III's AEIOU motto: Austriae est imperare orbi universe, "Austria is destined to rule the world." Indeed, Frederick's descendants would control the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Spain, the New World, and the Pacific, a dominion that Charles V called "the empire on which the sun never sets." Weathering religious warfare, revolution and all kinds of political storms, it came to a tumultuous end with the 1914 assassination of the Habsburg heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which of course, marked the start of another epochal chapter of history.