Frederick II, Duke of Austria

Frederick II, known as the Quarrelsome or the Warlike (German: Friedrich der Streitbare; 25 April 1211 – 15 June 1246), from the House of Babenberg, was the duke of Austria and Styria from 1230 to 1246.

He was the third, but the second surviving son of Duke Leopold VI of Austria and Theodora Angelina, a Byzantine princess. The death of his older brother Henry in 1228 made him the new heir to the Austrian throne. Two years later (1230), his father died and Frederick succeeded him.

His first spouse was another Byzantine princess named Sophia Laskarina, of the Laskaris dynasty, and his second wife was Agnes of Andechs, the daughter of Duke Otto I of Merania and Countess Beatrice II of Burgundy. Both marriages failed, he had no surviving children, and the male line of the Babenberg dynasty ended with him.

Proud of his Byzantine descent, Frederick was known as the Quarrelsome because of his harsh rule and frequent wars against his neighbors, primarily with Hungary, Bavaria and Bohemia. Even the Austrian Kuenringer noble family, which had so far been faithful to the ruling house, started an insurgency as soon as his reign began. But most dangerous were his disputes with Emperor Frederick II of Hohenstaufen in the course of the rebellion of the emperor's son Henry VII. Emperor Frederick ostracized the duke in 1236 and gave permission to King Wenceslaus I of Bohemia to invade the Austrian lands. During the years of Frederick's ban, his residence Vienna became an imperial free city for some years. However, he managed to maintain his position as the ruler of an Austrian rump state at Wiener Neustadt.

In 1239, in a spectacular change in imperial politics, Duke Frederick became one of the emperor's most important allies. The conflict with Bohemia was settled by the engagegement of his niece Gertrude of Babenberg with King Wenceslaus' eldest son Margrave Vladislaus of Moravia. Negotiations with the emperor about the elevation of Vienna to a bishopric and of Austria (including Styria) to a kingdom were initiated, however, on condition that the duke's niece Gertrude now would have to marry the fifty-year-old emperor, who moreover had recently been banned by Pope Gregory IX. In 1245 the terms were arranged, but the willful young girl, then in her late teens, refused to appear in the consummation ceremony at the diet of Verona. In the year before his death, Duke Frederick finally succeeded in gaining the March of Carniola from the Patriarchal State of Friuli, but upon his death it fell to the Carinthian duke Bernhard von Spanheim.

Duke Frederick's ambitious plans were dashed when he died at the Battle of the Leitha River, in a border conflict he had picked with the Hungarian king Béla IV Árpád. He is buried at Heiligenkreuz Abbey.

As the last Babenberg duke, Frederick the Quarrelsome signifies the end of an era in the history of Austria. With his overambitious plans, which were frequently foiled by his erratic character, he somewhat resembled his later successor Rudolf IV of Habsburg. As the Austrian Privilegium Minus also allowed women to inherit, his sister Margaret and his niece Gertrude would have been entitled to the throne. Shortly after the death of her uncle, Gertrude first married her fiancé Vladislaus of Moravia, who nevertheless died in the next year, then Margrave Herman VI of Baden, who did not manage to maintain his position in Austria, and finally in 1252 Prince Roman Danylovich, a younger brother of Kynaz Lev I Rurik, son-in-law of the Hungarian king. In the same year the Bohemian Přemyslids made a second attempt to confirm their claims to Austria by arranging the marriage between Gertrude's aunt Margaret of Babenberg and King Wenceslaus' son Ottokar II, more than twenty years her junior. Subsequently, Austria became of field of conflict between the Přemyslids and the Hungarian Árpád dynasty, in which Ottokar at first would prevail defeating King Béla at the 1260 Battle of Kressenbrunn, until finally being overthrown by the German king Rudolph of Habsburg at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278.