Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Savoy

Margaret of Austria was born into the Habsburg dynasty on 10 January 1480, her early years shaped by political marriages and deaths that emptied the rooms around her. Her mother died when she was two. She was engaged three times, married twice: John, Prince of Asturias, died six months after their wedding in 1497; Philibert II, Duke of Savoy, gave her three years before his death in 1504. Her only brother died in 1506. What followed was different. From 1507 to 1515, and again from 1519 until her death on 1 December 1530, she governed the Habsburg Netherlands - first for her father Maximilian I, then for her nephew Charles V - while they ruled an empire that kept them in Germany and beyond. She spent most of her life in the Low Countries, spoke French and Castilian but likely neither spoke nor read German, and kept an extensive library where the German texts came in French translation.