Francis III of Austria (The Once and Never Kings)

Francis III (born: Francis Leopold Ernst Albert Frederick von Habsburg) is the current reigning king of Austria and Bohemia. He is the only son of his father and predecessor, Francis II and his wife Josephina of Milan.

Life
Francis was born on December 8, 1957 in Vienna. The fourth of four children, his birth propelled him ahead of his three older sisters in the line of succession. It's believed that his oldest sister, Angela, often plotted to murder Francis whilst he was a child, removing and direct male heirs, and allowing her to succeed her father as per the Pragmatic Succession. But nothing came to fruition, as she died in a carriage accident at sixteen.

As heir, Francis could not join the military, though that did not stop him from making routine trips to the local army bases, watching the maneuvers and enjoying the salutes from thirty to forty year veterans. But young Francis especially enjoyed watching the naval war games the Austrian Royal Navy conducted in the Adriatic. Indeed, for his sixteenth birthday he personally broke a bottle of champagne against the bow of the iron-plated paddle steamer SMS Herzog Österreich, named for him and his title as heir ("Duke of Austria").

His love for the navy continued on after he succeeded his father after his death in 1979, when the now-King Francis III was eighteen. He managed to obtained funding for modernizing the fleet from the particularly army-orientated Vienna and Prague Diets. In light of the new Témerres-type battleships, Francis has overseen construction of a fleet consisting of no less than fifteen Témerres-type warships, though he has realized Austria-Bohemia has little to no chance of reaching the naval power of his cousins in Aragon.

Francis has also overseen a gradual reversal of the Austro-Bohemian Compromise, brokered by his father in 1959. The Prague Diet is occasionally criticized as a shadow of its former self, but Francis's relative popularity among the Bohemian populace is credited with preventing much discord.

A key player in mediating disputes between Imperial states, he caught the eye of the Holy Roman Electors, and when the previous Emperor, William III of Württemberg, died in early 1998, Francis was elected Hopy Roman Emperor with fourteen of twenty-one votes.

Since his Imperial election, the new Emperor Francis I immediately took the side of Luxembourg in its disputes with Francia over its territories laying within that entities borders (ironically, the Luxembourgish King John XI cast his two electoral votes against Francis). Their unflinching stance during negotiations, combined with Francis's decision to use Baden as a drilling ground for the armies of the Swabian Circle, are possibly only increasing tensions between Francia and the Holy Roman Empire.

Titles
The full titles of Francis III are as follows:

Francis III, By the Grace of God, King of Austria, King of Bohemia, Archduke of Upper Austria and Lower Austria, Duke of Carinola, Carinthia, Silesia, and Styria, Count of Sundgau, Tyrol, and Vorarlberg, Margrave of Moravia