Leopold III

Leopold III, known as Leopold the Good, was a member of the House of Babenberg and Margrave of Austria from 1095 until his death in 1136. He was born in 1073, the son of Margrave Leopold II of Austria and Ida of Formbach-Ratelnberg. The Babenbergs ruled a Danube frontier territory of the Holy Roman Empire that later formed the core of Austria. When his father died in 1095, Leopold succeeded to the margraviate. His early rule fell in the years of the Investiture Controversy, when emperor and papacy were in prolonged conflict over the appointment of bishops and the nature of royal authority in the Church.

In 1106 he married Agnes of Waiblingen, daughter of Emperor Henry IV and widow of Frederick I, Duke of Swabia. The marriage tied the Babenbergs to the Salian imperial house and raised the standing of the Austrian margraviate. Agnes and Leopold had a large family. Their sons included Leopold IV, who succeeded as margrave; Henry II Jasomirgott, later the first Duke of Austria; Otto, the historian and Bishop of Freising; and Conrad, who became Bishop of Passau and Archbishop of Salzburg. Daughters married into ruling houses, among them Agnes, who married Władysław II of Poland, and Gertrude, who married Vladislaus II of Bohemia. After Emperor Henry V died in 1125, Leopold was among those spoken of as a possible king of Germany, but he declined and supported Lothair of Supplinburg.

Leopold was known for piety and for founding and endowing monasteries. A later tradition holds that he established the Augustinian house of Klosterneuburg after a hunting episode in which a veil of his wife was found on a tree and taken as a sign for the site of an abbey; the monastery was developed in the 1110s and became closely linked to the Babenberg court. In 1133 he founded the Cistercian abbey of Heiligenkreuz in the Wienerwald, settled by monks from Morimond, and he also supported other houses, including Klein-Mariazell. These foundations served religious life and the settlement of the eastern frontier and left a lasting mark on the church geography of medieval Austria.

He died on 15 November 1136 and was buried at Klosterneuburg Abbey. Local veneration grew in the later Middle Ages, especially under the Habsburgs, who treated the Babenbergs as their predecessors in Austria. Pope Innocent VIII canonized him in 1485. In the seventeenth century he was proclaimed patron saint of Austria. He remains patron of Austria, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, and Vienna, and is also invoked for large families, step-parents, and the death of children. His feast is kept on 15 November. Klosterneuburg Abbey still houses his tomb and honors him as a model of the Christian prince.