Otto, the Merry (; 23 July 1301 – 17 February 1339), a member of the House of Habsburg, was Duke of Austria and Styria from 1330, as well as Duke of Carinthia from 1335 until his death. He ruled jointly with his elder brother Duke Albert II. Biography Otto was born in the Austrian capital Vienna, the youngest son of King Albert I of Germany and Elizabeth of Carinthia, a member of the House of Gorizia-Tyrol (Meinhardiner). His elder brothers were Rudolf III, who became King of Bohemia in 1306, Frederick the Fair, elected King of the Romans in opposition to Louis the Bavarian in 1314, the Austrian dukes Leopold I and Albert II as well as Henry the Friendly. After the murder of King Albert I in 1308, the Habsburgs lost out in the struggle around the German throne, when Frederick the Fair was defeated by his Wittelsbach rival Louis in the 1322 Battle of Mühldorf. In the course of a rapprochement of both dynasties, Otto married Elizabeth of Wittelsbach, a daughter of Duke Stephen I of Bavaria. In 1327 he founded Neuberg Abbey in Styria, on the occasion of the birth of his first son Frederick II, and the Chapel of Saint George in the Augustinian Church in Vienna. When his wife Elizabeth died in 1330, she was buried at the Neuberg Abbey church. From 1329 onwards, Otto administrated the original Habsburg possessions in Swabia (Further Austria). In 1330, he and his brother Albert II were enfeoffed with the Austrian duchy. Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor since 1328, also vested Otto with the title of an Imperial vicar. In February he developed close ties with the mighty House of Luxembourg by secondly marrying Anna of Bohemia, daughter of King John the blind and sister of future emperor Charles IV, in the Moravian royal city of Znojmo. Two months later, Otto's maternal uncle, the Meinhardiner duke Henry of Carinthia died without male heirs, whereupon Emperor Louis IV on 2 May 1335 ceded the Duchy of Carinthia, the adjacent March of Carniola and the southern part of the Tyrol to Otto and Albrecht as Imperial fiefs in Linz. Otto was enthroned as duke in accordance with the archaic Carantanian rite on the Zollfeld plain, and, from that time onwards, took care of Carinthia rather than of the Austrian duchy. In 1337 he founded the knightly order Societas Templois for the