In the ranks of his admirers nostalgic for the old empire, he was a pacifist cast among warmongers, a gentle soul out of his depth among backstabbing diplomats, ministers and generals.
To his critics, Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, was a dissembling buffoon who presided over the inglorious defeat and dissolution of his empire.
And to the Catholic Church, the kaiser was a devout miracle-worker who has just been launched on his way to sainthood.
Charles I of Austria and Charles IV of Hungary, the last emperor -- who ascended to the Habsburg throne in the middle of World War I in 1916 and died in exile on Madeira six years later at the age of 35 -- is to be beatified by the Vatican this year.
Historians argue the emperor's claims to Christian grace are undermined by the perception that he was a consummate liar, that he presided over the use of poison gas by his troops and that his chaotic leadership contributed to a fiasco when hundreds of thousands of his soldiers were taken prisoner in the war's last days.
But Cardinal Christoph Schonborn, the Archbishop of Vienna, who has been influential in the effort to beatify the monarch, insisted the last emperor was "a man of peace" and that the imminent beatification showed that political leaders could also be good Christians.
"The figure of Kaiser Karl is viewed differently," admitted Erich Leitenberger, the church's spokesman in Vienna. "But he led a very religious life, especially in his latter stages."
Last month the Vatican commission responsible for examining claims to sainthood -- the Congregation for the Causes of Saints -- certified, on the basis of three expert medical opinions, that Charles is to be credited with a miracle that occurred in 1960.
A nun in a Brazilian convent prayed for the late emperor's beatification and woke up the next morning able to walk for the first time in years.
Beatification, the intermediate stage to canonization, is expected to follow by September. So the last emperor will become the Blessed Charles, although to become Saint Charles another miracle has to be attributed to him.
Some historians smell a political agenda behind the campaign to make a hero of one of the least impressive Habsburgs. They note that the Pope, with his intense interest in central Europe, is seeking to revive an Austrian church with a long history of political activism, which in the 1930s degenerated into "clerico-fascism."
If the church is now celebrating Charles's religious record, the last emperor's political career was singularly undistinguished.
"He was a dilettante, far too weak for the challenges facing him. Out of his depth, not really a politician. I don't know why he is being beatified," said Helmut Rumpler, a history professor who heads the Habsburg commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
When Charles came to the throne in 1916 on the death of Emperor Franz Josef, amid war and with the Austro-Hungarian empire in its death throes, he was greeted with contempt.
His chief of staff complained: "He can't even write properly." One of his prime ministers quipped: "He is 30 years old, looks 20 and thinks like a 10-year-old."
As the empire collapsed at the end of the war, he fled to Switzerland but refused to abdicate. He was then manipulated by rightwing Hungarian nationalists into staging two comic-opera attempts at reclaiming the throne in Budapest. The result: the British dumped him on Madeira where he died of pneumonia.
But the biggest controversy surrounding Charles is also the main reason the Vienna cardinal applauds him.
Through his French brother-in-law in 1917, Charles secretly sued for a separate peace with France, deserting his German ally. When news of the overture leaked, he strenuously denied all involvement.
The furious French then published letters signed by him, infuriating the Germans and making him a laughingstock.
"He was a liar," says Brigitte Hamann, a Viennese historian.
Should he ever make the grade for canonization, suggested the Austrian weekly Profil, he should be nominated as the patron saint of losers.
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