Map 1
The main bloc of the Habsburg patrimony now composed the entire south-eastern corner of the German Reich, except the enclaves belonging to the immediate archiepiscopal sees of Salzburg, Brixen and Trent. Meanwhile, in 1453, the Emperor Frederick in, himself a Habsburg, had ratified the so-called Privilegium Maius, which, besides conferring various privileges on the rulers of Austria and the title of Archduke on all members of the Habsburg family, declared all Lands then held by the family to constitute an indivisible entail, hereditable in the male, or in default thereof, the female line of the House.5 The bloc of Lands listed above were thereafter commonly styled the Erbländer, or Hereditary Lands, an appellation which it will be convenient to retain, although by 1780 it had long ceased to be exclusively, or even particularly, applicable to those Lands.6
The Habsburgs were, however, then still no more than a secondary dynasty, having greatly reduced their own power by their practice of dividing the family heritage between them, thus splitting it at times into two or even three blocs. One of its members, Albert V, had ruled also over Bohemia and Hungary, but he had died a couple of years after his accession, and his posthumous son, Ladislas, had died without issue, the two crowns then passing out of the family. Albert had, however, initiated the tradition that the dignities of Roman Emperor and German King were regularly held by the senior ruling Habsburg. The collateral lines having died out, Maximilian I succeeded in 1493 to the entire complex of the Habsburg Lands, and the fortunes of his family now took a sensational rise. Maximilian himself had married Maria, daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, to whose possessions (the Franche Comté and the Netherlands) he had succeeded on Charles’s death in 1478. His only son, Philip, married in 1496 Joanna of Spain, and their elder son, Charles, married Isabella of Portugal. When Maximilian died in 1519, Charles kept for himself the Spanish and Burgundian territories, with the Imperial title for his own lifetime, but ceded the Austrian possessions to his younger brother, Ferdinand I, who soon after became the beneficiary of yet another astounding marriage transaction. Maximilian had married him in infancy to Anne, daughter of Wladislaw Jagiellon, King of Bohemia and Hungary, while Wladislaw’s son, Louis, married Charles’s and Ferdinand’s sister, Maria. It was agreed that if Louis died without male issue, his two crowns should pass to Anne and her husband. In 1526, Louis, who had succeeded to both thrones ten years previously, perished in the rout of the Hungarian arms by the Turks at Mohács, and Ferdinand thereupon claimed the two Crowns.
The Lands of the Bohemian Crown consisted at that time of the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Margravate of Moravia, the Duchy of Silesia and the Counties of Upper and Lower Lusatia. Of these Bohemia ranked as the senior. It had, indeed, been a fief of the Empire since AD 895, when its princes, after throwing off the overlordship of Moravia, had done homage to the then Emperor, but a member of its capable native dynasty, the Premyslides, had achieved the royal dignity in 1086, and this had thereafter been recognized as hereditary in his line. When the dynasty became extinct (in 1306), the Emperor had claimed the right to fill the throne, which the Bohemian Estates, on the other hand, claimed to be elective, and after they had won, the second representative of the new dynasty, the Luxemburger, Charles IV, who was also himself Emperor, had, in his Golden Bull of 1356, assured the Estates of this right, should his own dynasty become extinct in both the male and the female lines. They had in fact exercised it, when the situation arose,7 from 1439 onward.
Moravia had been associated with Bohemia since early times, having ranked, except for one brief interval,8 as a fief of the King of Bohemia. Silesia had been acquired in 1335, the Lusatias in 1355 and 1368 respectively. The Golden Bull had pronounced all the dominions of the Bohemian Crown to constitute an indivisible whole, but how far this remained valid on the extinction of Charles’s line was disputable, and when the point arose, the Nebenländer had usually claimed not to be bound by the decisions of Bohemia.9
The Lands of the Hungarian Crown consisted in 1526 of the Kingdom of Hungary proper (a kingdom since AD 1000) and the Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia (to which, however, Dalmatia no longer belonged, having been lost to Venice in the fourteenth century), which had become attached to the Hungarian Crown at the end of the eleventh century. The terms on which it had done so are totally obscure, the few texts relating to the event being capable of various interpretations, which are duly given to them by Hungarian and Croat historians respectively. It is certain that so long as the dynasty of the Arpáds, under which the union had taken place, survived, the Croats recognized its right to rule over Croatia, by virtue of a single coronation. The King’s rule in Croatia was exercised through a Viceroy (Ban), and each country conducted its internal affairs separately. Since the latter part of the sixteenth century, the Croats had sent delegates to the Hungarian Diet when matters of interest to both countries were being discussed.
In Hungary, too, the native dynasty died out at the beginning of the fourteenth century (in 1301), and the ‘nation’ claimed the right to elect its own king. Documentary evidence is lacking on what attitude Croatia took at such elections as took place, but it seems to have accepted the Hungarians’ choice.10
On the death of King Louis, obscure situations arose in both groups of Lands. Moravia and Silesia recognized Maria, and Ferdinand as her consort, as their monarchs by hereditary right; and it should be noted that from this date onward the Estates of Moravia, whenever the question arose, consistently asserted their immediate relationship to the Crown, a thesis which was accepted by the Crown. The Bohemian Estates refused to recognize the Habsburg-Jagiello family pact as binding on themselves, but duly elected Ferdinand and accepted his successors after him, until 1619, when there occurred the famous rebellion which ushered in the Thirty Years War. After crushing the rebellion, Ferdinand II issued Vernewerte Landesordungen (for Bohemia in 1627 and for Moravia in 1628) which made the determination of the succession in both Lands a Monarchic prerogative, and thus vested it securely in his own family. Lusatia, however, was ceded to Saxony in 1635, and in 1740 Frederick II of Prussia seized all but a fraction of Silesia, so that the Lands of the Bohemian Crown to which Joseph would succeed on his mother’s death were considerably less extensive than those over which Ferdinand I had ruled.
A Croat Diet also immediately recognized Ferdinand in 1526, but only a small minority of the nobles of Hungary proper ‘elected’ him, and that at a meeting which was constitutionally questionable. The majority elected a national king, John Zápolya; moreover, such effective rule as Ferdinand ever exerted over Hungary was confined to the north and west of the country; the remainder passed under Turkish rule, which was exercised directly over the centre of the country and in the form of a protectorate over Transylvania. Nearly two hundred years passed before Habsburg rule was established both de facto and de jure over the whole country, but Transylvania was reoccupied at the end of the seventeenth century, and under the Peace of Karlowitz (1699) Leopold I recovered all historic Hungary-Croatia except a small strip in the South which the Turks evacuated in 1718 under the Peace of Passarowitz.11 Meanwhile, a Hungarian Diet had in 1683 accepted the Habsburg succession in the male line.
In Hungary, almost alone of their dominions, the Habsburgs departed from their rule of leaving untouched the political identities and frontiers of their dominions, as acquired. They had continued to recognize that all the Lands east of the Leitha recovered by them belonged in theory to the complex of the ‘Lands of the Hungarian Crown’, but Leopold I had kept Transylvania as a separate ‘Principality’,12 with its own Constitution and Court Chancellery. He had also included within its boundaries certain areas, known in Hungarian terminology by the curious name of Partium, which, while not belonging to the recognized historic Transylvania, had been ruled by its princes in the Turkish era. Half of these had been restored to the Kingdom of Hungary by Charles III in 1738; the other half13 were still with Transylvania in 1780.
The southern fringe of Hungary-Croatia was
also under a separate dispensation. From the earliest emergence of the Turkish threat, the areas immediately behind the line of the Turkish advance had been organized as a defensive belt under direct military control. With time, this organization had been systematized and the areas concerned removed altogether from the control of the Croat and Hungarian Estates. When the Turks were driven behind the Danube in 1699, the frontier districts from which the danger had receded had been liquidated, but new ones formed behind the new frontier, as far as the Tisza, while when the area between the Tisza, the Maros and the Danube (the ‘Bánát of Temesvár’) was recovered under the Peace of Passarowitz, it was given a similar, but separate, organization, under a military Governor directly responsible to Vienna. In 1777, however, Maria Theresa had agreed to the liquidation of the Bánát, of which the northern portion was restored to civilian administration in 1778, while its southern and eastern portions were turned into Frontier ‘Districts’. The Frontier now constituted a long, narrow strip, running the whole length of the frontier with Turkey, from the Adriatic to the boundary with Transylvania.14 It was under the direct control of the Viennese Hofkriegsrat, and for fiscal purposes, the Hofkammer.15
Another area in South Hungary, the so-called Slavonian Counties, between the Lower Drave and Save, had in 1741 been placed under the Ban of Croatia for administrative purposes, but not legally incorporated in the Kingdom of Croatia.16
The manipulation had brought with it a change in nomenclature. The old ‘Croatia’ had lain chiefly in Bosnia, now still under Turkish rule. The area which now became known as Croatia had previously been called Slavonia, which name was now transferred to the area described, after a transitional period during which it was called ‘Lower Slavonia’.
Finally, Fiume with its hinterland had undergone various vicissitudes, including incorporation in Croatia as recently as 1776, but in 1779 had been constituted a ‘corpus separatum’ under the Hungarian Crown.
It may be remarked that even the mutilations described above were much smaller than it had first been intended to inflict on Hungary, for on recovering the central and southern parts of the country, the Crown had claimed them as its own absolute property by right of conquest, and had for a time administered them as such through an organization known as the Neo-acquistica Commissio. The idea of turning this whole vast area into a new province had, however, been abandoned, and in 1722 the Crown, while retaining ownership of the land (large parts of which were then either settled with free peasants or sold or donated to individuals) had restored it to the civilian administration.
Of the remaining territories under Habsburg rule in 1780, the Vorlande, a set of enclaves in Western and Southern Germany, the most important of which was the Breisgau, were for the most part the fruits of purchases and sales, concessions and counter-concessions, too numerous to detail. Few of them had been very long in the family hands, since most of Rudolph of Habsburg’s original patrimony had melted away quite early.17 Milan, Mantua and the Austrian Netherlands, these former possessions of the Spanish branch of the family, represented salvage retained by Austria at the end of the War of the Spanish Succession.18 The Kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria, with the Duchies of Zator and Oswiecim (Ausschwita) had been acquired by Maria Theresa herself under the First Partition of Poland; the Bukovina, previously the northern-most tip of the Danubian Principality of Moldavia, had been extracted from the Porte (its over-lord) in 1775 as ‘compensation’ for Austria’s mediation of the Russo-Turkish Peace of that year.
Furthermore it had, as we have said, become habitual since the fifteenth century for the senior member of the House of Habsburg to hold the dignities of German-Roman King and Holy Roman Emperor. On the death of Charles VI, last of the true male line, a Wittelsbach, Charles VII, had been elected to them, but on his death, in 1745, they had reverted to Maria Theresa’s consort, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, and then to their son, Joseph II.
All the Hereditary Lands and the Vorlande were, of course, like the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, parts of the Empire, but not those of the Hungarian Crown nor the Habsburgs’ possessions in Italy.
We may mention here that after its attribution to Francis Stephen, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany was, in 1763, made into a secondo-geniture of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. On Francis Stephen’s death in 1765, it had passed to his second son, Leopold. His third son, Ferdinand, had married Beatrix, daughter and heiress of Ercole of Modena d’Este, after whose death in 1803 Modena became a family tertio-geniture.
*
As this outline will have shown, the Habsburg Monarchy of 1780 was essentially a dynastic creation. The diligence of Joseph’s maternal ancestors had brought it together, and their single-minded pursuit of family aggrandizement had never been qualified by considerations of political, social, ethnical or geographical congruity; value and availability on the market had been their only criteria. If most of the Lands now composing the Monarchy formed a geographical continuum, this was simply due to the pragmatic fact that neighbouring estates are more easily and naturally acquired, and above all, more easily defended, than those which can be reached only across the territory of another, potentially hostile, ruler; not because any Habsburg had ever thought it improper or absurd that he should rule anywhere.
There was nothing peculiar about this mentality, or these methods. In the days when the Habsburgs built up their fortunes, every princely family, indeed, every baron, knight and squire in his own degree had been following exactly the same objective, by the same means, where he could. But in one respect, the Habsburgs had been unique. They had had their set-backs and their losses, but by and large, theirs had been a success story which no other European dynasty could rival. Again and again, a transaction which might have turned out either way according to the chance whether bridegroom outlived bride or vice-versa, whether this marriage or that proved barren, had ended favourably for them. The lines of Carinthia, of Meran and Gorizia, of Burgundy and Spain and Portugal, of Bohemia and Hungary, had died out; theirs had survived. It was true that it, too, had perished at last: Maria Theresa’s father had been the last male Habsburg of the blood. Yet he had managed to salvage almost all the family inheritance for his daughter, whose son was succeeding to it now, under the old name.
But their very success had, inevitably, been achieved at the expense of homogeneity, of any sort. A little domain of a few villages may bear one face, geographical, social, ethnic: not so an empire so far-flung as the Habsburgs’, sprawling clean across Central Europe, not to mention its outliers. And to the differences imposed by nature between its different parts and their inhabitants, there were added special ones due to the chance of the circumstances of its birth and growth. Fortune had set the cradle of Monarchy at the ethnic crossroads of Europe, where Teuton, Slav and Latin meet, and meet, moreover, precisely at that point which from time immemorial has constituted the last stage of their western journey for Europe’s successive invaders from the Eastern steppes. If the original Marks of Austria and Styria had been German by definition, and in the main, also by population (since the foundation of them had been accompanied by colonization of their empty or sparsely inhabited spaces with German settlers), almost every single new acquisition made by the dynasty, except for the relatively few westward extensions, had brought at least one new element under its rule, and usually more. The first expansion southward had added a Slavonic fringe to the German core; the next, an Italian. The great coup of 1526 had added lands which were the national homes of the Czechs and the Magyars, and each of these had contained also many minorities: Hungary, amongst others, Croats, Serbs and Roumanians. The later expansion had brought in more Italians and Roumanians, also Poles and Ruthenes, Flemings and Walloons.
The variety of geographical environment had naturally brought about, and the ethnic heterogeneity had enhanced, wide variations in the economic conditions and social structures of the different parts of the Monarchy. And while political unity would clearly have facilitated a large measure of mutual assimilation in thes
e respects, there was another feature of the Habsburg expansion which made such unity difficult to achieve. This was the comparatively late date of the family’s rise to power, which had begun only in an age when the movements of the peoples in Central Europe were over, and the area had already achieved its basic political pattern of Kingdoms, Duchies, Margravates and Counties, each bounded by recognized political frontiers and each already possessed of its own political institutions. For centuries after this stage had been reached, almost all changes in the political map of Central Europe had been purely dynastic: they had consisted simply of the transference from one hand to another of this or that Kingdom or Duchy, within its historic frontiers and, at least nominally, without alteration of its political institutions; indeed, when the acquisition had been peaceful and justified by a claim of legitimacy, or by election–and almost all the Habsburgs’ acquisitions had been of one or the other of these types19 – it was customary for the new ruler to swear to keep those institutions intact.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 2
