A corollary of this method of Empire accumulation was that the links between the components, at least when first formed, were purely dynastic. Even where subsequent developments associated certain of them in larger groups – the Hereditary Lands, the Lands of the Bohemian and of the Hungarian Crowns – such association did not impair the mutual independence of each component within the group; still less did each group recognize any connection, except the dynastic, with any other. This individuality, constitutional and perhaps even more, sentimental, of the different Lands, was and remained a continual feature of the entire Monarchy, throughout its history.
*
It was their political relationship to their subjects which had chiefly interested the Habsburgs, and it is fitting that our survey of the Monarchy in 1780 should begin with a description of its political structure at that date. The picture was, indeed, one of extraordinary complexity, owing to the extremely various nature of the forces involved, and the great strength of some of them, and it may be added that the serious attempts at political unification outside the sphere of the regia potestas had begun only a generation or so before the date of our sketch.
II THE POLITICAL STRUCTURE
In 1780 the only recognized constitutional link between the components of the Monarchy was still the Dynasty, whose rule was acknowledged by all of them in the same, or nearly the same, terms under the Pragmatic Sanction issued by Charles VI (as King of Hungary and of Spain, Charles III) in 1713, and the Hungarian legislation (Laws I and II of 172320) implementing it. These instruments declared all the Lands of the Monarchy to constitute an ‘indivisible and inseparable whole’ and bound all of them to accept as their future Monarch Charles’s heirs in primogeniture in the male or female line, or failing them, the heirs of his defunct brother, Joseph I, until the extinction of the line.21
The Pragmatic Sanction, as such, brought about no change in the mutual relationships of the components of the Monarchy. If some Austrian centralist historians have described it as turning the sum of these constituents into a ‘State’, this would have been vigorously denied in most of the Lands. No Hungarian could ever be found to acknowledge that Hungary formed part of any ‘State’ except Hungary itself. The Belgian and Bohemian Estates were on occasion equally emphatic in maintaining that the only ‘States’ to which they belonged were those of the United Netherlands and the Bohemian Crown respectively, and while none of the Hereditary Lands could claim either sovereignty or statehood, they would presumably have said that the State to which they belonged was the German Reich.22 The usual term for the sum of the Habsburg dominions was, in fact, Haus Oesterreich in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the eighteenth Oesterreichische Monarchie or Gesammtmonarchie (if the titles of some of the offices described below contain the word Staat, this was a mere matter of semantic usage). The conduct of the Monarch’s government deferred to this thesis in so far that the Monarch conducted his transactions with each Land in his capacity of its Landesherr, as King of Hungary or Bohemia, Archduke of Austria, Count of Tirol, etc.23
The dynastic link nevertheless meant in practice something more than the bare fact that each Land acknowledged the same Prince, for in pre-Constitutional times the Prince of any land normally enjoyed, jure majestatis, certain important prerogatives in it. The main rights so enjoyed by the Habsburgs, in 1780, can be grouped under three heads:
(1) The right to declare war and conclude peace, to conclude treaties and alliances with foreign Powers, and in general, to conduct foreign policy. The Monarch’s right in these respects was, in 1780, subject to no theoretical restriction whatever.24
(2) Connected with these rights were his prerogatives in the field of defence, where, again, he was usually supreme, subject to a fixed obligation, nearly always explicitly undertaken on his accession, to defend the frontiers of each Land, and in most cases limited by a provision that if he wished to undertake obligations which went beyond his own resources, he must apply to the Estates of his Lands for recruits or money, which they were entitled to refuse.
(3) His financial prerogatives in each Land included the determination of commercial policy and the levying of customs and excise, and, up to a point, internal indirect taxation.
Enjoying, as they did, these prerogatives in all the Lands subject to them, the Habsburgs naturally maintained certain central, pan-Monarchic, services for exercising them. These, in 1780, were as follows:
The Monarchy’s foreign policy had since 174225 been conducted through the Geheime Haus- Hof- und Staatskanzlei, the head of which was in practice the Foreign Minister of the Monarchy. He was also, in general, the first servant of the State, and the holder of the office in 1780, Prince Kaunitz, bore the title of Staatskanzler. This, however, was a title conferred only occasionally, and ad personam;26 heads of the Chancellery to whom it was not granted were usually called ‘Foreign Minister’.
The head of the Chancellery was, it may be remarked, the only official in the Monarchy who took his decisions (subject to the Monarchic agreement) personally; in every other Ministry the system was that known as ‘Collegiate’, i.e., decisions were taken in Committee, by vote.
The military system of the Monarchy had passed through various stages of evolution. In mediaeval days the defence force of each Land had consisted of a local militia, the recruitment and conditions of service of which had been governed by local law and usage. These forces had increasingly been replaced by mercenary armies, which the Lands were required to finance by ‘contributions’ rendered by them in lieu of the personal service now no longer required of them. As this system had in its turn proved unsatisfactory, owing to the difficulty of recruiting and keeping together the mercenary troops, the defence system of the Central Monarchy27 had, shortly before the date with which this sketch is concerned,28 been placed on a new footing. A few relics of the older days still survived. All Hungarian nobles were still bound to obey the call when the insurrectio (levée en masse) was proclaimed.29 The free peasants of the Tirol were under a similar obligation. In the Military Frontier, outside certain ‘Free Districts’ which were exempt from this obligation, every able-bodied male was liable for military service, and those not serving with the colours did duty in rotation as pickets along the Turkish frontier. But the main defence force of the Central Monarchy now consisted of a standing army, the strength of which had been fixed in 1774 at 164,000.30 Of these, 21,000 were recruited in Hungary by voluntary enlistment,31 the rest by conscription, for which purpose all the Hereditary Lands, except the Tirol (which was exempt), the Bohemian Lands and Galicia-Bukovina, were divided into recruiting districts (thirty-seven in number), each of which was allotted a certain quota of recruits. All able-bodied males between the ages of seventeen and forty were liable to conscription, unless they belonged to an ‘exempted’ occupational category, and the quota was, in theory, made up by the drawing of lots. The exempted categories were, indeed, so numerous that in practice this device was seldom used.32
Map 2
Austria also enjoyed, under Reich law, the right of recruiting in those Principalities of the Empire which did not maintain their own armed services (she made extensive use of this right especially to procure N.C.O.s, the non-Austrian Germans being regarded as constituting better material even than the Germans of Austria, let alone the non-Germans) and also accepted volunteers from other sources. Regular stations were kept up on the Silesian frontier for the reception of deserters from the Prussian army.
Subjects of the Monarchy could obtain commissions through entry from one of two cadet schools established by Maria Theresa, one for the sons of nobles from her dominions, the other for the sons of serving officers. A commission could, however, also be obtained through exchange from another service, or by simple purchase. In the 1770s a high proportion of the officers in the Austrian army came to it in one of these ways, and they were an extraordinarily varied body. Germans from the Empire furnished the largest contingent, but there were also Italians, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Iris
hmen and some of even more recondite origin.
The army was administered for the Crown by the Hofkriegsrat, a body established by Ferdinand I in 1560, originally as a small advisory Council, which, however, had since expanded into a permanent Ministry, employing a considerable staff, which was now divided into three departments: the publico-politicum, the judiciale and the economicum. All the regular forces of the Monarchy (including the Hungarian regiments33), came under the authority of the Hofkriegsrat, which also directly administered the Military Frontier and was thus the supreme authority, under the Crown, even for the civilian populations of that area.34 All these forces were sworn to loyalty to the Monarch, and owed no allegiance to any other person or instance.
A third pan-Monarchic service, the Camera (Hofkammer) collected and administered the Crown’s own financial assets – its revenues from the Crown lands, which were fairly extensive in most Lands, including the taxation paid by the Royal Free Boroughs, which were directly subject to the Crown, from mintage, from the revenues derived from the mining of gold, silver and salt,35 the yield of customs and excise and of certain special taxes such as the ‘toleration tax’ paid by Jews, who ranked as ‘Kammerknechte’. This was naturally to some extent decentralized in its operations, and even in its organization: the Netherlands and Milan had their own Camerae which operated independently, subject to the obligation of paying over a quota of their profits to the central exchequer, and the Camerae of Hungary and Transylvania were also nominally independent, although in practice only sections of the Central Hofkammer, from the head of which they took their orders. But the Lands had no control over the operations of the Camera, over the apportionment of the revenues deriving from it, or over policy in the fields lying within the Monarch’s financial-economic competence, although these included questions so important to them as those of foreign trade policy.
The central financial institutions included also a Kreditdeputatio, which administered the national debt, and a Hofrechnungskammer, or Supreme Court of Audit.
The field of operations of these bodies was in practice more extensive than the above words would suggest, for while, according to original theory, the Crown should have ‘lived of its own’, there had hardly been a time in the history of the Monarchy when it had succeeded in doing so. In times of war, actual or threatened, it had always been obliged to call on the Estates of some or all Lands for special contributions, and once the defence system changed over from one of local militias to one of a paid standing army, it had, as we have said, become the practice to call on the Lands which were now relieved of the obligation of providing the service in kind (in the form of manpower) for a financial contribution in lieu thereof. The taxation system had been reorganized after the War of the Austrian Succession by Maria Theresa’s great adviser, Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz.
In principle, the Crown still financed its central non-military expenditure, viz., the upkeep of the Court, the Privy Purse, out of which special donations were made, and its own administrative services, out of its Cameral revenues; since 1763, also in part out of certain direct taxes levied by the exchequer without consultation with the Lands. The cost of the defence services was apportioned between the Lands on an assessment based on their populations and assessed wealth; this was made every ten years and then notified to the Estates of the Land (in Hungary, to a Committee of the Diet). In the Western Lands the central exchequer defrayed out of the contributio, as this was called, the cost of local expenditure for the housing, provisioning, etc., of the troops quartered in the Lands; it was in return for this concession that the nobles (who had previously been tax-free in most respects) had agreed to submit themselves (i.e., their demesne lands) to a land tax, out of which the bulk of the contributio was derived. In Hungary, the nobles had refused to submit to the land tax, and each Hungarian County still had to pay for the upkeep of the troops quartered in it. The sums paid by Hungary under the heading, known as deperdita, were appreciable. The direct contributio was, however, relatively small.
Central, in another field, and up to a point, was the Crown’s advisory body. This, after changing its form and composition almost with every generation, had emerged by 178036 as a Staatsrat, consisting of three members of the higher nobility, three of the lower, and a bourgeois secretary. Each member of this body was sworn to give his true opinion on any question submitted to him, without fear or favour. Constitutional objections having been raised by Hungary, the competence of this body did not formally extend to the Hungarian Lands. Later a ‘Hungarian Referent’ was added to its members, but he reported independently on Hungarian questions; the other Councillors had no ‘vote’ on these.
All other questions were, in theory, dealt with on a Land by Land basis, being regulated either by the Crown in its capacity of Landesherr, and in virtue of its prerogative; by the Lands’ own ‘organs of self-government’, in virtue of the autonomous rights possessed by them, or through negotiation between the two.
At this point we must interpose an outline of the political structure of the Lands, albeit an over-simplified sketch of a subject of unimaginable complexity and innumerable variants.
The structures of all the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands had by 1780 become almost identical, earlier differences between them having been ironed out in the course of time, chiefly through assimilation of the latter group to the former. The foundations on which all alike rested were the personal distinction which existed in all between their free and unfree populations, and the territorial distinction between the respective domains of the Landesherr in his official capacity37 and the local nobles.
The personal distinction applied to both territorial groups, for the ordinary populations of most areas directly administered by the Camera were not free, but ranked as Kammerknechte. The burghers of the Royal Free Boroughs,38 however, and certain communities of peasants, while not noble, ranked as free men; they owned no direct master except the Landesherr.
The rest of the area of each Land belonged to its nobles. It was divided into ‘manors’ (Herrschaften, or Güter – the former name was usually reserved for very large estates), a list of which, known as the Landtafel, was kept in each Land, and which, normally, could be owned only by a noble, although not necessarily an individual:39 a corporation such as a Cathedral Chapter or a Monastery might, by a legal fiction, be granted ‘noble’ status entitling it to exercise manorial rights.
On such noble land, the direct link between the Landesherr and his subjects stopped at the manor; the unfree populations inhabiting each manor were, directly, the ‘subjects’ (the relationship was expressed by the term nexus subditelae) of the lords; for Maria Theresa herself, while introducing into the relationship certain modifications (the resultant position is described elsewhere40) had, after certain waverings41 resigned herself to leaving intact the political principle, which was that it was the lord of the manor only who was the direct subject of the Landesherr, the man of whom, alone, the latter took direct cognizance. Even where he had requirements which had in practice to be fulfilled by the unfree populations, such as the payment of taxes or service in the army, it was to their lord that he issued the orders, the lord then seeing to, and being responsible for, the execution of them by his subjects, apportioning and collecting the taxes, selecting and delivering the manorial quota of conscripts, etc. He also saw to the maintenance of public order and security among them, and of such services in connection with education, public health, etc., as the law required, and maintained a Court of Justice (usually known as the Patrimonial Court) which was the primary judiciary instance for his manor, himself dealing summarily with minor offenders and remitting others to a higher court, the dividing line varying, here again, with the size and dignity of the manor (the lords of some great Herrschaften were entitled to execute high justice and kept their own gallows, but smaller lords were as a rule competent to deal summarily only with comparatively light offences). When a manor was very small, several of them were often grouped together for the
purposes of justice.
Every commune also possessed its own elected Council, which sometimes, by custom or local law, enjoyed a fair measure of autonomy, and could appeal to higher authority against abusive conduct on the part of the manorial lord. The Councils were, however, still their lord’s subjects, not his partners in office.
The manorial lords were thus, looked at from the Landesherr’s point of view, the last link in the chain of his direct authority; from that of the Lands, they were the basis of their political structures, which were simply the machinery through which the manorial lords settled their mutual differences, took joint decisions on matters of common interest where they could do so autonomously, arranged how to carry out orders issued by the Landesherr in virtue of his potestas (such orders naturally going to a single body representing the lords and not to each one of them individually) and also defended their collective interests against him. This was done through a ‘Diet’ (Landtag), for the composition of which practically all Lands had evolved a representational system of ‘Estates’ (Landstände, or simply Stände) which reflected the differences in real power and importance between the different classes of its lords. The pattern had, in this respect also, become practically identical in nearly all the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands (here, too, earlier differences had been ironed out42), although the relative numbers of representatives contributed by each Estate to the collective representational body varied considerably from Land to Land. Normally, the First and Second ‘Benches’ (these were sometimes counted together) were composed respectively of the great Prelates (the Prälatenstand) and the Princes, Counts and Barons (the Herrenstand), each of these being individually entitled to sit on his ‘Bench’; the Rector of the local University (if any) and any important ecclesiastic not otherwise qualified also sat ex officio on this Bench (such representatives were known as ‘Virilists’). The third Bench (the Ritterstand) was composed of representatives of the untitled nobility. The manorial lords were supposed to represent the interests of their respective ‘subjects’, who were therefore not represented on the Estates. Representatives of the Royal Free Boroughs (the Bürgerstand) constituted a fourth Bench, but usually possessed only a single collective vote among what might, theoretically, be a number running into three figures. In the Tirol, uniquely, the free peasants sent two representatives to the Diet. Silesia had only two Estates: the Dukes and Princes, and the smaller nobles.43 The Littoral had none.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 3
