These assurances were very far from giving Hungary complete self-rule. They did not give her any more voice than that possessed by any ‘province’ in the conduct of foreign policy, or defence, and the independence promised to her Camera was never more than nominal. The Consilium Locumtenentiale which was the top-level organ of administration, was in fact a Gubernium like any other, and although the Hungarian Court Chancellery, from which the Consilium took its orders, was in name subject only to the King of Hungary, it was often the hands of the Austrian Chancellery and Staatsrat which drafted those instructions which came to it through the mouth of the king. Finally, the Crown got round its obligation towards the Diet by not convoking that body at all, except to ask it (as it was still formally asking the Diets of Bohemia or Styria) for men and money (Charles, after he had got his way over the Succession Law, convoked the Diet only once again during his reign, and Maria Theresa, only on her accession and twice thereafter); and by treating any subject on which some ancient document did not give the nation an irrefutable right to speak, as one which the Crown was entitled to regulate at its own discretion, by Rescript. Education, ‘colonisation’, religious questions, industrial legislation, even the peasants’ obligations to their lords, were so treated. When it was not a question of law, the minutest local and personal questions went up to the Chancellery, through the Consilium, and were decided by it.66
Nevertheless, Hungary’s size, her strategic importance, her inaccessibility and the resolution of her noble class, had enabled her to maintain successfully the principle that she constituted an entirely separate body politic, linked to the Habsburgs’ other dominions only through the Pragmatic Sanction, and quite unconnected, so far as her interna were concerned, with any of them, and in certain important respects she escaped the reality of central control. Her nobles retained intact the cardinal privileges of exemption from taxation, an extended right of habeas corpus and exclusive eligibility to public office. Her judiciary remained completely independent. The Counties, unlike the Austrian Kreisämter, were never etatized, and this provided a strong brake on the working of the central bureaucracy, since apart from their autonomy, they also provided the executive power through which the Crown gave effect to its decisions. Thus if they did choose to object to any demand, they put the Government in a position of real difficulty.
Finally, less because its law was different than because it could mobilize so large a de facto power of resistance, Hungary was really able to keep its consent to the contributio more than a formality. Here it was helped by the fact that when it was first assessed (in 1724) the country was exceedingly impoverished and depopulated after the Turkish Wars. Later Diets, in 1728, 1751 and 1765, did indeed vote increases to the contributio,67 but only after debates the legality of which the Crown did not question, and not proportionately to the country’s increase in wealth and population. It had also, as we have seen, maintained its exemption from conscription, so that it was able also to bargain over the number of ‘volunteers’ which it would allow to be enlisted, and to keep that figure, too, a relatively low one.
This real tenuity of the links between Hungary and the rest of the Monarchy and the real limitations of the Crown’s authority in it were cardinal factors in the structure of the Monarchy, much of whose political history after 1780 consisted of the Crown’s attempts to reduce Hungary to the status of ‘other provinces’, and the Hungarians’ resistance to them.
*
The question of self-government versus autocratic control was, of course, only one aspect of the administrative problem of the Monarchy: the nature and quality of the resultant government was another. In this respect a very great difference indeed had developed since 1750 between the Western and Eastern halves of the Monarchy. The advantage in human comfort does not lie wholly with the West, for the ultimate objects of the changes carried through were only in a very minor degree the welfare of the subjecta, but far rather the military efficiency of the State, to which the predilections and the happiness of the subjecta were sacrificed ruthlessly enough. In her later years Maria Theresa came to think in more human terms, but by that time her son’s influence was intruding itself into the picture. Many of the ‘reforms’ were thoroughly vexatious,68 aimed solely at reducing the leisure, and the pleasure, of the people in order that they should have more work and money to give the exchequer. Others were simply changes for change’s sake, the spiritual offspring of bureaucrats who suddenly found the toy of power in their hands. But whatever the motives, the Vereinigte Hofkanzlei had developed within a few years into a vast body which combined in itself the functions of a dozen modern Ministries – Interior, Education, Church Affairs, Commerce, Public Works, Agriculture and Forestries, Social Welfare – almost everything, in fact, that human ingenuity could think up, short of Foreign Affairs, Defence and the financial business still transacted by the Camera. Every branch of it was engaged, not only in supervising what was already being done in those fields, but itself drafting for the Monarch’s approval new ‘laws, ordinances and enactments’ which, since no one could say them nay, were at once put into effect if approved by the Monarch. By 1780 a generation of this bureaucratic rule had advanced the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands to a level of modernization far ahead of that reached by Hungary, not to speak of the newly acquired Galicia. The effects of these thirty years were plainly visible in the economic, social and cultural picture of the Monarchy; although they had, of course, only supervened on earlier conditions created by nature and by the past history of the different Lands.
*
The dignities of Roman Emperor and German King, both enjoyed in 1780 by Maria Theresa’s son, Joseph, were very little more than titular. The Emperor could not intervene at all in the internal affairs of the German Princes, nor call on them to take any joint action without the consent of the Imperial Diet, and this was practically unobtainable. His revenues from the few dues and taxes which were his perquisite did not even cover the expenses of the surviving Imperial institutions, the Reichskammergericht in Wetzlau and the Reichshofrat in Vienna, both of which were, moreover, so hopelessly corrupt, inefficient and dilatory that even Joseph, after a futile attempt, had given up hope of reforming them.
III ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL CONDITIONS
In 1780 the Austrian Netherlands and Milan stood no less far apart from the rest of the Habsburg dominions in respect of economic development and social structure, than they did in all other ways. With their dense populations (estimated in 1786 at 2,000,000 and 1,300,000 respectively), their busy cities, their flourishing trade and industries, their prosperous merchants and entrepreneurs, decent craftsmen and self-assured peasantries, they belonged in these respects where geography and history placed them, in Western Europe.
Very different was the state of the rest of the Monarchy. Most of the Hereditary Lands had never known wealth or ease. The Marches which formed the core of them were, except for the Danube valley, where agriculture was practicable on a modest scale, a mere tangle of forest-clad mountains, threaded by narrow and tortuous valleys which only rarely opened out into more spacious basins, and those usually occupied by lakes or marshes. The hill-slopes were fitted for little beyond cattle-raising, the forests inaccessible for exploitation except for local building or charcoal-burning. Of the other resources known before modern times, the iron of Styria and Eastern Carinthia, the gold and lead of the latter province, the silver and copper of the Tirol and the salt of Upper Austria were important, but the richest of the salt-mines lay outside Austrian territory, in the domains of the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, and difficulties of transportation limited the operations of the iron-mines to small-scale work: their chief products were scythes and nails.
It was, indeed, their inaccessibility that saved the Marches from succumbing to the barbarian attacks against which they had been founded, and under which their predecessors had perished; but the same inaccessibility denied them the possibility of accumulating wealth. They lay, moreover, on the very outskirts of ci
vilized mediaeval Europe, far from its centres of wealth, or from the trade-routes linking them. Between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries Vienna derived some prosperity as an entrepôt for the considerable traffic then passing by road or water between Central Europe and the Levant, but the Turkish conquest of the Balkans and Hungary put an end to this traffic and turned much of Austria into an outpost again. The only important trade-route now running across its territory was that which linked Italy with Germany via the Tirol. For the rest, the Hereditary Lands were thrown back on their own resources, which condemned their sparse population69 to its old fate of a laborious uphill struggle against difficulties, natural or man-made. The latter were still far from inconsiderable. The peasant risings of the sixteenth century inflicted much damage precisely on the most prosperous Lands. While they escaped the full force of the Thirty Years War, the losses inflicted on them by the Counter-Reformation were not negligible.70 In Upper Austria in 1663, 288 out of the 605 houses in Steyr were empty, 240 out of 426 in Wels, 133 out of 219 in Enns, 200 out of 288 in Freistadt. 120 out of 288 houses in Linz were uninhabitable. Lower Austria, Styria and Carniola were ravaged by Turkish armies (most notably, the great force which besieged Vienna in 168371) or small raiding parties, or scarcely less destructive bands of Magyars, and their resources were further constantly and heavily taxed to maintain the defences against the invaders. Another recurrent and dreadful visitant was the plague, which in some years and some places carried away half the total population.72
Nature had dealt more generously with Bohemia and Moravia. The soil of their central plains was fertile and communications across them easy, while the mountains of the periphery had contained deposits of gold and silver which in the thirteenth century had produced the richest yields in Europe, and were also well adapted for the growth of certain industries, notably that of glass, which had early acquired a European reputation. In the early Middle Ages Bohemia had ranked among the wealthiest lands of Europe. It had conducted a flourishing trade with Germany and Poland, and thanks to the enlightened policies of several of its kings, had contained a far larger number of towns, relatively to its size, than any Alpine Land.73 Silesia, while less naturally fertile, had early developed a textile industry which was very advanced for its age.
Here it was man that had been the destructive agent. All the Lands of the Bohemian Crown had suffered cruelly in the Hussite Wars of the fifteenth century. In spite of these, Bohemia is estimated to have contained some two million inhabitants in 1500, and Moravia and Silesia, another million each, and the population of Bohemia in 1620 is put at three million. Then, however, came the devastations of the Thirty Years War, which afflicted Bohemia more heavily than any other European land. Its towns were largely laid in ashes, its industry was ruined, its artisan class, with many of its nobles and even peasants, driven into exile, its very soil passed out of cultivation. Modern writers put its total population at the end of the war at only nine hundred thousand; some estimates are even lower. Moravia had suffered almost as severely.
Hungary, although never so densely populated or so highly developed economically as Bohemia, had also known considerable prosperity in the Middle Ages. When Louis the Great ruled over it in the fourteenth century, its population had been about three million, and it had boasted forty-nine Royal Boroughs, over five hundred ‘market towns’ and more than twenty-six thousand villages. Its gold mines produced more than three thousand lb of gold annually, more than five times as much as any other European State. By 1500 the population had risen by another million.
But Hungary, too, had fallen from its high estate, later than Bohemia, but even more terribly. Here it was the Turkish conquest and a hundred and fifty years long occupation of the centre of the country, with its accompaniment of fighting and slave-raiding – both extending across the frontiers into the areas not actually under Turkish rule – that had spread over much of the country a desolation which the wars of liberation at the end of the sevententh century had made almost total.74 By the end of them the population of the Lands of the Hungarian Crown was down to about three millions (until recently, most estimates put it lower still), nearly all of it concentrated in North-West Hungary, or, to a lesser extent, Transylvania. In the centre of the country, most of the surviving population had huddled for safety into ‘village towns’, each of which harboured the survivors of twenty or more deserted villages. The population of the largest of these, Debrecen, was only eight thousand in 1720, and between each such agglomeration and its neighbour might stretch twenty-five or thirty miles, unmarked by human habitation save for a gypsy’s or a herdsman’s hut. South Hungary was in worse state still: in 1692 the three large Counties of Baranya, Tolna and Somogy had numbered between them a population of only 3,221 souls, 1,652 of them in the single city of Pécs.
It was, of course, not man alone that suffered under this devastation, but also his works. Cities fell into ruins, villages disappeared without a trace as the unfired bricks crumbled back into the clay of which they had been fashioned. The Bohemian industries almost died out. Prague in 1674 could muster only 355 artisans, as against 1200 when the Thirty Years War began. Iglau, where seven to eight thousand persons had been employed in the cloth industry, was left with only 300 burghers. ‘Town’ in Hungary had become simply a name for a large agglomeration of peasants. When Hódmezövásárhely, a community of seven thousand, wanted to rebuild its church in 1747, not a single carpenter, stone-mason or brickmaker could be found in the commune; it had to send away for all its craftsmen.
Even in the Hereditary Lands, it was the most skilled and enterprising elements of the population that the Counter-Reformation drove into exile.
The agriculture into which the economy had everywhere relapsed had itself returned to the primitive. The surviving inhabitants of Central Hungary had abandoned cereal farming for cattle-breeding, in which it was easier to evade the eye of the tax-collector. For the same reason, barns were no longer used to store such vegetable crops as were still raised; they were hidden out of sight in underground holes.
*
It is true that the middle of the seventeenth century had marked the nadir of the economic fortunes of the Alpine Lands and Bohemia, and the beginning of the eighteenth, of those of Eastern Austria and Hungary. Since then all districts had made recoveries, some of them, in some respects, very large ones. With the end of the most destructive wars, and the abatement of disease (the last outbreak of plague in Vienna was in 1713) the population of Bohemia had recovered by 1750 to about one and a half million; after that it had been increasing very rapidly, and in 1780 was over two and a half million, and that of Moravia, about half as much. Rump Silesia had about three hundred thousand. The rate of increase in the Historic Lands had been slower,75 but their population is estimated to have reached something over four millions (Lower Austria, 1,200,000; Upper Austria, 600,000; Styria, 750,000; Tirol, 550,000; Vorarlberg, 100,000; Carinthia, 270,000; Carniola, 400,000; the Littoral, 200,000) by the same date, while the increase in Hungary, where the natural growth had been supplemented by immigration from the Balkans and by the systematic operation of colonization known as the impopulatio, had been even spectacular. In some areas, where the previous devastation had been particularly severe and the immigration very intensive, the population had risen six, eight, or ten times and the total, for all the Hungarian Lands, was now some nine and a half millions (just under six and a half millions in Inner Hungary, nearly one and a half millions in Transylvania, 650,000 in civilian Croatia and 700,000 in the Military Frontier).
Economically, these increases spelled almost pure gain for the Monarchy, for the population was still almost everywhere well below the economic optimum. Most of the increase went at first into agriculture, which before then had been undermanned for its struggle with nature. Now swamps could be drained, brakes cleared, favoured areas put under intensive cultivation, practised by new methods which were gaining and sometimes applied to crops such as tobacco (later, maize and potatoes76) wh
ich had formerly been unfamiliar. Some of the masters of the land on which these processes were carried through accumulated big fortunes and lived very luxuriously, by their own standards.
The tastes of most of them were, however, not very diversified. They stood themselves large living accommodation, entertained their friends lavishly, and kept enormous armies of domestic servants (who came to constitute a considerable fraction of the population), but did not buy manufactured articles on anything like the scale of a modern family. Moreover, since manpower meant wealth to them, they opposed any development of nature to draw it off their fields so long as it was in short supply – a condition which prevailed in large parts of the Monarchy until well into the nineteenth century, and was a factor of great importance in the economic history of the period which we are studying. Their wealth thus contributed relatively little to the diversification of the economy, and another factor with the same retarding influence was the policy of the guilds, which had developed the science of restrictive practices to a pitch from which any later age could have learned. Nevertheless, as one generation of internal peace followed another (most of Charles VI’ wars were fought outside the Monarchy), the demand for diversification did inevitably grow, not least under the stimulus of the luxurious Courts kept by Charles and, in spite of her poverty, by his daughter.77 The number of artisans and shopkeepers increased, and the towns expanded to receive them, and the old staple industries of the Monarchy – Bohemian glass, Silesian linen, Moravian woollens, Styrian iron – began to revive.
Meanwhile, moreover, the mercantilist doctrines of the age had found their adepts in Austria. As early as 1684 Johann Hörnigk had published a pamphlet entitled Oesterreich über Alles, wenn es nur will, in which he argued that if Austria developed her own resources, she could not only avoid the necessity of importing anything, but could herself become a big exporting country, besides enjoying greatly increased internal prosperity. His doctrines were taken up and elaborated by another writer, Johann Becher, and certain attempts were made to translate them into practice in the reigns of Leopold I, and still more, in that of Charles. What Charles effected for communications, in particular, was not insignificant, and the beginnings of some Austrian industries which later became important also date from his reign. Most of his attempts to introduce new industries came, however, to little, for various reasons, including the resistance of the landlords and the inexperience of the entrepreneurs; in any case, they did not very greatly affect the Austria with which we are concerned, since it was found easier to develop industries where they already existed, notably in the Netherlands and Silesia, than to found new ones elsewhere. The biggest development in his reign was in the luxury industries which grew up round the Court in Vienna.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 5
