The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  But even in Royal Hungary there was much distress. The mines were no longer as productive as they had been, and the once very prosperous wine trade had been hard hit by the Prussian wars, military and tariff, for Silesia had been the biggest market for the North Hungarian wines. There was already frequent grim distress among the Slovak and Ruthene mountaineers. In the fat plains themselves, animal comfort when the harvest was good could easily be followed by famine when it failed; a rich harvest could not be taken to market for lack of communications and was sometimes even left ungathered, to rot on the ground. Ex-Turkish Hungary was much more backward still. Buda had been rebuilt and Pest was growing into a big commercial centre, but the village-towns of the Plain were much as they had been in Turkish days, only somewhat larger, while the same unpopulated leagues stretched between them. This was still mainly a cattle area; the beasts were grazed in the open (where an unconscionable proportion of them perished) then driven on the hoof, as far afield as Germany and Italy. The cereal farming was on a low level. Only the vineyards were manured; otherwise, dung was used to build walls or patch roads. The German settlers, whose villages were islands of neatness, were the only people who practised the three-crop rotation, the Magyars contenting themselves with a two-year rotation of alternate crop and fallow, while the half-nomadic Serb and Vlach herdsmen of the South merely scratched a plot near their shacks and moved on to another when it was exhausted. Their own homes were pits sunk in the ground, with roofs of maize-straw and a hole at one end for door and chimney combined. The Bánát, settled largely with German colonists and organized under enlightened governors, was an outpost of progress, but the hinterland of Croatia (excluding, that is Fiume, which possessed shipyards and a large tobacco factory) and the Military Frontier were no more advanced than Central Hungary; the largest town in Croatia proper was Várasd, with 3,580 inhabitants. In Transylvania, the solid Saxon townlets and fortified villages had survived the troublous years reasonably well, but they were stagnating, for if the eighteenth century had brought Transylvania peace, it had also left it an economic backwater. Moreover, the birthrate of the Saxons – by far the most progressive element in the Principality – was declining, and the increase in the population was due to the growth of the Roumanian element, most of which lived in conditions of squalor hardly above those of the local gypsies.

  In Galicia, the population of which, when it came to Austria, numbered about 2,300,000, conditions ranged in a descending scale, from West to East. In the Western half of the province, which had escaped serious devastation for several centuries, the population was relatively dense – in some districts too dense for comfort – and conditions comparatively orderly, the more so since no mean fraction of the population was descended from German colonists, long since Polonized but retaining testimonies to their ancestry and former freedom in the shape of soundly built cottages and well-tilled fields. Here there was even a little industry, mostly connected with the cultivation and preparation of flax, and some export of wheat still went on down the Vistula, although only a quarter of what had existed two hundred years before. But in the East, where Tatar slave-raids were still almost a living memory, the population, which was Ruthene, was sparse and primitive. Not only the forested Carpathians, in which only a few wild Huzuls lived by charcoal burning and game-poaching, but wide stretches of plain were almost uninhabited.89 The large number of places ranking here as ‘towns’ simply meant that the population found it safer to live in company, while the landlords, too, derived some financial advantage from conferring urban status on a collection of houses. In fact, Lemberg was the only place which a traveller could recognize, and that with some repugnance, as a town. Of the others it was said that when a peasant stopped his cart at the Jew’s shop (almost the whole urban population was Jewish), the nose of his horse protruded at one end of the town and the tail of his cart at the other. In 1802 a traveller in the parts was unable to get his horse shod in Stanislavov, the largest town after Lemberg, and in another, was unable to buy a candle. All Galicia in 1781 had only forty-three brick-burners, seventeen plasterers, 118 house-painters, two glovers, eight leatherworkers and similar numbers of other craftsmen.

  The magnates’ palaces, which were not numerous here, were sometimes imposing outside, but bare and comfortless inside; the houses of the Szlachta (small nobles) mere cottages.90 Nine peasants out of ten lived in huts of wattle and daub, consisting of a single room which was shared by man and beast, windowless and chimneyless. An advantage of this for the peasant was that if he found his conditions burdensome, he simply did a moonlight flit. His home could easily be replaced; his portable possessions were as easily loaded on one cart.

  The more advanced rotation of crops was one year’s autumn-sown crop followed by two years’ summer-sown, then one year fallow, but in some places a communal system was followed, several years’ ploughing being followed by a long fallow. Ploughs were of wood; harrows consisted of boards studded with nails. Clover and fodder crops were almost unknown. The cereal crops were largely converted into rough brandy, of which the Galician peasants consumed fabulous quantities; but nearly half the area was pasture and ley.

  In the Bukovina conditions resembled those of East Galicia but were, if possible, more primitive still.

  *

  When Maria Theresa ascended the throne, she had found the finances of her Empire in that dismal condition with which all her successors were to become so familiar. A long line of her paternal ancestors had regularly lived beyond their incomes, and an alarming proportion of the Crown’s lands which had once formed the mainstay of its wealth had been sold. Many of the sources of indirect taxation had been farmed out, often on terms very disadvantageous to the Exchequer. The yield of the gold mines had long ceased to be appreciable, that of the silver mines was dwindling. The contributio had to be wrung painfully out of reluctant Estates, who were often themselves in difficulties and could not keep up with their payments (Carinthia, for example, owed the Treasury 2·8 million gulden in 1743). Charles’s acquisitions in the Netherlands and Italy had been a welcome windfall, but most of the latter had been lost again in 1735–8. The State’s revenues, which before the Turkish wars of 1736–9 had been estimated to bring in nearly forty million gulden, were in fact yielding barely half that amount in 1740. Meanwhile, Charles, like his predecessors, had kept an extremely extravagant Court.91 Austria had already contracted the habit of borrowing from foreign bankers, who usually charged exorbitantly for the accommodation. When Charles died, his daughter had found only 87,000 gulden in her treasury, and the State debt was 101 m.g., sixty per cent of it owed abroad, much of this to the Bank of England. She herself was then at once embroiled in the War of the Austrian Succession. She clapped on a number of extraordinary taxes, in more or less arbitrary fashion,92 but they were quite inadequate to cover the cost of the war, and it has been rightly said that the ‘only prop’ of Austrian finances during the following years was constituted by the English subsidies of £300,000 a year.93

  Under Haugwitz’s reforms, described on an earlier page, the yield from the contributio was stepped up considerably, and at the end of the Empress’s reign the Crown was receiving about 32·5 m.g. from this source, of which 19 m.g. came from the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands and Galicia, 7 from the Netherlands, 3 from Lombardy and 3·5 from Hungary, while the Netherlands and Lombardy had already paid all their own military budgets and Hungary the deperdita, amounting to another half million or so. The yield of indirect taxation and of certain direct taxes now levied by the Crown, with the profits from the Crown lands and enterprises, had risen to about 27 m.g., approximately twice the figure of forty years earlier. Expenditure had, however, shown a tendency to rise pari passu, for although the Empress had made conscientious efforts to economize (and had, in fact, dispensed with many of her father’s extravagances), and was a shrewd enough business woman, she was liable to costly lapses, especially when one of her favourites got out of his financial depth,94 and had, of course, been faced with
a second prolonged war only a few years after the conclusion of the first. Thus every year until 1775 had closed with a deficit, which had had to be met from ‘extraordinary contributions’ or by loans, which, since Maria Theresa was averse from borrowing abroad, were mainly raised inside Austria (lottery loans were a favourite way of raising the wind). Up to 1763 the State was paying 6% for its accommodation, and the service of its loans was becoming a heavy item in its expenditure. Her husband then took charge of the operation and managed to reduce the rate to 5%, and when he died, his widow and son devoted his entire public fortune95 to amortization of the public debt, part of which was redeemed and the interest on the remainder brought down to 4%. In 1767, however, the debt still stood at 260 m.g., 38 m.g. of which was owed abroad, and the annual interest on it at 9·4 m.g.

  In 1775 the budget was, for the first time for many years, if not the first in all Austrian history, balanced. The national balance of trade, long passive, had now also become heavily active. But barely had equilibrium been reached when there came the War of the Bavarian Succession, which cost another 30 m.g., which was again paid for out of borrowing, so that in 1780 the State debt stood again at 376 m.g.

  Earlier in the century attempts had been made to establish a State Bank to help the Government in its financial operations, but they had broken down on the well-founded mistrust of the public. The conduct of the operations had then been transferred to the Wiener Stadtbank, a well-managed institution in which the public had more confidence, and which accordingly had succeeded in holding its own. Gradually this had slipped into the position of a Government bank, with the main function of floating government loans, to which was presently added that of a bank of issue, for in 1762 the Government had begun to issue, through the bank, non-interest-bearing notes of denominations ranging from five to one hundred gulden.96 Later, as we shall see, these Bankozettel were to acquire a melancholy reputation, but at first they were issued only on a small scale (in 1780 only 6,798,000 of them were in circulation) and were taken readily at their face value, thus becoming an accepted part of the currency. They were, indeed, probably beneficial, as helping to relieve the stringency which must otherwise have resulted from the shortage of silver money.

  IV THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE

  Shielded as it had been by history against the impact of new economic forces, the social structure of the Monarchy had remained profoundly unmodern – a better word than ‘mediaeval’, for some of its features were less akin to those of a later age than were those of the mediaeval German Reich. In that, the Monarch had still been a human enough figure, whereas the Spanish Court ceremonial introduced by Ferdinand I and perpetuated under his successors (among whom Charles VI, who did much to revive it, had passed his own youth in Spain) treated His Imperial Majesty not only as politically omnipotent, but socially, as a special class of man, almost halfway towards deity. A fabulously intricate system of etiquette separated him by a great gulf from the most exalted of his subjects.

  Yet the Monarch’s eye was not of the divine type, before which all men are equal. The central tenet of the Hungarian Constitution, which decreed that the populus of the Hungarian nobles constituted, with the Crown itself, the sole positive element in the polity, was not the Hungarian speciality as which it is often represented. With certain pragmatic exceptions (and these existed, although more rarely, also in Hungary) the constitutional position was as we have shown, no different from the rest of the Monarchy. The entire political structure of the Hereditary and Bohemian Lands, no less than the Hungarian, rested on the manorial system and its corollary, the nexus subditelae, and the manorial lords in each Land – in practice, its local landowning nobles – were the only category of its population of which the Crown took direct political cognisance; its relationship with the lords’ subjects was only mediate.

  Under the same system it was, practically speaking, only the nobles of each Land who had any voice in its public affairs (the self-government enjoyed by the boroughs and communes through their councils was, of course, limited to their own lives). Apart from the derisorily small representation accorded to the Royal Free Boroughs and the few other specially selected communities, the nobles alone were represented on the Estates of the Western Lands or in the Hungarian Diet and County Congregationes. The limits of the authority of the manorial lords and the Estates were, indeed, growing increasingly restricted as the Crown interested itself in a wider range of questions, but even this had hardly affected the nobles’ near-monopoly. In the bureaucracy itself, the higher posts could be held only by nobles; only the lower grades were open to persons whose educational qualifications entitled them to the intermediate status of ‘honoratior’.97 If such a man’s talents, or his expertize in law, finance, or some other technical field, demanded his advancement, he was given a patent of nobility corresponding to the post. This device was always open to the Crown, but Maria Theresa herself used it only rarely, while her predecessors had resorted to it only in the most exceptional cases. Far more often, a post was filled by the direct appointment to it of a person already holding the appropriate rank. Even where a noble youth entering the public service as a life career was required to start in a subordinate position, he climbed the ladder of advancement quickly and easily, while his ignoble colleague panted up it slowly and laboriously.98

  The same system prevailed in the army, and even in the Church,99 so that in all fields of public life the principle was maintained that the Crown exercised its direct authority only through nobles, and conversely, that the nobles by birth were the class from which the Crown took the great majority of its servants.

  Any noble, landed or landless, enjoyed innumerable privileges. In Hungary he was exempt from all forms of taxation whatever, and in Austria, even after the eighteenth century reforms, his land was taxed at a lower rate than a peasant’s and he was exempt from some minor taxes. Nobles were exempt from the obligation of military service, outside the Hungarian insurrectio. A noble, in all Lands, was tried before a Court of his peers. A Hungarian noble charged with any offence, even a criminal one, except high treason, or unless he had been caught in flagrante in the commission of highway robbery, arson, or one or two other crimes, could not be apprehended; he remained at liberty until his trial. No noble could be compelled to give evidence on oath; his word of honour sufficed. He was not above the ordinary law, civil or criminal, but it was extraordinarily difficult for a peasant to win a case against a landlord, or for a bourgeois creditor to recover a debt from a noble debtor desirous of evading his obligation (and the frequency of such evasions was one of the scandals of Austrian society). Special schools existed to which only pupils of noble families were admitted – the most famous of these, the Theresianum, had been founded by Maria Theresa herself. There were also specially endowed convents for the daughters, young or elderly but unmarried, of noble families, these being graded to match the rank of their inmates. A noble possessed of even a minor title would be extraordinarily unlucky if he fell into destitution, except through irremediable extravagance – and not always even then; Maria Theresa, as we have said, personally paid the debts of many of her favourites. A younger son for whom no place could be found in the service of the Government or the Estates could probably get a Court sinecure101 or be received into one of the lay Orders which existed especially to provide for such cases.

  The noble’s other privileges included the right to wear special articles of clothing forbidden to lesser mortals, like Harrow bloods.

  *

  The nobility itself was far from being a homogeneous class. It fell into several categories, which in some respects were even legally differentiated, while the differences in their respective importance, and in the roles played by them in the State, were enormous. At the apex of this steep pyramid stood the Hochadel (itself tipped by the tiny elite blue-blooded enough even to marry into the Imperial family102) whose unblemished lineage procured them the privilege, denied to humbler mortals, of access to the Court and social intercourse with the
Monarch and his family.

  Generally speaking, possession of the title of Prince, Duke, Count or Baron (Freiherr) carried with it membership of this class, although even in the eighteenth century there were Counts and Barons who, although they could not be denied the legal privileges attaching to their rank, were not admitted by their colleagues as true members of the community.

  It was a fact of great importance for the whole structure of the Monarchy that – whether of calculation, that they despaired of attaching to themselves more closely the wide, heterogeneous masses of their subjects, or whether it was that their eyes simply did not recognize the attributes of humanity in humbler guise – the Habsburgs (or at least, Ferdinand I and his descendants) had always sought the foundation and the instruments of their rule in a great aristocracy. Thus although in almost all their Lands the political supremacy which they now enjoyed had been achieved only after severe struggles in which the resistance to them was headed precisely by the local grandees, yet when the victory had been won, they had neither abolished the political prerogatives of the class as such, nor sought to weaken its economic basis. Only in the most exceptional cases had they kept the confiscated estates of rebels permanently in their own hands, for the benefit of other classes of the population.103 Their general rule – applied by them alike in Bohemia, after the Battle of the White Mountain, and in Hungary after Wesselényi and Thököly and Rákóczi had shot their bolts – had been simply to replace the rebellious magnates by a new set of their own men, often even more richly endowed than their predecessors; for some of these favourites were given lands, not only of more than one great rebel, but of a dozen or a score of smaller nobles.