The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The Dynasties

  Series Editor: Nigel Saul, Professor of Medieval History Royal Holloway, University of London, UK

  Also in the series:

  The Tudors, David Loades (2012)

  The Plantagenets, Jeffrey Hamilton (2010)

  The Romanovs, Lindsey Hughes (2009)

  The Valois, Robert Knecht (2007)

  The Capetians, Jim Bradbury (2007)

  The Yorkists, Anne Crawford (2007)

  The Bourbons, J. H. Shennan (2007)

  The Hanoverians, Jeremy Black (2006)

  The Normans, David Crouch (2006)

  The Bonapartes, William H. C. Smith (2006)

  The Stuarts, John Miller (2006)

  The Habsburgs

  The History of a Dynasty

  BENJAMIN CURTIS

  Bloomsbury Academic

  An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

  1385 Broadway New York NY 10010 USA

  www.bloomsbury.com

  First published 2013

  © Benjamin Curtis, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

  Benjamin Curtis has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

  No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

  Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the Publishers would be glad to hear from them.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  eISBN: 978-1-4411-0053-5

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations

  Habsburg Family Tree

  Preface

  Introduction

  1From not so humble beginnings (c. 1000–1439)

  2Austria’s destiny (1440–1519)

  3The greatest generation (1516–64)

  4The European superpower (1556–1621)

  5Division in faith and family (1564–1619)

  6Endless war (1619–65)

  7Rise and fall (1657–1705)

  8Opulent stagnation (1705–40)

  9Enlightenment and reform (1740–92)

  10Revolution and reaction (1792–1848)

  11To succumb with honor (1848–1918)

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Cover: Maximilian I and family, by Bernhard Strigel (after 1515). In the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.

  Figures

  2.1Friedrich III, nineteenth-century illustration after a portrait attributed to Hans Burgkmair

  3.1Charles V at Mühlberg, by Titian (1548)

  3.2Ferdinand I, engraving by Hans Sebald Lautensack (1556)

  3.3Maria of Hungary, artist unknown

  4.1Felipe II, by Sofonisba Anguissola (after 1570)

  5.1Rudolf II, bust by Adriaen de Vries (1607)

  6.1Felipe IV, by Diego Velázquez (1656)

  7.1Leopold I, artist unknown

  9.1Maria Theresia, by Martin von Meytens (1759)

  9.2Joseph II and Leopold II, by Pompeo Batoni (1769)

  10.1Franz I, by Friedrich von Amerling (1832)

  11.1Franz Joseph I, photographer unknown (1914)

  Maps by C. James Carter

  1Growth of Habsburg territories

  2Habsburg lands circa 1700

  3Ethnic distribution in Austria-Hungary, 1910

  Table

  11.1Ethnic groups in Austria-Hungary

  Habsburg Family Tree

  PREFACE

  There is no shortage of books about the Habsburgs. That is only fitting for the family that can stake a credible claim to being the most important in European history. However, English has long lacked a concise overview of the dynasty, covering its first king to its last, and embracing both the Spanish and the Austrian branches of the family. This book seeks to fill that gap by answering some of the basic questions—Who were these people? What did they do?—while always keeping the dynasty itself at the center of the analysis. It was a family business, after all, whose individual members should be seen in the context of both their predecessors and successors. The task is to understand how the dynasty worked as a unit, and did so in a way that elevated it to the first rank of European royal houses. In surveying such broad territory chronologically and geographically, I hope that I have not sacrificed scholarly rigor in my attempt to make the narrative at least somewhat accessible to and engaging for nonspecialists. Contemporary academia tends to reward the narrow rather than the broad. But sometimes the educational mission demands a breadth comparable to the Habsburgs’ own expansive ambit.

  Like any book, this one required the hard work of many people besides my own. The staff at Seattle University’s Lemieux Library were outstanding in fetching material from far and near for the long research process. I am grateful to my colleagues in Matteo Ricci College for providing a worthy intellectual home. In particular, I cannot thank Dan Doyle, Emily Lieb, and Daniel Washburn enough for their comments on the manuscript. Thanks also to the other anonymous readers, and to Nigel Saul, the series editor, who provided feedback. All inadequacies are solely mine, as the standard disclaimer goes. My old friend Christopher Carter did excellent work on the maps. Rick Steves, Steve Smith, Michelle Michael Kono, and many other estimable compatriots in Edmonds have made it possible for me to go teach and learn in central and eastern Europe every year. Claire Lipscomb and Rhodri Mogford at Continuum-Bloomsbury were invaluable editors throughout this process. To these people and many others, for their support over the years of writing this book, Danke, gracias, köszönöm, děkuji, merci, obrigado, dzękuję, hvala, grazie, mulţumesc—in only some of the many languages of the Habsburg domains.

  Introduction

  AEIOU. The vowels themselves symbolized the Habsburg destiny: Austriae est imperare orbi universo (“Austria is to rule the whole world”). Another version of the motto was Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan (“All the world is subject to Austria”). This rather audacious usurpation of the alphabet was quite characteristic of the ambition—and the confidence—of the House of Habsburg. The family’s members were sure that they were born to rule. And though they shared this ideology of divine right with other European dynasties, several things make the Habsburgs distinct from the rest. Their preeminence was longer lasting, and their ambitions more grandiose, than any other modern royal family. For almost 650 years, from 1273 to 1918, Habsburg sons (and even a few daughters) ruled lands at the heart of Europe. There are only a few current countries on the continent whose lands were not at one point ruled by a Habsburg. From England to Serbia, Portugal to Poland, in the early modern period the dynasty’s dominions extended still further, encompassing nearly all of the Americas, touching territories in Africa and Asia as well. Not content with their near-monopoly of the highest crown in the West, that of the Holy Roman Empire, Habsburg rulers up to the eighteenth century truly believed that it was their destiny to rule the “universal orb,” to govern as much of the globe as possible.

  The AEIOU motto is but one ex
ample of how the Habsburgs wove a mythology of glory about themselves. They concocted genealogies to make their ancestors Roman nobles and Trojan heroes. They built lasting architectural monuments to their own majesty, such as the great palaces of Schönbrunn outside Vienna or El Escorial outside Madrid. They assembled a legendary treasury, now in the Viennese Hofburg, to show off the family’s fabulous wealth. It holds objects such as the Holy Lance that supposedly pierced Christ’s side, and the garishly bejeweled crown of the Holy Roman Emperor, once believed to have sat on the head of Charlemagne himself. They commissioned the greatest artists of their day such as Dürer, Titian, and Velázquez to create regal portraits of Habsburg family members. These paintings, and much other art besides, gave rise to the incomparable collections of the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which also serve as enduring reminders of Habsburg refinement.

  Such practices were not uncommon among European dynasties. But where the Habsburgs are again distinct is that no other dynasty has so thoroughly penetrated the popular imagination. The Habsburgs’ reputation among the general public includes elements rather more dubious than those many old emperors would prefer. Another of the House’s celebrated mottos—“Let others wage war; you, happy Austria, marry”—is often inextricably associated with tales of the family’s inbreeding. Those marital connections were indeed for a long time tightly linked within the family, which did produce a rather watery genetic stew, incarnated above all in the disabled Carlos II, the dead end of the Spanish Habsburgs. The marriage policies also perpetuated the family’s most characteristic physical inheritance: the protuberant jaw known as the “Habsburg lip,” easily visible in many of those same regal portraits by the great artists.

  Out of this long, intertwined line, an unprecedented number of the Habsburgs’ cast of characters still strut the stage of popular culture. Felipe II is usually seen as a villain, stained with the “Black Legend” of Spanish fanaticism, guilty of murdering his own son and brutalizing the freedom-loving people of the Netherlands. Rudolf II is imagined as the Habsburg Prospero, hidden away in the labyrinthine chambers of Prague castle, pursuing the dark arts of alchemy while his kingdom falls apart. Maria Theresia is the indomitable, fecund matron of Rococo Europe, mother to 16 children even as she ruled an empire on the upswing. One of her children, Marie Antoinette, symbolizes the cake-eating, doomed ancien régime. Her brother, Joseph II, has been portrayed as the brittle ultra-rationalist of the Enlightenment, infamous for his supposed comment to Mozart that the latter’s opera had “too many notes.” The lives of the last ruling Habsburgs in particular have been reconceived as a soap opera. Empress Elisabeth (known as “Sisi”), romanticized as the beautiful, misunderstood Princess Diana of her day, was murdered on the shores of Lake Geneva. Her son Rudolf is sketched as the brilliant, unstable heir who took his own life, while Franz Joseph himself, the emperor, husband, and father who saw his family die and his realm crumble around him, has attained a strange, tragic, plodding grandeur.

  The truth about the dynasty lies, predictably, somewhere in between its ostentatiously constructed self-image and the rather pock-marked public perception. The Habsburgs can be justifiably called the foremost family of Europe, and the paradigmatic European dynasty. The family owes these superlatives to its longevity, the prestige of its ruling titles, and its geographic reach. It attained all three via the astute manipulation of a number of key strategies for dynastic aggrandizement. These practices enabled the Habsburgs to rise from their original, modest power base in what is now Switzerland and southwestern Germany, to expand all the way across Europe and the planet, and to remain so important in European power politics for so many centuries. The Habsburgs’ astonishing record of success (along with some equally astonishing failures) offer a fascinating window through which to observe these strategies; they are nothing less than the work of dynasties, and the Habsburgs are the most consistently accomplished practitioners of European dynasticism.

  The strategies were intentional, even if they were not always practiced exclusively by a member of the family. The definition of a dynasty is a kinship-based political organization promoting the interests of a family across generations, which claims a right to power grounded in medieval notions of lineage and inheritance. This book studies the Habsburgs precisely as an organization, focusing on the strategies that reinforced the dynasty’s rule and maintained familial cohesion. Though the book is organized around the individual sovereigns, dynastic monarchy encompasses not just discrete rulers but a whole ruling cooperative, including the advisors, ministers, and underlings who assisted in governance. Why this is important is that a number of rather colorless Habsburg monarchs such as Karl VI or the nineteenth-century Ferdinand matter less for their personalities or decisions than for the position they occupied. Quite a few Habsburg rulers were thus place-holders, pale figureheads whose story is really their functional role in the perpetuation of the dynasty and its associated power structure.

  Dynastic strategies

  If a dynasty is in a sense a family business, then the Habsburgs’ family business was ruling. Dynasties were the most prominent actors behind the creation of the modern state. They provided the most influential and durable “continuity of interest” (in Wolfgang Reinhard’s phrase) that transcended individual rulers and the slowly developing conceptions of the impersonal, public state.1 The evidence that dynasties were the most successful creators of states is that many currently existing European countries trace their origins and consolidation to the work of individual families, even if those families are now long gone. Indeed, especially in the later medieval and early modern periods, key processes of state-building such as the growth of an administrative apparatus and the increased extraction of fiscal resources were very often measures taken to consolidate and centralize a dynasty’s rule.2 In most cases, the state and the dynasty were conceived as essentially identical; whatever was good for the dynasty was good for the state, and raison de dynastie became raison d’état. This fused identity of individual sovereign, family, and polity was vital because as the state consolidated out of many competing jurisdictions, creating some unity and harmony out of fragmented medieval polities, it was far easier for the sovereign to stand over all those tentatively fusing polities and represent (incarnate!) the developing state community. Before there was any shared state identity per se, there was thus the shared identity of being a sovereign’s subject. This means that the Habsburg dynasty had a mixed private-public character that is a particular characteristic of early modern state development.

  Over several centuries, a small number of dynasties out-competed other polities (such as city-states or ecclesiastical principalities) and even other aristocratic families to build up many of the state structures that persist in Europe today. The most successful dynasties such as the Habsburgs were those that competed most effectively using common strategies of dynastic furtherance, which also typically formed vital parts of building the dynastic state. This book studies four key dynastic strategies and how the Habsburgs used them:

  1How the dynasty produced and reproduced itself, which includes succession and marriage politics and territorial acquisition.

  2How the dynasty created legitimacy and loyalty for itself and its political system.

  3How the image and function of the ruler changed, which involves the evolution from the sacralized medieval warrior king to the demystified constitutional monarchy.

  4How the dynasty institutionalized and improved its government structures.

  There is certainly some overlap between these processes; legitimation can be related to the function of the ruler and the institutionalization of administrative structures, for instance.3 In any case, the four strategies require a brief, further explanation.

  The first, production and reproduction of the dynasty, involves not only producing heirs and securing marital alliances, but also the continuance of family traditions and the preservation of the patrimonial territorial complex. Th
ese activities are really the dynastic sine qua non. The essence of a dynasty is a family with a heightened sense of (a) its own identity and (b) exclusivity of membership. A dynasty is not just a familial group; it is also a culture. This culture of identity and exclusivity allows for common possession of certain goods via bequest across subsequent generations, all in the interest of preserving and increasing the family’s possessions. The idea of the dynasty as bigger and more important than any one member is fundamental to the dynastic ideology. The obsessiveness with which dynasties propagate this ideology is one of the things that separates them from ordinary families or even other, minor familial empires. Each member of the dynasty is really only a trustee whose duty is to pass on the dynasty’s domains. The head of the family, typically the oldest ruling male, oversees this project. However, it depends not just on the royal leader, since other members of the family also contribute, as do the extra-family advisors, clients, or groups who are interested in benefits (whether riches or power) they can accrue by supporting the dynasty.4

  For the dynasty to work as a corporate, trans-generational unit, an essential aspect of its reproduction is socialization: dynasties must inculcate their members with certain norms, including a sense of identity with and responsibility to the dynasty itself. This is indispensable for the perpetuation of the family’s possessions (territorial and material) as well as its symbolic image of authority. A dynasty’s claim of a right to rule a territory depends on inheritance, whose terms were not surprisingly of intense concern to most dynasties. There was a tension here between medieval traditions of partible inheritance and the succession imperative of producing as many legitimate children as possible to continue the line and serve the dynasty’s interests. Partible inheritance—the division of territory among sons—tended to weaken and scatter dynastic patrimonies, while primogeniture passed on the inheritance to the oldest son. The Habsburgs throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period grappled with partible inheritance versus primogeniture, the latter only gradually becoming dominant through various legal codes and other familial agreements. The persistence of partible inheritance helps account for intra-dynastic conflicts, such as those that bedeviled the family in the fourteenth century between the “Albertine” and “Leopoldine” branches. Though primogeniture was not definitively established in the dynasty until the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, a part of Habsburg success in this strategy was that they commonly managed to resolve conflicts within the family and maintain solidarity.