Despite primogeniture’s benefits in stabilizing dynastic rule by serving as a legal foundation for succession, it also brought drawbacks. When the oldest male child is automatically the family’s leader, this works against a meritocratic system by which younger but more talented members of the family could take over the leadership. Such was the problem on a few occasions in the Habsburg monarchy, perhaps most famously with Franz I’s younger brothers Karl and Johan, both of whom were more intelligent than he. Even with such drawbacks, primogeniture was recognized as an acceptable tradeoff, since it prevented an insecure succession, which historically was one of most destabilizing factors to the evolution of dynastic states. Moreover, the Habsburgs learned to use younger sons and daughters in productive ways, appointing them to rule parts of the family’s lands such as the Low Countries or northern Italy, or to key ecclesiastical positions. Indeed, another factor in the dynasty’s success was its occasional surplus of cadet lines that could still represent dynastic interests in far-flung outposts.5 The cadet lines also helped out in the case of succession crises in the ruling line, such as in the later years of Franz Joseph’s reign.
Multiple sons and daughters were also essential for the other vital aspect of dynastic production and reproduction, namely marital alliances. The Habsburgs’ fame of ascending through marriage rather than war rests above all on a series of alliances involving Maximilian I by which Burgundy, Castile-Aragon, and Bohemia-Hungary all came into the house over the course of 50 years from 1477. Marrying off sons and daughters to other dynasties brought such territorial gains and solidified diplomacy with other powers (such as Marie Antoinette marrying into the French royal house in 1770). But the practice also brought risks. Marrying outside the family could lead to other dynasties claiming parts of the Habsburg patrimony through marriage. Such was the case when Felipe IV’s daughter María Teresa married Louis XIV of France, which became the basis for later Bourbon succession claims to Spain in 1700. This danger led to another risk, that of inter-breeding. To keep the patrimony all in the family, and encourage strong collaboration between the Spanish and Austrian branches of the dynasty, cousins married cousins and uncles married nieces. It was this debacle of consanguinity that finally felled the Spanish Habsburgs.
The second dynastic strategy is legitimation and loyalty creation. Legitimation justifies the dynasty’s right to rule, and loyalty creation means inculcating a sense of allegiance to the dynasty and its rule among its subject populations. Blood itself was an aspect of legitimacy, and is obviously crucial to dynasties. Though Carlos II because of his many infirmities was incapable of governing, he was nonetheless legitimate because he was Felipe IV’s son. A ruler owed his prestige and position only partially to his individual attributes and abilities, but often more to his family line. Related to blood is an assiduous cultivation of a historical identity, to emphasize the dynasty’s longevity and hence its obligations for its currently living members. The Habsburgs were appropriately dedicated to the cultivation of a genealogical mythology which would legitimize their rule. Maximilian I in particular sponsored fabulistic investigations to legitimize Habsburg supremacy by tracing the family lineage back to the Carolingians, Merovingians, and Trojans. Legitimacy was also firmly grounded in persistent ideas of a Habsburg divine mission. This mission was simply one to rule. It said that the Habsburgs were anointed by God to defend Christendom. In part because the era of the Habsburgs’ hegemonic position in Europe coincided with the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, religious claims were more fundamental to their sense of legitimacy than they were for any other European house.6 Though the belief in divine right and the necessity of religious homogeneity declined as society secularized, it never fully disappeared from the family’s traditions.
The Habsburgs’ legitimation strategies until the end of their rule in 1918 were intertwined with particular imperial and dynastic principles. The Habsburgs believed very strongly in the imperial ideology, which postulated a continuity of Western empire from Rome, to Charlemagne, and onward into the later medieval and early modern periods. Seizing on this ideology, family members envisioned themselves as the supreme, overarching rulers of much of Europe. Because of this imperial mindset, the family was less inclined to regard the territories over which it ruled as one state that needed to be consolidated and centralized. Certainly there was consolidation and centralization of administrative structures and authority, which some monarchs such as Joseph II pushed more than others. But a number of scholars have advanced the argument that the family’s privileging of the imperial idea, rooted in its long hold on the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, helps explain why the Habsburgs did not work as persistently to fuse their territories into a more tightly bound state, as did say the French Bourbons or the Hohenzollerns.7 Bound up with this imperial legitimacy, though, was also a particular strand of dynastic legitimacy. Habsburg rulers always regarded themselves as the key point of unity among their diverse domains. The dynasty was what connected its subjects in the Netherlands and Naples—and to the Habsburgs’ traditionalist thinking, that dynastic connection was sufficient as justification for rule over such distant and disparate lands.
The Habsburgs’ strategies of legitimation and loyalty creation for the most part remained fundamentally rooted in medieval ideas of patrimony and sixteenth-century ones of confessional loyalty. Just as the medieval notions of divine right carried through to the end of the monarchy, so to a lesser extent did the Augsburg ideology of cuius regio, eius religio and the sovereign’s attendant responsibility for his subjects’ salvation.8 The Habsburgs never fully made the transition to territorial legitimacy—the idea of a common polity arising from common territorial bounds—and they certainly never made it to national legitimacy. The structural impediments to these other forms of legitimacy are obvious. Habsburg territories did not even become contiguous until after 1815, when Belgium was hived off. Even subsequently it would have been difficult to create a sense of territorial legitimacy subsuming regions as diverse as Lombardy and Transylvania. Moreover, that endeavor was already compromised by the middle nineteenth century with the rise of national identities. The Habsburgs tried only in the most modest way to create some sort of legitimating and loyalty-building identity to supplant a sense of national identity. Though the dynastic state did have significant legitimacy and loyalty even until World War One, in that cataclysm it lost both, and so the family’s rule was ended. This is not to say that legitimation strategies went without change. The justification of the rational, multinational state came to supersede that of divine anointment; the supranational gradually displaced the supernatural. The idea of the dynasty serving its subjects grew especially under Maria Theresia and her sons. This was associated with the state’s improved provision of things such as education and social welfare. Throughout the long nineteenth century the Habsburg state did enjoy legitimacy from the relatively efficient services it delivered.
The expanded role of state services in legitimation is related to the third dynastic strategy, the function and image of the ruler. The understanding of the role of the last Habsburg monarch, Karl I in 1916–18, evolved dramatically but not unrecognizably from that of the first, Rudolf I from 1273–91. Over these 645 years, the Habsburg rulers demonstrated many of the broader trends of European monarchy, including personal, patrimonial rule; the codification of law, the sovereign’s legal authority, and the legal rights of subjects; the Renaissance emergence of bureaucratic kingship; Baroque notions of “absolute” monarchy; the Enlightenment de-mystification of royal power and the growing primacy of kings as servants of the state; and the collision of aristocratic privilege with mass politics in the later nineteenth century.9 The image of the monarch accordingly also changed in many ways: compared to the armored knight of Titian’s portrait of Charles V in 1548, monarchs by Franz Joseph’s time still wore a military outfit, but it was now a simpler officer’s uniform, configuring the monarch as merely the highest of many state officials. No Habsburg ruler was ever
“absolutist” in the ideal type sense, but there was nonetheless a definite growth in monarchical power from, say, Friedrich III’s almost continual inability to impose his will, to Felipe II’s thorough control of the available levers of power. Habsburg rulers in the nineteenth century continued to yearn for absolutism, but after 1867 found their role reduced to that of constitutional monarch.
The rules, display, and cultural patronage of the court were vital in shaping the monarch’s role and image. An oft-discussed feature of the Habsburgs is their supposed “Spanish ceremonial” which made the courts in Vienna or Madrid particularly austere and formal. The growth of royal ceremonial after Maximilian I’s time gradually made the ruler more distant from the people, limiting access to him as a way of asserting his power and status. Charles V introduced a strictly regulated court etiquette in 1548, which a century later was further adjusted by Felipe IV. These regulations were an amalgam of Burgundian and Spanish traditions, and though elements of them lasted into the nineteenth century, they were also continually modified and even jettisoned. The size of the court grew enormously into the seventeenth century; where the Viennese court included some 500 people in the early 1500s, by the time of Karl VI it was over 2000. Joseph II, who disliked much of the pseudo-divine exaltation of the monarch, introduced his own changes, radically cutting back on court ceremonial, even refusing coronations. As in so many other areas, the Habsburgs evolved but remained traditional too. The court by the end of the 1800s was quite insular, less public than it had been, but still stamped with ideas of the ruler’s authority that were archaic in the context of obstreperous parliamentary politics.
The fourth strategy, institutionalizing the dynasty’s rule, refers to the administrative structures through which the Habsburgs exercised control of their realms. This is the evolution of the dynastic state in its purest sense, and it involves many different aspects, from the monopolization of the powers of coercion (i.e. the rise of standing armies), to the development of a professional bureaucracy (typically motivated by the need to extract resources to pay for the army), to the expansion of representative and consultative systems fundamental to governance.10 The reigns of the Habsburg rulers chart a distinct if fitful evolution from the very limited governance of the Middle Ages, with its relatively basic judicial, peacekeeping, and extractive functions, through the consolidation, intensification, and professionalization of government in the early modern period. Well into the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs had comparatively weak central power; they lacked the administrative apparatus to carry out their decisions without the help of other elites. Habsburg rule was therefore founded on cooperation with the landed aristocracy and the Church, especially in the Danubian domains. The aristocracy dominated the provincial representative bodies known as the estates, and consistently resisted encroachments on their own power. It took many centuries to wrest from these estates the power to raise taxes and to centralize in Vienna authority over legislation, defense, and even such things as maintaining roads. The Church was less essential to administration, but it supported the dynasty in a variety of ways, including sacralization (and thereby legitimation) of the sovereign’s authority, and ensuring the obedience of his subjects through doctrine and education. In return for the Habsburgs’ promotion of the Catholic faith, the Church promised to remain loyal to the dynasty’s rule, and to cultivate that loyalty among the population.
Apart from the relatively innovative and effective administrative institutions developed in Castile during the sixteenth century, the dynasty cannot lay claim to particularly efficient institutionalization until the middle of the eighteenth century under Maria Theresia. Indeed, the period from Ferdinand I to Maria Theresia saw few momentous developments. This is indicative of the family’s contentment with existing if ramshackle administrative institutions, but also the difficulty of creating better ones in such a scattered, heterogeneous set of territories. From 1740 onward, though, the dynasty’s government did penetrate society much more deeply. This was thanks in large part to the growth of the bureaucracy and the army, the two institutions most consistently essential to Habsburg central control. They facilitated the gradual move from indirect rule via local elites to direct rule by Vienna. This was part of the general evolution of European monarchical states by which the aristocracy and the Church were gradually subordinated to the dynasty’s vertical hierarchy of power, their autonomy reduced, and their own governance functions integrated into the state.11 In the Habsburg realms this development was slower and more partial than in some other monarchies such as the French. Nonetheless, by the middle of the nineteenth century the institutions of government had expanded, centralized, and largely separated from the dynastic court. These institutions became to a certain extent distinct from the dynasty, and operated without it. Of the structures that had grown up to carry out the monarch’s will, by Franz Joseph’s time only the military was still firmly under dynastic control. It was an odd transformation from the medieval sovereign, one of whose limited governance duties was warmaking, to the modern constitutional monarch, who had surrendered much of the institutional authority his ancestors acquired in seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Taken as a whole, the dynastic dynamics outlined above constitute a very tough set of tasks for any family and its leaders to manage. A dynasty’s overall objective is to continue its rule over its patrimony. This required among other things that the dynasty always persuade its various realms that the dynasty’s rule was legitimate and in some ways profitable. At the very least, as Wolfgang Weber has remarked, the dynasty had to convince its subjects and perhaps especially the elite that maintaining the relationship to the dynasty was more sensible than dissolving that relationship.12 The difficulty of these dynamics is apparent in that relatively few families actually succeeded at them. Most noble families with their own patrimonies witnessed their authority erode and eventually dissolve by the twentieth century. Very few families managed to make the system work for themselves, to survive and even thrive. Fewer still were able to work the system so that they came out on top. For instance, of the 136 leading families in England in 1300, only 16 survived to 1500, and of the 120 leading families in western German principalities in the early Middle Ages, only 9 lasted into the middle 1500s.13 This makes the Habsburgs’ achievements all the more remarkable.
The Habsburg realms
The Habsburgs’ achievements also have to be considered in the context of the challenges of the multifarious realms over which they ruled. These challenges included consolidating and centralizing enough to assert control, without antagonizing the provincial elites who were necessary for governance. Other rulers in the late medieval and early modern period faced similar challenges of heterogeneous cultures and polities within their realms, but the Habsburgs’ difficulties were much greater. The family’s core domains in the southern portion of German-speaking Europe were partially contiguous and had linguistic commonalities, but the situation was dramatically altered after the acquisition of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in the sixteenth century. The Spanish branch had to deal with disconnected territories in Italy and the Netherlands as well as the contiguous, more culturally similar lands in the Iberian peninsula. From its “big bang” of expansion thanks to Maximilian I, up to 1918, the Habsburgs always ruled a composite monarchy.
A composite monarchy is a dynastic agglomeration under one ruler of different territories that typically have distinct political and cultural histories.14 Most large European states today are the outcomes of composite monarchies. These heterogeneous monarchies were themselves the product of the personally based political organization of the Middle Ages, in which people commonly owed their allegiance not to a state or a territory, but rather to a person, to a family. In their agglomerative nature, the Habsburgs’ realms were therefore not unique. The Spanish Habsburgs ruled over the compounded realms of Castile and Aragon, with their possessions in Italy and overseas, plus the formerly Burgundian lands of the Netherlands. The Austrian H
absburgs ruled over several multiply composite monarchies. The Hungarian kingdom was a compound of Hungary, Croatia-Slavonia, and Transylvania, while the Bohemian kingdom compounded Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, and Lusatia. In the case of the central European domains, the compound parts were closer to equal in their relative populations than in Iberia (where Castile was clearly dominant) or even Britain (where the English far outnumbered the Welsh or the Scots). This fact always impeded centralization impulses from the dynasty’s main Austrian lands.
Another challenge of the dynasty’s geography was that its central European domains had no necessary connection to each other. Its western lands could easily have belonged to Switzerland, the Tyrol could naturally have been associated with Bavaria, and Carinthia and Carniola were part of the Adriatic hinterland. And yet the dynasty forged these realms into a sturdy polity that, over time, became not only one of the most powerful European states but also a monarchy under one of the longest continuous dynastic reigns in all of Europe. Alongside the challenges, it is important to recognize that these diverse realms shared some sources of cohesion too. To the traveler, the Habsburg heritage is still visible in much of eastern central Europe, evidence of a cultural unity that reinforced an admittedly often halting political unity: Baroque churches in cities and towns; main squares with a plague column at their center; pastel-painted administrative buildings, often colored “Maria Theresia yellow”; showy theaters and opera houses from the late nineteenth century. All testify that despite the heterogeneity of the Habsburgs’ realms, one thing overarched and united them all, namely the dynasty itself. As A. J. P. Taylor pithily observed, “In other countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people; in the Habsburg Empire peoples are complications in the history of the dynasty.”15
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 2
