Albrecht became duke in the Austrian lands in 1282. There was significant initial resistance to his taking over there. He was regarded as an outsider from Swabia who brought too many foreigners into his court. He made concessions to the Austrian nobility to win their support—but he also sometimes used an iron fist. He put down an uprising in Vienna in 1287, a rebellion in Styria in 1291–2, and a nobles’ revolt in 1295–6. He was fairly moderate in his punishment of the rebels, however, and attempted to win over his new subjects by giving his sons the names Friedrich and Leopold, which had been common names among the Babenbergs and then became traditional among Habsburgs. As he was trying to cement the dynasty’s control in the Austrian duchies, he also faced resistance in its Swiss lands. In August 1291, after Rudolf’s death, the cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden joined in an “Eternal League,” and shortly thereafter the towns of Zürich and St. Gall were brought in to solidify this defensive alliance. Though not directly antagonistic to the Habsburgs, the purpose of this league was to preserve the signatories’ independence against all powers, including their Habsburg overlords. The formation of the Eternal League is often cited as the birth of the eventual state of Switzerland, and it foreshadowed the escalating problems the dynasty would have there over the next two centuries.
Albrecht was chosen as German king only in 1298 after his predecessor Adolf of Nassau was deposed by the princes for overreaching his royal prerogatives. Given Albrecht’s harsh reputation it is not surprising that his ten years on the throne were rocky. He pursued a line of action not dissimilar from the deposed Adolf’s, hoping to strengthen his monarchical authority via efforts to take control of Thuringia and a number of other key territories. Albrecht arranged a marital alliance with Philippe IV of France, which alarmed a number of the electors who suspected that Albrecht was maneuvering to gain French support to make the Habsburgs hereditary monarchs in Germany in return for giving away certain lands of the Empire. Three electors—the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier—actually signed a pact to depose Albrecht. The latter responded forcefully, convincing the lesser nobility and the cities to remain on his side, and then sent armies to subdue the three archbishops. Their rebellion had collapsed by 1302, but not before involving the trouble-making pope Boniface VIII, eternal object of Dante’s scorn. Albrecht placated Boniface by swearing an oath of allegiance and renouncing certain aspects of his imperial authority over Lombardy and Tuscany.
As an audacious part of his plan to reinforce his own dynasty within the Empire, Albrecht took advantage of the death of the last male member of the Přemyslid dynasty to put his own son Rudolf on the throne of Bohemia. In 1306 he sent an army to Prague that chased away Heinrich, Duke of Carinthia, who claimed to be the legitimate heir. Albrecht’s soldiers also managed to “persuade” the Bohemian nobles to choose the Habsburg as their new king. Rudolf thus became the first Habsburg to wear the Bohemian crown, albeit only for a short stint, as he died prematurely in 1307. Albrecht’s other major venture to gain Thuringia also unraveled at this time. The Wettin family, who had been feuding over the right to rule the territory for a number of years, finally found in Albrecht a sufficient threat to settle their differences and unite against him. They made common cause with the new king of Bohemia, Heinrich of Carinthia, and together they defeated an army of Albrecht’s in May of 1307.
Like his father before him, Albrecht failed to secure for his son succession to the German kingship. He was prevented from doing so by one of the most nefarious turns of Habsburg family history, when he was murdered by his nephew Johann. Johann had for years aggressively protested that his share of the family’s patrimonial lands should be larger. He raised claims to Austria, Styria, and even argued that he should succeed as German king rather than Albrecht’s own son. Albrecht, not surprisingly, intended to keep primacy for his own branch of the family. This led Johann to form a conspiracy with four other nobles, and on 1 May 1308 they attacked and killed Albrecht as he rode toward the city of Brugg, now in Switzerland. Johann was never brought to justice for his crime, though he did have to flee the ferocious campaign of vengeance pursued by Albrecht’s heirs. Johann was much later given the appellation “Parricida,” and he died in Pisa in 1313. Albrecht’s murder was a disaster for the dynasty’s prestige. Though it is by no means certain that the Habsburgs could have retained their hold on the imperial crown, once Albrecht was gone the family was shut out of the kingship for the next 130 years. Certainly Albrecht’s own pugnacious politics helped bring about his downfall, and he must bear some of the blame for this disaster.
Albrecht’s sons: Friedrich I (1289–1330), Leopold I (1290–1326), and Albrecht II (1298–1358)
The failures of Albrecht’s two oldest sons—who shared their father’s and grandfather’s ambition, but not their ability—also help explain the family’s long drought. The brotherly team of Friedrich and Leopold can at least be faintly praised for their dynastic solidarity and close cooperation. Albrecht before he died had tasked Friedrich with leading the charge for the Bohemian crown following his older brother Rudolf’s death, but he was repelled on the battlefield. Friedrich was then outmaneuvered in the election to choose Albrecht’s successor as king in 1309, and the winner was Heinrich of the Luxemburg dynasty. The latter died suddenly in 1313, however, setting up perhaps the most controversial election of the late medieval period. The two main contenders were Friedrich and Duke Ludwig of Upper Bavaria, a Wittelsbach. The electors split: in September 1314, meeting on opposite sides of the Main River, four of the electors opted for Ludwig while three chose Friedrich. Ludwig was then crowned in the traditional coronation city, Aachen, but without the traditional imperial crown. That was in Friedrich’s hands, so his coronation took place in Bonn—the wrong city, but the right crown. The disputed vote led to an eight-year war between Friedrich and Ludwig. In this war, unrest in the Swiss lands was weakening the Habsburgs’ western possessions, which Ludwig used to his advantage. The Eternal League that the communities of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden had formed in 1291 saw several new communities join, forming what is known in Swiss history as the Waldstätten or “Forest Cantons.”
This League took an increasingly hostile stance toward the Habsburgs’ attempts to assert their authority in the area. It was Leopold’s job to suppress the unrest, but at the battle of Morgarten in November 1315 Habsburg forces suffered a terrible defeat. Leopold barely escaped with his life after his knights were ambushed and butchered by heavily armed Swiss farmers. It took another major battle to settle the conflict between Friedrich and Ludwig over their claims to the German crown. In the battle of Mühldorf in 1322, Friedrich had the larger force, and exemplified chivalric ideals by fighting alongside his men, but was defeated and taken prisoner. Mühldorf was one of the last large knightly battles fought on German soil, and was the very last fought without any firearms. Surprisingly, after the battle Friedrich and Ludwig’s relationship improved immensely. In 1325 Ludwig released Friedrich from prison on condition that he convince Leopold to give up the fight and return to Ludwig some territories that he had captured. When Leopold refused, Friedrich again honorably upheld the chivalric ideal by returning to imprisonment voluntarily. This gesture so impressed Ludwig that he made Friedrich his regent in Bavaria and eventually his coruler in the empire, allowing him to use the title rex, the only time in German history this occurred. Ultimately this arrangement meant very little: Leopold died in 1326, and Friedrich thereby lost his best strategist. He accomplished nothing important in the last years of his own life, dying in 1330.
After the Habsburgs’ impressive rise in the previous two generations, with Friedrich and Leopold gravity reasserted itself and the family entered a long period where it played little role in imperial politics. Despite Friedrich’s and Leopold’s ambitions, they achieved very little of what they had aspired to. They did further the family’s reorientation of its power base eastwards, which change can be traced through the increasing numbers of churches and monasteries they endowed
in the Austrian lands. Friedrich and Leopold themselves had no children, so it was left to two of Albrecht I’s other children to further the dynastic ambitions. The first of these was his daughter Agnes, an intelligent, energetic woman who, as the widowed Queen of Hungary, became an important advisor to the male heads of the family. After Friedrich and Leopold were gone, the head of the family became the surviving fourth son, also known as Albrecht. In contrast to his two rash, underachieving brothers, Albrecht II concentrated on prudently building up the family’s rule in the Austrian lands, making him the first truly “Austrian” Habsburg.
Albrecht was known as “the Wise,” but also as “the Lame.” An illness had left him nearly paralyzed, such that he often had to be borne about on a palanquin carried by two horses. Like many younger sons in the Middle Ages, he had been prepared for a career in the Church; the solid education he received contributed to both his intellect and character once he became the family’s leader. A humble, conciliatory man, Albrecht took a number of smart steps. He fully reconciled with King Ludwig in 1335, and in return for renouncing any further disputes over the imperial crown was enfeoffed with Carinthia and Carniola, which added to the family’s lands in what is now Austria and Slovenia. Albrecht married one of his daughters to the last count of Tyrol, helping prepare the eventual Habsburg acquisition of that territory. In another worthy dynastic marriage, in 1353 Albrecht betrothed his oldest son Rudolf to the daughter of Ludwig’s successor as German king, Charles IV of Luxemburg. Also during Albrecht’s reign, the Habsburgs lost further fights with the Swiss Waldstätten and their allied cities of Zürich and Bern in the 1350s. At this time, too, the Black Death struck the Austrian lands, killing some 30 percent of the population.
His efforts to institutionalize rule in the Austrian lands were Albrecht’s most lasting legacy for the dynasty. In 1341 Albrecht stated that his goal in Austria was to create “one people, one ruler, one house.”2 This phrase implies much more unity than Albrecht ever intended or could have achieved. But it does accurately represent his achievements in standardizing and integrating administrative structures and legal rights across the two Austrian duchies as well as Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. He also improved the financial basis of rule in these lands, gaining greater control over tax policy, for instance. This helped him raise revenues to pay off debts. His economic policies promoted the growth of towns and cities, which in turn also contributed to his government’s coffers. His government itself became somewhat more professional as he staffed it with more trained jurists. For all these reasons, Albrecht can be considered the true founder of the Austrian state. Essential to dynastic control of this growing state were the rules he decreed in 1355 to preserve the unity of the patrimony for inheritance purposes. Though these rules were not fully implemented, they were important for asserting dynastic solidarity, the indivisibility of the territories, and the identification of the noble magnates with the dynasty, since they all had to assemble in Vienna to approve them. Albrecht, in his peaceful way, secured the family’s control especially of its eastern lands more than his brothers’ belligerence ever did.
Rudolf IV “the Founder” (1339–65)
Rudolf IV was a comet that burned brightly if briefly, blazing a trail that all subsequent Habsburgs would follow—hence his sobriquet as “the Founder.” He came to head the family when he was only 19, upon Albrecht’s death, and did so until his own death just 7 years later at 26. The urgency of his ambition and the boldness of his deeds are very much those of a young man. The shrewdness of his politics would have been remarkable in someone twice his age, however. That he was raised from the time he was 9 as the son-in-law of the Emperor Charles IV, almost a crown prince while Charles had no sons, may help explain his self-assurance. So, too, may the fact that his brothers were all underage, allowing Rudolf to act alone, unhemmed by fraternal jealousies. He was also supported by the counsel of his aunt Agnes. There were four main areas of Rudolf’s achievements: completing the acquisition of Tyrol for his house, building up Vienna as the nascent dynastic capital, reforming governance and especially taxes in his lands, and concocting the extraordinary, myth-making document known as the Privilegium maius.
Tyrol and Vienna are the two territorial symbols of Rudolf’s reign. Though Albrecht had arranged the marriage of his daughter to give the Habsburgs a claim to inherit Tyrol, it fell to Rudolf to make good that claim. Rudolf had to fight off the Bavarian Wittelsbachs’ attempt to grab the territory when its last count, Rudolf’s brother-in-law, died in 1363. He marched over the Alps in winter with a small contingent of soldiers to the city of Bressanone, where he convinced Countess Margarete, the surviving daughter of the family that had ruled Tyrol, to agree to Habsburg suzerainty. Acquiring Tyrol was tremendously valuable for the dynasty because of its rich mines and its geographical connection between the Habsburg lands in Austria and those in the Vorlande. Rudolf’s efforts to build up Vienna as the dynasty’s main city include his laying of the foundation stones for the great Gothic expansion of St. Stephan’s cathedral in 1359. He also founded Vienna’s university in 1365, which made it the third in central Europe, after those in Prague and Kraków. Though the Vienna University nearly folded after Rudolf’s death, it was a vital endeavor for the prestige it lent the city and as an institution that supported the state through training officials and elaborating the legal basis of princely power. In both these projects Rudolf was inspired by (and competing with) his father-in-law Charles IV, who had made Prague a glittering capital through his many building projects, including Charles University and St. Vitus Cathedral.
Prestige was also a key motivation behind the Privilegium maius, promulgated by Rudolf in 1359. The “privileges” enunciated therein were many. According to the document, the Habsburgs were entitled to call themselves “archdukes”—which is to say, they were no mere dukes, but something considerably higher than that, as an archbishop is to a bishop. All sorts of other titles, both ceremonial (like the Holy Roman Empire’s “Master of the Imperial Hunt”) and regnal (like duke of Swabia) were also claimed for the Habsburgs. The family was exempted from any imperial military operations they did not want to participate in, and likewise exempted from any of the imperial diets they did not feel like attending. Legitimizing this special position over and above nearly all other noble families were letters from Julius Caesar and Nero emphasizing Austria’s unique rights. The trouble with these claims was that the Privilegium was a forgery; Rudolf purported to have conveniently “rediscovered” these ancient guarantees. In actual fact, the Privilegium maius was directly inspired by the Privilegium minus, an authentic set of privileges granted by Emperor Friedrich Barbarossa to the Babenbergs in 1156. Rudolf had Barbarossa’s seal removed from the older document and attached to the Privilegium maius to make it seem legitimate. When he received the Privilegium maius, a suspicious Charles IV had it examined by none other than Petrarch, who declared it a counterfeit. It was Charles, ironically, who provoked this surprising assertion of Habsburg supremacy. As part of regularizing the election procedures for the Empire in his Golden Bull of 1356, Charles had excluded the Habsburgs from the exalted ranks of the prince-electors.
Thanks to such slights, Charles and his son-in-law developed a rather testy relationship, and the emperor brushed off many of Rudolf’s pretensions, particularly his use of the iconography of the imperial crown, scepter, and sword. However, he let Rudolf get away with the title “archduke,” and henceforth in all of European history it was only the Habsburgs who ever used this title. Though the Privilegium was an invention, that did not hinder Rudolf from persisting in its claims, nor undermine its import for the dynasty. One of the more practical provisions of the Privilegium was to affirm the unity and indivisibility of the Habsburg patrimony. The Privilegium did not promote primogeniture per se (which was not yet a firmly established custom in the German cultural orbit), but it did insist that the oldest brother must have the highest authority, albeit with the other brothers consulting in major decisions. Sy
mbolically, the Privilegium expressed the Habsburg sense of a special mission and status. Though they were not entitled to call themselves kings, the Habsburgs claimed a similar level of prestige and authority. Rudolf here formulated an enduring precedent for his family. In terms of regnal power, the Privilegium also proclaimed the Austrian ruler’s jurisdiction over all courts in his land, and his rights to land usage such as forestry and hunting. In this way it helped strengthen the dynastic state, by enumerating the sovereign’s powers, the heritability of the patrimony, and the relationships between the various parts of the patrimony, their ruler, and the emperor. It is thus in Rudolf’s reign that the notion of the “House of Austria,” encompassing not just the family but all its possessions, began to crystallize.
Rudolf died in Italy in 1364, on his way to Milan for his brother Leopold’s marriage to a Visconti heiress that would help establish Habsburg claims to territory in northern Italy. The trail that Rudolf blazed for future Habsburgs makes him the most important member of the family between his grandfather, Albrecht I, and his grandnephew, Friedrich III, nearly a century later. Besides upholding the family’s claims to preeminence even while it was shut out of the German kingship, he pointed the way to other, further developments. In 1364 he signed a mutual inheritance treaty with the Luxemburgs and the Angevin dynasty of Hungary which prefigured the Habsburgs’ eventual acquisition of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in subsequent centuries. Bringing Tyrol into the house, he gave the family an almost uninterrupted string of land from east to west across the Alps, looking both north into Germany and south into Italy. And of course he is one of the key founders of the Habsburg mythology that would be further developed by his successors, including Friedrich III who fully legitimized the Privilegium maius after he was crowned emperor in 1452. Rudolf, then, represents a belief in and promise of future Habsburg greatness—even though his own life was too short to complete any of the ventures he had begun. So short, indeed, was his time in charge that he never managed to sire an heir and hence ensure the succession. Rather, once he was gone, the dynasty stagnated.
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 4
