The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Friedrich was elected German king in 1440 and ruled for 53 years—and yet could claim very few achievements for that long tenure. The electors chose him largely because his territories placed him in a strategic position to deal with the growing troubles on the Empire’s eastern flank, namely the chaos in Bohemia, the oncoming Turks, and what proved to be a rising power in the Hungarian kingdom. In the middle 1400s the Empire had many widely acknowledged internal problems as well, such as miniscule revenues for central institutions and frequent conflicts among the overlapping competencies of the various governmental powers in Germany, including the crown, the electoral princes, the imperial diet, and cities. Ruling the Empire was not impossible, and Friedrich was never entirely powerless. Distracted by crises in Austria, however, he lacked both the ability and the will to seize the initiative. After a few initial years of engagement, by 1444 he withdrew from German affairs and did not set foot in the Empire for the next 27 years. He did nonetheless journey to Italy in 1452 to become the last Holy Roman Emperor—and the first and only Habsburg—who was crowned as per tradition by the pope in Rome. This gave him added prestige and the right to designate his son as successor. In the years that he neglected imperial affairs, wars routinely broke out involving Brandenburg, the Palatinate, Swabia or among the Italian cities. This chaos, Friedrich’s disengagement from it, and his years of ignoring pleas for increased involvement in the Empire motivated an inconsequential effort to depose him in favor of Jiří z Poděbrad.

  It was only in June 1471, when the situation in Austria had stabilized, that Friedrich returned to the Empire, calling for an imperial diet meeting in Regensburg. His primary motivation for calling this Reichstag was to raise a military force to deal with the Turks. In 1453, when he had learned that the Ottomans had finally overrun the ancient Christian citadel of Constantinople, Friedrich reportedly broke down weeping—but he could not be motivated to muster an army to respond. By the 1470s, the Turks were encroaching on his own lands. In order to grant money for a military campaign, the diet insisted on several reform projects. Among these was one to reorganize the justice system in the Empire so that the diet would have more influence over the courts and the emperor less. Friedrich strongly resisted this proposal, understandably, since it would have reduced his powers over peace and the administration of the law. The outcome of his renewed engagement with the Empire turned out to be as dissatisfying as his previous forays. He was granted not a major offensive force to counteract the Turks, but only a few thousand men to serve as border defense. Relatively few of them ever materialized. Given the Empire’s institutional impasses, Friedrich’s decision to keep his distance from its politics and rest on his laurels as emperor was comprehensible if regrettable.

  Perhaps Friedrich’s single greatest achievement—bringing the Burgundian inheritance into the Habsburg dynasty—demonstrates how his tactics of tenaciously waiting for his enemies to implode proved rewarding. Over the century prior to 1470, the cadet line of the French Valois dynasty had built up a large, very rich, but scattered and loosely connected set of dominions in what is today the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of northern France. Taking as their primary title the dukes of Burgundy (which was a duchy subject to the French king), they were also vassals to the Holy Roman Empire by virtue of ruling over the county of Franche-Comté as well as the Low Countries. Since 1467 the ruler had been Charles the Bold, who was determined not only to continue adding territories to his patrimony, but also to settle his ducal inferiority complex by being raised to the title of king. Charles acquired Habsburg lands in 1469 when Sigmund of Tyrol mortgaged territories in Alsace, Sundgau, and Breisgau to him in return for 50,000 gulden. Sigmund, who resembled his equally spendthrift and bumbling father (he of the nickname “with the empty pockets”), needed the money because of his ongoing battles against the Swiss. Charles also began negotiations with Friedrich to have his various acquisitions of imperial fiefs legitimized, and then to gain a royal title. He needed Friedrich for this because the emperor still had some acknowledged authority as the supreme temporal power in Europe. Charles also knew that there was no way his brother-in-law Louis XI, the French king, was ever going to agree to a Burgundian kingdom on France’s eastern borders.

  Friedrich’s abrupt departure from the splashy summit meeting in Trier in 1473 delayed but did not derail his plans to marry Maximilian to Charles’s daughter. Sigmund, who wanted back the lands he had mortgaged, formed an alliance with several cities threatened by Charles’s expansionist designs and went to battle against him in 1474. Friedrich also summoned the Empire to raise an army after Charles invaded near Cologne in 1475. Friedrich himself, at 63 years old, led his troops. This two-pronged attack regained Sigmund his lost lands, and forced Charles back into negotiations with Friedrich. In 1475 they successfully concluded the marriage agreement. Charles, taking his own “bold” nickname too seriously, then went on the warpath again. He was killed besieging the town of Nancy in January 1477. This set off a mad scramble to claim the immensely valuable inheritance. Louis XI mobilized his troops and intended to marry his own son to Marie, who, however, was actually in love with Maximilian. Maximilian had just turned 18, and Friedrich directed him to rush to Bruges, where his wedding to Marie took place in August 1477. The marriage was the easy part; Maximilian had to spend the next several years on the battlefield and at the negotiating table to secure the inheritance, as will be described below.

  Though Friedrich demonstrated that he could not adequately govern his existing territories, that did not stop him attempting to acquire more. After Ladislaus Postumus’s death, Friedrich, Albrecht, and Sigmund all mounted preposterous and unsuccessful bids to take the Bohemian crown. Friedrich then made a claim for the Hungarian kingship, and was even elected by a splinter group of nobles. However, the majority of the Hungarian estates supported Mátyás Hunyadi, the son of the former regent. Though only 14 when he came to the throne, Mátyás turned out to be one of the most impressive statesmen of the entire fifteenth century, and he quickly secured his rule. In 1463 he made a deal with Friedrich whereby the Habsburg turned over the Hungarian crown and acknowledged Mátyás as king, but held on to some territory on the Austrian-Hungarian border and also retained succession rights upon Mátyás’s death. This was only the opening round of the long duel between these two. In 1482 an armistice with the Turks on his southern flanks freed Mátyás to attack Friedrich with his famous Black Army, perhaps the best fighting force of its day. Mátyás’s troops overran parts of Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola. In 1485 he conquered Vienna, then in 1487 Friedrich’s main residence city of Wiener Neustadt, which caused Friedrich to flee to Linz. Mátyás took for himself the title of Archduke of Austria. Friedrich could do nothing militarily to stop this humiliation. He did refuse Mátyás’s demands to renounce their 1463 treaty by which the Habsburgs had inheritance rights in the event that Mátyás failed to produce a legitimate heir, which indeed Mátyás was lacking.

  Meanwhile, Friedrich took care of his own dynastic succession issues quite neatly. In 1486, after careful politicking, the imperial electors accepted Maximilian as the King of Rome, which was the traditional title for the acknowledged heir to the German crown. For their part, the electors were evidently hoping that Maximilian, who was young and energetic, would more assiduously pursue imperial reforms. For his part, Friedrich was hoping that now the Empire would mobilize troops to help him regain the lands lost to Mátyás. That help never materialized, however. Thus the only thing that Friedrich could do was wait—a strategy that again worked for him. As conveniently predicted by one of Friedrich’s astrologers, Mátyás died in 1490. Maximilian then led an army to retake the lost Austrian lands. He hoped to push even farther east to claim the Hungarian crown for himself, but he ran out of money to pay his soldiers. The Hungarian magnates instead chose the reigning Bohemian king as their next sovereign.

  Also in these last years, Friedrich had to deal with his wayward cousin Sigmund in Tyrol. Sigmu
nd, now senile and chronically insolvent despite Tyrol’s rich mines, had been selling off his lands to raise funds. The Bavarian Wittelsbachs had been eagerly buying, hoping to make Habsburg possessions in Swabia and the Alps their own. With help from the Swabian cities, Friedrich put together an army to resist the Wittelsbachs and restore order in Tyrol. In 1488 he drove out the corrupt and incompetent advisors who had been running Sigmund’s domains. A temporary regency by the Tyolean estates took over governance until 1490, when Maximilian convinced Sigmund to sell him the ruling rights to Tyrol. Once this deal was completed with the approval of the other members of the family in 1492, the entire Habsburg patrimony was reunited after the previous century’s fragmentation. This cooperation with Maximilian was smoother than some of their relations in the years before Friedrich died. They both needed each other—Friedrich for help against Mátyás, Maximilian for help in Burgundy—but their interests did not always converge. In the end, perhaps prioritizing the future of the dynasty, Friedrich sometimes forewent his own objectives in order to support Maximilian’s.

  In the first months of 1493, Friedrich’s health worsened rapidly, and a stroke in August finally felled him. He had outlasted nearly all the other men who had crossed him: his brother, Charles the Bold, Jiří z Poděbrad, Mátyás Corvinus, Andreas Baumkircher, and many others. Though he pales as a personality when compared to the likes of Charles or Mátyás, Friedrich’s patient, sometimes indolent, always obstinate policies had placed his dynasty on the brink of world power. He played a long game, one with many short-term reversals but a few major, durable victories. Maximilian capitalized on those victories, and his own status as one of the dynasty’s most brilliant figures is built on a foundation Friedrich laid.

  Maximilian I (1459–1519)

  Maximilian has been stylized into the “Last Knight” in Habsburg lore. The idea is that he represents a final flowering of chivalric derring-do in the early bloom of the Renaissance. He did indeed pride himself on his manly skills of swordfighting, horse riding, hunting and jousting, at least until his youthful vigor began ebbing as he neared 40. He also led his troops into battle personally, often taking enormous risks, including once in 1504 when he was pulled off his horse and almost hacked to death by Czech mercenaries until his cavalry rescued him at the last minute. Another aspect of his life that looks more like a medieval king than a Renaissance prince was the itinerant nature of his rule. His was government on the move. Maximilian said of himself, “My true home is in the stirrup.”3 In some years it was uncommon for him to spend more than a single night in one place. But he was also an innovative, forward-looking man deeply intrigued by new ideas. His involvement with humanistic trends in art and philosophy, and his engagement with Renaissance artists put him at the forefront of central European rulers of his day. Even his military thinking was not completely rooted in the past: his use of artillery was advanced for its time. One of his long-term projects was reforming the German Landsknechte, the mercenaries, into a more effective fighting force. So, although Maximilian was neither the last knight nor fully the first prince in the early modern sense, the fact that he straddles these two appellations is most truly indicative of his character.

  Like his father, he was a big, robust man; he had a ship’s prow of a nose, and a jaw with a slight Habsburg jut. With his energy, rashness, and volatility, he did not resemble his father. Throughout their lives, Friedrich and Maximilian often did not see eye to eye. The father considered the son a reckless adventurer and withheld funds from him, hoping that shutting off Maximilian’s cash flow would moderate his ambitions. However, his very name, with its whiff of maximalism, points to his boundless ambition. It was an unprecedented moniker for a family previously populated with so many Albrechts, Rudolfs, Friedrichs, and Leopolds. More than any Habsburg before him, Maximilian played on a political field encompassing all of western Europe. His horizons were wide, politically but also intellectually. As might be expected, he was also an unapologetic egotist. In accordance with typical dynastic thinking, his own personal interests were to him inseparable from the interests of the areas he ruled. Machiavelli met Maximilian several times and considered him an excellent ruler with “infinite virtù” (in that acme of Machiavellian encomiums) but noted accurately that one of Maximilian’s greatest faults was that he could not handle money.4 His dreams—for reforming the Empire, conquering Italy, capturing the papacy—always outstripped his resources. But few men have so embodied the changeability of their age, or left a stronger mark on their family.

  After Maximilian raced to Bruges to marry Charles the Bold’s daughter Marie in 1477, he then immediately had to fight off rival claimants to the Burgundian inheritance. He beat back the French armies in 1481 and won a settlement by which he surrendered only Artois and the original duchy of Burgundy to Louis XI. At much the same time as dealing with the French attack, Maximilian also had to respond to revolts that broke out in the Low Countries. The revolts were motivated by protests against the costs of the war with France, but also as an assertion against the new ruler of cities’ and estates’ privileges, which Charles the Bold had sharply curtailed. Then in 1482 Maximilian sustained a brutal blow politically and personally: his wife Marie died, having given birth to their son Philippe in 1478. Maximilian had married at the age of 18, become a father at 19, and a widower at 23.

  The resistance to Maximilian from the Flemish estates grew even stronger. They demanded to take over as wardens of Philippe and ultimately to make him Marie’s heir, which Maximilian naturally rejected. He went to war against the estates and defeated them in 1485 to preserve his status as ruler. The increasing taxes he levied, the presence of his foreign troops in the country, and his attempts to reduce the estates’ privileges all sparked yet another uprising, in which representatives of the cities of Bruges and Gent took Maximilian prisoner. In 1488 for several weeks he was held hostage in a pharmacy on the main square of Bruges as the leaders of the revolt badgered him for the concessions they wanted. He had to watch as his officials were tortured and even beheaded in protest against his government. Not surprisingly, he feared for his own life. He wrote a desperate letter asking for help from his father, which was smuggled out in a sympathizer’s shoe: “I estimate that without money to run my own administration and protect the life of my son, I must surrender him and swallow my anger, for otherwise they will give me poison to eat and kill me. [. . .] This is my last letter, once and for all.”5 While Maximilian was undoubtedly afraid, the rebel leaders generally treated him with respect and even accepted him as the ruler. This letter was partly scare tactics to get help from his father. Friedrich, though pinned down by troubles with Mátyás Corvinus and in Tyrol, did get an army organized to come rescue his son. Finally Maximilian and the rebellious cities of Ypres, Gent, and Bruges made peace, though it was not the end of unrest in the Burgundian lands.

  Maximilian’s troubles were a harbinger of the Habsburgs’ long, turbulent, but sometimes profitable rule over the Low Countries. A fair portion of those lands—principally what is now Belgium and Luxembourg—would remain in the dynasty up until 1797. Besides giving the family territory in some of the richest parts of Europe, it also opened it up to greater influence from the wealth of French and Flemish culture. The dynasty thereby became a conduit for transmitting vital intellectual and artistic trends from its western possessions further east into the Hereditary Lands. Without weakening its anchor in Austria, however, the Burgundian lands did draw the Habsburgs more deeply into the political orbit of France and England than ever before. Indeed, conflicts between France and the Habsburgs would convulse Europe for the next two and a half centuries. In fortunate contrast to the restless Low Countries, and even to Friedrich’s time, the Austrian domains under Maximilian were relatively quiescent. With Friedrich’s death in 1493, Maximilian became the single ruler of all the Austrian domains, unifying them under one person for the first time since Rudolf IV in the 1360s. He made Tyrol and specifically the city of Innsbruck his base, since Vi
enna was too far east for easy connections to his interests in the Low Countries and Italy. Tyrol was also the goose that laid the silver egg thanks to its silver (and other) mines, as well as its location on major north-south roads over the Alps. Besides exploiting Tyrolean revenues to fund his political schemes, Maximilian’s main concern in Austria was to streamline the territories’ governance; he made some lasting changes which are discussed below.

  From the time he became King of the Romans in 1486, Maximilian was far more deeply engaged in the affairs of the Holy Roman Empire than his father had been. He said he wanted to be the greatest emperor since Barbarossa. He was also eyeing the threats from France and the Ottomans and wanted a strong Germany to resist both. Strengthening the Empire meant reforming its institutions. There was a widely acknowledged urgency to improve administration, the justice system, finances for imperial governance and defense. Maximilian tried to harness German national feeling to these ends, declaring for example that “My honor is German honor, and German honor is my honor.”6 What came to frustrate him repeatedly over several decades was that the imperial estates—the nobles, prelates, and cities—had very different notions of what reform should look like. They disagreed with Maximilian’s equation of his own person with German interests, as implied in the preceding quote. He wanted more effective central institutions to bolster his own power, to help with his schemes in his patrimonial lands and elsewhere. The solution most princes naturally preferred was that they, and not the king-emperor, should exercise control over strengthened imperial institutions. The negotiations between Maximilian and the estates took place at several assemblies, now formally constituted as Reichstags. The reforms ran into such a complicated constellation of competing interests that many of them were applied only in a piecemeal fashion.