The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Charles also intervened in the famous debate involving Bartolomé de las Casas in 1550. Las Casas argued that Indians were inherently free and deserved the same rights as any citizen of Castile, while his opponent Sepúlveda claimed that they were simply savages and therefore devoid of rights. Charles was inclined to support las Casas’ position, and he decreed that until the Indians’ legal position was fully resolved, conquests had to stop. Of course, actual enforcement of these laws and values from the distance of Europe was impracticable. Charles’s greatest interest in the Americas was in the money it provided for his military campaigns in the areas that truly mattered to him. From the large, growing influx of American silver and gold to Europe, Charles in the 1530s received on average 324,000 ducats a year, which had grown to an average of 871,000 a year by the time he abdicated. The truly massive flows of specie to the Spanish crown would wait until Felipe II’s reign.

  To his credit, Charles recognized early on that his vast dominions could not be ruled as one unit, nor even by one man. This is one reason why in 1522 he negotiated a treaty with Ferdinand by which the latter would act as Charles’s regent in the Austrian Hereditary Lands. Even at the time both brothers foresaw that this was more than merely a temporary arrangement, and indeed it marks the division of the house into Spanish and Austrian branches. Late in his life, more convinced than ever of the impossibility of unified governance for his territories, Charles came to further conclusions with Ferdinand. Charles was particularly concerned to keep the Burgundian lands within the dynasty, and he feared that Ferdinand lacked the resources to do so. Hence he awarded the Low Countries to Felipe, thinking that with Spanish wealth Felipe should surely be able to defend them against all threats. Because it gained not only Burgundy but also the Italian possessions, the Spanish branch became the “senior” of the house, with the richer patrimony. In a particularly controversial idea, Charles wanted Felipe to take over as German king after Ferdinand’s death so that not even the imperial crown would belong firmly to the Austrian branch. Their sister Maria had to sort out the argument this caused between the two brothers. Charles finally backed down, realistically seeing that the electors would not support Felipe’s candidacy.

  These last arrangements were a prelude to Charles’s abdication. This was gradual but started in 1555, and is essentially unique in European history, with the only real analogue Diocletian’s retirement as Roman emperor in 305 CE. He had already reached the decision to abdicate by 1553. His health was bad, with gout and hemorrhoids, and he led his last battle in 1554 from a litter. He was also dealing with serious bouts of depression, occasionally locking himself in his rooms and refusing visitors. He felt himself a failure, with the Peace of Augsburg the final insult.

  In October 1555 Charles gave an emotional speech to the Estates General of the Netherlands in Brussels in which he reflected on his life, and then formally surrendered to Felipe rule over the Low Countries. Charles and his audience were in tears, and the old emperor had to lean on the shoulder of the Dutch nobleman Willem of Orange for support—the same Willem who would later become one of Felipe’s bitterest antagonists. In January 1556 he gave up his Spanish possessions, and in September of that year renounced his imperial title. By 1557 he had retired to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura. Contrary to myth, he did not lead a truly monastic life there, since he had a retinue of 60 people to serve him, and enjoyed luxuries like lobster for dinner. He also continued to follow politics, advising Felipe. He finally went plus ultra into death in September 1558. Though he felt he had little to show for his life, in one way he was a great success: he never shirked his titanic responsibilities. His devotion to duty would make him a paragon for future Habsburg rulers confronted with seemingly insurmountable challenges. Indeed, it is as an archetype that Charles made his greatest impact on history. He was the last great western emperor, and a reminder of the time when much of Europe counted a Habsburg as sovereign.

  Ferdinand I (1503–64)

  Ferdinand’s difficulties in assuming rule of the Austrian lands were very similar to those Charles had in Spain. One might think that as a Habsburg, Ferdinand would not have been regarded as a foreigner, as Charles was in Spain. But since Ferdinand had grown up in Spain and arrived with many Netherlanders and Spaniards in his court, he encountered a xenophobic resistance. That was not the only source of opposition. In the years between Maximilian’s death in 1519 and Ferdinand’s take-over in 1521, the estates had once again asserted their authority in governance. Lower Austria and Vienna were in open revolt by the time Ferdinand arrived in the country. His first task was to suppress the revolt. He brought several nobles and townspeople to trial, and had a number of them executed, including the mayor of Vienna. He then began the process of improving his German, becoming familiar with the local situation, and developing a working relationship with the estates.

  Though he was technically Charles’s regent in the Hereditary Lands, it was not long before Ferdinand acquired a set of domains uniquely his own. In August 1526 the young king of Bohemia and Hungary, Lajos II, was killed and his army annihilated by the Turks at the battle of Mohács. Now the many years of Habsburg marital alliances and inheritance treaties regarding Bohemia and Hungary finally paid off. Already in October 1526 the Bohemian estates chose Ferdinand as their king; besides the inheritance treaty the Habsburgs had made with Lajos’s dynasty, Ferdinand was also the dead king’s brother-in-law.

  Ferdinand’s succession to the Hungarian crown was much more difficult. Late in 1526 the majority of Hungarian nobles actually chose the Hungarian magnate from Transylvania, János Szapolyai, as the new king. Thanks in part to the politicking of his sister Maria, Lajos’s widow, a smaller group of nobles elected Ferdinand. It was not just the marital treaties that brought these territories into the house—Ferdinand also had to resort to arms. The dispute with Szapolyai over rule of Hungary lasted many years. Ferdinand defeated him on the battlefield in 1527 and was then actually crowned king, but Szapolyai managed to flee and continue the fight. He gained support from François as well as Sultan Süleyman, essentially making himself a vassal of the latter. By the early 1530s Ferdinand controlled only a relatively small slice of western Hungary and Croatia in addition to Upper Hungary, today’s Slovakia. Transylvania was Szapolyai’s, and the rest of the former Hungarian kingdom was occupied by the Turks. Through a 1538 treaty Szapolyai granted Ferdinand the inheritance of Transylvania, but after Szapolyai’s death in 1540 Ferdinand did not have the resources to try to take it. Szapolyai’s son instead became the voivode of Transylvania, with the Turks’ assent.

  Hungary would remain divided into three until the end of the seventeenth century. But Ferdinand had nonetheless laid the foundations of the Habsburgs’ monarchy in the Danubian lands, which would long outlast the family’s temporarily more prestigious Spanish claims. The conditions under which Bohemia and Hungary were joined to the Habsburg patrimony—as two separate, independent kingdoms—profoundly shaped the development of the dynastic state. The overriding reason why the Bohemian and Hungarian nobilities chose the Habsburgs was because they hoped that the family would be strong enough to fight off the Turks. Apart from that common interest, though, relatively little connected Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary in the sixteenth century.

  The lands of the Bohemian crown were themselves a composite monarchy of several diverse provinces. Bohemia proper and Moravia had a Czech-speaking nobility, a reasonably well-integrated governmental structure, and quite assertive estates. Silesia and Lusatia were more decentralized, mostly controlled by a number of independent German-speaking noble families. As a whole, the complex of Bohemian lands was prosperous, with an economic base of mining and textile manufacturing. Hungary, too, was a composite monarchy, made up of what are today the countries of Hungary, Slovakia, much of Croatia, plus Transylvania (now in Romania). The upper nobility in Hungary—the magnates—were very influential and a major counterweight to royal power. Apart from some mining in Upper Hungary, Hungary’s economy
was overwhelmingly agrarian, though even that was seriously damaged by the Turkish wars. Transylvania had long enjoyed considerable autonomy from the crown, and it remained particularly feudal, with peasants subject to harsh conditions compared to countries farther west.

  In population, Bohemia carried the greatest weight. According to figures from the end of the sixteenth century, it had about 4 million people, compared to 2 million in the Austrian lands, and a little under 2 million in Hungary. A clear-eyed assessment in 1530 would have questioned whether it was even worth taking up the burden of governing this disparate conglomeration. The Bohemian estates remained very jealous of their rights and dubious of this foreigner who wore their crown. Ferdinand made a number of concessions upon taking over, including acceptance of the Hussite church (the movement descended from the fifteenth-century reformer Jan Hus), but he still had to suppress militarily a nobles’ rebellion in 1547. Hungary was divided, exhausted by war, but like Bohemia run by a nobility that clung to its considerable autonomy. Ferdinand had to take this patchwork of domains and try to forge it into some kind of workable realm, most immediately so that he could resist the Turkish offensive. That he managed to secure Hungary and Bohemia for his dynasty and mount an adequate defense with limited resources is evidence of his political adroitness.

  The formidable fortress of Belgrade had fallen to the Turks in 1521, and then the Hungarian army was defeated in 1526. Vienna and the Austrian lands stood next in line for the Turkish thrust into Europe. Here, too, Ferdinand was operating from a position of serious weakness. His realms’ population was less than 7 million, compared to the Turks’ nearly 20 million. The sultan could easily muster an army of 60,000 men while it was only under extraordinary circumstances that Ferdinand could raise as many as 20,000. The first half of the 1500s in many ways saw the zenith of Ottoman power. Under perhaps the greatest of all sultans, Süleyman, they were pushing to the west into Europe, to the east against Persia, and into the Mediterranean as well. While conquering the Austrian lands was actually not a major priority to the Turks, Ferdinand legitimately saw them as an enormous threat. In this fight, Ferdinand could count on very little help from Charles. His brother was preoccupied with the fight against France and had little reason to care about Hungary since it did not belong to him. Given that Charles and the Holy Roman Empire provided little money for an offensive, Ferdinand had to raise his own funds. In 1523 he announced a “Turkish tax” that everyone down to 12-year-olds had to pay. An indication of the lack of centralization in his lands was that he had to go the various estates separately to request funds, traveling in turn to the capitals of Innsbruck, Linz, Zagreb, and so on. These efforts still raised too little, and he had to begin borrowing heavily from the Fuggers.

  The most dramatic moment in Ferdinand’s conflict with the Ottomans came in the autumn of 1529 when they besieged Vienna. Süleyman fell upon the city with more than 100,000 men and 300 pieces of artillery. Before he arrived, Ferdinand had been pleading for aid from Charles and the Empire, but little help came. Vienna had to withstand Süleyman’s weeks-long onslaught alone. The city nearly fell, but then as the October rains came, the sultan decided to cut his losses and withdraw. This close call was sufficiently alarming that in 1532, as the Turks were again advancing north, Charles himself led an army of around 100,000 into Austria to do battle. The Ottoman forces were bogged down nearly all of August trying to conquer the little fortress of Kőszeg in western Hungary. They finally gave up in September, pulling out and avoiding a major engagement with Charles’s army. Vienna was not directly threatened again until 1683. Nonetheless, in subsequent years Ferdinand tried and failed to retake Buda, in 1541, and lost the Hungarian cities of Pécs and Esztergom to Süleyman in 1543. In 1547 he saw no alternative but to sign a truce with the Turks that required him to pay a humiliating annual tribute of 30,000 florins to the sultan. In the 1550s Ferdinand reasserted his claims on Transylvania and war resumed. Here again the Habsburg cause was helped by the heroic resistance of several Hungarian towns against overwhelming Turkish superiority. In 1552 the town of Eger fended off a siege, with the women and children even helping out from the castle’s battlements. In 1556 at the battle of Szigetvár 2,300 Hungarian and Croatian soldiers badly bloodied a Turkish army 100,000 strong.

  The wars had predictably terrible consequences for the lands that suffered through them. Central and eastern Hungary, the areas occupied by the Turks, emptied as people of all classes fled or died. The sixteenth century in general is associated with the phenomenon known as “the second serfdom,” in which the situation of peasants in eastern central Europe worsened compared both to peasants in western Europe and to their own situation in the previous century. The forced labor requirements (often known by the term robot) were ratcheted up, sometimes to more than 50 days a year. Hungarian peasants in many cases lost their own land and became a noble’s property. Local nobles’ authority increased, with the power to render court decisions on their domains and even to make their own laws. Towns and cities in the region typically declined as well; Vienna, for example, was hurt by losing its markets further east. From being in many ways the heart of central Europe, the Habsburgs’ Danubian domains after the Turkish invasion sat on the very edge of Europe, peripheral to much of the commerce and social developments happening further west.

  Ferdinand was similar to Charles in that he remained a devout Catholic but also believed some reform of the Church was necessary. Throughout his life he was inspired by Erasmian teachings of tolerance and peace. These teachings informed his politics but also his hopes for a Catholic reform that might heal the rift with the Protestants. Though he is often seen as somewhat more tolerant of Protestantism than Charles, Ferdinand nevertheless used the 1521 Edict of Worms to ban the printing, sale, and possession of Lutheran books and writings in his lands. He even had Lutheran preachers and sympathizers arrested. He clearly did not want Protestant ideas to spread, and he hoped that correcting some abuses of the Church would forestall them. So besides joining Charles in calls for a Church council to respond to some of the Protestants’ complaints, Ferdinand implemented reforms to improve the training and performance of the clergy in his lands, accepting for example the idea of priestly marriage. Three times over the course of his reign he also ordered “visitations” that surveyed the state of churches and the clergy, trying to identify problems and deficiencies. He also promoted measures to try to ensure Catholicism’s ongoing vitality and sway, for example inviting the Jesuits into his lands.

  In attempting to keep his realms Catholic, though, Ferdinand was facing an uphill battle. Lutheranism made strong inroads into Austria, Anabaptism less so. But by the 1550s, of the Austrian lands only Tyrol and Carniola remained majority Catholic. Styria and Upper Austria had become mostly Lutheran and some two-thirds of the population of Vienna was Protestant. Catholicism had all but disappeared in the lands of the Bohemian crown, replaced by Lutheranism and the various sects descended from Hussitism. So Prague was only about 5 percent Catholic at this time, and until Ferdinand appointed a new archbishop for the city in 1561, that post had been vacant since 1471. Elsewhere, Catholics amounted to no more than a third of the population. In the lands of the Hungarian crown, Croatia remained staunchly Catholic but other areas did not. Lutheranism made inroads, but it was really Calvinism that conquered Hungary. Most of the nobility and the clergy became Protestant, and it has been estimated that only 10–15 percent of the total population remained Catholic.7 This meant that Ferdinand had to be very careful about insisting on his dynasty’s Catholicism. Many of the estates organizations throughout his domains were now dominated by Protestants, who went over to the new creed often as a show of resistance to the sovereign’s power. Coordinating government with Protestant-dominated estates forced Ferdinand to moderate his own attitudes and policies.

  The situation with the Turks and the Protestants also related to Ferdinand’s politics within the Empire. Because quite a few princes, including several electors, had adopted Lu
theranism, they consistently pressed for concessions before they would grant any revenue to combat the Ottomans. In the 1550s, as Charles gradually gave up on trying to run the Empire, Ferdinand’s own authority and independence from his brother’s policies increased. That Ferdinand was the primary negotiator on behalf of the emperor for the Peace of Augsburg was a major boost to his prestige. And indeed, Augsburg was an important achievement, even if Charles considered it a defeat and Ferdinand (along with many others) considered it only a temporary solution. Augsburg did guarantee religious peace in Germany for the next several decades. Ferdinand, though, continued to hope that the Protestant-Catholic schism could be healed and unity restored to Christendom. He took over as king following Charles’s 1556 abdication, but was not officially crowned until 1558.

  His own stint formally occupying the imperial throne was relatively short, lasting only until his death in 1564. The events and achievements of that time were modest. Ferdinand as emperor struck a less martial tone than did Charles. Undoubtedly he had learned from his brother’s mistakes, but his own resources were too limited to pursue Charles’s constant military engagements, nor was his personality so inclined. Under Ferdinand the position of the emperor lost some of the prominence and centrality it had had under Charles; this was partly due to Ferdinand’s self-understanding as a ruler, but also to the debilitating events of Charles’s reign. The imperial diet and supreme court continued to bolster their authority vis-à-vis the emperor, though Ferdinand also strengthened his own governing council. His assumption of the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary diverted his attention away from German affairs somewhat. His general objective was to maintain religious peace, but his relationship to the papacy was as frustrating as Charles’s. Some Catholic reform proposals he had drafted were rebuffed by the Council of Trent, and he largely gave up on it after 1563. From the dynastic perspective, the imperative was to assure that his son Maximilian would be granted the succession, which transpired in 1562, though not without considerable hand-wringing from all sides over Maximilian’s ambiguous religious attitudes (as detailed in Chapter Five).