The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Dynastic strategies

  Ferdinand was more successful than Charles at the most basic element of dynastic reproduction: Charles had only 4 children who survived to adulthood, while Ferdinand had 13. All those offspring proved very useful in diplomatic and other politics. Two of his daughters were married to the same Polish king, and several others went to Italian noble families such as the Medici and the Gonzagas. Ferdinand managed dynastic matters on the whole quite intelligently, to arrange marriages and to ensure family unity on divisive issues like religion. With the perspective of hindsight, it may seem strange that he backslid into the practice responsible for so many troubles in the previous century, namely dividing the inheritance among his sons. The oldest son, Maximilian, got the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns in addition to Lower Austria. Ferdinand the younger received the Vorlande and Tyrol, and Karl Inner Austria. Ferdinand senior included various provisions in his will to try to prevent this divided inheritance from splintering the house. He laid out rules to keep inheritance within the family, and admonished the brothers to work together in the common interests of the dynasty, specifically to help Maximilian against the Turks. Division of inheritance was still not uncommon among German families of this time, and it had an additional appeal to Ferdinand in that it enabled him to spread his debts among the three sons.

  Given the enormous additions to Habsburg lands in this generation, it became an absolute imperative to maintain control of that territorial complex in its entirety. The division of the house into Spanish and Austrian branches was one practical response, though it posed particular challenges of assuring dynastic solidarity in the coming generations. Charles’s steps to ensure territorial integrity and familial loyalty include giving his son a thorough education in ruling. This conscientious program for Felipe, embodied in Charles’s many letters and in the tutors he appointed, was a sterling example of dynastic reproduction. Another wise policy at which the Habsburgs were particularly successful was in using regents who represented the interests of the ruler and the dynasty without aggrandizing their own power. The Habsburgs were somewhat unusual in that they regularly let women act as regents. From 1526 until she died in 1539, Charles’s wife Isabel of Portugal was his regent in Spain while he was away. Charles also appointed his aunt Marguerite as regent in the Netherlands, the position she had held under Maximilian. She served Charles equally well. She helped complete the negotiations with the electoral princes to get Charles elected as German king. She was also one of the two women behind the 1529 “Ladies’ Peace,” one of the periodically broken truces Charles signed with François. Margaret negotiated this peace with her childhood friend and former sister-in-law Louise of Savoy, François’s mother.

  Marguerite’s successor as regent in the Netherlands was Maria of Hungary (Figure 3.3), the sister of Charles and Ferdinand and widow of the Hungarian king Lajos II, to whom she was betrothed when she was just 6 months old. She was as politically astute as Marguerite, as well as being extremely intelligent and cultured; she had an interesting circle of humanists in her court and was admired by Erasmus. Maria however lacked Marguerite’s diplomatic finesse, displaying instead a strong authoritarian streak. That may have been necessary in helping her weak, inept husband try to rule fractious Hungary before he died. Maria was then instrumental in getting Ferdinand elected to the Hungarian throne. In 1531 Charles asked her to take over in the Netherlands, and for the next 24 years she doggedly defended his interests there. For instance, she fought with the provincial governors to preserve Charles’s right to make appointments to municipalities and bishoprics. She could also resist Charles’s plans, however, as when she deliberately dragged her feet on the idea of marrying their sister Christina, the widow of the king of Denmark, to Henry VIII. It has been said that Maria was the one advisor Charles would not argue against. She is also notable in the dynasty’s history in that she was reasonably open to Protestant ideas and had some Protestant preachers in her circle. She remained a committed Catholic, though Ferdinand had his doubts about her. When Charles abdicated, she pleaded with him to let her retire as well. She complained about the particular challenge of being a woman in politics, writing that if ever things go wrong, “It is not difficult to make people believe that the woman who heads the government is to blame for everything, and for this reason she is hated and held in contempt by the people.”8 Maria spent her last years in Spain with her sister Éléonore, François’s widow.

  FIGURE 3.3 Maria of Hungary, artist unknown. Image courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek.

  The breadth of Charles’s territories, his status as a kind of second Charlemagne, and the growing religious splits forced some adaptation in the dynasty’s legitimation strategies. Nearly everywhere the inheritance or election that had given him such a vast realm went unchallenged on principle. But while the legitimacy of his rule was not questioned, his rule itself—his actual policies—were almost continually challenged. The problem was the association of Charles with the ideal of the universal monarchy. This ideal had long roots back into medieval times, with contributions from among others Dante and Enea Silvio Piccolomini. It was called “universal” for two reasons. First, it held that the universal monarch should be the supreme political authority, such that even all other kings would be subordinate to him. Second, it implied that the universal monarch’s authority necessarily extended over all of Christendom. The simplest formulation was that humankind should be one flock united under one shepherd. Implicit here is an aspiration for harmony among Christians, a new era of peace that would unite them against their enemies, chiefly the Turks. Universal monarchy, with its hint of unitary political power, was seen as threatening by all sorts of other powers (such as François I or even estates bodies) and by religious schismatics.

  Charles, however, never aspired to absolute authority over the European continent. He personally subscribed to only portions of the idea of universal monarchy. As an ideology of legitimation, Habsburg universal monarchy was truly propagated by others, most notably Charles’s chancellor Mercurino Gattinara in the 1520s. Gattinara made an explicit analogy between Charles and the emperors of Rome, as one ultimate ruler for all of Europe. This aspiration was patently unworkable, as even Gattinara acknowledged. Charles’s interests in his different realms were too disparate, his power in each too limited, for him ever to have united them into one cohesive imperial unit. Moreover, he had no wish to unite his own realms, let alone subjugate others. The many wars he fought were consistently defensive, initiated by his opponents. Charles himself also never developed a coherent, unified imperial policy. The affinity of his politics with the ideology of universal monarchy basically rests with the harmony and defense of Christianity, as he himself stated in 1521: “In defense of Christendom I have decided to pledge my kingdoms, dominions and friends, my own body and blood, my soul and my life.”9 Thus though Charles regarded universal monarchy as an impossible dream, this idea was still used both to justify his rule and to oppose it. The idea did not fully disappear from the dynasty even after his death. Its affinity with the imperial ideology—that the Holy Roman Empire and its ruler were the heirs to the ancient Roman Empire—persisted into future generations of Habsburgs. As a polemic, the allegation of a tyrannical universal monarchy was also used against Felipe II.

  Whatever his ambivalence about universal monarchy, Charles’s court definitely had imperial overtones. Charles helped establish the style of subsequent Habsburg courts, which became famous for their grand, impressive, but also highly ritualized and somber ceremonial that imposed a notable distance between the monarch and his subjects. Though it was long thought that this ceremonial derived from the Burgundian court, in actual fact it was an amalgam of ideas and traditions cobbled together by Maximilian and Charles. It also continued to mutate over the years. Ferdinand first brought the Burgundian style to Vienna in the 1520s, and Charles imposed it on Felipe II in 1548. Because of the Spanish Habsburg court’s wealth and prestige, the ostensible Burgundian sty
le became the dominant trend in court etiquette of the day.

  Charles’s cultural patronage furthered the imperial image. He commissioned martial sculptures by Leone Leoni that made him look like a Caesar, and tapestries to depict his victories at Tunis and Pavia. Charles showed his excellent taste by hiring Titian to do several masterful portraits. Highlights of Ferdinand’s court patronage include bringing the painter Arcimboldo to Vienna, and commissioning the Belvedere in Prague. A pavilion designed for his wife Anna, it is one of the greatest exemplars of Italian Renaissance architecture in central Europe. He was in general quite engaged with intellectual currents such as humanism. He boldly but unsuccessfully tried to convince Erasmus to come to the University of Vienna. He did nonetheless attract a number of other humanist scholars. Ferdinand’s court was understandably less imperial than Charles’s, but not less cosmopolitan. There were always a significant number of Spaniards, though as time went on it also included people from the Austrian lands, the Low Countries, Bohemia, and to a lesser extent, Hungary.

  The differing ways that Charles and Ferdinand were depicted artistically point to their mildly divergent conceptions of the function and image of the ruler. The most iconic portrait of Charles is Titian’s depiction of the emperor on horseback at the battle of Mühlberg, the regal, victorious, Christian warrior. Influenced by the dying chivalric culture of Burgundy, Charles did still see himself as a warrior king. He led his own armies into battle, and his offer to duel his archrival François I expresses this knightly vision of leadership. Charles’s conception of his authority was not unitary, however. He saw himself, in accordance with contemporary understandings, as the sovereign of distinct realms, not of one united realm. He was often the sole link between the different areas and peoples that he ruled. This idea of the dynastic sovereign as a sufficient bond among multiple realms persisted until the very end of the Habsburg dynasty. Though Charles respected his domains’ distinct identities, he also regarded them as his personal dynastic possessions. He felt entitled to use their resources for his own goals. This is how funds from the Netherlands could go toward fighting the Turks, when the Dutch people actually had little at stake in that conflict. Charles’s diverse subjects certainly recognized that they had few common interests other than a shared sovereign. For this reason the Spanish would resent Charles’s dedication to matters in Germany.

  In contrast to Charles, artistic depictions of Ferdinand lack the martial and Roman-imperial overtones. Though he also became ruler of a composite monarchy and even emperor, he never had the inflated self-conception nor the propaganda campaign to portray himself as the great, chivalrous warrior king. Another way that Ferdinand’s relative modesty and acceptance of ruling norms revealed itself was in his ready acquiescence to Charles’s leading role. As the oldest male Charles was considered the “father” of the family, to whom Ferdinand owed obedience.

  Where Charles and Ferdinand did coincide was in their ideas of the ruler’s role vis-à-vis Christianity. Their engagement with religious issues was informed by the traditional conception of the sovereign as protector of the Church. This conception pertained most strongly to the Holy Roman Emperor, regarded as the highest secular leader of the western Church and obligated to further the Christianization of the world. Charles and Ferdinand fulfilled both roles in relation to the Turks and Islam. But during their lives this traditional conception faced radically altered political and religious circumstances. With the Reformation, Christendom became not one but many, and no one ruler could represent it. This is one reason why the universal, religious pretensions of the emperorship subsided after Charles. And yet Charles until the 1550s clung to this supposed duty to preserve the unity of Christianity. Ferdinand pragmatically adapted: as his lands and subjects became religiously highly pluralistic, he relaxed his belief that he was obligated to protect them from heresy. These rapidly changing ideas on the ruler’s role in regard to religion became a shifting ground underneath the dynasty. Subsequent generations of Habsburgs had to reconsider their own attitudes toward God and toward their duties as secular leaders. The transforming religious landscape also impacted the dynasty’s legitimation strategies; the Austrian Habsburgs in particular were forced to modify their approach in the next century.

  Another area where the dynasty had to adapt during this time was in governing a vastly enlarged set of domains. The distances between Habsburg domains—from the New World to Spain to Austria—and the time needed to traverse those distances, posed a challenge that no modern rulers had ever had to face. It routinely took eight months for a letter to get from Peru to Spain, for example. The challenge was not insuperable, but it helps explain Charles’s attitude toward governance. He tried to improve the institutions of the places he ruled, but he never tried to fuse them all into a single administration. Neither Charles nor any other European ruler of his day would have had the idea of creating a unitary state out of such territories. This said, he did oversee the development of some structures that would enable him better to exercise his rule over his expansive lands. His (and Ferdinand’s) preferred modus operandi was to expand on existing institutions, tweaking them to serve their own interests more effectively. An example is the council system in the Spanish monarchy, which Charles then brought into the Low Countries as well. Under this system there was a council for each individual land within the monarchy, plus some that dealt with the monarchy as a whole. These councils were generally advisory but could also fulfill administrative functions. An example is the Council of Finance in Spain, which was created to rationalize the financial state of the monarchy, and had powers to manage the credit operations necessary to keep the crown solvent. The councils interfaced with the viceroys or regents that governed the various territories in the king’s name when he was absent. In running this system, several key secretaries who were responsible to Charles acted something like modern governmental ministers.

  On the whole, this setup provided very thorough governance, in the sense that it attended to most matters that could possibly concern the king and his rule over the territories. It was admittedly very slow, and sometimes featured more discussion than action. It also produced a tremendous amount of paperwork, on a scale never before seen in any European state. Though Charles’s court was itinerant, his records became stationary. In 1543 the fortress of Simancas near Valladolid in northwestern Spain was selected to archive governmental paperwork, marking an important moment in the evolution toward the bureaucratic state. Above all the other governance structures Charles did have a rudimentary centralized administration, under the imperial chancellery led by Gattinara and others. But in reality Charles’s realms remained a very loose dynastic confederation.

  To answer the Herculean task of governing such an empire, Charles built on some solid and some weak foundations. He had an excellent diplomatic corps inherited partly from his grandfather Fernando of Aragon. For his vast defense commitments, Charles had to depend, like monarchs before him, on ad hoc arrangements. He had no standing army, but he could rely on experienced, professional soldiers from the famous Spanish tercios as part of military forces. Similarly, when the time came for major naval expeditions such as against Tunis, he had to contract with private ship owners to use their vessels. To pay for all of this, he had a major advantage in the form of a sales tax in Castile, the alcabala, which raised a lot of revenue and did not require the Cortes’ approval. Income from the Americas was fairly modest in Charles’s reign, so he also heavily taxed the Netherlands and his Italian possessions. None of this was enough, so Charles resorted to enormous borrowing, particularly through bonds known as juros. By the end of his reign, repayment of these bonds ate up more than 60 percent of the crown’s annual revenue in Castile, and he had to pay a similar percent in interest. Charles complained desperately of his financial problems, as did many other rulers at the time and since. But this complaint has to be put in perspective: he lived in incredible luxury for his era, by one count spending some 150,000 maravedíes a day while the
average worker in Castile would have earned one maravedí a day.10

  Ferdinand’s governance was likewise a patchwork collection of disparate kingdoms, counties, and archduchies with very limited centralization. These realms’ main common interest was the Turkish threat; their diverse other interests, institutions, and social structures inhibited the development of any joint institutions. Nonetheless, the governing arrangements Ferdinand established proved reasonably effective in contemporary comparison. They also set a basic template that lasted for the Habsburgs’ Danubian domains until the eighteenth century. He created a privy council to advise on the main issues of his combined realm of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Staffed with trained jurists, it was the only body that had jurisdiction over the entire monarchy, but it lacked executive power to enforce its decisions. Tellingly, there were no Hungarian or Bohemian members of the privy council. Ferdinand also created the Hofkammer (the treasury) to deal with revenues and expenditures, and it too was responsible for Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary together. Another relatively centralized institution was the Hofkriegsrat (founded in 1556) that oversaw all military matters for his realms. This war council took charge of recruitment, arming and provisioning of troops for his realms. It deserves some of the credit for successfully resisting Turkish military power.

  The limitations of Ferdinand’s government are easily illustrated. The Hofkammer and the Hofkriegsrat actually had to share competencies with similar bodies in Styria, Tyrol, Bohemia, etc. Vienna’s position as capital was also hardly dominant. It is only after the immediate danger from the Turks receded in the 1530s that it increasingly became the seat of Ferdinand’s government. It still had to share economic and governmental power with other cities such as Linz, Graz, and Innsbruck, however. A good example of how Ferdinand’s government remained profoundly patrimonial was that public revenues (such as taxes) were undifferentiated from private revenues (such as income from his own estates or regalian rights). In effect, all monies went into one pot and he spent it as he saw fit. Ferdinand’s was also not a fully professionalized bureaucracy in the modern sense. Though it acquired more university-trained jurists and a more formal structure, it was still a set of personal arrangements to serve a sovereign rather than an impersonal state. Moreover, Ferdinand’s bureaucratic structures comprised only around 100 people, and the estates and the local nobility still controlled much of the appointments and governing structures at regional and local levels. Hence the penetration of the central bureaucracy was quite limited; nobles’ courts still held first judicial jurisdiction in many areas, for example. The monarch’s direct administrative powers were mostly confined to the areas of the mines, customs, and the mint. But there were still some vital changes here: in Ferdinand’s reign can be said to begin the formation of an “Austrian aristocracy,” a circle of nobles from around the Habsburg lands that became instrumental in serving the monarchy.