The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  As soon as he came to the throne, Ferdinand III launched efforts to bring the war to a peaceful conclusion. Much as Felipe IV did, though, Ferdinand hoped that his battlefield position would improve just enough that he could sign a more advantageous treaty. This meant that peace kept receding. His armies won some victories over the Swedes in 1636 and 1637, but his opponents then closed ranks. France supplied Sweden with even greater subsidies in return for a promise not to seek a separate peace. By 1639, Ferdinand’s prospects were deteriorating nearly as rapidly as those of his brother-in-law in Spain. In that year, the Swedes launched an offensive that took large parts of Bohemia. After 1640, because of Felipe’s enormous troubles with Catalonia and Portugal, Spanish subsidies to the Austrian branch dwindled. Over the next few years, the Swedes occupied Silesia and Moravia, again posing a direct threat to Vienna.

  Ferdinand was enduring attacks from the east, too, as the Swedes made an alliance with the Transylvanian prince György Rákóczi, who invaded the Habsburgs’ Hungarian domains in 1643. Ferdinand appeased him by granting religious freedom in the lands under Rákóczi’s rule in 1645, but by then the Austrian war effort, much like the Spanish, was on a catastrophic last slide. In that same year, the combined forces of Ferdinand and his Bavarian ally Maximilian lost an important battle to the Swedes at Jankovice in Bohemia. Maximilian had no choice but to pull out of the war and sign an armistice. In 1648 there was a final humiliation when a Swedish army sacked Prague, plundering much of Rudolf II’s great art collection. Spanish setbacks meant that little support could be expected from that quarter, and so Ferdinand took the difficult step of deserting his dynastic ally and making a separate peace.

  The negotiations for what became the Peace of Westphalia had proceeded sporadically since 1644 in the two Westphalian cities of Münster and Osnabrück. It was one of the first major international congresses of the modern era, with Spain, France, Sweden, and the Empire the main participants, though the individual German princes were also intimately involved. Ferdinand’s main representative at the negotiations was Trautmansdorff, who kept up a copious correspondence with his sovereign about the changing terms of the peace. This correspondence affords one of the clearest signs of Ferdinand as a ruler: he diligently read and analyzed the many missives, displayed a wide-ranging understanding of the politics involved, and in the end did not shy from difficult decisions. The decision to break the alliance with Spain and remain neutral in its war with France was one of the most difficult, and Ferdinand fretted about what it would mean for the dynasty. His hope was to repair the damage done to the dynastic link as quickly as possible. In the treaty, much of Alsace was surrendered to France, which was a blow since it included some of the oldest parts of the dynasty’s patrimony. His father’s controversial Edict of Restitution was also mostly undone, valid only for properties returned to the Catholic Church by 1624. The powers of the princes within the Empire were increased, and the Calvinist princes were legitimized as they had not previously been. Among other terms of the settlement, Sweden, Bavaria, and Brandenburg all gained territory.

  For the Austrian Habsburgs, Westphalia had far-reaching but mixed results. Within the Empire, the dynasty’s power was considerably reduced. Ferdinand regarded the treaty as an injury to his personal dignity and to the institutional clout of the emperor. The family did still retain some prerogatives as the de facto hereditary emperors. They could appoint bishops, for instance, and they had significant suasion as the most powerful prince and symbolic head of the Empire. The family’s court in Vienna remained the most prestigious in all the German-speaking lands, and so acted as a magnet for many nobles from throughout central Europe. Another sign of the Habsburgs’ ongoing weight within Germany was that after 1648 the imperial Reichstag was moved to Regensburg, as close to Vienna as possible without actually being in Austrian lands. On the whole, though, Westphalia furthered a much greater decentralization within the Empire. The cohesion and authority of imperial institutions such as the Reichstag ebbed as the sovereignty of the individual princes was confirmed. The Habsburg dream of restoring Catholicism to its predominance within Germany was also dashed. The dynasty would never be able to rule the Empire with the same kind of power that it enjoyed in its Hereditary Lands. After 1648, therefore, the Austrian Habsburgs focused much more on strengthening their rule in Austria, Bohemia, and to a lesser extent, Hungary. Their ability to do so was partially predicated on Westphalia’s terms boosting princes’ territorial sovereignty. And though the Habsburg emperors’ profile in Germany would periodically rise—as under Leopold I and Franz I—henceforth the dynasty often paid less attention to affairs in the Empire.

  The attempts to recover from the upheaval of the Thirty Years’ War marked Ferdinand III’s last decade in power. The war’s destruction was enormous, above all in Bohemia. Hundreds of thousands of people had died, and half of Prague was destroyed. Ferdinand’s administration undertook some efforts to rebuild (with measures such as tax exemptions) and to repopulate (with new, firmly Catholic settlers). The characteristic power structure of the dynasty’s rule was solidified in these years after Westphalia: the Habsburg monarchs governed in a tight alliance with the Catholic Church and the high aristocracy. Towns and cities throughout much of the Danube lands lost their former vitality as commerce was disrupted by war; when their wealth declined so too did their political clout. In many rural areas conditions for peasants also worsened as their landlords’ authority increased. As an illustration, in Bohemia in 1650, 85 powerful noble families controlled 62 percent of all the peasantry.

  Ferdinand also had to keep a wary eye on his main enemies, the Swedes. They did not fully withdraw from Habsburg territory until 1650, after Ferdinand paid millions of florins in accordance with the treaty agreement. When Sweden, in alliance with Rákóczi, attacked Poland in 1655, Ferdinand tried to remain neutral, even though some of his advisors urged him to enter the war in contest for the Polish crown. His preoccupations to the north led Ferdinand to resist Felipe IV’s urgent requests for help against the French in the later 1650s. In these years the relationship between the Spanish and Austrian branches was at its most strained. There was also a great deal of tension concerning Felipe IV’s succession problems. Ferdinand III left the bulk of those problems to his own successor. Weakened by gout and years of military campaigning, he died in April 1657, at 50 years old. He had spent nearly his entire life at war. His main contribution to his dynasty, however, was in finally achieving peace.

  Dynastic strategies

  These three Habsburgs were intimately, alarmingly connected by marriage and other familial relations. Felipe IV was the son of Margarete of Styria, Ferdinand II’s sister. Ferdinand II, for his part, married a Bavarian and an Italian. But then Ferdinand III married María Ana of Spain, Felipe IV’s sister. She gave birth to a daughter, Mariana, who later became Felipe IV’s second wife. Felipe thus married his niece, before she turned 15 years old. From Felipe’s first marriage, to the French princess Élisabeth, came their daughter María Teresa, who went on to marry Louis XIV as part of the Peace of the Pyrenees. María Teresa and Louis were double first-cousins, showing that the Habsburgs were by no means the only practitioners of such consanguineous marriages. From Felipe’s second marriage came his daughter Margarita, the charming infanta depicted in Velázquez’s Las Meninas. She married Ferdinand III’s son Leopold I, who was her uncle. These too-close connections were intended to maintain dynastic solidarity between the Austrian and Spanish branches. The balance of power implications in that solidarity were actually one of the causes of the Thirty Years’ War. Olivares himself declared, “Not for anything must these two houses let themselves be divided.”12 But the dynasty’s cooperation was also often tested by shifting interests in the war. It was with great reluctance that Ferdinand III made a peace separate from Spain in 1648.

  Despite (and because of) all the intra-family marriages, Felipe IV was for most of his reign unable to produce a legitimate male heir, which predicament convuls
ed the dynasty for decades. His son from his first marriage, and his great hope, Baltasar Carlos, died in 1646. This disaster came amidst a string of others, including the rebellions of Portugal and Catalonia. From his two marriages, four sons were born who all died young. Felipe contemplated naming Ferdinand III’s son Leopold as his heir around 1656. Ferdinand was resistant to this idea, though, because by that time his own health was failing and his first-born son, Ferdinand IV (whom he had previously tried to marry to Felipe’s daughter María Teresa), had died—hence he needed Leopold as his own successor. Finally Mariana produced a son who survived, Carlos II, and he went on to inherit despite his severe mental and physical incapacities.

  Ferdinand II’s line overcame the succession problems that had plagued Rudolf and Matthias, first of all by dispatching Felipe III’s claims to be their legitimate heir. Via the Oñate Treaty of 1617, Ferdinand II granted Felipe III some territory in Alsace and Italy in return for Felipe renouncing his Austrian inheritance rights. Ferdinand also attempted to repair the previous generation’s failures in dynastic reproduction by formally declaring the principle of primogeniture in his will of 1621. He realized the necessity of not dividing the family’s territories among multiple heirs, and most of his successors upheld this principle.

  The threats to the dynasty’s legitimacy spurred aggressive but only partial solutions from all three of these monarchs. Those threats came from enemies abroad, such as the Dutch, but also at home, such as Protestants in Austria or Bohemia. The solutions were themselves largely dynastic, in that the Habsburgs remained one of the few binding links among their diverse realms. In Felipe IV’s case, his tenacious defense of dynastic prerogatives helps explain why he shackled Castile to decades of devastating wars. Like his grandfather Felipe II, he could not countenance the loss of his dynastic rights to a territory such as the Netherlands. This came also to apply to Portugal. Wedded to the concept of dynastic prerogative in Felipe IV’s reign was the idea of reputación. The insistence on defending Spain’s reputation—on not appearing weak, or susceptible to imperial fragmentation, or enemies’ predation—was enunciated most explicitly by Olivares. Of course strategic factors influenced Felipe’s foreign policy as well, such as the need to keep open the Spanish Road from Milan to Brussels. It was easier for Felipe to compromise on strategic goals than on dynastic rights, which helps explain the repeated shambolic attempts to retake Portugal.

  The divergent legal-institutional arrangements and strategic interests of the Spanish monarchy’s realms occluded most formal efforts to integrate those realms. Cultural integration was stronger, however, and contributed to the dynasty’s legitimacy and loyalty in a variety of ways. Still strong was the idea of the Spanish monarchy as the standard-bearer and sword arm of Catholic orthodoxy. In this area the Spanish and Austrian branches strongly overlapped. Interestingly, the Austrians were in many ways even more rabid in their insistence on Catholicism, largely because their domains (unlike the Spanish) were so religiously fragmented. Another vital binding agent of legitimacy and loyalty in Spain was the prestige of Castilian culture, which reached its peak under Felipe IV. Felipe in fact regarded it as one of the essential duties of his kingship to sponsor arts and culture. Thanks partly to his support, writers such as Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and Calderón were widely read throughout Europe. Church figures such as Juan de Palafox, mystics such as Teresa de Jesús, Jesuit philosophers, and the acerbic satires of Quevedo were also part of Castile’s ongoing cultural bloom, while the work of Spanish painters attained enormous esteem abroad. Beyond the arts, Iberian civilization under the Habsburgs made notable contributions to fields such as cartography, botany, mining, and metallurgy.

  Bound to the cultural patronage were the characteristically impressive royal courts of the Baroque, which also served to enhance legitimacy and loyalty. Here the Spanish court was again influential throughout Europe, and especially to the Austrian Habsburgs. Felipe’s court had some 350 principal servants, of whom 47 were designated to wait on the king’s table. Adding a few hundred other servants, several dozen clerics, 63 musicians, plus royal officials, the total number of people working in Felipe’s household in 1623 was around 1700.13 This excess was intentional. It was designed to overawe all observers, and particularly to discipline the members of the aristocracy at court. The court functions of magnificent display, showy religiosity, and regimentation of the aristocracy were all explicitly constructed by Olivares. They configured the monarch as the glorious, divinely anointed, untouchable authority over his disparate domains. The palace of Buen Retiro that Felipe constructed was his greatest showplace, decorated by luminaries such as Zurbarán, Rubens, Nicolas Poussin, and the younger Breughel. Nonetheless, the Spanish court was never as extravagant as Louis XIV’s in the last decades of the century.

  The courts of the Ferdinands were less opulent, but fulfilled many of the same functions. The Viennese court became the irresistible center of gravity for the aristocracy of the Austrian and Bohemian realms, less so for Hungary. Because both Ferdinand II and III had Italian wives, Italian influence swelled in the court and throughout the Austrian lands. This influence was felt strongly in the theater. As one example, the first permanent opera house north of the Alps was constructed in Innsbruck in 1629–30. Ferdinand II never had the kind of funds that Felipe IV lavished on artistic patronage or cultural display, but what money he did have he often spent on music. In 1626 his total tax revenues from Styria and Carinthia were not enough to cover the costs of all his musical performances. Characteristically, Ferdinand II favored music because he believed it aided in the praise of God. Neither of the Ferdinands were great builders, but under Ferdinand II the Capuchin Church in Vienna began to be constructed. It subsequently became the central necropolis for the dynasty’s Austrian members. Their two reigns also saw a profusion of pillars erected throughout town squares to depict the Trinity or the Virgin Mary. Veneration of Mary was yoked to legitimacy and loyalty for the dynasty: in the iconography, she was sometimes depicted wearing the same crown(s) worn by the Habsburgs. The Habsburg identification with Catholicism, and religion’s role as a force for unity in the otherwise culturally disparate Danubian domains, can also be seen through the many church buildings that were adorned with the family’s coat of arms.

  Though the Habsburgs prior to Ferdinand II were only averagely pious for European ruling families, with the Counter-Reformation the culture of devotion to the Catholic Church came to define the dynasty and its lands. The dynasty attached itself to central sacraments, such as in the anagram propaganda of “Eucharistia = Hic Austriae,” which identified the Eucharist and piety as guiding characteristics of Austria. In reimposing Catholicism throughout its realms, the dynasty promoted a number of saints’ cults; though it belongs mostly to the eighteenth century, most notable of the cults was that of Jan Nepomucký, whose Baroque statues are still to be found throughout central Europe. This dramatic religiosity is what gave rise to the image of pietas austriaca, the idea that the Habsburgs were more deeply pious (and hence divinely favored) than any other family. Piety was inextricably intertwined with loyalty. To Ferdinand II, being loyal to the king meant being Catholic. Intense Catholicism defined loyalty even within the dynasty, such that piety became an essential socializing aspect for the family’s dynastic norms. During this period, the Christian virtues were likewise used to construct the ruler’s image in a typically Baroque way. The Habsburgs’ incarnation of these virtues justified their power over their subjects. The paramount virtue for the Habsburgs was usually clemency, which as clementia austriaca became another foundational part of the dynasty’s myth. Though the idea that the Habsburgs were somehow particularly peaceful or forgiving was not new in the seventeenth century, it was now more vigorously promoted. Thus Ferdinand II was portrayed as uniquely clement in that he only had 27 rebels executed in Prague in 1621, rather than pursuing wider, harsher punishments.

  As animating a role as reputación played in Olivares’s foreign policy, it was also
important to Felipe’s (self-)image as a ruler. He staked a large part of his prestige on military victory, and often yearned for the kind of battlefield heroics of medieval rulers, or even of Ferdinand III. In the later 1620s Felipe wanted to go to Italy or Catalonia to lead armies while Olivares would remain in Madrid handling government. When Olivares rebuffed this plan, Felipe contented himself with staging mock battles at the Buen Retiro palace. He did, however, go to the front in Aragon in 1642 and was there for several years. Though he was obviously influenced by the ideal of the prince as warrior, in reality Felipe spent most of his reign pushing papers. It has been estimated that for much of his reign he worked some 8 hours a day, which in any case better suited his more intellectual character. During much of his adult life he read quite widely, often with the purpose of learning how to be a better monarch. This shows that he staked his reputation also on good governance. With all the troubles that befell his realms, he was consistently plagued by the worry that they came because of his own failings as a man and a king. The evolving nature of royal governance can also be seen through Olivares’s function as valido. Olivares combined his enormous administrative duties with basic household duties for the king, such as handing Felipe his clothes in the morning. Thus the valido was still partly the direct, personal servant of the king, and not a fully professionalized, ministerial bureaucrat in the modern sense.