The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Those impositions only provoked more upset, such that parts of Hungary and Transylvania seethed in revolt throughout the rest of Leopold’s reign. These revolts were particularly dangerous because they attracted French and Ottoman meddling, which is also a reason why the Habsburgs were never able to suppress them as conclusively as they did the Bohemian rebellion in 1620. At the end of the 1670s Leopold had to deal with a very serious rebellion led by the Transylvanian magnate Imre Thököly. Known as the revolt of the kurucok (“bandits”), Thököly amassed an army of possibly 20,000 troops and marauded all along Leopold’s eastern frontiers. By 1680 Thököly was openly inviting Ottoman intervention, and so Leopold’s advisers pressed for peace. In 1681 Leopold convoked the full Hungarian diet for the first time in 20 years and made a number of concessions. He restored some governing power to the diet, once again made the Hungarian treasury independent of that in Vienna, and promised respect for Protestants’ rights to worship. In return, the diet promised to raise troops against the Turks. Thököly and his hardcore partisans refused to give in, and he later fled to Transylvania. In the 1680s, to keep the magnates on his side, Leopold reaffirmed religious freedom in Hungary and the estates’ authority over local government. In return, the diet made monarchical succession hereditary to the Habsburgs’ male line.

  The other major disturbance to the east was the Turkish war, which in 1663 resumed for the first time since Rudolf II’s reign. Throughout the Thirty Years’ War, the Ottomans had been focused on Persia, which meant that the Habsburgs had little to fear from Turkish armies during that time. When the Ottomans attacked Transylvania in 1663, however, Habsburg, German, and even French forces mobilized via the League of the Rhine, which led to the battle of St. Gotthard in 1664. Leopold’s general Montecuccoli won a great victory over a Turkish force twice the size, but Leopold was still fearful of aggression from France to the west. He therefore quickly signed the capitulatory Treaty of Vasvár in 1664, in which he not only failed to capitalize on the St. Gotthard victory, but actually agreed to pay the sultan an annual tribute of 200,000 florins. This craven submission led directly to the nobles’ conspiracy in Hungary of 1670.

  St. Gotthard and Vasvár were just preludes to the more significant clashes between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans in subsequent decades. A major new Ottoman offensive into Europe was brewing around 1681 at the behest of the sultan’s bellicose vizier Kara Mustafa. The vizier openly sided with Thököly and the kuruc rebels against the Habsburgs, thereby violating the terms of Vasvár. It soon became clear that the Turks were assembling for a huge offensive against Austria, and once Louis XIV gave Kara Mustafa his assurance that France would not aid Austria or the Empire if attacked by the Turks, the Ottoman war machine rolled forward. Thanks in part to the pope’s mediation, many German princes and the Polish king, Jan Sobieski, pledged to assist Leopold.

  The famous siege of Vienna took place in the summer of 1683. The Turks had assembled an army of over 100,000 men (though force estimates for this encounter vary wildly) and began pounding the city in July. Leopold wisely fled to the city of Passau with his court, leaving Vienna’s defense in the capable hands of Ernst Starhemberg. Starhemberg managed to hold firm until 4 September, when Ottoman forces penetrated Vienna’s outer walls and came close to overrunning the city. In desperation, the Austrian commander fired signal rockets from the tower of Vienna’s St. Stephen’s cathedral, hoping for the immediate arrival of a relief force. Luckily, that force had been painstakingly assembled by Leopold’s general Charles of Lorraine. It included contingents led by the Bavarian Duke Max Emanuel III and the Saxon Elector Johan Georg III. Finally Sobieski with his army of 30,000 Poles arrived in the first week of September, bringing the Christian forces’ total to around 75,000. Charles lit bonfires on the hills west of Vienna on 7 September to give Starhemberg and the Viennese hope, and then by 12 September the combined armies under Sobieski’s supreme command swept down upon the Turks. Kara Mustafa had stupidly failed to fortify his encampment against the attack he knew was coming, and with a well-timed, last-ditch thrust from Starhemberg’s garrison as well, the Turks were routed. Kara Mustafa paid for his poor command with his life, but not at the edge of a Christian’s blade: the sultan had him strangled.

  Even had the Ottomans taken Vienna, they probably would not have held it for long. Instead, the Habsburgs launched a devastating counterattack that erased almost 200 years of Turkish conquests. The Empire, the papacy, and even Hungary rallied strongly to Leopold, supplying men and money as a kind of crusade fever swept Europe. Leopold tried to secure his western frontiers against Louis XIV’s opportunist predations by agreeing to a truce in 1684; in so doing, the Austrian Habsburgs temporarily abandoned their Spanish cousins. Louis did attack along the Rhine in subsequent years, but the German princes together with the Netherlands and England managed to fight back while Leopold’s advances in the east continued. By 1685 Charles of Lorraine had pushed the Turks out of present-day Slovakia. In 1686 after a terribly destructive siege the Turks lost Buda, and 1687 saw imperial forces take back Slavonia and Transylvania. Most of Thököly’s kuruc fighters now swore allegiance to Leopold. The Transylvanian diet also recognized Leopold’s sovereignty. In 1688 Max Emanuel of Bavaria led the command that succeeded in conquering Belgrade, and the following year drove further into the Balkans. There was even heady talk that Habsburg forces might press all the way to liberate Constantinople.

  From 1688 on Leopold had to wage a two-front war against the French and the Turks. Charles of Lorraine went to the Rhine to fight Louis’s armies, but thanks to the Habsburgs’ surplus of talented military leaders at this time, Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden took over command in the east. Thököly had assembled a new army and with the sultan’s help pushed into Transylvania in 1690. Ludwig Wilhelm moved his army there, defeated Thököly, but left Belgrade too weak to withstand a Turkish counterassault in that same year. Then in 1691 at the savage battle of Slankamen Ludwig Wilhelm annihilated a Turkish army, a defeat from which Turkish military power in the Balkans never recovered. In the next few years most of Leopold’s armies were focused on the fight against France, but then in 1697 his new general Eugène of Savoy won another astounding victory at Zenta. The Ottoman vizier and some 30,000 Turkish soldiers were killed, many drowning in the river Tisza as they fled the battlefield. The sultan himself barely managed to escape. Leopold took the opportunity to make peace. The 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz confirmed the Habsburgs’ huge gains in Hungary and southeastern Europe and established some borderlines that still exist today.

  The major events of Leopold’s reign took place abroad; within the Hereditary Lands, this was a time of re-Catholicization and recovery. He dutifully upheld the religious peace in the Empire, but in his own lands, and especially in Silesia, Leopold sent around “Reformation commissions” made up of priests, officials, and soldiers to enforce Catholic practice. Thousands of people and families who would not abjure Protestantism were compelled into exile. The lower classes were the most harshly treated, of course, such as by having their Protestant churches demolished. The nobility had more legal authority to resist this coercion, but the dynasty exerted other means of pressure, such as refusing places at court for Protestant nobles, though there were some exceptions. The Jesuits became the vital executors of the dynasty’s Counter-Reformation efforts, and Leopold had a number of important Jesuit advisors in his court. The order took control of most of the educational institutions in the monarchy, teaching not only the high born (such as Leopold himself) and aspirants to the clergy, but even some of the lower classes as well. Protestants were not the only targets of religious homogenization; Leopold also expelled the Jews from Vienna in 1670. Hungary, as always, resisted more successfully. By 1700, there were tiny pockets of Protestants in the Hereditary Lands, but the overwhelming proportion of the population was Catholic, a major turnaround from 100 years earlier.

  By 1700 the Danubian domains had mostly recovered from the damage of the Thirty Years’ War. Economic g
rowth was stronger in Austria than in either Bohemia, where devastation and depopulation lingered in the decades after Westphalia, or Hungary, which was a battlefield for much of Leopold’s rule. Signs of progress were a wool factory in Linz, increased trade down the Danube, and the introduction of new crops such as tobacco and potatoes. It was often the high nobility who most successfully took advantage of new economic opportunities, particularly since the towns took so long to recover their economic life after the decades of conflict. Power and wealth continued to concentrate into the magnates’ hands, and landlords’ authority over their peasants also tended to increase. Some changes came about thanks to the influence of cameralism, which was akin to French mercantilism in promoting ideas for how state policy could boost economic development. Writers such as Johann Joachim Becher and Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk argued for the necessity of improving conditions for the agrarian labor force. Hence Leopold issued a series of regulations to limit peasants’ forced labor requirements (to only three days a week) and to allow them to substitute cash payments for labor. The fact that the crown could not always enforce these regulations shows the limits of its power vis-à-vis the high nobility. Despite some improvements, at the end of Leopold’s reign the Danubian lands remained fairly backward economically, compared to farther west. Though the Austrian Habsburgs now had one of the largest realms in Europe, its population of 9 million was still well short of France’s 20 million, and it depended on strong allies for its final battle with Louis XIV over the Spanish succession.

  Carlos II (1661–1700)

  Even if Leopold was not the most dynamic monarch, he did at least truly rule, unlike Carlos II. The most remarkable achievement of Carlos’s sad life is simply that he lived as long as he did, given his physical infirmities, which in some ways mirrored the weakness of the Spanish monarchy during his time. At various points in his 38 years he had dreadful health ailments, including convulsions, intestinal problems, and edemas on his feet, legs, abdomen, and face. He did not learn to walk or speak until after he was 4 years old. He did eventually learn to read and write, but his education was often delayed by illness. He had the blondish hair, long face, and jutting lip common to many Habsburgs, but his jaw problems meant that his chin was deformed. He was described as being “so ugly it’s scary” by a French diplomat who knew him.2 In his last years he acquired the nickname “el Hechizado” (“the Bewitched”) because some Spanish nuns decided that his many problems including his infertility must have come from an evil spell. He was even exorcised after his death.

  The correct explanation for Carlos’s problems was his genetic makeup. Though he was disabled, he was not completely incapable. His development was slow but he was not unintelligent. He was in fact self-aware, but with a weak will and an inability to concentrate. He remained mostly a dynastic figurehead and a political pawn. Until 1677 government was managed by his mother and her favorites, later by his half-brother, then by a few reformist ministers, and after 1691 by his second wife. And just as the sickly Carlos was the unfortunate opposite of his energetic namesake Charles V (known as Carlos I in Spain), so too was Spain during much of his reign an unfortunate contrast with its periods of great energy under the earlier Habsburg kings. A Venetian ambassador wrote during this time, “Now there are no ships at sea nor armies on land, the fortresses are dismantled and defenseless; everything is in danger, nothing is protected. It’s incomprehensible that this monarchy survives.”3 There were signs of improvement in the later years of Carlos’s reign, but on the whole he was the nadir of the Spanish Habsburgs.

  Many of those who ruled in Carlos’s name provided unstable or outright inept government. When Felipe IV died, Carlos was only 4, and his mother Mariana (Leopold’s sister), was 31 but had very little political experience or skill. Mariana had proven herself to be brittle and stubborn, and Felipe limited her powers as regent. She was supposed to govern with a council comprising members of the higher bureaucracy in addition to some church officials and grandees. She preferred to entrust power to her own favorites, however, the first of which was the Austrian Jesuit Johann Nidhard (also spelled i.a. Neidhardt) who became in effect her valido. He was widely hated by the Spanish aristocracy, in part for being a foreigner. He was finally ousted in 1669. Then another favorite came along after 1673, the oily Andalusian arriviste Fernando Valenzuela, who inveigled his way into the queen regent’s court not through political talents but through marital connections. He lasted until 1677, when he was forced out.

  The man hovering around the edges of power until 1679 was Carlos’s half-brother Don Juan José, Felipe IV’s illegitimate son. He was not unaccomplished: he had held high positions in Felipe IV’s government, including on the council of state, and he served as the viceroy in Sicily from 1648 to 1651 after he subdued the revolt there. He also served as viceroy of Catalonia and the Spanish Netherlands. After Juan José’s failures commanding the armies sent to retake Portugal in 1661 and 1664, Felipe’s trust in his bastard son waned and he refused to legitimize him. So Juan José was reasonably talented, quite intelligent, very ambitious, but aggrieved by the taint of his illegitimate origins. It was he who chased Nidhard out of the court in 1669, but he did not have enough support in ruling circles to take over the regency and push through his ideas for reorganizing governance. In 1676, though, he did have sufficient backing from the Castilian aristocracy to muster an army and essentially overthrow Mariana and her venal favorite Valenzuela. Valenzuela was sent to prison in the Philippines for ten years, and Mariana was shipped off to Toledo to limit her influence.

  Juan José remains a controversial figure: some see his premature death at 50 as cutting short his significant potential, while others regard him as little more than a brutish caudillo who furthered the aristocracy’s dominance over the crown. In the two years that he governed before he died in 1679, he did begin some reforms to address the monarchy’s major problems of inflation and trade. The next two prime ministers who ran the government also both achieved some effective reforms. The first, the duke of Medinaceli, was the richest and most powerful noble in Castile. He continued to implement the monetary reorganization that Juan José had started, engineering the painful but necessary devaluation of 1680. He also lowered taxes in Castile, the first time that had happened under the Habsburg kings. After Spain’s loss of Luxembourg in 1684 to France, Medinaceli was pushed out by the aristocracy and Carlos’s queen in favor of the skilled and astute count of Oropesa. He attempted a number of difficult reforms such as making the tax system more equitable and reducing the bloated church administration. These measures predictably angered the clergy as well as the aristocracy, who arranged for his dismissal in 1691. Carlos’s second wife Mariana of Neuburg, the daughter of the Elector Palatine, now exercised royal power, together with a faction of German and Spanish nobles. The improvements that Juan José, Medinaceli, and Oropesa had instituted were piecemeal and halting, but they were part of what helped the monarchy begin to recover from its imperial exhaustion.

  At the outset of Carlos’s reign, the picture was still quite bleak. The population continued to plummet due to famines, plagues, and migration, in both rural and urban areas. The death toll from these calamities during Carlos’s years reached approximately 500,000. As one example, by the 1660s the population of Seville, the largest city on the peninsula, may have fallen by as much as half from its earlier peak. The last lights of the “Golden Age” culture, men such as Calderón and Murillo, flickered out. Intellectual life in Spain stagnated under the over-zealous sway of the Counter-Reformation Church, distrustful of ideas from outside such as the burgeoning revolution in science. Agricultural output also languished, and in much of the countryside landlords’ despotic control went unchallenged by the anemic royal power. The weakness of leadership, epitomized by the aristocratic factions at court scheming around the monarchical void, was described by the English ambassador: “This country is in a most miserable condition; no head to govern, and every man in office does what he pleases, wit
hout fear of being called to account.”4 By the last decades of the 1600s there were some positive developments, however. The peninsula’s peripheral areas revived more strongly than Castile did; shipbuilding and port traffic rebounded in the Basque Country, and trade picked up in Catalonia as well. The population began to grow and agricultural and wool yields improved. The currency devaluations of the 1680s were highly disruptive, but helped reduce inflation in the long run. The modest reforms of Medinaceli and Oropesa were ultimately tender green shoots, unable to produce a major advance in the last years of Habsburg Spain.

  Defeats by France were a sign of Spanish weakness. Louis XIV’s unceasing attacks took a few cities in the Spanish Netherlands in the 1660s. Having France as a common enemy motivated a remarkably quick warming of Spain’s relations with the old nemesis of the Dutch United Provinces. By 1676 the Dutch and the Spanish were fighting on the same side—and losing to the French, as when in that year the French navy defeated a combined Spanish-Dutch fleet. In the subsequent treaty Spain lost yet more slices of territory to France. After French forces invaded Catalonia in 1683 the Spanish had to give up Luxembourg in the peace of 1684. War resumed in 1688 with Spain again allied with the Dutch as well as with Leopold and the League of Augsburg. The French captured Barcelona for a time, but by the conflict’s end Louis did not press his gains too forcefully. The Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 gave the French half of the island of Hispaniola, which would later become Haiti. Louis, though, as one of the vultures which had long been circling Carlos’s frail body, was preparing for yet another conflict: namely, the struggle over the last male Spanish Habsburg’s succession.