The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  Where once the Spanish monarchy had had institutions that could fairly successfully channel the sovereign’s will, as under Felipe II, by Carlos II’s time the structures of dynastic rule had atrophied. The clearest example is with the Castilian bureaucracy’s decline in integrity. What had been relatively efficient under his predecessors fell victim to rampant corruption and the bloat of patronage. Some bureaucratic offices became hereditary, a ludicrous practice which allowed a 9-year-old boy to inherit his father’s position on the Council of the Indies in the 1690s. Hence even the highest apparatuses of government such as the councils became inefficient and resistant to reform, since the nobles who monopolized them vigorously defended their narrow prerogatives under the existing system. Just as the quality of the monarch himself plummeted at the end of the Spanish Habsburg dynasty, so too did the quality of the institutions for dynastic rule.

  As the Spanish Habsburgs waned, the Austrian Habsburgs waxed. Carlos II is one of the best possible arguments against hereditary monarchy as a form of government. His unfitness for rule furthered the nobility’s domination over royal power. It also impeded the kind of leadership that might have more vigorously arrested the years of decline and drift. He achieved nothing positive from a dynastic perspective. If anything, his manipulability and disloyalty to a Habsburg succession actually precipitated the dynasty’s ejection from Spain and its great empire. Leopold was also not an incisive politician, nor were the Danubian domains especially well governed in his time. But they were governed just well enough to hold together against French pressure, Ottoman attacks, and Hungarian uprisings. Leopold’s reign was important for the growth of trends that were to define the Habsburgs’ central European monarchy: Baroque Catholicism; the emergence of a Vienna-centered, German-dominated elite culture; a ruling partnership with the magnates of the various realms; and an ongoing negotiation of the constitutional relationship between the dynasty and its realms. Because he was usually more interested in events on his western frontiers than those in the east, Leopold would never have guessed that his greatest legacy was the reconquest of Hungary. After 1700 the Danubian domains were the Habsburgs’ main power base, and the center of gravity shifted eastward within those domains, thanks to that reconquest. While Leopold accomplished little in the way of institutional centralization, the fiscal base and cultural-political cohesion of his monarchy helped make it a potent enough player that, though it could not take up the baton of world empire from the Spanish branch, it became almost to the end of its existence an indispensable great power in European politics.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Opulent stagnation (1705–40)

  The contrast between Joseph I and his brother Karl VI was the chasm between what might have been and what actually was. Joseph was the mercurial oldest son of Leopold I, shorter of stature, lively, with flashes of brilliance but also of laxity. He ruled for only six years, but in that time he oversaw the beginnings of reforms that, had they been fully carried out, might well have strengthened the dynastic state as never before in the Danubian domains. Karl was actually Leopold’s favorite, and resembled his father in so many ways: he was ponderous and ugly, with a meaty, bovine head and the Habsburg jaw. His overriding preoccupation as ruler was to secure his succession—and even in that, his laborious arrangements were wanting. While they were both alive, there was considerable jealousy between these two, and open squabbling over their rights to rule parts of the Habsburg patrimony such as Naples and Milan. Those squabbles did not derail their joint dynastic pursuit, which was the prosecution of the Spanish succession war. Joseph is by far the more interesting of the two rulers; he had genuine promise, though he is often overlooked because of his short reign. Karl VI, on the other hand, was another of the dynasty’s yawning seat warmers.

  Joseph I (1678–1711)

  Joseph’s six years on the throne were characterized by the continuing war with the Bourbons, by the energetic rule of the young sovereign and his excellent team of advisors, by his feelings of German patriotism, and also by his incomplete plans for reforming the monarchy. Joseph was unlike both his father and his brother in his (relative) secularism. Though a devout Catholic, he was not educated by the Jesuits. Some of his tutors were in fact enemies of the Jesuits. He was also notably more tolerant of religious minorities than the several preceding generations of Habsburgs. He for instance appointed a Protestant nobleman among his high servants and allowed Lutheran churches to be built in Silesia. Like his father he was gifted musically both as a performer (he played the flute and violin) and a composer. But Joseph’s mind was more probing; he was intrigued by rationalist intellectual trends. His allegiance to things German extended even to his marital politics, since he insisted on marrying a German woman. Joseph’s character and leadership were not unimpeachable. Another advantage he had over his father and brother—that he was a fairly handsome man—surely aided in his notorious womanizing, which was criticized during his reign. And though he was enterprising and filled with ideas, he sometimes lacked the follow-through necessary to make real changes. During ministerial meetings he would sit doodling on his notes and then leave to go hunting as soon as he could. Though he was in many ways more modern than either Leopold or Karl, in other ways he remained a vain, profligate aristocrat; as an example, he left his last lover a gift of 500,000 florins.1

  Joseph saw a need for changing how the monarchy was ruled, and he attacked those challenges with more dispatch than his forebears. Joseph’s “young court” of reformers was influential already before 1705 over matters such as financing the war effort. Leopold was often not receptive to these initiatives, and there was quite a bit of wrangling among the father and the sons to get the dynasty’s affairs in a logical order before Leopold died. In the end, Leopold and Joseph agreed to renounce their claims to the Spanish throne in favor of Karl, and then all three signed the Pactum mutuae succesionis which, among other things, assured Karl’s heirs the right to inherit in Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. After this pact was signed, in September 1703 Karl set off for Spain, and never saw his father and brother again.

  Once he came to the throne, Joseph built upon the great successes of Eugène and Marlborough to provide strong leadership for the dynasty’s war aims. He helped shore up the monarchy’s precarious finances by founding the Vienna City Bank in 1706. After the battle of Blenheim had knocked Bavaria out of the war, Joseph wanted to annex that dukedom to Habsburg lands, but he failed to get the assent of the other German princes. He and Eugène then determined that Italy should be the target of a Habsburg military thrust. Aided by troops from Savoy and a sizeable loan from Queen Anne of England, Eugène won a major victory at Turin, which forced the French to withdraw from northern Italy. Habsburg forces took Naples as well. Joseph then sent Eugène to the Low Countries in 1708, where an allied victory at Oudenaarde enabled the conquest of the Spanish Netherlands. It was not an unbroken string of triumphs for the Habsburgs and their allies. In 1707 a combined English-Dutch-Portuguese army lost in Spain and the French pushed again into southern Germany. There was also the scare of the dynasty being dragged into the simultaneous Great Northern War, which pitted Sweden against Russia, Saxony, and Denmark. Thanks to able diplomacy, that conflict did not spread to Habsburg lands. Nonetheless, by 1709 France’s defeats forced it to the negotiating table.

  Joseph also dealt decisively with the revolt in Hungary and Transylvania that had begun under Leopold. In 1707 Ferenc Rákóczi, the revolt’s leader, declared the house of Habsburg deposed as rulers of these lands. But already by that point the tide was shifting against him. Rákóczi lacked the support of many nobles for deposing the dynasty and continuing the war. Moreover, a plague ravaged Hungary, and Louis XIV’s mounting defeats meant he was unable to provide much support. Also crucial, the successes in northern Italy freed up Joseph’s resources to suppress the revolt. The rebels’ army, though large—tens of thousands at various points—was made up overwhelmingly of untrained soldiers. Hence it was no match for the force t
hat Joseph sent into Hungary. The rebel army was soundly defeated at Trenčín (now in Slovakia) in 1708, and Rákóczi fled into exile. Joseph had to tread somewhat lightly in mopping up the various pockets of resistance, since his English and Dutch allies objected to any harsh treatment of Hungary’s Protestants. The pacification was largely successful, even though the final treaty ending the revolt was not signed until after Joseph had died.

  By Joseph’s time, the dynasty’s position within the Holy Roman Empire was firmer than it had been in a generation. Thanks to the German princes closing ranks in the wars against the Turks and Louis XIV, there was respectable solidarity and support for the emperor. Before he came to the throne, Joseph participated in the campaigns of 1702 and 1704 in Germany, which was an intentional strategy to raise the dynasty’s imperial profile. As emperor, Joseph managed to convince the imperial diet to grant 5 million florins to support the war effort. In the long run, this temporarily improved position did not translate into major gains for the dynasty. One reason was that the princes still jealously guarded their sovereign rights. The more important reason was that Joseph himself did not really intend to bolster the Empire, but rather to bolster Austria. The idea was to use imperial resources and prestige almost exclusively for the Habsburgs’ benefit. Hence to Joseph’s thinking (which others like Eugène and Starhemberg subscribed to), victories such as Blenheim—achieved with a measure of German unity—would serve primarily to help him achieve dynastic aims in defeating the French. Joseph’s subordination of the Empire to his dynastic aims was not unusual, since other German princes like the Hohenzollerns and the Wittelsbachs did much the same. His strategy might even have borne fruit, except that after Joseph’s death Karl largely dropped it.

  Though Joseph started some potentially valuable reforms in the administration of the dynastic state, he deserves credit more for their initiation than their fulfillment. He cut away some of the dead wood in top administrative circles, and enlisted a number of excellent minds among his top advisors. He attained markedly increased financial contributions from the estates for the benefit of the crown’s income. He failed, though, to secure the universal excise tax that he hoped would be independent of the estates. His administrative reforms included shifting some of Innsbruck and Graz’s competencies to Vienna. Joseph was aware of and sympathetic to certain ideas of the Austrian cameralists. For instance, he agreed with the utility of improving the conditions of the peasants, and so on some of his own estates he reduced the requirements of forced labor. Applying those reforms more widely throughout the monarchy did not get very far, however. The nobility, not surprisingly, offered strong resistance to commutation of the robot labor requirements. Of these many good ideas, most remained fragmentary as real policies.

  It is important to remember that all of Joseph’s six-year reign transpired during wartime. His and his ministers’ most immediate goals were always directed toward sustaining the military effort. And in that they were largely successful. By 1710 France was on the defensive, though negotiations kept foundering on Louis’s resistance to his opponents’ demands. Cracks were starting to show in the opponents’ alliance, too, since once the French had been expelled from the Spanish Netherlands the Dutch had met their most pressing war aims. After 1710, Britain’s commitment wavered as well, since the Tories now controlled Parliament and moved to take Britain out of the war. Before a resolution could be brought to any of the foreign conflicts or domestic reforms, Joseph contracted smallpox during an epidemic that hit Vienna. He died in April 1711, not yet 33 years old. His time on the throne was so short that it is impossible to predict what he might have achieved had he lived longer. Even in those six years, however, he can take credit for strengthening the dynasty militarily and financially.

  Karl VI (1685–1740)

  Karl VI’s reign was marked indelibly by succession issues. First was his improbable and ultimately impossible quest for the Spanish succession. Then, when that hope was definitively dashed, for most of the rest of his life he was preoccupied with his own succession—not because he had no heirs, but because he had only a female heir. As he frittered away his nearly three decades of rule extracting worthless promises from other powers to acknowledge the inheritance of his daughter Maria Theresia, the means of making them respect those promises, namely the remarkable military built up during Leopold’s and Joseph’s time, declined into decrepitude. During his time the Habsburg monarchy stretched its borders to its greatest-yet territorial extent, and the dynasty’s display reached an extravagant, overripe late Baroque. Yet those features are mere camouflage for Karl’s inadequacy as a ruler. He was dutiful, well-traveled, persistent to a fault, and not dumb, but he did not have good political judgment. His sense of his own limitations did not lead him to be more pragmatic, but to surround himself with mediocre advisors who also had little political talent. He tended to distrust those who were smarter or more capable than himself. He was another Habsburg monarch, much like his father, whose majesty derived more from the size of his wig and the pomposity of his costume than from his own innate qualities. In fact, even in court audiences he was known to mumble unintelligibly through his teeth like a gawky schoolboy.

  His involvement in the Spanish succession war demonstrates a few of his good qualities and many of his bad ones. Though Leopold and Joseph had not regarded gaining all of Spain and its empire as a particularly realistic war aim, that goal was nonetheless dear to Karl’s heart. He was present for the early part of the war in the Iberian peninsula, landing in Lisbon in 1704. Then, thanks to English and Dutch naval power, he captured Valencia and Barcelona in 1705. He was with the offensive that took Zaragoza in 1706, but a French-Spanish counteroffensive pushed Karl and his forces back to Barcelona, where he remained holed up most of the time until 1711. In 1708 Louis XIV, looking to end the war, signaled his willingness to renounce the Bourbons’ Spanish claims in favor of Karl. The English, Dutch, and Habsburgs insisted on substantial war reparations, and that French forces help drive the Bourbon claimant Philippe of Anjou out of Spain. Louis could not accept these conditions, so the negotiations broke down. Joseph’s death in 1710, as English and Dutch commitment was already wavering, did not help Karl’s cause. If the Spanish war were successful, he would inherit not only in Spain but also in the German and the Danubian domains. He would thereby follow in the footsteps of his namesake Charles V. The renewed prospect of the old Habsburg aspiration to “universal monarchy” was unappealing to the English and Dutch. Since the most serious threat from France had been repelled by 1711, Karl’s allies began seeking a separate peace.

  Karl was determined to keep on fighting for the Spanish crown even as the other powers made peace at Utrecht in 1713. Karl sent Eugène on one last campaign that year which achieved nothing. The French forces were exhausted and the Habsburg military was hamstrung by plague outbreaks and the estates’ refusal to vote another financial contribution. Pressed by his ministers to give up the farfetched idea of taking on France with no allies, Karl reluctantly agreed to end the war in 1714. He stubbornly refused to recognize the obvious, namely that Philippe was Spain’s king, and insisted on retaining that now-chimerical royal title for himself. Other than that, the terms of the treaties of Utrecht and Rastatt were a reasonable compromise all around. The territorial partition was not so very different from the plan William III had proposed at the war’s outset. The Habsburgs got the formerly Spanish Netherlands as well as large parts of Italy, including Naples, Milan, and Sardinia. France held on to acquisitions such as Alsace, Strasbourg, and Metz, while Philippe renounced his inheritance rights to the French crown.

  By war’s end, the Habsburgs were definitively ousted from Iberia but remained the predominant power in Italy. While Milan was quite rich, the dynasty was also saddled with particularly poor parts of the peninsula such as Naples. Moreover, all these Italian lands posed serious problems of defense, since the Habsburgs lacked a realistic sea power. Likewise, gaining what is now Belgium was a poisoned chalice. Karl recei
ved that territory as a sort of fallback, since for balance of power reasons it could not be given to France or the Netherlands. Here again was a territory far from the dynasty’s real power base in the Danubian lands that it would be hard-pressed to defend. That Karl agreed to such strategically ludicrous acquisitions is evidence of his blinding dynastic pride. In a way more medieval than modern, the Habsburgs embraced the old ideology that they could and should rule anywhere, that their inheritance claims must be upheld whether or not they were practical or militarily feasible. A more realistic thinker would have jettisoned the fantasy of the dynastic claims to Italy and Belgium as a springboard back to Spain (a fantasy Karl for a time maintained), and focused instead on amassing a more contiguous territorial realm. But Karl ignored the difficult defense demands of his acquisitions, wedded instead to dreams of prestige and territorial aggrandizement.