The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  As the Spanish succession war came to an end, so too did the Rákóczi uprising in Hungary and Transylvania. Not long after he ascended to the throne, Karl sealed the victory won during Joseph’s time by making peace with most of the Hungarian nobles at Szatmár in 1711. Though the Habsburgs had indisputably managed to defeat the revolt, the peace terms were fairly generous. A deal was struck to satisfy both the Habsburgs and the Hungarian nobles. Hungary proper retained much administrative autonomy, tax immunity for the nobles, and respect for religious privileges. Karl also agreed not to insist on the amnesty he had promised the kuruc rebels, since many of the nobles who had remained loyal to the dynasty wanted to hold onto the land they had seized from the rebels. The dynasty did assert its authority by having the Hungarian kingdom’s financial and military policy run from Vienna. After 1715 a standing army in Hungary was established, made up mostly of non-Hungarian troops. The Hungarian diet also agreed to a regular annual financial contribution. Karl kept Transylvania as a separate crownland and retained the military frontier areas along the Turkish border, ruling both directly from Vienna. On the whole this was an adequate compromise to extinguish what had been a formidable rebellion. It kept the Hungarian magnates on the dynasty’s side while also allowing for some of the kingdom’s traditional liberties. Part of Karl’s motivation for compromise was that he needed the Hungarian diet to agree to the Pragmatic Sanction.

  The Pragmatic Sanction was Karl’s overriding obsession and the defining feature of his reign. Promulgated in 1713, this was a document that codified the succession rules for the Habsburg lands and served as an essential legal foundation of the monarchy up to its end in 1918. The inheritance issues explain Karl’s obsession: after Joseph’s death he was the sole living male Habsburg. Moreover, at the time he first issued the Sanction, Karl had no children. His sons all then died young, which made his oldest daughter Maria Theresia his likely heir. He issued the Sanction to affirm the principle of primogeniture, but to apply it both to female heirs and to his own line. He expressly demoted Joseph’s daughters to the second line of inheritance even though they were from the elder line. This was really the last act in the Habsburgs’ long-running attempts to ensure the inherited unity of their territories over the older practice of partible inheritance. The Sanction also enshrined the principle that the Habsburgs’ realms would henceforth be indivisible. This was an attempt to tie the heterogeneous lands together on the basis of law, rather than purely on dynastic personal union. Though the Pragmatic Sanction has sometimes been understood merely as Karl’s attempt to have female succession recognized in the Habsburg lands, that is not strictly correct, since there were no legal impediments to such succession in Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary. Rather, the principal effect of the Sanction was to serve as a (flimsy) paper insistence that the diverse lands of the Habsburg inheritance were in fact one unified realm.

  Because the Sanction altered the dynasty’s legal relationships with its various realms, and altered Joseph’s daughters’ (and hence their husbands’) succession prospects, Karl felt he needed formal approbation of this act. Thus for almost two decades he lobbied to secure recognition from his realms and the other European powers, and he all but mortgaged his house to get it. The Austrian and Bohemian estates ratified it without much trouble by 1721. The Hungarian diet predictably drove a harder bargain, exacting another promise from Karl that the dynasty would respect all of the Hungarian nobles’ privileges. Nonetheless, the Sanction was accepted by Hungary and Transylvania by 1723, and in the Austrian Netherlands and Lombardy by 1725. The much more difficult part of this procedure was securing international recognition. Karl made a deal with his old rival Philippe of Spain whereby, in return for recognition, Karl would marry Maria Theresia to one of Philippe’s sons. The prospect of a Habsburg alliance with Bourbon Spain antagonized the English and Dutch, who forced an end to the marital pact. They also demanded for their recognition of the Sanction that Karl would have to close down Austria’s nascent overseas trading company, a competitor to British and Dutch interests. By 1732 Karl had secured the German princes’ recognition, but this too came at a price. He pledged to support the candidacy of Friedrich August of Saxony to the Polish throne, to marry Maria Theresia to a German prince, and to acknowledge the recent territorial acquisitions of the Prussian king.

  In his single-minded pursuit of such weightless promises, Karl overlooked the scheming about the future of his dynasty. Both the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria and the Wettins in Saxony, into whose families Karl had married Joseph’s daughters, signed secret treaties with France to support their succession claims to Habsburg dominions after Karl’s death. Even the deal to marry Maria Theresia to the imperial prince of Lorraine, Franz Stephan, spurred a plot by France and Spain to seize both Lorraine and the Habsburg possessions in northern Italy. So, although the Pragmatic Sanction marked a legal milestone for the dynasty, it also set up the treacherous scrum for the Habsburg inheritance once Karl died.

  Karl’s most positive attribute as a ruler was that he encouraged economic development and maritime trade in his monarchy, more than any of the Austrian Habsburgs before him. Not all the enterprises he promoted found success, but to his credit he saw clearly the need for pursuing them. He gave his approval to the foundation of a new trading company in Ostende to break into overseas trade with India and China. Though a worthy idea, the company was soon closed down as part of the deal to win recognition of the Pragmatic Sanction. Karl also named Trieste and Rijeka as free ports to encourage trade. He decreed the building of roads to link Vienna to the Adriatic; one of those roads, the “Carolina” going through Karlovac to Senj in Croatia, even bore his name. He founded a small navy, with two warships entering service in 1726. He lowered tariffs, reduced guilds’ monopoly powers, and granted concessions to boost a number of small industries. Factories sprung up for glass, textiles, porcelain, tobacco, and iron, among others. Wool production especially benefited, with output more than doubling in Bohemia and Silesia. Most of these enterprises remained small and not especially lucrative, but they were important as early industries in the Habsburg lands. In his economic ideas Karl, like his brother, was influenced by cameralist thinking, which led him to be more attentive to the condition of the peasantry. He advocated limiting peasants’ labor obligations, but he did not push liberalization too firmly. He could not antagonize the landed elite who constituted his social and political base.

  Karl’s government overall resembled his father’s, though perhaps more than Leopold, Karl dragged his feet in making difficult decisions. He also tended to resist the advice of what few competent advisors he had. His most effective minister, Gundaker Starhemberg, was a holdover from Joseph’s time. Starhemberg presented proposals for ameliorating the monarchy’s weak finances, but Karl negligently adopted only portions of his suggestions. Karl actually refused some ideas for centralizing and ameliorating the monarchy’s fiscal situation via measures such as a universal excise tax. That fiscal situation in many ways worsened during Karl’s reign. The treasury was sapped by Naples’ poverty and the high military costs in Belgium. Even the indisputably brilliant Eugène proved that his brilliance was limited to the battlefield. As the president of Karl’s war council and one of the main voices in the monarchy’s foreign relations, Eugène turned out to be both very conservative and somewhat lazy. His relationship with Karl was rocky, though both men evinced a preference for playing cards or billiards rather than tackling the thorny problem of reforming the monarchy’s dilapidated administrative structures. In relation to the Empire, Karl did not advance any of the gains in prestige and solidarity won under Leopold and Joseph. If anything, the other major dynasties such as the Wittelsbachs, Wettins, and Hohenzollerns became more assertive. Though cautiousness was the usual Habsburg watchword in dealing with their heterogeneous monarchy, Karl’s rule veered far into the realm of complacency.

  Despite that cautiousness, Karl found himself embroiled in several misguided wars. Philippe of Spain broke the pe
ace achieved at Utrecht and Rastatt by attacking Karl’s Italian possessions in 1717. Britain, the Netherlands, and France all came in on Karl’s side to stop Spain’s aggression. By the peace of 1720 Karl traded Sardinia for Sicily, briefly reestablishing Habsburg control over much of southern Italy; he also finally acknowledged Philippe’s right to rule Spain. From 1720 through the remainder of Karl’s reign, many of Austria’s valuable alliances frayed. Because France after Louis XIV’s death was less of a menace, British and Austrian interests coincided less. With cooling relations westward, Karl looked eastward, making an alliance with Russia as part of a deal to get the Pragmatic Sanction recognized. The disastrous War of the Polish Succession from 1733–8 then exposed the weakness of the Habsburgs’ geopolitical situation. Karl entered the war to support the claims of Friedrich August of Saxony (who was his nephew by marriage) to the Polish crown, against those of the French-backed claimant. Eugène, his days of glory long past, was now a senile 70-year-old, and could not effectively counter France’s invasion of Lorraine nor Spain’s attacks on the Italian Habsburg possessions. Karl received little support from Britain or the German princes since he had neglected his ties there. In the end, Friedrich August became king of Poland and Karl’s son-in-law, Franz Stephan, booted out of Lorraine, received Tuscany as recompense. Karl, for his part, lost Naples and Sicily to Spain but got Parma instead.

  There were also two wars against the Turks. The first resulted in a resounding victory, while the second only added to Karl’s list of late military debacles. Karl declared war on the Ottomans after appeals from Venice (which had been under attack from the Ottomans since 1714), but also because of his sense of imperial duty to make war on the Turks. Eugène saw his last, heroic triumphs in the battle of Petrovaradin in 1716, in which he routed a much larger Turkish army, and then in the siege of Belgrade in 1717, in which he built up a Danube fleet that again overcame negative odds to take Belgrade’s strategically vital fortress. The result was the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, which completed the reconquest of Hungary and added parts of Serbia and Wallachia to the monarchy. From this high point, the tables turned in another fight against the Ottomans at the end of Karl’s reign, from 1737–9. Karl entered this war to support Russia, which was a foolish maneuver because it was tangential to Habsburg interests, and the monarchy could scarcely afford it. However, Russia was almost his only ally at the time, and he had promised to support it in return for recognizing the Pragmatic Sanction. Eugène had died in 1736, and the Austrian military effort was sunk by inept generals and diplomats. Though Karl’s forces won several battles, they lost the peace, having to give up lands gained in 1718 including Belgrade. The worst disaster of this late Turkish war was that it exposed how the once-vaunted Austrian army had declined, which primed Prussia, among others, for attack in the subsequent War of the Austrian Succession.

  Karl died in 1740, shortly after eating a bunch of mushrooms that may have been poisonous. Legalistic to the very end, he insisted that his position as emperor entitled him to four—and not two!—lit candles around his deathbed. He never escaped nostalgia for his lost kingdom, either. According to some accounts his last word was a whispered, “Barcelona.”2 His legalistic fantasies—that he was the rightful successor to the Spanish kingdoms, that a piece of paper such as the Pragmatic Sanction could secure his own succession schemes—defined the man and his reign. Had Karl been sharper he might have seen that a strong financial and military basis would have provided more security for his dynasty than the empty commitments to the Pragmatic Sanction ever could.

  Dynastic strategies

  The Austrian Habsburgs’ failures at dynastic reproduction at this time were only somewhat less egregious than those that had ruined the Spanish Habsburgs in the previous generation. Territorially, the indefensible additions in Belgium and Italy were a problematic success at best. The fact that these lands were awarded to the Austrian Habsburgs is however an indicator of the dynasty’s indispensability; no other major house could lay claim to them without upsetting the balance of power. The succession issues placed the family in a still more precarious position. The Pactum mutuae sucessionis that Leopold, Joseph, and Karl agreed to in 1703 was necessary to sort out the inheritance issues between the two brothers. It included a provision whereby if one line died out, the other would inherit even if the oldest female were the heir. As it happened, neither Joseph nor Karl had a son who lived. Joseph’s one son died, and his wife Amalie Wilhelmine of Hannover also died after Joseph infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. Karl’s wife Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Lüneburg became so obese that he hoped she might die so he could marry again and perhaps produce a male heir. Part of Karl’s ploy with the Pragmatic Sanction was to alter the earlier Pactum so that his own daughter would inherit before Joseph’s daughters.

  Yet Karl’s machinations here were singularly dim-witted, since he married Joseph’s daughters to the Crown Princes of Bavaria and Saxony, respectively. Those princes were thereby able to raise claims to the Habsburg succession once Karl died, at the expense of his own daughter. Karl also mismanaged the education aspect of reproducing the dynasty. Even though he acknowledged Maria Theresia as his successor, Karl balked at giving her the kind of education she would need as a ruler. As she matured, he actively excluded her from high council meetings and refused to discuss affairs of state with her. He expressed his attitude when he once said that “a realm cannot be entrusted to a mere woman,” since she would need “the firm hand of a king” to guide her.3 His lack of respect for his daughter’s potential is the more surprising since he appointed his sister, Maria Elisabeth, to continue the family’s tradition of women regents of the Netherlands. She proved an assured and well-loved ruler, in a way prefiguring Maria Theresia’s own reign.

  The Pragmatic Sanction, tenuous as it was, nonetheless contributed to legitimacy and loyalty for the dynasty. The Sanction was the first law applied to all the lands of the Habsburg monarchy. It aimed to constitute a more unified state—a Gesamtstaat, a fusion of the various parts of the composite monarchy—where one had not previously existed, at least in a formal legal sense. The realm itself, as a nascent Gesamtstaat, was given legitimation by Karl’s proclamation. It was thus a step beyond Ferdinand II’s Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1627 which joined the Bohemian kingdom to the Austrian hereditary lands. The Sanction’s succession provisions also legitimized Habsburg rule by tying the dynasty to that tentatively coalescing Gesamtstaat. That Karl sought and received the various provincial estates’ approvals of the Sanction was a gesture of loyalty by the dynasty to the elites in the monarchy, and by the elites to the dynasty. Those elites signed off on language in the Sanction claiming that the Habsburgs’ monarchy was “indivisible.”

  More pervasive and probably effective than a legal document in securing loyalty and legitimacy was the ongoing Baroque cultural fusion of the dynasty, the Danubian domains, and their elites. The Baroque court was still essentially equated with the state. This meant that Karl’s servants were in most cases there to serve him personally, even if they held official administrative positions. He counted nearly 2,200 servants in his court.4 Many of them were not ministers or bureaucrats, since the Habsburg administrative apparatus remained modest at this time. They were instead people holding honorary titles or serving the cultural functions of the court such as artists, musicians, and actors. Except when the royal family was out of Vienna, Karl self-consciously adhered to the austere, black-clad Spanish royal style, which speaks to the lethargic conservatism of his court. He also held to the Austrian Habsburgs’ Baroque traditions of overwrought piety. Karl continued the practices of washing paupers’ feet on Maundy Thursday, for example. His devoutness he demonstrated by building churches, which in their lavishness stand in dubious contrast to ministering to the poor. The most famous of Karl’s constructions is the Karlskirche (actually named after St. Charles Borromeo) in Vienna, built from 1716 to 1737 by the architects Fischer von Erlach father and son. This church featur
es two exterior columns which are topped with the imperial crown and are meant to recall the pillars of Hercules from Charles V’s coat of arms. That it was built outside Vienna’s city walls testifies to the monarchy’s confidence that the Turkish threat had been conclusively beaten.

  These were the years when many of the grandest Baroque edifices sprung up throughout the Danubian domains. This was a triumphal, self-congratulatory display of the monarchy’s elites. Prince Eugène’s Belvedere, designed by the architect Hildebrandt, is the most perfect of all palaces in the Habsburg lands. The abbey of Melk, some 80 kilometers west of Vienna, was the high point of church construction. Boasting a dazzlingly gilded church, it is an overpowering assertion of Austrian Baroque Catholicism. Karl himself added to Vienna’s palace complex, including the building of the Spanish Riding School, and the Hofburg’s impressive library. But closer to his heart was his project to turn the abbey of Klosterneuburg into his own version of El Escorial, a new monastery-palace for the dynasty to replace the one lost in Castile. Vienna during Karl’s reign did see a great growth in art and artisans as all this construction took place. Hundreds of artists, many from Italy, found work there, and contributed to the city’s Italian cultural flavor. Karl had several Italian court poets, the most famous of which was Pietro Metastasio. Johann Joseph Fux was Karl’s court composer and helped stage the extravagant musical performances Karl enjoyed.

  Though Joseph may seem more progressive than Karl, they both exhibited quite traditional conceptions of the ruler. Joseph in particular was preoccupied with an iconography that would depict him as no less glorious than Louis XIV. This motivated his (unrealized) plans to make Schönbrunn outdo Versailles. Despite his very short reign, Joseph also founded Vienna’s Kärtnertor theater, established an arts academy, and ordered the construction of a new neighborhood outside the old city walls which continues to bear his name. Karl’s preoccupation with long-established, even outmoded images of the ruler can be seen in his imperial allusions to Charles V’s monarchy. He was a man who looked resolutely to the past rather than to the future. Divine right, untouchable monarchical gravitas, and tradition were the foundations of his conception of kingship. His belief that the sovereign was responsible for the moral/religious practice of his subjects justified his religious control of them, and the close alliance with the Church. For example, Karl for the first time allowed the Jesuits to enter the Military Frontier along the Turkish border, to try to convert Orthodox believers there to Catholicism. He also gave his approval to closing down various Protestant churches, albeit he did at least allow Protestants to worship privately. Thus Counter-Reformation intolerance persisted as an official ideology in the Habsburg lands long after it had started to moderate further west.