Comparing these two rulers’ contributions to the institutionalization of the dynasty’s rule reveals an unmistakable picture of improvement under Joseph and decline under Karl. Joseph’s reforms, though incomplete, made particularly valuable strides in fiscal matters. Besides bringing the administration of war and finance more under Vienna’s central control, he and his advisors helped raise the crown’s income from around 9 million florins at the end of Leopold’s reign to around 17 million by 1708. That increase came in part from the economic growth during Leopold’s years and onward, but also from some rationalization of bureaucratic management under Joseph. The founding of the Vienna City Bank in 1706 aided in providing the monarchy with loans. Expenditures still exceeded revenues, however, creating crippling debt in Karl’s years. In 1714 the monarchy’s debt was 52.1 million florins, but it increased to 99 million by 1739.5
By the end of Karl’s reign the monarchy’s credit was ruined, with much of its income going immediately to debt service. That Karl did so little to remedy this problem is one of the most glaring indictments of his rule. The financial problems meant that even the military, the best-functioning central institution in the monarchy, was seriously impaired. Fiscal constraints limited the maximum number of troops that could be supported to 110,000 or so, a number well short of what France could field. The other problem with the military was that by his later years Eugène had proved that he was a great battlefield leader, but a poor administrator. He failed to modernize the military in important ways, including in its guns, its supply line planning, its provisioning, and the training of its officers. During the wars with the Turks, the French, and the Spanish, Eugène achieved a great deal with modest resources, but in peacetime he achieved almost nothing at all.
Though it is impossible to know what Joseph might have accomplished had he lived longer, during his short reign he tallied some appreciable successes. His armies kept most of the Danubian domains safe from French aggression, and they efficiently suppressed the Hungarian revolt. They won northern Italy too, securing it from the Bourbons’ aspirations into Habsburg hands for another 150 years. He employed perspicacious advisors who began much-needed reforms. He was overall quite astute about furthering his dynastic interests, although he himself sometimes lacked the focus for direct management of politics. He could even compromise when necessary. An example of the latter is his refusal to commit too many resources to Spain, which he knew he could never defend. In all of these things—his intelligent identification of key interests, his effective ministerial team, and his flexibility—he far outshined his brother, who surpassed Joseph only in his longevity.
Karl had the luxury of a period of significant stability, with few major external threats. And yet, owing to his own intellectual limitations and his inflated sense of imperial grandeur, he did not see the need to exploit this relatively stable time to address some of his realm’s most obvious weaknesses. This is why his was a time of opulent stagnation. Counter-Reformation Catholicism was boastfully triumphant, but its stultifying suspicions, both of outside intellectual currents, and of the remaining large pockets of Protestants in Silesia and Hungary, fed into a slowly gestating discontent. There was also very little effort to streamline let alone centralize his administration and governing institutions. So the Habsburg domains remained considerably more heterogeneous and less cohesive than other large European polities. Karl also lost the momentum of solidarity within the Empire that had been established during Leopold’s time. Military momentum was lost as well. The Habsburg monarchy became militarily strong enough to be a valuable alliance partner in European balance of power politics, but never strong enough to be a threat on its own to the other major powers. In many ways, it was a rare, pivotal position that the dynasty occupied, and together with the great size of its territories, this position girded the Habsburgs’ status and prestige for more than a century. It is true that Karl had some redeeming qualities, such as his artistic patronage and his commercial initiatives. But he gave little of lasting value to the dynasty beyond his astounding daughter, Maria Theresia.
CHAPTER NINE
Enlightenment and reform (1740–92)
In September 1741 the Habsburg monarchy found itself in a lethal crisis, attacked all at once by Prussian, Bavarian, and French armies determined to dismember the young sovereign Maria Theresia’s inheritance. In that month she met the Hungarian diet at Bratislava. There, dressed in the Hungarian style, her infant son Joseph in her arms, she pleaded with the nobility to support her. She used tears. She appealed to chivalrous protection for a young mother. She reminded the nobles of their previous oaths to the dynasty. And they rose, swearing allegiance anew to their queen, promising to raise a massive army of 100,000 men to defend her with their lives and blood. Maria Theresia was then crowned according to custom: wielding the royal symbols of scepter and sword, she rode a horse up a hill of earth brought from all the counties of Hungary, and atop that hill she pointed the sword in the four cardinal directions, pledging to protect Hungary from all its enemies. In this famous, epic moment, Maria Theresia fought with all the tools in her repertoire. She demonstrated the exceptional political skills that would not only beat back the enemy onslaught, but enable her to refashion and revitalize the bases of Habsburg dynastic rule.
In her four decades on the throne, Maria Theresia was motivated above all by clear-eyed pragmatism and a willingness to compromise tradition for concrete, beneficial political ends. She herself was not truly a person of the Enlightenment, nor was she an intellectual. She was a product of the traditional Baroque world of her father, yet her mind was more forward-looking, and she surrounded herself with relatively enlightened advisors. The way she shaped a new image of the sovereign—as the first female head of her house—also shows how she would readily innovate upon older relationships where necessary. Testimony to her success is that she attained a popular esteem greater than that of any of her predecessors, an esteem that lasts until today. Her son Joseph II, on the other hand, through his willingness to throw tradition out the window, earned more enmity than esteem. He was the incarnation of the enlightened despot, aggressively and self-consciously seeking to institute reason and the primacy of the state as the guiding principles of governance. His reforms were intelligent but lacking in finesse, which explains why he achieved less than his mother. Leopold II found a happy medium between his mother’s careful political skills and his brother’s overweening autocracy. His time on the throne was so short, though, that it mostly involved cleaning up Joseph’s mess.
Maria Theresia, Joseph, and Leopold were by no means revolutionaries. They sought to preserve the old dynastic, aristocratic order, but to make it work better, to make it more modern. Their reforms built upon many existing structures while altering them in hopes of improving their efficiency. Though the reigns of these three monarchs have come to symbolize the Enlightenment in the Danubian domains, in truth Enlightenment ideas did not sink very deeply into what still remained a conservative society. Enlightenment ideas in general only reached a small number of people in the urban areas, or in the uppermost social classes. It was mostly the elite who had access to books and other material from abroad that brought in new thinking. In practice, the Enlightenment in the Habsburg lands was state-centric, and the dynasty selected relevant, “enlightened” principles to strengthen its rule. These were never going to lead to more participatory government, such as a stronger parliamentary system, since that would have been viewed as weakening the state rather than strengthening it. Nonetheless, by the end of this period, the Habsburgs’ Danubian monarchy was arguably in a better condition than it had ever been. Its economy was modernizing, and it had greatly improved systems of education and governance. The relationship between the Habsburgs and their peoples also profoundly changed: more than ever before, the welfare of its subjects became the dynasty’s justifying ideology.
Maria Theresia (1717–80)
Maria Theresia should not be misunderstood: she was fundamentally a
conservative. She clung to many of her family’s traditions and did not seek radical change. What made her reign so successful was precisely her ability to bridge the old and the new. Thus she held to those dynastic traditions yet innovated upon them. For example, she did not completely remake the power bases of her rule, continuing to rely on the aristocracy and the Church, but she did modernize them. While still acknowledging the privileges of the provincial estates, she centralized administrative structures. And though she respected Catholicism’s dominance in society, intolerance of other faiths relaxed. She held to the established conceptions of the ruler’s function, but she also feminized them, and emphasized her duty to foster the public good. She was able to act as a bridge because she was at heart a pragmatist. She had an acute assessment of what had to be done in order to accomplish what she wanted. This meant that despite her traditional upbringing, she was open to new ways of strengthening monarchical sovereignty. She was willing to make targeted, cautious changes, and delegate authority to intelligent advisors more progressive than she was. Even her bloodline shows how Maria Theresia was a hinge between her dynasty’s past and its future. She was the last progeny of the unbroken line of male Habsburgs stretching back to the thirteenth century. But she founded a new line, the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty, which was in every meaningful respect a continuation of ancestral traditions.
Martin von Meytens’s portrait of 1759 captures so much of this remarkable woman’s character. He painted her numerous times over two decades, and some features are constant. She is consistently depicted with her three crowns—the Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian—emphasizing both her majesty and her legitimacy. Another constant is her intelligence: in the 1759 portrait, her lively eyes and cooly appraising expression are unmistakable indicators of the perspicacity and insight with which she managed her government. Maria Theresia was obviously self-possessed, confident, and comfortable in her role as sovereign. Though she is depicted regally, with an elegant, powder-blue gown, a robe of gold and crimson, and diamond jewelry, the whole ensemble is not dramatically overstated. In earlier portraits her clothes are more voluminous, her setting more ostentatious. But this 1759 portrait is a more accurate representation of her nature. Maria Theresia (Figure 9.1) was not particularly preoccupied with her looks, at least compared to other women of her class. Most of the time she dressed quite simply, and after her husband died in 1765 for the rest of her life she wore plain black. The scaled-down magnificence of this portrait reflects Maria Theresia’s charm and approachability. She was adept at cultivating loyalty among her advisors and her subjects. She forged personal relationships with some very talented individuals. There are also characteristics that the portrait does not reveal. Maria Theresia was tough and dedicated. She fought for her very survival in 1740. She typically spent more than 7 hours a day dealing with affairs of state. In these matters, she proved far more serious and decisive than her immediate predecessors, particularly her negligent father.
All of these admirable qualities served her well as soon as she ascended the throne at the age of 23. Her father had foolishly trusted the promises of surrounding powers to respect the Pragmatic Sanction and a female’s elevation as sovereign. Karl VI had also amassed a huge state debt, had dissolved a number of army regiments, and had peopled his councils with fusty old men. Thus immediately when Maria Theresia came to power, she found herself “without money, without credit, without armies, without experience [. . .] also without any counsel,” as she complained.1 All five things were urgently necessary because of the predatory designs of the surrounding powers. Karl Albrecht, the Duke of Bavaria, claimed that his right to succeed to parts of the Habsburg domains superseded Maria Theresia’s because of his marriage to Joseph I’s daughter, and because of an old treaty of dubious validity from Ferdinand I’s time. France openly supported his claim. Meanwhile, Friedrich August of Saxony and Poland—husband to Joseph’s other daughter—announced his own claims. The scramble by surrounding powers to gobble up bits of the Habsburg patrimony was set off in December 1740 when Friedrich II of Prussia seized Silesia. This launched not only the War of the Austrian Succession, but also Maria Theresia’s enduring feud with Friedrich. She actively hated him, calling him a “monster” and an “evil man.”2
FIGURE 9.1 Maria Theresia, by Martin von Meytens (1759). In the collection of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna. Image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.
In 1741 Bavaria, with French backing, invaded Bohemia while French and Spanish armies attacked in the Austrian Netherlands and Lombardy respectively. This was Maria Theresia’s bleakest hour: the Upper Austrian estates and a portion of the Bohemian nobility deserted her for Karl Albrecht. The German electors, too, abandoned the Habsburgs, electing the Bavarian as emperor in 1742. Karl Albrecht’s three-year reign was the only interruption in the Habsburgs’ rule of the Empire from 1438 to its dissolution in 1806. At this point even many nobles in the Viennese court thought Maria Theresia’s was a lost cause. This is when she made her dramatic appeal to the Hungarian diet. That moment actually involved several months of negotiations, in which she had to promise to respect privileges such as the nobility’s exemption from taxation. Hungary as a result maintained its separate institutions and constitution from the rest of the monarchy, such that it would escape many of the reforms that Maria Theresia and Joseph II subsequently introduced. But the kingdom’s support came at a crucial time, and in 1742 she managed to fight back more strongly against her many enemies. Her armies retook Prague and she was crowned queen there in May of 1743. In that year, too, the British grew worried enough about French aggrandizement that they began aiding Austria more directly via subsidies and naval assistance. The allies’ armies conquered Bavaria and beat back French incursions into Germany. Then in 1745 Karl Albrecht died. His heir, desperate to regain Bavaria from Habsburg troops, promised to renounce his territorial claims and to support the election of Maria Theresia’s husband, Franz Stephan, as German emperor.
Though her armies fought an inconclusive campaign in Italy, Maria Theresia’s main concern was always Friedrich and Prussia. After signing one truce, Friedrich broke it by taking Bohemia and Prague in 1744. Together with her Saxon allies, Maria Theresia was able to push Friedrich out of those territories in 1745. Despite several brutal battles she still could not dislodge him from Silesia, so she had to seek peace. The terms of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 were in one way a triumph for the Habsburg queen: she had survived the crisis at the outset of her reign and fought an enemy onslaught to a standstill. She identified the sharpest minds in her circle and empowered them, but ultimate decisions came from her. She played every card she had, and she played them all very well. It was a remarkable performance for a person only in her 20s. She did cede several territories in northern Italy to Spain, but the only major loss was Silesia, which had been one of the most economically developed parts of the monarchy, contributing some 20 percent of the government’s total income. Silesia was not just a loss for the Habsburgs, but a long-term gain for the Hohenzollerns and Prussia. It weakened the Habsburgs’ position in Germany, just as it also reduced the number of ethnic Germans within the balance of the monarchy’s peoples. The monarchy was also set on a long, rivalrous course with Prussia, which would not be resolved until 1866. Maria Theresia was aware of how precarious her situation was. Thus even during the war she set about rectifying her chief vulnerabilities, namely weak finances, inefficient administration, and erratic military competence.
There were multiple influences on Maria Theresia’s reforms, including some admixture of Enlightenment theories with a purely practical search for institutions more responsive both to commands from the top as well as demands from below. The overriding impulse was Maria Theresia’s businesslike desire to strengthen her state and thereby her authority. The initial phase of reform was led by Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz. The most immediate problems to be solved were military weakness and its underlying financial weakness. To address the former
, in 1742 Haugwitz initiated the centralization of foreign policy and then military policy into administrative bodies that would have greater authority and effectiveness. Subsequent reforms continued the trend of centralizing lower bodies’ authority upward. At the end of the 1740s his plans became more ambitious. Despite some protests among Maria Theresia’s top ministers, Haugwitz pushed through a new funding mechanism by which the Austrian, Bohemian, and Moravian estates would approve taxation once a decade rather than annually. Nobles’ previous tax exemption was also ended. These steps had two main effects. They provided more money for the military and also minimized the estates’ control over raising revenue. Henceforth the central government had much more power in administering tax collection.
The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty Page 27
