Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (75 page)

Nonetheless, the Empire merely modified existing institutions rather than developing new ones after the mid-sixteenth century. It failed to combine the legitimacy of governance with political power to forge a modern government. Instead, power and legitimacy remained separate. The emperor, Reichstag and other institutions remained accepted as legitimate, but lacked the means to implement decisions, leading some historians to categorize the Empire as a ‘political system’ rather than a state.
¹³¹
However, others have drawn attention to the complementary character of the Empire’s development, which grew much more pronounced with imperial reform.
¹³²
The territories did not develop in opposition to the emperor, but as part of the Empire’s overall evolution. Rather than seeking to displace the territories, imperial reform
incorporated them as the Empire’s infrastructure. Thus, imperial institutions served to find and legitimate common policies, while the territorial administrations implemented them. The system cohered, because no element could dispense entirely with the others. It is the task of the next chapter to see how these structures fared during the three centuries of Habsburg imperial rule.

9

Dynasty

DYNASTICISM

Dynasticism not Dualism

Imperial reform had rebalanced the Empire’s governance to accommodate territory as the basis of both imperial and princely power. As the Empire entered the sixteenth century, it remained at the heart of European politics, culture and economic activity. Its flexibility and creativity enabled it to survive early modern Europe’s two greatest challenges: the Reformation and the Thirty Years War. Meanwhile, the era also saw the accession of Charles V, a truly pan-European monarch and arguably the best-remembered Holy Roman emperor after Charlemagne. Charles had already ruled Spain for three years prior to his election as emperor in 1519. His reign saw the co-existence of the Holy Roman Empire, rooted in Europe’s medieval past, and Spain’s expanding colonial empire, suggestive of Europe’s future global dominance. Charles’s decisions in 1558 to partition his possessions and retire to Spain to die both appear to mark the end of an epoch. This is certainly how many historians have chosen to present it, writing subsequent European history as that of nation states, many of which had extra-European colonial empires. The Empire almost disappears in this story, featuring at best as a kind of German adjunct to Habsburg Austria and, after 1648, as the supposed passive object of Austria’s rivalry with the ascending power of the Prussian Hohenzollerns.

This standard narrative discusses the Empire’s governance in terms of a double dualism. The tension between emperor and princes as imperial Estates at the ‘national level’ was supposedly mirrored in each
territory by similar conflicts between each prince and his territorial Estates (
Landstände
), composed of representatives from the mediate nobles, towns and (sometimes) clergy.
¹
Dualism at the territorial level is generally regarded as ending with the triumph of princely absolutism in 1648, something which was celebrated in Prussian history because it enabled the Hohenzollerns to emerge as the family that would eventually supplant the Habsburgs in Germany. Growing princely power is presented as fuelling centrifugal forces, draining the imperial office and formal structure of any meaning by the mid-eighteenth century, if not before.

This standard narrative reflects its roots in conventional ideas of state-building as a process of centralization, usually attributed to heroic and far-sighted monarchs and statesmen. Earlier chapters have already established that this perspective grossly oversimplifies and distorts the Empire’s richer political development. Likewise, the common understanding of eighteenth-century politics as an Austro-Prussian dualism ignores the lesser territories collectively constituting a larger ‘third Germany’, as well as underestimating the continued significance of the imperial constitution as a common framework – something that the final section of this chapter will return to. Dualism makes more sense when applied to the Habsburgs, whose renewed, rapid territorial expansion between 1683 and 1718 – likewise explored below – expanded their hereditary possessions into a second, dynastic-territorial empire only partially overlapping with the Holy Roman Empire. The increase in Habsburg resources exposed another duality: the growing discrepancy between the constitution and the actual distribution of material power. However, as we shall see both here and on
pp. 637–54
, this did not render the formal structure wholly irrelevant. On the contrary, the status hierarchy continued to matter a great deal, as already indicated in the discussion of the imperial title (pp.159–63). The real problem was that no one seemed able to bring the formal constitutional order and current politics back into alignment.

Interpretations emphasizing dualism stress tensions and discrepancies. The usual verdict is that territorialization was propelling the Empire inevitably from a loose monarchy towards a federation of principalities. Having failed to reassert stronger monarchy in the 1540s and 1620s, the Habsburgs allegedly lost interest in the Empire beyond the men and money they could extort for their own purposes. This view
misses important continuities across time, as well as underestimating how all elements along the status hierarchy remained within a common political culture. The presence of such commonalities should not blind us to the Empire’s serious problems, but nonetheless the commonalities help explain why it functioned amidst wider changes and why it retained meaning for its inhabitants.

Dynasticism was perhaps one of the strongest common practices within early modern imperial politics. One of the most striking aspects of imperial governance at this point is the unprecedented continuity in the imperial office. The period from 1254 to 1437 saw 16 kings and anti-kings from 11 families, while son followed father only once (1378). After 1438, there were no more anti-kings and the Habsburgs provided all but one (Charles VII, 1742–5) of the 18 monarchs. Not only did the Habsburgs last three times longer than any previous royal family (the Staufers, 116 years), but now there was greater continuity with sons following fathers directly eight times, with a further four successions of younger brothers following the premature deaths of reigning older siblings. The succession of a cousin or a nephew, more common in the Middle Ages, now only occurred twice (Frederick III after Albert II; Ferdinand II after Matthias), while the resumption of Habsburg imperial rule in 1745 came through the early modern innovation of dynastic continuity in the female line with the election as emperor of Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis I, former duke of Lorraine.

The Politics of Inheritance

Greater continuity stemmed from the acceptance of male primogeniture as the primary form of inheritance across all levels of the Empire’s society. As we have seen (
pp. 356–70
), male primogeniture was encouraged through the feudalization of vassalage and had been explicitly endorsed by Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ in 1158 before being confirmed for the secular electorates in 1356. However, we have already noted (
pp. 381–2
) its slow acceptance and the continuation of partitions that eased the problems of ruling non-contiguous lands by dividing them between relations. This also reduced family tensions by providing for younger sons, improving their marriage prospects. Within princely families, all members continued to share the status of immediacy. The spread of Roman civil law reinforced this from the late twelfth century, because
wives gained their husband’s rank and a claim to the means required to sustain this, including during widowhood. The Reformation not only increased the significance of marriage throughout society, but encouraged a return to Old Testament traditions amongst Protestant princes. As family patriarchs, fathers were expected to provide for all children. Duke Ernst ‘the Pious’ of Gotha expressly rejected primogeniture on these grounds in 1654.
²

Ernst’s was a relatively late example of partible inheritance. Many families adopted primogeniture between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, even if they subsequently temporarily suspended it, or made exceptions. It was not adopted as a ‘modernizing’ measure, but as a practical response to late medieval imperial politics, demonstrating the advantages of preserving large territorial blocs. Additionally, the leading mediate vassals and subjects increasingly lobbied against partition in order to preserve the tax base and limit princely debt; for example, the count of Württemberg was forced to forgo a planned partition in 1473. Crucially, aristocratic families could adopt the tighter family discipline required by dynasticism, because younger sons and unmarried daughters could still be accommodated in the imperial church. This explains why the closing of this option to Protestants in 1555 proved so explosive (see
pp. 122–3
). The definitive shift to territorially based imperial governance under the Habsburgs provided a further means to absorb the consequences of primogeniture. Territorial administration relied increasingly on salaried officials, not mediate vassals. Serving the imperial family had always been prestigious, while the Habsburgs’ possession of the most extensive territories also meant they were the Empire’s largest employers, constantly seeking new courtiers, officials and army officers.

The multilayered feudal structure also allowed families to adopt different inheritance practices simultaneously. Immediate fiefs became indivisible by 1582, when the Reichstag ruled that partitions could not be used to create additional votes. Some families continued to divide their lands internally but shared exercise of their associated imperial rights as a condominium. Others assigned or created mediate fiefs within their jurisdictions, as for example Charles IV, who granted Moravia and Görlitz to his younger sons in 1373 (see
p. 391
). Likewise, Frederick William the ‘Great Elector’ of Brandenburg established a junior Hohenzollern line in 1688 for the eldest son from his second
marriage by granting him the former lordship of Schwedt. Surviving for a century, this secondary line provided the senior branch with a useful pool of additional marriage partners to offer other German princes, whilst reserving its own offspring for more prestigious alliances. King Frederick II ‘the Great’, though personally remaining childless, proved skilful in promoting marriages for his relations, whilst ruthlessly refusing to grant them the means to be autonomous princes: he only left two horses in his will to his brother Heinrich.
³

Many early modern German princes not only married but kept numerous mistresses. The most notorious womanizer was Augustus ‘the Strong’ of Saxony, who reputedly fathered 355 children.
⁴
Such activities fuelled the contemporary critique of the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century baroque princely courts, but also reflected reduced sexual options following the Reformation’s restriction of marriage to church-sanctioned liaisons. Meanwhile, the formalization of the feudal hierarchy through imperial reform heightened status-consciousness amongst the Empire’s elite. Pressure increased within families to marry only within or (ideally) above their current status as delineated by their formal princely titles. Here we can see just one of the many connections between the Empire’s politics and wider society, an issue that will be explored further in the next chapter. Late sixteenth-century German lawyers developed earlier Italian ideas into the concept of ‘morganatic’ marriage, which conformed to ecclesiastical requirements but was based on a contract circumventing Roman civil law. The bride received gifts and an income, but was denied equal socio-political status. She could not assume her husband’s rank and title, but instead received a new title linked to a real or fictive property granted her. Children from such unions lacked full rights, but remained a ‘dynastic reserve’ like the secondary family lines that could be called upon in the absence of other legitimate heirs to prevent family extinction.

Morganatic marriages became increasingly common with the adoption of primogeniture. Younger sons who were unlikely to inherit the family’s imperial fief often had to accept a bride of lower status. Arrangements were generally flexible, but serious problems usually emerged if the main heir or ruling prince made such a match, since this was regarded as damaging the family’s
lustre
and hence endangering its position within the imperial status hierarchy. Relations often claimed that as unequal marriage invalidated the prince’s right to inherit, and that
could lead to acrimonious disputes, such as that between relations of the prince of Sachsen-Meiningen in 1763. Princes accordingly petitioned the emperor to elevate their wife’s status. The emperor’s powers to do this were restricted by the electoral agreement (see
p. 478
) of 1742, but remained a way he could influence imperial politics. For example, the already scandal-ridden Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg fell in love with Franziska Theresia von Bernhardin, daughter of a mere baron and already married to one of his chamberlains, whom she later divorced. Carl Eugen petitioned Joseph II, who eventually raised Franziska as imperial countess of Hohenheim in 1774. The affair continued until the duke’s own estranged wife died in 1780. Although the couple married morganatically in 1785 and the duchy’s Lutheran church even agreed to include her in their prayers, Carl never managed to persuade the emperor to raise her as full duchess.
⁵

The
Casa d’Austria

The Habsburgs were not more virtuous than the Empire’s other senior families. Many had illegitimate children, including Rudolf II, whose refusal to take a legitimate wife created a succession crisis after 1600.
⁶
Neither, as we shall see, did they exhibit greater family discipline, partitioning their lands with serious consequences on several occasions. These considerations force us to consider why the Habsburgs came to dominate the early modern Empire. There is no simple answer. Rather, their success derived from dynastic and individual biological good fortune (longevity, fecundity, ability), together with favourable circumstances.