Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (76 page)

Like the other great families of the late medieval Empire, the Habsburgs began as counts who amassed sufficient resources to be serious contenders for the royal title by the mid-thirteenth century. Their relative wealth encouraged them to partition their possessions, with the bulk of their original holdings at the junction of Alsace, Switzerland and Swabia being held by the senior, Laufenburg, line until its extinction in 1415. Count Rudolf, who represented the dynasty’s political breakthrough thanks to his election as king in 1273, in fact came from the junior line. His real contribution to his family’s subsequent success was to use his position as king to secure the Babenbergs’ old duchy of Austria (see
pp. 385
and
338
). Crucially, Emperor Frederick II had
endorsed the Babenbergs’ introduction of a single law code for all Austria in 1237, which reduced the prospect of partition as a way to resolve the long inheritance dispute, lasting from 1246 to 1282, unlike Thuringia, where a parallel contest ended with its being split into pieces between claimants by the early fourteenth century.

Although the Habsburgs were displaced as kings by the Luxembourgs in 1308 and the Wittelsbachs in 1314, they were now in the front rank and were able to consolidate and expand their possessions in return for cooperating with the current monarch (
Map 6
). Louis IV’s settlement with Frederick ‘the Fair’ saw the family acquire Carinthia and Krain by 1335 despite opposition from rivals, as well as the Tirol in 1363, which rounded out Austria as a large territory between the Alps and the Danube. As with the Luxembourgs, Wittelsbachs and others, the accumulation of fiefs made partition easier since there was more to distribute and Austria split into Albertine and Leopoldine lines from 1379 to 1490 despite a family agreement against this in 1355.
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The Albertine line benefited from the 1364 inheritance pact with the Luxembourgs and provided King Albert II in 1438. His death in turn benefited the Leopoldine line, which provided the emperors after 1440, as well as inheriting the south-west German possessions from the now defunct Laufenburg branch after 1415, though the Swiss areas were definitively lost in 1499. Finally, Maximilian I’s inheritance of the Tirol from another junior line in 1490 provided a significant boost, since this territory had become the main area of silver mining in the Empire, literally allowing the emperor to dig money from the ground.
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At 53 years, Frederick III’s reign was the longest of any emperor and entrenched Habsburg imperial rule despite his many difficulties. His son Maximilian used his position as emperor to intervene in the Wittelsbach inheritance dispute in 1504–5, playing the Palatine and Bavarian lines off against each other to keep both from becoming potential challengers. The fruits of dynastic strategies soon rendered such late medieval practices unnecessary to the Habsburgs’ retention of the imperial title. The web of dynastic marriages spun by Frederick pulled in their spoils as the successive extinctions of the ruling families in ducal Burgundy (1477), Spain (1516), Bohemia and Hungary (both 1526) left Maximilian’s grandsons, Charles V and Ferdinand I, as the heirs to vast additional territories (
Map 8
). Contemporaries remarked:
‘Let others wage war, but thou, O happy Austria, marry; for those kingdoms Mars gives to others, Venus gives to thee.’

Dynastic good fortune gave the Habsburgs far more territory than any of their possible rivals at a time when the electors appreciated the need for the emperor to possess the means to defend the Empire from the Turkish menace. However, the additional territory increased Habsburg liabilities, especially as Burgundy was contested by France, whom most of the princes were reluctant to consider a general enemy of the Empire. These tensions contributed to what became the greatest ever dynastic partition: Charles V’s division of Habsburg possessions into Spanish and Austrian branches (see
pp. 438–9
). The loss of scale was compounded by his brother Ferdinand I’s own tripartite subdivision of the Austrian line in 1564. The main Austrian line extinguished with Matthias in 1619, passing to Ferdinand II as head of the junior Styrian branch. The third, Tirolean, line died out in 1595, but was revived twice to accommodate junior relatives, before being definitively reabsorbed into Austria in 1665.

Throughout, however, Austria itself remained undivided, its special status having been enhanced by Duke Rudolf IV’s forgery of the
Privilegium maius
around 1358 to expand the genuine privileges granted when Austria was elevated to a duchy in 1156. Responding to his exclusion from the electoral college, Rudolf invented the entirely new title of ‘archduke’ with semi-regal powers, including ennoblement, and appropriately kingly insignia like a crown and sceptre. The symbols angered Charles IV the most, but his rapprochement with the Habsburgs in the 1360s helped entrench Austria’s special status, which Frederick III confirmed in 1453, shortly after his imperial coronation.
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Already Rudolf used his archducal powers to found Vienna University, the Empire’s second and a deliberate response to Charles’s new university in Prague. Austria’s distinct status persisted and the Habsburgs never used their powers as emperor to award themselves electoral rights. Instead, they fostered a sense that Austria was already somehow superior, though the precise ceremonial distinctions were never clarified. Despite considering raising it as a kingdom in the 1620s, they likewise rejected this, not least because they were now already royal thanks to their possession of Bohemia and Hungary, which stayed with Austria in the 1558 partition. The Bohemian and Hungarian constitutions were revised in 1627 and 1687 respectively, asserting that these were hereditary rather
than elective kingdoms. The unity of all possessions within and beyond imperial frontiers was expressed in 1703 as the
Monarchia Austriaca
(see pp. 159 and 162).

Matthias had a new archducal crown made in 1616 and it was used in all Austrian homage ceremonies until 1835.
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The crown bore an image of St Leopold, the Babenberg margrave of Austria who was canonized in 1485 and became the monarchy’s patron saint. The choice of image was part of a wider strategy to assert a divine right to rule. A family legend maintained that when Rudolf I was out riding in 1264, he gave his horse to a priest whom he saw carrying a Eucharist. By 1640, this had been rewritten to claim that God had given the Eucharist to the universal church while entrusting the divine right to rule the Empire to the Habsburgs.
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Efforts to forge a common identity based on saints associated with the dynasty failed, as Hungary and Bohemia already had their own traditions.
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However, a consistently dynastic ideology took root under Frederick III and developed with the lavish artistic patronage of Maximilian I and Charles V propagating a sense of a single, common
Casa d’Austria
, which survived all subsequent partitions.

This ideology was simultaneously imperial and dynastic. Rudolf I was celebrated not just for acquiring Austria but as the king who allegedly restored the Empire after the ‘interregnum’ following the end of the Staufers. Stories repeated the Rudolf motif for later Habsburgs, like Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III, who both supposedly also gave their horses to priests. Meanwhile, ingenious genealogists traced the Habsburgs as descendants of Aeneas, son of Venus and a Trojan royal who led the survivors of the fall of Troy via Carthage to Rome. Thanks to the idea of imperial translation, the line could be continued forward through the ancient Roman emperors, Christian Merovingians, Carolingians, and all the Empire’s other subsequent illustrious rulers.
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The skilful blending of family stories and imperial tradition trumped anything offered by their rivals to present the Habsburgs as the only ones worthy to be emperors.

The relative absence of serious challengers contrasts with the situation in the late Middle Ages. The Reformation opened speculation of a Protestant alternative once Lutherans secured full political rights in 1555. Rumours identified the Danish and Swedish kings as possible candidates, as well as the Protestant electors of Saxony, Brandenburg
and the Palatinate. In practice, only Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden represented a serious threat, and he never considered standing in a conventional election, but instead sought to subvert Habsburg rule by forcing his German allies to accept their fiefs as dependent on him rather than the emperor. Any plans to usurp the imperial title died with him in the battle of Lützen in November 1632. Discussion revived as the Saxon, Brandenburg and Hanoverian electors acquired foreign crowns around 1700. While they considered themselves personally worthy of the imperial title, all refrained from seeking it because of the risks this would involve. Prussia’s subsequent development undermined Habsburg imperial management, but none of the Hohenzollern monarchs wanted to be emperor. Only the Bavarian Wittelsbachs attempted this, with disastrous results for themselves and the Empire.
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HABSBURG IMPERIAL GOVERNANCE

Governing the Habsburg Lands

The period between Maximilian I’s accession in 1493 and Leopold I’s death in 1705 saw the consolidation and peak of the Habsburg system of imperial governance based on dynastic hereditary possessions. The family’s territorial expansion coincided with the high point of imperial reform around 1520, accelerating and transforming that process. The material power that made the dynasty the obvious choice as emperors, also threatened German liberties. The emperor assumed a Janus-faced position as the Empire’s sovereign and its most powerful prince. The imperial Estates appreciated a strong emperor capable of repelling the Ottomans, and were prepared to relinquish some of their cherished liberties to institutions they believed would bind the Habsburgs to performing their imperial duties. The Habsburgs accepted greater constitutional checks on prerogatives as the price for a more potent infrastructure to mobilize the additional resources from the imperial Estates needed to meet their own ambitions and commitments. The material results of these constitutional adjustments will be explored in the next section, after the discussion here of how the Habsburgs managed the Empire and their own extensive possessions.
¹⁵

The Habsburgs had no thought of ‘building’ a state or creating a
separate Austria. Nonetheless, their actions did distinguish their own territories more clearly as they followed the practice of kings since 1273 by enhancing the autonomy of their own possessions as a base from which to govern the Empire. Their court exemplifies this as it underwent a fundamental transformation under Maximilian I. The consultative functions were detached to the Reichstag, which now provided the main forum for the emperor to negotiate with the Empire’s political elite. Meanwhile, Maximilian greatly expanded the representational aspects along the lines of Charles IV by establishing his dynastic court as a glittering institution projecting his family’s power. Although it continued to accompany the emperor on his travels, the Habsburg court generally remained within the hereditary lands, especially Vienna, except for a prolonged stay in Prague under Rudolf II from 1576 to 1612. While the emperor or his representative attended at least the opening of each Reichstag, his itinerary was also now dictated by meetings of the various provincial Estates, or assemblies, in his Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian lands.
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Elector August of Saxony was the last prince to be enfeoffed with the traditional rituals in the open air in 1566. Thereafter, princes travelled to Vienna to pay homage in ceremonies now held behind closed doors. The symbols were Habsburg rather than imperial. The emperor no longer wore his traditional robes, but instead all participants dressed in black after the fashion of the Spanish court of Philip II. Increasingly, princes sent representatives as proxies, further eroding the old personal feudal nexus in favour of more formalized constitutional relations.
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The court remained a centre for brokerage that was still largely personal, but geared primarily to managing the Habsburgs’ own nobility. Recent studies have demolished the idea of early modern kings as puppet-masters, entangling their nobles in a golden honey trap that disarmed them and rendered them politically harmless.
¹⁸
Most nobles never attended court, which always contained several competing power centres around the monarch’s consort, relations and other important figures. Nonetheless, the court did focus power and act as a hub for patronage networks linking the royal centre to the localities. It gave firmer form to the kind of politics existing more generally in the Empire since the Carolingians, because the court was now permanent and fixed. Proximity to the king enhanced the prestige of individual nobles and allowed them to cultivate their own clientele. The Habsburgs used
this to restructure how they ruled their own lands between 1579 and the mid-seventeenth century. Court and administrative posts were restricted to men who proved their loyalty by either remaining Catholic or converting from Protestantism. The Habsburgs employed their archducal rights and imperial prerogatives to ennoble faithful servants and to confer the prestigious status of imperial nobility on loyal subjects from their Bohemian, Italian and Hungarian lands, as well as from across the Empire. Around fifteen thousand individuals were granted the status of imperial noble between 1500 and 1800, peaking during the crisis years of the 1620s when up to six hundred were ennobled annually, or five times the average across early modernity.
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The Habsburgs also granted titles and positions associated with their own court and institutions. Ferdinand III gave the title ‘court councillor’ (
Hofrat
) to 400 men across his reign. The court expanded from 400 courtiers in the late fifteenth century to 1,500 people by 1735, while the Habsburg army and administration offered employment to many thousands. Only the Wittelsbachs came close to matching the Habsburg court, briefly, in the 1550s and again around 1700. Most princely courts comprised a couple of hundred people, few of whom were nobles. For example, that in Wolfenbüttel numbered 381 in 1747, but only 20 of these posts were considered suitable for nobles, in addition to the 26 pageboys and 15 ladies-in-waiting. The largest groups were the 81 stable hands and 52 lackeys and messengers.
²⁰
Viennese etiquette and architectural styles remained the models throughout the Empire and only Cologne’s electoral palace at Bonn followed the internal layout of rooms used in Versailles. Despite his rivalry with the Habsburgs, Frederick the Great of Prussia used Viennese examples when he remodelled Berlin in the mid-eighteenth century. The Prussian state library, completed in 1786, was a direct copy of plans prepared by the Habsburgs’ leading architect 80 years previously.
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