Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (77 page)

Palatine rights allowed only princes to create lesser ‘patent nobles’ (
Briefadel
), which permitted commoners to insert the coveted ‘von’ before their surname. The Habsburgs’ possession of Bohemia consolidated their monopoly on creating more prestigious titles, since no other prince had royal status until the Saxon elector became king of Poland. While the Saxons used this to ennoble some of their own subjects, the Hanoverians were relatively sparing in their use of British royal powers after 1714. Only the Hohenzollerns sought to compete seriously with
the Habsburgs once they gained a royal title for Prussia in 1700. In 1742 Frederick the Great forced the short-lived Wittelsbach emperor, Charles VII, to declare the validity of Prussian noble titles throughout the Empire, thus adding to their attraction.
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Habsburg administrative institutions grew from their court to handle the expanding business and the family’s desire to demarcate their lands more clearly. Albert II had already separated the Austrian and ‘Roman’ (i.e. imperial) chancelleries in 1438. Maximilian I established his own treasury (
Hofkammer
) in Innsbruck in 1496 rather than pay Austria’s share of the Common Penny to the imperial receiver at Frankfurt. Further distinctions emerged when Charles V transferred control of the hereditary lands to his younger brother Ferdinand I between 1522 and 1525.
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As with so much of his reign, Charles’s action illustrates the transition to early modernity. Sharing power with Ferdinand as his designated successor resembled the medieval management of the Empire through a co-king. However, Ferdinand’s position was geographically fixed and underpinned by both imperial and Habsburg institutions, whereas Charles remained itinerant, making 40 separate journeys during his reign, half of which was spent outside the Empire, while most of his time within it saw him in Italy or Burgundy rather than Germany.

Charles’s status as king of Spain had already raised concern at his election that he would prove an absentee emperor, especially given previous experience with Frederick III’s reluctance to leave Austria and with Maximilian I, who was accused of spending too much time campaigning in Burgundy and northern Italy. The Reichstag had already imposed a regency council (
Reichsregiment
) on Maximilian in July 1500 to enable selected imperial Estates to help implement the agenda of imperial reform: uphold the public peace, dispense justice, administer finances and regulate social behaviour. Maximilian managed to get the council disbanded early in 1502, but Charles’s departure for Spain in 1521 led to its re-establishment to share responsibility with Ferdinand I, who made a more serious effort to work with it. The imperial Estates soon tired of their own creation. Its membership was supposed to rotate, but it was always dominated by the electors. Concerned for their own status and ‘freedom’, princes were prepared to accept their traditional subordination to the emperor, but not to their peers. They seized the opportunity of Charles’s return to Germany in 1530 to disband the
council. Ferdinand’s election as king of the Romans the next year gave him quasi-regal authority sufficient to act on his own initiative. Meanwhile, the institutionalization of the Reichstag appeared a more suitable forum with which to share power than the narrower council, which was never revived.
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Habsburg administration was reorganized while the imperial and dynastic roles were split between Charles and Ferdinand. In 1527 Ferdinand created an advisory privy council separate from the old
Hofrat
, which retained judicial functions: a separation of powers enacted around five decades ahead of that in princely territories. Hungary and Bohemia retained their own institutions once they passed to Ferdinand in 1526.
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Ferdinand expanded the remit of the new Austrian institutions once he himself became emperor at Charles’s death in 1558. The Habsburg treasury now received imperial taxes remitted by the Reichspfennigmeister. The Reichshofrat founded by Maximilian in 1497 was revived as a supreme court for cases involving imperial prerogatives, especially those relating to feudal relations. This temporarily absorbed the Austrian Hofrat, while the imperial and Austrian chancelleries also merged, handling correspondence with both the Empire and Habsburg lands. These changes reflected a return to past practice and were intended to save money rather than centralize imperial governance. Now that Ferdinand I combined both imperial and Habsburg authority, there seemed no need for separate institutions. However, the underlying trend was still to distinguish between Habsburg and imperial functions. For example, the 1566 chancellery ordinance separated imperial and dynastic business between two sets of officials in the same institution.

Dynastic and imperial institutions were formally separated by Ferdinand II in 1620, while the Bohemian chancellery was moved to Vienna four years later in an effort partially to centralize management of the Habsburg lands.
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Tensions persisted between the Habsburg and imperial chancelleries and much depended on the personal relations between the emperor and imperial vice chancellor. Like other princes, the Habsburgs found their own institutions often became unwieldy talking shops incapable of swift decision-making, yet staffed by people too important to dismiss. They consequently created a succession of new, initially smaller advisory bodies intended to formulate policy and coordinate the other departments. These inner councils frequently
bypassed the imperial chancellery and dealt with important imperial Estates directly, simply through expediency. Miscommunication and duplication of function were common elsewhere in Europe, but they certainly contributed markedly to slow decision-making and poor administration in the Habsburg monarchy into the mid-eighteenth century.

Habsburg Lands and the Empire

The rapid accumulation of dynastic possessions between 1477 and 1526 did not expand the Empire. Those lands already within the Empire remained so: Burgundy, Milan, Bohemia. Those outside were not incorporated within imperial jurisdiction: Hungary, Spain, Sicily, Naples. Meanwhile, Habsburg possessions within the Empire were grouped separately into the Austrian and Burgundian Kreise in 1512, while Bohemia was omitted entirely from the new regional structure. The princes had insisted on incorporation, hoping to extend scrutiny and control over the financial and military contributions from the Habsburg lands through the new common structures. The Habsburg lands always contributed the lion’s share, far in excess of their formal assessments, but Maximilian I and his successors were determined not to allow the princes to direct how they spent their own subjects’ money.

Over time, the Habsburgs came to appreciate the benefits of having incorporated their Austrian and Burgundian lands within the Kreise, since this allowed them to engage in regional politics as imperial Estates as well as emperor.
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After 1558 it also allowed the Austrian branch to retain a hold over Burgundy despite Charles V assigning it to Spain in 1548. Charles had agreed that Burgundy should pay double tax rates (triple if assisting against the Turks), and Spain initially honoured this, though it paid Austria directly rather than remitting the money through the Reichspfennigmeister. Austria’s refusal to treat the Dutch Revolt after 1566 as a breach of the public peace soured relations and led to Spain suspending further payments.
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Nonetheless, Spain also appreciated the utility of retaining its Burgundian territories as part of the Empire, since this allowed it to act as an imperial Estate rather than a ‘foreign power’. Spanish intervention in support of Austria during the Thirty Years War was presented this way to undercut anti-Habsburg Protestant propaganda.

Both Burgundy and Austria only existed as Kreise on paper; neither held an assembly, despite both containing a few minor non-Habsburg members.
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Meanwhile, the imperial police ordinances of 1530 and 1548 exempted Austria from a wide range of laws passed by the Reichstag. The imperial currency ordinance of 1559 granted similar exemptions, while Habsburg subjects were prevented from appealing cases to the imperial supreme courts after 1637. The Peace of Westphalia allowed the Habsburgs to claim all their possessions as officially Catholic, denying their still substantial Protestant minority the rights granted minorities elsewhere by that treaty, except for six ‘peace churches’ established in Silesia.

Although they isolated their lands, the Habsburgs still needed to deal with the rest of the Empire to foster legitimacy and solicit aid. Traditional methods were employed alongside the new institutions developing across the era of imperial reform. Swabia emerged as the area ‘closest to the king’ during the late fifteenth century, because this region was next to the Habsburgs’ original possessions in Alsace and around the Black Forest. Dealings with Swabia showed how the family skilfully employed the opportunities offered by the lengthening status hierarchy. As local lords themselves, the Habsburgs deliberately engaged with their neighbours more as equals to win their cooperation through the Swabian League, founded in 1488, which constituted the cornerstone of what has been termed the ‘Maximilian System’.
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Their methods show how the Empire’s internal structure was still fluid at this point. Frederick III and Maximilian I not only negotiated with those lords and cities who were being invited to the new Reichstag, but also with mediate nobles and towns in the process of forming assemblies (
Landstände
) in territories that themselves were still taking shape. Although they preferred to cooperate with senior nobles, both emperors were prepared to work with burghers where necessary, and offered cash, privileges, appointments and favourable judicial verdicts to cultivate useful clients.

These methods worked best where the emperor could appeal to a broad cross section of inhabitants, as in the south-west, but they were harder to employ in regions physically further from Habsburg possessions, which were also usually those with fewer lordships or inhabitants. The development of the Kreise gave the imperial Estates an alternative framework for regional cooperation independent of the emperor.
Nonetheless, the Habsburgs continued to see a league as a way to forge binding ties to imperial Estates outside the increasingly formalized imperial institutions. This became harder following the Reformation when Lutheran princes and cities combined in the Schmalkaldic League to demand religious autonomy, thereby hastening the demise of the pro-imperial Swabian League, which failed to renew its charter in 1534.

Charles’s victory over the Schmalkaldic League in 1547 at the battle of Mühlberg appeared to offer an opportunity for him to attempt a significant reorganization of imperial governance at the ‘Armoured Reichstag’ in Augsburg the following year. Milan and the western Habsburg possessions were transferred to Spain under the Burgundian Treaty. Meanwhile, Ferdinand remained responsible for Austria, Bohemia and Hungary. All princely alliances were formally annulled, except the defunct Swabian League, which was revived as a new Imperial League (
Reichsbund
), intended to bind the imperial Estates to the Habsburgs. All imperial Estates were now to pay funds into a central Imperial Military Chest to support an army under Habsburg control. Rather than centralizing the Empire, these measures were intended to provide a clearer division of responsibility, with Ferdinand and Charles’s son Philip looking after the two blocs of Habsburg territory, while the German lands were grouped within the League to manage them more easily. All three elements remained under Charles’s suzerainty as emperor.
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The scheme failed, because Charles tried to move too far too fast. By trying to include all electors in his new league, Charles allowed them to combine against it, using the Reichstag, which was now too well established to be ignored. Charles’s decision to push the measures in person at the Armoured Reichstag made it difficult to compromise without losing prestige. Resistance gathered into the Princes Revolt of 1552, forcing the Habsburgs not only to abandon the Imperial League but eventually to agree the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555.

This outcome exposed the difficulties of managing such an extensive collection of lands, prompting Charles to partition Habsburg possessions through a series of measures between 1556 and 1558. Whereas Frankish nobles retained a sense of a wider empire after the partition in the Treaty of Verdun (843), the connections after 1558 were now only dynastic, with the two Habsburg branches considering themselves a common Casa d’Austria. Spain was imperial through its extensive
possessions stretching to the New World, while Austria owed its status to retaining the imperial title in the person of Ferdinand I.

Ferdinand also tried to manage the German lands through a pro-imperial league called the Landsberg Alliance. Formed in 1556, this persisted until 1598, but never included more than nine imperial Estates confined to the south-east.
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The league’s significance lay in its deliberately cross-confessional membership of both Protestants and Catholics. By leading it, Ferdinand signalled the future direction of Habsburg imperial governance: the family justified its continued hold on the imperial title by presenting itself as trustworthy guardian of the common good and the Empire’s internal peace and external security. Ferdinand and his three immediate successors now accepted the Reichstag as the primary forum to negotiate with the imperial Estates, securing substantial financial backing by holding 12 Reichstags between 1556 and 1613.

However, the sheer number of imperial Estates complicated the process of finding a consensus, encouraging a parallel trend to consult the electors, either ahead of a Reichstag or instead of it, as occurred during Ferdinand II’s reign. Charles V’s unprecedented abdication on 3 August 1556 greatly enhanced the electors’ influence, since Ferdinand I depended on their continued support to secure the imperial title ahead of his elder brother’s actual death in September 1558.
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Ferdinand won them over by opposing Charles’s plan to make the title hereditary (see
p.165
), and by confirming their right of self-assembly. Cooperation continued despite the conversion of the elector Palatine to Calvinism around 1560. The electors accepted Ferdinand I’s son Maximilian II and grandson Rudolf II as kings of the Romans in 1562 and 1575 respectively, on each occasion ensuring the seamless continuity of Habsburg imperial rule.
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