Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (78 page)

Imperial Governance during the Thirty Years War

Rudolf II’s refusal to marry precipitated a succession crisis that deepened with the Habsburgs’ financial and political bankruptcy following the Long Turkish War (1593–1606). Unlike the previous deposition of Wenzel in 1400 orchestrated by the electors, the Habsburgs kept their problems to themselves. Spain backed Matthias as a safer pair of hands than the depressive and reclusive Rudolf. Matthias’s attempt to force
Rudolf to transfer power triggered the Brothers’ Quarrel after 1608, which saw both make damaging concessions to the Protestant nobles who dominated their provincial Estates. By May 1611, Rudolf had been deprived of all Habsburg lands and remained under virtual house arrest in his castle in Prague. His death in 1612 allowed Matthias to secure election as emperor, but he was himself childless and ill, and the whole episode seriously damaged Habsburg prestige and influence.
³⁵

As we have seen (
pp. 121–5
; also pp.
564–5
), the distraction created a partial political vacuum in the German lands that was filled by the Protestant Union and Catholic League, formed respectively in 1608 and 1609 by the rival Wittelsbach branches of the Palatinate and Bavaria (
Map 19
). By 1617, Matthias had neutralized the League by compelling Bavaria to admit new members, rendering the organization no longer suitable as a vehicle for its own interests. Meanwhile, the Palatinate’s deliberate disruption of the Reichstag in 1608 encouraged the trend to consult only the three ecclesiastical electors (Cologne, Mainz and Trier) and the generally pro-imperial Saxony.
³⁶
The group widened to include Bavaria once that prince received the Palatine lands and electoral title in 1623 as a reward for helping to crush the Bohemian Revolt (1618–20) at the start of the Thirty Years War. Electoral congresses convened in 1627, 1630 and 1636–7. Saxony temporarily defected to the Swedes between 1631 and 1634 to pressure Ferdinand II into reversing his ill-judged Edict of Restitution. Although limited, Ferdinand’s concessions were sufficient to entice Saxony back in the Peace of Prague in May 1635.

Saxony was allowed to annex the former Habsburg provinces of Upper and Lower Lusatia, which it had occupied since 1620 as a pledge that the cash-strapped Habsburgs would refund the cost of its military assistance in crushing the Bohemian Revolt. In return, it accepted Ferdinand’s interpretation of the war as a rebellion, thereby legitimating his expropriation of his opponents’ lands and titles whenever he could defeat them, like the Palatinate. Whereas the Religious Peace of Augsburg had been negotiated openly at a Reichstag, the Peace of Prague was agreed between Saxony and the emperor and then presented to the imperial Estates, who could only accept or reject it. Only Bavaria and, to a lesser extent, Cologne and Brandenburg were able to negotiate special concessions. The exclusion of the lesser imperial Estates fuelled their sense of disenfranchisement. Already, many minor lords and cities
had joined the Protestant Union and Catholic League because they believed the existing institutions no longer guaranteed their autonomy amidst the political and confessional tension. The Palatinate especially had played on their resentment, presenting a more aristocratic interpretation of the constitution in the guise of religious parity, since meeting in two confessional corpora offered to level the Reichstag’s hierarchy of three colleges: electors, princes and imperial cities.
³⁷

Ferdinand III addressed these concerns after his accession in 1637 in the hope of rallying broad support to end the Thirty Years War on the basis of the Peace of Prague. He held the first Reichstag for 27 years in Regensburg between 1640 and 1641, restoring some trust in Habsburg leadership despite the deteriorating military situation now that France had intervened to support Sweden, while Spain was no longer able to assist Austria.
³⁸
Ferdinand’s move inhibited the formation of a clear anti-Habsburg bloc among the imperial Estates, despite the willingness of France and Sweden to support constitutional changes that would indeed have converted the Empire into something more resembling an aristocracy. He avoided his father’s mistake at the Peace of Prague and invited all imperial Estates to the Westphalian peace congress in 1645, rallying most of them to block the more radical revisions proposed by France and Sweden.
³⁹

Stabilization of the Empire, 1648–58

The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 is usually seen as one of the ‘greatest catastrophes’ in German history.
⁴⁰
Supposedly, the Empire was reduced to a loose federation under the emperor’s nominal presidency, emancipating the principalities from the constitution, now allegedly ‘preserved in aspic’.
⁴¹
The terms referred to ‘territorial rights’ (
ius territorii
) and ‘alliance rights’ (
ius foedera
), but did not in fact grant new powers. Exercise of such rights remained curtailed by imperial law and duty to the Empire, as had been the case before 1618. Awkward constitutional questions were simply postponed until the next Reichstag. Imperial prerogatives remained broadly intact, though the exercise of some of them now clearly depended on consultation through the Reichstag. The repeated reference throughout the treaty to ‘imperial Estates’ further eroded the personal character of imperial politics, best symbolized by the princes’ loss of their earlier right (since Augsburg in 1555) to change
their subjects’ religion, which was now fixed by identifying each territory as officially either Protestant or Catholic.
⁴²

The presence of France and Sweden as foreign guarantors was probably the least significant of the main set of changes (see
pp. 127–8
and
174
). Saxony, Bavaria and above all Brandenburg obtained additional land at a point when the war had demonstrated the military potential of the larger territories (
Map 9
). The Habsburgs secured their core goals, including acceptance of the sweeping redistribution of private property within Austria and Bohemia in the 1620s, which rebalanced the Habsburg monarchy as an alliance between the ruling dynasty and major aristocratic landowners. The consolidation of Habsburg power preserved the Empire as a hierarchy, since no other prince was able to challenge their leadership. Likewise, the electors combined to ensure their continued pre-eminence over the other princes, regardless of the actual distribution of material resources.
⁴³

Austrian policy after 1648 was preoccupied with retaining the imperial title and asserting claims to the Spanish succession, given the increasing likelihood of that branch’s extinction, which grew after the accession of the childless and feeble-minded Charles II in 1665. Engagement with the Empire was necessary to both goals, especially as acquisition of Spain’s Italian lands was prioritized. Ferdinand carefully cultivated broad support amongst the imperial Estates, securing the election of his son Ferdinand IV as king of the Romans. Ferdinand III staged a lavish entry into Regensburg in 1653 for his son’s coronation and the opening of a new Reichstag amidst fireworks and opera performances, all demonstrating his family’s continued power despite the recent harrowing war. Additional limits were placed on his ability to create new princes, but more radical attempts to revise the constitution were defeated, and Ferdinand won new support from north German Protestant territories alarmed by Sweden’s ambitions in their region.
⁴⁴

Imperial politics remained open, with various routes for the emperor and imperial Estates to achieve their goals. These options gradually narrowed after the early 1680s without the constitution ever reaching total gridlock. A sense of uncertainty continued with the Franco-Spanish war, which only ended in 1659, as well as Ferdinand IV’s death at just 20 in July 1654, followed by that of his father aged only 48 in April 1657. Ferdinand III had not had sufficient time to secure the election of his second son, Leopold I, as king of the Romans, leading to an
interregnum prolonged to 14 months by French interference. The electors not only rejected Louis XIV’s candidacy, but refrained from imposing anything more than minor additional restrictions on imperial prerogatives in return for electing Leopold in July 1658.
⁴⁵

The Permanent Reichstag

Leopold was only 18 when elected emperor and what proved to be his longevity (1658–1705) gave the Habsburgs the stability they needed to achieve their objectives.
⁴⁶
Crucial to Leopold’s success was his willingness to work within rather than against the post-1648 constitutional order. Various attempts to negotiate with the electors and a small Imperial Deputation failed to resolve outstanding security and reform questions, obliging Leopold to summon a new Reichstag when confronted with a Turkish attack on Hungary in 1662.
⁴⁷
Having opened on 20 January 1663, the Reichstag remained permanently in session until the end of the Empire. This was not planned: there were four serious attempts to wind it up before 1741, while no formal sessions were held during 1692–7, 1747–50 and 1780–85 due to political tensions, notably Austro-Prussian rivalry.

Nonetheless, the Reichstag’s permanence exceeded the annual meetings agreed in 1495 and also began much earlier than Britain’s ‘mother of parliaments’, which only became permanent after 1717. England’s Triennial Act (1694) restricted each Parliament to no more than three years, because a permanent assembly was regarded like a ‘standing army’, as a mark of tyranny. This pinpoints the key distinction between Britain’s Parliament and the Empire’s Reichstag. British parliamentarians were representatives elected by enfranchised inhabitants who would lose their rights and influence if the same people remained MPs indefinitely.

The Reichstag was not a parliament, because it represented the imperial Estates, not their populations. There was no prospect of its evolving into a democratic institution without fundamentally altering the Empire’s character as a mixed monarchy and enfranchising inhabitants rather than territories.

The Reichstag remained permanent simply because it proved the most effective forum within which all imperial Estates and the emperor could negotiate, thereby rendering most other consultative institutions
redundant. This set the basic pattern for Habsburg imperial governance until 1806. The emperor would seek formal ratification for important measures like declarations of war by negotiating with the Reichstag and, in many cases, also the Kreis Assemblies, especially those in the south and west that enabled him to contact numerous smaller territories. Meanwhile, more informal channels were used to achieve more localized goals, or to speed up formal ratification, by negotiating directly with influential individual imperial Estates through envoys or correspondence. Bilateral and occasionally multilateral alliances were forged with princes, usually to secure additional military support above official obligations. These methods further eroded the personal element in imperial politics, which increasingly assumed the character of multiple written agreements between its different actors.

Politics remained asymmetrical, rather than equal as we would have expected if the Empire had truly become a federation after 1648. Princes appeared as petitioners, seeking the emperor’s backing for an elevated status for themselves, their morganatic wives or mistresses, or revisions to their territory’s formal position within the Empire, or other benefits like favourable verdicts in disputes with their neighbours. The goals of princes thus remained specific, and they did not seek generalized constitutional change; indeed, they often protested when other princes received the same kind of favours they sought themselves. Participation in wider European warfare was generally driven by similar desires. Princes overwhelmingly sought connections with other states that were already the emperor’s allies, like Britain and the Dutch Republic, in the hope these would pressure him on their behalf.
⁴⁸

Although the Habsburgs occupied the position of strength, theirs was a difficult hand to play. They remained perennially short of money, and were often unable to pay for the additional military assistance that princes provided. More importantly, the reservoir of desirable honours in their gift was finite. Minor ennoblements and local political backing cost the Habsburgs little, but direct interference in imperial justice risked undermining their prestige and, ultimately, their ability to manage the Empire. Habsburg support was usually limited to applying pressure on the parties involved to reach the desired settlement. Significant status elevations were harder to achieve after 1654 when they needed the Reichstag’s agreement. Leopold became adept at dangling promises that were rarely delivered, at least not in full.

He secured the election of his eldest son, Joseph I, as king of the Romans in January 1690, safeguarding the continuity of Habsburg rule. The election was actively promoted by the archbishop of Mainz, who appeared with five other electors in person to cast unanimous votes. This was a strong endorsement of Habsburg rule amidst a two-front war against both France and the Ottomans.
⁴⁹
However, the constant conflicts after 1672 accelerated the internationalization of imperial politics by widening the number of European powers keen to hire German auxiliaries. France was prepared to pay handsomely for key princes to refrain from participating in imperial defence, adding to the pressure on Leopold as the Spanish succession loomed in the 1690s. He was forced to deliver on promises and elevate the duke of Calenberg (Hanover) to electoral status in 1692, intensifying competition amongst the other ‘old princely houses’. Savoy had to be granted grand-ducal status in 1696, while Austria assisted the Saxon elector, whom the Poles chose as their king the following year. Finally, and fatefully, Leopold agreed to recognize the Brandenburg elector as ‘king in Prussia’ in November 1700 in return for military backing in what became the War of the Spanish Succession within a few months. Each time, he alienated other Habsburg clients and stoked problems for the future.