The impressive royal courts that Maximilian and especially Rudolf kept partially redeem their political faults. Both men were highly literate and refined. Maximilian’s largesse benefited the artist Arcimboldo, whom Ferdinand I had originally brought to Vienna, as well as other painters, musicians, and scholars. Two of the most notable scholars were the early botanist Charles de L’Écluse (known as Clusius) and the physician Johannes Crato, who also served Rudolf. Maximilian’s intellectual capacity and curiosity enabled him to participate actively in some of the debates sponsored by the intellectuals in his court. He himself took an interest in botany, importing plants from far-away places, including the potato, which he tried to introduce to his lands. One of his lasting architectural contributions is the Stallburg in Vienna, which now houses the Spanish Riding School.
Rudolf’s court was the most multifaceted and eccentrically resplendent of his age. Known popularly above all for its occult trappings, including Rudolf’s patronage of the magician John Dee, there was much more to it than alchemy. Rudolf surrounded himself with accomplished scholars of Latin poetry, history, math, astronomy, mineralogy, zoology, botany, and geography, among other subjects. The most famous of the scientists in Rudolf’s circle were Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. Many of these people were free thinkers in all kinds of ways. Protestants, Catholics, and ambivalents coexisted in a kind of bookish harmony. Rudolf himself read widely in many subjects, and was especially interested in the natural sciences. His cultural collecting was also diverse and edified. He built up an extraordinary collection of paintings, manuscripts, jewels, clocks, scientific instruments and fantastical things such as the narwhal tooth he believed to have magical powers. Among the most famous works that Rudolf commissioned was Arcimboldo’s depiction of the emperor as “Vertumnus,” a bizarre portrait in which Rudolf’s head is made up of flowers, fruits, and vegetables. He also commissioned a crown that much later became the imperial crown of Austria. Its form is a combination of a traditional royal circlet with a bishop’s mitre, symbolizing the Habsburgs’ divine right to rule. When he coveted a piece, he made sure he got it. One example is when he decided to add Dürer’s Rosenkranzfest to his collection: he ordered four bearers to transport the painting all the way from Venice to Prague while holding it upright. Not surprisingly, he spent tremendous sums on these acquisitions, so much that contemporaries complained that if he had invested that money in the army he could have beaten the Turks.
The perception that Rudolf misdirected attention to his cultural activities rather than affairs of state applies also to his interest in the occult. This interest had several motivations. It may have some roots in his peculiar relationship to Catholicism, which much like his father’s was somewhat conflicted. It was very likely connected to his withdrawal from reality, or even a quest for an alternate reality hidden behind the visible forms of the world. One of the reasons Rudolf was interested in art was because he believed that the greatest artists possessed some kind of supernatural power. So Rudolf at various times had a number of individuals in his circle who straddled some line between mystic, charlatan, and scholar, such as the Englishmen John Dee and Edward Kelley, and the Italian polymath Giordano Bruno. Prague was the center of all this multifarious cultural activity. Where Ferdinand I and Maximilian II had been somewhat itinerant, Rudolf chose to settle in Prague partly because it was much safer: the Turks were sometimes only 100 miles from Vienna’s gates. Also, Rudolf found Vienna’s Hofburg too cramped as a palace. He preferred the hilltop grandeur of Prague’s Hradčany. Finally, Prague was the main city of his richest domain, Bohemia, and by locating there he could cultivate better relations with the powerful Bohemian nobility. Yet as he was progressively deposed from Austria and Hungary, he became almost a hostage of the Bohemian estates. It was only after Matthias took over that Vienna rose into the Austrian branch’s definitive capital.
None of these three rulers left an appreciable legacy in building up the institutional structures of the dynasty’s rule in the Danubian domains. Their temperaments, but also political circumstances and a paucity of resources, deterred any significant reforms. Money, whether for military enterprises or even basic governance was, as always, a problem. For example, though Maximilian’s average annual income around 1570 was 4.5 million florins, he only had roughly 1 million to spend because of fixed costs such as debt service and the military frontier. He did try to scrape together funds by economizing measures, such as issuing decrees about how many candles his household could use. He also pushed through a reorganization of his exchequer in 1568, but it did not measurably improve his financial situation. Financial irregularities hampered the Austrian Habsburgs’ government in another way: when bureaucrats’ pay was late or partial, it became harder to employ them, complicating the already daunting challenge of finding enough qualified and capable officials to run the administration. In addition to these problems, Rudolf’s governance was often stymied by his personal frailties. His irresoluteness was exacerbated by the admittedly fractious confessional politics. As religion became a flashpoint in the relationship between crown, estates, cities, peasants and pastors, the nobles, in particular, were able to exploit these cleavages to assert their rights vis-à-vis royal power. Because of the struggle between Rudolf and Matthias, the estates definitely gained leverage, to resist the sovereign’s will and also to protect worship or feudal jurisdictions. There were also some compromises in favor of the crown. In 1578, for example, the estates of Inner Austria agreed to provide regular financial contributions for the fight against the Turks. In return for granting some basic religious concessions, Archduke Karl essentially removed the estates’ bargaining power over financial contributions.
From a Habsburg dynast’s point of view, governing the Empire was like governing the Danubian domains, only worse. The imperial princes were even more powerful than the provincial estates, and had more constitutional and physical protections. Given that they were less politically astute, had fewer resources and more confessional conflicts, Maximilian, Rudolf, and Matthias all had a more difficult time in the Empire than did Charles V or Ferdinand I. This is not to say that as emperors they had no influence. The emperor always had the suasion of both elected and symbolic legitimacy. More than any other prince in Germany, he had political capital and the stature to build allegiances. But apart from the last resort of military action, he had virtually no means of reliably enforcing his will, at least on the larger princes. Maximilian made one of the few bold initiatives of these years, the failure of which illustrates the dynasty’s unreliable influence in Germany. In 1570 at the Speyer Reichstag it was proposed that all military matters of the Empire would fall under the emperor’s authority, with the potential even of creating a standing army. The justification of course was to bolster the fight against the Turks, but this proposal was rejected on the predictable grounds that it would weaken the power of the diet. Thus the imperial office at this time remained a central focus of the Habsburgs’ interests and prestige, but it afforded them relatively little institutional control in German politics.
Maximilian, Rudolf, and Matthias exemplify the limitations of princely power in the face of religious conflicts and assertive estates bodies. They pose a stark contrast to Felipe II, who though he still governed in collaboration with other societal elites, had struck a more favorable bargain with them, which gave him vastly greater resources with which to achieve his objectives. Maximilian, Rudolf, and Matthias did not lack for that ambition. The first two did uphold the imperial ideal of leading the defense against the Turks, and Maximilian certainly subscribed to the hope of healing Christendom’s splits. But the political context of the Danubian domains impeded strong leadership. None of these three gave up on the legitimacy of the Habsburg mission and their exalted function as rulers. Catholicism remained a guiding ideology of the family, even if Maximilian and Rudolf were less committed to it. But given the obvious limits on their authority, they had to seek a kind of symbolic consolation. This was clearly the r
ationale of much of Rudolf’s cultural display; he even commissioned a martial bust of himself by the sculptor Adriaen de Vries that was virtually identical to the great, Caesar-esque bust of Charles V by Leone Leoni. Though not nearly as august or puissant as his grand-uncle (and grandfather!), Rudolf still aspired to be like him. His artistic bequest was Rudolf’s greatest legacy for the dynasty. Maximilian cannot be regarded as a complete failure either. He prevented violent religious conflict in his lands, and he also deserves credit for his heartfelt, nondogmatic attempts to navigate the confessional splits. The fratricidal machinations of Rudolf’s last years did weaken the bases of the dynasty’s authority, however, setting the stage for the calamitous tests of Habsburg power in the ensuing decades.
MAP 2. Habsburg lands circa 1700.
CHAPTER SIX
Endless war (1619–65)
In Velázquez’s Portrait of Felipe IV from 1656 we see a man regal, dignified, but beaten. He wears the solemn black usual for the Spanish Habsburg kings. There also is the characteristic Habsburg lip. He gazes, self-possessed, out of the portrait, but it is his drooping eyes that are so striking. They are wells of sadness that bespeak the king’s suffering. By the time Velázquez painted this portrait, Felipe [Philip] had lost his beloved first wife and his son, his reformist intentions for his monarchy had collapsed, Portugal and Catalonia had rebelled against him, Castile’s wealth and population were exhausted, and he had been defeated in most of his war aims in northern Europe. Despondent, in these years he often turned to a mystic for advice, a nun named Sor María de Ágreda. He once wrote to her, “I don’t know whether what is happening to me is real or only a nightmare.”1
The roughly contemporaneous reigns of Felipe IV in Spain and Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III in Austria were in many ways nightmarish for the dynasty. Almost this entire period was wracked by war. For three decades most of central Europe was a battlefield of the Habsburgs against nearly every major European state. Spain’s conflict with the Dutch spilled over into Germany and drew in France. The Austrian branch contended with rebellions in Bohemia and Hungary, and a civil war in the Empire that also provoked an aggressive Swedish invasion. Protestants battled Catholics, entire regions were laid waste, and the Thirty Years’ War became history’s most destructive conflict until the twentieth century. Felipe’s government tried and failed to stanch the brutal drain on its resources, and Habsburg Spain gradually slid from its near-hegemonic position. The Austrian Habsburgs succeeded in eradicating the Bohemian resistance and in propelling the Counter-Reformation in their lands. They had to retreat from many of their advances in the Empire, however. For all that was lost, this period of Habsburg history still left a great cultural legacy and a remarkable record of dynastic solidarity.
Felipe IV (1605–65)
Felipe IV is in some ways the most tragic of all Habsburg rulers. He was intelligent, cultivated, and diligent. He recognized that Spain had been adrift under the negligent rule of his father, and he wanted to correct those deficiencies. But it was his misfortune to rule during a very troubled time—and some of the troubles were of his own making. As his nickname of El rey planeta (“the planet king”) suggests, Spain’s vast empire reached its greatest extent under his reign. Its strategic commitments were likewise vast and simply impossible; there were enemies on all sides. The demands upon his realms and upon him as a monarch proved crippling. This is one reason why Felipe depended upon prominent ministers to do much of the work for him. The most powerful of these ministers was Gaspar de Guzmán, the Count-Duke of Olivares, a canny, controversial politician who is inextricably linked with the first 20 years of Felipe’s rule. Though he insightfully identified and energetically attacked many of the issues where Spain most needed reform, Olivares ultimately overreached, and the monarchy almost crumbled. Felipe gave Olivares too long a leash, and was therefore partly responsible for the wreck that resulted from his minister’s plan.
Since he succeeded to the throne when he was only 16, the dynasty was fortunate that the new king was astute and took governance seriously. In both these characteristics he was a marked contrast to his father. Though never as deeply engaged with the machinery of government as were Felipe II or Charles V, his rule was nearly as eventful as theirs. It typically receives less attention, though, because it is mostly a litany of defeats, lacking the glories that sporadically brightened his predecessors’ reigns. But Felipe IV (Figure 6.1) counts among the most well-rounded of all Habsburg rulers. He deeply loved the arts. He often patronized the theater and even built a few. He liked poetry and favored a few notable poets, including the acid-penned Francisco Quevedo, one of the greatest Spanish satirists, whose relationship with Felipe eventually turned so sour that the king had him imprisoned. And though he spent many hours at bullfights and in the hunt, he did not neglect more cerebral activities. For instance, he dedicated years to his own translation of an Italian historical tome into Spanish. Felipe’s taste and cultivation are best seen via his long friendship with Velázquez, many of whose paintings chronicle Felipe’s family and court.
Olivares became Felipe’s political tutor before Felipe III had died. Olivares came from a prominent noble family that had helped engineer the downfall of Felipe III’s venal valido Lerma. It is not surprising that a young man like Felipe would be overawed by the acumen of a man like Olivares, who was 34 when Felipe came to power. There is no question that Olivares was a gifted politician, nearly the equal of his great rival Richelieu in France. He was boundlessly ambitious and ruthless, and could be despotic and irascible. But he had vision, an extraordinary sense of how to manipulate people, and a firm conviction in the greatness of Spain. He worked very hard to realize that vision, which was to rescue Felipe’s realms from the humiliation and passivity of the previous reign. Olivares was determined to reestablish Spain’s reputation as the leading power of Europe. He did not advocate conquering new domains. Yet his insistence on defending all of Spain’s strategic commitments meant that the monarchy had to fight on all fronts, at a time when the economic and social bases of the monarchy’s power were already weakening. Nonetheless, Felipe bought into this campaign to restore Habsburg prestige. The partnership between these two men, though it started out as that between mentor and mentee, evolved over the years. Olivares worked to keep Felipe actively engaged in the workings of his government, and it is likely that Felipe’s own intelligence and sense of duty ensured that his valido was so hard-working. Olivares never truly eclipsed Felipe as the actual ruler, though with historical hindsight it is certain that Felipe delegated too much of his authority to the Count-Duke.
FIGURE 6.1 Felipe IV, by Diego Velázquez (1656). In the collection of the Museo del Prado. Image courtesy of the Bridgeman Art Library.
Olivares and Felipe cannot be accused of not thinking big. Their objectives included securing the southern Netherlands, preserving the Castilian/Portuguese monopoly in the overseas territories, defending Catholicism, and supporting the Austrian Habsburgs. Enormous tasks each in themselves, they also intertwined, which helps explain why Felipe’s monarchy was so overburdened. The commitment to the Habsburg alliance was emphasized already in Felipe III’s last years, as Spanish money and troops were sent to aid the Austrian cousins in suppressing the Bohemian revolt that was the first stage of the Thirty Years’ War. That revolt was viewed by the Spanish Habsburg kings and their advisors as a serious test of the dynasty’s power in central Europe, and as an attack on Catholicism. The war with the Dutch resumed in 1621 after 12 years of peace. To Olivares’s thinking, the Dutch were the aggressors. Even in the years of peace they had kept up attacks on Spain and Portugal’s overseas empires, and had refused to remove their stranglehold on the Spanish Netherlands through the blockade on Antwerp’s port. Hence Spain went to war not to reconquer its lost Dutch provinces, but to defend its economic and territorial interests.
When the Habsburgs combined forces, though, it could not help but upset the European balance of power. The Spanish Habsburgs’ war against
the Dutch, and the Austrian Habsburgs’ war in the Empire, dragged in most major powers in Europe. Cardinal Richelieu, leading France, had the old fear of being encircled by Habsburg power, and so began aiding the Dutch and the Habsburgs’ other Protestant enemies with funds and diplomacy. In the 1620s Spain and France circled each other warily, avoiding a direct war. England was also hostile because Habsburg power in Germany was seen as a threat to the English kings’ possessions there. Initially, Felipe IV’s armies won some impressive victories. In 1625 they repelled an English attack on Cádiz and expelled the Dutch from Bahía in Brazil, and Breda in the southern Netherlands. The latter victory occasioned Velázquez’s famous painting of the Dutch surrender. There was another series of victories leading up to 1627, closely coordinated with the Austrian branch. Following Spanish naval victories over the Dutch, and land victories by Ferdinand II’s general Wallenstein, Habsburg power extended to the Baltic as never before.
By the end of the decade, however, the Spanish monarchy encountered reversals on all fronts. In order to pay for its massive military operations, taxes and borrowing in Spain had skyrocketed. The crown was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1627. Many in Felipe’s court, including his greatest general Spinola, commander of the armies in the Low Countries, insisted that now was the time to negotiate for peace. Olivares, however, refused. Then in 1628 the Dutch admiral Piet Heyn captured the entire Spanish silver fleet in Cuba, a terrible blow to the monarchy’s already fragile finances. In that year, as well, Olivares committed one of his greatest blunders by diverting troops from the Netherlands for a campaign in northern Italy. After a line of the Gonzaga dukes of Mantua died out, the succession was open to a claimant backed by the French. Olivares was determined to prevent this because he saw it as a dangerous threat to Spain’s hold over the duchy of Milan. Spain’s action in northern Italy was closely coordinated with Ferdinand II, but it brought them both closer to outright war with France. Moreover, the campaign was an extremely expensive failure, hemorrhaging Spanish resources as the Dutch made new gains in Brazil, and Swedish forces rampaged in Germany. When this Italian conflict was ended by the Treaty of Cherasco of 1631, Olivares had virtually nothing to show for the struggle over the Mantuan succession. Indeed, in later years Felipe IV called this defeat the point “when my monarchy began . . . visibly to decline.”2
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