The Habsburgs- The History of a Dynasty

by Benjamin Curtis

  The claims to that succession were a tangle of dynastic threads. Though there were negotiated attempts to resolve them, ultimately the incommensurate interests of a number of European powers, including the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties, led to a worldwide war. Carlos II was the nephew and cousin of Leopold I, which was the basis for Leopold’s assertion of the Austrian branch’s right to succeed in Spain. Leopold in fact intended the Spanish crown for his second son, Karl [Charles], while his oldest Joseph would reign in central Europe. Louis XIV claimed the succession for his grandson based on the fact that both his own and his son’s mothers were Habsburgs. The other major claimant was for a time Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria, a Wittelsbach who was the son of Leopold’s daughter Maria Antonia. This meant that Joseph Ferdinand was also Felipe IV’s great-grandson. The Bavarian succession was actually favored by the English and the Dutch (after 1688 both ruled by William III) who, for balance of power reasons, wanted neither the Bourbons nor the Habsburgs to inherit Spain. Negotiations over the succession had begun already in the 1660s. Louis and Leopold never quite reached an agreement whereby the Bourbons would inherit in return for relinquishing a number of Spanish territories to the Austrian Habsburgs. Leopold’s advisors recommended that he settle because there would be no way that he could hold Spain in a war. Louis, likewise, was interested in a peaceful settlement because by the end of the 1690s his finances could ill afford another war. William III tried to make still other arrangements without consulting either of the Habsburg branches.

  All of this diplomatic intrigue failed to take account of the dominant interests within Spain, and also failed to prevent hostilities. The paramount concern of the Spanish nobility was that the empire’s territories not be divided up. They therefore tended to favor the Bourbon succession based on the belief that the Bourbon candidate, Philippe of Anjou, would be a strong king who could adequately defend the realm. Much of the Spanish nobility—including even Carlos II himself—did not trust that the Austrian Habsburgs would rule in the realm’s interests, since they would likely be distracted by their holdings in central and eastern Europe. Carlos turned his back on his family to express support first for the Bavarian and then the Bourbon candidate. What seems like dynastic treason can be explained partly by the machinations of the Castilian nobility at court, including the Cardinal Portocarrero, who had his hands on most levers of power. Additionally, Carlos did have a mind of his own, and he turned against the Habsburgs because he actively disliked his second wife, Maria Anna, Leopold’s daughter, who was pushing hard for the Austrian succession. In the year or so before Carlos’s long-awaited death, he signed three wills. In one will, he named Joseph Ferdinand of Bavaria his successor. In another, his wife and the Austrian faction at court convinced him to name Archduke Karl, Leopold’s son, as successor. The final will named Philippe of Anjou. The latter two wills were signed within days of his death in November 1700. By this point Carlos was probably only dimly aware of how he was being manipulated.

  War then engulfed the Habsburgs (spanning the reigns of Leopold, Joseph I, and Karl VI) and all of Europe between 1701 and 1714. It might never have happened had not the Bavarian claimant, the compromise third way out of the Bourbon-Habsburg struggle, died in 1699. Both Leopold and Louis then held tenaciously to their dynastic claims to the Spanish succession, rejecting even their prior attempts to negotiate a settlement. Those competing claims mapped onto great power politics. France and most of Spain fought for the Bourbon succession, while the Netherlands, England, and Austria fought against it, and its attendant threat of conjoining the French and Spanish crowns. Germany split, with Hanover, the Palatinate, and Brandenburg siding with Leopold, while Bavaria sided with France. Catalonia rebelled against the Bourbon claimant and recognized Archduke Karl as its sovereign. The war featured a number of shifting alliances and temporary gains for both sides. In its first phase, while Leopold was still alive, the dynasty managed to hold its position in Italy but suffered setbacks in Germany. Even with support from English and Dutch troops, Habsburg forces were often outnumbered by the French, but the Habsburgs had by far the superior generals fighting for their side, including the great Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugène of Savoy. At the Battle of Blenheim in August 1704, Marlborough’s and Eugène’s combined armies won a stunning victory that decimated a French army, forced Bavaria out of the war, and saved Vienna from an impending invasion.

  The successes Austrian arms achieved in Leopold’s last years came almost despite the old emperor. Around 1700, as he neared 60, Leopold became more conservative than ever, and less actively engaged in running his government. Most of his inner ruling circle were likewise old men who were in their positions more through long service and loyalty than skill. Mismanagement and neglect at the highest levels threatened to sink the Austrian war effort. This was especially dangerous after 1703 since there was a new, large revolt in Hungary led by Ferenc II Rákóczi, a Transylvanian magnate (and godson of the earlier troublemaker Thököly). As Habsburg armies left Hungary to fight the French, Rákóczi happily took 10,000 écus a month from Louis XIV to help finance a rebellion to distract Leopold in the east. This revolt would plague the Habsburgs until 1711. Dissatisfied with his father’s handling of Austria’s precarious situation, Leopold’s oldest son Joseph in 1703 pushed out a number of incompetent officials and took over the government with his “young court,” which included Prince Eugène among other reform-minded men. Most urgently this new team addressed the monarchy’s looming financial disaster by securing loans from England and the Netherlands. Though the old, conservative faction regained the upper hand in 1704, they had only one more year of influence before Leopold died in 1705 and Joseph became sovereign.

  Dynastic strategies

  It was not solely because of Carlos that the male line of the Habsburg dynasty was teetering on the edge of extinction. Leopold’s uncle, younger brother, and his last two cousins in the Tyrolean branch had all died by 1665. Thus when Felipe IV died that same year, Leopold and Carlos were the only surviving males in the entire dynasty. The boon for Leopold from this wave of deaths was that he gained all the Tyrolean lands, and thereby reunited the Habsburgs’ central European patrimony under one line. That was little consolation when he could not produce a surviving son until his third marriage. This son became Joseph I, and the third son from this marriage survived to become Karl VI. Leopold was not short of daughters: he had eleven of them, all but one of whom he named “Maria” in his exaggerated piety. Carlos II proved unsurprisingly incapable of producing heirs with his two unfortunate wives. In this last exponent of the Spanish branch, the dynasty’s long (and not unusual, for the time) practice of inbreeding took its final toll. That practice helps explain the sudden scarcity of males in the Habsburg line, as well as the family’s extremely high rates of infant mortality. Half of all the Spanish Habsburgs’ children died before they reached the age of 10, which was twice the mortality rate for children in Spanish villages. A genetic analysis has found that Carlos was as inbred as would have occurred in an incestuous parent-child or brother-sister pairing.5 Of all the Spanish Habsburgs, Felipe III and Felipe II’s son Don Carlos rank not far behind in their level of inbreeding. The sad, self-inflicted end of the Spanish branch recalls the apt words of the historian Marañón, who wrote that of the five Spanish Habsburg kings, “Charles V inspires enthusiasm, Felipe II respect, Felipe III indifference, Felipe IV sympathy, and Carlos II pity.”6

  The Spanish branch’s extinction forced the Austrian branch to look elsewhere for its marriages. The Habsburgs increasingly began to marry other German families. Leopold is an example: his first two wives were Habsburgs, and after they died he had to be persuaded to marry for a third time, to Eleonore of Pfalz-Neuburg, daughter of the Elector Palatine, a Wittelsbach. This marriage did assure the survival of the dynasty, producing both Leopold’s sons Joseph I and Karl VI. They both in turn also married German princesses, which helped strengthen dynastic connections within the Empire. Leopold’s stronger
position in the Empire contributed to the dynasty’s reproduction in another way as well. He capitalized on the sense of German solidarity against Louis XIV by having Joseph chosen as his imperial successor in 1690. The relative ease of this election, and the not ungenerous terms of the Wahlkapitulation, show how much progress the dynasty had made in shoring up its reputation in the Empire since Leopold’s difficult election in 1658.

  The dynasty’s problems with reproducing itself were for good and ill tied to its legitimacy. The family’s inbreeding produced a successor, Carlos II, who because of his inadequacies should never have been king, not least because he himself could not produce a successor. But because of the unavoidable dynastic norm of legitimacy, there was no other Spanish Habsburg who could rightfully take the royal title. In adhering to Carlos as heir, the Habsburgs privileged the ruling legitimacy of the family line at the expense of both adequate governance and the survival of that line. In the Danubian domains, both legitimacy and loyalty were expressed by the assertive, triumphant Baroque culture that matched the newly successful assertiveness of Austria on the international stage. This culture fulfilled a vital integrative role for the monarchy. More powerfully than ever before, provincial elites were integrated into the Baroque court, while the provinces themselves were assimilated into the Baroque culture. A highly visible sign of these processes was the increasing dominance of German language and culture throughout the lands of the monarchy. The elite was most subject to this Germanization: the high aristocracy became more likely to speak German, in part because of the heightened profile of the Vienna court. As Leopold’s court grew into the characteristic magnificence of the late seventeenth century, it became a magnet for nobles from all the monarchy’s lands. They found that by assimilating at least somewhat to German culture, they could enjoy the pecuniary and preferment benefits of the court. The Bohemian and Moravian nobility in particular gravitated more than ever toward Vienna, where some of them took high state positions.

  While Germanization and court preferment helped build allegiance to the monarchy, the success of the Counter-Reformation also continued to bolster loyalty and legitimacy. Leopold furthered the practices of Ferdinand II and III in insisting upon Catholic hegemony as an essential fundament of the dynasty’s rule. He did not stint on promoting religious processions and other ostentatious displays in which both the Catholic Church’s and his own majesty were conflated. Perhaps the most famous example of both the ostentation and the conflation is the great plague column on the Graben in Vienna, whose archetypically Baroque effusion configures Leopold as humbly praying for, and victoriously receiving, deliverance from an epidemic and the Turks. Trumpeting Catholicism was only one part of Leopold’s court, which flourished especially after Vienna’s 1683 deliverance. As part of managing administration and integrating the nobility, the court centralized and displayed both the monarch’s tangible and symbolic power. Though Louis XIV’s contemporaneous court was perhaps more lavish and certainly more frivolous than Leopold’s (whose court was often described as religiously somber), the Austrian Habsburgs presided over a comparable cultural flowering. The dynasty of course reigned through many other cultural periods, but the monarchy’s territorial expansion and gradual but decisive penetration into society during this era forever left its mark on the Danubian lands.

  The Habsburg heritage of art and architecture is unmistakably Baroque-tinted. The greatest early influences on the style of the Leopoldine Baroque came from Italy, and there were many Italian artists and musicians in Leopold’s court. These artists contributed to the court’s lavish operatic productions, which were used to demonstrate the cultural achievements and glory of Leopold’s rule. Apart from the Leopold Wing of the Vienna Hofburg, designed by Italian architects, the monarch himself built relatively little. He preferred to spend his always-short monies on music, theater, festivals, and literature; Leopold’s book collecting was prodigious. The Baroque nonetheless gave birth to the first great Austrian architects such as Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Johann Lukas von Hildebrandt, who both continued to work under Leopold’s successors. Fischer von Erlach drew up the first plans for the palace at Schönbrunn, which was originally intended to exceed even Versailles’s excess, though for lack of funds the palace did not attain its present look until the time of Maria Theresia. Ecclesiastical architecture in general helped spread the Baroque throughout the Habsburg lands, and with it the dynasty’s message of supremacy. A signal example is with the churches of Prague, nearly all of which were rebuilt in Baroque style as part of the Counter-Reformation. Prague also saw one of the first waves of Baroque palace building, which then spread to Vienna and resulted in such imposing structures as the Lobkowitz and Liechtenstein palaces.

  As with overblown displays everywhere, the cultural achievements of the dynasty in this era masked an underlying weakness. The Leopoldine Baroque was miles wide and an inch deep. It was an elite culture, the culture of the monarchy’s power bases: the dynasty, the high aristocracy, and the Church. It was not the culture of a thriving bourgeoisie because the cities and towns were still small and subdued. So despite the outward impressiveness of cultural achievements in Leopold’s time, broader intellectual life was not particularly vital. The same can be said for Carlos II’s court in Spain. There the weak monarch ended the great tradition of the Spanish Habsburg court’s artistic patronage, and few great works came out of this period. Though there was some activity in the sciences and medicine, on the whole cultural life reflected the king’s own dim light.

  The court culture of Baroque display was very well suited to Leopold, the small man inhabiting a very large role. Because his personality was nowhere near the contemporary ideal of “absolutism,” the awe of the monarch had to be created through the image of the monarch. While this was always the function of royal display, in Leopold’s case the disjuncture between the image and the actuality was particularly gaping. Festivals, balls, and theatrical presentations were typical ways of literally staging Leopold’s majesty. Genealogies, biographies, and other visual representations similarly affirmed that Leopold was not just one unprepossessing man, but rather the current incarnation of his dynasty’s authority and mission. Though Leopold owed almost all his symbolic authoritativeness to that dynastic legitimacy, he was not purely a figurehead ruler, as Carlos II was. Carlos’s lineage justified him wearing the crown, but it was the fig leaf for others’ exercise of power. His person was difficult to glorify, no matter the amount of display. Leopold on the other hand took a more active role in governance. He regarded himself as his own prime minister, and generally resisted letting any one man in his court accumulate too much power. Hence he would dismiss some of his top ministers after a time, such as Johann Weikhard von Auersperg, in part just to churn the power structure. Leopold, though neither a decisive nor an imposing personality, came to play his role rather well. He left much of the actual running of the monarchy to more energetic underlings. He was never a battlefield leader, preferring to pray for the success of his armies from the relative safety of Vienna, surrounded by the iconography of power.

  That those armies were so successful points to the most important institutional development of Leopold’s time. By the end of his reign the Austrian military was stronger than it had ever been, able to fight and win on multiple fronts simultaneously. The military grew from the small nucleus of the peacetime standing army created under Ferdinand III to one of the best fighting forces in Europe by 1700, with a core of over 100,000 troops. Leopold’s great generals Montecuccoli and Eugène instituted key improvements such as a more professional corps of officers who were more tightly bound to their sovereign than were, for example, Wallenstein’s men. They made the military for the first time a truly effective tool of state power. Its centralized nature helped strengthen the links between the different realms into a common cause against a feared enemy. Its success showed that the Habsburgs’ Danubian monarchy had evolved into something stronger than the Ottomans’ war machine. There remaine
d significant problems in raising money, however. The estates retained some power over raising the financial contribution to the military. They sometimes refused to pay up, though by the end of his reign, Leopold’s government had whittled the estates’ authority down to bargaining over the amount of the contribution.

  The military aside, Leopold made few lasting changes to the structures of dynastic rule. He left inefficient practices and institutions untouched—such as the custom that individual army regiments had to collect their own portion of the contribution—despite the very obvious drawbacks of such practices. He did very little to centralize the separate Austrian governments in Graz and Innsbruck under Vienna’s power. He never understood finances, and what funds he did have were often poorly managed. He sometimes appointed unqualified or corrupt men to administer his domains, the most notorious being Count Georg Ludwig Sinzendorff, whom Leopold left in office for 24 years despite widespread suspicions that he was embezzling millions from the treasury. There were always audible voices calling for reform; Austrian cameralists such as Hörnigk wrote of the need for Austria to transform its economic and political structures, with the specific goal of generating more financial resources to support the military. The problem was Leopold’s personality: he was too mild and too cautious ever to shake things up in a useful way. A Venetian diplomat commented that because Leopold “was afraid of stumbling, he walked slowly.”7

  The fact that separate provincial diets retained varying degrees of authority throughout Leopold’s reign shows that there was no unified “Austrian” polity at this time. It was still very much a composite monarchy, never strictly absolutist because the monarch depended on the various local interests such as the estates, magnates, and the Church in order to rule. The magnates were necessary in all sorts of ways. One was purely financial. Because Leopold was chronically insolvent, he needed loans from the richest nobles, such as the 100,000 florins Ferdinand Schwarzenberg provided during the reconquest of Hungary. Wealthy aristocrats were also necessary to fill many of the high administrative offices in the monarchy, since the crown’s financial troubles meant that officers sometimes had to cover their own costs. Even more than elsewhere, the dynasty depended on the local nobility for rule in Hungary. The Viennese government was barely represented in many parts of Hungary; authority belonged to the local lord. The Church was still vital to the dynasty as a political unifier and propagandist, yet state control over churches did increase during Leopold’s time. Another instance of the limited centralization was that in Hungary the monarch gained the authority (from the estates) to appoint the high clergy. This served a political function to control the church through the appointment of loyalists, and also to increase the monarch’s control of Hungary by appointing non-Hungarians to ecclesiastical as well as secular leadership positions.