The Hapsburgs

Note: I am publishing later in the day than usual because I’m traveling with family in Puerto Rico. I count the location as on theme, since the island was once a Hapsburg possession.

Driving home from Boston a couple of weeks ago, I stopped in Bear Pond Books in Montpelier—a bookshop that was inundated last summer during the flooding in Vermont. I was happy to see that the place has recovered. Looking through the non-fiction section, I noticed Martyn Rady’s new history of Central Europe. Though I was tempted by it, I knew I should start with a less ambitious volume, and decided to read Rady’s short history of the Hapsburg empire instead. (I cannot write the dynasty name with two Bs, I’m sorry; in my head there is always a P in there, because that was the standard English spelling for so long.)

I thought I needed an overview of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, but having read the book, I realize that I do know a lot about the dynasty, just not from their point of view. For instance, I mostly think of the Holy Roman emperor Charles V as the uncle of Catherine of Aragon, the first wife of Henry VIII. Or I think of Philip II of Spain as Mary Tudor’s husband—and as the king who sent the Armada defeated by the English in 1588. It’s difficult to connect pieces of their history, simply because their land holdings were so vast and disparate, and because they do not cut romantic figures in English-language sources. Being the leaders of the Counter-Reformation does not help their case, on that score.

Last week I mentioned Stefan Zweig’s assessment of the Hapsburgs: since they were not known for their military prowess, they concentrated on being good at government, and engaging in generous patronage of the arts. After reading that argument of his, I tried to remember their military campaigns. Of course the Austro-Hungarian empire ended with its defeat in World War I. But perhaps the reputation dates from Austria’s multiple defeats against Revolutionary France and Napoleon, until they finally joined the winning coalition spearheaded by the Duke of Wellington. Vienna was occupied twice during the Napoleonic wars. Count Metternich, who presided over the Congress of Vienna, was known for his statesmanship and diplomacy—and the calculation that Napoleon would be defeated by the Russian winter—not as a military leader in his own right.

The Hapsburgs did defeat the Turks in 1683. Earlier in the seventeenth century, they fought the Thirty Years’ war, which succeeded to some degree in halting the spread of Protestantism in Hapsburg lands, but was—as its name suggests—an inconclusive slog ending in a somewhat muddled peace. Rady suggests that the Turkish threat in the Balkans and Hungary was a factor in the original spread of Protestant ideas. The Catholic Hapsburgs did not try to rein in their rebellious populations until a lull in Turkish military campaigns after the death of Suleiman I, in 1566. For the first few decades after Luther, the Hapsburgs were too worried about the threat from the east to crack down on heresy.

The Hapsburgs controlled so much territory in the first place through politics and marriage, rather than military conquest. Charles V became King of Spain in 1516 and archduke of Austria in 1519 through inheritance, and used his relatives’ influence to become Holy Roman emperor. His brother Ferdinand then consolidated the Hapsburg holdings through a strategic marriage which gave him land in Bohemia and Hungary. Ferdinand and his wife had 15 children, for whom they also made strategic marriages. As kings of Spain, they added territories in the Americas to their sphere. At the height of their power, their empire spanned the globe.

We will see if I end up reading the more thorough history of Central Europe, but I at least feel I have the overview I was looking for.