The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
How the Habsburgs lasted a millennium
Rupert Christiansen on a magnificently entertaining chronicle of the big-chinned clan who dominated Europe
ATHE HABSBURGS by Martyn Rady 416pp, Allen Lane, £30, ebook £12.99
n honest chronicle of the Habsburg dynasty has to be nothing less than a panorama of a millennium of European history – and so this magnificent new study of the phenomenon by Martyn Rady of University College London duly starts in the late 10th century and ends in 2011 with the death of Otto, the last of its Crown Princes.
Given the vast range of epochs, events and states embraced, there are no useful generalisations that can be made about the Habsburgs’ attitudes and achievements: what occurred under their auspices was as much a matter of chance as force or judgment – Rady compares them to Fortinbras in Hamlet for their knack of moving smartly in to fill a vacuum.
There’s no strong ideological thread or chain to follow either: unlike the Romans or the British, the Habsburgs did not create a single social order or rule of law throughout their empire. Even if their instincts were Catholic and conservative, they largely sustained their authority through bureaucratic management and propaganda rather than fanatic persecution or aggressive warfare. But in 1066 and All That terms, they can’t be classified as a Good or a Bad Thing, and one of the many virtues of Rady’s approach is its scrupulously even-handed scepticism.
Habsburg roots can be traced to the borders of France, Germany and Switzerland, where the family controlled tolls and built castles, establishing pockets of influence throughout the region and gradually consolidating a leading position in that weirdly nebulous and politically ineffectual concept known as the Holy Roman Empire.
The first prominent Habsburg was Rudolf, an exuberant crusader of the 13th century said to be seven foot tall, who captured territory in Austria and Bohemia, elbowing the rival Bavarian clan of the Wittelsbachs. Forgeries of charters claiming ancient rights and tracing bogus ancestries played an important part in the Habsburgs’ subsequent ascent. These were exploited with particular skill in the 15th century by Frederick III – unalluringly described by a contemporary as “indolent, morose, brooding, sulky, melancholy, miserly, frugal and troubled,” but nevertheless extremely effective in building a fanciful dynastic mythology (extending back to Julius Caesar) and negotiating a marriage for his son Maximilian that brought Burgundy and the Low Countries into the portfolio.
Maximilian’s son then married into and inherited the Spanish royal house; the thrones of Portugal and Hungary followed in the next generation. By the mid-16th century, Habsburg lands had become so extensive that power had to be divided into two branches, one based in Spain, the other in Austria. From Madrid, Charles V, memorably painted by Titian, oversaw expansion into the Americas as well as Pacific outposts in India, Japan and China.
His conquistador, Hernando Cortes, described him, not altogether inaccurately, as “Monarch of the Universe”.
Confronted by the upsurge of Protestantism, Charles was inclined to compromise. His son Philip II took a much tougher line, repressing heresy in the Low Countries and building that ghastly monument to the reactionary spirit of the Counter-Reformation – the cathedral-palace-fortress of the Escorial, with its hundred miles of corridors.
But the Habsburg might declined in Spain through the 17th century. Inbreeding was no help, and as chins lengthened, brains softened – a process reaching its nadir in the pathetic Charles II, a half-witted hermaphrodite whose childlessness meant that the throne passed to the Bourbons in 1700. The Habsburgs’ Austrian branch was, meanwhile, beset by both the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War and the incursions of the Ottomans. Yet, as Rady illuminates, this was also the period when the baroque flourished, a heavily allegorised style of architecture that embodied the Habsburgs’ spiritual pretensions and presented their rule as triumphant.
What gave these gilded assertions solidity was efficient administration, which the 18th-century Empress Maria Theresa handsomely provided.
She is perhaps the most impressive figure in these annals, a woman who not only fought off Frederick the Great of Prussia but also mothered 16 children. Both she and her heir Joseph II wanted
Did you know that Princess Stephanie of Belgium invented the hostess trolley?
“order, regularity, observation, accountability”, and the values of an efficient civil service prevailed in government. Living standards improved, but the tendency to micromanage meant that during the crisis of the Napoleonic wars, society quickly hardened into a police state.
Maria Theresa won many concessions in her struggle against Prussia, including a chunk of partitioned Poland (“she wept as she took, and the more she wept the more she took”).
Her territorial acquisition was continued in the Congress of Vienna’s carve-up of Europe when Francis II, empowered by the masterly diplomacy of Klemens von Metternich, secured much of northern Italy and the Balkans for Austria. Rady calls this moment “an apogee of Habsburg power”, but it didn’t last for long.
The eruptions of the 1848 revolution and Risorgimento (or unification) obliged ground to be yielded to liberalism, and the final chapter begins with the uneasy yoking of Austria and Hungary in the “dual monarchy” under Franz Joseph, a man impeccably dedicated to his paperwork but dismally unimaginative in his policies. After his wife was assassinated, his brother shot by rebels in Mexico, and his eldest son killed himself in the Mayerling scandal, he became known as “the mighty rock amidst the surging waves”, but his rigidity in the face of the Serbian separatism that led to Franz Ferdinand’s demise in Sarajevo was fatal, plunging Austria-Hungary into a war it was incapable of winning.
Yet the Habsburgs had always respected culture and learning, and Franz Joseph’s fin de siècle Vienna, pompously encircled by the neo-baroque Ringstrasse, became a hub of scholarship and the innovative endeavours of the likes of Wittgenstein, Freud, Hofmannsthal, Mahler and Klimt.
Hitler grew up here, his pathology fed by Habsburg decadence and inertia.
Rady maintains unerring poise as he steers through the depths and complexities of his material. His erudition seems effortless, he never gets bogged down in detail, his prose is pellucid, and he spices the narrative with delightfully dry asides and telling anecdotes. Who could forget the image of Charles V spending his dotage compulsively fiddling with the mechanisms of clocks to make them tick in unison?
Did you know that Princess Stephanie of Belgium invented and patented the hostess trolley? And how intriguing is Anna of the Tyrol, “a kindly woman of exceptional girth… whose skill at the clavichord was matched only by her dedication to penitential self-flagellation.”
Most piquant of all, perhaps, is a glimpse of the 16th-century karate champ Cymburga, wife to Frederick III, renowned for both “her beauty and for her ability to drive nails into oak planks with her bare fists” – clearly a superwoman cut out to be the heroine of Quentin Tarantino’s next movie.