The Habsburgs
Posterity has not been kind to the Habsburgs, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. For centuries, they were the “most powerful and successful family in Europe”, ruling vast tracts of land from their Austrian heartland. Yet today, they are viewed as “weak, baroque, and terminally ridiculous”, and are best known for being afflicted by a congenital defect, the “notorious Habsburg jaw”. In his new history, Martyn Rady sets out to challenge this “comic-opera image”. The Habsburgs, he shows, were “ruthlessly single-minded”. For centuries, they ruled most of Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Bohemia and Hungary. They launched the Armada and the Thirty Years’ War; they oversaw the conquest of much of Latin America, and of the Philippines. Mozart and Cervantes were both Habsburg subjects – as were Freud, Wagner and Hitler. “Enjoyable and clever”, if somewhat “brisk”, Rady’s book triumphantly demonstrates that “the Habsburgs were no joke”.
The dynasty’s roots lay not in Austria but “far to the west, among the rustic cowherds of northern Switzerland”, said John
Adamson in the Literary Review. After rising to prominence within the medieval Holy Roman Empire, they conquered Austria in the 14th century, and made it their “territorial powerbase”. Their “vertiginous rise” owed much to their “carefully chosen brides and a rabbit-like capacity for reproduction”: they gobbled up the holdings of “more illustrious rivals” – the dukes of Burgundy, the kings of Castile and Aragon – when all these became extinct in the male line. By the 16th century, the Habsburg empire comprised not only most of continental Europe, but also “unimaginably large territories in the New World”. After the death of Emperor Charles V in 1558, the Habsburg lands were divided into two branches, one in Spain, the other in Austria, said Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Telegraph. In Spain, their might declined throughout the 17th century, largely because of inbreeding. “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.” But the Austrian branch survived, and often flourished, through the 18th and 19th centuries, before the “uneasy yoking of Austria and Hungary” under Franz Josef led to its demise in the First World War. Written with “unerring poise”,
The Habsburgs is a “magnificent” study – “nothing less than a panorama of a millennium of European history”.