HAPSBURG (HABSBURG), HOUSE OF

The Hapsburg family (also the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine, the House of Austria) is the most European of the former ruling dynasties of Europe (it played a role in the history of Germany, Switzerland, the Danubian states, the Lowlands, and the Iberian Peninsula) and the one usually associated with Roman Catholicism and the Holy Roman Empire. Its history as a family is the history of the old dynastic Europe in microcosm; it also furnishes an excellent case study of the impact on European affairs of one biological community with its own set of traditions and possessions. A description of that family history will be followed by a brief discussion of Hapsburg relations with the Catholic Church and an assessment of its contributions to European art and culture.

Origins. Though legend would trace its lineage back to the Trojans and the ancient Romans, the actual origins of the family remain obscure. Guntram the Rich (c. 950), who may have been one of the Etichonen of Alsace, a great Carolingian noble clan, is usually regarded as the first historical, rather than legendary, member of the family. His descendants flourished in the southwestern section of Germany, and one of them, Bp. Werner of Strassburg, constructed the Habichtsburg (shortened to Habsburg and meaning the "hawk's castle") from which the family would take its name. Though they were far less powerful and prestigious than the great local families such as the Hohenstaufen, the Kyburger, and the Zähringer, an early display of the Hapsburg talent for intermarriage and for survival enabled them to inherit large amounts of territory when those families became extinct.

The resulting concentration of family property was large enough to be partitioned in the years 1232 to 1238; the senior line also recovered the lands of the junior line (Hapsburg-Laufenburg) when it died out in 1408.

The Hapsburgs' first appearance in European politics took place with the election of Count Rudolph IV of Hapsburg as King Rudolph I (1273). This was the beginning of an almost continuous association between the family and the Reich —in the process the Hapsburgs provided the Holy Roman Empire with its rulers from 1273 to 1308 and again from 1438 to its dissolution in 1806 (with the brief interim reign of the Bavarian Wittelsbach, Charles VII, 1742–45). Rudolph hoped to restore the central authority in Germany by establishing his Hausmacht (family holdings) in southeastern Germany, where he managed to acquire the Babenberg inheritance, chiefly the duchies of Austria and Styria, for his sons Albert and Rudolph (1278–82), thus establishing a family interest in the Danubian area that was to endure for more than 600 years.

This sudden accretion of power and property was quickly followed by a less glorious chapter in the family's history; Rudolph's heir Albert I was murdered by his nephew John the Parricide in 1308 and the imperial title passed out of the family for nearly a century and a half. In this period of retrenchment the family devoted itself to its Austrian lands and to establishing the customary ties of relationship with the dynasties of eastern Europe.

This growing involvement in the east led to a weakening of the family influence in the area of its origin; the Swiss cantons began to assert themselves against their Hapsburg overlords and in the battles of Morgarten (1315) and Sempach (1386) revealed the superiority of their peasant army over the feudal levies of the Hapsburgs. The reign of Duke Rudolph IV, the "Founder" (1358–65), was a brief yet promising exception to the general pattern of decline; he rounded out the Austrian possessions (Carinthia and Carniola had been acquired in this period) by the addition of the Tyrol. In 1364 he signed a treaty of mutual succession with his father-in-law, Charles IV of Luxembourg, which provided that the dynasty that outlived the other would inherit fill its territories—an anticipation of the situation at the end of 1437, when the last Luxembourg emperor, Sigismund, was succeded as king of Bohemia and of Hungary by Albert of Austria, Albert II, as Holy Roman emperor.

The Imperial Hapsburgs. The outlines of the Hapsburg monarchy in central Europe were already discernible, but Albert's death in 1439 in the struggle against the Turks and the establishment of George Podiebrad in Bohemia and Matthias Corvinus in Hungary postponed the real foundation of this state until 1527. Emperor Frederick III (1440–93) found it almost impossible to carry out his political program, but he gave an imperishable expression of his faith in the family's historic mission in the motto A.E.I.O.U., variously rendered as Austria erit in orbe ultimo ("Austria will exist at the end of the world") and Alles erdreich ist österreich unterthan ("The whole Earth is subject to Austria"); he also gave imperial sanction to the spurious Privilegium maius that the equally hopeful Rudolph IV had used to support a claim to the archducal title and to precedence over the other members of the empire's college of princes. This faith in the future was more than justified by the marriage of Frederick's son Maximilian to Mary, the heiress of Charles the Bold of Burgundy in 1477; family interests gravitated then to dynastic and political involvement in western Europe.

Hapsburg-Valois Rivalry. The house of Austria and Burgundy inherited the traditional Burgundian rivalry with the French Valois, and the life and death struggle of the House of Austria and France remained a basic component of European politics until the middle of the 18th century. Maximilian's innumerable, inimitable plans—he dreamed of creating Austrian and Burgundian kingdoms, of becoming pope, of securing for his family the crowns of Bohemia and Hungary, of reforming and reinvigorating the Holy Roman Empire—often remained plans. Yet at his death (1519) his grandson, Charles, fell heir to the largest single inheritance in European history: Castile and Aragon with the Spanish possessions (in Italy and overseas), the Burgundian lands (chiefly the Netherlands), and the Hapsburg lands in Austria now reunited after a partition that had lasted from 1379 to 1496. The relatively unimportant feudal dynasty in southwestern Germany had progressed to the point where it could lay claim to being the first world empire and becoming possibly a "universal monarchy" in Europe.

At this zenith of Hapsburg power the magnitude and the diversity of the problems facing Emperor Charles V and his brother Ferdinand I made another partition of the family properties mandatory: Charles retained Spain, the colonies, and the Netherlands, while Ferdinand received the Austrian lands. (The death of Louis II of Hungary at Mohács in 1526 brought about the union of Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary in Ferdinand's person.) Both men remained loyal to the universalistic conceptions of empire and Church (they could be described as old family traditions at this point) and sought to prevent the spread of the Reformation and the rise of newer political and social forces on the European scene. The common family background and the close personal ties, reinforced by excessive intermarriage, did not obscure the fact that there were two houses of Austria rather than one, as dynastic interests often came into conflict with policies dominated by more localized perspectives: the rivalry with France, the affairs of the empire, the war with the Turks, and concessions to the various estates of a measure of religious freedom.

While Hapsburg Spain was widely regarded as the most powerful state in Europe in the reign of philip ii (1556–98), the German Hapsburgs played a secondary role in European affairs; there was a tripartite division of the Austrian lands in 1564 and a protracted period of dissension in the family councils on the ways and means of dealing with the Protestants and the estates, which often represented their interests. Emperor Rudolph II (1576–1612) revealed so little appetite for governing that members of the family combined against him in the Treaty of Vienna (1606) and supported his brother Matthias, who it was hoped would provide more effective leadership. This unattractive quarrel of brothers (Bruderzwist ) ended with the triumph of Matthias and a renewed sense of self-reliance in the various estates, which profiled from these Hapsburg differences.

The Thirty Years' War. Matthias was succeeded in 1619 by ferdinand ii (1619–37), the head of the Hapsburg Styrian line and an exponent of the Counter Reformation and confessional absolutism. The beginning of the thirty years' war was followed by the defeat of the Bohemian estates and the "Winter King" of Bohemia, Frederick V of the Palatinate, at the battle of the White Mountain (1620). It was a decisive victory for the preservation of the Hapsburg dynasty and Roman Catholicism in the Danubian lands, but although possible at that regional level, it could not be repeated for Germany as a whole, for there the territorial princes (Catholic as well as Protestant) and Germany's powerful neighbors, especially Sweden and France, resisted the effort to improve the position of the emperor and the Catholic Church. In the Peace of westphalia (1648) the German Hapsburgs had to recognize the existence of a constitutional compromise between the emperor and the princes, the Catholic and the Protestant communions.

The Ottoman Empire and Spanish Succession. Disappointed, the German Hapsburgs turned a large portion of their attention to the war against the Turks and to securing for themselves the inheritance of their childless relative, Charles II of Spain. In the reign of Leopold I (1658–1705) the Turks were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna (1683) and forced to relinquish their hold on Hungary (1699). A heroic period of Austrian arms under the great leadership of Prince Eugene of Savoy assured the Austrian monarchy a place as one of the great powers of Europe.

These striking successes of the Althabsburger (the old-Hapsburgs) were paralleled by the decline of the Spanish monarchy evident in the figures of Philip III (1598–1621), Philip IV (1621–65), and Charles II (1665–1700). In the last decades of the 17th century Europe waited expectantly for the death of the childless Charles: both Leopold I and Louis XIV of France laid claim to the Spanish Hapsburg possessions. His death in 1700 and his will, which bequeathed his possessions intact to Louis XIV's grandson Philip, brought the expected Austrian response in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13). European statesmen were not at all anxious to see the Spanish dominions joined to the power of France or of Austria, and when Archduke Charles, the Austrian claimant in Spain, succeeded his brother Joseph I in 1711, the maritime powers pressed for a compromise. In the peace settlement Philip received Spain and the colonies; Charles VI received the Spanish Netherlands, Lombardy, and the Two Sicilies.

The Austrian Succession. The family that had once been so blessed with male heirs now found there was only one surviving male Hapsburg—Emperor Charles VI. In the Pragmatic Sanction (1713) he took steps to ensure the succession of male and female heirs by primogeniture to a single and undivided bloc of family possessions. This family law that was also a decisive moment in the constitutional development of the Austrian monarchy received the official recognition of most of the European states. It did not, however, prevent Frederick II of Prussia from invading and occupying Silesia on the death of Charles VI. His daughter maria theresa found herself required now to fight for the continued existence of the Hapsburg state in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48). She had married Francis Stephen of Lorraine in 1736, and their numerous progeny would be formally reckoned members of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine. Francis had exchanged Lorraine for the Grand Duchy of Tuscany (1738), thus establishing a separate Hapsburg line in Tuscany (1738–1859); a similar arrangement would be made for Modena (Hapsburg-Este).

Austria survived the war weakened by the loss of Silesia but strong in Maria Theresa's determination to revamp its government and to bring its society into line with the more advanced states of western and central Europe. Her reign and those of her two sons, joseph ii (1780–90) and Leopold II (1790–92), demonstrated a Hapsburg willingness to carry out basic reforms whether in the pragmatic and moderate manner of the mother or the more radical and precipitate manner of Joseph II.

Austria took a vigorous part in the Seven Years' War (1756–63), and though it failed to win back Silesia, its interests had to be reckoned with in the three later partitions of Poland. The Bukovina was also annexed in 1775 without resistance on the part of the Turks. On the eve of the French Revolution the Austrian monarchy could lay justifiable claim to an enlightened public policy and to Hapsburgs who possessed impressive credentials as "enlightened despots."

The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. Reform from above, no matter how well intentioned and judicious, could not long delay the confrontation with the notions of nationality and democracy that were powerful moving forces in the revolution. Leopold I and his son Francis II could do little to save the life of their sister and aunt, Marie Antoinette, but Austrians did fight valiantly to contain the Revolution and napoleon's brilliant effort to establish French hegemony in Europe.

In the face of Napoleon's coronation in 1804, Francis II established the Austrian Empire; a combination of French pressure and his own insensitivity to the old imperial traditions of the family led to his formal abdication of the imperial crown (1806). If Francis marked a new decline in the quality of Hapsburg emperors, his gifted brothers, Archduke Charles, the victor at Aspern, Archduke John, one of the most genuinely popular Hapsburg princes of modern times, and Archduke Joseph, who created an impressive reputation as Palatine of Hungary, revealed that there was a creative response to the needs of the dynasty and its subject peoples.

For a few years (1805–09) Austria appealed to the forces of local patriotism and incipient nationalism in preparing for a showdown with Napoleon; its defeat at his hands in 1809 brought Klemens von Metternich to power and with him a more conservative position in foreign and internal affairs. In 1810 Francis I consented to the marriage of his daughter Maria Louisa to Napoleon; in 1814 in rather different circumstances he played host to one of Europe's most brilliant political and social gatherings, the Congress of Vienna. Austria then became synonymous with the preservation of the status quo in Europe, the suppression of the national aspirations of its peoples, and the uninspired bureaucratization of society. Such policy or lack of it could not long delay the confrontation between the new and the old, the principle of national self-determination and the principle of dynastic rule.

The Revolutions of 1848. In the revolutionary year of 1848 the peoples of the Austrian Empire experienced the exhilaration of political freedom and national renaissance; in the first months of that year the future of Hapsburg Austria seemed bleak indeed with the general expectation that it would dissolve into its component parts. The Germans, the Magyars, the Italians, and the Slavs looked to their own interests rather than to that of the preservation of the dynasty and the state machine. But the system was still viable enough to defeat the forces of revolution by sheer force of military power and with the support of the army of Czar nicholas i. In the wake of counterrevolution there was a renewed will to recapture Austria's unity, strength, and prestige, and this was the program with which the young Francis Joseph ascended the throne in December of 1848.

Absolutism, even with a modernizing air about it, was a costly business: the huge army and bureaucracy that it required were burdens on an economy already backward by comparison with western Europe and northern Germany. Austria discovered that her pretensions as a great power were more often than not at variance with the facts; in 1859 she was defeated by France and in 1866 by Prussia and thus effectively removed from any further participation in German and Italian affairs. Francis Joseph was then forced to come to terms with the Hungarians and to concede them a large measure of independence in the compromise (Ausgleich ) of 1867.

The Balkans and World War I. Deprived of their historic base in Germany and their age-old interest in Italian affairs, the Hapsburgs hoped to discover yet another "Austrian mission" in the Balkans, but this led almost inevitably to a collision with nascent South Slav nationalism and Russian interests in the area. Austrian statesmen and military leaders professed to believe that the status of Austrian relations with Serbia constituted the life and death questions for the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The desire to preserve Austrian prestige as a great power at all costs and to eliminate the source of South Slav irredentism (a disruptive force in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which had been annexed in 1908) helped to bring about the war that would seal the fate of the Austrian monarchy; it was the assassination of a Hapsburg, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the heir apparent at Sarajevo (June 28, 1914) that touched off World War I.

Growing political difficulties were accompanied by troubling signs in the dynasty itself whose members found it more difficult to imitate the selfless devotion to duty of Emperor Francis Joseph. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian had allowed himself to become involved in the Mexican adventure of Emperor napoleon iii of France and with the substantial French support was proclaimed Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico (1864). When the French troops were withdrawn, he made a quixotic effort to save his throne only to be defeated and captured by the forces of Benito Juárez; he was executed at Querétaro on June 19, 1867. Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life at Mayerling (1889); his mother, the Empress Elizabeth, was the victim of an assassin in 1898. A number of archdukes abandoned their titles to seek anonymity as simple citizens abroad. Even Francis Ferdinand, a most militant supporter of the dynastic traditions, married morganatically.

Francis Joseph in his old age came to be the last surviving link between the peoples, an almost ageless symbol of the political anachronism over which he ruled; his death in November of 1916 removed the system's last important prop. The excessive strain of the war had already weakened it beyond repair, and when his youthful successor, Charles I, sought to secure a peace that would permit the monarchy to continue on more democratic and federalistic lines it was already too late; the people were no longer satisfied with a minimal program of that kind. The defeat of the Central Powers in the autumn of 1918 produced an almost instantaneous fragmentation of the Hapsburg Hausmacht; the imperial government in its last days was simply charged with the peaceful transfer of its remaining power to the succession states. On Nov. 11, 1918, Charles I renounced any further participation in state affairs and thus brought the long history of the dynasty's involvement in Danubia to a close. In 1920 he attempted on two occasions to prolong that involvement, in this case in Hungary, but pressures from Hungary's neighbors and the lack of real enthusiasm in the country precluded his success. He was then removed to a more remote place of exile (he had originally gone to Switzerland) in the Madeira Islands, where he died in 1922. Dr. Otto Habsburg-Lothringen, Charles' eldest son, applied to return permanently to Austria as a private citizen, but he was denied by the Austrian government (1965). In 1981 his son and heir, Karl von Habsburg (1961–) became a resident of Salzburg. Memories, pleasant and unpleasant, of Hapsburg rule continue to excite lively political controversy in modern Austria.

The Hapsburgs and the Catholic Church. By the 19th century the Hapsburgs had acquired the reputation of being the most Catholic of all European reigning houses. The historical tie with the triumphs of the counter reformation had left an indelible impression on the European consciousness, and as if to give their own expression to it a special form of Hapsburg piety had evolved, the Pietas Austriaca, in which family traditions clustered about the devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the Holy Cross, and the Immaculate Conception. The presence of members of the dynasty at the annual Corpus Christi procession in Vienna testified to the vitality even in the 20th century of such family traditions. But unquestioned piety and filial loyalty to the pope were usually combined with a refusal to make concessions in disputes with the papacy and to regard its requests as unwarranted interventions of the Roman Curia. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries Habsburg policy often dominated religious affairs, a tendency that reached its zenith in josephinism. The Hapsburgs had inherited a conception of state intervention in religious affairs from the Hohenstaufens, and this played a continuing role in their policy. The Catholic Church undoubtedly owed its survival in Danubia and other parts of Europe to the Hapsburgs, but their great zeal in the cause of Catholic Christianity was not without its unfortunate consequences for the inner life of the Church—all too often the Church was regarded as the spiritual arm of dynastic policy.

The Hapsburg Legacy. In their more than 600 years at the center of European affairs the Hapsburgs had revealed more than political gifts and an instinct for survival; they were often generous patrons of the arts and in the process left imperishable monuments to their unique sense of mission and to the greatness of the artists who worked for them. The palace as the center of a dynastic cult took Hapsburg form in the Escorial and Vienna's Hofburg; the character of a number of European cities— Vienna, Innsbruck, and Prague—owed much to Hapsburg builders. Rudolph II was perhaps the most famed of Hapsburg art collectors, but others were quite as active, and the family collections form the core of the great art museums of Madrid and Vienna. The grandeur of the dynasty attracted the musical genius of the classical period of Viennese music, while the portraits of individual members by Dürer, Titian, and Velásquez are a priceless source for the understanding of the family's character and its role in European culture.

Every family eventually acquires its own tone, a set of characteristic traits physical as well as psychic, and the Hapsburgs were no exception. The most obvious and famous of these was the pronounced "Hapsburg lip" that appeared in the course of the 15th century and attained to classic proportions in the physiognomies of the last generations of the original Hapsburg line. There were other qualities, too: a love of music, a passion for hunting, a gift of languages easily acquired that assisted them in the family business of ruling so many different peoples, and a predisposition to mildness (Clementia Austriaca ). Because a Hapsburg ruler had such a compelling sense of the grace of God that had established his family in such a position of authority he tended to be excessively scrupulous in making decisions and in weighing their moral implications; this provided the family with a reputation for lethargy and procrastination. Since the Holy Roman Empire had been virtually a family monopoly for so many centuries, other dynasties seemed to be recent arrivals even when their claim to recognition was beyond doubt. The Hapsburgs had often followed in the wake of other dynastic achievements and had often been most prominent for their ability to husband their resources and to allow intermarriage to take the place of creative political progams—Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (Other nations make war, you, happy Austria, marry). But there had been great visionaries in the family—Rudolph IV, Maximilian I, Joseph II—and individuals whose fame rested on their mastery of practical politics—Rudolph I, Ferdinand I, and Maria Theresa. Though it often seemed that they had been motivated by dynastic interest rather than ideals, the very quest for power had produced as its legitimate consequence a number of political communities in various parts of Europe, and European nations would find shelter and security under Hapsburg rule. The recent tragic experience of the peoples who once composed the most outstanding of these Hapsburg creations, the Austrian monarchy of Danubia, has encouraged observers to take a more nuanced and positive view of the truly unique Hapsburg achievement.

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[w. b. slottman]