Separation and Symbiosis: The Habsburg Monarchy and the Empire in the Seventeenth Century
Thomas Winkelbauer
Looking at the decades around 1700, historians of Central Europe have detected a growing separation between the imperial policy (Reichspolitik) of the emperors, on the one hand, and the politics of the court of Vienna, being primarily directed by the interests of the Austrian Monarchy, i.e. the rising European great power Austria, on the other hand. After the Peace of Westphalia, it was said, a gradual evolution away from the Holy Roman Empire, or a gradual ‘outgrowth’ of Austria from the Reich, can be observed.1 No doubt, this observation is right, but Austria’s ‘outgrowth’ or evolution away from the Empire had a long previous history. As Oswald Redlich stated already shortly after World War I, the peace instrument of Osnabrück in this respect only brought a ‘formal legal completion of long existing circumstances’.2 This dichotomy or ambiguity of imperium and monarchia in a way was already present at the birth of the Habsburg Mon- archy. It came into being in 1526 as a ‘monarchical union of corporative states’ (‘monarchische Union von Ständestaaten’),3 and it continued to be a ‘composite monarchy’4 until its very end in 1918. Archduke Ferdinand I,
1 Cf. e.g. Karl Otmar von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806 (4 vols, Stuttgart, 1993–2000); Heinz Duchhardt, Altes Reich und europäische Staatenwelt, 1648–1806 (Munich, 1990); Elisa- beth Kovács, ‘Die “Herausentwicklung Österreichs aus dem Heiligen Römischen Reich” im Reflex der Beziehungen von Kaisertum und Papsttum während des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung. Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II. (2 vols, Vienna, 1985), i. 421–36; Harm Klueting, Das Reich und Österreich, 1648–1740 (Münster, 1999). 2 ‘[. . .] nur einen reichsrechtlich formellen Abschluß längst schon bestehender Verhält- nisse’: Oswald Redlich, Österreichs Großmachtbildung in der Zeit Kaiser Leopolds I. (Gotha, 1921), 2; identical with id., Weltmacht des Barock. Österreich in der Zeit Kaiser Leopolds I. (4th edn, Vienna, 1961), 2. 3 Otto Brunner, ‘Das Haus Österreich und die Donaumonarchie’, Südost-Forschungen, 14 (1955), 122–44: ‘Die Monarchie erweist sich als eine monarchische Union ihrer Königre- iche und Länder, die jede für sich Ständestaaten waren.’ Id., Land und Herrschaft. Grund- fragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter ([1939], 5th edn, Baden bei Wien etc., 1965), 447. 4 Cf. e.g. Helmut G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale? Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe’, in Karl Bosl (ed.), Der moderne 168 thomas winkelbauer who after the battle of Mohács via personal union combined the Austrian hereditary lands of the Habsburgs with the lands of the Bohemian and the Hungarian crown into a condominium, was only in 1531 elected King of the Romans, and not proclaimed the ‘chosen Roman emperor’ by the elector of Mainz until 1558. Two decades ago, Robert Bireley called Emperor Ferdinand II, the grandson of Ferdinand I, ‘the founder of the Habsburg Monarchy’. Bireley assessed his ‘long intervention in the Empire’ in the first half of the Thirty Years War as ‘an aberration that distracted him from attention to the Habsburg lands’.5 He summed up his considerations as follows: ‘The Habsburg Monarchy, based on a system of co-operation among dynasty, aristocracy or estates, and Church, assumed this form under Ferdinand II and as a result of his policy. It emerged successfully from the crisis of the 1620s as a European power by 1648. Ferdinand established his inheritance as a unified entity [. . .]; he determined a policy of conciliation towards the estates and nobility which continued to give them a significant role in the Monarchy; and he promoted a policy of confessionalisation that contributed to the Monarchy’s identity and otherwise served its interests. So he more than any other may rightfully be called the founder of the Habsburg Monarchy.’6 Jaroslav Pánek, however, in an examination of the continuities to be found in the political programme of the Austrian branch of the house of Habsburg in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, took the example of the kingdom of Bohemia in the fields of succession to the throne, diet management, public finances and jurisdiction, and came to the conclusion that Emperor Ferdinand II and the authors of the ‘Revised Land Ordinance’ (Verneuerte Landesordnung) for Bohemia (1627) and Moravia (1628) fol- lowed a constitutional and political tradition that went back to the reform endeavours of Ferdinand I. According to Pánek, King Ferdinand and his
Parlamentarismus und seine Grundlagen in der ständischen Repräsentation (Berlin, 1977) 43–86; id., ‘Zusammengesetzte Staaten, Repräsentativversammlungen und der amerikani- sche Unabhängigkeitskrieg’, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 18 (1991), 399–423; J[ohn] H. Elliott, ‘A Europe of Composite Monarchies’, Past & Present, 137 (1992), 48–71. See also Thomas Fröschl (ed.), Föderationsmodelle und Unionsstrukturen. Über Staatenverbindun- gen in der frühen Neuzeit vom 15. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna/Munich, 1994); Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt. Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1999), 44–7. 5 Robert Bireley, ‘Ferdinand II: Founder of the Habsburg Monarchy’, in R(obert) J.W. Evans and T.V. Thomas (ed.), Crown, Church and Estates. Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London, 1991), 226–44, at 230. 6 Ibid., 240.