CROWN, CHURCH AND ESTATES Crown, Church and Estates Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Edited by R. J. W. Evans Lecturer in Modern History Brasenose College, Oxford and
T.V. Thomas Lecturer in Czech and Slovak History School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London
St. Martin's Press New York © School of Slavonic and East European Studies 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1991 978-0-333-48568-2 All rights reserved. For information write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1991
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ISBN 978-1-349-21581-2 ISBN 978-1-349-21579-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21579-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Crown, church, and estates: central European politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries/edited by R. J. W. Evans and T.V. Thomas p. em. Includes index. ISBN 0-312-06019-X 1. Central Europe-Politics and government. I. Evans, Robert John Weston. II. Thomas, T. I. V. DB1047.C76 1991 943- Preface vii List of Abbreviations ix Notes on the Contributors xi Map xiv-xv Introduction xvii R. J. W. Evans 1. The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison 1 Volker Press 2. The Political System and the Intellectual Traditions of the Bohemian Stiindestaat from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century 23 Winfried Eberhard 3. Ferdinand I and the Estates: Between Confrontation and Co-operation, 1521-64 48 Alfred Kohler 4. Protestantism and Defence of Liberties in the Austrian Lands under Ferdinand I 58 Gunther R. Burkert 5. Crown, Estates and the Financing of Defence in Inner Austria, 1500--1630 70 Sergij Vi/fan 6. The Crown and the Diets of Hungary and Transylvania in the Sixteenth Century 80 Laszlo Makkai 7. Princes, Jesuits, and the Origins of Counter-Reforma- tion in the Habsburg Lands 92 Gernot Heiss 8. The Collegium Germanicum Hungaricum in Rome and the Beginning of Counter-Reformation in Hungary 110 Istvan Bitskey v vi Contents 9. Habsburg Absolutism and the Resistance of the Hun garian Estates in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 123 Kalman Benda 10. The Religious Question and the Political System of Bohemia before and after the Battle of the White Mountain 129 Jaroslav Panek 11. Moravia and the Crisis of the Estates' System in the Lands of the Bohemian Crown 149 Josef V alka 12. Estates and the Problem of Resistance in Theory and Practice in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 158 Winfried Schulze 13. Armed Conflict in East-Central Europe: Protestant Noble Opposition and Catholic Royalist Factions, 1604-20 176 Gottfried Schramm 14. The Bohemian Opposition, Poland-Lithuania, and the Outbreak of the Thirty Years War 196 Inge Auerbach 15. Ferdinand II: Founder of the Habsburg Monarchy 226 Robert Bireley 16. The Austrian Nobility, 1600--50: Between Court and Estates 245 Georg Heilingsetzer 17. The Struggle for Protestant Religious Liberty at the 1646-47 Diet in Hungary 261 Katalin Nter 18. Confessions, Freedoms, and the Unity of Poland- Lithuania 269 Antoni M9czak 19. The Contractual Principle and Right of Resistance in the Ukraine and Moldavia 287 Orest Subtelny 20. Epilogue: Central and Western Europe 300 H. G. Koenigsberger Index 311 Preface This volume consists of the revised versions of papers which were originally given at a conference held at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 5-8 January 1988. This conference was among the most international in a series which the School of Slavonic Studies has organised in recent years, bringing together over twenty scholars from Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, the United States and the United Kingdom. The major theme which the conference organisers proposed was the triangular relationship in the period from the advent of the Protestant Reformation to the victory of the Counter-Reformation between the Habsburg Crown, the estates of the Austrian, Bohe mian, and Hungarian lands, and the Church. The conference focused on the crisis which the Reformation caused and its con sequences for the relation between the dynasty, the Church and the nobility in the Habsburg Monarchy. For the purposes of compara tive analysis papers were included on regions outside the Monarchy such as Poland and the Holy Roman Empire. The more specific topics which the conference speakers were asked to address included the nature and workings of the system of Crown and estates; the relations between the Habsburgs and the Church; the character of Habsburg absolutism; the connection between Protes tantism and the defence of noble rights; and the relationship between religion and politics during the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There is a lack of published work in English on all these aspects of a crucial period of European history, even though some dis tinguished exceptions to that generalisation have been published in recent years. This present volume is intended to go some way towards repairing that deficiency in historical writing in English. It cannot, of course, claim to cover the ground comprehensively; the ground is too extensive and the issues too complicated. There is less on the second half of the seventeenth century than the conference organisers originally intended there would be. This volume can claim to provide a survey of the state of current research in the field from leading scholars whose work in many instances is available at best only in German and otherwise only in east-European lan guages. But the editors of this volume hope that it will be of interest Vll viii Preface not only to English-speaking historians of Central Europe. The visiting participants at the conference impressed on the organisers how much they welcomed the conference as an unusual, indeed a unique, opportunity to meet together in one place and discuss their work, and many of the papers incorporate significant new findings. I would like to thank for the success of the conference Professor Michael Branch, Director of the School of Slavonic Studies, for all the assistance he gave the conference organisers, in particular on the financial side; the Austrian Institute in London, the British Acad emy, and the British Council for financial support; Dr R. J. W. Evans, whose advice was indispensable, Dr Laszlo Peter, Dr John Stoye and Professor H. G. Koenigsberger who helped to organise the conference, and also the last for his expert instant summing-up of the whole proceedings at the end of the conference; the transla tors of the conference papers, Petr Charvat, Angela Davies, Catherine Errington, Ursula Reitmaier and Helga Robinson Hammerstein; and last, but not least, the scholars who took part and made the occasion so stimulating and enjoyable. School of Slavonic and East European Studies University of London Trevor Thomas List of Abbreviations AC Archiv cesky cili stare pisemne pamatky ceske a mor avske (37 vols. Prague, 1840--1904) AOG Archiv fur osterreichische Geschichte (earlier Archiv fur die Kunde osterreichischer Geschichtsquellen) AS StA Arhiv Slovenije ( = Archives of Slovenia, Ljubljana), Stanovski Arhiv CCH!CsCH Cesky casopis historicky, 1953-89 Ceskoslovensky casopis historicky FHB Folia Historica Bohemica HHStA Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv ( = part of Austrian State Archives, Vienna) HZ Historische Zeitschrift JGGP6 Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft fur die Geschichte des Prot estantismus in 6sterreich MIOG Mitteilungen des lnstituts fur osterreichische Geschichtsforschung NoLA Niederosterreichisches Landesarchiv ( = Lower Aus trian Provincial Archives, Vienna) SC Snemy ceske od leta 1526 ai po na§i dobu (15 vols. Prague, 1877- ) SUA SM Statni Ustfedni Archiv ( = State Central Archives, Prague), Stani Manipulace TsGADA Tsentralnyi Gosudarstvennyi Archiv Drevnich Aktov ( = Central State Archives for Ancient Documents, Moscow) ZHF Zeitschrift fur historische Forschung ix Notes on the Contributors loge Auerbach is a Lecturer at the University of Marburg, where she teaches central and eastern European history. She has published books and articles on social history, especially on the comparative history of the central and eastern European estates. Kalman Benda is Director of the Raday Collection and Library of the Hungarian Reformed Church, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Historical Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His publications cover many aspects of the history of Hungary in the early modern period, especially the development of representative institutions and the oppositional movements associated with Bocskai, Ferenc Rakoczy II, and the Jacobins of the 1790s. Robert Bireley, S.J. is Professor of History at Loyola University of Chicago. He was educated at Loyola, the Hochschule Sankt Georgen in Frankfurt, and Harvard University. He has published two books and several articles on the Counter-Reformation in Germany and The Thirty Years War. Istvan Bitskey is Professor of Old Hungarian Literature at the Kossuth University in Debrecen. He has published books and articles on the literature of the Hungarian Reformation and Coun ter-Reformation. Gunther Burkert is Lecturer in Austrian History at the University of Graz. He has published on Austrian history, particularly on the history of the estates and the peasantry. Winfried Eberhard is Professor of Medieval History at the Ruhr University of Bochum. He has published on the history of the Bohemian Reformation and on several aspects of late medieval and early modern history. R.J.W. Evans is a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and a University Reader in Modern History. He has published on various aspects of the history of the Habsburg lands from the late sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries, but especially on their cultural and religious history in the early modern period. Georg Heilingsetzer is Archivist at the Upper Austrian Provincial Archive at Linz and Lecturer in Austrian History at the University Xl xii Notes on the Contributors of Vienna. He has published numerous articles on Austrian history and Anglo-Austrian relations. Gernot Heiss is Senior Lecturer in Austrian History at the Univer sity of Vienna. His publications deal with Austrian history, espe cially with education during the early modern period. H.G. Koenigsberger is Emeritus Professor of History at the Univer sity of London, and was educated at Cambridge. He has published books and articles on early modern European history and especially on the history of representative institutions. Alfred Kohler is Reader in Modern History at the University of Vienna. He has published books and articles on German and Austrian history, especially on the Reichstag. Antoni M;:tczak is Professor of Modern History at the University of Warsaw, and was educated at Warsaw and Cambridge. He has published books and articles on economic history, on the history of travel, and on the development of state and clientage structures in the early modern period. Laszlo Makkai was Professor at the Eotvos University in Budapest and the Debrecen Theological College. Educated at Kolozsvar, Budapest and Basel, he published books and articles mainly on medieval and early modern cultural and economic history. Jaroslav Panek is Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. Educated at the Universities of Prague, Ljubljana, and Poitiers, he has published several books and numerous articles on the history of central and south-eastern Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, mainly on Bohemia between the Hussite wars and the revolt of 1618-20. Katalin Peter is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She was educated at the University of Debrecen and has published books and articles on early modern Hungarian history, especially on seventeenth-century politics and culture. Volker Press is Professor of Modern History at the University of Tiibingen. He has published many studies on the social and constitu tional history of the Holy Roman Empire, from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. Notes on the Contributors xiii Gottfried Schramm is Professor of Modern and East European History at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. He has published widely on Polish, Russian and south-east European history. Winfried Schulze is Professor of Modern History at the Ruhr University of Bochum. His publications extend from German and Austrian politics in the sixteenth century and peasant conditions in the early modern period to historiography in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1945. Orest Subtelny is Professor of History and Political Science at York University, Toronto. He received his PhD from Harvard University and has published a number of books and articles on Ukrainian and Russian history. T.V. Thomas teaches Czech and Habsburg history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London. Edu cated at Cambridge and London, he has published articles on Czech and Austrian politics in the late Habsburg period. Josef Valka is Senior Lecturer at the University of Brno. He has published books and articles on the social, economic and cultural history of the Bohemian lands and central Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. Sergij Vilfan is Professor of Legal History at the University of Ljubljana. His books and articles deal with national and compara tive topics in social, economic and legal history. Habsburg Empire in 1660 North Sea EMPIRE FRANCE Boundary of the Empire Habsburg Possessions 100 200 km POLAND UKRAINE WALLACH lA Introduction The conference papers published here afford an international, comparative perspective on key issues in the political development of early modern Central Europe. It is political issues which they squarely address, in our belief that these should assert, or reassert, their central claim to attention. Notable advances have been made in recent decades in economic and social, cultural and spiritual spheres; and of course all those varieties of history have much to say to the historian of politics, by the contribution they make to an understanding of ideology in its widest sense. Yet the evolution of states, of their authority and their institutions, needs also to be considered in its own terms: and here, too, as the present collection may demonstrate, scholars have not been idle. The main focus in what follows are the territorial possessions of the Habsburg emperors, what gradually came to be known as the Austrian or Habsburg Monarchy, in their transition from the age of Reformation to the age of Baroque. The fundamental structure of the book evinces a symbolism which would appeal to the Baroque mind (as well as to the original Caesar!), since it is triply trinitarian: tripartite with respect to geographical area, to theme, and to chronological scheme. First, and most obviously, we have the three broad land-blocks ruled by the dynasty in Central Europe, them selves all ternary in their subdivisions: the Austrian provinces, falling into the separate administrative units of Lower and Upper Austria, Inner Austria, and Further Austria1; the Bohemian Crown, comprising the kingdom of Bohemia proper, the margravate of Moravia, and the German duchies of Silesia and Lusatia; and the Hungarian Crown, torn into three by Turkish occupation from the 1520s, where the Habsburgs as yet controlled only a western strip, and contested the rest with Ottoman sultans and princes of Tran sylvania. Links, parallels and divergences between Austria, Bohemia and Hungary are illuminated by most contributors, though several range more widely, too, while a further trio examine related issues in the history of the German Reich and the Polish Common wealth or Rzeczpospolita. A little more introduction is required to the second, thematic triad: the three authorities of our title, the high medieval duality of secular and ecclesiastical power, mediated and complicated by the late medieval institution of estates, or privileged corporations of the XVll xviii Introduction political nation in each territory. The sovereignty of Habsburg rulers was at first deeply fragmented, separately constituted in the several kingdoms, duchies, counties, and so forth over which they reigned. How, when, and to what purpose did the dynasty seek political unity? The question allows of no straightforward answer: Ferdinand I, for example, while pursuing greater uniformity in government with considerable resolve, nevertheless voluntarily provided for the distribution of his inheritance among three sons after his death. In a sense the very notion of a single Habsburg 'crown' is a construct, covering the reality of a congeries of diverse households, courts and administrations. How then did it operate, physically and struc turally? What sort of nexus bound it together, at the centre and in the regions, through favours, honours, grants, and that whole apparatus of clientage which is so inseparable from the workings of even the most efficient states in the period?2 Moreover, the dynasty's strategies of dominion were all located, throughout the age which concerns us, between the twin poles of a larger identity. On the one hand, the Habsburgs' authority was legitimated by their role as defenders against the Turks. The anti Ottoman stance provided the very raison d' etre for their election in Bohemia and Hungary in 1526, and an important point d' appui in Austria too. Why, therefore, does it seem to have comprised essentially a negative response-as in the 1520s, the 1590s, even the triumphant 1680s-so rarely a forward policy? On the other hand, the Habsburgs' overlapping dignity as emperors in the German Reich, to which the Austrian lands and, in a more shadowy way, Bohemia also owed ultimate allegiance, sat uneasily with their 'Danubian' power-base. While it could enhance dynastic esteem and the scope for international leverage, it tended to distract from the priorities of central control and the building of an apparatus of state. In that case, why did the German theatre continue to generate a more potent rationale and motivation for Habsburg ambitions through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, even-arguably until 1804 and perhaps beyond? What, besides, was the nature of the interplay between those two versions of the Habsburg European mission, the one looking eastward, the other westward, the one belligerent, the other pacificatory? The reader may care, in the light of the contributions here assembled, to ponder these enigmas. We encounter more of them if we turn to consider the churches and their relation to the dynasty. From the 1520s the Reformation made speedy inroads in the Introduction XIX Habsburg lands, helped by Turkish pressure and by much indeci siveness on the part of the authorities who, after all, shared a great deal of the dissatisfaction with the existing state of religion. By mid century incentives for the dynasty to join the Reformation, to revivify the Church under the aegis of the State, to control its personnel and its resources as Protestant princes could, must have been strong. Why did the Habsburgs remain Catholic? Did their position in the Reich demand it? Or their links with Spain? Or their anti-Ottoman posture? Did they cherish the role of the Catholic clergy as public servants, and sense that existing church lands and property, as well as being held in a sacred trust not lightly to be abused by anointed princes, already allowed of considerable secular suasion? Did they associate universal Catholicism with the territorial unity of their whole patrimony? Or, rather, associate it with traditional forms of statehood in individual lands? Historians have surprisingly rarely put such basic questions. Of course, they have often, and properly, identified a spiritual dimen sion, too, in the decisions of rulers, as in the spread of that Reformation to which the rulers were responding. East-Central Europe took few creative initiatives in the great age of religious renewal: Protestants and Catholics there were equally galvanised from outside the area. Ironically, from our point of view, its only distinctive contribution lay in the activities of Anabaptists, Anti trinitarians, Bohemian Brethren and other 'Hussites', that is, of sectarians whose impact on the processes of state-building was small and overwhelmingly negative. Here are further fundamental puzzles, which furnish a starting-point for this book, but which its business is not to engage with directly. Why did Protestantism gain so much ground, but with such poor organisation? What determined its three-way split between Lutherans, Calvinists and sectaries (a question whose ethnic dimension needs more careful comparative analysis than it has yet received)? Why did Catholicism, by contrast, lose so much ground, but retain so much better organisation? It was that organisation which helped the old Church to reassert itself from the late sixteenth century onwards (a reconquest apparently, unlike the varieties of Protestant advance, lacking in any pronounced kinds of ethnic coloration). Catholicism could not have recovered, however, without some profoundly innovative impulses from abroad, especially the work of the Society of Jesus. Several of the essays here may help us evaluate the particular attractiveness of Jesuits in the Central European context. XX Introduction It is the political and ideological aspects of ecclesiastical history with which the present volume will mainly be concerned; and these carry us directly to the third theme announced in our title, since the Catholic Church was everywhere, with the one significant exception of Bohemia (but not of the other provinces in the Crown of St Wenceslas) before the 1620s, the senior estate of the realm. That gave old clerical establishments an important vested interest and scope for some thoroughly worldly manoeuvrings. Yet Protestan tism, despite the fact that its ordained leaders had no such repres entation at the diet (with the partial and idiosyncratic exception of Transylvania), was even more a matter of the estates. The Reforma tion was espoused by nobles and towns throughout the region in order to justify political claims: both to assert corporate privileges against the sovereignty of the crown, and to demand an enhanced share in government. It would prove a two-edged weapon; and Bohemia, where the traditional clerical estate had been eliminated from politics by the Hussites in the early fifteenth century, proves the point most clearly. There we see the correspondingly early development of Utraquism as an ideology of opposition; but we also find the first evidence that internal cleavages within and between estates might be exacerbated in the process. What was the place of estates in government? That is a subject about which it is dangerous to generalise, in the face of patchy evidence and considerable variation from territory to territory. The estates sat as diets, multifarious in form and procedure: this volume considers the performance not only of more familiar quasi-parlia mentary bodies, from the German Reichstag through the Bohemian Snem and Polish Sejm to the Hungarian Orszaggyiiles; but also of little-known equivalents like the Transylvanian diet, which existed almost independent of any formally-constituted estates, or the likewise unicameral Croatian Sabor. No less importantly, the estates operated as administrative, judicial and financial institutions. As such they reached their highest form in the Bohemian Defensors, capable of challenging, and then of unseating, their ruler; but elsewhere too, Verordnete, or representatives chosen to act for the estates in a regular political capacity, exercised crucial functions in the organisation of the state. It is, for instance, frequently a less significant historical fact that diets had the right to approve taxes, than that officials of the estates were empowered to assess and collect them. In any developed form, this involvement of estates-that is, of nobles and (in lesser degree) of burghers, as corporations, not just Introduction xxi as individuals-in the business of government amounted to divided sovereignty: to dominium politicum et regale, or 'dualism', or a Stiindestaat. Could such a structure have been indefinitely sustained in Central Europe? That depended on whether the relation between crown and estates was broadly one of co-operation or of confronta tion. How much overlap existed between 'royal' and 'country' notables? Were the associated systems of clientage centripetal or centrifugal? Would the impact of new struggles, especially the contest within Christendom between confessions and the external challenge to Christendom from the Ottoman Turks, tend to consoli date or to undermine the established balance? These questions lead to the third of our trichotomies: from the static picture drawn so far to the dynamic changes examined by our contributors for the three periods before, during and after the deep crisis of political authority which reached a climax during the first two decades of the seven teenth century. In the first essay, Volker Press introduces Central Europe's German dimension: the Reich in its relation to the power of the Habsburgs and its myriad interconnections with the lands of their direct rule. The Holy Roman Empire was the senior secular polity in Christendom, but also the locus classicus of dualism; and the Habsburgs, as its elective rulers, faced the German estates at the Reichstag and through the rest of its institutional structure. The strengths and weaknesses of the dynasty's resulting position are carefully assessed by Professor Press, as are the parallels and contrasts between German and Austrian developments. The politi cal, institutional and social role of the imperial court, if anything, grew during the period; but as the Habsburgs' grip over the Empire as a whole gradually loosened, so they sought compensation in their own patrimony. There it was Bohemia, the subject of Win fried Eberhard's extended analysis, which presented the fullest paradigm of estates' opposition, precociously advanced by the triumph of Hussite nobles and towns over the crown and the Church. Yet that triumph remained incomplete, gravely marred by confessional as well as political divisions among the victors, and not devoid of paradox: in 1526 it was radical Utraquists rather than Catholics who favoured the election of Ferdinand I. The first trial of strength between Habsburg king and Bohemian estates saw the latter discountenanced (ironically through being drawn into a German quarrel), but not yet abased. Meanwhile tensions in the Erblande, the Austrian provinces proper, mounted more slowly, as shorter essays by Alfred Kohler, xxii Introduction Gunther R. Burkert and Sergij Vi/fan show. In fact Austrians had lost the first chance of tighter control over their prince by mishand ling the opportunity presented by Ferdinand's succession after 1519 (as Bohemians and Hungarians were themselves soon to do). Politics now drifted into stalemate, with the Habsburgs pressing the estates for money and men to contain the Turkish menace, while the estates, rapidly won to a Protestantism at once sincere and also ideological, sought guarantees of religious liberties in compensation. Each side looked to outflank the other by appealing to a general diet (Generallandtag or Ausschusslandtag), attended by representat ives of all the Austrian lands, and perhaps of Bohemia and Hungary too. Dr Kohler and Dr Burkert help towards a reappraisal of this neglected institution, a potential variant of the French Etats Gene raux or Netherlandish States General, which-evincing enough estates' solidarity to check Ferdinand, yet enough loyalty to the crown to frustrate outright resistance-proved an abortive experi ment by the 1550s. In individual territories a different balance might be struck; Professor Vilfan's important conclusion for the Inner Austrian lands is that the needs of defence, however embarrassing to the prince in the short term, subtly represented a long-run disadvantage to the estates, who had to pay for the economic and social rewards offered by the Military Frontier with growing restraints on their political, and hence also religious, freedom. Chief victim of the Turkish wars, of course, was Hungary. Laszlo Makkai's survey provides a helpful orientation to her complex political situation in the sixteenth century, a subject still little treated in English-language sources. 3 In Habsburg Hungary, too, religious schism tended, at least over the decades immediately after the battle of Mohacs, to exacerbate the impasse between crown and estates. The dynasty maintained an extensive military and a tenuous civil ascendancy by confirming and amplifying the privileges of the nobility and turning a blind eye to the spread of several competing brands of Protestantism. Patriots often identified foreign rule as the chief threat to Hungarian liberties; yet the evolution of the eastern portion of the kingdom, loosely known as 'Transylvania', 4 should cause us to qualify that judgement. Although sixteenth-century Transylvania was governed by native princes from the families of Zapolyai (Szapolyai) and Bathory, whose tenure, moreover, depended on election by the diet, the material resources at the disposal of the ruler, and the absence of any entrenched estates organisation, or of religious confrontation between estates and Introduction XXlll government, favoured the development of a precocious absolutism. That such absolutism, which would be extended under the seven teenth-century princes, went hand in hand with the most generous religious toleration in Europe, is a peculiarity of early modern statehood in our area which awaits further examination in an international context. Around the mid-sixteenth century, then, a rough equilibrium obtained between crown, Church, and estates in the Habsburg lands: or rather, for 'Church' read 'churches', since it was conces sions to Protestantism which oiled the mechanisms of compromise between the dynasty and the local political elites. By the same token, the directest threat to that comparative stability would come from any revival of the old Church. Precisely the years after 1550, years of the later sessions of the Council of Trent and an inter national campaign by the reinvigorated Papacy, brought the glim merings of Catholic recovery in Central Europe. Its agency was first and foremost the Jesuits, as Gernot Heiss and Istvan Bitskey demonstrate. Their activities, directed by Canisius, in Vienna and Prague soon spread to Hungary. Overwhelmingly foreign in inspira tion (and considerably so in its early personnel), untrammelled by local understandings reached under pressure of circumstances, the order worked ceaselessly on members of the ruling house to convert a sometimes nominal Roman allegiance into firm backing for the Counter-Reformation. It achieved encouraging results without ser ious resistance in the Alpine provinces: in the Tyrol under Arch duke Ferdinand, then in Inner Austria under Charles and Ferdinand. By the end of the century militant Catholics stood poised for a much riskier challenge, to the bastions of the estates in Hungary and Bohemia. One prong of their attack was a Hungary prostrated since 1593 by renewed and still more devastating war with the Turks. Yet given the weakness of the existing royal position there, the presence of a still more-or-less independent-albeit bruised and battered-Tran sylvania, and the military preparedness of the country's society at large, Hungarian Protestants could reply immediately and unequi vocally to this reckless campaign. Kalman Benda sketches a general context for Hungarian rebellion, in which the rising of Bocskai in 1604-6 forms merely the most successful episode. With the resulting temporary collapse of Habsburg authority in Hungary, attention turned to Bohemia, seat of the whole imperial court and administra tion under Rudolf II. Bohemia's political system, the subject of xxiv Introduction Jaroslav Pfmek's pioneering and extended contribution, was already undergoing a gradual shift in favour of the crown and the Roman Church. Her Protestant estates had not recovered all the ground lost under Ferdinand I, and a small but weighty faction, numbering old Czech as well as new and immigrant families in its ranks, now openly sided with dynastic and Catholic interests against the patrio tic opposition. Moreover, as Josef Valka indicates in his introduc tion to a seriously neglected aspect of the issue, the sister province of Moravia, though akin to Bohemia in many ways, exhibited remarkably little community of purpose with her overbearing neigh bour. (Still less was that true of the Silesian and Lusatian duchies.) The absence of any general diet for the lands of the Bohemian Crown, or of any other consistent co-operation between them, regularly frustrated their effective mobilisation of grievance. For the moment, however, the resistance of the estates in Bohemia proved as effective as in Hungary. It fed on a domestic struggle within the dynasty, the so-called Bruderzwist between the Emperor Rudolf II and his brother Matthias: the self-destructive and ultimately impenetrable calculations of the former matched by the self-assertive and ultimately jejune ambitions of the latter. 5 This allowed the Bohemian Snem to make an advantageous peace with Rudolf by the famous Letter of Majesty of 1609, with which the Silesians and Lusatians also associated themselves, and then to depose him two years later, while Moravia had (characteristically) already joined Hungary and Austria in Matthias's camp. There were thus immediate triggers of confrontation in the play of personality, as well as underlying structures of confrontation in the tensions of dualism, refracted by growing confessional animosity. At the same time a third set of factors nurtured the resolve of Central European estates to take up arms against their ruler: the contemporary theories of resistance examined in Winfried Schulze's broad survey. In the Habsburg territories, as elsewhere when Protestant churches grew up under Catholic monarchs, such theories had percolated into the consciousness of political elites by the end of the sixteenth century, both from the Lutheran tradition of constitutional opposi tion in Germany and from the tyrannicide (monarchomach) litera ture of French Calvinists. They represented a great opportunity for the principled assertion of estates' rights, as the rising leader of the whole movement, Georg Erasmus Tschernembl, most clearly recog nised. Yet they also introduced a fundamental dilemma, stressed by Professor Schulze, since resistance to established authority might Introduction XXV also legitimate revolts of the lower orders against their lords, a threat of which nobles in the region, not least Tschernembl himself, were acutely conscious. The age which staked out claims to new religious liberty in Central Europe was equally an age which withdrew much of the socio-economic liberty of the labouring classes. Thus the bid for power by the Central European estates, which between 1604 and 1620 came near to excluding the Austrian Habsburgs from some or all of their realms and installing Protestan tism as the dominant religion there, did not build on a substantial degree of popular support, even if the material resentments of Bocskai's freebooting Hajducks gave it much initial impetus. Its strength lay in a remarkable degree of international solidarity. At the heart of the analysis in this book are two important essays on the confederal politics of the anti-Habsburg camp, by Gottfried Schramm and Inge Auerbach. The former examines the rapid spread of an estates alliance through Hungary, Bohemia and Austria after 1606, and its parallels and contacts with the simultaneous rokosz, or rebellion, of Zebrzydowski in Poland. (Parallels and contacts with the Evangelical Union just being founded in the Reich cry out for similar treatment. 6) A series of compromises only temporarily settled this first phase of the clash over privileges and religion. When in 1618 Protestant leaders in Prague were driven into further violence by the provocation of the new king, Ferdinand II, they could reactivate existing bonds of association to build up that grand Confederation on which they had already set their hopes. Dr Auerbach deploys extensive new documentation and places new emphases in her meticulous account of these events and her assessment of their implications for the concept of estates' sov ereignty. By 1620 the network embraced all the lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas, Lower and Upper Austria, Hungary and Tran sylvania, and the German Union-in the person of its leader, the Elector Palatine, just chosen to be King of Bohemia-with feelers in the direction of the Poles. Within a further year, this edifice lay in ruins. The disastrous defeat on the White Mountain reveals the failure, not so much of Bohemia's own estates, but of the whole confederal movement, to mobilise resources effectively. It suffered from political divisions (especially nobles versus towns) and from confessional ones: its leaders, mostly Calvinists, dedicated to the doctrine of deliverance from tyranny, could not carry all their co-religionists, let alone the xxvi Introduction bulk of the Lutherans, at least of the Austrian ones, with their philosophy of 'suffering obedience' (leidender Gehorsam). Its pre ferred monarchs were loath to play the auxiliary role assigned to them: Frederick of the Palatinate proved a wilful autocrat in Prague-Dr Auerbach is particularly illuminating on that; Bethlen Gabor declined the invitation from the Hungarian diet to operate as ruler over a kind of Hungarian Rzeczpospolita. 1 Meanwhile Poland responded to appeals for support, not from the rebels, but from the Habsburgs: 'Jagiellonian Europe' turned out to survive for the mutual benefit rather of kings than of their subjects. Besides, as Professor Schramm stresses, the different estates oppositions were always ill-coordinated one with another. Each looked to its own constitutional guarantees, and they showed themselves collectively less capable of achieving a broader perspective even than the faction-ridden Habsburg government. By any criterion 1620 affords a turning-point in the political history of all the Habsburg lands, much more clearly identifiable as a terminus for the crisis of authority than any year (1555? 1576? 1600? 1604? 1606?) which might be proposed as witnessing its inception. Now Catholic and dynastic programmes came together with formidable impetus under Ferdinand II, whom the Emperor's distinguished American interpreter, Robert Bireley, does not hesi tate to describe here as the 'real founder' of the Monarchy. In the light of recent discussions of 'confessionalisation' or 'confessional absolutism', especially in Germany, 8 it is now easier for us to see how, for Ferdinand, conviction went hand in hand with statecraft in a policy of forcible Counter-Reformation, since the Church had so much to offer the prince as an ideological and organisational prop to his sovereignty. At the same time, Professor Bireley adds the twist that Ferdinand could quite sincerely view himself as heading a government which, in marrying morality with advantage, was the very antithesis of Machiavellian. By the mid-seventeenth century, with Protestant churches eliminated or in speedy retreat throughout the area, the secular balance of power had also shifted decisively. Yet no full transformation took place. The political guidelines applied after 1620 had been available earlier, while Ferdinand was then already busy promoting his own vision of conformity in his home dominions of Inner Austria. Even in Bohemia, as Dr Panek shows, the strategies of the 'Habsburg model' had been laid down, as an option, by the time of the opposition's triumphs under the crumbling Rudolfine regime. Arguably they were only hardened in Introduction xxvii adversity. By the same token, dynastic government did not suddenly acquire any new mechanisms or ideology of control. The estates, if suitably acquiescent, retained their status, and the monarchy remained no more disposed to search for allies among the unprivileged than they had been themselves. Georg Heilingsetzer marshals much evidence from the Austrian duchies to indicate how the political culture of the nobility there changed only gradually and partially to accommodate new realities during the first half of the seventeenth century. Eila Hassenpflug-Elzholz, who was unable to accept an invitation to the Conference, has demonstrated by a major case-study how much of the influence, along with some of the patriotism, of the Bohemian estates survived the purges and emigra tion after the White Mountain.9 In Hungary, where the Habsburgs still stood on the defensive and Ferdinand II's success was limited to repairing the damage which his governmental position had suffered in the recent past, the constitu tion remained-for the present-inviolate, and Counter-Reforma tion a largely unofficial activity. Confessional factors did not necessarily even dominate the political process, as Katalin Peter's vignette of the 1647 Diet shows. There, we find, not only did many Catholic deputies support a Protestant claim for religious parity, whether out of patriotism, or out of animosity against magnates and clerics; so did King Ferdinand III. The episode serves to reveal how the dynasty's authority in Hungary continued to be circumscribed, both by the international situation-with Transylvania a party to the delicate negotiations in Westphalia, as well as a possible accessory to any revival of Turkish aggression-and by native traditions of coexistence. The Habsburgs still had to work within the structures of the historic estates' commonwealth; any attempt even to bypass, let alone to dismantle them, would still be resisted tooth and nail. Those structures had some striking equivalents in the Polish Rzeczpospolita, and it seemed appropriate to include in this collec tion some modest attention to broader comparisons with Poland, over and above the parallels elucidated by Professor Schramm and Dr Auerbach. 10 Antoni M(lczak draws both on received views and on his own revisionist insights to depict the early seventeenth century Commonwealth as a polity whose remarkable inherited cohesiveness rested essentially on the social harmony of the privi leged szlachta estate. Religion never seriously menaced it; of cardinal importance for our purposes, of course, is the fact that Protestantism was always a minority affair, and that confessional xxviii Introduction toleration could be secured organically within the existing frame work of constitutional safeguards. The threat came from two interlocking developments: the rise of the magnates, which gradu ally deprived the crown of its control over patronage; and the demand of the Ukraine for full integration into the political and social establishment of the kingdom, which quite suddenly threw Poland into turmoil in the very year, 1648, when the Habsburg realms began to return to normality. 11 The eventual outcome in Poland must appear vastly different. An increasingly hidebound Catholicism came to operate as the ideologi cal vehicle, not of the monarchy, but of the estates, and the country sank into an oligarchic torpor by succumbing to the dominance of her oriental neighbour, Russia, just when the Habsburgs-with that excess of good fortune which sometimes rewards the totally unprepared-were chasing theirs, Turkey, out of the Danubian basin and confirming Austria's credentials as a European power. Yet much remains to be learned about the circumstances of this divergence. Meanwhile a further comparative topic is adumbrated here by Orest Subtelny, who investigates, as an offshoot of his recent analytical survey of oppositional movements in the area c. 1700, 12 how far resistance theory could be grafted on to the quite different political and religious traditions of the continent's true autocracies, the Muscovite and Ottoman Empires. The initiatives in the Ukraine and Moldavia, however muted and belated, cast further light on the overall contemporary contest about the limits of sovereignty and the construction of the state, pursued between rulers and their chief ecclesiastical and temporal vassals from the Rhine to the Dnieper. This brief exposition may have done little more than suggest the complexity of the issues considered in the following pages. It certainly should not anticipate the conclusions of H. G. Koenigs berger, who in his Epilogue provides a European context for the evolution of dominium politicum et regale, under challenge from expansive monarchies and religious change. One of Professor Koenigsberger's findings, however, deserves to be underlined: the uniqueness, in its scope and ambitions, of the confederal movement in the Habsburg lands. Nowhere else on the continent was such a broad alliance of local elites assembled to defy crowned authority. Moreover, as several authors assert here, the confederate idea, far from just masking reactionary provincial self-interest, displayed some markedly progressive features: the provision of genuine Introduction xxix Generallandtage involving all participant territories, constitutional parity, toleration, administrative and military reform. We should judge its potential from the powers of organisation and dynamism which it displayed in its early seventeenth-century heyday, not, as normally happens, from the effete nobiliar republicanism of ancien regime Poland later. After all, the Poles would not have become so isolated, introverted and vulnerable, had the estates of the Habsburg territories succeeded in building their own Rzeczpospolita. In the event Habsburg authority alone welded together those territories; no general diet or equivalent ever came into being. Localisms embodied in estates' claims were, however, mostly sub sumed within the Austrian state, not destroyed by it. Much the same can be said of the religious experience examined here: the Catholic Church retained its own particularisms; the Hussite legacy lived on; so did the Hungarian Reformation in its several facets. The outcome was a partial consolidation under dynastic aegis. The power of central government tended to increase, yet it left much of the existing political and social structure intact, like the mortared vertical capping on a horizontal dry stone wall. Barely perceptibly, recent European power-blocs have managed to assert themselves as explanatory factors in history. A division into West and East has been frequently invoked, already for the early modern period, largely on socio-economic grounds. Its stereo types, however crude, are influential: the more progressive, individ ualist, bourgeois, innovative, nationally homogeneous, frequently Protestant West tends to be set against a neo-feudal, backward, serf-based Catholic or Orthodox, despotic or anarchic East. This is therefore the time to reaffirm the distinctiveness of a 'Central Europe' or 'East-Central Europe' decisively affected by the pro cesses of Austrian state-building. The aristocratic-clerical common wealth presided over by the Habsburgs took its own road towards modernity: the roots of that Sonderweg form the subject of the present book. R.J. W. Evans Notes 1. In this book, as in the normal parlance of historians, Lower and Upper Austria are the two divisions of Austria along the Danube, centred on Vienna and Linz respectively, and also known as Austria xxx Introduction below and above the [River] Enns; Inner Austria comprises the southerly provinces of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola; Further Aus tria, the Tyrol, Vorarlberg and the Habsburgs' Swabian territories. There was also, confusingly, a sixteenth-century administrative arrangement whereby 'Lower Austria' included all lands in the first two groups and 'Upper Austria' those in the last. Cf. pp. 48-9 below. 2. For the role of the court and its structures of patronage, see also the proceedings of two other recent conferences where particular atten tion was paid to German Central Europe: Klientelsysteme im Europa der Fruhen Neuzeit, ed. A.Mjlczak with E.Miiller-Luckner (Munich, 1988), and Princes, Patronage and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, ed.R.Asch (Oxford, 1990). 3. As accessible introductions see, for military issues: From Hunyadi to Rak6czi. War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary, ed. J.M.Bak and B.M.Kinlly (New York, 1982); for economic issues: East-Central Europe in Transition, from the Four teenth to the Seventeenth Century, ed. A.M;.tczak et a/. (Cambridge/ Paris, 1985), and V.Zimanyi, Economy and Society in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Hungary, 1526-1650 (Budapest, 1987); for reli gious issues: R.J.W.Evans, 'Calvinism in East Central Europe: Hungary and her Neighbours, 1540----1700', in International Calvi nism, 154I-1715, ed. M.Prestwich (Oxford, 1985), 167-96. 4. It is important to underline, as Professor Makkai points out, that 'Transylvania' was no clearly-defined or historic political entity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Not only did its borders fluctuate continually, and extend well beyond those of the former voivodate of Transylvania; but the country drew on the inheritance of medieval Hungary as a whole, which its political leadership, like the Habsburgs, continued to invoke. 5. For a recent introductory reappraisal of the aims of Rudolf's policy see R.J.W.Evans, 'Rudolf II: Prag und Europa urn 1600' in Prag urn I600. Kunst und Kultur am Hofe Rudolfs II. (Freren, 1988) 27-37. The activities and intentions of Matthias, whose importance is stressed by Professor Schramm, await a thorough modern investigation. 6. For an up-to-date introduction to the Union and its existing litera ture, see G.Parker et a/., The Thirty Years' War (London, 1984) 24 ff.' 284 f. 7. The complicated relationship between Transylvania and Hungary in the time of Bethlen is depicted most recently in Erdely tortenete, ed. B.Kopeczi eta/. (3 vols., Budapest, 1986) ii.656 ff. 8. Cf. E. W.Zeeden, Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegen reformation und katholischer Reform (Stuttgart, 1985); H.Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise: Deutschland, 1517-1648 (Berlin, 1988); and the titles cited below, p. 109, nn.42-3. 9. E.Hassenpftug-Elzholz, Bohmen und die bohmischen Stiinde in der Zeit des beginnenden Zentralismus. Eine Strukturanalyse der bohmischen Adelsnation urn die Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1982). Cf. R.J.W.Evans, 'The Habsburg Monarchy and Bohemia, 1526-1848', in Early Modern State Building: Intention and Reality, ed. M.Greengrass (London, 1991). Introduction xxxi 10. Further general information on Poland in East Central Europe in Transition, and in A Republic of Nobles: Studies in Polish History to 1864, ed. J.K.Fedorowicz (Cambridge, 1982). Cf. A. Mficzak's new survey of European government and society in the early modern period, with especial reference to Poland: Rz(IdZ(ICY i rz(Jdzeni. Wtladza i spotleczeflstwo w Europie wcz~snonowuiytnej (Warsaw, 1986). 11. There are stimulating recent approaches in English in F.E.Sysyn, Between Poland and the Ukraine. The Dilemma of Adam Kysil, 1600- 53 (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), and in R.I. Frost, '1nitium Calamitatis Regni'? John Casimir and Monarchical Power in Poland-Lithuania, 1648--68', European History Quarterly, xvi (1986) 181-207. 12. O.Subtelny, Domination of Eastern Europe. Native Nobilities and Foreign Absolutism, 1500-1715 (Kingston/Montreal, 1986).