More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Pillars of Hercules, in some traditions seen as the point where he pushed the two shores of the Mediterranean apart to form the Straits of Gibraltar. In another tradition Hercules actually builds two enormous
ceiling of Klosterneuburg in the huge stump of Charles VI’s partially built palace outside Vienna, abandoned on Charles’ death in 1740. As a teenager he had hopes of being King of Spain and nearly inherited much of his earlier namesake’s empire,
thought-experiment – and a very unenjoyable one – I have been trying lately is to imagine what might have happened in the mind of the Emperor Charles VI as he woke up each morning. This may just be a sign of the madness which is creeping in while trying to keep this book under control, but it is really worth pursuing. All hereditary rulers face the same blood-freezing problem: of being inescapably and for every moment of each day both the key political actor and the symbolic
yesterday’s cock-ups waving at him again and the coming day’s cruelly guessable. Did sleep provide any real respite – were the Emperor’s dreams
We therefore know relatively little about him and he looms very small in the public imagination compared to his father Leopold or his daughter Maria Theresa. And yet, as long as some of the numbing detail is missed out, his life, almost
lived stretched out on a rack of fiascos, is a remarkable one.
King Carlos II, the last Spanish Habsburg. This figure, both
Philip IV getting older and older and ever more haggard. Philip had to face the death of nine children by two marriages, leaving two daughters and the severely handicapped infant Carlos. The two daughters married Louis XIV and Leopold I. The former, Maria Theresa, had two offspring who died as children, but crucially also had one son who survived – Louis. The
devout princess from far-off Düsseldorf and a notably fertile family. She had a long life and successfully restocked the dynasty. But Leopold’s own
the young Louis XIV and young Leopold I had realized that without an agreement war on a cosmic scale could result. The two monarchs had married the two surviving sisters of Carlos II just to keep their hand in, and in conditions of the strictest secrecy agreed that on Carlos’s surely imminent death Leopold would receive Spain, America and northern Italy and Louis the Spanish Netherlands, Franche-Comté, Navarre, southern Italy and the Spanish bases in north Africa. The plan was both an interesting measure of how relatively unimportant America was still felt to be at this point and a mad vision
...more
clever compromise to Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Philip IV via Leopold’s daughter. But we need to move on quickly before wearying genealogical tables are dragged out
jaded and exhausted Louis and Leopold to initiate what proved to be the War of the Spanish Succession, the most brutal and wide-ranging conflict experienced by Europe since the Thirty Years War. Leopold’s army came close to disaster but in 1704, at the great Anglo-Habsburg
Charles, Leopold I’s younger son, who began this section, was the Habsburg candidate for the Spanish throne in opposition to Louis’s new candidate, his grandson Philippe of Anjou. Louis, in a spirit of haggard recklessness, announced that Philippe would
Leopold more frugally announced that he wished Charles only have the current Spanish domains (which meant he would be supported militarily by a badly frightened Britain, Holland and Portugal) – even though this was a lie and a
a son the other branch would get the whole lot, creating an Austro-Spanish superpower, a further souped-up version of Charles V’s old empire. Charles, aged eighteen and now rebranded as Carlos III, arrived in Lisbon in 1705, at the head of an Anglo-Imperial-Portuguese army. Philippe of Anjou,
Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, who had succeeded as Emperor on the death of Leopold in 1705. At
Charles was boosted by his marriage in Barcelona to the tough Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, a Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, and been pushed on Charles by her formidable grandfather Duke Anton Ulrich, who readers of Germania may remember for his enthusiasm for paintings of nude women dying under oddly orgasmic circumstances.
The only good thing to come out of his experiences was the re-establishment of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna in a lovely new building. But religiose maundering was the order of the day: the French ambassador worked out irritably that in the eight days between Palm Sunday
If you want to represent the control, ownership and mastery of books, then the Court Library in Vienna or the monastic library at Melk are two of the world’s greatest buildings. If you want to represent the control, ownership and mastery of horses, then the Spanish Riding School in Vienna has the same status.
Göttweig, it is clear that decay has set in. The Abbey Church
painting of Babel which makes it look like a high-end holiday-camp, another of the Last Supper which has the air of a gala
obscurantism
dukes came to hold their land from the King of Bohemia so after the 1526 catastrophe at the Battle of Mohács they owed allegiance to the Habsburg family. Over the following century the dukes’ families died out and one by one the territories reverted to direct Habsburg rule. Some chunks went elsewhere – Crossen to Brandenburg (later Prussia) and Zator and Auschwitz were linked to the Polish
In the centre of the town today a shop displays a very beautiful Austro-Hungarian map from about 1910 showing the town whole, bound together across the river at its heart by
shot at hieroglyphs. In what I hope will be permanently kept as a reminder
that of Charles’s elder brother, the short-lived Emperor Joseph I. Joseph in his short reign was a startling and inspiring figure – hard-drinking, reckless, adoring warfare, sexually chaotic: it is hard to imagine a less Habsburg Habsburg. He didn’t even have the giant chin. While he had been impatiently waiting for his father
cheerful-blacksmith, birds-whistling-in-the-forest, Snow White atmosphere they
Emperor Sigismund, abusing his title as King of Hungary, had mortgaged them in 1412 to the King of Poland in return for seven tonnes of silver (an interesting indication of the resources then available in Poland) to allow him to fight some futile war with Venice. The money
Maria Theresa eventually marched in without bothering with repayments and three years later her rule was confirmed in the First Partition of Poland and the Zips towns became part of the Kingdom of Hungary again, maintaining their somnolent oddness in the
and handed by the Polish
king Casimir the Great
personal motto (‘Ich dien’) being picked up by the Prince of Wales, who has used it ever since.
The Polish kings were too preoccupied both by the Ottoman Empire and the increasing menace from Russia to be concerned about Silesia; and the Brandenburg rulers to the north were a classic Holy Roman Empire joke-shop outfit: easily the most financially feeble and geographically incoherent of the Electors. In the later seventeenth century the Brandenburg
Charles VI floundered around trying to get the rulers of Europe to support his daughter’s accession, there was one of those traditional discussions
old Prussian documents to show the possible illegality of Habsburg rule over Silesia. As soon as he heard the news of Charles’s death, the very young new Prussian king, Frederick II, saw that here was a chance to grab a major piece of land. This decision was to shape a generation.
But in 1740 it was the true centre of Europe and for the young Frederick II and the even younger Maria Theresa it was a fight to the death.
Oh no – you think – he is typing rubbish about tofu to put off confirmation of the awful truth: that he is about to foist on us the feared Habsburg monarchy sea-mammal analogy.
Maria Theresa’s lands are that krill-loving but increasingly incoherent behemoth and people like Frederick the Great and the Prince-Elector Charles Albert are toothed whales. Such an assumption would be unfair – I had
The Habsburgs were vulnerable to invasion from almost every angle. And even the destruction of one opponent would reveal another behind it: most famously, the more they weakened the Poles and Ottomans, the closer they got
to the Russians.
Indeed, after the eight grinding years of the War of the Austrian Succession, the British did not even bother to tell Maria Theresa that they had come to terms. Meanwhile the Habsburgs still lived in their very
Italy she faced the machinations of the peculiarly single-minded and obtuse Elizabeth Farnese, the Spanish queen who was determined to get her sons Italian possessions to rule.
Duchy of Savoy, Maria Theresa ended up holding on to the parts of Italy squeezed between Savoy and Venice, but giving up Parma to Elizabeth
is impossible to exaggerate just how little Maria Theresa understood her position initially and how much
mouton sublime in her portraits, but this is totally misleading.
lands. The newly
crowned Frederick II of Prussia
Duchy of Auschwitz, to the north of Teschen, was owned by Maria Theresa separately, snatched from the Polish crown in 1772. It is hard to work
out what impact the loss of Silesia had on the Habsburgs.
the mortal threat came from Charles Albert, the Elector of Bavaria. As a woman, Maria Theresa legally could not become Emperor.
