In Vienna’s Imperial Palace, the former seat of the Habsburg dynasty, a fresco above the library entrance spells out a mysterious acrostic: AEIOU. Even today its meaning is obscure. Most interpret it as a Latin or German phrase: either Austria Est Imperare Orbi Universae or Alles Erdreich ist Österreich untertan. Both mean the same thing: Austria is to rule the world.
The Habsburgs were the first to whom that phrase “the empire on which the sun never sets” was applied. At various times their domains included Austria and Hungary, Spain and Bohemia, Burgundy and Belgium, Italy and Latin America. These comprised numerous ethnic groups, cultures, and languages, each of whom was united in the personage of the Emperor.
Their legal and political systems were also separate. Each time a monarch acceded to the throne, a series of coronations would be required to ratify his power. In Vienna he became the Archduke of Austria (a title analogous to King). Until 1530, the Pope was required to crown him as Holy Roman Emperor after being confirmed by vote of the Electoral College of the Imperial Diet. And in the Rákos Plain near Pest, all the noblemen in the land, having set up an executioner’s block as a warning, would come with a long list of grievances; only after protracted negotiations would they finally swear loyalty to him as King of Hungary.
The family’s inauspicious beginnings were actually in 10th century Switzerland. Legend held that Radbot, one of the first Habsburg counts, was out hunting one day when he lost his favourite hawk. “Searching for it, he came by chance on a rocky outcrop… an ideal site for a stronghold, Radbot named the fort that he built there the Habichtsburg [Hawk’s Castle]”, from which the name “Habsburg” is derived. (14) Radbot’s demesne was located at the very bottom of the Duchy of Swabia. His wealth derived from tolls levied on bridges in the lush Aargau tableland, which sat at the confluence of several then-navigable rivers and overland trade routes.
Because of shrewd political allegiances and manoeuvring, the Habsburgs successfully positioned themselves as the best candidate for Holy Roman Emperor during a period of instability known as the Long Interregnum. They mobilised the rest of princes against their chief rival, Ottokar of Bohemia, to secure the Babenberg Inheritance—among which the lands of modern Austria—for themselves.
In the old days Austria was a borderland between the Germans and various migrating warrior peoples, such as the Avars and the Hungarians. Under the Babenbergs, it had been elevated to the level of a Duchy. The Babenbergs married into the families of both the Holy Roman and Byzantine empires and founded a series of monasteries, in return for which several generations of monks praised their piety and glory. Literary traditions in the Babenberg lands generously mixed tales from German mythology with episodes from the dynasty’s history.
The Habsburgs drew on these semi-historical accounts as well as popular eschatological traditions to legitimate their newfound hegemony. A chronicle held in the Königsfelden Monastery traces the family’s supposed descent from a family of Roman senators. It also relates the story of another book, supposedly unearthed in Spain, in which the entirety of history until the end times had been written. According to its prophecies, the Habsburgs were destined to become Emperors of the known world.
That one monarch should rule all was not a new idea. Dante Alighieri—better known for his epic poem The Divine Comedy—wrote a treatise in 1312, De Monarchia, in which he defends the temporal authority of the King against the spiritual authority of the Pope. He argued that monarch’s right to rule came directly from God, and that a universal sovereignty was both necessary and desirable so as to realise man’s capacities on earth: “the whole human race is ordered to gain some end… there must, therefore, be one to guide and govern.” (Book I, ch. V)
The promulgation of ancient claims and the arrogation of universal monarchy explained Habsburg rule as something ordained in the fabric of existence. But in terms of Realpolitik, the family owed their success largely to what Rady calls the ‘Forinbras effect.’ In the last scene of Hamlet, as all the characters lie dead on the stage, King Fortinbras of Norway suddenly shows up to claim the throne of Denmark. So the fecund Habsburgs married into numerous other families and simply took over their titles when their bloodlines died out. Such “biological goodluck” won them the thrones of Burgundy, Spain, Hungary, Bohemia, and Portugal. This strategy was encapsulated in the motto Alii bella gerunt, tu felix Austria nube: Let other nations make war; you, o happy Austria, marry.
Habsburg princesses received an education in line with the idea that they should go forth and multiply. Languages came first: German and Latin, but also those of their subjects, and of foreign powers into which they would marry. But Habsburg women were also tough, and many fell into powerful political roles beyond the expectations of their sex, whether as regents, rulers, or governesses:
… the space between the private world of female piety and childbearing was regularly intersected by archduchesses, wives, and widows crossing into the otherwise masculine public world. Their portraits stare down at us — women seated at desks, in confident pose, beside crowns, terrestrial globes, and sometimes paperwork. (217)
While strategic marriages ensured the steady growth of the Habsburg territories, it also weakened their biological stock. Consanguinity (that’s a fancy word for incest) resulted in numerous genetic disorders. In the years 1527 to 1661 the Spanish branch of the family had an infant mortality rate of 80% - four times the average. (94-5) Those who survived to adulthood were often infertile, such as Charles II, whose death in 1700 brought the line to an end. A postmortem revealed “a very small heart, lungs corroded, intestines putrefactive and gangrenous, three large stones in the kidney, a single testicle, black as coal, and his head full of water.” (168) He had a single kidney and testicle each, and his urethra exited on the underside of an undeveloped penis. He likely had Fragile X syndrome, a genetic disorder which (among other things) causes a long, protruding face - the so-called “Habsburg chin.”
Genetic health mattered, for the Habsburg domains were only loosely connected by the blood ties of their royal personages. While the Emperor was the supreme authority in his lands, his powers in practice were constrained by the need to observe the varied customs of each. That only began to change with the spread of the Enlightenment. With the success of science in describing the workings of nature, the belief spread that human affairs might be similarly ordered and regulated. The application of these ideas to governance and administration saw the gradual transformation of the Habsburg realms into a singular state with a coherent political and legal system.
The Empress who set upon this path was Maria Theresa. She was motivated by the belief that her role as monarch was not only ordained by God, but that she was granted it for the express purpose of improving the lives of her subjects. This mixture of utilitarianism and absolutism justified a top-down programme of total regulation, according to which civil servants would be appointed to implement the decrees of the Empress for the interests of society as a whole. Their resulting ‘science of government’ was known as cameralism. It was a dull field of study, mostly concerned with how the state might increase its revenue. Unlike the familiar liberalism of our English political tradition, it was largely unconcerned with constraints on the exercise of power, nor the protection of individual rights against collective decisions.
Maria Theresa’s fiscal reforms had a very compelling urgency: as a woman, her succession was contested, and upon becoming Empress she found herself under attack on all sides. To increase the tax-take, she forced the nobles to ten-year fiscal plans. The diets and other customary forms of government declined in importance as county officials and other appointed magistrates enabled the civil service to bypass them entirely. To obtain fresh soldiers, they drew up lists of men who might be pressed into service. This required a census, and within a few years, “the census takers had extended their interest to house numbering, since there is no point knowing whom you wish to recruit unless you know where to find them.” (188)
For the first time, the will of Empress began to impress itself upon every far corner of the Empire, including far-flung frontier towns like Višegrad in Bosnia. In his epic historical novel Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andric describes how the Bosniaks resist the government’s attempts to conscript them:
Men concealed their ages or gave false information, making the excuse that they were illiterate… Despite all the instructions and threats of the authorities, the tablets with the house numbers were nailed upside down or hidden away in places where they were invisible. Or else they immediately whitewashed their houses and, as if by chance, the house number was whitewashed too.” (ch. 13)
What Maria Theresa began her son Joseph II finished. He abolished serfdom, abolished noble privileges, and implemented a land tax. He closed religious houses and seized the assets of the church. He made marriage a civil matter, rather than a religious one. And he decreed a policy of toleration, allowing some religious minorities, including the Jews, to openly practice their religion and take important jobs in the bureaucracy and in the trades; Cameralists had long argued against their exclusion on the grounds that it merely excluded people from economically productive jobs.
The civil service had become increasingly important for enacting the government’s decisions. It was also a prestigious career path. It led to the development of a new kind of imperial citizenship, one that did not require any particular language or ethnicity or birthright, but asked only for adherence to the norms of the state. The Empire thus retained its multilingual and multicultural character: in 1775, Maria Theresa promised free primary school education to all children in their mother tongue, and later, after the reforms of 1867, if 20% or more of a conscript regiment spoke a particular language, it became one of that regiment’s official languages.
Joseph II believed wholeheartedly in the Enlightenment project. Even after he passed away, his ideas lived on in the tens of thousands of civil servants who carried out the Emperor’s decisions. With modern literacy, communications, and organisation, those decisions became more effective than ever: with a stroke of the pen, the Emperor could change the way society functioned. The growing middle-class began to call for constraints on his powers. This was an indispensable demographic: unlike the nobles of old, they could not simply be defeated in battle and done away with. The Empire needed their brains and pens to keep everything running. Even the scornful Franz Josef (ruler from 1848 to 1916) could not ignore them. After a disastrous war in Italy, the bankers simply refused him more loans. Anselm Rothschild put it to him straight: “No constitution, no money.”
Constitutional reform turned the Empire into something resembling a modern state. But Franz Josef’s intransigence regarding the new political reality was the “incubator for nationalism”, which spread among the urban, educated middle-class: “Before [the constitution of 1848], nationalism had been just one bond among many… Now it became the predominant force, its potency enhanced by an oppressive regime bent on centralization and uniformity.” (279) The bureaucracy, with its universalist ideals, should have been a bulwark against nationalism. It instead became a nationalist battleground. Administrative institutions were duplicated and divided across national lines. Local officials promoted the interests of and diverted funds to their own causes. The parliaments were also perpetually deadlocked, which only fed Franz Josef’s misgivings that liberal democracy was an unworkable “middle-class disease.” Retaining the ability to appoint the government, he ruled largely by executive decree, summoning parliament only to give retrospective sanction to decisions that had already been made.
Intelligent patriots recognised the need for further reform, but there was no consensus on how. Hungary, which retained the ability to veto any constitutional amendments, refused to elevate any other national communities to the same level as themselves, realising that they only stood to lose influence in any new arrangement. In the absence of a functioning democracy, and without a unifying language, ethnicity, or culture, fidelity to the Emperor had to stand-in for national identity. Franz Josef’s astounding longevity made this fiction all the more believable:
By 1870, his hair was receding and his moustache greying. Over the next decade, his whiskers whitened, and he went completely bald. Except for the spreading lines around his eyes, he looked almost the same for the next thirty-five years, thus conveying a sense of his own timelessness. (288)
Franz Josef was the symbol of unity, a personification of the Fatherland and of an ideal which stretched back before the beginnings of the Habsburgs in the Swiss Aargau to the spiritual origin of all worldly power. Everything is contained in that mysterious acrostic. Austria is to rule the world. Its position, at the entrance to the Court Library, presents the Habsburgs as they wanted to be seen: as patrons of learning, committed to the progressive comprehension of a reality in which their majesty was foreordained.
The Habsburgs thus sponsored numerous scientific expeditions and undertakings. In 1857 the Novara set sail on a 92,000 kilometre journey that went as far afield as Antarctica and New Zealand (whence the name Franz Josef Glacier). Its scientific findings “ran to twenty-one volumes and took seventeen years to complete,” (293) and its experiments yielded the first distillation of pure cocaine, then administered as a medicine. When they weren’t getting high on their own supply, the Habsburgs made their own numerous botanical specimens available in public gardens, the beauty of which was a symbol of their own splendour. Finally, in 1887, Prince Rudolf was commissioned with the publication of a 24-volume encyclopaedia of the Habsburg realms. It ran to more than 12,000 pages, 4,500 illustrations, and 430 contributions. Over 16 years they wrote about everything, from their local geography, flora, fauna, ethnography, culture, and history. Local pride was thus co-opted as a marker of belonging to the Empire; though one cynic, commenting on the Emperor’s 1908 jubilee, remarked that the profusion of different peoples speaking a cacophony of languages only underscored the fact that the Empire contained vast, mutually unintelligible divisions.
It remains one of the great historiographical debates. Did the various nationalities and languages contained within the Habsburg realms sow the seeds of its downfall? Or would it have kept trudging along had it not been for the outbreak of World War I?
When the heir-presumptive, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a secret society of Serbian revolutionaries, public sympathy rallied to the Emperor. Franz Josef signed the declaration of war, wearily remarking: “I can’t do anything other.” He did so with the assurance of Field Marshall Conrad von Hötzendorf, who believed Serbia could be defeated in a matter of days, before their Russian allies had time to fully mobilise.
As it turned out, the army was in bad shape. Decades of under-funding left it ill-prepared and poorly-equipped. “Only one in twenty adult males had received any military instructions before 1914… The trains that conveyed men to the front travelled no faster than bicycles.” (316) Halfway through mobilization, Conrad tried to redeploy the Austrian 2nd Army to the Russian front. Since they were already engaged with the Serbians, they could not fully commit; split in two, they suffered a crushing defeat at the Battle of Cer, in which the outnumbered Serbs scored the first victory for the Entente.
To encourage the war effort, the government tapped into reservoirs of nationalism, allowing units to march under their own banners. Nationalist fervour among the conscripts did not inspire great acts of bravery; on the contrary, the ill-disciplined soldiers ran amok, “slaughtering civilians and burning villages.” Hundreds of prisoners were executed during the battle of Cer, alongside the rape and murder of women and children.
The death of Franz Josef in 1916 only made things worse. With the unifying figure of the nation gone, the political order broke down. Martial law had already greatly curbed civil liberties, handing direct control of much of the country over to the army; now there was confusion on the home-front. The nation’s economy was kept afloat by German loans, and sections of the Austro-Hungarian army came under control of the German war administration. As rations dwindled, provincial governments began to appropriate military supplies to feed their own people.
There is no day on which the Habsburg Empire ceased to exist. The nation withered bit by bit, until one day the war was over, and when the smoke had cleared the people hardly realised it was gone. Chunks of the country had been promised to Romania and Italy to get them onto the side of the Entente, and the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon officially dismembered it, distributing its territories among the various nation-states which rose in its aftermath.
The subsequent reputation of Austria-Hungary has been that of a despotic regime, oppressive of its peoples and preventing their full expression and development. That is only partly true. While never democratic, it always affirmed and cherished its various languages, cultures, and customs (though with an admittedly more blemished record on race and religion). At the heart of the Empire was an idea. It took the form of a preordained social hierarchy, at the top of which sat the Habsburgs. Born rulers, they acknowledged a spiritual obligation to care for their subjects. They promoted the arts and the learning and the wellbeing of all in the fashion of enlightened despots. But fabulous, learnéd royals weren’t enough: once the Empire became inextricably connected to the outcome of the war, it could not survive the death of the personalities who ruled it. And when the institutions of state had ceased to work, the common bond linking its peoples was too weak to be worth resuscitating.