In Combating the Hydra, Stephan Steiner considers the nature of the violent coercive power wielded by the Habsburg Empire against its own subjects and explores “the conditions, possibilities, and limits” (xvi) of these subjects’ resistance. The focus here is on the early modern era, particularly the eighteenth century, an age that Steiner argues was “a formative period to our contemporary attitudes to, and struggles with, violence,” (xv) and that thus provides the roots of some modern atrocities. The “Hydra” in the book’s title is Steiner’s metaphor for the many forms of state violence employed by early modern Habsburg officials. He notes that these included not simply bloody massacres or executions but also, and serving as a focus of this book, state-organized coercive acts such as forced migration or deportation, political and religious persecution, forced labor, and slavery. As to the people oppressed, brutalized, and exiled by their own rulers, the book’s essays emphasize three main categories: social misfits or outcasts (such as prostitutes), Protestant religious dissenters, and the Roma.
The volume consists of multiple essays (most previously published but now revised) organized into four parts. Part I includes three essays on deportation and coerced labor within the Habsburg Empire. Here Steiner demonstrates that despite having no overseas territories, the empire’s rulers nevertheless embraced the eighteenth-century fashion of forcefully deporting unwanted populations. Unable to send such undesirables abroad, Habsburg officials instead organized internal deportations that moved targeted populations to settlements or labor camps on the very peripheries of the empire—especially Transylvania and the newly Habsburg-controlled Banat of Temeswar (Timişoara). This then consisted of a form of internal colonialism and wielding of state power and oppression rarely addressed in the histories of the empire. One of the most interesting essays in this section concerns the Temeswarer Wasserschub, an organized resettlement scheme established by Maria Theresa and lasting from 1744 to 1768 under the direction of a specialized antivice agency titled the Committee of Chastity (Keuschheitskommission). Designed to cleanse Vienna of riffraff, vagrants, and especially “idle women” (such as prostitutes or homeless women), the Wasserschub included regular collections of such undesirables, who were then shipped down the Danube to forced labor camps in the Banat of Temeswar.
Part II considers Habsburg aggression toward Protestant religious dissenters within the empire in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter 4, for example, examines how an attempt during the mid-eighteenth century by Habsburg officials within the duchy of Carinthia to crack down on increasingly bold Protestant nonconformists (or “underground Protestants” as Steiner terms them) led to riots and revolts. This then resulted in a brutal response by Habsburg authorities, including the forced deportation (“transmigration”) of the dissidents to Transylvania. Yet, as Steiner shows, this persecution also garnered a fascinating, multifaceted set of responses from the Protestants themselves, such as appeals for help to the international Protestant diplomatic community. He also explores these dissidents’ agency elsewhere in this section, including (in chapter 5) a close study of a collection of archival letters written by dislocated or transmigrated farmers; and (in chapter 6) a discussion of efforts to foster religious toleration and irenicism in the imperial capital of Vienna during the reign of Charles VI.
In Part III, Steiner offers four thought-provoking essays that consider the Romani people, who, Steiner notes, are not only “extremely under-researched,” but also “arguably the most radical outsiders in the early modern Habsburg empire” (xviii). Based on extensive archival sources, including the complete records of an early eighteenth-century Romani trial, Steiner examines how this community experienced instances of state control and violence, and he explores the repercussions of their treatment as internal enemies, the use of public “warning signs” designed to discourage their travel or presence, and the Romani people’s varied strategies of resistance. Also extremely interesting is an essay (chapter 10) that illuminates the nature of the Romani people’s enslavement in the principality of Moldavia and offers the first close examination of an almost unknown late eighteenth-century official abolition movement in Bukovina—a portion of Moldavian territory conquered by Habsburg troops in 1774.
In this section and elsewhere in the volume, Steiner consistently uses the common English term for the Romani people that is not preferred by many Romani people themselves and is now generally accepted in government and academic circles as pejorative. He offers an explanation and justification for this, which is provided in the glossary and referenced in an endnote offered with the first use of the term in each chapter. Though he admits the common term is “problematic” and was historically “used with pejorative or exoticizing intent,” he argues that using an alternate “politically correct” term such as Roma or Romani would not only be anachronistic but “would bring an air of human rights, equality, and citizenship into constellations that in fact were inherently exclusive, and more often than not relentless and brutal” (xxii). Whether or not one finds such an argument convincing, avoiding the pejorative term might have helped broaden the audience for Steiner’s valuable and innovative research into the brutality of the state oppression suffered by the Romani people in the early modern Habsburg Empire.
The book’s final section, Part IV, is a change of pace, offering a transcription of a conversation between Steiner and the Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg that considers some of the themes raised in the rest of the book, including the use of microhistorical methodology, the joy of archival research, the importance of historical memory, and the significance of studying marginal populations as independent actors. Indeed, a particular strength of this book is how Steiner, throughout all the essays, emphasizes the agency of the persecuted and marginalized, highlighting their efforts to resist or defend themselves from the long arm of Habsburg state power. Steiner also uses his excellent trove of source materials to elevate the individual voices and experiences of nonelites, women, and minorities, and to downplay the high politics found in most histories of the Habsburg Empire. Thus, although Vienna and the imperial court are present in this volume, most of the essays instead maintain a welcome geographic focus on the seldom-addressed, peripheral areas of the empire.
This is a fascinating work of deep, archival-based scholarship that expands our understanding of the Habsburg Empire and its people, and that provides readers with a great deal of new and often unexpected detail about the Habsburg use of state violence. The essays work together well but could easily be separated and assigned individually to students. One hopes that the author’s fruitful use of these sources will also inspire other early modern historians to explore further the rich and often under-used material that lies within the archives of Eastern Europe.
