Thirty years ago, R. J. W. Evans, in the preface to his influential work, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, outlined what he saw as needed in the study of this complex subject. The three themes to which he pointed and then addressed in the 450 packed pages that followed were: “a consistent account of the Central European Counter Reformation,” “a balanced view of the Monarchy as a whole,” and “an understanding of intellectual evolution from the Renaissance to the Baroque.”Footnote 1 Over the last three decades, numerous historians have taken Evans's lead and contributed to a deeper and more variegated image of the histories of the lands of the Central European Habsburgs. Pieces by five of these historians comprise the forum under discussion here.
The works of these authors illustrate well how rich Evans's suggested themes were and continue to be. Rona Johnston Gordon takes on the Counter Reformation in her study of the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in “Austria below the Enns.” The other four authors take on aspects of Evans's second theme, a theme that included the study of “interaction between regions and central government.”Footnote 2 Michael Chisholm looks closely at just who the “most honorable” families of Tirol were in 1567, according to a report of the Tirolean government. Regina Pörtner discusses examples from Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Upper Styria in her study of “the apparent revival of confessional absolutism” (which was actually, according to Pörtner, more a strategy of maximizing resources in a period of crisis) under the empress-queen Maria Theresa.
Graeme Murdock and William O'Reilly combine attention to the broad reaches of the Habsburgs' territories' rulers and inhabitants with some aspects of Evans's third theme, that of intellectual developments. Murdock mines a case study to discuss two of Evans's interests: Hungary and international Calvinism. In so doing, Murdock analyzes print sources, illustrations, and even a nineteenth-century monument and twenty-first-century commemorative ceremonies. In his piece on the Habsburg archduke, claimant-king, and then emperor Charles, O'Reilly breaks the geographic boundaries laid down by Evans and incorporates the Habsburgs' Iberian and American territories—or at least claims over them—into the story of early modern Habsburg governance. In so doing, O'Reilly, like Murdock, reaches into the world of the imagination, seeking evidence of imperial intentions in architecture, poetry, and court ritual.
Evans chose to concentrate on the 150 years from the mid sixteenth century to around 1700. One characteristic of the pieces discussed here is that they, similar to some of Evans's later work, stretch beyond the 1700 boundary and well into the eighteenth century. Significantly, they cover their two centuries, from the 1560s to the 1770s, rather unevenly. There is almost a century missing between Johnston Gordon's 1580s and Murdock's 1670s. Although this may be due to chance, the omission of the period immediately before, during, and after the Thirty Years' War can also be seen as a reflection of another aspect of Evans's approach in the 1970s. In the preface to Making, Evans argued that “I have written little about wars and armies, diplomacy and foreign relations” because these themes had been written about already and because “social and intellectual fields appear to offer a larger and more coherent set of explanations.”Footnote 3 With some significant qualifications, the pieces under discussion here follow this path.
As part of the analysis of “the Monarchy as a whole,” historians have dedicated a significant amount of attention to the intermediary powers in the Habsburgs' various lands, particularly the estates. These were one element of the triad of political powers discussed at the 1988 School of Slavonic Studies conference, the papers of which Evans edited with T. V. Thomas.Footnote 4 More recently, the roles of these estates were discussed at a Vienna conference in 2006. This conference, similar to many of the contributions in this forum, pushed the chronological boundary up, this time into the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 In his piece here, M. A. Chisholm chooses to take a bit of a different tack. He looks at the leading families of Tirol at the time of the accession of Archduke Ferdinand instead of at the famous estates of that complicated county and its affiliated prince-bishoprics.Footnote 6
Chisholm's methodology is similar to the one employed by Evans in his influential chapter in Making about the developments in Hungary. (See Part Two: “The Centre and the Regions,” Chapter 7: “Hungary: limited rejection.”) In his preface, Evans had argued that “the consolidation of the Habsburg state rested essentially on a series of bilateral agreements between the rulers and their mightier subjects.”Footnote 7 In the chapter on Hungary, he went on to state that there was a “hidden compromise,” a “community of interest . . . between dynasty, aristocracy and Catholic Church.”Footnote 8 Thirty or forty families, Evans estimated, came to dominate political affairs in the kingdom; and there were only ten families in the group's “inner circle.”
Decades later Chisholm discovered a report in the Tirol Provincial Archive in Innsbruck in which twenty-four families were listed as the “most eminent and distinguished families of the land.” Following the paths marked out by prosoprographers before him, Chisholm lists and briefly describes these families and the roles they played in the semiautonomous government of Tirol. One facet of early modern Tirolean history, which Evans had pointed to in his earlier work, was that Tirol “displayed extreme localism, even parochialism, with little contact between the north and the south of the province.”Footnote 9 Chisholm's research helps to explain why. Almost all of the leading families of the territory based their power on lordship rights tied to lands south of the Brenner Pass. The evidence presented also reveals, however, that these notables played significant roles in the Innsbruck administration and at the courts of the Habsburg archduchesses and archdukes who resided there.
The date of Archduke Ferdinand's entry into rule in Tirol, January 1567, also should be put into the context of that winter. This was just three months after news of the Ottoman cessation of offensive operations had reached court. The Habsburgs as rulers of Tirol could present themselves as the bulwarks against the Ottomans.Footnote 10 Lords with their holdings south of the Brenner may have felt more exposed and more in need of ties to the Habsburg court at this particular moment.
In her piece on the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the Habsburgs' holdings around Vienna and the Danube (“Austria below the Enns”) in the early 1580s, Rona Johnston Gordon touches on many issues concerning identity, space, noble influence, and of course time. Based to a large extent on correspondence now found in the diocesan archive in Vienna between various religious and secular rulers, Johnston Gordon does not explicitly refer to Evans's work, nor does she adopt explicity prosopographical or political approaches similar to those of some of her co-contributors. Her concern is to highlight aspects of the cultural turmoil that ensued in a territory in which the authority on which time itself was based was contested.
This period of contestation was an important one for the later development of religious affairs in the Danubian archduchies. Dowager Empress Maria had left to return home to Spain in the fall of 1581 following the death of her daughter Queen Anna of that kingdom. Maria's children, brother, and brothers-in-law were reorganizing the administration of the dynasty's properties across Europe.Footnote 11 The emperor, Rudolf II, was settling into his seat in Prague; his brother Matthias was returning from his unsuccessful venture as Statthalter of the Netherlands and would settle in Linz; and their sister, the dowager queen of France, Elizabeth, and brother Archduke Ernst were moving to establish themselves firmly in Vienna. This was a period Evans once characterized as when the Catholics' “resolve seems to have hardened” in Bohemia.Footnote 12 A similar point could be made about the Habsburgs in their older holdings across the border in Austria. The decisions to try and implement the papally decreed new calendar, enforce Lenten fast regulations, and reintroduce female monasticism in Vienna, for example, were all parts of a spurt of activity that took place at this time.Footnote 13
Johnston Gordon, who completed her dissertation on the bishopric of Passau and the Counter Reformation, places the developments she traces into a broader, comparative context. The introduction of the new calendar was obviously not limited to Lower Austria. She understands well the complex relationship between religious change in the Austrian archduchies and their relationship with foreign prince-bishops such as the one in Passau. He was responsible for the spiritual jurisdiction over much of Lower Austria. In addition, Johnston Gordon makes the well-known comparison with the neighboring duchy of Bavaria, as well as in many ways more intriguing comparisons with the imperial free cities of Augsburg and Dinkelsbühl, and, briefly, the diocese of Speyer. It is important to place developments in early modern Austria not simply into the context of the Habsburg monarchy, but also in the context of the Holy Roman Empire as a whole. With this orientation, Johnston Gordon follows Evans in Making. There, he devoted a chapter to the “limited hegemony” exercised by the Habsburgs in what he called the “German Empire.”Footnote 14
Graeme Murdock responded to Evans's appeal that “the fascinating Puritan movement of the seventeenth century cries out for analysis in a European context.”Footnote 15 Evans had already studied Calvinism and the mechanisms of international communication in his book on the Wechsel presses.Footnote 16 Now it was time to turn to what he called “Hungary's fuzzy-edged Reformation,” where “Calvinism came late and homespun.”Footnote 17 In his contribution to this forum, Murdock builds on an example mentioned in Evans both in Making and in his piece in the International Calvinism collection of a few years later: the imprisonment and rescue of a number of Calvinist ministers in the years 1674–1676. This case created what Evans described as “a first real martyrology for Hungary's anti-Catholic opposition.”Footnote 18
Murdock refers to Evans's important chapter on Hungary in Making on a number of occasions in his contribution to this forum. By the later seventeenth century, the “limited rejection” to which Evans referred was limited indeed. A 1672 court decree required the emigration of all Protestant preachers from Hungary. The leading noble protectors (of rank and influence even greater than those studied by Chisholm in Tirol) had increasingly sided with the Crown and the Roman Catholic clerical hierarchy. The “Catholicization” of the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen was well underway.
Similar to the pieces by O'Reilly and Pörtner in this forum, however, the emphasis in Murdock's analysis is not on the local history of the events, but on their international ramifications. Originally, the international ties of the Hungarian Calvinists had been connected to the training of clerics for service in Habsburg Hungary and Transylvania. The Protestant-led Low Countries, in particular, had been a preferred site of education for these men. Now, in the later seventeenth century, international ties were mobilized to rescue (some of) the ministers in distress and to create a set of images of Habsburg intolerance and presecution that would reinforce members of the Reformed party's commitment to the cause.
As his main sources, Murdock points to manuscripts and pamphlets and their illustrations as important factors in the creation of a sense of international (and national) solidarity in trying (and confusing) times. As the states involved shifted alliances, as kings seemed to choose their kingdoms' friends less and less by reference to religious affiliations, for some the need to point out religious differences increased. The tension between international relations and demands, on the one hand, and domestic politics, on the other, is deftly sketched by Murdock in reference, for example, to the tense English scene of the Restoration. Another tension is highlighted: that between the late-seventeenth-century present and standardized memories of the heroic past. Here again were martyrs, particularly for the readers in the West. Back in Hungary, Habsburg censorship hampered the development of such a role for stories of the rescued ministers.
The shifting military tides on the Hungarian front in the later seventeenth century severely handicapped the Habsburg rulers in their attempt to impose religious conformity. The Calvinist nobles were needed in the wars on that front. When added to the need for allies against an aggressive France, allies that were determined more by shared geopolitical interests than shared confessional ones, the decision to compromise becomes understandable. The Habsburg emperor-king Leopold I restored the rights of Protestant clergy in his Kingdom of Hungary in 1681.
Unique among the contributors to this forum, Murdock takes his story out of its early modern setting and follows it up into the modern period. In so doing, he echoes Evans in his more recent work on more modern Hungary.Footnote 19 The creation of a sense of Hungarian Reformed identity, which was discussed in reference to the international Calvinism of the seventeenth century, is followed in Murdock's presentation by a brief discussion of the memory of the events of his case study in the decades around 1900, as well as the decades around 2000. The martyrs and heroes of the 1670s were brought back on stage in these periods to help represent Hungarian nationalism, first against the Habsburgs and later against the Communists.
Murdock follows the trend toward international or transnational history in his wide-ranging analysis of the case of the imprisoned ministers and Calvinists in the Netherlands, England, France, and elsewhere. William O'Reilly similarly casts a wide net in his analysis of the intellectual worlds and political undertakings of a man Evans described as “the least colourful of Habsburg emperors,” Charles VI.Footnote 20 O'Reilly builds on a point raised by Evans in his introduction to the papers presented at a conference at the Centers for Early Modern and Austrian Studies in Minneapolis in 1991. There, Evans wrote of new chances beginning in the 1680s. As a result of military successes versus the Ottomans and the Bourbons, the Habsburgs could revive or resuscitate earlier ambitions and the “dream of universal empire.”Footnote 21 Of particular relevance to O'Reilly's contribution was Evans's point that it was a time when “Spanish visions” could be nutured.Footnote 22
O'Reilly steps beyond the emphasis on the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs outlined in Evans's Making. Evans concentrated on Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and “the German Empire.” With Archduke Charles, O'Reilly finds an example of a Central European Habsburg who, like a number of his sixteenth-century predecessors, had substantial Spanish experience and connections. The convenient division between a Spanish and an Austrian branch of the dynasty can at times obscure some of the ties and influences such as those discussed by O'Reilly.Footnote 23 O'Reilly's analysis provides a mix of diplomatic and cultural evidence to support his point that Charles, as pretender to the Spanish crown beginning in 1705, accumulated experience and was subject to significant influence in Iberia. This experience and influence affected him even after he left his government in Spain in the hands of a regency headed by his wife Elizabeth Christine and ascended the imperial throne in 1711.
This last male Habsburg thought big, O'Reilly informs his readers. Even though Charles's government had little expertise in American affairs, the experience of participating in the rule of a transatlantic colonial empire affected his later mercantile policies. These included improving the ports at Trieste and Fiume, establishing an Eastern Trading Company, and various expeditions to Asia. In a pregnant formulation, O'Reilly presents Habsburg resettlement and colonization projects in newly acquired Hungarian lands as a reconquista. Some of the settlements established in Hungary even provided property for poor Catalans and Valencians who had supported Charles in Spain and then migrated eastward in the aftermath of the Bourbon takeover there.
This is imperial history writ large, and O'Reilly does not limit himself to diplomatic or administrative evidence to outline his story of Spanish visions in Vienna. Like Luc Duerloo in his recent discussion of the artistic representations tied to Charles VI's 1717 inauguration as Duke of Brabant in the (now Austrian) Netherlands, O'Reilly provides evidence for his argument by reference to artistic productions.Footnote 24 Duerloo points to “the iconographic language of victory and conquest” used in the tapestries commissioned to commemorate Charles's advent as ruler.Footnote 25 These tapestries included depictions of victories in the War of the Spanish Succession, such as the “Capture of Barcelona” (1705) and the “Battle of Saragossa” (1710). O'Reilly discusses Viennese architectural examples where Spanish models were used to reinforce a new imperial style in buildings. His examples include the Hofburg library, the imperial chancellery, the Saint Charles Borromeo Church (with the famous pillars echoing those used in the emblem of Emperor Charles's namesake, Charles V), and most importantly Charles's plan to reproduce the Spanish El Escorial by rebuilding the Klosterneuburg Monastery complex outside of Vienna.
Much of Emperor Charles VI's energy was devoted to assuring the international acceptance of female inheritance of the Habsburgs' lands. Regina Pörtner, in her contribution to this forum, follows the activities of the woman who benefited from this policy, the archduchess, then queen and later Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. Pörtner builds on points made by Murdock about the international attention given to religious affairs in the Habsburgs' lands in the eighteenth century and on themes touched on by O'Reilly in reference to the sources of Maria Theresa's father's religious policies, which of course may have been tempered by memories of the roles of Protestant lands, such as England and the United Provinces, in support of his claim to the Spanish throne. (On his way to claim the Spanish throne, Charles had played cards with Queen Anne at Windsor and sailed to Iberia aboard an English ship in early 1704.)
Pörtner places the policies of “confessional absolutism” employed by Maria Theresa into the military and political contexts of her accession. According to Pörtner, the new ruler had to tighten control and maximize her access to her territories and their resources, be they material or human. One way to do this was to increase the pressure on her nonconformist subjects, subjecting them to the dual policy of persuasion and coercion after she was firmly on her thrones in Bohemia, Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. Pörtner's emphasis on foreign or imperial affairs (such as the invasion of the Kingdom of Bohemia's territory of Silesia by troops of one the leading princes of the Holy Roman Empire) as crucial to an understanding of domestic policies echoes Evans's earlier assertion that “the circumstances of reform in Austria, as a response to international pressure, must always be borne in mind.”Footnote 26 The “foreign” context discussed by Pörtner does not reach as far afield as the contexts described by O'Reilly. Maria Theresa's field of vision, it seems from Pörtner's analysis, was more limited to her hereditary lands and the Holy Roman Empire. The imperial diet at Regensburg and the activities of neighboring princes, such as the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, the duke of Württemberg, or (especially) the king-elector of Prussia, remain in the center of Pörtner's discussion.
This contextualization of developments in the Habsburg monarchy within the specifics of the monarchy's relations with the empire is partly the result of the evidenciary basis on which Pörtner builds her argument. This basis includes archival records relating to religious affairs from the diocesan archive of Graz-Seckau. In addition, Pörtner used decrees, instructions, reports, and records relating to the imperial diet, which are found now in the Styrian Provincial Archive in Graz. Some evidence from the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna relating to Silesia was also cited. Pörtner, a specialist on religious changes in Styria in the decades around 1600, is familiar with seeing the monarchy's affairs not only from the center, but from the periphery as well.Footnote 27 She refers to Evans's Making on a number of occasions when discussing the nature of negotiated power in the monarchy and, in particular, in reference to the contentious state of affairs in seventeenth-century Hungary. The recognition of the multifaceted, complex nature of early modern Habsburg rule, which Evans outlined in reference to the period 1550–1700, appears here in Pörtner's work to function as an aid to understanding developments up to the 1770s as well.
All five of the contributions to this forum reflect aspects of the approaches to the histories of the Habsburgs' holdings, which were sketched out in R. J. W. Evans's groundbreaking The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy thirty years ago. An interest in the Counter Reformation, the specific mechanisms and social aspects of rule, and the cultural and intellectual developments of the early modern period have served to supplement the older institutional and military histories of the dynasty's territories. One area that seems to have remained outside of the frame of analysis is a detailed study of the economic bases of Habsburg authority, although these are at times touched upon in some of the contributions collected here in reference to rural lordship rights of nobles, colonial trading schemes, or mining interests.
By looking at what Evans called the Habsburg monarchy from the perspective of the leading Tirolean families or the men trying to implement papal decrees about time in local parishes, in reference to controversies around imprisoned preachers in Hungary or archdukes in Spain returning to rule in Austria, or in connection with crises of authority manifested in Habsburg provinces but resulting from external political and military threats, historians are able to develop fascinating images of the complex entity known as early modern “Austria.” The variety of examples and approaches are appropriate for the study of what Evans aptly described as “not a ‘state’ but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogenous elements.”Footnote 28
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Thirty years ago, R. J. W. Evans, in the preface to his influential work, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700, outlined what he saw as needed in the study of this complex subject. The three themes to which he pointed and then addressed in the 450 packed pages that followed were: “a consistent account of the Central European Counter Reformation,” “a balanced view of the Monarchy as a whole,” and “an understanding of intellectual evolution from the Renaissance to the Baroque.”Footnote 1 Over the last three decades, numerous historians have taken Evans's lead and contributed to a deeper and more variegated image of the histories of the lands of the Central European Habsburgs. Pieces by five of these historians comprise the forum under discussion here.
The works of these authors illustrate well how rich Evans's suggested themes were and continue to be. Rona Johnston Gordon takes on the Counter Reformation in her study of the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in “Austria below the Enns.” The other four authors take on aspects of Evans's second theme, a theme that included the study of “interaction between regions and central government.”Footnote 2 Michael Chisholm looks closely at just who the “most honorable” families of Tirol were in 1567, according to a report of the Tirolean government. Regina Pörtner discusses examples from Bohemia, Hungary, Silesia, and Upper Styria in her study of “the apparent revival of confessional absolutism” (which was actually, according to Pörtner, more a strategy of maximizing resources in a period of crisis) under the empress-queen Maria Theresa.
Graeme Murdock and William O'Reilly combine attention to the broad reaches of the Habsburgs' territories' rulers and inhabitants with some aspects of Evans's third theme, that of intellectual developments. Murdock mines a case study to discuss two of Evans's interests: Hungary and international Calvinism. In so doing, Murdock analyzes print sources, illustrations, and even a nineteenth-century monument and twenty-first-century commemorative ceremonies. In his piece on the Habsburg archduke, claimant-king, and then emperor Charles, O'Reilly breaks the geographic boundaries laid down by Evans and incorporates the Habsburgs' Iberian and American territories—or at least claims over them—into the story of early modern Habsburg governance. In so doing, O'Reilly, like Murdock, reaches into the world of the imagination, seeking evidence of imperial intentions in architecture, poetry, and court ritual.
Evans chose to concentrate on the 150 years from the mid sixteenth century to around 1700. One characteristic of the pieces discussed here is that they, similar to some of Evans's later work, stretch beyond the 1700 boundary and well into the eighteenth century. Significantly, they cover their two centuries, from the 1560s to the 1770s, rather unevenly. There is almost a century missing between Johnston Gordon's 1580s and Murdock's 1670s. Although this may be due to chance, the omission of the period immediately before, during, and after the Thirty Years' War can also be seen as a reflection of another aspect of Evans's approach in the 1970s. In the preface to Making, Evans argued that “I have written little about wars and armies, diplomacy and foreign relations” because these themes had been written about already and because “social and intellectual fields appear to offer a larger and more coherent set of explanations.”Footnote 3 With some significant qualifications, the pieces under discussion here follow this path.
As part of the analysis of “the Monarchy as a whole,” historians have dedicated a significant amount of attention to the intermediary powers in the Habsburgs' various lands, particularly the estates. These were one element of the triad of political powers discussed at the 1988 School of Slavonic Studies conference, the papers of which Evans edited with T. V. Thomas.Footnote 4 More recently, the roles of these estates were discussed at a Vienna conference in 2006. This conference, similar to many of the contributions in this forum, pushed the chronological boundary up, this time into the nineteenth century.Footnote 5 In his piece here, M. A. Chisholm chooses to take a bit of a different tack. He looks at the leading families of Tirol at the time of the accession of Archduke Ferdinand instead of at the famous estates of that complicated county and its affiliated prince-bishoprics.Footnote 6
Chisholm's methodology is similar to the one employed by Evans in his influential chapter in Making about the developments in Hungary. (See Part Two: “The Centre and the Regions,” Chapter 7: “Hungary: limited rejection.”) In his preface, Evans had argued that “the consolidation of the Habsburg state rested essentially on a series of bilateral agreements between the rulers and their mightier subjects.”Footnote 7 In the chapter on Hungary, he went on to state that there was a “hidden compromise,” a “community of interest . . . between dynasty, aristocracy and Catholic Church.”Footnote 8 Thirty or forty families, Evans estimated, came to dominate political affairs in the kingdom; and there were only ten families in the group's “inner circle.”
Decades later Chisholm discovered a report in the Tirol Provincial Archive in Innsbruck in which twenty-four families were listed as the “most eminent and distinguished families of the land.” Following the paths marked out by prosoprographers before him, Chisholm lists and briefly describes these families and the roles they played in the semiautonomous government of Tirol. One facet of early modern Tirolean history, which Evans had pointed to in his earlier work, was that Tirol “displayed extreme localism, even parochialism, with little contact between the north and the south of the province.”Footnote 9 Chisholm's research helps to explain why. Almost all of the leading families of the territory based their power on lordship rights tied to lands south of the Brenner Pass. The evidence presented also reveals, however, that these notables played significant roles in the Innsbruck administration and at the courts of the Habsburg archduchesses and archdukes who resided there.
The date of Archduke Ferdinand's entry into rule in Tirol, January 1567, also should be put into the context of that winter. This was just three months after news of the Ottoman cessation of offensive operations had reached court. The Habsburgs as rulers of Tirol could present themselves as the bulwarks against the Ottomans.Footnote 10 Lords with their holdings south of the Brenner may have felt more exposed and more in need of ties to the Habsburg court at this particular moment.
In her piece on the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the Habsburgs' holdings around Vienna and the Danube (“Austria below the Enns”) in the early 1580s, Rona Johnston Gordon touches on many issues concerning identity, space, noble influence, and of course time. Based to a large extent on correspondence now found in the diocesan archive in Vienna between various religious and secular rulers, Johnston Gordon does not explicitly refer to Evans's work, nor does she adopt explicity prosopographical or political approaches similar to those of some of her co-contributors. Her concern is to highlight aspects of the cultural turmoil that ensued in a territory in which the authority on which time itself was based was contested.
This period of contestation was an important one for the later development of religious affairs in the Danubian archduchies. Dowager Empress Maria had left to return home to Spain in the fall of 1581 following the death of her daughter Queen Anna of that kingdom. Maria's children, brother, and brothers-in-law were reorganizing the administration of the dynasty's properties across Europe.Footnote 11 The emperor, Rudolf II, was settling into his seat in Prague; his brother Matthias was returning from his unsuccessful venture as Statthalter of the Netherlands and would settle in Linz; and their sister, the dowager queen of France, Elizabeth, and brother Archduke Ernst were moving to establish themselves firmly in Vienna. This was a period Evans once characterized as when the Catholics' “resolve seems to have hardened” in Bohemia.Footnote 12 A similar point could be made about the Habsburgs in their older holdings across the border in Austria. The decisions to try and implement the papally decreed new calendar, enforce Lenten fast regulations, and reintroduce female monasticism in Vienna, for example, were all parts of a spurt of activity that took place at this time.Footnote 13
Johnston Gordon, who completed her dissertation on the bishopric of Passau and the Counter Reformation, places the developments she traces into a broader, comparative context. The introduction of the new calendar was obviously not limited to Lower Austria. She understands well the complex relationship between religious change in the Austrian archduchies and their relationship with foreign prince-bishops such as the one in Passau. He was responsible for the spiritual jurisdiction over much of Lower Austria. In addition, Johnston Gordon makes the well-known comparison with the neighboring duchy of Bavaria, as well as in many ways more intriguing comparisons with the imperial free cities of Augsburg and Dinkelsbühl, and, briefly, the diocese of Speyer. It is important to place developments in early modern Austria not simply into the context of the Habsburg monarchy, but also in the context of the Holy Roman Empire as a whole. With this orientation, Johnston Gordon follows Evans in Making. There, he devoted a chapter to the “limited hegemony” exercised by the Habsburgs in what he called the “German Empire.”Footnote 14
Graeme Murdock responded to Evans's appeal that “the fascinating Puritan movement of the seventeenth century cries out for analysis in a European context.”Footnote 15 Evans had already studied Calvinism and the mechanisms of international communication in his book on the Wechsel presses.Footnote 16 Now it was time to turn to what he called “Hungary's fuzzy-edged Reformation,” where “Calvinism came late and homespun.”Footnote 17 In his contribution to this forum, Murdock builds on an example mentioned in Evans both in Making and in his piece in the International Calvinism collection of a few years later: the imprisonment and rescue of a number of Calvinist ministers in the years 1674–1676. This case created what Evans described as “a first real martyrology for Hungary's anti-Catholic opposition.”Footnote 18
Murdock refers to Evans's important chapter on Hungary in Making on a number of occasions in his contribution to this forum. By the later seventeenth century, the “limited rejection” to which Evans referred was limited indeed. A 1672 court decree required the emigration of all Protestant preachers from Hungary. The leading noble protectors (of rank and influence even greater than those studied by Chisholm in Tirol) had increasingly sided with the Crown and the Roman Catholic clerical hierarchy. The “Catholicization” of the lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen was well underway.
Similar to the pieces by O'Reilly and Pörtner in this forum, however, the emphasis in Murdock's analysis is not on the local history of the events, but on their international ramifications. Originally, the international ties of the Hungarian Calvinists had been connected to the training of clerics for service in Habsburg Hungary and Transylvania. The Protestant-led Low Countries, in particular, had been a preferred site of education for these men. Now, in the later seventeenth century, international ties were mobilized to rescue (some of) the ministers in distress and to create a set of images of Habsburg intolerance and presecution that would reinforce members of the Reformed party's commitment to the cause.
As his main sources, Murdock points to manuscripts and pamphlets and their illustrations as important factors in the creation of a sense of international (and national) solidarity in trying (and confusing) times. As the states involved shifted alliances, as kings seemed to choose their kingdoms' friends less and less by reference to religious affiliations, for some the need to point out religious differences increased. The tension between international relations and demands, on the one hand, and domestic politics, on the other, is deftly sketched by Murdock in reference, for example, to the tense English scene of the Restoration. Another tension is highlighted: that between the late-seventeenth-century present and standardized memories of the heroic past. Here again were martyrs, particularly for the readers in the West. Back in Hungary, Habsburg censorship hampered the development of such a role for stories of the rescued ministers.
The shifting military tides on the Hungarian front in the later seventeenth century severely handicapped the Habsburg rulers in their attempt to impose religious conformity. The Calvinist nobles were needed in the wars on that front. When added to the need for allies against an aggressive France, allies that were determined more by shared geopolitical interests than shared confessional ones, the decision to compromise becomes understandable. The Habsburg emperor-king Leopold I restored the rights of Protestant clergy in his Kingdom of Hungary in 1681.
Unique among the contributors to this forum, Murdock takes his story out of its early modern setting and follows it up into the modern period. In so doing, he echoes Evans in his more recent work on more modern Hungary.Footnote 19 The creation of a sense of Hungarian Reformed identity, which was discussed in reference to the international Calvinism of the seventeenth century, is followed in Murdock's presentation by a brief discussion of the memory of the events of his case study in the decades around 1900, as well as the decades around 2000. The martyrs and heroes of the 1670s were brought back on stage in these periods to help represent Hungarian nationalism, first against the Habsburgs and later against the Communists.
Murdock follows the trend toward international or transnational history in his wide-ranging analysis of the case of the imprisoned ministers and Calvinists in the Netherlands, England, France, and elsewhere. William O'Reilly similarly casts a wide net in his analysis of the intellectual worlds and political undertakings of a man Evans described as “the least colourful of Habsburg emperors,” Charles VI.Footnote 20 O'Reilly builds on a point raised by Evans in his introduction to the papers presented at a conference at the Centers for Early Modern and Austrian Studies in Minneapolis in 1991. There, Evans wrote of new chances beginning in the 1680s. As a result of military successes versus the Ottomans and the Bourbons, the Habsburgs could revive or resuscitate earlier ambitions and the “dream of universal empire.”Footnote 21 Of particular relevance to O'Reilly's contribution was Evans's point that it was a time when “Spanish visions” could be nutured.Footnote 22
O'Reilly steps beyond the emphasis on the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs outlined in Evans's Making. Evans concentrated on Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and “the German Empire.” With Archduke Charles, O'Reilly finds an example of a Central European Habsburg who, like a number of his sixteenth-century predecessors, had substantial Spanish experience and connections. The convenient division between a Spanish and an Austrian branch of the dynasty can at times obscure some of the ties and influences such as those discussed by O'Reilly.Footnote 23 O'Reilly's analysis provides a mix of diplomatic and cultural evidence to support his point that Charles, as pretender to the Spanish crown beginning in 1705, accumulated experience and was subject to significant influence in Iberia. This experience and influence affected him even after he left his government in Spain in the hands of a regency headed by his wife Elizabeth Christine and ascended the imperial throne in 1711.
This last male Habsburg thought big, O'Reilly informs his readers. Even though Charles's government had little expertise in American affairs, the experience of participating in the rule of a transatlantic colonial empire affected his later mercantile policies. These included improving the ports at Trieste and Fiume, establishing an Eastern Trading Company, and various expeditions to Asia. In a pregnant formulation, O'Reilly presents Habsburg resettlement and colonization projects in newly acquired Hungarian lands as a reconquista. Some of the settlements established in Hungary even provided property for poor Catalans and Valencians who had supported Charles in Spain and then migrated eastward in the aftermath of the Bourbon takeover there.
This is imperial history writ large, and O'Reilly does not limit himself to diplomatic or administrative evidence to outline his story of Spanish visions in Vienna. Like Luc Duerloo in his recent discussion of the artistic representations tied to Charles VI's 1717 inauguration as Duke of Brabant in the (now Austrian) Netherlands, O'Reilly provides evidence for his argument by reference to artistic productions.Footnote 24 Duerloo points to “the iconographic language of victory and conquest” used in the tapestries commissioned to commemorate Charles's advent as ruler.Footnote 25 These tapestries included depictions of victories in the War of the Spanish Succession, such as the “Capture of Barcelona” (1705) and the “Battle of Saragossa” (1710). O'Reilly discusses Viennese architectural examples where Spanish models were used to reinforce a new imperial style in buildings. His examples include the Hofburg library, the imperial chancellery, the Saint Charles Borromeo Church (with the famous pillars echoing those used in the emblem of Emperor Charles's namesake, Charles V), and most importantly Charles's plan to reproduce the Spanish El Escorial by rebuilding the Klosterneuburg Monastery complex outside of Vienna.
Much of Emperor Charles VI's energy was devoted to assuring the international acceptance of female inheritance of the Habsburgs' lands. Regina Pörtner, in her contribution to this forum, follows the activities of the woman who benefited from this policy, the archduchess, then queen and later Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. Pörtner builds on points made by Murdock about the international attention given to religious affairs in the Habsburgs' lands in the eighteenth century and on themes touched on by O'Reilly in reference to the sources of Maria Theresa's father's religious policies, which of course may have been tempered by memories of the roles of Protestant lands, such as England and the United Provinces, in support of his claim to the Spanish throne. (On his way to claim the Spanish throne, Charles had played cards with Queen Anne at Windsor and sailed to Iberia aboard an English ship in early 1704.)
Pörtner places the policies of “confessional absolutism” employed by Maria Theresa into the military and political contexts of her accession. According to Pörtner, the new ruler had to tighten control and maximize her access to her territories and their resources, be they material or human. One way to do this was to increase the pressure on her nonconformist subjects, subjecting them to the dual policy of persuasion and coercion after she was firmly on her thrones in Bohemia, Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire. Pörtner's emphasis on foreign or imperial affairs (such as the invasion of the Kingdom of Bohemia's territory of Silesia by troops of one the leading princes of the Holy Roman Empire) as crucial to an understanding of domestic policies echoes Evans's earlier assertion that “the circumstances of reform in Austria, as a response to international pressure, must always be borne in mind.”Footnote 26 The “foreign” context discussed by Pörtner does not reach as far afield as the contexts described by O'Reilly. Maria Theresa's field of vision, it seems from Pörtner's analysis, was more limited to her hereditary lands and the Holy Roman Empire. The imperial diet at Regensburg and the activities of neighboring princes, such as the prince-archbishop of Salzburg, the duke of Württemberg, or (especially) the king-elector of Prussia, remain in the center of Pörtner's discussion.
This contextualization of developments in the Habsburg monarchy within the specifics of the monarchy's relations with the empire is partly the result of the evidenciary basis on which Pörtner builds her argument. This basis includes archival records relating to religious affairs from the diocesan archive of Graz-Seckau. In addition, Pörtner used decrees, instructions, reports, and records relating to the imperial diet, which are found now in the Styrian Provincial Archive in Graz. Some evidence from the Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv in Vienna relating to Silesia was also cited. Pörtner, a specialist on religious changes in Styria in the decades around 1600, is familiar with seeing the monarchy's affairs not only from the center, but from the periphery as well.Footnote 27 She refers to Evans's Making on a number of occasions when discussing the nature of negotiated power in the monarchy and, in particular, in reference to the contentious state of affairs in seventeenth-century Hungary. The recognition of the multifaceted, complex nature of early modern Habsburg rule, which Evans outlined in reference to the period 1550–1700, appears here in Pörtner's work to function as an aid to understanding developments up to the 1770s as well.
All five of the contributions to this forum reflect aspects of the approaches to the histories of the Habsburgs' holdings, which were sketched out in R. J. W. Evans's groundbreaking The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy thirty years ago. An interest in the Counter Reformation, the specific mechanisms and social aspects of rule, and the cultural and intellectual developments of the early modern period have served to supplement the older institutional and military histories of the dynasty's territories. One area that seems to have remained outside of the frame of analysis is a detailed study of the economic bases of Habsburg authority, although these are at times touched upon in some of the contributions collected here in reference to rural lordship rights of nobles, colonial trading schemes, or mining interests.
By looking at what Evans called the Habsburg monarchy from the perspective of the leading Tirolean families or the men trying to implement papal decrees about time in local parishes, in reference to controversies around imprisoned preachers in Hungary or archdukes in Spain returning to rule in Austria, or in connection with crises of authority manifested in Habsburg provinces but resulting from external political and military threats, historians are able to develop fascinating images of the complex entity known as early modern “Austria.” The variety of examples and approaches are appropriate for the study of what Evans aptly described as “not a ‘state’ but a mildly centripetal agglutination of bewilderingly heterogenous elements.”Footnote 28
Joseph F. Patrouch is associate professor of history at Florida International University. His comments were written while at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin.