The Argument

This blend of religious conviction, clear purpose, tactical flexibility, and raw persistence contributed significantly to the expansion and consolidation of Habsburg power in the early decades of the sixteenth century. They were not, however, the only resources that the House of Austria brought to bear in protecting the integrity of its massive holdings. In his broadly and deeply researched synthesis of family-based rule in world history, Jeroen Duindam raises several times the problem of intra-house tension and its corrosive impact upon dynastic rule and survival. Among the most disruptive challenges was a contradiction built into familial dynasticism itself. Siring multiple male heirs usually guaranteed a house's continued control of patrimonial holdings. Nevertheless, when lines of succession moved laterally through generations, that is from brother to brother, and not vertically, as was the custom among German princes, the scene was set for sibling rivalries. The obvious and most effective solution to the problem was reducing the number of births in the family. Yet, while biologically straightforward, such tactics exposed ruling houses to the most dreaded of all genealogical catastrophes: extinction, often in a dismayingly short time. Few sovereigns, the Habsburgs among them, were willing to take that risk. Among German princes, the common, yet never wholly satisfactory, remedy for such disputes was some form of partible inheritance and/or shared rule. Sanctioned by historical custom and biblical command, it, too, had distressing side effects, the thinning out of princely wealth chief among them. Nor did it end venomous squabbling over the terms of the arrangements where confusion among multiple heirs sometimes reigned. Before an assembly of the German princes chaired by Emperor Frederick III in 1471, Duke Wolfgang of Bavaria-Munich accused his older brother Duke Albrecht IV of managing succession issues so badly in their house of Wittelsbach that only the application of “knives and hot iron” would excise the malignant strife that bedeviled the family.Footnote ⁴

Scholars studying these disputes generally concentrate on the details of the quarrels with scant attention paid to techniques for tempering or avoiding them altogether, other than redistributing assets and positions. Jean-Marie Moeglin flatly accepts conflict as a way of life among German princely lines in the late Middle Ages. Such episodes, he says, occurred, then subsided, only to have others take their place. Duindam's painstaking research has gone considerably further, identifying and analyzing particular social strategies that helped to relax such tensions. Some of these ploys were bold and often productive: among them was organizing support for internally troubled houses among sympathetic, if privately interested, individuals and groups external to a sovereign family itself.Footnote ⁵

This article also looks at the issue of resolving disputes within ruling houses, but by turning inward to see if sibling interactions linked more specifically with family behaviors alone, independent of power relations in public life, may have helped Charles, Mary, and Ferdinand prevent, rather than encourage, outbreaks of internecine rancor that troubled and sometimes even destroyed other German princely lines. Dynamis, the Greek root for power, and ruling houses, in fact, have not always been as closely tied as they are today. In his now classic Families in Former Times, Jean-Louis Flandrin says that as late as the eighteenth century, a French lexicographer noted that “one speaks of a Royal Family and a Reigning House.” The difference was subtle but important. It implied that temporal might, and the families that nurtured rulers, were functionally related, but not the same thing.Footnote ⁶ Only in the first decades of the 1600s did the term “dynasty” in English cover both sovereign houses and the power they exercised. Indeed, anthropologists well into the 1950s observed distinctions between the family as a self-protective private unit and the family as an institution for organizing and managing social, economic, and political processes that come to it from an external world.Footnote ⁷ Such a dichotomy further suggests that one might well look at more subtle forces such as how the tone of contacts and communications among Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary as brothers and sister might have contributed as significantly to the Habsburg ascendancy of the sixteenth century as much as did improbable turns in succession schemes and persistent diplomacy. Absent interactions filtered through the structures of familial kinship, one might argue that the establishment of Habsburg rule in a significant part of Europe might not have made its way into the historical record. It should be noted that the term family is understood here as people related by kinship and not household personnel such as domestic servants who were conventionally folded into an extended household without being born or having married into it.Footnote ⁸

Analyzing such behavior requires historians to look beyond the hard data of politics and territorial aggrandizement found in even routine sources such as the voluminous, yet to be fully published, Habsburg family correspondence of the sixteenth century. Almost two decades ago, Christopher Laferl hinted that doing so might enlarge our understanding of the Austrian Habsburg success story. A veteran editor of the written exchanges of Ferdinand with Charles and Mary, he suggested that deeper biographical dimensions of the relationships of the trio remained to be explored, even giving samples of genuinely personalized language and tones that he had picked up in their messages. “Dryness,” he said, characterized one of Ferdinand's responses to his brother. The emperor was “less circumspect’’ (wenig zimperlich) when he wrote in German.

Laferl did not move beyond that, however, contenting himself with a careful study of the more formal properties of these communications such as the choice of language in which they are written, topics they cover, and the tricky question of the influence advisers and secretaries might have had on these materials. Two years later, he still thought that the letters were indispensable for what they tell scholars about Habsburg tactics and policies. Nevertheless, in his opinion, the personal comments about “one another's health,” announcements that new sons and daughters had been born into the family, reports on prowess (or lack thereof) at their shared passion for the hunt, observations about contemporary men and women with whom they had to work, mention of their ties to one another and their mutual problems were of “far less value ‘weit geringen Stellenwert.’” Such views would not be strange to the first modern editor of Ferdinand's family letters, Wilhelm Bauer, for whom the overwhelming bulk of the vast collection revealed the Habsburgs as political animals, and not much more. Indeed, it was this focus that knit these materials together. It is just these passages, however, along with the general tone of many exchanges among Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary that introduce us to the securely familial, rather than publicly political, comfort zone they were creating in these letters for themselves and themselves alone. There, as brothers and sister, rather than sovereigns or the surrogates of sovereigns, they could hone the arts of getting along by opening up in writing their inmost thoughts and heartfelt feelings to one another, often in a vocabulary that might antagonize the House of Austria's most persistent and dangerous rivals if circulated publicly. As a reader of the New York Times put it not so long ago “letters … so often reveal sides of a subject's personality—the unguarded side, the playful side, the petulant side, sometimes even the unabashedly lustful side—too often obscured by the public persona.” It is just these passages, sharply at odds with the sober discussions of the political, religious, diplomatic, and military issues confronting the dynasty in the first half of the sixteenth century, that give parts of these documents what one might call a “family feel.”Footnote ⁹

But how do we read such texts to extract what insight they give us into intra-familial relations and dynastic advantage that will help us understand how Charles, Mary, and Ferdinand forestalled the fraternal discord that had plagued their house in the past and would return in the near future during the reign of Emperor Rudolph II? First, one must think of the House of Austria not as Bauer's exclusively political construct, but as a sociopolitical, even sociolinguistic, entity. Second, for all the chronological space between the sixteenth-century “then” and our contemporary “now,” one can profitably turn to the findings of experts in the psychology of family life, clinical and therapeutic, who, in fact, have a great deal to tell us as we move our question forward.

The work of Susan Scarf Merrell, Jeffrey Kluger, Jane Greer, and Morton Mendelson, along with others, is very helpful. All professionals, they stress the importance of full candor when siblings contact and communicate with one another. Kluger refers to what he calls “I” honesty, by which he means confronting mutual problems openly rather than masking them. Merrell has developed four rules tested in clinical practice for harmonious, long-term sibling relationships. First, forget past slights. Focus on what you and your brothers and/or sisters will, or must, deal with in the future. Second, be frank, but do not insult or belittle one another. The outcome will be greater mutual trust. Third, accept your brothers and sisters as they are. Admitting one's own weakness and shortcomings often brings siblings together. Try to find commonalties between, or among, yourselves. Additionally, and of crucial significance to this study, all parties may be able to do all of this more comfortably and effectively in letters rather than in face-to-face encounters where defensiveness often gives way to anger in otherwise mild-mannered interlocutors.Footnote ¹⁰

Greer has said much the same thing. Recommending clarity in communications between hostile siblings, she notes that those of them who disagree often and sharply with one another seem paradoxically less likely to break off relations altogether. Brothers and sisters who can speak openly and courteously about problems they have with one another will find it easier to reduce tensions among themselves, perhaps even resolve them. One must, she says, be prepared not only to express one's own feelings openly, but to grant speaking time to his or her interlocutor. Avoid cutting and hostile language and treat one's siblings as adults. The self-esteem of all parties should remain more or less intact, even when one sibling heavily influences the lives of the others. Brothers and sisters should also be available to help one another, though not to the point of jeopardizing their own interests, especially in money matters. All of this, as Greer also points out, is easier when siblings share interests. She, too, suggests discussing problems in letters: “If you can put your feelings into words, you're less likely to express them through inappropriate actions.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet another psychologist, Morton Mendelson, has developed a table which reechoes most of these considerations and adds a few: protectiveness, friendliness (i.e., absence of competitiveness), nurturance, and, very importantly, enjoyment of one another's companionship.Footnote ¹²

The Operative Context

The year 1530–31 was a very troubled one for Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary alike, presenting them complex challenges that tested to the utmost their ability to convert positive properties of sibling relationships into antidotes for divisive quarreling and to strengthen the territorial foundations of the Habsburg dynamis. As sensitive as they were to their responsibility for the overall welfare of their house, the three Habsburgs faced situations that had led to toxic quarreling among their ancestors throughout the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth centuries. All three siblings, each in their own way, were uncomfortably insecure, even though their immediate progenitors had tried to provide equitably for them. Hungary, where Ferdinand and Mary had joint claims to revenues, was a likely trouble spot.Footnote ¹³ Though Charles V's accumulated titles far outstripped those of his European rivals, the emperor fretted off and on about partitions of his holdings in the future. Challenges to his rule were frequent, locally and abroad. Kings of France believed that they had as much claim to the imperial office as did the House of Austria. For the Spanish, the Habsburg monarch was too arbitrary. Contemporary princes equated his on-and-off aspirations for universal governance with tyranny. Nowhere was this more resented than in Germany, where his steadfast commitment to reversing the inroads of the Reformation was, to some, a disingenuous cover for hegemonic dreams. Defending what they called their liberties and the decentralized constitutional arrangements that legitimized them was second nature to German territorial princes. Otherwise divided confessionally by 1530, evangelical Hesse and electoral Saxony, along with Catholic Bavaria, joined forces on at least one issue: keeping the Habsburgs from making the imperial title hereditary in their house.Footnote ¹⁴ And then there was Sultan Süleyman II the Magnificent in Constantinople, extolled by his polemicists as a world ruler and bent on scaling down the Habsburg presence in east central Europe and Charles's influence in the Mediterranean.Footnote ¹⁵

The situation of his brother Ferdinand was shakier still. Younger by four years than the emperor, his aspirations somewhat exceeded his place in the birth order.Footnote ¹⁶ Though king of Bohemia and a significant part of Hungary, he desperately wanted the German imperial crown and its promise of a future emperorship. At least in his opinion, his entire career in the empire and in his own lands was contingent on the elder Habsburg's backing. Negotiating his election within Charles's lifetime was an especially delicate matter, not only with the imperial German electoral college but between the two of them.Footnote ¹⁷

Ferdinand was also scrambling to tighten his underfinanced hold on his recently acquired realms to the east and southeast. In Hungary, he was threatened both by Ottoman expansion and an obstinate Hungarian counter claimant, John Zapolya, the voivode or duke of Transylvania. The latter was also, after 1527, an Ottoman vassal. Just how far Ferdinand's royal Polish relatives were prepared to go in staying on cordial terms with the Porte was always a question in his mind. As for Mary, she was a trial, to her brothers and, in some ways, even to herself. Hyper-reactive, she was relentlessly self-centered, particularly where money was an issue. Her whims at times trumped social decency and tactical common sense. They also antagonized very important people. In 1526, the Hungarian estates took umbrage at the hunting party along the Danube that she organized for herself, only two days after her equally feckless husband had perished defending his kingdom against Ottoman invasion.Footnote ¹⁸ She and Ferdinand were frequently at odds over toll revenues owed her as a widowed queen of Hungary. Two of Ferdinand's more burdensome chores were placating her when she thought that her brothers were holding back monies that were rightfully hers or working to persuade her that she was quite capable of being Charles's governor in the Netherlands. She would never quite get over taking the job, which she eventually did, particularly because she had not been fully aware of the fiscal difficulties she would encounter. That she was a woman at a time when territorial divisions were largely all-male arrangements forced her into subservience that was not part of her basic nature.Footnote ¹⁹

Faced with the spread of Ottoman influence into central Europe, Protestant heterodoxy, assertive local estates, and anemic treasuries, three proud, anxiety-driven, and ambitious siblings were emotionally primed to contest all challenges to what had come to them through their family legacies and their own efforts. Foreign intruders were bad enough. But when fellow siblings lagged in honoring their perceived obligations to one another, furthering individual agendas included, moods darkened. Ferdinand repeatedly despaired, and occasionally fumed, at what he thought to be Charles's indifference to his problems. He and Mary were not beyond joining forces when begging their brother to take their concerns to heart. In June of 1531, Ferdinand asked for his sister's support, as he sought to impress upon the emperor and king of Spain the importance of German affairs.Footnote ²⁰ Mary's resistance to becoming governor of the Low Countries and to remarrying after the death of her royal husband was fierce. On the latter question Charles and Ferdinand eventually backed down. Concessions, however, did not persuade her to treat the emperor more gently. At one point her opinion of Charles's management of her finances, not to mention those of her house, was so low that she wished she could discuss the situation orally, meaning as privately as possible. Allowances that Charles was to pay her out of revenues from Naples and other sources, totaling something like 50,000 florins, were in arrears. The emperor had reported he could not cover the sum. Should these conditions last, she said, particularly those with a direct bearing on her well-being, Charles and Ferdinand would bear much of the shame. Begging Ferdinand to intercede with their brother on her behalf, she also entreated him to burn the letter and to keep his reply to her as secret as possible. Affairs connected with her dowry in Hungary also needed attention, particularly from Ferdinand. It was especially necessary that he come to some sort of decision. She was sorry to hurry him, but she needed his input because her concerns touched upon Ferdinand's.Footnote ²¹ Many of her claims in Hungary and Bohemia, where her late husband had also ruled, were dispatched by August of 1531, but not all. She never was quite satisfied. The fraternal rancor that had divided their house throughout the later Middle Ages seemed poised for a rerun any time.Footnote ²²

Getting Along

Yet, as people around the world often did at the time, Mary more often than not yielded to the wishes and decisions of the eldest living male in their house.Footnote ²³ By March of 1531, she had left for the Netherlands to take up her new office and carry out Charles's commands. In staffing her household, she followed Charles's recommendations, more rarely Ferdinand's, though she did consult with him.Footnote ²⁴ As for Ferdinand, he never forgot that he and his branch of the family were serious claimants to the Spanish crowns and even the German emperorship. Nevertheless, by 1522 he had manfully accommodated himself to junior status as the guardian of his family's central European patrimony.

Fraternal ties forged in childhood cannot account for such deference, crucial though the attitude would be in maintaining solidarity in the House of Habsburg throughout the first half of the sixteenth century. While the two boys and Mary, along with their other sisters, Eleanor and Isabel, were tutored to some degree or other at the court of their aunt Margaret in the Low Countries, their paths would not cross frequently. Ferdinand was fourteen years old when he had his first face-to-face contact with his brother in 1517.Footnote ²⁵ A meeting in 1530 of the three in Innsbruck would be a notable exception. Ferdinand knew Mary somewhat better, especially after 1529, when she joined his peripatetic central European establishment. By that time, however, she had acquired a distinct adult identity, permanently hardened by the death of her husband and the swift implosion of their Buda court.

Nevertheless, improbable though it seems, psychological findings suggest that living at a distance from one another appears to foster sibling compatibility in adulthood. Charles, Mary, and Ferdinand fit the picture. All of them had a chance to develop relatively stable personalities before their careers intersected significantly. It is useful to note here that relations between Ferdinand I's eldest two sons, archdukes Maximilian and Ferdinand, raised together with only two years between them, were sometimes ominously tense, should paternal favor seem to be focused on one or the other.Footnote ²⁶ Siblings who have little contact with their parents also seem to develop more positive fraternal bonds.Footnote ²⁷ Neither Charles, Ferdinand, nor Mary had much experience with their father, who died in 1506; their mother, Princess Juana of Castile, was too erratically neurotic to supervise any child, her own included. Their Aragonese grandfather, King Ferdinand, took his younger namesake away from her in 1507 so that he could grow up among men, as the elder monarch put it. Thus, unlike less exalted families in which the roles of members and the hierarchies they encourage are often a matter of private negotiation, Habsburgs did not have to struggle with one another in childhood to create authentic individual identities. The lifetime scripts followed by the dynasty's offspring and their counterparts in other sovereign houses were conferred upon them at birth. Charles and Ferdinand's use of surrogates to iron out contentious responsibilities—such as coming to agreement on paying off the immense debts of their other grandfather, Emperor Maximilian I, may have prevented face-to-face discord as well.Footnote ²⁸

But if there were ever a ruling family likely to maintain fraternal peace by writing letters to one another, as psychotherapists recommend, it was the sixteenth-century Habsburgs. The relentless formality that dominates most of the correspondence through which Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary conducted their financial, political, and military affairs between 1530 and 1531 may by itself have discouraged extensive wrangling. More important, however, is the frequency with which these documents incorporate some, and sometimes all, of the therapeutic interventions mentioned above, absent professional coaching. Applying these prescriptions to passages of both greater and lesser “worth” in these communications gives us access to the securely familial, rather than publicly political, comfort zone the trio was creating in these materials for themselves and themselves alone. It is just these phrases and word choices, sharply at odds with the sober discussions of the political, religious, diplomatic, and military issues confronting the dynasty in the first half of the sixteenth century, that give parts of these documents what one might call a “family feel.” Such exchanges, even in policy-heavy documents, add to our understanding of how Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary kept the family business together in what were moments of emotional and political stress for all members concerned. Parts of the following text suggest this template for successful sibling relations: realism about one's self and one's co-correspondent, mutual respect, courtesy, even deference, readiness to assist one another when called upon, personal transparency, and capacity to find and pursue mutual interests.

Letters that went back and forth among Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary make very clear that each of them respected one another by virtue of their membership in the house from which all three drew their primary identity. The formal titles they held, presently and in the past, determined their self-images and their connections to their siblings. Writing to the emperor with considerable passion in 1531, Ferdinand declared a highly likely Ottoman advance into east central Europe a menace to his “titulo y derecho,” for him, functional synonyms. Deprived of either, he would be unable to defend plausibly his claims in Hungary and those of his Jagiellonian Polish wife, Anna, who was a sister of Louis II, the realm's late ruler. Recognizing Ferdinand's financial difficulties, Charles supported a truce in Hungary with John Zapolya, but on the condition that the younger Habsburg kept his title in the kingdom. The quality of these distinctions increased the eminence and respect of each sibling. Ferdinand thought that Mary's position as a governor in the Low Countries would be to her “honor and profit” in the material sense of those terms, but also because it was an emperor himself who wanted her to assume the position.Footnote ²⁹

Regardless of the institutional differences in their official functions, relations between the three were not asymmetrical. In fact superior to his brother and sister, Charles was not a “simple mortal glorified as a demigod.” If anything, his humbler familial role was that of a pseudo-parent, frequently acknowledged as such in the ways that his younger siblings addressed him.Footnote ³⁰ He also relied upon his siblings as much as they upon him. As early as 1524 Charles was calling Ferdinand “another me [aung altres moys- mesmes]” whom the emperor trusted more than any other person in the world.Footnote ³¹ Such feelings had important practical spin-offs. If necessary, family members stood in for one another in roles peculiar to the House of Austria. Ferdinand oversaw the business of the Burgundian fraternity of the Golden Fleece when Charles did not have the time. By 1531, twenty of their members had died, and replacements were needed for what the emperor called “his order.” He begged his brother to nominate and sign off on a list of twenty men whom the latter thought appropriate. After four months without any follow-through on Ferdinand's part, his brother still relied upon him enough to repeat his request.Footnote ³²

All three of them recognized their interdependence, consistently expressed in what was becoming an epistolary community of need to which they turned regularly for help, and also to admit their vulnerabilities, domestic and foreign, trivial and crucial. It was Mary, for example, whom Ferdinand asked for an ointment, which he thought might relieve his wife's swollen feet. Although Charles exercised considerable control over her finances and her court, he also found useful the archduchess's close contacts with Antwerp bankers, especially the house of Schetz.Footnote ³³

They also looked one to the other as reliable sources of information. Indeed, they begged each other for it.Footnote ³⁴ Long silences between communications troubled them deeply, and excuses for such lapses were elaborate and prolix. Charles V, for example, went into deep detail to explain why he could not get to a diet scheduled for Speier in 1531, something that Ferdinand very much wanted.Footnote ³⁵ Ensuring the privacy of many of these exchanges was yet another ongoing concern. By 1531, Charles would ask Ferdinand to keep something he had written him about the travel plans of King Francis I of France “entre vous et moy.” Habsburg fiscal problems heightened the need for discretion. Explaining at length his financial and political problems in 1531, Charles urged Ferdinand to put the letter someplace where no one could see it.Footnote ³⁶ They were also in a position to advise one another about potentially damaging false reports. In October of 1531, Mary assured Ferdinand that Charles had every intention of holding a diet of the imperial estates in Speier, regardless of what her younger brother was hearing.Footnote ³⁷

Exposure to largely identical political and confessional opponents also tied the three siblings more firmly together, particularly as the House of Austria became the preeminent defender of Roman Catholicism in central Europe.Footnote ³⁸ Misguided though the Habsburgs thought it to be, the Protestant Reformation reminded the emperor, Ferdinand, and even Mary, whose early interest in German evangelicals drew heavy criticism from the Hungarian estates, of how central confessional unity was becoming for the political viability of their house. Such thoughts eased the way for the trio to develop their common insecurity as an “everyone is against us” mode of self-defense that united them ever more tightly. As Ferdinand prepared for an upcoming diet in Augsburg, Mary urged him to see that his affairs were in good order. Few “potentates,” as she put it, wished her brothers well. The latter's rivals, in her opinion, preferred Christian discord to having Charles and Ferdinand thrive.Footnote ³⁹ As Charles put it to Ferdinand, the Turks were a problem for “vous et moi.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary's shared commitment to the dynamis of their house, territorially, confessionally, and institutionally, was but one of several considerations in the letters that promoted collegiality among them. There was also the availability of the private fraternal comfort zone mentioned above where each of them could express the otherwise publicly inexpressible. Indeed, such an environment seemingly promoted a startling degree of frankness and the emotional release that went with it. Their letters have passages of blunt and pithy commentary about people, events, and even themselves that echo the honesty recommended by Merrell for deepening trust among siblings. They also testify to the depth of familial intimacy and understanding offered to them in such settings. Ferdinand, for one, took the freedom of expression that he and his siblings enjoyed as a cardinal benefit of family membership: “between a sister and a brother we can speak and write frankly, and openly. To do otherwise does not seem to me a good thing.” Mary's frequent apologies for her forthright criticisms of her brothers’ management of her finances were, he said, quite superfluous. In fact, frank commentary was a basic part of her makeup. As Ferdinand, for example, chafed at Charles's delay in getting to a diet set for Speier in Germany, their sister pointedly observed that the very busy emperor had always underestimated the time he would have to do anything. His affairs appeared to her to be in grand confusion, and she feared that he would leave it to her to deal with them. She was self-censoring enough to excuse what she called her “crazy” writing style, but apparently thought that it was an appropriate way to express herself and her anxiety to help Ferdinand.Footnote ⁴¹ Ferdinand allowed himself more than a little unofficial testiness in telling Mary that Francis Batthyány, an influential Hungarian grandee who wanted a payment of 500 florins, might spend more time working on the welfare of Christendom than on private interests.Footnote ⁴²

Indeed, their privately held opinions of others could have caused Ferdinand and Mary far more political trouble than they needed. Ferdinand's comments about a communication from Duke Ulrich of Württemberg, who was in exile, would not have sat very well with the latter at all. The letter, sniffed the Habsburg archduke and king, bore not a trace of the humility befitting a man who was virtually landless. Unable to terminate a prolonged stay by Christian II of Denmark in Flanders, Charles grumbled that “this fool king” was partially responsible for keeping him away from Germany where he was to preside at an imperial diet. Ferdinand agreed with Mary that the influential Bohemian nobleman, Jan Pernstejn, said one thing and sometimes did another. And Ferdinand, at least with his sister, dropped all tactically driven pretenses of impartiality toward German evangelicals, calling them “obstinate and unbending” with heads so impenetrable [tan dura cerviz], that no force could make them abandon their new faith.Footnote ⁴³

The more conventionally stylized language of sections of their brother-sister correspondence was also occasionally displaced by colloquialisms and metaphors that relaxed the flow of formalities as well as the emotional pressures brought on by the varied troubles that shaped their lives. They also said what they wanted to say more economically. With both his wife and sister at odds over engaging the same lady-in-waiting, one Countess Salm, Ferdinand described himself as stretched between two women who were prepared to “tear out his hair” should he not judge the matter “properly.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Explaining the need for Charles's presence at an upcoming diet in Augsburg, Ferdinand quoted a Spanish proverb: “beard to beard honor expresses itself.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Perpetually annoyed with her tasks in the Low Countries, Mary attributed her plight to the “leash on her neck” (“m'a mis la corde au col que me suis acordée á accepter la serge”) that Charles had used when persuading her to take the job. The rationale behind her brothers’ decisions and policies left her, at times, “scratching behind her ear.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Positive though the effect of such experiences can be in sibling interactions, the line between frankness and insult is often imperceptible, especially for subjects of unflattering and negative remarks. Here again, however, the three Habsburgs dealing with one another appear to have accepted the therapeutic dictum that fraternal exchanges should be candid, even critical, but not insulting or derogatory.Footnote ⁴⁷ The mutual respect discussed earlier helped to preclude such behavior, but the trio often went much further in actively commending one another for wise advice, policies, and behavior. Expressions of gratitude among them ran from thanks for help in financial concerns, to Mary's delivery of the ointment that might relieve her sister-in-law's edema. Ferdinand was so pleased that he volunteered to divide revenues from the Hungarian cattle trade with his sister. For her part, Mary thanked him for his painstaking management of her claims in Znojmo.Footnote ⁴⁸ A communication of Mary's to the Austrian estates and her decision to remain silent about her problems in managing the fortification of Altenburg on the Hungarian border won Ferdinand's praise.Footnote ⁴⁹ Charles much appreciated his younger brother's suggestions for dealing with the German electors and the spiritual princes at a diet scheduled to meet in Augsburg in 1531. Ferdinand responded with pleasure when his brother followed his counsel. The emperor complimented Ferdinand for the advance work and preparations he had made for the much-postponed diet of Regensburg. In April of 1531 he was happy with the way Ferdinand was putting together a military force and the latter's helpfulness in Mantua where Charles was having problems. If Charles envied Ferdinand at all, which by and large he did not, it was for the latter's prowess at the hunt, the family passion. He could tell only of downing a deer in 1531, whereas Ferdinand had felled a bear.Footnote ⁵⁰

Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary also followed yet another of Merrell's rules for productive sibling interaction—setting aside past and even present difficulties that had cropped up among or between them in their relationships and focusing on future issues. They were very quick to reset good relations with thoughtful apologies for any behavior that offended, or could offend, another member of the trio. Contritely rehearsing in 1531 his reasons for his much-delayed arrival in Germany for a diet now rescheduled for Regensburg, Charles wrote his brother that he was “very sorry for the trouble this has brought you. I can say only that you must be patient. Our affairs are so closely linked that we feel each other's pains twice—as ourselves and as our other.”Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, Mary, who regarded her two brothers as her “solicitors and procurators” in dealings with the Porte, was at times lyrically grateful for Ferdinand's help. Noting his many preoccupations, she piled on her regrets for having developed her concerns about the defense of Altenburg against the Ottoman forces in such detail that her letter was likely to “break his head.” Such considerations tempered some of her more unkind remarks such as reminding Ferdinand how close the Turks came to Vienna in 1529. Nevertheless, Ferdinand, who had confessed that he had no time for long letters himself, had carried through on promises to keep Mary informed about a truce with the Turks. He added that a longer description was coming from Charles. He also, in prescribed brotherly fashion, said that he understood the passions with which she wrote to him and declared she had no need to excuse herself. Indeed, she had continued to put business before pleasure, pouting in March of 1531 at having to spend Easter week in Mainz, when she wanted to be in Cologne.Footnote ⁵² Charles followed Ferdinand's lead in admitting that Mary's ceaseless complaints about her financial picture in Hungary had some merit.Footnote ⁵³ He also took pains to acknowledge Ferdinand's concerns. In the spring of 1531, he told Ferdinand that he was really perplexed about the delays in Ferdinand's election as king of the Romans.Footnote ⁵⁴

His concern for his brother's position in central Europe was made even clearer in October of 1531 as the latter continued to bemoan the delays in getting a diet underway. “As to the doubts you had before hearing my resolve, and as to the peace of mind [contentement] you will have in knowing it, there is only one response. [This is] because the effect it will have will please everyone. I leave Spain to do important things, and I hope to achieve them…. Above all, I want to assure you that your election is settled with no loose ends to be tied up.” He allowed that the date set for the meeting at Speier had long since passed and that the entire chain of events had harmed Ferdinand's interests considerably. His elder brother, however, believed that he had little choice in the matter. Leaving the Low Countries at this point would do great harm to his reputation and standing among his subjects there. Ferdinand, he pointed out, knew well, what blows to “reputation” could mean. At the same time, however, he told his brother, who wanted to get back to his Austrian lands where he hoped to raise a force to counter an expected Ottoman campaign, to do whatever he thought best to shore up his own holdings. The emperor also advised his younger sibling to do exactly what he wanted to do: announce that any return Ferdinand made to his Austrian lands would be to drive up military assistance from local estates to counter another possible Ottoman invasion. Nor did Charles want to leave Ferdinand facing alone the collectivity of German territorial rulers who doubted that any diet would take place. He had therefore contacted all the princes, asking them to excuse their emperor's tardiness.Footnote ⁵⁵

But of all the psychological prescriptions for negotiating harmonious siblinghood, none did Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary follow more closely than those that reinforced the sense of commonality in their interests. Their shared membership in their house, which they expressed again and again, in their political and military deliberations, not only equalized them, but raised their sights beyond their personal ambitions and interests. Reinforcing this capacity for collaboration was the enjoyment they seem to have taken from one another's company, particularly where recreation was on the program. As Ferdinand began his journey from Santander to the Netherlands, Charles allegedly told his brother's Hofmeister, Luis Manrique, margrave of Aguilar, that he, in all likelihood the next emperor, looked forward to future hunting parties in Brussels when he and Ferdinand met.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although such occasions were rare, the three of them would remain vicariously, if not always actually, aware of their family obligations and bonds through house celebrations and rituals—weddings, births, baptisms, and funeral protocols at Habsburg courts wherever they were established.Footnote ⁵⁷ Some of these had broader cultural implications: Mary's extravagant tastes inspired the castle of Binche between Charlerois and Mons, erected in 1549 for family festivities, the first of which presented the future king, Philip II of Spain, costumed as Amadis of Gaul. The site became a contemporary emblem of lavish social occasions. But more routine events were causes for mutual familial rejoicing as well. Charles's congratulations to Ferdinand on fathering a daughter were a heartfelt testimonial to his confidence in the future of their entire house. The birth of another Archduchess Maria testified, he said to the common “good” of their relationship. Such growth in their line would benefit the two of them, the welfare of their house and that of their lands.Footnote ⁵⁸

Even when their immediate interests differed substantially, the three siblings could turn them into the concern of all. They frequently assured one another that their own views were, in the end, motivated by their commitment to helping one another. The emperor, for example, had early on construed his desire to have himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome, as a way of securing Ferdinand's election as king of the Romans, or German king.Footnote ⁵⁹ Their correspondence abounds in affirmations of their interest in one another's problems and developing ways of addressing them. In his efforts to win Mary's compliance with Charles's request that she become governor of the Low Countries, Ferdinand declared that both he and the emperor had only her well-being in mind. In April 1531, Charles was preoccupied with issues in Spain. He did not, however, neglect to mention that Ferdinand's efforts against the Turks were important for the welfare of Germany, Christendom, “our House of Austria, our realms and lands,” and his obligations to the younger Habsburg's Queen Anna whom the Emperor now regarded as “madame my sister, his consort.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The presence of the Turks in Hungary endangered, as Ferdinand put it, the borders of whatever lands the dynasty held in the region.Footnote ⁶¹ In 1531, Ferdinand reported that a change of venue of the German diet from Speier to Regensburg brought him closer to his lands as he wanted without prejudicing Charles's agenda. Both were delighted that the move would work out well for both of them. As Mary prepared in 1531 to travel to the Low Countries to take up the governorship, Ferdinand assured her that his lands and his court in Austria would treat her in ways that would both please her and contribute to the stature—they called it honor—of each of them.Footnote ⁶² Where meeting a challenge seemed unlikely to benefit either brother, Charles recommended that he and his family let others tackle the problem—a controversy between Mantua and Monferrat along with one in Milan being examples.Footnote ⁶³ In dealing with his sister's fraught Hungarian affairs, Ferdinand assured Mary that he would do for her what he would do for himself. Though the archduchess and ex-queen sputtered at length about treatment she had received negotiating with her younger brother's councillors over the defense of Altenburg, she complied. Avowing that she had done everything possible to promote Ferdinand's interests, she not only sent him money but her hopes that it would improve his position and those of his children and his lands. Even when marital duty brought other siblings to untrustworthy courts such as France, where their sister Eleonore was a queen, Charles felt responsible for preserving her “reputacion.”Footnote ⁶⁴

In discussing one another's health, in this case the emperor's, Ferdinand and Mary set ambition aside for sincere concern, a key ingredient in any recipe for harmonious relations between brothers and sisters. Following Charles's complaint about two bouts with a “quatrain fever” that had afflicted him, Mary was thankful for his recovery. For her (“á mon apetit”), however, his chest troubles flared up all too often, a hint that he may have contracted the tuberculosis that was increasingly widespread in his family. Should his elder brother die, Ferdinand, in 1531, was an obvious candidate-in-waiting for the German emperorship. A Spanish succession was not out of the question, either. Nevertheless, he was not ready to hurry things along. His sister's report just heightened his hopes that God would continue to value Charles's service and the contribution it could make to the common good of Christendom.Footnote ⁶⁵

Read casually, such repetitious language comes across as the kind of vapid formula that Moeglin has dismissed.Footnote ⁶⁶ Frequent reiteration, however, may also have helped to smooth relations among the trio. The very vocabulary of fraternal relations upon which Mary, Ferdinand, and Charles drew time and again underscored their sense of fraternal togetherness. Members of a highly exclusive class, they were nevertheless part of a greater social environment in which familial positions—brother, sister, father, husband, wife, even widow—conveyed overtones of fidelity, codependency, benevolence, and equality. Such values and behaviors seamlessly promoted the “diffuse enduring solidarity” of kinship, as one sociologist has put it, that helped the House of Austria in the first half of the sixteenth century to keep its territorial dynamis intact.Footnote ⁶⁷ It is true that in his more formal letters on state affairs Charles normally restricted the numerous references he made to fraternal relations found in his more private and intimate correspondence with his brother and sister. Laying out in detail how he wished to manage the empire with Ferdinand as king of the Romans, he refers only at the end to “son bon frere” who can expect from the emperor a “good, cordial and brotherly correspondence.” In the rest of the text, Ferdinand is “le roy,” specifically, the king of Hungary and Bohemia. With a visit pending from Francis I of France and Queen Eleanor, Charles refers to Mary of Hungary as the dowager queen of Hungary. Ferdinand and Mary were just as coolly correct. Mary speaks of an envoy Charles had sent to the “king and queen of France.” Ferdinand, who is desperate to get Charles to Germany, refers to the “king and queen of France” without intimate familial referents at all.Footnote ⁶⁸

In communicating exclusively with one another, however, the terminology of conventional family positions and relationships, along with their positive attributes, prevailed, incorporated into both simple nouns and emotionally charged adjectival and adverbial intensifiers. Charles wanted to hear Ferdinand's “brotherly and friendly opinion.” In one of her frequent references to her miseries in the Low Countries (“the most foolish thing I ever did”), Mary promised to fulfill her duties and hoped that Charles will also behave toward her as “a good lord and father.” Having alerted the emperor to some of Ferdinand's concerns, she reported that Charles had taken these to heart as a good brother should. Ferdinand urged “brotherly assiduousness” (Fleiss) upon Charles in dispatching judicial affairs concerning Margrave Philip of Baden.Footnote ⁶⁹

Such relatively modest usages, however, were only starters for moments when the trio went into high overdrive. Charles handed over the German Staathalterschaft [viceroyalty] in the empire to “fratrem nostrum charissimum,” “serenissimo fratri nostro,” “serenissimum fratrem nostrum,” on 16 January 1531. Speaking for herself to Ferdinand in May of 1531 about sensitive property issues in Moravia, Mary pulled out even more familial stops, calling him her “good lord, father, brother, and husband.” Ferdinand, however, outdid her, at least in benign male referents, promising in October of 1531 to help her not only as a brother, father, or husband, but as a “son.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Conclusions and Questions

The normal intimacy generated in family structures that promoted trust, rather than suspicion, cooperation rather than competition, and commitment to common purpose, was forced upon Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary by circumstance and inheritance. All these behaviors, however, were crucial to the survival of the Habsburg imperium as it grew to outsize proportions in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The collective willingness of Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary to confront disagreement, then to move beyond it, coupled with their readiness to apologize and remedy any breaches in their mutual regard for one another as members of a sovereign family did much to prevent serious ruptures among them. So did carrying on fraternal relations within an epistolary safe zone, where they could confess their often human failings to one another. Mary was an especially heavy user of the privacy extended to her to excuse and justify her varied lapses, among them as a correspondent. As psychological studies suggest, confining their grievances to letters enabled them to bond as fully as they did in their concern for one another's mental, physical and political well-being. Constant reminders to one another of the benevolent attributes of family roles and settings helped, too. All these factors helped Charles, Mary, and Ferdinand between 1530 and 1531 to minimize fractures in their relationships that had tormented many houses in earlier times, their own included. The territorial complex they inherited had come to them largely by planned accident, but their careful cultivation of intra-sibling best practices helped them to control that legacy in very difficult times.

What, if anything, is to be learned from these relationships that might further future research on Habsburg dynastic activities, indeed dynastic history generally? Certainly, that dynastic power in the sixteenth century was as much a matter of productive family behaviors and the associations assigned to them as it was of military might. In fact, the central European, as opposed to the Spanish, branch of the Habsburgs performed dismally in the latter category. One of Ferdinand I's deepest regrets would be the loss of Buda and Pest to the Porte in 1541 and the tributary agreement he eventually signed to get some sort of truce with the Turks.Footnote ⁷¹ Constructive fraternal collegiality among the members of reigning families was probably not unique to Charles V, Ferdinand I, and Mary. We would do well to scrutinize the language of communications, its acquisition and development among dynastic siblings more extensively and more closely. Writing off any feature of intra-dynastic correspondence as of “lesser value” and/or empty rhetoric is a bad idea indeed; single sentences can be hermeneutically crucial if one finds a way to unlock their message. Interdisciplinary approaches to historical questions have long gained acceptance among scholars, and we should keep them in reserve for when our own methods fail to answer questions we put to our data.

One should not, of course, forget that less academic practical decisions also furthered Habsburg family solidarity. A nasty mid-century dispute between Ferdinand and Charles over which family member would be the emperor once Charles died—his son, Prince Philip of Spain, or Ferdinand—was in part suppressed by the heated opposition of German territorial rulers to the scheme and Philip's reluctance to stand them down. The relatively smooth succession to the emperorship of Ferdinand's grandson, Ferdinand II, without objections from his paternal cousins, in part followed from their recognition of their physical frailness. They were also unlikely to produce any heirs, let alone males, whereas their considerably younger cousin had already generated two sons.Footnote ⁷² One also wonders if the very dimensions of Charles, Mary, and Ferdinand's dynastic enterprise contributed to what one might call responsible sibling behavior. Did Habsburg respect for the size of their imperium and their responsibilities toward it intensify their regard for one another? Or did the contiguity alone of their holdings in central Europe make it easier for them to control their lands jointly?Footnote ⁷³ At the very least, such research will better acquaint us with the rivals in various in-house princely quarrels that tore apart royal and imperial houses for millennia. Better yet, we may gain some insight into the process of early modern dynastic conflict resolution, especially in Europe. But we should also keep in mind that few of these measures brought enduring harmony to any ruling family. Charles and Ferdinand refused to meet face to face in 1551 as they argued over the imperial succession, and the house, as a whole, was only four decades or so away from the fractious rivalry that made a fiction of the commonality that in theory prevailed between emperors Rudolf II and Matthias.

But what if there is no run of correspondence equivalent to the voluminous exchanges in the sixteenth century between Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary to mine for clues to their corporate success? Family documentation of the Rudolfine era, for example, is comparatively thin. More sociological and anthropological study will probably be helpful. Male birth and death order, for example, may hint at future troubles in ruling families, or at prospects for relative tranquility. Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III, who restored comparative peace to their house in the first decades of the seventeenth century, are good examples. Squeezed as he was between two sets of non-threatening sisters, the first had no immediate male rivals among his siblings. His eventual successor, Ferdinand III, had an elder brother, Johann Karl, three years older than himself, but who died at the age of fourteen. Two sisters and, lastly, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm followed, the latter destined for a clerical career and the freedom to indulge his exquisite tastes in art.Footnote ⁷⁴

Clarifying our understanding of past behaviors through the methodological perspectives of another discipline is, however, no academic cure-all, either. In the case of Charles, Ferdinand, and Mary, psychologists and psychotherapists have been very helpful. But historians cannot always rely upon them to guide our research. Even professionals steeped in the intricacies of sibling relationships seem reluctant to admit that analyzing families of all kinds as cohesive historical agents is an uninformative enterprise. Indeed, they may not want to think about sovereign houses of any kind at all. In general, their studies are focused on the problems that divide families in the more numerous lower orders of society, beset as they have been since the eighteenth century by the pressures of economic, psychological, and political individualism. At least one practitioner has questioned the value of “the language used by ‘historical actors’” that may blur awareness of ‘structure and quantitative features’” more common to domestic settings of the middle- and working classes. Should they accept such premises, historians of sovereign dynasties may be well-advised, therefore, to concentrate on the princely quarrels and their impact upon the exercise of power, rather than on the mechanisms of familial self-repair that reduced discord.Footnote ⁷⁵ If nothing else, this article might be a reminder to democratically inclined behavioral scientists generally that family practices, innate or learned, were central to the careers of august ruling dynasties as well. The Habsburg dynamis of the sixteenth century—expressed in territorial mass and the ability of Charles and Ferdinand to acquire and defend it, if largely on borrowed money, and plain luck—avoided compromising clashes over control and exercise of titles, along with financial obligations to both creditors and themselves, in good part because two archdukes and an archduchess sister, consciously or not, incorporated into their communiqués instruments of sibling comity that clinicians, sociologists, and historians in the distant future could investigate and decode.