Dan Snow's History Hit - The Habsburgs

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

It was an honour to be joined by Martyn Rady to discuss one of history's most thrilling families, the Habsburgs. Ruling for almost a millennium, their imperial vision was perhaps best realised in Emperor Frederick III's AEIOU motto: Austriae est imperare orbi universe, "Austria is destined to rule the world." Indeed, Frederick's descendants would extend their power into the Holy Roman Empire, Italy, Spain, the New World, and the Pacific, a dominion that Charles V called "the empire on which the sun never sets." Weathering religious warfare, revolution and all kinds of political storms, it drew to a close with the 1914 assassination of the Habsburg heir presumptive Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which of course, marked the start of another epochal chapter of history. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The other day I was reading about 19th century European history and it just struck me how many times the Habsburgs were on the losing side of great wars and battles. And what's amazing about this family that dominated central, eastern, southeastern Europe for centuries is their staying power, their remarkable ability to cling on to this polyglot, transnational, non-contiguous empire, the Austrian or the Austro-Hungarian empire. They are the most fascinating family. It's one of the most extraordinary stories in European history. I'm very lucky to have Martin Raddy on the podcast to talk about the Habsburgs. He's just written a gigantic book, The Habsburgs, The Rise and Fall of a World Power. He's the Professor of Central European History

at University College London. And he joined me a little while ago to talk about this most remarkable of families from start to finish. It's a good one, this one. If you want to go and listen to back episodes of this podcast, they're available exclusively on History Hit TV. It's our subscription history service. You get hundreds of history documentaries. This week we're featuring Churchill's great 1940s speeches. 80 years ago we got exclusive access to the House of Commons, so please go and check that out. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you will get a month for free and then one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. Please go and check that out. In the meantime, everybody, here's Martin Raddy. Enjoy. Martin, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

My pleasure. The Habsburgs are so fascinating. Can we talk about their beginnings before they become this sort of world, this hegemonic family spanning the globe. Where do they come from originally? Who are the first Habsburgs? The first Habsburg we know is about the year 990. And we can't really get any further back than that. Lots of people speculate. Lots of people devise sort of Da Vinci code explanations as to where they come from, but they originate about the 10th century. And we find them earliest in northern Switzerland in what is now the Arth century, when the Holy Roman Empire in Germany goes through a period of major dislocation as a result of civil war, eruption of Vikings, Hungarians, and the earliest Habsburgs carve out a territory in what is now northern Switzerland. Alsace was then called southern Swabia and the key point really is about the year 1000 when a Habsburg warlord called Radbot founds the castle Habsburg in now northern Switzerland and makes that for a short period of time, certainly much less than a

century, he makes that the, if you like, the Habsburg redoubt from which he administers his increasingly large territories. They build up their power during the course of the 11th and 12th centuries. They're lucky they they're in northern Switzerland, everybody thinks it's Switzerland is mountains, most of it, about half of it is plain and it's washed by rivers coming down from the Alps. It's a fantastically lush countryside and they're able to extract revenues from the peasantry and they're able to take advantage of the trade routes that go through Switzerland linking the low countries to northern Italy via the Saint-Gottard Pass which is opened about the year 1200. So that is the basis of their power. From there they're able to make a series of leapfrogs. They leapfrog to

become emperors of the Holy Roman Empire or kings one should say because they don't get crowned by the Pope which you need to do to become an emperor. They acquire in 1272 the office of king of Germany emperor in waiting and they are able to become one of the three great families that contest power within the Holy Roman Empire from that point and from the 15th century they hold the office of Holy Roman Emperor virtually in perpetuity. It's an elected office, but nevertheless, they managed to make it de facto hereditary. And they continue as Holy Roman Emperors with only one short break, right through until 1806. When Napoleon goes and gets rid of it. I'm fascinated that it's that crisis of the 10th century, the same crisis that gives us the establishment of the Normans in what became Normandy.

It's an important crucible in the medieval period. Absolutely, yes. I mean, you've got, you have a fantastic empire that is built up in the course of the 9th century, the Carolingian Empire. This is, it depends what definition one wants to use for a state, but this, by most most definitions is a state. It is administered through a literate bureaucracy. It is run by clerks, run by churchmen in the pay of the ruler.

The ruler and his agents transverse this vast territory. transverse this vast territory. All this collapses in the course of the late 9th century and is then suffers further strains from invasion, invasion by the Slavs who recapture territories that have been lost in northern Europe, invasion by the Hungarians, invasion by the Vikings. This is a period of tremendous turmoil. Out of it emerges a new Germany based upon the Saxon rulers who then give way by degrees to new dynasties. But Germany moves towards some form of consolidation. It's not bad going. I mean, lots of families claim an ancient lineage, but it's not bad going. I mean, lots of families claim an ancient lineage, but it's not bad going actually holding significant sovereign power in Europe until 1918 from those beginnings. Yes. I mean, there are other dynasties there that are equally lucky. One thinks of the

Wittelsburgs. One thinks of some of these aristocratic families. There's a case in something like in 1910 when I think it's a leading Hungarian aristocrat and he's meeting Franz Josef and he points out the ancient lineage of his family and says we were great lords in Hungary while you were still robber barons in Switzerland to which the emperor replied yes yes, but I think we've done somewhat better. So, you know, one can see individual aristocratic families achieving the same over long periods of time. But yes, in terms of sheer endurance, they certainly are up there. Of course, they do perform a slate of hand. The family dies out in 1740, because only a female is left. But what a female! Yes, yes, indeed. I mean, she is pushed into power by a legal slate of hand. She loses the office of emperor by very virtue of the fact that she's female. She loses nearly all her territory at one point. But she has a marriage to a really quite formidable but overlooked gentleman, Francis Stephen of Lorraine.

to perpetuate and replenish the line from that marriage but technically of course in 1740 the line should become the house of Lorraine but it doesn't the Habsburgs managed to call it by again another state the house of Habsburg Lorraine so the impression is given that the Habsburgs have a continuity that is perhaps slightly longer than one might technically think they deserve. Well indeed we're not going to mention the House of Windsor and Prince Philip in that regard either but we're talking of course about the Empress Maria Theresa but I want to go back a bit further this is my slightly naughty joke but has there ever been a family a sovereign power as successful and enduring and hegemonic as the hapsburgs but who've been so completely useless at losing nearly every single battle they've ever fought

i think that's a bit unfair i mean what they do have is a tremendous ability when they're on the losing side to make a deal and to get rid of chunks of territory in order that the line can continue or one can see them constructing artful marriages so that the line is perpetuated that's how they deal with napoleon i mean they are as you say they are constantly defeated by napoleon except in the very last battle when they're on the winning side but otherwise they're constantly defeated and their technique is to get rid of territories to if you like sell off a princess as the new wife of Napoleon and of course they're aided by some pretty duplicitous diplomacy in the form of Metternich who actually has various of Napoleon's

ministers in his pocket, so he knows exactly what's going on in France. But they are able to strike deals. This, of course, is their undoing. In any other circumstance, during a war that they were doing very badly at, namely the First World War, they would have extricated themselves, made a separate deal and come out of it with something intact. They actually attempt to do that in 1917 onwards, where the new emperor, Emperor Charles, does attempt to put together a deal with the Western allies. The Kaiser finds out about it, summons him to German military headquarters and gives him a dressing down. From that point onwards, the Habsburgs are unable to extricate themselves from the First World War and they go down along with the German Kaiser. Okay, so obviously I'm rude about the Habsburgs,

but it's just striking that unlike the Hohenzollerns or the Saxe-Coburgs or the Romanovs, you don't think of the Habsburg lands or indeed a Chinese dynasty, you don't think of the Habsburg lands being expanded through annexation, through military might. But am I wrong?

Am I wrong about that? If you go all the way back to Maximilian in the early 16th century or Charles V, was that a more recognisably straightforward power grab? Is that how they built up these gigantic European empires? Well, I mean, I think there are two things at work. Firstly, we'll construct marriages, but marriages are a cloak of legitimacy for military power that normally has to be exerted in the wake of the marriage. So, for instance, Maximilian constructs in 1477 a marriage with the Burgundian Princess Mary. The Netherlands, the Low Countries, aren't going to accept it. He has to go and spend the next 20 years fighting in the Low Countries in order to make good his claim. On top of that,

we shouldn't overlook the fact that Mexico, the New World, is conquered by force of arms, by Habsburg admirals and Habsburg generals, people like Hernando Cortes. And we shouldn't forget either the tremendous advance in the 1680s and early 1690s, which carries the Habsburgs deep into the Balkans. I mean, they are in 1690, not that far off Constantinople. That is a tremendous achievement. They are militarily successful against the Turks. They break the power of the Turks effectively in Central and Eastern Europe. And they manage to put together an empire by force that stretches across the world. You're absolutely right. I am correct. I will never be rude about the Habsburgs again. When is their zenith? I mean, the extraordinary period in which they are just simply the most

powerful family that the world has ever seen. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing

Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. I would have thought probably one would say 1580 to 1640. This is when they have Portugal.

They get Portugal because Charles V's wife is a Portuguese princess. And when the Portuguese line defaults in 1580, it ends up the last king is a cardinal, so necessarily celibate. When the line defaults, it goes to Philip II of Spain and he is therefore able to accumulate the Portuguese overseas possessions which means not just Mexico and Peru which the Spanish Habsburgs already have but he's able to take in the Portuguese possessions which include Brazil parts of the Indian coast and parts of the Chinese coast as well. It's at that point when you start adding up and looking at what the Habsburgs have, their power extends from Florida all the way down to the bottom of South America. You've got

outposts across the Pacific in places like the Philippines, in Taiwan, along the Chinese coast. You've got possessions along the Indian coastline. And then, of course, you have the Habsburg possessions in Spain, the Netherlands, and northern Italy, run by the Spanish branch, and then the Central European branch, which extends from the Holy Roman Empire, i.e. really from the Rhine, over towards the Falkarpathians in the east. And part of what is now Ukraine was Habsburg territory. So I'd have thought that's the moment of their high point from 1580 to 1640. Can you just give us the list of territory within Europe that Charles V controlled? He controlled Spain. That's the territory he is crowned king of first in 1516, or proclaimed king of first because they don't have a coronation in Spain. He's therefore controller of Castile and

Aragon. He inquires likewise at this time the Netherlands, by which we mean what is now the Netherlands, but also including Luxembourg and Belgium. That is, if you like, the core territory. He then becomes Holy Roman Emperor in 1519 when he's elected to the office. That gives him control essentially of Germany. He has possessions in northern Italy, some of which belong to the Holy Roman Empire, some of which are Spanish Hapsburg territories that come via his grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon, and those include Sicily, Naples, and bits of the north as well. He has the Austrian lands. These he's assigned to his brother Ferdinand to look after. Ferdinand manages in 1526 to take possession of Bohemia and Hungary and Croatia,

which is then a part of Hungary. So we can see that at its height in Europe, the Habsburgs are extending from what is now Slovakia, eastern Slovakia, all the way across to Spain, and also including the Spanish territories in the Mediterranean. Are the seeds for their downfall sown in that period as well? Is it just simply too large and possibly too straggling an empire? I'm sure that's not the international relations word for that. But unlike what the Romanovs were building in Russia, or the Chinese were able to build, or what the American state would eventually build in North America, it's a ridiculously

vulnerable collection of territory, that, isn't it? Yes, it is. They do very well to hold it. They managed to hold it and to expand it during the Thirty Years' War in terms of their overseas possessions. They are fighting on the West African coast in the 1630s and 1640s. The downfall is marriage, just as marriage provides the legitimating force for the Habsburgs. So a lack of heirs also acts as the delegitimizing force. And come 1700, the Spanish Habsburg line collapses.

we end with the tragedy of Carlos II, Charles II of Spain, who is mentally and physically disabled. He's unable to produce an heir. And as a consequence, the line perishes in 1700. The Hapsburgs, the Central European Hapsburgs, attempt to maintain their power in Spain, but it's at that point that they hit the power of France most directly. Spain passes under the Bourbons. So in a sense, just as marriage and inheritance had built the Habsburg power or provided the legitimating claim behind it, so a lack of heirs destroys the Habsburgs in 1700, destroys Habsburg power in Spain.

And in 1740, just to go back to Maria Turek, it almost robs them of their Central European possessions as well. When Frederick the Great, Frederick II of Prussia, absorbed Silesia, I mean, that really is, I think, one of the most important pivots of modern European history. Yes, I think it's important in a number of ways. It is a completely illegal act. Frederick doesn't even bother to really try very hard to justify his intervention. He digs up some old charters and says, oh look, Prussia had a claim to it that goes back several centuries. Nobody takes this very seriously. It is a naked grab. And from that point onward, naked grabs become possible. Just under 40 years separates the rape of Silesia to the rape of Poland, the first rape of Poland, where

Austria, Prussia and Russia, without any justification, simply start eating away at the Polish territories. And Napoleon will come along and Napoleon will likewise have no conventional justification for the wars and occupations that he makes. So I think the rape of Silesia, Frederick Caesar of Silesia in 1740, is important in diplomatic terms for its fallout. It's important as well because Silesia was probably the most industrialized part of the Habsburg lands in Central Europe. But it wasn't particularly wealthy. It wasn't bringing in a huge amount of money to the Habsburg treasury. What Frederick does is work out a way of economically upswinging Silesia while at the same time

getting a much larger tax take the system that Frederick uses becomes the one that's adopted by the Habsburgs and in fact is copied throughout a large part of Europe it is the bureaucratic administrative military machine that Frederick introduces into Silesia that becomes the pattern via the Habsburgs for European states as a whole. Let's look at the 18th and 19th centuries when you get these empires aided by things like railways, the American empire, the Russian empire, the German empire, that seem to coalesce to take on modern forms and evolve into sort of unit-like super states. Why do the Habsburgs, the Central European Habsburgs, are they quite successful? They just end up on the wrong side

of the First World War? Why is there a perception that they don't quite get it right? They become a little bit of the sick man of Europe as Germany and Russia are reordering themselves. One might call it a federal construction. That's the first point. It doesn't fit in to the centralised bureaucratic machine that we associate with the developing state structures of the 19th century. We know that the 19th century is the period of nationalism. Obviously, there is going to be a problem in a multinational empire. The Habsburg Empire is multi-state and it's multinational.

It doesn't identify with any one single national group. with any one single national group. Obviously Prussia and the emerging Prussia that becomes Germany in 1871 is a German national state. The new Italy that emerges after 1859, that is able to present itself as an Italian state as well. The Russians make out that they are a Russian national state of the same type. The Habsburgs never go down that route. They don't presuppose that they have a German state, they accept the fact that it's multinational. So in other words, the Habsburgs appear not to be on the side of the state, not to be on the side of the nation. And of course, when these two ideas fuse together most powerfully in the 20th century, when nation-states are carved out across Europe, the Habsburg monarchy, Habsburg empire, is thought that it must necessarily be

dispensed with at that moment in the same way as the Ottoman Empire. There is something so extraordinary about the Habsburgs and the Ottomans going down in the same year, 1918, as allies. Of all the strange currents of history, I mean, that is a bizarre one, isn't it? These two powers that for centuries were each other's nemesis. But of course, Britain and France were also fighting on the same side in the First World War as well, and they've never gone on particularly well. So they end up in much the same fate

and much the same sort of choreographed ending almost. I mean, one thinks of the last emperor being told in the Schönbrunn Palace that it's time for him to phone the taxi and go into exile. And one thinks likewise of the last Ottoman sultan, who by that time only holds the title of caliph, waiting in 1922 on a dusty railway station outside Istanbul for a train that will eventually take him to Paris. So there is a similarity both in the trajectory of imperial decline and in the individual fates of the people who had run these two. to. It is unusual as well because the Habsburgs have been helping themselves to as much territory as they can decently get in the Balkans at the expense of Ottoman Turkey but in a sense that

provides us with the clue as to why Ottomans and Habsburgs should have been on the same side in 1914, and that is the fear of Russia, that Russia will occupy the Balkans, it will push on towards Constantinople, it will achieve the outlet to the Mediterranean that it wants, and in so doing, it will separate off, act as a magnet for the Slavs in Southern Europe, but also in Eastern Europe as well. So there's that fear of Russia that pushes the Habsburgs and Ottomans into a mutual embrace. I don't know how you begin to write a book about the Habsburgs, but congratulations on doing that. What's it called? It's called The Habsburgs, A Rise and Fall of a World's Power. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on doing that. What's it called? It's called The Habsburgs' Rise and Fall of a World's Power. Fantastic.

Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money.

Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review,

I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there and I need all the fire support I can get so that will boost it up the charts it's so tiresome but if you could do it I'd be very very grateful

thank you