The Austrian Government

Abstract

The Habsburg monarchy, an “agglomeration of territories… and… of nations” ¹, as Metternich called it, had been accumulated through a conscious policy of marriages ever since Maximilian I had himself married the Burgundian heiress, his son to the Spanish and his grandson to the Bohemian-Hungarian princesses. Not until 200 years later, when the cohesive effect of the Turkish danger had disappeared, did the Habsburgs take any steps to unify the disparate possessions of the House of Austria. The Pactum Mutuae Successions of 1703 and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713 provided for “indivisible and inseparable” union and for succession through male and female lines ².