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Introduction

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War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria

Part of the book series: Studies in Modern History ((SMH))

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Abstract

Historians usually consider the Bohemian Revolt of 1618–20 as the starting-point of the so-called Thirty Years’ War. Whether they view the early stages of the war as the outcome of long-term rivalries among European powers, or as a Habsburg-centred, political-religious conflict, they have neglected to provide a systematic or comprehensive study of its origins. Most monographs in English that seek to include the Habsburgs’ lands must rely on older research that concentrates on the Bohemian kingdom. Furthermore, Habsburg historians themselves have taken little interest in the developments which culminated in 1619 in a grand alliance of Protestant Estates from most of the dynasty’s lands, even though they view the defeat of the Confederation as a crucial divide in Habsburg history. Hans Sturmberger’s monograph of 1959 is still the standard work in German on the beginnings of the ‘Bohemian’ revolt that also pays attention to the involvement of the Austrian Estates.1 The stronger interest that Czech scholars have traditionally shown in the Bohemian side of the uprising also waned after Polišenský’s important contributions during the 1960s,2 although Czech, Moravian and Silesian historians have recently renewed their concern with the pre-Confederation Estates.3

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Notes and References

  1. Hans Sturmberger, Aufstand in Böhmen. Der Beginn des dreißigjährigen Krieges (Munich/Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1959).

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  2. J. V. Polšenský and Frederic Snider, War and Society in Europe, 1618–1648 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 55; see also Polišenský’s The Thirty Years’ War, trans. Robert Evans (London: Batsford, 1971).

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  3. Myron P. Gutmann, ‘The Origins of the Thirty Years’ War’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xviii (Spring 1988), pp. 751–2. However, Gutmann also complains that the origin of the Thirty Years’ War has not been discussed sufficiently in recent treatments of the war. The English literature on the Thirty Years’ War is extensive; recent works include Stephen J. Lee, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge, 1991); Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (Boston, Mass.: Routledge, 1984); and N. M. Sutherland, ‘The Origins of the Thirty Years’ War and the Structure of European Politics’, English Historical Review, 107 (July 1992), pp. 587–625.

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  4. Paula Sutter-Fichtner, ‘Habsburg State-Building in the Early Modern Era: The Incomplete Sixteenth Century’, Austrian History Yearbook, xxv (1994), pp. 139–57.

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  5. Berthold Bretholz still emphasized this aspect in the early twentieth century in Neuere Geschichte Böhmens (Gotha: F. A. Perthes, 1920).

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  6. Victor S. Mamatey, ‘The Battle of the White Mountain as Myth in Czech History’, East European Quarterly, xv(3) (Sept. 1981), pp. 335–45, provides an overview of Czech historiography.

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  7. F. L. Carsten, Princes and Parliaments in Germany from the Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959); Fritz Hartung, Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte vom 15. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 5th edn. (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1950).

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  8. See, for example, Dietrich Gerhard, ‘Ständische Vertretungen und Land’, Festschrift für Hermann Heimpl zum 70. Geburtstag am 19. September 1971 (Gottingen: Max Planck Institut für Geschichte, 1971), pp. 447–72, who suggested that this dualism was not overcome until the nineteenth century.

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  9. See, for example, Grete Mecenseffy, Geschichte des Protestantismus in Österreich (Graz: Böhlaus, 1956) and Victor Bibl, ‘Die katholischen und protestantischen Stande Niederösterreichs im XVII. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ständischen Verfassung’, Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich (JbLkNÖ) 2, NF (1903); pp. 167–323. Gustav Reingrabner’s, Adel und Reformation. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Protestantischen Adels im Lande unter der Enns während des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Verein für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich, 1976), offers no new interpretation of the conflict.

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  10. Robert Bireley, ‘Ferdinand ii: Founder of the Habsburg Monarchy’, in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas (eds), Crown, Church and Estates. Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Sevententh Centuries (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 230–1, 240.

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  11. Jeremy Black, ‘Recent Work on European Absolutism’, Teaching History (Jan. 1988), pp. 39–40, has asked these questions.

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  12. See Thomas Ertman, Birth of the Leviathan. Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1, for succinct review of these debates. However, Ertman’s own differentiation between patrimonial and bureaucratic constitutionalism and absolutism suffers from a similar problem, and his argument will not hold up if applied to the entire complex of the Austrian Habsburg lands.

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  13. Nicholas Henshall claims this in The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 1–3. For more balanced overviews of the debate and treatment of the subject, see Richard Bonney, ‘Absolutism: What’s in a Name?’ French History, 1(1) (1987), pp. 93–117; Heinz Duchhardt, ‘Absolutismus — Abschied von einem Epochenbegriff?’, Historische Zeitschrift, 258 (1994), pp. 113–22; Phyllis K. Leffler, ‘French Historians and the Challenge to Louis xiv’s Absolutism’, French Historical Studies (1985), pp. 1–21; Black, ‘Recent Work on European Absolutism’, and especially John Miller’s ‘Introduction’ in John Miller (ed.), Absolutism in Seventeenth-Century Europe, (London: Macmillan, 1990).

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  14. Rudolf Vierhaus, Germany in the Age of Absolutism, trans. Jonathan B. Knudsen (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 88–9.

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  15. See, especially, Marc Raeff’s work, The Well-Ordered Police State. Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983); Peter-Michael Hahn, ‘“Absolutistische” Polizeigesetzgebung und ländliche Sozialverfassung’, Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, 29 (1980), pp. 13–29. R. W. Scribner’s examination of policing at the grass-roots calls into question the existence of a well-ordered police state in his ‘Police and the Territorial State in Sixteenth-century Württemberg’, in E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott (eds), Politics and Society in Reformation Europe (London: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 103–20; Karl Vocelka, ‘Public Opinion and the Phenomenon of Sozialdisziplinierung in the Habsburg Monarchy’, in Charles W. Ingrao (ed.), State and Society in Early Modern Austria, (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1994), pp. 119–40, gives the problematic a different, and interesting twist.

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  16. Polišenský and Snider, War and Society in Europe, 1618–1648 (Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 55; see also Polišenský’s, The Thirty Years War.

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  17. See Jonathan Dewald, The European Nobility, 1400–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. ch. 1, for a review of debates.

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  18. R. F. Schmiedt, ‘Vorgeschichte, Verlauf und Wirkungen des Dreissigjährigen Krieges’, in Max Steinmetz, (ed.), Deutshland von 1476 bis 1648: von der frühbürgerlichen Revolution bis zum Westfählischen Frieden (Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1967), pp. 271–383. For a review and bibliography of Marxist historiography, see Klaus Deppermann, ‘Der preussische Absolutismus und der Adel. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit der marxistischen Absolutismustheorie’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 8 (1982), pp. 538–53; on Engels’ contribution, see M. C. Howard and J. E. King, A History of Marxian Economics, Vol i: 1883–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), chs 1 and 2.

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  19. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 18, 54–5.

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  20. L. Makkai, ‘Die Entstehung der gesellschaftlichen Basis des Absolutismus in den Ländern der österreichischen Habsburger’, Études Historiques, 1 (1960), pp. 630–67.

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  21. Peter Feldbauer, Herren und Ritter, Vol. 1: Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1973), and Der Herrenstand in Oberösterreich. Ursprünge, Anfänge, Frühformen (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1971); Herbert Knittler, Städte und Märkte, Vol. 2: Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1973); Michael Mitterauer, ‘Ständegliederung und Ländertypen’, in Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung, Vol. 3: Beiträge zur Typology der österreichischen Länder aus ihren mittelalterlichen Grundlagen (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1973), 115–203; Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna/Munich: Herold Verlag, 1985); Herbert Knittler, Nutzen, Renten Erträge. Struktur und Entwicklung frühneuzeitlicher Feudaleinkommen in Niederösterreich (Vienna: Verlag für Geschichte und Politik, 1989); Adel im Wandel. Politik, Kultur, Konfession, 1500–1700. Katalog der Niederösterreichischen Landesausstellung, Rosenburg 1990 (Vienna: NÖ. Landesregieirung, 1990); and Beatrix Bastl, Herrschaftsschätzungen. Materialien zur Einkommens- und Besitzstruktur niederösterreichischer Grundherrschaften 1550 bis 1750 (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1992). The interest of Austrian historians in economic history and the legal aspects of noble land ownership is, of course, older; see in particular Helmut Feigl’s contribution, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den there-sianisch- josephinischen Reformen (Vienna: Verein f. Landeskunde von NÖ. und Wien, 1964); and H. Feigl and W. Rosner (eds) Adel im Wandel. Vorträge und Diskussionen des elften Symposions des Niederösterreichischen Instituts für Landeskunde Horn, 2.–5.Juli 1990 (Vienna: NÖ. Institut für Landeskunde, 1991).

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  22. See, for instance, Pánek, ‘The Religious Question’; and Válka, ‘Moravia and the Crisis of the Estates’ System’. Much of the literature provides summaries of older (including Marxist) research, and therefore does at times refer to social composition and the structure of property; as does, for example, Jaroslav Mezník, ‘Der böhmische und mährische Adel im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert’, Bohemia, 28 (1987), pp. 69–91.

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  23. Günter Barudio, Der Teutsche Krieg, 1618–1648 (Frankfurt-am-/Main: Fischer Verlag, 1985); Heinz Duchhart, Protestantisches Kaisertum und Altes Reich (Wiesbaden: Steiner Verlag, 1977); Martin Heckel, Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1983); and Volker Press, Kriege und Krisen. Deutschland 1600–1715 (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1991).

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  24. Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Enstehung der Konfessionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1965); Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker Humblot, 1969); Wolfgang Reinhard, ‘Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters’, in Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, 10 (1983), pp. 257–77; and Heinz Schilling, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620’, Historische Zeitschrift, 246 (1988), pp. 1–45. More recently, Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Konfessionalisierung im 16. Jahrhundrert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1992); Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, Die katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposium der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1993 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995); Eberhard, ‘Voraussetzungen und strukturelle Grundlagen der Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa’, in Joachim Bahlcke and Arno Strohmeyer (eds), Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa. Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 1999), pp. 89–103; R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation. Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1989) provides an English synthesis of research on confessionalization.

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  25. Robert Bireley, ‘Confessional Absolutism in the Habsburg Lands in the Seventeenth Century’, and Anton Schindling, ‘Delayed Confessionalization. Retarding Factors and Religious Minorities in the Territories of the Holy Roman Empire, 1555–1648’, in Charles W. Ingrao (ed.) State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press), pp. 36–70.

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  26. Ronald G. Asch, The Thirty Years’ War. The Holy Roman Empire and Europe, 1618–48 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), chs 1 and 2. Georg Schmidt still believes that ‘the Thirty Years’ War as a fight over power and influence justified with confessional motives’, and that the defenestration in Bohemia was caused by fear of the Estates to lose influence and religious freedom; Der dreißigjährige Krieg, 4th rev. ed. (Munich: Beck, 1999) p. 29; Geschichte des alten Reiches: Staat und Nation in der frühen Neuzeit, 1495–1806 (Munich: Beck, 1999), p. 151. See also Joachim Bahlcke’s Regionalismus und Staatsintegration im Widerstreit. Die Länder der Böhmischen Krone im ersten Jahrhundert der Habsburgerherrschaft (1526–1619) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1994); and Klaus Gerteis’s introduction to a source collection on the Bohemian revolt, Monarchie oder Ständestaat. Der Böhmische Aufstand von 1618. Quellen und wissenschaftliche Diskussion (Trier: Auenthal Verlag, 1983); Winfried Eberhard, Monarchie und Widerstand. Zur ständischen Oppositionsbildung im Herrschaftssystem Ferdinands I in Böhmen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1985); and Winfried Becker, ‘Ständestaat und Konfessionsbildung am Beispiel der böhmischen Konföderationsakte von 1619’, in Dieter Albrecht et al. (eds.) Politik und Konfession, (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1983), pp. 77–96. There are exceptions: Bůžek, ‘Nižší šlechta v předbělohorských cecháh’; Eduard Maur, ‘Der böhmische und mährische Adel vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert’, in H. Feigl and W. Rosner (eds.), Adel im Wandel, pp. 17–37; and Thomas Winkelbauer, ‘Krise der Aristokratie? Zum Strukturwandel des Adels in den böhmischen und niederösterreichischen Ländern im 16. und 18. Jahrhundert’, Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung (MIÖG), 100 (1992), pp. 328–53, who draws heavily on my previous research on the Austrian nobility.

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  27. Norbert Elias, The Court Society, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).

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  28. Ellery Schalk has levelled the most famous challenge to this interpretation: ‘The Court as Civilizer’, in Ronald G. Asch and Adolf Birk (eds.), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650, (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 256–64; see also Schalk’s From Valor to Pedigree: Ideas of Nobility in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

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  29. For a synthesis of research by social scientists on clientage systems, see S. N. Eisenstadt and L. Roniger, Patrons, Clients and Friends. Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society (Cambridge University Press, 1984). Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (Oxford University Press, 1986), has been particularly influential in showing how historians can use the conceptual tools of social scientists on clientage.

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  30. Kristen B. Neuschel, Word of Honour. Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 16–19.

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  31. Victor Morgan, ‘Some Types of Patronage, Mainly in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England’, in Antoni Maczak (ed.) Klientelsysteme im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1988), pp. 91–126; quote on p. 106. However, Morgan’s comment (p. 111) that ‘feudal patronage represented a command economy, and patrimonial patronage a market economy in the exercise of influence’ seems misplaced, since economists also define modern centralized systems as command economies.

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  32. Robert Brenner has stressed this in his Merchants and Revolution. Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 644. Other social theorists and historians of Western Europe have pointed to the difficulties of dissociating early modern rebellions from long-term processes of social change; see Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1991); M. S. Kimmel, Absolutism and Its Discontents: State and Society in 17th century France and England (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1988); and Jones, ‘Bourgeois Revolution Revivified’ in Colin Lucas (ed.) Rewriting the French Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 69–118.

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  33. The historical sociologist, Jack A. Goldstone, Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991) has made a brilliant and suggestive beginning in explaining the multiplicity of early modern revolts.

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  34. See S. N. Eisenstadt, and L. Roniger, ‘Patron-Client as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Comparative Study of Society and History, 22 (1980) pp. 51–61, for a critique of this neglect.

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  35. See, for example, Robert R. Harding’s discussion of noble fidelity, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 34–7. Richard van Dülmen supports the first assertion with a quote from a German noble, who prayed in 1583 to God to protect his honour, which he ‘loves more than gold, silver or [his] estate Mertschütz’, Entstehung des frühneuzeitlichen Europa, 1550–1648 (Frankfurt-am-Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1982), pp. 137. See also Peter Moraw, ‘The Court of the German King and of the Emperor at the end of the Middle Ages, 1440–1519’, in Asch and Birke (eds), Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility, p. 126; and Elias, The Court Society, pp. 64–5, 85.

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© 2003 Karin J. MacHardy

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MacHardy, K.J. (2003). Introduction. In: War, Religion and Court Patronage in Habsburg Austria. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230536760_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230536760_1

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-349-39087-8

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