Martyn Rady. <i>The Habsburgs: To Rule the World</i>

Martyn Rady’s monograph on the history of the Habsburg dynasty has won him much, and deserved, acclaim. His book is based on extensive research and is very well written. It is a truly valuable contribution to the scholarship on the Habsburgs and their lands. Rady tells the millennial story in twenty-nine chapters, from the obscure beginning of the family in Switzerland to the end of the empire in 1918. It is a political and cultural history, in most parts a tale of the rulers and their realms and how they attempted to shape or cultivate them; or, often, just to preserve them in the face of a long series of challenges and centrifugal tendencies. Architecture, art, and religion as ways to symbolize and strengthen the power of the dynasty were prevalent, but also military violence, political pressure, and diplomacy. The goal of most of the many rulers and the destiny of the family became increasingly “to rule the world,” as the subtitle of the book suggests. They seemed to have reached this under Charles V in the sixteenth century (chapter 6), when Central Europe, parts of the Low Countries, Spain, and, most of all, the “New World” were integrated under one emperor. However, this unity soon fell apart because of dynastic divisions, the Reformation, religious wars and conflicts, the Ottoman challenges, and shifts among the great powers of Europe: the rise of Russia and the maritime Protestant powers of the Netherlands and Britain, and the dominance of France in the West after the Thirty Years’ War.What, however, does Rady’s book add to our knowledge on the relationship between the Habsburgs and the Hungarian Kingdom, which they ruled for almost half a millennium? What can we learn from it from the perspective of Hungarian studies? The catastrophe of Mohács with the death of the young Renaissance Jagiellonian king Louis II of Hungary, together with “half of the leading magnates and seven bishops and archbishops, who had led their contingents personally into battle” (75), opened the way for Charles’s son Ferdinand to claim the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary (including Croatia). Rady suggests that the two kingdoms were wealthy and the Hungarian army of 25,000 men was one of the strongest in Europe, but it could not withstand the onslaught of 75,000 Ottoman troops from Anatolia and the Balkans. The Habsburgs were “doubly” related to Louis II through marriage—his wife, Maria, was Ferdinand’s sister, and his sister, Anne, was married to Ferdinand. But Hungary’s powerful magnates as well as its numerous nobility (up to ten thousand!), who made the annual meetings of the Diet of Hungary tumultuous and hardly controllable, elected John Zápolya, the voivode of Transylvania, as king instead. The Croatians assented to Ferdinand as Louis’s successor. The following civil war, in which Zápolya first allied with the Sultan and then found an agreement with Ferdinand, ended with Zápolya’s death and the occupation of the middle region of Hungary by the Ottoman Empire. During this time, Calvinism made inroads into the Hungarian cities, creating a specific form of victim-centered narrative for Hungarians who had “suffered like the Israelites” (80). This narrative would go on to have a long afterlife, although Rady does not mention how the defeats of 1848/49 and later Trianon somehow could be molded into a similar myth. Ferdinand attempted to fight against these “heresies,” but he could not even stop the spread of Protestantism in his own backyard, the Austrian lands. Eventually, as Rady highlights, so many noblemen converted to the new faiths that the emperor came to depend on many Lutherans in his administration because of a lack of Catholic support (82).In short, “Ferdinand was unable to impose a uniform government any more than he could enforce religious conformity. The lands and kingdoms over which he held sway were possessed of powerful nobilities, obstructive diets, and noisy Protestant majorities” (83). The beginning of Habsburg rule over Hungary overshadowed the next four centuries. Rebellions in the seventeenth (123, 151) and eighteenth centuries were often based on the idea of Hungarian independence, until French revolutionary ideas were added toward the end of this period (156, 176, 227). The administrative reforms under Maria Theresa and her sons Joseph and Leopold in the second half of the eighteenth century could not break the authority of local Hungarian noblemen, but they obeyed “with a nervous glance over their shoulders,” fearing the deployment of royal commissars or troops (186). From the perspective of the Habsburgs, this uneasy relationship seemed to only have relaxed, ironically, in the decades before the end of the Empire, albeit in a Hungarian Kingdom which enjoyed greater independence than ever before. However, the 1898 jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph brought tensions about the emperor’s role in the crushing of the Hungarian revolution of 1848/49 back to the surface. The emperor’s son and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, even “hated the Hungarians and saw Hungary’s special status within the Habsburg Empire as an obstacle to the changes he wanted” (303).It might be that Hungary and the Hungarians, especially the nobility, were from the court in Vienna mostly regarded as a difficult, obstructive, negative part of the empire, with the exception of Empress Elizabeth (“Sisi”)’s flirtation with the country. But to the reviewer, this appears as an exaggeratedly negative image of the relationship between the Habsburgs and the Hungarians. It is probably due to a lack of space in a 329-page long (or rather, short!) book on the history of this immensely important dynasty, which ruled over large parts of Central Europe for centuries, that more positive aspects and periods of the almost 400 years of Habsburg dominion over Hungary have not found more mention in this otherwise wonderful book. It is up to specialists of Habsburg Hungary to present a more nuanced picture.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.