The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

Thus under Albert the possessions of the House of Habsburg were large, but widely scattered. The two newly acquired eastern duchies not only gave its princes their highest titles, but they formed a compact territory, well suited for extension northward and southward. ♦Falling off of the Swabian lands.♦ But among the outlying Swabian territories, though some parts remained to the Austrian House down to the end of the German Kingdom, the tendency was to diminish and gradually to part off altogether from Germany. In the lands south of the Rhine this happened through union with the Confederates; in the Alsatian lands it happened at a later stage through French annexation.

♦Connexion of Austria with the Empire.♦

It is to be hoped that it is no longer needful to explain that the hereditary lands of the House of Habsburg or Austria had no inherent connexion with the German Kingdom and Roman Empire of which they were fiefs, beyond the fact that they were among its fiefs. They were further connected with it only by the accident that, from Rudolf onwards, many princes of that house were chosen Kings, and that, from the middle of the fifteenth century, onwards, all the Kings were chosen from that house and from the house into which it merged by female succession. It is to be hoped that there is no longer any need to explain that every Emperor was not Duke of Austria, and that every Duke of Austria was not Emperor. But it may be needful to explain that every Duke of Austria was not master of the whole dominions of the House of Austria. ♦Divisions of the Austrian dominions.♦ The divisions, the reunions, the joint reigns, which are common to the House of Austria with other German princely houses, become at once more important and more puzzling in the case of a house which gradually came to stand above all the others in European rank. The caution is specially needful in the case of the Swabian lands, as the history of the Confederates is liable to be greatly misunderstood, if every Duke of Austria who appears there is taken for the sole sovereign of the Austrian dominions. It is needless to go here through all these shiftings between princes of the same house. Through all changes the unity of the house and its possessions was maintained, even while they were parted out or held in common by different members of the house. But it is important to bear in mind that some of the Dukes of Austria who figure in the history of Switzerland were rather Landgraves of Elsass or Counts of Tyrol than Dukes of Austria in any practical sense.

The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may be defined as a time during which the Austrian House on the whole steadily advanced in the Eastern part of its dominions and steadily fell back in the Western. But in the course of the fourteenth century an acquisition was made which, without making them absolutely continuous, brought them into something more like geographical connexion with one another. ♦Acquisition of Carinthia and Tyrol, 1335.♦ This was the acquisition of the Duchy of Carinthia and County of Tyrol, the latter of which lands lay conveniently between the Eastern and Western dominions of the house. ♦Extent of the Austrian territory.♦ These now stretched continuously from the Bohemian frontier to Istria, and they threw out, in the form of Tyrol and the Swabian lands, a scattered, but nearly continuous, territory stretching to the borders of Lorraine and the county of Burgundy. The Austrian possessions now touched the eastern gulf of the Hadriatic and came into the neighbourhood of the Dalmatian Archipelago. ♦Commendation of Trieste, 1382.♦ Somewhat later they reached the main Hadriatic itself, when the city of Trieste, hitherto disputed between the commonwealth of Venice and the patriarchs of Aquileia, commended itself to the Austrian Duke Leopold as its lord. This is the same Leopold who four years later fell at Sempach. By this time the Swabian possessions had been increased north of the Rhine, while south of the Rhine the Austrian dominion was steadily giving way. ♦Loss of Thurgau, 1460.♦ The Confederates and their several cantons advanced in every way, by purchase and conquest, till, after the loss of Thurgau, the House of Austria kept nothing south of the Rhine except the towns known as the Waldstädte.

By this time the division of the estates of the house had taken a more lasting shape. One branch reigned in Austria, another in Carinthia and Styria, a third in Tyrol and the other western lands. At this time begins the unbroken series of Austrian elections to the German and Imperial crowns. ♦Albert the Second, king, 1437-1440.♦ The first was Albert the Second, Duke of Austria. ♦Frederick the Third, king, 1440; Emperor, 1452.
Archduke of Austria, 1453.♦ Then Frederick the Third, the first Emperor of the House, united the Austrian and Carinthian duchies, and raised Austria to the unique rank of an Archduchy. ♦Siegmund, Count of Tyrol, &c., 1429-1496.♦ Meanwhile, Siegmund Count of Tyrol held the western lands, and appears as Duke of Austria in Confederate and Burgundian history. He there figures as the prince who lost Thurgau to the Confederates and who mortgaged his Alsatian lands to Charles the Bold. ♦Maximilian, King of the Romans, 1486; Archduke, 1493; Count of Tyrol, 1496; Emperor-elect, 1508.♦ In Maximilian the whole possessions of the house of Austria were united. ♦Beginning of union with lands beyond the Empire.♦ But by this time the affairs of the purely German lands which had hitherto formed the possessions of the Austrian house had begun to be mixed up with the succession to lands and kingdoms beyond the Empire, and with lands which, though technically within the Empire, had a distinct being of their own. In the course of the fifteenth century the house of Austria, hitherto simply one of the chief German princely houses, put on two special characters. ♦Succession of Austrian Kings and Emperors.♦ It became, as we have already seen, the house which exclusively supplied kings and Emperors to Germany and the Empire. And it became, by virtue of its hereditary possessions rather than of its Imperial position, one of the chief European powers. For a while the greatest of European powers, it has remained a great European power down to our own time.

♦Union with Bohemia and Hungary.♦

The special feature in the history of the house of Austria from the fifteenth century onwards is its connexion—a connexion more or less broken, but still constantly recurring till in the end it becomes fully permanent—with the kingdom of Bohemia within the Empire and with the kingdom of Hungary beyond its bounds. These possessions have given the Austrian power its special character, that of a power formed by the union under one prince of several wholly distinct nations or parts of nations which have no tie beyond that union. The Austrian princes, originally purely German, equally in their Swabian and in their Austrian possessions, had already, by the extension of their power to the south, obtained some Slavonic and some Italian-speaking subjects. Still, as a power, they were purely German. ♦Various acquisitions of Austria.♦ But in the period which begins in the fifteenth and goes on into the nineteenth century, we shall see them gradually gathering together, sometimes gaining, sometimes losing—gaining and losing by every process, warlike and peaceful, by which territory can be gained or lost—a crowd of kingdoms, duchies, and counties, scattered over all parts of Europe from Flanders to Transsilvania. But it is the acquisition of the two crowns of Bohemia and Hungary which, above all others, gave the House of Austria its special position as a middle power, a power belonging at once to the system of Western and to the system of Eastern Europe. Among the endless shiftings of the states which have been massed together under the rule of the House of Habsburg, that house has more than once been at the same moment the neighbour of the Gaul and the neighbour of the Turk; and it has sometimes found Gaul and Turk arrayed together against it. Add to all this that, though the connexion between the house of Austria and the Empire was a purely personal one, renewed in each generation by a special election, still the fact that so many kings of Hungary and archdukes of Austria were chosen Emperors one after another, caused the house itself, after the Empire was abolished, to look in the eyes of many like a continuation of the power which had come to an end. The peculiar position of the Austrian house could hardly have been obtained by a mere union of Hungary, Austria, and the other states under princes none of whom were raised to Imperial rank. Nor could it have been obtained by a series of mere dukes of Austria, even though they had been chosen Emperors from generation to generation. It was through the accidental union under one sovereign of a crowd of states which had no natural connexion with each other, and through the further accident that the Empire itself seemed to become a possession of the House, that the House of Habsburg, and its representative the House of Lorraine, have won their unique position among European powers.

The first hints, so to speak, of a coming union between the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms and the Austrian duchy began, as we have seen, in the days of Ottokar. A Bohemian king had then held the Austrian duchy, while a Hungarian king had for a moment occupied part of Styria. ♦Relations with Hungary and Bohemia.♦ But the later form which the union was to take was not that of the Bohemian or the Hungarian reigning over Austria, but that of the Austrian reigning over Hungary and Bohemia. The duchy was not to be added to either of the kingdoms; but both kingdoms were in course of time to be added to the duchy. The growth of both Hungary and Bohemia as kingdoms will be spoken of elsewhere. We have now to deal only with their relations to the Austrian House. ♦Rudolf, son of Albert, King of Bohemia, 1306.♦ For a moment, early in the fourteenth century, an Austrian prince, son of the first Austrian King of Germany, was actually acknowledged as King of Bohemia. But this connexion was only momentary. The first beginnings of anything like a more permanent connexion begin a hundred and thirty years later. ♦Albert the Second, King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1438.♦ The second Austrian King of Germany wore both the Hungarian and the Bohemian crowns by virtue of his marriage with the daughter of the Emperor and King Siegmund. The steps towards the union of the various crowns are now beginning. ♦Siegmund, King of Hungary, 1386; King of the Romans, 1414; King of Bohemia, 1419; Emperor, 1433.♦ Siegmund was the third King of Bohemia who had worn the crown of Germany, the second who had worn the crown of the Empire. Under his son-in-law, Hungary, Bohemia, and Austria were for a moment united with the German crown; in the next reign, as we have seen, begins the lasting connexion between Austria and the Empire. But the Hungarian and Bohemian kingdoms parted again. ♦Wladislaus Postumus, Duke of Austria, 1440-1457; King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1453-1457.♦ One Austrian King, the son of Albert, reigned at least nominally over both kingdoms, as well as over the special Austrian duchy. But the final union did not come for another eighty years. The Turk was now threatening and conquering. At Mohacz Lewis, king of the two kingdoms, fell before the invaders. ♦Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria, 1519; King of Hungary and Bohemia, 1527; King of the Romans, 1531; Emperor-elect, 1556.
Permanent union of Bohemia.♦ His Bohemian kingdom passed to Ferdinand of Austria, and from that day to this, unless we except the momentary choice of the Winter King, the Palatine Frederick, the Bohemian crown has always stayed in the House of Austria. And for many generations it has been worn by the actual sovereign of the Austrian archduchy.

♦Effects of the union with Hungary.♦

The acquisition of the crown of Hungary was of greater importance. It at once put the Austrian House into a wholly new position; it gave it its new later character of a middle state between Eastern and Western Europe. The duchy had begun as a mark against the Turanian and heathen invaders of earlier times. Those Turanian and heathen invaders had long before settled down into a Christian kingdom; they had latterly become the foremost champions of Christendom against the Turanian and Mahometan invaders who had seized the throne of the Eastern Cæsars. ♦Mission against the Turk.♦ With the crown of Hungary, the main duty of the Hungarian crown, the defence of Christendom against the Ottoman, passed to the Archdukes and Emperors of the Austrian House. ♦The Austrian kings in Hungary.♦ But for a long time Hungary was a most imperfect and precarious possession of its Austrian Kings. ♦1526-1699.♦ For more than a century and a half after the election of Ferdinand, his rule and that of his successors was disputed and partial. They had from the very beginning to strive against rival kings, while the greater part of the kingdom and of the lands attached to the crown was either held by the Turk himself or by princes who acknowledged the Turk as their superior lord. These strictly Hungarian affairs, as well as the changes on the frontier towards the Turk, will be spoken of elsewhere. ♦Peace of Passarowitz, 1718.♦ It was not till the eighteenth century that the Austrian Kings were in full possession of the whole Hungarian kingdom and all its dependencies.