Austrian expansion in the Balkans—Occupation of Bosnia—Problem of Servia Irredenta—Postponement of the day of reckoning—Luck of the Habsburgs in public life—Calamities dog them in private life—List of Habsburg fatalities during Francis Joseph’s reign.
The four great dates in modern Austrian history are 1859, 1866, 1870, and 1878—the year of the Russo-Turkish war. The events of those years gradually made it clear that the future of Austria was not in Italy, nor in Germany, but in the Balkans: that the real rival of Austria was Russia, and that the real contest would be for the hegemony, not of Germany, but of the Slav subjects of the Sultan of Turkey. Thenceforward the central principle of Austrian foreign policy was that, for every step which Russia took towards Constantinople, Austria should take a corresponding step towards Salonica; and its first tangible expression was the secret treaty which, in 1878, allowed Austria to occupy Bosnia as the price of her neutrality.
It took an army of 200,000 men, with 480 guns, to pacify that little strip of land; and the occupation, and the subsequent events in the peninsula, have brought Austria up against another problem, uncommonly like the old one which disturbed the beginning of Francis Joseph’s reign. For the inhabitants of Bosnia are of Servian race; and there are many other Servians in other parts of the Austrian dominions; and there is a Kingdom of Servia, full of fiercely patriotic men, from whom the cry of Servia Irredenta is going up. Austria once despised them, as she once despised the Italians; but they have proved, like the Italians, that they can fight; and they demand, as loudly as the Italians, to be taken seriously. So that Austria, in spite of her losses and gains, retains her essential character as the Purgatory of the Unredeemed.
It is not a quiet purgatory—perhaps no purgatory is ever quiet—but a purgatory in which order is only kept by the strenuousness of the police, and the frequent declaration of martial law. Consequently it is a purgatory in which startling things may happen at any time; but speculation as to what will happen there may be deferred until a later chapter. Probably nothing in particular will happen during Francis Joseph’s lifetime; but the matter needs nevertheless to be mentioned here as a part of the spectacle of trouble perpetually dogging Francis Joseph’s footsteps alike in public and in private life. People speak of him as a lover of peace; and it is likely enough that he has learnt to love peace through sheer weariness of war and rumours of war. But it is none the less true that, whenever he has sought to extend his paternal sway, he has not brought peace but a sword; and it was mainly with reference to the events of his reign that Gladstone said: “Nowhere on the map of Europe can you lay your finger and say: ‘Here Austria has done good.’” It has already been demonstrated to him, more than once, that the Servians are of Gladstone’s opinion; and the demonstration will not become less emphatic with the lapse of time.
We must let that pass, however, though we shall have to return to it. The day of reckoning is not yet; and it will not come in Francis Joseph’s life-time if either he or his Ministers can help it. One’s continual impression, when reading modern Austrian history, is of a day of reckoning always imminent, yet repeatedly by some happy hazard adjourned.
In public affairs, that is to say, Francis Joseph has enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, a luck like that which is said to attend the British Army and save it from the consequences of its blunders. It is only in his private life that misfortune has pursued him so closely and incessantly that, when the news of the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth was broken to him, he covered his face with his hands and broke down, exclaiming: “What! Is there no sorrow possible to man which I am to be spared?”
The time has come to speak of these sorrows; and the black series began, curiously enough, in the very year in which Francis Joseph achieved his most signal triumph as a ruler. It was in 1867, as we have seen, that he pulled his Empire out of the fire after the disaster of Sadowa, conciliated Hungary, and was crowned with gorgeous and impressive ceremony in the Buda Cathedral. It was also in 1867 that his brother, the Archduke Maximilian, was shot for pretending to be Emperor of Mexico; and that execution was the first of the series of tragedies which never fail to strike one as due to happen in fulfilment of Countess Károlyi’s curse. Since we have come to the theme, we must have the text of that curse before us once again: the curse of a mother whose son had forfeited his life as a rebel:—
“=May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!=”
And now let us set beside that curse a newspaper cutting, taken from one of the Vienna journals at the time of the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth. It is a bald summary, headed “The Sorrows of the House of Habsburg,” and it runs thus:—
“On January 30, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life in his hunting-box at Meyerling. In May, 1897, Sophie, Duchess d’Alençon, at one time the affianced bride of Ludwig II. of Bavaria, was burnt to death, in Paris. On June 16, 1867, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, the Empress’s brother-in-law, was shot by a firing-party at Queretaro. His consort, the Belgian Princess Marie-Charlotte, lost her reason, and has been, for the last thirty years, under restraint at the Château of Bouchout. Archduke William Francis Charles died, in the summer of 1894, at Baden near Vienna, from injuries sustained through a fall from his horse. Archduke John of Tuscany, who had resigned his rank and taken the name of John Orth, disappeared on the high seas off the coast of South America. King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, the Empress’s cousin, committed suicide on June 13, 1886, drowning himself in the Lake of Starnberg in a fit of insanity. Count Ludwig of Trani, Prince of the Two Sicilies, husband of Duchess Matilda in Bavaria, and sister of the Empress, committed suicide at Zurich. Archduchess Matilda, daughter of Field-Marshal Archduke Albert, was burnt to death in her father’s palace as the result of a blazing log from the fire having set alight to her ball dress. Archduke Ladislas, son of the Archduke Joseph, came to grief while hunting by an accidental discharge of his gun. And now we learn that the Empress Elizabeth has been murdered.”