Austria

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Civil and Foreign Wars

During the 16th and 17th centuries Austria also was involved in the strife that followed the Protestant Reformation in Europe. Charles V had fought the Reformation on religious and political grounds. His struggle to preserve religious unity as a basis for Habsburg power led to war within the empire, which then became entwined with wars against France and the Ottoman Empire.

The Reformation made surprising progress in Austria, and many people left the Roman Catholic Church. Several forces checked the spread of Protestantism: the Council of Trent, which reformed the Catholic church; the Society of Jesus (see Jesuits), which reconverted the great landed families, rightly assuming that the peasants would follow their lords; and coercion by the court of Vienna.

Ferdinand II, an uncompromising champion of the Counter Reformation, attempted to reimpose Catholicism on his subjects. This ardently Catholic and rigidly authoritarian ruler became king of Bohemia in 1617 and Holy Roman emperor in 1619. Protestants in Bohemia, fearing they would lose their religious liberties, rebelled in 1618. This began the first phase of the Thirty Years’ War. After the rebels deposed Ferdinand in 1619, this internal Austrian conflict grew into a European war, fought mainly on German soil. The Habsburgs were defeated in battle, and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) weakened their control over the Holy Roman Empire by reducing it to a loose union of independent states.

In the 1680s the Ottoman Empire agreed to help Hungarian rebels against Habsburg rule. The climax came in 1683, when Ottoman armies once more besieged Vienna. The city was rescued by an army of Poles and Germans under Polish king Jan III Sobieski. The imperial armies won major victories near the end of the century, led by Prince Eugene of Savoy, who drove the Ottomans out of Hungary. After the prolonged warfare had ended, Habsburg cities saw a wonderful outburst of architectural activity. Massive baroque buildings—ornate, with elaborate decoration inside and outside—were built in Prague, Salzburg, and especially Vienna. The magnificent Belvedere Palace was built in Vienna for Prince Eugene. Churches and abbeys that had been destroyed were also rebuilt. The imposing Benedictine abbey at Melk, perched on a rocky cliff above the Danube, typified baroque tastes in Austria and advertised the triumph of the Counter Reformation.

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The removal of the Ottoman threat in the east enabled Austria to follow a more aggressive policy in western Europe. In 1700 Charles II of Spain died without an heir. He left Spain, the Spanish Netherlands, and his possessions in Italy to Philip, duke of Anjou, a grandson of Louis XIV, king of France. Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, a Habsburg from the Austrian line, claimed these lands for his son Joseph I; this led to war (see Spanish Succession, War of the). At the end of the war Philip was recognized as Philip V, king of Spain, but Austria gained control of the Spanish Netherlands and Spanish possessions in northern Italy.

In 1713 Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI promulgated a so-called Pragmatic Sanction, which declared his possessions indivisible and hereditary in both the male and female line of the House of Austria. Charles had no son and did not want his country to be plunged into internal convulsions after his death or to be dismembered by foreign powers. Hungary accepted the sanction only after Charles confirmed the Hungarian constitution and autonomy, in effect strengthening Hungarian separatism. Most European monarchs pledged to accept the Pragmatic Sanction in return for various concessions, but they repudiated their pledges in 1740 when Charles died, leaving no male heirs.

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Enlightened Despotism

In accordance with the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles’s eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, who in 1736 had married Francis, duke of Lorraine, ascended the Habsburg throne. (In 1745 Francis became Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, but his wife remained the power on the throne.) Maria Theresa’s ascension and rival claims to Habsburg dominions led to war (see Austrian Succession, War of the) and culminated in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). As a result Austria lost most of Silesia, economically the best-developed province of Bohemia, to Prussia. But in 1772, during the reign of Maria Theresa’s son and successor, Joseph II, Austria cooperated with Russia and Prussia in the dismemberment of Poland. In the process the Habsburgs gained the Polish region of Galicia.

Internally, the reigns of Empress Maria Theresa, from 1717 to 1780, and of her son, Emperor Joseph II (1741-1790), were a period of administrative centralization and reform. Under Maria Theresa a central bureaucracy was established in Vienna, and its agents supervised local administration throughout the empire. The power of local assemblies was curtailed. Hungary was the only territory in the empire to retain self-rule. Joseph II reduced the power of the Roman Catholic Church in his dominions by removing its control over secular matters, and he decreed religious toleration. He abolished serfdom and brought about land reforms. He reorganized the system of taxation and introduced a new legal code, and he attempted to encourage the spread of literacy. At the same time he introduced still greater administrative centralization.

Joseph’s reforms, especially the abolition of serfdom, land reform, and the effort to curtail the power of the church, aroused widespread opposition. At the time of his death, Hungary and Belgium were in full revolt, and there was unrest in the Austrian hereditary lands and Bohemia. Joseph’s brother and successor, Leopold II, revoked most of the reforms and was forced to recognize Hungary as a separate unit of the Habsburg lands. Even so, Joseph’s reign had regenerated the monarchy and opened it up to European trends.

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Warfare with France

From 1792 to 1815 the Habsburg Empire was involved almost continuously in warfare, first in the French Revolution and then in the Napoleonic Wars. The French rebels’ democratic and nationalistic ideas were a threat to the absolutist Habsburgs, who were drawn into the conflict after Leopold II was succeeded by his reactionary son, Francis II, in 1792. Austrian military involvement began with a successful Austro-Prussian invasion of France, then faltered when the French forces drove the invaders back across the border and, during the winter of 1794 and 1795, conquered the Austrian Netherlands. In 1806, after Napoleon’s conquest of most of Germany, Francis dissolved the Holy Roman Empire. In anticipation of this move, in 1804 the monarch had declared himself Francis I, hereditary emperor of Austria. Following Austria’s defeat at the Battle of Wagram in 1809, Francis’s daughter Marie Louise married Napoleon, cementing the peace treaty negotiated by Prince Klemens von Metternich.

It was not long before Napoleon’s fortunes turned, however, and Austria was part of the coalition that drove him into exile in 1814. Francis’s power and territory were to some extent restored by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Although Austria lost some territories in Belgium and southwest Germany, it gained Lombardy, Venetia, Istria, and Dalmatia. The diplomatic skill of Austrian chancellor Metternich made the Habsburg Empire the center of the new European order. Austria became a leading power in both the German Confederation, which replaced the Holy Roman Empire, and the Holy Alliance of European rulers.

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Revolution of 1848

From 1815 to 1848 the course of the Austrian Empire, directed by Metternich, was essentially dedicated to preserving the status quo. The empire was still basically rural, although significant industrial growth had taken place since the late 1820s. The forces of nationalism, especially in Hungary and Bohemia, became entwined with a desire for social and political change. The pressures for change were heightened by peasant discontent.

In 1848 revolutions broke out in much of Europe. A rebellion in Vienna in March quickly spread, as Germans, Magyars, Slavs, Italians, and others turned against the imperial regime. These violent explosions threatened to tear the Habsburg empire apart. Small groups of students and workers, as well as liberally oriented members of the middle class, demanded that Metternich leave office and that a constitution be granted. The Habsburg court quickly gave in, and Metternich, who for two generations had been the “Rock of Order,” fled in disguise to England. In response to the demands of the peasants, the Austrian assembly abolished serfdom. See also Revolutions of 1848.

Street fighting broke out in Vienna in October 1848, but an imperial army bombarded the city, ending the insurrection. Ferdinand I abdicated in December, and his 18-year-old nephew, Francis Joseph I, began a reign that would last until 1916. The new emperor promulgated a constitution for Austria that set up a parliamentary government. Italian rebels took over the government in Milan, and Hungary declared itself all but independent, bound to the empire only through its Habsburg monarch. In addition, a constitutional assembly drew up a plan for the administrative organization of the empire along national lines.

The revolutionary forces soon were weakened as the goals of different social classes and nationalities clashed. The Habsburg armies defeated the Italian rebels and, with the help of conservative Russia, crushed the Hungarian rebellion. Francis Joseph dropped all liberal pretensions. He abolished constitutional government and rejected the plan for imperial reorganization along national lines. The only reform that survived was the abolition of serfdom.

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Austrian Losses

In the 1850s Austria faced the problems of protecting the empire from nationalism, especially in Italy and Prussia, and from Russian advances into the Balkan Peninsula. During the Crimean War (1853-1856) Austria threatened to intervene on the side of England and France if Russia did not evacuate the Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Walachia. After the Russians complied in 1854, Austria occupied the territories until the end of the war. The prolonged conflict ruined Austria’s finances, however, and its longtime ally Russia became an enemy, supporting the anti-Austrian policies of France and Prussia.

After a war that broke out in 1859, the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia expelled Austria from the Italian Peninsula, gained Lombardy, and created the kingdom of Italy. After this defeat, the emperor tried to strengthen his government by promulgating a limited constitutional system, which satisfied none of the opposition groups.

Austria fared no better in its struggle with Prussia for supremacy in Germany. The Prussian chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, was determined to eliminate Austria from German affairs and bring about German unification under Prussian leadership. The climax was reached in 1866 with a Prussian victory on the battlefield of Sadowa near Königgrätz (now Hradec Králové, Czech Republic). The German Confederation was dissolved and Prussia took the lead in the reorganization and eventual unification of Germany. In addition, Austria lost Venetia to Prussia’s ally, Italy (see Seven Weeks’ War).

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