Hapsburgs were not very considerable. The greatest part of
Hungary was in the hands of the Turks; the Tyrol belonged to a
collateral line; and, in the other provinces, the independence
of the Nobility was much stronger than the sovereignty of the
Archdukes. The Nobles were all zealous protestants, so that a
monarchical power could only be created after a victory of the
Catholic faith. For the first time since 1621, the crown was
seen in these regions to assume a really dominant position.
Efforts in this direction had been zealously carried on since
1648; the Tyrolese Estates now lost their most important
privileges; and, above all, the Emperor succeeded, by the help
of Polish and German troops, in driving out the Turks from
Hungary, and at the same time crushing the national freedom of
the Magyars with frightful bloodshed. By these victories the
Monarchy gained, in the first place, a large increase of
territory--which placed it nearly on a level with France. In
the second place it acquired at home the power of raising as
many taxes and soldiers as were necessary to increase the army
to the extent of its wishes; and of distributing its officials
and troops--without distinction of nation--as imperial
servants, throughout its dominions. And thus it secured
submission at home and disposable strength for its operations
abroad. Here it stopped short. As it had no national, and,
consequently, no warm and natural relation to any of its
provinces--which were merely used as passive tools to promote
the lofty aims of the Hapsburg family--the Government had no
intention of using its power at home for the furtherance of
the public good, or the building up of a generally useful
Administration. The Nobility had no longer the strength to
resist the demands of the Crown for men and money, but it
still retained exemption from taxes, the jurisdiction and
police among its own peasants, and a multitude of feudal
rights, which, often enough, degraded the peasant to the
condition of a serf, and everywhere bound down agriculture in
the most galling bonds. Of manufactures there were little or
none; trade was carried on on the system of guilds. The State
officials exercised but little influence over the internal
affairs of the Communes, or Provinces; and the privileged
orders had full liberty to prosecute their own interests among
their inferiors with inconsiderate selfishness. In this
aristocracy, the Church, from its wealth and its close
internal unity, assumed the first place; and its superior
importance was still farther enhanced by the fact of its being
the chief bond of unity between the otherwise so loosely
compacted portions of the Empire. ... The Church attached the
Nobility to the Government; for we must not forget that a very
considerable portion of the estates of the Nobles had passed
into the hands of new possessors who had received them as a
reward for being good catholics. The Church, too, taught all
the youth of the Empire--in all its different languages--
obedience to the House of Hapsburg, and received from the
Crown, in return, exclusive control of the national education.
It formed, in spite of the resistance of nationalities, a sort
of public opinion in favour of the unity of the Empire; and the
Crown, in return, excluded all non-catholic opinions from the
schools, from literature and religion. Austria, therefore,
continued to be catholic, even after 1648; and by this we
mean, not only that its Princes were personally devout--or
that the Catholic clergy were supported in the performance of
their spiritual functions--or that the institutions of the
Church were liberally supported--but also that the State
directed its policy according to ecclesiastical views, made
use of the Church for political purposes, and crushed every
movement hostile to it in all other spheres of the national
life. In Austria, therefore, it was not merely a question of
theological differences, but of the deepest and most
comprehensive points of distinction between the mediæval and
the modern world. Austria was still, in its whole nature, a
Mediæval State or Confederacy of States. The consequences of
this condition were most strikingly seen in its relation to
Germany. In the first place, there was a complete separation,
in regard to all mental and spiritual matters, between the
great body of the Empire, and its powerful Eastern member.
This was the period, in which Germany was awaking to a new
intellectual life in modern Europe, and laying the foundation
of its modern science in every branch--in History and
Statistics, Chemistry and Geology, Jurisprudence and
Philosophy--and assuming by its Literature, an equal rank with
other nations in national refinement and civilization.
{1489}
By the works of genius which this period produced Austria
remained entirely uninfluenced; and it has been said, that
Werther had only been made known to the Viennese in the form
of fireworks in the Prater. The literary policy allowed no
seed of modern culture to enter the Empire; and the Jesuit
schools had rendered the soil unfit for its reception. All the
progress of German civilization, at this period, was based on
the principle of the independence of the mind in art and
science. The education of the Jesuits, on the contrary, though
unsurpassed where the object is to prepare men for a special
purpose, commences by disowning individual peculiarities, and
the right of a man to choose his own career. There was, at
this time, no other characteristic of an Austrian than an
entire estrangement from the progress of the German mind. ...
The progress of the people in science and art, in politics and
military strength, was only seen in the larger secular
territories, which, after 1648, enjoyed their own sovereignty;
and even these were checked in their movements at every step
by the remnants of the Imperial Constitution. The Members of
the Empire alone, in whom the decaying remains of Mediæval
existence still lingered on--the Ecclesiastical Princes--the
small Counts--the Imperial Knights and the Imperial
Towns,--clung to the Emperor and the Imperial Diet. In these,
partly from their small extent of territory, partly from the
inefficiency of their institutions, neither active industry,
nor public spirit, nor national pride, were to be found. In
all which tended to elevate the nation, and raise its hopes
for the future, they took, at this period, as little part as
Austria herself. ... The Imperial constitution, therefore, was
inwardly decayed, and stood in no relation to the internal
growth of the nation. ... There was the same divergence
between Austria and Germany with respect to their foreign
interests, as we have observed in their internal relations.
After the Turks had been driven from Hungary, and the Swedes
from the half of' Pomerania, Germany had only two neighbours
whom it was a matter of vital importance to watch,--the Poles
and the French. In the South, on the contrary, it had no
interests in opposition to Italy, except the protection of its
frontier by the possession or the neutrality of the Alpine
passes. And yet it was just towards Italy that the eyes of the
House of Hapsburg had been uninterruptedly directed for centuries
past. The favourite traditions of the family, and their
political and ecclesiastical interest in securing the support
of the Pope, and thereby that of the Clergy, constantly
impelled them to consolidate and extend their dominion in that
country. All other considerations yielded to this; and this is
intelligible enough from an Austrian point of view; but it was
not on that account less injurious to the German Empire. How
strikingly was this opposition of interests displayed at the
end of the glorious war of the Spanish succession, when the
Emperor rejected a peace which would have restored Strasburg
and Alsace to the Empire, because only Naples, and not Sicily
also, was offered to Austria! How sharply defined do the same
relations present themselves to our view, in the last years of
the Hapsburg dynasty, at the peace of Vienna in 1738!--on
which occasion the Emperor--in order at least to gain Tuscany,
as a compensation for the loss of Naples,--gave up Lorraine to
the French, without even consulting the Empire, which he had
dragged into the war. Austria thus maintained a predominant
influence in Italy; but the Empire, during the whole century
after the Peace of Westphalia, did not obtain a single
noteworthy advantage over France. How much more was this the
case with respect to Poland, which during the whole period of
the religious wars had been the most zealous ally of Spain and
the Hapsburgs, and which subsequently seemed to threaten no
danger to Austrian interests."
_H. Von Sybel,
History of the French Revolution,
book 2, chapter 1 (volume 1)._
GERMANY: A. D. 1658.
Election of the Emperor, Leopold I.
GERMANY: A. D. 1660-1664.
Renewed war with the Turks.
Victory of St. Gothard.
Transylvania liberated.
A twenty years truce.
See HUNGARY: A. D. 1660-1664.
GERMANY: A. D. 1672-1679.
The war of the Coalition against Louis XIV.
See NETHERLANDS (HOLLAND): A. D. 1672-1674,
and 1674-1678;
also NIMEGUEN, PEACE OF.
GERMANY: A. D. 1675-1678.
War with Sweden.
Battle of Fehrbellin.
See BRANDENBURG: A.D. 1640-1688;
and SCANDINAVIAN STATES (SWEDEN): A. D. 1644-1697.
GERMANY: A. D. 1679-1681.
The final absorption of Alsace and Les Trois-Evêchés by
France, with boundaries widened.
Bold encroachments of the French Chambers of Reannexation.
The seizure of Strasburg.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1679-1681.
GERMANY: A. D. 1686.
The League of Augsburg against Louis XIV.
"The Duke of Orleans, the French King's brother, had married
the sister of the Elector Palatine, the last of the House of
Simmern, who died in May 1685, when his next relative, the
Count Palatine Philip William, Duke of Neuberg, took
possession of the Electorate. The Duchess of Orleans had by
her marriage contract renounced all her feudal rights to the
Palatinate, but not her claims to the allodial property and
the moveables of her family." These latter claims, taken in
hand by Louis XIV. on behalf of his sister-in-law, were made
so formidable that the new Elector appealed to the Empire for
protection, "and, thus redoubled the uneasiness felt in
Germany, and indeed throughout the greater part of Europe,
respecting the schemes of Louis. The Prince of Orange availed
himself of these suspicions to forward his plans against
Louis. He artfully inflamed the general alarm, and at length
succeeded in inducing the Emperor Leopold, the Kings of Spain,
and Sweden, as princes of the Empire, the Electors of Saxony
and Bavaria, the circles of Suabia, Franconia, Upper Saxony,
and Bavaria, to enter into the celebrated League of Augsburg
(July 9th 1686). The object of this league was to maintain the
Treaties of Münster and Nimeguen and the Truce of Ratisbon. If
any of the members of it was attacked he was to be assisted by
the whole confederacy; 60,000 men were to be raised, who were
to be frequently drilled, and to form a camp during some weeks
of every year, and a common fund for their support was to be
established at Frankfort. The League was to be in force only
for three years, but might be prolonged at the expiration of
that term should the public safety require it. The Elector
Palatine, who was in fact the party most directly interested,
acceded to the League early in September, as well as the Duke
of Holstein Gottorp."
_T. H. Dyer,
History of Modern Europe,
book 5, chapter 5 (volume 3)._
{1490}
"To Madame's great anger France set up a claim to the
Palatinate on her behalf, Louvois persuading the King and the
royal family that with a few vigorous measures the Palatinate
would be abandoned by the Neubourgs and annexed to France as
part of Madame's dowry. This led to the devastation of the
states, to which Madame [Charlotte Elizabeth, the Duchess of
Orleans] so often and so bitterly alludes during the next ten
years. Obliged by Louis XIV. 's policy to represent herself as
desirous to recover her rights over her father's and brother's
succession, in many documents which she was never even shown,
Madame protested in all her private letters against France's
action in the matter, and made every one at court thoroughly
aware of her grief and disapproval of what the king was doing
on her behalf."
_Life and Letters of Charlotte Elizabeth,
Princess Palatine,
chapter 2._
GERMANY: A. D. 1689-1696.
The War of the League of Augsburg, or Grand Alliance,
against Louis XIV.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1689-1690 to 1695-1696.
GERMANY: A. D. 1690.
The second Devastation of the Palatinate.
See FRANCE: A. D. 1689-1690.
GERMANY: A. D. 1700.
Interest in the question of the Spanish Succession.
See SPAIN: A. D. 1698-1700.
GERMANY: A. D. 1700.
Prussia raised to the dignity of a kingdom.
See PRUSSIA: A. D. 1700.
GERMANY: A. D. 1700-1740.
The first king of Prussia and his shabby court.
The second king, his Brobdingnagian army
and his extraordinary character.
The up-bringing of Frederick the Great.
The "Great Elector" of Brandenburg "left to his son Frederic a
principality as considerable as any which was not called a
kingdom."
See BRANDENBURG: A. D. 1640-1688.
"Frederic aspired to the style of royalty. Ostentatious and
profuse, negligent of his true interests and of his high
duties, insatiably eager for frivolous distinctions, he added
nothing to the real weight of the state which he governed:
perhaps he transmitted his inheritance to his children
impaired rather than augmented in value; but he succeeded in
gaining the great object of his life, the title of King. In
the year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. He had, on that
occasion to undergo all the mortifications which fall to the
lot of ambitious upstarts. Compared with the other crowned
heads of Europe, he made a figure resembling that which a
Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought a title, would make in
the company of Peers whose ancestors had been attainted for
treason against the Plantagenets. The envy of the class which
Frederic quitted, and the civil scorn of the class into which
he intruded himself, were marked in very significant ways. ...
Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic William, a prince
who must be allowed to have possessed some talents for
administration, but whose character as disfigured by odious
vices, and whose eccentricities were such as had never before
been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and diligent in the
transacting of business; and he was the first who formed the
design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European
powers, altogether out of proportion to her extent and
population, by means of a strong military organization. Strict
economy enabled him to keep up a peace establishment of 60,000
troops. These troops were disciplined in such a manner, that,
placed beside them, the household regiments of Versailles and
St. James's would have appeared an awkward squad. The master
of such a force could not but be regarded by all his
neighbours as a formidable enemy and a valuable ally. But the
mind of Frederic William was so ill regulated, that all his
inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of
the character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony
degenerated into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp
and order became a mania, like that of a Dutch burgomaster for
tulips, or that of a member of the Roxburghe Club for Caxtons.
While the envoys of the Court of Berlin were in a state of
such squalid poverty as moved the laughter of foreign
capitals; while the food placed before the princes and
princesses of the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to
appease hunger, and so bad that even hunger loathed it, no
price was thought too extravagant for tall recruits. The
ambition of the king was to form a brigade of giants, and
every country was ransacked by his agents for men above the
ordinary stature. ... Though his dominant passion was the love
of military display, he was yet one of the most pacific of
princes. We are afraid that his aversion to war was not the
effect of humanity, but was merely one of his thousand whims.
His feeling about his troops seems to have resembled a miser's
feeling about his money. He loved to collect them, to count
them, to see them increase; but he could not find it in his
heart to break in upon the precious hoard. He looked forward
to some future time when his Patagonian battalions were to
drive hostile infantry before them like sheep: but this future
time was always receding; and it is probable that, if his life
had been prolonged 30 years, his superb army would never have
seen any harder service than a sham fight in the fields near
Berlin. But the great military means which he had collected
were destined to be employed by a spirit far more daring and
inventive than his own. Frederic, surnamed the Great, son of
Frederic William, was born in January 1712. It may safely be
pronounced that he had received from nature a strong and sharp
understanding, and a rare firmness of temper and intensity of
will. As to the other parts of his character, it is difficult
to say whether they are to be ascribed to nature, or to the
strange training which he underwent. The history of his
boyhood is painfully interesting. Oliver Twist in the parish
work-house, Smike at Dotheboys Hall, were petted children when
compared with this wretched heir-apparent of a crown. The
nature of Frederic William was hard and bad, and the habit of
exercising arbitrary power had made him frightfully savage.
His rage constantly vented itself to right and left in curses
and blows. When his Majesty took a walk, every human being
fled before him, as if a tiger had broken loose from a
menagerie. ... But it was in his own house that he was most
unreasonable and ferocious. His palace was hell, and he the
most execrable of fiends. ... Early in the year 1740, Frederic
William met death with a firmness and dignity worthy of a
better and wiser man; and Frederic, who had just completed his
28th year, became king of Prussia."
_Lord Macaulay,
Frederic the Great (Essays)._
{1491}
"Frederick William I. became ... the founder of the first
modern State in Germany. His was a nature in which the
repulsive and the imposing, the uncouth and the admirable,
were closely united. In his manners a rough and unrefined
peasant, in his family a tyrant, in his government a despot,
choleric almost to madness, his reign would have been a curse
to the country, had he not united with his unlimited power a
rare executive ability and an incorruptible fidelity to duty;
and from first to last he consecrated all his powers to the
common weal. By him effective limitations were put upon the
independent action of the provinces, and upon the overgrown
privileges of the estates. He did not do away with the guilds
of the different orders, but placed them under the strict
control of a strongly centralized superintendence, and
compelled their members to make every necessary sacrifice for
the sake of assisting him in his efforts for the prosperity
and power of Prussia. It is astonishing to see with what
practical judgment he recognized a needed measure both in
general and in detail; how he trained a body of officials,
suited in all grades to the requirements of their position;
how he disciplined them in activity, prudence, and rectitude,
by strict inspection, by encouraging instruction, and by
brutal punishments; how he enforced order and economy in the
public finances; how he improved the administration of his own
domains, so that it became a fruitful example to all
proprietors; and how, full of the desire to make the peasants
free owners of the soil, although he did not yet venture on
such a radical measure, he nevertheless constantly protected
the poor against the arbitrariness and oppression of the
higher classes. ... There was no department of life to which
he did not give encouragement and assistance; it is also true
that there was none which he did not render subservient to his
own will, and the products of which he did not make conducive
to the one great end,--the independence and aggrandizement of
the State. So that he who was the ruler of, at most, three
million people, created, without exhausting the country, a
standing army of eighty thousand men: a remarkably skilful and
ready army, which he disciplined with barbarous severity on
the slightest occasion, at the same time that he looked out
for the welfare of every soldier even in the smallest detail,
according to his saying, that 'a king's warrior must live
better than a gentleman's servant.' What he had in his mind,
almost a hundred years before Scharnhorst, was the universal
obligation of military service; but it fared with him in
regard to this as in regard to the freedom of the peasants:
strong as he was, he could not turn the world he lived in
upside down; he contented himself with bequeathing his best
ideas to a more propitious future. The foundations of the
government rested upon the estates in spite of all monarchical
reforms. Thus, beside the federative Empire of the Hapsburgs,
arose the small, compact Prussian State, which, by reason of
the concentration of its forces, was a match for its
five-times-larger rival."
_H. Von Sybel,
The Founding of the German Empire by William I.,
book 1, chapter 2 (volume 1)._
ALSO IN:
_T. Carlyle,
History of Frederick II., called the Great,
book 3, chapter 19, books 5-10 (volumes 1-2)._
GERMANY: A. D. 1702.
The War of the Spanish Succession:
Siege of Landau.
Battle of Friedlingen.
On the part of the Imperialists, the War of the Spanish
Succession was opened on the Rhine frontier in June 1702, by a
movement of the army commanded by the Margrave Louis of Baden,
which "came over the Rhine and laid siege to the important
fortress of Landau,--the bulwark of Alsace as it was then
regarded. The Margrave was subsequently joined by the
Emperor's eldest son, the young King of the Romans, who
desired to share in the glory, though not in the toils of the
expected conquest. ... The Maréchal de Catinat, one of the
soldiers of whom France has most reason to be proud,--the
virtuous Catinat as Rousseau terms him--held command at this
period in Alsace. So inferior were his numbers that he could
make no attempt to relieve Landau. But after its reduction an
opportunity appeared in which by detaching a portion of his
army he might retrieve the fortunes of France in another
quarter. The Elector of Bavaria, after much irresolution, had
openly espoused the cause of Louis. He seized upon the city of
Ulm and issued a proclamation in favor of his new ally. To
support his movements an enterprising and ambitious officer,
the Marquis de Villars, was sent across the Rhine with part of
the army of Alsace. The declaration of the Elector of Bavaria
and the advance of Villars into Germany disquieted in no
slight degree the Prince Louis of Baden. Leaving a sufficient
garrison in Landau, he also passed the Rhine. The two armies
met at Friedlingen on the 14th of October. Louis of Baden, a
ponderous tactician bred in the wars against the Turks, might
out-manœuvre some Grand Vizier, but was no match for the
quick-witted Frenchman. He was signally defeated with the loss
of 3,000 men; soon after which, the season being now far
advanced, Villars led back his army to winter quarters in
France. His victory of Friedlingen gained for him at
Versailles the rank of Maréchal de France."
_Earl Stanhope (Lord Mahon),
History of England: Reign of Queen Anne,
chapter 2._
ALSO IN:
W. Coxe,
History of the House of Austria,
chapter 68 (volume 2).
See, also; NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1702-1704,
and SPAIN: A. D. 1702.
GERMANY: A. D. 1703.
The War of the Spanish Succession:
Campaigns on the Upper Rhine and in Bavaria.