Part 64

"It is by no means an easy task to tell the story of the various lands which have at different times come under the dominion of Austrian princes, the story of each land by itself, and the story of them all in relation to the common power. A continuous narrative is impossible. … Much mischief has been done by one small fashion of modern speech. It has within my memory become usual to personify nations and powers on the smallest occasions in a way which was formerly done only in language more or less solemn, rhetorical or poetical. We now talk every moment of England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, as if they were persons. And as long as it is only England, France, Germany, Russia, or Italy of which we talk in this way, no practical harm is done; the thing is a mere question of style. For those are all national powers. … But when we go on to talk in this way of 'Austria,' of 'Turkey,' direct harm is done; thought is confused, and facts are misrepresented. … I have seen the words 'Austrian national honour;' I have come across people who believed that 'Austria' was one land inhabited by 'Austrians,' and that 'Austrians' spoke the 'Austrian' language. All such phrases are misapplied. It is to be presumed that in all of them 'Austria' means something more than the true Austria, the archduchy; what is commonly meant by them is the whole dominions of the sovereign of Austria. People fancy that the inhabitants of those dominions have a common being, a common interest, like that of the people of England, France, or Italy. … There is no Austrian language, no Austrian nation; therefore there can be no such thing as 'Austrian national honour.' Nor can there be an 'Austrian policy' in the same sense in which there is an English or a French policy, that is, a policy in which the English or French government carries out the will of the English or French nation. … Such phrases as 'Austrian interests,' 'Austrian policy,' and the like, do not mean the interests or the policy of any land or nation at all. They simply mean the interests and policy of a particular ruling family, which may often be the same as the interests and wishes of particular parts of their dominions, but which can never represent any common interest or common wish on the part of the whole. … We must ever remember that the dominions of the House of Austria are simply a collection of kingdoms, duchies, etc., brought together by various accidental causes, but which have nothing really in common, no common speech, no common feeling, no common interest. In one case only, that of the Magyars in Hungary, does the House of Austria rule over a whole nation; the other kingdoms, duchies, etc., are only parts of nations, having no tie to one another, but having the closest ties to other parts of their several nations which lie close to them, but which are under other governments. The only bond among them all is that a series of marriages, wars, treaties, and so forth, have given them a common sovereign. The same person is king of Hungary, Archduke of Austria, Count of Tyrol, Lord of Trieste, and a hundred other things. That is all. … The growth and the abiding dominion of the House of Austria is one of the most remarkable phænomena in European history. Powers of the same kind have arisen twice before; but in both cases they were very short-lived, while the power of the House of Austria has lasted for several centuries. The power of the House of Anjou in the twelfth century, the power of the House of Burgundy in the fifteenth century, were powers of exactly the same kind. They too were collections of scraps, with no natural connexion, brought together by the accidents of warfare, marriage, of diplomacy. Now why is it that both these powers broke in pieces almost at once, after the reigns of two princes in each case, while the power of the House of Austria has lasted so long? Two causes suggest themselves. One is the long connexion between the House of Austria and the Roman Empire and kingdom of Germany. So many Austrian princes were elected Emperors as to make the Austrian House seem something great and imperial in itself. I believe that this cause has done a good deal towards the result; but I believe that another cause has done yet more. This is that, though the Austrian power is not a national power, there is, as has been already noticed, a nation within it. While it contains only scraps of other nations, it contains the whole of the Magyar nation. It thus gets something of the strength of a national power. … The kingdom of Hungary is an ancient kingdom, with known boundaries which have changed singularly little for several centuries; and its connexion with the archduchy of Austria and the kingdom of Bohemia is now of long standing. Anything beyond this is modern and shifting. The so-called 'empire of Austria' dates only from the year 1804. This is one of the simplest matters in the world, but one which is constantly forgotten. … A smaller point on which confusion also prevails is this. {197} All the members of the House of Austria are commonly spoken of as archdukes and archduchesses. I feel sure that many people, if asked the meaning of the word archduke, would say that it was the title of the children of the 'Emperor of Austria,' as grand-duke is used in Russia, and prince in most countries. In truth, archduke is the title of the sovereign of Austria. He has not given it up; for he calls himself Archduke of Austria still, though he calls himself 'Emperor of Austria' as well. But by German custom, the children of a duke or count are all called dukes and counts for ever and ever. In this way the Prince of Wales is called 'Duke of Saxony,' and in the same way all the children of an Archduke of Austria are archdukes and archduchesses. Formally and historically then, the taking of an hereditary imperial title by the Archduke of Austria in 1804, and the keeping of it after the prince who took it had ceased in 1806 to be King of Germany and Roman Emperor-elect, was a sheer and shameless imposture. But it is an imposture which has thoroughly well served its ends."

_E. A. Freeman, Preface to Leger's History of Austria-Hungary_.

"Medieval History is a history of rights and wrongs; modern History as contrasted with medieval divides itself into two portions; the first a history of powers, forces, and dynasties; the second, a history in which ideas take the place of both rights and forces. … Austria may be regarded as representing the more ancient form of right. … The middle ages proper, the centuries from the year 1000 to the year 1500, from the Emperor Henry II. to the Emperor Maximilian, were ages of legal growth, ages in which the idea of right, as embodied in law, was the leading idea of statesmen, and the idea of rights justified or justifiable by the letter of law, was a profound influence with politicians. … The house of Austria … lays thus the foundation of that empire which is to be one of the great forces of the next age; not by fraud, not by violence, but here by a politic marriage, here by a well advocated inheritance, here by a claim on an imperial fief forfeited or escheated: honestly where the letter of the law is in her favour, by chicanery it may be here and there, but that a chicanery that wears a specious garb of right. The imperial idea was but a small influence compared with the super-structure of right, inheritance, and suzerainty, that legal instincts and a general acquiescence in legal forms had raised upon it."

_William Stubbs, Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History, pages 209-215._

[Image]

ETHNOGRAPHICAL MAP OF AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

NOTE: The shaded parts denote the distribution of the Germans.

AUSTRIA: The Races.

"The ethnical elements of the population are as follows (1890 for Austria and 1880 for Hungary) on the basis of language; Austria (1890): German 8,461,580; Bohemian, Moravian and Slovak 5,472,871; Polish 3,719,232; Ruthenian 3,105,221; Slovene 1,176,672; Servian and Croatian 644,926; Italian and Latin 675,305; Roumanian 209,110; Magyar 8,139. Hungary (1880): German 1,972,115; Bohemian, Moravian and Slovak 1,892,806; Ruthenian 360,051; Slovene 86,401; Servian and Croatian 2,359,708; Roumanian 2,423,387; Magyar 6,478,711; Gipsies 82,256; Others 83,940,"

_Statesman's Year-Book, 1893; edited by J. S, Keltie._

AUSTRIA: End----------

A Logical Outline of Austrian History

In Which The Dominant Conditions And Influences Are Distinguished By Colors.

[Red] Physical or material. [Blue] Ethnological. [Green] Social and political. [Brown] Intellectual, moral and religious. [Black] Foreign.

The history of Austria, so far as it has importance, is unique in being the history of a Family and not the history of a State,— the history of a Dynastic and not of a National Power. Territorially, the name was attached, until 1806, to an inconsiderable arch-duchy, on the Danube, in that corner of Teutonic Europe where the Germans of the Middle Ages fought back the Turanian races and the Slaves. Dynastically, it became connected, in the 13th century, with a House, then insignificant, in Alsace, and to the future remarkable fortunes of that House the territory so named contributed little more than a strong central position and a capital town.

Rodolph, Count of Hapsburg, with whom the importance of Austrian history begins, was elected Emperor in 1272, for the reason that his possessions were small and the resoluteness of his character was unknown. He disappointed the Electors by increasing the weight and reviving the power of the Imperial office, which they had not at all desired, and he used its power vigorously for the benefit of himself and his own. The King of Bohemia resisted him and was defeated and slain; and a part of the dominions which the Bohemian king had acquired, including Austria (then a duchy), Carniola and Styria, was appropriated by Rodolph, for his sons. The House of Hapsburg thus became the House of Austria, and its history is what bears the name of Austrian history from that time until 1806. The Hapsburg family has never produced men of the higher intellectual powers, or the higher qualities of any kind; but a remarkable vitality has been proved in it, and a politic self-seeking capability, which has never, perhaps, persisted through so many generations in any other line. It owes to these qualities the acquisition, again and again, of the elective Imperial crown, until that crown settled, at last, upon the heirs of the House, in practically hereditary succession, despite the wish of the princes of Germany to keep it shifting among the weaker members of their order, and despite the rivalry of greater houses with ambitions like its own. The prestige of the splendid Imperial title, and the influence derived from the theoretical functions of the Emperor—small as the actual powers that he held might be—were instruments of policy which the Austrian princes knew how to use with enormous effect. Austrian marriages and Austrian diplomacy, often alluded to as examples of luck and craft in political affairs, show, rather, it may be, the consistent calculation and sagacity with which the House of Austria has pursued its aims.

By marriages, by diplomacy, and by pressures brought to bear from the headship of the Empire, the family plucked, one by one, the coronets of Tyrol and Carinthia (1363), Franche-Comté and Flanders, with the Low Countries entire (1477), and the crowns of Spain, Naples, Sicily and Sardinia (1516), Bohemia (including Moravia), and Hungary (1526). Its many diadems were never moulded into one, but have been, from first to last, the carefully distinguished emblems of so many separate sovereignties, united in no way but by homage to a common prince.

The one most fortunate acquisition of the House, which has given most stability to the heterogeneous structure of it power, in the judgement of the ablest among modern historians is the Hungarian crown. Its Burgundian and Spanish marriages, which brought to it the rich Netherlands and the vast realm of Ferdinand and Isabella, brought also a division the Family, and the rooting of s second stem in Spain; and while its grandeur among the dynasties of Europe was augmented, the real gain of the House in its older seat was small. But the Kingdom on Hungary has been a mass of very concrete political power in its hands, and has supplied in some degree the weight of nationality that was otherwise wanting in the dominions of the House.

The mixture of races under the Austrian sovereigns is the most extraordinary in Europe. Their possessions exactly cover that part of the continent in which its earlier and later invaders fought longest and most; where the struggle between them was final, and where they mingled their settlements together. The Slavic peoples are predominant in numbers; the Germans are scarcely more than one-fourth of the whole; and yet, until recent years, the Austrian power figured chiefly as a German power in European politics, and took leadership in Germany itself. This position accrued to it through the persisting, potent influence of the Imperial title which the Archdukes of Austria bore, with mediæval fictions from Rome and from Germany woven together and clinging around it; and through the broken and divided condition of the German land, where petty courts and princelings disputed precedence with one another, and none could lead. When time raised up one strong and purely German kingdom, to rally and encourage a German sentiment of nationality, then Austria—expelled by it from the Teutonic circle—first found her true place in the politics of Europe.

For Germany the relationship was never a fortunate one. Alien interests came constantly between the Emperors and the Empire— the proper subject of their care,—and they were drawn to alien sympathies by their connection with Spain. They imbibed the hateful temper of the Spanish Church, and fought the large majority of their German lieges, on the questions of the Reformation, for a century and a half. Among the combatants of the frightful "Thirty Years War" they were chiefly responsible for the death and ruin spread over the face of Germanic Europe. At no time did Germany find leading or strength in her nominal Emperors, nor in the states making up the hereditary possessions of their House. In the dark days when the sword of Napoleon threatened every neighbor of France, they deserted their station of command. It was the time which the head of the House of Austria chose for abdicating the crown of the Holy Roman Empire—that lingering fiction of history,—and yet assuming to be an Emperor still—the Emperor of an Empire which rested on the small duchy of Austria for its name.

The renunciation was timely; for now, when Germany rose to break the yoke of Napoleon, she found leadership within her own family of states. Then began the transformation in Germanic Europe which extinguished, after half a century, the last remains of the false relations to it of the Austrian House. Prussia opened her eyes to the new conditions of the age; set the schoolmaster at work among her children; made herself an example and a stimulus to all her neighbors. The Family which called itself Austria did otherwise. It was blind, and it preferred blindness. It read lessons in nothing but the Holy Alliance and the Treaty of Vienna. It listened to no teacher but Metternich. It made itself the resurrectionist of a dead Past in all the graveyards of Feudal Europe, and was heard for half a century as the supporter and champion of every hateful thing in government. It had won Lombardy and Venice by its double traffic with Napoleon and with those who cast Napoleon down; and it enraged the whole civilized world by the cold brutality of its oppressions there.

Events in due time brought the two "systems" of domestic polity— the Prussian and the Austrian—to account, and weighed them together. As a consequence, it happens to-day that the House of Austria has neither place nor voice in the political organization of Germany; has no footing in Italy; has no dungeons of tyranny in its dominions; has no disciples of Metternich among its statesmen. Its face and its feet are now turned quite away from the paths of ambition and of policy which it trod so long. It has learned, and is learning, so fast that it may yet be a teacher in the school of liberal politics which it entered so late. It has set Hungary by the side of Austria, treading the one great nation of its subjects no longer under foot. It sees its interests and recognizes its duties in that quarter of Europe to which History and Geography have been pointing from Vienna and Buda-Pesth since the days of Charlemagne. Its mission in Europe is to command the precarious future of the southeastern states, so far as may be, and to guard them against the dangerous Muscovite, until they grow in civilization and strength and are united as one Power. In this mission it is the ally and the colleague of both Germany and Italy, and the three Powers are united by stronger bonds than were possible before each stood free.

[Right Margin]

9th Century. The March.

A. D. 1272. Rodolph of Hapsburg. Emperor.

A. D. 1282. The House in possession.

A. D. 1438. The Imperial Crown.

A. D. 1363-1526. Gathering of crowns and coronets.

The mixture of races.

A. D. 1521-1531. The Reformation.

A. D. 1618-1648. Thirty Years War.

A. D. 1806. End of the Holy Roman Empire.

A. D. 1815-1866. Policy of Metternich. vs. policy of Stein.

A. D. 1859. Loss of Lombardy.

A. D. 1866. Seven Weeks War. Loss of Venice.

A. D. 1867. Austro-Hungarian Empire.

A. D. 1882. The Triple Alliance.

End of "A Logical Outline…"-----

{198}

AUSTRIA: A. D. 805-1246. The Rise of the Margraviate, and the creation of the Duchy, under the Babenbergs. Changing relations to Bavaria. End of the Babenberg Dynasty.