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The ability to borrow on a sustainable basis was an essential element of a successful fiscal-military state. Historians have shown greater interest in direct taxation as a source of revenue, though they have drawn attention to the role played by the Vienna City Bank and external borrowing in the rise of a medium- and long-term public debt in the 18th-century Habsburg Monarchy. This chapter factors two further, crucial elements into the story. First, the central government increasingly tapped into the credit facilities of the provincial Estates in the Austrian and Bohemian lands, in effect deriving a critical advantage from the Monarchy’s composite political structure and the public bodies associated with it. The high points of this activity would be the Seven Years War and the wars of the 1790s. After 1763 Vienna’s debt management strategies proved so successful that the first sustainable form of cameral debt could be sold, which came to represent the fourth main pillar of affordable public credit.

The introduction firmly restores the upkeep of a standing army in war- and peacetime to the center of the Habsburg government’s concerns in the early modern period. After a brief discussion of the peculiarities of Habsburg historiography, it argues that the idea of ‘composite monarchy’ (J.H. Elliott) best encapsulates the complex political framework within which a Habsburg fiscal-military state operated within its own borders. A review of the recent literature shows that the Habsburg Monarchy has figured more in the literature on ‘fiscal states’ than on ‘fiscal-military states’. Based on current knowledge, the introduction posits four major shifts in the Habsburg Monarchy’s fiscal-military arrangements between the 16th and 18th centuries. By the early 18th century, it is furthermore argued, a ‘fiscal-military core’ had emerged in the relatively well-coordinated and regularized fiscal-military activity occurring in the Bohemian and Austrian lands. Its three key facets constituted the rigorous use of primarily older forms of direct taxation, credit mobilization, and recruitment.

The House of Arenberg was one of the great lineages of historic Burgundy, a politically fragmented crescent of Western Europe wedged between the French and German heartlands until the revolutionary...

The Bernini-like marble and gold Plague (Trinity) Column set up by the emperor Leopold I on a central Viennese thoroughfare has acquired new significance as a place of prayer and remembrance during...

Until not so very long ago, the national conflicts in the last decades of the Habsburg monarchy prompted historians to focus on nationality as the crucial marker of self-understanding among its populations. The high tide of modern nation-states after 1918 made national borders, national mindsets, and national power structures the framework for ever-greater historical interest in the lineages of national genealogy. In recent decades, scholars have questioned the assumption that modern nations were primordial or natural, even as such entities remain a prime object of attention in a world where nation-states and identity politics help define research agendas and nationalism continues to be a potent force. The lines of inquiry have taken a number of directions. First, historians have linked the pervasiveness of nation and national identity to specific historical circumstances. Perhaps most famously, the political scientist Benedict Anderson's insight regarding “imagined communities” pointed up the contingency of modern nations. It was increasingly accepted that they are artificial constructs of relatively recent date and firmly rooted in time and place. The neat boundaries that seemed to define them, as on old ethnographic maps, faded as their elusive, conditional, and shifting contours were recognized.

For generations after 1918, the Habsburg monarchy’s dissolution and the nationally tinted lenses that defined the field of vision made its end seem inevitable. The First World War appeared merely t...

This study ambitiously speaks to the question of “culture and identity” in the work of Austrian writers over a two-hundred-year period beginning in the eighteenth century. From the perspective of t...

This chapter deals with two distinct periods following the reform of the annual Contribution in 1748. The years between 1749 and 1756 were characterized by the government’s persistent and largely successful attempt to ensure that the new Contribution was actually paid, as well as by a range of other reforms that induced prolonged conflict with the Estates. These initiatives included a “rectification” of the tax registers and the revitalization of the local princely domain. It was at this time that the “circle offices” as the extended arm of central authority in the countryside were established. With the outbreak of the Seven Years War (1756–63), the domestic tension subsided as the Estates and government reached a political compromise. Without the credit raised by the Estates’ good offices, the war effort could hardly have been sustained.

The scale of the Estates’ financial intercession on behalf of the government during the Seven Years War had been unprecedented. It also laid bare problems of financial oversight and resistance to changing conceptions of good government. As the war wound down, tension resurfaced between government and Estates that would combust in scandal and confrontation. The result was a far-reaching reform of the Estates’ organization in 1764 that aimed to reduce mismanagement and improve coordination. Given what was now the fundamental financial interdependence of central and intermediary authority, not only could the government not dispense with the Estates but it had to respect the autonomy necessary to the Estates’ financial intermediation.

This chapter examines the Estates against the background of the war-induced crisis of government that began in 1733. It shows that the Habsburg fiscal-military state was more effective in this period in one of its central territories than has been assumed. The ordinary and extraordinary sums approved by the Estates for the government in the last couple of years of the War of the Austrian Succession roughly equaled the sum that would be negotiated as the reformed Contribution in 1748. The leading opponent of the reformed Contribution at the level of the central government, the grand aulic chancellor, Count Friedrich Harrach, belonged to a family that had dominated the Lower Austrian Estates in the previous generation. Harrach’s personal and financial circumstances cast illuminating light on the forces of resistance to reform at the territorial level.

This chapter introduces the organization of the Lower Austrian Estates including the main assemblies and officeholders. The Estates’ presiding officer was the ruler-appointed Landmarschall, who was always drawn from the Estate of lords. The Estate of knights provided the Landuntermarschall. The Estates met and conducted business in differing combinations in a variety of assembles: the annual diet; the “three upper Estates” of prelates, lords, and knights; and three standing committees. One of these committees, the college of Deputies, constituted the Estates’ directorial panel, which was also a key administrative conduit between central power and the localities. Aristocrats and great abbots dominated, but did not monopolize, these bodies.

Joseph II’s policy toward the Estates was born in part of resentment at the government’s financial dependency on them in the Seven Years War. This chapter surveys the Estates in Lower Austria in systematic comparative perspective (the other central lands). It answers the following questions. To what extent was Joseph successful in enervating the Estates during his personal rule? How did his religious reforms and other initiatives modify their composition? Who managed them on his behalf? How did their standing committees, assemblies, and other structures change? What role did these bodies play, if any, in palliating fiscal-military exigency and in the reign’s final crisis? To what extent were the Estates alienated from the Habsburg regime by 1790?

This chapter divides into two sections. The first deals with what we shall call Leopold II’s “renovation” of the Estates following Joseph II’s death; the resolution of grievances from the previous reign; assemblies and officeholders; and the question of spheres of influence and participation in government. How did the circumstances of the Estates after 1790 differ from those before 1780? The second section treats the Estates’ inherent condition not only in relation to the changing ideas of representation under the impact of both the rise of contract theory in natural law and the Atlantic revolutions, but also in view of Austrian social and political conditions generally. To what extent were the Estates an anachronism by 1815?

Though weakened by recent scholarship, the paradigm of “absolutist state-building” remains embedded in the thinking about Habsburg history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The “emasculation” of traditional elite groups such as the Estates by the reforming “state” of the eighteenth century is an especially tenacious assumption. The present study utilizes recent concepts for large, compound political entities in an international context including “fiscal-military state” and “composite monarchy” to throw light on the relationship of government and society over time. It anatomizes the impact of fiscal-military exigency on the relationship between the rulers in Vienna and the Estates of the archduchy below the river Enns (Lower Austria), which geographically, politically, and financially was one of the central Habsburg lands. The thesis is posited that the Habsburg monarchy’s composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Estates constituted an increasingly vital, if changing, element of Habsburg international success and resilience.

Under the impact of conditions of fiscal-military exigency as well as shifting conceptions of government and representation, the relationship between Habsburg rulers and their elites changed continually between 1650 and 1820. In an ongoing process characterized by both cooperation and conflict, the two sides came together around the standing army. The Estates’ operations on its behalf encompassed at varying times military administration, tax collection, credit mediation, among other activities. As lenders to the dynastic state, the Estates were never more important than between the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic wars. With the exception of Great Britain, whose national debt was guaranteed by Parliament, no other eighteenth-century great power accorded the representative tradition such significance in the question of borrowing and finances as the Habsburg monarchy. After 1830 political, social, and economic change undercut the Estates und unravelled their relationship to Habsburg authority. They would be abolished in 1849.

This chapter examines how the exigencies of decades-long Habsburg rivalry with the Ottoman empire and France affected provincial revenue, fiscal practices, and flows of money. Special attention is paid to the interplay of innovative forms of taxation, new agreements between ruler and Estates known as “recesses” that fixed a minimum level of the diet’s annual grant over a number of years, and the increasing use of the Estates’ credit on the government’s behalf. In particular, it draws attention to the inherent and increasingly visible link between taxation and borrowing as manifested in the Estates’ financial intermediation. The profound change in the financial relations between government and Estates between the 1680s and 1710s helps explain Habsburg international staying power.

This chapter explores the composition of the Estates and how admission to their ranks was regulated. It also considers relations among the four Estates. Membership in the Estates of prelates and townsmen was largely static over time, while that in the lords and knights was changing. As a body, the Estates were not monolithic. Lines of fissure ran between nobility and clergy, within and between the various formal and informal groups of nobles, and between the townsmen and the others. There were also confessional and geographical factors that produced vertical divisions. These distinctions governed the dynamic not only within the halls of the Landhaus but also between the Estates and government.

On October 18, 1783, a cortege of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the Imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Count Johann Anton Pergen and that included a dozen representatives of the four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen) that composed the diet. The group ascended into the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the Imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor's appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government's annual tax demand. As his mother the Empress Maria Theresa had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of Estates' attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadastre that underlay the system of direct taxation. This prefigured one of the reign's celebrated initiatives that culminated in the great tax and peasant labor reform of 1789. Joseph's participation in a court function that dated back to the middle years of the previous reign and that was rooted in a much older ritual in which the Lower Austrian Estates had in corpore received the tax request out of the monarch's own hands largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year, his absence from Vienna prevented its occurrence, and in 1785 he did away with it altogether.

The House of Austria had a long tradition dating back at least to the Thirty Years War of accepting foreign nobles, regardless of origin, into its service. During the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, this tradition received renewed impetus. A relatively small, but highly visible, group of émigrés from France, the southern Netherlands, and the left bank of the Rhine gained admission on the basis of birth to Court at Vienna and eventually integrated permanently with the great Hapsburg aristocracy. By the late nineteenth century, the paternal ancestors of no less than ten per cent of Austrian aristocratic families had first settled in the Monarchy after 1789. These émigrés -aristocrats and their immediate descendants came to occupy many prominent positions in the highest echelons at Court, in the diplomatic service, and in the military. Almost alone among western and central European nobilities, the Hapsburg aristocracy had not been directly hit by revolutionary change. Yet its easy absorption of émigrés represented a remarkable social and cultural transformation that was not without political ramifications as well.

The aristocracy in modern Europe has emerged in recent years as a renewed object of scholarly attention and debate. Long dismissed by various schools of historical thought as insignificant relics of a vanished past, the old elites allegedly made way for a triumphant bourgeoisie during the French Revolution. The story of the European nobility after 1789 became one of crisis, decline, and dissolution. The modern world presented obstacles that could not be surmounted. The doctrines of the Enlightenment, including novel concepts of equality and individualism, undermined the ideological foundations of the old order, while the process of urbanization removed large numbers of people from the authority of the local manor. Changes in legal and administrative structures similarly contributed to weakening the position of the nobility. And the fortunes made by entrepreneurs in the course of the industrial revolution quickly began to overshadow aristocratic wealth, which was based primarily on more traditional agricultural sources. Such a bleak portrayal of aristocratic experience in the era up to the First World War has been greatly modified by the recent work of historians. The aristocracy now appears to have proven remarkably tenacious in clinging to the levers of power and influence during the “bourgeois century.” That we had previously failed to perceive this phenomenon may be attributed in part to the implicit assumption that the old order accepted its preordained fate and obligingly disappeared from the stage of history. But the exaggeration of the effects of the industrial and political revolutions on European life, even in the