3
LANDS AND DYNASTY
The House of Austria has generally been cast as the villain in our story. C.V. Wedgwood’s widely read history was published in 1938, the year of appeasement, and portrays a weak British ruler, James I, conciliating impending Habsburg dictatorship. The Czech historian Josef Polisensky experienced the Nazi occupation first hand, and explicitly compared the failure of the western powers to assist the Bohemian rebels in 1618 with the Munich crisis over three centuries later. Günter Barudio’s popular German-language account presents Gustavus Adolphus as a champion of peace and justice fighting for German Freedom against Habsburg hegemony. The older, German perspective was even more overtly partisan, associating the emperor with Catholic tyranny, seeking to extinguish the forces of light and historical progress. It is also unfortunate that the best writing in English on this period concentrates on Spain, neglecting the Austrian branch whose problems were central to the causes, course and conclusion of the conflict.
The dynasty’s fortunes had been a long time in the making. For much of the later Middle Ages they had trailed behind more powerful competitors in the struggle for influence within the Empire. Acquisition of the imperial title in 1438 had thrust them onto centre stage, but their real power derived from the rapid accumulation of additional provinces and kingdoms between 1477 and 1526. Chief among these was Spain, inherited in 1516 as it was on the cusp of conquering a new world empire. Government remained a family business. Not only did the Habsburgs lack the technical expertise and resources to establish a uniform system of rule, such centralization was not even on their agenda. Each acquisition or conquest added a new title to the family’s growing list, magnifying their power and prestige among Europe’s crowned heads. Of these, the imperial title was unquestionably the most important, but it was linked to Spain through the person of Charles V only between 1519 and 1558. His vast domains touched every problem facing the early modern world: religious schism, rapid demographic and economic change, encounters with new lands and peoples, international conflict. The challenge was met by creating new branches in the family firm; a process that, as we have seen in Chapter 2, was well under way in the 1540s and led to the formal partition of the dynasty on the emperor’s death.
Charles’s brother, Emperor Ferdinand I, continued the Austrian branch, which remained formally the most senior through its retention of the imperial title, as well as the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns. Charles’s son, Philip II, was given Spain and its overseas empire, together with the Netherlands, which as the Burgundian Kreis were nominally still part of the Empire, and the Habsburg possessions in Italy, many of which also fell under imperial jurisdiction. Inferiority in status was amply compensated by superior resources, given the economic might of the Netherlands, and the American silver now reaching Europe (see Chapter 5). By contrast, Ferdinand I faced the complex problems of the Empire, most of which he ruled only indirectly and which contributed comparatively little against the Turks who had overrun much of Hungary. The Austrian state debt rose fivefold over Ferdinand’s reign to reach 10 million florins by his death in 1564, equivalent to nearly five years’ revenue. The cost of servicing this sum consumed 1.5 million fl. a year, while the defence of the eastern frontier required another million. The emperor left a further 1.5 million in personal debts, as well as owing his soldiers a million in pay arrears.1 Ferdinand’s posthumous solution was further devolution; in his will he entrusted the imperial title to a senior line, while establishing two junior branches for his younger sons. In the short term, this allowed the dynasty to intensify its rule by sharing the burden of government between three archdukes. However, economies of scale were lost as the debts were split between the branches, forcing each to raise taxes to pay off its share. The centrifugal forces, already present in provincial autonomy, gained momentum as each line concentrated on local problems and evolved its own identity.
As the youngest son, Archduke Carl received the poorest share, consisting of five provinces collectively known as Inner Austria, but often named after Styria, the most populous, that had around 460,000 inhabitants by 1600.2 The combined total for the others (Carinthia, Krain, Görz and Gradisca) came to around 600,000, giving the archduke more subjects than most electors. However, his lands were located at the Empire’s south-eastern corner, placing them immediately behind the front line against the Ottomans. Though the Styrian economy expanded, thanks to copper and iron mining, its taxes were increasingly diverted to subsidize Croatian and Hungarian border defence. Nonetheless, the Styrian branch assumed second place within the Austrian hierarchy since its relative growth outstripped that of the Tirol line, founded by the middle son, Archduke Ferdinand. The silver mines that had once made the Tirol the family’s richest province were in terminal decline, and though salt production provided alternative revenue, the entire area had just 460,000 inhabitants scattered in Alpine valleys and across the region known as Further Austria, a string of small enclaves along the Upper Rhine stretching west into Alsace. Only a third of Alsace belonged directly to the Habsburgs, and their influence over the rest of it and elsewhere in Further Austria depended largely on jurisdictions associated with the imperial title that was reserved for the senior branch.
As eldest son, Maximilian received Austria, together with the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns, and was accepted by the electors as the new emperor. However, only the two provinces of Upper and Lower Austria were directly inherited, and though they had a combined population of 900,000, they produced less revenue than the more populous kingdom of Bohemia.3 The Habsburgs succeeded to Bohemia after the death of their relations, the Jagiellon dynasty, in 1526. The new rulers regarded their crown as hereditary, but had been unable to persuade the local nobility to formally renounce their theories of elective monarchy. Bohemia was a patchwork of five distinct provinces, each with its own laws and government. As a kingdom, Bohemia itself claimed precedence, including denying the other four from participating in choosing their monarch. With around 650,000 inhabitants, the margraviate of Moravia was around half the size of Bohemia, but shared more with it than the other provinces, including the predominance of the Czech language and the legacy of the Hussites. The latter were theological precursors to Luther who related religious freedoms to a campaign for political autonomy and had been crushed only with difficulty by their ruler with assistance from the German nobility in the 1430s. The experience sharpened distinctions with the other, predominantly German-speaking provinces of Silesia and Upper and Lower Lusatia that lay beyond mountain ranges to the north and east.
Habsburg authority was shakiest in Hungary that had also been acquired in 1526 when the last representative of another branch of the Jagiellons died, along with three-quarters of his army at the battle of Mohács against the Turks. The surviving Hungarian nobles divided sharply over whether to accept Habsburg claims to their crumbling kingdom. The majority opposed a foreign ruler, preferring instead one of their own, János Zápolyai, whom they proclaimed king in accordance with their theory of elective monarchy. The others accepted the Habsburgs, who granted wide concessions to buy support. United resistance against the Turks collapsed and the Ottomans captured over 120,000km2 of the country, acquiring 900,000 new subjects by 1541. Zápolyai retreated north east, creating his own state by amalgamating the largely autonomous principality of Transylvania with Ruthenia, a region that is now part of the Ukraine but was then known as the Partium and consisted of eight Hungarian counties east of the Tisza river. This gave him around 80,000km2 of territory, with perhaps three-quarters of a million subjects. He secured Habsburg recognition as prince on the condition that Transylvania would pass to them on his death. However, the local nobility had no intention of losing their rights and instead elected István Báthori as their new ruler, who secured Ottoman protection in 1571. Transylvania thus emerged as an autonomous axis between Ottoman Hungary governed from Buda and the rump Habsburg kingdom based at Pressburg (Bratislava). The influx of refugees fleeing the Islamic advance gave the Habsburgs marginally more subjects than either of the other two parts, but the split deprived them of over two-thirds of the former kingdom.4 Only the Croatians fully accepted the dynasty as their new rulers, using this opportunity to enhance their own autonomy from the Hungarians. The latter remained royalists, accepting Habsburg possession of the ancient crown of St Stephen but steadfastly insisting on their rights not only to elect each king but to oppose him if he broke their constitution. As in Bohemia, these political differences were not a clash between monarchism and republicanism, but represented diverging conceptions of mixed monarchy, alternatively stressing the rights of the ruler or his Estates.
ESTATES AND CONFESSION
Estates Representation
The Estates were early modern representative institutions that were found in all the Habsburg provinces and many of the German territories in the Empire. Just as the lay and ecclesiastical princes, lords and free cities considered themselves the imperial Estate-members sharing powers with the emperor, so the principal nobles, clergy and burghers constituted the Estates of their territory. The Estates’ social composition and political role has been open to widely different interpretations. Much writing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries echoed complaints from seventeenth-century rulers in presenting the Estates as obstacles to good government and bastions of petty interests. Conversely, liberals championed them as precursors to modern parliaments, struggling valiantly against selfish and reckless rulers who risked their subjects’ lives and property in the pursuit of their personal ambitions. Czech and Hungarian writers gave this a distinctive twist by claiming their Estates as guardians of national traditions that were extinguished by Germanic Habsburg aggression. Marxists minimized these conflicts of interest, regarding rulers and the largely aristocratic Estates as part of the same feudal class, united in their exploitation of the peasantry.5
Lurking behind all these interpretations is the question whether monarchy or Estates offered the better route to integrate the diverse Habsburg lands into a modern state. This preoccupation with ‘modernization’ is unhelpful, since such ideas were far from the minds of seventeenth-century Europeans. The Estates certainly contributed positively to the development of the Habsburg monarchy by providing fora for the dynasty to meet their most important subjects. Their development helped dampen the violence that had characterized the later fifteenth century, especially in Austria where the local nobles had even besieged their ruler in the family’s Hofburg palace in Vienna in 1461. As with the ‘juridification’ of imperial politics through the development of the Reichstag, politics in the Habsburg provinces shifted from armed confrontation to legalistic debates about the precise meaning of a growing body of charters and other constitutional documents.
Estates represented corporate groups, not individuals, reflecting the tripartite hierarchical division of early modern society along functional lines into three social ‘estates’. The clergy, whose function was to pray for everyone’s salvation, were ranked first as the closest to God, followed by the noble estate of warriors and the third, or commons, that provided for society’s material welfare. Representation was generally indirect. Bishops, abbots and the heads of religious houses generally represented the bulk of the clergy, who together numbered no more than 2 per cent of the population. Noble representation was through the possession of qualifying manorial estates associated with a seat in the Estates’ assembly, or diet (Landtag). Nobles comprised around 1 per cent of all Austrians, slightly more of Bohemians and around 5 per cent of Hungarians, but collectively acted as ‘the country’, speaking for their dependent tenants and serfs who were denied any direct participation. The commons were thus restricted to the urban population living in ‘crown’ towns directly under Habsburg authority, and excluded those settlements under the jurisdiction of a lay or ecclesiastical lord. Only in the Tirol did the wider population gain access through the communal representation of numerous villages entitled to send their mayors elected by the propertied, male householders.
Of all the Habsburg Estates, only those of the county of Görz conformed to the classic tri-cameral model of clergy-nobles-commons. Elsewhere, the nobles were divided into lords (Herren) and knights (Ritter). These sat together in a single house in the Inner Austrian provinces, but separately in Upper and Lower Austria, as well as Hungary and the Bohemian lands. Around 200 lords and 1,000 knights were entitled to sit in the Bohemian diet, compared to 90 and 189 respectively in Moravia in 1618. Eighty-seven lordly and 128 knightly families were represented in Lower Austria, but there were always additional nobles without qualifying land who were disenfranchised. Around 300 noble families remained unrepresented in Upper Austria, outnumbering the 43 lords and 114 knights who were. The situation was complicated in Silesia by the presence of the princes of Jägerndorf, Troppau, Liegnitz and elsewhere who together ruled about a third of the duchy. They claimed precedence over all Bohemian lords and had pretensions, thanks to dynastic marriages, to join the ranks of the imperial princes with representation in the Reichstag. Their presence kept most of the lesser nobles and towns disenfranchised, restricting the Silesian Estates to only forty members, including the bishop of Breslau.
Peasant communes existed as a fourth estate alongside the towns and a relatively weak clergy and nobility in the Tirol. The latter two were absent entirely in the small Voralberg Estates, composed only of burghers and peasants. The commons were strong in the other lands of the Tirolean Habsburgs, reinforcing the introspective character of their diets that wanted little to do with grand affairs beyond their valleys. Separate clerical and urban estates existed everywhere else, except in Bohemia where the clergy lost their franchise during the Hussite emergency, but the clergy lacked cohesion, given the absence of powerful bishops outside Vienna, Prague, Breslau, Olmütz and Gran. The Habsburgs acquired wide powers over the Austrian clergy through a papal concordat in the fifteenth century and established a bureau to manage the monasteries and convents in 1568. The clergy were thus caught between Habsburg political supervision and the spiritual jurisdiction of bishops who were generally members of the imperial church beyond the frontier in Passau, Freising, Bamberg, Regensburg and Salzburg. The urban estate was weaker still, since the exclusion of patrimonial towns on land owned by lay and spiritual lords reduced representation to those on the crown domains (Kammergut). One hundred towns were excluded for this reason in Moravia, reducing urban representation to six royal towns. Towns still played a role in Bohemia, where there were 32 represented in the Estates, including the 4 that together composed the city of Prague. Only in Hungary did the royal and mining towns sit together with the gentry, facing an upper house of aristocrats and senior clergy reminiscent of the bi-cameral English Parliament. Everywhere, however, townsmen were considered inferior by the nobles, not merely on grounds of social status, but distrusted politically due to their close relationship with the ruling dynasty.
Habsburg Administration
Like those in the German lands, the Habsburg Estates emerged in the fifteenth century to advise their ruler. As representatives of propertied and corporate groups, they spoke for the country on matters of common concern, claiming to offer more impartial advice than servile courtiers or foreign-born councillors. The Habsburgs soon tired of being told unpleasant truths, and developed their own advisory bodies better suited to coordinating policy across their many domains. The basic administrative framework was created by Ferdinand I who had already been entrusted with governing Austria in 1522 by his absentee elder brother Charles V. Ferdinand formed a new privy council in 1527, appointing men by ability as well as status, and created separate Bohemian and Austrian chancellories to deal with the correspondence and paperwork between Vienna and the various provinces. Other specialist departments emerged, notably the treasury (Hofkammer) and court war council (Hofkriegsrat), to handle particular business and provide expert advice to assist the privy council. We should not make too much of this. Habsburg administration remained extremely sloppy. Gundacker von Liechtenstein was appointed president of the treasury by Ferdinand II in August 1620, but was surprised to receive post a few days later addressed to Seifrid Christoph von Breuner, while his subordinates all thought Gundacker von Polheim was in charge.6Despite their imperial prestige, the Habsburgs found it difficult to attract skilled and experienced staff. Considering their appalling record as employers, this is not surprising: Rudolf II died in 1612 owing two and half million florins in back pay to his officials and servants.
The ability of the central agencies to reach into the localities was severely restricted. The Habsburgs could appoint a governor (Statthalter) in those provinces without a resident archduke, but had to consult the Estates when naming the lord lieutenant (Landmarschall) and his deputy who commanded the local militia. They could also appoint bailiffs in the crown towns and stewards to manage the economic assets of their domains, but these rarely constituted more than 5 per cent of each province. Virtually all other local administration was in the hands of the nobility. In Bohemia, for example, the nobles ran the provincial court that resolved disputes between them, passed laws and exercised jurisdiction over the entire rural population. The situation was even more extreme in Hungary where half the villages were owned by 50 aristocratic families, and most of the rest belonged to the 5,000 gentry families. Only the royal towns fell under Habsburg jurisdiction, but even the largest of these, Debrecen, had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants. The king could not even name a governor, known here as the palatine, but simply proposed candidates to the diet that chose who was to exercise royal prerogatives when the monarch was out of the country.
With the majority of subjects living outside the crown lands, the Estates became a vital link between the dynasty and the bulk of the population. It was difficult to achieve anything without their assistance, or at least acquiescence. In particular, their help was essential to raise taxes, since domains’ income covered only a fraction of Habsburg expenditure. Medieval monarchs had been expected to ‘live off their own’, only drawing on their subjects’ resources in critical situations, such as facing invasion or natural disaster. Estates emerged in Central Europe to facilitate such extraordinary grants at a time when rulers were assuming wider responsibilities during the fifteenth century. The growing permanence of royal government and the complexity of the problems it faced led to more frequent assemblies, gradually transforming intermittent taxation into regular, annual levies. Estates were compelled to create their own institutions, forming standing committees to liaise with the ruler when the diet was not in session, as well as a secretariat to maintain records and a treasury to administer the taxes. The Habsburg treasury received taxes from the Estates as well as revenue remitted by the stewards on the domains. The size and regularity of the Estates’ taxes improved their credit rating, enabling them to borrow additional sums and to assume responsibility for some of the dynasty’s debts, in return for permission to levy further taxes to pay these off.
A parallel governmental structure thus emerged alongside that of the dynasty, but the Estates had little desire to usurp political power. Their theory of mixed monarchy left the initiative in the ruler’s hands, particularly in dealings with outsiders and in times of crisis. They saw their role as guardians of the established order, to preserve the common good by preventing their ruler embarking on reckless or illegitimate policies. Rights and liberties had been established through several centuries of bargaining with the ruler. The Estates saw it as their duty to defend and enhance these, objecting to new laws that transgressed old charters and resisting measures that lacked their consent. Yet, this did not amount to modern parliamentarianism, since the Estates were vehicles for sectional and even individual interests. Nowhere can this be more clearly seen than in the campaign for religious liberties that accompanied the spread of the Reformation to the Habsburg lands, since Protestantism became associated with corporate privileges, not individual freedoms.
The Spread of Protestantism
Despite Protestant hopes that this or that archduke might convert, the Habsburgs remained uniformly Catholic. Protestantism thus lacked the political support that produced the territorial churches elsewhere in the Empire. Converts in the Habsburg lands were forced to build their organization from the bottom up, making the nobility, not the dynasty, the key players. Nobles exercised local jurisdiction that often extended to patronage over the appointment of parish priests and school teachers for their tenants. Spiritual jurisdiction still rested with the bishop, but he was usually far away and relied on the landlords to pay the priests. The church’s weakness was replicated in the Estates, where it deferred to the nobles. Given the Estates’ role in passing laws on moral and social behaviour, the nobles were well-placed to promote the second Reformation of life, as well as that of the Word. Whatever their personal convictions, Protestantism also suited the intensification of lordship by uniting the right of patronage with other proprietorial rights. As one prominent Lower Austrian put it, nobles were ‘at the same time lords and bishops on our property, we hire and fire clerics and they have to obey us’.7 The presence of Lutheran noblemen within a province soon created the phenomenon known as ‘exodus’ (Auslauf), as peasants and burghers left neighbouring Catholic manors and towns to attend Protestant services. The nobles’ pivotal role is demonstrated by the case of the Tirol, where the new faith remained tainted by the experience of early sixteenth-century radicalism while Catholicism grew more attractive thanks to Capuchin missionaries sent by Cardinal Borromeo. The Tirolean nobles remained solidly Catholic and the Estates backed the archduke in ordering Protestants to convert or leave in 1585.
By then, Catholicism was under severe pressure in the other provinces. Nine in ten Lower Austrian nobles had embraced Lutheranism, as had 85 per cent of those in Upper Austria, where three-quarters of the urban population and half the peasants were Protestants. Around 70 per cent of the Inner Austrian population had also abandoned Rome, and only 5 out of the 135 Styrian nobles remained Catholic. Though the largely Slovene peasantry rejected what they saw as a German religion, 16 of the 22 Styrian crown towns had accepted Lutheranism by 1572.8 As nobles converted they began lobbying through the Estates to secure formal recognition from the Habsburgs. With Catholic membership dwindling, the dynasty had no choice but to compromise with the Protestants to secure continued assistance with its mounting debts. The tripartite division of the dynasty in 1564 forced each branch to negotiate separately with its own Estates. Those of Upper and Lower Austria obtained the Religious Assurance (Assecuration) in 1568 and 1571 respectively, granting freedom to accept Lutheranism for the lords, knights and their tenants, in return for the Estates paying off 2.5 million fl. of Habsburg debts. The privileges were extended in 1574 to allow nobles to worship in their town houses that now became de facto churches in crown cities, notably Vienna. The Inner Austrian Estates assumed responsibility for another 1 million fl. of debt in 1572 in return for similar privileges. These were consolidated six years later in the Pacification of Bruck (Brucker Libell) in return for regular taxes to maintain border defences against the Turks. Debt amortization had cost the Inner Austrians 1.7 million fl. by 1600, while subsidies for the frontier accounted for a further 2.93 million between 1588 and 1608.9The population paid dearly, buying the Austrian nobles their own version of the religious freedoms granted the German princes in the Peace of Augsburg.
The situation was different in Bohemia where agreements from 1436 and 1485 already recognized Utraquism alongside Catholicism. Utraquism was a moderate development of the Hussite faith, so-called because it insisted the faithful receive the Eucharist in both bread and wine (sub utraque specie), rather than the latter being exclusively reserved for the clergy. Services were in Czech and the church lay outside episcopal jurisdiction, though the Utraquists compromised with Rome by sending their priests to Venice for ordination. The Habsburgs confirmed these privileges when they acquired Bohemia in 1526, not least because Utraquism was losing its momentum and most Catholics hoped its followers would soon rejoin them, although a radical minority of Utraquists split to become the Unity of Brethren, refusing to submit to Rome or abandon the Hussites’ social programme. Utraquism’s close ties to Czech culture restricted the spread of Lutheranism to the German-speaking urban population and some of the nobles. When the Czech nobility refused to back the Habsburgs in the Schmalkaldic War in 1547, Ferdinand cracked down on the radical Brethren and initiated a programme to revitalize the Catholic church. A Jesuit college was founded in Prague in 1556 and an archbishop appointed there five years later, after a vacancy of a century and a half.
The Catholic revival caused the other faiths to draw closer together. The Bohemian Estates brokered the Confessio Bohemica in 1575 that attempted to establish a broadly Protestant church by glossing over the theological differences between Lutheranism, Utraquism and the Brethren. However, no deal comparable to those in Austria followed. Maximilian II saw no reason to extend recognition beyond the Utraquists and consequently the Estates rejected his successor’s request to amortize the Bohemian crown’s debts of 5 million fl. The Brethren split, many defecting back to Utraquism to receive official protection, while others embraced Calvinism that was brought into Bohemia by Palatine immigrants and by nobles returning from German universities in the 1580s. Lutheranism took hold only in Silesia and Lusatia, though the Silesian princes and educated burghers also adopted Calvinism in the early 1600s.
The religious spectrum in the kingdom had become more diverse than in Austria. Catholics were reduced to less than 15 per cent of Bohemians and around 35 per cent of Moravians, the others being mainly Utraquists, Brethren or Lutherans. Calvinists composed only 3 per cent of the total population but they had disproportionate political influence thanks to their numbers among the elite of society. The situation remained fluid as the Estates continued to regard religion as a gift from God that could not be determined by mere mortals. Relations with the ruler were based on mutual respect for each party’s interests, with negotiations intended to secure lasting compromise. This tradition penetrated deeply into the fabric of society where it was not uncommon for the same family to have adherents of different churches. Understandably, most nobles refused to acknowledge their faith publicly, particularly in Moravia where the local Brethren continued to make converts and even Anabaptist communities persisted. Many noblemen had books from a variety of confessions in their libraries, and most seem to have favoured a non-denominational Erasmian personal faith. There were tensions, but no sense of imminent crisis.
Calvinism was stronger in Hungary where Lutheranism had long been distrusted as too ‘Germanic’. Less than a fifth of the Magyar population embraced Lutheranism, and then mainly those in mountain villages away from aristocratic domination. Luther’s faith also found some acceptance among the Slovaks of Upper Hungary in the north-east, as well as among the southern Slavs of Croatia and Slovenia. However, nearly half the nobility embraced Calvinism, as did many of the Magyar peasantry. Only one in ten Magyar nobles stayed loyal to Rome and there were only 300 Catholic priests left in Habsburg Hungary by 1606, mainly concentrated around the episcopal seats of Gran, Raab and Neutra. Croatia and the three Slovene counties remained predominantly Catholic, mainly because the local nobility depended on employment on the Military Frontier and faced competition for appointments from Lutheran Inner Austrians.
Social Tensions
The spread of the competing faiths had depended everywhere on the attitudes of the nobility. Though Catholics were in a minority outside Croatia and the Tirol, none of the varieties of Protestantism succeeded in securing complete acceptance. Their legality rested on rights extorted from the Habsburgs through the Estates’ power of the purse. Such rights had not yet been hallowed by time and their preservation depended on how far those who benefited from them convinced others of their necessity. Protestant nobles not only faced internal opposition from their remaining Catholic peers, but wider economic developments made it hard to sustain the support of other corporate groups.
Noble wealth derived from the largely agrarian economy that produced rye, oats, wheat and barley. Mining assumed some significance in the Tirol and part of Inner Austria, but the Habsburgs retained control of much of this. Textile production was growing in Upper Austria, Bohemia and western Moravia, while horse breeding was important in other parts of Moravia and in Hungary. All these activities required land and labour and these in turn were controlled through feudal jurisdictions. Like the Habsburgs, most lords managed only a small part of their property directly as domains, leasing the rest to tenant farmers in return for fixed rents. Rising inflation made this less attractive in the later sixteenth century, but it was difficult to force tenants to pay more since they often owed obligations to multiple landlords and could play one master against another. The Habsburgs were also extending the right of appeal to peasants as a means of inserting themselves as arbiters of the rural world between landlords and peasants, except in Hungary where the diet prevented this in 1556. The rising urban population of north-western Europe stimulated the demand for grain, creating new opportunities for eastern and Central European landlords in the sixteenth century. They expanded their domains by purchase, foreclosing or simple eviction, while intensifying feudal jurisdiction to compel dependent peasants to work for them.
This process has been labelled ‘second serfdom’ since it emerged around 1500 just as medieval serfdom declined elsewhere in Europe. It was pronounced in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, parts of Austria and north-eastern Germany, but was far from uniform, nor necessarily the dominant form of lordly exploitation even in regions where it was practised.10 Nonetheless, when combined with inflation, demographic and environmental change, the spread of this ‘manorial economy’ grew increasingly oppressive and symbolized a wider commercialization of the rural world. Lords began exploiting forests and other assets in new ways, for example charging peasants for collecting firewood or letting their pigs root for food. The changes also fuelled tensions within the elite, as some lords were better placed to seize opportunities than others. The situation was most extreme in Hungary where around fifty magnate families accumulated 41 per cent of the entire country, creating economies of scale and winning clients among the gentry and peasants through their ability to pay private armies to combat banditry and oppose the Turks. The decline of the Hungarian gentry was paralleled in Bohemia where the number of knights fell by nearly a third in the five decades before 1618. Wealth became increasingly concentrated to the point where a quarter of the country was held by only eleven aristocratic families.
Peasant resentment exploded first in Upper Austria in 1595, and spread to the western parts of Lower Austria the following year. Heavy-handed attempts to reimpose Catholic priests in some Protestant parishes provided a trigger, but the underlying causes ran deeper and protests were soon directed against the Lutheran nobles who dominated the Estates. Peasants called for ‘Swiss Freedom’, demanding representation in the Estates as well as the abolition of recent dues and taxes. As the current head of the dynasty and archduke in Austria, Emperor Rudolf II tried to broker a compromise, but he antagonized both sides by linking his mediation to clumsy moves to restore Catholicism. Faced with a resurgence of violence in the autumn of 1596, Rudolf handed the initiative to his younger brother Matthias, whom he had already appointed governor of Austria the year before. Matthias combined more effective military counter-measures with an investigation of peasant grievances. It was the policy that had worked so well in the wake of the 1525 German Peasant War. Around a hundred alleged ringleaders were executed and several thousand others were mutilated by cutting off their noses and ears to underscore the illegitimacy of rebellion. Protest through the ‘proper’ legal channels was meanwhile rewarded by decrees in June 1598, restricting peasant labour service on landlords’ fields to two weeks a year.
The emergency exposed the nobility’s continued dependency on the ruling dynasty, not least because the provincial militia proved useless against the peasants. It also revealed the difficulties of forging a broad alliance across the corporate divisions in society. Even where they shared the same faith, nobles, burghers and peasants remained bitterly divided. Burghers despised peasants and were often involved in their exploitation, extending expensive credit to indebted tenants, or paying their families miserable wages for piecework in the nascent textile industry. They had little interest in the peasants’ calls to extend Estates representation to the villages. More fundamentally, all communities were split by deep inequalities that generally overrode the neighbourliness of living in close proximity and left them divided, especially when it came to responding to demands from landlords and other outsiders. Though communities largely managed their own affairs, only a minority of propertied inhabitants were enfranchised. The poorer, disenfranchised majority frequently lacked firm rights of residence, especially in the towns, and relied on common assets, such as meadows for grazing their few animals, to supplement irregular or casual employment. Richer peasants tried to shift the burden of additional taxes or labour demands onto their unrepresented poorer neighbours, while restricting access to valuable communal assets in danger of erosion through over-usage. Far from bringing people together, religion added new fissures through confessional antagonisms that cut across social and economic divisions. The question of how best to achieve common goals prompted bitter disputes as some placed their faith in official promises to address grievances through the courts, while others felt violent protest was the only option. Nobles showed some respect for peasants’ religious convictions, provided these coincided with their own. However the rebellion demonstrated the difficulty of linking religious to political liberty, as Lutheran lords joined their Catholic counterparts to hire mercenaries to assist Archduke Matthias in 1596.
THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL
The leading members of the Habsburg family became convinced that the future of their dynasty depended on restoring Catholicism as the basis of political loyalty. This goal was not unrealistic, given the continued presence of a Catholic minority in the Estates and the deep divisions among the Protestants, the majority of whom remained loyal subjects despite the confessional differences. The religious freedoms extorted in the 1570s had been granted as special privileges to the nobles and towns of individual provinces, and had yet to be accepted by all members of each Estate as integral parts of their corporate rights. The Estates lacked a platform to coordinate a response to the dynasty since they had failed to develop a viable general assembly. Here, the partition of 1564 actually worked to the dynasty’s advantage since it reinforced the practice of negotiating with each province separately and ensured that the general Austrian diet never reassembled after the early sixteenth century. Bohemia’s refusal to recognize the kingdom’s other four provinces as equals ensured that its general diet did not meet for nearly a century after 1518. The initiative thus lay in Habsburg hands, with fair chances of success provided the different branches could work together and present a united front.
Rudolf II
As head of the main line, it fell to Rudolf II to provide leadership once he became emperor on his father Maximilian’s death in 1576.11 At the age of eleven Rudolf had been sent in 1563 to Madrid with his younger brother Ernst to keep him away from Protestant contagion and to curry favour with the powerful Spanish Habsburgs. The austere, emotionally detached environment of the Spanish court left a lasting impression on both boys who witnessed the harsh realities of power firsthand. Don Carlos, Philip II’s son by his first marriage, became mentally unstable and was imprisoned after developing a pathological hatred of his father. Carlos’s already delicate health was undermined by his hunger strikes and the intrusive remedial measures of his gaolers. His death in 1568 immediately sparked rumours that he had been poisoned to remove him as a political liability and the Dutch rebels later openly accused Philip of this. Though the charge is certainly false, there was nonetheless something awful about the king’s conduct, remaining at his desk busy with the affairs of state while his son died in agony. The affair may have convinced Rudolf of the impossibility of matching his uncle’s strict devotion to duty. Contemporaries certainly noted a change in his behaviour upon his return to Vienna in 1571. Though he had adopted the stiff Spanish formality, it was clear he had no love for his uncle’s kingdom. Despite considerable pressure from his relations to ensure a legitimate heir, he refused to marry Philip’s favourite daughter, Isabella, preferring instead his long-term mistress, Katharina Strada, with whom he had at least six children. This close relationship was an exception, as Rudolf found it increasingly difficult to deal with the living, retreating into an exaggerated veneration for his ancestors. Those who did get to meet him, often after waiting literally months at a time, were struck by his intelligence, curiosity and wide knowledge. He became an avid art collector and patron of astronomers, alchemists and poets. His Spanish experience left him with an inflated sense of majesty that prevented him from delegating responsibility to those who wanted to help him. While not afraid of hard work, his mind was crowded by too many thoughts, leading to indecision, especially as he was likely to get discouraged if his initial efforts failed to meet immediate success.
This became apparent at the very start of his reign when he decided to set an example in promoting Catholicism in his capital. Local clerics and laity had revived the Corpus Christi brotherhood in 1577 and planned a procession through Vienna the following May. Rudolf placed himself at its head, flanked by his brothers Ernst and Maximilian, as well as Duke Ferdinand of Bavaria and other dignitaries. It was an explicit challenge to the largely Protestant population in the manner of the Orange Order marches in modern Belfast. Lutheran stallholders who refused to move out of the way were roughly handled by the imperial bodyguards, knocking over a jug of milk for sale in the process. The ensuing Milk War riot startled the emperor, precipitating a serious illness in 1579–80 that left him permanently altered. It is doubtful if he was ever clinically insane, though at least one of his illegitimate children also exhibited schizoid tendencies. Rather, he suffered from what contemporaries diagnosed as melancholia, or severe depression.12 His own intelligence probably contributed to this by making him acutely aware of the yawning gap between his sense of majesty and the stark realities of limited power. Though he had never been on good terms with his mother, her departure for Spain in 1581 deprived him of one of his few remaining confidantes. He grew still more isolated by moving his court to Prague two years later, shutting himself away in the Hradschin palace, high above the city, refusing to see anyone for days and leaving important documents unsigned. In September 1591 one of his chemical experiments went wrong, burning his cheek and beard and killing his master of horse who had the misfortune of being beside him. The accident plunged him deeper into despair and he now shut himself away for months at a time. His persistent refusal to marry caused mounting disquiet among his relations, driving Philip II to arrange the betrothal of Isabella to another of the emperor’s brothers, Archduke Albert, in 1597. Their marriage two years later deepened Rudolf’s suspicions towards Spain and finally forced him to confront the frustrations of his own personal life. His obsession with astrology encouraged growing paranoia as the new century dawned, especially as Rudolf interpreted Tycho Brahe’s predictions for September 1600 to mean there was a plot to assassinate him. His mood swings became more violent and he lashed out at his courtiers, even injuring one of them.
Melchior Klesl
Rudolf’s move to Prague and subsequent nervous breakdown heightened the centrifugal forces within the dynasty, as Austrian government was devolved to Ernst. Neither he, nor his successor Matthias after 1595, was able to devote much time to Catholic renewal, which now fell to the son of a Lutheran baker from Vienna, Melchior Klesl. Klesl had converted to Catholicism while a student at Vienna University and rose, thanks to Jesuit and Habsburg patronage, to become chancellor of his former alma mater by 1580, then bishop of Wiener Neustadt in 1588 and of Vienna itself a decade later. Extremely shrewd, with a tongue as sharp as his mind, Klesl made enemies easily, especially as he came to regard himself as the only one competent to advise the Habsburgs, ignored formal structures and made policy on his own. As familiar with Machiavelli as with the Bible, he has often been depicted as a secular politician in clerical robes. He was certainly worlds apart from Cardinal Borromeo, spending more time at Rudolf’s court than either of his two bishoprics after 1590. His absence itself speaks for the slow pace of Catholic renewal. Religion nonetheless remained central to his world view as the underpinning of proper order, rather than any sentimental, mystical or spiritual attachment.13
Klesl targeted Vienna where Protestantism was spreading rapidly thanks to the presence of the Lower Austrian Estates’ assembly hall, numerous Lutheran aristocratic town houses, and the practice of exodus that saw thousands of Viennese leave the city each Sunday to worship at surrounding Lutheran manors. The Milk War riot was used as a pretext to install a Catholic city council and withdraw permission to use the assembly hall for Lutheran services, while those worshipping outside the city were fined. A year after becoming chancellor, Klesl ruled that only Catholics could graduate from the university. He then worked with new councillors to transfer to the church around 90 of the 1,200 houses within the city walls for use as places of worship or education.14 The Catholic presence in the city was further boosted by the return of the court after Rudolf’s death in 1612. Courtiers, nobles and their servants squeezed the burghers from the more desirable properties around the Hofburg, especially in the inflationary years of the early 1620s when rich Catholics bought houses with debased coin. The number of Catholics had already quadrupled from the time of Rudolf’s accession to reach 8,000 by 1594.
The collapse of peasant protest by 1598 encouraged Klesl to extend his activities deeper into the countryside. The Upper Austrian lord lieutenant was sent with an armed escort to install Catholic parish priests and to close the Protestant Estates’ school in Linz. The following year, Klesl led 23,000 Lower Austrian pilgrims to Mariazell in Styria, initiating what had become an annual event by 1617. Other pilgrimage sites were developed, especially those associated with Austrian history and the dynasty to reinforce the links between piety and loyalty. These developments did not go unopposed. When the Corpus Christi procession was introduced to Linz in 1600, the citizens seized the priest and drowned him in the river. As with the Milk War, this merely offered a pretext to remove more Protestant privileges, in this case expelling all school teachers from Upper Austria. When the salt miners downed tools in the Salzkammergut in further protest, Archduke Matthias sent 1,200 troops and militia to force them back to work in February 1602. However, impressive though it seemed, the Catholic revival in Austria lacked firm foundations and even as late as 1600 three-quarters of the 50,000 Viennese still dissented from the official faith.
Catholic Strategy
Greater success was achieved in Inner Austria, where the combination of religious and political loyalty was developed more systematically after inauspicious beginnings. Archduke Carl was staunchly Catholic, but was driven by debts and the cost of border defence to concede the Pacification of Bruck in 1578. He had hoped to keep this secret, but to his horror the jubilant Protestant members of his Estates published an unauthorized version of the concessions and he was promptly excommunicated by an unsympathetic Pope Gregory XIII. Chastised, he went to meet his brother, Ferdinand of the Tirol, and brother-in-law, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria, in Munich in October 1579. His relations accepted his explanation that the published text misrepresented his intentions, but felt that it was too dangerous to revoke it. Only three months before, 5,000 Viennese had demonstrated before the Hofburg to protest against the Catholic policies there. None of the archdukes had more than a handful of troops and they had to avoid anything that might unite opposition against them. A less confrontational policy was required and the Munich meeting provided it in the form of a programme that became the blueprint for all subsequent measures up to 1618.
It was agreed that the present concessions represented the limit of what could be granted. Rather than revoking existing privileges, the archdukes would insist on a strictly Catholic interpretation of them, banning all Protestant activities that were not expressly sanctioned under the law. They had no desire to crush the Estates, since it was impossible to govern without them. Instead, the Protestant members were to be isolated by denying them any further favours, while loyal Catholics were to be rewarded and promoted. Here the Habsburgs could draw on their uncontested archducal, royal and imperial prerogatives to ennoble, legitimize children and confer degrees and other honours. These powers extended their influence throughout the Empire, since most princes could not create new nobles but merely recommend individuals to the emperor for special favour. As self-regulating corporations, the Estates could chose who to admit as members, but they depended on the Habsburgs to ennoble people in the first place, while the dynasty alone elected lords from the existing knights and exercised further influence over the church and crown towns. A significant number of Austrian noble families died out during the sixteenth century, creating further opportunities to increase the proportion of loyal Catholics. For example, forty new families joined the Inner Austrian nobility between 1560 and 1620, mainly from Italy, and sixteen of these acquired Estates membership.
Further efforts were made to make Catholicism more attractive, by ensuring a better-educated, disciplined and more numerous clergy that paid greater attention to the spiritual needs of ordinary folk. Pope Gregory was persuaded to support the plan and began to encourage other rulers to participate. Germanico Malaspina, a veteran of the Council of Trent, was appointed as a new nuncio for Inner Austria to persuade lay and ecclesiastical rulers to stop bickering over jurisdiction. Able though he was, Malaspina could not resolve all the disputes, not least because most bishops were also at loggerheads with their cathedral canons. Nonetheless, Salzburg reached a concordat with Bavaria in 1583, followed by an Austrian agreement with Passau nine years later, which ushered in an era of better relations. The new archbishop of Salzburg, Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, was inspired to travel to Rome in 1588 and returned fired with Counter-Reformation fervour, while his suffragan dioceses also passed into the hands of more reform-minded clerics, notably Martin Brenner who became bishop of Seckau in 1585.
However, the Munich programme required time to take effect and the new unity soon shattered when Carl’s precipitous attempt to ban Protestant worship in his crown towns stirred resistance in December 1580. Fearing an imminent revolt, his allies got cold feet and refused to send assistance. Lack of qualified personnel prevented any headway on the ground, and the archduke was forced to restrict his policies to his capital at Graz where he recruited a group of loyal advisers and raised the status of the Jesuit college there to a university to train more priests and officials. By 1587 he felt sufficiently strong to start again, targeting the smaller provincial towns that were expected to offer less resistance. Invoking the right of reformation accorded him as an imperial prince under the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, he established a ‘reform commission’ under Bishop Brenner, protected by a military escort, to tour the country installing new priests, closing Protestant schools and transferring each town council to Catholic hands. The measures were presented as moderate and reasonable, with the archduke simply wanting peace and reconciliation between his subjects, taking action only to defend Catholic faith and property against Protestant vandalism. Anxious to avoid the commission being extended to their manors, the nobles did little to help their burgher allies who were picked off, one by one. Brenner met only passive resistance until Carl fell ill in May 1590. A serious riot in Graz then forced the authorities to release an imprisoned Protestant student. Sensing weakness, disorder soon spread to other towns, especially after Carl died in July leaving his twelve-year-old son, Ferdinand, as the new archduke. The Estates asserted their traditional right to step in during the regency, rejecting the boy’s Bavarian relations as unsuitable and placing government in the hands of Archduke Ernst, who had no stomach for further confrontation.
Archduke Ferdinand
When Ferdinand was declared of age in 1595, it seemed highly unlikely that he would be able to recover the ground lost to the Estates, let alone become one of the most powerful men of his age. The future emperor has received a mixed reception, particularly among Anglophone historians who echo contemporary Protestant opinion that he was ‘but a silly Jesuited soule’. His mother, Maria of Bavaria, sent him to the Jesuit college in Ingolstadt to escape Protestant influence in March 1590, but his father’s death forced him to cut short his studies and return to Graz. He was a short youth, something that probably accounted for his shyness, and his family grew concerned at his poor health, especially because his elder brother had already died. Such fears were unfounded, as Ferdinand grew up physically fit, becoming an accomplished horseman and passionate hunter. Unlike his cousin Rudolf, Ferdinand was friendly and well-disposed to those around him, an impression enhanced by his red complexion and later corpulence. He grew fond of food, especially game and other rich meats that made him put on weight and develop asthma. Unlike most of his contemporaries among the German princes, he refrained from heavy drinking and his confessor proudly reported that he never received women alone in his room. Allegedly, to quell carnal urges he wore a hair shirt prior to his marriage and subsequently as a widower. The papal nuncio, Carlo Carafa, later reported that
he goes to bed around ten in the evening as is the German custom; he is already up around four in the morning or earlier… Once he has got up, His Majesty goes to the chapel to hear two masses, one for the soul of his first wife, who, though of shaky health, was tenderly loved by the emperor. If it is a feast day, the emperor then takes holy communion, for which purpose he goes to the church and hears a German sermon. This is usually given by a Jesuit and lasts an hour. After the sermon he remains at the high altar, usually for an hour and a half accompanied by specially selected music… On those days that are not feast days, the emperor, after attending two masses (something from which he never deviates), spends the rest of the morning and often much of the afternoon in council meetings.15
He continued this routine of heavy meals, work, hunting and long hours of prayer in draughty churches throughout his life; after his autopsy, his doctors were amazed he had lived so long.
While he chose three successive Jesuit confessors after 1595, Ferdinand was devout rather than a fanatic. His desire to advance Catholicism was tempered by a deep legalism that prevented him from deviating from what he understood as the constitution. While he told the Inner Austrian Estates that he was an ‘absolute prince’, he rejected Machiavellian reasons of state, believing that political success depended on adhering to Christian principles. Faith in divine providence was reinforced by his own experience during the Graz riots of 1590 when a thunderstorm dispersed the protesters and averted what the Catholics feared was an impending massacre.16 The success of his later reform efforts strengthened his convictions, because most of his advisers had predicted they would end in revolt. Yet, doubts persisted that God might abandon him if he made a mistake, encouraging caution and the desire to consult widely before taking action.
Ferdinand immediately signalled his intent by reverting to the old princely oath on his accession, rather than the version from 1564 modified to be less offensive to the Protestants. He also refused to acknowledge the Pacification of Bruck as part of the territorial laws. None of the Estates wanted a confrontation and took his silence for assent, accepting him as their ruler by 1597. To Ferdinand, their submission left his conscience clear to revoke the 1578 privileges as soon as he was strong enough. His political advisers urged caution, conscious of Archduke Carl’s earlier failures, but bishops Brenner and Georg Stobaeus of Levant urged him to follow his conscience. Having travelled to Rome to consult the pope, and after long discussions to ensure all his ‘team’ were on board, Ferdinand finally revived the reform commission in April 1598. Careful preparations were made to avoid a repetition of the protests of 1580 and 1590. All three Inner Austrian Estates were summoned simultaneously but separately to keep them busy and prevent combined opposition. Each was forced to accept a Catholic cleric on its executive committee who them promptly blocked any anti-government measure. Ferdinand did not shy away from naked force. Two Estates officials were seized and tortured until they agreed to surrender control of the principal school in Graz. The entire regular garrison of 800 men were deployed to protect the commission and troops were billeted on any burghers who protested. Operations entered full swing in 1599 as Brenner visited each Styrian town in turn, expelling Protestant teachers and pastors to break the back of any resistance and installing a Catholic priest. Once passions subsided, the commission would return for more provocative actions, closing the Protestant school, destroying the cemetery and demolishing the church, sometimes spectacularly as at Eisenerz where it was blown up. Brenner soon earned the sobriquet of Ketzenhammer – hammer of heretics – as he went out of his way to humiliate and denigrate his foes, trampling on everything they held dear:
The bodies of the faithfull digged up, and given to be devoured by Dogs and Hogs; as also the Coffins taken and set by the highway side, some burnt with fire; a worke both barbarous and inhumane. Also upon the burial-places of the faithfull, were erected Gibets and places for execution of malefactors. Also upon those places where Protestant Churches stood, or where the Pulpit stood, or the Font-stone, were erected alwaies most filthy spectacles most ugly to behold.17
Events climaxed as Brenner returned in triumph to Graz in 1600 to preside over a bonfire of 10,000 Protestant books. Ferdinand celebrated by marrying Maria Anna, the pious and dutiful daughter of Wilhelm V of Bavaria, in an eight-day festival that April. All remaining Protestant pastors and teachers were then expelled, as were those burghers who refused to convert. In all, around 11,000 left the Inner Austrian provinces between 1598 and 1605, either by expulsion or by choosing exile. Many went to Protestant territories in the Empire, like Württemberg where the duke founded Freudenstadt (literally ‘Joy Town’) to welcome them.
Throughout, Ferdinand had remained within his albeit narrow interpretation of the law. The commission officially targeted ‘heresy’, not Lutheranism, and it was not until 1609 that Catholicism was made a formal prerequisite for office-holders. Brenner also hit Lutheran church structures that lacked explicit privileges, leaving private belief untouched. Special concessions were made to the miners to forestall disruption to the economy and revenue. The Estates had already retaliated by withholding taxes in 1599 and appealing to the emperor. When Ferdinand prohibited further appeals, 238 nobles signed a petition threatening to emigrate unless he restored free worship. He simply called their bluff; most stayed at home and a second tax strike collapsed in 1604.
Bohemia
The sea change around 1600 was even felt in Bohemia where Rudolf remained aloof in his palace. As in the Austrian provinces, re-Catholicization targeted the crown towns as the weak link in the Estates. Catholic sympathizers won a majority on the Utraquist consistory by portraying the more radical Brethren as a Calvinist fifth column. Supported by the official Catholic and Utraquist church establishments, the Habsburg government began appointing loyalists as bailiffs of the royal towns, securing control of their councils even though only Pilsen and Budweis had predominantly Catholic populations. The Corpus Christi procession was revived in Prague after 1592 and soon extended to other towns where local dignitaries were obliged to participate. The crown also benefited from the extinction of many Bohemian noble families, sequestrating or purchasing their properties to increase its share of the kingdom from 1 per cent to over 10 per cent by 1603. The proportion belonging to the church and the royal towns rose to 9 per cent, giving the crown control of around a fifth of the country. The proportion was larger still in Moravia where the church had retained more land. Catholic wealth was influential given the undercapitalized state of the Bohemian economy.
The character of Bohemian Catholicism was also changing. Seven major landowning families died out between 1597 and 1611, and their wealth passed largely to those who were more militantly inclined. Vilém Slavata, whom we last met hanging from a window in the Hradschin, inherited the Neuhaus (Hradec) estate in 1596, while Karl Liechtenstein acquired the Boskowitz fortune in Moravia a year later. Many of the new generation were converts and included the men who were to hold power at the outbreak of the revolt. Liechtenstein, who later became governor of Bohemia, was raised as one of the Bohemian Brethren, as was his younger brother Gundacker, who converted in 1602 and subsequently became treasury chief in 1620. Michael Adolf von Althann from Lower Austria was converted by Klesl in 1598 and was made governor of Gran in 1606 and an imperial count in 1610. Another Lower Austrian, Franz Christoph von Khevenhüller converted and was made ambassador to Spain, later returning to write the Annales Ferdinadei, an extended biography of Ferdinand II. The Styrian Lutheran Johann Ulrich von Eggenberg likewise became a Catholic in the 1590s and had become Ferdinand’s closest adviser by 1597. Maximilian von Trauttmannsdorff, another Styrian who became the Habsburg monarchy’s leading statesman, was also raised a Lutheran, but followed his parents in adopting Catholicism during Brenner’s reform commission. Slavata converted from personal conviction while studying as a young adult in Siena, but others were persuaded at an earlier age, such as Peter Pázmány who embraced Rome under Jesuit influence at the age of twelve. Pázmány succeeded Ferenc Forgach (another convert!) as cardinal and archbishop of Gran in 1616 to spearhead Catholic reform in Hungary. Conversions helped raise the Catholic proportion among the nobility to one in ten in Upper Austria, one in five in Bohemia and one in four in Lower Austria by 1610.
The accumulation of wealth and office emboldened the militants to exclude Protestants from government. The papal nuncio in Prague persuaded the unstable Rudolf to make Zdenko Lobkowitz Bohemian chancellor on 24 August 1599, the anniversary of the Massacre of St Bartholomew. Inspired by his reading of Spanish political theorists, Lobkowitz then pressed the emperor to dismiss his Protestant advisers in 1600 and reissue the mandate outlawing the Bohemian Brethren. Clerical vacancies were filled by new men of vigour. The position of bishop of Olmütz, head of the Moravian church, went to Franz Dietrichstein in 1598, a graduate of the Jesuit Collegium Germanicum who owned a thirteenth of the entire province. The aggressive Wolfgang Setender was appointed abbot in Braunau, while Klostergrab (Hrob) with its associated monasteries at Tepl and Strahov was entrusted to Archbishop Johann Lohelius, who held a synod in Prague to promote Tridentine reform. Whereas all key government posts in Moravia had been occupied by Protestants in 1594, the administration was uniformly Catholic a decade later.
On the surface, the situation looked promising for the militants as the new century dawned. The Munich programme had proved quite successful in Inner Austria, moderately so in Upper and Lower Austria and was beginning to bear fruit in Bohemia and Moravia. But the policies were alienating many previously loyal Protestants at a time when Catholics remained outnumbered at least three to one outside Croatia and the Tirol. Continued momentum depended on unity within the ruling family and there were clear signs this was approaching imminent collapse. Rudolf was incapable of providing the necessary leadership. While he favoured Catholic renewal, intellectually he belonged to the moderate climate of the 1570s, rather than the polarized, confessional environment of 1600. Having been cajoled into backing militant measures, he then welcomed the astronomer Johannes Kepler, a Lutheran whom Archduke Ferdinand had just expelled from Styria. As the pressures mounted, he became engrossed in trivia, spending months designing a new imperial crown, even though there was already a perfectly good one kept safely in Nuremberg.18Meanwhile, relations between his younger brothers and cousins cooled rapidly as the monarchy became mired in a long war against the Turks that finally precipitated a major crisis after 1606.