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Conflict or Consensus? Habsburg Absolutism and Foreign Policy 1700–1748*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 February 2009

Charles Ingrao
Affiliation:
Purdue University

Extract

Much has been made in recent years about the vitality of parliamentary institutions in early modern Europe and of the existence of considerably more cooperation between monarchs and their estates than one had previously thought. While this trend constitutes a significant revision in the thinking of western European historians, it has long been accepted by those who have studied the Habsburg monarchy. Over the last few years specialists on the seventeenth-century monarchy such as R. J. W. Evans, Jean Bérenger, and John Spielman have reemphasized the existence of a consensual, symbiotic relationship between the dynasty and its corporate bodies, especially those of the Erblande.

Type
Habsburg Foreign Affairs
Copyright
Copyright © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 1983

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References

1 Spielman, John P., Leopold I of Austria (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Evans, R. J. W., The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700: An Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Bérenger, Jean, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans le seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle (Paris: H. Champion, 1975).Google Scholar

2 For more on the Habsburgs' reliance on the security which these buffer regions provided cf. Ingrao, Charles, “Habsburg Strategy and Geopolitics during the Eighteenth Century,” in Rothenberg, Gunther E., Király, Béla K., and Sugar, Peter F., eds., East Central European Society and War in the Pre-Revolutionary Eighteenth Century, Brooklyn College Studies in Change, II (Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 1982), 4966.Google Scholar

3 Recent scholarship has pointed out that even the Bohemian estates enjoyed a considerable degree of independence from the crown, despite the restrictions placed upon them by the Verneuerte Landesordnung. Hassenpflug-Elzholz, Eila, Böhmen und die böhmischen Stände in der Zeit des beginnenden Absolutismus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1980)Google Scholar; Bérenger, , Finances et absolutisme p. 499.Google Scholar

4 Tapié, Victor Louis, “Les états de la Maison d'Autriche de 1657 à 1790” (unpublished typescript, n.d.), p. 149.Google Scholar

5 von Mensi, Franz Fr., Die Finanzen Österreichs von 1700 bis 1740 (Vienna: Manz, 1890), pp. 6367, p. 166 ff.Google Scholar

6 Ingrao, Charles, In Quest and Crisis: Emperor Joseph I and the Habsburg Monarchy (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1979), pp. 2427.Google Scholar

7 Hassenpflug-Elzholz, , Böhmen und die böhmischen Stände, p. 32.Google Scholar

8 The Maritime Powers directly maintained seven thousand Palatines, three thousand Saxe-Gothans, ten thousand Hessians, and eight thousand Prussians, and were also supporting much of the sixteen thousand-man Savoyard army. Austrian forces numbered about thirty-two thousand men but as many as half were funded by British loans and by taxes levied by Prince Eugene's military administration in Bavaria.

9 Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Staatenabteilung, Schweden 18a: 17 June 1707 Referat; Staatskanzlei, Vorträge 51: Joseph's notes of 12 August 1707 Conference.

10 Turba, Gustav, Die pragmatische Sanktion mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Länder der Stephanskrone (Vienna: Manz, 1906), pp. 3545.Google Scholar

11 Roider, Karl, The Reluctant Ally (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), pp. 23, 9596, 157Google Scholar; Barker, Thomas, Army, Aristocracy, Monarchy (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1982), p. 19.Google Scholar