Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918

Robert A. Kann, Zdenek David

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780295806839
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Europa del Este

The Peoples of the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526-1918

CHAPTER 1

The Habsburgs and the Eastern Habsburg Lands, 1526–1918

Any considerations of this relationship, and in a wider sense the topic of this volume, revolve around two preliminary questions. What do we understand by the term Eastern Habsburg lands? And to what extent—if any—are we justified in conceiving of a bond among the Eastern Habsburg lands beyond the strictly legal one of subordination under the rule of a dynasty? As to the first issue, two conflicting answers are possible, one focused on geographic criteria, the other on ethnic and historical factors.

We will take the Habsburg empire¹ roughly within the boundaries it had from the peace of Karlowitz (Sremski Karlovci, Karlócza) of 1699 to 1918 (exclusive of the not yet annexed territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina), and will draw an imaginary line from the northernmost to the southernmost point. The area west of this line, including the contiguous territories of the indisputably Western Habsburg peoples (Austro-Germans, Italians), would also comprise the major part of Bohemia and a slice of Moravia—that is, the overwhelming majority of the Czechs. Also to the west of the imaginary line we would find almost all the Slovenes and a major portion of Croatian areas of settlement. The Magyar, Romanian, Serb, Slovak,² and subsequently the Polish and Ruthenian territories would almost in their entirety be to the east of the north-south line.

If we turn to the ethnic and gradually evolving historical concept, we have to disregard the north-south line as the criterion of what is east and west, and perceive the Czechs, together with all the other Slav peoples in the Habsburg realms, as Eastern people. That is even more obvious in the case of the Slovenes, the only other Slav people located almost totally to the west of the imaginary north-south line. Because of their ethnic or historic affiliation with other South Slav peoples, their Eastern association was even less challengeable than that of the Czechs.

Within the Eastern area we would also have to place one fully non-Slav group and one that is primarily non-Slav, the Magyars and the Romanians. As to the latter, a significant ethnic relationship between Romanians and Slavs had been brought about by many centuries of intermarriage. An ethnic mixture to that degree was lacking between Magyars on the one side and Slavs and Romanians on the other. Where, before 1918, intermarriage of Slavs and Romanians with Magyars did exist, the price to be paid for such a mixture was complete Magyarization as a consequence of the dominant Magyar political position in the Danube valley. Thus a continuous conflict runs through the better part of the modern history of Magyars versus nationally conscious Slavs and Romanians. It is true that most Slavic peoples, and indeed Germanic and Romance peoples, had conflicts with some of their neighbors at times; the Magyars had trouble with all of them most of the time. The understandable feeling of ethnic isolation among the Magyars was largely responsible for this peculiar relationship. To be sure, this does not void the geographical facts, but it certainly interferes with the assumption of a common link between the Eastern peoples in the Habsburg lands. What kind of union is indeed conceivable that would include peoples in continuous struggle with each other—not only Magyars with Slavs but Slavs with other Slavs, the conflict between Poles and Ruthenians to wit?

Before we attempt to answer this question, obviously a far more complex one than the problem of the imaginary geographic dividing line between Eastern and Western peoples in the Habsburg lands, it would be helpful to arrive at a clear understanding of what is meant by the distinction between Eastern and Western Habsburg peoples.

Concerning the division between East and West, the answer will of necessity have to be based on a compromise. It is natural for a historical study to put greater emphasis on ethnic factors and cultural and social evolution of peoples than on geographical data and political history. This means that we will perceive all Slavic peoples, including the westernmost ones (Czechs, Slovenes, and Croats), as Eastern peoples. This Eastern concept naturally also includes the Romanians. Beyond this—the major divergences between Magyars, Slavs, and Romanians notwithstanding—the fact remains that Magyar history has been to a greater extent and for a longer period part of Eastern rather than Western History.

This kind of determination—and here the compromise comes in—requires exceptions, and major exceptions at that. Geographic factors do, of course, greatly influence historical developments. There can be no question, for instance, that the Czech Reformation as precondition for the rise of Lutheranism in Germany has much closer spiritual and political ties to the West than to the East. In this sense, Czech history in the sixteenth century and even in the early seventeenth century was indeed part of the history of the Western Habsburg lands, although not in all spheres of human activity. Magyar history after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise (Ausgleich) of 1867, and in particular after conclusion of the Austro-German alliance of 1879–1918, had much more in common with the interests and objectives of the Austro-Germans than with those of Slavic peoples. At least to this extent—though not to it alone—Magyar political history for a limited time must be considered to be part of Western history.³ Finally, Western affiliations, in particular to the Republic of Venice, played an important role in the late medieval and early modern history of Croatia. These, however, are only some very obvious examples of specific qualifications that have to be made to modify our basic East-West distinction. They do not obviate the Eastern affiliation of these ethnic groups for the best part of their history.

It could be said in general that all major ethnic groups under Habsburg rule⁴ shared the great experiences of Renaissance, Reformation, Counter Reformation, and the Thirty Years’ War; and along with the Poles and Ruthenians they shared the Enlightenment, French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, Restoration era, Revolution of 1848, and Neo-Absolutism until 1859. Therupon national life of the Habsburg peoples branched out in more diffuse ways and summarization becomes more problematical.

With the exception of Hungary under King Matthias I Corvinus (1458–90), the Renaissance was of declining significance as we move from the German-Italian West to the Transylvania East. To establish here a straight Western concept compared with an Eastern one would be difficult, inasmuch as decided Eastern influences heralding from the Polish kingdom also are notable in this period. Anyhow, in terms of this study the onset of the Renaissance precedes even the political union of the Habsburg lands brought about in 1526–27.

Concerning the Reformation on the European continent and not merely within the Habsburg realms, the Czechs were unquestionably the leading nation. Inasmuch as the Protestant Reformation—except for relatively brief phases of Slovene and Magyar history, especially east of the Tisza (Theiss, Tisa) River—had a much greater impact on West European than on East European lands, the Czechs have to be comprehended in this connection as Western Habsburg people to the end of the Bohemian phase of the Thirty Years’ War.

The Counter Reformation, with its consequences of cultural delay,⁵ unquestionably originated in the West, but it had an equally significant impact on the East. The major difference was in timing. When the Counter Reformation began to make its full impact felt in the East—that is, even before the reconquest of Buda by imperial armies in the war against the Turks in 1686—it had spent its most aggressive tendencies in Austro-German, Slovene, and Czech territories. Only then were its full political and cultural consequences felt by the Eastern peoples, for a time still mainly by the Magyars. A major result of the Counter Reformation in the context of our study was undoubtedly that it strengthened the position of the Austro-German Hereditary Lands against the Lands of the Hungarian and Bohemian Crown, which in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either ravaged by the Ottoman forces from the east or subjugated by imperial armies from the south.

The Thirty Years’ War, which overlaps with the era of the Counter Reformation, reveals in full clarity the gradual transition from ideological conflict to the even more complex social and national struggle. Without doubt it was accompanied by far greater suffering for the West than for the East. This, of course, had largely geopolitical, strategic reasons. In this context, the Czechs, who as much as the Germans or more bore the brunt of fighting and devastation, must be counted with the West.

Yet a general observation holds true for the Counter Reformation as well as the Thirty Years’ War. Conflicts that could still be reconciled in political or religious terms became irreconcilable when they broadened into social or inter-nationalities’ conflicts. As such they became truly insoluble.⁶ That is as true of the fate of the Czechs after the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 as of the Magyars at the time of the Rákóczi insurrections and the so-called peace of Szatmár of 1711 between emperor and Magyar rebels.

Late Baroque and early Enlightenment overlapped in the first half of the eighteenth century in the Habsburg lands. The former was of steadily declining momentum, the latter had as yet made little impact on the contemporary scene. Late Enlightenment and the era of the French Revolution had a much greater immediate influence on the Western than on the Eastern Habsburg lands—in purely political terms, that is, and politics here means mainly foreign policy. Change in domestic policies, on the other hand, while more often than not originating in the West, affected all Habsburg lands deeply. In matters cultural, the influence of the Enlightenment was far reaching in all Habsburg lands, though perhaps somewhat greater in the West than in the East. The revolutionary era was, however, of far less importance in all Habsburg lands, West and East alike, than in the Germanies to the north and west and the Italian states to the south.

The great impact of the Napoleonic wars before 1809 extended again far more markedly to the traditional Western Austro-German and Italian national groups, and only since the peace of Schönbrunn of 1809 distinctly to the western fringe of the South Slavs, the Croats and Slovenes.

The reactionary Restoration era from 1814 to the Revolution of 1848, and Neo-Absolutism after the revolution, oppressed all Habsburg peoples roughly to the same degree—with one exception, the Magyars. With brief interruptions, Hungarian autonomy dominated by the Magyars was on the whole respected until 1848; but after their defeat in the revolution and the War of Independence in 1849, the same Magyars were more brutally oppressed than any other people. This held true for the entire Neo-Absolutist era.

The distinction between East and West became more complex when constitutional government was on the rise and the political life of the Eastern peoples developed more fully. Beginning with the era of constitutional government in the Western part of the empire after 1867, a concept of Slavic solidarity, though by no means unity, developed haltingly. It had become apparent briefly already at the Slav Congress in Prague in the spring of 1848. Yet this solidarity, which must be confused neither with a Russian-inspired political Panslavism nor with the Slavic Renaissance in the cultural field, not only united but to a degree divided the eastern peoples of the Habsburg empire. The Panslav Congress of 1867 in Moscow brought the conflict between the Catholic Poles and the other—Orthodox—Slav peoples of the empire into the open; and the same can be said for the long-smoldering enmity between Poles and Ruthenians, after a kind of Galician autonomy was granted practically to the Poles alone in 1868. In either case the religious factor was merely a symptom of ethnopolitical differences that had existed between Magyars and surrounding Slavs and Romanians for centuries.

From now on the Czechs and all South Slavs in the empire, whatever their geographic situation, have to be counted with the East. But following the Compromise of 1867, the Magyars joined the Germans as part of a Western alliance in terms of joint dominance in foreign and domestic policies. The Romanians, on the other hand, supported the Eastern Slavic peoples on the grounds of common opposition to the oppressive Magyar nationality policy. The Croats, owing to the existence of an imperial military border district on their ethnic territory and as a consequence of their struggle against Magyar claims for supremacy, had particularly close ties with the Austro-German imperial West as the main seat of executive power. But they too gradually became involved in the struggle for South Slav unionism, and their continuing aspirations for South Slav leadership must not be confused with pro-Western political affiliation. Like the Slovenes farther to the west, they eventually amalgamated fully with the Eastern sphere of the Habsburg monarchy. The Italians under Habsburg rule remained closely tied to the West during this era; but in their case “West” has to be understood increasingly as alignments and loyalties transcending the western and southern borders of the Habsburg empire.

Altogether if we review the situation just before the outbreak of World War I, only the German-Magyar axis remained closely tied to Germany as a matter of interest as well as principle. If one separates the two factors, one might add to this axis the Poles and Slovenes, both Catholic ethnic groups whose loyalty was, however, qualified: it would last as long as adherence to the Habsburg monarchy, represented by the German-Magyar axis, served their interests better than an association of Russia with the West European powers. In any case, the distinction between Western and Eastern interests became ever more clearly accentuated.

The World War itself does not provide a very useful yardstick for measuring developments between 1914 and 1918. The idea of separation from the empire was now increasingly linked to the fortunes of the war and to the geopolitical situation of individual ethnic groups, favoring those settled at the fringes of the empire against those in a more central position, such as the Czechs, Slovenes, and Croats. The greater chance of cooperation with those ethnic groups that had conationals across the border became a decisive factor. One might perhaps distinguish now between the following groups: first, the German-Magyar axis, within which a liberal Magyar opposition attached to the values of Franco-British limited democracy, became increasingly discernible; second, there was a group of Slav ethnic bodies—Poles, Croats, Slovenes, and Slovaks—whose long-range interests lay with the East but the more immediate ones with the Habsburg West (in the case of the Poles, after the dissolution of the Habsburg empire, for two decades the Atlantic West); third, a group—consisting of Czechs, Ruthenians, Serbs, and Romanians—was committed to the East either sooner or more firmly than the second group; and this was true even though Romanian cultural values were predominantly pro-French and the Czech geopolitical position would tend to make the nation a natural member of the middle group. Nevertheless, political, cultural, and ethnic interests in the case of Czechs, Ruthenians, and Serbs, and geopolitical ones in the case of the Romanians, transformed these four ethnic bodies into the spearhead of Eastern concerns against the preservation of the Habsburg empire.

Thus, quite apart from the entirely separate position of the Magyars, the East did not represent a uniform entity through the war years.

Concerning the common experience and interests of the peoples under Habsburg rule from 1526 to 1918 in foreign relations, the following facts stand out. In the sixteenth-century wars between the Habsburg powers and France, the involvement of the German Habsburg realms, compared with the leading role of the Spanish power, was secondary. The interests of the Eastern Habsburg lands were affected only insofar as the Franco-Turkish alliance of 1536 at least indirectly strengthened Protestantism in eastern Hungary and Transylvania, whereas Emperor Charles V’s efforts in the Schmalkaldic war in Germany against the Protestant princes led ultimately only to a meager compromise. The leading role of the Czechs within the Protestant Reformation was, of course, touched by these developments but as yet neither decidedly weakened nor strengthened.

Of far greater immediate significance for the evolution of West-East relations were, of course, the Turkish wars. Taking a large-scale view, here and only here can one speak of a solidarity of interests between Western and Eastern Habsburg peoples in an era still dominated by the notion of common Christian values in defense against the onslaught of the Mohammedan Turkish power. This was on the whole true only for the sixteenth century. The concept of Christian defense was steadily undermined by several forces. One was the never-to-be-healed rift between Catholicism and Protestantism, which became increasingly apparent when in the seventeenth century the wars against the Turks shifted, first intermittently and then steadily, from defense to offensive warfare. There was also the fact that a military command in these wars gave the Germans unchallengeable predominance, a fact resented in particular by the Magyars but also to some degree by the Czechs throughout the era of the Counter Reformation. The Habsburg peoples naturally were affected very unevenly by the Turkish wars. Only Magyars, Serbs, Romanians, and eastern Croats suffered directly from Turkish occupation; Austro-Germans experienced only occasional for ays into their territories. The decisive role the West played after the lifting of the siege of Vienna in 1683 and the ensuing great imperial offensive in Hungary is, on the other hand, somewhat overrated. Unlike the onslaught under Süleyman the Magnificent a century and a half earlier, the Turks would presumably have been stopped in southern Germany even if they h...