On Nov. 1, 1921, the last Habsburg emperor of Austria-Hungary, Charles I, left Vienna for good. His empire, the second-largest state in Europe, had already disintegrated at the end of the First World War. After two futile attempts to regain his throne, he was sent into exile on the remote Portuguese island of Madeira, where he died of pneumonia, aged 34, a few months later.
It was an inglorious end for the Habsburg dynasty, whose rise and fall from the 10th century to 1918 is the subject of Martyn Rady’s highly accessible and insightful new book. Rady expertly tells the story of how the Habsburgs became the most powerful royal family in Europe through a combination of luck, beneficial marriage arrangements, and stubborn determination. From Vienna and Madrid, the family’s Austrian and Spanish branches at some point ruled much of Germany, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, the Netherlands, Bohemia, and Hungary.
As Rady shows clearly in his family portrait, the Habsburgs were at the heart of European history for centuries. It was a Habsburg, Philip II, who launched the Spanish Armada in 1588. The election of a Habsburg emperor, Ferdinand II, triggered the Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century. Marie Antoinette, the last French queen before the revolution of 1789, was a Habsburg archduchess, as was Marie Louise of Parma, the second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte. The First World War, which would ultimately seal the family’s destiny, started as a regional conflict between Belgrade and Vienna after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Habsburg throne, in Sarajevo in 1914.
The family’s influence was not confined to Europe, and Rady is particularly strong on the early modern period, during which the Habsburgs’ influence became global. It was the Habsburg Emperor Charles V who led the conquest of much of Latin America, where the large Aztec and Incan empires were destroyed and their lands annexed by conquistadores in Charles’s service. Habsburg territorial expansion and conquest also stretched into Southeast Asia: The Philippines were named after Charles’ son, Philip II. Traces of the Habsburgs’ global footprint are still visible today. To this date, the color of Brazil’s national soccer team is “Habsburg yellow” — a reminder that Brazil’s first empress, Maria Leopoldina, was a Habsburg princess.
Yet as Rady demonstrates, not all of the Habsburgs’ global ventures succeeded. In the mid-19th century, the Habsburgs’ ambition to reclaim some of their lost influence over Latin America failed in dramatic fashion. In 1864, Maximilian, the younger brother of then-Emperor Franz Josef, landed in Veracruz to become emperor of Mexico. Much to his surprise, his new subjects had no interest in a foreign ruler and resisted Maximilian with force. Three years after his arrival, Maximilian, wearing a sombrero, was shot by a firing squad.
Even before Maximilian’s execution, the Habsburgs had suffered some serious setbacks. In 1700, the last Habsburg ruler of the Spanish empire, Charles II, died without an heir, marking the ascension of the French House of Bourbon on the Iberian Peninsula. The French Revolution of 1789 further raised questions about the legitimacy of monarchical rule, while the military successes of Napoleon Bonaparte over the Habsburg armies led to the dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806.
The Habsburgs continued to play an important role in international affairs after the Congress of Vienna restored a balance of power in Europe in 1815. Yet they faced serious challenges over the coming decades: the growth of nationalism undermined their vision of an empire uniting different ethnic groups and faiths and eventually contributed to Austria-Hungary’s implosion under the pressures of the First World War. Furthermore, the unification of Germany under the leadership of Prussia, completed in 1871, meant that Austria-Hungary was no longer the political and military powerhouse of Central Europe.
Already in 1867, after a crushing military defeat at the hands of the Prussians the previous year, the Habsburgs bowed to growing internal pressure and agreed to the so-called Austro-Hungarian Compromise, which restored sovereignty to the Kingdom of Hungary. Henceforth, the Habsburg empire became known as Austria-Hungary or the Dual Monarchy, with separate parliaments in Vienna and Budapest but ruled by the emperor of Austria, who simultaneously served as king of Hungary. What had already been a complex empire with highly disparate territories had now become even more ungovernable.
In the decades before and after its dissolution, some observers belittled the Habsburg empire as a dysfunctional patchwork of hostile ethnic groups and an anachronistic imperial relic ruled by a royal family out of touch with changing times. This judgment has been revised in recent years, leading to a more positive appraisal of the empire and its ruling family. Rady does not romanticize the Habsburgs, but it is difficult to disagree with him when he notes that the history of much of Central and Eastern Europe after 1918 makes the days of their rule seem benign by comparison.
The difference between the Habsburg empire and some of its successor states can be illustrated by the different ways in which they handled the issue of ethnic or religious diversity. Prior to 1918, minorities such as Jews had rightly perceived the Dual Monarchy as a guarantor of their rights and status as equal citizens. It is not a coincidence that many of the most nostalgic Habsburg novels of the 1920s and 1930s were written by Jewish authors such as Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. As Count Chojnicki, a Galician aristocrat from Roth’s novel The Radetzky March puts it, “As soon as the emperor says goodnight, we’ll break up into a hundred pieces. … All the peoples will set up their own dirty little statelets. … Nationalism is the new religion.”
In the end, Count Chojnicki was proved right. The process of ethnic unweaving, genocide, and mass expulsions that culminated in World War II devastated the former Habsburg lands. After 1990, when many of these countries were freed from communism, a new wave of nostalgia led to the beatification of the last Habsburg emperor, Charles I, by Pope John Paul II, who hailed from the Polish town of Wadowice, which had once been part of Habsburg Galicia.
Rady’s book does not fall into the trap of eulogizing its subject, but it goes a long way in restoring the Habsburgs’ place as one of the most important aristocratic families in European history. The key challenge for a book like this is how to square the dynastic history of a royal family with the wider and more complex story of its empire and its people. Rady rises to the challenge, but a book that surveys more than a millennium of Habsburg history necessarily has its limitations in terms of coverage. Those looking for more information on the social and cultural history of Austria-Hungary from the 18th century onward should read Rady’s book alongside Pieter Judson’s excellent recent study, The Habsburg Empire. Taken together, these two books will help readers to appreciate how, for better or worse, the Habsburgs and their empire shaped Europe and the world.
Robert Gerwarth is a professor of modern history at University College Dublin and director of the Centre for War Studies. He is the author of The Vanquished: Why The First World War Failed to End.
