The Sinews of Habsburg Power: Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State 1650–1820 0198809395, 9780198809395

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Maps
List of Abbreviations
Glossary of Terms
Introduction
1 The Estates of Lower Austria
2 Organization and Officeholders, c.1650–1764
3 Evolving Fiscal Foundations, c.1650–1730
4 A Commissariat for the Standing Army, c.1650–1764
5 Toward a “Military, Cameral, and Debt System,” 1733–48
6 Reform, Credit, and Compromise, 1749–63
7 “Fifteen Years of Military Government,” 1763–80
8 “He is working to abolish all Estates,” 1780–90
9 Renovation and Representation after 1790
10 Resilience in the Contest with France, 1792–1815
Conclusion
Appendix Receivers (Einnehmer) and Receivers General (Obereinnehmer) of the Lower Austrian Estates 1637–1818
Genealogical Tables
Manuscript Sources
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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T H E SI N E W S O F H A B S B U R G P O W E R

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power Lower Austria in a Fiscal-Military State 1650–1820 WILLIAM D. GODSEY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © William D. Godsey 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941750 ISBN 978–0–19–880939–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To Richard

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Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to remember the many kindnesses that I have experienced in researching and writing this study. Grete Klingenstein inspired the original idea. Over many years she provided needed advice and generous support, including a critical reading of an earlier version of the manuscript. Hamish Scott likewise contributed decisively to the successful conclusion of the project. He too read and commented on a previous version in a way that can only be described as unselfish and stimulating. I am tremendously grateful to the three anonymous readers of Oxford University Press for their careful reading and thoughtful criticism. I hope all of these scholars will recognize their valuable input into this book. Sources from a dozen public archives in three countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia) underlie this study. I am greatly indebted to the friendly and professional staff of these institutions. Because of the central importance of its holdings for the pages that follow, I should especially like to thank the men and women of the Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv in St. Pölten, all of whom made my research hours there a pleasant and rewarding experience. Waltraud Winkelbauer deserves particular mention for her unfailing advice and assistance. With regard to private archives and collections I should like to express appreciation to the following for their obliging cooperation: Prior Wilfried Kowarik, OSB (archives of Melk abbey); Helga Penz (archives of Herzogenburg abbey); Maximilian Alexander Trofaier (archives of the Schotten abbey); Count Ernst Harrach (Harrach Family Papers); and Hubertus Suttner (Moser Family Papers and a family portrait). I fondly recall a morning spent at the lovely castle in picturesque Retz, where Baron Matthias Suttner-Gatterburg graciously allowed me to photograph what may be the only surviving oil portrait of a receiver general of the Lower Austrian Estates—and made me a present of wines from his vineyards. I regret not being able to include the picture here. For all manner of other support ranging from stimulating discussions to their help with specific questions, my gratitude extends to Michael Alram, Derek Beales, Elisabeth Garms-Cornides, Christine Gruber, Barbara Haider-Wilson, Michael Hochedlinger, Volkhard Huth, Veronika Hyden-Hanscho, Hans Peter Hye, Shuichi Iwasaki, Pieter Judson, Lupold von Lehsten, Petr Maťa, Philip Mansel, Gernot Peter Obersteiner, Miloš Řezník, Anna Schirlbauer, Baron Niklas Schrenck, David Schriffl, Rita Steblin, Arno Strohmeyer, Arnold Suppan, Julian Swann, Klaas Van Gelder, Luboš Velek, Stephan Wagner, Johann Weißensteiner, and Thomas Winkelbauer. My home institution, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Historical Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, offered an ideal base from which to work on this book. My deepest thanks to its staff and scholars. This book is dedicated to Richard Arnhold for keeping faith. William D. Godsey Vienna, June 2017

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Contents List of Figures List of Tables List of Maps List of Abbreviations Glossary of Terms

Introduction

xi xiii xv xvii xix 1

1. The Estates of Lower Austria

37

2. Organization and Officeholders, c.1650–1764

67

3. Evolving Fiscal Foundations, c.1650–1730

107

4. A Commissariat for the Standing Army, c.1650–1764

151

5. Toward a “Military, Cameral, and Debt System,” 1733–48

189

6. Reform, Credit, and Compromise, 1749–63

213

7. “Fifteen Years of Military Government,” 1763–80

247

8. “He is working to abolish all Estates,” 1780–90

289

9. Renovation and Representation after 1790

323

10. Resilience in the Contest with France, 1792–1815 Conclusion Appendix Genealogical Tables Manuscript Sources Bibliography Index

359 393 399 403 407 409 438

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List of Figures 1.1. Count Johann Wilhelm Wurmbrand: “Commissioner of the Estate of lords” (as such the last Protestant officeholder at the Lower Austrian Estates); President of the Imperial Aulic Council beginning 1728 2.1. Count Ernst Abensperg und Traun: General Field War Commissary 1647–51; “father of the standing army;” Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1651–68; Vice-President of the Aulic War Council 1668 3.1. Figures for the annual grant by the Lower Austrian diet, 1650–1748 3.2. Carl von Perger, Receiver General of the Lower Austrian Estates, 1648–56 3.3. Receipt issued by the “Imperial General War Disbursement Treasury” to Schotten abbot Johann Schmitzberger, auxiliary bishop of Vienna, for payment of the “Turk tax,” Dec. 4, 1682 3.4. Income/Expenditure of the Lower Austrian Estates’ receivership general in selected years between 1687 and 1739 5.1. An image commemorating Maria Theresa’s inauguration as archduchess, based on a painting by Martin van Meytens. The coats of arms are those of Landmarschall Count Aloys Harrach (center) and the members of the college of Deputies 5.2. Count Friedrich Harrach: Grand Aulic Chancellor 1745–9; Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1744–5, acting 1746–7, 1747–8; Haugwitz’s chief opponent in the councils of the central government 6.1. Income/Expenditure of the Lower Austrian Estates’ receivership general, 1738–62 7.1. Bond of the Lower Austrian Estates made out to Petronilla Lambrechts, sacristan of the Beguines church in Lierre, Brabant, Dec. 22, 1777 (signed by the six Deputies and Receiver General Johann Georg Groppenberger) 7.2. Habsburg treasury debt borne by the Bohemian-Austrian lands, 1763/1771/1781 8.1. Bond of the Lower Austrian Estates made out to the church in Ried, Feb. 6, 1789 (signed by six members of the Estates including the two Deputies and Receiver General Joseph Rohrwürth) 9.1. Count Joseph Dietrichstein: Governor and Landeshauptmann of Moravia and Silesia 1802–4; Lower Austrian governor 1804–5; Aulic Vice-Chancellor 1805–9; Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1809–25; Governor of the Austrian National Bank 1817–25

58

68 114 122

131 148

192

196 232

266 277

315

341

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xii

List of Figures

9.2. Baron Karl Moser: elected (underage) to the expectancy to the Estates’ receivership general 1760; councilor of the Lower Austrian government 1765–70; knights’ Deputy 1770–6, 1779–82; member of the Estates’ executive committee after 1784 and after 1790; Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1802–23. Original painting by Johann Leonhard Herrlein 10.1. Habsburg treasury debt borne by the Bohemian-Austrian lands, 1810/1818 10.2. Habsburg treasury debt borne by selected lands, 1810/1818

354 368 369

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List of Tables I.1. The Habsburg monarchy’s major foreign and domestic armed conflicts, 1650–1815 I.2. Effective/(Paper) strength of the Habsburg standing army, 1650–1814 1.1. Lists of prelates by rank, 1677 and 1690 2.1. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landmarschall, 1626–1742 2.2. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall, 1627–1764 4.1. Imperial senior war commissaries (kaiserliche Oberkriegskommissare) in Lower Austria, 1640s–1740s 4.2. Senior commissaries (Oberkommissare) of the Lower Austrian Estates in selected years, 1640s–1680s 4.3. Senior commissaries (Oberkommissare) of the Lower Austrian Estates in selected years between 1685 and 1764 5.1. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landmarschall under Maria Theresa

18 19 44 71 74 160 164 167 203

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List of Maps I.1. The Archduchy of Austria below the Enns (Lower Austria) I.2. The Habsburg Monarchy 1648–1815

21 22

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List of Abbreviations AHY AÖG AS 2 AVA BVLkN CEH EHQ EHR FHKA HA HB HHStA HJ HS HZ IHR JbLkN JbStK JbVGStW JEH JIH JMH KLA KP LAA LH LR MbVLkN MHVK MIÖG MOLA MÖStA MZA NA NÖLA NStReg OMeA ÖNB ORH ÖZV PA Prot. RA

Austrian History Yearbook Archiv für österreichische Geschichte Arhiv Republike Slovenije, Deželni stanovi za Kranjsko (Ljubljana) Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv (Vienna) Blätter des Vereines für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich Central European History European History Quarterly English Historical Review Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv (Vienna) Herrenstandsarchiv Herrenstandsbücher Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (Vienna) The Historical Journal Handschrift Historische Zeitschrift The International History Review Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich Jahrbuch des Stiftes Klosterneuburg Jahrbuch des Vereines für Geschichte der Stadt Wien The Journal of Economic History Journal of Interdisciplinary History The Journal of Modern History Kärntner Landesarchiv (Klagenfurt) Kaiserliche Patente Landschaftsarchiv Antiquum Landtagshandlungen Landesregistratur Monatsblatt des Vereins für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich Mittheilungen des historischen Vereins für Krain Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung Mitteilungen des Oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs Moravský zemský archiv (Brno) Národní archiv (Prague) Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv (St. Pölten) Neue Ständische Registratur Obersthofmeisteramt Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Oberster Rechnungshof Die Österreichische Zentralverwaltung Prälatenstandsarchiv Protokoll Ritterstandsarchiv

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xviii SOA StA StB StK StLA StReg StV UH VP ZA ZHF ZRA

List of Abbreviations Státní oblastní archiv Ständische Akten Ständische Bücher Staatskanzlei Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv (Graz) Ständische Registratur Ständische Verfassung Unsere Heimat Verordnetenpatente Zeremonialakten Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung Zentralrechnungsabschluss

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Glossary of Terms In translating terms, I have endeavored to stay as close to the original German as possible, also in order to convey the flavor of the original sources. Thus Kreisamt is “circle office” rather than, say, “district office,” while “Viertel” to refer to a geographical-administrative region is rendered as “quarter” rather than “district” or “county.” Ausschuß Edler Einstandsrecht Erblande Feldzeugmeister Freiherr Generalfeldkriegskommissariat Generalkassa Graf Großer Wirtschaftsausschuß Gült Herr Herrenstand Hofkanzlei Hofkommission Hofkriegsrat Hofrechenkammer Kassa (Cassa) Kopfsteuer Kreisamt Kreishauptmann Landesfürst landesfürstlich Landhaus Landmarschall Landmarschall’sches Gericht Landrecht Landtafel Landtagserklärung Landtagspostulata Landuntermarschall Metze(n) Obereinnehmer

executive committee of the Estates minor noble title the Estates’ right of redemption in the sale of manorial property Habsburg hereditary lands general’s rank in the Habsburg army baron General Field War Commissariat General Disbursement Treasury (1762) count extended finance committee (of the Lower Austrian Estates) seigniorial income noble possessing the rank of lord; also, form of address corresponding to Mr. Estate of lords Aulic Chancellery aulic commission Aulic War Council Aulic Chamber of Accounts till, disbursement treasury, caisse capitation circle office circle captain (head of a Kreisamt) ruling prince princely (sovereign) palace of the Estates president of the Lower Austrian Estates provincial tribunal of privileged jurisdiction until 1764 (also known under certain circumstances as the Landrecht) provincial tribunal of privileged jurisdiction seigniorial land register diet’s solemn reply to the ruler’s demands on the annual diet financial (and sometimes material) demands by the ruler on the annual diet head of the Estate of knights a unit of measure equal to 61.48 liters receiver general (of the Estates)

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xx

Glossary of Terms

Obereinnehmeramt Oberkommissar Oberkriegskommissar Obersterblandkaplan

receivership general (of the Estates) senior commissary (of the Estates) (imperial) senior war commissary literally “grand territorial chaplain” (a Lower Austrian office of state) Obersthofmarschall grand marshal of the Court Obersthofmeister grand master of the Court (ranking great officer of state) Prälatenstand Estate of prelates Quartierskommissar see Oberkommissar Raitherr accounts’ officer Raith Secretario accounts’ secretary Raitkollegium college of accounts Raitmarschall accounts’ marshal Reichshofrat Imperial Aulic Council Ritter knight Ritterstand Estate of knights Statthalter stadholder (governor) Unterkommissar junior commissary (of the Estates) Vermögensteuer (Türkensteuer) property tax Verordneten Deputies Verordnetenkollegium college of Deputies Viertel quarter

A note on place names These are given as they appear in the sources used for this book unless standard Englishlanguage equivalents exist (for example, Vienna or Prague). Other or later variants are found in parentheses following the first mention.

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Introduction Less than three weeks before the Peace of Hubertusburg, which ended the continental Seven Years War (1756–63), the empress Maria Theresa revoked a rule from the year 1750 barring officials of the Lower Austrian Estates from entering her service without special dispensation. Such a rule had precedents. To minimize the risk of conflicts of interest between central and territorial power, previous monarchs had maintained standards that had been enforced or not depending upon circumstance. In the classical age of “state-building” reform and “enlightened absolutism,” the reversal of 1763 might appear incongruous. The rationale behind it is striking. The authorities postulated an identity of interests in which the ruler’s “welfare” was intrinsically bound up with the Estates (and vice versa): “the one cannot exist without the other” (“die eine ohne die andere nicht bestehen könne”).1 This declaration was neither empty flattery nor baroque rhetoric, but it expressed in a neat and concise way the state of Habsburg affairs at the end of the immensely costly Seven Years War. Thanks to their good offices, the Estates had become one of the monarchy’s key financiers. The mutual reliance was more marked in 1763 than a generation earlier. It was arguably never greater. The evidence of reciprocal dependency gainsays what would long be the dominant, and still influential, meta-narrative of Habsburg state-building rooted in nineteenth-century constitutional and legal history. Two essential elements characterize this narrative in its diverse manifestations. First, the history of the central European Habsburg “state” is equated with the rise of centrally controlled administrative power, especially in the Bohemian-Austrian lands. Second, the evolution of that initially “absolutist” state was understood as an ongoing struggle with autonomous forms of socio-political authority embodied by the territorial Estates. In this view, the crushing defeat of a federation of Protestant Estates at the Battle of White Mountain (1620) shifted the balance decisively toward the Catholic ruler and his government. Still, the success was imperfect: the Estates remained extant and continued to exercise local authority to the detriment of the monarchy as a whole. Only with the overhaul of state and society under Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80) and Joseph II (r. 1765–90 [with Maria Theresa 1765–80]) would an end be put to this state of affairs. A form of enlightened or bureaucratic absolutism came into its own.2 1 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Prince Johann Wilhelm Trautson, Jan. 29, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 173v–174v. 2 For a useful recapitulation of this narrative on the basis of a historiographical survey, see Michael Hochedlinger, “Stiefkinder der Forschung: Verfassungs-, Verwaltungs- und Behördengeschichte der

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

Path-breaking in its day, this paradigm acquired enduring expression in the serial publication entitled Die österreichische Zentralverwaltung (“The Austrian Central Administration”). An endeavor that surveyed the nearly 400 years from Maximilian I (r. 1493–1519) to Francis Joseph (r. 1848–1916), it consisted of ten volumes and appeared between 1907 and 1970.3 They reproduced large numbers of still invaluable primary documents. The findings of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury scholars as diverse as Alfred von Arneth (1819–97), Max Weber (1864–1920), and Otto Hintze (1861–1940) lent intellectual thrust to the equation between modern state power and bureaucratic centralization at the expense of local authority.4 The career of the series’ main contributor, the historian Friedrich Walter (1896–1968), spanned the period from the 1930s through the 1960s and exemplified the persistence long after World War II of perspectives worked out earlier. Mid-twentieth-century political experience intensified them. In a metaphor highly suggestive of National Socialist Gleichschaltung, Walter had the Theresan reformers “knocking the weapon” out of the hands of the Estates.5 Like Walter, two other highly influential postwar voices on Habsburg state formation, Otto Brunner (1898–1982) and Hans Sturmberger (1914–99), succumbed to the totalitarian temptation of the 1930s. Yet in his seminal book Land and Lordship, first published before World War II, Brunner compellingly critiqued the projection of nineteenth-century concepts of constitutionalism back into the medieval and early modern periods.6 At the same time, both he and Sturmberger remained beholden to exclusivist categories that cast the relationship between ruler and Estates as a zero-sum game in which the latter’s authority advanced at the

frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie. Probleme—Leistungen—Desiderate,” in Michael Hochedlinger and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Herrschaftsverdichtung, Staatsbildung, Bürokratisierung: Verfassungs-, Verwaltungs- und Behördengeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Vienna and Munich, 2010), 295–314. For a fresh restatement of key aspects of the narrative, see John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA, 2015), introduction, chap. 1. 3 Thomas Fellner, Heinrich Kretschmayr, and Friedrich Walter, eds., Die österreichische Zentralverwaltung [ÖZV], 10 vols. in 3 parts (Vienna, 1907–70). For a valuable discussion of the early history of the concept of “absolutism” with reference to the Habsburg context, see Arno Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung: Widerstandsrecht bei den österreichischen Ständen (Mainz, 2006), 415–29. 4 Alfred Ritter von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, 10 vols. (Vienna, 1863–79); Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1978), esp. vol. ii; Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Fritz Hartung (Leipzig, 1941). For an insightful contextualization of the enduringly influential early scholarship on Maria Theresa as a “state-builder,” see Werner Telesko, Maria Theresia: Ein europäischer Mythos (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2012), 129–42. 5 ÖZV, II/1/1, 123. The ÖZV volume II/1/1 (Die Geschichte der österreichischen Zentralverwaltung in der Zeit Maria Theresias) dealing with the reign of Maria Theresa appeared in Vienna in 1938. Walter’s condensed version of the ÖZV came out later in the one-volume handbook entitled Österreichische Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte von 1500–1955, ed. Adam Wandruszka (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1972). 6 The first edition of Land und Herrschaft was published in 1939. This was followed by a revised edition in 1942. The book has gone through numerous editions since the 1950s and the fourth, revised edition was published in English in 1992: Land and Lordship: Structures of Government in Medieval Austria, ed. and trans. Howard Kaminsky and James Van Horn Melton (Philadelphia, PA, 1992).

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Introduction

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former’s expense, or the other way around.7 In Sturmberger’s case, this occurred in the context of postwar scholarship that postulated what was thought to have been the Estates’ own latent capacity as state-builders, as well as their place in a genealogy of parliamentary government now positively signified. In a famously elegiac, later study, Brunner portrayed a minor Lower Austrian noble, Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg, as the victim of a triumphant form of absolutism.8 Those nobles who replaced the likes of Hohberg at the Estates appeared little better than CatholicHabsburg placeholders. Either way, the Estates of the central Habsburg lands were understood as being in terminal decline from the seventeenth century. This was the upshot of a series of articles by Herbert Hassinger (1910–92) that until recently constituted the only modern surveys of the Estates in their later history.9 Though increasingly tattered by the advances of recent scholarship, the notion of absolutist state-building remains deeply embedded in the thinking about Habsburg history between the Thirty Years War (1618–48) and the nineteenth century.10 This is in part a function of the peculiarities of Habsburg history. Among the monarchy’s constituent nations before 1918 and then among the later “successor states,” the trope of a foreign and repressively Catholic absolutism underpinned the 7 On Sturmberger, see Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung, 420–1; also Hochedlinger, “Stiefkinder der Forschung,” 323. The collection entitled Land ob der Enns und Österreich: Aufsätze und Vorträge (Linz, 1979) contains Sturmberger’s key essays. 8 Otto Brunner, Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist: Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg 1612–1688 (Salzburg, 1949). 9 Hassinger focused largely on areas belonging to the later Austrian republic. Herbert Hassinger, “Die Landstände der österreichischen Länder: Zusammensetzung, Organisation und Leistung im 16.–18. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 36 (1964): 989–1035; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 247–85; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und in Salzburg,” in Walter Hubatsch, ed., Absolutismus (Darmstadt, 1973), 436–87. See also Günther R. Burkert, “The Österreichischen Erblande in the Time of the Glorious Revolution,” Parliaments, Estates and Representations 12/1 (1992): 15–24; Winfried Schulze, Landesdefension und Staatsbildung: Studien zum Kriegswesen des innerösterreichischen Territorialstaates (1564–1619) (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1973); Winfried Schulze, “Das Ständewesen in den Erblanden der Habsburger Monarchie bis 1740: Vom dualistischen Ständestaat zum organisch-föderativen Absolutismus,” in Peter Baumgart and Jürgen Schmädeke, eds., Ständetum und Staatsbildung in Brandenburg-Preussen (Berlin and New York, 1983), 263–79; Grete Klingenstein, “Skizze zur Geschichte der erbländischen Stände im aufgeklärten Absolutismus der Habsburger (etwa 1740 bis 1790),” in Baumgart and Schmädeke, eds., Ständetum und Staatsbildung, 373–80; and Thomas Winkelbauer, “Landhaus und Hofburg: Elemente der politischen Kultur der Habsburgermonarchie in der Frühen Neuzeit am Beispiel von Österreich unter der Enns,” in Halina Manikowska et al., eds., Political Culture in Central Europe (10th–20th Century) (Prague, 2005). For the older literature on the Bohemian-Austrian territories, see the compilation in Kersten Krüger, Die landständische Verfassung (Munich, 2003), 103–4, 111–20, 129–30; also Joachim Bahlcke, Landesherrschaft, Territorien und Staat in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2012). 10 This point has been made in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, “Das Absolutismuskonzept, die Neubewertung der frühneuzeitlichen Monarchie und der zusammengesetzte Staat der österreichischen Habsburger,” in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006), 14; Renate Pieper, “Financing an Empire: The Austrian Composite Monarchy, 1650–1848,” in Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla et al., eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History (Cambridge, 2012), 164; Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 17–18.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

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lineages of nationalist history.11 Alternatively, scholars in other traditions have accorded centralized administrative control unique explanatory power in the preservation of a multifarious political union also characterized by linguistic and confessional diversity. The territories and nationalities have been seen as centrifugal forces, the dynasty, army, and bureaucracy as centripetal ones. In some areas of scholarship, the term “absolutism” itself retains currency.12 More common are certain persistent assumptions closely associated with the concept. One such concerns the supposed fragility and cozy inertia of Habsburg government thanks to the influence of the Estates before 1740. Even though their reigns corresponded to the zenith of the monarchy’s international power and prestige, Leopold I (r. 1657–1705) and Charles VI (r. 1711–40) would seem to have ruled over little more than a “ramshackle inheritance of disparate lands” and an “administrative nightmare.”13 The endurance of territorial autonomy and the lack of a Weber-style bureaucracy ostensibly blocked access to the population and its resources.14 The “emasculation” of the Estates by eighteenth-century reform from above is an especially tenacious assumption. It is still supposed that the territorial diets lost their right to approve taxes, or that they ceased to meet, or even that they were eradicated entirely.15 Where the Estates endured, they continued to be the “villains of the piece.”16 Labels of this kind are indicative of the tendency to juxtapose the

Maťa and Winkelbauer, “Das Absolutismuskonzept,” 19–20, 23. Particularly in the areas of constitutional and legal history: Wilhelm Brauneder, “Die Habsburgermonarchie als zusammengesetzter Staat,” in Hans-Jürgen Becker, ed., Zusammengesetzte Staatlichkeit in der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte, Beihefte zu “Der Staat,” no. 16 (Berlin, 2006), 207, 209, 227; Martin P. Schennach, “Die ‘österreichische Gesamtstaatsidee’: Das Verhältnis zwischen ‘Gesamtstaat’ und Ländern als Gegenstand rechtshistorischer Forschung,” in Martin P. Schennach, ed., Rechtshistorische Aspekte des österreichischen Föderalismus (Vienna, 2015), 16, 21, 22, 27. 13 Quotations respectively from M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (London and New York, 1995), 3, and Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1993), 17. For the lack of “strong government,” see R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford, 1979), 169. For Charles VI’s government as “baroque façade . . . largely unchanged since the days of Leopold I,” see Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 126. Cf. Heinz Duchhardt, Balance of Power und Pentarchie: Internationale Beziehungen 1700–1785 (Paderborn, Munich, Vienna, and Zurich, 1997), 116–20. 14 As in a new edition of a work first published under a different title in the 1970s: Jean Bérenger, Les Habsbourg et l’argent de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris, 2014), 465. The earlier edition was called Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 1975). For a similar view expressed in a synthetic account, see Karl Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang der höfischen Welt: Repräsentation, Reform und Reaktion im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna, 2001), 354–5. See also Michael Hochedlinger, “The Habsburg Monarchy: From ‘Military-Fiscal State’ to ‘Militarization’,” in Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P. G. M. Dickson (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2009), 73; Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 26–7. 15 For example, Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1999), 332; Wilhelm Brauneder and Friedrich Lachmayr, Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte (4th edn., Vienna, 1987), 98; Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Monarchy: A New History (Cambridge, MA and London, 2016), 85; Miloš Řezník, Neuorientierung einer Elite: Aristokratie, Ständewesen und Loyalität in Galizien (1772–1795) (Frankfurt am Main, 2016), 284. 16 Franz A. J. Szabo, “Perspective from the Pinnacle: State Chancellor Kaunitz on Nobility in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 250. 11 12

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Estates to positively connoted carriers of historical progress, as the scholars Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg and Gabriele Haug-Moritz have pointed out.17 By the same token, some accounts still portray the central authorities as “the driving force” behind “modernization” or a “motor of social progress.”18 Such categorization, which attributes “intention” rather than inquires after “process,” tends to simplify the past, as the historian John Breuilly has insightfully observed. Above all, it fails “to capture the full range of contemporary positions, both as consciously held views and also as categories which were fluid and diverse and not to be caught in terms of one agenda or another.” And it hardly allows for situation and circumstance, or how these factors helped define choice.19 A final assumption that bears scrutiny is that “the modern centralized state” freed of reliance on provincial elites was both the reformers’ aim and actually achieved under their aegis in the central lands.20 A reified, bureaucratic “state-building project” of early modern origins continues to be imagined.21 The scholarship of recent years on topics ranging from nobles to ritual to fiscalmilitary states warrants a fresh look at the nature of Habsburg government and its relations to its elites, while even a cursory look in the extant provincial archives reveals that the volume of records kept by the Estates—including minutes of their meetings—was growing at the very time they were supposed to be in decline. Nearly a generation ago, the now classic study on the “making of the Habsburg monarchy” by the historian R. J. W. Evans cast significant doubt on the standard understanding of Habsburg state-building.22 He explained the rise of a potent central European commonwealth by reference to distinct social and cultural developments, rather than to force or institutional arrangements. On this view, the monarchy’s cohesion and functionality came to depend on the alliance of the 17 Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg and Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Stand, Stände,” in Friedrich Jaeger, ed., Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2010), xii, 826; for an incisive critique of the concept of “progress” as a historical category applied to the early modern Catholic world, see Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna, 2006), i, 36–44. 18 Quotations respectively from Andrea Pühringer, “ ‘ . . . nach äusseristen Kröfften best möglichisten Widerstandt zu thuen’: Landstände, Militär und Finanzen im Land ob der Enns,” in Peter Rauscher, ed., Krieg führung und Staatsfinanzen: Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreiß ig jährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums 1740 (Münster, 2010), 401; and Deak, Forging a Multinational State, 50. 19 John Breuilly, “Napoleonic Germany and State-formation,” in Michael Rowe, Collaboration and Resistance in Napoleonic Europe: State-formation in an Age of Upheaval, c. 1800–1815 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003), 128, 135. 20 Werner Ogris, “The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State,” in Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and Justice, vol. C of The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th–18th Centuries series (Oxford and New York, 1997), 313; Arthur Schlegelmilch, “Österreich,” in Peter Brandt, Martin Kirsch, and Arthur Schlegelmilch, eds., Handbuch der europäischen Verfassungsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert: Institutionen und Rechtspraxis im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, i: Um 1800 (Bonn, 2006), 862. For a little-noticed critique of the “remarkable consensus” that has characterized the scholarship on this point, see Hamish M. Scott, “The Problem of Government in Habsburg Enlightened Absolutism,” in Moritz Csáky and Walter Pass, eds., Europa im Zeitalter Mozarts (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 1995), 252. 21 Quotation from Deak, Forging a Multinational State, 4. 22 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy.

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dynasty with an aristocracy composed of landed magnates in its core lands and an equally distinctive set of common mental habits imbued with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation. A key insight was that the commonwealth stayed together less through coercion and centralized organization than by informal lines of authority through great families whose territorial power bases buttressed central authority. Succeeding scholars have continued to illuminate the social foundations of Habsburg power. In exchange for loyal service, nobles such as Gundaker Liechtenstein were rewarded with lands and entails, offices and commissions, titles and orders, and other opportunities that enhanced the status, honor, and wealth not only of themselves but of their descendants.23 The preservation of these advantages over time depended on the periodic renewal of the bonds of cooperation. The Court was a vital site in which this took place. Where this institution was earlier interpreted in keeping with the sociologist Norbert Elias’s celebrated image of a “golden cage” to domesticate nobles in the interests of absolutism, more recent work has teased out its possibilities both as an instrument of control and as an arena for pursuing specifically noble interests, but especially as a place that brought ruler and elites together. Simultaneous service at the Court in Vienna and in the territorial Estates both availed the family strategies of individual noble lineages and made their local authority more readily available to the central government. For the emperor, the Court offered a way to “coordinate” rather than enervate forms of authority essential to government. As dynastic power expanded, the nobility became more differentiated and stratified, a process also reflected in the workings of the Court.24 23 Thomas Winkelbauer, Fürst und Fürstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein österreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Vienna and Munich, 1999); Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht: Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2003). See also Grete Klingenstein, Der Aufstieg des Hauses Kaunitz: Studien zur Herkunft und Bildung des Staatskanzlers Wenzel Anton (Göttingen, 1975); James Van Horn Melton, “The Nobility in the Bohemian and Austrian Lands, 1620–1780,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2007), ii, 171–208; Petr Maťa, Svĕt české aristokracie (1500–1700) (Prague, 2004). A German-language summary by Thomas Winkelbauer of Maťa’s work (“Ein neues Standardwerk zur Geschichte der böhmischen Aristokratie im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert”) is found at http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2005/ 2/Winkelbauer, accessed Nov. 18, 2016. Gustav Pfeifer and Kurt Andermann, eds., Die Wolkensteiner: Facetten des Tiroler Adels in Spätmittelalter und Neuzeit (Innsbruck, 2009); Joachim Bahlcke et al., eds., Das Haus Schaffgotsch: Konfession, Politik und Gedächtnis eines schlesischen Adelsgeschlechts vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne (Würzburg, 2010). 24 For the older view, see Hubert Christian Ehalt, Ausdrucksformen absolutistischer Herrschaft: Der Wiener Hof im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1980). For the more recent view, see Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003); Grete Klingenstein, “Der Wiener Hof in der Frühen Neuzeit,” ZHF 22 (1995): 237–45; Jeroen Duindam, Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe’s Dynastic Rivals, 1550–1780 (Cambridge, 2003); Grete Klingenstein, “Zwei Höfe im Vergleich: Wien und Versailles,” Francia 32 (2005): 169–79; Mark Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte der Macht in der Vormoderne (Konstanz, 2004); Mark Hengerer, Kaiser Ferdinand III. (1608–1657): Eine Biographie (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2012); Andreas Pečar, Die Ökonomie der Ehre: Der höfische Adel am Kaiserhof Karls VI. (1711–1740) (Darmstadt, 2003); Katrin Keller, Hofdamen: Amtsträgerinnen im Wiener Hofstaat des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2005); William D. Godsey, “Adel, Ahnenprobe und Wiener Hof: Strukturen der Herrschaftspraxis Kaiserin Maria Theresias,” in Elizabeth Harding and Michael Hecht, eds., Die Ahnenprobe in der Vormoderne: Selektion—Initiation—Repräsentation (Münster,

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The research on government in France and other places has pointed up the significance of communication, bargaining, brokerage, and compromise for the routine exercise of early modern dominion. “Consensus” was “fundamental” to politics, as Peter Wilson has shown in the case of the Holy Roman Empire.25 Authoritarian assumptions about government that derived from twentieth-century experience have yielded to new understandings of how authority was diffused and accepted, as well as how legitimacy was upheld, problems that unceasingly confronted those in power.26 This has involved a shift of focus so that not only the ruler and his council, but also those who mediated authority as well as the ruled themselves (also nobles), come into view. Cultural factors such as status and confession; friendship, patronage and clientele networks; ceremony and rituals; and patterns of communication are all now seen to have been governing techniques as much as formalized agencies. Again, nobles and other elite groups played key roles in practices that, more often than not, meant taking account of the concerns of the ruled or providing for their expression. As the historian Grete Klingenstein has shown in the specifically Habsburg context, the integration of local expertise and knowledge remained a concern of the more rationalizing and enlightened forms of government of the later eighteenth century.27 This too entailed partnerships with local authority. The lively discussion about the problem of “absolutism” in the early modern French context has been inseparable from the closer study of the relationship between crown and nobles (from army officers to the territorial Estates).28 In its 2011), 309–31; Irene Kubiska-Scharl and Michael Pölzl, Die Karrieren des Wiener Hofpersonals 1711–1765: Eine Darstellung anhand der Hofkalender und Hofparteienprotokolle (Innsbruck, Vienna, and Bozen, 2013); Éric Hassler, La Cour de Vienne 1680–1740: Service de l’empereur et stratégies spatiales des élites nobiliaires dans la monarchie des Habsbourg (Strasbourg, 2013). 25 Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 43. 26 Hillay Zmora, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and the State in Europe, 1300–1800 (London and New York, 2001); Sharon Kettering, Patronage in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France (Aldershot, Hampshire and Burlington, VT, 2002); Hans-Heinrich Nolte, ed., Patronage und Klientel: Ergebnisse einer polnisch-deutschen Konferenz (Cologne, Vienna, and Weimar, 1989); Stefan Brakensiek and Heide Wunder, eds., Ergebene Diener ihrer Herren? Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005); Stefan Brakensiek et al., eds., Herrschaft und Verwaltung in der Frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 2014); Ronald G. Asch and Dagmar Freist, eds., Staatsbildung als kultureller Prozess: Strukturwandel und Legitimation von Herrschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005); Heiko Droste, “Patronage in der frühen Neuzeit: Institution und Kulturform,” ZHF 30 (2003): 555–90; Leonhard Horowski, “Der Preis des Erfolgs: Gunst, Kapital und Patrimonialisierung am Hof von Versailles (1661–1789),” ZHF 36 (2009): 71–91; Arne Karsten and Hillard von Thiessen, eds., Nützliche Netzwerke und korrupte Seilschaften (Göttingen, 2006); Hamish M. Scott, “ʻActs of Time and Power’: The Consolidation of Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, c. 1580–1720,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 30 (2008): 3–37; Ronald G. Asch, ed., Europäischer Adel im Ancien Régime: Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600–1789) (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2001). 27 Grete Klingenstein, Karl Graf Zinzendorf: Erster Gouverneur von Triest, 1776–1782: Einführung in seine Tagebücher [vol. i of Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al.] (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), 115–18. 28 A sample of what is now a large literature includes William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985); Ronald G. Asch, “Kriegsfinanzierung, Staatsbildung und ständische Ordnung in Westeuropa im 17.

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essentials, the now discredited narrative of the French absolutist state bore remarkable parallels to the Habsburg one, the main difference having been that “absolutism” was reckoned a stunning success much earlier in France than in Austria. Its key figures, Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) and King Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715), were depicted as having brought recalcitrant nobles to heel through bureaucratic innovation and the sidelining of special interests subversive of the common weal. Yet as the architect of a spectacular expansion of French power and as a masterful politician, Louis XIV has retained his fascination for scholars. For the king’s political talents are now understood to have been used in fashioning sustainable compromises with his leading subjects to mutual benefit. As the font and arbiter of privilege upon which their anomalous and highly advantageous positions in society depended, he wielded an instrument of enormous power with great skill. The rewards for obeying him could be high, a lesson quickly learned. On their part, nobles and other elites disposed of a wide range of resources—from fodder for the royal army’s horses to credit for the royal treasury—without which the king’s government could hardly have operated under the circumstances of the day. Where revisionism at first tended to emphasize “collaboration” between the king and his nobles as well as the limits of his power, the tendency now is to reintegrate coercion and conflict into the picture without supposing that these modes of behavior were the order of the day, as did the absolutist model. While nobles as a social group as well as individual grandees and lineages have drawn more attention as pillars of Habsburg rule, comparatively less account has been taken of corporately organized nobles and representative bodies such as the Estates. Precisely because of their ubiquity in the Habsburg lands and their position at the intersection of government and society, the Estates remain crucial to any illumination of how government functioned, as the historians Thomas Winkelbauer and Petr Maťa have pointed out.29 Yet the sustained interest since World War II in such bodies across the wider Holy Roman Empire, which has upturned the older thesis of early modern decline, has largely passed the Habsburg institutions by.30 The scholar Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin attributed what is sometimes known as “the renaissance of the Estates” in the German-speaking lands to at least two factors

und 18. Jahrhundert,” HZ 268 (1999): 635–71; Marie-Laure Legay, Les États provinciaux dans la construction de l ’état moderne aux xviie et xviiie siècles (Geneva, 2001); Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003); William Beik, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past & Present 188 (2005): 195–224; James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2009); Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002); Darryl Dee, Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV’s France: Franche-Comté and Absolute Monarchy, 1674–1715 (Rochester, NY, 2009); Rafe Blaufarb, “The Survival of the Pays d ’États: The Example of Provence,” Past & Present 209 (2010): 83–116. 29 Maťa and Winkelbauer, “Das Absolutismuskonzept,” 38. 30 For the state of research on the Estates, see Bömelburg and Haug-Moritz, “Stand, Stände”; Raingard Esser, “Landstände im Alten Reich: Ein Forschungsüberblick,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 27 (2005): 254–71; also Joachim Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2012), ii, 241–8.

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relevant to the Habsburg case.31 First, the high courts of the Holy Roman Empire, including the Imperial Aulic Council whose judgments issued from its seat in the Viennese Hofburg, backed the Estates against princes trying to curtail their liberties. Though obliged by imperial law to contribute financially to common defense, the territorial Estates retained the right to consent to fiscal levies and were seen as an essential element of consensual, and hence stable and legitimate, government. As late as Joseph II’s reign, the Council intervened to force the elector of Bavaria to back down in a confrontation over the right of the local Estates to approve taxes.32 Appeals to the imperial tribunals were prohibited to Habsburg subjects after 1637, but the very regularity with which tax diets were summoned in the centuries thereafter points to a remarkable congruity of policy in and beyond the hereditary lands.33 Second, the financial credit of the Estates was as a rule superior to that of their princes. As the cost of armies rose in relation to tax revenue, rulers resorted to the good offices of their intermediary powers to make up the difference. The Estates thereby acquired an additional raison d’être. Also, here imperial law protected them as creditors against insolvent princes.34 The problems of taxation and credit would prove fundamental to the relationship between Estates and government precisely in the Habsburg territories. If the role and significance of the Estates in the German lands have undergone basic reconsideration, the recent scholarship has also helped clarify the nature of the bodies in question. In their search for the roots of the representative tradition in Germany after the catastrophe of Nazism, historians at first tended to highlight the connections between old-style Estates and new-style parliaments. Drawing on Otto Brunner’s critique of anachronistic nineteenth-century constitutional categories

31 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1648–1806, 3 vols. (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1997), i, 29–31. 32 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, “Die bayerische Landschaftsverordnung 1714–1777,” in Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen, 235. There is now a large literature on the high courts of the Holy Roman Empire. As an introduction, see Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Des ‘Kaysers rechter Arm’: Der Reichshofrat und die Reichspolitik des Kaisers,” in Harm Klueting and Wolfgang Schmale, eds., Das Reich und seine Territorialstaaten im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert: Aspekte des Mit-, Neben- und Gegeneinander (Münster, 2004), 23–42; Leopold Auer, “The Role of the Imperial Aulic Council in the Constitutional Structure of the Holy Roman Empire,” in R. J. W. Evans et al., eds., The Holy Roman Empire 1495–1806 (Oxford, 2011), 63–75. See also Michael Hughes, Law and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Germany: The Imperial Aulic Council in the Reign of Charles VI (Woodbridge, Suffolk and Wolfeboro, NH, 1988). 33 For the relationship of the tribunals to the Habsburg hereditary lands, see Volker Press, “The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 8–10; also Wilson, Heart of Europe, 437, 465. 34 See Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Landstände im Heiligen Römischen Reich an der Schwelle der Moderne: Zum Problem von Kontinuität und Diskontinuität um 1800,” Historisches Jahrbuch 123 (2003): 58 (esp. fn. 21 with reference to the various relevant publications of Volker Press). For the credit facilities of the Estates in the south German territories, see Hans-Peter Ullmann, Staatsschulden und Reformpolitik: Die Entstehung moderner öffentlicher Schulden in Bayern und Baden 1780–1820, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1986); Dietrich Pirson, “Das bayerische Schuldenwerk aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gerhard Lingelbach, ed., Staatsfinanzen—Staatsverschuldung—Staatsbankrotte in der europäischen Staaten- und Rechtsgeschichte (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2000), 263–76.

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imposed on the distant past, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and others now question the existence of simple lines of continuity.35 As manifested in the rulings of the Imperial Aulic Council, the clear link between the imperial constitution (Reichsverfassung) and the Estates-based constitutions (landständische Verfassungen) was one indicator of dissimilarity. After 1806, lesser rulers such as Bavaria took the opportunity offered by the disappearance of the former to rid themselves of the latter. The application of novel concepts of representation such as the contract theory of natural law gave rise to political bodies whose claims to law-making power were advanced by elected deputies beholden to wider constituencies. By contrast, birth and status rather than the vote determined who attended the Estates; they owed their existence to rulers who convoked them (or not) to deal with problems of government otherwise not easily addressed. In this way, the configuration of prince and Estates lacked the fundamentally adversarial character later imputed to it by scholars working under the auspices of parliamentarianism. Scholarly interest in the Estates of the Habsburg lands remains strongest for the time before 1620, when they are perceived to have been at their most robust and relevant.36 But rethinking the problem of intermediary power is now evident for the period to the advent of Maria Theresa. In particular, the publications of the Vienna-based scholar, Petr Maťa, explore the nature, composition, and business of the Estates of the Bohemian-Austrian lands and compellingly call into question the state-building meta-narrative with respect to them.37 The potentiality of the Estates 35 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Ständische Repräsentation— Kontinuität oder Kontinuitätsfiktion?,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 28 (2006): 279–98. See also Volker Press, “Landtage im Alten Reich und im Deutschen Bund: Voraussetzungen ständischer und konstitutioneller Entwicklungen 1750–1830,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 39 (1980): 100–40; Press, “The System of Estates”; Volker Press, “Steuern, Kredit und Repräsentation: Zum Problem der Ständebildung ohne Adel,” ZHF 2 (1975): 59–93; and Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London and New York, 2000), 89–90. 36 See, for instance, Dieter Speck, Die vorderösterreichischen Landstände: Entstehung, Entwicklung und Ausbildung bis 1595/1602, 2 vols. (Würzburg, 1994); Evans and Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates; Joachim Bahlcke et al., eds., Ständefreiheit und Staatsgestaltung: Übernationale Gemeinsamkeiten in der politischen Kultur vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1996); Anita Ziegerhofer-Prettenthaler, Ferdinand I und die steirischen Stände: Dargestellt anhand der Landtage von 1542 bis 1556 (Graz, 1996); Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung; Bahlcke, Landesherrschaft, Territorien und Staat. 37 Petr Maťa, “Landstände und Landtage in den böhmischen und österreichischen Ländern (1620–1740): Von der Niedergangsgeschichte zur Interaktionsanalyse,” in Maťa and Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 345–400; Petr Maťa, “Wer waren die Landstände? Betrachtungen zu den böhmischen und österreichischen ‘Kernländern’ der Habsburgermonarchie im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 68–89; Petr Maťa, “Patres patriae or proditores patriae? Legitimizing and De-Legitimizing the Authority of the Provincial Estates in Seventeenth-Century Bohemia,” in Balázs Trencsényi and Márton Zászkaliczky, eds., Whose Love of Which Country? Composite State, National Histories and Patriotic Discourse in Early Modern East Central Europe (Leiden and Boston, 2010), 405–42; Petr Maťa, “Ort der Distinktion—Ort der Entscheidung: Zur Teilnahme des Adels am oberösterreichischen Landtag unter Karl VI.,” in Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert, 205–37; Petr Maťa, “Verordneteninstruktionen: Normen und Reformen in der landständischen Verwaltung der niederösterreichischen Ländergruppe (17. und 18. Jahrhundert),” in Anita Hipfinger et al., eds., Ordnung durch Tinte und Feder? Genese und Wirkung von Instruktionen im zeitlichen Längeschnitt vom Mittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna and Munich,

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lay not in law-making, as was assumed, but in participation in key areas of government. Maťa has also found that their homogeneity and cohesiveness were overdrawn, while key lines of conflict and cooperation both among themselves and with central authority were ignored or misconstrued. A Japanese scholar, Shuichi Iwasaki, followed up with a reconsideration of the Lower Austrian Estates between the second Turkish siege of Vienna (1683) and the famous tax reform of 1748.38 Based on extensive original research, it is the first monograph in more than a century on one of the Habsburg monarchy’s leading representative institutions and intermediary corps.39 He too questioned the absolutist paradigm, though did not entirely escape its strictures. In due course we shall return to this point. The half-century of regime-induced reform after 1740 constitutes a well-worn divide in Habsburg history still rarely overcome.40 Some thirty years ago, the 2012), 337–80; Petr Maťa, “Der steirische Landtag in Raum und Bild um 1730: Symbolische Ordnung und visuelle Darstellung,” Zeitschrift des Historischen Vereins für Steiermark 104 (2013): 163–218. See also the collected essays in Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten?. 38 Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014). 39 The literature on the Lower Austrian Estates includes a few older works and a series of modern dissertations on selected aspects: Viktor Bibl, Die Restauration der niederösterr: Landesverfassung unter K. Leopold II. (Innsbruck, 1902); Viktor Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände Niederösterreichs im XVII. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ständischen Verfassung,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 165–323; Viktor Bibl, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die französische Revolution,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 77–97; Viktor Bibl, Die niederösterreichischen Stände im Vormärz: Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Revolution des Jahres 1848 (Vienna, 1911); A. F. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die Krone in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I.,” MIÖG 14 (1893): 589–652. See also Silvia Petrin, Die Stände des Landes Niederösterreich (St. Pölten and Vienna, 1982); Silvia Petrin, “Die Stände Niederösterreichs im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, Adel im Wandel: Politik—Kultur—Konfession 1500–1700 (Vienna, 1990), 285–300; Silvia Petrin and Max Weltin, “Zum System der Gültbesteuerung in Niederösterreich,” UH 43 (1972): 172–81; Robert Douglas Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God: The Establishment of Secular Authority and the Pacification of Lower Austria, 1618–1648,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979; Gottfried Stangler, “Neue Ergebnisse der niederösterreichischen Ständeforschung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des späten 16. Jahrhunderts,” UH 44 (1973): 170–82; Johann Schmid, “Die Politik der Stände des Erzherzogtums Österreich unter der Enns in der Zeit vom Prager Fenstersturz bis zur Spaltung der protestantischen Ständepartei (Mai 1618–Jänner 1620),” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1928; Hans-Günter Erdmann, “Melchior Khlesl und die niederösterreichischen Stände,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1949; Dagmar Schopf, “Die im Zeitraum von 1620–1740 erfolgten Neuaufnahmen in den nö. Herrenstand,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1966; Eva Susanne Knoll, “Der niederösterreichische Herrenstand von 1740–1848,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1966; Angelika Hametner, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1530–1564,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1970; Günther Ortner, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1635–1648,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1975; Maria Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1683 bis 1705,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1976; Gabriele Neugebauer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1577 bis 1592,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1979; Silvia Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand 1711–1780,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1980; Liselotte Seeger, “Die Geschichte der ständischen Steuern im Erzherzogtum Österreich unter der Enns, 1500–1584,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1995; Michael Erlach, “Die Entwicklung des niederösterreichischen Prälatenstandes in den konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen 1580–1620,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 2007. 40 On the problem of such divides “remaining tenaciously in place” despite the fact that they have few staunch advocates, see Jeroen Duindam, “Early Modern Europe: Beyond the Strictures of Modernization and National Historiography,” EHQ 40 (2010): 606–23.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

Oxford scholar P. G. M. Dickson produced a pioneering work on Theresan “finance and government” whose findings, perhaps because of their density and complexity, still await full incorporation into historical perceptions. This is particularly true regarding the Estates. He concluded that they “played a quite important part in government” and “actually strengthened their position,” but the extent to which hard financial data corroborated such assertions remains insufficiently appreciated.41 In particular, he laid bare the policy of massive official borrowing through the Estates of the central lands. In this way he demonstrated their tremendous importance to the monarchy’s survival. At the same time, he was not specifically concerned with the interaction of Estates and government—the debate about “absolutism” in the French context was only just getting off the ground as he was writing; his research was largely confined to the manuscript sources of central authority; and the temporal angle beginning around 1740 was not conducive to reflection on the problem of continuity and change over a longer time period haul. Moreover, he had nothing to say about the increasingly elaborate credit facilities run by the various territories, whose records are preserved in provincial archives, or their wider political and social implications. In fact, the structure of Dickson’s discussion tended to place the Estates in the shadow of individual financiers, the City Bank of Vienna, and foreign credit markets. Dickson’s conclusions underlined the centrality of war to Theresan government. The entire reign saw a struggle to meet the costs of armed hostilities or come to terms with their equally terrifying financial consequences. For Europe more generally, scholars of recent decades have built on the recognition that large standing armies had a profound impact on society and government. Though there is little agreement about when or even whether the European “military revolution” postulated by some historians took place, there is broad consensus that warfare and the establishments necessary to pursue it changed dramatically in the centuries after 1500. As the historian Christopher Storrs has written, armies became “much larger, more complex in composition and structure, and more permanent; they were also much more expensive, not least because they required a whole range of services— arms, provisions, and other supplies—all of which required the elaboration of more complex administrative structures.”42 At the same time, the vast expansion of power that raising and maintaining the new forces occasioned did not inevitably

41 Quotations from P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), i, 329. 42 Christopher Storrs, “The Fiscal-Military State in the ‘Long’ Eighteenth Century,” in Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State, 3. For “military revolution,” see Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution 1560–1660,” in Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), 197–225; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800 (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1996); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1992); Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO, 1995); Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550–1800 (London, 1991); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1998); Peter H. Wilson, “European Warfare 1450–1815,” in Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Early Modern World 1450–1815 (London, 1999), 177–206.

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give rise to recognizably modern forms of dominion.43 Governments differed markedly in the strategies they adopted to meet the exigencies arising from incessant international rivalry and frequent war. Social, political, and cultural realities rather than reified ideas of the state conditioned responses to the unrelenting problem of how new and ever larger permanent armies were to be recruited and sustained. The unparalleled challenges generated novel solutions in the areas of taxation, borrowing, and military economy, among others. In many cases they empowered or strengthened private interests or particular groups called on to provide money and services.44 The innovations in Great Britain pointed most obviously to what we might think of as the modern state. As P. G. M. Dickson showed in a trailblazing work published two decades before his study of Austrian finance and government, the years following the Glorious Revolution (1688) saw the formation of a long-term national debt secured by parliament.45 The ability to borrow at affordable rates would become more and more vital to polities whose military establishments no longer allowed them to exist within their means. In a further milestone of scholarship, the historian John Brewer laid bare eighteenth-century Britain’s other major financial advantage over its rivals: an excise-based revenue service strongly reminiscent of what Max Weber would define as modern bureaucracy. Brewer recognized that reliable tax income underlay the borrowing power that Dickson had addressed. He coined the term “fiscal-military state” to describe the potent new combination. In the process he overturned the myth that the British polity had been lightly governed in contrast to the allegedly heavily administrative, absolute monarchies across the Channel.46 Indeed, parliament’s right to approve taxation and its backing of the new public debt legitimized the fiscal burden. This political element was integral to the success of Britain’s fiscal-military state. Louis XIV’s France became continental Europe’s premier power thanks to a different fiscal-military blend that included stark reliance on the sale and exploitation of old-regime privilege, a practice that proved not to be forward-looking. At the same time, the first (almost) universal tax imposed across his realms in 1695 by the “Sun King” presaged the age of fiscal equality.47 Like many other major states at the time and since, Bourbon France lived beyond its means, but, unlike Great Britain—or the Habsburg monarchy—it would fail in the long run to manage its debt in a politically sustainable way.48 The rudiments of Spanish, 43 On this point, see David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2012), 8–14. 44 For the concept of the “contractor state,” see Roger Knight and Martin Wilcox, Sustaining the Fleet 1793–1815: War, the British Navy and the Contractor State (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2010). 45 P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution: A Study in the Development of Public Credit 1688–1756 (London, 1967). 46 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), xvii. For the continuing debate, see Aaron Graham and Patrick Walsh, eds., The British Fiscal-Military States, 1660–c.1783 (London and New York, 2016). 47 Louis was in fact inspired by a tax that the emperor had already introduced in his hereditary lands. See Chapter 3. 48 The origins of French financial crisis have been dated to as early as the War of the Spanish Succession. See Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012).

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

Dutch, and Swedish power in an earlier period, and of Russian and Prussian in a later one, have also drawn notice.49 In the urbanized, mercantile Netherlands, high levels of interest aggregation across provincial boundaries put a system of admiralties as well as distinct tax regimes and vigorous credit networks at the service of Golden Age military power. Russia compensated for its comparative lack of a commercial economy and financial resources by harnessing its vast reservoirs of manpower. The recruiting mechanisms for men and officers associated with Peter I (1672–1725) facilitated the empire’s emergence as a major international player.50 Thanks to long-standing rivalries with the Ottoman sultan to the east and the French king to the west, the Habsburgs actively participated, like the Romanovs, in shifting constellations of power across Eurasia and remained by all definitions a leading power long past 1800. Yet the Habsburg monarchy has been comparatively marginal to the recent debates about war, government, and society.51 This is explicable, at one level, by the fact that it disappeared from the map in 1918. The later historical traditions—nationalist or Marxist-communist—have plausibly evinced priorities other than the problem of the extinct monarchy’s fiscal-military foundations. Here the profound relevance of a state’s existence to historiography is apparent ex negativo.52 At another level, of the three major areas of early modern state activity—justice and public order, defense and foreign policy, and fiscal extraction—the first named consistently attracts the greatest attention.53 For the eighteenth century, the large literature on agrarian, ecclesiastical, and legal consolidation offers in the final reckoning a lopsided perspective on Habsburg rule.54 49 See I. A. A. Thompson, War and Government in Habsburg Spain, 1560–1620 (London, 1976); Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish-Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796 (Cambridge, 2014); Jan Lindegren, “The Swedish ‘Military State’, 1560–1720,” Scandinavian Journal of History 10 (1985): 305–36; James D. Tracy, A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: Renten and Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515–1565 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1985); Marjolein ’t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence: Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands 1570–1680 (London and New York, 2014); Jan Glete, War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States, 1500–1660 (London and New York, 2002); Robert I. Frost, The Northern Wars: War, State and Society in Northeastern Europe, 1558–1721 (Harlow, 2000). 50 Carol B. Stevens, Russia’s Wars of Emergence, 1460–1730 (Harlow, 2007); Janet Hartley, “Russia as a Fiscal-Military State, 1689–1825,” in Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State, 125–45. For the later foundations of Russian power, see Dominic Lieven, Russia Against Napoleon: The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814 (London, 2009), chap. 2. 51 Its absence from standard themed volumes is striking: Richard Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (Oxford, 1999); and Philippe Contamine, ed., War and Competition between States (Oxford, 2000). But see Hochedlinger, “The Habsburg Monarchy;” also Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars; Peter Rauscher, ed., Krieg f ührung und Staatsfinanzen: Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreißig jährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums 1740 (Münster, 2010); Guy Thewes, Stände, Staat und Militär: Versorgung und Finanzierung der Armee in den Österreichischen Niederlanden 1715–1795 (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2012). 52 Exemplary for the pre-1918 interest in the foundations of Habsburg power was the work of Adolf Beer Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Prague, 1877); Adolf Beer, “Die Staatsschulden und die Ordnung des Staatshaushaltes unter Maria Theresia,” AÖG 82 (1895): 1–135; Adolf Beer, “Die Finanzverwaltung Oesterreichs, 1749–1816,” MIÖG 15 (1894): 237–366. 53 For these areas see Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, 28. 54 Ferdinand Maaß, ed., Der Josephinismus, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1951–61); William E. Wright, Serf, Seigneur and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia (Minneapolis, MN, 1966);

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The vast resources laid out by the authorities under Maria Theresa and Joseph II on war and the army dwarfed what was spent in other areas. As Dickson put it, “The state budget, weighed down by expenditure on defence and debt-service, had little to spare for new buildings—other than fortresses—and roads, for grants to industry, or (at least before the acquisition of Jesuit funds from 1773) for education and culture.”55 It would appear that the three areas of activity closely interconnected in ways that remain little understood. The present study utilizes the concept of the “fiscal-military state” in order to throw light on Habsburg government and society over time. It does not attempt to impose a British or any other model on the Habsburg example. Indeed, the qualitative differences preponderate, though striking parallels are also obtained. The Habsburgs and their subjects found their own solutions to the problems they confronted, ones that were conditioned by the monarchy’s domestic concerns and historical circumstances. By fiscal-military state we mean, in the concise words of Hamish Scott, “a government which both taxed and borrowed in order fund warfare.”56 Given that the contraction of debt was ultimately unsustainable without the tax revenue to finance it, the two activities were closely linked. Their ramifications furthermore extended deep into everyday lives. At the same time, the concept of the “state,” which recalls modern integrated political entities or nation-states, will be qualified by reference to analytical categories for compound or non-integrated polities that have become current since Brewer’s book. Much as simple lines of continuity are not easily traceable from early modern Estates to later parliaments, scholars have moved away from the idea that the “early modern state” was precisely that: a simple prototype of nineteenth- and twentieth-century successor-organizations. The shifting nature of nomenclature over time is itself

Ernst Wangermann, Aufklärung und staatsbürgerliche Erziehung: Gottfried van Swieten als Reformator des österreichischen Unterrichtswesens 1781–1791 (Vienna, 1978); Elisabeth Kovács, ed., Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus (Vienna, 1979); Richard Georg Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, eds., Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung, 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985); Josef Karniel, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josephs II, trans. Leo Koppel (Gerlingen, 1986); James Van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge, 1988); Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994); Alfred S. Weiß, “Providum imperium felix.” Glücklich ist eine voraussehende Regierung: Aspekte der Armen- und Gesundheitsfürsorge im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, dargestellt anhand Salzburger Quellen ca. 1770–1803 (Vienna, 1997); Helmut Reinalter, ed., Josephinismus als aufgeklärter Absolutismus (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2008). 55 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 108. 56 Hamish M. Scott, “The Habsburg Fiscal-Military State in International Perspective,” in William D. Godsey et al., eds., The Habsburg Monarchy as a Fiscal-Military State c. 1648–1815 (Oxford, forthcoming). As Scott shows, the idea of the “fiscal-military state” is to be differentiated from the “fiscal state,” a concept of longer standing. On the “fiscal state,” see E. Ladewig Petersen, “From Domain State to Tax State,” Scandinavian Economic History Review 23 (1975): 116–48; Richard Bonney, ed. Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995); Bonney, ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State; Glete, War and the State; Frank Tallett and D. J. B. Trim, eds., European Warfare, 1350–1750 (Cambridge, 2010); Peter Rauscher, Andrea Serles, and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Das “Blut des Staatskörpers”: Forschungen zur Finanzgeschichte der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 2012); Yun-Casalilla, et al. eds., The Rise of Fiscal States.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

suggestive of the crooked path between the seventeenth- and nineteenth-century “Habsburg monarchies.”57 In a now classic article, the British historian, J. H. Elliott, fleshed out the idea of “composite monarchy” to describe a union of distinct territories under the rule of one sovereign by which each territory retained its own practices and customs whose observance “involved in particular the perpetuation of estates and representative institutions.”58 More recently, the concept of “empire” has widened our perspective on polities that rule large aggregations of peoples and territories.59 One argument advanced in this book is that the Habsburg monarchy remained a “composite” one; whether it was an “empire” at some point in its history is less certain. Yet both terms imply that stable and successful government involved the effectuation of a level of consolidation and the preservation of difference among the various parts. Ruling was a political balancing act. Both composite monarchies and empires relied upon an accommodation with local elites and the mediation of power through them. This is not to argue that the relationship did not change over time. Indeed the opposite was the case, as will be shown. As a scholar of “empires,” Renate Pieper has taken exception to the “rather gloomy picture” of the Habsburg monarchy given that it “survived the long-lasting attacks from another imperial power, the Ottomans, and constantly expanded its territories from the fourteenth century through the Napoleonic era.” In her view, historians have overstressed the need for a concentration of control in Vienna and overlooked “the benefits of a decentralized fiscal structure for an empire composed of many nations.”60 It is perhaps worthwhile to think of Habsburg government as an “experiment” or “process” under the conditions of fiscal-military exigency. This lends the outcome less inevitability and more dynamism, and also opens up room for contingent factors. * * * * Building on the debates and advances in knowledge outlined above, this book examines the domestic foundations of the immense growth of Habsburg power from the end of the Thirty Years War to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. It assumes that the enduring aim of the House of Austria was, as the British historian A. J. P. Taylor memorably put it, “to exist in greatness.”61 For the Habsburgs, 57 Grete Klingenstein, “The Meanings of ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’ in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robert Oresko et al., eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 423–78. 58 J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137 (1992): 54. 59 Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton and Oxford, 2010); John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 (London, 2007); Herfried Münkler, Empires: The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge and Malden, MA, 2007); Arno Strohmeyer, “Die Habsburgermonarchie in der Frühen Neuzeit—ein Imperium? Ein Problemaufriss,” in Michael Gehler and Robert Rollinger, eds., Imperien und Reiche in der Weltgeschichte: Epochenübergreifende und globalhistorische Vergleiche, part i: Imperien des Altertums, mittelalterliche und frühneuzeitliche Imperien (Wiesbaden 2014), 1027–56. 60 Pieper, “Financing an Empire,” 164, 168. 61 A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809–1918: A History of the Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary (Chicago and London, 1976), 10. For the phenomenon of “dynasticism,” see Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army, 12–16; also Liesbeth Geevers and Mirella Marini, eds.,

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preserving and enhancing the splendor of their House and their inheritance was first and foremost an international affair that involved some two dozen individual conflicts and decades of conflagration (see Table I.1). The competition with fellow dynasts required an ever-growing army that became permanent after the Thirty Years War. Into the Napoleonic era it expanded irregularly, if steadily, in size. From a paper strength of some 24,500 men in 1650, the number rose to some 100,000 after 1700, to around 200,000 by the 1730s, to more than 300,000 by the end of Maria Theresa’s reign, and to more than 500,000 by the end of the Napoleonic period (see Table I.2).62 It is now difficult to imagine that the ambitions imputed to Charles VI in the 1720s raised the specter of the hegemonic Charles V (1500–58) in the minds of contemporaries. As early as 1717, the Russian tsar, Peter the Great, warned a French minister that “the power of the emperor [Charles] has grown infinitely.”63 As a result of decades of struggle with the French and the Ottomans, the central European Habsburg monarchy reached what would be its historical pinnacle. Following the war-induced crisis of the late 1730s and early 1740s, it would again show terrific resilience in the face of the Prussian and later the French revolutionary and Napoleonic threats. This study accepts, second, that the challenge of meeting the spiraling outlays associated with the armed forces was a prime and lasting concern of the Habsburg authorities. With these assumptions in mind, this study anatomizes the impact of fiscal-military exigency on the relationship between rulers from Ferdinand III (r. 1637–57) to Francis II/I (r. 1792–1835) and their subjects in the guise of the Estates of the archduchy below the river Enns, which geographically, politically, and financially was one of the central Habsburg lands. The historical record offers little support for the idea that the Estates were enduring opponents or collaborators of the Habsburg regime. It does hold a wealth of evidence showing varying levels of conflict and cooperation, one or the other of which might preponderate depending upon circumstance. The thesis posited here is that the monarchy’s composite-territorial structures constituted an increasingly vital, if changing, element of Habsburg international success and resilience. Fiscal-military requirements transformed the relations between government and society as they came together around the army. From the seventeenth century, the Estates were pulled into new and evolving arrangements of power that served the purposes of government, while for their part they were able, in previously little-understood ways and within narrowing boundaries, to preserve vital interests in a changing world. They survived because they were necessary, not only because of their financial potency but because they offered the regime a politically viable way of Dynastic Identity in Early Modern Europe: Rulers, Aristocrats and the Formation of Identities (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2015). For dynasticism as a driving force in early modern international politics, see Jeremy Black, European International Relations 1648–1815 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2002), 10–18. 62 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 104, 300. 63 Quoted in Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (London, 2015), 83. For contemporary views from the 1720s, see Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (London, 2014), 82–4; Brendan Simms, Three Victories and a Defeat: The Rise and Fall of the First British Empire, 1714–1783 (London, 2007), 185.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

Table I.1. The Habsburg monarchy’s major foreign and domestic armed conflicts, 1650–1815 1657–1660 1663–1664 1672–1678 1674–1679 1678–1687 1683–1699 1689–1697 1701–1714 1703–1711 1708–1709 1716–1718 1733–1738 1737–1739 1740–1748 1756–1763 1778–1779 1788–1791 1789–1790 1792–1797 1799–1801 1805 1809 1813–1814 1815

Second Northern War Ottoman war kuruc rebellion in Hungary French war (in connection with Franco-Dutch war) Thököly (kuruc) rebellion in Hungary Ottoman war Nine Years War War of the Spanish Succession Rákóczi (kuruc) rebellion in Hungary Papal war Ottoman war War of the Polish Succession Ottoman war War of the Austrian Succession Seven Years War War of the Bavarian Succession Ottoman war rebellion in the Austrian Netherlands War of the First Coalition War of the Second Coalition War of the Third Coalition War of the Fifth Coalition War of the Sixth Coalition Hundred Days War

governing as ever-increasing quantities of money and other resources had to be taken from local people. This aspect would persist as ruling became more regularized, formalized, and homogenized, and also as the very understanding of the Estates in the political theory of the day transformed perceptions of them from the “incarnation” of the land into a privileged corps representing socio-economic (landed) interests.64 The time from the rise of a permanently standing army following the Thirty Years War to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars (the last major hostilities in which the Habsburg monarchy was involved before the constitution of March 1849 swept the Estates away) defines the study’s temporal limits. In effect, the parameters of international history are applied here to territorial history—two fields seldom linked in the Habsburg case—in order to explore the workings of government. In the intervening roughly 170 years, the Estates were convoked annually almost without exception to deal with military needs or the financial fallout of war; their administrative organization was a standing, if changing, one. Covering the period from the confessional age to the post-revolutionary era, this remarkable continuity was replicated in other Habsburg central lands, though hardly elsewhere in 64 On the theoretical foundations of this transformation, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999).

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Table I.2. Effective/(Paper) strength of the Habsburg standing army, 1650–1814 1650 1661 1675 1677 1683 1687 1697 1703 1705 1711 1714 1717 1727 1732 1735 1739 1741 1744 1747 1756 1757 1761 1771 1778 1779 1784 1787 1790 1791 1792 1798 1805 1809 1811 1813 (August) 1814

24,500 53,000 60,187 77,621 55,700 63,800 77,736 76,000 113,000 (130,622) (137,229) (160,722) (190,257) (141,713) (205,643) (159,519) (134,935) (200,167) (179,552) (156,750) (197,518) (201,311) (151,700) (195,108) (308,555) (219,130) (313,804) (314,783) (215,478) (313,874) (438,000)/300,000 300,000 (470,656)/300,000 (259,918)/171,066 479,000 568,000

* The figures for the period 1705–92 do not include artillery, special forces, garrison, and/or border units. Sources: Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 104, 237, 300; Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (London, 1982), 53, 81, 82, 114, 126, 129, 175, 179.

continental Europe. Hence our inquiry into the changing relationship of Habsburg rulers and Lower Austrian Estates will encompass two of the three major areas of state activity—sustaining the army and finding the means to do so—ones that profoundly impacted society as a whole. The third area, law and public order, will be touched on in the event of a direct link to fiscal-military affairs or when eighteenth-century reform directly impacted the structures and officeholders of the Estates. The Estates were involved in many other activities ranging from public

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health to the regulation of the Danube to cultural patronage, issues that cannot be considered in depth here.65 The archduchy of Austria below the Enns, the common older designation for the territory later known as Lower Austria, was in close attendance at the birth of what would become the permanent standing army. More than half of the 25,000 troops that remained under arms immediately after the Thirty Years War were at some point billeted there, bringing further hardship to an area already devastated by conflict.66 With its capital at Vienna, Lower Austria stretched expansively along the middle Danube from the river Enns in the west to the plains of Hungary in the east (see Map I.1). Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it lay at the heart of a shifting empire of layered and nested forms of sovereignty that at various times touched the shores of the North, Baltic, Tyrrhenian, Mediterranean, and Adriatic Seas and at points ran up against the realms of the French king, the Ottoman sultan, and the Russian tsar, among others (see Map I.2). To a greater or lesser degree, dynastic authority radiated out from the Bohemian-Austrian patrimonial core to take in at various times the whole of the Holy Roman Empire including Italian fiefs under imperial jurisdiction; the southern Netherlands (the Burgundian heritage technically part of the Holy Roman Empire); the Hungarian lands (including Transylvania and Croatia-Slavonia); other Italian territories including Naples, Sicily, Parma, Venice, and Tuscany (some governed by subsidiary branches of the ruling family); Galicia and Bukovina (composed of formerly Polish-Lithuanian and Ottoman lands respectively); and finally the German Confederation (of which the Austrian emperor assumed the presidency). Core areas including the larger Austrian duchies (most importantly Lower Austria and Styria), the kingdom of Bohemia proper, the margraviate of Moravia, and a large swathe of upper Hungary, all of which may be thought of as belonging to a geographically, culturally, and politically more coherent composite monarchy, remained in large part consistently in dynastic hands. The duchy of Austria, which had come into Habsburg possession in 1282 and gave the dynasty the name by which it was to be known for 600 years, had been divided politically since the thirteenth century into two parts (above and below the river Enns).67 Its rulers were unquestionably “absolute”—as this term was understood by contemporaries rather than by later commentators. The holder of sole law-making authority, the archduke was formally subject to no earthly power save the emperor, an office that was in personal union with him throughout almost all of our period. In this sense, the archduke was an “absolute” legislator. But his mandate was limited. Divine, natural, and certain fundamental laws, as well as 65 For the Estates’ role in public health, see Christine Ottner, Dem gemeinen wesen zum besten: Verwalten von Krankheit und Gesundheit in Krems an der Donau und Österreich unter der Enns (1580–1680) (St. Pölten, 2003). 66 Erich Landsteiner, “Wiederaufbau oder Transformation? Niederösterreich vor, während und nach dem Dreißigjährigen Krieg,” in Walter Leitsch and Stanisław Trawkowski, eds., Polen und Österreich im 17. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1999), 185. 67 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter (5th edn., Darmstadt, 1963), 197–205.

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Map I.1. The Archduchy of Austria below the Enns (Lower Austria).

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Map I.2. The Habsburg Monarchy 1648–1815.

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contract, circumscribed the remit. A vital contract was the one solemnly concluded near the beginning of each reign by which territorial privileges were confirmed in exchange for homage rendered by the Estates during a formal inaugural rite. No longer constitutive of dominion, as before 1620, the ceremony nonetheless signified an unwritten “constitution” manifest in the socio-political hierarchy on display. The magnificent publication that commemorated the Lower Austrian act of homage (Erbhuldigung) held for Charles VI in 1712 gave concise expression to this circumstance: “Although the illustrious rulers of this land reign with more independence [independenz] than many other princes and lords, they have for centuries ex pio moderamine acquiesced, through oral and then written letters of confirmation of the customary privileges and charters of liberties of the most truly obedient Estates, in subjecting themselves to the order established by such confirmation.”68 With the notable exception of Joseph II, every ruler submitted to the very public inaugural ritual that played out between the abbey of Klosterneuburg just north of Vienna on the Danube, the main Habsburg palace known as the Hofburg, the palace of the Estates, and St. Stephen’s cathedral, the last three all located within the old city walls of Vienna.69 Since the late Middle Ages, Austrian rulers had convoked assemblies of landed nobles to confer on matters of territorial importance and secure consent to fiscal assessments invariably levied for military purposes or the maintenance of the Court.70 Over time, the approval of taxation became a key activity of the Estates, who by the fifteenth century included prelates and townsmen as well as nobles. Like

68 Johann Baptist Mair Edler von Mairsfeld, Beschreibung was auf Ableben Weyland Ihrer Keyserl. Majestät Josephi, Biß nach vorgegangener Erb-Huldigung, welche dem Allerdurchleuchtigst-Großmächtigstund Unüberwindlichsten Römischen Keyser, Carolo dem Sechsten, zu Hispanien, Hungarn, und Böheim König, u.u. Als Erz-Herzogen zu Oesterreich, die gesamte Nider-Oesterreichische Stände den 8. Novembris Unterthänigkeit abgelegt, Sich Merkwürdiges hat zugetragen (Vienna, n.d.), f. 2r. For the relationship of ceremonial practice and legal order in the early modern world, see David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT and London, 1988); Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Herstellung und Darstellung politischer Einheit: Instrumentelle und symbolische Dimensionen politischer Repräsentation im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Jan Andres et al., eds., Die Sinnlichkeit der Macht: Herrschaft und Repräsentation seit der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2005), 73–92. 69 For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century inaugurations in the Austrian lands, see Arno Strohmeyer, “Vom Widerstand zum Rebellion: Praxis und Theorie des ständischen Widerstands in den östlichen österreichischen Ländern im Werden der Habsburgermonarchie (ca. 1550–1650),” in Robert von Friedeburg, ed., Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit: Erträge und Perspektiven der Forschung im deutsch-britischen Vergleich (Berlin, 2001), 206–43; Arno Strohmeyer, “Propaganda durch Geschichte? Die Verbreitung des Geschichtsbildes der Stände in den innerösterreichischen Ländern im Zeitalter der Konfessionalisierung,” in Karel Hruza, ed., Propaganda, Kommunikation und Öffentlichkeit (Vienna, 2002), 263–6; Strohmeyer, Konfessionskonflikt und Herrschaftsordnung. For the later period, see Gustav Otruba, “Die Erbhuldigungen der oberösterreichischen Stände 1732— 1741—1743: Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Treueverhaltens von Klerus, Adel und Bürgertum gegenüber Karl VI., Karl Albert und Maria Theresia,” MOLA 16 (1990): 135–301; William D. Godsey, “Herrschaft und politische Kultur im Habsburgerreich: Die niederösterreichische Erbhuldigung (ca. 1648–1848),” in Roland Gehrke, ed., Aufbrüche in die Moderne: Frühparlamentarismus zwischen altständischer Ordnung und monarchischem Konstitutionalismus 1750–1850 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005), 141–77. 70 Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, 426–37.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

many other liberties, it was not forfeited by the rebellion of Protestant Estates around 1620 and continued to regulate and legitimize the ruler’s access to his subjects’ property thereafter. This right was not a “constitutional” one analogous to the guarantees found in modern fundamental laws, for example the Estates did not have the authority to gather on their own—the full diet met at the ruler’s instigation.71 Their rights to gather and vote on taxes were in essence privileges originally conceded and periodically renewed—as at the act of homage—by the archduke.72 For this reason, it would be wrong to assume lasting or elementary opposition between the two parties, just as we should not suppose, given the vagaries of human nature and the high material stakes involved in the affairs of government, a relationship of simple collaboration based on class, religion, or other factors. The Habsburg Court (Hof ) was the locus of power, and the Austrian Aulic Chancellery (and its respective successor bodies including Haugwitz’s famous Directorium and, later, the “United Offices”) was the agency that exercised direct authority over the Lower Austrian Estates in the ruler’s name. It should be emphasized that the Estates were—and understood themselves to be—subject to the ruler, not his equals. They were proud of the immediacy to their archduke (or archduchess), and throughout the period under consideration they continued to refer their petitions, remonstrations, and other communications to Court.73 The sovereign was typically addressed as “emperor” or (in the case of Maria Theresa after 1745) “empress” rather than as “archduke” or “archduchess,” the proper title as sovereign of the land below the Enns. This book follows the Estates’ practice. The term “imperial” is here reserved to institutions associated with the Holy Roman Empire or the Habsburg ruler in his capacity as emperor both before and after the assumption of the Austrian imperial dignity (1804) and the abdication of Charlemagne’s crown (1806), though the term turns up in the territorial sources in other contexts as well. The term “state administration” (Staatsverwaltung) in reference to a distinct entity becomes common in the sources only in the early nineteenth century. This study employs the terms “Court,” “(central) government,” “(central) authorities,” and “dynastic state” interchangeably to refer to the same idea.74 When reference is made to the chief governing body within Lower Austria, the agency known as the Regiment or Regierung, which was headed for much of our period by the stadholder (Statthalter), the qualifier “provincial” 71 Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, 433. A contemporary statement of this principle is found in a manuscript prepared for the education of the future emperor Joseph II: “Anmerkungen über die kurze Nachricht von der Beschaffenheit, und Verfassung des Erz-Herzogthums Oesterreich unter- und ob der Ennß,” Vienna, Apr. 15, 1760, ÖNB, Sammlung von Handschriften und Alten Drucken, 15.291. 72 The problem of (fiscal) privilege remains largely unexplored in the Habsburg context. See John P. Spielman, “Status as Commodity: The Habsburg Economy of Privilege,” in Charles Ingrao, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 110–18. For early modern France, see Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000); Rafe Blaufarb, The Politics of Fiscal Privilege in Provence, 1530s– 1830s (Washington, D.C., 2012). 73 See Volker Press, “The Habsburg Court as Center of the Imperial Government,” JMH, supplement 58 (1986): S23–S45. 74 The term “dynastic state” is adopted from Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army, 9–17.

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or “territorial” applies.75 The Estates were not formally subordinate to that body. The relationship was collegial; the Aulic Chancellery was the arbiter in the event of disputes. Despite the endurance of the Estates across the centuries, the plan is neither to invert the traditional reading of history by declaring them the real winners of the “dualist” struggle with “absolutism” nor to downplay the profound transformation that they underwent. Instead, this book contends that they were mobilized with remarkable success on behalf of the dynasty’s great-power ambitions—long before eighteenth-century reform. This entailed workable compromises between ruler and Estates, ones that were invariably forged over the fire of war. Over time, the Estates as a whole were changed by this process—from a body heavily involved in daily government into a major financier of the dynastic state. The impact of this process on the individual Estates varied, tending to harden dividing lines, as between lords and knights, and making the Estates as a whole in many senses less cohesive. The impecunious townsmen were pushed further to the margins. In recruiting for the imperial army; in housing, provisioning, paying, and supplying troops; in providing cartage, beasts, barges, and other services; in bringing in taxes; and in floating loans on the government’s behalf, the Estates (or elements thereof ) were able to bring their interests to bear in myriad ways—from offloading the tax burden to preserving their social exclusivity to safeguarding their credit-worthiness. As the scope and power of Habsburg government grew, the influence of the Estates did as well— without their becoming or claiming in any way to be rivals of sovereign authority. In the eighteenth century this general trend would be accentuated rather than weakened by reform (even as the room for compromise narrowed with the military defeats of the 1730s and 1740s), as ruling became a more complex affair thanks to the growth of the military establishment, and as conceptions of government evolved in favor of greater rationality, equality, impartiality, and probity. Though the contours of the relations between central and territorial authority changed, notions such as emasculation do little to capture historical reality. Between the late 1740s and mid-1760s, Maria Theresa should rather be thought of as having hammered out a new political dispensation with the Estates, a process that was drawn out and at times contentious. But it was durable and built rather more on the achievements of her forebears than she liked to admit. In Lower Austria, the center of her monarchy, she excluded them from one core area of government—the administration of justice. Even then, a territorial court of privileged jurisdiction, the reformed Landrecht, survived and continued to meet in the palace of the Estates. The celebrated agreement between the Estates and Count Haugwitz in the summer of 1748 known as the “recess” foresaw the conversion of their militaryadministrative responsibilities (marching routes, recruitment, billeting, etc.) into a pecuniary equivalent. The Estates had long resented the burdens and hidden costs of the existing arrangements. As it was, the dissolution of the Estates’ commissarial 75 The standard work on this body remains [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897).

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

structures and the introduction of Prussian-style conscription were achieved. Yet the Estates remained heavily involved in areas such as provisioning through the Napoleonic era. Maria Theresa and her successors were even less able to dispense with their financial clout. The central authorities borrowed from them more heavily than ever after 1748—highpoints would be the Seven Years War and the coalition wars of the 1790s—and hence had an intrinsic interest in their existence and solvency. Their creditworthiness in turn required a measure of autonomy from the central treasury with its historically poor credit-rating. In consequence the Landhaus, as the palace of the Estates was known, retained routine control of direct taxation built on the still-extant manorial structures in the countryside. Assessment, repartition, imposition, and collection lay in its bailiwick. Generally speaking, the Estates’ activity was ever more concentrated in this area, in keeping with the enlightened-physiocratic ideas of agrarian wealth and landed representation that were by then current. Here we detect the glimmerings of an ideological renewal of the Estates’ raison d’être. Their handle on the fiscal apparatus and the diet’s formal consent to taxation underlay the millions of florins in debt they contracted on the regime’s behalf from ever widening circles of the population. The sporadically closer official supervision and coordination of their financial affairs, which has been much emphasized, respected the autonomy necessary to their good name. Here the Habsburgs remained heavily reliant on the “politics of difference” to run their monarchy.76 A territorially defined, privileged corps with its own history, traditions, and liberties remained the sine qua non of the “financial intermediation” essential to the functioning of government.77 Also in other ways, the ever mightier dynastic state preserved distinction among its component parts. The educational standards prescribed for officials by Maria Theresa did not apply to the noble and ecclesiastical administrators still involved in key areas of government on behalf of the Estates. The initial “circle offices” (Kreisämter) introduced in 1753 as an extended arm of central authority conspicuously failed in the territory below the Enns and had to be revamped after the Seven Years War by plugging them more closely into local sources of authority. This is not to deny that the refurbished offices shifted the power dynamic in the countryside in important respects. Yet by becoming the watchdogs of good governance and reining in the use of arbitrary power by landlords over rural people, the circle offices helped stabilize lordship. At a different level, the importance of corporate credit for Habsburg public finances can hardly be overstated: it was greater at the end of Maria Theresa’s reign than at the beginning. The reformed dispensation of power drew heavily on earlier precedents. The reliance on the Estates’ good offices secured both their endurance as a privileged corporation and the evolving social hierarchy that underlay it.

76

Quotation from Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 11. For the term “financial intermediation,” see James D. Tracy, “Taxation and State Debt,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, ii: Cultures and Power (Oxford, 2015), 519. 77

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The ten chapters of this book demonstrate these arguments on the basis of the historical record. The first four deal with the period from the rise of the permanent standing army around 1650 to the second quarter of the eighteenth century and are thematic. The first chapter explores the composition of the Estates and how admission to their ranks was regulated. In the second chapter, their organization, including assemblies and officeholders—incumbents in the offices of Landmarschall and Landuntermarschall, as well as the elected members of the directorial committee called the “college of Deputies”—will be introduced. Both of these chapters highlight in varying ways the interface between aristocracy, Estates, and social climbers that was a vital aspect of the partnership between ruler and elites in governing a territory belonging to a larger composite monarchy. The third chapter examines how the exigencies of decades-long rivalry with the Ottoman Empire and France affected provincial revenue, fiscal practices, and flows of money, with special attention to the interplay of innovative forms of taxation, new agreements between ruler and Estates known as “recesses” that fixed the level of the diet’s annual grant over a number of years, and the increasing use of corporate credit on the government’s behalf. In particular it draws attention to the inherent and increasingly visible link between taxation and borrowing as manifested in the Estates’ financial intermediation. The profound change in the financial relations between government and Estates between the 1680s and 1710s partly explains Habsburg staying power then and later. Chapter 4 shows how the Estates were transformed from a military factor in the older sense of Landesdefension into an essentially civilian support organization for the new standing army. The growth and durability of the structures they established—known as a “commissariat”—mirrored the development both of the army and of the central agency responsible for military economy known as the General Field War Commissariat. This development too suggests how the Habsburg dynastic state could dispense with classical state-building because it was able to rely on already extant, corporately ordered, and territorially organized social groups that exhibited institutional attributes and possessed the local expertise necessary to early modern dominion. This was a peculiarly Habsburg twist on the idea of a “contractor state.” Each of the last six chapters picks up themes from the first four. Beginning with Chapter 5, which examines the Estates against the background of the war-induced crisis that began in 1733 and the circumstances surrounding the famous reform of the Contribution in 1748, the treatment becomes primarily chronological. The chapter shows that Charles VI’s state, like Leopold I’s, was more successful than has been assumed, but also considers the problems and the resistance that governmentordered change encountered there. Chapter 6 deals with the contentious period of reform of the late 1740s and 1750s, before turning to the abrupt improvement of relations between Estates and government at the outbreak of the Seven Years War. The shift in the pattern of official borrowing evident since the 1690s together with the sharp rise of the regular Contribution effected by Haugwitz in 1748 allowed for what would be a lasting political accommodation in the face of the Prussian menace. The scale of the Estates’ financial intercession on the government’s behalf was to prove unprecedented. Without this assistance, the dynasty would not have

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power

been able to sustain the fight. The return of peace in 1763 opened the door to farreaching, though hardly inevitable, structural change at the Landhaus that in part constituted a reaction to the Estates’ financial power. That the reforms worked themselves out in a way that reinforced the monarchy’s resilience, while preserving the Estates’ wherewithal, is the focus of Chapter 7. Joseph II’s policy, unlike his mother’s, was born in part of a true antipathy to nobles that was partially rooted in resentment at their corporate strength. In contrast to other enlightened rulers of the day, he little appreciated the value of representative institutions to the vitality, legitimacy, and solvency of government. He distanced himself from the practices of composite monarchy that had characterized previous reigns, but, unlike in the southern Netherlands, the political dispensation dating from his mother’s reign held. Much reduced, the Estates survived his rule. Chapter 8 explains why. The last two chapters take the story from the end of Joseph’s reign to the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Chapter 9 discusses Leopold II’s revival of the Estates against the background of enlightened notions of political economy and representation. Influential strands of physiocratic theory that foresaw the participation of assemblies of landowners in public affairs were changing awareness of the Estates, while the fiscal and credit activity of the Estates rooted them in new ways in broader sections of the population. Chapter 10 explores the financial, organizational, and political role of the Estates in the age of revolutionary warfare. Over time, the Habsburg fiscal-military state rested on a complex and changing mixture of elements. One of its hallmarks was the ability to mobilize elite social groups to the purposes of government. This was an advantage in an economy that would not support large-scale institution-building paid for out of central revenues. Into the nineteenth century, the “bureaucracy” would remain rudimentary.78 A number of the fiscal-military state’s key elements derived specifically from the Estates and their integration into the wider composite union. Three of them made the monarchy more internationally competitive. First, they were involved in a civilian-administrative capacity in the preservation of the Habsburg standing army, in an array of functions from billeting to recruiting to provisioning. Second, through their services as financial intermediators, they enabled the government to tap deepening wells of domestic credit at gradually more favorable rates of interest. Ever larger numbers of men and women beyond the local elite invested money in the Estates’ coffers. In sum, the Estates borrowed increasingly heavily on behalf of the Habsburg treasury, and lowered the cost of doing so. In the last reckoning, they were crucial to the development of eighteenth-century Habsburg deficit finance on an unmatched scale.79 Third, the partnership with the landed and debt-holding interest that was evident in these activities enabled the Habsburg fiscal-military 78 Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, i: 1780 bis 1848 (2nd edn., Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 2013), 151. 79 For the argument that the credibility of government debt depended less on the existence of a representative system than on debt-holders being part of the representative assembly that guaranteed the debt, an argument also illuminating for the Austrian case, see David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688–1789 (Cambridge, 2003). But Stasavage

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state to extract growing resources from the population in a politically sustainable way. This was evident in recurring rituals as well as in political and administrative arrangements that grounded central authority in provincial soil. The annual diet provided the arena in which the government regularly justified its demands; the Estates retained the formal right to approve the Contribution; both taxes and resources in kind were apportioned, imposed, and collected locally by them. The various elements were of vital significance. There would be no fatal alienation of the regime from the most powerful and influential groups in society as occurred in France in the late 1780s, a process that would paralyze the kingdom abroad and bring down the king at home. * * * * Unlike in France, where provinces called pays d’états with customary representative bodies endured primarily on the kingdom’s periphery, the Estates survived in virtually all of the Habsburg monarchy’s central lands, as well as further afield.80 Lower Austria was in this respect unexceptional. In the arc of Austrian lands that reached from the Danube down to the Adriatic and then back up through the Alps across to the French border, assemblies based on birth and status gathered regularly in Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Gorizia, Trieste, Tyrol, Vorarlberg, Breisgau, and Swabian Austria. Some of these entities were modified in Maria Theresa’s time; only in Trieste does the council appear to have ceased to meet. To the north, despite the outcome at White Mountain, the lands of St. Wenceslaus—the kingdom of Bohemia proper, the margraviate of Moravia, and the duchy of Silesia—also retained Estates of varying aspect. In Silesia both a general diet and assemblies in individual principalities obtained. In Hungary the Estates gathered in the diet whose membership was determined in part by noble county congregations, revived in those parts of the country recovered from the Turks. The kingdom’s incorporated lands, Transylvania and Croatia, had their own diets. Ten Habsburg territories in the southern Netherlands boasted assemblies or other representative bodies, as did various Italian lands ruled by the house of Austria, such as the duchy of Milan with its senate. The emperor also had to contend with the Holy Roman Empire’s diet famously in “perpetual” session at Regensburg from the third quarter of the seventeenth century. That Estates were

draws an anachronistic distinction for the early modern period by discounting representative bodies based on birth and status. 80 For the following, see Maťa, “Landstände und Landtage;” Franz Quarthal, Landstände und landständisches Steuerwesen in Schwäbisch-Österreich (Stuttgart, 1980); Franz Quarthal, “Vorderösterreich in der Geschichte Südwestdeutschlands,” in Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart, Vorderösterreich: Nur die Schwanzfeder des Kaiseradlers? (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1999), 14–59; the articles on the BohemianAustrian, Hungarian, and Swabian lands, as well as the southern Netherlands in Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten; Rolf Kutschera, Landtag und Gubernium in Siebenbürgen, 1688–1869 (Cologne and Vienna, 1985); Horst Glassl, Das österreichische Einrichtungswerk in Galizien (1772–1790) (Wiesbaden, 1975). For the later period, there is useful information in the articles in Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vii: Verfassung und Parlamentarismus, part 2: Die regionalen Repräsentationskörperschaften (Vienna, 2000). For the pays d’états in late eighteenth-century France, see Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, 224; Blaufarb, “The Survival.”

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thought to retain their usefulness in the age of enlightened government was evident in their creation in the newly fashioned province of Galicia-Lodomeria, acquired through the first partition of the commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania. Only in the military border (Militärgrenze) that faced the sultan, in the area that came to be known as the Bukovina, taken from an Ottoman tributary state in 1775, and in West Flanders, a so-called pays d’imposition, do we find no representative assemblies. From a fiscal perspective, Lower Austria was a vital Habsburg possession. By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, it was “perhaps the most important land of the monarchy.”81 Geographically, the archduchy below the Enns with its some 12,000 square miles in area lay at the meeting point of the three core aggregations of Habsburg territories (Bohemian, Hungarian, and Austrian) and exhibited in rich variety features of all three. To the north, the forested highlands and wine-growing hills above the Danube—a mighty waterway that from west to east divides Lower Austria into irregular halves—yield to the imposing geological formation known as the Bohemian-Moravian elevation. Lower Austria’s eastern reaches marked off by the rivers March and Leitha are an extension of the vast Pannonian plain. Below the Danube, a band of farmland that stretches from the Upper Austrian border along the river Enns to the basin around the town of Tulln west of the Vienna Woods is dominated to the south by Alpine hills and peaks that ultimately separate Lower Austria from Styria, the most important of the Inner Austrian duchies. From the south, several larger rivers and streams fertilize the agricultural areas before emptying into the Danube, which is fed from the north by fewer waterways of notable quality, the Krems being an exception. Administratively, Lower Austria was divided into four historic “quarters” (Viertel ). The Estates’ organization reflected those divisions. Here too the Danube was of central importance, dividing as it did the two northern quarters (above and below the Manhartsberg82) from the two southern ones (above and below the Vienna Woods).83 Relatively remote and heavily forested, the quarter above the Manhartsberg (today commonly known as the Waldviertel) also contained the northern bank of the winding Wachau valley of the Danube, a major region of viticulture. Three of the quarter’s six princely towns (Krems, Stein, and Langenlois) lived from the production and sale of wine. A fourth, Zwettl, tucked away in the woods to the northeast, gave its name to the quarter’s leading religious foundation, the Cistercian monastery located in a geological depression beyond the city walls. There were two further princely towns (Waidhofen an der Thaya and Eggenburg), as well as two other major ecclesiastical houses, Benedictine Altenburg and Premonstratensian Geras, the latter evidence of religious influences emanating from nearby Bohemia. Apart from the wood trade, crops of significance included rye and hay. The other district north of the Danube, the quarter below the Manhartsberg, was dominated by rolling

81

Quotation from Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 96. The Manhartsberg is a granite ridge that geologically forms the southern and eastern flanks of the Bohemian-Moravian elevation. 83 The following is based on Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974); Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God,” 1–15. 82

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hills ideal for the cultivation of wine, but also grain (hence the name Weinviertel used today). In the distant past, the pull of wealth had led the nobility to consolidate its hold on the region; large civic and religious establishments were rare. There were only three princely towns—Retz, Korneuburg, and Laa an der Thaya—and no major monasteries, a notable anomaly in a territory otherwise known for the splendor of its abbeys and convents. Most of the major religious establishments were found on the other side of the Danube. To the west, the quarter above the Vienna Woods contained small-scale farming in fruits and grain as well as a once-flourishing iron industry around the towns of Scheibbs and Waidhofen an der Ybbs (neither a princely town). The quarter’s largest civic area, St. Pölten (today the capital of Lower Austria), located on the river Traisen that poured into the Danube, also did not have the status of a princely town. What the district lacked in urban amenities it made up for in the presence of the Church. Ecclesiastical foundations whose seats became ever grander during the baroque dotted the Danube’s southern bank. Most impressively, Benedictine Göttweig and Benedictine Melk guarded respectively, from their elevations above the river, the eastern and western approaches to the Wachau valley. Other leading houses included Augustinian St. Pölten, Augustinian Herzogenburg, Cistercian Lilienfeld, Benedictine Seitenstetten, and Carthusian Gaming. The territorial capital that was also the seat of Habsburg central government dominated the smallest of Lower Austria’s four districts, the quarter below the Vienna Woods. Due to the vicinity of the Court, the nobility was a presence to be felt there as well, also in the thermal belt south of Vienna ideal for growing wine. Four of this quarter’s seven princely cities and market towns (apart from Vienna)— Perchtoldsdorf, Mödling, Gumpoldskirchen, and Baden—were economically dependent on the healing waters and libations already known to the Romans. Another town, Klosterneuburg, is more often associated with the Augustinian monastery of the same name that Charles VI planned to make into his own Escorial in memory of his dreams of Spanish empire. It lies on the Danube just north of Vienna. Klosterneuburg was, after Melk, Lower Austria’s richest religious house. Not surprisingly, given the Court’s immediacy, this quarter was also the site of other major religious foundations, including Cistercian Heiligenkreuz, the Cistercian Neukloster at Wiener Neustadt, and the Augustinian canons of St. Dorothea and the Benedictine Schotten abbey, the latter two both headquartered within the city walls of Vienna. Among the intermediary powers of the Habsburg lands, the Estates of Lower Austria were exceptional in their proximity to central authority. The archduchy’s capital, Vienna, was the seat of all emperors after Rudolf II (r. 1576–1612) with one brief interlude—the Bavarian Charles VII (r. 1742–5). Their residence, the rambling complex known as the Hofburg, lay a stone’s throw from the Lower Austrian Landhaus, the palace of the Estates located on the square of the Friars Minor in the shadow of the ancient church of the same name with its distinctively soaring roof and tower.84 In the sixteenth century the Landhaus had been erected

84 The following is based on Leopold Joseph Fitzinger, “Versuch einer Geschichte des alten Nieder-Österreichischen Landhauses bis zu seinem Umbaue im Jahre 1837,” AÖG 41 (1869):

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on the spot where a house bought from the Liechtensteins in 1513 had stood. By the 1570s the building had acquired the form it was to keep until the elegant neoclassical makeover of the 1830s. Perpendicular to the main front along the square of the Friars Minor, two wings of differing length stretched in the direction of the Herrengasse, the street where, as the name indicates, many nobles kept townhouses. The structure accommodated the Estates’ main assembly hall, the chambers of the individual curiae, the room where their standing directorial committee conducted its business, and the receiver general’s office (in the righthand wing). In the early eighteenth century, as more space was needed, the Estates purchased a neighboring house on the same square. The “small Landhaus,” as it became known to distinguish it from what was now called the “large Landhaus,” was used to varying, lesser purpose or let to third parties. In this book the term “Landhaus” is typically used as a synonym for the Estates, but otherwise refers to the original building. That the widowed empresses Wilhelmine Amalia and Elisabeth Christine rented the small Landhaus as living quarters for their noble pages for nearly twenty years beginning in the 1730s was indicative of the physical immediacy to Court.85 The boundary between Court and Estates could at all events be blurred. Comparatively spacious in a city cramped behind its defensive ramparts, the Estates’ premises were occasionally the scene of Court events and festivities. At the time of the archduke Ferdinand’s marriage to a Spanish infanta in 1631, the Estates were approached not only about the use of their hall for a staged performance but also about the possibility of breaking through a passage to facilitate the Court’s arrival. In 1689 they placed the chamber where the Estate of lords usually met at the emperor’s disposal for a conference with Ottoman envoys. Some two decades later, a group of courtiers arranged a masked ball in the diet’s assembly hall with its superb, new fresco proclaiming Austria’s universal mission. From the official tribune and later in disguise on the dance floor, the emperor Joseph I (r. 1705–11) himself took part. During the Seven Years War the empress Maria Theresa, together with members of her family and household, attended celebrations at the Landhaus that marked the restoration of its chapel. Only a few years later, some of those present, including the grand master of her Court (Obersthofmeister), Count Ulfeld, would be involved in one of the sharpest open clashes between government and Estates during her reign. Personal contact between representatives of central and intermediary authority on official business and otherwise was by then long commonplace. In terms of its wealth and comparative prosperity, the archduchy was consistently among the most important central lands, together with Silesia and Bohemia proper. But it seems more appropriate to keep in mind the archduchy’s relative poverty—not only in the seventeenth century but throughout our period. The Thirty Years War had come at a time when Lower Austria’s economy, including its most lucrative segments such as wine and iron, had been in decline since the late 113–94. See also Anton Eggendorfer et al., eds., Altes Landhaus: Vom Sitz der niederösterreichischen Stände zum Veranstaltungszentrum (Vienna, 2006). 85 For this and the following, see Fitzinger, “Versuch einer Geschichte.”

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1500s.86 The general decay accelerated between 1618 and 1648 when the territory below the Enns was both a theater of war—the Swedes stood before the walls of Vienna in April 1645—and subject to heavy billeting by the emperor. More than ever before, Lower Austria after 1650 was an overwhelmingly agrarian and manorial world, with most agricultural production at the subsistence level or for the local market. Serfdom had never taken hold, as it had further to the north and east, but the rural population stumbled under heavy dues and practically unlimited labor obligations as well as the monopolies of its lords. Neither Vienna nor any other town had wider significance as a place of commerce, high finance, or manufacturing. The virtual lack of trade even on the Danube, one of Europe’s great navigable rivers, was, according to one contemporary, nothing less than a “disgrace.”87 By 1680 wine production had climbed to pre-war levels, but, again, remained below what had been achieved a hundred years earlier and never really took off, even in the eighteenth century. Economic growth remained spotty and slow due to repeated outbreaks of the plague after 1678, which killed thousands, and to decades of warfare against the Turks and French beginning in the 1680s. In 1683 the sultan’s troops not only besieged Vienna but also made inroads into Lower Austria’s western reaches, inflicting “immense damage” as they did so. Both the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish Succession brought further disruption, given that the archduchy lay at a crossroads between theaters of war while also being subject after the turn of the century to raids by Hungarian insurgents.88 On the other hand, the baroque Catholic habits of mind to which the Swiss historian Peter Hersche has brilliantly drawn attention placed a premium on forms of behavior that, while not “irrational” as once thought, also did not necessarily lead to an enduring rise in conventional economic indicators.89 The ancient Christian tradition of piling up “capital” in heaven by giving in apposite ways in this world—for masses, charitable foundations, and other pious purposes—lived on.90 “Leisure and extravagance” as expressed in baroque architecture and in cults of the saints, holy days, and religious festivals had a higher value than “work” in the sense of the Protestant ethic. Tellingly, the impressive sacral landscape of abbeys and pilgrimage churches still visible across Lower Austria today took shape roughly from the 1660s to the 1730s—at the very time that the standing army expanded some tenfold. 86 The following draws on Landsteiner, “Wiederaufbau oder Transformation?;” Roman Sandgruber, “Zur Wirtschaftsentwicklung Niederösterreichs im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” UH 45 (1974): 210–21; Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998); Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1995), 103–231; Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), 695–6. 87 Quoted in Landsteiner, “Wiederaufbau oder Transformation?,” 149. 88 Franz Ruzicka, “Studien zur Geschichte der Kuruzzeneinfälle in Niederösterreich in den Jahren 1703–1709,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1976. 89 Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung. 90 For the beginnings of that tradition, see Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton and Oxford, 2012).

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For these same years, scholars have noted changes in patterns of consumption, for example of tobacco and coffee (though not tea or sugar), that recall contemporary developments in western Europe, and there were sporadic initiatives to encourage trade and manufacturing.91 In the early eighteenth century the Lower Austrian Estates themselves repeatedly pressed the government for measures of economic stimulation that would in turn expand the tax base, and thus help lighten the individual fiscal burden. Most initiatives appear to have failed within a short time, or had little broader impact. At the same time, the demographic figures were recovering from the low point of the Thirty Years War. By the mid-eighteenth century the population had increased by about half—from an estimated total of 630,000 in the year 1600 to 922,200 in 1754.92 As the century advanced, an “industrious revolution” made itself felt in the territory below the Enns, particularly in the area of textile production. In the two decades after the Seven Years War, the number of persons employed in manufacturing nearly quintupled—to 94,094—and there was a move away from putting-out at piece rates toward production in larger units (factories).93 All the same, Lower Austria’s agrarian structures seem to have muted the later eighteenth-century economic growth visible elsewhere in the European countryside. Change was more evident in areas such as crop diversification and the legal position of the wider agricultural population.94 Urban expansion manifested itself in Lower Austria almost exclusively in the capital, where the population is thought to have more than tripled—to some 175,000—in the hundred years prior to the first reliable census of 1754. Thereafter it continued to grow, even as Vienna took its character from Court and officialdom rather than finance and bourgeoisie. Its status as a residential city was reinforced by the many aristocratic establishments that had arisen within its walls and immediate environs from the later seventeenth century. The growth of officialdom changed the city’s social complexion, while Joseph II’s reform of the Church reduced the visibility of the clergy.95 The city lacked the self-confident strata of wealthy merchants and financiers found in London, Paris, and Amsterdam. What

91 Roman Sandgruber, Die Anfänge der Konsumgesellschaft: Konsumgüterverbrauch, Lebensstandard und Alltagskultur in Österreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 1982), 192–205, 210–17; Herman Freudenberger, Lost Momentum: Austrian Economic Development 1750s–1830s (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2005), 210–17. 92 Figures taken from Sandgruber, Die Anfänge, 26. 93 Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (New York, 2007), 123–5. For the term “industrious revolution,” see Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge, 2008). See also Gutkas, Geschichte, 334–6, and Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (2nd edn., Vienna and Munich, 2001), 202. 94 Roman Sandgruber, “Agrarpolitik zwischen Krisen und Konjunkturen,” in Alfred Hoffmann, ed., Bauerland Oberösterreich: Entwicklungsgeschichte seiner Land- und Forstwirtschaft (Linz, 1974), 100–1; Helmuth Feigl, “Der Adel in Niederösterreich 1780–1861,” in Armgard von Reden-Dohna and Ralph Melville, eds., Der Adel an der Schwelle des bürgerlichen Zeitalters 1780–1860 (Stuttgart, 1988), 206. 95 Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen; P. G. M. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Reshaping of the Austrian Church,” HJ 36 (1993): 89–114; P. G. M. Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy in Late Eighteenth-Century Austria,” EHR 110 (1995): 323–67; Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), 41–58, 179–228.

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passed for the middle class in Vienna was in large part a blend of officials dependent on the dynastic state—typical of the central European world at that time.96 The neoclassical Biedermeier style so often associated with middle class tastes owed its breakthrough in Austria to the patronage of the Court and nobility.97 “Almost everyone engaged in trading, retailing or manufacturing was,” as the historian Tim Blanning noted, “part of the Residenzstadt nexus.”98 Into the nineteenth century Vienna remained a city of courtiers, nobles, officials, military men, rentiers, professionals, artisans, small shopkeepers, and swarms of servants. The indicators in Lower Austria suggest that social and economic change accentuated and perhaps streamlined existing paths of development. Just as Vienna remained a residential city, if larger and more diverse in the year 1800 than a century earlier, so traditional hierarchies continued to prevail in the rural world where most people still lived. To be sure, the occasional factory now punctuated the horizon and some agrarian communities had taken the new legal opportunity to buy themselves free of manors and become self-administering. The circle offices increasingly ensured good governance by lords who themselves were drawn from a more varied background—no longer necessarily noble—thanks to the proximity of the empire’s largest metropolis. But the seigniorial system remained in place, and, in contrast to their counterparts in Bohemia, who were mostly demesne farmers, landlords in the archduchy remained very much dependent on the dues and labor obligations (Robot) that legally bound their peasants. In early nineteenth-century Lower Austria, one category of rural laborer known as the Ganzbauer was yearly “required to perform 104 days of Robot with four work animals.” The list of products subject to the lord’s tithe was, moreover, “an unusually full one.”99 Even the soil retained its feudal character: distinctions such as “dominical,” “rustical,” or “civic” had not yet given way to free market consolidation. Where possible in this book, a comparative perspective will be offered on events in other parts of the monarchy, also on the basis of original research in the relevant archives. But there will be no attempt to extrapolate from the case below the Enns, even for the other Austrian duchies, much less the central lands generally. The Estates of the Bohemian-Austrian territories have sometimes been lumped together with little or no distinction. In fact, there is good reason to think that contemporaries, including those in power, distinguished clearly among them, and perceived their respective strengths and weaknesses. Proximity to central government and the opportunities it offered, but also the constraints that it imposed, made the Lower Austrian Estates at all events sui generis. But this circumstance simultaneously offers the singular opportunity of being able to follow the direct interaction of central and intermediary power over a long period of time. In no other territory did the ruler come together so regularly with the Estates. Alternatively, no new 96

For the latter, see Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 177–8. William D. Godsey, “A ‘Bourgeois Century’? Society and High Culture in Vienna 1780–1920,” in Michael Huey, ed., Viennese Silver: Modern Design 1780–1918 (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2003), 375–9. 98 Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory, 113. 99 Quotations from Jerome Blum, Noble Landowners and Agriculture in Austria, 1815–1848 (Baltimore, MD, 1948), 72, 75. Cf. Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 120. 97

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legal-constitutional order was imposed on Lower Austria after 1620 as occurred in Bohemia with the Verneuerte Landesordnung of 1627. As a result, the ruler’s prerogative would appear to have been more expansive with respect to the Estates in Prague than to those headquartered in Vienna not far from the Hofburg. Economically and financially, Lower Austria had more in common with wealthy Bohemia than with poor Carinthia, another Austrian duchy. Where the data support conclusions beyond the Lower Austrian case, these will be indicated. As we shall see, a number of key developments in Lower Austria presaged the course of events elsewhere. During the eighteenth century a convergence would become increasingly apparent as the Estates of the central lands were transformed into leading financiers of the Habsburg dynastic state. The prerequisite for this was that they retain crucial elements of provincial autonomy. Here too the archduchy below the Enns would play a pioneering role already apparent in the late 1600s.

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1 The Estates of Lower Austria In a testament drawn up a few months after the crushing victory in 1620 over the Protestant nobility at White Mountain near Prague, the emperor Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37) enjoined his successor to preserve the Estates in his hereditary lands. By the terms of the same document, those lands were to remain in perpetual unity, a provision that has won him the title “founder of the Habsburg Monarchy.”1 Together these arrangements manifest the link between integration and differentiation that was to be an enduring theme of Habsburg history over the following centuries. His concern for the Estates has variously been interpreted as evidence of his respect for law, the currency of the idea that effective rule was consensual in nature, and the continuing need of the Estates’ financial and administrative support.2 While there is something to be said for all of these arguments, they would also apply to France, whose rulers since the fifteenth century had instead “gradually suppressed provincial Estates in the kingdom’s heartland.”3 Of course France, more urban than the Habsburg realms, had developed a large class of royal financial and judicial officiers as a prop of central authority. Beyond the simply practical or material, the Estates in central Europe remained a highly visible manifestation of a particularly Habsburg, counter-reformatory vision of society suffused by notions of honor and hierarchy.4 Suitably cleansed of Protestantism in keeping with the emperor’s simplistic equation of confession and loyalty, the Estates would continue to occupy a crucial place in the scheme of Habsburg dominion.5

1 Quotation from Robert Bireley, “Ferdinand II: Founder of the Habsburg Monarchy,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 226; Hans Sturmberger, Land ob der Enns und Österreich: Aufsätze und Vorträge (Linz, 1979), 285. 2 Bireley, “Ferdinand II,” 226–32; Robert Bireley, “Confessional Absolutism in the Habsburg Lands in the Seventeenth Century,” in Charles Ingrao, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 39–43; Robert Bireley, Ferdinand II: Counter-Reformation Emperor, 1578–1637 (Cambridge, 2014), 124–5, 135–8, 293, 303. 3 Rafe Blaufarb, “The Survival of the Pays d’États: The Example of Provence,” Past & Present 209 (2010): 83. 4 For the thesis of Catholic “re-feudalization,” see Peter Hersche, Muße und Verschwendung: Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter, 2 vols. (Freiburg, Basel, and Vienna, 2006), i, 235–7. 5 For insightful reflections on the cultural influence of Catholicism on state formation, see Giovanni Levi, “The Origins of the Modern State and the Microhistorical Perspective,” in Jürgen Schlumbohm, ed., Mikrogeschichte—Makrogeschichte: Komplementär oder inkommensurabel? (Göttingen, 1998), 55–82.

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In the French pays d’états that survived, the local Estates contended with bodies that rivaled their own aspirations to corporate authority and status. In Languedoc there were two sovereign courts, the parlement at Toulouse and the cour des comptes, aides et finances at Montpellier, in addition to the Estates. Brittany had a parlement in Rennes and a chambre des comptes at Nantes, as well as Estates. In Burgundy the preeminence of the Estates at Dijon was challenged by a parlement and a chambre des comptes, both in the same city.6 The Habsburg central lands lacked corresponding diversity. There were no comparable institutions to call into question the primacy of the Lower Austrian Estates as the representative corps in the land below the Enns. Though the provincial government, an organ of justice and public order, unquestionably exhibited characteristics of a corporation, it lacked the independence of a French sovereign court whose members owned their offices and pressed a political agenda sometimes in opposition to the king’s; it likewise had no claims to be “representative” as did the Estates. Like most other equivalent bodies in the Habsburg lands, the Lower Austrian Estates were by tradition composed of clergy, nobles, and townsmen—those groups whose economic and political importance had originally justified their attendance at medieval diets. In the archduchy below the Enns, these groups separated into four curiae or consortia.7 The First Estate was made up overwhelmingly of the heads of the great religious houses. The nobility divided into two Estates (“lords” and “knights”) that mirrored the old distinction between greater and lesser nobles. The townsmen of the city of Vienna and eighteen other cities and market towns constituted the “Fourth Estate.” And though the vast majority of the territory’s populace, the rural people in all their variations, sent no deputies to the Landhaus, it would be anachronistic, as the historian Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger has shown, simply to declare that they were not represented. In the concept of “representation” prevalent into the eighteenth century, the “corporate constitutional reality of a particular territory” was thought to express “the legitimate order of the population in its entirety.” The question of how and by whom “representatives” were chosen was not pertinent to that understanding. When clergy, nobles, and townsmen

6 Bernard Bardiche, Les Institutions de la monarchie française à l’époque moderne XVIe–XVIIIe siècle (2nd edn., Paris, 2001), 340–2, 359–64; William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge, 1985), 77–97; James B. Collins, Classes, Estates, and Order in Early Modern Brittany (Cambridge, 1994), 108–11; Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003), 27–8, 262–94. 7 For the classical theory on this question, see Otto Hintze, “Typologie der ständischen Verfassungen,” in Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Fritz Hartung (Leipzig, 1941), 110–28. For the specifically Habsburg context, see Herbert Hassinger, “Die Landstände der österreichischen Länder: Zusammensetzung, Organisation und Leistung im 16.–18. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 36 (1964): 995–1015; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 250–65; Petr Maťa, “Wer waren die Landstände? Betrachtungen zu den böhmischen und österreichischen ‘Kernländern’ der Habsburgermonarchie im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 75.

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legally gathered as the Estates, they were thought—at least by theorists—to be the very embodiment of their area, their actions in that capacity binding upon all inhabitants.8 In demanding an annual grant from the diet to be financed by the population subject to the provincial land records, the authorities certainly accepted the Estates as “representative.” With few exceptions, the Lower Austrian Estates continued to encompass the most affluent elements of local society—the seigniorial landed interest—given that the archduchy remained overwhelmingly agrarian. With little large-scale commerce and finance, there were no significant social groups engaged in such activity. Until the nineteenth century, the land itself, much like society, retained a feudal quality, being classified as “dominical” (also referred to in this book as “seigniorial,” “manorial,” or “demesne”), “rustical,” or “civic” according to circumstance. Owners of dominical land originally attended the Estates by right. By our period the Estates had long lost any monopoly on “dominical” land that they may have had, but they did retain until Joseph II’s reign a highly cherished privilege— the so-called Einstandsrecht—that gave them the right of redemption in the event of the sale of such property. Unlike in the French province of Provence, dominical land did not lose its quality when it passed to non-nobles, while a higher tax penalized possessors not drawn from the ranks of the Estates—which put a premium on joining their ranks.9 The corporate facade of the Estates masked what was in fact a remarkable disparity in their composite parts, the changing relationship of those parts to one an other, and the resulting osmosis of the whole. The disparity in turn manifested the larger historical forces at work, in particular the cultural and political influence of the Counter-Reformation and the expansion of dynastic power under the impact of international rivalry and armed conflict. The membership of the Estate of prelates was characterized by notable, if not total stability from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1780s. This contrasted with the dynamism of the two noble Estates. Whereas the number of lineages of lords nearly doubled (from 87 to 160) between the reign of Ferdinand II and the advent of Maria Theresa (r. 1740–80), the knights experienced a steep decline. From some 128 families in around 1620, the number dropped to 73 in 1777.10 The expansion of the lords was paradoxically accompanied by a rise in that Estate’s prestige; the same pattern in reverse was evident in the knights. In the Fourth Estate the picture looked different yet again— stasis. These trends in turn imperfectly mirrored the shifting political weight away

8 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999), 81–91; quotations are translations of passages on p. 87. 9 For the tax penalty, see Dagmar Schopf, “Die im Zeitraum von 1620–1740 erfolgten Neuaufnahmen in den nö. Herrenstand,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1966, 4; for the Einstandsrecht, see Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 256–7. 10 These figures are cited in Thomas Winkelbauer, “Der Adel in Ober- und Niederösterreich in der Frühen Neuzeit: Versuch eines Literaturüberblicks (seit etwa 1950),” in Spojující a Rozde˘lující na Hranici—Verbindendes und Trennendes an der Grenze, Opera Historica, ii (České Bude˘jovice, 1992), 16–17.

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from townsmen and lesser nobles toward abbots and grand nobles. How the shifts worked themselves out will be a recurring theme in this and the following chapters.

T HE ES TA TE OF PR ELA TES Though common in the literature on early modern representative bodies, the term “First Estate” is seldom used in the record in reference to the Lower Austrian prelates. But given the importance attached by Ferdinand II to corporately organized clergy, as well as the fact that the abbot of Melk had the right of speaking and voting first in assemblies of the Estates, to say nothing of the unparalleled opulence and splendor of the archduchy’s prelates generally, the term is not misleading.11 The heads of long-established religious houses overwhelmingly composed the Estate of prelates (Prälatenstand ) in the territory below the Enns.12 They came from the great, non-mendicant orders of the Roman Church: the Benedictine, Cistercian, and Carthusian monks who lived under the Rule of St. Benedict or a derivative, as well as the less strictly cloistered Augustinian and Premonstratensian canons.13 By the late seventeenth century, twenty-six prelates had the right to attend the diet: six Benedictine (Melk, Göttweig, Schotten, Altenburg, Seitenstetten, and Kleinmariazell); five Cistercian (Heiligenkreuz, Lilienfeld, Zwettl, Wiener Neustadt, and Säusenstein); three Carthusian (Gaming, Mauerbach, and Aggsbach); six Augustinian (Klosterneuburg, St. Pölten, Herzogenburg, St. Dorothea, St. Andrä an der Traisen, and Dürnstein); two Premonstratensian (Geras and Pernegg); as well as the heads of four small foundations (Zwettl, Ardagger, Eisgarn, and Kirnberg an der Mank).14 It is worth noting that two houses were settled in or 11 In 1627 Ferdinand II restored the prelates to the Bohemian Estates. Joachim Bahlcke, “Geistlichkeit und Politik: Der ständisch organisierte Klerus in Böhmen und Ungarn in der frühen Neuzeit,” in Joachim Bahlcke et al., eds., Ständefreiheit und Staatsgestaltung: Übernationale Gemeinsamkeiten in der politischen Kultur vom 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1996), 170. One Lower Austrian prelate, the provost of Herzogenburg, later assumed a similar restoration in the archduchy. Minutes of Estate of prelates, Mar. 11, 1702, NÖLA, HS, 75. 12 Helmuth Stradal, “Die Prälaten—Grundlagen und Ausbildung der geistlichen Landstandschaft,” in Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung: Beiträge zur Typologie der österreichischen Länder aus ihren mittelalterlichen Grundlagen, ed. Alfred Hoffmann and Michael Mitterauer, iii (Vienna, 1973), 73–8; Helmuth Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie der österreichischen Landstände,” Anciens pays et assemblées d’états—Standen en landen 53 (1970): 147–51; Silvia Petrin, Die Stände des Landes Niederösterreich (St. Pölten and Vienna, 1982), 15; Silvia Petrin, “Die Stände Niederösterreichs im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, Adel im Wandel: Politik—Kultur— Konfession 1500–1700 (Vienna, 1990), 291; Hassinger, “Die Landstände,” 996–9; Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 251–3; and Jean Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 1975), 118–19. Cf. Sean T. Perrone, “Assemblies of the Clergy in Early Modern Europe,” Parliaments, Estates, and Representations 22 (2002): 45–56. 13 For an overview of Roman Catholic orders, see Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), 19–22. 14 Twenty-six is the number in two tables of precedence preserved in the minutes of the Estate of prelates, Apr. 19, 1690 and Feb. 3, 1701, NÖLA, HS 75. A. F. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die Krone in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I.,” MIÖG 14 (1893): 598 (fn. 2), offers the figure of 25 for the year 1674 and 27 for the “end of the [seventeenth] century.” Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 147, reports that the three Carthusian priors only “formally” became members of the Estates in 1670,

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near the town of Zwettl and known by that name: the collegiate church for secular clergy dominated the hill above the town while the more important religious house for regular clergy lay beyond it to the east in sylvan lowland typical of the setting of Cistercian monasteries. Unlike in other territories, no heads of foundations for women in Lower Austria, such as the affluent prioress of Kirchberg, belonged to the Estates. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the former collegiate churches at Zwettl, Ardagger, and Eisgarn had become one-man affairs whose provosts drew the entire income of the foundation and whose affiliated churches were managed by vicars rather than canons.15 The post of provost of all three went increasingly to noble clerics who accumulated livings. At least two Viennese bishops, Counts Ernst Trautson (1633–1702) and Sigismund Kollonitsch (1677–1751), were provosts of Zwettl.16 These changes did not apparently abridge the right of the three dignitaries to be present at the Estates, even as there is no indication that the respective bishops turned up there in this or any other capacity. The minor foundation of Kirnberg had evolved differently, having been incorporated in Cardinal Khlesl’s time into the provostship of the cathedral chapter of St. Stephen at Vienna, evidently with an eye to reviving an older right of the provost to attend the Estates.17 During our period, the latter’s claim to appear at the Estates seems to have derived from his possession of the Kirnberg deanery, though he appears irregularly under both titles in the official sources. Attempts to give him his own seat were not successful. Several prominent ecclesiastics did not sit with the prelates. The south German bishops with Austrian holdings, such as Passau, had gravitated in the fifteenth century to the Estate of lords. This anomaly has plausibly been explained by the desire of these semi-independent episcopal princelings to circumvent the authority of Austrian rulers over the temporal holdings of the clergy in their territories.18 This the year in which the emperor awarded them the title of “prelate.” This award is recorded in the “Codex Provincialis,” i, 259 (NÖLA). However, all three had earlier taken part in assemblies. Minutes of Estate of prelates, Sept. 4, 1651 (Gaming), Feb. 6, 1652 and June 20, 1653 (Mauerbach), July 19, 1658 (Aggsbach), July 27, 1658 and June 17, 1661 (Mauerbach), NÖLA, PA, HS 1a. 15 Godfrid Edmund Friess, “Geschichte des einstigen Collegiat-Stiftes Ardagger,” AÖG 46 (1871): 457; Gustav Reingrabner, “Ardagger in der Zeit der Reformation und der Katholisierung,” in Thomas Aigner, ed., Kollegiatstift Ardagger: Beiträge zu Geschichte und Kunstgeschichte (St. Pölten, 1999), 298; Marktgemeinde Eisgarn, Eisgarn: 50 Jahre Markterhebung—650 Jahre Propstei (Eisgarn, 1980), 19–21. 16 For the installation of Trautson as provost of Zwettl, see Ignaz Franz Keiblinger, Geschichte des Benedictiner-Stiftes Melk in Niederösterreich, seiner Besitzungen und Umgebungen, i (Vienna, 1851), 891 (fn. 2). 17 Hermann Zschokke, Geschichte des Metropolitan-Capitels zum Heiligen Stephan in Wien (Vienna, 1895), 264; Stradal, “Die Prälaten,” 74–5 (fn. 125), 77–8. I am grateful to Dr. Johann Weißensteiner of the Diözesanarchiv in Vienna for help on the question of the relationship between the provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral and the dean of Kirnberg. 18 Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 146; Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 251. For the monasteries as an extended part of the ruler’s domain, see Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter (5th edn., Darmstadt, 1963), 374–6. For a hint of the influence exercised by the bishop of Passau on the prelates’ internal politics, see Helga Penz, “Kloster—Archiv—Geschichte: Schriftlichkeit und Überlieferung im Augustiner-Chorherrenstift Herzogenburg in Niederösterreich 1300–1800,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 2004, 137.

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precedent accounts in turn for the membership of the newer bishoprics of Vienna and Wiener Neustadt, both established in the 1400s, in the Estate of lords. None of these clerics—the imperial bishops having been too grand and the others relatively too poor—was much of a presence at the Landhaus in our period.19 A passing exception was the bishop of Wiener Neustadt, Count Leopold Kollonitsch (1631–1707).20 As a professing knight of Malta and usufructuary of the order’s splendid wine-growing estate at Mailberg in the quarter below the Manhartsberg, he had earlier taken part in the lords’ proceedings. While the evidence suggests that his attendance as a Maltese knight had not been in dispute, the presence at the Estates of prebendaries of the Church’s old military orders (the Order of Malta and the Teutonic Order) was less common than in the duchy of Carniola, for example.21 As a churchman, Kollonitsch later transferred to Hungary, where he rose to the top of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Lower Austrian lords unanimously granted admission to his successor as cardinal-primate there, Christian Augustus of Saxe-Zeitz (1666–1725).22 The event was unique: no other ecclesiastical dignitary is on record as having acceded to the Estates (either lords or prelates) in such an ad hoc (personal) capacity. No doubt his role in converting his famous kinsman, Augustus the Strong of Saxony, to Catholicism, an event that had taken place at the spa town of Baden near Vienna, merited the honor. Ex officio, the abbot of Melk headed the Estate of prelates, a position that was challenged from a number of sides as late as the mid-seventeenth century. An authoritarian attempt in 1631 by Ferdinand II to settle an acrimonious dispute between Benedictine Melk and Augustinian Klosterneuburg—Lower Austria’s two richest monasteries—over the presidency of the prelates predictably did not end the pirouettes over precedence. The emperor favored Melk.23 At a session of the prelates held in the Viennese lodgings of Göttweig only a few years later, the Schotten prelate took advantage of the premier abbot’s absence to argue that Melk had the right to chair sessions held only in connection with “public diets.” Primacy at meetings that did not take place in that connection fell, in his view, to the curial representatives on 19 For “sporadic” earlier attendance at the Estates by “foreign” prelates, see Petrin, “Die Stände Niederösterreichs,” 299 (endnote 33). See also Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 134. 20 Minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 5, 1672, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. 21 Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 148. Gaston Graf von Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, Minister unter Maria Theresia, Josef II., Leopold II. und Franz I.: Ihre Selbstbiographien nebst einer kurzen Geschichte des Hauses Zinzendorf (Vienna, 1879), 222–3, reports that the commander of the Austrian bailiwick of the Teutonic Order did not take his seat in the lords between 1575 and 1792. The Maltese knight Kollonitsch’s presence in the lords is evidenced by their minutes of May 22, 1666, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. At this meeting, an objection was expressed to his possible election to a lords’ position on the Estates’ directorial committee given that “his” property (Mailberg) belonged to the Church (Order of Malta). There was no objection to his presence as such, no doubt given that Kollonitsch was a member of the Estates by birth. 22 Minutes of Estate of lords, July 16, 1708, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 218–21. 23 The relevant aulic decree is cited in Ernst Bruckmüller, “Die öffentliche Funktion des Stiftes,” in Ernst Bruckmüller, ed., 900 Jahre Benediktiner in Melk. Jubiläumsausstellung 1989 Stift Melk (Melk, 1989), 376. See also Keiblinger, Geschichte des Benedictiner-Stiftes Melk, 881.

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the Estates’ directorial committee—the so-called Deputies (Verordnete).24 This stance enjoyed enough support to carry the day, for a time at least. Even in Melk’s presence, the abbots of Schotten and Göttweig are recorded as having presided in their capacity as Deputies.25 This practice is apparent as late as the 1660s.26 But as diets increased in length later in the century, leaving correspondingly less time for non-concurrent curial meetings, the usage seems to have lapsed. The abbot of Melk assumed the more capacious ascendency that he would enjoy into the nineteenth century. Precedence among the prelates remained relatively fluid past the turn of the eighteenth century. There was considerable jostling, also among the leading houses, as evidenced by lists of members according to rank preserved in the consortium’s minutes for the years 1677, 1690, and 1701. The roll of 1677 includes those who were actually present, whereas the registers of 1690 and 1701 are more expansive (see Table 1.1). All three of the Church’s great established orders are represented among the top ten prelates in the three lists, with the Benedictines at a slight advantage. The primacy of Melk followed by Klosterneuburg and Göttweig in the second and third spots respectively is clear in every case. Among those absent in 1677 was the relatively senior provost of St. Pölten, as well as his Augustinian fellows of St. Andrä an der Traisen and Dürnstein in the Wachau valley. In 1677 the Cistercian monastery at Zwettl notably secured a place (four) immediately above its mother foundation at Heiligenkreuz (five), but dropped several rungs (to seven) in 1690, one of which was recovered in 1701 (six). In both of the later lists, Zwettl remained firmly behind Heiligenkreuz. The Benedictine abbots of Altenburg and Seitenstetten disagreed about their relative pre-eminence in 1690, whereas no record of the dispute is evident in 1701. Only in 1677 do the two Premonstratensian abbots (Geras and Pernegg) precede the abbot of Wiener Neustadt. Otherwise they immediately outranked the Carthusian prelates, who in turn all came directly ahead of the provosts of the collegiate churches. The provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral chapter brought up the rear on every list. Only one difference distinguishes the register of 1690 from one drawn up in 1701, which was perhaps indicative of a hardening in the order of precedence in the late seventeenth century.27 The question of admissions that became acute around the turn of the eighteenth century was complicated by uncertainty among the prelates themselves about whether they had the right to accept new members as did the noble Estates. At one level, the monasteries’ subordination to the ruler’s domain in temporal affairs seemed to limit their own conception of their political autonomy;28 at the

24

Minutes of Estate of prelates, Apr. 16, 1639, NÖLA, PA, HS 1. Minutes of Estate of prelates, Nov. 20, 1640 and Nov. 21, 1641, NÖLA, PA, HS 1. 26 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Dec. 9, 1662, NÖLA, PA, HS 1a. 27 The lists are found in the minutes of Estate of prelates, Mar. 11, 1677, NÖLA, HS 76; minutes of Estate of prelates, Apr. 19, 1690 and Feb. 3, 1701, NÖLA, HS 75. The list from 1690 has been reproduced in Bruckmüller, “Die öffentliche Funktion,” 376. 28 Minutes of Estate of prelates, May 4 (especially the remarks by the abbot of Altenburg) and May 8, 1702 (especially the contribution by the provost of Herzogenburg), NÖLA, HS 75. 25

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Table 1.1. Lists of prelates by rank, 1677 and 1690 1677

1690

1. abbot of Melk 2. provost of Klosterneuburg 3. abbot of Göttweig 4. abbot of Zwettl (Cistercian monastery) 5. abbot of Heiligenkreuz 6. provost of Herzogenburg 7. abbot of Lilienfeld 8. Schotten abbot (Vienna) 9. abbot of Altenburg 10. abbot of Seitenstetten 11. provost of St. Dorothea (Vienna) 12. abbot of Säusenstein 13. abbot of Kleinmariazell 14. provost of Geras 15. provost of Pernegg 16. abbot of Wiener Neustadt 17. prior of Gaming 18. prior of Aggsbach 19. provost of Ardagger 20. provost of Eisgarn 21. provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral chapter in Vienna

1. abbot of Melk 2. provost of Klosterneuburg 3. abbot of Göttweig 4. abbot of Heiligenkreuz 5. provost of St. Pölten 6. provost of Herzogenburg 7. abbot of Zwettl (Cistercian monastery) 8. abbot of Lilienfeld 9. Schotten abbot (Vienna) 10. abbot of Altenburg 11. abbot of Seitenstetten 12. provost of St. Dorothea (Vienna) 13. provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen 14. abbot of Säusenstein 15. abbot of Kleinmariazell 16. provost of Dürnstein 17. abbot of Wiener Neustadt 18. provost of Geras 19. provost of Pernegg 20. prior of Gaming 21. prior of Mauerbach 22. prior of Aggsbach 23. provost of Ardagger 24. provost of Zwettl (collegiate church) 25. provost of Eisgarn 26. dean of Kirnberg an der Mank (provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral chapter in Vienna)

same time, there were fears about the nobility’s attitude. The application for admission by the provost of the Viennese cathedral chapter in the spring of 1702 therefore met a cool response, despite the fact that the holders of the dignity—as deans of Kirnberg—had been among the consortium’s more active members, no doubt thanks to the cathedral’s convenient proximity to the Landhaus. The relatively strict conditions eventually set by the prelates, including a high fee, appear to have helped scuttle the plan.29 The provost’s financial circumstances had become comparatively more pinched as the bishop’s position had appreciated over time. Despite an endorsement by the Austrian aulic chancellor, the plan may have lacked the government’s full backing, which was not to be the case with respect to the new Benedictine abbot of Montserrat a few years later.

29

Minutes of Estate of prelates, May 8, 1702, NÖLA, HS 75.

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A foundation with its origins in the time of Ferdinand II, Montserrat was located just outside the walls of Vienna at the Schotten gate and fostered the cult of the Virgin Mary. After decades as a dependence of the religious house of the same name at Emaus (Emauzy) in Prague, it achieved the status of an abbey under the emperor Joseph I (1708). The authorities had carefully consulted the Estate of prelates about the advisability of the change.30 Its quick approval also signified willingness to recognize the cleric chosen to run the monastery as one of its own.31 Yet the formal admission of the new abbot, Anton Vogl (1666–1751), who enjoyed imperial favor, required written application.32 Accorded the last place in the order of precedence, behind the dean of Kirnberg, he was nevertheless dispensed from a high admissions fee for fear that he would appeal to Court.33 His acceptance constituted a novelty in two other respects. First, uniquely among the religious houses that belonged to the Estates, he owned no manorial property, a shortcoming the prelates directed him to remedy. Second, the transfer of a prelate from the Estates of one territory to those of another, as occurred in Vogl’s case, must have been a highly seldom occurrence. As abbot of Emaus in Prague, he had belonged to the Bohemian Estates. Among the high nobility, on the other hand, membership in the Estates of multiple territories was common by the later seventeenth century. Hovering in the background of both Montserrat’s admission and the failed effort of the cathedral chapter’s provost was the contentious question of the Society of Jesus, the most important of the new Catholic orders to sustain the CounterReformation in the Habsburg lands. Although its members stood in high favor with various emperors, including Ferdinand II, its representatives never joined the Estates in any of the Austrian duchies.34 The suggestion that its political activity had no need of the territorial diets is contradicted by the evidence that it tried, but failed, to gain a foothold in the Lower Austrian assembly.35 The effort foundered on the nobility’s firm opposition, as both the provost of Herzogenburg and the abbot of Wiener Neustadt noted in 1702 in the debate over admitting the provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral.36 This opposition explains the privilege issued in 1699 by Leopold I placing the Society’s college in Vienna and its incorporated properties on the same legal footing as the Estates. The privilege was renewed by both Joseph I (1707) and Charles VI (1716).37 30 Aulic decree to Estate of prelates, Nov. 22, 1707, NÖLA, PA, O, 5. See also Cölestin Rapf, “Wien, Schwarzspanier,” in Ulrich Faust and Waltraud Krassnig, eds., Die benediktinischen Mönchsund Nonnenklöster in Österreich und Südtirol (St. Ottilien, 2002), 818–20. 31 Estate of prelates to Emperor Joseph I, Dec. 11, 1707, NÖLA, PA, O, 5. 32 At the meeting of Aug. 31, 1708, NÖLA, HS 75. His application has been preserved in NÖLA, PA, O, 5. Vogl had enjoyed the favor of Leopold I, a circumstance mentioned by the abbot of Melk at Montserrat’s introduction to the Estates on Sept. 11, 1708. NÖLA, PA, O, 5. 33 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Sept. 6, 1708, NÖLA, HS 75. 34 Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 151; Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 252. On the Habsburgs and the Jesuits, see Robert Bireley, Religion and Politics in the Age of the Counterreformation: Emperor Ferdinand, William Lamormaini, S.J., and the Formation of Imperial Policy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1981); R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford, 1979), 72–3, 145. 35 The suggestion in Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 151 (fn. 178). 36 Minutes of Estate of prelates, May 4, 1702, NÖLA, HS 75. 37 “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 881–2 (NÖLA).

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The political dispute between Jesuits and corporate nobility had an eminently material aspect: access to the (landed) spoils of re-Catholicized Austria. Since at least the Thirty Years War, a struggle had been underway between nobility and clergy in the Austrian lands over the ownership of manorial property. For the nobility in a territory so well-endowed with large religious foundations, the threat posed by increasing clerical landownership seemed existential.38 Hence the otherwise immensely influential Jesuits had to be both kept out of the Estates and prevented as far as possible from acquiring the land considered a prerequisite for political life in an agrarian society. The new abbot of Montserrat’s formal presentation to the Estates (1708) provided lords and knights with another opportunity to warn the prelates: it was not to be seen as a precedent for the Jesuits.39 The Jesuit acquisition ten years later of the manor of Zellerndorf in a major viticultural area below the Manhartsberg dominated by the nobility caused particular affront. Threatening to invoke their right of redemption (Einstandsrecht), the Estates appealed to the government. The Jesuits were forced to sell.40 Over time, the Society was arguably the most important interest to remain outside the framework of the Estates, its absence laying bare a notable fault line within the ruling coalition of dynasty, Church, and nobility. The Society’s suppression in the Austrian territories (1773) inadvertently put an end to this state of affairs. But the reforms of state, religion, and society in the reign of Maria Theresa had little impact on the composition of the Estate of prelates in Lower Austria. Its membership remained almost stable between the admission of Montserrat in 1708 and the empress’s death in 1780, the only exception being the little-noted suppression of the collegiate church at Zwettl after the demise of its titular provost, Cardinal Kollonitsch, in 1751. The fact that its endowment was diverted to support a project considered more worthy of funding, while perhaps evocative of Joseph II’s later policies, hardly foreshadowed them. Neither the prelates nor the Estates formally protested this change, which theoretically deprived them of a member, but also coincided with the high tension between Landhaus and government after 1748 about more pressing issues. In addition, the funds in question, which had previously gone to keeping up an ecclesiastical dignitary with multiple livings, were now applied to an academy for noble youth.41 38 An expression of the nobility’s fears of biological extinction as a result of the Church’s recruitment practices is found in the communication from the territorial court of privileged jurisdiction (Landmarschall’sches Gericht) to the lords’ and knights’ Deputies, June 15, 1688, NÖLA, StB, 539, f. 119r–120r. On tensions between nobles and the Church, see Alessandro Catalano, “ ‘Das temporale wird schon so weith extendiret, daß der Spiritualität nichts als die arme Seel überbleibet’: Kirche und Staat in Böhmen (1620–1740),” in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006), 324–31; Petr Maťa, “Landstände und Landtage in den böhmischen und österreichischen Ländern (1620–1740): Von der Niedergangsgeschichte zur Interaktionsanalyse,” in Maťa and Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 371. 39 Recorded in the minutes of Estate of prelates, Sept. 11, 1708, NÖLA, HS 75. 40 “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 694–5 (NÖLA). For the Jesuits as manorial landowners in Inner Austrian territories, see Regina Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580–1630 (Oxford, 2001), 252. 41 The Theresan academy for noble youth (later known as the Theresianum) had been established a few years earlier. The information that the endowment of the collegiate church in Zwettl was diverted

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ADMISSION TO T HE ESTATES O F LORDS AND K NIGHTS As with the prelates, large landholdings had originally conditioned the summoning of nobles to the Lower Austrian diet. By our period, political participation had been decoupled from the ownership of demesne land, even as its possession remained both an abiding aspect of noble life in an agrarian world as well as a prerequisite for high office at the Landhaus. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Lower Austrian nobility was evolving into two formally closed corporations that followed an older division between “lords” and “knights.” Decisive in this development was a privilege issued in 1572 by the emperor Maximilian II (r. 1564–76) that allowed the two groups the autonomous regulation of membership.42 Such a grant was in itself a sign of the ruler’s rising importance in the definition of noble status, an importance that Habsburg rulers heightened through their social and confessional strategies. According to the privilege of 1572, only those nobles were to be allowed to attend assemblies who had been explicitly authorized to do so by the noble Estates themselves. As the historian Karin MacHardy noted, the aim was not to exclude newcomers altogether, but rather to ensure the Estates a voice in the admission of those who had received a grant of nobility from the ruler.43 The archducal privilege responded to native resentment at the alleged buy-up of manorial land below the Enns by rich, ennobled “foreigners”, and it aimed to impede such purchases as far as possible by reserving the political rights connected with its possession to established families. The episode also featured a confessional aspect at a time when the dynasty remained Catholic and much of the nobility adhered to Lutheranism. There was clearly no intention on the part of either Maximilian or the Estates of de-coupling political participation from seigniorial landholding. The privilege of 1572 indeed explicitly reiterated the connection. Yet resolutions of the diet at the time accepted the reality of non-landed members: those newly admitted were to be required to buy real property of a certain value within a year of joining the

to this purpose in 1751 is found today on a plaque mounted near the gate of the church. J. Schwarz, “Geschichte der k.k. Theresianischen Akademie von ihrer Gründung bis zum Curatorium Sr. Excellenz Anton Ritter von Schmerling, 1746–1865,” in Jahres-Bericht des Gymnasiums der k.k. Theresianischen Akademie in Wien für das Schuljahr 1890 (Vienna, 1890), 8, notes that the original foundation created to support the academy included “income” from the “parochial estates” of Zwettl. For monastic reforms in other territories of the Monarchy before 1780, see Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 186–92. 42 A copy of “Kayser Maximiliani 2di Confirmation über der zwayen Stendt verglichne Ordnung die Annembung der newen Landt leuth betr.,” Feb. 10, 1572, is found in NÖLA, RA, AI, f. 43–45. Evidence of such practice is a decision of the Estate of lords on May 21, 1563 to exclude representatives of “foreign nations” from their consortium. NÖLA, HA, Lade IV, Nr. 5, f. 2. See also Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 2–3; Silvia Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand 1711–1780,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1980, 7–8. For the problem of landholding and early modern political rights, see Wolfgang Neugebauer, Standschaft als Verfassungsproblem: Die historischen Grundlagen ständischer Partizipation in ostmitteleuropäischen Regionen (Goldbach bei Aschaffenburg, 1995). 43 Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003), 139.

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Estates.44 This provision aimed at preserving the connection. In 1606 the assembly coupled the possession of a manor with the right to vote.45 But this late attempt to maintain the old relationship between land and political rights failed. A few years later, another ordinance required that new inductees who did not own the prescribed land within one year had to deposit 10,000 florins at 5 percent in the Estates’ treasury.46 (In 1711 the sum demanded would be reduced to 1,000 florins.47) Long before 1620, therefore, the noble Estates had in effect accepted the presence in their ranks of those neither landed nor “native.” At the same time, they asserted their freedom to regulate attendance at the diet and the access to political rights that it entailed. Those outside the Estates who held manorial property paid a tax penalty. The evolution into closed corporations occurred in the other main patrimonial lands of the Habsburgs as well. The Bohemian Estates had acquired the right to regulate admissions as early as 1554.48 On the same day as their Lower Austrian counterparts, the Estates of Styria received an almost identical guarantee of their corporate autonomy.49 The nobility of other Inner Austrian territories appears to have assumed control over membership without explicit permission. In 1591 the Carinthians implemented a statute of admissions, which was revised at least once (1611) before a new version in 1616.50 These moves fell near the height of confessional tension between Catholic ruler and Protestant Estates. The Styrian nobility’s ordinance of 1609 belongs in the same context.51 That the nobility of Carniola enacted its first statute in 1624 was indicative of a lag on the monarchy’s southeast margins, but also of continuity in the autonomous regulation of admissions procedures in the Austrian lands after the divide of 1620.52 If political participation was effectively detached from manorial landownership, status at the Estates was increasingly linked to dynastic power, which was ever more energetically Catholic. In making “merit” earned in the ruler’s service a prerequisite for entry into its curiae, the Lower Austrian nobility had already made the correlation explicit at a time when Protestants still constituted the majority of its members. The provision was not dropped even as Habsburg rulers pushed an increasingly counter-reformatory agenda regarding admissions to the Estates after 44 A copy of the statute of admission from 1579 in NÖLA, RA, AI, f. 73–74. See also Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 4; Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 39–40; MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 139. 45 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 5; Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 40. 46 A copy of the knights’ statute of admissions from 1612 is found in NÖLA, RA, AI, f. 94–101. 47 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 5–6, 53–4. 48 MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage, 137. See Carl Edmund Langer, Die Ahnen- und Adelsprobe, die Erwerbung, Bestätigung und der Verlust der Adelsrechte in Österreich (Vienna, 1862), 72–4, for a list of privileges regulating admission to the Estates of various Habsburg lands. 49 A copy of the privilege issued by the emperor Maximilian II on Feb. 10, 1572 is preserved in StLA, LAA, III, 2, 8. 50 The statutes of Feb. 17, 1591 and Feb. 26, 1616, as well as the revision of 1611, are found in KLA, StA, Abt. 1, 445, f. 13–29. 51 The statute is from Feb. 20, 1609, StLA, LAA, III, 2, 8. 52 The statute of admissions from Jan. 16, 1624 is preserved in AS2, I, 2, folder “Statutum wie es mit der Aufnahme neuer Landleute gehalten werden soll.”

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1580. The ruler’s control of appointments to the leading offices of the noble consortia (Landmarschall in the lords and Landuntermarschall in the knights) facilitated this policy.53 Yet the ever more irreconcilable political claims made in connection with confession and the associated conception of two antagonistic poles of authority have tended to obscure the growing significance of access to the locus of power across the divide of 1620.54 An enduring theme of noble history— perhaps the only one—has been the attraction to power and the drive to limit access to it under the shifting circumstances of time. The nobility had always asserted the right of privileged proximity to the prince and a prerogative on places of confidence and offices. Without such perquisites, corporate exclusivity for its own sake offered few palpable benefits in a monarchy. This fundamental pattern would remain recognizable throughout the disorder of the first half of the seventeenth century. The Protestant nobility’s failure in 1620 to define power relations on its own terms dramatically accelerated the process of confessionalizing the Estates. Despite the efforts of previous decades, Catholics had remained a distinct minority at the Landhaus.55 Unlike in the other central lands, the process of eliminating the Protestants would continue in Lower Austria long after 1648 due in part to the famous religious guarantee that Ferdinand II granted in 1620 in exchange for the nobility’s submission. Yet the arc of an increasingly titled, Catholic, and aulic nobility, concentrated in the lords, putting ever more socio-political space between itself and the lesser nobility in the knights was reinforced.56 The events of 1620 opened up new opportunities for the ruler to impose his equation of confession and loyalty. Ferdinand II’s aggressive support for partisans who sought entry into the Estates is on record not only in other territories but also in the land below the Enns.57 He and his immediate successor formally granted access to the Estates in violation of the privilege of 1572. Some of these awards covered the patrimonial lands generally; at least one applied to Lower Austria in particular. In early 1626 Ferdinand formally granted admission to the Estate of knights to the arrriviste Jacob Berchtold († 1641). Yet even at the height of his authority, the emperor had 53

MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 142–6. For the increasing importance of the expansion of state power for the transformation (and in some cases) substantiation of noble power, see Hillay Zmora, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and the State in Europe, 1300–1800 (London and New York, 2001), 60; Hamish M. Scott and Christopher Storrs, “The Consolidation of Noble Power in Europe, c. 1600–1800,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2007), i, 34–52; Hamish M. Scott, “ ‘Acts of Time and Power’: The Consolidation of Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Europe, c. 1580–1720,” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 30 (2008): 27–9; Stefan Ehrenpreis, “Österreichischer Adel, habsburgische Höfe und kaiserliche Zentralverwaltung (1580–1620),” in Ronald G. Asch, ed., Europäischer Adel im Ancien Régime: Von der Krise der ständischen Monarchien bis zur Revolution (ca. 1600–1789) (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2001), 235–61. 55 Gustav Reingrabner, “Der evangelische Adel,” in Adel im Wandel, 205, estimated that two-tenths of the Lower Austrian nobility was Catholic in 1610 and only about one-fourth at the beginning of Thirty Years War. 56 On this point, see MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 190–3. 57 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 7, 9, 50. An example from Carniola is the aulic decree of Dec. 12, 1623 to the Estates of Carniola. AS 2, Reg. 1, carton 846, folder P (Martin von Palmburg). 54

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difficulty imposing his will if the Estates refused to cooperate. The knights delayed for more than two years before accepting Berchtold under the condition that he deposit a capital of 10,000 florins in the Estates’ treasury and pay the required admissions fee.58 At the same time, Ferdinand’s authoritarian approach to membership in the Estates vitiates any stark contrast between the practice in his Austrian and Bohemian lands. In both places he attempted to arrogate unto himself the formal right of bestowal. Ultimately, he and his successors only made it stick in Bohemia. Formally, the Lower Austrian privilege of 1572 remained in effect and the noble Estates would revive it in due time. Quite apart from the absorption of ever larger numbers of Catholic lineages, the noble consortia were transformed by the loss of Protestants, a process that in Lower Austria would come to a close ironically around the time of Joseph II’s famous patent of toleration some 150 years later. The first Protestants to disappear had participated in the uprising that ended at White Mountain and were either killed, proscribed, or exiled as a result. Their number, relatively small, was swollen by others who refused to swear allegiance to Ferdinand. In the following decades a combination of economic misery and counter-reformatory pressure induced larger numbers of Protestant nobles to emigrate despite the guarded archducal pledge of religious liberty for those who had sworn the oath of loyalty.59 A decree of April 30, 1629 barring the admission of Protestants to the Lower Austrian Estates, which followed outright bans on the Protestant nobility of Upper and Inner Austria, ensured that Lutheranism would die out among the nobility below the Enns by attrition, if not otherwise.60 The Peace of Westphalia’s confirmation of limited freedom of belief by Protestant nobles in Lower Austria did little to alleviate the tenuousness of their situation. Even so, some continued to attend the Estates; the occasional one held office at the Landhaus as late as the 1720s—an unheard-of state of affairs elsewhere in the Austrian duchies or Bohemia. The wave of departures into exile continued past 1660 despite the guarantees of 1620 and 1648.61 After the

58 For Ferdinand’s original grant to Berchtold, see Karl Friedrich von Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das Deutsche Reich und die Österreichischen Erblande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), i, 73. Berchtold’s admissions file: NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C12. 59 For the pledge, see Viktor Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände Niederösterreichs im XVII. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ständischen Verfassung,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 296–308; Bireley, Religion and Politics, 9; MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 198. See also Arndt Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus und konfessionelle Identität: Die protestantischen Herren und Ritter in den österreichischen Erblanden nach 1620 (Vienna and Munich, 2013), 28–33, 151–213. 60 A copy of the decree of Apr. 30, 1629, addressed to Landuntermarschall Johann Rupprecht Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, in NÖLA, HA, Lade XV, carton 16, folder 2, f. 1. Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 7–8. Gustav Reingrabner, “Der protestantische Adel in Niederösterreich—seine Zusammensetzung und sein Beitrag zur Reformationsgeschichte des Landes,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1973, 140, mentions a “patent” of Apr. 30, 1629. For the measures in Upper and Inner Austria, see Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation, 138–40; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 33–6. For the relevant provision of the Peace of Westphalia, see Otto Brunner, Adeliges Landleben und europäischer Geist: Leben und Werk Wolf Helmhards von Hohberg 1612–1688 (Salzburg, 1949), 53. 61 Reingrabner, “Der protestantische Adel,” 141, reports that the 1660s marked the end of major emigration.

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conclusion of peace, the government had renewed its campaign of Catholic conversion, isolating the Protestant holdouts even more. The expansion of dynastic power evident in these events and in what one historian has characterized as “the consolidation of the [Lower Austrian] elite around the state” had lasting consequences for the nobility’s inner structure and balance.62 During the seventeenth century, Catholic social climbers replaced the older nobility in the Estate of knights, which had been more heavily Protestant than the lords. The knight Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg (1612–88) is the most memorable victim of the decline. To be sure, the Lutheran Hohberg descended from an established noble lineage, though one whose wealth had been based on sixteenth-century service to the Habsburgs. The family fortunes decayed as confessional differences became politicized, while the crisis around 1620 made a “rebel” out of Hohberg’s father. Hohberg himself was a minor landowner largely cut off from Court benefaction. The award of the baronial title and transfer from the knights to the lords, both in 1659, did little to alter the dim prospects.63 Given that Hohberg remained true to the faith of his ancestors, the admission to the prestigious “old lineages” of the lords was a dead end. He perished as a religious exile in Regensburg. The pressure to convert or emigrate modified, though in the end did not nullify, the admissions autonomy granted the two noble Estates in 1572. It would be a prized privilege of the increasingly Catholic nobility, just as it had been of the overwhelmingly Protestant one. During Leopold I’s long reign (1657–1705), outside encroachment on curial independence became entirely uncommon. Unlike in the Inner Austrian duchies, where separate noble consortia were little developed and the diets themselves decided whom to admit, decisions in Lower Austria were reserved to the individual Estates of lords and knights. Once a candidate had been accepted into one of them, he was simply “introduced” into the larger assembly of the Estates. The principal exception to this practice concerned the rare incorporation of women, who could belong to the Estates under their own names, though not take part in gatherings. When Maria Anna Victoria of Savoy (1683–1763), Prince Eugene’s heiress, was admitted in 1737, a male proxy appeared in her stead.64 The distinction between “admission” and “introduction” allowed the lords on one occasion a way around the rule of 1629 banning Protestants. In 1705 they opened their chamber to Count Christoph Ernst Fuchs († 1719), a Lutheran imperial aulic councilor from Franconia who had acquired a small property in the Leitha hills close to the Hungarian border. But the actual “introduction” was restricted to his Catholic son.65 Fuchs’s good connections to the 62 Robert Douglas Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God: The Establishment of Secular Authority and the Pacification of Lower Austria, 1618–1648,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979, xviii. 63 As late as 1686, the lords agreed to the transfer of a Protestant (Baron Hector Friedrich Kornfail) from the knights into their consortium. Franz Karl Wißgrill, Schauplatz des landsässigen NiederOesterreichischen Adels vom Herren- und Ritterstande, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1794–1804), v, 262. 64 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 299. 65 Minutes of Estate of lords, May 5, 1705, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, 1, p. 173. Oswald von Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat: Bedeutung und Verfassung, Schicksal und Besetzung einer obersten Reichsbehörde von 1559 bis 1806 (Vienna, 1942), 346. Fuchs married a daughter of the Lower

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Court of Vienna suggest that his welcome at the Landhaus enjoyed tacit official approval. In practice, the formal requirements for admission changed little after 1620, despite adjustments to the norms. A candidate’s noble standing was expected to correspond to the consortium in question. The higher, titled nobility (baron, count, and prince) corresponded to the lords, nobles with the simple “von” and those of the rank of knight (Ritter) to the lesser body. An elevation in status might prompt a transfer from the knights to the lords, but this was not automatic. New barons and even counts stayed on in the knights because of the seniority they enjoyed, or because they lacked heirs who would benefit from the change, or for other reasons. It is striking that neither noble birth nor ancestry was a prerequisite for enrollment: both Estates accepted nobles of recent vintage into their “new lineages,” if sometimes with misgivings. On condition that he not seek office at the Landhaus, the lords let in a wealthy financier and freshly minted baron of advanced years who conveniently had no children.66 Yet unlike in certain Inner Austrian territories, those without formal noble status were not allowed into the corporate nobility. Then again, documented proof of the rank claimed was not demanded in any systematic way, even as admissions procedures regularized somewhat over time. Thus the occasional noble usurper with all the necessary attributes surely slipped into the Estates of Lower Austria as well.67 Above all, money was required to join, even as the Estates were not a class in the Marxist sense given the presence of poor nobles as well.68 Failing proprietorship of a manor, which remained the ideal, a sizable deposit in the Estates’ treasury was required. Such investments were less common and are reported to have been less important to corporate finances in Lower Austria than in some Inner Austrian lands, where membership was more or less openly sold.69 The Estates below the Enns levied a tax (unbegüterte Landmannsteuer) on persons not possessed of the requisite seigniorial land. As a rule, both noble curiae imposed a high, one-off fee on those admitted, a charge all the more onerous given the “gratifications” expected at all levels from doorman to curial president.70 But given that the Estates let in those from whom they themselves expected to gain, they often granted dispensations from some charges. A qualified exception concerned nobles who belonged to a corresponding corps in one of the other Austrian territories and thus enjoyed a claim to discounted admission.

Austrian Landmarschall Mollart. She was governess and later confidante to the future empress Maria Theresa. 66 Minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 15, 1701, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, 1, pp. 127–8. 67 See William D. Godsey, “Adelsautonomie, Konfession und Nation im österreichischen Absolutismus ca. 1620–1848,” ZHF 33 (2006): 213, for the admission of non-nobles in Inner Austria. 68 William Doyle, Aristocracy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2010), 27, pointed up the oftoverlooked importance of wealth generally for joining the nobility. 69 Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 257, reports that such loans constituted “an essential support of corporate credit” in Carinthia. 70 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 22–35; Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 29–38.

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In other words, the rules governing admission were flexible, allowing the Estates to draw the maximum possible benefit from the circumstances. Pedigrees and proofs of noble descent—such as those prescribed by the military orders of knighthood, cathedral chapters, and other closed corporations in the wider Holy Roman Empire—were required only for advancing within the curiae from the “new” into the “old lineages.” Here again systematic rules consistently applied did not determine actual practice. In the later seventeenth century, the question of genealogy played less of a role in the knights’ promotions than service, merit, and standing in a body dominated by homines novi and their immediate descendants. With a time lag of as little as a decade, the knights elevated the very same person into their “old lineages” whom they had earlier admitted to their “new lineages.” In the lords, proofs seem to have been required chiefly from nobles from outside the central lands, such as Ferdinand marchese Obizzi or Count Max Joseph Lannoy, whose backgrounds and relations would have been less known.71 There is little evidence to suggest that their papers were given the scrutiny usual at the Teutonic Order or the Rhenish collegiate foundations. In the lords, a transfer from the “new lineages” to the prestigious “old lineages” was a seldom occurrence. These arrangements allowed the Estates, especially the lords, to let in the wealthy, exalted, well-connected, influential, and, perhaps, powerful—while keeping the others at bay. Leading aristocrats inevitably combined such attributes in an unrivaled way, while even the greatest among them saw admission to the Estate of lords in the monarchy’s central territory as adding “luster” to their names.72 Curial practice was also apparent in relation to ministers and other dignitaries of less impressive background. The aulic chancellors who ex officio managed the Estates in the Austrian duchies on behalf of the central authority were frequently not of high birth. But the Estates absorbed them all—including Matthias Pricklmayr (in office 1640–56), the son of local peasants. Described as “energetic, industrious, and uninspired,” Pricklmayr enjoyed the patronage of Count Maximilian Trauttmansdorff (1584–1650), the leading figure at Ferdinand III’s Court. Because of his client’s origins, even Trauttmansdorff opposed—unsuccessfully—a barony for his protégé.73 Pricklmayr was the only aulic chancellor who had to settle for the knights rather than the lords. The obscure, north Italian parentage of Pricklmayr’s predecessor in office, the first Austrian aulic chancellor, Baron Johann Baptist Verda von Verdenberg (1620–37), offered more room for maneuver. Yet the lords managed to admit and

71 Godsey, “Adelsautonomie,” 206 (fn. 25); Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 308. For the use of proofs in the Upper Austrian Estate of lords, see Petr Maťa, “Ort der Distinktion—Ort der Entscheidung: Zur Teilnahme des Adels am oberösterreichischen Landtag unter Karl VI.,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 212–13. 72 Quotation from the application for admission by Prince Ferdinand Schwarzenberg, Feb. 11, 1694, NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten, S9. 73 Henry Frederick Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London, 1943), 323–5.

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offend Verdenberg at the same time by rejecting his brother.74 This was symptomatic of the situation only a few years after the open clash between ruler and Protestant nobility. A generation later, the incorporation of Aulic Chancellor Baron Johann Paul Hocher (1667–83), the ennobled son of a lawyer in Freiburg, came off more smoothly despite the ticklish circumstances. Hocher had replaced a Lower Austrian of more established lineage, Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein, at the chancellery. This drew caustic commentary by the latter on his background.75 Only two years later, Sprinzenstein, now Lower Austrian Landmarschall, presided over the unanimous induction of Hocher by the lords.76 A burgher by birth, Hocher had already married off one daughter to a local noble, while another would soon follow, and he rather than Sprinzenstein was to be the strong man at Leopold I’s Court. Hocher’s hatchet man, Christoph Abele, also joined the lords after helping to bring down the long-serving president of the Aulic Chamber, Count Georg Ludwig Sinzendorff, and stepping into his place. Sinzendorff hailed from one of the archduchy’s ancient families. Hocher’s successor, the Rhinelander Theodor Stratmann (1683–93), the son of a non-noble jurist, received a place in the lords too, as did Baron Johann Friedrich Seilern, the author of the Pactum mutuae successionis that underlay the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713. The son of a south German craftsman, Seilern served for a decade as Austrian aulic chancellor (1705–15).77 Like the Verdenbergs and Hocher’s grandchildren in the female line (belonging to the Kuefstein and Pergen lineages), Seilern’s descendants quickly integrated into the aristocracy. These admissions and others—including Prince Eugene of Savoy (1717), the marqués de Rialp (1726), and State Chancellor Ulfeld (1745)—reflected existing constellations of power. The lords themselves hoped to win over the mighty. They inducted Stratmann “on their own initiative.”78 Seilern was said to be “much inclined” to the Estates. The vote on his admission was unanimously positive.79 With the incorporation of Rialp, a Spanish favorite of Charles VI, the lords aimed both to please the ruler and oblige the inductee.80 At the same time, the nobility in 74 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 340–1; Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 383–5; Johann Baptist Witting, ed., J. Siebmacher’s großes Wappenbuch, vol. IV/4/ii: Der niederösterreichische landständische Adel (Nuremberg, 1918), 449–50. 75 Stefan Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz unter Kaiser Leopold I.: Personelle Strukturen und Methoden zur politischen Entscheidungsfindung am Wiener Hof (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 140. 76 Estate of lords to Sprinzenstein, July 8, 1670, NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten, H-12. For the marriages of Hocher’s daughters, see William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert, 150–1. 77 On the backgrounds and careers of these men, see Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz, 136–42 (Hocher), 178–80 (Stratmann), 208–9 (Seilern), and 221–5 (Abele). For the Sinzendorff affair, see Hansdieter Körbl, Die Hofkammer und ihr ungetreuer Präsident: Eine Finanzbehörde zur Zeit Leopolds I. (Vienna and Munich, 2009). 78 Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 317. On Stratmann’s background, see Max Braubach, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen: Eine Biographie, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1963–5), i, 104, 388. Stratmann invested money at the Estates. “Specification Aller und Jeder Credits Partheyen so Ao. 1693 bey Einer Löb: N:Ö: Landtschafft Capitalia angelegt,” NÖLA, StA, A5, Nr. 14, carton 2, f. 367v. 79 Minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 30, 1705, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 174–5. 80 Minutes of Estate of lords, Feb. 21, 1726, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1720–45, p. 87.

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its increasingly Catholic guise after 1620 was prepared to defend its magic circle. The status of lord qualified its holder not only for office at the Landhaus but also for certain judicial appointments and privileged entrée to Court (the rank of chamberlain was reserved to lords). Socially, it offered incontrovertible proof that a person with the outward trappings of nobility enjoyed broader acceptance. For precisely that reason, the admission of leading ministers to the corporate nobility strengthened the government’s authority in a world in which social distinction was indispensable to the exercise of power. Just as the inundation of “foreigners” and other alleged undesirables had set off alarm bells at the Protestant-dominated Estates before 1620, so the ever more Catholic nobility in succeeding decades fretted about inflation of numbers and debasement of quality. Many who had successfully squeezed in themselves wanted, quite logically, to keep out those who came after. During his stay at Münster for the peace negotiations that culminated in 1648, a major beneficiary of the new order, Count Trauttmansdorff, ruefully reported home about the dismal reputation of the Austrian nobility in the wider Holy Roman Empire—“much disdained.”81 Repairing a state of affairs engendered by thirty years of turmoil would ironically fall to the very lineages that had most profited. Hence the erection of new barriers of exclusivity was not fully underway until later. As late as the 1660s, the heads of both knights and lords were themselves beneficiaries of the previous upheaval. The first stabs at greater exclusivity coincided with a wider attempt at the Landhaus to reimpose order after a generation of war and upheaval. The lords focused on stemming the tide they saw sweeping in from the knights, who were accused of scandalously inducting “artisans” into their midst.82 The year 1654 saw an attempt to limit the lesser consortium’s autonomy by restricting entry to the noble Estates jointly.83 Prestige and numbers would have given the lords the upper hand. Though the knights managed to deflect the blow, it did force them to renew or tighten up procedures and requirements. A series of measures between 1654 and 1669 testify to their attempts at greater selectiveness.84 Closing the gate after the horse had bolted hardly proved easier in the lords. Shortly after assailing the knights, they accepted a shady mint master, rich financier, and freshly patented baron who appropriately sported the title “Baron Chaos.” Born under the more prosaic family name of Richthauser, Chaos was the son of a well-to-do spicer and Court purveyor. His induction did involve a compromise: on the very same day that he was accepted into their ranks the lords resolved stricter standards.85 A pivotal installment in the ongoing effort to balance openness and selectiveness concerned the case of an imperial factotum, Baron Johann Walderode († 1674). Trauttmansdorff ’s letter from Jan. 4, 1647 quoted in Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 324. [Robert Freiherr von Walterskirchen], Die Walterskirchen zu Wolfsthal: Gesammelte Nachrichten über dieses Geschlecht, ii (The Hague, 1893), 170. 83 Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 63–4. 84 Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 14, 29, 50, 62. 85 For Chaos, see Wißgrill, Schauplatz, ii, 30–4; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 149. Cf. Felix Czeike, ed., Historisches Lexikon Wien, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1992–7), i, 561–2. 81 82

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Walderode was an archetypal social climber of the day whose own talents—as a jurist—had taken him far. His time as privy secretary to the emperor Leopold I represented the apogee of a career spent in various central chancelleries and the Imperial Aulic Council.86 Repeated elevations in status by both ruler and Estates punctuated his rise. The Lower Austrian knights inducted him in 1652; only twelve years later he advanced into their “old lineages.” Eventually, his refusal to pay the special tax imposed on those lacking manorial property prompted the Estates to ban him from their assemblies. Walderode was not one to take such a decision lying down. His prickly personality (he was known admiringly, if hardly affectionately, as the “minutes of the Imperial Aulic Council [Reichshofratsprotokoll]”), his readiness to invoke imperial protection, and the Estates’ resolve to enforce their authority within their own walls led to a years-long dispute over the issue of (his) membership.87 A delicate compromise that ultimately reinforced corporate self-rule was finally hammered out. While Walderode paid his back taxes, the lords agreed to take him on as a new baron (1671), even if this was under circumstances that implied that he had not theretofore belonged to the Estates. Because this deal involved the payment of a higher fee than would have been needed by simple transfer from the knights, he again demurred. Several more years passed before the resulting knot could be untied.88 More important is that the original compromise involved a general guarantee by Leopold of the nobility’s right “at all times” to regulate incorporations into its ranks “independently.”89 The Estates interpreted this as a confirmation of the privilege bestowed by Maximilian II almost a century before. Leopold’s own grant, which signaled the confidence of the regime a half-century after 1620, became firmly implanted among Lower Austrian corporate liberties. With greater success than the knights, the lords developed more sophisticated admissions procedures while continuing to recognize the advantages of absorbing new nobles. Special appointees to vet candidates began to appear in their records just as the Walderode case was simmering. Later known as “commissioners” (Herrenstandskommissare), they became permanent rather than ad hoc.90 Chosen in pairs, they evidenced both the rising number of nobles eligible for admission and the more regularized nature of curial business by around 1700. Invariably they were drawn from among the eminent lineages, and often from the lords on the Estates’ executive committee (the so-called Ausschuß ). They included Bishop Kollonitsch of Wiener Neustadt (1672), Count Julius Traun (1701), Count Philipp Christoph Breunner (1701), Count Johann Wilhelm Wurmbrand (1702), and

86

Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 240–1. The beginning of the affair is evident in the aulic decree to the Estates’ Deputies, Sept. 9, 1669, NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 356r–358v. 88 Walderode to the Estate of lords, Feb. 25, 1673, NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten, W-3. Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 348–9. Walderode became a baron in 1666. Frank, Standeserhebungen, v, 179. 89 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 3, 1671, NÖLA, StB, 532, f. 187v–188v. 90 An early reference to two lords (Count Sigismund Herberstein and the bishop of Wiener Neustadt) responsible for “elaborating on the [candidates’] genealogies” (zur Elaborirung der Genealogien) is found in the minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 5, 1672, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. 87

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Count Gotthard Helfried Welz (1708). Where necessary, they prepared proper “reports” (Relationen) on aspirants that took into account heraldic devices, patents of nobility, family trees, pedigrees, and other relevant material. The weight accorded the counsels of these men in turn strongly influenced curial decisions.91 Of all the commissioners, Count Johann Wilhelm Wurmbrand (1670–1750), one of eighteenth-century Austria’s leading jurists, was the most outstanding (see Figure 1.1). For nearly a half-century he held the charge, making it a highly coveted one.92 His career was full of the paradoxes so common to Habsburg history. Born at the family castle of Steyersberg some fifty miles south of Vienna into one of the dwindling number of Lutheran lineages, he studied in Leipzig and Utrecht, where he became familiar with the latest currents of legal and historical thought. Even before he assumed a Protestant seat on the Imperial Aulic Council on the recommendation of Brandenburg’s elector (1697), he had been active at the Lower Austrian Estates, to which he belonged by birth. As he built up a reputation for talent and diligence at the Council, he also became the driving force behind the ordering and classification of records at the Landhaus—in particular the creation of archives of the Estate of lords and a modern register (Matrikel ) of member lineages.93 No mere antiquarianism, such activity had eminently political significance in the context of an early modern corporation. In the process, the Protestant Wurmbrand oddly facilitated the institutional consolidation of the post-1620 order. In a protracted dispute between the noble curiae concerning questions of precedence in the 1710s—one that was ultimately grounded in the dynasty’s cultivation of the titled aristocracy and the consequent devaluation of the lesser nobility—he applied his energy and expertise to substantiating the lords’ claims. He authored the tract they submitted to Court on this question.94 Perhaps it was only logical that Wurmbrand finally joined the Church of Rome (1722), a step that made him eligible for the highest offices of government. In 1728 he became president of the Imperial Aulic Council, a position renewed in 1745 after the Bavarian interlude.95 During his long tenure, the tribunal operated as a guardian of the liberties of the Estates in the German territories, especially the right to consent to taxation, while his career between Hofburg (the Council’s seat) and Landhaus very much suggests how the government’s policy toward the intermediary powers in the wider empire

91 An early example of such a report, dated Sept. 5, 1685, on the case of Johann Peter von Mallendein is found in NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten, M-2. 92 Wurmbrand is first referred to explicitly as “commissioner” in the minutes of the Estate of lords, Mar. 11, 1702, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 132–4. He held the appointment until his death in 1750. 93 Minutes of Estate of lords, Feb. 11, 1696, Mar. 11, 1697, July 4, 1701, Aug. 29, 1702, July 16, and Aug. 4, 1708, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 75, 86–7, 131–2, 145, 218–21, 224. The results of his work also appeared in print under his own name: Collectanea GenealogicoHistorica, ex Archivo Inclytorum Austriæ Inferioris Statuum (Vienna, 1705). 94 Minutes of Estate of lords, Jan. 29 and Feb. 17, 1716, June 21, 1719, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 336, 341, 391–2. 95 Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 336–7; Ines Peper, Konversionen im Umkreis des Wiener Hofes um 1700 (Vienna and Munich, 2010), 96–7; also Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, passim.

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Figure 1.1. Count Johann Wilhelm Wurmbrand: “Commissioner of the Estate of lords” (as such the last Protestant officeholder at the Lower Austrian Estates); President of the Imperial Aulic Council beginning 1728. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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and the hereditary lands converged.96 As a lords’ commissioner before his conversion, Wurmbrand was to be the last Protestant officeholder at the Lower Austrian Estates. The prestige with which he endowed the post is evident in the names of a few of his successors: Count Ferdinand Bonaventura Harrach (1758, president of the Imperial Aulic Council); Prince Franz Liechtenstein (1778); and Count Karl Zinzendorf (1787, a leading member of Joseph II’s government). The Estate of knights had no direct counterpart to the lords’ commissioners. Instead, a committee consisting of the Landuntermarschall and representatives of the “old lineages” examined the suitability of candidates for inclusion in the more exclusive circle. Though a curial resolution of 1654 had provided for such a body at a time when the lords were pushing the lesser nobility to be more discriminating, a similar procedure had in fact been in use earlier. In many cases, written reports to the larger assembly of knights have survived. But, as in the lords, the actual practice of admissions neither conformed consistently to established norms nor was it a bureaucratic process. Wurmbrand’s handwriting is also apparent on a noble protest at a perceived violation of admissions autonomy under Charles VI. In 1724 the Austrian Aulic Chancellery decreed in no uncertain terms that membership grants required prior clearance.97 An objection to a specific case will account for this démarche. Even more certain is that the authorities did not act because the Estates had incorporated disloyal or politically suspect elements into their ranks. For their part, the Estates supplied a sober, well-documented survey of the autonomy they claimed back to 1572.98 Careful mention was made of Leopold I’s confirmation of 1671 in connection with the Walderode affair, as well as of the procedures that the curiae had in place to prevent abuse. Almost superfluously, they noted their openness to the ruler’s “recommendations” of candidates. Though the government did not officially withdraw the decree, it became a dead letter, even as the affair raised official awareness of the problem of access to the Estates in the Austrian lands, possibly in connection with the tax privileges that nobles enjoyed at a time of increasing fiscal and financial hardship. In the 1730s the same government dispatched a commission to Klagenfurt to look into what was regarded as the lax management of admissions at the Estates there.99 In consequence, the Carinthian diet approved a statute that substantially reaffirmed the rules that the predominantly Protestant Estates had implemented more than a century before.100 Typically, the solution was seen to be a return to an earlier, supposedly “ideal” condition. 96 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, 3 vols. (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1997), i, 94, refers to the influence of the practices in the emperor’s hereditary territories on the Council’s jurisprudence. 97 Aulic decree to Estates, Jan. 28, 1724, NÖLA, HA, Lade IV, Nr. 9. 98 Remonstration by the two noble Estates to Emperor Charles VI, Mar. 8, 1724, NÖLA, HA, Lade IV, Nr. 9. 99 Mention is made of this “imperial commission” and its purpose in a report from Klagenfurt, July 29, 1738, KLA, StA, Abt. I, 445, f. 46. 100 Extract of the minutes of the Carinthian diet, Aug. 9, 1743, KLA, SA, Abt. I, 445, f. 86.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power TH E CO MP OSITION O F THE N OBLE EST AT ES

As Protestant nobles either emigrated or converted and moved up the social ladder, they were replaced in the Estate of knights after 1620 by the status seekers also typical of earlier times—judicial agents, tax collectors and petty financiers, and patrimonial and other lesser officials.101 The newcomers were recruited primarily from among the growing number of the “ennobled” (Nobilitierte). Some barely had offices considered worthy of a nobleman, and there were relatively few military men among them. But now the pattern of recruitment was accompanied by another critical factor: the progressive decline in the knights’ share of seigniorial property, which passed more and more into the hands of the clergy and titled nobility. This was already apparent in the decades after 1580. After 1700, fewer than 10 percent of the recruited knights owned manors; the decline would continue without interruption past 1800.102 Composed largely of lesser officeholding families, the body of knights as it existed by the late seventeenth century had neither the ideological sophistication nor the resilient self-confidence of noble corporations in France such as the sovereign courts. The prestige of the knights continued to fade as the lines of stratification hardened with the growth of dynastic power. The concepts of clientele and patronage throw useful light on the relationship between the Estates of lords and knights.103 In the Austrian duchy of Carniola, successive heads of the dominant aristocratic family, Eggenberg, placed their protégés in the local Estates.104 Comparable power relations operated in the land below the Enns, even if the spectrum of sponsors was greater in the larger and more diverse territory. The patronage extended by grand lords to even leading knights was manifest in the relationship of Landmarschall Ernst Traun to the knight Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg the elder, or Landmarschall Harrach to Landuntermarschall Aichen.105 101 For this and the following, see Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God,” 24, 260–5; Winkelbauer, “Der Adel,” 18; Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 259; Susanna Maria Moser, “Strukturwandel des ständischen Besitzes im Viertel unter dem Wienerwald: Untersuchungen zum Herren- und Ritterstand aufgrund der Gültbücher 1571–1701,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1982, 196–206; Sochor, “Der niederösterreichische Ritterstand,” 20–6. 102 See MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 202–3. Of the 120 lineages that belonged to the Estate of knights in 1844, only about 20 were in possession of significant manorial property. Minutes of Estate of knights, July 6, 1844, NÖLA, RA, HS, 22. 103 For patronage and clientele primarily in the Habsburg context, see Mark Hengerer, “Amtsträger als Klienten und Patrone? Anmerkungen zu einem Forschungskonzept,” in Stefan Brakensiek and Heide Wunder, eds., Ergebene Diener ihrer Herren? Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005), 45–78; Jean Bérenger, “La cour impériale de Léopold Ier: partis, clans et clientèles,” in Klaus Malettke and Chantal Greli with Petra Holz, eds., Hofgesellschaft und Höflinge an europäischen Fürstenhöfen in der Frühen Neuzeit (15.–18. Jh.)—Société de cour et courtisans dans l’Europe de l’époque moderne (xve–xviiie siècle) (Münster, 2001), 257–71. 104 Admissions connected with the Eggenbergs were still recorded in an official register of the Carniolan nobility drawn up much later. “Ständische Adels Matrikel des Herzogthums Krain,” AS 1073, Sign. III/3r, f. 9v, 10v, 11r, 21r, 40r, 44v, 92v. 105 Traun was godfather to Hätzenberg’s daughter. Diarien und Tagzettel des Kardinals Ernst Adalbert von Harrach (1598–1667), ed. Katrin Keller and Alessandro Catalano with Marion Romberg, 7 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2010), iii, 746 (Oct. 6, 1653).

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Aichen thought of himself as “an old dyed-in-the-wool Harrach servant.”106 The later Landuntermarschall Grundemann makes an early appearance in the historical record as the legal agent of the later Landmarschall Sprinzenstein.107 Both with significant Upper Austrian connections, they served together at the Lower Austrian Landhaus. The knights constituted very much the junior partner of the lords. In Wolf Helmhard von Hohberg, Otto Brunner stylized a loser in seventeenthcentury processes of change into a last representative of an idealized old noble world. Certainly, the rise of a Catholic and titled aristocracy was transforming the Estate of lords that Hohberg joined. The lords were a more heterogeneous group than the knights in several respects. When Hohberg became one of their number in 1659, the ranking member and a frequent attendee was the crypto-Calvinist Count Erasmus Starhemberg the younger. Until the late seventeenth century, the exponents of ancient noble houses who refused to convert to Rome made up a visible, if declining, element in the lords. Unlike Hohberg, the Protestant lines of the Starhembergs, Zinzendorfs, Polheims, Hardeggs, Auerspergs, and Teuffels bore some of the archduchy’s most prestigious names. It nevertheless seems reasonable to assume that the induction of Hohberg was part of what would ultimately be an unavailing attempt to staunch the loss of Protestants. Socially, the lords encompassed lesser nobles whose backgrounds hardly set them apart from knights. New titles bestowed by the Habsburgs facilitated entrée. Ambitious officeholders from government agencies located just streets away from the Landhaus in Vienna’s compact historic core provided a steady stream of hopeful aspirants. A trickle of army officers increased the flow.108 A small, if representative, sample of those admitted would take in Barons Augustin Mayer von Mayersberg and Johann Gabriel Selb (both Aulic Chamber councilors), Baron Johann Rudolph (Schmidt) von Schwarzenhorn (aulic war councilor), and Baron Johann Georg Arnold (lieutenant-colonel in the Habsburg army). Some of these new lords, whom we should also regard as military financiers and entrepreneurs, if not bankers and industrialists in the conventional or civilian sense, may have smoothed the path by loaning money to the Estates, even though no direct evidence of the outright sale of membership in the Estates below the Enns has come to light. A lesser number of ministers and high dignitaries, such as the aulic chancellors, rounded out this group. While the families of some of these men were in the process of moving up the ladder via the Estates, they did not dominate the lords through either participation or officeholding. This was reserved to those lords who belonged to the aristocracy.

106

Aichen to Count Friedrich Harrach, Jan. 8, 1729, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, carton 481. Grundemann to Sprinzenstein, Wels, Apr. 9, 1653, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, carton 135, Nr. 1542. 108 By the late seventeenth century, military officers were being considered as a separate social category for tax purposes. An example is the capitation patent of Oct. 26, 1690, NÖLA, KP, 18. For the rise of a “military nobility,” see Michael Hochedlinger, “Mars Ennobled: The Ascent of the Military and the Creation of a Military Nobility in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Austria,” German History 17 (1999): 141–76. 107

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As an identifiable social formation, the aristocracy had emerged in the sixteenth century as an informal, Court-oriented cluster of landed Catholic lineages drawn from diverse territorial nobilities—Bohemian, Austrian, Italian, Hungarian, and others. While its general importance for the rise, cohesion, and viability of the Habsburg monarchy is now clear thanks to the work of R. J. W. Evans and others, its relationship to the Estates in the various areas is less well understood.109 The historical trajectories of aristocracy and Estates have seemed distinct, the one with its supra-regional horizons apparently in the ascendancy, the other with its provincial blinkers seemingly in decline. The aristocracy was furthermore not a corporation like the Estates. Hence its outlines are indistinct and its distinguishing feature was less its (incomplete) monopoly on offices than the personal ties of loyalty and service that over generations bound its lineages to the ruling house.110 These ties fortified their position in the localities that were in turn more firmly attached to the wider monarchy. The same power dynamic operated at the Lower Austrian Estates. There were no aristocrats who were not lords (or the equivalent rank). That part of the aristocracy rooted in the Estates below the Enns was made up of three overlapping and deeply interrelated “groups” more easily distinguished analytically than in practice. The most important one constituted long-established families that had either remained or become Catholic and turned the early seventeenth-century domestic crisis to advantage. Among them, the house of Liechtenstein was primus inter pares. In 1612 the Estate of lords conceded the Liechtensteins formal precedence among its number following their acquisition of princely rank—a compelling demonstration of the link between monarchical favor and status at the Landhaus even before the turning point of 1620.111 In fact, the Liechtensteins would seldom turn up at the Estates in the generations after the Thirty Years War, possibly because of their far-flung interests and affiliation with multiple corporate bodies.112 Other lineages of old stock stood out at the Estates: Starhemberg, Traun, Kuefstein, Harrach, Breunner, Hoyos, Althann, Lamberg, Sprinzenstein, Zinzendorf, and Herberstein. Like the Liechtensteins, some were landed elsewhere. Most common was an Upper Austrian connection, as with the Starhembergs, Trauns, Lambergs, and Sprinzensteins. Breunner and Herberstein possessed close ties to Styria, Althann to Moravia, and Harrach to Bohemia. In some cases these clans were far-flung, diverse branches being landed in different places. A second “group” of aristocratic lineages consisted of those whose center of gravity clearly lay outside Lower Austria, but who maintained an establishment in or near Vienna as the seat of the Court. Among those admitted between 1620 and 1700, predominant were noble houses from the Inner Austrian duchies (including Cobenzl, Eggenberg, Leslie, Rosenberg, Rabatta, Thurn-Valsassina, and Wagensperg), 109 An important exception is Mark Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte der Macht in der Vormoderne (Konstanz, 2004). 110 On the significance of aristocratic women in this respect, see Katrin Keller, Hofdamen: Amtsträgerinnen im Wiener Hofstaat des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2005). 111 “Codex Provincialis,” iii, 1718 (NÖLA). 112 See Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 79–82, 253.

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the Bohemian lands (such as Buquoy, Czernin, Kaunitz, Schwarzenberg, Waldstein, and Wratislaw), and Italian territories (for example Carretto, Cavriani, Montecuccoli, and Paar). While the nobility of other Austrian lands enjoyed preferential treatment in the admissions process, the old worries about the ambitions of Magyar lineages typical of the border duchies were evident in Lower Austria as well. Leading west Hungarian nobles sometimes encountered a grudging reception, as Count Ladislaus Esterházy learned when Ferdinand III tried getting him through the door of the Landhaus in Vienna.113 Recognizably aristocratic Inner Austrian and Italian cognomens became somewhat less common among those accepted into the Estates later, while prominent south German lineages (such as Schönborn) with close ties to Austria, and Spanish émigrés who came to Vienna with Charles VI (for example Rialp), turn up on the roster. At the same time, the lords continued adding grand Bohemian names (including Kinsky, Lobkowitz, Nostitz-Rieneck, and Wilczek), while the Hungarians remained notably scarce. Except for the Montecuccolis and Cavrianis, both of whom descended from soldiers in imperial service and acquired local castles and lands, none of these families played much of a role at the Estates. Prince Franz Ulrich Kinsky’s visit to the lords in the spring of 1777 was revealing. A leading Bohemian magnate, he sat in keeping with his high noble rank at the “directorial table” with the Landmarschall. His main contribution to the proceedings consisted of an awkward confession of his lack of familiarity with the Estates’ usages and resolutions.114 Of greater moment to the Estate of lords than the second was the third aristocratic element: those lineages whose ancestors had risen from lesser noble or even non-noble status after 1600 and whose fortunes had likewise been made in Habsburg service. The spectrum here ranged from ancient families of originally knightly status (such as Schallenberg) to the descendants of a petty troop paymaster on the Hungarian border (Walsegg) to the posterity of an ennobled physician in Vienna (Pergen). In all cases, the ascent into the aristocracy was not coincidental with, but transpired at some point after, co-option by the lords. As a rule, becoming an aristocrat necessitated decades, if not generations, of careful adaptation in status, connections, and lifestyle. While many names that may be reckoned to the aristocracy remained on the fringes in terms of standing and prestige, all succeeded in acquiring bonds of blood or marriage to the longer established (usually to families in the first “group”). Marriages with the daughters of other successful climbers preceded alliances in succeeding generations with bona fide aristocrats. This was true of the Pergens, for instance.115 Over time, the descendants of “newcomers” became less distinguishable from those whose forebears had earlier found a place in the monarchy’s highest circles. By the same token, those of older extraction themselves might descend from the nouveau riche through mothers and grandmothers. This was no disqualification in the lords, where the distinction 113 114 115

Schopf, “Aufnahmen,” 8–9, 109, 145–7, 340. Minutes of Estate of lords, Apr. 4, 1777, NÖLA, HA, HB, 3, pp. 39–47. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg.”

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between “old” and “new” lineages represented an ideal rather than a genealogical certainty.116 Of course the various markers of exclusivity such as ancestry and bloodlines influenced the internal dynamic of noble society in ways that remain shadowy at this distance. Only in the eighteenth century would pedigree become a habit of mind among Habsburg aristocrats. That development too was a function of processes of differentiation within the nobility associated with the growth of dynastic power.

T HE FOU R TH ES TA TE (TO WNS M EN) The internal divisions among the townsmen rivaled those that fragmented the nobility.117 But while the knights’ loss of status was in part a function of the higher nobility’s ever greater prevalence, the Fourth Estate’s political irrelevance was not a function of its disunity. We can almost speak of two Estates of townsmen in Lower Austria given that there were officially two “halves” of the Fourth Estate: the city of Vienna and the so-called eighteen princely cities and market towns (landesfürstliche Städte und Märkte), both of which were subject, like the prelates, to the financial oversight of the ruler’s domain in a way that the nobility was not. To distinguish them from Vienna, the eighteen cities and market towns were habitually referred to as the “other half ” of the Fourth Estate. As with the prelates, a corporation likewise composed of representatives of entities (religious foundations), the configuration of the Fourth Estate’s “other half ” had been subject to fluctuation through the centuries. By our period it had stabilized at nine members in the two quarters north of the Danube (Krems, Stein, Zwettl, Waidhofen an der Thaya, Langenlois, Eggenburg, Korneuburg, Retz, and Laa an der Thaya) and the same number in the two south of the river (Klosterneuburg, Bruck an der Leitha, Tulln, Ybbs, Hainburg, Perchtoldsdorf, Baden, Mödling, and Gumpoldskirchen). For differing historical reasons, two of the archduchy’s more important urban agglomerations— St. Pölten (today the capital of Lower Austria) and Wiener Neustadt—had not become part of the Fourth Estate. The townsmen’s political marginality was less a consequence of their status than of the poverty resulting from the drastic decline in trade and commerce that began in the late sixteenth century. Even including Vienna’s share, their contribution to the Estates’ finances deep into the eighteenth century hardly exceeded 10 percent annually and was often, thanks to simple impotence, substantially less. Their back 116 MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage, 139, dates the appearance of the distinction between “new” and “old” lineages to 1575, whereas Petrin, Die Stände, 16, gives the year 1588. For the relevance of bloodlines to the early modern understanding of nobility, see William D. Godsey, Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2004), chap. 2. 117 The following is based on Brunner, Land und Herrschaft, 409–10; Hassinger, “Die Landstände,” 1009–10; Franz Baltzarek, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des vierten Standes in Niederösterreich,” MÖStA 23 (1970): 64–104; and Andrea Pühringer, Contributionale, Oeconomicum und Politicum: Die Finanzen der landesfürstlichen Städte Nieder- und Oberösterreichs in der Frühneuzeit (Vienna and Munich, 2002).

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taxes piled up over the decades, creating an enduring fund of ill-will between them and the prelates and nobility that reinforced the social cleavage. Unlike the other Estates, the townsmen lacked their own chambers, did not meet as a body, and before the nineteenth century were a comparatively rare presence at the Landhaus, even on important ceremonial occasions.118 When a burgher turned up, he invariably represented the city of Vienna at the diet concerned with the annual tax proposition, which was almost the only point of business in which the Fourth Estate participated. If the eighteen cities and market towns were in attendance at all, it was not individually but rather in the person of their joint tax receiver. In the absence of the Fourth Estate, the prelates, lords, and knights deliberated in their joint capacity as the “three upper Estates” (drei obere Stände). This in turn constituted only one of the many combinations—if an important one—into which the Estates separated. Apart from the “three upper Estates,” the “two political Estates” (zwei politische Stände)—as the lords and knights together were known— gathered to consider affairs of joint concern. Lines of fissure ran between nobility and clergy, within and between the various formations of the nobility (knights and lords, “old” and “new” lineages, aristocrats and other nobles, etc.), and between the townsmen and the others. There were also religious (Catholic/Lutheran) and geographical factors (the four “quarters”) that produced vertical divisions. Each of the “three upper Estates” itself had evolved into a sub-corporation with its own rules and traditions within the larger structure. Hence it is important to keep in mind that the “Estates” were less monolithic and more disjointed, also in the strict organizational sense, than they have appeared. These distinctions governed the dynamic not only within the halls of the Landhaus but also between the Estates and government.

118 As at the installation of Ernst Traun as Landmarschall, minutes of diet, Mar. 9, 1651, NÖLA, StB, 75.

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2 Organization and Officeholders, c.1650–1764 In the winter of 1651, the emperor Ferdinand III appointed the seasoned former General Field War Commissary, Ernst von Traun (1608–68), Lower Austrian Landmarschall and so president of the Estates. He had been the candidate in waiting since 1648, when he had become Generallandesobrister, an office traditionally concerned with territorial defense held in combination with that of Landmarschall (see Figure 2.1). The new assignment was not only challenging but tricky. A significant part of the nobility remained Protestant, hence suspect in imperial eyes. And the material and financial burdens of the Thirty Years War, which the Swedes had carried to the gates of Vienna, had prostrated the Estates. Traun’s task—to revive them and restore order—had to be reconciled with the fact that soldiers continued to be billeted on the land below the Enns. The units in question were part of what would later be understood as the beginnings of the peacetime standing army whose creation is attributed to Traun.1 During the war he had proven his ability and loyalty as a regimental officer, commander, diplomat, and military administrator. He is remembered as Austria’s first General Field War Commissary.2 His work had taken him into the wider Holy Roman Empire and parts of Western Europe. At the Court of Vienna he adhered to the “Spanish party” around generals Piccolomini and Leslie.3 At the time of the Lower Austrian appointment, he was the third man at the Aulic War Council, a body to which he would be recalled as vice-president in 1668, shortly before his death. He also belonged to a lineage on the make. His own part in his family’s rise into the Habsburg monarchy’s noble elite—the aristocracy—was crucial, while his career demonstrated the dynasty’s need of local authority to govern effectively. Traun had early abandoned his ancestral Lutheranism and conformed to dynastic policy by professing allegiance to Rome. In this he followed his father, Sigmund Adam (1573–1637), whose fidelity to the ruling house laid a firm basis for later success.4 In the last years of Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37), Sigmund Adam became 1 Philipp Hoyos, “Die kaiserliche Armee 1648–1650,” in Der Dreissigjährige Krieg: Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte (Vienna, 1976), 207. 2 Philipp Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun, Generalkriegskommissar, und die Abdankung der kaiserlichen Armee nach dem 30-jährigen Krieg,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1971. 3 Lothar Höbelt, Ferdinand III.: Friedenskaiser wider Willen (Graz, 2008), 190. 4 Robert Douglas Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God: The Establishment of Secular Authority and the Pacification of Lower Austria, 1618–1648,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1979, 270, suggested that Sigmund Adam Traun did not convert. But see Arndt Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus

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Figure 2.1. Count Ernst Abensperg und Traun: General Field War Commissary 1647–51; “father of the standing army;” Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1651–68; Vice-President of the Aulic War Council 1668. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

Lower Austrian Landmarschall, the office his son would hold. Though the Trauns were an ancient family of lords, their attachment to Protestantism had blighted their prospects. Ernst Traun’s marital alliance to a rich heiress of parvenu origin, but with the best connections to Court, facilitated the return to prosperity and rise to distinction. She came from an eminent, originally Swabian line of jurists that had remained Catholic. In the decisive years around 1620, her father, Johann Baptist Weber zu Bisamberg († 1643), was inducted at the emperor’s personal request into the Imperial Aulic Council and also served on the directorial committee of the Lower Austrian Estates. He died as the archduchy’s vice-stadholder.5 At the time of her marriage to Traun in 1637, Catharina Ursula Weber († 1667) brought her und konfessionelle Identität: Die protestantischen Herren und Ritter in den österreichischen Erblanden nach 1620 (Vienna and Munich, 2013), 306. 5 Oswald von Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat: Bedeutung und Verfassung, Schicksal und Besetzung einer obersten Reichsbehörde von 1559 bis 1806 (Vienna, 1942), 196–7; [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 433; Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003), 199.

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husband Bohemian domains confiscated from Protestants.6 She later came into choice Lower Austrian properties, among them the manors of Neuwaldegg and Bisamberg near Vienna, and Petronell on the Danube not far from the Hungarian capital at Preßburg. While at the Landhaus, Traun himself was able to add to the holdings, including the medieval redoubt at Rappottenstein above the Manhartsberg.7 In 1656 he picked up the small Swabian county of Egloffs, which lent substance to the rank of count acquired three years earlier and through which his lineage passed into the imperial high nobility (Reichsstände). The Landmarschall attended to his duties at the Estates with the same skill that he applied to his personal affairs. He carried out a financial retrenchment that allowed a substantial reduction of their horrendous wartime debt. The emperor noted with “pleasure” that “millions” were paid off.8 As former General Field War Commissary, Traun was uniquely qualified to accustom the Estates to the idea that they would have to contribute, also in peacetime, to the upkeep of a permanent Habsburg standing army.9 He effected reform with a hard, at times imperious hand that aroused open antipathy at the Landhaus. At the same time, he shored up the Estates’ shaken authority and credibility, and rallied them to the regime. How typical was Traun of the men who managed the Estates on behalf of the Habsburgs? This chapter offers a collective biography of the Estates’ principal officeholders and an overview of their organization in the century after the Thirty Years War. The focus is on those who managed daily business that in varying ways engrossed all three major areas of government. Who was chosen as Landmarschall? Who was the Landuntermarschall? What was the socio-political profile of the so-called college of Deputies? This body was not only the directorial committee at the Landhaus but also a vital conduit between central and local authority. Under what modalities were appointments made? What considerations governed nominations? What influence did the government have? STRUCTURES AND O FFIC ES Let us first place the Landmarschall, Landuntermarschall, and college of Deputies in the broader institutional context of the Estates. The basic structure of assemblies, standing committees, and officeholders remained recognizable from the 1650s into the 1760s, and in a qualified way thereafter. At the apex stood the Landmarschall, an office of medieval origins.10 The Estates later believed that its first holder had

6 Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun,” 20. For the turnover of landed property generally in Lower Austria, see MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage, 201–7. 7 Josef Grubmüller, Geschichte der Marktgemeinde Petronell (Carnuntum) (Petronell, 1965), 302–3. 8 Aulic decree to “two upper political Estates” (lords and knights), Feb. 22, 1668, NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 178r–179r. This debt is reported to have cost 400,000 florins annually to service. “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2347–8 (NÖLA). 9 Hoyos, “Die kaiserliche Armee,” 206. 10 See Alfred Ritter von Wretschko, Das österreichische Marschallsamt im Mittelalter: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Verwaltung in den Territorien des deutschen Reiches (Vienna, 1897).

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been a Liechtenstein in the year 1204, whereas modern reckonings date a different incumbent to the late thirteenth century.11 In our period the selection of a Landmarschall was the ruler’s prerogative; the Estates enjoyed no right of consultation or recommendation, as is sometimes assumed.12 The choice invariably fell on a major seigniorial landowner who belonged to the “old lineages” of the Estate of lords, not because the monarch was formally so constrained, but because social clout translated into political authority (see Table 2.1).13 The same principle operated in the choice of the archduchy’s stadholders (governors), who came from the same stratum, though there was little actual overlap in the groups of men who held the posts. None held both simultaneously. In our period Count Johann Franz Trautson (1609–63) was the only Landmarschall who was later stadholder. As we have seen, the “old lineages” are not to be confused with “ancient” or “pedigreed” nobility. The families of several Landmarschälle of “old lineage” were sixteenth-century additions to the archduchy’s nobility or lacked long noble bloodlines. A distinguishing factor of great importance was that they all hailed from the aristocracy, that relatively small group of titled and landed families that is now understood to have emerged toward the end of the sixteenth century as a pillar of enhanced dynastic rule in the hereditary lands. Its members were distinguished above all by proximity to power rather than pure noble ancestry. If the experience of Ernst Traun’s successor, Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein, is indicative, a Landmarschall assumed office first by swearing an oath at the provincial government to which he was subordinate as head of the provincial tribunal of privileged jurisdiction known as the Landmarschall’sches Gericht (or on certain formal occasions as the Landrecht).14 A ceremony at the Landhaus followed in which he was formally installed by two “commissioners” sent by the provincial government.15 Short addresses first by a commissioner, then by the Landuntermarschall on behalf of the Estates, and finally by the new Landmarschall himself might hint at the tension inherent in the office. After all, his was a delicate balancing act: to uphold the ruler’s authority and territorial liberties. Invested with a reform mandate after the wartime chaos and breakdown, the hard-nosed Ernst Traun chose in his speech to link the two in a scarcely veiled threat. He made the preservation of the Estates’ “freedom” contingent on their willingness to 11 “Verzeichniß der Herren Landmarschallen in Oesterreich unter der Enns,” NÖLA, HS 93. For a modern list, see Felix Czeike, ed., Historisches Lexikon Wien, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1992–7), iv, 404. 12 For example Herbert Hassinger, “Die Landstände der österreichischen Länder: Zusammensetzung, Organisation und Leistung im 16.–18. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 36 (1964): 1015; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 265. Gustav Reingrabner, “Ein Bericht des Landmarschallischen Gerichtes unter der Enns,” UH 80 (2009): 323, reports that the appointment was made on the advice of the provincial government. Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 141, offered evidence of the Estates’ recommending three candidates only in the case of appointments in the 1740s. 13 On this point, see Hamish M. Scott and Christopher Storrs, “The Consolidation of Noble Power in Europe, c. 1600–1800,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2007), i, 37–9. 14 Minutes of diet, Aug. 17, 1668, NÖLA, StB, 118. See also Reingrabner, “Ein Bericht,” 324. 15 Minutes of diet, Mar. 9, 1651 (Ernst Traun) and Aug. 18, 1668 (Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein), NÖLA, StB, 75 and 119.

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Table 2.1. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landmarschall, 1626–1742 Landmarschall

dates in office

other appointments and honors

Baron (1628 Count) Hans Balthasar Hoyos the elder (1583–1632)

1626–32

president of the Lower Austrian Chamber (niederösterreichische Kammer) 1617–25

Sigmund Adam von Traun (1573–1637)

1632–7

president of the Lower Austrian Chamber

Count Johann Franz Trautson (1609–63)

1637–42

stadholder 1642–63; privy councilor 1648; knight of the Golden Fleece 1653

Count Georg Achaz Losenstein (1597–1653)

1642–51

grand equerry (Oberststallmeister) 1642–50; grand chamberlain 1651; privy councilor 1653; knight of the Golden Fleece 1653

Ernst von (Abensperg und) Traun (1653 Count) (1608–68)

1651–68

General Field War Commissary 1647–51; provisional administrator of the grand chamberlain’s office 1651; privy councilor 1663; vice-president of the Aulic War Council and Stadthauptmann of Vienna 1668

Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein (1625–79)

1668–79

chamberlain to Archduke (later Emperor) Leopold; grand master of the court of the young archduchesses; Austrian vice-aulic chancellor 1665–8 (acting aulic chancellor for a year); privy councilor 1671

Count Hans Balthasar Hoyos the younger (1626–81)

1679–81

councilor in Aulic Chamber 1661; “administrator of the office of stadholder” 1672 and 1674

Count Franz Maximilian Mollart (1628–90)

1681–90

councilor of provincial government 1657; vice-stadholder 1679; privy councilor 1683

Count Otto Abensperg und Traun (1644–1715)

1690–1715

councilor in Aulic Chamber 1687–90; knight of the Golden Fleece 1694; privy councilor

Count Aloys Thomas Raimund Harrach (1669–1742)

1715–42

imperial aulic councilor 1693; knight of the Golden Fleece 1697; ambassador in Madrid 1698–1700; ministerial rank through co-option into the “Finance Conference” after the War of Spanish Succession; viceroy of Naples 1728–33; later member of the Privy Conference

Count Otto Christoph Volkra (1660–1734), “administrator of the Landmarschall’s office” during Harrach’s absence in Naples

1728–33

minister in England 1715–17; president of the Silesian chamber 1722; chief equerry of the duke of Lorraine 1732

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“cooperate with him.”16 His successors tended to be more conciliatory in their addresses, even as the cost of privilege was rising. More assuaging at his own inauguration, Landmarschall Sprinzenstein put the government’s case to the Estates when necessary.17 During an assembly that coincided with an acute phase of the Hungarian rebellion of the 1670s, he conjured up the specter of “Hannibal ante portas,” averring that “crown, scepter, and [the general] welfare” depended upon their action.18 On another occasion the Estates themselves extolled a “highly moving” speech he had made in reference to a threat from the east.19 In opening a tax debate only a few years later, Sprinzenstein’s shortlived successor, Count Hoyos, invoked the peril posed by both Ottomans and French.20 As the ruler’s representative at the Landhaus, the Landmarschall offered a key channel of communication from the top down; as the ranking member of the Estates, he was expected by his fellow members to pass on their concerns and make their interests known further up. Delicate matters in particular were better finessed in person than by written declaration. When they rejected the request for a property tax in 1702, for instance, they charged the incumbent Landmarschall with the unenviable task of delivering their “subservient” response “to His Imperial Majesty in the name of the Estates.”21 This was a common modus operandi that facilitated the search for solutions acceptable to both sides. Ex officio the Landmarschall presided over a variety of assemblies at the Estates. Most important was the annual diet (Landtag) whose agenda he controlled. The Estates had no legal remit to convoke it themselves, a right vested in the ruler alone.22 Composed of the four Estates, the diet gathered to deliberate on the ruler’s yearly postulation and to vote a grant. Though a broad range of other fiscal and administrative matters came up for resolution, the diet was not a law-making body comparable to a modern parliament and, just as significantly, did not claim legislative power. An even more common form of gathering was the body referred to in the sources as the “three upper Estates” composed of prelates, lords, and knights. Its existence manifested the exclusion of the townsmen from most routine business because of their impecuniousness and inability to shoulder their share of the financial burden. Meetings of the “two political Estates,” as the lords and knights were known jointly, were rarer.23 Each of the “three upper Estates” met in distinct chambers at the time of the diet to consider the ruler’s demands. Together (in theory) with those of the two “halves” of the Fourth Estate, the resulting “votes” were collated to produce the diet’s official response—referred to as the “declaration.” The three upper curiae invariably met separately on other occasions during the year, as the surviving minutes of each from 16

Minutes of diet, Mar. 9, 1651, NÖLA, StB, 75. Minutes of assembly of the Estates, Aug. 18, 1668, NÖLA, StB, 119. 18 Minutes of Estate of lords, Apr. 2, 1675, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 9, p. 1. 19 Estates to Sprinzenstein, Sept. 1, 1676, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, 130/1507. 20 Minutes of Estate of lords, May 18, 1680, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 9, p. 75. 21 Resolution of the Estates, Dec. 19, 1702, concerning the aulic decree of Dec. 14, 1702, NÖLA, StB, 544, f. 21r–23v. 22 On this point generally, see Hans-Jürgen Bömelburg and Gabriele Haug-Moritz, “Stand, Stände,” in Friedrich Jaeger, ed., Enzyklopädie der Neuzeit (Stuttgart and Weimar, 2010), 830. 23 Records of such meetings are found in the minutes of Estate of lords, Jan. 22, 1663, Feb. 1, 1668, and Dec. 19, 1671, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. 17

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the Thirty Years War onward show, and were indeed among the more frequent gatherings at the Landhaus. Their registers evidence the heightened institutionalization not only of the individual corporate bodies but of the Estates generally under the impact of rising fiscal-military pressure.24 When present, the Landmarschall chaired the lords, the Landuntermarschall the knights, and the abbot of Melk the prelates. A type of meeting that has left little trace in the records, but that must have been fairly common, concerned discrete gatherings of the “three upper Estates” from each of Lower Austria’s four quarters. These assuredly took place in Vienna at the time of the diet to fill quarter-level posts in the Estates’ administrative apparatus such as military commissary, physician, apothecary, and so on.25 The title of Landuntermarschall deceptively suggested that its holder, a knight, was the second man at the Estates. In fact, the inflation of titles and the consolidation of the higher nobility under Habsburg patronage weakened the knights’ recurring claims to precedence. The fact that few older lineages remained in their consortium, which included no aristocrats, further compromised their position. The lords balked at being subordinated to the Landuntermarschall even during a vacancy. Conflict was inevitable given the political meaning attached to ceremonial place. The absence of the ill Landmarschall Sprinzenstein in the summer of 1679 provided one occasion for dispute over precedence.26 The interregnum following the demise of Landmarschall Otto Traun in 1715 unleashed a round of contention punctuated by learned juridical-historical treatises and outraged appeals to Court after the Landuntermarschall was allowed the chair for a short time.27 But the practice appears to have established itself that the Landuntermarschall might preside at the ceremonial installation of a new Landmarschall, though not over longer intervals of time. During Landmarschall Harrach’s absence in Naples (1728–33), he was temporarily replaced by Count Otto Christoph Volkra, a lord and the son-in-law of one of Harrach’s predecessors as Landmarschall. When Landuntermarschall Moser ensconced himself in the Landmarschall’s chair for an installation ritual in December 1742, one observer found the sight uncommon enough to record in his diary.28 The office of Landuntermarschall was open to talented social newcomers, a factor that corroded the prestige of the knights in another way. The Habsburgs were less bound by noble wishes respecting the choice of Landuntermarschall given that there was no perceived need for an incumbent of old ancestry.29 Unlike the 24 They are also an invaluable source given that the minutes of the diet have been lost for the period from the 1670s to the 1720s. 25 Evidence of such meetings in minutes of diet, May 5, 1664, NÖLA, StB, 81; Landmarschall Harrach to Estates’ syndic Christoph Kriegl, July 5, 1742, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 121. The minutes of an assembly for the quarter above the Manhartsberg, Feb. 16, 1732, have survived: NÖLA, StB, 90, pp. 15–16. 26 Minutes of Estate of lords, July 4, 1679, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 9, vol. 1675–85, pp. 63ff. For similar disputes earlier, see [Robert Freiherr von Walterskirchen], Die Walterskirchen zu Wolfsthal: Gesammelte Nachrichten über dieses Geschlecht, ii (The Hague, 1893), 165–74. 27 Minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 17, 1715, Jan. 29, 1716, and Feb. 17, 1716, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, pp. 321, 336, and 341. 28 Diary of Abbot Adrian Plieml of Melk, Dec. 3, 1742, ii, p. 32, Stiftsarchiv Melk, 3 Äbte, carton 7a. 29 For the older idea that the Habsburgs were constrained by the Estates in choosing the holder of the office, see Hassinger, “Die Landstände,” 1015; Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 265;

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Table 2.2. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall, 1627–1764 Landuntermarschall

dates in office

last known charge(s) before appointment

Dr. Johann Rupprecht Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler († 1633)

1627–33

chancellor of the Lower Austrian government

Georg Christoph von Walterskirchen (1643 Baron) († 1654)

1633–54 (beginning 1631 provisional Landuntermarschall)

councilor of the Lower Austrian government; commissary of the Estates in the quarter below the Vienna Woods

Christoph Ehrenreich Geyer von Edlbach (1665 Baron) († 1667)

1654–67

councilor of the Lower Austrian government

[Dr. Johann Baptist Suttinger zum Thurnhof: “administrator of the office of Landuntermarschall” († 1662)]

1661

Landschreiber; chancellor of the Lower Austrian government

Adam Anton Grundemann von Falkenberg (1624–1711)

1667–1711

councilor of the Lower Austrian government

Dr. Franz Anton von Quarient († 1713)

1711–13

Landschreiber

Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg (1715 baron) († 1717)

1713–17

Johann Joachim von Aichen († 1729)

1718–29

councilor of the Lower Austrian government; member of Estates’ executive committee (Ausschuß ); Obersthofstäbelmeister councilor of the Lower Austrian government; member of Estates’ executive committee (Ausschuß )

Carl Leopold von Moser (1765 Baron) (1688–1770)

1729–64

receiver general of the Estates; member of the Estates’ executive committee (Ausschuß )

lords, the knights had homines novi imposed on them (see Table 2.2). Apart from Johann Rupprecht Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, appointed in 1627, these included Christoph Ehrenreich Geyer von Edlbach (1654), a man of small beginnings, and Adam Anton Grundemann von Falkenberg (1667). The indignation among the knights over Geyer brought the laconic reply from Landmarschall Ernst Traun that the nomination constituted “His Imperial Majesty’s resolution and command.”30 In Grundemann’s case, the knights groused before attempting to expunge the blemish themselves by promoting him into their “old lineages.”31 With a term of more than four decades, he was to be the longest serving Landuntermarschall after the Thirty Years War. A. F. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die Krone in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I.,” MIÖG 14 (1893): 601. 30 Minutes of Estate of knights, Apr. 28, 1654, NÖLA, RA, HS 3, pp. 18–19. 31 Minutes of Estate of knights, Mar. 21, 1667, NÖLA, RA, HS 5, pp. 77–80.

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The appointment of new nobles as Landuntermarschall was a function of the changing social character of the Estate of knights, but also of the office’s heavily judicial character. In addition to the lesser noble consortium, the incumbent presided over the provincial tribunal of privileged jurisdiction known as the Landmarschall’sches Gericht—the court of first instance for the Estates.32 Although this body took its name from the Landmarschall, who, as its formal head, influenced membership and swore in staff, it was the Landuntermarschall who chaired routine proceedings and was in effect a key provincial judge. Indeed, the tribunal’s sessions were held in the chamber of knights. The growing importance and complexity of the legal system made a qualified jurist at the tribunal’s head essential just as the fount of justice was confronted by a trend peculiar to the established nobility: its sons were ever less inclined to complete the requisite legal training.33 This circumstance, together with the fact that dozens of Lower Austrian noble families remained Protestant, reduced the already small pool of available candidates for the court’s leadership further. Given that Protestant noble orphans were notoriously converted to Catholicism under its aegis, the Landmarschall’s tribunal constituted an important, if littleexplored, tool of official confessional policy in the archduchy.34 The need for reliably Catholic legal minds overrode social considerations relative to the Landuntermarschall. To be sure, of the eight incumbents between 1627 and 1764, five belonged to the knights’ “old lineages” at the time of appointment. However, at least two of these (Franz Anton Quarient and Carl Leopold Moser) had themselves acquired that status, while Johann Joachim Aichen’s father entered the knights and advanced into the “old lineages” within a decade. With the exceptions of Georg Christoph Walterskirchen and Johann Ernst Hätzenberg, no Landuntermarschall descended from a family that had belonged to the Estates before the Thirty Years War. Moser’s and Aichen’s paternal ancestors were at best barely noble before 1620. As Grundemann’s promotion into the “old lineages” after his appointment as Landuntermarschall showed, dynastic service translated into standing at the Estates, also at the top levels. All appointees had formal training or long years of judicial practice, or both. Hegenmüller, Grundemann, and Quarient were all lawyers; the first-named had taken a doctorate in law at Padua and served at the Imperial Aulic Council.35 Unusually for a Landuntermarschall, Aichen had in his younger years been an assessor (Beisitzer) on the Landmarschall’s tribunal, where his father had held the

32 There is no modern study of this important tribunal. See Sigmund Adler, Das adelige Landrecht in Nieder- und Oberösterreich und die Gerichtsreformen des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Vienna and Leipzig, 1912); Silvia Petrin, Die Stände des Landes Niederösterreich (St. Pölten and Vienna, 1982), 21–2; Reingrabner, “Ein Bericht,” 320–37. 33 Gernot Heiss, “Bildungs- und Reiseziele österreichischer Adeliger in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Rainer Babel and Werner Paravicini, eds., Grand Tour: Adeliges Reisen und Europäische Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern, 2005), 222. 34 On this point, see Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 30–1, 179. 35 Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 178–9. See also Henry Frederick Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London, 1943), 246–7.

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coveted office of Landschreiber (literally “territorial scribe”). As such, he had run the court’s chancery. Quarient was the son of an Upper Austrian Landschreiber and had himself been Lower Austrian Landschreiber.36 In addition to studies of politics and languages, the young Carl Leopold Moser had undergone legal training at the academy that the Estates themselves ran.37 Significantly, all nominees to the post of Landuntermarschall had years of experience at the provincial government, the agency responsible for the court system and public order. Both Hegenmüller and Johann Baptist Suttinger zum Thurnhof, who briefly stood in for Geyer in 1661, were its chancellors (Kanzler). A key figure in reforming the courts after the Thirty Years War, Suttinger had taken pains to ingratiate himself with the Estates, who dispensed him from the customary taxes upon admission to their ranks, even as his lack of noble birth drew censure.38 By 1648 the diet maintained three standing committees, two of which had emerged the previous century under the impact of the Ottoman threat.39 Appointments to all three were paid. Originally responsible for implementing resolutions of the diet, a collegial body known as the college of Deputies (Verordnetenkollegium) constituted both the oldest committee and an organization of pivotal administrative importance. Following its near collapse under the pressure of business in the later Thirty Years War—piles of unfinished reports and letters are recorded as being cleared out of its quarters in 1652—the chamber was revamped with new “instructions” approved by the diet under Landmarschall Traun (1656). In the following decades the instructions would be modified as needed, until being overhauled during the War of the Spanish Succession (1710).40 The number of Deputies had been fixed at six in 1627, permanently as it turned out.41 Initially, the three upper Estates of prelates, lords, and knights each chose two Deputies to serve fouryear terms. The guidelines prescribed the appointment of owners of seigniorial

36 Johann Georg Adam Freiherr von Hoheneck, Die Löblichen Herren Herren Stände, Deß ErtzHertzogthumb Oesterreich ob der Ennß; Als: Prälaten, Herren, Ritter, und Städte, Oder Genealog- und Historische Beschreibung . . . , 3 vols. (Passau, 1727–47), ii, 176; [Starzer], Beiträge, 447. Quarient was listed as “Doctor beeder Rechten” at the time of his marriage (1680). Domarchiv St. Stephan (Vienna), “Trauungsbuch,” vol. 27, p. 24. For the post of Landschreiber, see Max Vancsa, “Die Anfänge des ständischen Beamtentums in Österreich unter der Enns,” MbVLkN 9 (1918): 137; Petrin, Die Stände, 21. 37 Moser to Estates, Mar. 24, 1719, NÖLA, StA, B-7, Nr. 53 (carton 203), f. 1 and 6. See Anton Mayer, “Die ständische Akademie in Wien,” BVLkN, new series, 22 (1888): 311–54. 38 Estates of prelates and lords to Estate of knights, Oct. 29, 1658, and report of the knights’ committee, Dec. 4, 1658, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C18 (Suttinger). See also Reingrabner, “Ein Bericht,” 325; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 149. 39 Vancsa, “Die Anfänge,” 130–3; cf. Jean Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 1975), 150–3. 40 See Petr Maťa, “Verordneteninstruktionen: Normen und Reformen in der landständischen Verwaltung der niederösterreichischen Ländergruppe (17. und 18. Jahrhundert),” in Anita Hipfinger et al., eds., Ordnung durch Tinte und Feder? Genese und Wirkung von Instruktionen im zeitlichen Längeschnitt vom Mittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna and Munich, 2012), 361–4, 368–9. The “instructions” from 1656 and 1710 as well as a document noting later seventeenth-century amendments are in NÖLA, StA, A2, Nr. 2. 41 Vancsa, “Die Anfänge,” 133; Viktor Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände Niederösterreichs im XVII. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ständischen Verfassung,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 237, 314.

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property located within the land below the Enns. As a rule, elections were not concurrent, meaning that the college typically had several more or less experienced participants. An increase to six-year terms in 1682 enhanced the importance already attached to continuity and practical knowledge, at least among the lords.42 Unlike in the Inner Austrian duchies, the Estates’ receiver general did not sit in the chamber, nor did townsmen.43 Notably, the Landmarschall neither presided over nor attended the college.44 On Traun’s watch, the lords repeatedly (1656, 1661) and successfully asserted their right to the chairmanship.45 The instructions drawn up in 1656 to put the college on a new footing after the wartime breakdown provided for daily morning sessions, except on Sundays and holidays, in its own chamber in the Landhaus. Actual practice of course varied from the norm. Earlier attempts to keep proper minutes with attendance lists had given way to the use of registers recording the college’s resolutions and dispatches.46 The dates of these transactions in turn allow tentative conclusions about the pace of business as well as about how often the chamber met. The Deputies do not seem to have assembled daily, while their business increased appreciably, if irregularly, over time. Whereas they met an average of five times per month between January and April in both 1637 and 1638, the average number of days for which business is recorded in each of the same months in 1663 was 14.5. The corresponding number for 1680 is eleven, and for 1701, twelve.47 For all of 1700, the year following the Peace of Karlowitz, approximately 1,150 transactions are registered. For only the first nine months of 1703, however, by which time the emperor was heavily involved in the Spanish succession struggle, evidence of some 1,500 transactions has been preserved.48 The numbers for the relative international lull of the early to mid1720s look different yet again: 470 transactions in 1722 and not quite double that for 1725, when international tensions were rising again.49 The provision that meetings occur in the appropriate chamber at the Landhaus, that business not be conducted in private dwellings, and that at least four of the six Deputies be present (with all three upper Estates represented) aimed to ensure the 42 “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2037 (NÖLA). The knights were still serving four-year terms in the early eighteenth century. Minutes of Estate of knights, May 17, 1701, NÖLA, RA, HS 8, p. 141. 43 Hassinger, “Die Landstände,” 1020–1. But the Fourth Estate was represented in the equivalent body at the Upper Austrian Estates. Gerhard Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation in Österreich ob der Enns vom Anfang des 16. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte (Linz, 1978), 85–6. 44 Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 601, reported that the Landmarschall presided over the college of Deputies. This was formalized only in 1764 (see Chapter 7). 45 The chamber’s minutes from the 1630s show the two lords alternating in the chair roughly every six months, NÖLA, StB, 197a. An early eighteenth-century source reports that the two lords alternated in the presidency quarterly or half-yearly. Carl Christoph von Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae” (1715–c.1722), NÖLA, HS 37, pp. 9–10. The college’s “instructions” from 1656 (§1) provided for the presidency of a lord (NÖLA, StA, A2, Nr. 2). This was reinforced by a provision in 1661 (“Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2048 [NÖLA]). 46 The first volume of minutes preserved from the college of Deputies encompasses the years 1636 to 1638. NÖLA, StB, 197a. 47 College of Deputies’ register of business, 1663 and 1680, NÖLA, StB, 205 and 220. 48 College of Deputies’ register of business, Jan. 1700–Sept. 1703, NÖLA, StB, 229. 49 College of Deputies’ register of business, 1722–6, NÖLA, StB, 230.

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transparency and confidentiality of affairs. Here too practice deviated from the rule. In the summer of 1683 the Deputies relocated upstream to the town of Krems as Ottoman forces approached Vienna. From there they organized provisions, munitions, and further assistance for the city’s defenders.50 On another occasion, urgent imperial requirements necessitated councils outside the Landhaus. In July 1719 the Deputies met twice in the lodgings of the ailing abbot of Heiligenkreuz to discuss arrangements in connection with the wedding of an archduchess and the electoral prince of Saxony. The Estates were responsible for seeing that the roads were in good repair for the traveling party.51 Because of the absence of the other prelate and the need to have at least one member of each Estate present, the Deputies gathered in Heiligenkreuz’s red-draped state apartment, presumably in his monastery’s imposing complex in the center of Vienna. The fact that their secretary carefully recorded the seating arrangements suggests both the event’s uncommonness and concerns about a precedent for the future. While the college of Deputies was the diet’s executive arm, charged with carrying out its resolutions and other business, it was also subject to the ruler in the guise of the Austrian Aulic Chancellery, the central authority responsible for relations with the Estates. The Estates (and their Deputies) defended what they regarded as the privilege of being formally subordinate solely to the Chancellery among dynastic agencies. To be legally binding, orders from other offices of central government such as the War Council, the Aulic Chamber, and the General Field War Commissariat had to pass through the Chancellery. Lively direct contact nonetheless characterized the Deputies’ dealings with those offices and the territorial government. There is no evidence that, mutatis mutandis, the chamber refused to cooperate provided that a request from these bodies was “collegial” in form rather than a command. In key areas of state activity including taxation, the Deputies functioned as the clearing house between central power and manorial authority. The college did not operate as a “bureaucracy” in the Weberian sense, even as increasingly elaborate written norms such as the “instructions” periodically approved by the Estates bore on its work.52 Its bailiwick was geographical rather than functional in scope, and the full extent of its business is apparent less from normative sources than from the vast stores of records preserved in connection with its administrative activity, including registers, correspondence, reports to the diet, aulic decrees, and so on. Two of the three main concerns of government—fiscal and military-related affairs—dominated its agenda. The management of taxation was central to its mission. Its activity ranged from the publication of tax patents to checking up on claims for relief or remittance to settling accounts with the Aulic Chamber. Assessment, imposition, and collection took place with the aid of lesser officers including the bookkeeper who maintained the registers that were the basis

50 For insight into the activities of the college of Deputies at this time, see Karl Graf Kuefstein, Studien zur Familiengeschichte in Verbindung mit der Landes- und Kulturgeschichte, iii (Vienna and Leipzig, 1915), 379–83. 51 Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” 174–5. 52 On these “instructions,” see Maťa, “Verordneteninstruktionen,” 351–6, 361–4, 368–9.

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of fiscal charges; the receiver general into whose office levies were paid; and the bailiff (Rentmeister) who brought in back taxes. The conflation of administration and justice (the third major area of government) typical of the early modern world was also apparent in the college’s business. The Deputies handled appeals against the very decisions that emanated from their chamber. They also supervised indirect taxes leased or bought by the Estates collectively from the ruler’s domain and were responsible for the loans contracted on behalf of both Landhaus and government. The instructions of 1656 forbade the chamber either to take out loans or to grant money without the Estates’ consent, unauthorized borrowing during the Thirty Years War having caused “great damage” to corporate credit.53 Exceptions were foreseen in the case of foreign invasion or domestic insurgency. The chamber likewise tried to coordinate the onerous burden placed on Lower Austria by the army. The provision of quarters, recruits, and transport necessitated complex arrangements in conjunction with central agencies, local settlements, and officials of neighboring lands. Apart from the paperwork involved, military and fiscal administration required that the Deputies join in ad hoc meetings known as “conferences” with other authorities at all levels to deal with specific problems. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, their participation in longer-lasting “commissions” charged with special fiscal tasks became more frequent. By contrast, matters not directly connected to war and taxes, among which public health figured prominently, occupied their intermittent attention. The college additionally managed a large administrative apparatus consisting at its core of the syndic, receiver general, bookkeeper, bailiff, secretaries, clerks, miscellaneous receivers and paymasters, commissaries and agents of varying quality, a lawyer, trumpeters, porters, and others. Some of these were hired by the Deputies, the more important ones directly by the Estates. Another, more amorphous group were the lesser contractors and tax farmers that the Estates employed sporadically in a variety of capacities. An annual report (Amtsrelation) to the diet based on written information submitted to this purpose by the main departments and functionaries was another obligation of the Deputies.54 The reports were sometimes late, or two or more years were filed at once. Finally, the college had charge of safeguarding Lower Austrian interests in border disputes, as well as minding the privileges and liberties of the Estates. To this end, the Deputies also attended conferences with representatives of the government to discuss formal remonstrations by the diet. The other standing committee with sixteenth-century roots was the college of accounts (Raitkollegium) composed, as of 1655, of six Raitherren (“accounts’ officers”) likewise drawn in pairs from each of the three upper Estates. In this body, a knight who bore the deceptively resounding title of Raitmarschall Quotation from §21 of the Deputies’ “instructions” from 1656, NÖLA, StA, A2, Nr. 2. An undated addendum to the “instructions” of 1656 provided that the Deputies’ annual report also be submitted to the Landmarschall: “Schlüss der Löbl: drey Obern Ständte, durch welche dero auch Löbl: Herren Verordneten nach den 9. Decembris 1656 aufgerichte Ambts Instruction in denen hernach gefolgten Jahren erweitert, mehr erleüteret, oder vermünderet, und veränderet worden ist,” in NÖLA, StA, A2, Nr. 2. 53 54

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(“accounts’ marshal”) held the chairmanship. Called into being to monitor flows of money through the Estates’ channels, this committee was an internal control organ of the Landhaus. Registers of its proceedings, if kept, have not survived, though traces of its activity are common.55 It was mainly concerned with examining accounts such as the closing statements of officeholders who handled money from the Estates’ coffers. In some cases, the sums involved were substantial, amounting to tens of thousands of florins and more. In the early eighteenth century, appeals against its audits could be made to the Deputies, a circumstance indicative of its subordinate position.56 The college of accounts possessed neither the clout nor profile of the college of Deputies and was also eclipsed by the third standing committee, which had taken on recognizable shape during the Thirty Years War. Known simply as the Ausschuß (translated here as “executive committee”), its members collectively called Ausschüße, this body was likewise drawn only from among the “three upper Estates.”57 The individual curiae again elected their own members: four each for a total of twelve. The committee’s wartime origins and comparatively large size— double that of either Deputies or Raitherren—indicate a desire to expedite business by calling on a group of senior clerics and nobles. Like the larger assemblies of the Estates, it was chaired by the Landmarschall. In the event, neither this committee nor any other superseded the diet, as happened in late seventeenth-century Bavaria, and it is difficult to make out any “tendency” in that direction.58 Minutes of the executive committee have not survived for the period before 1790, though an early eighteenth-century source credibly relates that they existed.59 The same source reports that the committee’s main purpose was to prepare material for resolution by larger assemblies of the Estates. The diet’s surviving records confirm the frequent referral of weighty or difficult questions to the committee, which responded with sometimes lengthy written opinions containing advice and suggestions for action. The opinions were often, if not invariably, incorporated verbatim into final resolutions of the assemblies. Composed as it was of leading members of the Estates, the executive committee also exercised a

55 An armorial of the Raitherren between 1686 and 1758 has survived. See Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, Adel im Wandel: Politik—Kultur—Konfession 1500–1700 (Vienna, 1990), 305. 56 “Codex Provincialis,” iii, 1439–62 (NÖLA); Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” p. 16. 57 “Codex Provincialis,” i, 127–36 (NÖLA). This body should not be confused with the großer Wirtschaftsausschuß, an “extended finance committee” that was periodic rather than standing (summoned, for instance, in the 1630s, 1650s, and 1700s). It seems to have united the members of the three standing committees and come together in times of stress or crisis. “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2343–58 (NÖLA); Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 600–1; Mat’a, “Verordneteninstruktionen,” 361–2, 368–9. 58 As supposed by Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 268. For events in Bavaria, see Thomas Paringer, “Die bayerische Landschaft als unabhängige Finanzbehörde 1669–1807,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 305–22. 59 The minutes are said to have been kept by the syndic, who had the same responsibility in the diet. Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” 8–9.

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general controlling function in respect of the college of Deputies, an organ directly subject to the pressure of central power and military exigency. Thorny fiscal decisions entailed the executive committee’s input. It was sounded out on the annual tax repartition drawn up by the Deputies, advised on the public patent imposing the Contribution, and reviewed the chamber’s yearly report. Because of their pre-eminence, members of the executive committee also at times acted in the Estates’ name at meetings with the authorities. This role too set them apart from the Raitherren. Neither the accounts’ office nor the executive committee is on record as having been a direct recipient of aulic decrees, which, depending on subject matter, were addressed to the diet, the college of Deputies, or one or more of the Estates, most commonly the “three upper Estates.”

OFFICEHOLDERS: PREREQUI S I TES AN D A P P O I NT ME NT S No modern collective biographies of the Estates’ presiding or major officeholders exist for any of the Bohemian-Austrian lands between the Thirty Years War and the Theresan era. Lists of Deputies have been published with little or no commentary. Some of these date back a century and more.60 A number of mostly older studies focus on standing committees from a classical legal-institutional perspective.61 Traditional provincial historiography has taken the Estates’ structures into account, though less is known about them in Lower Austria than in Styria or Upper Austria, for example.62 Works of this provenance—in some cases still very useful— commonly factor out the personalized nature of early modern authority. Birth, connections, personal loyalties, and other “informal” determinants for appointment tend to be played down in favor of the ideal-typical. In hundreds of pages of text, one otherwise informative study of the standing committees of the Upper Austrian Estates mentions few of the actual occupants of the offices discussed.63 Thus factored

60 For Upper Austria, there is a “Verzeichniß deren Löbl. Herren, Herren Verordneten, von Löbl. Prälaten= Herren= und Ritter=Stand, welche von Zeit der Einführung dises Löbl. Collegii solches Ambt bedient haben,” in Hoheneck, Die Löblichen Herren Herren Stände, i, f. i2–k2; for Carniola, see Peter Hitzinger, “Zur Reihenfolge der Landeshauptleute, Landesverweser und Verordneten des Landes Krain,” MHVK 20 (1865): 117–19, and 23 (1868): 60–1. 61 For Carinthia: Ilse Manhart, “Das Burggrafenamt in Kärnten,” Carinthia I 131 (1941): 41–85; Martin Wutte, “Beiträge zur Verwaltungsgeschichte Kärntens,” Carinthia I 131 (1941): 86–120. Bohemia: Robert Flieder, “Zemský výbor v království Českém: Jeho organisace v letech 1714–1783,” Zprávy zemského archivu království Českého 5 (1918): 39–190. Moravia: Robert Flieder, “Zemský výbor stavovský na Morave,” Sborník ve˘d právních a státních 16 (1915–16): 136–57. Upper Austria: Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation. 62 For Styria, see Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929). On Upper Austria, see Franz X. Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden über die Wirksamkeit der Stände von Österreich ob der Enns (Linz, 1884). On Tyrol, see Werner Köfler, Land—Landschaft—Landtag: Geschichte der Tiroler Landtage von den Anfängen bis zur Aufhebung der landständischen Verfassung 1808 (Innsbruck, 1985), 489–575. 63 Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation.

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out, they assume the character of faceless modern bureaucrats whose personal background and social status are irrelevant to the operation of government. The debate about the re-Catholicization of the Estates in the hereditary lands has provided one of the few contexts for reflection on the (changing) quality of officeholders. The territory below the Enns has been particularly well-served on that score precisely because Protestant nobles survived there thanks to the guarantees of 1620 and 1648.64 With the advent to power in the late sixteenth century of the Catholic reformer, bishop, and later cardinal Melchior Khlesl (1552–1630), the dynasty initiated what would be a long-term policy of advancing Roman Catholics at the Landhaus. The ruler’s relative freedom of choice in high appointments obviously facilitated it. In 1592 a Catholic became Landmarschall at the overwhelmingly Protestant Estates; thereafter Catholics maintained an unbroken hold on the post. In 1595 a Catholic also became Landuntermarschall, and hence presiding officer of the Estate of knights where the Lutherans were more obdurately entrenched than in the lords.65 Circumstances later forced the archduke Matthias to give the office to a Protestant, but this proved episodic. Under Ferdinand II, it returned to Catholic hands. Increasing factional strife among the religious parties at the Landhaus sharpened the struggle for places in the college of Deputies, whose members the Estates themselves selected. With the Court’s support, the Catholic nobility re-established a foothold there in the early 1600s with the lords’ choice of the convert Gundaker Liechtenstein (1580–1658).66 Not long thereafter, a precarious compromise increased the number of noble Deputies from four to six (three lords and three knights), at the same time guaranteeing Catholics one seat for every two occupied by Lutherans. Following the power-political denouement of Ferdinand II’s inauguration as Austrian archduke and the battle of White Mountain, the squeeze on the Protestant Estates tightened. After long debate, the number of noble Deputies was reduced to four again in 1627, which effectively gave the Catholics, who included the college’s two prelates, a permanent majority.67 As late as the 1640s, the still heavily Protestant noble consortia appointed the occasional Lutheran. Already enraged by a Protestant protest against the intensified re-Catholicization of the countryside, Ferdinand III forbade the practice in the lords in 1652, and in the

64 Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände;” Gustav Reingrabner, “Der protestantische Adel in Niederösterreich—seine Zusammensetzung und sein Beitrag zur Reformationsgeschichte des Landes,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1973; Gustav Reingrabner, “Der evangelische Adel,” in Adel im Wandel, 195–209; Hans-Günter Erdmann, “Melchior Khlesl und die niederösterreichischen Stände,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1949; MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage; Karin J. MacHardy, “Confessionalizing Patronage at the Early Modern Habsburg Court,” in Jörg Deventer, Konfessionelle Formierungsprozesse im frühneuzeitlichen Ostmitteleuropa (Leipzig, 2006), 51–84; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 33. 65 MacHardy, War, Religion and Court Patronage, 142, 144. 66 Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände,” 189; Thomas Winkelbauer, Fürst und Fürstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein österreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Vienna and Munich, 1999), 165. 67 Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände,” 317–20.

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knights in 1654.68 But the prohibition by no means allayed official worries that the Estates might again turn to a Protestant. Ferdinand III’s exclusion of Lutherans abridged, but by no means abrogated, the noble autonomy in choosing Deputies. Within a few years, the Estates would give their time-honored freedom a new twist. In the meantime, the emperor’s ban looked less absolute to contemporaries than to later generations. Ballots were factious and volatile; outside intervention was controversial and sometimes abortive. In 1648 direct imperial support for the re-election of Baron Peter Ernst Mollart, father of the later Landmarschall, did not produce the desired outcome.69 Concerned with the distribution of the territorial cake rather than confessional defiance, the lords chose a different Catholic. A well-connected Protestant, Hans Cyriac von Traun (1599–1652), sat for the same consortium into the early 1650s; Ferdinand III’s insistence on a Catholic to succeed Traun provoked an impassioned boycott of the proceedings by the crypto-Calvinist Erasmus Starhemberg.70 Only two years later, the Protestants in the lords based renewed claims for a place in the college of Deputies on a compromise dating to before 1620.71 As late as 1660, Leopold I’s fears that Catholics would be outnumbered in the lords prompted him to have the vote delayed.72 Confidence that the nobility would observe the rule laid down only a few years previously was obviously wanting. And trust in Landmarschall Traun on this issue went little deeper. Like many of his fellow nobles, he continued to have familial ties to Protestants, and he was suspected of favoring a Lutheran brother-in-law for office. Traun was advised in no uncertain terms that the emperor stood by his predecessor’s policy.73 The government’s heightened interest in personnel reflected uneasiness about a new electoral modus that looked like it might favor Protestants. In fact, the scheme was meant to lessen Traun’s high-handed influence on appointments. As the consortium’s presiding officer, he was accused of tampering with results in order to put a (Catholic) military crony into office.74 The resulting dispute led to a 68 Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände,” 320. For the protest, see Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 165–72. 69 Copies of letters by Ferdinand III and the grand master of the Court, Count Maximilian Trauttmansdorff, to Landmarschall Losenstein (respectively Jan. 15 and 25, 1648) on behalf of Mollart are preserved in NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, 105/1359. 70 Mark Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte der Macht in der Vormoderne (Konstanz, 2004), 203–4. A copy of the aulic decree directing the election of a Catholic is found in NÖLA, HA, Lade XV, carton 16, fasz. 2, f. 3. 71 Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel, 204 (fn. 785). Franz Karl Wißgrill, Schauplatz des landsässigen Nieder-Oesterreichischen Adels vom Herren- und Ritterstande, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1794–1804), v, 261, lists Baron Hector Seyfried Kornfail (1623–69) as the “last knights’ Deputy ex corpore Evangelicorum” (1665–7). If Kornfail bore this title, it was one that apparently gave him no seat in the extant standing committee. 72 Baron Hans Franz Lamberg to Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein, Graz, Aug. 2, 1660, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, 134/1540. Lamberg was a Lower Austrian Deputy traveling with the Court in Inner Austria, while Sprinzenstein was the other lords’ Deputy back in Vienna. 73 Baron Hans Franz Lamberg to Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein, Laibach, Oct. 5, 1660, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, 134/1540. 74 The case concerned the controversial election of Georg Adam Kuefstein. Minutes of Estate of lords, May 18, 1656, July 6, 1656, and Jan. 26, 1657, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 7, pp. 142, 155–8,

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revision of the electoral rules that in time would generate an elaborate, multi-tiered system of voting.75 Thoroughly baroque in its ordered complexity, the system in effect produced the most qualified candidate, who was assumed to be someone well-acquainted with the Estates’ business: thus the senior lord in the chamber of Raitherren acquired claim to the next opening in the college of Deputies. In this way, a quasi-automatic official progression was inaugurated, with competition reserved to the entry level. The fact that the landed and “old lineages” enjoyed privileged standing under the rules raised eyebrows at Court, where it was thought, not without reason, that this accorded the Lutheran nobility undue advantage. Into the 1660s, the senior Lower Austrian lord was indeed Count Erasmus Starhemberg (1595–1664), who had represented the Protestant Austrian nobility at the peace conference at Osnabrück. His status allowed him the first vote in curial sessions.76 More generally, the innovation reflected the search for stability and hierarchy after the long war. In limiting the excrescences of rivalry and factionalism, it would prove successful. Yet the new modus remained divisive and implementation of it fitful. Starhemberg himself proposed that the college of Deputies be dissolved and its duties transferred to the executive committee, on which he was a leading member.77 This suggests that he did not regard the rules as beneficial to Protestants. His démarche earned qualified support from his cousin, the Catholic vice-stadholder Konrad Balthasar Starhemberg, who thought the Raitherren a “useless” institution as well. An election in 1662 was so bitterly contested that Landmarschall Traun simply “declared” the winner.78 Additionally, ambitious nobles spurned the comparatively modest dignity of Raitherr as a prerequisite for higher office. With the help of connections at Court, including his father-in-law, Aulic Chancellor Hocher, Count Hans Georg Kuefstein resisted the idea of serving in that capacity.79 He ultimately relented, while another Hocher son-in-law, the knight Heinrich von Pergen, seems to have leapfrogged successfully.80 The lesser nobility adopted rules and 163–9. Further material in NÖLA, HA, Lade XIII, Nr. 13. See also Kuefstein, Studien zur Familiengeschichte, iii, 323. 75 Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel, 204 (fn. 785). The new electoral rules (“neue modus eligendi”) from Dec. 9, 1656 were printed. A reference to this is in the minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 18, 1662, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8, p. 39. 76 Reingrabner, “Der protestantische Adel,” 137. 77 Minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 28, 1660, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. 78 Minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 18, 1662, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. 79 As related in two undated letters [1677] by the provost of Eisgarn to Landmarschall Sprinzenstein, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, 135/1542. For the Hocher-Pergen connection, see Heinz Noflatscher, “ ‘Freundschaft’ im Absolutismus: Hofkanzler Johann Paul Hocher und die Standeserhebungen Kaiser Leopolds I.,” in Sabine Weiss, ed., Historische Blickpunkte: Festschrift für Johann Rainer (Innsbruck, 1988), 493; and William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 150–1. 80 The minutes of the Estate of knights for the years preceding Pergen’s appointment on July 3, 1669 do not show his having been elected Raitherr. Then again, a vacant Raitherr position was filled at the same session in which Pergen was chosen as Deputy. NÖLA, RA, HS 5. Pergen married Hocher’s daughter a little more than two months before he became Deputy. Landuntermarschall Grundemann, who presided at Pergen’s election, witnessed his marriage. See Godsey, “Der Aufstieg,” 150.

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resembling those of the lords, though enforcement proved if anything more laborious thanks to curial weakness and susceptibility to outside influence. One of the knights’ positions in the Deputies remained vacant for a longer period because of controversy over apparently outside manipulation of the result.81 The affair carries the handwriting of Landmarschall Traun, who endured vituperation at the Estates as a result.82 This controversy capped a period of heightened inner-Estates tension near the end of Traun’s tenure. External influences apart, factions and coalition-building within the individual curia also continued to make outcomes uncertain. As late as the 1690s, the Benedictine prelates divided against their Augustinian fellows in a contest over a place in the Deputies. The presumptive successor, the provost of Herzogenburg, who had just completed a term as Raitherr, succumbed in a farcical contest to the abbot of Melk, who had not sought the office.83 Over time, however, the cursus honorum hardened into custom, also in the prelates, even as they abjured the intricate voting procedures common in the noble consortia. By the 1730s, the provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen could refer casually to the automatic succession from Raitherr to Deputy (“von sich selbst volglich”) as a reason not to travel to Vienna in “cold and nasty weather” to take part in what he saw as a formality.84 The cursus became more sophisticated as well. By the eighteenth century it encompassed the executive committee as the third and highest rung on the ladder.85 When places opened up, former Deputies acquired life tenures there after comparatively simple balloting. In 1721 the lords awarded their retiring Deputy, Count Wenzel Adrian Enkevoirth († 1738), a position by acclamation.86 In this way, those with long experience of fiscal-military affairs came to populate the Estates’ most prestigious committee. In the individual curiae there were also tendencies for officeholders further down the scale to become part of the sequence.87 In the lords the four senior military commissaries moved up the hierarchy with some regularity. Enkevoirth’s career from commissary to Raitherr to Deputy to member of the Ausschuß illustrated the pattern well.88 In other words, the arduous, dirty, and perilous work of guiding, billeting, and provisioning troops overseen by the Estates opened up career opportunities in Vienna. In the knights the receivership general that was customarily held 81 Minutes of Estate of knights, Sept. 4, 6, and 11, and Nov. 29, 1667, NÖLA, RA, HS 5, pp. 55–77. 82 An aulic decree of June 23, 1667 censured the “three upper Estates” on this account. NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 116r–118v. 83 Helga Penz, “Kloster—Archiv—Geschichte: Schriftlichkeit und Überlieferung im AugustinerChorherrenstift Herzogenburg in Niederösterreich 1300–1800,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 2004, 137. 84 Anton von Ruckenbaum, provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen, to Leopold von Planta, provost of Herzogenburg, Nov. 5, 1734, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.3.1. F. 366. 85 This was established by formal resolution of the Estates, a reference to which is found in the minutes of the Estate of lords, Jan. 10, 1708, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, Nr. 1, pp. 210–16. 86 Minutes of Estate of lords, June 10, 1721, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1720–45, pp. 18–19. 87 Revised electoral rules were approved on July 10, 1710. A printed copy of them listed in the relevant archival register is missing from NÖLA, PA, Z, Nr. 2. 88 [Starzer], Beiträge, 448.

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by one of their number became a springboard to the Raitherren. For reasons difficult to reconstruct, but related to a protracted conflict over a former receiver general’s ambitions, there was some effort around 1720 to restrict the cursus honorum to the three standing committees. The prelates and lords jointly urged the knights to open up the race for the position of Raitherr.89 Neither this démarche nor one by the government a few years later about the pretensions of another receiver general altered curial practice that was by then congealed into convention.90 The knights defended it tenaciously, and receivers general continued to progress through the ranks as they had since the later seventeenth century. Around the same time, the lords explicitly resolved that commissarial service conferred no right to the post of Raitherr, which was to be acquired through “completely free election.”91 Yet established practice shaped electoral outcomes there too, even as competition continued to characterize the process at the entry level. Commissarial appointments occasioned the solicitation of votes among local landowners in the respective quarters.92 Soon after becoming provost of Herzogenburg, Leopold von Planta launched a campaign among his fellow prelates for the office of Raitherr. As it turned out, he would need years to achieve the goal.93 In principle, the cursus honorum circumscribed external meddling in the makeup of the Estates’ directorial committee. In particular, it tied the hands of the presiding officers of the three upper Estates, two of whom, the Landmarschall and the Landuntermarschall, were the ruler’s appointees. In most cases, years passed between election to the post of Raitherr and arrival in the Deputies. In practice, the new disposition was not anti-dynastic in thrust. Rather, it helped ensure that no (Catholic) group or faction entirely dominated the Estates’ organization, in this way lending it a measure of constancy, predictability, and functionality. Once the ban on Lutherans stuck, the cursus became a mechanism of self-regulation ensuring that the available places were shared out among local nobles. For the same reason, there was no re-election. Before the reform of 1764, Matthäus Kollweis (1620–95), abbot of Lilienfeld, was apparently the last Deputy to have enjoyed more than one term. Precisely because of the cursus, the collective biography of the Deputies that follows encompasses the great majority of members of the Estates’ three standing committees over a period of more than a century. Those who fall outside the parameters were either those who died after entering the system but before reaching the Deputies or those—some Protestants—who belonged to the executive committee before it became a fixed part of the cursus.94 89

Minutes of Estate of knights, Mar. 30, 1719, NÖLA, RA, HS 9, p. 267. Minutes of Estate of knights, Dec. 4 and 11, 1726, NÖLA, RA, HS 10, pp. 189–95 and 204–20. 91 Quotation from minutes of Estate of lords, June 10, 1721, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1720–45, p. 17. 92 Evidence of such campaigning is in letters to the provost of Herzogenburg by Baron Julius Gilleis, Vienna, May 16, 1731; Count Joseph Auersperg, St. Leonhard im Forst, Sept. 2, 1734; Count Leopold Schallenberg, Rosenau, Nov. 12, 1738; and Count Philipp Joseph Hoyos, Horn, Mar. 16, 1739, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.3.1. F. 366. 93 The relevant correspondence from the 1720s in Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.3.1. F. 366. 94 Count Franz Joseph Traun was elected Deputy, but died before he could take office. Minutes of Estate of lords, Sept. 13, 1744, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1720–1745, pp. 250–4. The minutes of 90

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OFFICEHOLDERS: PRELATES Between roughly 1650 and the end of the cursus honorum in the 1760s, some fortyfour prelates on behalf of eighteen of a total twenty-seven members of the First Estate occupied places in the college of Deputies.95 The three Carthusian priories (Gaming, Aggsbach, and Mauerbach) were never among them, nor were the Premonstratensian abbot of Geras and four other, lesser prelates. Unsurprisingly, representatives of older foundations with great wealth, chiefly the Benedictines and Augustinians, dominated. No house achieved overriding import. The prelates of Melk, Göttweig, Heiligenkreuz, Herzogenburg, Lilienfeld, Schotten, Altenburg, and St. Dorothea were elected several times each. Only St. Dorothea was not among the senior members; the provost’s Viennese seat offered convenience and cost savings that account for the unusual frequency of his presence. Zwettl’s location far away in the forests in the quarter above the Manhartsberg must have worked against its abbot’s electoral ambitions. Far more senior than St. Dorothea’s provost, he was chosen as Deputy only three times, the even higher ranking provost of St. Pölten only twice.96 More unusual was the relative under-representation of Klosterneuburg, the grandest monastery after Melk and easily accessible from Vienna. That the presiding officer of the prelates—Melk—served as a Deputy was a practice with no parallel in the noble curiae. His appointment furthermore did not inevitably entail previous service among the Raitherren. Like the Landuntermarschall for the knights, Melk served on the Estates’ executive committee for the prelates. While many noble officeholders had little real claim to ancient ancestry, the prelates in the college of Deputies descended overwhelmingly from less-privileged social strata. Austrian monasteries in general attracted few novices of noble extraction, even fewer of whom found their way onto the Landhaus’s directorial committee. None came from older or established families. Only a few ecclesiastical dignities consistently attracted nobles—notably the provostships of Zwettl (the collegiate church rather than the monastery of that name) and Ardagger—but they were paradoxically too low in the pecking order to merit consideration at election time. It was oddly left to the Estate of lords to appoint an authentically aristocratic cleric: the later cardinal and primate of Hungary, Count Leopold Kollonitsch (1631–1707). A professing knight of Malta in possession of the commandery of Mailberg, he had completed the Mediterranean military service against the

the Estate of prelates, May 8, 1696, record the provost of Eisgarn, Ezechiel Vogel, as having belonged to the Estates’ executive committee. He never served as Deputy. NÖLA, HS 75. 95 This number is based on the list in NÖLA, HS 362. 96 His living costs in Vienna during his time as Deputy contributed to the notorious debts of Michael Führer, provost of St. Pölten (1715–39). His prodigality cost him the provostship. Floridus Röhrig, ed., Die ehemaligen Stifte der Augustiner-Chorherren in Österreich und Südtirol (Klosterneuburg, 2005), 463–6. An undated letter in the papers of the Schotten abbot, Carl Fetzer, reports that money problems in connection with the economic “decay” of the foundation in St. Pölten had initially prompted its provost to solicit an office at the Estates. Schottenstiftarchiv (Vienna), Scrinium 3, Nr. 82L.

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Ottomans required by the order. The inner-curial objections to Kollonitsch were not just Protestant in origin, but reflected the broader tension between clergy and nobility at the time. He resigned from the college following his ordination as priest.97 Like the aristocrat Kollonitsch, many prelates had backgrounds that belie notions of narrow provincialism. Cosmopolitan connections were especially common at the height of confessional conflict, when natives of other territories were called in to head the archduchy’s monasteries.98 As domestic religious education improved, more Lower Austrians again moved into leading positions. Even so, the tradition of clerical geographical mobility never entirely disappeared. Deputies from the First Estate born outside the Bohemian-Austrian lands included the Rhinelanders Cornelius Strauch (abbot of Lilienfeld 1638–50) and Benedikt Wirsberg (abbot of Säusenstein beginning 1676); the Hungarian Raimund Regondi (abbot of Altenburg 1681–1715); the Bavarians Stephan Stengelmayer (provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen 1656–71) and Sebastian Faber (Schotten abbot 1683–1703); Gottfried Bessel from electoral Mainz (abbot of Göttweig 1714–49); and Roman Mayerl from the Upper Palatinate (abbot of Säusenstein 1738–51). The impressive renewal of Catholic life grew in part out of the dynasty’s intense re-cultivation of religious orders long established in the land below the Enns. In 1568 a “monastery council” (Klosterrat) under the stadholder was created to improve quality and control. Commissioners called “monastery councilors” monitored abbatial elections, a practice derived from the rights of the princely domain over the clergy’s temporal affairs. The ruler also confirmed the heads of religious houses in office.99 While its overtly political significance declined as Catholicism regained traction, this practice survived the council’s abolition. Upon being informed of the selection of the cultivated Robert Leeb for the abbacy of Heiligenkreuz in 1728, the emperor Charles VI is characteristically supposed to have replied “placet persona, placet pietas, placet prudentia.”100 Leeb later became a Deputy. Prelates who joined the directorial committee at the Estates had thus been vetted by higher authority in a way not applicable to noble Deputies even before taking up their miters and assuming their places in the diet. But we should not forget, as the 97 Minutes of Estate of lords, May 22, 1666 and Jan. 28, 1668, NÖLA, HA, Lade III, Nr. 8. Joseph Maurer, Cardinal Leopold Kollonitsch, Primas von Ungarn: Sein Leben und sein Wirken (Innsbruck, 1887), 31–2. 98 On this point, Gerhard Winner, “Die niederösterreichischen Prälaten zwischen Reformation und Josephinismus,” JbStK, new series, 4 (1964): 118–23. 99 For the “monastery council,” see [Starzer], Beiträge, 188; Johann Sattek, “Der niederösterreichische Klosterrat: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Staatskirchentums in Österreich im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1949; Winner, “Die niederösterreichischen Prälaten,” 112–13. 100 Sebastian Brunner, ed., Ein Cisterzienserbuch: Geschichte und Beschreibung der bestehenden und Anführung der aufgehobenen Cisterzienserstifte in Österreich-Ungarn, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Würzburg, 1881), 99. For other examples of official confirmation of the election of abbots in the period after the dissolution of the “monastery council,” see Peter G. Tropper, “Das Stift von der Gegenreformation bis zur Zeit Josephs II.,” in Günther Hodl, ed., Geschichte des Stiftes Göttweig 1083–1983: Festschrift zum 900-Jahr-Jubiläum (St. Ottilien, 1983), 293; Emmeran Ritter, “Abt Odilo Piazoll von Göttweig,” UH 29 (1958): 156.

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prelates themselves did not, that they belonged to an organization based in Rome whose interests were not identical with those of the house of Austria. Perhaps this accounted for the cool and observant gaze with which Charles VI greeted one newly elected abbot of Melk on his inaugural visit in the Hofburg. The ruler not only enjoined him to maintain discipline in his monastery but also “recommended” the Landhaus to him. Only three days later, an aulic decree landed on Melk’s desk requesting a loan of 200,000 florins from the Estate of prelates for waging the Ottoman war.101 The dynastic Counter-Reformation relied on ecclesiastic talent at the Estates to enforce religious policy. The notoriously roving commissions in the 1650s to coax and, if necessary, drag the still large numbers of Protestants back into the Roman fold included leading prelates. Abbot Matthäus Kollweis of Lilienfeld headed one such body that carried on for some twelve years in the quarter below the Manhartsberg.102 His counterpart in the other quarter above the Danube, Abbot Benedikt Leiss of Altenburg, was a reform-minded Catholic who had studied in Rome and received consecration as a priest in the basilica of St. John Lateran.103 While their missions were underway, both men served at the Estates. In their own areas, individual monasteries likewise helped roll back Lutheran influence. This occurred through the pastoral care of local people and the buy-out of embattled Protestants, activity that intensified the wrangling between Church and nobility over landownership. The abbot of Heiligenkreuz, Michael Schnabel († 1658), earned Ferdinand III’s gratitude for his purchasing zeal. From his seat in the college of Deputies, which managed land taxes, he occupied a vantage point for scouting out bargains.104 The practices of baroque piety not only lent legitimacy to the consolidation of dynastic power but also created bonds of personal trust between rulers and clerics. Under Johann Walterfinger († 1641), the Benedictine Schotten abbey in Vienna became a flourishing center of the Marian cult. As such, it was patronized by the emperor Ferdinand II, who regarded the Virgin as his “Generalissima.”105 Walterfinger combined the abbacy with the offices of auxiliary bishop of Vienna and 101 Diary of Abbot Adrian Plieml, Apr. 4 and 7, 1739, i, pp. 10 and 12–13, Stiftsarchiv Melk, 3. Äbte, carton 7a. 102 Paul Tobner, Lilienfeld vor zweihundert Jahren, oder: Leben und Wirken des heldenmüthigen Abtes Matthäus III. Kolweiß von Lilienfeld (Lilienfeld, 1883), 10. 103 Sebastian Brunner, ed., Ein Benediktinerbuch: Geschichte und Beschreibung der bestehenden und Anführung der aufgehobenen Benediktinerstifte in Österreich-Ungarn, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Würzburg, 1880), 80, 442–3; Albert Groiß and Werner Telesko, eds., Benediktinerstift Altenburg: Mittelalterliches Kloster und Barocker Kosmos (Vienna, 2008), 17–18. 104 Brunner, ed., Cisterzienserbuch, 94–5; see also Tropper, “Das Stift,” 279–80. For the “reform commissions” and the role of manorial authority in re-Catholicizing the countryside, see Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht: Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2003), ii, 59, 113–16, 245–60. 105 Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 403; quotation from Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca: Ursprung und Entwicklung barocker Frömmigkeit in Österreich (Vienna, 1959), 54. See also Robert Bireley, Ferdinand II: Counter-Reformation Emperor, 1578–1637 (Cambridge, 2014), 139. For the Marian devotion of his son, Ferdinand III, see Mark Hengerer, Kaiser Ferdinand III. (1608–1657): Eine Biographie (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2012), 134–5.

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Deputy at the Landhaus. One of his noteworthy successors, Carl Fetzer (abbot 1705–50), enjoyed the “entire favor” of Charles VI. Fetzer passed through the cursus honorum at the Estates, where, it was alleged, no important business was conducted without him.106 Even better known as a confidant of Charles was the able Gottfried Bessel (1672–1749), whose call to Göttweig owed much to imperial influence. Bessel was also Court theologian and carried out delicate diplomatic missions on the emperor’s behalf. Bessel’s biographers have little to say about his work at the Estates, though he too progressed through their hierarchy.107 Among his predecessors at Göttweig, the Danzig-born Johann Dizent (abbot 1672–89) continued to advise the emperor Leopold even after gout had made it necessary for him to be carried into the imperial presence. Dizent’s rhetorical abilities reputedly allowed him a conspicuous role in the college of Deputies’ deliberations. He served during the Ottoman siege of Vienna.108 Because of monasticism’s continued growth and vibrancy, the historian Derek Beales has compellingly dated the Counter-Reformation’s “apogee” to the middle of the eighteenth century.109 The most spectacular baroque makeovers of Austria’s greatest religious foundations indeed took place after 1700. Built to the greater glory of God, the superb new complexes with their dizzyingly gilt and frescoed interiors inimitably manifested the inherent link between His Church and dynastic authority. The inevitable imperial staircases, imperial courtyards, and sweeps of imperial apartments underlined the house of Austria’s profoundly Catholic political program. The abbots who most cultivated the splendor included Berthold Dietmayr of Melk (abbot 1700–39), Melchior Zaunagg of Zwettl (abbot 1706–47), Gottfried Bessel of Göttweig (abbot 1714–49), and Placidus Much of Altenburg (abbot 1715–56). These exceptional men all sat in the Estates’ directorial committee between the 1710s and 1730s, their tenures in some cases overlapping. Although Dietmayr’s breathtaking achievement on a bluff above the Danube some fifty miles from Vienna far outshone any imperial residence of the day, he, like Bessel, stood high in Habsburg favor. Had Charles VI’s plan to create a palacemonastery at Klosterneuburg in imitation of the Spanish Escorial been fully realized, even Melk would have paled beside the stone apotheosis of the Austrian-Catholic idea. The austere provost who reluctantly presided over the building program, Ernst Perger (1707–48), also held office at the Landhaus. In the mid-seventeenth century, Lower Austria’s monasteries had occasionally propped up decayed ecclesiastical institutions in neighboring Bohemia.110 As 106

Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 409. Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 143; Edmund Vašiček, Abt Gottfried von Bessel von Göttweig: Ein Lebensbild (Vienna, 1912); Tropper, “Das Stift,” 291–327. 108 Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 142; Tropper, “Das Stift,” 283–8; Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 286–7. 109 Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), 27. 110 Lilienfeld’s assistance to Bohemian Cistercians is mentioned in Tobner, Lilienfeld, 9, 10, 17; Melk’s to Emaus in Prague in Ignaz Franz Keiblinger, Geschichte des Benedictiner-Stiftes Melk in Niederösterreich, seiner Besitzungen und Umgebungen, i (Vienna, 1851), 884–5; Klosterneuburg’s for the Augustinian foundations in Wittingau (Třeboň) and Forbes (Borovany) in Floridus Röhrig, ed., 107

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Habsburg arms retook large swathes of Hungary from the Ottomans beginning in the 1680s, the question of the restoration of Catholic religious life there presented itself. Once again, territorial boundaries posed no obstacle to the mobilization of foundations in the land below the Enns to pan-monarchical purpose. The Cistercian and Benedictine houses in particular are known to have taken over the desolate and sometimes ravaged properties of their orders there.111 As early as the 1660s, after the Austrian victory over the Turks at St. Gotthard, the Cistercians of Lilienfeld under Matthäus Kollweis attempted to resuscitate the endowment at Zirc near Veszprém.112 After the Peace of Karlowitz (1699), official institutional ties between Lower Austrian and Hungarian establishments became more common. The emperor Leopold I gave the abbey of Tihany on Lake Balaton to Benedictine Altenburg; the Schotten at Vienna received the Benedictine foundation of Telki in Buda from the same ruler.113 Under Charles VI, the abbey of Zalavár, also near Balaton, passed to the Benedictines of Göttweig, while the forsaken Cistercian settlement providentially located at St. Gotthard in western Hungary was revived in 1734 by Klosterneuburg.114 These trans-territorial connections signify in a different way the broader political horizons of the archduchy’s leading clerics. The Hungarian affiliations of those elected to the college of Deputies, including Carl Fetzer of Schotten and Telki, Robert Leeb of Heiligenkreuz and St. Gotthard, and Odilo Piazoll of Göttweig and Zalavár, were carefully noted in the roll of officeholders kept by the Estates. OF FICEHO LDERS: LO RDS If the prelates were leading exponents of the Habsburg political dispensation, who were the nobles occupying the four other places in the college of Deputies? The bans on Lutherans of the early 1650s, which reinforced the practice of making access to patronage and office dependent on confession, ensured that they were all Catholic. From then until the reform of the Estates’ organization in 1764, some fifty lords and forty-three knights served single terms in the college of Deputies.115 Eleven men held or administered the office of Landmarschall between 1630 and 1742; five of these—Hans Balthasar Hoyos the elder, Sigmund Adam Traun, Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein, Franz Maximilian Mollart, and Otto Die bestehenden Stifte der Augustiner-Chorherren in Österreich, Südtirol und Polen (Klosterneuburg and Vienna, 1997), 121–2. 111 Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 407–8. But for the activities of the Premonstratensian foundation of Pernegg in Hungary, see Alphons Žak, “Das Chorherrenstift Pernegg,” BVLkN, new series, 35 (1901): 208–13 and passim. 112 Brunner, ed., Cisterzienserbuch, 179. 113 Eugen Bonomi, Die ungarische Abtei Telki unter den Wiener Schotten (1702–1881): Deutsche und ungarische Bauern bei Benediktinern (Munich, 1977). 114 Brunner, ed., Benediktinerbuch, 81, 143; Groiß and Telesko, eds., Benediktinerstift Altenburg, 19; Tropper, “Das Stift,” 294–5; Ritter, “Abt Odilo Piazoll,” 159. 115 The number of knights is slightly uncertain given both the nature of the sources and disputed tenures in the early decades.

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Traun—had been Deputies. Only two of the eight Landuntermarschälle—Johann Ernst Hätzenberg and Johann Joachim Aichen—had sat in the college of Deputies. Because the social profiles of the Landmarschälle and Landuntermarchälle did not appreciably differ from those of the Deputies of the respective curiae, the discussion below is collective of the entire group with special attention to the higher officeholders. Thirteen families from the Estate of lords provided two or more Deputies.116 Thus, there were thirty-seven lords’ lineages in total. The picture was comparable for the knights: eight surnames occur more than once, with thirty-five in all.117 An almost complete lack of overlap between the families that furnished Deputies to the two curiae was indicative of the growing disparity between the titled and lesser nobility. Only one noble house (Pergen) transferred from knights to lords and continued to provide Deputies. In addition, the chamber’s last Protestant knight, Ferdinand Hohenfeld (in office 1650–4), converted to Catholicism after the end of his term, rose to the vice-presidency of the Aulic Chamber, and eventually became General Field War Commissary. He acquired a count’s coronet; two of his sons and a grandson served as lords’ Deputies. The fact that the Pergens were not an old family like the Hohenfelds made their success all the more notable, but also hinted at an important, little-noticed similarity between the two noble Estates. Particularly in the earlier period, both were shot through with social climbers. But let us return briefly to the question of religion, which continued to influence the course of noble careers for generations after Ferdinand III’s ban on Protestant Deputies. In contrast to the situation in the other Austrian duchies, Bohemia proper, and Moravia, the Lutheran nobility in the archduchy below the Enns enjoyed official toleration guaranteed by the Peace of Osnabrück (1648). Yet the rewards for converting to Catholicism were alluring, especially as the emperor became an ever more formidable European power. Consequently, we find converts among the Deputies long past 1700. Related through his mother to Georg Erasmus Tschernembl (1567–1626), the famous Calvinist leader of the Estates in 1620, Count Christoph Hans Althann (1633–1706) waited until his parents were dead to follow his cousin from the family’s elder line, the field marshal Michael Adolph (1574–1636), into the Church of Rome. The step paid off. He passed in relatively young years through the cursus honorum at the Estates (Deputy 1667–70) before changing to the diplomatic service.118 Both Johann Wilhelm Traun and his cousin, the later Landmarschall Otto Traun, also began life as Protestants and entered the Deputies in the decade or so after Althann. The former’s father had been the

116 Herberstein, Kuefstein, Zinzendorf, Heissenstein, Traun, Brandis, Hohenfeld, Fünfkirchen, Gilleis, Geymann, Pergen, Auersperg, and Harrach. 117 Walterskirchen, Hätzenberg, Oppel, Lempruch, Hackelberg, Aichen, Albrechtsburg, and Moser. 118 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, i, 80–3 (for Michael Adolph), 103, 105. For Tschernembl, see Hans Sturmberger, Georg Erasmus Tschernembl: Religion, Libertät und Widerstand. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gegenreformation und des Landes ob der Enns (Linz, 1953). According to Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, ii, 124, Michael Adolph was “probably the most important aristocratic patron of the Jesuits.”

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college’s last Lutheran lord, while the latter’s uncle, Landmarschall Ernst Traun, successfully thwarted a plan to give the orphaned Otto a Protestant education among Austrian exiles at Regensburg. Instead he was taught by Jesuits and converted by Nicolaus Avancini (1611–86), a baroque poet and dramatist who belonged to the Society.119 Otto Traun’s own tenure at the Landhaus saw the accession of the occasional convert (Baron Hans Carl Geymann † 1707) or convert’s son (Baron Hans Carl Fünfkirchen † 1694) to the college of Deputies.120 Others followed, even much later. The first lords’ Deputy chosen under Maria Theresa, Count August Falkenhayn (in office 1741–3), was the son of a formerly Protestant north German diplomat who had entered imperial service and risen to General War Commissary. In an ironic twist, August’s son, Nikolaus (1725–77), bought the property of what proved to be the last Protestant noble lineage to emigrate from the land below the Enns, enjoyed the empress’s confidence, and thanks to her influence followed in his father’s footsteps in the college of Deputies.121 Several scions of the house of Auersperg, whose Lower Austrian branch remained Lutheran deep into the eighteenth century, served as Deputies under Charles VI and Maria Theresa. The last convert, Count August Auersperg (1741–1821), was elected in 1779.122 His tenure ended a year after Joseph II’s patent of toleration made the induction of Protestants into the Estates possible again for the first time since 1629. In Joseph II’s later years, Auersperg stood in for the ill Landmarschall Pergen, putting a former Protestant intermittently at the head of the Estates. But the very last convert to preside over them would be Landmarschall Karl Zinzendorf (in office 1800–2). Especially in the seventeenth century, the lords who held the offices of Landmarschall and Deputy sprang overwhelmingly from families that had sided with the dynasty in the crisis around 1620 and ascended into the evolving aristocracy. The originally Spanish Hoyos had been unwaveringly Catholic courtiers in Habsburg service in the century preceding the advent of Landmarschall Hans Balthasar Hoyos (1626–32); in return for their devotion, the ruling family no less richly and reliably advanced the interests of the house of Hoyos. The basis of their later stupendous landed fortune in the archduchy dated to the 1500s, though it would be Hans Balthasar’s own acquisition of thousands of forested acres in the 1620s—some as repayment for loans to Ferdinand II—that would be remembered by his descendants as the turning point. Not coincidentally, his gains underpinned the Catholic cause in the countryside. The title of count and one of Lower Austria’s

119 Before his father’s death, Otto had received a Lutheran education, first in Nuremberg and later at Preßburg. Idea de’ nobili nelle gesta del gran maresciallo dell’ Austria, conte Ottone Onorio di Traun (n.p., n.d.), 11–12; Grubmüller, Geschichte, 309; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 202. 120 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 136, 313. Fünfkirchen’s mother did not convert. 121 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 12–14. For the family Stockhorner von Starein, which sold its Lower Austrian landholdings in 1761, and entered Prussian service, see Reingrabner, “Der evangelische Adel,” 207. 122 Miha Preinfalk, Auersperg: Geschichte einer europäischen Familie, ed. Ernst Bruckmüller, trans. Irena Bruckmüller-Vilfan (Graz and Stuttgart, 2006), 385–7.

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first entails helped secure what would be a splendid future that included another incumbency in the office of Landmarschall as well.123 Closely related to the Hoyos were the grander and more trans-territorial Trautsons, originally Tyrolean, who for generations belonged to the imperial inner circle (see Genealogical Table 1). The Hoyos put great store by this connection: Hans Balthasar bore the Christian name of his maternal grandfather, the imperial privy councilor Baron Balthasar Trautson. Hoyos’s great-grandfather, Baron Hans Trautson (1509–89), had been grand master of Maximilian II’s Court and was grandfather of another Lower Austrian Landmarschall, Johann Franz Trautson (in office 1637–42). Johann Franz’s father, Paul Sixt (1548–1621), was in turn “one of the most influential privy councilors” of the emperors Rudolf II and Matthias; his mother, an impeccably Catholic Meggau whose brother managed Ferdinand II’s Court, had charge of the imperial children in the 1630s.124 Paul Sixt was one of the earliest counts in the new aristocracy; his “county”—Falkenstein—was cobbled together out of his holdings in a prime wine-growing region below the Manhartsberg. Though less noteworthy, Johann Franz received the Golden Fleece and was the archduchy’s stadholder for more than two decades after leaving the Landhaus.125 Perhaps his greatest service was simply to keep the line going for better days. As a major figure at the Court of Joseph I, his son Leopold Trautson (1659–1724) brought the family to a new, indeed princely, zenith. And the empress Maria Theresa would have recourse to Johann Franz’s grandson, Johann Wilhelm (1700–75), a favorite who in times of change would combine high aulic and territorial office not unlike his ancestors around 1600. He became the longest-serving Theresan Landmarschall of Lower Austria. If less grand than the Trautsons, the families of several other closely interrelated Landmarschälle were hardly less dependably dynastic and well-connected. Of these, the three generations of the Trauns beginning with the convert Sigmund Adam (in office 1632–37) have been mentioned. Ernst Traun was exceptional among the presidents of the Estates in having been a military man. His successor, Count Ferdinand Maximilian Sprinzenstein (1625–79), was married to the stepdaughter of Traun’s sister, Regina Anna (1605–71) (see Genealogical Table 2). Not unusually for the age, Sprinzenstein’s elegantly noble surname disguised a more prosaic past. His direct ancestor, Paul Ritz (c.1480–1542), had been an originally Jewish Court physician in Ferdinand I’s time. Ennobled in 1523, Ritz and his descendants swiftly moved up under the name “Sprinzenstein” taken from a castle acquired in Upper Austria. Successive generations served as jurists on the Imperial

123 Karl Leeder, Geschichte des Hauses Hoyos in Österreich, 2 parts (Vienna, 1914), i, 135–58; Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God,” 238–41. 124 Quotation in Katrin Keller, Hofdamen: Amtsträgerinnen im Wiener Hofstaat des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2005), 331. There is no satisfactory history of the Trautsons, but a good genealogy can be found in Johann Baptist Witting, ed., J. Siebmacher’s großes Wappenbuch, vol. IV/4/ii: Der niederösterreichische landständische Adel (Nuremberg, 1918), 375–9. 125 Johann Franz’s father as well as his Meggau uncle who was Ferdinand II’s Obersthofmeister (1626–37) served as stadholder, the former from 1608–21, the latter as his brother-in-law’s immediate successor 1621–6. [Starzer], Beiträge, 210–25, 247–52; Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 369–72.

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Aulic Council. As staunch Catholics in a period of flux, they percolated to the top of the lords (“old lineages”) around 1600, only decades after admission to the Estates. Yet no evidence suggests that Landmarschall Sprinzenstein endured the haughty condescension that a successor in office, Count Johann Anton Pergen (1775–90), endured a century later. Pergen was one generation further removed from an ennobled doctor of medicine than his distant predecessor Sprinzenstein. Unlike the Pergens, the Sprinzensteins remained very much tied to social newcomers—albeit powerful ones—into the Landmarschall’s own time. His wife was a Kurtz, which linked him to the line of ennobled jurists of that name, two of whom were imperial vice-chancellors. The Kurtzs descended in turn from the Webers, the family of parvenu imperial aulic councilors to which Landmarschall Ernst Traun’s wife belonged.126 More indicative of the importance of new men to the standing of top nobles was Sprinzenstein’s connection to Vinzenz Muschinger († 1628), maternal grandfather of his wife and thus father-in-law of the later imperial vice-chancellor Count Ferdinand Siegmund Kurtz (1592–1659). Son of an ennobled Viennese burgher, Muschinger was a financier attached to the Aulic Chamber, a major beneficiary of the turnover on the Lower Austrian property market around 1620, and a trusted collaborator of Ferdinand II.127 Several choice manors picked up by Muschinger later passed to his grandson-in-law Sprinzenstein, in the hands of whose descendants they remain to this day. Another connection deserves mention: Sprinzenstein’s sister married Baron (later Count) Windhag (1600–78). Born Joachim Enzmilner, son of a Swabian schoolmaster, Windhag crowned an extraordinary career in dynastic service as “general commissioner” in charge of bringing the archduchy’s Protestants back into the Catholic fold after the Thirty Years War. Along the way, he assumed, in the words of R. J. W. Evans, all the “trappings of a Baroque grand seigneur.”128 Sprinzenstein’s ceremonial 126 Landmarschall Sprinzenstein’s father and grandfather had both been imperial aulic councilors, which helps account for the Kurtz marriage. For the Kurtz-Weber connection, as well as the Kurtzs and Sprinzensteins on the Imperial Aulic Council, see Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 140–1, 157–8, 215–16, 219; also Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 381–2. An extract from the patent of nobility for Paul Ritz (dated Dec. 13, 1523) is found in NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, carton 120, Nr. 1460. See also Heinrich Schnee, Die Hoffinanz und der moderne Staat: Geschichte und System der Hoffaktoren an deutschen Fürstenhöfen im Zeitalter des Absolutismus, iv (Berlin, 1963), 312–13. A Sprinzenstein genealogy can be found in Witting, ed., Der niederösterreichische landständische Adel, 185–7. 127 Richard Perger, “Die Aufnahme von Wiener Bürgern in den Ritterstand Österreichs unter der Enns im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 63/4 (1998): 374; Anna Maria Sigmund, “Es steht ein Schloß—Zur Bau- und Besitzgeschichte der Rosenburg,” in Adel im Wandel, 591, 598; Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God,” 270. For Muschinger’s acquisition of properties taken from Protestants, see also [Walterskirchen], Die Walterskirchen, 159–62; Muschinger papers including correspondence with Ferdinand II have survived in NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, cartons 95–102. On the recommendation of the archduke Matthias, Muschinger was admitted to the Estate of knights (“new lineages”) in 1607. NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C9. Muschinger became a baron in 1622. Karl Friedrich von Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das Deutsche Reich und die Österreichischen Erblande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), iii, 279. 128 R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford, 1979), 119, 294 (quotation); also Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, ii, 115–16. Provincial government to Estates, Aug. 14, 1668, NÖLA, StB, 500, f. 126r.

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installation as Landmarschall was almost a family affair given the presence of his brother-in-law Windhag as an official representative of the provincial government. Though Sprinzenstein’s next-but-one successor, Count Franz Maximilian Mollart (1628–90), had no Windhag tie, he boasted a blood relationship to Vinzenz Muschinger, his maternal grandfather, while his brother was married to a daughter of Aulic Chancellor Pricklmayr, whose ancestors were peasants. As Muschinger’s principal heirs, the Kurtz-Sprinzensteins and Mollarts spent decades in legal tussles over the rich spoils, which each used to endow entails.129 The Sprinzenstein-Mollart link predated the alliance through the Muschinger daughters. The first wife of the later Landmarschall Sprinzenstein’s father had been a daughter of the later Landmarschall Mollart’s paternal uncle, Baron Jacob Mollart (1565–1616), governor (Landeshauptmann) of Upper Austria. The deeply personal ties to the dynasty cultivated for generations by the Mollarts recall those of the Trautsons. Around the turn of the sixteenth century, Ludwig Mollart had come to Austria with Maximilian I from Franche-Comté. His son Peter († 1576) was chief equerry to the consort of Maximilian II, and his grandson Ernst († 1621), a brother of the aforementioned Jacob, accompanied the archduke Ernst (1553–95) on his mission to the Low Countries as Spanish governor. He is said to have pawned his silver and his wife’s jewels to keep his master afloat financially. A Catholic like the rest of his family, he replaced a Protestant as Lower Austrian stadholder (1601–8) at a time of rising religious tension. If the anecdotes that have come down to us are indicative, he was on terms of considerable familiarity with the emperor Rudolf II. Ernst and Jacob Mollart, as well as their brother Johann (1563–1619), also occupied high office: the first-named as grand marshal of the Court (1606–12); the second as president of the Aulic Chamber (1605/6); and the third as president of the War Council (1610–19).130 The tradition of dynastic service continued at a slightly less exalted level into the generation of the Landmarschall’s father, Peter Ernst Mollart († 1655), a son of the stadholder who himself became vice-stadholder, major-domo in the household of the dowager empress Eleonora (1598–1655), and acting grand marshal of the Court. Ferdinand III made him a count shortly before his death; he thus joined the ranks of the Hoyos, Sprinzensteins, Trauns, and other lineages so honored. Yet it cannot be said that Landmarschall Sprinzenstein and his successor Mollart did not earn their own spurs. The latter had been vice-stadholder before taking over at the Landhaus and was in the running for the office of stadholder after the incumbent’s death in 1687. Sprinzenstein’s early career had brought him into personal contact with the future emperor Leopold, to whose entourage he had 129 Despite the Muschinger inheritance, the Mollarts appear to have been in straitened financial circumstances in the mid-seventeenth century. [Starzer], Beiträge, 277; Chesler, “Crown, Lords, and God,” 267. 130 The Mollarts, who died out in the eighteenth century, are even more poorly served by the standard genealogical and biographical literature than other families considered here. The above is based on [Starzer], Beiträge, 205–9; ÖZV, I/1, 276–9, 285, 287; Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen, iii, 252; and Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 303–9. There is a useful, unpublished family tree on deposit in the Bourcy Papers, Institut für Personengeschichte, Bensheim, Germany.

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been attached. Sprinzenstein would remain a reliable courtier, combining turns in archducal households and at Leopold’s Court with duties in the Estates’ standing committees. At one point, he officiated for over a year as interim Austrian aulic chancellor.131 He was Leopold’s first appointee as Lower Austrian Landmarschall, Ernst Traun having been a holdover from the previous reign. The career of Count Otto Traun (1644–1715), president of the Estates for a quarter-century after 1690, spanned the period from the troubled, postWestphalian world of the casa de Austria to the age of Prince Eugene. Brought up as his uncle’s ward, Otto shared Ernst Traun’s Spanish inclinations. A grand tour in younger years had a distinctly Iberian flavor. In Madrid he witnessed the marriage by procuration of a daughter of Philip IV to the emperor Leopold, and he fought under the banner of the Catholic king against Portugal and France. Decades later, Charles II would give him the Golden Fleece. In the 1670s Traun returned home, where he showed his mettle in the face of the Ottoman menace. As a member of the Lower Austrian college of Deputies, he helped organize provincial defenses in 1683. In the emperor’s name, he welcomed the Polish king John Sobieski as he crossed from Moravia into Lower Austria on the way to relieve Vienna.132 Only a few years later, his abilities were thought to qualify him for the job of General Field War Commissary.133 His appointment as Landmarschall at a time of acute Habsburg financial distress during the Nine Years War occasioned a costly demonstration of devotion to the Austrian cause. He loaned the Court the immense sum of 250,000 florins “ad necessitates publicas.”134 Though reminiscent of Louis XIV’s notorious sale of offices, the deal served the interests of both parties without advancing those of a rigid class of hereditary officeholders as in France.135 Traun would in fact be the last of his family to preside over the Estates. He was followed in 1715 by Count Aloys Harrach (1669–1742), head of the younger line of one of the monarchy’s great noble houses.136 Confirmed Catholic loyalists, the 131 The “Extractus Diplomatis Kaysers Leopoldi de dato 22ten Februar 1666” provides a good overview of Sprinzenstein’s career to that point. NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, carton 120, Nr. 1460. Also [Starzer], Beiträge, 442; Stefan Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz unter Kaiser Leopold I.: Personelle Strukturen und Methoden zur politischen Entscheidungsfindung am Wiener Hof (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 140; and Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 351–2. 132 Idea de’ nobili, 210–11; Grubmüller, Geschichte, 309–11; Andreas Pečar, Die Ökonomie der Ehre: Der höfische Adel am Kaiserhof Karls VI. (1711–1740) (Darmstadt, 2003), 177. 133 Prince Ferdinand Schwarzenberg, Journal de la cour de Vienne (1686–1688), ed. Jean Bérenger (Paris, 2013), 211 (Jan. 7, 1688). 134 Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 490. 135 For the “informal sale of offices” in Austria in the form of loans, see Klaus Müller, “Habsburgischer Adel um 1700: Die Familie Lamberg,” MÖStA 32 (1979): 99–102. 136 For the following, see Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 285–6, 323–4; Arnold Gaedeke, “Das Tagebuch des Grafen Ferdinand Bonaventura von Harrach während seines Aufenthaltes am spanischen Hofe in den Jahren 1697 und 1698,” AÖG 48 (1872): 165–72; Keller, Hofdamen, 279–81; Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz, 104–8, 191–2; Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 241–2, 274–6; Pečar, Die Ökonomie, 89, 98–9; Karl Gutkas, “Die führenden Persönlichkeiten der habsburgischen Monarchie von 1683 bis 1740,” in Karl Gutkas, ed., Prinz Eugen und das barocke Österreich (Salzburg and Vienna, 1985), 74, 84; Müller, “Habsburgischer Adel,” 81–3, 94–5; Éric Hassler, La Cour de Vienne 1680–1740: Service de l’empereur et stratégies spatiales des élites nobiliaires dans la monarchie des Habsbourg (Strasbourg, 2013), 136–40 and passim; Friedrich Polleroß, Die Kunst

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Harrachs had early settled into the aristocracy’s inner circle. But Harrach otherwise had little in common with his predecessors as Landmarschall, to whom he lacked close ties of blood or marriage. While the Trauns, Sprinzensteins, and Mollarts had had their share of trans-territorial connections, the Harrachs were of almost European format. Through his Muschinger mother, Landmarschall Mollart had barely been noble; the Harrach pedigree, by contrast, opened up the empire’s famously exclusive cathedral chapters. The Landmarschall’s elder brother, Franz Anton (1665–1727), was prince-archbishop of Salzburg, hence primate of Germany. His paternal grandmother, a Gonzaga, tied him distantly to two empresses of that name. Aloys’s father, Ferdinand Bonaventura (1636–1706), was an able senior diplomat, and both he and his maternal grandfather, Count Johann Maximilian Lamberg (1608–82), were grand masters of Leopold I’s Court. Of gentle disposition and polished manners, Ferdinand Bonaventura was also the emperor’s personal friend, hunting companion, and political confidant. The high esteem in which Leopold held the Harrachs evinced itself in the unusual award of the Golden Fleece to Aloys during the lifetime of his father. Though the Harrachs were long-situated below the Enns, the Landmarschall’s landed center of gravity was less obviously Lower Austrian than those of his direct antecedents at the Estates. In addition to properties at Bruck an der Leitha in the quarter below the Vienna Woods, he called extensive acreage in Upper Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary his own. The grand Italianate palace in Vienna symbolized the close Harrach association with central authority rather than the archduchy specifically. The Landmarschall’s own marriages underscored the panmonarchical orientation. Where Otto Traun’s second wife had been a Silesian countess, all three of Harrach’s wives were not primarily Lower Austrian. The first was of old Bohemian stock, the second from the Swabian imperial nobility, and the third a Dietrichstein heiress. In keeping with the evolving constellation of power after the death of Leopold I, Harrach sought protectors at Court, including Charles VI’s favorite Count Althann, and later Prince Eugene. After the War of the Spanish Succession, Harrach was appointed to the special committee established to sort out the financial mess. In our period he would be the only Landmarschall simultaneously to be a minister. We should not make too much of a distinction between Aloys Harrach and his predecessors at the Landhaus: it was a subtle one within the monarchy’s small aristocratic elite rather than one between wholly divergent parts of the nobility. And the Trauns, after all, took pride in being one of the archduchy’s ancient lineages. Much reduced in number by our period, this group did not dominate the college of Deputies. In the century after the Thirty Years War, the majority of the lords’ Deputies came from either grander trans-territorial clans propertied in the land below the Enns—Herberstein, Breunner, and Auersperg—or originally lesser noble lines of local origin such as Kuefstein, Fünfkirchen, Hohenfeld, and Schallenberg. der Diplomatie: Auf den Spuren des kaiserlichen Botschafters Leopold Joseph Graf von Lamberg (1653–1706) (Petersberg, 2010), passim.

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The latter alone accounted for around one-third of the lords’ Deputies. Other families were of obscure or non-noble background (Petschowitz, Gurlandt, Pergen, Unverzagt). Whatever the differences in extraction, the lords’ Deputies collectively represented the seigniorial landed interest.137 An aristocratic-oligarchical consistency reconciled the ancestral variety. Only two incumbents, Barons Ferdinand Raymund Neudegg (in office 1710–15) and Franz Rudolph Borschitta (in office 1728–9), do not fit the general pattern. Both would appear to have lacked the usual signs of aristocracy: aulic appointments, personal proximity to the dynasty, and supra-regional affiliations, combined with certain markers of rank, kinship, and landed wealth. Closer inspection reveals such indicators in other seemingly unlikely cases. Baron Casimir Petschowitz’s mother was a Zinzendorf, Baron Johann Baptist Pergen’s a Traun. Both the mother and wife of Count Albrecht Ernst Gurlandt were Herbersteins. Of allegedly Bosnian extraction on his father’s side, Petschowitz served as a Deputy in the 1680s together with his first cousin, Baron Georg Zinzendorf († 1688). Around the same time, another relation, Count Albrecht Zinzendorf (1619–83), was the ranking great officer of state at Leopold I’s Court.138 Descended in the third generation from an ennobled keeper of Ferdinand II’s privy purse who had come by a landed fortune in the lands above and below the Enns around 1620, Gurlandt was in essence the fourth Herberstein elected to the college of Deputies after the Thirty Years War.139 His father-in-law Ferdinand Herberstein had served there in the 1660s. Affiliation with the aristocracy was in practice indispensable not only for the post of Landmarschall but also for election to office by the Estate of lords. A typical case in point concerned Baron Georg Julius Gilleis (1641–1700), his descendants, and allied families, who, despite their eighteenth-century effervescence, are now largely forgotten (see Genealogical Table 3). Georg Julius himself began life under a cloud. His father had defiantly remained Lutheran, dying at mid-century cut off from patronage and deeply in debt. To escape the misery, his widow sold off much of the family patrimony and appears to have embraced Catholicism. In 1655 her newly converted daughter—a sister of Georg Julius—became lady-in-waiting to the empress. In time, this same daughter would marry a noble on the make, Baron

137 There were a handful of major families unrepresented in the college of Deputies. The Liechtensteins had presumably become too grand for the office. The long attachment of the Hardeggs to Protestantism explains their absence. The Starhembergs and Sinzendorffs, both prominent in government, are others. 138 There is a fine Zinzendorf genealogy in Witting, ed., Der niederösterreichische landständische Adel, 636–43 (the Petschowitz marriage on p. 642). Petschowitz’s father—a new baron—was admitted to the Estates and he himself was a Court chamberlain. Johann Evang. Kirnbauer von Erzstätt, ed., J. Siebmacher’s großes Wappenbuch, vol. IV/4/i: Niederösterreichischer Adel (Nuremberg, 1909), 343. A third Zinzendorf, Ferdinand (1628–86), was also an Estates’ Deputy. For Albrecht Zinzendorf, who had belonged to the college of Deputies after the Thirty Years War, see [Starzer], Beiträge, 439–40; Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 255–6; Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 389–90; Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz, 173–5; Keller, Hofdamen, 288; and Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel, passim. 139 Niclas Gurlandt was admitted to the Estate of knights on the basis of an “oral” (mündliche) recommendation by Ferdinand II. Report of the knights’ committee, Mar. 17, 1629, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C13, folder Constantin Grundemann von Falkenberg.

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Hans Carl Fünfkirchen, who, like his brother-in-law Gilleis, would become a Deputy at the Landhaus.140 Where the makeover of the Fünfkirchens into aristocrats followed the marital alliance in 1664 of Hans Carl’s younger brother with the Slavatas, tough Bohemian partisans of the Habsburgs, the turning point for the Gilleis family was the marriage of Georg Julius to Countess Sabina Christina Starhemberg († 1725). She bore one of the archduchy’s—and monarchy’s—most illustrious names. They were a family of generals, ministers, and courtiers par excellence. Ernst Rüdiger Starhemberg would be the famed defender of Vienna in 1683, while Sabina Christina’s brother was the field marshal Guido (1657–1737), a sometime friend and ally of Prince Eugene. Ernst Rüdiger’s brother, Gundaker Thomas, was the finance minister who kept the monarchy buoyant during the Spanish succession conflict. Ernst Rüdiger and Gundaker Thomas were in turn the sons of Konrad Balthasar Starhemberg (1612–87), stadholder of Lower Austria at the time of Sabina Christina’s union with Georg Julius Gilleis.141 As Starhemberg satellites, the Gilleis would in due course emit a little light of their own. Within a few years of his marriage in 1672, Georg Julius embarked on the cursus honorum at the Estates, the income from which supplemented his depleted inheritance around Kattau castle near the old fortified town of Eggenburg. As a commissary in the district above the Manhartsberg, he was in the field during the Turkish invasion of 1683. The Nine Years War found him in Vienna, first among the Raitherren, then the Deputies. After Georg Julius’s death, his widow served the dowager empress as chief lady-in-waiting. Under Charles VI, she became governess (Aja) of the imperial children. From her roost at Court, she arranged impressive marriages for her offspring, the most spectacular of which was that of her daughter Maria Oktavia (1689–1762) to Hungary’s leading magnate, Prince Esterházy.142 One of her sons won the hand of the daughter of the Bohemian grand chancellor Kinsky. The brilliance of these ties was the backdrop for continuing Gilleis success at the Lower Austrian Estates. Both the younger son and a grandson of Georg Julius and Sabina Christina passed through the cursus honorum. The couple’s descendants in the female line did equally well. In the 1750s and 1760s no fewer than four grandsons or grandsons-in-law, and one great-grandson, served in the college of Deputies: Count Carl Joseph Heissenstein (in office 1751–6); Count Wenzel Breunner (in office 1754–9 and 1764–7); Baron Julius Gilleis (in office 1758–63); Count 140 Keller, Hofdamen, 278; Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 332–5. Details of Fünfkirchen’s military career are in Heinrich Graf Fünfkirchen, “Die Fünfkirchen zu Wien, Enns, Steinabrunn und Falkenstein im Mistelbacher Bezirke: Nachrichten über dieses Geschlechte,” NÖLA, HS 1116, 160–1. 141 Georg Heiligensetzer, “Fata Starhembergica: Aristokratie, Staat und Militär zur Zeit des Prinzen Eugen am Beispiel des Hauses Starhemberg,” in Gutkas, ed., Prinz Eugen, 87–98; Brigitte Holl, Hofkammerpräsident Gundaker Thomas Graf Starhemberg und die österreichische Finanzpolitik der Barockzeit (1703–1715) (Vienna, 1976); Hassler, La Cour de Vienne, 268–77 and passim; [Starzer], Beiträge, 253–67. 142 The son of the Gilleis-Esterházy union, Prince Nikolaus Esterházy (1714–90), builder of a palace known as the “Versailles” of Hungary, earned the epithet “the Magnificent.” Amt der Burgenländischen Landesregierung, Die Fürsten Esterházy: Magnaten, Diplomaten und Mäzene (Eisenstadt, 1995), 50–4.

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Leopold Schallenberg (in office 1764–5); and Count Franz Harrach (in office 1760–4). Heissenstein’s grandfather on his father’s side, a nobleman with ties to old Bohemian nobility and new Austrian money, had been a Deputy as well. The Gilleis alliance cemented the comparatively late arrival of the Schallenbergs, rebels in 1620. Leopold Schallenberg would briefly preside at the Estates after Joseph II’s death. Though Sabina Christina Gilleis-Starhemberg’s access to the ruling family was unusually intimate, her husband and other male relations also enjoyed entrée to Court. They held the coveted rank of chamberlain (Kämmerer). Though much inflated by the seventeenth century, the award was no empty honorific.143 It offered privileged admittance to the imperial apartments, thus to the imperial presence, and in some cases entailed personal attendance on the monarch. In 1659 Leopold I charged Hans Franz Lamberg, a chamberlain who was also a member of the Lower Austrian college of Deputies, with preparations for the diet.144 For weeks at a time, another Deputy from the land below the Enns, Count Ferdinand Pergen, waited on Charles VI in his capacity as chamberlain.145 The Estates in fact formally exempted holders of the title of chamberlain from their rules governing conflicts of interest between archducal and corporate authority. The incidence of Deputies who were also chamberlains was accordingly high. With few exceptions, all lords elected to the college of Deputies appear to have been recipients of the chamberlain’s key. The antechambers of power at the Hofburg lay only a few yards from the Landhaus. Estates and government overlapped at the level of personnel in another way. More than one-quarter of the lords who became Deputies served at some point on the council of the provincial government. Official guarantees of rank facilitated seamless transfers to the Landhaus and back.146 Given that the Landmarschall’s tribunal was a part of the court system overseen by the provincial authorities, no absolute disjunction even obtained between the two. For a noble, a provincial councilorship typically followed an apprenticeship at the tribunal. The cursus honorum at the Estates might fall midway in a career and be succeeded by another stint in the government. There were of course variations. A scion of a family of courtiers, Count Franz Jacob Brandis (1677–1746) joined the household of the future Charles VI soon after receiving a supernumerary councilorship. He later returned to the provincial council for more than a decade before starting at the Estates in 1716. A colorful highpoint was his reception on their behalf of the sultan’s ambassador, who was entering Lower Austria on his way to Vienna at the head of “the richest and most magnificent” Ottoman embassy to date. It included no less than 180 camels.147 Recurrent spells as acting grand marshal of 143

144 Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel, 545–6. Pečar, Die Ökonomie, 25–31. As chamberlain, he served from Dec. 20, 1739 to Jan. 9, 1740. He was recalled to Court service in Sept. 1740. Diary of his wife, Countess Maria Elisabeth Pergen, Dec. 20, 1739 and Sept. 11, 1740, NÖLA, Aspang Castle Papers, HS 23, f. 163 and 164. 146 [Starzer], Beiträge, 441, 442, 443, 446, 448, 449, 451, 453, 465. Various biographical entries on these pages record such transfers, sometimes with mention of the guarantee. 147 Quotation in the preceding sentence from Karl A. Roider, Jr., Austria’s Eastern Question 1700–1790 (Princeton, 1982), 59. This paragraph is otherwise based on Ferdinand Graf von 145

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the Court, a great office of state, interrupted his time at the Landhaus. At the end of his long life, which had seen him closely involved in all major areas of government, Brandis was the ranking councilor after the vice-stadholder. Four former lords’ Deputies—Count Hans Franz Lamberg (1664), Count Franz Maximilian Mollart (1679), Count Otto Felician Heissenstein (1687), and Count Ferdinand Pergen (1761)—themselves held the rank of vice-stadholder. If anything, the overlap of archducal and corporate power in Lower Austria was more extensive. In an overwhelmingly agrarian society, only a relatively small number of people had the requisite combination of social and intellectual qualifications to hold office. The same noble families appear again and again in lists of officials. If we shift the focus to the families of the lords’ Deputies, we discover that a full four-fifths were represented on the council of the provincial government between the Thirty Years War and the Seven Years War. The findings, though differently weighted, are comparable for the knights. The Deputies from the lesser noble consortium had more experience on the council than the comparable group in the lords. More than a third—rather than a fourth—served under the stadholder.148 But “only” some two-thirds of the relevant lineages—as opposed to four-fifths—sent its sons into provincial government. Again, we should not assume a simple conflation of interests between government and Estates, despite the correspondences at the level of personnel. In fact, conflicts of interest were an ever-present reality that both government and Estates tried to guard against with rules and regulations. O FFICEH OLDERS: K NIGHTS The knights who sat on the Estates’ directorial committee were as much exponents of the new world of Habsburg power as their counterparts from the lords. From a smaller base, the fortunes of almost all families concerned were made in the decades of war and civil unrest around 1620. With the principal exception of the Walterskirchens, who supplied a Landuntermarschall and three Deputies in the seventeenth century, few lineages came from the established landed nobility, which had been overwhelmingly Protestant and either moved up through conversion or emigrated. Most of the knights’ Deputies were only a generation or two removed from ennobled judicial agents, tax collectors and petty financiers, patrimonial administrators, army officers, and the like. The families of two Landuntermarschälle—Geyer von Edlbach and Aichen—may have usurped noble status, a common enough occurrence in the early modern world.149 Admission to the Estates authenticated their claims. By the late seventeenth century, Brandis, Das Familienbuch der Grafen von Brandis (n.p., 1889), 160–6; Wißgrill, Schauplatz, i, 367–8; [Starzer], Beiträge, 448; Keller, Hofdamen, 266, 311. 148 [Starzer], Beiträge, 441, 442, 443, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 452, 457, 458. 149 Jerzy Lukowski, The European Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003), 22, refers to this phenomenon as “even normal.” In connection with his admission to the “new lineages” of the Estate of knights, the father of the later Landuntermarschall Aichen cited the offices he had held (“nobile officium”) rather than his ancestry as proof of his noble status. Peter

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most of the knights in the college of Deputies descended from people who had not been part of the Estates before the Thirty Years War. Loyalty to the dynastic and Catholic cause strongly determined appointments to the offices of both Landuntermarschall and Deputy, despite the very different modes of selection. In the critical year 1620, Ferdinand II made Johann Rupprecht Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler chancellor of the archduchy’s government. The reward for his service came after only a few years. To the knights’ consternation, this son of a brilliant parvenu jurist, who was himself a practiced legal expert and diplomat, became Landuntermarschall; he subsequently picked up fine domains in the Wachau valley taken from Protestants.150 Georg Christoph von Walterskirchen’s path to the office of Landuntermarschall was different. A Lutheran, he remained loyal in 1620, while his turn to Catholicism a few years later removed an obstacle to preferment. His talent as a conciliator clinched the succession to Hegenmüller.151 In the 1630s and 1640s Walterskirchen served under two formerly Protestant Landmarschälle. One son of Hegenmüller and three sons of Walterskirchen belonged to the Estates’ directorial committee. The Walterskirchen connection explains Raimund von Heysperg’s election to the post of Deputy in 1658; his sister was married to the eldest Walterskirchen son who had himself belonged to the college only shortly before.152 Landuntermarschall Walterskirchen’s second and third sons allied themselves with the lineages of their father’s predecessor and successor in office, respectively (see Genealogical Table 4).153 The successor, Christoph Ehrenreich Geyer von Edlbach, had risen from obscurity. He began as a bailiff on the Stockerau estates of the bishop of Passau before moving into the archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s service. He joined the “new lineages” of the knights in 1635, by which time a fortuitous marriage had given him a foothold in the local elite. In 1618 the appointment of his future father-in-law, Erasmus Gold von Lampoding († 1623), to the post of Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall had put an end to what would be the last Protestant interlude at the head of the consortium of knights. Gold too had a Passau background, though grander than Geyer’s.154 In 1637 Geyer transferred to the Lower Austrian government whence he was called to the Landuntermarschall’s office in the 1650s. He had successfully been caught up in the swirl of new blood sustaining the Catholic ascendency. Adam Anton Grundemann von Falkenberg held the office of Landuntermarschall for more than forty years. Though he was too young to have earned von Aichen to Estate of knights, July 4, 1667, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C20. His father had been mayor of Hattingen in the Ruhr area. 150 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iv, 226–7; Gschließer, Der Reichshofrat, 119–21, 178–9; Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council, 246–7. 151 [Walterskirchen], Die Walterskirchen, 3–28. See also Brunner, Adeliges Landleben, 17. 152 Heysperg also came from a family of converts. His great-aunt had been a notorious dévote responsible for bringing her brother, the grandfather of Raimund, into the Catholic fold. Kirnbauer von Erzstätt, ed., Niederösterreichischer Adel, 185. 153 [Walterskirchen], Die Walterskirchen, 31–60. 154 [Starzer], Beiträge, 435, 439; Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 283, 351. Geyer’s application for admission to the Estate of knights, Feb. 15, 1631, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C14.

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spurs in the Thirty Years War, his father Constantin (1582–1658) had been a zealous partisan of the Catholic party in Upper Austria. In little more than a decade, the elder Grundemann metamorphosed from a patrimonial judge at Kremsmünster to administrator (Vizedom) of much of the archducal domain above the river Enns. His lucrative charges soon allowed him to set up as an authentic landed knight. In the 1620s he purchased the medieval eyrie of Streitwiesen in the land below the Enns. Admission to the Estates there and in Upper Austria followed. Later, he was able to pass on the office of Vizedom in Linz to an elder son while launching the gifted Adam Anton in Vienna. After training at the Landmarschall’s tribunal, Adam Anton joined the provincial government, for a time as a monastery councilor. On behalf of the central authorities, he later undertook diplomatic assignments to Italy, even after he had become Landuntermarschall. His son, Ernst Konstantin († 1702), would pass through the cursus honorum at the Estates.155 Of Adam Anton’s two relatively fleeting successors, Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg was the first Landuntermarschall in a century to descend from a line of elected officeholders at the Estates. Both he and his successor, Johann Joachim von Aichen, themselves passed through the cursus honorum. If somewhat older, the Hätzenbergs were as much a product of the early seventeenth-century political crucible as the Geyers or Grundemanns. Hätzenberg’s grandfather Justinian († 1639) had been a councilor of Ferdinand II who had twice sat in the college of Deputies in the 1620s. His second term overlapped with the incumbency of Landuntermarschall Hegenmüller, to whom he was related through his mother. Though less long-lived, Justinian’s son, Johann Ernst the elder († 1657), did his bit for the Catholic interest at the Estates. Though the re-election of a Lutheran of more distinguished ancestry was in the offing, he assumed the post of Deputy after Ferdinand III had let it be known that only a member of the Roman Church was acceptable. This episode proved a confessional watershed at the Landhaus.156 In the next generation, the later Landuntermarschall Johann Ernst the younger and the former army officer Albrecht Ignaz († 1734) were Deputies also, the former during the Nine Years War, the latter during the War of the Spanish Succession. Though the officeholders of the knights were more “provincial” in the conventional sense than the more resoundingly aulic and trans-territorial lords, their horizons were not purely Lower Austrian in all, or even most, cases. As with the lords, familial and landed connections in the land above the Enns were common. Landuntermarschall Geyer owned an estate in Moravia, while Ernst Konstantin Grundemann was naturalized in Hungary in the same year (1688) that he took his seat in the Lower Austrian college of Deputies.157 The father of the Deputy Franz Ignaz von Albrechtsburg had received the Hungarian indigenat fifteen years before

155 Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen, ii, 135; Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 428–33; [Starzer], Beiträge, 442, 445–6; Klaus Birngruber, “Waldenfels im Mühlviertel: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Herrschaft und ihrer Besitzer,” MOLA 21 (2008): 384–97. 156 Minutes of Estate of knights, July 1–8, 1654, NÖLA, RA, HS 3, pp. 20–7. See Bibl, “Die katholischen und protestantischen Stände,” 320; Schreiber, Adeliger Habitus, 112. 157 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 431.

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joining the Lower Austrian Estates.158 Both Landuntermarschall Hegenmüller and Landuntermarschall Quarient had served in the central government, the former at the Imperial Aulic Council, the latter at the Austrian Aulic Chancellery. Quarient’s brother undertook hazardous diplomatic missions to Constantinople and Moscow before joining the War Council.159 Nearly a half-dozen Deputies or their relations (Gatterburg, Hegenmüller, Grundemann, Albrechtsburg, and Pinell) held appointments at the Aulic Chamber under Leopold I.160 The relevant family trees also contain a sprinkling of army men. As a grenadier captain in Guido Starhemberg’s regiment, Landuntermarschall Aichen’s grandson was so slashed up by the Turks at Peterwardein (1716) that only his head turned up in the carnage.161 Despite occasional kinship ties that over time became less common, none of the knights belonged to the monarchy’s aristocratic elite. The titles at Court such as cupbearer (Mundschenk) or steward (Truchseß ) given to lesser nobles were little sought-after, offering as they did access to only the outer, less exclusive apartments at the Hofburg. The rank of chamberlain with its privileged entrée was reserved to lords. Prominent knights sometimes belonged to archducal households, though not in top positions.162 The wives and sisters of knights were largely excluded from the aulic honors set aside for women. They did not become ladies-in-waiting to archduchesses, nor did they receive the Star-Cross, the baroque-Catholic order for noblewomen founded in 1668 by the dowager empress Eleonore. As it declined in numbers and prestige, the Estate of knights offered a way station for the ambitious. Tellingly, the lineage of every Landuntermarschall between Hegenmüller and Hätzenberg with the exception of Quarient acquired the rank of baron or count. These titles opened the path to the lords; a few families, including the Walterskirchens and Grundemanns, would advance into the aristocracy—long after they had left the knights. By the third quarter of the seventeenth century, a constellation of social forces had come together that would make the Estates an effective partner of the dynasty in fashioning a more potent fiscal-military state. With the notable exception of the Jesuits, they included leading supporters of the Tridentine Church (in the Estate of prelates), new nobles of ambition and ability, and the scions of more ancient families (in the Estates of lords and knights). The old corporate categories of lords and knights did not quite correspond to the dynamic social variety. The local exponents of aristocracy, with their manifold ties to the ruling house and Court, composed the noble distillation at the very top. They anchored the dynastic state in the archduchy through landowning and in other ways. As officeholders, 158 A useful, unpublished Albrechtsburg genealogy is preserved in the Bourcy Papers, Institut für Personengeschichte, Bensheim, Germany. 159 Franz Anton and Christoph Ignaz von Quarient to Estate of knights, [1702], nineteenthcentury copy, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C24. 160 There is a list in Hansdieter Körbl, Die Hofkammer und ihr ungetreuer Präsident: Eine Finanzbehörde zur Zeit Leopolds I. (Vienna and Munich, 2009), 355–7. 161 Wißgrill, Schauplatz, i, 53. 162 For example the knights Hätzenberg and Moser at the Court of Charles VI; see Irene KubiskaScharl and Michael Pölzl, Die Karrieren des Wiener Hofpersonals 1711–1765: Eine Darstellung anhand der Hofkalender und Hofparteienprotokolle (Innsbruck, Vienna, and Bozen, 2013), 600, 649–50.

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they furnished the local proconsul in the person of the Landmarschall and dominated, together with the great abbots, the Estates’ organization. Through the aristocracy’s command of patronage, the government’s tentacles extended into local society. This too was apparent at the Estates. Across curial boundaries, patron-client relationships created informal, also vertical, bonds of dependency that served the purposes of power. Even leading knights adorned the clienteles of great lords. Still, no absolute identity of interests animated these groups, just as none joined them to the government. A multiplicity of tensions—confessional, factional, political, social, and material—manifested themselves both within and between the individual Estates. Nobles competed with the Church on the land market; knights contended with lords over precedence; Benedictines and Augustinians wrangled over offices; and the “three upper Estates” and the Fourth Estate clashed over money. At one point the nobility feared the Church’s recruitment practices as a threat to its very biological existence.163 In the end, these tensions remained manageable, in part because of the mediating role played by the authorities. As an organization, the Estates—increasingly the “three upper Estates”—were to remain viable thanks not only to aggregations of interest under the changing auspices of war-induced constraint, but also to the vital function they would fulfill at the intersection of government and society. In the coming generations, they would grasp opportunities in a way that gave rise to a more powerful Habsburg fiscal-military state.

163 This is explicit in a communication from the Landmarschall’sches Gericht to the Deputies of the lords and knights from June 15, 1688, NÖLA, StB, 539, f. 119r–120r.

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3 Evolving Fiscal Foundations, c.1650–1730 On the morning of November 16, 1712, a congregation of the Lower Austrian Estates in Spanish Court dress walked in pairs the short distance from the Landhaus to the Hofburg. A time-honored ritual had begun that would culminate in the solemn handover of the ruler’s annual written demands on the diet. For generations, the yearly handover was the most habitual personal contact between the sovereign and Estates of a Habsburg land. Both Leopold I and Joseph I had observed the custom. Now the 28-year-old Charles VI, until the previous year the besieged pretender to the Spanish throne in Barcelona, was continuing the tradition. If the Estates were not already well aware that Charles was now the last living male Habsburg dynast, he would rivet their attention by reminding them of their good fortune in enjoying “the personal presence of your prince.”1 Both he and they understood that the close association with Habsburg rule sustained their privileged existence. At the Hofburg the Estates repaired to a mass of the Holy Spirit in the medieval chapel, a rite enhanced by the Court of Vienna’s glorious music and celebrated in the imperial presence by the provost of St. Pölten as “grand territorial chaplain” (Obersterblandkaplan). A ceremonial apartment known as the Ritterstube hosted the main event. While the Estates arrayed themselves before the dais, a deputation of their number formally invited the emperor, who had retired to his audience chamber, to undertake the handover. Walking behind the raised sword of state, Charles VI soon appeared. He took a seat on a throne-like armchair covered in yellow brocade that was raised under a baldachin. The grand marshal, other courtiers, and the guards’ captains took their places on the dais to his right. At the emperor’s signal, the elderly Austrian Aulic Chancellor Seilern, standing to the left, delivered a short talk to the Estates, handing the proposition to the Landmarschall as he did so. Seilern’s presence may have recalled to participants the whims of dynastic-biological fate in a different way. He was the author of the Habsburgs’ Pactum mutuaæ successionis from 1703, a document that would soon serve as the basis for the famous Pragmatic Sanction. Charles VI himself then addressed the Estates “with vigor.”2 Last came a speech of thanks by the aged Landmarschall Otto Traun that evinced a baroque passion for number play: he was his family’s third Landmarschall; in his twenty-third year in office; his tenure extended across three reigns; and 33 multiplied by two equaled his current age—or so 1 2

Proposition to the diet pro 1713, Nov. 16, 1712, NÖLA, StB, 552, f. 135v. Quotation from the description of the ceremony in HHStA, ZA Prot. 7, f. 205v–206v.

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he reported.3 His wit had the happy effect of highlighting the fact that Charles VI was following in the footsteps of his predecessors. If we credit the traditional reading of the financial relations between Estates and government between the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and the Treaty of Aix-laChapelle (1748), the emperor was engaging in a form of very public masochism by participating in this rite. In 1975 the historian Jean Bérenger published what is still the only modern survey of the subject. Informed by the long-standing interpretation of successful French “absolutism,” his account blamed the Habsburg monarchy’s alleged failure to effect a strong state squarely on its composite structures and noble elites—those standing in front of Charles VI on that November day.4 In a recent, slightly revised and expanded edition, Bérenger stood by the finding of the “immobilisme” of government.5 In an otherwise useful case study of the financial regime during the War of the Spanish Succession, another scholar called attention to the “unbelievable helplessness of the absolute ruler in financial matters.”6 The “unbroken power” of the Estates and the “particularism” and “selfinterest” of their representatives “barricaded” in the ministries explained systemic deficiency. Here the empress Maria Theresa’s celebrated criticism of her predecessors, filtered through the later “state-building” historiography, is given a further lease on life.7 Even revisionist work on the Lower Austrian Estates has tended to repaint the picture of a territorial diet failing to do its part for the Habsburg cause. The Japanese scholar, Shuichi Iwasaki, gathered an impressive collection of data on the Estates’ annual financial grant between the last Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) and the reform of the Contribution in 1748.8 His figures indicate an upward trend over time similar to the one noted for Bohemia: the rising burden kept approximate

3 Wienerisches Diarium, Nov. 16, 1712. The standard genealogical literature gives Traun’s birthdate as 1644. 4 Jean Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 1975), 499. 5 Jean Bérenger, Les Habsbourg et l’argent de la Renaissance aux Lumières (Paris, 2014), 465. 6 Brigitte Holl, Hofkammerpräsident Gundaker Thomas Graf Starhemberg und die österreichische Finanzpolitik der Barockzeit (1703–1715) (Vienna, 1976), 437. See also Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 268–9; Werner Ogris, “The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State,” in Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and Justice, vol. C of The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th–18th Centuries series (Oxford and New York, 1997), 315–19; Hansdieter Körbl, Die Hofkammer und ihr ungetreuer Präsident: Eine Finanzbehörde zur Zeit Leopolds I. (Vienna and Munich, 2009), 342. 7 The memorials in which she expressed the criticism were first published by Alfred Ritter von Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften der Kaiserin Maria Theresia,” AÖG 47 (1871): 267–354 (criticism of her reigning ancestors at 298). P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 3, dated the memorials to 1750 and 1756 respectively. The memorials were reprinted by Joseph Kallbrunner under the more suggestive title Kaiserin Maria Theresias politisches Testament (Munich, 1952) whence they influenced the work of Hans Sturmberger, a leading exponent of the thesis of “soft” or “incomplete” Habsburg absolutism. Hans Sturmberger, Land ob der Enns und Österreich: Aufsätze und Vorträge (Linz, 1979), 296. 8 Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 344–6.

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pace with the size of the military. Both increased by a factor of almost ten.9 Even so, he described the grant as often “hardly satisfactory” from the Court’s perspective, while also claiming that the ruler “quite highly appreciated” the Estates’ financial efforts.10 Though Iwasaki rightly discarded the idea of inherent antagonism between government and Estates rooted in the paradigm of “absolutism,” the findings remain framed by a conception of countervailing forces in stalemate. In particular, the Estates’ simple staying power is highlighted, while the issue of their financial intermediation is largely factored out. If innovation and the Estates have seemed an unlikely combination, scholars of Habsburg government have spotlighted change around 1700 in other areas related to the challenge of the standing army. Building on earlier research, the scholar Franz Mensi (1854–1935) demonstrated the success in placing Habsburg debt on a firmer, more lasting footing that was achieved through the City Bank of Vienna.11 The disastrous collapse of the Oppenheimer financial empire early in the Spanish succession conflict showed up the need for a lasting, reliable source of credit. In time-tried fashion, the good name of an old-regime corporation—the city of Vienna—was mobilized to the benefit of the ruler’s treasury. Without the implicit support of Charles VI, whom Volker Press characterized as the “Habsburg whom historians love to criticise,” this experiment could hardly have succeeded given the cupidity that the bank’s assets aroused among competing ministers.12 More recently, Thomas Winkelbauer has argued that Habsburg government underwent a makeover in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that was at least as far-reaching as the later Theresan one.13 He pointed to the improved coordination of central fiscal and military agencies; budgetary innovations; the rise of a depersonalized state debt and up-to-date forms of international borrowing; the growth of a domestic capital market that reduced rates of interest; attempts to increase revenue from the ruler’s own domains such as monopolies; and compulsory territorial recruitment in place of the costly practice of voluntary enlistment.14

9 Petr Maťa, “ ‘Unerträgliche Praegravation’: Steuererhebung und Militärfinanzierung im Königreich Böhmen vom Dreissigjährigen Krieg bis zum Regierungsantritt Maria Theresias,” in Peter Rauscher, ed., Krieg f ührung und Staatsfinanzen: Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreißig jährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums 1740 (Münster, 2010), 170. 10 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 329. 11 Franz Freiherr von Mensi, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs von 1701 bis 1740 (Vienna, 1890); Franz Freiherr von Mensi, “Staatsschuld,” in Ernst Mischler and Josef Ulbrich, eds., Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch, iv (Vienna, 1909), 404–7, 408–10. Hermann Ignaz Bidermann, “Die Wiener StadtBank, ihre Entstehung, ihre Eintheilung und Wirksamkeit, ihre Schicksale,” AÖG 20 (1858): 341–445. 12 Volker Press, “The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 15. 13 Thomas Winkelbauer, “Nervus rerum Austriacarum: Zur Finanzgeschichte der Habsburgermonarchie um 1700,” in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006), 212. See also William B. Slottman, Coordinating Committee: An Austrian Delegation Looks at War, Taxes and Reform, 1696–1703 (Boulder, CO, 1999). 14 Winkelbauer, “Nervus rerum Austriacarum,” 212–13.

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The pre-reform Habsburg state is now beginning to look rather more vital than the implicit and sometimes explicit comparison to Louis XIV’s regime suggested.15 This chapter examines how the financial and material exigencies of international rivalry and the standing army transformed the relations between Estates and government in the generations after 1650. The various strands to be woven together in chronological fashion include the irregularly rising value of the yearly grants; the modalities by which funds were raised and expended; regular direct taxation and novel forms of direct taxation; the pacts known as “recesses” between ruler and Estates concerning the level of the grant; the gradual shift of borrowing onto the Estates and the growth of the resulting debt; and the changing parameters of negotiation at the annual diet. The new fiscal charges and the problem of credit deserve particular consideration. Foreign success emboldened the emperors to take on their richer subjects and corporate elites—successfully. Taxation and debt constituted, as the historian James D. Tracy has argued, “two sides of the same coin.”16 The ability of a state to borrow on a sustained basis to make up for the financial resources that for political, social, and other reasons could not be raised through taxes was a crucial aspect of a successful fiscal-military state. The satisfaction of fiscal-military needs opened up lucrative prospects for those very same groups in the form of investment and career opportunities that help explain why they accepted the growth of the military and its support structures. Both ideologically and materially, the Catholic-baroque ethos of pietas Austriaca cultivated by the dynasty, nobles, clerics, and others underpinned common interest in the new arrangements. The dynamic realignments in Lower Austria in this period moreover provided not only a pattern for events in other hereditary lands but also the fundaments upon which Habsburg rule would withstand the international shocks of the mid-eighteenth century. Maria Theresa’s oft-cited criticism of her ruling ancestors offers less original insight into their methods of government than into her own concerns about fame and the achievements of her own time.

T AX A TI O N A N D CRED I T Throughout our period, the Lower Austrian diet came together annually to hear the ruler’s requests for support that invariably included a combination of material and monetary aid.17 In the second half of the seventeenth century, it was usually 15

Explicit in Bérenger, Finances, 405, 498. James D. Tracy, “Taxation and State Debt,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, ii: Cultures and Power (Oxford, 2015), 512. 17 For the introduction of yearly diets, see Petr Maťa, “Wer waren die Landstände? Betrachtungen zu den böhmischen und österreichischen ‘Kernländern’ der Habsburgermonarchie im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhundert,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 78, and Petr Maťa, “Landstände und Landtage in den böhmischen und österreichischen Ländern (1620–1740): Von der Niedergangsgeschichte zur Interaktionsanalyse,” in Maťa and Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie, 375–6. 16

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convoked in the winter months, most often in January, but it also gathered as early as November for the next year’s fiscal-military needs or as late as March for the same year.18 Not until the early eighteenth century did the government begin coordinating the start of the assemblies in the central lands, including the archduchy below the Enns, for the late fall (for the following year).19 Because the assistance being requested was meant primarily for the army (and secondarily for the Court and diplomatic establishment), the proposition typically reported in a prefatory way and frequently in some detail on existing threats to the monarchy— not just Lower Austria—that were thought to justify and legitimate the demands. The threats were usually foreign (the Turks or French), but sometimes domestic (insurgent Hungarians). In view of the immediacy of the Lower Austrian Landhaus to the locus of power and information, the assumption that the Estates were well-informed about events in the wider world also appears to have operated. The diet provided the main forum for negotiating the government’s requirements.20 In the decades after the Thirty Years War, official demands unfailingly reflected both older notions of territorial defense and new military realities. With the ongoing fears of an Ottoman invasion, the Estates were expected to continue financing that part of the military border around the fortress of Raab (Győr) in western Hungary covering the approaches to Vienna, an obligation analogous to the one further south that fell to the Inner Austrian duchies.21 Another recurring request concerned the provision of troops passing through or stationed in the archduchy. Given Lower Austria’s geopolitical centrality within the Habsburg agglomeration, this responsibility effectively amounted to a lasting encumbrance. As early as 1650, several “regiments and companies” of the incipient, peacetime standing army were lying in winter quarters below the Enns.22 At times of armed conflict, the burden might rise sharply. In November 1663, during an Ottoman war, the diet was asked to feed men and beasts on Lower Austrian territory that saw 21,415 consignments of victuals consumed daily. In the year beginning December 1, 1663, this equaled an outlay of 769,860 fl., of which 687,134 had been raised by the end of November 1664.23 The annual proposition also routinely contained an application for a sum of money to be placed at the ruler’s “free disposition;” less 18 The diet of 1658 was opened on Mar. 12 of the same year, and that of 1664 on Nov. 25, 1663. NÖLA, LH, 44 and 46. A. F. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die Krone in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I.,” MIÖG 14 (1893): 602; Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344–6. 19 Maťa, “Landstände und Landtage,” 376. 20 Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter (5th edn., Darmstadt, 1963), 426. 21 For border defense against the Ottomans, see Géza Pálffy, “The Origins and Development of the Border Defence System against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (up to the Early Eighteenth Century),” in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne, 2000), 3–69. 22 “Kurzer Begrif und Inhalt waß dises 1650 Jährige Landtags-handlung Haubtsächlich tractirt,” NÖLA, LH, 41. 23 “Überschlag waß das Ertzhertzogthum Österreich undter der Ennß auf die Ihme assignirte Khriegs Völckher und Portiones vom 1. December 1663 an biß letzten November 1664 auß allen vier Viertln deß Landts würckhlichen bezahlt, und verpflegt hatt,” NÖLA, LH, 46.

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often, quantities of agricultural produce were desired.24 There were sometimes other charges. The diet’s collective appropriations were referred to as the “grant” (Landtagsbewilligung)—the term “Contribution” dating to the Thirty Years War also appears in this connection.25 Crafted to the circumstances obtaining at a specific moment, the propositions differed from year to year. The parleys between ruler and Estates did not follow a rigorously pre-arranged scheme, even as certain patterns repeated themselves over time. By the 1670s the Court was staking out an initial bargaining position by asking for more than it expected to receive.26 On their part, the Estates had to decide among themselves how to respond to the demands. Deliberations by each of the four Estates produced separate written opinions out of which a formal joint “declaration” was culled. The lords’ report was generally accorded special weight in this process.27 The townsmen (Fourth Estate) have notably left a stronger written record of participation in this internal dialogue than would be the case a century later, though even by the third quarter of the seventeenth century their influence was slight given that they effectively contributed nothing to the annual grant.28 Because the grant was by tradition linked to their right to present their own claims and grievances, the Estates were not obliged to adhere to a specific agenda. Apart from countering the proposition with possibly scaled-down offers of their own, they commonly raised unrelated matters. The declaration of 1672 addressed a mélange of issues from privileged claims to army commissions to the issue of a revised territorial law code (Landesordnung).29 Hence questions of military finance and provisioning were embedded in a range of local concerns that themselves constituted an aspect of the confabulations, which involved written and occasionally oral exchanges between the Austrian Aulic Chancellery and Estates. In effect, the Estates were negotiating the terms of their participation in the new military system. In the earlier period, a diet commonly lasted for at least six months. Later it became in practice perpetual as the new diet opened on the same day that the preceding one closed. Changing constellations of members took part in individual sessions over the diet’s course.30 The closure is known to have occurred without the resolution of all issues, though not without the offer of a grant.31 24 The proposition of 1660 requested supplies of corn and oats for provisioning both the Hungarian border and the imperial household (Hofstaat). NÖLA, LH, 44. 25 Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht: Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2003), i, 492, for the first use of the term “Contribution” in Lower Austria. 26 Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 469. Cf. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 605–6 (fn. 3); Mensi, Die Finanzen, 13. 27 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 127. 28 This is explicit in the opening passages of the “recess” between the ruler and the “three upper Estates” on July 23, 1689 (NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 1v). Cf. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 83; Franz Baltzarek, “Finanz- und Steuerinnovationen im Habsburgerreich im Zeitalter zwischen 1680 und 1780,” in Moritz Csáky and Andreas Lanzer, eds., Etatisation et bureaucratie—Staatswerdung und Bürokratie (Vienna, 1990), 34. 29 The Estates’ declaration, Apr. 4, 1672, NÖLA, LH, 48. 30 On this point, see Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 130–1. 31 Unresolved differences are apparent in the aulic decree closing the Lower Austrian diet, dated Laibach, Oct. 7, 1660, NÖLA, LH, 44. See Bérenger, Finances, 138, for closing dates of the Lower

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The law of the Holy Roman Empire was another factor that defined the parameters of negotiations, even as Habsburg subjects were not subordinate to its high tribunals after the 1630s.32 The Estates of the empire’s individual territories were legally obliged by §180 of the Reichsabschied (imperial law) of 1654 to contribute to the costs of defense. A comparable policy applied to the Habsburgs’ own lands. In times of crisis Leopold I would invoke his sovereign authority as emperor as well as ruling prince to impose taxes in the archduchy. By the same token, the defense of property rights including the right of the Estates to approve fiscal levies progressively distinguished the rulings of the empire’s tribunals.33 The practice in the Habsburg territories not only conformed to this jurisprudence, it was exemplary of it. The Estates were obliged to contribute to defense, which clearly limited their room for political maneuver, but a qualified right of consent remained intact. In few territories of the Holy Roman Empire were the diets consulted as habitually about fiscal affairs as in the Habsburg ones, where for generations they were convoked on a yearly basis. In lands such as Brandenburg that successfully limited imperial jurisdiction within their borders, the Estates forfeited their right to vote on taxes. The impact of great power rivalry and armed conflict on the Lower Austrian diet is readily evident in the correlation to troop strength. Over time, the size of the annual grant augmented in rough proportion to military growth. From some 100,000 fl. around 1650 with perhaps 25,000 men under arms it increased to 900,000 fl. in the 1730s with some 200,000 men.34 Mutatis mutandis, the grant rose and fell not in response to threats to the archduchy’s borders, but to the Habsburgs’ broader foreign entanglements. Four differing sets of figures that purport to show the monetary value of the annual grant are available for varying periods between roughly 1650 and 1750 (see Figure 3.1). Two sets were drawn up at the Estates in the early 1700s; Bérenger published the third in the 1970s, while Iwasaki brought out the fourth in 2014. The set that is preserved in the unpublished, multi-volume “Codex Provincialis” must in some ways be regarded as the most authoritative as it was compiled at the Estates’ behest and under their supervision as part of a wider effort to preserve institutional memory at a time of rapid change. It lists the annual grants in chronological order from 1653 to 1723, giving a consolidated figure for each year.35 An officer at the Landhaus named Carl Christoph von Gatterburg, a scion of a lesser noble family deeply involved in provincial fiscality, drew up the second compilation in the early eighteenth century. In a manuscript containing a mass Austrian diet from 1657 to 1700, and Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344–6, for the closing dates from 1683 to 1748. 32 Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 437. 33 See Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, 3 vols. (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1997), i, 91–7; Andreas Schwennicke, “Ohne Steuer kein Staat”: Zur Entwicklung und politischen Funktion des Steuerrechts in den Territorien des Heiligen Römischen Reichs (1500–1800) (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 283–8. 34 For army strength, see Table I.2 (p. 19). 35 “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 1104–7 (NÖLA).

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800,000

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Figure 3.1. Figures for the annual grant by the Lower Austrian diet, 1650–1748. Sources: Carl Christoph von Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae” (1715–c.1722), pp. 194–5, NÖLA, HS 37; “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 1104–1107 (NÖLA); Jean Bérenger, Finances et absolutisme autrichien dans la seconde moitié du xviie siècle (Paris, 1975), 349; Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 344–6.

of seemingly miscellaneous information, he provided an overview of grants between 1640 and 1712.36 Given the discrepancies, his figures do not appear to have furnished the basis for those in the “Codex” compiled not long thereafter. Furthermore, Gatterburg applied the concepts of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” grants to the period before they were common usage. Bérenger’s figures deviate in certain years from those of either the “Codex” or Gatterburg.37 Where these two sources report the sums of 550,000 and 571,223 fl. respectively for the year 1660, Bérenger gives the much higher total of 800,000. For the year 1661, the “Codex,” Gatterburg, and Bérenger all agree on 700,000 fl. A systematic examination of the diet’s surviving papers yielded Iwasaki’s data. Figure 3.1 draws on the figures he supplied for the “sum to which the Estates finally agreed”—as opposed to the sum 36 Carl Christoph von Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae” (1715– c.1722), pp. 194–5, NÖLA, HS 37. 37 He cited a schedule of grants drawn up in 1695 as the basis of his data. Bérenger, Finances, 348 (fn. 252) and 349 (table). For the documentary problem in relation to Bérenger’s figures, see Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 184 (fn. 1253).

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the ruler originally demanded or the one the Estates initially offered or even the Estates’ “total expenditure” in a particular year, all of which he also furnished. In some cases, consultation of the original records raises questions about the reliability of the later compilations. For the year 1664, the “Codex” and Bérenger refer to a grant of 769,800 fl., while Gatterburg miscopied the same number (“796,860”). One contemporary source reported that the Estates needed 769,800 fl. to cover the expense of feeding military units on the archduchy’s territory in the same year. But a calculation prepared at the Landhaus estimated the “total expenditure” required to meet the outlay to have been no less than 1,274,534 fl.38 This higher figure accounted for, among other items, administrative costs not charged to the government, though borne by the Estates in connection with bringing in taxes, raising credit, and provisioning troops.39 The discrepancies in the available figures for one of the most dramatic years in Austrian history—1683—are similarly revealing of the difficulties. Both the “Codex” and Bérenger give almost identical, comparatively low figures (216,666 and 216,660 fl. respectively) that again suggest a mistake in transcription, whereas Gatterburg specifies the much higher 746,775 fl. This sum nearly coincides with the number (“776,099”) from Iwasaki based on the Estates’ own official estimate (Anschlag) of expenditure.40 According to Iwasaki, the annual grant approved by the diet for that year was 650,000 fl. Consultation of the record casts yet different light on (or obfuscates) the situation: while the Estates had agreed to 650,000 fl., only 216,666 fl. were actually paid out before the Ottoman invasion. Then again, the Estates claimed to have incurred 243,830 fl. in expenses connected with the maintenance of “imperial and auxiliary Kriegsvölker” and calculated 1,362,037 fl. in costs arising out of the presence of the Polish army on the archduchy’s territory.41 As evidence, Iwasaki’s figures were consistently drawn from the same source and possess a high degree of credibility. The numbers provided by the “Codex,” Gatterburg, and Bérenger appear to have a more varied provenance: in some cases they constituted what was contained in the decree closing the diet; in others a sum that represents (some part of ) actual expenditure; in yet others projected outlay. Whether any of these sets of figures would correspond to the results of the settlement of accounts between the Aulic Chamber and the Estates, which we know to have taken place periodically, is unclear. Such figures would at least reflect consensus on expenditure.42 It is at all events hazardous to presume at this distance “Verordneten- und adjung. Ausschuß-Anschlags Gutachten,” Aug. 8, 1664, NÖLA, LH, 46. In 1671 the pay for the Estates’ Deputies, Raitherren, and others totaled 70,452 fl. “Beyleuffige Lista waß die Löb. drey obere Stendt zu Bestreitung ihrer eigenen Außgaaben in dem machenden 1671iährigen anschlag einzutragen,” NÖLA, LH, 48. 40 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344. 41 “Extract waß von A: 1683: biß 1686 inclusivè vor Landtagß Bewilligungen beschehen, wieviell derentwegen auf jedeß Jahr besonders, auch darüber bezahlt worden, undt der Kay: Hoff deren löb: drey oberen Ständten schuldig verbleibt,” NÖLA, LH, 52, bundle Landtag vom J: 1686. 42 In the informal notes he took during his time in the college of Deputies, Maximilian Herb, provost of Herzogenburg, noted with respect to the settlement of accounts for 1697 that the Estates’ grants for that year were 250,000 fl. (“ordinary”) and a “nach Postulatum” of 333,333 fl. for a total of 583,333 fl. This figure corresponds to those supplied by the “Codex,” Gatterburg, and Iwasaki. But 38 39

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in time that we can reconstruct the actual fiscal-military costs incurred by the Estates with absolute precision. Into the eighteenth century, services and provisions in kind were provided on site across the archduchy. Calculating the worth of food, drink, lodging, fuel, cartage, and other facilities was a tricky business at the best of times. The Estates complained about the hidden costs of the system, while the government feared fraud on the part of individual administrators. It was also an age of rudimentary bookkeeping in which, into the 1670s, flows of territorial money did not inevitably clear even the Viennese coffers of the Landhaus before distribution to the soldiery, much less the treasuries of central authority. All the same, the various sets of available figures together display a clear pattern: the value of Estates’ grants peaked at times of military growth. In the decade following the Thirty Years War, with its terrible losses and suffering, the grant amounted to as little as 100,000 fl.43 Later, during periods of conflict that corresponded to increased troop strength, the value of the grants rose: during the wars against the Turks (1661 and 1663–4), the War of Devolution (1667/8), the opening stages of Louis XIV’s Dutch War with the initial campaign in 1673, and the lead-up to the Ottoman incursion of 1683. In the two decades before 1683, the average annual grant is reported by another source to have totaled 580,000 fl.44 In roughly the same period, annual Habsburg military expenditure fluctuated between some three and nine million florins.45 After 1683 the grant dropped, even as fighting flared across the plains of Hungary. Iwasaki calculated that the Estates approved on average only 37 percent of what the government demanded. He attributed this, as the Estates themselves did, to the devastation wrought first by the plague and then the grand vizier.46 Where did the money needed by the Estates to meet their obligations come from? What were their sources of income? Given the nature of the evidence, an answer to these questions is no less problematic than the issue of how much the annual grant was actually worth. Here too broader patterns become apparent upon examination of the available data. Yet we should not equate the grant in any simplistic way with taxation, as if money taken from taxpayers was in all cases passed directly up to the authorities. Given that the imposition of taxes quickly ran up against political difficulties and structural bounds in a poor, agrarian society, the Estates also deployed their well-worn, collective credit. With a permanent army to maintain, the emperor did not usually insist that funds come from a precise source, even one the proposition specified.47 The flexibility with which the Estates cobbled Herb also calculated in further costs including those associated with troop passages through Lower Austria (“Durchzugs Unkhosten”) that raised the total to 611,980 fl. He noted that the Court would be responsible for “making good” the difference of 28,647 fl. Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2 B.2, f. 10r–11v. 43 The amount of 100,000 florins found in the aulic decree closing the diet, Sept. 3, 1650, NÖLA, LH, 41. Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” p. 194, reports 156,179 fl.; Bérenger, Finances, 349, 200,000 fl. 44 As cited in Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 184. 45 Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 479. 46 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 182–6. 47 This is explicit in the proposition for 1658, dated Amberg, Feb. 21, 1658, NÖLA, LH, 44.

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together money for the grant year after year proved advantageous to a hard-pressed government in an uncertain, constantly changing environment. Increasingly, the Estates would loan directly to the ruler. It is also important to remember that in wartime the formal grant constituted only one element of a sometimes much larger package of financial and other services provided by the Estates. This was increasingly the case. Let us turn first to the issue of taxation—keeping in mind that borrowing drove fiscal extraction. There were three distinct elements to regular direct taxes in Lower Austria, all administered by the Estates since before the Thirty Years War. The first was a tax known as the Gült or Gültgebühr on the capitalized value of manorial income: the fees and dues paid to the owners of demesne land by bound peasants.48 The nobility thus enjoyed no absolute exemption. The second component was the so-called Landsteuer (also called Urbarsteuer), which was assessed on cotters (bound peasants occupying cottages) and earmarked to pay for Hungarian border defense.49 The levy on manorial income and apparently the Landsteuer rested on sworn declarations by the owners of demesne land rather than on surveys carried out by a third party. Under the oversight of the college of Deputies, the Estates’ bookkeeper kept and administered the relevant records (in the so-called Gültbuch), which dated to the sixteenth century.50 Unlike their Bohemian counterparts, the Estates were able to thwart an initiative to overhaul the records that was part of a wider effort to reorder territorial finances after the Thirty Years War.51 Thus these two taxes were assuredly based on at least partly obsolete or incomplete data. The third, most lucrative element, the hearth tax, dated to the later 1500s.52 Originally levied on intact buildings lacking exempt status, such as some noble, ecclesiastical, and civic properties enjoyed (here we can speak of a proper “privilege”), it too evolved in time into an abstract unit of taxation.53 The numbers illustrate its gradually increasing importance relative to the other two elements. In 1629 it produced some 129,000 fl. in comparison to the 98,000 fl. brought in by the Gültgebühr and Landsteuer together.54 Over a fourteen-month period in

48 Liselotte Seeger, “Die Geschichte der ständischen Steuern im Erzherzogtum Österreich unter der Enns, 1500–1584,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1995, 42–89; Silvia Petrin and Max Weltin, “Zum System der Gültbesteuerung in Niederösterreich,” UH 43 (1972): 177; Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998), 67–8; Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 491; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 243–4; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 30–9. 49 Bernhard Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion in Niederösterreich 1748–1756: Ein fiskalischer Reformprozeß im Spannungsfeld zwischen Landständen und Zentralstaat (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 42–3. 50 Sigmund Adler, Das Gültbuch von Nieder- und Oberösterreich und seine Function in der ständischen Verfassung (Stuttgart, 1898), 22–32; Seeger, “Die Geschichte,” 111–13. 51 Annual report by the Lower Austrian Deputies pro 1658, Feb. 13, 1659, NÖLA, Verordnetenamtsrelationen, 7, folder 1658. Cf. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 20. 52 The terms Hausanschlag and Hausaufschlag were the most common German-language designations in the later seventeenth century. 53 Kurt Klein, “Der Häuserbestand Niederösterreichs um 1590,” UH 47 (1976): 74–90; Mensi, Die Finanzen, 21–2; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 243. 54 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion in Niederösterreich, 45.

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the early 1660s, the analogous figures were 244,000 and 140,000 fl. respectively.55 The later seventeenth-century accounts contain comparable figures. That the hearth tax provided such a comparatively reliable source of income is readily explainable by the fact that it was collected from the wider agrarian population by the landowners to which that population was subject. The lines of fiscality and dominion overlapped, conveniently for the government at least. This circumstance helped account for the domestic order and political stability that characterized the Habsburg regime as fiscal pressure rose. The mechanisms of manorial power supervised by the Landhaus, rather than outside agents imposed by more distant authorities, ran the tax system. The Estates had direct charge of the provincial land records. As one historian noted for the British context, the local administration of the land tax attached the political nation to the apparatus of the state rather than alienated it.56 In Austria it was not only politically more expedient for the government to leave the assessment, repartition, and collection of taxes in the hands of the Estates as the apex of the landed establishment, it was also cheaper. The costs of these arrangements were at best indirect to the dynastic state, whereas running its own tax-gathering organization would have entailed financial outlays insupportable in a society poorer than its British counterpart. Though we should not imagine the simple staying power of the Estates or manorial life under fiscalmilitary pressure, there was no realistic alternative to their management of taxation until much later. While the rates of—and receipts from—the hearth tax continued to rise over time, the Gültgebühr stagnated and declined in relative importance, while the Landsteuer disappeared in stages. The fate of the Gültgebühr reflected the influence of landed nobles and clergy whose manorial income was liable to that assessment. The Landsteuer ended differently. The government alienated its capitalized value at times of dire financial need, a common early modern practice little explored in the Austrian context.57 During the Nine Years War (1693), Leopold I sold the first “third” of its value to the Lower Austrian Estates (hence the term Drittelsteuer sometimes found in the sources); this transaction allowed them the right to sell off in their turn the revenue source so acquired, which ended up in the pockets of the holders of demesne land.58 Under the impact of the outbreak of the Spanish succession war (1701), the Estates agreed to purchase the second “third” for a term of twenty years. In all, the government raised one million desperately needed florins in this manner in less than a decade. The last “third” was conveyed permanently to the Estates in another crisis, the War of the Austrian Succession (1742), for 55 “Summari Endtwurff aller der Jenigen Mittl, so vom 1. May 1661 biß letzten Juny 1662 einer Löb. N:Ö: Landtschafft OberEinnehmber Herrn von Rafenstain würckhlich erlegt, und dargegen von ihm widerumben außgeben worden,” NÖLA, StA, B-11, Nr. 10–14/2, f. 59–62. 56 Colin Brooks, “Public Finance and Political Stability: The Administration of the Land Tax, 1688–1720,” HJ 17 (1974): 283. 57 For examples of the practice, see Karl Haselbach, “Über finanzielle Zustände in Niederösterreich im XVII. Jahrhundert,” BVLkN, new series, 30 (1896): 295. 58 For the purchases of the tax by one prominent noble family, see Karl Graf Kuefstein, Studien zur Familiengeschichte in Verbindung mit der Landes- und Kulturgeschichte, iii (Vienna and Leipzig, 1915), 378.

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600,000 fl.59 From the late seventeenth century, revenue from the Landsteuer dwindled accordingly. As the proceeds from the Gültgebühr and Landsteuer declined, while those of the hearth tax rose, the fiscal burden carried by the wider population increased, while that borne by the landed elite diminished, at least with respect to the tax rolls. Scholars have noted this exploitative state of affairs. Still, through lending, the elite would furnish an ever larger portion of the funds placed at the government’s immediate disposal than their declining share of the regular tax load might suggest. To satisfy urgent demands, the Estates resorted to borrowing from wealthy individuals and corporations, many in their own ranks. As tensions with the Ottomans mounted in the early 1660s, for instance, several dozen parties—almost exclusively clerics and nobles—put up tens of thousands of florins to help cover the annual grant. Leading exponents of the Estates were indeed expected to set an example: four of the six serving Deputies (the abbot of Lilienfeld, Count Sprinzenstein, Baron Lamberg, and Philip Jacob Carl von Carlshofen) lent comparatively large sums.60 In the fourteen months ending June 30, 1662, the Landhaus in this way raised 100,000 fl., an amount that roughly equaled the proceeds from the Landsteuer (99,328 fl.) and nearly doubled those of the Gültgebühr (51,387 fl.).61 As it furnished the needed security, the Estates’ control of taxation underlaid this system. The hearth tax was especially important because of its comparative regularity and reliability. By extending credit to the Estates, territorial elites were in essence investing in flows of tax revenue that they themselves managed. In exchange for upfront funding, money poured back into their pockets—with interest. The Landhaus was an old credit institution, the Habsburgs among its longstanding beneficiaries. In the dynasty’s lands in Western Europe, the muscle of corporate credit had early been flexed and expanded.62 In the Low Countries under Charles V and his successor, “the new province-based system of funding the government’s war expenses through credit proved an efficient means of coping with the burden, and mitigating the disruptive effect of rising fiscal pressure.”63 The

59 Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 616–17 (Pribram confused Gült and Landsteuer); Mensi, Die Finanzen, 21; Maria Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1683 bis 1705,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1976, 111–12, 356–9; Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft, 68; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 243–4 (fn. 5). 60 “Einkhomene schrifftliche ercklärung von denen Löb: Landtsmitgliedern, und andern Partheyen . . . ,” NÖLA, LH, 44. 61 “Summari Endtwurff aller der Jenigen Mittl, so vom 1. May 1661 biß letzten Juny 1662 einer Löb. N:Ö: Landtschafft OberEinnehmber Herrn von Rafenstain würckhlich erlegt, und dargegen von ihm widerumben außgegeben worden,” NÖLA, StA, B-11, Nr. 10–14/2 (carton 346), f. 59–62. 62 One of the few surviving documents from the period records the Estates’ debt in 1573 as 5,893,249 fl. “Von den Capitalien khomen hinweg so bezahlt od auf gewissen Bezallungen assignirt worden,” NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 1, f. 16–17. 63 Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806 (rev. edn., Oxford, 1998), 133. See also James D. Tracy, A Financial Revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: Renten and Renteniers in the County of Holland, 1515–1565 (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London, 1985).

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mounting debt drove the trend toward the convocation of regular representative assemblies to approve the taxation needed to service it.64 The same dynamic obtained in the territory below the Enns. In the 1560s the Estates of the Austrian territories first assumed responsibility for repaying Habsburg cameral debt. In exchange for religious concessions, the heavily Protestant Lower Austrian Estates agreed to settle 2.5 million fl. in liabilities.65 This involved credit operations on their own part to finance the new burden. The first recorded perpetual annuities encumbering their disbursement treasury date from that period.66 The Long Turkish War (1593–1606) gave the Lower Austrian Estates renewed occasion to interpose their credit on the government’s behalf.67 The evidence for such activity becomes more plentiful during the Thirty Years War. A combination of direct taxes and excise charges on drinks secured large loans made to the Estates between 1630 and 1648 by Count Hieronymus Montecuccoli (9,000 fl.), Dr. Michael Crassius (18,000 fl.), the provost of St. Pölten (15,000 fl.), Hungarian Jesuits together with Cardinal Pázmány (20,000 fl.), as well as Cardinal Pázmány on his own (100,000 fl.).68 On his part, Ferdinand II borrowed more than one million florins from the Estates in exchange for the concession of duties on a range of products. An impressive, possibly exhaustive inventory of capital invested at the Estates was drawn up in 1655 in the postwar financial overhaul. It lists hundreds of lenders, the amounts invested, and the interest due. The total was some 5.6 million fl. at a time when the diet’s annual grant amounted to a fraction of that sum. The circle of investors extended well beyond the clergy and nobility to encompass social climbers such as Joachim Enzmilner (later Count Windhag), women, and Court Jews including Jacob Frankl and Zacharias Mayr.69 64 On the relationship between regular assemblies, taxation, and debt, see Paul Janssens, “Taxation in the Habsburg Low Countries and Belgium, 1579–1914,” in Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla et al., eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History (Cambridge, 2012), 67–8. 65 Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 491. Cf. Carl Schwabe von Waisenfreund, Versuch einer Geschichte des österreichischen Staats-Credits- und Schuldenwesens, 2 parts (Vienna, 1860/ 1866), i, 12–15. Remarkably, there is no scholarship specifically concerned with the problem of the Estates and Habsburg credit. But see Bérenger, Finances, 444–51; also Otto Thorsch, Materialien zu einer Geschichte der Oesterreichischen Staatsschulden vor dem XVIII. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1891), passim. The relevant work on the Estates in ancien régime France is helpful. See Mark Potter and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates of Burgundy,” in JIH 27 (1997): 577–612; Mark Potter, “Good Offices: Intermediation by Corporate-Bodies in Early Modern French Public Finance,” JEH 60 (2000): 599–626. 66 An annuity to the benefit of the Viennese Friars Minor was established in 1562 with an investment of 800 fl. “Extract der bey Gem: N:Ö: Landtschafft auf Ewigen Zinß angelegten Capitalien,” NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 1, f. 427r. 67 “Verzaichnüs des Anticipierten Geldts, waß Gemaine Landtschafft inn allem [ . . . ] Schüldig ist biß zu Ennd des Monats Aprilis Anno 1562 biß 1618,” NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 1, f. 220–68. Cf. Gottfried Stangler, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1593 bis 1607,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1972. 68 “Extract welche Herren und Partheyen, mit Bezallung der von Ihren, bey einer Löb: N:Ö: Landschafft Caße gegen 5. und Sechs Per Cento anligenden Capitalien, Jährlich verfallenden Interesse auf die Steüer, Landsanlagen und Zapfenmas geföll in speciè verwiesen, versichert, und darauß Jährlich bezalt werden müessen,” July 22, 1647, NÖLA, StA, A-5, Nr. 14, carton 1, f. 433–434. 69 “Verzaichnuß deren bey einer Löb: N:Ö: Landschafft Cassa von Ao. 1562 biß Ende 1654 gegen 4. 5. und 6. per Cent jährlicher Verzinßung angelegten Capitalien, und wie hoch sich die davon biß

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The Thirty Years War perilously overstretched the Estates’ credit in ways that remain little understood. By the conflict’s end, the rate of interest on their paper had risen from 4 to 6 percent, which remained substantially below that on credit to the ruler’s treasury, but still represented a sizeable added burden. As a result, they sought a moratorium on older financial obligations (beginning 1651), a measure that was surely grounded in the discrepancy between income and debt. Into the eighteenth century, further government-sanctioned, partial moratoria ensured that Catholic religious and charitable foundations received priority of payment, and perhaps offered an excuse to discriminate against older (Protestant) debt.70 But the records, including the inventory of 1655, show that the Estates continued to borrow substantial amounts. Indeed, the divergence between the yearly grant and the annual “estimate” of financial need strongly indicates that the broader population was being subject to assessments specifically for the purpose of paying down the debt. By the late 1660s, “millions” had been discharged on obligations dating from the Thirty Years War.71 Financial transfers into the pockets of the landed interest and the politically well-connected via the credit mechanism run by the Estates would long be a hallmark of Habsburg government.72 Contributing to its vitality were the system’s decidedly personalized nature and procedures. The Estates’ receivership general embodied the organizational link between taxes and credit. Under the supervision of the college of Deputies, the receiver general (Obereinnehmer) gathered in direct levies and oversaw the floating of loans. He was a key figure in territorial fiscality. From 1648 to 1656 the incumbent was Carl von Perger (1623–59), son of a Lower Austrian chancellor (see Figure 3.2). He belonged to a minor, ardently Catholic noble family that had risen in dynastic service during the havoc of the previous half-century. In differing ways, the careers of father and son exemplified the chances open to newcomers in Ferdinand II’s world.73 We can safely assume that the younger Perger, like his father, owed his ascent to powerful patronage. In the 1620s the elder Perger had followed Stadholder Breunner into the provincial government and become its chancellor in 1639.74 A political operator, financier, and former Landmarschall, Breunner 1654 und 1655 ausständige Interesse belauffen,” NÖLA, StA, A-5, Nr. 14, carton 1, f. 268v, 271v, 278v–279r. 70 “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 1203–5 (NÖLA). See also Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 613. 71 Aulic decree to “two upper political Estates” (lords and knights), Feb. 22, 1668, NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 178r–179r. 72 Contemporaries were well aware of this transfer of wealth from social groups that were politically “unrepresented” to those (creditors) who voted taxes in the Estates. Schwennicke, “Ohne Steuer kein Staat”, 72. 73 For Perger’s background, see William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 145–8. 74 Mark Hengerer, Kaiserhof und Adel in der Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts: Eine Kommunikationsgeschichte der Macht in der Vormoderne (Konstanz, 2004), 164. Breunner recommended candidates for posts in the provincial government. [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 234.

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Figure 3.2. Carl von Perger, Receiver General of the Lower Austrian Estates, 1648–56. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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retired in 1640, but was still alive when the younger Perger assumed the receivership at the comparatively tender age of twenty-five. Whether Breunner had a hand in his appointment is unknown, but Perger did enjoy other potent protection. The connection to Austrian Aulic Chancellor Pricklmayr was surely a family inheritance: the elder Perger and the later aulic chancellor, both jurists, had entered Lower Austrian government service around the same time in the 1620s. Pricklmayr’s signature on the younger Perger’s marriage contract is revealing of the friendship that obtained.75 The ability to organize credit on the Estates’ behalf rested on the receiver’s personal wherewithal, which was enhanced in classic fashion by possession of what in effect was one of the most lucrative offices in the land below the Enns thanks to the rake-offs associated with the control of large sums of money. Perger’s credit worthiness was reinforced not only by the patronage of the great but also by the fact that he was part of a kinship network of rising, socially ambitious families deeply involved in territorial fiscality—corporate and archducal. This was apparent in the sequence of receivers general between the 1640s and 1660s, though the dignity was never hereditary, as was the comparable position at the Estates of Burgundy.76 Carl Perger followed his brother-in-law, Matthias Wägele von Walsegg, in office since 1644, and was succeeded in his turn in 1657 by his own brother, Heinrich Perger. Beyond the Estates, the Perger brothers’ stepmother, Eva Regina Berchtold von Sachsensgang, was the daughter and granddaughter of castellans at Ebersdorf, an imperial hunting lodge near Vienna, while her paternal uncle as Vizedom administered a large portion of Lower Austrian cameral income.77 For his part, the first of Heinrich Perger’s three notably efficacious marriages was to the daughter of Aegyd von Seeau († 1663), also Vizedom in the land below the Enns.78 Before becoming receiver, Carl Perger gave proof of his ability to mobilize money for the Estates. Near the end of the Thirty Years War, he and his brothers and sisters—six in all—invested at the Estates. Each put up 1,605 fl. from what may have been a paternal inheritance, their father having died in 1646. After taking office, Perger paid in a further 6,000 and over the following years, with Habsburg troops to be provisioned in winter quarters in the archduchy, he and other easily

75 A copy of the contract from Nov. 27, 1650 in NÖLA, Schloßarchiv Aspang, Urkunden, Nr. 99. Henry Frederick Schwarz, The Imperial Privy Council in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London, 1943), 323–4. 76 For the treasurer general in Burgundy, see Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003), 106–9. The office of Lower Austrian Estates’ receiver is traceable to at least the early sixteenth century. Max Vancsa, “Die Anfänge des ständischen Beamtentums in Österreich unter der Enns,” MbVLkN 9 (1918): 131–4. 77 The standard genealogical literature gives Eva Regina as the Pergers’ mother, but she married the elder Carl Perger only in 1641. A copy of the Perger-Berchtold marriage contract is in NÖLA, Schloßarchiv Aspang, Urkunden, Nr. 99. Their mother was a woman named Eva König from Carniola. A fine, unpublished Pergen genealogy by Johann Baptist Witting is found in the Bourcy papers in the Institut für Personengeschichte, Bensheim, Germany. 78 For Perger’s decisive third marriage, which occurred after his tenure at the receivership general, see Godsey, “Der Aufstieg,” 150–1.

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identifiable kin, including his wife and father-in-law, Johann Baptist Suttinger († 1662), a successor to his father as chancellor of the provincial government, loaned further large quantities of altogether some 100,000 fl.79 This sum approximated the diet’s yearly grant in the early 1650s and was the same amount that the Estates required as surety from his brother Heinrich when he assumed the receivership a few years later.80 The funds that Carl Perger funneled into the Estates’ treasury will have been composed at least in part of smaller sums that he himself had borrowed against his own good name. These transactions occurred as he was laying the basis—with the purchase of the manors of Thomasberg, Aspang, and Seebenstein in the quarter below the Vienna Woods—for what would be his descendants’ landed and noble existence over the centuries. Variations on the Perger credentials for the receivership general prevailed in succeeding generations, even as the method of selection changed, other patronage groups came into play, and the Estates began to hire from their own ranks (see the Appendix for a list of the receivers general). Carl Perger had only been admitted to the Estate of knights after he became receiver. In contrast to the practice in some parts of Inner Austria, where the Estates employed titled nobles in the equivalent position, the Lower Austrian Landhaus preferred (with a brief non-noble exception) to choose a receiver general from the petty nobility. The reason for the difference is uncertain, though in all cases the potential of a designee to access networks of creditors was crucial as the monarchy moved into a period of almost incessant warfare in the 1670s. Carl Perger would be the last receiver general hired from outside the Estates by the college of Deputies. Among the reforms wrought under Landmarschall Ernst Traun, the “three upper Estates” assumed the prerogative of nomination (1655), for good as it turned out, though the Deputies could make recommendations.81 Notably, the Pergers’ hold on the post survived the change of 1655, as the election of Carl’s brother Heinrich showed. Thereafter the receivers were palpably Traun men. Hans Jacob von Rafenstein had no apparent ties to the Pergers, but he was the son-in-law of Landuntermarschall Geyer von Edlbach, whom Traun had forced on the knights in 1654.82 Rafenstein had entered the knights on Geyer’s watch (1655), which made him the first receiver general in our period to belong to the Estates at the time of his appointment. The experiment would initially be short-lived, whereas the financial constellation around

79 “Verzaichnuß deren bey einer Löb: N:Ö: Landschafft Cassa von Ao. 1562 biß Ende 1654 gegen 4. 5. und 6. per Cent jährlicher Verzinßung angelegten Capitalien, und wie hoch sich die davon biß 1654 und 1655 ausständige Interesse belauffen,” July 10, 1655, NÖLA, StA, A-5, Nr. 14 (carton 2), f. 272v–273r, 279v, 280v, 286v, 287v, 290v, 291r, 296r. 80 Deputies to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 1657, NÖLA. StA, B-11, Nr. 9, f. 99. 81 The Deputies’ right to recommend candidates mentioned in the “receiver’s instructions,” Jan. 27, 1668, NÖLA, StA, B-12, Nr. 4, f. 44–75 (§1), as well as in the “receiver’s instructions,” May 5, 1698, NÖLA, StA, B-7, Nr. 39, f. 8–27. 82 Minutes of Estate of knights, Apr. 28, 1654, NÖLA, RA, HS 3, pp. 18–19. Rafenstein’s marriage to Maria Anna Geyer von Edlbach is reported by Friedrich Freiherr von Haan, “Genealogische Auszüge aus den beim bestandenen niederösterreichischen Landmarschall’schen Gerichte publicierten Testamenten,” Jahrbuch der k.k. heraldischen Gesellschaft “Adler”, new series, 10 (1900): 161.

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Rafenstein included well-connected lords with deep pockets. Together with their mother, a highly placed lady at Court from whom Rafenstein had purchased a manor in the environs of Vienna, the brothers Counts Johann Jacob and Adam Wilhelm Brandis pledged security on his behalf for the 50,000 fl. bond incumbent on receivers general.83 But Rafenstein’s tenure exacerbated already extant tensions between prelates and nobles, and ended in contention. The Estates resolved that no one from their own ranks could in future hold the receivership.84 Hence his successor, Caspar Holdt, did not belong to the Estates, nor was he initially noble. The office itself was degraded from a receivership general to a receivership. Yet the election sparked controversy so intense that the authorities intervened. Here again there are traces of Landmarschall Traun’s imperiousness. As a paymaster in a weapons depository headed by Traun (in his capacity as Generallandund Hauszeugmeister), Holdt was the Landmarschall’s client. His application for the receivership had enjoyed his explicit support.85 A reputation for honesty corroborated by the Lower Austrian cameral bookkeeper also spoke in Holdt’s favor, and the Court confirmed the election.86 Though the receivership would soon be reclaimed by the knights, Holdt’s time in office was characterized by a notable change in revenue-handling and bookkeeping that reduced corruption in the management of the all-important hearth tax. In this way it recalled other postwar efforts to regenerate the Estates’ finances, though Traun himself had moved on by that point. Since the 1630s quarter-level disbursement treasuries kept by the Estates had brought in the hearth tax, often distributing the takings directly to Habsburg troops. The lack of oversight had encouraged individual misappropriation. Under official pressure, the Estates ended this practice in 1674.87 Thereafter the original collectors—local magistrates and manorial officials—routed the proceeds to a special agent in the receivership in Vienna who accounted for it separately before passing it on to central caisses or the Estates’ own disbursement treasuries for dispersal among the military assigned to Lower Austria or passing through.88 The

83 The Brandis brothers’ declaration on behalf of Rafenstein in NÖLA, StA, B-11, Nr. 10–14/2, f. 57–8. For Eva Maria Brandis, see Katrin Keller, Hofdamen: Amtsträgerinnen im Wiener Hofstaat des 17. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2005), 266. Rafenstein’s purchase of a property from her is reported in Johann Evang. Kirnbauer von Erzstätt, ed., J. Siebmacher’s großes Wappenbuch, vol. IV/4/i: Der niederösterreichischer Adel (Nuremberg, 1909), 371. 84 The resolution from Nov. 20, 1666 is mentioned in the report by the Deputies to the “three upper Estates,” Sept. 14, 1667, NÖLA, StA, B-12, Nr. 4, f. 26. 85 Holdt to “three upper Estates,” [Dec. 22, 1666], NÖLA, StA, B-12, Nr. 4, f. 21–2. 86 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” July 30, 1667, NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 163r–165r. 87 A copy of an Aulic War Council report on the problem of tax revenue being held back at the level of the disbursement treasuries and then loaned to the ruler at interest is attached to the aulic decree to the Lower Austrian Estates, Feb. 4, 1674, NÖLA, StB, 533, f. 317r–322r. The decision was taken at an assembly of the Estates, Apr. 12, 1674, NÖLA, StB, 120. 88 Deputies’ decree to Caspar Holdt von Holdegg, Aug. 18, 1674, NÖLA, StA, B-12, Nrs. 3 and 4, carton 354, f. 528. The special receiver was a man named Johann Michael Gerber, who was required to provide a deposit of 20,000 fl., which was supplied by Baron Carl Leopold Geyer von Edlbach, son of the Landuntermarschall of that name. Gerber to Deputies, Sept. 4, 1674, NÖLA, StA, B-12, no. 11, f. 15–16, 80.

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reformed practice improved the Estates’ financial standing just as the emperor’s war with Louis XIV loomed in the west. Beginning with Holdt’s successor, Carl Hackelberger von Höchenberg, the rule against hiring a member of the Estates was abandoned and the title of receiver general restored. Until 1764 the office would remain a preserve of the knights. Hackelberger’s officeholding background at the Landhaus—he had been a Raitherr—prefigured the increasing recruitment of the incumbent from among the Estates’ own officials and their families. The later receiver general, Franz Adam Werner, held a minor military-commissarial position under Baron Hans Carl Fünfkirchen below the Vienna Woods before moving on to the Landrecht.89 The admission to the knights’ “old lineages” of the jurist Werner, the son of an ennobled medical doctor, testified to how the social complexion of the knights had changed. Training in the law was a qualification also distinctive of the Albrechtsburgs, who provided the Estates with a syndic—Johann Bernhard († 1696)—and two receivers general. In 1730 the contested election of Johann Raimund von Albrechtsburg to the expectancy to the receivership general (i.e., to the right of succession to the office) manifested the fact that the office, though held by a knight, was not in the primary gift of the knights. With the support of most prelates and the entire Estate of lords, Albrechtsburg shut out the Landuntermarschall’s candidate in a fight that laid lines of division within the consortium bare.90 The short-lived Receiver General Quarient was himself the son of a Landuntermarschall. Like the Pergers, these receivers relied on well-placed patrons and sponsors to supplement the family connections and personal qualifications they brought to the job. The support continued in some cases to be financial. Like his predecessor Rafenstein, Hackelberger came to office indebted to a lord who embodied the Counter-Reformation establishment. By guaranteeing the 50,000 fl. deposit required of Hackelberger, Count Sigismund Ladislaus Herberstein, a serving Deputy no less, in essence invested in territorial tax revenues whose collection he himself oversaw. An analogous deal existed between Receiver General Wellenstein and Baron Hans Bernhard Fünfkirchen, the son of a Catholic convert and son-in-law of an Aulic Chamber vice-president.91 As scions of a well-connected line of lesser financiers, the two Gatterburg brothers elected receiver general, Max Servatius and Constantin Joseph, offered advantages when money was tighter than ever in the 1690s and 1700s.92 Their family’s main pasture was the Handgrafenamt, an old cameral agency that gathered in excise duties in Lower Austria and Moravia. Their father had passed through its ranks before heading the central Aulic Payments

89 Evidence of Werner’s commissarial work in NÖLA, StB, 418 (Ständische Besoldungen 1685/ 86), f. 435v. See [Starzer], Beiträge, 448. 90 “Rahts Protocoll” (an informal diary of the Estates’ business kept by Leopold von Planta, provost of Herzogenburg), Nov. 29, 1730, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2 B.3, p. 21. 91 The Herberstein-Hackelberger and Fünfkirchen-Wellenstein deals are referred to in the report by the Estates’ “finance committee” to the “three upper Estates,” Apr. 12, 1680, NÖLA, StA, B-12, Nr. 16, carton 369, f. 15–16. 92 The elder, Max Servatius, died in 1698 two days before he was scheduled to assume office. NÖLA, HS 362. Constantin Joseph served c.1705–11.

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Office (Hofzahlamt); in the 1690s their first cousin was the second man at the Handgrafenamt (the so-called Gegenhändler); and another cousin, Carl Christoph, the Landhaus secretary whom we have already met, seemed the best man to manage levies later leased by the Estates from the Handgrafenamt. Like Carl Perger nearly a half-century earlier, Max Servatius Gatterburg had money invested at the Landhaus at the time of his election in 1692. As a “faithful patriot,” he had put up 15,000 fl. when the fall of the fortress of Belgrade two years earlier had triggered “worry and shock” in the “land of Austria.”93 Constantin Joseph Gatterburg did so well during his time as receiver general during the Spanish succession conflict that he was able to loan the government the enormous sum of 200,000 fl. at the height of a later Ottoman war (1716–18).94 His reward was the title of count. A letter surviving in the papers of Landmarschall Sprinzenstein offers uncommon insight into the way the receiver general pieced together groups of lenders with the support of leading figures at the Landhaus. Written by Carl Hackelberger, who had become receiver general under Sprinzenstein, it concerns a loan of 200,000 fl. that the Estates had agreed to raise for Leopold I after the Dutch Republic and Spain had made a separate peace in 1678, leaving the emperor alone in the field to face Louis XIV and renewed unrest in Hungary.95 It was Hackelberger’s responsibility, as receiver general, to find the money. His first appeal to the assembled “three upper Estates” failed to have the desired effect, and the enterprise only got off the ground after the Landmarschall himself, at Hackelberger’s urging, brought his own “highly potent credit” (Hochvermögendes Credit) into play. Sprinzenstein pledged 60,000 fl. Other members of the Estates then came on board, though they demanded a full year’s interest instead of the six months foreseen by the Landmarschall. While the receiver general believed this concession to be necessary, he assured Sprinzenstein that he would do all in his power “to spare the imperial Court [added] interest.”

F I SC AL I NN OV AT I ON A ND CRED I T The transaction handled by Hackelberger involved the interposition of the Estates’ good offices directly on the emperor’s behalf. This borrowing activity picked up pace as the monarchy fought a series of wars with the French and Turks that would keep it in arms almost uninterruptedly until 1718. As in 1679, domestic unrest in Hungary exacerbated the situation. In the 1680s Ottoman troops would push all the way to the battlements of Vienna, only to be swept back across the Hungarian plain in a war that lasted until the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699). Even as the tax yield 93 Quotations from Gatterburg’s petition to the “three upper Estates” for the expectancy to the receivership general, Feb. 12, 1692, NÖLA, StA, B-7, Nr. 37. For the Handgrafenamt, see Schwabe von Waisenfreund, Versuch einer Geschichte, ii, 95. 94 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 677–8. 95 Hackelberger to Sprinzenstein, Jan. 20, 1679, NÖLA, Lamberg Family Papers, carton 134, no. 1541. For the foreign political context, see Oswald Redlich, Weltmacht des Barock: Österreich in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I. (4th edn., Vienna, 1961), 154–5.

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in the land below the Enns dropped sharply because of the accompanying devastation, proxy loans by the Estates continued almost unabated.96 By the later 1680s, the accumulated debt was producing an under-swell that prompted a pathbreaking innovation in government. For the first time, the Lower Austrian Estates assented, by way of a formal accord with the ruler known as a “recess,” to a fixed annual grant over an extended period (in this case twelve years). Not by chance was it signed in the summer (July 23, 1689) of the first full campaigning season in which Austria faced a two-front war against sultan and sun king. The agreement set an important precedent throughout the central lands. Negotiated between the Aulic Chamber and the “three upper Estates,” the recess was retroactive to 1688 and regulated a range of outstanding fiscal-military issues.97 On their side, the Estates agreed to a fixed annual grant in the first six years (1688–93) of 200,000 fl., rising in the following three years (1694–6) to 225,000, and finally to 250,000 fl. (1697–9). Before transferring actual cash, they were permitted to subtract costs incurred directly in supplying, housing, feeding, and paying troops and other army-induced charges and damages, as well as certain miscellaneous expenses. The Estates additionally forewent claims of more than 1,100,000 fl. in war-related loss and injury (dating to 1683) as well as repayment of an equal sum loaned to Ferdinand II in the dark days of the Thirty Years War. In return they committed themselves to service 811,000 fl. in debt contracted on Leopold’s behalf in the preceding years. On its part, the government confirmed for a further twenty-five years their possession of a set of excise duties originally conceded in connection with the advance of funds to Ferdinand II. It also exempted nobles, prelates, and other owners of demesne land from a grain levy; promised not to increase the so-called Vienna Woods’ tolls; undertook to sanction the Estates’ cherished Einstandsrecht; and agreed to extend the moratorium on older debt. The recess concluded with a blanket confirmation of the Estates’ “rights, prerogatives, privileges, and liberties.”98 This passage would characterize future such pacts as well. By signing the agreement, the Estates effectively relinquished the right to haggle over the basic grant, even as the ritual of consent would continue without fail.99 By their acceptance of what in hindsight has appeared to have been a perpetual encumbrance, the Estates would seem to have gotten the bad end of the deal. They quickly learned that the agreed amount was little more than a yearly minimum and by no means protected them from further demands. Why would they have consented to such an arrangement? This recess and its sequels at irregular intervals (1701, 1713, 1723, 1730, 1739, and 1748) have widely been understood

96 For loans made by the Estates to the ruler in the 1680s, see Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 168–70, 192, 193, 203, 210, 228, 230. Also Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344. 97 The text is preserved in NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 1r–11r. 98 Recess, July 23, 1689, NÖLA, HS 173, i, 10v–11r. 99 This was noted by Helmuth Stradal, “Stände und Steuern in Österreich,” in XIIe Congrès international des sciences historiques (Louvain and Paris, 1966), 158.

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as an aspect of a long-term Habsburg strategy to erode the Estates’ liberties.100 In fact, as the historian A. F. Pribram pointed out more than a century ago, a different rationale lay behind the recess of 1689: the need to uphold the Estates’ financial good name.101 Given their own heavy investments in their own paper, this was not only in the fundamental interests of the Estates but also of utmost concern to a government dependent on their credit. Leopold I wished “above all,” as he put it, “to preserve the credit of Our faithfully obedient three upper Estates.”102 The debt contracted by the Estates depended on revenues to service it. Hence there existed an essential link between their income and liabilities. In effect, as Franz Mensi put it somewhat differently long ago, the “Contribution” was an “object for credit operations.”103 The diet’s vote of the annual grant (Contribution) constituted a public guarantee of that debt, hence of Habsburg finances. The higher the debt rose, the higher the grant had to be for it to remain sustainable and attractive. Inexorable pressure bore on the Estates, also because of their own investments in the debt, to agree to increased grants in later recesses, most famously in 1748. The central authorities came fully to appreciate this highly desirable side effect.104 By the same token, the Habsburgs were compelled to preserve the Estates—in particular the “three upper Estates”—as a privileged corps and to call regular diets. For the Estates, the debt and their ability to create more of the same were to be crucial to their survival. For the moment, the recess of 1689 was a step in rectifying the imbalance between revenue and debt that threatened to bring down a system that functioned for both sides, despite drawbacks. For the government, debt-service potentially decreased future revenue from the grant. At the Estates, the burden of lending in a cash-poor society took place time and again under duress: individual members had to borrow the needed funds under their own names. Sporadic opposition at the Landhaus was the consequence. Firing the late seventeenth-century dynamic were two other fiscal innovations that enhanced the ruler’s ability to extract money from the Estates. Acute foreign crises gave direct rise to both. In 1682 the looming Turkish threat followed the loss

100 Sturmberger, Land ob der Enns, 289; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 283; Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 325; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 132. Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 184, portrayed the recess as “a measure to lessen the tax burden,” though he does not explain why Leopold I would have assented to such a provision in the middle of a two-front war. An agreement also known as a “recess” (Dec. 17, 1717) concerning the problem of tax jurisdiction over the properties subject to the Lower Austrian Vizedom was also signed between the two parties. A copy is preserved in NÖLA, LH, 89. See Gertrude Pruckner, “Der Türkenkrieg von 1716–1718: Seine Finanzierung und militärische Vorbereitung,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1946, 70–2. 101 Pribram’s insight is buried in a footnote. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 628 (fn. 1). 102 Recess, July 23, 1689, NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 2v. 103 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 164. The connection between taxes approved by representative assemblies and the ability to contract debt was well-known in Europe. See Tracy, A Financial Revolution; David Stasavage, Public Debt and the Birth of the Democratic State: France and Great Britain, 1688–1789 (Cambridge, 2003). 104 On this point, see Mensi, Die Finanzen, 533.

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of much of Upper Hungary to the kuruc leader Imre Thököly. To prepare for the expected onslaught, Leopold I decreed an extraordinary property assessment called a “Turk tax” in the central lands, including the archduchy, in the same month that the sultan and grand vizier departed Constantinople to the northwest. The property taxes of previous conflicts had sometimes borne the label “Turk tax.” But because they had targeted groups such as foreign tradesmen, servants, and day laborers that might have escaped the fiscal net, they differed from the new tax.105 Indeed, the measure of 1682 aimed at the top of the scale: the wealthiest social elements that in an agrarian society lacking large-scale commerce and manufacturing were landowners at least nominally within the usual purview of the tax gatherer. The patents nailed up on the city gates of Vienna in early November 1682 exacted a 1 percent charge on all real and personal property valued at 1,000 fl. or more.106 This base was sufficiently high to exclude most of the rural world, while the Church was not exempt. Indeed, the pope accepted the imposition and the Habsburg authorities paid close attention to clerical tax declarations. The Schotten abbot was made to pay 1,000 fl. more than he had declared, for example (see Figure 3.3 for the receipt).107 Just as striking was the fact that the Lower Austrian diet was not consulted in advance about the tax nor did it consent to it. To the contrary: the emperor invoked his sovereign power (“aus Kaiser- und Landesfürstlichen Macht, Gewalt, und Vollkommenheit”) in a way unusual, if not unique, in the history of imperial taxation.108 Diverse influences inspired this tax. It is noteworthy that Leopold I appealed to his authority as emperor as well as archduke given that the hereditary lands are sometimes portrayed as decoupled from the wider Holy Roman Empire by this time. Imperial jurisprudence left no doubt that the territorial Estates were obliged to subsidize imperial defense. The prevalent understanding of Bodin’s theory of sovereignty furthermore ascribed untrammeled fiscal power to the ruler to preserve the commonwealth in times of danger.109 In the face of “imminens

For earlier “Turk taxes,” see Seeger, “Die Geschichte,” 246–8. Patent for Lower and Upper Austria, Oct. 29, 1682, NÖLA, KP, carton 17. Ludwig Baur, “Berichte des Hessen-Darmstädtischen Gesandten Justus Eberh. Passer an die Landgräfin Elisabeth Dorothea über die Vorgänge am kaiserlichen Hof und in Wien von 1680 bis 1683,” AÖG 37 (1867): 356–7. 107 The abbot declared a liability of 1,500 fl. (in a statement dated Nov. 23, 1682), but in fact paid 2,500 fl. (according to a receipt issued on Dec. 4, 1682 by the “Kaiserliche Generalkriegskassa”). Both documents are preserved in Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 175, Nr. 2g, 2j. In his own declaration, the provost of Herzogenburg protested against the tax, dated Dec. 12, 1682, but paid as well. Both declaration and receipt are found in Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. F. 441. That such documents were carefully preserved evidenced the shock caused by the tax. For the relative historiographical neglect, see Maťa, “ ‘Unerträgliche Praegravation’,” 168 (fn. 98); Jiří David, “Staatsfinanzen und Steuererhebung in Mähren (1620–1740),” in Rauscher, ed., Krieg führung und Staatsfinanzen, 204. For the levy of the “Turk tax” generally in Lower Austria in 1683, see Bérenger, Finances, 336–7. For the attitude of the papacy, see Ludwig Freiherr von Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, xiv/2 (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1930), 780–3. 108 Emperors had previously invoked their “absolute” power to tax without the consent of the local Estates. See Tracy, A Financial Revolution, 33, 81. 109 Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 453. 105 106

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Figure 3.3. Receipt issued by the “Imperial General War Disbursement Treasury” to Schotten abbot Johann Schmitzberger, auxiliary bishop of Vienna, for payment of the “Turk tax,” Dec. 4, 1682. Courtesy of the Schottenstift Archiv, Vienna.

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bellum Turcicum,” the emperor declared, “salus populi [est] suprema lex.”110 Thus he did not need the Estates to satisfy his obligation to defend his realms and subjects. Less certain is the influence of late seventeenth-century Austria’s famous trio of cameralists (Becher, Schroeder, and Hörnigk). Schroeder had called for an end to the right of intermediary powers to approve taxation, but he was out of favor and the idea implausible in the circumstances of the time.111 At a higher level, the privy councilor, Count Johann Quintin Jörger, argued for precisely the sort of property charge that transpired. Clearly motivated by the intellectual swirl of the time, he contended that territorial privilege should not be allowed to jeopardize the common good (bonum commune) and urged a levy without respect to birth or the diet’s views.112 As a former Aulic Chamber vice-president, he was wellacquainted with the practicalities of fiscal-military exigency. By inheritance he belonged to the Lower Austrian Estates. The provisions for the “Turk tax” presaged the fiscal future in other ways. Leopold entrusted imposition to a unique, two-tiered commissioned administration. Whereas the juntas that were such a common tool of government in the casa de Austria’s Spanish realms are generally thought to have induced bureaucratic muddle and infighting, the advent of supra-territorial tax commissions in Vienna betokened the ability to coordinate more effectively.113 Because it took account of regional peculiarity, this type of centralized construction would remain useful into the Napoleonic period. In 1682 a “General Commission” (Hauptkommission) of five high dignitaries, including Bohemian Chancellor Nostitz, Austrian Chancellor Hocher, Grand Marshall Zinzendorf, Prince-Bishop Sinelli, and Aulic Chamber President Abele, directed the operation from Vienna.114 At the next level, territorial commissions under the respective governors supervised implementation— collecting and reviewing the “written declarations” (schriftliche Bekenntnisse) by those subject to the levy. While the names of the Lower Austrian commissioners have eluded discovery, the stadholder was Count Konrad Balthasar Starhemberg,

110 Quotation from the aulic decree to the central commission responsible for the tax, Oct. 31, 1682, FHKA, Hoffinanz Österreich, fasc. 500, f. 1110r and 1111v. Cf. Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 617 (esp. fn. 1). 111 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Wilhelm von Schröder: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Staatswissenschaft (Vienna, 1910), 104. 112 Excerpts of Jörger’s report of Aug. 1681 reproduced in [Starzer], Beiträge, 272, and Hermann Ignaz Bidermann, Geschichte der österreichischen Gesammt-Staats-Idee 1526–1804, 2 parts (Innsbruck, 1867/ 1889), i, 146–7. The patent of Oct. 29, 1682 called for a levy “ohne respect der Personen;” Jörger had used the phrase “ohne einiges menschen respect.” Stefan Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz unter Kaiser Leopold I.: Personelle Strukturen und Methoden zur politischen Entscheidungsfindung am Wiener Hof (Frankfurt am Main, 2001), 203, suggested that Jörger had no influence on Leopold in finances or foreign policy. For a contemporary description of Jörger, see Prince Ferdinand Schwarzenberg, Journal de la cour de Vienne (1686–1688), ed. Jean Bérenger (Paris, 2013), 148–9 (Aug. 24, 1687). 113 For the Spanish case, see Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), 124. For an assessment of the use of commissions in Theresan Austria similar to the one rendered for seventeenth-century Spain, see Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 230–1. 114 By aulic decree of Oct. 31, 1682, FHKA, Hoffinanz Österreich, fasc. 500, f. 1110–12, 1123–4. See also Sienell, Die Geheime Konferenz, 168–70 (Nostitz), 136–42 (Hocher), 173–5 (Zinzendorf ), 175–8 (Sinelli), and 221–5 (Abele).

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father of Vienna’s glamorous defender the following year and brother-in-law of Grand Marshall Zinzendorf. Like Jörger and Zinzendorf, he belonged to one of the archduchy’s old families and had attended Lower Austrian assemblies. There was no provision for the Estates to participate qua corps in management of the tax. Given that the charges were to be paid to the usual receivers, the Estates’ structures were nonetheless involved, if under special accounting restraints. The commissioned organization likely restricted recourse to the regular courts of law, as similar levies later did explicitly. By the time of the second innovation improving the emperor’s ability to leverage money out of the Estates—the universal capitation of 1691—the high-minded Johann Quintin Jörger had succeeded Starhemberg as Lower Austria’s stadholder. Imposed at another moment of military crisis, the capitation represents an undeservedly forgotten milestone in Habsburg fiscal and political history. After the unparalleled successes of the later 1680s, which had brought almost all of formerly Ottoman Hungary and Transylvania under Habsburg control, the tide shifted with the French return to the battlefield. Emboldened by the sun king, the sultan launched a counteroffensive in the Balkans and dispatched Leopold’s old kuruc nemesis, Imre Thököly, with an army to Transylvania. Only weeks after the dramatic fall of Belgrade to the Turks, the emperor decreed the capitation (October 26, 1690) in the central lands.115 That this tax has earned no special place in Habsburg history is explicable by its uneven implementation across the hereditary territories as well as by the circumstance, again, that the distinction between earlier such taxes and the Leopoldine one is not readily apparent. The word “capitation” had designated a variety of taxes (Leibsteuer, also called Kopfsteuer) levied since the late Middle Ages. Few of these had been universal in that they had applied to males and females of all ages regardless of birth or status. Most were directed at those not covered by the regular tax registers.116 The universal capitation with its graduated assessment based on wealth was an old dream, however. Much as necessity was the mother of invention in 1690, it was the terror struck by the Ottoman Turk that had driven Charles II’s proclamation of such a tax in Styria more than a century earlier, in 1568. But even though Charles had declared his own person subject to the levy, it had failed.117 Soon thereafter, a similar capitation proposed in the land below the Enns by Charles’s brother, the emperor Maximilian II, also ran up against insuperable obstacles.118 At least two further attempts in Lower Austria in the middle decades of the seventeenth century (1645 and 1657) produced little more than documents of great historical charm: charts in which the inhabitants of a largely courtly and rural world are arranged into dozens of taxable categories.119 115

Patent for Lower Austria, Oct. 26, 1690, NÖLA, KP, 18. Bérenger, Finances, 337–9. Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929), 528–9; Franz Freiherr von Mensi, Geschichte der direkten Steuern in Steiermark bis zum Regierungsantritt Maria Theresias, ii (Graz and Vienna, 1912), 143. 117 Mensi, Geschichte der direkten Steuern, 172–6. 118 Seeger, “Die Geschichte,” 216–22. 119 The patents for these taxes, dated Aug. 23, 1645 and July 8, 1657 respectively, are preserved in NÖLA, KP, 11 and 14. See Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 618 (fn. 2). 116

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Leopold I’s levy of 1691 inspired Louis XIV’s celebrated capitation of 1695, now regarded as a landmark in the advance of state authority and fiscal equality in Europe. As early as the previous year, a general capitation such as “the emperor [had] recently instituted . . . in his hereditary states” had been proposed to the king.120 The fiscal breakthrough in France helped pay for what was possibly the ancien régime’s largest army; it also established the principle that all of the kingdom’s inhabitants must pay direct taxes. Because of its formal exemption of the clergy, Louis’s capitation was not quite universal. In Lower Austria the emperor Leopold had made clear that he expected the Church to bear part of the burden, if under a title that preserved formal exemption.121 Accordingly, the public patent only “recommended” levels of payment for ecclesiastics. The sum of 1,000 fl. assigned to the bishop of Vienna corresponded to the highest secular charge (princes in the first class). The sums demanded from richer prelates and abbesses, 800 and 600 fl. respectively, topped those imposed on all nobles below princes of the first class (500 fl. on princes in the second class and on counts in the first class). Well-to-do priests were thought able to contribute 100 fl. Clerical resistance was undercut by the disaster at Belgrade, the repeated papal authorization in the 1680s of taxes to fight the Turks, and the strained relations between Vienna and Rome at this time. From his Viennese domicile, the abbot of Melk collected the payments of his fellow prelates.122 Otherwise the tax encompassed in theory every man, woman, and child, and was supervised by a two-tiered commissioned administration similar to that of 1683.123 The 12 fl. levied on burghers of the first class testified to the advanced decay of the towns. Only the relative wealth of Court purveyors relieved the wretched picture of civic impotence. Officials, professionals, and nobles who did not belong to the Estates all fell within a range of 40 to 50 fl. Rural males paid between 12 Kreuzer (bound peasants) and 10 fl. (freeholders). Their women and offspring were liable for proportionately less. Printed, standardized tax declarations make an appearance at this time, auguring the future. As the regular channels of taxation collected from the broader agrarian populace, manorial officials and local magistrates used the new forms. Numbers rather than names were made known to the authorities. Passed in triplicate up to the Landhaus, the college of Deputies sent one copy “to Court” that

120 Quoted in Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), 34. Cf. Richard Bonney, “The Eighteenth Century: II. The Struggle for Great Power Status and the End of the Old Fiscal Regime,” in Richard Bonney, ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995), 323. On the French capitation generally, see James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2009), xxxviii–ix, 215–17. 121 The distinction is apparent in the summons to pay issued by the Estate of prelates to the provost of Herzogenburg, Nov. 27, 1690, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. F. 457. 122 The receipt he issued to the provost of Herzogenburg for 400 fl. (dated Dec. 4, 1690) in Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg H.7.2. F. 457. Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste, 1063–4. See Bérenger, Finances, 445, for examples of extra taxes on the clergy. 123 Material relevant to the implementation of the tax has been preserved in a substantial bound file entitled “Expeditiones, so in puncto der allgemeinen Bey= und Kopfsteuer von Ao. 1690, bis 1692 hin und wieder ausgeferttiget worden,” FHKA, Hoffinanz Österreich, fasc. 559. One of the Lower Austrian commissioners was Baron Carl Pergen, eldest son of Carl Perger, the earlier receiver general of the Estates. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg,” 154.

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likely ended up in the hands of the provincial commission; another to the receiver general (to be forwarded to the Aulic War Payments Office); and the third to the Estates’ bookkeeper.124 As with the “Turk tax” of 1683, the government did not submit the capitation to the Estates for approval, though there was no explicit invocation of sovereign imperial authority. Their Deputies appealed personally to Aulic Chancellor Stratmann, citing the recess fixing the territorial grant signed only the previous year. While this move does seem to have resulted in a concession allowing corporate nobles to submit their declarations via the Landmarschall’s tribunal, thus preserving the illusion of privileged status, they still had to pay. Special provisions governed how this was to be done. Nobles declared in duplicate, once “to Court” and once to the Aulic War Payments Office, including information on family members, retainers, and servants.125 Sums due were deposited into the same office rather than the Estates’ receivership general. In Lower Austria the capitation yielded some 281,000 fl.; the lords and knights accounted for more than a third (104,016 fl.).126 A contemporary list preserves the names of those assessed as a fascinating snapshot of the corporate nobility of the land below the Enns more than thirty years into the reign of Leopold I.127 Neither the property tax of 1683 nor the capitation of 1691 was uniformly enforced across the Habsburg lands, perhaps explaining why these exercises have largely been forgotten. Still, the new instruments served their purpose well: even in places where the tax did not apply, such as Styria and Bohemia, the Estates felt compelled to purchase expensive exemptions.128 This was to be the pattern of the future, much as in the pays d’états under Louis XIV. In Lower Austria the “three upper Estates” soon learned the lesson. They too would buy themselves out, also with borrowed funds. Because this practice brought quick and relatively cheap money into their treasuries—no mean achievement in a cash-poor and low-growth economy—the authorities were prepared to accept it. The advantage to elites consisted in heightened opportunities for low-risk investment rather than submission to confiscatory taxation, even as lending took place under conditions of both constraint and distress. The “Turk tax” experiment of 1683 was repeated in ensuing years with the exception of 1690, when peace with the new sultan seemed imminent.129 Given

124

Lower Austrian Deputies to Receiver General Sinnich, Dec. 7, 1690, NÖLA, StA, G-15, no. 15. Several examples of individual declarations (including that of Receiver General Sinnich), as well as a printed specification, are preserved in NÖLA, StA, G-15, no. 15. Cf. Max Vancsa, “Die ältesten Steuerbekenntnisse der Stände in Oesterreich unter der Enns: Ein Beitrag zur Steuergeschichte und zur Kunde der Geschichtsquellen Oesterreichs,” MIÖG suppl. vol. 6 (1901): 458–71. 126 The figure of 281,000 fl. for the capitation of 1691 found in the aulic decree of Jan. 20, 1694, NÖLA, StA, G-15, no. 15. 127 “Consignation waß invermelte Fürsten, Grafen, und Freyhern, auch Ritterstandts Persohnen an der Kopfsteuer zu entrichten haben,” NÖLA, StA, G-15, no. 15. 128 For Styria, see Mensi, Geschichte der direkten Steuern, 80–9. For Bohemia, Bérenger, Finances, 337–8. 129 The development was similar in Bohemia. See Maťa, “ ‘Unerträgliche Praegravation’,” 168. This paragraph is based on Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 182, 183, 188, 192, 125

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that the Ottoman peril had receded across the Pannonian plain, the tax was no longer imposed by virtue of sovereign authority. Instead it became a matter for negotiation at the diet. At a time when his Lower Austrian subjects were still trying to recover from the double shock of the plague of 1679 and the invasion of 1683, Leopold asked in 1684 for a “Turk tax” of 75,000 fl. The Estates tendered a loan of 30,000 fl. at 6 percent, and this pattern of offer and counteroffer, with slight variations, held through 1688. In 1685 the tax appeared for the first time in the regular proposition. Within days of the diet’s opening in 1686, the Estates proffered 50,000 fl. so that troops could be recruited and provisioned as quickly as possible for the next campaign. In the fiscal year subsequent to the recess of 1689 the emperor bargained for an interest-rate reduction to 5 percent. Later the same year, with both the French and Turks now in the field, the Aulic Chamber was able to borrow 200,000 fl. through the Estates at the lower rate when 9 percent and more had to be paid elsewhere. In this case, the Estates interposed their credit between the government and the two original lenders of the funds in question, a Count Lamberg and one of the Gatterburg brothers.130 Comparatively fast and cheap money—more of it—in exchange for exemption from the new taxes was the mix that characterized the period largely coinciding with the Nine Years War and the Turkish wars. Here the capitation replaced the property tax as the prod that was applied to the Estates. At the same time, the crisis of a two-front war accelerated Habsburg borrowing from corporate sources. In January 1691 Leopold requested a grant of 300,000 fl. from the diet—all of it to be advanced if necessary through the use of the Estates’ credit.131 Following the previous year’s military debacle, there was no time to wait for ordinary revenue to trickle in. The same diet witnessed another financial innovation: the government reorganized borrowing in its central lands by apportioning a single sum (2.5 million fl.) among them. Here the extent to which the individual composite parts were being handled as a financial whole came into view, while territorial autonomy was the precondition for raising such funds in the first place. The Lower Austrian Estates were assigned one-tenth (250,000 fl.) of what we might call the first “composite loan.” The exercise amounted to a forced loan on the owners of demesne land and aroused corresponding resentment. The resistance in Lower Austria was comparatively muted—the Schotten abbot complained that his monastery already owed debt of between 60,000 and 70,000 fl.—and the Estates paid up. The Styrian Estates mounted more effective opposition.132 193, 203, 204, 209, 210, 212, 220, 221, 228, 239, 252, 254, 256. This dissertation is useful as a mine of barely digested primary information. 130 Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 124–5, 272–3. Cf. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 144. 131 Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 257. This was 100,000 fl. more than foreseen in the recess signed only the previous year. 132 Handwritten notes presumably by the Schotten abbot for meetings of the Ausschuß and Defensions Ausschuß between Jan. 11 and 27, 1691 in which the loan was discussed. Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 16, Nr. 83. In 1696 the abbot borrowed 3,000 fl. from a Countess Herberstein in order to pay a property tax. A copy of the bond he issued is preserved in Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 67, Nr. 21. Correspondence relative to events in Styria is in StLA, Laa.A. Antiquum VI, Schuber 815. Bérenger, Finances, 448, reports that the Bohemian Estates

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A changing combination of requests for loans, extra taxes, and other concessions in the following years placed relentless pressure on the Landhaus. The Estates invariably countered with proposals of their own, while the recess they had signed in 1689 with its basic Contribution gave them, as Iwasaki has shown, a line of rhetorical defense. The greater the foreign danger, the smoother the negotiations proved. As it receded and the conflict dragged on, this was less so, though the grants always exceeded the recess’s specifications. Even before the diet for the fiscal year 1692 opened, the emperor decreed a capitation, but only days later invited the Estates to suggest an alternate revenue source—in other words, to purchase an exemption that would place quick money in his pocket.133 They proposed raising 900 recruits, half of them free of charge, but the authorities apparently preferred them to reimburse some 100,000 fl. owed to Samuel Oppenheimer, one of the Court’s leading money-lenders.134 The success of this strategy ensured the inclusion of the capitation in the propositions through 1697.135 Through 1695, the Estates continued to renew the lease on their privileged status by lending in exchange for an exemption from the capitation. In 1693 and 1695 this involved 150,000 fl. at 6 percent; in 1694 they agreed to satisfy further obligations to Oppenheimer, among other services.136 As the monarchy looked to achieve an optimal position from which to negotiate peace, the pressure was ratcheted up in 1696 with the revival of a 1 percent property tax on the wealthy—in combination with the capitation. With management and collection of the property tax largely conceded to the Landhaus, the proceeds came in slowly and unevenly, while the capitation seems to have been confined to those not hit by the other levy.137 The Estates drew heavily on their good offices in the following years. In 1697 the authorities demanded a “Turk tax” and a capitation, and then an advance as part of a “composite loan.” Since 1691 the Estates had participated at least twice in such lending operations. On the first occasion, in the spring of 1692, six of their leading members had been summoned to Court to confer with Obersthofmeister Dietrichstein and Aulic Chancellor Stratmann. In due course, the Estates promised 135,000 fl. at 6 percent; three years later they undertook to deliver 150,000 fl. at the same rate to the same purpose.138 In both 1697 and 1698 they bought themselves out of the threatened property taxes and capitations by subscribing to another “composite loan” totaling three million fl. The Lower Austrian quota amounted to 333,333 fl. In exchange, the emperor were finally ensnared at this time in “the emperor’s financial combinations” by being induced to lend to the government. 133 Provided for in the aulic decree, Nov. 30, 1691, NÖLA, StA, G-15, Nr. 15. 134 This charge dating from 1692 is still apparent in their accounts more than a decade later: “Specification deren Credits Partheyen welche bey Einer Löb: N:Ö: Landschafft anligente Capitalia haben pro Ao. 1704” (Rubric 12), NÖLA, Verordnetenamtsrelationen, 18. 135 Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 268. 136 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344; aulic decree, Jan. 20, 1694, NÖLA, StA, G-15, Nr. 15. 137 As suggested by the figures in Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” p. 197; “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2013–17 (NÖLA); Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 309, 314. 138 Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 270–1, 272, 273–4, 300, 301, 304, 305.

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agreed to pay the interest on loans already taken out by the Estates on his behalf.139 Also in this way the authorities were able to take advantage of the lower yields on corporate paper. The financial arrangements in connection with the Estates’ purchase of onethird of the capitalized value of the Landsteuer in 1693 offer good insight into the circle of backers on which they relied for their credit operations at this time. We will recall that the purchase was the first stage in the alienation of the Landsteuer, one of the three elements of regular direct taxation in Lower Austria. The asking price was 600,000 fl. In order to finance the deal, more than 100 lenders put up money at the Estates.140 All but a handful supplied more than 1,000 fl., usually much more. Leading families of lords in the 1680s and 1690s (Althann, Herberstein, Traun, Geymann, Breunner, Fünfkirchen, Hoyos, Hohenfeld, Jörger, and Sinzendorff ) were rather better represented than prelates (St. Pölten, Zwettl, Altenburg, Wiener Neustadt, and the provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral). There was still the chance Protestant with money to spare, or out of whom it was pressed, such as Baron Hector Friedrich Kornfail or the underage Countess Maria Magdalena Auersperg; prominent knights (Grundemann) and petty nobles constituted the most numerous group; and officers of the Estates including Receiver General Sinnich, his predecessor Wellenstein, and Secretary Johann Christoph Pendterriedter (later secretary to Prince Eugene) also appear. Though exceptional in number, “outsiders” were the largest individual lenders: Prince Schwarzenberg 100,000 fl., Aulic Chancellor Stratmann 24,000 fl., and the family of the Imperial Aulic Council’s presiding judge, Count Wolfgang Oettingen, 20,000 fl.141 A sprinkling of non-nobles, minor clerics, and the University of Vienna rounded out the group. In part due to the novel blend of fiscal devices—from the “Turk tax” (1683) to the recess (1689) to the capitation (1691)—the Estates were emerging as a major source of Habsburg credit. Through their intermediation, the emperor was able to borrow well over 100,000 fl. in most years during the 1690s. In each of the last two years before the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699) ending the Austro-Turkish war, the Estates loaned more than 300,000 fl. For the government, the advantages included a favorable interest rate of not more than 6 percent and the Landhaus’s responsibility for servicing the debt. But Leopold had piled up a mountain of debt in his own name since 1683. Like Louis XIV, he lived beyond his means, but unlike the French king, he and his successors were able in the long term to place their liabilities on a relatively solid footing that would also prove politically viable. The search for comparatively easy, affordable credit was in itself part of the larger, indeed central, problem that Vienna confronted: how were the spiraling costs of conflict that required an army of ever increasing size to be met? The kind of short-term, personalized borrowing that climaxed in the notorious collapse of the Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 320. “Specification Aller und Jieder Credits Partheyen so ao. 1693 bey Einer Löb. N:Ö: Landschafft Capitalia angelegt,” NÖLA, StA, A-5, Nr. 14, carton 2, f. 366–70. 141 Stratmann and Oettingen already belonged to the Lower Austrian Estate of lords, having been admitted in 1684 and 1672 respectively. Schwarzenberg joined in 1694. 139 140

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Oppenheimer financial empire in 1703 was clearly not the answer. This disaster paralyzed Habsburg credit just as a new conflagration was getting underway.142 The systematic mobilization of corporate credit had long been viewed as a way to summon up larger sums in a more cost effective way. As early as the 1680s, the cameralist Wilhelm von Schroeder had floated the idea of a bank based on the Lower Austrian Landhaus, an idea suggestive of the financial potential ascribed to the Estates, but also of their already comparatively solid reputation.143 The idea was to have an astonishingly long life. After the turn of the century, the success of statebacked banks elsewhere in Europe prompted the authorities to set up a similar body—called the “Banco del Giro” after the Venetian prototype—to underwrite public credit. Here too corporate wherewithal was seen as indispensable. Prince Liechtenstein, the monarchy’s grandest magnate, and Landmarschall Otto Traun were drafted as “inspectors” of the new institution. Though the Lower Austrian Estates were assuredly the leading corporate lender at that point, they protested at the role that the scheme assigned to them, which they believed endangered their financial good name.144 For lack of adequate funding, the bank would indeed fail within a couple of years. A project advanced by the monarchy’s inspired finance minister during the Spanish war, Count Gundaker Thomas Starhemberg, foresaw the BohemianAustrian Estates as the joint guarantors of a bank. Though unrealized, it too signified that the 1690s had been a defining moment in the Estates’ mediation of government credit, as Bérenger perceptively noted.145 After so much trial and error, the good name of the city of Vienna, another corporation, underlay the banking institution known as the City Bank of Vienna (Wiener Stadt-Banco) that would finally open its doors in 1706 and become one of the success stories of eighteenthcentury Habsburg public finance. The Estates were also consulted in its creation.146 Better endowed than the “Banco del Giro,” it enjoyed Starhemberg’s protecting hand for decades. Among its initial assets was an excise tax on meat approved and collected by the Lower Austrian Estates. Even as the Spanish conflict was in the offing, Leopold called on the Estates of his central lands in a manner that underscored their growing significance in the realm of public credit. Resorting to an older precedent, he shifted a large sum of cameral debt onto them. In confabulations from territory to territory in 1701, the various bodies agreed to assume Habsburg liabilities dating back to the period from

142 On Oppenheimer, see Max Grunwald, Samuel Oppenheimer und sein Kreis (Ein Kapitel aus der Finanzgeschichte Österreichs) (Vienna and Leipzig, 1913); Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 522–3. 143 Bidermann, “Die Wiener Stadt-Bank,” 352. 144 Bidermann, “Die Wiener Stadt-Bank,” 354; ÖZV, I/1, 100 (fn. 1); Mensi, Die Finanzen, 184, 188; Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 112; Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 373. 145 Bérenger, Finances, 451. For the project, see Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 112–14; Mensi, Die Finanzen, 189–90. 146 Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 243. See also Winkelbauer, “Nervus rerum Austriacarum,” 201–3; Mensi, Die Finanzen, 212, 215, 613.

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1683 and totaling some 16.3 million fl.147 As a result of the talks with the Lower Austrians concluding at a time when the government surmised that the total transfer would exceed 20 million fl., the Estates promised to shoulder two million. In the end, this amounted to rather more than the 10 percent assigned to the land below the Enns in the “composite loans” of the previous decade. The Estates undertook to service their share at 6 percent interest and reimburse 166,666 fl. in capital annually over twelve years by withholding the requisite funds from the annual grant. Though the success of this complex operation unsurprisingly varied from place to place, it constituted a “considerable alleviation” of the dynastic state’s burden given that most lands, including Lower Austria, “by and large met the obligations they had taken on.”148 The debt allocation of 1701 was sealed in Lower Austria by a twelve-year recess.149 By its terms, the Estates agreed to double the annual Contribution from the previous 250,000 to 500,000 fl. Some 66 percent of the increase was earmarked for redeeming the cameral debt assumed. Unlike in Bohemia, no special excise or other duties were conceded to help meet the costs of the undertaking. A rise in the rate of the customary hearth tax will presumably have offset the costs. In either case, the solution was socially regressive. As in 1689, the authorities recognized the Estates’ right to deduct outlays incurred in paying, supplying, and sheltering Habsburg troops passing through the archduchy as well as the value of damages thereby sustained. During the Spanish struggle, the military presence with its attendant destruction and disorder would in fact become a major burden. By arranging a buy-out worth 300,000 fl. for the fiscal year 1701, the recess also sanctioned the now-established practice by which the Estates compounded property taxes with loans.150 One provision was worthless almost before the ink was dry: the Estates’ formal immunity from property taxes and capitations.151 As in 1689, the Landhaus also obtained assurances on concerns that had little or nothing to do with the debt problem: the tax-free status of noble and ecclesiastical property; the right of first refusal in the sale of manorial property (Einstandsrecht); long-running disputes over the Fourth Estate’s tax shortfall; and the Vizedom’s share of the fiscal burden. Even before the recess’s signature in the land below the Enns on January 7, 1701, Prince Eugene had taken command of an army to press Habsburg claims to Spain’s Italian inheritance. Only a few years had passed since Ryswick (1697) and then Karlowitz (1699) had ended long years of conflict. To be sure, the deal on cameral debt alleviated the financial crunch. By freeing up previously encumbered revenues, the monarchy was in a stronger position to meet Louis XIV’s renewed challenge. 147 See Mensi, Die Finanzen, 62–74, on this operation. Also Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 349. 148 Quotations from Mensi, Die Finanzen, 73–4, 165. 149 The text is preserved in NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 12r–25r. See also Mensi, Die Finanzen, 81 (fn. 3). 150 The “three upper Estates” raised their part of the advance through credit operations of their own. “Specification deren Credits Partheyen welche bey Einer Löb: N:Ö: Landschafft anligente Capitalia haben pro Ao. 1704” (Rubric Nr. 2), NÖLA, Verordnetenamtsrelationen, 18. 151 The aulic decree of Dec. 14, 1702, NÖLA, StB, 544, f. 21r–23v, levied a new property tax.

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Yet the Estates found themselves saddled with a large burden of fresh debt that together with their own previous obligations reduced their credit at the start of the new conflict.152 The enforced purchase of the second third of the Landsteuer for 400,000 fl. late in 1701 heightened constraint. This combination of circumstances explains why they deployed their credit comparatively little or on a smaller scale during the fighting—even as the level of Lower Austrian resources flowing into the war effort rose. In 1702, for instance, chivalrous impulses induced the Estates to offer a loan of 35,000 fl. to equip a military foray by the young king of the Romans, the future Joseph I. In debating the offer, the abbot of Heiligenkreuz reminded his fellow prelates that they were “duty-bound to come to His Majesty’s aid in order to preserve his scepter and crown.”153 The heir soon appeared before the fortress of Landau keen to do battle with the “French devils.” The government had more recourse during the war to the resources and lending power of the Church per se—including the prelates in the Estates individually and collectively. The pope’s willingness in this period to concede assessments on the clergy evidenced in an indirect way the dynastic state’s growing readiness—and ability—to soak its mightiest subjects. If the clergy’s ties to Rome constituted an impediment that had to be overcome, the prelates were formally subject, unlike the nobility, to the ruler’s domain. The “Church silver collect” that commenced in 1704 gained the greatest notoriety. Behind it stood the archduke Joseph himself, who assured the provost of Ardagger that the loss would be redeemed when “good times” had returned.154 In effect a forced loan, it yielded disappointingly little in total, though Lower Austria’s share was disproportionate given that the treasures of its houses of God lay conveniently close to those in power, while the action enjoyed some clerical support.155 More successful was a different approach: notorious holograph letters from the monarch to specific prelates requesting discrete sums that added up to a precalculated total. Such an invitation was a command at least implicitly underlain by the threat of coercion that was all the more effective for being aimed at an individual rather than a corporation.156 In 1702, the first full year of the Spanish conflict, this tactic generated 150,000 fl. from the prelates below the Enns, a loan

152 On this point, see Mensi, Die Finanzen, 98; Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 369. The recess of 1701 attributed the Estates’ debt burden in large part to their purchase of the Landsteuer in 1693. NÖLA, HS 173, I, f. 18r. 153 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Mar. 11, 1702, NÖLA, HS 75. Similar sentiments were voiced by the lords the following year. Minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 14, 1703, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, p. 149. Oswald Redlich, Das Werden einer Großmacht: Österreich von 1700–1740 (4th edn., Vienna, 1962), 10. Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 344, erroneously reports a loan by the Estates of more than 800,000 fl. in 1703. 154 As related by Ardagger at a meeting of the Estate of prelates, Jan. 26, 1704, NÖLA, HS 75. See also Mensi, Die Finanzen, 332–3. 155 Apparent in the debate in the Estate of prelates, Mar. 1, 1704, NÖLA, HS 75. 156 In some cases, the menace was explicit. Evidence of the use of holograph letters in Styria in the 1680s backed up by the possibility of distraint (“Execution”) is in StLA, Laa.A. Antiquum VI, Schuber 815.

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secured on the Contribution.157 Two years later, a request for an additional 100,000 fl. aroused fears of being politically isolated from the nobility. Here too the fiscal pressure tended to drive the Estates apart. After much haggling, the prelates agreed to 60,000 fl. apportioned among them (twenty-six in all) on the basis of their demesne holdings.158 Further missives calling for loans or outright subsidies went out in subsequent years.159 Large-scale borrowing from the prelates as a corps resumed at the time of the recess of 1713. By the 1720s the machinery for tapping the Church’s wealth for fiscal-military purposes was so well-oiled that the prelates were paying a peacetime tax to build fortresses to protect Prince Eugene’s Balkan conquests.160 It is telling that the tax was allowed to expire in Charles VI’s last decade. The historian Charles Ingrao once noted that the contribution made by the Estates of the central lands to the Spanish war effort can hardly be “overestimated.”161 The evolution of the Lower Austrian grant substantiates this claim. If we accept Iwasaki’s numbers, the grant of 1705 would be the highest until the 1740s, although the monarchy fought three intervening wars. Not coincidentally, the year 1705 was also a Habsburg military milestone: the army’s effective strength surpassed 100,000 men for the first time.162 The recess of 1701 had doubled the grant to 500,000 fl., but two other factors also explain the wartime rise. First, the reliance on the Estates to procure manpower for the growing army was becoming more pronounced. In the 1680s the system of centrally organized conscription had proven so inadequate that it had partly given way to a form of territorial recruitment (Landrekrutenstellung) by the Estates.163 Whatever the drawbacks, the new arrangements were successful enough by the 1700s that the War Council considered making them permanent. In 1705 the Lower Austrian diet was asked to supply 2,314 infantrymen and 464 cavalrymen, almost triple the annual number in the 1690s. The Estates accepted the infantry burden without demur and furnished similar numbers in succeeding years.164 157 The relevant holograph letters are mentioned in the minutes of the Estate of prelates, Sept. 11, 1702, NÖLA, HS 75. Also Mensi, Die Finanzen, 169, 325, 326. 158 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Mar. 1 and July 9, 1704, NÖLA, HS 75. 159 Minutes of Estate of prelates, June 15, 1708, NÖLA, HS 75. An original letter from the emperor Joseph to the abbot of Melk dated Feb. 27, 1710 asking for a war loan of 6,000 fl. is preserved in NÖLA, PA, Fasc. O, Nr. 4. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 109, 334–5. 160 “Repartition was Jedes dem Löb: Praelaten=Standt incorporirtes Stüfft undt Closter zu der von Ihro Päbstl: Heyligkeit Ihro Röm: Kay: Maytt: zu erbauung der zwey Haubt Vöstungen Pelgrad, undt Temeswar auß deren geistl: einkünfften deren Königreich Hungarn, undt Böhaimb, wie auch Österreichischen Landten ad instar Decimarum in 5: Jahren zu colligiren bewilligten 800/m. fl. dem hierländigen Praelathen: Standt aber auf besagte 5. Jahr zu repartirten: dem Kays: Hoff auch bereits abgeführten Summa pr: 80/m fl. /: so in mehrbesagt 5 Jahren alß ab ao: 1725 bis 1729 unter sich hinwidumb zu colligiren, umb damit die an den 1723 Jähr: Hoff Darlehen pr: 125/m. fl annoch hafftende Creditores sambt den pro rata vorfallenten Interesse abzustossen unterm 4ten May 1725 geschlossen worden:/ Jähr: beyzutragen hat,” Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg H.3.1. F. 366. The receipts (dated Aug. 30, 1725, May 22, 1726, May 19, 1727, May 30, 1728, and May 15, 1729) issued by the abbot of Melk to the provost of Herzogenburg for installments on this payment are in Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. F. 456. 161 Charles Ingrao, “Conflict or Consensus? Habsburg Absolutism and Foreign Policy 1700–1748,” AHY 19/20, part 1 (1983–4): 34–5. 162 For army strength, see Table I.2 (p. 19). 163 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 109–10. 164 Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” pp. 198–200; Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 368, 385, 390, 391–2, 397.

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Second, the grant’s rise is attributable in some years (1703, 1704, 1705, and 1709) to revenues raised by (the threat of ) property taxes on the wealthy. Yet the recurrent buy-outs of the 1680s and 1690s were not repeated in the same form; varying solutions that brought in more free money emerged from the protracted dialogue between ruler and Estates. Even before the advent of Starhemberg’s strong hand at the Aulic Chamber in June 1703, the government refused to admit either the Estates’ rejection of the 1 percent property tax decreed for that year or their follow-up offer of a simple lump sum.165 Instead it accepted a swift, initial advance of 100,000 fl. covering the Estates personally and their staff, as well as the idea that the Landhaus itself collect the tax from others subject to it.166 These concessions explain why the Estates, abandoning previous opposition, recommended such a tax themselves in 1705 when offered the chance to float a loan of 444,444 fl. (as part of a “composite advance”). On this later occasion, they were successful in pulling a number of the ruler’s own agencies and other bodies (the grand marshal’s office, the War Council, the Aulic Chamber, the provincial government, and the university) under their fiscal jurisdiction.167 This development foreshadowed the Estates’ expanding tax authority across the eighteenth century under the impact of fiscalmilitary exigency. A two-tiered, central/territorial commissioned organization oversaw the property tax of 1703. Unlike in 1683, the Estates managed the operation in a way that set a precedent at least into the 1730s: a special committee at the Landhaus accepted and processed the initial tax declarations.168 Assigned running numerals to make information accessible at all levels, the declarations passed from there up to the authorities, who duly verified them, also against the records of the “Turk tax” of 1683.169 The exercise raised some 600,000 fl. in Lower Austria.170 For reasons that remain unclear, more than two-thirds of this sum flowed into the treasury of the Estates’ “deputy frontier paymaster” (Grenzunterzahlmeister), Simon Prenner von Flamberg († 1737), whose title of office recalled the old responsibility to defend the Raab border. His disbursements in turn offer insight into the ways the monies were used. Some 135,000 fl. were made over to the Aulic War Payments Office; another 174,000 fl. went to military regiments charged to the land below the Enns; approximately 69,000 fl. were used to service debt; and there were diverse other transfers.171

165 Aulic decrees to the Estates, Dec. 30, 1702 and Feb. 5, 1703, NÖLA, StB, 544, f. 27v–29v, 75r–77v. For property taxes generally at this time, see Mensi, Die Finanzen, 174–6. 166 These ideas were put forward in the declaration of Feb. 9, 1703, NÖLA, StB, 506, f. 78r. The 100,000 fl. was paid up by late March. Aulic Chamber to Austrian Aulic Chancellery, Mar. 24, 1703, FHKA, Hoffinanz Österreich, fasz. 647, f. 934r. 167 Hummer, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage,” 395; Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 345. 168 “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2018, 2024 (NÖLA). 169 Aulic Chamber to the emperor Leopold, Apr. 2, 1703, FHKA, Hoffinanz Österreich, fasz. 648, f. 26–30. 170 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 94 (fn. 2). 171 “Specification waß an der 1705: Jährigen Vermögensteüer deren 444444 fl. mir in das gränitz Unterzahlambt paar eingegangen und also in Empfang genohmen wordten ist,” [1706], NÖLA, StA, B-7, no. 39, f. 502–3.

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In 1704, and again in 1709, the Estates were able to negotiate property tax exemptions, on the first occasion for 200,000 fl., on the second for 150,000.172 As the war ground on, such deals faced greater hurdles. As early as 1706, following the record grant of the previous year, the Estate of lords unanimously rejected, in a highly unusual move, all demands above those listed in the recess.173 Little wonder that the authorities turned to the strategy of divide et impera that had shown some success earlier. A steep income (rather than property) tax on the “opulent” (ab opulentoribus) targeted the clergy. The new emperor Joseph’s spirited support of this measure smothered a challenge by the Landhaus, and the tax yielded significant sums from individual members of the Estates (50,000 fl. from the abbot of Melk, 30,000 fl. from the provost of Klosterneuburg, etc.) that were not subsumed under the annual grant.174 After almost ten years of war, the French enemy nearly collapsed under the strain, prompting Louis XIV’s dramatic appeal to the public.175 If not as desperate, the situation in Austria was bleak as the conflict entered a second decade. Finance minister Starhemberg himself conceded that the Habsburg lands were “much oppressed and not in a position to contribute more.”176 Two property taxes mooted in Lower Austria toward the end of Joseph’s comparatively short reign, in 1710 and 1711, failed, and the Estates could not be persuaded to compound them. Where Louis tried stopping the holes in his budget with tax expedients of the same kind, the government in Vienna stepped up reliance on the Estates’ good offices given the impending end of the debt commitment they had assumed in 1701. This turn from taxation to credit would have the advantage of reducing friction with the Landhaus as the conflict entered its last, crucial phase. In response to a call for a property tax in the late spring of 1712, just as the British were preparing to withdraw from the Grand Alliance, the Estates successfully counteroffered with 100,000 fl. “gratis” and a loan of 300,000 fl. at 6 percent. The resulting transaction brought together a group of lenders whose claims the receiver general was still satisfying years later.177 After the breakdown of peace talks between France and the emperor at Utrecht in 1713, borrowing at the Estates resumed on an even larger scale to keep Prince Eugene’s army on the Rhine. A new twist on the idea of a “composite loan” ensued in the face of the budget crunch: each of the central lands (the five Austrian duchies and three Bohemian lands) was to lend a set amount over the course of ten years for a total of nine million fl. This sum was to serve as an “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2018–19 (NÖLA); Mensi, Die Finanzen, 111 (fn. 1). Minutes of Estate of lords, Jan. 14, 1706, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1686–1720, p. 178. 174 Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 157. Cf. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 328–9. 175 Collins, The State, 161, 186–8. 176 Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 295 (quotation), 306. Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” p. 199, notes an “advance” of 150,000 fl. to the government in 1711. 177 “Specification deren bey Löbl: N.Ö. Landschafft OberEinnehmer Ambt annoch hafftenden passiv Capital Schulden, von welchen die 6 pro Cento Interesse Jährl. Lauffen, Ingleichen deren Löbl: Stände Schluß zu waß Ende die Anticipationes geschehen, und waß an Jedwederen Schluß noch hafftet,” [1724], NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 2, f. 434. “Codex Provincialis,” iv, 2027 (NÖLA); Mensi, Die Finanzen, 176; Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 307–8. 172 173

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amortization fund for loans that the government contracted with other parties. Lower Austria’s share amounted to one million fl.—100,000 fl. per annum at 6 percent for ten years. The costs were to be deducted from the yearly grant.178 The Estates did not object in principle, but did appeal for a fixed grant covering the transaction’s projected duration.179 They made this a condition for attending a “ministerial conference” on the subject. In essence, they were calling for a new recess to prop up their liquidity, the pact from 1701 being set to expire that same year. They repeated their plea a short time later when Charles VI approached them for a one-time advance of 200,000 fl. They pledged to make “no difficulties” about the money once a new recess had received the emperor’s “most gracious” consent.180 Around the same time, the clergy below the Enns was subject to a further, thinly veiled forced loan that yielded 600,000 fl. In typical fashion, its proceeds were used to raise money from other sources.181 The third recess within a quarter-century between the Estates and their archduke was signed on April 12, 1713 and ran for ten years rather than the twelve (1714–23) specified in previous agreements.182 Whereas the government had sought 800,000 fl. yearly until the end of the Spanish war, thereafter dropping to 600,000 fl., the Estates offered only 500,000 fl. The parties compromised at 600,000 fl. for the term of the settlement, a rise of 20 percent that took into precise account the new ten-year loan. Strikingly, there was no question of reducing the grant below the level established in 1701, when the Landhaus had assumed two million florins in cameral debt. Liabilities remained high in relation to income. The language of the recess put it more drastically: “Both Camerale and Länder have sunk into an abyss of debt.”183 As of the end of 1709, the Estates owed some 3,109,013 fl.184 This figure can only have grown in succeeding years. Though the government was not able to carry its maximum position, a safety clause did provide for a higher grant in the event of an Ottoman war.185 This was a muted attempt to reconcile current military needs and the requirements of debt-service within the framework of the recess. In this way it presaged the Haugwitz solution of 1748 that would prioritize the former issue without neglecting the latter. Concerned primarily with debtservice, the agreements of 1689 and 1701 had only indirectly ensured running funds for the army. The pledge that the diet would continue to meet was given more elaborate expression in the new recess. Regular convocation remained, after

178

Mensi, Die Finanzen, 75–7; Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 319–25. This is apparent from the aulic decree to the Estates, Feb. 9, 1713, NÖLA, StB, 552, f. 206v–208v. 180 The Estates’ resolution of Apr. 3, 1713 in response to the aulic decree of Mar. 31, 1713, NÖLA, StB, 552, f. 241v–243v. 181 Aulic decree to Estates, June 14, 1713, NÖLA, StB, 553, f. 61r–62v. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 334–5; Holl, Hofkammerpräsident, 326. 182 The text is preserved in NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 51r–69r. 183 Text of the “recess,” Apr. 12, 1713, NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 51v. 184 Report of the Estates’ chancellery to college of Deputies, Oct. 31, 1710, NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 2, f. 423–8. 185 Previous recesses had provided that a “Turk tax” could be imposed in the event of a war with the sultan. 179

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all, the best way to reassure the bearers of the Estates’ credit instruments and other lenders against the Lower Austrian Contribution. The recess of 1713 recapped concessions made to the Estates in previous agreements concerning deductions for damages caused by the army and for costs related to maintaining military units; exemption from capitations, property taxes, and certain excise duties; and the stability of the level of the grant and other charges. In addition, several “conferences and commissions” dealing with territorial grievances were confirmed in their activity.186 Iwasaki noted that the relations between government and Estates became more harmonious after Charles VI’s accession (1711). We can infer that the prospect of peace, followed by its actual signature at Rastatt in early 1714, did its part in soothing nerves worn thin by the long conflagration. With the exception of the Ottoman war of 1716–18, the monarchy would remain at peace for the next twenty years. Yet the burden of debt and its consequences had narrowed the political options open to the Estates. This circumstance better explains the “tamer” diets of the eighteenth century than a search for “consensus and compromise.”187 The sums required annually continued to increase. Indeed, they were to peak again during the Ottoman war.188 If the Estates were to preserve their creditworthiness and the value of the paper that many of them held personally, then rising grants were inevitable. This was an old lesson.189 At the same time, the Estates were becoming more indispensable to the authorities. The new political dynamic grew out of the changing convergence of interests since the 1680s. The government’s greater recourse to credit not only reduced friction with the Landhaus but also contributed to the success of the three Turkish campaigns that ineffably enhanced the prestige of Habsburg arms. The Estates mediated substantial proxy loans in addition to recruiting—with some reluctance—the same quota of troops per season (2,314 men) as in the Spanish war and providing services to three regiments (“Guido Starhemberg,” “Alt-Daun,” and “Niklas Pálffy”) and a group of staff officers assigned to Lower Austria.190 The 450,000 fl. at 6 percent proffered by the Landhaus in 1716 was the largest one-time loan since the later seventeenth century.191 In 1717 the authorities at first pondered a property tax before discarding the idea as “odious” to the Estates. The abbot of Melk pointed the way forward: the mobilization of the Estates’ good offices. For the Estates, this solution in effect involved a buy-out that did not require free money; the Text of the “recess,” Apr. 12, 1713, NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 64r. Quotation “consensus and compromise” from Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 219. 188 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 218. 189 See Schwennicke, “Ohne Steuer kein Staat”, 70–8. 190 For the recruits: Gatterburg, “Memorabilia Dominorum Statuum Inferioris Austriae,” pp. 201–2. Pruckner, “Der Türkenkrieg,” 107–8, 118–19, 133–4. See also Karl A. Roider, Jr., Austria’s Eastern Question 1700–1790 (Princeton, 1982), 38–57. 191 Aulic decree to Estates, Feb. 28, 1716, NÖLA, LH, 59. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 665. Shuichi Iwasaki, “Konflikt, Annäherung und Kooperation: Herrscher und Stände auf den niederösterreichischen Landtagen 1683 bis 1740,” Frühneuzeit-Info 16 (2005): 20, provides the figure of 500,000 fl., which was the one originally agreed upon until it became clear that the Fourth Estate would not be able to come up with its share (50,000 fl.). 186 187

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government, on its side, would obtain credit on terms hardly possible from a private banker.192 Anxious to avoid months of “unnecessary exchanges,” the Estates offered a total of 1,200,000 fl. (a 900,000 fl. grant plus a loan of 300,000 fl. at 6 percent), a sum almost equal to the one in the proposition. On that basis the diet was closed after only three months.193 Events followed a similar pattern the next year. In the end, the average annual funding provided by the Estates during the conflict topped that of the Spanish succession war. The threat of hostilities in 1719 on the Italian peninsula, which would soon bring the crowns of Naples and Sicily into the Habsburg collection, occasioned an accommodation by the Estates more noteworthy in its way than any made during the Ottoman war. Annually through 1723, they grudgingly agreed to furnish an extra sum of 66,666 fl. as a sinking fund for state borrowing elsewhere. It was a step, they noted, “without example,” given the lack of the usual recess that regulated such deals.194 Here again their good offices underwrote official credit operations. Further heavy borrowing occurred in connection with the growth of the imperial army in the later 1720s, as tensions mounted around Charles VI’s commercial venture at Ostend and Bourbon Spain’s Italian ambitions. In four consecutive years the Estates interposed their credit on the government’s behalf. With 660,000 fl., the archduchy below the Enns was the largest contributor to a “composite loan” in the central lands in 1727.195 That the Lower Austrian Estates were reliable financial partners was also evident in the advances of between 120,000 and 130,000 fl. made in each of the three following years.196 Borrowing from the Estates was now becoming a peacetime affair. The growing incidence and volume of credit activity required continuing adjustments to the financial parameters. Debt-service had become the single largest item in the Estates’ accounts, which had expanded almost continually since the 1680s (see Figure 3.4). In a one-year period after the Peace of Passarowitz (1718), expenditure on liabilities (rollovers, repayments, etc.) approached three million fl.197 In contrast, the cash transferred to the government in these years constituted only a small fraction of what was spent on debt-service, as the receiver general’s accounts show. The recess of 1723 followed immediately on the previous one. Picking up on an innovation at the diets of the 1710s, the new recess provided for the first time for both an ordinary grant and an “extraordinary” one—600,000 fl. and 100,000 fl. respectively.198 The extraordinary grant was earmarked for servicing charges contracted by the Estates on the ruler’s behalf, as were revenues from the second third of the Landsteuer available again following the expiry of the Estates’ 192

43–4.

The proposition pro anno 1717, Nov. 18, 1716, NÖLA, LH, 59. Pruckner, “Der Türkenkrieg,”

193 Declaration of the diet, Dec. 3, 1716, and aulic decree closing the diet, Feb. 12, 1717, NÖLA, LH, 59. Cf. Mensi, Die Finanzen, 665. 194 Declaration of the diet, Feb. 1, 1719, NÖLA, LH, 60. 195 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 666. Bohemia’s portion was 600,000 fl. 196 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 667; Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 345–6. 197 An accounts’ “extract” for the period May 1, 1719–Apr. 30, 1720 in NÖLA, Verordnetenamtsrelationen, 18. 198 The text (May 12, 1723) is preserved in NÖLA, HS 173, i, f. 202r–217v.

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148 6,000,000

5,000,000

4,000,000

3,000,000

2,000,000

1,000,000

0 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1 May 1687 to 1688 to 1697 to 1698 to 1699 to 1704 to 1706 to 1719 to 1721 to 1722 to 1728 to 1735 to 1737 to 1738 to 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 30 Apr. 1688 1689 1698 1699 1700 1705 1707 1720 1722 1723 1729 1736 1738 1739

Income (Empfang) in florins

Expenditure (Außgaab) in florins

Figure 3.4. Income/Expenditure of the Lower Austrian Estates’ receivership general in selected years between 1687 and 1739. Source: NÖLA, Amtsrelationen, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20.

lease of 1701. Additionally, the Aulic Chamber renounced all outstanding claims on the Landhaus through 1721. Unless otherwise specified, the new pact prolonged the provisions of the 1713 recess through 1740. Only seven years later, an extension would be needed again—until 1745—to take into account the enhanced borrowing of the later 1720s and a large advance from the City Bank of Vienna to the Aulic Chamber, which was to be repaid over a fifteen-year period out of the Lower Austrian grant.199 Further modifications would follow in the 1730s. The network of lenders on whom the Estates relied around 1720 encompassed both Lower Austrians and people from further afield.200 The local nobility and officialdom (such as Rappach, Fünfkirchen, Schallenberg, Welz) predominated, together with the clergy (the abbot of Melk, the prior of Gaming, the provost of St. Dorothea, the prioress of Kirchberg, the Trinitarian fathers, and so on). There were the usual aristocrats with Lower Austrian connections including Count Trauttmansdorff, but also more unusual names from neighboring territories (e.g. Martin Papaneck, rector at Güns [Kőszeg] in Hungary), as well as a smattering of imperial officers and military enterprisers such as Feldzeugmeister Scipio Bagno. The name of Leopold of Schleswig-Holstein, who invested 53,000 fl., was not as exotic as it may seem: he was a Catholic convert married to a Liechtenstein and joined the lords in 1720. Of the hundreds of names in all, most had lent up to 5,000 fl., very few less than 1,000 fl. At least two dozen parties advanced sums in excess of 10,000 fl. Despite the variety and uncertainty concerning some names, the Landhaus’s credit operations 199 Mensi, Die Finanzen, 667–8. The text of the recess of July 9, 1730 is in NÖLA, StB, 562, f. 177–95. 200 A list found together with Receiver General Schmidlin’s report for the fiscal year 1719/20 in NÖLA, Amtsrelationen, 18.

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remained strongly territorial in range despite the archduchy’s political and geographical centrality, while the Estates had barely begun to tap into the resources of less privileged social groups. This would change as rising fiscal pressure made compulsory lending to the state (via the Estates) a common practice later in the century. The recess of 1723 formally extended the moratorium on the Estates’ older liabilities which had been standard since the middle of the seventeenth century. Yet only the following year, they would be able to dispense with a long-standing financial crutch known as the “mons pius” that gave priority of payment to charitable foundations and the poor with investments at the Landhaus.201 The Lower Austrian debt had achieved long-term sustainability. Its determined management, clearly apparent in the recurrent recesses since 1689, was at the root of this success. The two parties to the agreements shared an abiding interest in the Estates’ good name. That such management was lacking in the Inner Austrian territories was clear to potential lenders long before it became so to Haugwitz and Maria Theresa. When Field Marshal Guido Starhemberg, a knight of the Teutonic Order, wanted to create a perpetual endowment for his order’s Carniolan clergy, he chose to commit his 15,000 fl. to the Lower Austrian Estates, noting thereby that he knew of “no better, more certain, or more enduring” way of investing the money.202 He notably did not lay the money up with the Estates of Carniola, which were mired in debt and for that very reason would be an early target of the reformers only a few years later. Through the use of patronage and confession, seventeenth-century Habsburg rulers were able to reshape the Estates in the image of the dynastic-Catholicaristocratic synthesis of power. Still, this (incomplete) success would be no guarantee that these same people and their descendants would come together around the new, supra-territorial standing army—but this is in fact what happened in the generations after 1650. The government and Estates learned to negotiate the financial and other burdens in a mutually acceptable way. At least in part, this explains why Habsburg rulers including Charles VI in 1712 agreed year after year to risk their personal prestige by publicly opening the diet. On their side, the Estates had clearly come to identify with the imperial power that had retaken vast areas of central and southeastern Europe from the Ottoman Turks and asserted claims to the Spanish legacy. A new, more expansive form of patriotism that combined broader, pan-monarchical elements with specifically Lower Austrian traditions had transformed perspectives among the Estates in the preceding decades. Dynasty and territory were now clearly joined by the larger Habsburg polity as an essential, positively connoted point of reference. The redecoration of the main hall at the Landhaus, taken in hand toward the end of the succession war by Landmarschall Otto Traun, constituted the most striking artistic manifestation of the change. A magnificent new ceiling fresco by the painter Antonio Beduzzi, as shown on the cover of this book, exalted the House of 201 Pribram, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 614. For the “mons pius,” see the “Codex Provincialis,” ii, 1177–201 (NÖLA). 202 Starhemberg to Lower Austrian Estates, Feb. 20, 1737, NÖLA, StA, A-5, no. 14, carton 3, f. 13–14.

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Austria’s pretensions to universal monarchy. A central figure of “Austria” being invested by Providence with crown and banner is surrounded, along the vaulted rim of the ceiling, by personifications of rivers historically linked to the dynasty, including the Danube, Elbe, Rhine, Sava, Tagus, Po, and Rio de la Plata. The accentuation of the Rhine as the line of defense against France is of particular interest, given the contemporary context. Images of the four continents known (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America) adorn the hall’s upper corners. Symbols of the archduchy and allusions to it, including coats of arms and color schemes, are carefully blended into a playful iconographic program, broadly hinting that the hereditary territories were constituent of Habsburg power. The image of the crown recalled the archducal hat employed at the inauguration that marked, in Lower Austria, the beginning of each reign. In the case of the archduchy, “Austria” was the conveniently interchangeable name of both territory and ruling house. The involvement of the Court historiographer, Giovanni Comazzi, in designing the fresco signified the partnership in a different way.203 The Estates’ patriotism and association with the entire composite monarchy also manifested itself in their enthusiastic reaction to the Pragmatic Sanction (1713), a Habsburg family pact that regulated the dynastic succession in the event of the failure of the male line. Its aim was to preserve the Habsburg realms inseparable. It was laid before the Lower Austrian Estates in 1720. To underscore their commitment to abiding unity, the Estates proposed that the lands themselves enter into perpetual union (Erbverbrüderung), an idea that would not be pursued.204 They clearly understood that their own existence was bound up with the perpetuation of Habsburg rule and the Habsburg union, also through the female line. In material terms, the exigencies of war and international rivalry between the 1670s and the 1720s had given rise to a dynamic, new fiscal-military system in which they were key participants and upon which they depended for their own grandeur and solvency. Its elements included new forms of taxation and buy-outs; a fixed minimum annual grant; the mediation of credit; and financial recesses with the government that were at first sporadic and then effectively lasting. The reform-state of the mid-eighteenth century would build on these elements. But before considering it, let us turn to the problem of administering the new standing army after 1650. In this sphere the Estates would coalesce around the Habsburg dynastic state in a different way.

203 For a fine interpretation of the iconography, see Andreas Kusternig, “ ‘Der Auftrag zur Weltherrschaft’: Das Programm des Freskos im Großen Saal der Stände als politische Propaganda für das ‘Haus Österreich’,” in Anton Eggendorfer et al., eds., Altes Landhaus: Vom Sitz der niederösterreichischen Stände zum Veranstaltungszentrum (Vienna, 2006), 146–55. 204 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 226–8.

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4 A Commissariat for the Standing Army, c.1650–1764 In the late summer of 1672, Landmarschall Sprinzenstein received a delicate request from the central authorities. The Lower Austrian Estates were asked to look after the entourage of General Montecuccoli, the renowned victor of St. Gotthard (1664) and president of the Aulic War Council, as it advanced through the archduchy on the way to Eger in western Bohemia. There the imperial army was gathering in preparation for a march to the Rhine to face the forces of Louis XIV. The Landmarschall passed the message along to the college of Deputies, the Estates’ directorial committee, which set territorial administrative structures in motion. Directives were issued to “commissaries” maintained by the Estates in the quarters north of the Danube. These functionaries in turn orchestrated events on the ground.1 The Montecuccoli party had to be escorted, housed, and fed as it moved from Vienna across the land below the Enns; its horses sheltered and otherwise attended to; and baggage transported. Finally it had to be passed off in an orderly way at the Bohemian border to the neighboring kingdom’s circle officers responsible for the journey from there. The reliance of the monarchy’s leading general on the Estates in this matter might seem incongruous. Unusual about the business, however, was only that the request came to the Deputies through the Landmarschall rather than directly from the Aulic Chancellery or the General Field War Commissariat, and that the Estates agreed to assume the burden at no cost to the travelers. By that time the Estates had for decades routinely undertaken comparable tasks on the army’s behalf. Many of the thousands of military-administrative operations in which they were involved in the century between the Thirty Years War and the Austrian succession conflict far outdid the Montecuccoli operation in terms of size and complexity. The Landhaus oversaw the marches of entire units through Lower Austrian territory; organized foodstuffs and lodgings for officers, men, and beasts; lined up conveyances for military supplies and munitions; otherwise arranged transport in the form of oxen, wagons, and barges; remunerated soldiers and civilian officials associated with the military; and regularly managed enlistment as of the 1680s. Over time, this activity 1 Deputies to senior commissaries in the quarters above and below the Manhartsberg (respectively Counts Hans Georg Kuefstein and Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch), Aug. 5, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286. For the army at Eger and the campaign of late 1672, see Oswald Redlich, Weltmacht des Barock: Österreich in der Zeit Kaiser Leopold I. (4th edn., Vienna, 1961), 112–13.

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tended to become more normalized, as in respect of the provisioning system known as the étapes, recruitment modalities, and the construction of barracks. All of these efforts constituted the flip side of the original commissarial mission: upholding public order by heading off depredations by “friendly” troops. This mission was current for as long as the Estates kept commissaries. What would prove to be a lasting Estates’ organization called a “commissariat” to handle territorial administrative affairs associated with the growing Habsburg military emerged during the Thirty Years War. This process would be of longer duration and, it is worth emphasizing, at the government’s explicit behest. It transformed the Estates from a (potential) military force themselves into an essentially civilian support structure for the new standing army. According to need and circumstance, the commissarial organization they established would change over time, enduring deep into the eighteenth century in recognizable form and almost symbiotic relationship to what had become the permanent army. Although the Lower Austrian archives (and those of other former Habsburg territories) contain vast stores of records left behind by this activity, the assumptions that have conditioned historical thinking about the Habsburg state, society, and military have made them little discernible. To be sure, the battlefield rout of 1620 ended any meaningful direct military role for the Estates; they themselves ceased to field armed forces except under the authorities’ direct supervision, and even then only in highly exceptional, limited cases. But because of their continuing local power, they have been thought rather more hindrance than help to a government preoccupied by the challenge of maintaining a standing army.2 The rollback of the Estates was understood as part of the larger process of state formation in connection with what is known as the “military revolution.”3 With the disappearance of private noble armies and military enterprisers on the scale of Wallenstein, the dynastic state gradually acquired a monopoly on the legitimate force embodied in vastly expanded, permanent armies. It was assumed that these new bodies were provisioned, supplied, and billeted directly by state agents, and 2 As in Hans Sturmberger, Land ob der Enns und Österreich: Aufsätze und Vorträge (Linz, 1979), 290; Herbert Hassinger, “Die Landstände der österreichischen Länder: Zusammensetzung, Organisation und Leistung im 16.–18. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 36 (1964): 1026; Thomas M. Barker, Double Eagle and Crescent: Vienna’s Second Turkish Siege and its Historical Setting (Albany, NY, 1967), 14; Thomas Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht: Länder und Untertanen des Hauses Habsburg im konfessionellen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Vienna, 2003), i, 76, 415; and Michael Hochedlinger, “The Habsburg Monarchy: From ‘Military-Fiscal State’ to ‘Militarization’,” in Christopher Storrs, ed., The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Essays in Honour of P. G. M. Dickson (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2009), 70–1. 3 On the “military revolution,” see Michael Roberts, “The Military Revolution 1560–1660,” in Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London, 1967), 197–225; Geoffrey Parker, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West 1500–1800 (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1996); Brian M. Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change: Origins of Democracy and Autocracy in Early Modern Europe (Princeton, 1992); Clifford J. Rogers, ed., The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transformation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO, 1995); Jeremy Black, A Military Revolution? Military Change and European Society 1550–1800 (London, 1991); David Eltis, The Military Revolution in Sixteenth-Century Europe (London, 1998); Peter H. Wilson, “European Warfare 1450–1815,” in Jeremy Black, ed., War in the Early Modern World 1450–1815 (London, 1999), 177–206.

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therefore that the points of intersection between social entities such as the Estates and the troops declined in that area as well.4 “Conventional wisdom,” as one historian has put it, “has stressed the incompatibility of functioning estates and a ruler with a standing army.”5 For the Estates of the Habsburg lands, the consequences were summed up neatly: “As a result of the build-up of the imperial army, important tasks were removed from the estates.”6 Only in the context of older forms of “territorial defense” (Landesdefension) have the Estates as a military or military-support factor attracted much notice.7 The relative invisibility of the Estates in relation to the standing army has been a function of another factor: that we know comparatively little about Habsburg military economy. Even the main central agency, the General Field War Commissariat, which emerged as an identifiable entity during the later Thirty Years War, is little explored.8 Its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century activities included the coordination of territorial structures such as the Estates’ commissariat that had their origins in the period before 1648 as well. In recent decades the field of military history has placed early modern armies more firmly in the social context. It has shown that they were not isolated from the surrounding communities, indeed that the authorities were not in a position to sustain large forces on their own.9 Early modern warfare itself was a major scourge, bringing disease, damage, and death to those in its path, while army expansion required men, money, animals, payments in kind, and other resources whose extraction impacted the remotest village. Both

4 On this point, see David Parrott, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2012), 197. For the previous assumption, see Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1999), 351–9; Peter Broucek, “The Border Defenses of Lower Austria, Styria, and Moravia against the Turks and Rákóczi’s Insurgents,” in János M. Bak and Béla K. Király, eds., From Hunyadi to Rákóczi: War and Society in Late Medieval and Early Modern Hungary (New York, 1982), 499. 5 Frank Tallett, War and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1495–1715 (London, 1992), 193. 6 Günther R. Burkert, “The Österreichischen Erblande in the Time of the Glorious Revolution,” Parliaments, Estates and Representations 12/1 (1992): 20. 7 Franz Stundner, “Die Verteidigung des Landes Österreich unter der Enns im Dreißigjährigen Krieg (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Maßnahmen der Stände und deren Auswirkung auf die Bevölkerung),” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1949; Anton Eggendorfer, “Der Beitrag der Stände zum Defensionswesen in Niederösterreich im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Bericht über den sechzehnten österreichischen Historikertag in Krems/Donau veranstaltet vom Verband Österreichischer Geschichtsvereine in der Zeit vom 3. bis 7. September 1984 (n.p., 1985), 218–25; Michael Hochedlinger, Oberösterreich im Spanischen Erbfolgekrieg 1702–1706 (Vienna, 1993), passim; Gernot P. Obersteiner, “ ‘Wenn das Panthertier fleugt . . . ’: Militärverwaltung und Kriegsfinanzierung in der Steiermark vom 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Überblick,” in Peter Rauscher, ed., Krieg führung und Staatsfinanzen: Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreißig jährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums 1740 (Münster, 2010), 355–83. 8 On its origins, see the indispensable dissertation on the first General Field War Commissary by Philipp Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun, Generalkriegskommissar, und die Abdankung der kaiserlichen Armee nach dem 30-jährigen Krieg,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1971. 9 Tallett, War and Society; Alan James, “Warfare and the Rise of the State,” in Matthew Hughes and William J. Philpott, eds., Palgrave Advances in Modern Military History (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2006), 23–41; Bernhard R. Kroener, Kriegswesen, Herrschaft und Gesellschaft 1300–1800 (Munich, 2013); Marjolein ’t Hart, The Dutch Wars of Independence: Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands 1570–1680 (London and New York, 2014).

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during and between campaign seasons, the troops had to be lodged on the population in the absence of barracks; conflicts with local people were inevitable. Coping with the civilian consequences of war involved new forms of administrative work not only at the locus of power in Vienna but also at the territorial, quarter, and manorial levels. Here new realms of endeavor for the Estates, poised at the interface of government and society, opened up. Research has also broken down the absolute dichotomy thought to have existed between public weal and private interest. The warfare in which dynastic states were engaged provided new opportunities to those (groups) in a position to exploit them. In non-Habsburg settings, nobles have been recognized as the chief beneficiaries of the growth of the large, ruler-controlled, permanent armies. Military endeavor “remained the principal way in which Europe’s élite served the State during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”10 As Guy Rowlands demonstrated in a magisterial study, the most potent early modern military machine, the army of Louis XIV, drew upon the skillful exploitation (and advancement) of specifically noble interests.11 With respect to corporate bodies in particular, Rafe Blaufarb has shown how fiscal-military needs occasioned their survival along the borders of the French kingdom: “[p]rovincial institutions offered the royal government a level of administrative effectiveness which it would have otherwise been unable to attain.”12 Whether such logistical support constituted the type of “public-private partnership” in military affairs mooted by David Parrott depends upon our definition of the Estates.13 In contemporary corporation theory, they literally “embodied” their territories into the eighteenth century in a way that individual nobles or groups of nobles did not.14 The diets in which the Estates came together were “public” affairs. At the same time, the Estates clearly constituted a small, highly privileged social group. The golden age of the Habsburg army—the age of Prince Eugene—was to coincide almost exactly with the greatest scope and variation of the military commissariat run by the Lower Austrian Estates. From the beginning, the commissariat was part of a constellation of administrative forces that arose in response to the irregularly growing standing army; it is the focus of this chapter, even as we should keep in mind that a strict differentiation between the Estates’ financial and their military-organizational contributions to the Habsburg war effort is scarcely possible. Under the changed power-political circumstances of the mid-seventeenth 10 Hamish M. Scott and Christopher Storrs, “The Consolidation of Noble Power in Europe, c. 1600–1800,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2007), i, 40. 11 Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002). See also Ronald G. Asch, Nobilities in Transition 1550–1700: Courtiers and Rebels in Britain and Europe (London, 2003), 133. 12 Rafe Blaufarb, “The Survival of the Pays d’États: The Example of Provence,” Past & Present 209 (2010): 113. 13 Quotation from Parrott, The Business of War, 102. 14 For the problem of “representation” in “corporation theory,” see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999), 81–103.

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century, the Estates purchased a lease on their privileged existence in part through readiness to assume administrative burdens connected with the army. There was an undeniable element of coercion as the pressure on government itself grew in response to foreign and military imperatives. Still, the advance and intensification of dynastic power also occurred through functional reliance on the Estates. This reliance strengthened both the emperor-archduke by giving him heightened access to the resources and inhabitants of one of his central lands and also elements of the territorial elite by endowing them with influence, prestige, offices, and income. And service invested nobles with the honor requisite to their status. Before turning to the Estates and the upkeep of the new army, let us briefly consider older forms of military activity that survived past 1650. The provision of mounted armor and foot soldiers; the fabrication of munitions, weapons, and other equipment; provisioning and supply; and border security had all fallen within the Estates’ purview. Corporate involvement in local, especially border, protection was indeed as old as the Estates themselves. Famously, the Estates in the Austrian duchies had been intrinsic to the system of “territorial defense” against the Ottoman challenge.15 Until the Turks were driven away in the 1680s, the Lower Austrians remained financially responsible for the Raab border. Throughout our period, direct threats to Lower Austria invariably prompted officially sanctioned efforts at self-defense that were at best flanking measures to the operations of the standing army.16 This was true during the Ottoman foray to the walls of Vienna in 1683, the kuruc incursions of the early eighteenth century, the Franco-Bavarian invasion of 1741, and even the Napoleonic threats of a later date. Whereas Lower Austrian effectiveness in 1683 has long been a subject of dispute among historians, with harsh judgments overweening, the Estates’ determination in 1741 to deny all forms of assistance to the invaders appears to have exacerbated the dilatoriness and indecision of the Bavarian advance.17 In this respect, their long experience in areas of civilian support for the Habsburg army such as transport, billeting, and provisioning came to bear. In comparison, the traditional military capacities of the Estates had declined sharply. Still, it is important to keep their existence in mind,

15 The classic study is Winfried Schulze, Landesdefension und Staatsbildung: Studien zum Kriegswesen des innerösterreichischen Territorialstaates (1564–1619) (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1973). 16 Broucek, “The Border Defenses”; Peter Broucek, “Niederösterreich und die Osmanen,” in Marktgemeinde Perchtoldsdorf, Museum Perchtoldsdorf (Perchtoldsdorf, 1983), 89–116; Gottfried Stangler, “Neue Ergebnisse der niederösterreichischen Ständeforschung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des späten 16. Jahrhunderts,” UH 44 (1973): 175–6; Géza Pálffy, “The Origins and Development of the Border Defence System against the Ottoman Empire in Hungary (up to the Early Eighteenth Century),” in Géza Dávid and Pál Fodor, eds., Ottomans, Hungarians, and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest (Leiden, Boston, and Cologne, 2000), 3–69; Géza Pálffy, “Die Türkenabwehr in Ungarn im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert—ein Forschungsdesiderat,” in Anzeiger der philosophisch-historischen Klasse 137/i (2002): 99–131; Alphons Freiherr von Wrede, Geschichte der K. und K. Wehrmacht: Die Regimenter, Corps, Branchen und Anstalten von 1618 bis Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1898–1905), v, 13–20. 17 J. Schwerdfeger, “Der bairisch-französische Einfall in Ober- und Nieder-Österreich (1741) und die Stände der Erzherzogthümer,” AÖG 87 (1899): 319–446, and 91 (1902): 121–247; here, see part ii, 131.

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both because older and newer forms sometimes intersected and to avoid a retrospective “modernization” of the Estates. THE A DMINISTRATIVE CONTEXT The permanent Habsburg army is traditionally, if somewhat simplistically, dated to the post-Westphalian period when some military units from the war just concluded remained standing. Its origins in fact lay further back and its rise followed a lengthy and complex evolutionary process. As Géza Pálffy has shown, Austrian rulers had kept up an impressive, standing, fortress-based military establishment against the Ottomans much earlier.18 During the Long Turkish War (1593–1606) and the Thirty Years War (1618–48), troops were now and again retained between campaigning seasons, while some regiments served continuously over a number of years instead of being dissolved at the finish of hostilities.19 Following the conflagration that ended in 1648, thousands of soldiers remained under arms, not because the emperor was consciously planning to launch a standing army, but because of fears that the Peace of Westphalia would not hold. The process of disengagement after the long years of war was itself a matter of lengthy and wearying negotiation.20 Renewed belligerence by the Swedes in the 1650s and another Turkish conflict (1663–4) caused troop numbers to peak again. The virtually incessant wars against the French king and the Ottoman sultan between 1673 and 1718 noticeably accelerated the army’s expansion. Though the figures vary from source to source, Austrian military strength may be said to have tripled or even quadrupled from the end of the Thirty Years War to more than 100,000 men early in the War of the Spanish Succession. The peacetime army after 1718 consistently remained above that figure, at least on paper, while the ruinous War of the Polish Succession (1733–5) broke yet another record: the 200,000-man mark, again on paper.21 The rise of a perpetual army that (irregularly) grew in size over time placed Habsburg government and society before daunting organizational and logistical obstacles. Providing shelter, heat, light, food, drink, and pay for hundreds and even thousands of men in a depressed, agrarian economy at a time when infrastructure such as roads and barracks was either primitive or unknown occupied the Pálffy, “The Origins and Development.” Eugen Heischmann, Die Anfänge des stehenden Heeres in Österreich (Vienna, 1925); Jürg Zimmermann, Handbuch der deutschen Militärgeschichte 1648–1939, i/3: Militärverwaltung und Heeresaufbringung in Österreich bis 1806 (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 45–51; Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 416–17. 20 Philipp Hoyos, “Die kaiserliche Armee 1648–1650,” in Der Dreissig jährige Krieg: Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte (Vienna, 1976). 21 Figures from Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 102–4, 237; Peter H. Wilson, “Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789,” in Jeremy Black, ed., European Warfare 1453–1815 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 1999), 80; Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 419–20: and P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 114–15, 343–57. Cf. Peter H. Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years War (London, 2009), 771. 18 19

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authorities at all levels, while the impact on the population who ultimately bore the affliction can hardly be overstated. The presence of allied troops on Austrian territory heightened the burden. Most vividly, the last Ottoman siege of Vienna brought an impressively international host, including the contingent led by the Polish king John Sobieski, into the monarchy’s Lower Austrian heartland. The Estates’ records indicate that “friendly” forces otherwise crisscrossed their territory again and again.22 The corridor between the western Holy Roman Empire and Hungary was especially important, but Lower Austria also offered a passageway for troops over the Semmering pass to Inner Austria, and from there on to the Italian battlefields. The upkeep of soldiers occurred under two general sets of conditions: first, when in their winter quarters, a situation that has received more attention from scholars because of its recurring nature;23 second, during the campaigning season, because of transfers to and from the various fronts (in the Balkans, in the wider Holy Roman Empire, in Italy, and so on). In some instances, the archduchy was itself the battlefield, as in 1683. Marches depended on the fortunes of war and were sometimes achieved at short notice or with none at all. This required an unusual degree of organizational flexibility, and year-round support. The standing army needed a standing administration, one endowed with sufficient local authority to be effective. More than a century ago, Otto Hintze offered a comparative, still illuminating survey of the phenomenon of the “commissary” in early modern Europe.24 Though certain conclusions based on notions of “absolutism” are now dated, his interpretation of the office as a key instrument in the consolidation of state power has lost none of its relevance. Given certain historical considerations and the context of Hintze’s own time, France and Prussia were his focus. The French intendant remains the best-known variant on the commissary, originally understood as an ad hoc functionary with a specific charge. The commission lapsed upon the task’s completion and its holder acquired no lasting claims to office. The intendants sent out by Cardinal Richelieu conformed to this pattern. The position of intendant then vanished for a time, only to reappear on an enduring basis and with an enhanced role under Louis XIV’s famed Controller General Colbert.25 Because the Prussian General War Commissariat curtailed corporate fiscal influence, Hintze saw it as a harbinger of the powerful modern administrative state in central Europe. As in the case of the intendants, newer research shows the story to have been less linear and the old-style authority less weakened than previously thought.26 Yet the 22 For example, household troops (Leibgarde) of the duke of Mantua and cavalry from the Swabian “imperial circle” (Reichskreis), as documented in the aulic decrees of June 11 and 23, 1687 respectively, NÖLA, StB, 539, f. 17v–18r and 39v–40r. The Deputies were directed to arrange for the provisioning of these units. 23 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 131. 24 Otto Hintze, “Der Commissarius und seine Bedeutung in der allgemeinen Verwaltungsgeschichte,” in Otto Hintze, Staat und Verfassung: Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur allgemeinen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Fritz Hartung (Leipzig, 1941), 232–64. 25 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2009), xliv, 63–4, 115. 26 Frank Göse, “Landstände und Militär: Die Haltung der Kur- und Neumärkischen Ständerepräsentanten zum brandenburg-preußischen Militärsystem im ausgehenden 17. und 18.

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commissariat continues to be regarded as an institution that played “a crucial role in toughening the sinews of central authority in the Brandenburg-Prussian state.”27 The evidence points to an increased use of commissioned administrators in the Habsburg context as well. If the experience of the archduchy below the Enns is indicative, the same phase of the Thirty Years War—the 1630s—that saw the initial emergence of intendants in France was a turning point in the rise of commissarial organizations in the Austrian lands. The structures established by the Lower Austrian Estates belonged, by the 1650s, to a larger arrangement of interlocking administrative forces taking recognizable shape alongside the standing army. These included, most importantly, the General Field War Commissariat (later known as the General War Commissariat) with its central and local organizations, but also the commissariats set up by the intermediary powers of other Austrian lands and the royal circle offices in the Bohemian territories.28 Though older local and territorial divisions continued to circumscribe administrative bailiwicks, a trans-territorial purpose—the maintenance of a permanent, centrally controlled army—underlay the agglomeration of forces in a way that had not been the case with Landesdefension. Over time, this represented a qualitative change toward closer coordination of the Habsburg composite monarchy. The General Field War Commissariat grew out of the Thirty Years War partly in response to the proliferation of commissioned administrators over the previous two decades. Individual commissaries had long been handling matters ranging from assembling armies to ordering all manner of troop needs. Dispositions by Wallenstein in the early 1630s increased the use of “general commissaries” endowed with a territorial mandate, as in Bohemia and areas of the wider Holy Roman Empire.29 The aim was to spare the lands concerned from plunder and devastation, while meeting the needs of the army. In retrospect, the advent of Ernst von Traun (1608–68) as General Field War Commissary lent the group of territorial commissaries, administrators attached to individual army units, and functionaries charged with specific tasks, such as providing artillery, a loose, if coherent institutional shape that in time would take on a more lasting character. The war payments’ and supply offices too passed under his control.30 The year of his appointment—1647—is now understood as the foundational date of the War

Jahrhundert,” in Stefan Kroll and Kersten Krüger, eds., Militär und ländliche Gesellschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Hamburg, 2000), 191–222. 27 Christopher Clark, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 (London, 2007), 43–4. Cf. Hans Schmidt, “Staat und Armee im Zeitalter des ‘miles perpetuus’,” in Johannes Kunisch with Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, eds., Staatsverfassung und Heeresverfassung in der europäsischen Geschichte der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin, 1986), 221. 28 For the more rudimentary military administration of the Carniolan Estates, see William D. Godsey, “Österreichische Landschaftsverwaltung und stehendes Heer im Barockzeitalter: Niederösterreich und Krain im Vergleich,” in Rauscher, ed., Krieg führung und Staatsfinanzen, 313–54. For the re-establishment of the Bohemian circle offices in the 1630s, see Christian Ritter d’Elvert, Zur Oesterreichischen Verwaltungs-Geschichte, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die böhmischen Länder (Brünn, 1880), 234–8. 29 Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun,” (second pagination) 4–9, 13–18, 30. 30 Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun,” (second pagination) 21–43.

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Commissariat. Its reach extended unevenly through Habsburg hereditary and imperial lands. In many ways a network of Traun clients, it did not operate according to the rules of a Weberian bureaucracy: its “retainers” also attended to the “private” business of their “high patron.”31 In the personal and informal aspects of his power, Traun’s organization was typical. Charged with “military economy in the broadest sense,” the General Field War Commissariat was the Habsburg government’s logistical mainstay for the standing army.32 It oversaw the movement, quartering, provisioning, supply, and recruitment of troops. Individual “war commissaries” endowed with the requisite power operated in the Habsburg lands, where the Commissariat was unique at that time among central agencies in having its own on-site representatives to coordinate local effort. The aulic chancelleries, the War Council, and the Aulic Chamber all operated through subordinate, though institutionally autonomous, bodies such as provincial governments and chambers. The state of research on the Commissariat’s regional structures is even less satisfactory than on its central apparatus. As its officers worked with, rather than displaced, local authority, as in Brandenburg-Prussia, the records of the Estates shed valuable light on its reach into town and countryside. In Traun’s time, the land below the Enns had alone among the Austrian duchies a military commissary on a par with those stationed in the Bohemian lands.33 In later years the record shows that one official bearing the title “imperial senior war commissary” (kaiserlicher Oberkriegskommissar)—who is to be distinguished from the “senior commissaries” (Oberkommissare) of the Estates—was consistently assigned to Lower Austria. Though commissioned military administrators of varying quality turn up time and again in the Estates’ records, the senior war commissary was by far the most common. Over time, he was the main channel of communication between the General Field War Commissariat and the Estates, in particular their college of Deputies, but also, if less often, their field commissaries. He transmitted directives, requests, and information, and in general exercised a pivotal managerial role that naturally took in the army itself (for example, individual officers and units on Lower Austrian territory needing assistance).34 His activity represented a meaningful and lasting expansion of dynastic state activity at the territorial level. Yet while the incumbents were all either new or non-nobles, it would be misleading to detect in their doings the empowerment of socially upstart “bureaucrats” at the expense of traditional elites (see Table 4.1). Throughout our period, the General Field War Commissaries themselves continued to be drawn from the old nobility—such as 31 Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun,” (second pagination) 42–3. For Weber’s typology of modern bureaucracy, see Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt, 128–30. 32 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 120. Because the War Commissariat lacked tax authority, it has been portrayed as toothless in contrast to its Prussian counterpart. See Schmidt, “Staat und Armee,” 226. 33 Hoyos, “Ernst von Traun,” appendix III (unpaginated). There was one such military commissary covering Inner Austria. 34 For the early modern “coordinating state,” see Karin J. MacHardy, War, Religion, and Court Patronage: The Social and Cultural Dimensions of Political Interaction, 1521–1622 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2003), 22–5.

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The Sinews of Habsburg Power Table 4.1. Imperial senior war commissaries (kaiserliche Oberkriegskommissare) in Lower Austria, 1640s–1740s Martin von Janikho (ennobled 1646) Conrad Wilstock † c.1664 Johann von Dimbruck (Diembruck) (ennobled 1674) Christoph Vorster(s) (ennobled 1690) Matthias Oßwald Anton Pendterriedter von Adelshausen Matthias Bartholomäus Hann von Hannenberg Andreas Georg von Hofmann (ennobled 1728)

1647/51 1656/63 1672/74 1686/89 1698/1704/1713 1716/1722 1733 1744

Breunner, Rabatta, Caraffa, Schlick, and Thürheim—and we can safely assume that they, like their predecessor Traun, disposed of the clientele (also war commissaries) indispensable to the exercise of early modern power. At least two other General Field War Commissaries in the early years apart from Traun—Baron Alexander Schifer († 1661) and Count Ferdinand Hohenfeld (1612–75)—were Lower Austrian lords.35 Hohenfeld signed his letters to the Lower Austrian Deputies as their “most servile vassal” (“dienstschuldigster Knecht”), a flourish evocative of the continuing bonds to those on the Estates’ directorial committee, where he had once served.36 That both Traun and Hohenfeld moved between the Landhaus and War Commissariat, albeit in opposite directions, suggests the comparability of war-induced administrative problems, and the transferability of qualifications and expertise. A generation later, only a few years before becoming Landmarschall himself, another Traun, Otto, was being handled as a candidate for the office of General Field War Commissary.37

TH E ESTATES ’ COMMISSA RIAT: CHANGING STRUCTURES AND PERSONNEL The military-support (“commissarial”) organization operated by the Lower Austrian Estates from the Thirty Years War into the reign of the empress Maria Theresa changed first and foremost in relation to the Habsburg army. The imperatives of dynastic foreign and military affairs rather than the concerns of local elites drove the dynamic, even as those concerns fashioned the forms that the organization took. Its contours remained subject to the ebb and flow of events especially between the 35 Hohenfeld appears to have served provisionally for several years before the appointment was made permanent. Ernst Adalbert Harrach, Diarien und Tagzettel des Kardinals Ernst Adalbert von Harrach (1598–1667), eds. Katrin Keller and Alessandro Catalano with Marion Romberg, 7 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2010), vii, 139 (Nov. 25, 1661), 445 (Jan. 29, 1664). Cf. Franz Karl Wißgrill, Schauplatz des landsässigen Nieder-Oesterreichischen Adels vom Herren- und Ritterstande, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1794–1804), iv, 413. 36 For example Hohenfeld to Deputies, Feb. 28, 1665, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282. The term Knecht has a military flavor. 37 Prince Ferdinand Schwarzenberg, Journal de la cour de Vienne (1686–1688), ed. Jean Bérenger (Paris, 2013), 211 ( Jan. 7, 1688).

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1630s and 1680s, with the number of functionaries tending to rise and fall according to need. The process of change was never linear. In hindsight, we can see that a rudimentary framework assumed lasting character around 1650 with the peacetime standing army. The challenges apparent in the aftermath of the last Ottoman siege of Vienna prompted a shake-up that induced greater institutionalization. But even then, it retained vitality, expanding or differentiating to meet the exigencies of virtually continuous warfare. If the system’s vitality had little in common with later-accepted notions of corporate-territorial inertia, the expansion of authority that it involved does not correspond to modern ideas of bureaucratization. Patronage, kinship, and other informal networks of power determined the cooption of human resources; the boundary between “public” and “private” was fluid. Commissarial officeholders became visibly more highborn over time, a process that paralleled the decline of the lesser nobility and the continuing shift in the balance of forces at the Estates away from the knights toward the lords. Lower Austrian commissaries make an initial appearance in the sources during the Long Turkish War just as portents of a standing army were becoming apparent. Following a massive peasant uprising provoked in part by military rampage and pillage (1596–7), the diet appointed several of its own number to manage Habsburg troops as they passed through the archduchy.38 This involved not just maintaining order, but also ensuring that the men were housed and fed, with the two tasks obviously intrinsically related. The experiment proved so successful that the central authorities asked that it be repeated. In preventing ruler-appointed “doctors [the university-trained] and other alien persons outside the Estates” from performing such activity, the corps not only ensured its own influence but mutatis mutandis heightened the chances of the exercise’s efficacy.39 The maintenance of order among local people was a function of recognized, indigenous authority. This circumstance conditioned the growth of early modern state power: in exchange for assuming burdens of government, monarchs allowed elites to flex or even expand their muscle. No territorial commissaries are on record again before the Thirty Years War, by which time the growing civil disorder prompted somewhat different procedures. In 1618 the authorities simply instructed the Estates’ directorial committee to designate commissaries.40 Two years later, as the internal struggle moved toward a climax, the monarch himself named an incumbent in the quarter above the Vienna Woods. The choice fell not on a “doctor” or an “alien,” but on Baron Hans Joachim Zinzendorf (1570–1626), a Lower Austrian lord of ancient family who was charged with organizing troop lodgings and provisions on behalf of the local commanding general. Revealingly, the “Catholic Estates,” as they were called, did not protest, instead requesting matching assignments for a knight and a prelate to preserve equilibrium among the “three upper Estates.”41 38 “Codex Provincialis,” iii, 1247 (NÖLA). For the uprising, see Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 49. 39 Extract of the minutes of the diet of 1598, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 112–13. 40 Stundner, “Die Verteidigung des Landes,” 209. 41 Extract from the petition of the “Catholic Estates,” June 5, 1620, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 114–15.

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The sweep of Swedish troops across central Europe in the 1630s called comparatively large numbers of commissioned territorial administrators into the field for the first time. In Lower Austria, Ferdinand II left the Estates to name commissaries to cater for the needs of the units he billeted on the archduchy (and by extension to protect local people from military excesses).42 After initially assigning three such to each quarter for a total of twelve, the diet soon reduced the number while providing for less expensive subordinate or “junior commissaries” (Unterkommissare), figures who make their first appearance in the sources at this time.43 Unlike the principal or “senior commissaries,” they did not belong to the Estates. In the later 1630s, as Habsburg fortunes improved, Lower Austria remained mostly free of troops and therefore of commissaries. In the 1640s the structures revived as war spilled over into the hereditary lands with catastrophic results. Both the Swedes and Transylvanians terrorized Lower Austria, while practically the entire Habsburg army fell back at one point into the two quarters below the Danube, where they were reliant on local resources.44 The number of senior commissaries appears to have peaked in the year 1646, with four such stationed in each of the two southern quarters as well as above the Manhartsberg, and three below the Manhartsberg. One of those above the Vienna Woods was the later General Field War Commissary, the still-Protestant Ferdinand Hohenfeld, earning his spurs in territorial service.45 The war ended with eight senior commissaries in office, two in each of the four quarters. The two grades of commissary—“senior” and “junior”—that emerged during the Thirty Years War would remain the main organizational differentiation into the eighteenth century. With the army’s reduction in size after the conflict’s end, the Estates dismissed their senior commissaries, who as nobles and clergy were costly to keep up.46 Into the 1670s, these offices were filled only at times of need, as in the Swedish conflict in the 1650s and the Turkish war of 1663–4. The first half of 1674, just before the struggle with Louis XIV heated up, would be the last point in time without serving senior commissaries.47 But because a standing army had been retained after the Peace of Westphalia, the Estates began keeping junior commissaries on a continual basis. The appointments, unlike those of the leading functionaries, were renewed in 1650. The incumbents were chosen by the Deputies, who, in the absence of senior commissaries, oversaw their work

Stundner, “Die Verteidigung des Landes,” 95–110, 208–13. Patents of the Deputies, May 26 and July 31, 1634, NÖLA, VP, 3. 44 Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 245–8. 45 Lists of the provincial commissaries for the years 1645, 1646, and 1648, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 74v–76r. Wißgrill, Schauplatz, v, 413. 46 Baron Georg Adam Kuefstein (commissary) to “three upper Estates,” Oct. 8, 1650, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 432–33. Other resignations similar to Kuefstein’s are found in this material as well. Also Karl Graf Kuefstein, Studien zur Familiengeschichte in Verbindung mit der Landes- und Kulturgeschichte, iii (Vienna and Leipzig, 1915), 316. 47 Report of the Deputies to the “three upper Estates,” Aug. 30, 1673, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 756–60. “Information über das N.Ö. Quartiers Commissariat” [this is a brief contemporary history of the commissariat, compiled in 1674], NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 770v. 42 43

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from the Landhaus.48 In this way, what would become lasting, if at first elementary, quarter-level administrative structures appeared almost simultaneously with the permanent army in one of the monarchy’s central territories. In subsequent years, appointments of junior and senior commissaries continued to originate in requirements of the moment rather than from a pre-conceived plan. As had earlier been the case, they were usually dispersed unevenly among the quarters, a situation reflective of need. Whereas each area received one senior commissary at the beginning of the Turkish war in 1663, five such officials in all are on record in 1681: two each in the quarters above the Vienna Woods and the Manhartsberg, one below the Manhartsberg, and none below the Vienna Woods. There was pressure to keep costs down, which limited numbers. The scale of pay depended upon the state of war or peace, with the senior commissaries earning between 1,000 and 2,000 florins per annum, handsome sums that were meant to compensate for the dangers and hardships. The clergy and nobility monopolized the post of senior commissary from the beginning. The townsmen qua Estate played no role in the commissariat and had no claims even on the junior jobs. This can be explained not only by their financial and political insignificance: a direct correlation existed between social rank and the ability to enforce authority in a rural and hierarchical society, a circumstance whose importance can hardly be overestimated when order had to be maintained among troops. Assemblies of landed members from each quarter—likely meeting in Vienna during sessions of the diet—chose senior commissaries for their area.49 Decisions were at least rubber-stamped by the “three upper Estates,” in whose name correspondence was conducted and appointments made.50 The weight accorded to the possession of manorial property in the selection process explains the dwindling number of lesser nobles among commissaries after the Thirty Years War. Intermittent pressure by the knights for parity in assignments neither resulted in equal numbers on specific occasions nor reversed the general trend (see Table 4.2). Of the eight commissaries selected in 1660, at least three were knights, while the lords provided no less than four and the prelates only one (one nobleman’s rank is uncertain). When the number was halved in the spring of 1663, all of the knights and Clemens Scheffer († 1693), abbot of Heiligenkreuz, lost their positions, leaving four lords (two counts and two barons) in office.51 By 1681 the drop in the figure

48 “Information über das N.Ö. Quartiers Commissariat,” [1674], NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 766v–767r. Also Deputies to Adam Pittner (junior commissary above the Manhartsberg), Aug. 20, 1660, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 556–57. 49 See William D. Godsey, “Stände, Militärwesen und Staatsbildung in Österreich zwischen Dreißigjährigem Krieg und Maria Theresia,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 248 (fn. 71). 50 “Three upper Estates” to Counts Georg Jacob Herberstein and Ferdinand Zinzendorf, Apr. 2, 1659 and Jan. 5, 1675 respectively, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 546 and 803 (informing them of their election to senior commissary); “three upper Estates” to Baron Heinrich Casimir Ernst Kielmannsegg, Apr. 29, 1681, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 3r. 51 “Codex Provincialis,” iii, 1249–50 (NÖLA).

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Table 4.2. Senior commissaries (Oberkommissare) of the Lower Austrian Estates in selected years, 1640s–1680s Year

quarter above the Vienna Woods

quarter below the Vienna Woods

quarter above the Manhartsberg

quarter below the Manhartsberg

1646

abbot of Lilienfeld (prelate); Baron Oed (lord); Baron Zinzendorf (lord); Ferdinand von Hohenfeld (knight)

Baron Brandis (lord); Jacob Rauch (knight); Baron Wolf Christoph Unverzagt (lord); Baron Hans Sigmund Fünfkirchen (lord)

provost of Pernegg (prelate); provost of Eisgarn (prelate); Johann Caspar von Lindegg (knight); Baron Georg Adam Kuefstein (lord)

Emmerich von Traun (lord); Baron Ferdinand Jacob Welz (lord); David von der Ehr (knight)

Christoph Adam Geyer von Osterberg (knight)

Baron Georg Adam Kuefstein (lord)

Baron Ferdinand Jacob Welz (lord)

1650

1661

Hans Seifried von Lassberg (knight)

abbot of Heiligenkreuz (prelate)

Georg Adam von Mühlwang (knight); Baron Johann Ehrenreich Sonnau (lord)

1663

occupied; holder not known

Baron Ehrenreich Ferdinand Neudegg (lord)

occupied; holder not known

1664

Schotten abbot (prelate); Count Franz Herberstein (lord)

1665

Count Hans Carl Sinzendorff (lord)

1672

Count Hans Carl Sinzendorff (lord)

Count Franz Herberstein (lord)

1680

1681

occupied; holder not known Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch (lord)

Baron Johann Ehrenreich Sonnau (lord) Count Hans Georg Kuefstein (lord)

Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch (lord) Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch (lord)

Count Sigismund Ladislaus Herberstein (lord) Count Ferdinand Zinzendorf (lord); Matthias Adam von Höckenstall (knight)

not occupied

provost of Eisgarn (prelate); Baron Christoph Ferdinand Rappach (lord)

Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch (lord)

for the knights was the most striking difference to two decades earlier: one knight compared to three lords and a prelate. A knight in office had become exceptional. The last such, Matthias Adam von Höckenstall (1673–85), appears to have been the only minor nobleman tapped after the 1660s. But his circumstances signified the social change in the quality of officeholders in their own way. A social climber who

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had himself been admitted to the Estates, the landed Höckenstall had twice married into the titled nobility.52 The fading of the clergy from commissarial service had nothing to do with political or social decline, as with the knights. A bulwark of both the Estates and dynastic rule, the prelates of the great religious houses were among Lower Austria’s leading feudal lords. A combination of circumstances explains why, even so, few of them became commissaries. Testimony by the Schotten abbot, Georg Mörth († 1664), at the time of the Turkish war in the 1660s raised concerns that would have been shared by other clerics. He found the job scarcely compatible with running his own foundation in what he called “these so confused and afflicted times” only a decade and a half after the Thirty Years War.53 His chief interest was in restoring discipline in his monastery.54 The objections he voiced to the “great inconveniences, dangers to life and limb, and odium” associated with commissarial activity reflected prevailing social and cultural influences. Like most Lower Austrian prelates, Mörth did not belong by birth to the traditional noble warrior caste, while the age of mitered clergy leading troops had passed. For patriotic reasons (“love of fatherland”), Mörth reluctantly accepted the Estates’ commission below the Vienna Woods, only to die shortly thereafter. He appears to have been the last prominent prelate to have accepted such authority. Even in the devastating closing phase of the Thirty Years War, the grander abbots—with the exception of the gifted and courageous Cornelius Strauch of Lilienfeld († 1650)—had been conspicuously absent from the field.55 Economic considerations explain the presence of a few heads of lesser or economically weaker houses, such as Säusenstein and Pernegg. They bettered their incomes by serving. The last prelate to become an Estates’ commissary was Ezechiel Vogel († 1699), provost of the small foundation at Eisgarn deep in the forests of the quarter above the Manhartsberg.56 His selection in 1680 was by then as unusual as the knight Höckenstall’s a few years earlier. Vogel’s finances were such that he doubled as a parish priest to make ends meet. Like Höckenstall, Vogel lost his post during the most substantial overhaul of the structures since they had taken shape during the Thirty Years War. In the 1680s the campaigns against the Turks flooded Lower Austria with Habsburg and allied troops, among others, effectively swamping the Estates’ commissarial dispositions to the detriment of the units and local people. Loud complaints of the ensuing “damage” as well as “disorder and insolence” in town and country prompted the 52

Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iv, 348. Mörth to Deputies, Jan. 10, 1664, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 608–10. 54 Sebastian Brunner, ed., Ein Benediktinerbuch: Geschichte und Beschreibung der bestehenden und Anführung der aufgehobenen Benediktinerstifte in Österreich-Ungarn, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Würzburg, 1880), 405. 55 For Strauch, see Sebastian Brunner, ed., Ein Cisterzienserbuch: Geschichte und Beschreibung der bestehenden und Anführung der aufgehobenen Cisterzienserstifte in Österreich-Ungarn, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Würzburg, 1881), 175–8. A list of commissaries in the years 1645, 1646, and 1648 is in NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 74v–76r. 56 “Three upper Estates” to Vogel, May 22, 1680, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 850. Marktgemeinde Eisgarn, Eisgarn: 50 Jahre Markterhebung—650 Jahre Propstei (Eisgarn, 1980), 22–3. 53

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Estates to reform “the entire commissarial arrangement” (“das völlige Commissariat werckh”) in early 1685.57 Several aspects of the change are worthy of note. First, although the failures of individual officeholders repeatedly came in for criticism, a simple replacement of them was not seen as a solution to the problem. Instead, a general reorganization was taken in hand. Second, the language in which the proposed change was couched did not hearken back to an idealized past that should be restored, as early modern rhetoric often did.58 And third, corporate structures continued to be “self-correcting” in response to the challenges posed by dynastic warfare. No known evidence indicates that the authorities attempted to supplant the Estates’ commissariat with other procedures. The provost of Eisgarn’s dismissal even before the reform and the simultaneous confirmation of Baron Christoph Ferdinand Rappach in the quarter above the Manhartsberg, where they had served together as senior commissaries, anticipated the prime innovation in the package of measures adopted by the Estates a year later: “that the senior commissariat in every quarter be administered in the future by one, and not two senior commissaries.”59 The practice in which multiple senior commissaries attended one quarter, while another area had none, ceased. A junior commissary became standard for each quarter. Just as importantly, nominations to the senior positions were restricted to lords who had to live and own seigniorial property in the quarter concerned. They were expected to understand “something of territorial and military affairs.”60 The lords’ monopoly less reflected grasping entitlement than the need of officials with the clout to enforce discipline during troop marches and billeting—awkward affairs at the best of times. The essential prerequisite constituted “natural” authority, which local landed nobles above all were thought to possess. Knights owned ever fewer manors, while the major prelates, whose holdings outshone those of the nobility, had all but withdrawn from commissarial service. Hence the influence of a social group that was already a central prop of Habsburg government—the titled nobility—attained a newly institutionalized and territory-wide form in the commissariat. This body remained in many ways rudimentary and informal, but its contours were to be more fixed and enduring. After 1685 the commissioned nature of appointments was more strictly enforced than in earlier years. There would be no more near-permanent assignments such as that of Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch, who had handled affairs in the quarter below the Manhartsberg for some twenty years beginning in the 1660s.61 The rules of 1685 prescribed that senior commissaries formally resign at the end of every 57 The quotation is taken from the report of the Deputies to the “three upper Estates” dated Sept. 20, 1684. The reform itself was resolved by the Estates on Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 87–90 and 100–106. 58 On this point, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA, 2004), 11. 59 “Three upper Estates” to “extended finance committee,” Feb. 23, 1684, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 59. 60 Resolution of the “three upper Estates,” Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 101v–102r. 61 Kollonitsch to Estates, Jan. 31, 1684, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 51.

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calendar year; this step is on record for all four functionaries as late as 1716.62 In practice, terms of six years came to be the norm. Over time, the commissariat tended to be a launching pad for the cursus honorum in the Estate of lords. Socially, we detect no difference between the commissaries after 1685 (see Table 4.3) and the lords who sat in the college of Deputies. Indeed, many names are identical. Merits acquired in commissarial service moreover substantiated elevations in noble rank, as was demonstrated by Leopold I’s bestowal of the title of count on Johann Baptist Pergen (senior commissary in the quarter below the Vienna Woods Table 4.3. Senior commissaries (Oberkommissare) of the Lower Austrian Estates in selected years between 1685 and 1764 Year

quarter above the Vienna Woods

quarter below the Vienna Woods

quarter above the Manhartsberg

quarter below the Manhartsberg

1685

Count Albrecht Ernst Gurlandt

Baron Hans Carl Fünfkirchen

Baron Christopher Ferdinand Rappach

1694

Baron Johann Gottfried Geymann

Baron Hans Carl Geymann

unknown

Baron Hans Bernhard Fünfkirchen unknown

1706

Count Hans Carl Kuefstein

Baron Ferdinand Ignaz Unverzagt

Count Franz Anton Traun

Count Wenzel Adrian Enkevoirth

1713

Count Hans Carl Kuefstein

Baron Ferdinand Ignaz Unverzagt

Baron Georg Gilleis

Count Otto Ferdinand Felix Hohenfeld

1723

Count Franz Joseph Auersperg

Count Carl Anton Harrach

Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein

Count Johann Anton Ernst Gurlandt

1729

Baron (Count) Carl Ludwig BartolottiPartenfeld

Count Ferdinand Pergen

Count Johann Albert Geyersperg

Count Ernst Breunner

1737

Count Hans Ernst Kuefstein

Count Joseph Leopold Walsegg

Count Ernst August Falkenhayn

Baron Johann Adam Fünfkirchen

1744

Count Wenzel Breunner

Count Carl Heissenstein

Baron Julius Gilleis

Count Johann Adam Traun

1758

Count Leopold Schallenberg

Count Carl Pergen

Count Franz Joseph Lamberg

Count Wenzel Sinzendorff

1764

Count Leopold Schallenberg

Count Franz Heissenstein

Count Johann Leopold Hoyos

Count Johann Anton Hoyos

62 The letters of resignation are preserved in NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73. A request for submission of yearly resignations four years earlier had been meant as a disciplinary measure. Deputies to four senior commissaries, Sept. 17, 1712, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 652.

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in the 1690s). The award suggests how little the central power did perceive the Estates and their officers as inherently antagonistic to it.63 Much later, Pergen’s son and then grandson served as commissaries in the same quarter, where the main family holdings lay. A similar pattern was evident elsewhere, even as no lineage succeeded in dominating the position available in its area. Between the 1690s and 1740s, three generations of the Barons Gilleis held intermittent office from their seat at Kattau between the town of Eggenburg and the Moravian border. Based at the elegant Renaissance chateau of Greillenstein just west of the town of Horn, the Counts Kuefstein were the only other family to appear with the same frequency as the Gilleis in the commissariat of the quarter above the Manhartsberg. After their acquisition of the moated castle of Pottenbrunn northeast of St. Pölten, we also find them in the quarter above the Vienna Woods, which Count Hans Carl Kuefstein (1679–1717), who was its commissary for much of the Spanish succession war, characterized as “[Lower Austria’s] largest and most difficult.”64 An adroit courtier, this grandson of Aulic Chancellor Hocher conveyed imperial condolences to the English queen on the prince consort’s death. To run the commissariat during his absence, Kuefstein recruited another local noble, Count Wolf Ehrenreich Auersperg (1671–1723), a circumstance indicative of the continuing personal and informal nature of commissarial practices.65 The college of Deputies confirmed the choice of Auersperg, which brought an old, previously unrepresented lineage into the service. Situated along the streams and among the Alpine foothills south of the Danube, the Auersperg manors at Peilstein, Purgstall, and other places made the lineage a force in the quarter above the Vienna Woods. Wolf Ehrenreich ultimately succeeded Kuefstein in office and no fewer than three other Auerspergs—Franz Joseph (1682–1749), Ernst Ferdinand (1700–67), and Joseph Volkard (1702–64)—followed over the next thirtyfive years. The cooption of Wolf Ehrenreich shows how preferment at the Estates still hinged on confession. More than a century after access to patronage and office had become a Catholic prerogative, Wolf Ehrenreich’s abandonment of his ancestral Lutheranism opened up the corporate career ladder to him and his relatives.66 But they too did not monopolize the post in question, which was held by the sons of other local families including Bartolotti-Partenfeld (1720s), Kuefstein again (1730s), and Breunner (1740s). Even late in the commissariat’s existence, nobles whose families had until then produced no incumbents secured a foothold: Count 63 William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 155. 64 Kuefstein to Deputies, Jan. 24, 1709, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 541r. For Kuefstein’s commissarial activity, see also Karl Graf Kuefstein, Studien zur Familiengeschichte in Verbindung mit der Landes- und Kulturgeschichte, iv (Vienna and Leipzig, 1928), 150–1. 65 Kuefstein to Deputies, Jan. 31, 1709, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 546. 66 For the conversion of Wolf Ehrenreich’s branch of the family, to which Franz Joseph and Joseph Volkard also belonged, see Miha Preinfalk, Auersperg: Geschichte einer europäischen Familie, ed. Ernst Bruckmüller, trans. Irena Bruckmüller-Vilfan (Graz and Stuttgart, 2006), 356, 402–3. Ernst Ferdinand belonged to a line that had apparently been Catholic longer.

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Ernst August Falkenhayn (1730s, in the quarter above the Manhartsberg), Count Carl Joseph Heissenstein (1740s, in the quarter below the Vienna Woods), and Count Niclas Hamilton (1740s, in the quarter below the Manhartsberg). These men, like their predecessors, were exceptionally well-connected at the Landhaus and beyond. Falkenhayn’s father was a Catholic convert of Silesian origin who had risen to the rank of imperial General Field War Commissary.67 Managing the army on behalf of ruler and archduchy offered material benefits to officeholders in the form of income as well as prestige and influence. From the 1680s, the senior commissaries earned yearly remuneration of 1,200 florins paid by the Estates.68 A lump sum of 3,000 florins paid out at term’s end to cover miscellaneous expenses, which did not have to be accounted for, was another perk.69 The only other administrators who drew regular pay were the junior commissaries, who as of 1685 received 500 florins annually.70 Whereas seigniorial landownership and horizontal ties of friendship and kinship defined the circle of leading functionaries, vertical systems of patronage determined the lesser ones. Here too the formal structures created by the Estates converged (or conflicted) with informal mechanisms of authority.71 With a few, later exceptions, the junior commissaries were not noble; none seems to have belonged to the Estates.72 For lack of sources, most remain shadowy figures, especially before the 1680s. Until then, the right of appointment lay at times with the senior commissaries, at times with the college of Deputies. In the earlier period the Landmarschall had the right of nomination; later his sway was more casual, if no less palpable.73 Before 1685, senior functionaries were on occasion expected to pay their junior counterparts out of their own pockets. Hence we can assume a vertical, dependent relationship between them. The reform aimed to solidify that arrangement by assigning the senior commissaries the initiative in junior appointments. Though 67

Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iii, 12–13. “Codex Provincialis,” iii, 1251–2 (NÖLA). Also “Ständisches Besoldungsbuch,” [c.1716–44], NÖLA, StB, 419, f. 25–26, for the yearly pay of Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein in the quarter above the Manhartsberg. 69 Resolution of the “three upper Estates” (in favor of Baron Ferdinand Ignaz Unverzagt), Oct. 2, 1706, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 497–98. Resolution of the “three upper Estates” (in favor of Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein), Dec. 19, 1727, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 74, f. 129–30. 70 Resolution of the “three upper Estates,” Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 104v. 71 For patronage and power in the early modern Habsburg context, see Mark Hengerer, “Amtsträger als Klienten und Patrone? Anmerkungen zu einem Forschungskonzept,” in Stefan Brakensiek and Heide Wunder, eds., Ergebene Diener ihrer Herren? Herrschaftsvermittlung im alten Europa (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005), 45–78. 72 Long after his death, the descendants of Christoph Ferdinand Hackher claimed that the family had belonged to the Estates since the later Thirty Years War. Documentation relative to the case is found in the minutes of Estate of knights for 1773, NÖLA, RA, HS 15, pp. 305–22. A report was sent to the ruler on this case: Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Mar. 11, 1773, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 111v. Also Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iv, 21–7 (with a possibly embellished genealogy). Junior commissaries were also ennobled for service to ruler and territory. For the case of Joseph Pitterle “von Pittersfeld,” see Karl Friedrich von Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das Deutsche Reich und die Österreichischen Erblande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), iv, 80. 73 For the period before the 1680s, see “Information über das N.Ö. Quartiers Commissariat,” [1674], NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 765r and 767v. 68

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contentious at the Estates, no doubt because of the claims to patronage involved, the enhancement of senior commissarial influence favored clearer lines of authority through the overlap of formal and informal power structures. The senior commissary received the prerogative of proposing three names for the lesser post in his quarter, the formal choice (and the fees involved) being reserved to the college of Deputies.74 As practice would show, the Deputies simply confirmed the candidate placed first on the senior commissary’s list.75 It also happened that only one name was put forward, as when Hans Carl Kuefstein successfully sought to install his secretary, Jacob Weinhart (1677–1754), in the position in the quarter above the Vienna Woods.76 Weinhart epitomized the milieu from which the junior commissaries came: a noble clientele. As retainers of varying quality, the men chosen to be junior commissaries had invariably attended upon great households as bailiffs, stewards, bookkeepers, grooms, and in other capacities. The recruitment of the abbot of Melk’s equerry (Stallmeister), Leopold Hirschl, into commissarial service was more exceptional. Even here noble brokerage was crucial; the senior commissary concerned endorsed Hirschl.77 Brokerage more commonly operated on behalf of noble clients. With the help of the local senior commissary, a former steward of Aulic Chancellor Sinzendorff obtained a post in the quarter below the Manhartsberg.78 The patron here was of course unusually exalted, but the Sinzendorffs were an old, landed family in the area in question. The senior officeholders might oblige the incumbent Landmarschall as well. In 1721 the commissary above the Vienna Woods recommended the usual three names for the junior position. First came Landmarschall Harrach’s groom, second an administrator in the employ of another grandee, and, only third, the commissary’s own bookkeeper. As was customary, the first-named received the nod.79 As the Harrach grip on the Landhaus tightened, established practices were sometimes ignored through direct applications to the Estates by the Landmarschall’s dependants. On one occasion, an appointment appears to have been made without consultation of the senior commissary.80 On Resolution of the “three upper Estates,” Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 105v. For example: resolutions of the Deputies, Apr. 2, 1685 (appointing Christoph Ferdinand Hackher as recommended by Count Albrecht Ernst Gurlandt) and July 9, 1703 (appointing Johann Joseph Rötzer as recommended by Count Wenzel Adrian Enkevoirth), NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 145 and 464–65. Also Deputies’ resolution, Mar. 21, 1720 (appointing Johann Ferdinand von Gastheimb as recommended by Count Franz Jacob Brandis), NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 297–300. 76 Resolution of the Deputies, Apr. 4, 1710, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 591v. Other such cases: Count Ernst Joseph Breunner (senior commissary below the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Feb. 19, 1731, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 74, f. 333–34; Baron Julius Gilleis (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Kattau, Feb. 9, 1742, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 222. 77 Count Franz Joseph Auersperg (senior commissary above the Vienna Woods) to the Estates, Apr. 6, 1729, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 74, f. 210–11. The head of Austria’s leading monastery was the only clergyman whose influence in such appointments has come to light. Another case is documented in the letter of Abbot Adrian Plieml of Melk to Landmarschall Harrach, Loosdorf, June 7, 1742, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 88, f. 4r. 78 Correspondence relative to this case in NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 155–56. 79 Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Jan. 18, 1721, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 341–42. 80 Resolution of the “three upper Estates,” Feb. 18, 1737, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 67v. 74 75

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another, the senior commissary notably declined to accept either of two aspirants— one a Harrach client—because he was not acquainted with them.81 As the imperial army grew so too did the Estates’ commissarial structures. Until around 1700 there is little evidence that officeholders beyond those regularized in 1685 were remunerated out of the Landhaus’s treasury. During the Ottoman campaigns of the 1710s, new agents begin to appear in the form of ad hoc functionaries paid to “escort” or “steer” troops (Begleit- und Führungs Commissarien).82 Their services were costly. Given the high numbers of men who stayed with the colors, pressure for expansion and differentiation remained after the return of peace. By the early 1720s, near the height of Charles VI’s international prestige, the senior commissary above the Manhartsberg found the standardized organization of senior and junior commissaries insufficient.83 Problems had indeed been evident during the Turkish war.84 But no rationalization occurred as in 1685, with the system continuing to mutate (or not) according to momentary need. The Estates increasingly bestowed expectancies to both leading and lesser commissarial positions. Those so awarded—often called “substitutes” or “supernumeraries”— received no regular pay, but were expected to serve if needed. At the time of the army’s greatest expansion under Charles VI, the college of Deputies improvised by naming two senior “substitutes” to assist the officeholder in the quarter above the Vienna Woods.85 Three senior commissaries on duty in an area recalled seventeenth-century practice. During the War of the Austrian Succession, “escort” and “steering” commissaries also became commonplace.86 By the 1740s the skeleton of the Estates’ military-support apparatus of 1685 was barely visible beneath the flesh of the intervening decades. In the same period of time the standing army had roughly quadrupled in size. The commissarial organization had never been limited to the posts that the Estates actually created and paid for. The senior officeholders were expected to use their own retinues in fulfillment of their duties. This was in part a question of cost saving in a poor society. Here again, informal aspects of early modern authority supplemented rudimentary official structures, facilitating the assertion of dynastic power beyond what would otherwise have been possible. Managing troop movements as well as arranging food and shelter for military personnel, horses, and draft 81 Report by the Deputies to “three upper Estates,” June 25, 1742, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 243–44. 82 Early references are found in Deputies to four senior commissaries, Jan. 22, 1718; also the Deputies’ report to “three upper Estates,” Mar. 22, 1719, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 205 and 277–79. 83 Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein to Deputies, Jan. 18, 1721, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 341v. 84 The disorganization is apparent, for example, in the communication of Baron Georg Gilleis (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Kattau, July 3, 1716, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 38. 85 Deputies to “substitute” senior commissaries above the Vienna Woods (Counts Auersperg and Breunner), June 12, 1736, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 43–44. 86 Evidence for the use of “escort” and “steering” commissaries is found in the communications of Deputies to senior commissaries, Mar. 13, 1739, Apr. 3, 1743, and May 9, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 116–17, 362–63, and 538–39. The communication of May 9, 1744 unusually contains the names of four such “steering commissaries.” Another list of names is found in “Protocols Extract deren Führungs Commissarien Lifer Gelder pro 1743 et 1744 betr.,” NÖLA, StA, A-3, 76, f. 274–76. Also register of Deputies’ business, 1744, NÖLA, StB, 230a, f. 96–297, passim.

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animals—all of which involved paperwork—required couriers, copyists, clerks, paymasters, and other assistants. These “attendants” rarely turn up by name in the records.87 In 1685 the Estates reiterated the rule that senior commissaries provide and pay for their own auxiliary staff.88 In one case, those mobilized included the servants of the officeholder’s castle at Ebenfurth, which served for a time as the headquarters of army units transferred across the river Leitha from nearby Hungary.89 Had Jacob Weinhart not become junior commissary above the Vienna Woods, his earlier military-administrative experience might have left no trace in the public archives. As Count Kuefstein’s private secretary, he had been involved in “all commissarial affairs,” a fact that came to official notice when Kuefstein recommended Weinhart for junior service.90 Between the 1630s and 1750s, perhaps no more than 150 persons held junior and senior appointments; but the total number of people sporadically and “unofficially” occupied in commissarial work must have been several hundred or more. Most will have been the retainers of great nobles. While the Estates sought to tap into the prestige and clout of local nobles, they also valued personal qualifications beyond those attached to status, such as individual aptitudes and attainments. Above all, senior commissaries were expected to exhibit familiarity with the land and the military, the flip sides of commissarial business. In choosing Count Georg Jacob Herberstein to serve in the quarter below the Manhartsberg, the Estates praised his “known dexterity” and “great experience in territorial affairs.”91 More than twenty years later, they extolled another nominee’s skill in “military as well as territorial affairs.”92 The reorganization of 1685 formalized a similar combination of prerequisites concerning “deß Landt und Soldaten weesen.”93 Official language describing the abilities of appointees never became entirely formulaic. The expertise attributed to Carl Anton Harrach in “war” and “territorial” matters contrasted with Johann Anton Ernst Gurlandt’s practical knowledge of “city and country.”94 Both men had been councilors in the provincial government. Because of their social standing, junior commissaries were believed to be wanting in the authority ultimately needed for guiding and managing troops.95 But, like 87 Quotation from the letter of Count Heinrich Carl Kollonitsch (senior commissary below the Manhartsberg) to Estates, Jan. 31, 1684, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 51. 88 Resolution of the “three upper Estates,” Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 105r. 89 Deputies’ report to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 30, 1706, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 497. 90 Quotations from letter by Kuefstein to Deputies, Jan. 24, 1709, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 542v–543r. 91 “Three upper Estates” to Herberstein, Apr. 2, 1659, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 546. 92 “Three upper Estates” to Baron Heinrich Casimir Ernst Kielmannsegg, Apr. 29, 1681, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 3r. 93 Resolution of “three upper Estates,” Feb. 26, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 101v–102r. 94 Quotations from Deputies to Harrach, Mar. 18, 1722, and Deputies to Gurlandt, Feb. 3, 1723, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 402–03. 95 “Puncta so die Herren Verordneten und Ausschüße mit Herrn Landmarschall zu conferieren, die H. Quartier Commissarien betr.,” [n.d.], and Report by the Deputies and executive committee to “three upper Estates,” Aug. 19, 1665; both in NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, 45–6, 669–70, and 684–5. Also aulic patent, Mar. 24, 1685, NÖLA, KP, 17.

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senior commissaries, they were expected to be familiar with local conditions in a way virtually impossible for an outsider. This made them effectively indispensable. In an age that lacked precise atlases and other topographical guides, a thorough acquaintance with their areas of responsibility remained imperative. One senior commissary bluntly summed up what was at stake: “if, then, having only consulted a map, a junior commissary billets troops on a place, and has no [first-hand] knowledge of its strength and capacity, then such a small village can at one blow be ruined.”96 The consequences of soldiers lacking shelter and food could be as pernicious for the army as for local people. Prior to his appointment, Christoph Ferdinand Hackher (1647–1712) already possessed familiarity with “all byways and crossings” in the quarter above the Vienna Woods.97 Subsequently, he was the junior officeholder there for more than a quarter-century and was succeeded by his son-in-law, Jacob Weinhart, the Kuefstein secretary already mentioned, himself an experienced administrator. The need for skills best attained through long practice not only meant that the originally temporary character of the junior posts wore away but it also encouraged dynasty-building among junior commissarial families. Between them, Hackher and Weinhart held the post above the Vienna Woods from 1685 to 1747. In the quarter below the Manhartsberg, the family Rezer (Retzer/Rötzer) appears to have been similarly long-serving. It was ennobled for its trouble by Charles VI.98

THE COM MISSARIAT IN ACTION The historian Otto Hintze claimed that commissaries such as those retained by the Lower Austrian Estates were responsible solely for safeguarding “the interests of a district . . . during marches of troops, billeting, transport, [and] storage.”99 This aspect corresponded only partly to reality. Throughout their history, the Estates’ commissaries performed a function whose two sides were inherently in tension to one another. On the one hand, they were supposed to protect local people from looting and pillage by Habsburg troops. Successive rulers charged them with this basic mission. The language of a patent issued by Ferdinand III (r. 1637–57) authorizing their work made this explicit: “the conservation of the Land.”100 Meeting this expectation required, on the other hand, the logistical support of the military. As the armed forces grew, so too did the scale of the support necessary. Most fundamentally, troops wanted guiding, feeding, and housing. Hence military 96 Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Nov. 23, 1722, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 454v–455v. 97 Quotation from the letter by Count Albrecht Ernst Gurlandt (senior commissary above the Vienna Woods) to Deputies, Apr. 2, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 145. Also Wißgrill, Schauplatz, iv, 23. 98 Frank, Standeserhebungen, iv, 167. 99 Hintze, “Der Commissarius,” 233. 100 Quotation from an aulic patent of 1645 [otherwise undated], NÖLA, KP, 11. Similar patents from May 26, 1657 and Mar. 24, 1685 found in NÖLA, KP, 14 and 17 respectively.

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personnel were instructed “to follow the march-route and take up the quarters assigned to them by the district commissaries of the Land.”101 Officers and men came under passing direction of the Estates at the government’s express bidding, a circumstance crucial to commissarial authority.102 Neither the emperor nor local landlords had an interest in seeing their subjects—at least the Catholic ones— ruined by supposedly friendly soldiers. Ideally, the Estates or their Deputies received timely notification of the expected arrival of military units at the Lower Austrian borders. The relevant directives came most often from the Austrian Aulic Chancellery and the General Field War Commissariat. The imperial senior war commissary as the War Commissariat’s main representative in Lower Austria was a particularly important conduit. Yet the Aulic Chancellery retained formal primacy given its responsibility for the ruler’s relations with the Estates. Other agencies including the War Council and to a lesser extent the Aulic Chamber also dealt with the Estates in this regard. By contrast, the provincial government played little appreciable role. The problem of military administration underscored the fact that the regime was hardly monolithic. Typically for the early modern world, clearly observed lines of competence were rare. The Lower Austrian Estates sometimes (but not always) received directives on the same matters from different entities.103 Institutional rivalry, particularly between the War Council and War Commissariat, exacerbated the complications.104 The functioning of military-support structures depended in the first instance on communication, negotiation, and cooperation between government and Landhaus. Commands in the form of princely decrees were considerably less common than simple requests (either written or oral). This was especially true of the ever brisker contact between the Estates and the War Commissariat; together they bore the logistical brunt of the army when it was on the archduchy’s territory. The imperial war commissaries in Lower Austria couched their written directives to the college of Deputies in generally deferential language. Christoph Vorsters tended to flowery and ingratiating rhetoric, where his successor, Matthias Oßwald, chose fewer, crisper words.105 Tension and disagreement demonstrably characterized the upkeep of a standing army in a relatively poor society, quite apart from the fact that the Estates were prepared to challenge requests that in their view violated established law or custom. But the record for the century after 1650 evidences neither habitual resistance to the demands made upon them nor routine paralysis of 101

Quotation from the aulic patent, Mar. 24, 1685, NÖLA, KP, 17. The importance of monarchical “patents of authorization” for commissarial influence among the soldiery is clear from the remarks of the senior commissary Count Hans Carl Kuefstein to Deputies, Pottenbrunn, July 2, 1704, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 298. In a petition dated Dec. 5, 1716 to Charles VI, the Deputies requested the re-publication of the “patent of authorization” of Mar. 24, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 47. 103 For example: aulic decree (information passed from War Council via Aulic Chancellery) to Deputies, Apr. 17, 1713, and Senior War Commissary Matthias Oßwald to Deputies, Apr. 28, 1713, both communications regarding the march-route for troops moving from Hungary to Neuhaus (Jindřichův Hradec) in southern Bohemia. NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305. 104 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 120–1. 105 Christoph Vorsters to Deputies, May 31, 1686, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 292. 102

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operations. The fact that for generations the government continued to request assistance from the Estates in the area of military economy is proof enough that deadlock was the exception rather than the rule. The central authorities typically addressed militarily relevant directives to the Estates or the Deputies. Over time, as armed conflict became almost unremitting and the pressure of circumstances grew, the influence of the college of Deputies tended to increase at the expense of assemblies that met less frequently, a pattern that repeated itself with variations elsewhere in central Europe. In Bavaria the Estates’ executive council effectively superseded the diet, which did not meet after 1669.106 But the diet in the land below the Enns did not wither away, as we have seen. That body and the “three upper Estates” most frequently brought influence to bear in predictably recurring affairs, such as winter quarters. Objection to measures already implemented by the college of Deputies also occurred. The Estates expressed displeasure, for instance, about the distribution of five companies of troops around the Wachau valley, the town of Zwettl, and elsewhere by the local senior commissary, who was operating under the Deputies’ oversight.107 On another occasion, presumably as a control measure, the diet directed that the Deputies draw up the repartition of billets in consultation with the executive committee.108 In a pinch, the college was prepared to ignore the larger assembly’s resolutions, as when in the run-up to the War of the Polish Succession an army unit received more sustenance than planned. The Deputies justified themselves on the basis of military exigency as made known by the authorities.109 Yet bypassing the Estates never became the rule. As the Estates’ directorial committee, the college of Deputies was the provincial authority accountable on a daily basis for seeing that Lower Austria was not visited by troop depredation. By extension, they managed the logistics needed to prevent it. Generally speaking, the Deputies supervised all aspects of march-routes, housing, supplies, transport, and recruits. This involved consultations with the senior commissaries as those officials best acquainted with local conditions. Now and again, the commissaries came to Vienna to confabulate with the Deputies.110 The commissaries and Deputies also met with the imperial senior war commissary at the Landhaus.111 Given that the commissaries controlled affairs on the Estates’ behalf on the ground, they were also a link between imperial war commissaries attached to military units on the move and local magistrates and manorial officials. These worthies in turn had the task of assigning lodgings in the settlements chosen by the 106 Thomas Paringer, “Die bayerische Landschaft als unabhängige Finanzbehörde 1669–1807,” in Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten, 311–17. 107 Estates to Deputies, Apr. 29, 1665, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282. 108 Resolution of the Estates, May 20, 1669, NÖLA, StB, 531, f. 302v–304r. 109 Deputies’ report to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 6, 1733, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 318. 110 Evidence of such summonses: Deputies to all senior commissaries (in regard to provisions for two cavalry regiments billeted on the archduchy), Mar. 9, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286; Resolution of the college of Deputies (in response to the aulic decree of Aug. 25, 1674), Aug. 30, 1674, NÖLA, StB, 534, f. 39v–40v; and Deputies to senior commissaries above the Vienna Woods and the Manhartsberg, July 13, 1716, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 33. 111 As on Feb. 8, 1700 in respect of provisioning. Informal minutes kept by the Deputy Maximilian Herb, provost of Herzogenburg. Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.2.

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Estates to host troops.112 Issued by the provincial commissaries, documents called “ordinances” (Ordonanzen) apprised landowners and their agents of their exact obligations to soldiers in their midst.113 If the commissary failed to exact obedience, he could appeal for support to the Landhaus. An official on the manor of Gföhl near the valley of the Krems was twice called to account for recalcitrance. After the second incident, which involved a failure to provide oxen for a military conveyance, he received a summons to answer personally in Vienna before the college of Deputies.114 On another occasion, the Deputies issued a general public warning that “all Estates and subjects” in the quarter above the Manhartsberg who did not “strictly” obey “commissarial ordinances and impositions” would be reported to the ruler herself.115 Such evidence contradicts the widely prevalent view that the Habsburgs had no organized access to the population and its resources before the introduction of the celebrated circle offices in the 1750s. An administrative diagram that neatly connects soldiers to lodgings via seigniorial officials, the Estates’ commissaries, the Deputies, and imperial war commissaries would drastically simplify early modern reality. The overview offered here is not meant to impose a retrospective “pattern” or “principles” on what was quite often improvisation. Given slow communications, poor and often impassable roads, and the unpredictability of armed conflict, administrative activity lacked the regular quality associated with modern bureaucracy and demanded a high degree of flexibility. Though the army had undergone an étatisation, notification of troop movements did not always come from above. Corporate dignitaries learned of the (imminent) arrival of soldiers in Lower Austria from army officers and neighboring provincial authorities. Direct contact between the military and Deputies in logistical matters also obtained, though it may have been more common in the earlier years on account of the War Commissariat’s rudimentary development. In the late winter of 1665, an officer whose unit had been ordered to Styria appeared personally before the college of Deputies asking for instructions, his directive from the War Council not having specified whether Upper or Lower Styria was the goal. The Deputies prescribed the march-route.116 In the winter of 1700 the quartermaster of one regiment billeted on Lower Austria approached the Deputies about monthly pay for his men.117 112 Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998), 71–2, 218. 113 References to such “ordinances” are found in the communication from the imperial senior war commissary Christoph Vorsters to Deputies, Nov. 29, 1686, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 292, as well as the senior commissary Baron Georg Gilleis to Deputies, Kattau, Sept. 28, 1713, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305. Such documents had been in use by the commissaries since at least the Thirty Years War. Stundner, “Die Verteidigung des Landes,” 135–41. 114 Senior Commissary Baron Georg Gilleis to Deputies, Kattau, June 15, 1713 (together with resolution by the Deputies summoning the Gföhl official to Vienna), NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305. 115 Deputies’ circular, Aug. 29, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 613–14. 116 Deputies to Aulic War Council, Mar. 13, 1665 and Aulic War Council to Deputies, Mar. 14, 1664, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282. A similar example from a later date is the letter of the comte de Mercy (lieutenantcolonel of the Lorraine cuirassiers) to Deputies, May 17, 1701, NÖLA, StA, B7, no. 39, f. 150–51. 117 Informal minutes of the college of Deputies kept by Maximilian Herb, provost of Herzogenburg, Jan. 21, 1700, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.2, f. 13r.

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It also happened that no adequate warning of transfers occurred. Having heard nothing from either the Deputies in Vienna or the circle captains north of the border, Oberkommissar Kuefstein himself took the initiative when soldiers crossed into his bailiwick from Bohemia on their way to Hungary. Fearing chaos if they were left to themselves, he provided housing for three nights and handed them off in an orderly way to his counterpart in the quarter below the Manhartsberg.118 Later the same year, notification from the General Field War Commissariat of the transfer of an artillery unit reached Kuefstein only after its planned arrival date. Adequate forewarning had come instead from the unit’s colonel, who had written from Neuhaus in southern Bohemia to Kuefstein’s paymaster. On this occasion too Kuefstein made arrangements without waiting for a nod from Vienna. In staving off “damaging inconveniences and embarrassments” caused by marauding soldiers, Kuefstein served the interests of both Lower Austria and the Habsburg army.119 The procedures, obviously clumsier than those of the “modern” state, worked here as intended. The trans-territorial nature of corporate military support manifested itself in cross-border cooperation. By the second half of the seventeenth century, commissarial instructions issued by the Estates invariably required that the relevant officeholders remain in contact not only with their colleagues in other districts but also with their counterparts in neighboring lands. “Correspond” and “correspondence” were the terms most consistently applied in this context.120 This precaution reflected an awareness of infrastructural inadequacy and the uncertainties of war, with functionaries expected to swing into action also in the absence of a directive from above. The three core groups of Habsburg territories (Austrian, Bohemian, and Hungarian) came together geographically around Lower Austria, whose capital was the dynastic nerve center. In consequence, we find Lower Austrian commissaries interacting with their Upper Austrian and Styrian opposite numbers, as well as with Bohemian and Moravian circle officers. Handing off or taking on Habsburg troops was the main object of business. Hungarian contacts are less evident in the sources, despite the fact that the archduchy adjoined four of the kingdom’s counties (Preßburg [Pozsony], Wieselburg [Moson], Ödenburg [Sopron], and Eisenburg [Vás]) and the Estates frequently processed units heading east against the Turks and insurgents. During the “absolutist” phase of Leopold I’s rule in the kingdom of St. Stephen, the Lower Austrians helped move troops deep into Hungarian territory, where they were responsible for a stretch of the military border around the fortress of Raab (Győr).121 Even following the relative normalization of the domestic situation after the Peace of Szatmár (1711), evidence of cross-border contacts in military-administrative affairs is sparse.122 Yet the modus operandi in the Bohemian-Austrian lands does point to 118

Count Hans Georg Kuefstein to Deputies, June 2, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286. Kuefstein to Deputies, Dec. 12, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286. 120 §9 of the “Instruction für die gesambten Herr[e]n Ober Commissarien aller Vier Viertlen,” Mar. 31, 1685, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 137v. 121 Aulic decree to Deputies, Oct. 4, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286. 122 One possible transfer of troops across the border by Preßburg county is alluded to in the aulic decree to Deputies, Laxenburg, May 14, 1713, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305. 119

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previously little-explored processes of lateral Habsburg state formation through the loose mesh of quarter- and district-level authority responsible for the standing army. The assignment of billets and itineraries for military units in Lower Austria hinged more on communication at the local and provincial levels than centralized routine. In consequence, the Vienna-based agencies—including the college of Deputies—couched directives on such matters in general terms. On one occasion, the Aulic Chancellery ordered that several companies be lodged in such a way that they were within a day’s march of each other; on another, a relocation of soldiers from Upper Austria to Hungary was to take place “as far as possible on the Danube.”123 The Deputies used similar language in directing the senior commissary above the Vienna Woods to lodge the men of the Schlick regiment “as closely together as possible” near the settlement of St. Valentin.124 This required close collaboration between the Estates’ officers and imperial war commissaries on location. The importance of such collaboration found recurrent normative and practical expression.125 Imperial war commissaries accessed (in theory) the information—numbers of men and beasts to be accommodated— needed for determining which places were appropriate as housing. The resultant finding in turn influenced the route chosen by the Estates’ commissary. The system purposely left decision-makers on the spot with substantial freedom of maneuver. As the army grew in size and military conflict became nearly incessant, the drawbacks of handling troop displacements through time-consuming discussions and paperwork multiplied. Accordingly, the General Field War Commissariat mooted an idea to standardize procedures during the War of the Spanish Succession: permanent march-routes in the central lands. This innovation promised to reduce the uncertainties of military movements both for the army and local people. The history of this endeavor is paradigmatic for the limits to change that were imposed by the sheer scale of requirements compounded by wartime. It also vitiates persistent assumptions about provincial power and the Habsburg state. The government was not planning to create march-routes either in opposition to the Estates or by ignoring them. To the contrary, their support was solicited, their representatives being invited early in the process to deliberations with the War Council and War Commissariat.126 The Landhaus delegated the ranking Deputies and four senior commissaries to this purpose.127 In this way, the authorities accessed the best information available on territorial conditions. The Estates’ own records reveal neither reflexive nor fundamental opposition to the idea. Indeed, the spontaneous reaction of the senior commissary in the quarter

123 Aulic decree to Estates, June 30, 1665, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282; and aulic decree to Estates, Jan. 23, 1674, NÖLA, StB, 533, f. 302. 124 Deputies’ resolution, Jan. 20, 1703, NÖLA, StB, 544, f. 60r–61r. 125 Aulic decree to Estates, June 30, 1665, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282; General Field War Commissary Hohenfeld to Deputies, June 17, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286; Deputies to Senior Commissary Count Sigmund Ladislaus Herberstein, July 1, 1680, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 288. 126 Aulic decree, June 9, 1704, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 298. The decree refers generally to the hereditary lands. 127 Deputies’ resolution, June 10, 1704, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 298.

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above the Vienna Woods was more than guardedly positive: “No greater benefit could accrue to the Land than the institution of a permanent march-route,” which by concentrating soldiers in smaller areas would help avert “the extortion of money and other excesses that have become so common.”128 The principle obstacle he saw to the project’s realization, the construction of fixed magazines for provisions with costly personnel to run them, anticipated the ensuing discussion. In a report filed after an exchange of views with the imperial senior war commissary in Lower Austria, Matthias Oßwald, the Estates’ four commissaries jointly welcomed the proposal as a way to help the rural man, whom the army, they claimed, had “ruined and harried.”129 But the discussions also made clear that an enduring solution required clarification of related problems. Stable march-routes necessitated not only magazines but also barracks. The question of adequate supplies of victuals and draft animals also presented itself if settlements along the itineraries chosen were not to be unduly burdened. In effect, the seemingly straightforward effectuation of marchroutes presupposed a large-scale and long-term commitment of resources impracticable at a time when the imperial armada was facing the French and Bavarians in southern Germany. The battle of Blenheim, one of the hardest-fought of the Spanish succession conflict, was only weeks away (August 1704). Far-reaching change in troop movements and billets was put on hold, also given the Estates’ misgivings about a solution that created new problems. Their mandate—the “conservation of the Land”—precluded replacing an imperfect modus, which at least spread the burden around, with one that shifted it wholly onto people living along the main roads. After the restoration of peace, the next attempt accordingly proved more successful. The building of barracks and roads came first, the Landhaus providing financial and organizational backing.130 Here too dynastic military imperatives induced the growth of corporate structures.131 Work proceeded for approximately a decade in the 1720s and 1730s. That the Estates’ commissaries participated in both projects in a supervisory capacity highlighted the military rationale behind roads’ improvement, which has been seen as largely mercantilist in inspiration.132 The laying of the cornerstone for a barracks in the town of Krems occasioned a three-day fête thrown for army officers and local dignitaries by the senior commissary in charge, Count Kuefstein, who brought

128

Count Hans Carl Kuefstein to Deputies, Pottenbrunn, July 2, 1704, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 298. Senior commissaries (Count Franz Anton Traun, Count Wenzel Anton Enkevoirth, Count Hans Carl Kuefstein, and Baron Ferdinand Ignaz Unverzagt) to Deputies, [1704], NÖLA, StA, A-3, 71, f. 29–31. 130 Felix Czeike, “Die Wiener Kasernen seit dem 18. Jahrhundert,” Wiener Geschichtsblätter 35 (1980): 164; Robert Rill, “Der Festungs- und Kasernenbau in der Habsburgermonarchie,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und Österreich 11 (1996): 63; Heinrich Güttenberger, “Die Begründung des niederösterreichischen Straßenwesens unter Karl VI.,” JbLkN, new series, 21 (1928): 238–9; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 280–1. 131 Count Hans Leopold Kuefstein to Deputies, Nov. 23, 1722, mentions four “barracks administrators” (Kasernenverwalter) under his own authority. NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 454–57. 132 Güttenberger, “Die Begründung,” 245, on individual senior commissaries involved in roads’ improvement. Both Güttenberger and Gutkas, Geschichte, 299–300, refer to the mercantilist aspect. 129

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the edifice to completion.133 With the return of war in the 1730s, work ceased for some fifteen years and the territory below the Enns entered the crisis of the Austrian succession with still too few barracks and improvised march-routes. In the interests of deterring plunder and extortion, the Estates were also expected to feed men and beasts as they passed through Lower Austria. Throughout our period, patents published by the government time and again prescribed, with predictably mixed results, the “portions” of food and drink to which a soldier or an officer was entitled from the household upon which he was billeted. The commissarial officeholders of the Estates were supposed to reimburse inhabitants for what had been furnished (or taken). In the earlier years they collected claims from affected parties (mostly through local magistrates and manorial officials), recompense also being drawn from the disbursement treasuries under commissarial control at that time.134 Until the 1670s these treasuries took in much of the hearth tax, the Estates’ most lucrative source of income. Thus very large sums remained in the countryside instead of passing through a central exchequer (either the Landhaus or Aulic Chamber), while the systematic verification of claims to compensation remained all but impossible. In the event, the rationalization of provisioning proved more successful over time than with respect to march-routes. The army’s system of staging posts or étapes (Etappen in German) for regulating the supply of food, drink, and other necessities first appears in the records of the Lower Austrian Estates in the 1680s and soon became standard.135 Military imperatives informed corporate operations in this respect as well. The word étapes itself recalls contemporary procedures in Louis XIV’s army that by the 1670s were influencing the conduct of business by French local authorities.136 Almost inevitably, given the lack of research into Habsburg military economy, little is known about étapes in the hereditary lands. Still, their introduction as an organizational yardstick was accompanied by an increasingly common practice in the territorial context: the government prescribed the exact number of “portions” due to designated units or groups of soldiers as they moved from staging point to staging point. This measure rendered arbitrary or inflated claims by subordinate authorities easier to detect and tended to reduce the venality typical of unsupervised functionaries, also those of the Estates. Its success naturally depended on timely foreknowledge of troop movements.

133 Hans Leopold Kuefstein to “three upper Estates,” June 20, 1727, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 74, f. 129–30 and 133. Kuefstein also touches here on his work in connection with roads’ reparation. 134 Baron Hans Ehrenreich Sonnau (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Walkenstein, Oct. 3, 1665, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 282. Sonnau announced that 28,299 fl. had been paid out of his treasury for 2,000 rations for men (Mundportionen) and 150 rations for horses (Pferdeportionen). 135 An early reference to étapes found in the Deputies’ resolution of June 25, 1687, NÖLA, StB, 539, f. 18r. 136 Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: The Estates General of Burgundy, 1661–1790 (Cambridge, 2003), 213–17. For standardization in European armies in this period, see Peter H. Wilson, “Warfare in the Old Regime 1648–1789,” 82–3.

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Calculations of the required quantity of rations came from the General Field War Commissariat, whose information reached the Estates through varied channels in the early years. In November 1688 the Aulic Chancellery directed the Deputies to “collect” from the imperial senior war commissary the data required for a unit of “field artillery” moving from Hungary through the archduchy to Bohemian winter quarters.137 Early the following year, the Chancellery itself announced that 1,273 “portions” for men and 1,051 “portions” for horses were needed for the Pálffy regiment.138 By the War of the Spanish Succession, the War Commissariat’s provincial representative was the principal channel for such instructions. Written figures were transmitted using a so-called étapes note (Etappenzettl ), also called an “étapes abstract” (Etappenentwurf ). These papers must have been among the most commonly circulating documents in early modern Austrian government. They set the daily rations for larger units or even for a person of rank journeying alone. In the winter of 1700, the imperial senior war commissary Oßwald passed along an abstract to guide the work of the Estates’ commissaries in provisioning the Soldateska billeted at that time on Lower Austria.139 A few years later, an “étapes note” signed and sealed by him prescribed six “portions” for an officer on his way from Vienna to Bohemia.140 The formal changes to the system of provisioning did not in practice elicit linear standardization. Inevitably neither the resources and services provided to the army nor the associated financial paperwork met the specifications laid down (sporadically) by the authorities. Late in the War of the Spanish Succession, the government decreed that recompense would be had only for rations that had been pre-approved in “étapes abstracts” issued by the imperial senior war commissary.141 That being the case, the Estates’ officeholders were expected to keep accounts based on the abstracts.142 Such norms were obviously most difficult to enforce in extraordinary circumstances, as when food was stolen from local people or when military units arrived in a place unannounced. A recurring difficulty concerned both the size and worth of “standard” portions of meat, bread, beer, and wine, whose prices depended on a fluctuating market. The Estates themselves looked for prescriptive answers to these problems. In the year of Prince Eugene’s conquest of Belgrade—and the afflictions the campaign entailed as far away as Lower Austria—one conscientious senior commissary, Count Wolf Ehrenreich Auersperg, proposed uniform rations to alleviate the distress of both peasants and troops. His suggestion that a soldier was to enjoy a 137

Aulic decree to Deputies, Nov. 18, 1688, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 292. Aulic decree to Deputies, Jan. 30, 1689, NÖLA, StB, 539, f. 66. 139 Informal minutes of the college of Deputies kept by Maximilian Herb, provost of Herzogenburg, Jan. 14, 1700, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.2, f. 7v. 140 Exceptionally, the “étapes note” itself, dated May 12, 1704, has survived in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 298. 141 Aulic decree to Deputies, June 25, 1713, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305. This disposition interestingly also disqualified specifications that had been provided by imperial war commissaries attached to individual units. A similar norm was transmitted by the Deputies to the four senior commissaries, Feb. 28, 1719, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 269–70. 142 Deputies to four senior commissaries, Feb. 28, 1719, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 269–70. 138

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specified quantity of food, and no more, from the family upon which he had been billeted indicates that neither the periodically published patents on the subject nor the étapes system itself always sufficed. The Landhaus empowered Auersperg to introduce his ideas provisionally in his own quarter, Lower Austria’s most expansive.143 There is no proof that the central authorities were consulted. By the same token, it will hardly have taken place in opposition to the military, which had its own interest in maintaining order among its men. A short time later, the college of Deputies asked the other senior commissaries about the feasibility of implementing Auersperg’s plan in their areas.144 Driven by the imperatives of war, such rationalizing measures were comparable to reforms such as those associated with the étapes system. The Landhaus supported the government’s objective, one of long standing, of converting territorial obligations in natura into their pecuniary equivalents. Military personnel would then have paid ready money for provisions obtained at their lodgings, eliminating delays in compensation to inhabitants and laborious clerical work. An early, failed attempt in this direction dated to the general military-financial reorganization at the center of government in the late seventeenth century.145 Only a few years later, the Lower Austrian college of Deputies, in collaboration with Imperial War Commissary Oßwald, agreed an almost identical “remedy.” The goal was the “prevention and cessation of all exactions and extortion as well as [the] introduction of good order and discipline.”146 Cash for rations was to be transferred from the Estates’ receivership general to Oßwald, who was to pay it out in turn to commanding officers in exchange for a receipt. Though the records are silent on the outcome of the experiment, there is some evidence of its repetition later in the same war, also in the somewhat more predictable circumstances of winter quarters.147 Other aspects of military upkeep routinely fell to territorial administrators. They included transport for all manner of provisions, baggage, tents, weapons, and ammunition. Even in death, the army took advantage of this help: in one case the Estates arranged for a deceased general’s body to be hauled back to Vienna. Commissarial “ordinances” such as those used in billeting called up the needed wagons, animals, and carters from manorial agents and local magistrates, who apportioned the burden within individual settlements.148 The numbers of vehicles 143 Auersperg (senior commissary above the Vienna Woods) to Estates, Mar. 12, 1717 (with Estates’ resolution of Mar. 20, 1717), NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 85–89. 144 Deputies to senior commissaries above and below the Manhartsberg and below the Vienna Woods, June 19, 1717, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 107–9. In a letter dated Sept. 3, 1721, Count Franz Joseph Auersperg, Wolf Ehrenreich’s brother and successor as senior commissary, mentions a “provisions regulation” (“Verpflögs=reglement”) issued by the Deputies on Aug. 1 of the same year (NÖLA, StA, A-3, 73, f. 441–44). Whether this step resulted from Wolf Ehrenreich’s démarche several years earlier is unknown. 145 For this reorganization, see Winkelbauer, Ständefreiheit und Fürstenmacht, i, 457, 476. 146 Deputies to Receiver General Franz Adam Werner, Nov. 23, 1703, NÖLA, StA, B7, no. 39, 336–7. 147 Deputies to Baron Georg Gilleis (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg), Nov. 1, 1713, StA, Reihe 2, 305. Gilleis was instructed to arrange shelter (“Dach und Fach”) for four companies of Bayreuth dragoons. Only the horses were to receive rations “in natura.” 148 Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft, 218.

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requested might vary from a handful to dozens or more. One more manageable request from the Aulic Chancellery concerned four carts to carry munitions purchased in Vienna by the Kollonitsch and Spleny regiments. The Deputies charged the senior commissary in the quarter below the Vienna Woods (the officeholder in charge of the area in question) with seeing that it was carried out.149 For reasons of economy and safety, great importance was attached to relocating soldiers and equipment by water. This possibility had particular relevance in riparian Lower Austria, stretched as it was along the mighty Danube from the Enns in the west to the Hungarian plain in the east. One commissary in the quarter above the Vienna Woods, Count Gurlandt, took particular pride in averting devastation by arranging troop conveyances by water.150 Fears for “the fruit in the vineyards and other gardens” around harvest time prompted another commissary to have “new and still undisciplined soldiers” moved in the same manner.151 The government welcomed a plan put forward by the “three upper Estates” to transport military material to the archduchy above the Enns by water rather than land.152 Such operations necessitated boats and barges, which the Estates’ commissaries also had to organize. On another occasion, the Deputies summoned two senior officeholders to Vienna for consultations on a planned “water march.”153 Military exigency mobilized territorial resources in other ways that augmented the Estates’ authority beyond guiding, billeting, provisioning, pay, and transport. The building of barracks and roads in the 1720s and 1730s has been noted. Another signal development concerned recruitment. In the 1680s the central lands became responsible for providing soldiers in kind rather than simply covering the costs of bounties. This innovation is said to have increased efficiency.154 After the turn of the century, the Lower Austrian Estates were annually responsible in wartime for raising some two thousand troops. Managing this business fell to their Deputies and commissaries, who oversaw the corresponding activity of the localities. In this way, regiments billeted on or allotted to Lower Austria refreshed their numbers; other units might enroll in the land below the Enns as well. How the methods of raising troops changed in response to military growth remains unclear. At all events, flexibility and ingenuity appear to have governed how the Estates met their obligations. In 1736 their Deputies delegated recruitment to an officer of the city of Vienna known as the Obristwachtmeister, providing that if demesne landowners placed recruits at his disposal they receive part of the bounty. Later in the same year, this scheme was either complemented or replaced by a levy on local authority. The levy would be adopted the following year 149 Deputies’ resolution (to the aulic decree of Jan. 28, 1713), Jan. 30, 1713, NÖLA, StB, 552, f. 191v–192r. 150 Albrecht Ernst Gurlandt to “three upper Estates,” May 19, 1695, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 349–51. 151 Count Hans Georg Kuefstein (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg) to Deputies, Greillenstein, Sept. 20, 1672, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 286. 152 Aulic decree, Laxenburg, June 7, 1728, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 74, f. 174. 153 Deputies to senior commissaries above the Vienna Woods and the Manhartsberg, July 13, 1716, NÖLA, A-3, 73, f. 33. 154 Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 109.

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as well.155 During the Austrian succession conflict, the Estates had their own “recruiter” (“ständischer Recrouten Werber”) in the person of Count Johann Baptist Acuña.156

CONCLUSION The commissariat maintained by the Lower Austrian Estates never operated according to modern standards of efficiency and effectiveness. Especially when war was carried into the archduchy itself, as in the 1640s and 1680s, the Estates’ organization frayed or broke down. Yet administrative failure was neither uncommon in the early modern world, nor was it unique to the structures of privileged corporations, as events in Louis XIV’s France showed.157 Governing remained improvised and precarious. At the same time, the prodigious evidence reveals that for generations the Estates performed myriad, if often mundane, military-logistical tasks on behalf of the standing army. Their commissariat emerged with that army; it interlocked with other forms of initially innovative commissarial authority; and it retained a dynamic quality into the eighteenth century. This was one conspicuous way in which the Estates rallied around the Habsburg military. The accompanying growth of central power occurred in part through structures that, because of their corporate, often makeshift, and informal nature, have remained largely unseen. An exceptional combination of circumstances in the fifteen years after the outbreak of the War of the Polish Succession (1733) put the territorial militarysupport system up for disposition: an army that roughly doubled in size between the Wars of the Spanish and Polish Successions, only to shrink thereafter; almost continual international conflict that was now accompanied by lost wars and lands (Naples-Sicily, Belgrade, most of Silesia) rather than victories and expansion; and an existential crisis with the extinction of the dynasty’s male line. The lower levels of Austrian authority perceived the novel quality of the challenges quite as much as those working the levers of power higher up. In the respite between the two Silesian wars of 1740–2 and 1744–5, the senior commissary of Lower Austria’s largest district, the quarter above the Vienna Woods, characterized the situation thus: “That which occurred in earlier times cannot be compared to present circumstances.”158 From his base in the town of St. Pölten, he reported being overwhelmed by troop marches. His long experience in office, but also the fact that other family members had held the same position in preceding decades, lends his 155 “Rahts Protocoll” (informal minutes of the college of Deputies kept by Leopold von Planta, provost of Herzogenburg), Nov. 9, 1735, Mar. [no day], 1736, and Nov. [no day], 1736, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.3, pp. 21, 23, 38, and 46. 156 Minutes of the college of Deputies, 1744, NÖLA, StB, 230a, passim. 157 Darryl Dee, Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV’s France: Franche-Comté and Absolute Monarchy, 1674–1715 (Rochester, NY, 2009), 159–65; Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012), 162–9. 158 Count Ernst Ferdinand Auersperg to Deputies, St. Pölten, Apr. 8, 1743, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 364–5.

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testimony special immediacy and credibility.159 The contradiction inherent in the system from the beginning emerged under the pressure. Reconciling the needs of the Habsburg army with the interests of local people had always required a delicate balancing act. During the War of the Austrian Succession, this act was brought off less effectively, or not at all. By the second Silesian conflict, the defense of particularist interests that damaged the common cause was especially manifest, even as structural and personal inadequacies in the face of enormous logistical challenges, more than politically motivated resistance or inaction, accounted for the difficulties. Troop and equipment movements across borders proved a particularly neuralgic point; the handover of men and material between Lower Austria and Bohemia was subject to failure. Already in the first Silesian conflict, the Aulic Chancellery itself had unprecedentedly reprimanded a junior commissary who bungled a battalion’s through-march. This and other mistakes by Leopold Hartmann († 1742) in the quarter above the Manhartsberg were traced to the failure to harmonize activity with the neighboring Bohemian circle office.160 The cross-border difficulties gave rise to expedients that ultimately made procedures more cumbersome. The imperial senior war commissary in Lower Austria directed that the Estates’ commissaries inform his counterpart in Prague when marches in the direction of Bohemia were in the offing.161 Until then, only the notification of the nearby circle office had been customary. On another occasion, the arbitrary dispositions of the senior commissary above the Manhartsberg, Baron Gilleis, were suspected of allowing weapons to fall into enemy hands. The soldiers for whom it was destined were condemned to weeks of inactivity in Prague.162 Individual attempts to shift military burdens onto ostensibly unwary neighboring areas increased the danger of hungry, marauding soldiers, as well as impaired military readiness. Gilleis himself accused the Bohemians of this tactic.163 The fact that the Estates’ commissaries began to close internal borders against each other raised further alarm bells in Vienna. On the surface, the lack of provisions and supplies explains unparalleled conduct ultimately ascribable to the tension between the mandate to “conserve the land” and the duty to sustain the army. That such conduct elicited the college of Deputies’ censure is suggestive of fault lines within the Estates, as well as between the authorities in Vienna and local people in the countryside.164 The changing quality of the commissarial office noticeable by the 1730s exacerbated the situation. A position that in earlier periods had been notorious for its dangers and hardships was increasingly regarded as a sinecure for the high-born. For 159 Ernst Ferdinand Auersperg was assuredly the same “Count Auersperg” appointed “substitute senior commissary” to help the incumbent in the spring of 1736. Deputies to “substitute” senior commissaries above the Vienna Woods (Counts Auersperg and Breunner), June 12, 1736, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 43–44. 160 Aulic decree, Oct. 31, 1741, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 177. 161 Deputies to four senior commissaries, Aug. 19, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 599. 162 Aulic decree to Deputies, July 23, 1745, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 76, f. 141 and 144. 163 Gilleis to Deputies, Kattau, Aug. 10, 1745, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 76, f. 147–50. 164 Deputies to four senior commissaries, Apr. 27, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 530v. Also Count Carl Heissenstein to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 17, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 636–38.

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the first time, we find ancestral cachet lauded before personal knowledge or merits in decrees of appointment.165 Count Wenzel Sinzendorff applied for the job solely on the basis of the “services of his family.”166 Another appointee, Count Anton Salm-Reifferscheidt, received his expectancy on the basis, to be sure, of his unspecified “good qualities.”167 But the selection of this courtier of illustrious Rhenish name and large Moravian domains was otherwise unexampled. He had no landholdings either in the assigned quarter or elsewhere below the Enns. The propertied qualification had presupposed familiarity with the Land and hence the requisite local knowledge. Salm-Reifferscheidt’s errors on march-routes would soon offer the reforming government a concrete pretext for setting up Lower Austrian circle offices—ironically manned by “outsiders” with similar results. Salm-Reifferscheidt is also known to have left his area of duty without permission. This problem too became more frequent. After an unexcused absence from his post during preparations for the Ottoman campaign of 1739, Count Franz Friedrich Engl abandoned it altogether in 1741 to pay homage to the elector of Bavaria at Linz. The “substitute” put in his place, Baron Gilleis, left management on the ground to the junior commissary Pittersfeld even as the French were withdrawing through the area.168 Shortly thereafter, the invaders took Pittersfeld hostage, together with other local dignitaries. At the height of the second Silesian War, the commissaries below the Manhartsberg disappeared from the scene just when the military needed them.169 Responsible for managing troop transfers across the Moravian and Hungarian frontiers, the senior incumbent, Count Traun, had complained not long before about the high costs that he was expected to meet out of his own pocket.170 Perhaps this expectation was increasingly felt to be out of date given the changing parameters of warfare, ones that also created strain between the Landhaus and individual officeholders. The Estates as a body sought to cut expenses by restricting both the use and pay of “steering commissaries.” These measures had the (surely intended) effect of shifting costs and burdens onto the senior functionaries, who protested vigorously.171 The Estates’ commissariat itself would survive the establishment of circle offices in 1753 until after the Seven Years War, a fact that should make us wary 165 “Three upper Estates” to Counts Franz Harrach and Joseph Volkard Auersperg, July 11, 1742 and Dec. 1, 1743 respectively, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 260–61 and 437–38. 166 Sinzendorff to Estates, Sept. 20, 1751, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 77, f. 125–26. 167 “Three upper Estates” to Salm-Reifferscheidt, Jan. 9, 1745, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 76, f. 7–8. 168 Deputies to Engl, Apr. 28, 1739; Deputies to Gilleis, Oct. 3, 1741; and Gilleis to Deputies, Oct. 14, 1741, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 118–19, 165–66 and 175. Schwerdfeger, “Der bairischfranzösische Einfall,” ii, 222–4. 169 Count Carl Heissenstein to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 17, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 636–38. 170 Deputies to Traun, Aug. 25, 1744, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 607–08. 171 Deputies to four senior commissaries (restricting the use of paid “steering commissaries”), July 13, 1743, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 75, f. 409–10; Deputies to four senior commissaries (reducing by half the recompense for “steering commissaries”), Aug. 23, 1746; and Baron Julius Gilleis (senior commissary above the Manhartsberg ) to Deputies, Kattau, Aug. 25, 1746, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 76, f. 246–47 and 248. Letters of protest from the other commissaries, Counts Niclas Hamilton, Wenzel Breunner, and Franz Harrach, are also found in this documentation.

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of highlighting only the inadequacies of a system that had existed since the Thirty Years War. Even during the War of the Austrian Succession, the story was not entirely one of failure, even as the drawbacks of established practice had come to outweigh the advantages. The evidence also does not allow us to project the experience of the 1730s and 1740s back in time. Even after the abolition of the Estates’ commissariat, the government could not exclude the Estates from military affairs given its own limits and the wartime imperatives that continued to make local expertise and logistical help indispensable. As the leading representatives of the agrarian world, the Estates had a long history of supplying natural produce to the army.172 This activity would increase vastly in scale and endure into the nineteenth century. Demands for assistance with transport, billets, recruits, and other organizational matters would also continue to arrive at the Landhaus. Even as the Habsburg monarchy was being reformed and the relations between central and intermediary authority were evolving, the burden of maintaining a standing military continued to fall not just on government, but on society as well.

172 Earlier examples include the 100,000 florins’ worth of forage and other produce gathered for the army by Senior Commissary Unverzagt in the quarter below the Vienna Woods in the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession which is documented in the communication by the Deputies to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 30, 1706, NÖLA, StA, A-3, 72, f. 497. The Estates also contracted with private entrepreneurs to provision the army. NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 305, contains a “contract” between the Deputies and a burgher in Stockerau, Johann Michael Holzer, “wegen Beschaffenter Fourage, vor die, sowohl dieß= als Jenseiths der Tonau stehent: Kay: Trouppen,” Jan. 12, 1713. Holzer delivered the feed paid for by the Estates to an imperial provisions commissary (Aulic Chamber to college of Deputies, Feb. 7, 1713).

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5 Toward a “Military, Cameral, and Debt System,” 1733–48 On June 14, 1748 the three ranking Deputies of the Lower Austrian Estates, attired in Spanish and gala dress, collected Count Friedrich Wilhelm Haugwitz at the Hofburg and proceeded with him in a carriage followed by trumpeters and other escorts the short distance to the Landhaus on the square of the Friars Minor. There he was received with the honors due the ruler’s “special commissioner.” A Silesian noble and Catholic convert, Haugwitz was the leading domestic advisor of the empress-queen-archduchess Maria Theresa, who had assumed the reins of government in the Habsburg lands under notoriously difficult circumstances eight years earlier. The acting Landmarschall, Vice-Stadholder Breunner, and other senior members of the Estates received Haugwitz on the stairs and ushered him through the grand hall whose superb ceiling fresco, realized in better times, now seemed to mock Austrian pretensions to universal monarchy. Before a slightly larger than usual assembly of some sixty-seven prelates, nobles, and townsmen, Haugwitz laid out the case for their participation in an expansive “new military and debt system” encompassing the monarchy’s core lands.1 His speech exuded none of the lofty confidence manifest by the nearby frescoed image of Austria’s investiture by Providence. Defensive in tone, it called for the upkeep of a “sizeable” peacetime standing army of 108,000 men to safeguard “against formidable neighbors” and the wherewithal to service the heavy wartime liabilities contracted by the government. The Estates would have to approve an unusually large increase in the regular annual grant over the long term. The minister left no doubt that his ruling mistress expected agreement. This proved the hardly revolutionary Lower Austrian prelude to what Hamish Scott appropriately labelled the most “radical programme of reform from above in later eighteenth-century Europe.”2 Even as Haugwitz negotiated with the Estates in the summer of 1748, the Habsburg monarchy had still not quite emerged from a decade and a half of almost continuous, calamitous armed conflict. From the pinnacle of his power and prestige in the 1720s, the emperor Charles VI had 1 Minutes of the Estates, June 14, 1748, NÖLA, StB, 93; Wienerisches Diarium, June 15, 1748, p. 7. See also Shuichi Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie in Österreich unter der Enns 1683–1748 (St. Pölten, 2014), 308–9. 2 Hamish M. Scott, “Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740–90,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1990), 146.

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taken a deep fall, one in which the Estates are sometimes thought to have been implicated. In 1733 he went to war in defense of his interests in Eastern Europe and Lorraine only to lose his possession of Naples and Sicily in what came to be known as the War of the Polish Succession (1733–8). The Ottoman imbroglio that followed in the years 1737–9 ended in a humiliating peace with the loss of strategically important areas in the Balkans, including the fortress of Belgrade, which Prince Eugene had taken with so much skill and daring only twenty years earlier. Soon thereafter, the new Prussian king Frederick II exploited Austrian weakness—now compounded by a young, inexperienced ruler, Maria Theresa, at the head of a geriatric establishment—to conquer Silesia in a war (1740–2) with the support of a coalition of allies including two other German states and France. This blow threatened to transform the crisis into an existential one. In the Second Silesian War (1744–5), Frederick repulsed an attempt to wrench back the province. After further bloodletting against the French in the southern Netherlands, the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (October 1748) finally brought the War of the Austrian Succession to a close. It confirmed the loss of what had been one of the dynasty’s richest, most economically developed lands.3 For the monarchy’s population, which ultimately bore the terrible bill for the armies in this strife, the fifteen years down to 1748 possessed an inherent coherence that transcended the change of monarch from Charles VI to his daughter in October 1740. After a century of a permanent standing army, whose growth starkly accelerated into the 1730s, the domestic circumstances of the Estates in the Habsburg lands varied markedly. Yet Haugwitz’s notorious discoveries on his tour of inspection of two fiscally weak and badly managed Inner Austrian duchies have tended to be taken as typical of these diverse bodies generally.4 The historical record with respect to the Estates in the land below the Enns, one of the monarchy’s leading corporations, vitiates the picture of incorrigibly corrupt and renitent elites failing in their financial duty as the Habsburgs lurched from disaster to disaster. Let us briefly look at the Estates’ part in the war effort of the 1730s and 1740s before moving on to the question of the resistance that the Haugwitz reforms faced in Lower Austria. The Estates consistently and readily approved the annual grant demanded of them (733,333 fl. in 1734 and 900,000 fl. in the succeeding years to 1740). In 1738 they were thanked for having “fully” complied with “His Imperial Majesty’s intentions.”5 These sums all moreover surpassed the one specified by the recess of 1730 (700,000 fl.) whose signature had been necessary, we will recall, because of increased peacetime borrowing from the Estates. The Estates also recurrently 3 Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York, 1993); M. S. Anderson, The War of the Austrian Succession, 1740–1748 (London and New York, 1995). 4 Karl A. Roider, Jr., The Reluctant Ally: Austria’s Policy in the Austro-Turkish War, 1737–1739 (Baton Rouge, LA, 1972), 13; Werner Ogris, “The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State,” in Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and Justice, vol. C of The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th–18th Centuries series (Oxford and New York, 1997), 319; Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 268–70. 5 Aulic decree to the Estates, Dec. 26, 1738, NÖLA, LH, 65. See also Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 236–42.

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compounded property taxes with lump sum payments brought in at least partly by their own 1 percent assessments on the capitalized value of real property, sometimes in combination with income taxes on those not covered by the cadaster, a precedent from the War of the Spanish Succession. These exercises invariably raised large amounts of fast money ranging from 225,000 to 500,000 fl. per year between 1734 and 1739.6 The authorities also drew upon the Landhaus’s ever more solid financial credit. By the late 1730s, the Estates were able to offer the emperor a proxy loan of 500,000 fl. at 5 rather than the 6 percent usual since the seventeenth century.7 In this way, they were helping to bring down the costs of central borrowing. They also guaranteed an advance to the Habsburg treasury of 2.5 million fl. by the Estates of Brabant.8 Such a transaction, which involved mortgaging the Contribution to lenders in the Low Countries, had previously been confined to Silesia. As the fund in question neared exhaustion, the practice was extended to Bohemia and Lower Austria.9 Under these circumstances, the Estates called for a new recess to preserve their solvency. To account for the Brabant deal, which required an annual payment of 216,000 fl. over fifteen years into the Universalbancalität (the central disbursement treasury), the new accord with the Aulic Chancellery extended to 1754.10 Still, it is striking that both the annual grant and the sum specified in the recess had stagnated.11 The 900,000 fl. approved in each of the years between 1735 and 1740 was the same amount that the diet had thrice agreed to without fuss during the Turkish war (1716–18) some two decades earlier. Perhaps even more striking is that in the later 1730s the propositions to the diet named smaller sums than had been the case in the 1710s (900,000 as opposed to 1,242,222 fl. in 1717 and 1718). The long-established practice of asking for more to get more had obviously lapsed in Charles VI’s later years. The Habsburg army shrank in size by more than a quarter below the brief high-water mark of 1735 (a paper strength of 205,643 men), a trend still holding as the Prussians struck at Silesia.12 The figures in the recesses tell a similar story. Whereas the agreement of 1701 had doubled the annual grant to 500,000 fl., the one of 1713 increased it by only 20 percent (to 600,000 fl.), and that of 1723 by less than 17 percent (to 700,000 fl.). Despite two prolongations during the 1730s (1730, 1739), the figure remained frozen at 700,000 fl. 6 1734 (225,000 fl.); 1735 (500,000 fl.); 1736 (475,000 fl.); 1737 (450,000 fl.); 1738 (450,000 fl.); and 1739 (450,000 fl.). These numbers are taken from the “Billance oder ausweisung über die Anno 1734, 1735, 1736 ausgeschrieben geweste Vermögen: dan Anno 1737, 1738 et 1739 publicirt geweste Türcken Steür und ferers Anno 1743, 1745, 1746 et 1747 abermahlen ausgeschrieben geweste Vermögen Steüer,” table compiled by the Estates’ chancellery, [c.1747], Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 175, Nr. 2tt. Cf. Franz Freiherr von Mensi, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs von 1701 bis 1740 (Vienna, 1890), 660–2. 7 “Three upper Estates” to Charles VI, Nov. 29, 1738, NÖLA, StB, 511, f. 153. 8 Lower Austrian Estates to Charles VI, Feb. 21, 1739, NÖLA, StB, 511, f. 161v–162r. 9 For the Silesian and Bohemian cases, see Mensi, Die Finanzen, 373–90. 10 A copy of the Recess of Mar. 9, 1739 found in NÖLA, StB, 569, f. 202–19. 11 P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 6, noted that state income stagnated in the last twenty years of Charles VI. 12 For army strengths, see Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 237.

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Figure 5.1. An image commemorating Maria Theresa’s inauguration as archduchess, based on a painting by Martin van Meytens. The coats of arms are those of Landmarschall Count Aloys Harrach (center) and the members of the college of Deputies. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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With inflation and rising military costs calculated in, there was less and less for the army once the debt had been serviced. The property tax buy-outs and proxy loans made up to some extent for the shortfall, but borrowing also encumbered the Contribution. And the stasis in income constrained borrowing itself. During the War of the Austrian Succession, the financial offerings continued as in the 1730s, with variations. Unlike the land above the Enns or Bohemia, the Lower Austrian Estates remained steadfastly loyal to Maria Theresa despite the presence of a Franco-Bavarian invasion force in the fall of 1741 (see Figure 5.1). From Preßburg (Pozsony, Bratislava), where he followed the Court, Landmarschall Harrach kept watch and coordinated their defense activities, especially as a siege of Vienna looked increasingly likely.13 This eventuality soon evaporated. The diet would be convoked as usual to hear a proposition unique in its annals. In abbreviated form, the Estates were asked not for a specific sum, but rather to vote a grant at their own discretion, remembering that it was for the “salvation of the whole monarchy [universum] and especially the esteemed Fatherland.”14 It was an appeal to her subjects’ gallantry, and also to their Habsburg and territorial patriotism, if not the personal one that Maria Theresa famously made that same year to the Hungarian diet. Though lamenting the wartime hardship, the Estates were neither insensible to military exigency nor deaf to their archduchess’s entreaty. Rather than seizing the opportunity to reduce the grant, which the continuing presence in western Lower Austria of the Franco-Bavarian occupiers, or even the recess, might have justified, they responded by offering the same grant voted in Charles VI’s later years and at Maria Theresa’s first diet (900,000 fl.).15 We should remember that this exceeded by 200,000 fl. the amount named in the recess of 1739, while further demands were inevitable and scarcely to be refused. As in the second half of the 1730s, the annual grant of 900,000 fl. was to be the basis of considerably higher outlay by the Estates in each of the war years down to 1748. The additional funding assumed various forms. A sizable donum gratuitum, a term that denoted free money as opposed to a loan, was voted twice, once in the critical spring of 1741 (200,000 fl.) and then in late 1746 (165,100 fl.) for winter quarters in the southern Netherlands. Fearful of an unwelcome precedent, the Estates had on the latter occasion rejected an actual “winter quarters’ contribution,” but agreed to pay the amount requested under the title of a donum gratuitum.16 In 13 Harrach to the Estates’ syndic Christoph Kriegl, Preßburg, Sept. 23, 1741, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 121. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Preßburg, Sept. 7, 1741, NÖLA, StB, 571, f. 24r–25v. J. Schwerdfeger, “Der bairisch-französische Einfall in Ober- und Nieder-Österreich (1741) und die Stände der Erzherzogthümer,” AÖG 91 (1902): 145–67. 14 Proposition to the diet, Nov. 25, 1741, NÖLA, LH, 66. For the term universum, see Grete Klingenstein, “The Meanings of ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’ in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robert Oresko et al., eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 462. 15 Declaration by the diet, Dec. 13, 1741, NÖLA, LH, 66. See Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 258. 16 The resolution of the Estates of Dec. 20, 1746 to the aulic decree of Dec. 5, 1746, NÖLA, StB, 574, f. 146r–147v. The amount of the donum gratuitum of 1741 was fixed in a “ministerial conference” attended by the Estates’ representatives. Aulic decree, May 30, 1741, NÖLA, StB, 570, f. 287v–289v. Thus the finding that “war costs” were “covered for [the first] two years without extraordinary help” is not quite accurate. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 121.

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1742 the authorities dusted off an old trick from Leopold I’s reign. They offered to sell the capitalized value of the last one-third of the old Landsteuer for 600,000 fl., the same price as in 1693. With understandably greater readiness than a halfcentury earlier, the Estates agreed under certain conditions.17 Most importantly, they received permission to mortgage entailed property, otherwise strictly limited, as an added way of helping local nobles raise money to buy shares of the tax. Personal credit was again being mobilized to the dynastic state’s benefit at the cost of sovereign revenues disappearing into private pockets. This sale released the Estates from a long anachronistic obligation. Originally earmarked for the upkeep of the military border around the fortress of Raab (Győr) in western Hungary, the Landsteuer had simply continued as part of the regular grant, though the Ottomans had long vanished from the area. Financially more important to the central treasury were the property taxes compounded by the Estates every year between 1743 and 1748, with the apparent exception of 1744. The increasing ability to tax elites that was evident in these operations portended the reform of the Contribution in 1748, as Haugwitz himself suggested.18 The modalities differed from case to case, though in the end each assessment yielded a lump sum of between 400,000 and 500,000 fl. In 1747 the Estates offered 400,000 fl. before accepting the higher amount.19 The quid pro quo was the same as in the 1730s: the Estates levied their own taxes on property and income whose collection was supervised by a “deputation” at the Landhaus.20 Thus the burden could be partly offloaded as it rose. In 1735 Count Johann Baptist Pergen had paid 927 fl. on his manors at Aspang and Seebenstein in the hills south of Wiener Neustadt; twelve years later, in 1747, his heirs were liable for 1,445 fl. on the same assets.21 In 1746 the authorities succeeded in enforcing a qualified universal capitation for the first time since the 1690s, which explained the “universal clamor” witnessed by the Venetian ambassador.22 Concessions to the Estates in the manner of its collection signified the half-hearted official interest in defending the southern Netherlands, where the center of fighting now lay.23 Brussels would fall to the French in the late summer of 1746. 17

Declaration of the Estates, Apr. 28, 1742, NÖLA, StB, 512, f. 25. ÖZV, II/2, 183. 19 Minutes of the diet, Jan. 28, 1747, NÖLA, StB, 93. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 123 (table 4.3), reports that the Estates provided 500,000 fl. in each of the years in question. Other evidence shows a sum of only 400,000 fl. in 1743: “Billance oder ausweisung über die Anno 1734, 1735, 1736 ausgeschrieben geweste Vermögen: dan Anno 1737, 1738 et 1739 publicirt geweste Türcken Steür und ferers Anno 1743, 1745, 1746 et 1747 abermahlen ausgeschrieben geweste Vermögen Steüer,” table compiled by the Estates’ chancellery, [c.1747], Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 175, Nr. 2tt. For 1747, see also Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 294. 20 The deal for 1738 is explicitly laid out in the informal minutes of the college of Deputies (“Rahts Protokoll”) kept by Leopold von Planta, provost of Herzogenburg, Jan. 24, 1738. Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.3. 21 “Vermögensteuer Bekenntnisse de Anno 1735 et 1736, auch Türkensteuer pro Anno 1737,” NÖLA, StB, 382, f. 56r; “Vermögenssteuerprotokoll pro 1747,” NÖLA, StB, 381, nos. 43 and 44. 22 Quoted in Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 121–2. 23 The concessions included their being allowed to collect the assessments on townsmen and the subject population. “Codex Provincialis,” ix, 543–8 (NÖLA). Further proof that the capitation was in fact imposed is found in the Estates’ property tax patent of Feb. 27, 1747, NÖLA, StB, Nr. 381, as 18

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In addition to the regular grant, the tax buy-outs, and other, more sporadic support, the Estates once again mediated wartime loans. Between 1742 and 1747 the sums involved varied between 200,000 and 800,000 fl.24 The growing strain on the Contribution prompted the Estates to demand unencumbered cameral revenues as security.25 By 1747 resources were so overstretched that reimbursement for an advance of 600,000 fl. had to be deferred until 1754, when the fund covering the Brabant loan of 1739 would be free. Altogether, the yearly sums provided by the Estates in taxes and loans approached or even exceeded two million florins in the last phase of the Austrian succession war, which was not even concerned with the recovery of Silesia. For the military year 1747, the Estates voted a grant of 900,000 fl., compounded a property tax for 500,000 fl., and lent 800,000 fl.—a total of nearly 2.2 million fl. In the summer of 1748, Haugwitz would request a regular annual grant of 2,008,968 fl., which more than doubled the previous amount (900,000 fl.), yet approximated the high wartime achievement.26 When Haugwitz arrived at the Lower Austrian Landhaus on June 14, 1748 to lay out his new military-financial scheme, he was venturing onto enemy territory in a way that had not been true of his earlier appearances before the diets in Brünn (Brno) and Prague. For the previous generation, the Lower Austrian Estates had been dominated by the Harrachs, the family of his main antagonist in government, the Bohemian grand chancellor Count Friedrich Harrach (1696–1749) (see Figure 5.2). In a highly unusual act of open defiance in an absolute monarchy, Harrach had refused to argue Haugwitz’s (hence the empress’s own) case to the Estates. It followed in the wake of the legendary showdown between the two men in the ministerial conference of January 29, 1748, also attended by the empress and her husband and co-regent, Francis Stephan of Lorraine.27 No doubt had existed about the need for an improved army to defend the remaining Bohemian lands from Prussia; in his own calculations Harrach had used Haugwitz’s figure (14,000,000 fl.) for the projected costs. But there was basic disagreement about how to meet them. Whereas Haugwitz sought higher peacetime grants from the well as in the communication of the “three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, Oct. 25, 1758, NÖLA, LH, 73. That the clergy agreed to a “voluntary subsidy” in place of the capitation is reported in a letter from Count Johann Joseph Trautson (the later cardinal and archbishop of Vienna) to an unidentified vice-dean, Feb. 18, 1746, Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 175, Nr. 2rr. For 1744, see Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 290–1. 24 See the figures in Adolf Beer, “Die Staatsschulden und die Ordnung des Staatshaushaltes unter Maria Theresia,” AÖG 82 (1895): 107–8; also Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 346. 25 Diary of Abbot Adrian Plieml of Melk, Dec. 15, 1742, p. 38, Stiftsarchiv Melk, 3. Äbte, carton 7a. Resolution of the Estates from Apr. 26, 1747 concerning the aulic decree of Apr. 14, 1747, NÖLA, StB, 574, f. 190r–191v. 26 Alfred Ritter von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, 10 vols. (Vienna, 1863–79), iv, 16. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 11, 14, pointed out that Haugwitz fixed peacetime taxation at the wartime level. 27 See Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 10–15. Cf. Friedrich Walter, Die Theresianische Staatsreform vom 1749 (Vienna, 1958), 44–5. For a fine discussion of the problem of the relationship of minister and ruler under absolute monarchy, see Julian Swann, “From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’: The Breakdown of Personal Monarchy in Louis XVI’s France,” in Julian Swann and Joël Félix, eds., The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France from Old Regime to Revolution (Oxford, 2013), 63–89.

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Figure 5.2. Count Friedrich Harrach: Grand Aulic Chancellor 1745–9; Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1744–5, acting 1746–7, 1747–8; Haugwitz’s chief opponent in the councils of the central government. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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central lands, Harrach advocated greater flexibility for the Estates as to how money would be raised. In particular, he wanted to stimulate economic growth in order to expand the tax base, a long-standing demand of the Landhaus and, later, of State Chancellor Kaunitz. More controversially, Harrach proposed that a large portion of cameral revenues be managed by the Estates. His proposals were thus not simply obstructive.28 Yet this measure would have undermined the City Bank of Vienna, whose debt was successfully underwritten by cameral income, and deprived Maria Theresa of control of a significant part of her domain. Given Haugwitz’s experiences in the Inner Austrian lands, where the Estates had been deeply entangled in cameral affairs, Harrach’s proposal can only have been regarded as obnoxious.29 As Haugwitz would later explain to the diet, he saw the growth of indirect taxation as the only way of reducing direct levies. That ministers clashed in council over policy and for factional reasons was nothing new: that Harrach remained contumacious once advice had been rendered and an imperial decision taken was altogether more exceptional.30 This is a mystery. How can it be explained and what might these events tell us about the forces of resistance to reform? How did Harrach figure in the course of events at the Lower Austrian Estates in 1748? The mystery deepens if we recall that Harrach was no backwoods diehard; rather he belonged to the inner circle of aristocratic families that had been a pillar of dynastic rule since the sixteenth century. Indeed, the Harrachs had been there from the beginning. Over the generations they had remained at or near the center of affairs. Friedrich’s grandfather, Ferdinand Bonaventura Harrach (1636–1706), had been the highly influential Obersthofmeister and personal friend of Leopold I, who had made Harrach’s second son, Franz Anton (1665–1727), princebishop of Vienna. Another son of Ferdinand Bonaventura was the later Lower Austrian Landmarschall Aloys Harrach (1669–1742), father of Friedrich. The Harrachs had adhered to the Spanish party at Court and Aloys’s career initially followed the pattern. Less distinguished than his father, he had in younger years succeeded him as ambassador at Madrid, the last such appointment before that line of the casa de Austria died out. Under Charles VI, he appeared as part of the Spanish grouping around the imperial favorite Count Althann.31 He also sought the protection of Prince Eugene into whose orbit the family—notably his son Friedrich—gravitated.32 Soon after the War of the Spanish Succession, Aloys served on a committee under the prince of Savoy to restore order to state finances. Two years later, by which time he was already Landmarschall, he joined the so-called Finance Conference

28

ÖZV, II/1/1, 135. For Haugwitz and cameral affairs in Inner Austria, see ÖZV, II/1/1, 120–1; also Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 14–15. 30 In the first of her famous memorials, Maria Theresa herself recorded this defiance. Alfred Ritter von Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften der Kaiserin Maria Theresia,” AÖG 47 (1871): 314. 31 Andreas Pečar, Die Ökonomie der Ehre: Der höfische Adel am Kaiserhof Karls VI. (1711–1740) (Darmstadt, 2003), 89. 32 Max Braubach, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen: Eine Biographie, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1963–5), iv, 357; v, 57 and 294; Pečar, Die Ökonomie, 98–9. 29

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that was chaired by the emperor personally. In time he presided over a “special commission” charged with the thankless task of economizing given the financial fallout of the Turkish war of 1716–18.33 In these capacities, he appears to have belonged to a group in the upper reaches of government which was opposed to the City Bank of Vienna’s autonomy, a prime element in its success, as we realize in hindsight. Otherwise Harrach made himself useful in imperial eyes by taking on the thankless viceroyalty of Naples, where he proved a willing, if largely ineffective, reformer.34 During his years in southern Italy (1728–33) that allowed him to round out his family’s discerning collection of Spanish-Neapolitan pictures, he remained Lower Austrian Landmarschall. After his return he advanced to ministerial rank in the “Privy Conference” made up of the ruler’s closest advisers. Both he and another brother, Johann Joseph (1678–1764), an old military associate of Prince Eugene who became president of the War Council in 1738, belonged to the lackluster set of aged councilors facing Maria Theresa at her accession. The historian Arneth reported that Aloys was one of those who advised that she give way to Prussian demands.35 Aloys’s last decade at the Landhaus corresponded with the slackening of the reins of government that was noticeable in its failure to increase the grant either in the annual propositions or in the recess. As minister, Harrach bore more responsibility for this state of affairs than as Landmarschall. Indeed, he used his local power and influence to see that official demands on the Estates, for example the property taxes beginning in 1734, were met.36 The conflation of central and provincial office in one person was nonetheless emblematic of the malaise of Prince Eugene’s and Charles VI’s declining years. Aloys Harrach’s consolidation of his family’s hold on the office of Landmarschall with its many perquisites was revealing. From the emperor he extracted a written pledge that his son would follow him at the Landhaus, despite the fact that it would weaken, as Charles himself noted, the nonhereditary character of the office and thus the ruler’s right of preferment.37 The Landmarschall exercised broad powers of patronage that extended not only to lesser officials but also into the Estate of knights and the Landmarschall’s tribunal. Apart from the handsome yearly remuneration of 10,000 fl. paid out of the Estates’ treasury, pecuniary advantages of a more casual nature attached to the position. It would be the vested Harrach interest at the Landhaus, one that her predecessors had for reasons of state promoted, that Maria Theresa would have to dislodge once she had failed to win over Aloys’s son, Friedrich, to her course of action. The struggle would be a key lesson in her education in the art of managing the Estates. Let us look at one revealing way in which Aloys had dug his baroque heels into the land below the Enns. In connection with the extension of the recess in 1739, he renewed a personal lease on a clutch of excise taxes including the 33

Mensi, Die Finanzen, 433, 463, 557, 559, 560, 567, 569, 579, 583–4, 590. Heinrich Benedikt, Das Königreich Neapel unter Kaiser Karl VI.: Eine Darstellung auf Grund bisher unbekannter Dokumente aus den österreichischen Archiven (Vienna and Leipzig, 1927), chap. xxii and passim. 35 Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, iv, 8. 36 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 239. 37 Pečar, Die Ökonomie, 53. 34

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“Landesaufschläge zu Ybbs” and “Landesaufschläge am Tabor.”38 In other words, he was a tax farmer who had come to the lease through the office of Landmarschall, his first contract having taken effect in January 1724. These duties in theory were part of the regalia, but had long passed to the Estates in exchange for financial help.39 In the early years, the Estates in the guise of their college of Deputies had managed them directly—as applied to corn, flour, and wine, and later to other products including leather and all manner of apiarian goods. In 1662 they had sublet the duties to Landmarschall Ernst Traun in return for a loan. This set the pattern for the future. Traun kept the farm until he died a few years later, after which it changed hands several times over the next decades. One of the leaseholders was Carl Hackelberger, a former receiver general of the Estates. After his contract expired, the Estates hired out the lease to Landmarschall Mollart and his heirs. Thereafter it would remain in the hands of Mollart’s successors in office and their heirs. The Mollarts held it from 1691 (beginning shortly after the Landmarschall’s death) to 1702; the Trauns again from 1703 to 1723 (Count Otto Traun was Landmarschall from 1690 to 1715); and the Harrachs from 1724 to 1748. Its unchanging annual cost over decades—18,000 fl.—as the economy and population expanded explains why it came to be regarded by the lineages involved as a “benefice.”40 It had almost lost its fiscal raison d’être and become a mere perk of office. Public patents authorized the work of officials identified with the leaseholder’s noble title and surname.41 Successive webs of comitial “Mollart,” “Traun,” and “Harrach” agents levied taxes at town gates and border crossings across Lower Austria. Though confirmed by the recesses, this situation justifiably aroused the appetite of a government anxious to claw back as much cameral income hocked in times of crisis as possible—if only to farm it out again on better terms. Such plans existed as early as 1700, as the scale of previous concessions became alarmingly apparent. In the run-up to the Ottoman onslaught of 1683, the Aulic Chamber had sold off, for instance, the customs’ house (Schlüsselamt) at Krems and the granary office (Kastenamt) at Stein, both in the fertile Wachau valley.42 In the long years of peace after Passarowitz, Charles VI’s government had greater opportunity than his

38 A copy of the lease, dated Apr. 16, 1739, is preserved in NÖLA, StA, B-10, nos. 28–29, carton 332, f. 60–7. 39 The following account based on a report by the Estates’ registrar, Nikolaus Eberhardt von Aybling, to the college of Deputies, Nov. 29, 1717, NÖLA, StA, B-10, no. 25, f. 516v–517v and 523r. 40 This was the term used by Count Franz Anton Traun (Otto’s son) to the Estates, Apr. 4, 1716, NÖLA, StA, B-10, no. 25, f. 441r. 41 Examples are the patents of June 21, 1690 (Mollart), Nov. 20, 1699 (Mollart), and Dec. 24, 1729 (Harrach), NÖLA, Verordnetenpatente, 8, 9, and 13. 42 Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998), 213. Karl Haselbach, “Über finanzielle Zustände in Niederösterreich im XVII. Jahrhundert,” BVLkN, new series, 30 (1896): 295. For the long-standing attempts to redeem and improve cameral revenue, see Thomas Winkelbauer, “Nervus rerum Austriacarum: Zur Finanzgeschichte der Habsburgermonarchie um 1700,” in Petr Maťa and Thomas Winkelbauer, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1620 bis 1740: Leistungen und Grenzen des Absolutismusparadigmas (Stuttgart, 2006), 213.

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father’s to recover lost revenue sources. It refurbished the Handgrafenamt, some of whose excise taxes the Lower Austrian Estates had farmed.43 Landmarschall Harrach’s absence from Vienna in the late 1720s offered the authorities a chance to scrutinize his tax farms. To parry the inquiries, Harrach turned to Landuntermarschall Carl Leopold von Moser, his leading client at the Estates, a man who owed his office to Harrach. On the day following his appointment, Moser had memorably promised lifelong service both to the Landmarschall’s “gracious person” and his “high house.”44 He would faithfully keep his word. When the Estates were asked to account for the revenues leased out to Harrach, Moser claimed to know Charles VI’s interests better than those actually charged with safeguarding them. The ruler, reasoned Moser, had intended that whatever profit Harrach realized be “part of his salary and some recompense for the high merits acquired by Your Excellency [in the service] of His Imperial Majesty, the dear Fatherland, and the entire public.”45 The Landmarschall also farmed a lucrative customs house on the Hungarian border close to the castle of Prugg that had been redesigned for him by the fashionable architect Lukas von Hildebrandt. The customs house had been in Harrach possession since the sixteenth century. To finance road-building in the 1720s, the government planned to levy charges on such bodies. Here too Moser looked after Harrach’s investments. He assured his patron that he had “nothing to worry about.”46 Though he would be the inveterate defender of stasis as the fiscal screw tightened under Maria Theresa, Moser was not the Landmarschall’s only recourse at the Estates. Harrach also operated through other minions and thinly veiled bribes. For renewing his contract on the excise-tax farm, he had been paying each member of the college of Deputies 400 fl. every four years.47 Aloys’s former personal clerk, Georg Christoph Kriegl, was secretary and then syndic of the Estates (the latter appointment 1741–51), while another client, Johann Georg Kees (1673–1754), progenitor of an eminent line of jurists, received the key post of Landschreiber. In a piquant conflation of interests, Kriegl managed corporate business in which he dealt with his benefactor as tax farmer rather than Landmarschall.48 This network 43 The patent of re-establishment, July 5, 1724, NÖLA, KP, 25. For the Estates’ farm of the Handgrafenamt’s levies (1716–23), see “Codex Provincialis,” i, 114–23 (NÖLA) and Carl Schwabe von Waisenfreund, Versuch einer Geschichte des österreichischen Staats-Credits- und Schuldenwesens, 2 parts (Vienna, 1860/1866), ii, 95. 44 Moser to Harrach, Nov. 5, 1729, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 89, f. 9. 45 Moser to Harrach, Aug. 2, 1732, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 89, f. 31–2. In a similar vein on the same subject, see the abbot of Melk to Harrach, May 2, 1730, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 88. 46 Moser to Harrach, Jan. 5, 1732, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 89, f. 25v. For another Harrach lease on cameral property, see Mensi, Die Finanzen, 277, 320. For the Harrach customs house in Bruck, Benjamin Bowman, “Das Mautwesen des 18. Jahrhunderts im heutigen Niederösterreich,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1950, 104–7, 175–6. 47 As related in the revealingly unofficial minutes of the college of Deputies (“Rahts Protokoll”) kept by the provost of Herzogenburg during his term of office, Oct. 3, 1737, Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, H.7.2. B.3, p. 54. 48 The relevant correspondence from the 1730s in NÖLA, StA, B-10, nos. 28–9, carton 331. Kees’s letters to Harrach in AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 82. A contemporary reference to “five Landmarschall’s creatures in the Estates’ service” is in the diary of Abbot Adrian Plieml of Melk, Apr. 23, 1739, p. 18, Stiftsarchiv Melk, 3. Äbte, carton 7a.

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personified not an ancient, entrenched elite but rather the Austria of Prince Eugene dying a slow and agonizing death. The government had come to face a serious “principal-agent” problem manifest in the long Harrach pre-eminence at the Estates. Such a problem occurs when agents of the state “escape the bounds set by their political masters.”49 In the early modern world, “where private interests are treated quite legitimately as part of the wider public interest,” this engendered what is called “rent-seeking,” “a situation in which contractors and agents manipulate and alter the very frameworks within which they are seeking to gain advantage.” An appointee of the ruler, Harrach clearly engaged in such conduct. In her famous memorials, the empress Maria Theresa would diagnose the problem precisely in those terms rather than as a struggle with quasi-sovereign bodies. In grappling with the problem of rent-seeking in the following decades, the government of Maria Theresa, much like its predecessors since the rise of the standing army, would succeed in redirecting noble self-interest more effectively to the changing imperatives of the fiscal-military state. After Harrach’s return to Vienna from Naples, official pressure on his tax farms eased off. But no sooner was he in his grave in 1742 than the authorities returned to the question, now abetted by a number of circumstances. The Peace of Breslau in the summer of 1742 offered a respite from armed conflict. Pointedly ignoring her father’s promise to the Harrachs, Maria Theresa installed a Landmarschall of her own choosing, Count Ferdinand Herberstein, a close confidant and former head of her household.50 The lease’s heir, none other than Friedrich Harrach, had not returned from a tour of duty as interim stadholder in Brussels (1741–3).51 The Estates were informed that the taxes sublet to the Harrachs had not been conceded in perpetuity, also that the aulic decree of May 10, 1727 obliged them to render account of revenue that ultimately belonged to the ruler’s domain.52 Aloys Harrach had never provided the required information nor had the Estates insisted he do so. Now they claimed that the taxes were actually their property. Rather more barefaced was the demand to know why the Aulic Chamber had “remained silent [about the accounts] for so long” and waited until after the Landmarschall’s death to “push [its claims] forward.”53 This latest initiative fizzled out less thanks to the Estates’ delaying tactics than to Friedrich Harrach’s homecoming. After kicking his

49 On the principal-agent problem (and the quotations in this sentence and the following ones), see Guy Rowlands, The Financial Decline of a Great Power: War, Influence, and Money in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford, 2012), 9–10. 50 Aulic decree to the Estates, Nov. 29, 1742, NÖLA, StB, 572, f. 135v–137r. In a letter to Friedrich Harrach at the time of Herberstein’s appointment, State Chancellor Ulfeld conjectured that the young queen wanted to flex her political muscle. Count Corfiz Ulfeld to Harrach, Nov. 16, 1742, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 606. 51 Three days after the Landmarschall’s death, the Estates’ syndic Christoph Kriegl petitioned for permission to remain administrator of the duties. Kriegl to Friedrich Harrach, Nov. 10, 1742, AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 545. 52 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” NÖLA, StA, B-10, nos. 28–9, carton 332, f. 361–7. 53 Report to the “three upper Estates” by their “deputies” to the consultations, Mar. 29, 1743, NÖLA, StA, B-10, nos. 28–9, carton 332, f. 376–9.

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heels in the southern Netherlands following his father’s demise, he finally arrived back in Vienna. Count Herberstein’s tenure as Landmarschall proved an unexpectedly short interlude. He died taking the waters at Carlsbad only a year and a half after assuming office. Friedrich Harrach’s hour finally struck. And there was much to recommend him. He was a man of energy, talent, intelligence, and influence, as well as an adept diplomat who had been a protégé of Prince Eugene in the great commander’s better days.54 With an eye to the future, he had in good time transferred his allegiance to Francis Stephan of Lorraine. As Obersthofmeister, he had spent nearly a decade at the side of the archduchess Maria Elisabeth, the regent in Brussels, where he had been a tenacious, if pragmatic, champion of the central government’s interests. Though he rejected the Church’s interference in affairs of state, he opposed “despotism in the French style” and “saw the wise management of public finances as a prerequisite to persuading the Estates to apply their credit for the service of the ruler.”55 These circumstances are worth bearing in mind given the dispute a few years later with Haugwitz. On the archduchess’s death, he had become acting stadholder. The debt that he had accumulated during his long stay in the Netherlands perhaps fed his impatience to get back to Vienna, but ambitious courtiers always feared being away from the center of power for too long.56 Even before Herberstein expired, the signs presaged a Harrach comeback at the Landhaus. When the Landmarschall departed for Carlsbad, Maria Theresa named a Harrach of the family’s elder branch, Carl Anton (1692–1758), a member of the Estates’ executive committee, to act in his stead. Only weeks later, in July 1744, she finally sent for the determined and self-confident Friedrich. He was not to keep the coveted post for long, formally at least. His promotion the following year to the Bohemian grand chancellorship made him one of her leading ministers, obliging him to give up the Lower Austrian job even as a return to the halcyon days of 54 Franz Pichorner, “Niederländische Ökonomika: Ein Thema der Korrespondenz des Grafen Friedrich Harrach mit Prinz Eugen von Savoyen (1733–1736),” in Othmar Pickl, ed., Wirtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen den Österreichischen Niederlanden und den Österreichischen Erblanden im 18. Jahrhundert (Graz, 1991), 101–22; Elisabeth Garms-Cornides, “ ‘On n’a qu’a vouloir, et tout est possible oder i bin halt wer i bin’: Eine Gebrauchsanweisung für den Wiener Hof, geschrieben von Friedrich August Harrach für seinen Bruder Ferdinand Bonaventura,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 89–111; Sandra Hertel, Maria Elisabeth: Österreichische Erzherzogin und Statthalterin in Brüssel (1725–1741) (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2014), 111–21; Klaas Van Gelder, “Financial Depletion, Faction Struggle and Competing Networks: The Background to Count Harrach’s Reforms of the Southern Netherlands’ Central Government (1733–1735),” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 92 (2014): 1081–1112; Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 300–7. See Rudolf Graf Khevenhüller-Metsch and Hanns Schlitter, eds., Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias: Tagebuch des Fürsten Johann Josef Khevenhüller-Metsch, kaiserlichen Obristhofmeister 1742–76, 7 vols. (Vienna, 1907–25), ii, 328–30 ( June 4, 1749), for a sympathetic contemporary account of Harrach’s personality and career. For the high opinion that contemporaries had of Harrach’s honesty and abilities, see Braubach, Prinz Eugen, iv, 249. 55 Quotations from Pichorner, “Niederländische Ökonomika,” 114; Van Gelder, “Financial Depletion,” 1100. 56 On this point, see Pečar, Die Ökonomie, 51–2. Harrach’s debt problems are apparent in his correspondence in the early 1740s with State Chancellor Ulfeld. AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 606.

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Table 5.1. Holders of the office of Lower Austrian Landmarschall under Maria Theresa Count Aloys Harrach Count Leopold Viktorin Windisch-Graetz Count Ferdinand Leopold Herberstein Count Carl Anton Harrach Count Friedrich Harrach Count Ferdinand Bonaventura Harrach Count Friedrich Harrrach Count Joseph Breunner Count Carl Ferdinand Königsegg-Erps Prince Johann Wilhelm Trautson Count Johann Anton Pergen

(1715–42) (1742, acting) (1742–4) (1744, interim) (1744–5) (1745–50) (1746–8, acting) (1748–9, acting) (1749–53, until 1750 acting) (1753–75) (1775–90)

Harrach influence at Court seemed to be in the offing.57 But the chair at the Landhaus on the square of the Friars Minor was to remain firmly in family hands after all. His younger brother, Ferdinand, now received the nod. In actual fact, Friedrich himself would deputize as Landmarschall almost continuously from the fall of 1746 to the spring of 1748 during Ferdinand’s absence on diplomatic missions and as governor of Milan (see Table 5.1). Friedrich Harrach was well and truly a minister “made” by Maria Theresa, as she herself famously, if bitterly, noted on the minutes of the momentous conference of late January 1748.58 Yet he ultimately paid little heed to this basic fact and fiercely opposed the Haugwitz program adopted as the policy of the government in whose councils he sat. In the internal deliberations in the fall of 1747 on the planned Moravian and Bohemian recesses, he initially played a cooperative role.59 But by the spring of 1748, many weeks after negotiations with the diets in Brünn and Prague had begun, he was protesting so tempestuously and in such a threatening tone that the empress reminded him through Count Ulfeld that she was his sovereign. If he had adhered to “other principles,” she wrote, she “did not doubt that he had done so out of a well-meaning intention to serve.” She expected that he would “operate according to the decision” she had taken and ensure that the territories complied “because there would be nothing more harmful to My service than introducing a system that was not observed.”60 This unequivocal summons failed to move Harrach. For reasons that the empress would later label “obstinacy and aversion,” he refused his support.61 Only days before the Lower Austrian diet opened to consider the new plan, he was replaced as acting Landmarschall by the 57 The Harrachs owned large estates in the kingdom of St. Wenceslaus and were in fact Bohemian in origin. 58 See ÖZV, II/2, 206. 59 Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 93–5. 60 Maria Theresa to [Obersthofmeister Ulfeld], Schönbrunn, May 1748 [no day], AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 481, f. 40–1. Ferdinand Menčik, “Kaiserin Maria Theresia und Friedrich Graf Harrach,” Sitzungsberichte der königl. böhmischen Gesellschaft für Wissenschaften: Classe für Philosophie, Geschichte und Philologie 7 (1899): 3–4, reproduced this letter without dating it. Cf. ÖZV, II/1/1, 155–6; Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, iv, 20. 61 Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften,” 343.

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archduchy’s vice-stadholder, Count Joseph Breunner, on the pretext that he was to accompany the Court to Moravia.62 Harrach unfortunately left behind no memoirs or other writings that would shed light on his motives in 1748. The diarist Khevenhüller, a friendly witness, testified to a distinct spirit of contradiction that caused him to hold views “only in order not to speak like the others.”63 Ambition and factional motives, in addition to overweening self-confidence, may be suspected behind his politics. Both he and Philipp Kinsky, his predecessor as Bohemian grand chancellor, were antagonists of Johann Christoph Bartenstein, an imperial confidant to whom Maria Theresa felt she owed her monarchy’s survival. Haugwitz was another advisor who enjoyed both the empress’s particular favor and the enmity of Harrach and Kinsky, leaders of the Bohemian party in Vienna. As a Silesian, Haugwitz was a native of the Bohemian lands who conspicuously owed his rise to neither of them. He was an interloper out of their own backyard. He had come to Maria Theresa’s attention through her husband, Francis Stephan of Lorraine, and her friend, Count Silva-Tarouca, and had been sponsored by her privy secretary, Ignaz von Koch, who, like Bartenstein, was a trusted councilor. Marital connections to the empress’s household through the Fuchs clan, to which her beloved former governess belonged, also helped Haugwitz, who otherwise had his own formidable abilities, administrative experience, and determination to recommend him.64 Having established himself in the empress’s confidence without Harrach’s help, Haugwitz threatened the grand chancellor’s political position with his plan to renovate the monarchy’s finances. Increasing the Contribution and overhauling the territorial cadasters, which was to follow, directly impinged on core areas of Harrach’s official bailiwick. Another aspect of Haugwitz’s program deserves closer attention in respect of his conflict with Harrach. The reformer was an exponent of cameralism determined to manage and enhance the ruler’s income.65 He gave systematic application to a theory of government that had earlier attracted Habsburg attention and acquired new currency under the auspices of fiscal-military exigency and the rationalizing impulses of the early Enlightenment. Throughout the central lands, the famous “Representations and Chambers” established under Haugwitz’s aegis imparted

62 Aulic decree, June 10, 1748, NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 11v. Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 243 (June 21, 1748). 63 Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 329 (June 4, 1749). 64 Dagmar Ruzicka, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf von Haugwitz (1702–1765): Weg, Leistung und Umfeld eines schlesisch-österreichischen Staatsmannes (Frankfurt am Main, 2002), 105–6. For Harrach, Kinsky, and Bartenstein, see Alfred Ritter von Arneth, “Johann Christoph Bartenstein und seine Zeit,” AÖG 46 (1871): 26. For Kinsky’s hatred of Haugwitz, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 15. 65 For Haugwitz as a cameralist, see Walter, Die Theresianische Staatsreform, 36. Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994), 74–6; Peter H. Wilson, Absolutism in Central Europe (London and New York, 2000), 115. For cameralism generally, see Keith Tribe, “Cameralism and the Science of Government,” JMH 56 (1984): 263–84; Andre Wakefield, The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice (Chicago and London, 2009).

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tangible, institutional expression to the new approach.66 The empress herself spoke of her “military, cameral, and debt system.”67 Given the alienations of previous generations, revenue sources had to be recovered before progress was even possible. Friedrich Harrach’s own vested interests not only weakened his case in the ministry for signing away cameral income; they also made him personally vulnerable. In her message of warning to him of May 1748 via Ulfeld, the empress repeated her cameralist resolve. Haugwitz brought his redemption plans to general attention in the proposition laid before the diet a month later. The threat to his own tax farms would be the factor that prompted Harrach’s obstreperous return in July to Vienna after having promised to stay away. One well-placed observer wondered that he would discredit himself in such a way when he otherwise disposed of such “handsome means.”68 A combination of factors ranging from pride and arrogance, faction, and personal financial interest to very real policy differences reveals the Haugwitz–Harrach conflict as a typical clash of opposing parties at an early modern Court. With the help of relatives and supporters, Harrach threw up a little dust when he arrived in Vienna in July.69 As Iwasaki has shown, the Estates had by that time accepted with no fundamental dissent the need for a major increase in the grant. Maria Theresa herself praised their “compliance.”70 After Haugwitz’s harangue to the diet, now sitting under the vice-stadholder’s chairmanship, each of the “three upper Estates” had debated the proposition in its own chambers. Due to its chronic poverty, the Fourth Estate remained as marginal at this diet—more than ever concerned with money—as it had been at earlier ones. Basic agreement to the demands already obtained in these preliminary discussions, which took place in the third week of June. Over the course of the following weeks, a “deputation” of the Estates hammered out the new recess with Haugwitz.71 No corporate body in the Habsburg lands in 1748 had greater experience of such agreements than the

66 Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1995), 222, has drawn attention to the marked rise in the proportion of indirect (regressive) to direct taxation in the monarchy’s revenues beginning under Haugwitz. 67 Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften,” 318. 68 Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 249 ( July 22, 1748). 69 Menčik, “Kaiserin Maria Theresia,” 5–6; Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 319, reports Maria Theresa’s irritation at the delay in later July. 70 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 314. The quotation is from Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften,” 314. See also Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 103. 71 Previously published lists of Lower Austrian representatives to the negotiations contain errors or omissions (e.g., Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 102; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 16 (fn. 43); and Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 316–17). According to the original minutes (NÖLA, LH, 69, f. 204–88), the participants on behalf of the Estates included Joseph Rosner, provost of St. Dorothea (member of the college of Deputies); Karl Fetzer, Schotten abbot (member of the Estates’ executive committee); Count Ernst Ferdinand Auersperg (presiding officer of the college of Deputies); Count Carl Anton Harrach (member of the Estates’ executive committee and earlier briefly acting Landmarschall); Landuntermarschall Moser (head of the Estate of knights); Daniel von Moser (member of the college of Deputies); and Johann Albrecht von Lindegg (member of the college of Deputies who succeeded when Daniel von Moser’s term expired in July 1748). The Estates’ syndic (Christoph Kriegl) also attended. Different constellations of these men turned up at the various sessions.

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Lower Austrian Estates. Since the 1680s they had operated almost continuously under the terms of a recess (1689, 1701, 1713, 1723, 1730, 1739). The novelty of 1748 was that it provided for a standing army of pre-determined size as well as longterm debt-service, “in effect, two Contributions,” as Dickson put it.72 As we have seen, previous recesses had prioritized the debt problem. Haugwitz now corrected the disproportion that had become ever crasser. The Prussians anticipated, and no doubt hoped, that the new system would destroy the Estates’ financial credit by ruining their autonomy.73 That this was not planned became clear even before the end of the negotiations: the authorities asked the Estates for a loan of 400,000 fl. to maintain Habsburg troops in the Low Countries.74 If the Estates regarded assent to the proposition as both their patriotic duty and in their own interests, the magnitude of the planned increase nonetheless came as a shock. The distress was all the greater with peace in sight. The treaty at Aix-laChapelle would be signed only weeks later. In the recess of 1723, the Estates had agreed to the sum of 700,000 fl.; this had been confirmed in 1730 and 1739. From the later 1730s onward, they had regularly voted a basic grant of 900,000 fl. The amount required by Haugwitz—2,008,968 fl. annually over ten years—more than doubled the previous figure and increased by some 130 percent the sum provided for in the last recess. In the later years of the Austrian succession war, the Estates had furnished support approaching or even exceeding in value the Haugwitz request. But the extra money had come largely through loans or self-administered property taxes, while a high proportion of the money approved by the diet had been held back for debt-service. Haugwitz now foresaw regular taxation based on revised tax records, a topic which the recess did not address, as the source of the entire sum. Half-heartedly, the Estates tried to challenge their “proportion” in relation to that of the other lands. This old ploy failed. When Haugwitz let them know in no uncertain terms at the beginning of July that the sum requested could not be revised, they quickly gave in.75 Though his success has widely been thought to have ended the culture of negotiation on taxation at the diet, it would be more accurate to refer to the culmination of a longer-standing trend. In the preceding decades, for reasons already discussed, the grant listed in the official proposition had effectively ceased to be a matter of controversy or even much debate. But the jolt of 1748 sent out a lasting shock wave: the ordinary peacetime grant set by Haugwitz would remain in effect for more than sixty years. Yet the talks on the new recess involved give and take much as in earlier cases. Haugwitz made allowances to secure agreement, while the Estates voiced their own concerns. Some points of compromise were already apparent in his speech to the diet in June; others emerged from the deliberations in July. The most

72

Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 24. On this point, see Emile Karafiol, “The Reforms of the Empress Maria Theresa in the Provincial Government of Lower Austria 1740–1765,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1965, 98 (fn. 1). 74 Aulic decree to the Estates, Aug. 23, 1748, NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 38r–40r. 75 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 317. 73

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important concerned the material (as opposed to financial) burden in connection with maintaining the army. Despite earlier attempts to convert obligations into monetary equivalents, the Estates had remained liable for all manner of logistical support and payments in kind. Haugwitz himself noted victuals, lodgings, transport, recruits, and mounts, and the fact that because need could not always be anticipated, the Estates had ended up bearing costs with little or no compensation. In exchange for accepting the increased grant, he promised that “the Estates [should] have nothing to do with the military.”76 The only exception, they were assured, would be billeting until sufficient barracks existed, while agricultural produce for the army would be paid for in cash. For the recess’s duration, whether in peace or war, he promised that the government would refrain from increasing the grant or requesting other forms of aid such as extra taxes, loans, or the various forms of free money historically milked out of the Estates (including the “presents” customarily expected at dynastic births and marriages). Vigorous and, as it would turn out, fully warranted skepticism based on long experience met these assurances, though the authorities did in fact succeed for a while in organizing military provisioning without the Estates’ help.77 The most vexing problem for the Landhaus concerned how the bill for the increased grant was actually to be met. Though Haugwitz had sworn to redeem cameral revenue “little by little,” he was prepared to compromise even on that issue. In her message of May 1748 to Friedrich Harrach through Ulfeld, the empress herself had already indicated a degree of flexibility. A long-standing bone of fiscal contention between the government and Estates concerned the real estate subordinate to the Lower Austrian Vizedom, a cameral agency dissolved in 1745. As an incentive to accept the new system, Haugwitz now permitted the Estates to incorporate the approximately 1,800 disputed tax units (“houses”) into their tax records, proportionately decreasing the load on other taxpayers.78 This solution was a nod to Friedrich Harrach, the advocate of just such a solution.79 In addition to placing the properties under the Estates’ tax jurisdiction, the empress likewise offered to sell the Vizedom’s patrimonial rights and income, though the details were not worked out until after the recess’s conclusion.80 Albeit in very general terms, the government undertook to promote commerce, a policy for which the

76 Quotation from the proposition to the diet, June 11, 1748, NÖLA, LH, 69. See Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 282. 77 As early as 1749, the Estates resumed recruitment for the army. Michael Hochedlinger, “Rekrutierung—Militarisierung—Modernisierung: Militär und ländliche Gesellschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie im Zeitalter des aufgeklärten Absolutismus,” in Stefan Kroll and Kersten Krüger, eds., Militär und ländliche Gesellschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Hamburg, 2000), 343. 78 Silvia Petrin, “Die Auflösung des niederösterreichischen Vizedomamtes,” Mitteilungen aus dem Niederösterreichischen Landesarchiv 1 (1977): 33. 79 Shuichi Iwasaki, “Grabmal der ständischen Freiheiten? Die Steuerrezessverhandlung von 1748 in Niederösterreich und die Etablierung eines komplementären Verhältnisses von Krone und Stände,” in Gerhard Ammerer et al., eds., Bündnispartner und Konkurrenten der Landesfürsten? Die Stände in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna and Munich, 2007), 323–45, 337. 80 Petrin, “Die Auflösung,” 33–46.

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Estates had long pleaded and that Harrach too had seen as a way of easing the fiscal squeeze. Still, the recess drove home Haugwitz’s triumph in a very personal way: Friedrich Harrach lost his tax farms.81 A further concession intended to make the enlarged grant palatable at the Landhaus underscored the political insignificance of the Fourth Estate in 1748. In theory, the townsmen were responsible for one-fifth of the Lower Austrian grant, but urban poverty outside Vienna had engendered perpetual arrears and a running conflict with the other Estates. Rather than reducing the tax burden on the basis of the findings of the official “Gaisruck commission,” a body that had recently confirmed the lesser markets and towns’ lack of wherewithal, the authorities agreed to let the traditional charge of one-fifth stand.82 By contrast, only the previous year, the “three upper Estates” had been directed to find ways and means of making up themselves for what the Fourth Estate could not pay. Now, the clergy and nobility would bear proportionately less of a vastly increased grant. In effect, the government itself had to pick up the slack. Worries about their creditworthiness had prompted the Estates to sign previous recesses. The same inducement operated in 1748. If they rejected the new system, Haugwitz suggested, bankruptcy loomed.83 His interest in their survival and solvency was hardly less essential than theirs. Also under his system, the annual vote by the leading local landowners offered a form of recurring political legitimacy to taxation that would otherwise have been lacking. With the large increase, this was more necessary than ever. As in the past, the yearly convocation likewise continued to be a kind of surety for the debt the Estates underwrote. Given Haugwitz’s hostility to the Estates, a determination to rein in the growing reliance on their credit is beyond doubt. The empress herself condemned the consequences of this as socially malign.84 But as a precious source of cheap money, the Estates retained unbroken potential. During the negotiations earlier that year with the Estates in Prague, Haugwitz had carefully provided for the servicing of the large Bohemian debt.85 A calculation of the total amount owed to the Lower Austrian Estates by the government in 1748 showed the figure of 3,940,270 fl.86 This debt represented more than one-fifth of treasury liabilities to the Bohemian-Austrian lands, which totaled some 19,242,309 fl. This sum made up in turn nearly one-third of the long-term Habsburg debt other than that

81 College of Deputies to Friedrich Harrach, Oct. 25, 1748, officially notifying him of the end of his excise-tax farm as a consequence of the new recess. His claim to compensation is apparent in the communication from the college of Deputies to the “three upper Estates,” Nov. 29, 1748, NÖLA, StA, B-10, Nr. 28–9, carton 332, f. 630–1 and 636–9. His possession of the custom’s house at Bruck an der Leitha also ended. Menčik, “Kaiserin Maria Theresia,” 8; Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 103, 117; Mensi, Die Finanzen, 725; Bowman, “Das Mautwesen,” 175–6. 82 Iwasaki, “Das Grabmal,” 338. For the Gaisruck commission, see Franz Baltzarek, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des vierten Standes in Niederösterreich,” MÖStA 23 (1970): 85–95. 83 Iwasaki, Stände und Staatsbildung, 310; also Karafiol, “The Reforms,” 97–9. 84 Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften,” 303. 85 For the Bohemian negotiations, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 220. 86 This is the figure contained in §13 of the Recess, Sept. 18, 1748, NÖLA, LH, 69.

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charged on the City Bank of Vienna.87 The credit of the Estates of the central lands, with Lower Austria a leading source, was now a brace helping to hold the Habsburg state together. Specifics of the recess ensured the Estates’ ongoing financial soundness in four ways. First, an annual sum of 208,968 fl. drawn from the new grant—what Dickson referred to as the “cameral Contribution”—was set aside to service liabilities.88 The issue of debt management was settled differently than in the other central lands, which might account for the erroneous assumption that the Lower Austrians alone among the various bodies of Estates saved their good offices in 1748.89 In the land below the Enns they continued to be in immediate charge of part of their treasury debt, while their counterparts elsewhere sacrificed, for a time at least, administrative control of the equivalent liabilities. Even so, the “cameral Contributions” levied in those places guaranteed that there would be no default on existing obligations. Second, the government accorded the Lower Austrian Estates a share of the income from the tobacco monopoly amounting to 50,000 fl. annually to ease debt-service. Third, the government undertook to publish no laws concerning the Contribution without first consulting the Estates. By extension, the Estates were to remain in immediate charge of the system of direct taxation based on the tax records that they continued to maintain. In succeeding years, Haugwitz applied enormous pressure on them to see that the levies imposed were brought in, but he had no way of raising direct taxes himself without a costly administrative apparatus that was an unrealistic option in a society such as Austria’s. Crucially, the Estates’ credit would have been undermined without direct access to tax flows to pay interest and recompense capital on the public bonds in circulation under their own name. The vast increase of the grant, the fund that ultimately underlay their ability to float loans, and the inexorability with which Haugwitz insisted on collection would in actual fact sink the wells of corporate credit to new depths. Within a decade, the government would again have spectacular recourse to the Estates’ good offices, though this was surely unforeseen in 1748. Fourth, the recess specified that the diet would be convoked yearly for “renewing” the official tax request.90 The ten-year authorization did not change established practice, any more than earlier recesses had done. All sides continued to view the tax vote as imperative. Yet there was a difference: previous agreements had guaranteed only a minimum grant, whereas Haugwitz had pledged that 2,008,968 fl. represented the maximum amount on demand. For this reason, Maria Theresa

87 For a breakdown of the territorial debt in the Bohemian-Austrian lands, including Lower Austria, see Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 106–9. Figures on the larger Habsburg debt are in Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 27. 88 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 21, 201. 89 As in Karafiol, “The Reforms,” 98 (fn. 1). The differing territorial solutions are apparent in the papers of Ludwig Zinzendorf. HHStA, Nachlaß Zinzendorf, HS 21, pp. 574–5. 90 The longstanding idea that Haugwitz effectively “abolished” the Estates’ right to approve taxation is traceable to Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, iv, 14. Another nineteenth-century scholar, Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 94, was closer to the mark.

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dispensed with opening the diet with the traditional panoply, reasoning that the fixed request and her promise to make no added demands rendered the rite superfluous. As early as 1749, she declined to attend the customary De Sancto Spiritu mass when the Estates came to the Hofburg to claim the proposition, leading some courtiers to joke that “she herself realized that her new arrangements had nothing to do with the Holy Spirit.”91 The following year she decreed a different procedure that amounted to the bestowal of a new privilege. In future a deputation from the Landhaus—rather than the Estates in corpore—would receive the annual tax proposition out of her own hands in a reduced ceremony.92 This new handover in fact set a precedent into the nineteenth century. Like the previous ritual, it would invariably be reported in the press.93 We might be tempted to construe the confirmation of the “freedoms, privileges, and old usages” set out in the recess of 1748 as a baroque turn of phrase simply lifted from earlier accords. Yet the fiscal authority and good offices of the Estates rested intrinsically on privileged status acquired by solemn concession and preserved by recurrent and equally solemn sanction. If that status were lost, the financial clout that went with it would evaporate. However much Habsburg rulers might restrict (fiscal) privilege over the coming decades in the never-ending quest for money, they could not afford to undermine the Estates. The recess of 1748 was an installment in an enduring story. A concession of a different caliber—this time to Friedrich Harrach personally— facilitated the conclusion. Only a week before the recess’s signature, the empress notified her grand chancellor and former Landmarschall that he would receive 100,000 fl. as reparation for the cancellation of his customs’ house on the Hungarian border at Bruck an der Leitha.94 His return to Vienna in July had paid off after all, or so it would have seemed. In reality, he was shortly to forfeit the Bohemian chancellery, dissolved early the following year to make way for Haugwitz’s Directorium in publicis et cameralibus, which unified political and fiscal power. Here too the empress sought to sweeten the bitter pill. Not only was Harrach allowed his munificent chancellor’s pay of 36,000 fl. per annum, he was also invited to preside over the so-called Conferenz in Internis. Though one witness saw him as the new “prime minister,” he was probably being “sidelined in a highly honorable way,” as the historian Friedrich Walter suspected long ago.95 Kicking troublemakers upstairs would be typical of Maria Theresa’s adroit approach to power. His reappointment as acting head of the Lower Austrian Estates just at the time that the ticklish reform of the tax records was getting underway nonetheless suggests the empress’s continuing dependence on established families who might not share her goals.96 91

Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 350–1 (Sept. 15, 1749). Aulic decree, Sept. 8, 1750, NÖLA, LH, 70. 93 Examples in Wienerisches Diarium, Nov. 13, 1754 (pp. 5–6), Oct. 17, 1764 (p. 5), and Oct. 11, 1775 (pp. 5–6). 94 Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 103. 95 ÖZV, II/1/1, 175. Also see Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 225–6. 96 Aulic decree to Lower Austrian Estates, May 2, 1749, NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 145r. 92

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Smallpox carried Friedrich Harrach off before he could pick up the pieces of his career. With his brother Ferdinand Harrach, who formally remained Landmarschall, still absent in Milan, the vacancy gave the empress a chance to place someone at the Estates more in tune with her own policies. But there were few takers, though she had a relatively free hand. No one wanted “to bite under the current domestic circumstances,” as the diarist Khevenhüller put it.97 The impending reform of the tax records had created an atmosphere of fearful wait-and-see. Only three months after Harrach’s death did Count Carl Ferdinand KönigseggErps agree to fill the breach in an acting capacity. The appointment was made definitive in 1750.98 It was stopgap all the same, as Königsegg-Erps, a Swabian noble with close ties to the southern Netherlands, where he had spent much of his career, was a minister loaded with other duties. Though his family had belonged to the Lower Austrian Estates since the time of his grandfather, an imperial vicechancellor, he was not a local seigniorial landowner, qualifying him as one of those infamous “foreigners” supposedly favored under the new regime. On the government’s side, he had participated in a marginal way in the recess talks in the summer of 1748; his acquaintanceship with Friedrich Harrach went back to their days in the Low Countries. In the event, Königsegg would have little time for the Landhaus. Only in 1753 with the installation of the empress’s confidant, Prince Trautson, as Landmarschall would a durable solution to the problem of managing the Lower Austrian Estates be found. Even then, the embittered remnants of the Harrach grouping dissolved only slowly through death and attrition. To what extent did the events of 1748 represent a revolution or fundamental break with the past? There can be no question that many nobles including Khevenhüller, a leading courtier who was himself a member of the Estates in the land below the Enns, or the dislocated Harrachs, for that matter, experienced a year of bewildering and annoying change: an unprecedentedly massive, peacetime increase in the annual grant with apparently little prospect of cushioning its impact by means of loans or property taxes commuted for lump-sum payments, and the loss of long-enjoyed and lucrative sources of cameral revenue.99 Yet we should perhaps not take noble lamentations reverberating down the centuries at face value. A comparison with almost contemporary events in France is instructive. In a dispute over royal financial reform and law-making power in the early 1770s, the French chancellor Maupeou launched an assault on the parlements, the kingdom’s leading privileged corporations, that was dubbed a “revolution” by people at the time. He notoriously made use of musketeers, exile, purges, restructuring, and abolitions to enforce his will.100 97

Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 340 ( July 30, 1749). Aulic decrees of July 22, 1749 and Sept. 22, 1750, NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 152 and 229v. 99 Khevenhüller himself used the term Revolution to refer to the reorganization of the central agencies in the spring of 1749, not in respect of change at the Estates in 1748. Khevenhüller, Tagebuch, ii, 318 (May 2, 1749). 100 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2009), 337–8; Julian Swann, “Politics: Louis XV,” in William Doyle, ed., Old Regime France 1648–1788 (Oxford, 2001), 220. 98

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If Haugwitz was not above intimidating his adversaries, he did not resort to physical coercion or disperse the Estates by force. He was lucky that Friedrich Harrach’s hostility was so clumsy. Taking advantage of the absence of a potential troublemaker, Haugwitz went to the Landhaus personally to argue his case. He combined determined persuasion with the time-tried instrument of a recess, which he skillfully adapted to new circumstances. For their part, the Estates exhibited a realistic understanding of their own interests in a changing world in which their Silesian counterparts had fallen under Prussian-Protestant domination. An avatar of the Catholic-Habsburg world, the Estates were being asked to approve practically the same annual sum as in the last war years. The recess did not hazard their credit or touch their organization; and the annual diet with the tax vote stood under guarantee. By engaging the Estates, Haugwitz brilliantly succeeded in winning their consent, however grudging it may have been. His feat ultimately lent the new dispensation the permanence and legitimacy that the Maupeou “revolution” lacked. Yet the implications of 1748 had still to be worked out. More reform was in store. Only then would a new political balance that took account of fiscalmilitary realities emerge.

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6 Reform, Credit, and Compromise, 1749–63 On September 25, 1760 a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates attended a meeting with government leaders at the former Bohemian Chancellery, a grand baroque edifice by Fischer von Erlach in central Vienna that now housed Haugwitz’s Directorium. On one side of an oblong conference table, Haugwitz himself occupied a place flanked by the Chotek brothers and various aulic councilors. Facing them were the Estates: Count Franz Harrach (son of the former acting Landmarschall Carl Anton); Rainer Kollmann, abbot of Zwettl; Count Ferdinand Lamberg; the Schotten abbot Robert Stadler; Landuntermarschall Moser; Johann Baptist von Mensshengen; and the Estates’ syndic. At the table’s head sat Landmarschall Trautson, whose placement suggested his intermediary status between ruler and Estates. The meeting was one of a series with representatives of the Estates of the central lands that had been scheduled for the express purpose of conveying official financial needs for the coming military campaign. Haugwitz had high hopes of victory now that Prussia was on the defensive. But the monarchy’s financial straits threatened his hopes in the fourth year of bitter war. Toward the meeting’s end, to accentuate the situation’s gravity, he confidentially gave Trautson a copy of the total projected requirements for the fiscal year 1760 in the expectation that these would be taken into account by the Estates in voting their grant.1 Though the actual budget had not been revealed, as in later parliamentary practice, and the participants were sworn to secrecy, they fully appreciated the extraordinary step that the minister had taken (“so gar den Statum rerum communcire, welches ansonsten nicht gewöhnlich”). By raising the curtain on its financial deliberations, an otherwise politically unaccountable government was attempting to demonstrate transparency—this with the aim of inspiring confidence in a privileged corps that over the previous years had raised millions of florins for the war effort above and beyond what the recess of 1748 had called for. Two days later, the attendees convened at Trautson’s apartment in the Hofburg to review the material provided by Haugwitz. Those who took part in these scenes might have rubbed their eyes at the image later painted by many historians of the Estates in the age of Maria Theresa— namely that their “essence . . . was completely robbed of meaning; only the shell

1

Minutes of the meeting are preserved in NÖLA, LH, 77.

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remained and the empress was astute enough to leave the facade alone.”2 Some thirty years ago, the pathbreaking work of P. G. M. Dickson demonstrated that this image had little basis in the hard financial facts. The Estates were not the “ciphers” of legend.3 But old perspectives have died hard. Terms such as “emasculation” and “disempowered” continue to describe what the Estates experienced under the reforming Habsburg government.4 Alternative lines of argument are likewise strongly étatiste. Reform allegedly “integrated” or “incorporated” the Estates, or their administrative structures, into the “state.”5 This process similarly involved the unilateral imposition of authority from above, a kind of Gleichschaltung. Admittedly, little actual proof has been produced for this assumption. A Manichean division of historical actors into pro- and anti-modernizers also still obtains in areas of the scholarship. The Estates appear as “villains”—though they underwrote the Habsburg war effort with their credit.6 Though Dickson shed much light in shadowy corners, little is actually known about how mid-eighteenth-century fiscal-military exigency and state-sponsored reform might have changed the Estates. There has been no archives-based survey of the Estates for any of the central lands in this period. The data about their organization and activities over the empress’s reign are sketchy and conflicting, and large gaps exist. Some commentators since Dickson have declared that the intermediary powers were confined to the administration of justice, implying the forfeiture of fiscal and other charges.7 Since Dickson’s finding that the Estates routinely managed direct taxation (Carinthia was for a time the exception among the Austrian duchies), their preservation and loss of fiscal control have both been

2

Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 325. P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), i, 329. 4 John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA, 2015), 16 (“abrogated, annulled or ignored”); Werner Ogris, “The Habsburg Monarchy in the Eighteenth Century: The Birth of the Modern Centralized State,” in Antonio Padoa-Schioppa, ed., Legislation and Justice, vol. C of The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, 13th– 18th Centuries series (Oxford and New York, 1997), 319 (“deprivation of power”); Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (2nd edn., Vienna and Munich, 2001), 262 (“disempowered”); Karl Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang der höfischen Welt: Repräsentation, Reform und Reaktion im habsburgischen Vielvölkerstaat (Vienna, 2001), 357 (“emasculation”); Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz und Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994), 77 (“deprived” and “reduced”). 5 Eugen Guglia, Maria Theresia: Ihr Leben und ihre Regierung, 2 vols. (Munich and Berlin, 1917), ii, 33; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 269; Helmuth Stradal, “Stände und Steuern in Österreich,” in XIIe Congrès international des sciences historiques (Louvain and Paris, 1966), 160. Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 268; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 162; Wolfgang Reinhard, Geschichte der Staatsgewalt: Eine vergleichende Verfassungsgeschichte Europas von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich, 1999), 332; Thomas Winkelbauer, Fürst und Fürstendiener: Gundaker von Liechtenstein, ein österreichischer Aristokrat des konfessionellen Zeitalters (Vienna and Munich, 1999), 170. 6 Franz A. J. Szabo, “Perspective from the Pinnacle: State Chancellor Kaunitz on Nobility in the Habsburg Monarchy,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 250. 7 Szabo, Kaunitz, 77; Vocelka, Glanz und Untergang, 359. 3

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alleged.8 Apart from an occasional reference to their bookkeeping offices, historians including Dickson have had almost nothing to say about the Estates’ administrative structures either in or outside of Vienna. This chapter and the next one examine the relationship between the Estates and the dynastic state from the Haugwitz reforms of the late 1740s and early 1750s to Maria Theresa’s death in 1780. All three major areas of early modern government—justice and public order, fiscal affairs, and military administration— will be considered. Given the alternation of war and peace, the forces of ebb and flow characterized the interplay of central and territorial authority rather more than linear drive. Between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War, dissension prevailed as a result of Haugwitz’s three-pronged reform offensive to ensure that the new Contribution would be paid, the tax registers rectified, and the princely domain revitalized. The coming of armed conflict in 1756 defused the domestic tension, which gave way to far-reaching cooperation. As the fighting wore on, strains resurfaced due to the sheer scale of resources that had to be exacted from local society. Moreover, the Estates’ unparalleled mobilization of cash and credit exacerbated problems at the Landhaus that attracted the authorities’ notice. The friction produced by the war’s disastrous financial legacy, combined with scandal at the Estates and punctuated by open confrontation, combusted in 1764. The government overhauled the Estates’ standing committees and other structures, while their financial doings came in for closer monitoring. These developments account for the idea that state-sponsored reform crippled the Estates. Toward the end of the reign, activity at the Landhaus, never at a standstill, gathered pace again in the wake of the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9) and efforts to retool the tax system. In fact, the Estates were more essential to the regime than ever. They provided basic services that stabilized Habsburg rule; in exchange, their superior status was upheld. Even as it clipped back thickets of privilege and clawed back cameral income and other prerogatives, the government of Maria Theresa would respect the freedoms and autonomy required for the financial intermediation on which the security of her monarchy depended. Yet there is also evidence for a widespread principled view among those in power, with 8 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 236, 248. For the former, see Hamish M. Scott, “Reform in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1740-90,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., Enlightened Absolutism: Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth-Century Europe (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1990), 155; Wilhelm Brauneder and Friedrich Lachmayr, Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte (4th edn., Vienna, 1987), 103; and Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 282. For the latter, See Charles Ingrao, “Conflict or Consensus? Habsburg Absolutism and Foreign Policy 1700–1748,” AHY 19/20, part 1 (1983–4): 40; James Van Horn Melton, “The Nobility in the Bohemian and Austrian Lands, 1620–1780,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 2 vols. (2nd edn., Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2007), ii, 184; Ogris, “The Habsburg Monarchy,” 319; Renate Pieper, “Financing an Empire: The Austrian Composite Monarchy, 1650–1848,” in Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla et al., eds., The Rise of Fiscal States: A Global History (Cambridge, 2012), 173; James D. Tracy, “Taxation and State Debt,” in Hamish M. Scott, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, 1350–1750, ii: Cultures and Power (Oxford, 2015), 526. Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 271, confusingly stated that the “assessment and levy of the Contribution” became a responsibility of the new institutions called “Representation and Chambers.” If he meant actually running the tax system as opposed to oversight, this was not the case in Lower Austria (or other places).

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the possible exception of Joseph II and his more radical supporters, that representative institutions, however irksome, were necessary to a well-governed polity. Underpinning this view, apart from utilitarian considerations and political calculation, were the law and new currents in political economy. Where the cameralism practiced by Haugwitz tended to set limits to the Estates, later, physiocratic ideas evident in the thinking of enlightened reformers such as Karl Zinzendorf stressed the importance of the political representation of landed wealth and its participation in government. In varying ways, from their control of the tax registers on landed income to the spreading acreage of the abbeys, the Estates embodied such wealth. The ongoing jurisprudence of the Imperial Aulic Council in Vienna with its support for property rights as manifested by the Estates generally, the reform of the Lower Austrian Estates specifically in the 1760s, and the plan to create Estates in the new kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria in the 1770s all revealed the significance attributed to the representation of interests.

A T IM E OF “F EAR AN D MISGIVING ” The great administrative reshuffle beginning in 1749, the first of two such during Maria Theresa’s reign, brought forth a super-ministry called the Directorium in publicis et cameralibus at the locus of Habsburg government. As its head, Haugwitz became in name, as well as in fact, the empress’s chief domestic minister.9 This institutional concentration of fiscal and political authority, formerly divided up among other bodies, purposed the upkeep of the planned peacetime army that justified the reformed Contribution. The new agency swallowed up the Austrian and Bohemian Aulic Chancelleries, the latter the old stomping ground of Friedrich Harrach, hence allowing for greater coordination of the central lands and making it more difficult for ministers to lobby on behalf of their native areas. Because it inherited the Austrian Chancellery’s mandate with regard to direct taxation, the Directorium assumed responsibility for the annual Lower Austrian diet and the tax agreed in the recess of September 1748. Like the Chancellery, the Directorium was the sole institution of government entitled to issue the Estates with formal directives. In this way they continued to be “immediate” to their archduchess rather than subordinate to a provincial office, a highly prized privilege. Shake-up at the local and territorial levels complemented change at the center. Haugwitz’s early experiments have thrown the spotlight on rump Silesia and Inner Austria; reform attempts in Lower Austria dated back to the later years of Charles VI.10 The pattern was similar: the drive to increase cameral income exposed poverty and corruption. Following earlier inquiries, a commission set up in 1737 gained supervisory authority over the city of Vienna’s finances.11 Beginning in 1745, 9

Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 224–32. For the Silesian and Inner Austrian reforms, see ÖZV, II/1/1, 95–126. Rudolf Till, “Die Stadt Wiener Wirtschaftskommission,” Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Wien 2 (1940): 80–3. 10 11

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the pecuniary affairs of the eighteen princely cities and market towns in Lower Austria—the other “half” of the Fourth Estate—came in for closer inspection.12 Like religious foundations, the townsmen historically stood under the purview of the ruler’s domain in a way that the nobility did not, which explains the relative ease of such intervention. A special commission known by the name of its president, Count Gaisruck, recommended cost-cutting measures in the lesser urban areas that included fewer paid offices and regular financial statements.13 Such advice would be common in succeeding decades. After 1749 the highest institution of authority in the archduchy below the Enns—the office of stadholder presiding over the provincial government—gave way to bodies that mirrored the attempt to separate administration and justice.14 The new Regierung in publicis, soon renamed the “Representation and Chamber” as in other provinces, handled administrative affairs. Given that its reach did not extend much beyond Vienna and that central agencies or the City Bank of Vienna handled most Lower Austrian cameral revenue, it was comparatively weak. It exercised no formal power over the Estates (also in respect of the Contribution) and, like them, was formally subject to the Directorium. The newly created provincial high court oversaw, like the precursor institution, the entire court system including the Landmarschall’s tribunal (also known under certain circumstances as the Landrecht) with its seat at the Landhaus. The Estates retained their privileged jurisdiction, while the tribunal continued to be a fixed starting point for young nobles anxious to acquire the legal knowledge and training essential to their station. The tribunal would remain substantially unchanged until after the Seven Years War. Thanks to their solid finances, the Lower Austrian Estates did not experience comparable restructuring.15 Their standing directorial committee—the college of Deputies—continued to apportion, impose, and collect regular direct taxation with the help of auxiliary offices at the Landhaus including the receiver general and bookkeeper. The sitting Deputies in the late 1740s—Provost Joseph Rosner of St. Dorothea (1744–50), Count Ernst Ferdinand Auersperg (1745–51), Johann Albrecht von Lindegg (1747–53), Abbot Roman Mayerl of Säusenstein (1746–50), Count Adam Traun (1748–54), and Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta (1748–54)— had all come to office according to the usual modalities in the individual curiae. The receiver general chosen by the “three upper Estates” in 1746, Ferdinand Maximilian von Moser, served out his regular six-year term. His successor was elected in the accustomed way. And subordinate personnel at the palace of the

12 Emile Karafiol, “The Reforms of the Empress Maria Theresa in the Provincial Government of Lower Austria 1740–1765,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1965, 80–8; Franz Baltzarek, “Beiträge zur Geschichte des vierten Standes in Niederösterreich,” MÖStA 23 (1970): 81–104. 13 Franz Baltzarek, “Finanz- und Steuerinnovationen im Habsburgerreich im Zeitalter zwischen 1680 und 1780,” in Moritz Csáky and Andreas Lanzer, eds., Etatisation et bureaucratie—Staatswerdung und Bürokratie (Vienna, 1990), 34–6. 14 See Karafiol, “Reforms,” 103–18. 15 Karafiol, “Reforms,” 51, 98–9; Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 267 and ii, 248.

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Estates continued to be drawn from the clienteles of nobles and prelates.16 Just as the former aulic chancellery had done, the Directorium passed directives to the college, which remained a vital administrative link between the central and local levels. The college was still accountable to the diet and the assembly of “three upper Estates,” both presided over by the ruler’s proxy, the Landmarschall. The relative stability at the Lower Austrian Landhaus contrasted with the flux in the Inner Austrian duchies, where the badly managed Estates, especially in Carniola and Carinthia, were sunk in a morass of debt. Haugwitz’s famous tours of inspection in those places upended the provincial elite’s old assumptions about their room for maneuver. Still, the historian P. G. M. Dickson’s astute conjecture—that the successive “commissions,” “deputations,” and “representations” did not ultimately deprive the local Estates of control of the tax system— can be largely confirmed.17 In Laibach (Ljubljana) Haugwitz decreed that a townsman receive a seat in the chamber of Deputies (Verordnetenstelle)—the equivalent to the college of Deputies in Lower Austria—until then composed of a prelate, three lords, and a knight as well as the receiver general (also a lord).18 A reduction in the number of Deputies was also considered; new elections to the chamber were held, and the results sent to Vienna for approval.19 The Estates in Klagenfurt and Graz came in for similar treatment.20 In Carinthia they did lose their tax authority, though not as a result of Haugwitz’s whirlwind of 1747, but two years later as punishment for their steadfast refusal to approve the new Contribution.21 The task of bringing in direct taxes, beginning in 1750, fell to the Representation and Chamber, an agency that in the other Inner Austrian lands supervised the collection of taxes, though did not itself collect them—a role comparable to the Directorium’s in respect of the Lower Austrian Contribution.22 In Carinthia we might thus speak of “emasculation,” though all sides (including Maria Theresa) regarded the situation as anomalous and undesirable. In time it would be reversed. By May 1748 the dust in Laibach was settling: the chamber of Deputies still had the usual five members and receiver general (a lord). A townsman had not joined

16 Apparent in a letter from the Deputy, Johann Albrecht von Lindegg, to the Schotten abbot, July 5, 1753, concerning an appointment to a clerical position at the Landhaus. Schottenstift Archiv (Vienna), Scrinium 169, Nr. 15i. 17 Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 265–8. 18 Commissional decree (signed Haugwitz), Laibach, Mar. 12, 1747, AS 2, I, 178. 19 A contemporary account of these events (dated Aug. 1747) is found in AS 2, I, 178. 20 Martin Wutte, “Beiträge zur Verwaltungsgeschichte Kärntens,” Carinthia I 131 (1941): 98, 112. A reduction in the number of Styrian Deputies (from five to four) has also been reported. Gernot P. Obersteiner, Theresianische Verwaltungsreformen im Herzogtum Steiermark: Die Repräsentation und Kammer (1749–1763) als neue Landesbehörde des aufgeklärten Absolutismus (Graz, 1993), 145–6, dates this change to 1748/49, while Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929), 608, cites 1743. Bernhard Hackl, Die Theresianische Steuerrektifikation in Ober- und Innerösterreich 1747–1763: Die Neuordnung des ständischen Finanzwesens auf dem Sektor der direkten Steuern als ein fiskalischer Modernisierungsprozeß zwischen Reform und Stagnation (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 234, provides the names and salaries of the four Deputies in office in 1752. 21 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 16. 22 Wutte, “Beiträge,” 110.

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the group after all.23 Unlike in Lower Austria, the ruler’s representative at the Estates, the Landeshauptmann, had attended certain meetings of the chamber, labelled “conferences.” This practice continued after 1748. When present, the Landeshauptmann did not preside, though his prestige meant that the Deputies might journey to a “conference” away from Laibach. In the high summer of 1750, Landeshauptmann Auersperg hosted such a meeting at his castle at Kreuz in Upper Carniola.24 The chamber’s registers of business in the 1750s suggest that he participated above all when matters of back taxes or tax relief for individuals were on the agenda.25 This coincides with what is known about Haugwitz’s inexorable stringency in such questions in Lower Austria. Lasting changes to the Estates’ standing directorial committees in Inner Austria transpired in the early 1750s. The government buttressed the already strong position of the lords in these bodies: regardless of the date of appointment, they came to take precedence over knights. More importantly, the rotating presidency among prelates, lords, and knights was abolished and the chamber’s chair permanently assigned to a lord.26 The same practice already obtained in the lands above and below the Enns and Bohemia, where the authority associated with high birth already served fiscal-military purposes more consistently. In Inner Austria Maria Theresa also sanctioned longer tenures for presiding officers, which allowed their knowledge and experience to be put to longer use.27 These measures only haltingly changed older patterns. Similar considerations governed the bestowal in 1753 of the rank of privy councilor—high in the aulic pecking order—on the Lower Austrian Deputies.28 In a still largely agrarian and manorial world, social status and local prestige remained vital to effective rule. The succession of highborn nonentities that held the new Lower Austrian governorship in this period evidenced this truism.29 If the Lower Austrian Estates had hoped that consent to the new grant would ease the pressure, they were to be greatly disappointed, for Haugwitz was as determined to bring in the approved sum, and otherwise maximize revenues, as he had been to conclude the recess. Historically, wartime taxation—the grant fixed 23 A “Specification aller Landschaftlicher Besoldungen” dated May 1748 in AS 2, I, 178. It lists pay for five Deputies and the receiver general. 24 On Aug. 5, 1750, “Eintrag=Buch deren Conferential undt Sessions=Decreten,” June 1745–May 1753, AS 2, I, 925. 25 “Eintrag=Buch deren Conferential undt Sessions=Decreten,” June 1745–May 1753, AS 2, I, 925; also “Ordinari Decreten Eintrag=Buch de Anno 1760 bis Anno 1782,” AS 2, I, 926. 26 Decree of the Representation and Chamber, Laibach, Mar. 6, 1751, AS 2, I, 822/545. The application of these provisions to Styria, Carinthia, Gorizia, and Gradisca is referred to in this document. 27 Obersteiner, Theresianische Verwaltungsreformen, 146, mentions the change in Styria (1753). The Carniolan chamber’s register of business shows the last presiding prelate to have been Count Cajetan Augustin Wildenstein, a Teutonic knight who left office in the summer of 1753, the empress having made a special exception in his case. Thereafter, lords presided for varying, but increasing, lengths of time (Baron Joseph Xavier Lichtenthurn 1753/54, Baron Maximilian Anton Taufferer 1754/55, and Count Carl Auersperg 1756–9), suggesting the gradual acceptance of the norm. “Eintrag=Buch deren Conferential, und Sessions=Decreten,” May 1753–May 1760, AS 2, I, 926. 28 Aulic decree to Deputies, Apr. 14, 1753, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 95v. 29 Karafiol, “Reforms,” 115–17, 122–3, 176, 181.

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in 1748 in essence carried the previous rate forward—was all but a reliable source of steady income. With this in mind, the minister unleashed a flood of supporting legislation that aroused “exceptional rancor” and widespread dissatisfaction.30 ViceChancellor Bartenstein, a Haugwitz backer who occupied the third rung at the Directorium, criticized the haste, confusion, and secrecy of the process, to which he attributed the atmosphere of “fear and misgiving.”31 He reserved particular ire for the situation in the archduchy below the Enns, where he himself was a landowner and member of the Estates. In particular, the planned reform of the existing scheme of direct tax assessment, which concerned all manner of landed income (also noble), raised alarm bells in a territory where no major overhaul had occurred since the sixteenth century.32 Indeed, tax rectification was the main order of fiscal business apart from making sure that the new Contribution was collected and the princely domain reinvigorated. A territory-wide survey of the sources of landed income (meadows, vineyards, forests, brewing, tithes, feudal dues, and so on) threatened to expose the gap between reality and the extant tax registers. Under pain of double taxation, landowners had to declare their income and its sources, and hand over proof.33 In the later 1740s and 1750s, Haugwitz forced reform on this front with some success. Aggressive management of the Estates would remain his hallmark. Rather than bypassing or marginalizing the Estates, he initially attempted to integrate them into the process. The lack of qualified personnel and the need for local expertise made another course of action hardly feasible. Routine oversight of the operation fell to a special “deputation” composed of ranking members of the “three upper Estates” including the Deputies. Landmarschall Königsegg-Erps presided. One possible mischief-maker, Carl Anton Harrach, himself a former acting Landmarschall and leading member of the Estates, was omitted.34 The government sought to minimize conflicts of interest—a participant should not review his own property—and by no means accepted all names put forward by the Estates.35 Claims of seniority and the practice of parity in appointments among the “three upper Estates” were sometimes ignored. The empress favored prelates; she is known to have personally decided assignments.36 The fluctuation of human resources that 30

Quotation from Szabo, Kaunitz, 6. P. G. M. Dickson, “Baron Bartenstein on Count Haugwitz’s ‘New System’ of Government,” in T. C. W. Blanning and David Cannadine, eds., History and Biography: Essays in Honour of Derek Beales (Cambridge, 1996), 12–17 (quotation on p. 12); Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 271. 32 The existing scheme did not amount to a proper cadaster. Bernhard Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion in Niederösterreich 1748–1756: Ein fiskalischer Reformprozeß im Spannungsfeld zwischen Landständen und Zentralstaat (Frankfurt am Main, 1997), 62–3, 69–70. Historically, there had been greater success in Bohemia. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 216, 218–19, 222, 223; Petr Maťa, “ ‘Unerträgliche Praegravation’: Steuererhebung und Militärfinanzierung im Königreich Böhmen vom Dreissigjährigen Krieg bis zum Regierungsantritt Maria Theresias,” in Peter Rauscher, ed., Krieg führung und Staatsfinanzen: Die Habsburgermonarchie und das Heilige Römische Reich vom Dreißig jährigen Krieg bis zum Ende des habsburgischen Kaisertums 1740 (Münster, 2010), 160–2. 33 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 244–5. 34 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 187–92. 35 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 136. 36 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 218, 221. 31

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tax rectification entailed furthermore allowed her to cultivate support at the Estates. Later distinguished partisans of her authority, including Abbot Dominik Gußmann of Seitenstetten ({ 1777), the aristocrat Count Wenzel Breunner (1697–1781), and the knight Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta (1714–76), make an appearance at this time.37 After several years of sluggish progress, Haugwitz turned up the heat in the early 1750s.38 The fact that he treated directly with the Estates on the issue of tax rectification illustrates how modalities in the land below the Enns differed from those elsewhere, where the Representations and Chambers and diverse commissions dealt with the intermediary powers.39 The lack of a provincial agency with the requisite fiscal authority put the responsibility in Lower Austria directly on the Directorium. Beginning in 1753, commissioners fanned out into the countryside to check the accuracy of income declarations. Even here, the authorities tried to ensure conformity with what was considered a harsh expedient by leaving the Estates in immediate charge and drawing the (paid) commissioners from their ranks (four prelates, two lords, and two knights).40 In Inner Austria visitations at the local level had begun in the late 1740s. In a final effort to speed up the process, the government shifted approach in the last and simultaneously least successful phase (1754–6). An aulic commission comparable to similar bodies in the Inner Austrian lands took managerial control out of the hands of the Estates. The new entity included non-landed officials and other outsiders to the local establishment. The newly created circle offices (Kreisämter) began carrying out visitations to verify the information provided.41 But even these steps did not shut out the intermediary powers entirely. The “three upper Estates” were seated as such on the aulic commission, a majority of whose members belonged to their ranks, while four agents of the Estates, including two prelates, matched the four circle officers as co-commissioners. As in Inner Austria, the implementation of an operation on such a scale proved impossible without local knowledge.42 The circle offices, set up after tax rectification was already well underway, constituted an extended arm of central authority.43 This innovation, later celebrated, was taken up in the monarchy’s central land comparatively late on. As early as 1744, Haugwitz had adopted what was an originally royal Bohemian institution to rump Silesia. The administrative realignments of the later 1740s brought 37 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 211, 214, 217, 218, 226; the reference to Maria Theresa’s personal selection of commissioners is on p. 214. Mannagetta was a brother of the capable Lower Austrian vice-governor, Joseph Mannagetta. 38 Alfred Ritter von Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften der Kaiserin Maria Theresia,” AÖG 47 (1871): 317–18. 39 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 131–2. 40 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 136, 140. 41 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 221 (circle officers as commissioners), 226–9 (aulic commission). For the commissions in Carinthia and Styria, see Hackl, Die Theresianische Steuerrektifikation, 80–1, 239–47. 42 On this point in Inner Austria, see Hackl, Die Theresianische Steuerrektifikation, 491. 43 Decree of the Lower Austrian provincial government, July 24, 1753 in NÖLA, KP, 32.

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such bodies to Upper and Inner Austria; the Bohemian and Moravian originals underwent reform between 1748 and 1751. After Lower Austria, Tyrol was apparently the last substantial territory to receive the new entities.44 In Bohemia the number of circles was increased, while in Lower Austria the traditional four quarters conditioned their placement. A circle captain (Kreishauptmann) headed each office. But the Lower Austrian arrangements differed in one important respect from those across the border. Whereas the Bohemian offices continued to be overseen by members of the kingdom’s Estates, only two of the four circle captains below the Enns had the corresponding affiliation. Only one of them, Count Joseph Herberstein (1727–1809), the son of Maria Theresa’s first Landmarschall, was a seigniorial landowner at home in his area of responsibility.45 As was the case elsewhere, the circle offices operated under the supervision of the provincial government (the Representation and Chamber), which was in turn subject to Haugwitz’s Directorium. Scholars have depicted the circle offices as freeing state power from local influence, much as the intendants used to be seen as the unalloyed carriers of French absolutism. Two long-standing assumptions have dominated thinking about the Habsburg institutions. First, they quickly and successfully displaced the Estates as the authority in the localities.46 Loud complaints from the nobles about their activities, no less than about tax rectification, would seem to corroborate this assumption. Second, a prime duty of the early circle offices concerned the protection of the subject peasantry from landlord abuse and exploitation.47 44 Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 278–9, gives the following starting dates: Silesia (1744); Carniola (1748); Styria (1748); Carinthia (1750); Lower Austria (1753); and Tyrol (1754). Gerhard Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation in Österreich ob der Enns vom Anfang des 16. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte (Linz, 1978), 57, dates the Upper Austrian offices to 1749. Jože Žontar, “Die Verwaltung der Steiermark, Kärntens, Krains und des Küstenlandes 1747/48 bis 1848,” in Jože Žontar, ed., Handbücher und Karten zur Verwaltungsstruktur in den Ländern Kärnten, Krain, Küstenland und Steiermark bis zum Jahre 1918: Ein historisch-bibliographischer Führer (Graz, 1988), 32, reports that one circle office each existed in Gorizia and Gradisca until the unification of these lands in 1754, after which one office covered both areas. For Bohemia, see Bohuš Rieger, “Kreisverfassung in Böhmen,” in Ernst Mischler and Josef Ulbrich, eds., Österreichisches Staatswörterbuch, iii (Vienna, 1907), 259–60. 45 Franz Karl Wißgrill, Schauplatz des landsässigen Nieder-Oesterreichischen Adels vom Herren- und Ritterstande, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1794–1804), iv, 294. The other “Lower Austrian,” Baron Anton Vinzenz Pilati, has been categorized as one of those “Silesians” favored by Haugwitz. Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 221–2. Karafiol, “Reforms,” 188, lists the four names under consideration in February 1753 and those finally appointed in July 1753. See also [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 494–6. 46 Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der österreichischen Staatsverwaltung 1740–1848, ed. Alfons Huber, 2 vols. (Innsbruck, 1896/1898), i, 30–4; Friedrich Walter, Österreichische Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte von 1500–1955, ed. Adam Wandruszka (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1972), 99; Gutkas, Geschichte, 324; Silvia Petrin, Die Stände des Landes Niederösterreich (St. Pölten and Vienna, 1982), 13; Heinrich Rauscher, “Das Kreisamt des Viertels ober dem Manhartsberg und die Bezirkshauptmannschaft Krems a.d. Donau,” in Rudolf Sauer, ed., Kreisamt und Bezirkshauptmannschaft Krems a.d. Donau 1753—1850—1950 (Krems, 1950), 30; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 269. 47 Alfred Ritter von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia’s, 10 vols. (Vienna, 1863–79), ix, 337; Christine Mueller, The Styrian Estates 1740–1848: A Century of Transition (New York and London,

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The evidence from Lower Austria offers a rather different perspective on the early offices, even as appointments to the post of circle captain largely ignored corporate sensibilities. The “instructions” issued to those officeholders in 1753 were strongly cameralist in inspiration.48 Above all, the local princely domain in all its facets was to be brought under more effective guardianship. The maintenance of public security and order (Policey), the regulation of communal life and ecclesiastical foundations, and the exploitation of customary sources of revenue including mining, tolls, and excise taxes all attracted detailed attention. One conspicuous stipulation (§2) expressed in no uncertain terms the ongoing commitment to confessional uniformity: “the unadulterated preservation of the Catholic faith.”49 Only one sub-paragraph (§3.19), concerning excessive fines, addressed the problem of seigniorial misrule. Military exigency was a further consideration in the creation of circle offices. In Upper Austria and Styria, the local Representations and Chambers and circle offices had already assumed the duties formerly reserved for the chambers of Deputies and territorial commissaries.50 In the spring of 1753, a false disposition by a commissary of the Lower Austrian Estates in a matter of army transport provoked Haugwitz to declare that circle offices did make such mistakes and to threaten the Estates with unspecified “measures.”51 Yet for unknown reasons, the circle offices set up in Lower Austria in July 1753 possessed no military-administrative authority. As they also had no supervisory power with respect to the Contribution, the Landhaus remained silent on this development. Only two months later did the Estates in fact lose responsibility for marching routes, billets, supply, and transport. The timing tends to substantiate ViceChancellor Bartenstein’s perception of legislative haste and confusion. No reference was made to renewed commissarial failure, only to the blunder of the previous spring.52 The culpable officeholder had since resigned—to take up a post in the

1987), 55; Franz Stundner, “Die Kreisämter als Vorläufer der polit. Behörden I. Instanz (1748–1848),” in Johannes Gründler, ed., 100 Jahre Bezirkshauptmannschaften in Österreich (Vienna, 1970), 10–11; Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998), 260; Helen Liebel-Weckowicz, “Auf der Suche nach neuer Autorität: Raison d’état in den Verwaltungs- und Rechtsreformen Maria Theresias und Josephs II.,” in Richard Georg Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, eds., Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung: Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II., 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985), i, 346. 48 “Instruction für die in allen Vierteln des Erzherzogthum Österreich unter der Ennß aufgestellten Creyß Haubt Leuthe,” July 24, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A3, 78, f. 81–98. ÖZV, II/1/1, 159 states that the instructions for the Inner Austrian circle offices were modeled on the Bohemian example. 49 Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 281, noted the “emphasis [placed] on religious business.” See also Stundner, “Die Kreisämter,” 11. 50 This is related in the aulic decree (signed Haugwitz) to Lower Austrian Deputies, July 1, 1750, NÖLA, StA, A3, 77, f. 29–30. 51 Aulic decree (signed Haugwitz and Count Johann Chotek), Apr. 14, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A3, 77, f. 300–2. 52 Aulic decree (signed Haugwitz and Count Johann Chotek) to Deputies, Oct. 6, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 1–3.

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provincial government.53 With the nobility away at the wine harvest, the Deputies on duty filed an initial protest.54 A formal remonstration by the “three upper Estates” followed a few weeks later.55 In response, the government struck a conciliatory tone with an appeal to “united hands,” but remained adamant about shutting out the Deputies and senior commissaries.56 The Estates might retain the junior commissaries and other lesser personnel that carried out much of the work on the ground. Because these officials would also come under the direction of the circle offices, a form of mixed administration would obtain. In some respects this arrangement anticipated the rebooting of the circle offices after the Seven Years War. But the Estates took issue again, this time through Landmarschall Trautson, a move that angered both the empress and Haugwitz. At a conference attended by the minister himself as well as Vice-Chancellors Chotek and Bartenstein, the Estates’ representatives learned of the revocation of the concessions already made.57 The empress herself refused to be mollified. Not only the senior commissaries, but also the junior commissaries were dispossessed. The circle offices took over the so-called steering commissaries and in February 1754 assumed their new military-administrative responsibilities.58 These steps represented a notable caesura in the history of Habsburg government, the land below the Enns having been the last Austrian duchy to manage the army through commissaries appointed by the Estates. Even then, the well-paid senior and junior posts endured, albeit deprived of their original raison d’être. Their abolition would have entailed direct intercession at the Landhaus at a time when their continued existence might assuage noble outrage at rising fiscal affliction and snooping tax commissioners. As it was, no lasting consolidation of the circle offices of 1753, which collapsed under the burden of the Seven Years War, was to occur. The Estates and circle offices arguably clashed more often in the three years prior to the outbreak of renewed hostilities against Prussia than at any other time in Maria Theresa’s reign. The understaffed and underfunded circle captains inundated manorial officials, local magistrates, and rural people with directives and requests for assistance. If Haugwitz’s cameralist program required that nobles such as the Harrachs be kept at a distance from the ruler’s domain, the improvement of public order entailed the active support of the landed establishment and those under its influence. Subject peasants were drafted to repair roads, a major order of business.59 Although the new circle institutions had no authority to collect the Contribution, 53 Count Anton Salm-Reifferscheidt to “three upper Estates,” June 5, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A3, 77, f. 333. 54 Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Oct. 8, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A3, 77, f. 354–7. 55 “Three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, Nov. 22, 1753, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 13–25. 56 Aulic decree (signed Haugwitz and Count Johann Chotek), Jan. 5, 1754, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 26–9. 57 Minutes of this meeting (along with a list of participants), Jan. 18, 1754, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 35–8. 58 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 12, 1754, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 39. For “steering commissaries” and circle offices, see Karafiol, “Reforms,” 193. 59 Declaration of the diet, Nov. 27, 1754, NÖLA, LH, 70. See also Karafiol, “Reforms,” 190–4.

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they tried gathering data of obvious interest for the tax rolls, such as figures on population and buildings. This too involved demands on seigniorial structures. Tax rectification also appeared on their order of business. In November 1753 the clergy and nobility formally protested about the circle offices for the first time at the annual tax diet. Each diet through the fiscal year 1756 brought the solemn, invariably bitter expression of the same grievance.60 By the spring of 1754, the college of Deputies had received so many complaints that the Estates did not even wait until the next diet to apply for relief.61 The Estates’ own sources thus confirm the odium attached to the new bodies. Dickson noted that Haugwitz levied the Contribution agreed in 1748 “with unrelenting severity.” For example, he required lords to make up out of their own pockets sums unpaid by the subject peasantry.62 In Lower Austria he tolerated no arrears, in fact demanding monthly payments on an anticipatory basis.63 Apart from tax rectification, other forms of pressure were applied to recalcitrant payers. Though the reforms of these years famously separated administration and justice at some levels, Haugwitz abjured this change when it threatened his fiscal control. Here he was the worthy heir of a trend apparent since the 1680s. As of 1751, a special “judicial senate” within his own super-ministry had the last say in all disputes over direct taxes. New bodies with corresponding authority known under the baroque appellation concessus in causis summi principis et commissorum were attached to the provincial governments.64 The very institutions that levied taxes ultimately adjudicated conflicts about them. The Court lent further urgency to its fiscal case in 1752 by replacing the “order of distraint” (Exekutionsordnung), in force in Lower Austria since Leopold I’s reign, with one that set a higher penalty for noble tax arrears and expedited the sequestration of seigniorial property in cases of non-compliance.65 This measure too provoked years of dissension at the Estates.66 While complaints about the circle offices fell on deaf ears, opposition to the new order of distraint proved more effective. Only after the government’s long insistence and its concessions on the question of penalties

60 Declarations of the diet, Nov. 22, 1753, Nov. 27, 1754, and Nov. 26, 1755, NÖLA, LH, 70. Complaints about the circle offices by the individual curiae are found in this documentation. 61 Deputies to Maria Theresa, May 6, 1754, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 111–12 and 138–9. 62 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 205–6. 63 This is mentioned in the tax proposition for 1754, Nov. 11, 1753, NÖLA, LH, 70. Also Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 205. 64 Friedrich Tezner, Die landesfürstliche Verwaltungsrechtspflege in Österreich vom Ausgang des 15. bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 parts (Vienna, 1898/1902), ii, 92–6; Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 271; Obersteiner, Theresianische Verwaltungsreformen, 55–6; Grete Klingenstein, Karl Graf Zinzendorf: Erster Gouverneur von Triest, 1776–1782: Einführung in seine Tagebücher [vol. i of Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf 1776–1782, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al.] (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), 120. The same trend is apparent in France: Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000). 65 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Aug. 22, 1752, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 27r. 66 Protests contained in the petitions by the “three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, Nov. 8, 1752, Jan. 31, 1753, and Feb. 26, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 514, f. 28r, 37v–38r, 124.

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was the Landhaus willing to publish the order, hence giving it legal force.67 In this matter, the authorities had been unable simply to override the nobility, whose privileged legal position in tax affairs remained institutionally enshrined in both the Landmarschall’s tribunal and the college of Deputies. While the tribunal had fiscal jurisdiction as the court of first instance over the local nobility, the Deputies passed elementary judgments and exercised the power of distraint over seigniorial assets.68 By law, it penalized nobles who did not pay the taxes they owed. Even as the Estates were being squeezed fiscally, time-honored social and legal distinctions circumscribed the remit of the circle offices, whose basically cameralist character is apparent precisely in respect of direct taxation. Because the clergy and townsmen were by custom subject to the ruler’s domain, sanction of representatives of these groups in the event of back taxes fell under the legal auspices of the provincial government (the concessus).69 This agency operated through the new circle offices, which lacked comparable rights over the nobility.70 Hence the central government exercised fiscal jurisdiction over Lower Austria’s most privileged inhabitants (as gathered in the Estates) through bodies of differing judicial quality. If reform did not necessarily level established differences, the unification of political and judicial control applied across the board in tax affairs. The college of Deputies (for the nobility) and the provincial government (for clergy and townsmen) were hybrid bodies that combined both kinds of power, while the Directorium functioned as the high court of appeal for fiscal disputes concerning any of the Estates. The question of a seigniorial land register (Landtafel ) was another flashpoint in the 1750s. Precedents for such an instrument went back nearly a century. Bohemia and Moravia had received registers in the 1600s, while reform in Silesia around 1700 produced one there. Under Charles VI, a register was created in Styria (1730); Carinthia acquired one in the 1740s even before Haugwitz’s memorable visit to Klagenfurt.71 It was left to the Directorium to take the initiative in the lands above and below the Enns. In 1754, the year that the patent for Upper Austria appeared, the Lower Austrian Estates were invited to deliberate on how a Landtafel could be adapted to local conditions and to supply key information. The long tradition in the land below the Enns of passing the credit burden down the scale from a hardpressed government via the Estates to seigniorial landowners made the planned 67 The concessions apparent in the aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” June 21 and Sept. 13, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 354v–355r, 369r–371r. 68 In June 1756, the college of Deputies forwarded to the Landmarschall’s tribunal a list of noble taxpayers in arrears for the second quarter of 1755. NÖLA, StB, 514, f. 168r. 69 The Estates reluctantly passed lists of clerical back taxpayers to the provincial government. College of Deputies to Representation and Chamber, Apr. 10, 1753, Aug. 21, 1753, June 6, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 514, f. 48r, 57r, 137r. 70 Evidence of the administrative involvement of the circle offices in bringing in back taxes from the clergy (including the sequestration of the “temporalities,” the Church’s secular revenues): Representation and Chamber to Deputies, Nov. 11, 1753, July 10, 1754, Jan. 15, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 146v–149r, 254r–255v, 305r–306r; Representation and Chamber to Deputies, June 26 and Sept. 11, 1756, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 45r–46r, 83v. 71 Ludwig Freiherr von Haan, Studien über Landtafelwesen (Vienna, 1866), 6–21. The term “Landtafel” originally had a different meaning in Lower Austria. Gottfried Stangler, “Die niederösterreichischen Landtage von 1593 bis 1607,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1972, 164.

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register a charged political issue given that mortgages were to be recorded against property values.72 The authorities would have had lists of assets and liabilities at their fingertips. Shadow-boxing on this issue contributed to the contention in the last years before the war.73 The improved relations between Estates and government after the outbreak facilitated implementation of the project only in 1758. Conflict was not the whole story of the period between 1748 and 1756. The dynasty’s interest in rallying rather than destroying intermediary power was especially manifest in the continuing need of cheap and reliable credit. We have already seen the authorities borrowing a large sum from the Estates even as the recess was in negotiation in the fall of 1748. Two years later, the empress asked for a loan of 700,000 fl., in part to pay for a splendid new university building (that today houses the Austrian Academy of Sciences). For possibly the first time, the Estates’ good offices were being yoked to civilian purposes. Without demur, the Landhaus accepted the offer of 5 percent interest as well as revenues from the tobacco monopoly and the Contribution itself as security.74 That same year, the city of Vienna had already loaned the Court three million florins. In return, it retained its annual share of the new Contribution (200,000 fl.) for fifteen years as repayment.75 In 1752 the Estates agreed to guarantee an advance of four million florins by the Estates of Brabant in the southern Netherlands. This was a service that had previously been undertaken thirteen years earlier on behalf of Charles VI.76 Further credit was extended in subsequent years. The government obtained cheap money, local elites safe investment opportunities. The interests of ruler and Estates coincided in other areas as well. Even as she turned the tax screw, Maria Theresa provided educational opportunities for nobles, particularly the less well-off. Two of the monarchy’s most celebrated noble academies originated in the years around 1750: the secondary school in Vienna later known as the Theresianum and the military academy at Wiener Neustadt.77 The argument for the advantages of “an education befitting rank” was used to elicit corporate financial help for these projects.78 Entering a field dominated until then by institutions run by the Estates and the Church, the dynastic state effectively reinforced and reshaped rather than dissolved social hierarchy. Nobles were to bring not only their social prestige and local expertise to public service but also new routines and knowledge. In exchange for an annual subsidy, the nobility furthermore received the right to nominate its 72 For the problem of mortgage registers in France at this time, see Philip T. Hoffman et al., Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago and London, 2000), 20–1. 73 Aulic decrees to Estates, Jan. 17, 1754, Oct. 18, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 177r–178r, 379; aulic decrees to Deputies, May 8, June 5, and Oct. 9, 1756, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 28r–29v, 39r–40r, 88v–89v. 74 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 1, 1750 (with Estates’ resolution of Dec. 5, 1750), NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 247r–248r. 75 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Mar. 18, 1750, NÖLA, LH, 70. 76 Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” Jan. 24, Apr. 13 and 16, 1752, NÖLA, StB, 575, f. 354r– 356v, 376v–381v, 385r–386v. The loan from Brabant to Charles VI: aulic decrees to Estates, Jan. 15, Mar. 3 and 9, 1739, NÖLA, StB, 569, f. 220, 224r, 228. 77 Michael Hochedlinger, “Mars Ennobled: The Ascent of the Military and the Creation of a Military Nobility in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Austria,” German History 17 (1999): 154–60. 78 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 28, 1754, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 196r–198v.

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sons to annual scholarships in the “noble corps of cadets.”79 The Estates also agreed to put up 200,000 fl. to house the new military institution.80 With short interruptions, this system—and the privileged access to state service that it entailed—lasted until 1848. The give and take between ruler and Estates disclosed itself in other ways. Like her predecessors, Maria Theresa sought to have her own advisers drafted into their ranks. Much as they had assimilated worthies of the old Aulic Chancellery, the lords now accepted representatives of the new Directorium. Not even two years after the doubling of the Contribution, Landmarschall Königsegg-Erps effected the admission of the great reformer himself, Count Haugwitz, with considerable aplomb.81 As a sign of her satisfaction with him at the height of tension with the Estates, Maria Theresa gave Haugwitz the Lower Austrian great office of state known as Obersterblandtürhüter.82 Sporadic ceremonial duties at Court fell to the holders of such offices, who usually came from leading local families.83 On his side, Haugwitz would appeal to the Estates as one of their own at a crucial moment in the Seven Years War. Vice-Chancellor Bartenstein’s reception into the lords in 1753 was followed by that of the Chotek brothers, one of whom was likewise Directorial vice-chancellor. Rudolph Chotek was a favorite of the ruling couple.84 In 1755 Maria Theresa’s longtime mentor and confidant, Count Emanuel Silva-Tarouca (1691–1771), joined these men in the Estates. Her holograph letters to the Landmarschall on his and Bartenstein’s behalf have left traces in the lords’ curial minutes. On another occasion, the empress employed her gracious style and irregular spelling on behalf of Field Marshall Lacy: “I should very much like to see the Estates give Lasci the indigenat gratis.”85 In placing her own people at the Landhaus, Maria Theresa was relying on the Estates’ age-old interest in inducting those who might burnish their own shine. A famous statute promulgated on April 9, 1753 prescribed a patent of nobility issued by the Habsburg authorities as a prerequisite for admission to the Estates of the hereditary lands.86 This law circumscribed, but did not abrogate, the freedom to regulate their own membership enjoyed by the Estates since the sixteenth century. Indeed, the empress gingerly avoided revoking what the local nobility regarded as a guarantee of its exclusivity. Aimed at the 79 Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 17, 1754 and Feb. 3, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 298v–299r, 316. 80 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” June 29, 1754 (with Estates’ resolution of July 1, 1754), NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 243r–244r. For other Theresan initiatives on behalf of the nobility, see William D. Godsey, “Adel, Ahnenprobe und Wiener Hof: Strukturen der Herrschaftspraxis Kaiserin Maria Theresias,” in Elizabeth Harding and Michael Hecht, eds., Die Ahnenprobe in der Vormoderne: Selektion—Initiation—Repräsentation (Münster, 2011), 309–31. 81 Minutes of Estate of lords, June 8, 1750, NÖLA, HA, XXIIa, vol. 1745–64, pp. 52–3. 82 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Jan. 16, 1755, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 306v–307v. 83 For the Court of Vienna as an archducal court at its core, see Grete Klingenstein, “Zwei Höfe im Vergleich: Wien und Versailles,” Francia 32 (2005): 173. 84 Minutes of Estate of lords, June 5, 1753 (Bartenstein) and Jan. 23, 1754 (Choteks), NÖLA, HA, XXIIa, vol. 1745–64, pp. 88–91, 104–5. For Rudolph Chotek and the ruling couple, see ÖZV, II/1/1, 251. 85 Maria Theresa to Landmarschall Trautson, [c. Mar. 1766], NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten, L-15. 86 Aulic decree, Apr. 9, 1753, NÖLA, HA, Lade XV, carton 18, fasz. 2, f. 11f.

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arrogation of status and fiscal privileges by those who had no right to them, the statute was of far less consequence than Ferdinand II’s notorious ban on Protestants more than a century earlier. The Estates accordingly did not protest, though they were at odds with the government on a range of issues at the time. Haugwitz and other agents of the regime also passed into the Estates of other Austrian duchies that controlled access to their own ranks.87

T H E S E V E N Y E A R S WA R The political tide shifted abruptly as a new Prussian war approached. Reform had to be shelved as the monarchy’s rulers realized that the Estates would be needed just as much as in previous conflicts. The impact on tax rectification, already stalling thanks to the Directorium’s increasingly harsh methods, was almost instantaneous. The project was abandoned to the mercies of the Landhaus, with corresponding results.88 Other concessions in succeeding years followed the same political logic. The new seigniorial land register (1758) did not list property values, the main bone of contention with the Estates. Two years later, the new order of distraint implemented after long delay was withdrawn. A suspension of the Leopoldine order of distraint that had replaced it ensued.89 In 1759 the administrative failure of the circle offices prompted the remarkable offer to dissolve them and transfer their powers to the Landhaus’s organization.90 The Estates’ stubborn rejection of any solution other than a return to the situation before 1753 delayed reform until the return of peace. Yet compromise with the Estates paid off spectacularly. During the Seven Years War, the Lower Austrian Landhaus would raise on average between three and four times the sum payable annually under the terms of the recess of 1748. The extra funding took the form primarily of credit in hard cash and paper; supplementary taxes also accounted for the increase. The ability of the Habsburg dynastic state to extract high levels of resources from society in a sustained way entailed working with the Estates as lenders, tax gatherers, and provisioners. In particular, the extensive use of forced credit as a viable, if hardly painless, form of wartime finance presupposed their willingness to employ their good offices. The oversight necessary 87 Documentation on Haugwitz’s admission to the Carinthian Estates in KLA, Ständisches Archiv, Abteilung 1, Schachtel 449, Aktenzahl 325, f. 175–83. The Estates in Carniola admitted a Catholic convert recommended by Haugwitz. Haugwitz to Landeshauptmann Auersperg, Dec. 20, 1754, AS 2, I, 845, folder K. 88 Hackl, Die Theresianische Dominikal- und Rustikalfassion, 297–301; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 248. 89 For the seigniorial land register, see Haan, Studien, 22–5. For the order of distraint: aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 9, 1760, NÖLA, StB, 580, f. 42r. Aulic decree to Deputies, Aug. 8, 1761, NÖLA, StB, 580, f. 162r–163r. 90 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 21, 1759, NÖLA, StA, A3, 78, f. 61–62. Another copy of this decree is in NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 116r–117v. The problems with the circle offices are also documented in “Anmerkungen über die kurze Nachricht von der Beschaffenheit, und Verfassung des Erz-Herzogthums Oesterreich unter- und ob der Ennß,” Apr. 15, 1760, ÖNB 15.291.

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for the success of these practices involved a mixture of informal, customary, and ad hoc arrangements rather than institutional centralization per se. The Landmarschall’s role as the ruler’s coordinator at the Estates intensified; the use of aulic commissions common since the wars of the late seventeenth century revived; and the government intervened more and more openly in the choice of personnel at the Estates. Their unique physical proximity to central authority also facilitated Haugwitz’s treating with them personally. The culture of negotiation at the Landhaus re-emerged as it became clear that the grant of 1748 was insufficient to official needs. The war’s unprecedented costs were portended more than six weeks before Prussia’s lightning strike at Saxony. On July 9, 1756, already fearing the worst, the empress asked the Lower Austrian Estates for a loan of two million florins for the “preservation of the monarchy” and the “security of all of her most devotedly obedient hereditary lands.”91 With the possible exception of the Estates’ assumption of cameral debt in 1701, this was the largest such request in their long history as a credit institution. They quickly acquiesced, while calling explicit attention to the connection in the public mind between their “creditworthiness” and “prestige,” the ruler’s “service” (“A[ller]h[öchst] dero eigenen Dienstes”), and the “favor” she showed them.92 The intrinsic link between the government’s financial interests, the Estates’ good offices, and their existence as a privileged body could hardly have been more pointedly expressed. What went unmentioned must have been clear to all: the Estates’ ability to mediate such a massive sum in short order resulted directly from the reformed Contribution of 1748 and Haugwitz’s ongoing resolve to see that it was paid. Both factors ineffably enhanced the Estates’ borrowing power by increasing their available income, namely the revenue flowing through their receivership general. By early September 1756 nearly three-quarters of the loan had come in.93 Soon after the Prussian attack, they agreed to another lump of credit worth a further two million florins.94 The opening months of the conflict likewise saw swift compliance with official requests to help secure loans from the famous widow Nettine, a Brussels banker, as well as the Genoese house of Cambiasi.95 The latter demanded guarantees from the Lower and Inner Austrian duchies, evidencing the Estates’ significance for access to foreign credit.96 For 91 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” July 9, 1756, NÖLA, LH, 70. Franz A. J. Szabo, The Seven Years War in Europe 1756–1763 (London and New York, 2013), 124, 378–9, pointed up the difficulties that comparable requests encountered elsewhere, though not the ultimate importance of the credit of the Bohemian-Austrian lands for the war effort. 92 “Three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, July 19, 1756, NÖLA, LH, 70. 93 Kurt Janetschek, “Die Finanzierung des Siebenjährigen Krieges (Ein Beitrag zur Finanzgeschichte des 18. Jahrhunderts),” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1959, 40–1. 94 “Three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, Oct. 7/9, 1756, NÖLA, LH 70. 95 Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 15, 1756 (with the Estates’ resolution of Nov. 22, 1756) and Dec. 13, 1756 (with the Estates’ resolution of Dec. 22, 1756), NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 116v– 188r, 144v–146v. 96 A similar guarantee was later demanded by another group of Genoese bankers. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 8, 1760, NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 288r–289r. For Austrian operations on the Genoese credit market during the Seven Years War, including those contracted by the Estates and corporate bodies in the Habsburg lands, see Giuseppe Felloni, Gli investimenti finanziari genovesi in Europa tra il seicento e la restaurazione (Milan, 1971), 547–8, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554.

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the army massing in the fall of 1756 in Bohemia, the Estates were furthermore asked for vast quantities of victuals and fodder, including the equivalent of 200,000 Metzen of oats.97 The immense loan of 1756 was a signal event in the relations between government and Estates as well as in the history of the Habsburg state and society generally, for the authorities found themselves unable to keep the solemn promise of 1748 that no further requests for money in any form would be made if the Estates agreed to the reformed Contribution.98 Under these circumstances, the two sides reached what was effectively a compromise that would have long-term consequences.99 In exchange for the money that the Estates were able to raise through the interposition of their good offices, the empress was prepared to accept a massive extension of the use of territorial credit that she herself had condemned as socially pernicious: loans contracted by the Estates whose costs were borne in the end by the general pool of taxpayers.100 In time, the expansion of the Estates’ borrowing to groups beyond the landed elite would vitiate this negative side effect. The compromise also entailed leaving the regular grant at the level agreed in 1748, which is notable in view of the fact that war was on and the recess had almost run its course. But the trade-off deflected a possibly contentious renegotiation of the recess in a time of crisis, and avoided political shock along the lines of 1748. Still, the failure to increase regular direct taxation ultimately capped the ability to borrow once the Contribution was burdened again. The early reliance on corporate good offices set the wartime pattern. Loans would be by far the most important form of extraordinary financial support by the Estates. In a way that had not changed fundamentally, the Landhaus interposed its credit between individual lenders and the central treasury. In exchange, the latter assigned it varying sources of revenue as amortization. In the early years, the military Contribution itself, which was supposed to have remained unencumbered for military purposes, was the most common form of security;101 other kinds of receipts, as from the tobacco monopoly, would be used as well. The negotiation of credit between Landhaus and government nearly always concerned the scope of security. As the war dragged on and ever more revenue was tied up, the bargaining 97 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Oct. 1, 1756, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 95r–96v. Other large provisioning requests during the war are documented in: aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 1, 1757, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 177v–180v; aulic decree to Deputies, July 17, 1758, NÖLA, StB, 578, f. 147v–149v; aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Mar. 26 and Nov. 2, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 93r–94r, 229r–230r; and the tax proposition for the military year 1763, Aug. 11, 1762, NÖLA, LH, 81, §§4–6. 98 Dickson perceptively pointed out that the government’s case for new taxation in 1756 was weakened by the promise of 1748. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 131–2. 99 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 127–8. 100 Maria Theresa’s criticism as expressed in the memorials published by Arneth, “Zwei Denkschriften,” 303, 345. 101 On this point, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 202. The obligations issued by the Estates referred to the Contribution in this connection. See Eduard Gaston Graf von Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, Minister unter Maria Theresia, Josef II., Leopold II. und Franz I.: Ihre Selbstbiographien nebst einer kurzen Geschichte des Hauses Zinzendorf (Vienna, 1879), 104.

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232 30,000,000

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Expenditure (Außgaab) in florins

Figure 6.1. Income/Expenditure of the Lower Austrian Estates’ receivership general, 1738–62. Source: NÖLA, Amtsrelationen, 20–22.

became difficult, at times acrimonious. The Estates invariably insisted on adequate backing. In the case of aulic loans contracted elsewhere for which they pledged, they supplied a legally binding declaration known as an instrumentum fideiussionis. For loans raised in the land below the Enns, their own administrative machinery shifted into motion. Under the college of Deputies’ oversight, the receiver general handled public subscriptions that involved accepting money (and later various forms of paper in lieu of cash) from lenders at a rate of interest fixed by the government with an eye to what the market would bear (generally 5 percent). The bonds, still written out by hand until 1758, were issued by the Estates in their own name.102 The funds collected by the receiver general passed in larger sums to an agency known as the Universal Cameral Payments’ Office. With the subscription complete, the ruler closed the circle by issuing a borrower’s note to the Estates binding herself and her heirs.103 The steep rise in the sums—tens of millions of florins—coursing through the receivership general during the war (see Figure 6.1) put a premium on good management there, a question that was of mounting concern to the authorities as the financial stakes and mutual dependence perilously increased. 102 Johann Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des österreichischen Staatskredites in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1954), 49. 103 An example: “Copie der K:K: original obligation pr: 2000/m fl. [two million florins],” Nov. 1, 1756, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 132r–133r.

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Where patriotic fervor in the early months brought in the initial two million florins rapidly, credit soon tightened up. By May 1757 only about half of the second two million florins promised by the Estates had come in.104 With Bohemia partly overrun, the government considered a forced loan (known as a subsidium praesentaneum), requesting its imposition on the owners of seigniorial property if the money could not otherwise be found. In exchange for concessions, including the release of the subject peasantry from the road-building corvée, the Estates agreed to the action. It became a common form of wartime borrowing that was regarded on all sides with misgiving because of the duress involved.105 Still, coerced lending was no invention of Maria Theresa’s government; the Estates themselves had resorted to the practice since the later seventeenth century to meet their obligations. The processing of the new loan (900,000 florins in six monthly installments) fell as usual to the receiver general, who worked on the basis of a list of assessments approved by the Estates. Austria’s grandest magnate, Prince Joseph Wenzel Liechtenstein, was liable for 39,600 fl. The leading prelates, Melk and Klosterneuburg, occupied the second and third places (respectively 21,300 and 21,000 fl.). Next came Count Philipp Joseph Hoyos with 18,600 fl. At the bottom of the scale, parish priests, including those at Amstetten and Ybbs, and minor civic corporations, such as the hospitals in Eggenburg and Zwettl, paid 50 fl.106 These lenders all received interest-bearing bonds of the Estates endorsed by the college of Deputies. Let us keep in mind that the use also of forced loans occasioned the interposition of their credit. During the same military campaign, the government resorted to a financial expedient indicative both of social change and of more expansive methods of control, especially in urban areas. A forced loan was levied on Lower Austria’s socalled prosperous inhabitants in order to tap non-seigniorial wealth.107 Once again, the authorities called upon the Estates’ good offices. The Landhaus agreed to the scheme provided the issue could not be redeemed for three years given other outstanding obligations. The stipulation gained official acceptance and some 700,000 fl. were raised in sums of between 1,000 and 3,000 fl. The money came not from the old elites, but from prosperous traditional social groups such as administrators, clerics, professionals, and tradesmen, as well as foreign entrepreneurs, all of whom perhaps for the first time acquired direct interest in the existence Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” May 16, 1757, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 212r–214r. Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” May 2 and 13, 1757, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 208v–211v, 205r–208v. For the Bohemian-Austrian lands as a whole, Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 316, reported that “lenders must largely have coincided with the payers of the Contribution.” This was true for forced loans (at least as regards seigniorial landowners). Janetschek, “Die Finanzierung,” 120, stated that the Bohemian-Austrian lands furnished almost no voluntary credit. This was not the case in Lower Austria. The records of the Estates distinguished between “Anticipationen” and “subsidia praesentanea” (the latter forced). NÖLA, LH, 89. 106 “Verzeichnus des unterm 20. May 1757 ausgeschribenen Subsidii praesentanei,” NÖLA, LH, 71. The last installment of the loan was delivered by December 1757: “Copia der K:K: original obligation dd:o Ersten Decembris 1757 pr: 150000 fl. als das 6te Ratum des bewilligten Subsidii praesentanei,” NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 348r–349r. Janetschek, “Die Finanzierung,” 51. 107 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Aug. 16, 1757 (with Estates’ resolution of Aug. 27, 1757), NÖLA, LH, 71. 104 105

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of the Estates. The few known names on the lists of the assessed include the Swiss financier, entrepreneur, and imperial confidant Johann Fries and the Court poet Pietro Metastasio.108 Administratively, the Representation and Chamber notified concerned parties of what they owed, while the central authorities passed the relevant names to the Landhaus. Payments flowed into the Estates’ receivership general, which issued the necessary debentures and transferred the intake to the Universal Cameral Payments’ Office. As the immediate supervising authority, the college of Deputies kept the Directorium informed of the loan’s status.109 In 1758, with Prussian troops still on Habsburg territory and no end to the war in sight, the government turned up the fiscal heat. The formal expiration of the recess offered room for maneuver, yet also renewed the premium on suasion.110 Appointed “special commissioner” to the intermediary powers of the central lands, Haugwitz chose to put his case personally. Shortly after dispatching the annual tax proposition to the Lower Austrian Estates, he summoned a deputation from their midst for consultation at the Directorium. They sent three members of their executive committee (Provost Joseph Rosner of St. Dorothea; Count Ferdinand Lamberg; and Landuntermarschall Moser) and three Deputies (Abbot Dominicus Beckenstorfer of Lilienfeld; Count Wenzel Breunner; and Rudolph von Hackelberg), as well as the syndic and two spokesmen of the Fourth Estate.111 At the empress’s command, Landmarschall Trautson and Provost Berthold Staudinger of Klosterneuburg, a financially potent prelate who was also a Theresan stalwart, likewise attended. Seated around an oval conference table, with Haugwitz and Trautson opposite each other, the participants deliberated on the numerous special demands in addition to the regular grant as specified in the proposition. Though known for his gruffness, Haugwitz went out of his way to be conciliatory, evoking the common danger of Prussian arms to religion and monarchy. His amiability will have sprung from an appreciation of the disproportionate help that the Lower Austrians had already provided. Some nine-tenths of the loans taken out with corporate backing and secured on the tobacco monopoly up to that point, for instance, had come from the land below the Enns.112 The minister used the gathering to explain official needs otherwise. As it broke up, he offered to go to the Landhaus personally “without ceremony” and “like other members of the Estates” to address concerns. 108 For Fries, see Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf 1776–1782, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al., 4 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), iv, 211. 109 Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Sept. 10, 19, and 26, 1757, as well as “three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa, Aug. 27 and Sept. 26, 1757, NÖLA, LH, 71. 110 Dickson’s statement that there was less active consultation of the Estates from this time is not borne out by the Lower Austrian sources. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 269, 111 “Protocollum über die extra postulata, was bey gelegenheit der, den 24:ten Augusti 1758 von Sr. Excellenz Herrn Grafen Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, als hierzu Vermög Hof=decret von 22:ten eiusdem ernennet Landes=Fürst: Special Commissario, denen HH: Deputirten gesamt: N:Ö: Ständen, beschehenen Eröffnung ah. Ansinnungen, in ein so anderen fürgegangen,” NÖLA, LH, 73. 112 “Summarium über die von nachstehenden K:K: Erblanden theils schon baar erlegte, zum Theil aber annoch abzuführen habende und auf den Taback=Fundum zu versichern angetragende Capitali von 10603104 fl. 12 xr.,” NÖLA, LH, 73.

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Back at the Landhaus, the Estates declared that they fully recognized the need to mobilize “all forces to navigate and save the universum”—as the Habsburg realms continued to be known.113 With minor adjustments, they agreed to the requested help, which included substantial numbers of recruits, large amounts of agricultural produce, and extra direct taxes for the first time since the War of the Austrian Succession (including a capitation and a levy on income from capital not invested in the City Bank of Vienna). A few weeks later, after similarly positive replies from the other lands, Haugwitz convened a further meeting with the Lower Austrians, this time in the garden of his palace in the Viennese suburb Josephstadt. While the Estates deputed almost the same group as before, Haugwitz was now joined by several officials of the Directorium.114 The order of business concerned the wording of public patents for the new taxes, which were to be administered in the archduchy below the Enns by a special aulic commission under Landmarschall Trautson. These events inaugurated the war’s third full year. Apart from using his own formidable prestige and authority, Haugwitz increasingly deployed aulic commissions as a means of applying pressure. The reign’s administrative restructuring had given rise to a proliferation of these bodies at the central and provincial levels. In Lower Austria they managed road construction, commerce, and public health. As a fiscal expedient in wartime, the aulic commission was already a recognizable quantity at the time of the famous “Turk tax” of 1683. The commissions of the Seven Years War varied in quality. Some were one-off affairs, while others lasted weeks, months, or even years. The “Aulic Commission on the Inheritance Tax” (Erbschaftssteuerhofkommission), created between 1759 and 1761, endured into the nineteenth century as a sign of the war’s financial legacy. Some bodies seem to have been fashioned to specifically Lower Austrian purposes; others were part of the “centralized” Bohemian-Austrian fiscal superstructure visible since Leopold I’s time. The most important example of the latter type was the commission on supplementary war taxes (Kriegsbeisteuerhofkommission). Though this body undoubtedly facilitated enhanced coordination by the center, it did more than simply limit corporate influence.115 The commission provided a forum for communication and the expression of provincial concerns given the Estates’ presence on such bodies. In the last reckoning, Haugwitz could not raise direct taxes in an abiding way without the Estates’ cooperation. The Lower Austrian variation on the aulic commission for supplementary war taxes, which bore varying appellations over the years depending upon its tasks, grew

113 Estates to Empress Maria Theresa, Aug. 28, 1758, NÖLA, LH, 73. For the baroque appellation “universum” to denote the lands of the House of Austria, see Grete Klingenstein, “The Meanings of ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’ in the Eighteenth Century,” in Robert Oresko et al., eds. Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 462–3. 114 “Protocollum über das Hauptsächlichste, so den 6: 8bris 1758 von Sr: Excellenz H: Grafen von Haugwiz in ordine deren unterm 24: Aug: jüngsthin eröffneten extra ordinari=Postulatorum vorgetragen worden,” Oct. 6, 1758, NÖLA, LH, 73. Janetschek, “Die Finanzierung,” 72–3. 115 Karafiol, “Reforms,” 159–64. On aulic commissions at the center of power, see Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 230–1.

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out of a 10 percent levy on interest income from capital introduced, ultimately unsuccessfully, in the fall of 1758. In May 1760 the same body appears as the “Aulic Commission on Subsidies and Supplementary War Taxes;” months later it was referred to as the “Aulic Commission in Matters of Loans, the Industrial Tax, and Supplementary War Taxes.”116 Under Landmarschall Trautson’s presidency, its members initially included two government representatives (the head of the local Representation and Chamber, Baron Joseph Mannagetta, and Aulic Councilor Carl Joseph Cetto von Kronstorff ) and two members of the Estates (Provost Berthold Staudinger of Klosterneuburg, and Count Wenzel Breunner). Those liable for the tax on interest income were obliged to submit declarations to a specified form in a way that was exemplary of the improvised and personalized nature of fiscal power: at Trautson’s lodgings picturesquely identified by the public patent as located “under the clock . . . on the first floor” of the Hofburg (Trautson was also deputy grand chamberlain of the Court). Within three days, the commission was supposed to decide the amount payable into the Universal Military Disbursement Treasury.117 The existence of the commission did not rule out more old-fashioned forms of bargaining. In the same fiscal year, the Estates commuted the proposed capitation with a loan of nearly one million florins.118 The desperate financial straits and halting flows of funds as the conflict entered its fourth year—we note the first signs of problems at the Estates’ treasury under Receiver General Mannagetta—induced Haugwitz to harden his stance.119 Emphatically departing from precedent, he made the following year’s extraordinary demands on Lower Austria known at the Landhaus months in advance of the diet’s convocation.120 As a flanking measure, he instituted an aulic commission not just to deliberate on ways and means, but to effectuate decisions. Likewise chaired by the Landmarschall, this body differed qualitatively from the one it replaced. From the Estates, Haugwitz specifically summoned the three senior members of their executive committee as well as the three senior Deputies. Moreover he sought to have them endowed with authority sufficient to make consultations with the larger collectivity unnecessary. Here was a genuine attempt to scale back communication

116 Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63, NÖLA, StB, 393, f. 111r, 122r. For the vingtième d’industrie in eighteenth-century France—a tax on income from the production of goods and services—see James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2009), li. 117 Aulic patent, Oct. 10, 1758, and patent of the Lower Austrian Representation and Chamber, Nov. 10, 1758, NÖLA, KP, 34. The quotation in the previous sentence is from the second patent. 118 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates” (provides a list of members of the aulic commission on the capitation, none of whom was summoned as a member of the Estates), Oct. 23, 1758, NÖLA, StB, 578, f. 207v. Aulic decree to Estates (agrees to abandon universal capitation and to limit the tax to those who did not pay the regular Contribution), Dec. 13, 1758, NÖLA, LH, 73. The offer and acceptance of the loan (930,000 florins) is apparent in the communication of the “three upper Estates” to Maria Theresa, Jan. 5, 1759, and aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Jan. 14, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 74. Later documentation suggests that the money was raised by a combination of forced loans on seigniorial property (340,000 florins) and “prosperous inhabitants” (590,000 florins). Joint report of the Estates’ executive committee and the Deputies, Mar. 27, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 74. 119 At a special aulic commission on June 26, 1759, Mannagetta was present together with his father, who worked for the provincial government. The minutes are preserved in NÖLA, LH, 74. 120 Aulic decree to Estates, June 6, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 74.

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with the Estates, or at least to concentrate it. Remarkably, the Estates agreed to provide their negotiators with a general proxy known as the mandatum cum libera.121 From the Directorium, three aulic councilors (Carl Joseph Cetto von Kronstorff, Theodor von Thoren, and Balthasar Spiersch) also attended the commission.122 The provincial government’s Baron Mannagetta, father of the receiver general, took part in deliberations somewhat less than half the time. Limiting numbers and prescribing attendees carried forward the sporadically resolute personnel strategy employed toward the Estates since 1748. Even so, the commission’s configuration mutated over time. The Estates’ chief negotiator was the distinguished Count Wenzel Breunner, elected to the college of Deputies in 1754 and senior lord there by 1757. His term of office ended in 1760. Other frequent attendees were Landuntermarschall Moser, who belonged to the Estates’ executive committee, and his son, Ferdinand Maximilian von Moser, the knights’ senior Deputy. The prelates’ representation fluctuated. In the early months, Abbot Rainer Kollmann of Zwettl (junior Deputy) filled in often for Abbot Dominicus Beckenstorfer of Lilienfeld (senior Deputy), but on one occasion neither showed up. Differing prelates and lords from the Estates’ executive committee (Provost Joseph Rosner of St. Dorothea, Schotten abbot Robert Stadler, Count Adam Traun, and Count Ferdinand Lamberg) also appeared. Including miscellaneous substitutions and natural attrition, twelve men from the Estates rather than the six originally foreseen by Haugwitz attended the meetings at one time or another. The commission was meant to expedite business by eliminating “time-consuming” exchanges between Directorium and Landhaus—when time was of the essence.123 By the beginning of the fiscal year (November 1), when the diet was usually just convening, substantial agreement had been reached on the question of where the nearly 1.5 million extra florins requested were to come from (a supplement to the regular Contribution and forced loans on prelates and other seigniorial landowners).124 At the meetings, the choleric outbursts of the aged Landuntermarschall Moser caused irritation, but he was usually in a tradition-minded minority of one. The general discord over a demand for a surcharge on income from excise taxes on beverages known as Taz/Ungeld, another question with strongly cameralist overtones, was more serious. These taxes had long before been alienated to local landowners, who opposed giving a cut to the princely domain that had originally sold them off. The Estates’ commissioners successfully opposed the project. The government also failed in its now openly avowed goal of placing the Estates’ receiver general, who handled funds on a previously unknown scale, under the commission’s 121 This is clear from the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Aug. 8, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 75, as well as from the minutes of the commission’s first meeting on Aug. 17, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 76. Minutes for further meetings (Aug. 23 and 29, Sept. 3, 5, 10, 18, 22, and 27, Oct. 3, 5, 18, and 30, Nov. 7, 12, and 26, and Dec. 22, 1759, and Jan. 30, Mar. 29, and May 28, 1760) are found in the same documentation. For the mandatum cum libera, see Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, xix (Halle, 1739), 891. 122 For Spiersch as “one of Haugwitz’s fiscal experts,” see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 38. 123 Quotation from aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Aug. 8, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 76. 124 Aulic decree to Estates, Oct. 22, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 223v–225v.

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supervision.125 But Haugwitz had nonetheless managed to get the controversial issues of Taz/Ungeld and financial oversight on the table, creating precedents to which his successors would return. The commission also organized the transport to Moravia of large quantities of local flour and oats for the army.126 Preparations for the campaign of 1761 prompted the memorable encounter between Haugwitz and the Estates in September 1760 that was related at the beginning of this chapter. Only a month later did the concrete tax proposition arrive at the Landhaus; it almost doubled, to some 3.8 million florins, the normal peacetime request (the regular grant remained fixed at the level of 1748). A sign of the deteriorating situation on the international front, this delay portended Haugwitz’s downfall. An aulic commission with responsibility for the first time for both ordinary and extraordinary revenues took charge of the operation given that the flow of even regular income was faltering. Chaired by Landmarschall Trautson, the commission once more theoretically encompassed three members of the Estates’ executive committee, three Deputies, and diverse representatives of the government. The actual attendees from both sides again varied, while the meetings were more sporadic than the previous year.127 Baron Mannagetta turned up on just one occasion, which corresponded with the single joint appearance of the aulic councilors Cetto, Thoren, and Spiersch. The commission signally failed in its purpose, an outcome symptomatic of the end of the Haugwitz era. As a form of “relief ” to the Estates, the Court had agreed that the entire extraordinary requirement for the military year 1761 could be met in loans.128 Yet the acute shortage of ready cash and the fall in bond prices after years of heavy borrowing had driven capital underground. Attempts during the winter of 1760–1 to find the needed sums at home failed.129 An unusually large deficit in expected intake opened up. The post-Haugwitz government responded with a novel expedient called the “Estates’ Credit Deputation” that ambitiously aimed to expand public credit generally and access the millions needed specifically for that year’s military campaign. With the exception of the City Bank of Vienna, it has been the only instance of eighteenth-century corporate financial intermediation ever to have drawn sustained historical attention.

125 The Estates’ resolution of Aug. 25, 1759 (on the report of their “extended finance committee,” Aug. 14, 1759), NÖLA, LH, 75. The goal of placing the receiver general under the control of the aulic commission was expressed in no uncertain terms in the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Aug. 8, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 75. 126 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 2, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 229r–230r. 127 Minutes of four meetings of this commission have survived (Oct. 3 and 30, 1760, and Feb. 7 and 14, 1761), NÖLA, LH, 77–8. 128 Quotation from the minutes of the meeting of the aulic commission, Oct. 3, 1760, NÖLA, LH, 77. 129 Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung, 18. The Estates negotiated a loan of 400,000 florins from the Republic of Genoa on behalf of the Court in late 1760/early 1761. The Landmarschall and three Deputies (Count Franz Harrach, the abbot of Lilienfeld, and Johann von Mensshengen) were involved. Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 1, 14, and 30, and Dec. 10, 1760, and June 22, 1761, NÖLA, StB, 580, f. 34, 50, 131v–132r. Felloni, Gli investimenti finanziari, 551.

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Before turning to the last years of the war, let us briefly review the practice of fiscal power under Haugwitz. In 1756 he reached what was in effect a seminal compromise with the Lower Austrian Estates that would remain in place long after he was gone: the expeditious extension of credit forestalled a rise in the regular grant. The trade-off of taxes for loans would continue after the formal expiration of the ten-year recess of 1748. The ordinary assessment continued at the previous rate, while extraordinary taxation declined as a proportion of additional revenues demanded of the Estates. For as long as Haugwitz remained in office, this pattern held. The failed attempt in 1759 to impose both a levy on interest income and a universal capitation—the latter compounded by a loan—was followed the next year by a proposal for supplementary funding of two-thirds loans and one-third taxes.130 The military year 1761 saw a reversion to complete reliance on corporate credit for extra income. The authorities made concessions about who would be charged and how. The repeated forced borrowing on seigniorial property will have been treated as a simple supplement to regular taxation. In 1759 the Estates raised part of the Extraordinarium using a time-honored property tax (Vermögenssteuer) managed by a special “delegation” of their own number, much as in the 1730s and 1740s.131 A year later, Maria Theresa sanctioned a proposal by the Estates to bring in added revenue through a levy on Lower Austria’s “prosperous inhabitants.”132 Such special assessments gave the Estates fiscal jurisdiction over persons not covered by the regular tax on landed income. The Landhaus repeatedly imposed forced loans on this amorphous group, known in the language of the day as “those outside the cadaster” (“Extra-Catastrales”).133 Incongruously, the Estates found themselves applying forms of administrative levelling under the impact of armed conflict, a development noted for later eighteenth-century France as well.134 In the Austrian case, the enhanced tax authority of the Landhaus led to seemingly paradoxical situations, such as the subjection of the circle officers to the Estates in the case of special taxes. The separate, privileged jurisdictions typical of a corporately minded world explain the reluctance to submit to the Estates felt by princely officials who regarded themselves as subject solely to the provincial government.135 No less ironically, the “noblesse” resident in the town of St. Pölten 130

Aulic decree to Estates, June 6, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 74. “Codex Provincialis,” x, f. 1384v (NÖLA). The “delegation” is mentioned in Deputies to receiver general, Apr. 11, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 393 (“Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63”), f. 22. 132 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 10, 1760, NÖLA, LH, 77. 133 “Three upper Estates” to Empress Maria Theresa (requests the issue of a formal patent for the “property tax” to obligate taxpayers not “incorporated” into the Estates’ “cadaster”), Mar. 28, 1759; and aulic decree to “three upper Estates” (informing the Estates that the requested patent would be published), Apr. 3, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 393 (“Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63”), f. 11v, 21. 134 See Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation. 135 Deputies to Lower Austrian provincial government (requesting that circle-office personnel be directed to cooperate with the Estates’ tax collectors), May 6, 1762; and Lower Austrian provincial government to Deputies (reporting that circle-office personnel had been instructed to hand in the required declarations and pay the tax), May 11, 1762, NÖLA, StB, 393 (“Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63”), f. 197r, 199. Lower Austrian provincial government to Deputies (reporting that Circle Captain Baron Alberstorf had been threatened with a lien on his salary if he did not pay a tax collected by the Estates), May 21, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 231. 131

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was subordinated, at the behest of the college of Deputies, to the local magistracy in respect of a wartime levy.136 Administrative expediency could take precedence, also at the Estates, over claims based on status. The fusion of administrative and judicial power in one agency characteristic of fiscal exigency in our period likewise manifested itself at the Landhaus. When the college of Deputies empowered a clerk named Johann Lorenz Reyberger to seize assets from those in arrears on the property tax of 1759, it explicitly noted that persons so affected had no right of appeal. The government used the same language (cum derogatione omnium Instantiarum) in setting aside the right of appeal to the regular courts of justice in the case of extraordinary taxation. At least some of those subject to the levy for which Reyberger was responsible did not normally fall under the college’s fiscal jurisdiction or the authority of the Landmarschall’s tribunal. Reyberger was not the only ad hoc commissioner employed by the Estates during the Seven Years War. Fiscal-military requirements elicited the employment of such officials in other cases. In 1762 the college of Deputies sent out Johann Thaddäus Viertler and Joseph Plaschke to bring in an auxiliary war tax. The former reviewed the declarations of those assessed, the latter collected payments, passing them in lump sums weekly or biweekly to the receiver general in Vienna.137 They too exercised authority in the Estates’ name over those outside the regular tax system.

THE A DV ENT OF KAUN I TZ At the turn of the year 1761, Count (later Prince) Wenzel Anton Kaunitz succeeded Haugwitz as Maria Theresa’s leading minister, though not at the Directorium. Kaunitz’s advent coincided with a major administrative reshuffle in which the Directorium disappeared and new faces assumed the levers of power. A Bohemian grandee and former diplomat behind the famous renversement of alliances in 1756, Kaunitz ran the State Chancellery but his influence extended far beyond the realm of foreign policy. A combined Bohemian-Austrian Chancellery preserved the level of integration of the central lands effected by Haugwitz’s Directorium. An Aulic Chamber of Accounts and a General Disbursement Treasury were established, while the Aulic Chamber reappeared. Hence the dense bundling of financial, political, and military-administrative authority characteristic of the Haugwitz years loosened, even as the new, consultative State Council (1761) sought to bestow greater overall coherence on government.138 An underlying continuity characterized policy toward the intermediary powers, though Kaunitz did not evince Haugwitz’s hostility to the Estates. Nothing symbolized the continuity better than the new “Estates’ Credit 136 Deputies to magistracy of St. Pölten (Stadtrichter und Rat), Aug. 20, 1762, NÖLA, StB, 393 (“Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63”), f. 213r. This source shows that the nobility had claimed privileged status. 137 Deputies to Viertler and Plaschke, Feb. 29, 1762, NÖLA, StB, 393 (“Extrasteuerprotokoll 1758–63”), f. 187r. 138 On these changes, ÖZV, II/1/1, 281–365; Szabo, Kaunitz, 83–91; Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 233–45.

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Deputation” with its mandate to expand the Estates’ credit in the service of the dynastic state. Written largely from the perspective of debates and actors at the locus of power, the standard accounts give little sense of how the Credit Deputation fitted into the long historical experience of borrowing on the good name of the Estates.139 A key supplier of credit, Lower Austria provided an obvious laboratory of experiment for Count Ludwig Zinzendorf (1721–80), a protégé of Kaunitz and latter-day originator of the idea of raising money through innovative financial transactions involving the Estates. Zinzendorf headed the new Aulic Chamber of Accounts. He was a scion of the archduchy’s ancient nobility, but only bits and pieces of the family’s entailed patrimony remained after decades of confession-induced exile. A Catholic convert who had re-established himself in the Habsburg lands, Zinzendorf had trained as a young man at the Landmarschall’s tribunal and early occupied himself with the problem of a bank based on corporate credit.140 Near the beginning of the Seven Years War, the government approached the Lower Austrian Estates with a proposal he had drawn up for enhancing their borrowing power. The fact that they had already “so fruitfully” employed it to the benefit of the “all-highest service” offered the immediate impetus.141 Though nothing came of this initiative, Zinzendorf continued refining his ideas on how to mobilize large-scale credit. The practical exhaustion by 1761 of previous methods of domestic borrowing and the dire financial straits given the skyrocketing costs of war facilitated the realization of another of his projects: a large bond-issue jointly guaranteed by the Estates of the central lands. While the idea recalled the practice by which the Austrian duchies had provided common security for foreign credit extended to the Habsburgs, it was primarily inspired by Western European experiments in the creation of national credit. Kaunitz guided his protégé’s project through the Council of State; most of the intermediary powers quickly agreed to the operation in the spring of 1761. P. G. M. Dickson convincingly attributed the speed to corporate “preference for this form of burden to that of new taxes.”142 The link between the Estates’ status as a privileged corps and their financial strength was 139 The principal account remains Hans Gross, “Die Ständische Kredit-Deputation und der Plan eines erbländischen Nationalkredites,” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1935. See also Adolf Beer, “Die Staatsschulden und die Ordnung des Staatshaushaltes unter Maria Theresia,” AÖG 82 (1895): 9–16; Janetschek, “Die Finanzierung,” 99–104; Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung, 10–26; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 133–8; Christine Lebeau, Aristocrates et grands commis à la cour de Vienne (1748–1791): Le modèle français (Paris, 1996), 182–4; Szabo, Kaunitz, 126–30; Gustav Otruba, “Staatshaushalt und Staatsschuld unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II,” in Richard Georg Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, eds., Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung: Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II., 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985), i, 203–5. 140 For Zinzendorf ’s intellectual background, see Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, 53, 59; Grete Klingenstein, “Between Mercantilism and Physiocracy: Stages, Modes, and Functions of Economic Theory in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1748–63,” in Charles Ingrao, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 184–95. Also Lebeau, Aristocrates et grands commis, 164–8. 141 Quotation from the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 30, 1757, NÖLA, LH, 71. The decree provided for a conference between Zinzendorf and representatives of the Estates. See Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung, 10–12. 142 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 134.

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evident in the formal confirmation of their “constitution.”143 Perhaps not surprisingly, the Lower Austrian Estates proved the last holdouts. Over the previous century, any number of schemes to hitch their good offices to the government’s purposes had come and gone. Given the still comparatively solid reputation of their credit, they were justifiably fearful of perceived threats to it. In the end, the acquiescence of the Estates in the other lands forced their hand.144 Neither the plan itself nor the ruler’s own wherewithal inspired confidence. In an advisory report, the Estates’ “extended finance committee” noted that interest payments on existing debt consumed most of the regular Contribution, which was the very fund earmarked as the loan’s prime security.145 The size of the planned issue—18 million florins—also made the Lower Austrians skittish. This sum tripled the amount originally foreseen during the State Council’s deliberations in the late winter and doubled that made known at the end of April.146 The operation bore the name of the “Estates’ Credit Deputation,” after the body created to run it. Initially chaired by Zinzendorf, the Deputation comprised one deputy each from the Estates of Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Gorizia-Gradisca. No embryonic Estates General, this remarkable assembly nevertheless exemplified the significance attained by corporate financial intermediation in the Habsburg monarchy’s calculations. The Deputation met until the project was wound up in 1768.147 Initially representing Lower Austria was Count Franz Harrach (1720–68), the junior lords’ Deputy and son of the former acting Landmarschall Carl Anton Harrach. The younger Harrach appears to have enjoyed the Court’s trust. He was replaced in 1765 by another aristocrat, Count Franz Colloredo, a councilor of the provincial government who was gathering experience for his later career as confidant and leading minister of Francis II.148

143 In §1 of the “Recess” formalizing the agreement. This document is attached to the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” July 3, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 79. As co-commissioner, Zinzendorf participated in the negotiations with the Estates. Gross, “Die Ständische Kredit-Deputation,” 24. 144 The Lower Austrian Estates agreed to the guarantee on July 1, 1761 (resolution to the aulic decree of June 24, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 78). The literature (Gross, “Ständische Kredit-Deputation,” 25; Szabo, Kaunitz, 127; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 134) dates the implementation of the project to late June. 145 Report of the Estates’ “extended finance committee,” May 14, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 78. 146 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 22, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 78. 147 According to Lower Austrian records (“Coupons Recess de Ao. 1761,” NÖLA, LH, 79), the representatives dispatched by the various corps to negotiate the new credit plan included: Count Philipp Kolowrat and Count Leopold Buquoy (for Bohemia); Count Franz Anton Schrattenbach and Heinrich Xavier Hayek von Waldstätten (for Moravia); Baron Maximilian Heinrich Sobek and Baron Adam Joseph Gotschalkowsky von Gotschalkowitz (for Moravia); Landmarschall Trautson and the provost of Klosterneuburg (for Lower Austria); Count Leopold Schlick and Count Franz Joseph Weißenwolf (for Upper Austria); Count Johann Ernst Herberstein (for Styria); Count Felix Sobeck and Count Franz Anton Sigmund Ursenbeck-Massimi (for Carinthia); Count Leopold Lamberg and Count Johann Nepomuk Ursini-Blagay (for Carniola); and Count Caspar Lanthieri (for GoriziaGradisca). A published list of those who initially sat on the Credit Deputation is in Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 136 (fn. 56). 148 The Estates’ Credit Deputation to Deputies (concerning the empress’s approval of Colloredo’s appointment), Aug. 19, 1765, NÖLA, LH, 83. The aulic decree of July 14, 1762 expressed “special

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Formal consent to the operation did not dispel the Estates’ deep distrust of the paper they themselves guaranteed, a paradox difficult to imagine in the case of the contemporaneous British Parliament and the bonds of the Bank of England.149 They initially attempted to limit the amount of paper accepted by their receivership general despite the fact that its acceptance was mandated in all disbursement treasuries (Kassen) handling cameral revenues, direct taxation, and military spending. The operation’s success indeed depended on such exchangeability. Resistance was by no means confined to the Estates. The empress had to issue hasty guarantees in her own hand not only to Landmarschall Trautson as head of the Estates but also to General Daun after protests from the officer corps about the use of the new obligations in lieu of cash pay.150 State credit had yet to become depersonalized. When the empress’s asseveration failed to have the desired effect at the Landhaus, the government threatened to suspend the college of Deputies, an omen of the future.151 Sporadically applied pressure and official readiness to infuse cash into the receiver general’s office in case of need at last jump-started the system and kept it sputtering. Interlocking treasuries and routines increasingly mirrored the financial interdependence of central and intermediary authority. The Credit Deputation did not ultimately meet expectations.152 In the short run, it tempered financial pressure in the form of extraordinary demands at the diet, even as the need for resources and the human misery caused by the long conflict intensified. For the military year 1762, some 700,000 fl. rather than the previous year’s 1.8 million were requested in addition to the regular grant, the usual large quantities of agricultural produce, and transport.153 The Lower Austrian guarantee of the Credit Deputation appears to have been calculated into the proposition. That the extra funds had to be raised in taxes rather than loans reversed the trend apparent under Haugwitz in which free money had declined as a proportion of supplementary revenue. As a concession, the Estates’ fiscal jurisdiction over those in the countryside not subject to their “cadaster” was again confirmed.154 In what would be the war’s last full year, the government tried a different combination that included a reduced issue of securities by the Credit Deputation as well as the emission of a form of paper money—called Bancozettel—by the City Bank of

confidence” in Harrach’s ability to organize a major military transport given his intimate knowledge of Lower Austria and his “diligence.” NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 83r–84r. 149 For a concise comparison of state credit systems in eighteenth-century Britain and France, see Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (New York, 2007), 595–603. 150 Empress Maria Theresa to Landmarschall Trautson, undated (located together with the aulic decree of Aug. 22, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 79). For the difficulties with the officer corps, see Gross, “Ständische Kredit-Deputation,” 55–6. 151 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Sept. 10, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 79. 152 Dickson characterized it as a “qualified failure.” Finance and Government, ii, 136. 153 Tax proposition pro anno 1762, Aug. 3, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 79. On Apr. 3, 1762 satisfaction was expressed at the way the new “finance operation” had been functioning in respect of one of the two kinds of bonds (“payments’ bonds”) that had been issued. The Estates’ Credit Deputation to Deputies, Apr. 3, 1762, NÖLA, LH, 79. 154 Aulic decree to Estates, Sept. 1, 1761, NÖLA, LH, 79.

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Vienna.155 These measures notwithstanding, charges on the diet increased for 1763 by some 100,000 fl. compared with twelve months earlier. As a quid pro quo, the Estates were asked to propose “modalities” for bringing in the necessary funds.156 By the time peace was finally signed in early 1763, the army’s relentless needs had elicited an unparalleled mobilization of provincial resources. According to Dickson, a sum of 243,034,687 fl. in taxes and domestic loans was raised from the Hungarian, Bohemian, and Austrian lands during the Seven Years War. Of the 90,736,479 fl. provided by the Austrian group (including Tyrol and Further Austria), nearly half or 43,229,980 fl. came from the archduchy below the Enns (including the city of Vienna).157 In other words, Lower Austria furnished just less than one-fifth of the total from the monarchy’s core lands. It paid more than the Hungarian lands combined (42,208,608 fl.) and the financial burden was second only to that borne by Bohemia proper (77,548,916 fl.). Of Lower Austria’s overall share, the ordinary Contribution accounted for more than 12,000,000 fl. A further 5,670,000 fl. came from supplementary war taxes, while the largest amount— 20,890,267 fl.—represented credit in the form of cash. Paper credit constituted another 3,500,000 fl. The Seven Years War had made the Lower Austrian Estates the dynasty’s most important source of credit apart from the City Bank of Vienna. The loans they had floated exceeded by several million florins even what the Estates of Bohemia had raised. In the larger scheme of Habsburg public finances, it was the huge expansion of borrowing through the Estates of the central lands that distinguished the Seven Years War from the Austrian succession struggle. The Lower Austrian Estates had emerged from the latter conflict bearing nearly four million florins in Habsburg treasury debt. By 1763, underlain by the increased Contribution of 1748, that debt had expanded by a factor of more than six—to some 24.5 million fl. including paper credit. Taken together, the Estates of the Bohemian and Austrian lands came out of the conflict as the monarchy’s leading lenders. Their new role involved a reluctant, if profound, change in their relationship to the government. The reformed Contribution of 1748 and Haugwitz’s intense wartime engagement of the Estates underlay the transformation. From the standpoint of what we must now regard as a fully developed Habsburg fiscal-military polity, this broadening and deepening of the sources of domestic credit signaled a massive expansion of the official ability to borrow at comparatively favorable rates of interest that were simply not available to the empress herself or the financial agencies directly dependent on her. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Habsburg state had successfully brought down the cost of borrowing through the City Bank of Vienna, which, as the name suggested, had drawn on the good name of one form of corporate authority. Now another major piece of the

155

For the Bancozettel, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, passim. Quotation from the tax proposition pro anno 1763, Aug. 11, 1762, NÖLA, LH, 81. 157 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 389–90. The figure of “58,247,486” given for the Austrian territories on p. 390 must be a misprint in view of Dickson’s other figures. The city of Vienna furnished slightly more than 10 percent (4,165,668 florins) of the Lower Austrian total. 156

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Habsburg deficit finance puzzle had fallen into place in the form of the Estates of the central lands—led by Lower Austria. How the government would deal with this novel situation, which also held political risks at a time when the issue of representation in connection with pressing problems of public finances was becoming a topic of European-wide discussion, is the subject of the next chapter.

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7 “Fifteen Years of Military Government,” 1763–80 In the late morning of March 10, 1763, a resplendent cavalcade departed the Viennese Hofburg for St. Stephen’s Cathedral where a service of thanksgiving was to mark the recently signed Peace of Hubertusburg which ended the continental Seven Years War. At its head rode a throng of mounted Court chamberlains. A halfdozen imposing carriages each drawn by six horses followed. The most magnificent conveyance—the “mirrored” imperial state coach—bore the ruling couple, the emperor Francis Stephan and the empress-queen Maria Theresa. He was attired in Spanish Court dress of black velvet trimmed in lace and wore a gem-studded Golden Fleece on a red ribbon, while she appeared in a black velvet Court gown and glittered with jewels. Further vehicles carried their eldest son, the archduke Joseph and his wife, as well as other offspring, including the later emperor Leopold II and the future queens of Naples and France. Courtiers, household officers, and lackeys attended each personage. A detachment of the Hungarian Noble Guard on horseback, equipages with ladies-in-waiting, and a company of infantry brought up the rear. To the festive sound of church bells and the roar of cannon fire from the city’s battlements, the imperial party was received at St. Stephen’s by the cardinalarchbishop and cathedral chapter, the papal nuncio, grand officers of state, ministers, privy councilors, generals and staff officers, the local magistrate, the university faculty, and a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates. A musical setting of the Te Deum and a solemn mass followed before the return to the palace for a public banquet.1 The official ceremonial chronicle noted only one departure from precedent in this spectacle: the Estates’ presence. They had occasionally been included as a corpus at grander Court events, such as the celebration a few years earlier of the marriage of the Habsburg heir, Joseph, to Isabella of Bourbon-Parma.2 But this was the first time that they had been called upon to take part in rites punctuating the conclusion of war. The invitation had come down through the Landmarschall, Prince Trautson.3 That the monarchs turned out in black possessed symbolic meaning quite beyond the fact that the Court happened to be in mourning: the loss of Silesia now appeared irrevocable. And the Seven Years War had subjected 1

This description is based on the Court’s ceremonial records. HHStA, ZA, Prot. 29, f. 22v–26r. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” May 4, 1760, NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 308v–309v. Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Mar. 8, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 195. This decree was read out in an assembly of the “three upper Estates” the following day. NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 44r. 2 3

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the monarchy, like its allies and rivals, to colossal human and material suffering.4 A disproportionate burden had fallen on the Bohemian-Austrian lands.5 By allotting the Estates a place of honor at the service of thanksgiving, the empress acknowledged in an emblematic way her debt to them. Yet their presence masked tensions lurking just beneath the shimmering surface of Court ritual.6 Exacerbating the war’s calamitous legacy was the empress’s decision at the start of peace to augment the military budget by nearly 11 percent from roughly 14.9 million to 16.5 million florins.7 As in 1748, there would be no peacetime disarmament. Revenue would have to be found to pay the troops and service a debt that had swollen by 150 percent over the level of 1756. Administrative streamlining— now at the local level—returned to the agenda. This was the unforgiving backdrop to an extensive reform of the Lower Austrian Estates. The profusion of committees and officeholders was pruned back, freedom of curial election infringed, tighter management of the college of Deputies imposed, and the provincial tribunal of privileged jurisdiction (Landrecht) remodeled. Reconstituted circle offices definitively replaced the Estates’ commissariat. Under Ludwig Zinzendorf ’s watchful eye, the Landhaus’s financial business came in for greater supervision, regulation, and adaptation. If that were not enough, Haugwitz’s successors pursued back taxpayers quite as inexorably as he had, and levied a universal tax that ignored the Estates’ claims to special status. The relentlessness manifested not only the desperate financial situation but also a reaction in official circles to the power inherent in the Estates’ good offices. The Habsburgs now owed tens of millions of florins to those same landed classes that were the historic bedrock of their rule. The future emperor Joseph’s first known fit of vitriol against the nobility and the Estates took place as the terrible extent of this new form of dependence was becoming fully visible.8 Still, the reforms after 1763 did not subvert the Landhaus (in fact they were not meant to do so), though contemporaries regarded them as bitter and historians as fatal. The government could not have afforded it. The restructuring at the Estates tended to improve not only their creditworthiness after the wartime beating but also their chances of longterm survival. In the final reckoning, greater financial transparency served the innate interests of both regime and Estates in political and social stability given that the larger pool of taxpayers was saddled with financing the debt and the army. 4 For a fine comparative survey of the repercussions of the Seven Years War on government and society across Europe, see Hamish M. Scott, “The Seven Years War and Europe’s Ancien Régime,” War in History 18 (2011): 419–55. On the intellectual impact of the explosion of debt, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton and Oxford, 2007). 5 P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 125. 6 See Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 245, for the idea that Court ceremony not only demonstrated harmony but also “submerged persistent tensions” evident elsewhere. 7 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 46. 8 As evidenced in his notorious Rêveries from the spring or summer of 1763. Derek Beales, “Joseph II’s Rêveries,” in Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-century Europe (London and New York, 2005), 164.

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At the same time, the authorities clearly pursued the goal of managing the Estates more effectively and reducing their share of the treasury debt, hence redressing the financial-political balance between central and intermediary power. The dispensation of Theresan government would remain firmly rooted in the compromise of 1756.

WARTIME PRELUDES TO R EFORM Quite apart from the sheer financial pressure of wartime, the unprecedented amounts of money passing through the Landhaus engendered difficulties of an altogether new caliber. By 1759 the need for every available florin recommended better oversight of the Estates’ finances. Delays in the flow of funds into government coffers aroused particular frustration. The receivership general had become a notorious bottleneck between the localities and the Universal Military Payments’ Office. Haugwitz sought to subordinate Receiver General Joseph Gotthard von Mannagetta (in office November 1758 to March 1761) to the aulic commission that had been set up in the fall of 1759 to see that supplementary financial demands on Lower Austria were met. Not without justification did the minister accuse Mannagetta of the “irregular administration” of his charge.9 Overload worsened the misery. In the space of only a few years, the receivership general’s annual income and outlay more than doubled.10 For the moment, the attempt to supervise more closely an office that handled so much money failed. The application of increasingly current, innovative ideas of public accounting accompanied the efforts to move provincial money more effectively.11 This was occurring even before the creation of the Aulic Chamber of Accounts (1761) and the advent to power there of Ludwig Zinzendorf, the principal proponent of such ideas. In 1759 the Landhaus was directed for the first time to submit a projected budget (known as the praeliminar=Systema) laying out its estimated financial requirements and receipts for the coming year. A monthly “extract” of its books detailing expenditure and income also became obligatory.12 The information was moreover to be arranged in a form standardized for the other central lands.13 Typically, transmitting norms proved easier than enforcing them.14 Still, the Lower Austrian records for the years around 1760 show a sustained endeavor by the Habsburg government to coordinate the many longstanding provincial Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 30, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 75. See Chapter 6, Figure 6.1. 11 On this point, see Marie-Laure Legay, “The Beginnings of Public Management: Administrative Science and Political Choices in the Eighteenth Century in France, Austria, and the Austrian Netherlands,” JMH 81 (2009): 253–93. 12 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 24, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 75. This decree lays out the original requirement for both the budget and the monthly accounts. 13 Quotation from the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 10, 1759, NÖLA, LH, 75. 14 A theme in the aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, May 10, 1760, NÖLA, LH, 76; and aulic decree to Deputies, Apr. 2, 1763, NÖLA, LH, 82. 9

10

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disbursement treasuries using improved and more uniform accounting methods. These efforts would pick up pace after the war. The basso continuo of reducing personnel costs paradoxically underlay the Habsburg state-building concerto throughout this period. Economizing through consolidation constituted a “favorite theme” in the halls of power around 1760.15 One wartime experiment merged the two organizations (judicial and politicaladministrative) that together had made up the Lower Austrian provincial government for a decade.16 The new body now administered the archduchy above and below the Enns. Maria Theresa’s offer in 1759 to dissolve the circle offices below the Enns will also have been understood in part as a cost-saving expedient: double respite because her aerarium would have been relieved of costs and the Estates would have borne the replacement outlays.17 Shortly after war’s end, the reform of local authority across the Bohemian-Austrian lands was taken in hand as a complement to the realignment at the center in the early 1760s.18 Posts were often combined in one person and institutions fused. An amalgamated Inner Austrian agency at Graz absorbed the Representations and Chambers in the individual duchies. In Carniola, Carinthia, and Upper Austria, Maria Theresa’s chief local representative—the Landeshauptmann—now assumed the chair at the Estates. A similar solution obtained in Bohemia. Under these circumstances, a glaring spotlight shone on the high number of paid officeholders from the Estates of the nobility and prelates in Lower Austria. In the summer of 1759, Haugwitz had been only partly successful in blocking the emoluments of this group as punishment for a funding shortfall.19 Together, the receiver general and the members of the three standing committees (executive committee, college of Deputies, and college of accounts) earned more than 50,000 fl. annually. SCANDAL, CONFRONTATION, AND REFORM Even as the Estates sat with the empress in St. Stephen’s cathedral, structures and costs at the Landhaus were being turned into a charged political issue by a confluence of circumstances. The flagging morale of taxpayers worn down by years of impositions in money and kind had not improved as the end of the fighting approached. Indeed, the hoped-for blessings of peace reduced the incentive to pay. Haugwitz’s careful dispositions to ensure the flow of tax money availed little: the Estates’ coffers were transferring funds only haltingly. Three months 15 Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994), 126; Gustav Otruba, “Staatshaushalt und Staatsschuld unter Maria Theresia und Joseph II,” in Richard Georg Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, eds., Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung: Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II., 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985), i, 207. 16 Emile Karafiol, “The Reforms of the Empress Maria Theresa in the Provincial Government of Lower Austria 1740–1765,” Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1965, 220–2. 17 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 21, 1759, NÖLA, StB, 597, f. 116v–117v. 18 Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 272–86; for the archduke Joseph’s call for administrative reform, see Beales, “Joseph II’s Rêveries,” 167. 19 Material on the dispute in NÖLA, LH, 75.

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after Hubertusburg, Lower Austria had “sizeable” outstanding tax liabilities of more than 600,000 florins.20 The figure remained above 400,000 at the end of the fiscal year.21 A few weeks later, growing official impatience culminated in the suspension of remuneration for the same group of officeholders—prelates and nobles—that Haugwitz had penalized.22 Unprecedented in the land below the Enns, the step was symptomatic of the frazzled nerves higher up. The authorities, themselves caught between the Charybdis of the army and the Scylla of the debt, had no room to make allowances. Arrears had to be followed up unremittingly. Two interlocking affairs of a more contingent nature deepened the crisis generated by post-war financial exigency. First, the premature death in 1761 of the incumbent receiver general, Joseph Gotthard von Mannagetta, left the books in predictable disorder. The airing of his malfeasance in an assembly of the “three upper Estates” portended trouble. In the fall of 1762, some 130,000 florins were reported as unaccounted for.23 In an age in which clear distinctions between public and private interest had not obtained, the office of receiver general had provided an avenue of enrichment for the holder and his backers. The untimely death, in 1699, of a previous receiver general before the books could be put right had left confusion and embarrassment in its wake.24 Given the sheer scale of the financial requirements of the Seven Years War and thus of the sums passing through Mannagetta’s hands, his rent-seeking may well have been unusually excessive. His connections heightened the drama. His father was vice-governor, while Landuntermarschall Moser, who regarded the receivership general as a family heirloom and was the Estates’ most inveterate traditionalist voice, was a marital relation. Joseph Gotthard’s father appealed to the Estates on behalf of his widowed daughterin-law as the business was turning into a full-blown scandal.25 Just before the Mannagetta imbroglio became an affair of state, a rare open clash of central and intermediary authority transpired that added a final, explosive element to an already noxious political mix. It was the first of two such occurrences in 1763 and the most dramatic one in Lower Austria after the Harrach affair of 1748. Even more, it was indirectly, if fatally, related to events in the receiver general’s office. A week after the service of thanksgiving for the Peace of Hubertusburg, Count Joseph Volkard Auersperg (1702–64) won election to the college of Deputies against the government’s express bidding. Having passed through the usual stages of the cursus honorum from senior commissary in the quarter above the Vienna Woods to Raitherr, he had the best customary claim to the post. But he was deep in debt, which, as a recipe for venality, was a disqualification in official eyes in the existing financial climate. We can infer that official circles already knew that 20,000 florins from the receivership general had ended up in his pocket.

20 21 22 23 24 25

Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” May 21, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 23v. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Oct. 31, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 275. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 8, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 292. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Oct. 30, 1762, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 22r. After the premature death of Receiver General Koch. NÖLA, HS 362. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Jan. 12, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 32.

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A galaxy of exalted courtiers turned out in an attempt to prevent what otherwise would have been his pro forma election by the Estate of lords. They included the grand master of Maria Theresa’s Court, Count Ulfeld; the imperial vice-chancellor, Count Colloredo-Mannsfeld; the head of the archduke Joseph’s household, Field Marshal Batthyány; and the grand master of the kitchen, Count SaintJulien. The importance ascribed to the vote was especially apparent in the highly unusual presence of Ulfeld, the ranking great officer of state. In a nasty contest that spilled over into a second day, he led the resistance to Auersperg’s quasi-automatic right of succession.26 The Court’s own candidate, Count Wenzel Sinzendorff, did not qualify according to the practices of the cursus honorum. Auersperg’s victory placed a compromised figure in the college of Deputies, the body that supervised the Estates’ entire financial apparatus. Worse, it rebuffed the empress herself in a way that could hardly go unchallenged at a time when rationalization and simplification were watchwords of government. Discord at the Landhaus had always offered an ideal opportunity for intervention by the authorities and this was no less true as the Mannagetta affair continued to unfold after the Auersperg vote. The Estates themselves provided an opening: they appealed to the ruler through Landmarschall Trautson as the problem threatened to spin out of control.27 A major complication concerned the fate of a lesser official of the Estates named Franz Anton Ennß, who had been involved in Mannagetta’s shady dealings and tried making good before it was too late by handing over promissory notes signed by nobles. One of these—for 20,000 florins—bore Auersperg’s name.28 Just before the latter took up his new post (June 1763), the Court demanded an explanation for the money missing from the receiver general’s office. The Ennß case, labelled a “clear causa criminalis,” was referred to the regular courts, while Landmarschall Trautson took charge of an aulic commission to investigate the losses.29 Both of the lords’ Deputies, one of whom was now Auersperg, were excluded from the commission. The affair also offered the opportunity to mandate new financial procedures at the Estates. Standardized bookkeeping modeled on that introduced in Bohemia was prescribed, as was the submission of a complete statement of the receiver general’s accounts with supporting documentation for “one of the last years of the war.”30 These directives suggest how little 26

Minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 16/18, 1763, NÖLA, HA, XXIIa, vol. 1745–64, pp. 221–43. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Apr. 27, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 51v. 28 This occurred at an assembly of the “three upper Estates,” May 6, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 53. One source—Miha Preinfalk, Auersperg: Geschichte einer europäischen Familie, ed. Ernst Bruckmüller, trans. Irena Bruckmüller-Vilfan (Graz and Stuttgart, 2006), 357—gives Auersperg as an “inspector” in the receiver general’s office. 29 References to two of the relevant aulic decrees (June 15 and Aug. 19, 1763) are found in the minutes of the assemblies of the “three upper Estates,” June 23 and Aug. 29, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 59r, 66r. The quotation is taken from the minutes of Aug 29th. The aulic decree of Aug. 20, 1763 created the aulic commission, while that of Sept. 9, 1763 provided for the representation of the Landmarschall’s tribunal and the “three upper Estates” in the legal proceedings. NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 259, 267v–268r. Ennß ended up in the fortress of Spielberg in Brünn. Lower Austrian provincial government to Deputies, June 16, 1768, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 182r. 30 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” July 15, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 251v–252r. Quotation from aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Oct. 1, 1763, NÖLA, LH, 82. 27

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insight had existed into the daily management of money at a leading disbursement treasury located only a few hundred yards from the Hofburg. In keeping with usage, the “three upper Estates” passed the directives to their “extended finance committee,” an advisory body that had existed intermittently since the Thirty Years War, for deliberation and recommendations. There, the second patent collision of central and territorial authority in 1763 took place. Given the absence of extant minutes, the specifics of the occasion remain unclear. Two facts are certain: Landmarschall Trautson and Landuntermarschall Moser were present and clashed openly.31 A holdover from the Harrach days, the aged Moser lost his temper, behaving in a way considered “insubordinate” towards the empress’s own representative at the Landhaus. The social disparity between a petty noble descended from a Viennese burgher and a courtier from the aristocracy’s inner circle surely exacerbated the situation. Maria Theresa lost little time in suspending Moser from the Estates’ executive committee and banning him from assemblies. But his outburst shows that he understood the writing on the wall. The lesser nobility—of which he was the leading exponent—was to be the principal victim of reform at the Estates. The first blow fell a few months later. The decree of May 7, 1764 mandated the reorganization of the Estates’ administrative apparatus. Signed by two nobles at the Aulic Chancellery whose admission to the Estates Maria Theresa herself had endorsed—Count Rudolph Chotek and Baron Johann Christoph Bartenstein—it cited “financial retrenchment” (“Einschränkung der Würtschafft”) as justification for the step.32 Corporate structures were to become more “reliable” and “succinct.” The long Habsburg tradition of relying on local power and indigenous expertise proceeded under the changing parameters of fiscal-military exigency and reforming government. To this end, the decree cancelled the three standing committees at the Landhaus—the executive committee, the college of Deputies, and the college of accounts—as well as the still extant commissarial structures in Lower Austria’s four quarters. The college of Deputies was simultaneously reconstituted under the Landmarschall (the senior lord had previously chaired sessions). As before, it seated two members from each of the “three upper Estates,” the Fourth Estate remaining unrepresented. The “extended finance committee,” which had been composed of the combined membership of the three older standing committees (and where Trautson and Moser had butted heads), also ceased to exist. While incumbent officeholders were directed to submit their resignations, the reform provided for the free election of new Deputies as well as the receiver general, 31 The source for this affair is the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Dec. 9, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 293v–294r. 32 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” May 7, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 1–8. Szabo, Kaunitz, 91, refers to Chotek as “reactionary.” The literature contains perfunctory mention of this reform, often misdated to 1763: Sigmund Adler, Das adelige Landrecht in Nieder- und Oberösterreich und die Gerichtsreformen des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Vienna and Leipzig, 1912), 15–16; Karafiol, “The Reforms,” 227–35; Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 302–3; Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 325; Silvia Petrin, Die Stände des Landes Niederösterreich (St. Pölten and Vienna, 1982), 13.

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an office likewise vacated with the proviso that it was now forbidden to the nobility. In this respect, the profile of the receivership general underwent fundamental change. The Estates were to choose a person experienced in the practical business of “cash accounting” (“in Cassa Weesen wohl geübet”), whereas previous officeholders had often hailed from financier families whose networks could be tapped on the Estates’ behalf. The father of the receiver general deposed in 1764, Ludwig von Hacqué (1719–1802), had loaned the government an immense sum earlier in the century.33 As “in other imperial-royal hereditary lands,” the Court reserved the right to confirm appointments to the offices that survived. The disappearance of the hierarchy of standing committees put an end to the cursus honorum that had routed prelates and nobles through office since the later seventeenth century (and made Auersperg’s advent possible). Conversely, no educational or professional requirements were specified for the position of Deputy. Candidates should possess the “ability,” “insight,” and “other requisite good qualities” necessary for the “service and welfare of Her Majesty and the Fatherland.” Lastly, the reform of May 1764 refurbished the circle offices, which had not been a success. Amid the strains of the Seven Years War and a rising crescendo of provincial complaints about “confusion” and fears for the “destruction” of rural settlements by troops, the institutions of 1753 had disintegrated.34 As early as 1757, the first official censure of a circle captain had taken place at the instigation of the Estates.35 Less than two years later, conceding that the circle captains had not acquired “sufficient knowledge of the Land,” the empress offered to abolish the offices and transfer their duties to the Estates’ commissaries.36 The Estates stubbornly and unwisely rejected the idea, even as their functionaries were pulling up the slack left by the flailing circle offices.37 Now, with a solution still pending, the circle offices were retained and the commissaries suppressed. Yet the new arrangements eliminated a basic flaw of the original institutions. Maria Theresa now agreed to employ territorial nobles (two lords and two knights) to head the offices, still to be based in Lower Austria’s four historic quarters. The incumbent circle captains 33 For the father, see Franz Freiherr von Mensi, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs von 1701 bis 1740 (Vienna, 1890), 154. Hacqué himself does not appear to have belonged to the Moser clique around the receivership general. He received the expectancy to the office at the height of the Haugwitz system in the early 1750s, after which he was admitted to the “old lineages.” Estate of knights to Hacqué, Jan. 5, 1752, NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C29. Maria Theresa’s personal partiality to Hacqué suggests that he was a Haugwitz man. 34 The Votum of the Estate of lords, Nov. 9, 1757, on the tax proposition pro 1758, NÖLA, LH, 71. For military-administrative problems in connection with the Directorium’s takeover of the General War Commissariat, see ÖZV, II/1/1, 226–8. 35 Aulic decree to Deputies (regarding the “inappropriate conduct” of the circle captain above the Vienna Woods), Sept. 22, 1757, NÖLA, StB, 577, f. 293. 36 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 21, 1759, NÖLA, StA, A3, 78, f. 61–2. Another copy of this decree in NÖLA, StB, 579, f. 116r–117v. The difficulties with the circle offices are also documented in “Anmerkungen über die kurze Nachricht von der Beschaffenheit, und Verfassung des Erz-Herzogthums Oesterreich unter- und ob der Ennß,” Apr. 15, 1760, ÖNB 15.291. 37 “Specification derjenigen Verrichtungen, welche denen Ständischen Herren Ober Commissarien von Februario 1754 biß anhero folglich wehrender Activitet der Herren Creys=Haubtleüthen in verschiedenen angelegenheiten aufgetragen, und von selben richtig vollzohen worden,” [c.1763], NÖLA, StA, A3, 78, f. 305–9.

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from outside the Estates lost their jobs. In this way, the new offices were plugged into the circuits of local authority without sacrificing the goal of greater central oversight. They would endure as their predecessors had not. Though the empress reserved the right to nominate non-members of the Estates, she would never do so. A practice developed whereby the college of Deputies suggested candidates for a vacancy. The central authorities took a decision after consulting the provincial government. On one occasion, when the college proposed a lord for a knight’s place, the recommendation was not accepted.38 The first four circle captains under the new plan—Count Wolf Engelbert Auersperg in the quarter above the Vienna Woods, Count Johann Leopold Hoyos in the quarter above the Manhartsberg, Ignaz von Mensshengen in the quarter below the Vienna Woods, and the elder Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta (uncle of the late receiver general of the same name) in the quarter below the Manhartsberg—all exhibited the inherited habits and entitlements of leadership.39 All belonged to the Estates and were propertied in their own bailiwicks. Auersperg descended from a lineage conspicuous in the commissariat above the Vienna Woods in the preceding generations; he was also a Catholic convert from Lutheranism.40 The last senior commissary of his quarter, Hoyos came from one of the archduchy’s grandest landed families. Mannagetta would conduct circle business from his manor at Würnitz in the hills north of Vienna. With Maria Theresa’s special permission, one of his younger sons, Ferdinand, succeeded him in office (1774–82).41 Mensshengen was the only holdover from the previous offices. Because he was a landed noble, his original assignment (1760) had already taken local sensibilities into account. One key provision of May 1764 subordinated the reformed circle offices to the college of Deputies in all matters pertaining to the Contribution (“in provincialibus”).42 A mixed, consensual system arose in which Estates and provincial government shared authority over quarter-level administrative bodies of the dynastic state that were now managed by local nobles. Though underfunded and understaffed, the system came to function comparatively well, giving the regime greater room for maneuver in the rural world. The circle authorities in the other Bohemian-Austrian lands appear to have operated similarly.43 Not coincidentally, the four, relatively 38 Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa (recommending Count Ferdinand Traun), Aug. 12, 1777 and aulic decree to Deputies (appointing Jacob von Schick), Oct. 11, 1777, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 326–7, 330. 39 The names are found in the aulic decree of notification to Deputies, Aug. 11, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 49–53. See also [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 494–6. 40 Auersperg’s father-in-law, Count Ernst Ferdinand Auersperg, had been senior commissary above the Vienna Woods around 1740. For the familial relationship, which involved Wolf Engelbert’s marriage to a cousin, see Preinfalk, Auersperg, 367–8, 545. His conversion is mentioned in the report of the Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Apr. 11, 1771, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 233–6. 41 Aulic decree to Deputies, Aug. 12, 1774, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 265. [Starzer], Beiträge, 457. 42 §8 of the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” May 7, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 1–8. 43 For example, in Styria, see Gernot P. Obersteiner, Theresianische Verwaltungsreformen im Herzogtum Steiermark: Die Repräsentation und Kammer (1749–1763) als neue Landesbehörde des aufgeklärten Absolutismus (Graz, 1993), 279–98. The surnames of early circle captains in Carniola are in Anton von Globočnik, Uebersicht der Verwaltungs- und Rechtsgeschichte des Landes Krain (Laibach, 1893), 12.

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well-paid positions of circle captain (2,500 fl. per year) helped cushion the loss of remunerated offices at the Landhaus and reconcile the nobility to the new situation. Maria Theresa also skillfully staved off open opposition by pensioning off rather than simply dispossessing the officeholders of the Estates’ executive committee, college of accounts, and senior commissariat. The especially prestigious executive committee worthies, all senior members of the Estates, enjoyed lifelong claim to their pay. The reform of the Landmarschall’s tribunal (also known under certain circumstances as the Landrecht) followed in the fall of 1764.44 On the whole, it was less sweeping than older accounts suggest, though the tribunal was largely disentangled from the Estates institutionally, if not spatially or in personnel terms.45 The principle of privileged jurisdiction for the nobility endured. The reconstituted court received a new president known as the Oberster Landrichter in the person of Count Christoph Cavriani (in office 1764–79). The new title explains why the appellation of “Landmarschall’s tribunal” was dropped in favor of Landrecht exclusively. As acting grand marshal of the Court (Hofmarschallamtsverweser), Cavriani had held a high aulic appointment vested with judicial power. By birth, he belonged to the Lower Austrian Estates, as would his successor at the Landrecht, Count Wenzel Sinzendorff (in office 1779–82), the Court’s abortive contender for the college of Deputies in 1763.46 The Landmarschall bore the “honorary presidency” of the new body, but this was less significant than the loss of the associated powers of patronage, given the Landuntermarschall’s daily management of the old tribunal. The Landmarschall is reported to have retained the right to preside in criminal cases involving the Estates.47 In time, the new court’s assessors would be known as Landräte. They continued to be drawn from the indigenous nobility (lords and knights), the empress having rejected the idea of a bench for the “learned” (Gelehrtenbank).48 This too must be seen as a nod to local sentiment. One of the new, allegedly “bourgeois” assessors, Franz Bernhard von Kees (1720–95), in fact belonged to the lower reaches of the territorial establishment. Both his maternal grandfather and uncle (from the Orelli family) had been elected receiver general of the Estates, while his father Johann Georg (1673–1754) had held the prestigious post of Landschreiber at the old tribunal. The elder Kees was a client of Landmarschall Aloys Harrach, who had arranged his appointment.49 That the new Landrecht continued to sit at the 44 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Sept. 24, 1764, and aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Oct. 6, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 81–2, 87–90. 45 Adler, Das adelige Landrecht, 16–22; Karafiol, “The Reforms,” 232–3; Alphons von DominPetrushevecz, Neuere österreichische Rechtsgeschichte (Vienna, 1869), 36. 46 For Sinzendorff, see Michael Friedrich von Maasburg, Geschichte der obersten Justizstelle in Wien (1749–1848) (2nd edn., Prague, 1891), 91–3; Gutkas, Geschichte, 341. 47 Adler, Das adelige Landrecht, 21. 48 Adler, Das adelige Landrecht, 18. The aulic decree to the “two upper political Estates” (lords and knights), Oct. 31, 1778, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 335r–336r, confirmed the provision that only corporate nobles would be appointed as councilors on the tribunal. 49 The elder Kees’s correspondence with Harrach in 1729–42 is preserved in AVA, Harrach Family Papers, 82. Kees became Landschreiber in late 1731/early 1732. The Orelli connection is mentioned in the letter of July 13, 1729. The reference to Kees as “bourgeois” is in Karafiol, “The Reforms,” 233.

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Landhaus constituted perhaps the most palpable sign of the continuing connection between it and the Estates. Perhaps most strikingly, the Landrecht reform put an abrupt end to the long and varied career of Landuntermarschall Carl Leopold von Moser, another old Harrach protégé. Since 1729 Moser had presided over the tribunal, where the aristocrat Cavriani now replaced him. To be sure, Moser’s suspension from the Estates following his run-in with Landmarschall Trautson had been rescinded, but he remained in disgrace.50 More than this, he forfeited the dignity of Landuntermarschall only weeks after losing his place at the tribunal. His sacking was likely meant to head off scandal at the approaching handover of the tax proposition, when he would have been part of a deputation received personally by the empress.51 When this punishment failed to intimidate him, Maria Theresa resorted to a favorite stratagem: she promoted him. In raising him to the rank of baron, she forbade him to attend the Estates except as a “lord.” This was meant to force his transfer to the higher noble consortium, hence breaking his hold on the knights.52 Whatever his obduracy, Moser was no champion of a timeless form of corporatism or particularism. His forebears had first flickered up as a Catholic light in the intestine strife of the early seventeenth century. By famously opening a city gate to a unit of cuirassiers at a critical moment, the ennobled burgher and Viennese mayor Daniel Moser, a man of vigor and talent, had helped rescue Ferdinand II under siege in the Hofburg by a group of Protestant Estates.53 Later, Daniel was one of those new men that Ferdinand pressed on the reluctant Estates. Carl Leopold himself, Daniel’s descendant, was—as a Harrach client—a last representative at the Estates of the days of Prince Eugene. The stations of a highly reputable life had included a diplomatic assignment, stints as a councilor in various provincial and central government agencies, and as receiver general and Landuntermarschall at the Estates.54 The empress’s comparative leniency allowed for his merits personal and ancestral, as well as his great age. Unlike the barony, the bestowal of the rank of privy councilor entitling him to the honorific “Excellency” was a true reward (October 1764). She allowed him to keep his pension as a former member of the Estates’ executive committee and to draw his full Landuntermarschall’s pay for 50 The revocation of Moser’s suspension was made known by the aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Jan. 28, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 306v. 51 [Starzer], Beiträge, 451–2, gives Oct. 16, 1764 as the date for Moser’s dismissal as Landuntermarschall, the same day as the handover at Schönbrunn. Three days earlier, Moser, his brother, and his son had been selected to represent the knights in the ceremony, a circumstance that gives an idea of their dominance in the lesser noble curia. Resolution of the Estates, Oct. 13, 1764, to the aulic decree of Oct. 7, 1764, NÖLA, LH, 83. Constant von Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich, xix (Vienna, 1868), 150, places Moser’s dismissal on Oct. 6. In that case, it seems unlikely that he would have been chosen to go to Schönbrunn. 52 “Codex Provincialis,” xi, f. 325–6 (NÖLA). The Mosers did not at first use the title and never transferred to the lords. 53 Felix Czeike, Wien und seine Bürgermeister: Sieben Jahrhunderte Wiener Stadtgeschichte (Vienna and Munich, 1974), 171–5. 54 Details of this career, which included a resolution not to abandon Vienna in the dark days of 1741 as a Bavarian-French force approached the city, can be found in Wurzbach, Biographisches Lexikon, xix, 149–51.

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life.55 With his nearly eighty years, the dyspeptic Moser championed no coherent political ideology—such as the parlementaires in France—but rather what must have seemed to him privilege well-earned in the Habsburg cause. Still under the deposed Landuntermarschall’s sway, the knights fiercely protested the reforms at the diet of 1764. The other Estates demonstrated greater political acumen: in their written opinion in response to the tax proposition the lords did not even touch on the abolition of posts and committees.56 The diverse responses reflected the different perspectives. Landed abbots and counts more easily adjusted to diminished opportunity at the Landhaus than did petty nobles dependent on officeholding. With the new restrictions on the post of receiver general, the knights—indeed the Mosers—lost the juiciest plum of all. The later Landuntermarschall Carl Leopold had made his fortune with the position; his brother Daniel († 1769) also held it under Charles VI; his son Ferdinand Maximilian (1718–79) occupied it at the time of the reform of 1748; and his young son Karl (1744–1823) won the expectancy to it during the Seven Years War.57 The latter preferment ceased in 1764. The disappearance of the Estates’ college of accounts likewise affected the knights disproportionately. Though the “three upper Estates” had equal representation there, the knights had supplied the Raitmarschall, a proud title that now became extinct. That Moser’s career ended with the Landrecht reform rather than the previous spring’s structural changes was not happenstance. The tribunal had given stature to the head of the Estate of knights in an establishment otherwise dominated by the prelates and lords. Now, the post of Landuntermarschall itself lapsed after Moser’s ouster, although this may have been inadvertent and might be put down to the exLanduntermarschall’s continuing intransigence.58 His brother, Daniel, and eldest son, Ferdinand Maximilian, followed, respectively, only as presiding officer of the knights (without the Landuntermarschall’s title), no doubt in recognition of the fact that the Estate would be difficult to control in opposition to its wealthiest, most important lineage.59 After Ferdinand Maximilian’s death, Maria Theresa bestowed the lesser status on the much-favored Ludwig von Hacqué, who would benefit from Leopold II’s revival of the office of Landuntermarschall (if not its judicial functions) in 1790.60 Generally speaking, the reforms of 1764 hastened the already advanced decline of the Estate of knights. 55

Aulic decree to Deputies, Jan. 8, 1765, NÖLA, StB, 582, p. 187. Voten of the Estates of prelates, lords, and knights (on the tax proposition pro 1765), respectively Oct. 22, 22/30, and 30, 1764, NÖLA, LH, 83. Moser continued to preside over sessions of the knights until Jan. 9, 1765. Minutes of Estate of knights, NÖLA, RA, 15. 57 There is some evidence that the election of Moser’s son to the expectancy caused irritation. Minutes of Estate of knights, July 9, 1760, NÖLA, RA, 13. 58 The aulic decree of Jan. 8, 1765 refers to “the newly to-be-resolved Landuntermarschall.” The resolution never came. NÖLA, StB, 582, p. 187. 59 Two Mosers had been the only knights rich enough to take part in the celebrations of the marriage of the heir Joseph to Isabella of Bourbon-Parma with the necessary six-horse carriages. Minutes of Estate of knights, May 3, 1760, NÖLA, RA, 13. 60 Aulic decree to Deputies (notification of Hacqué’s appointment as “praeses” of the knights), Feb. 20, 1779, NÖLA, StB, 588, f. 14v–15r. Hacqué’s confirmation as Landuntermarschall in aulic decree of July 8, 1790, NÖLA, StB, 598, pp. 32–3. 56

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The reconstituted college of Deputies inherited the responsibilities of the three old standing committees and retained its place within the broader provincial administrative constellation—in respect of direct taxation and other matters. Now the only standing committee, it offered the authorities a more defined, manageable body in contrast to the changing array of dignitaries with which Haugwitz had had to deal. The assignment of the college’s chair to the Landmarschall improved oversight in a different way. Landmarschall Trautson now formally headed most of the Estates’ principal assemblies: the annual diet; the assembly of the “three upper Estates;” the college of Deputies; and the Estate of lords. Only the Estate of prelates continued to meet under the abbot of Melk. A pervasive system of patronage that was anchored in the Hofburg itself—where Trautson had his lodgings as deputy grand chamberlain—threatened to smother the earlier competition and variety at the Estates. In different ways, Trautson and his successor as Landmarschall, Count Johann Anton Pergen (in office 1775–90), both personified the loyal political following built up by the middle years of Maria Theresa’s reign. The enhancement of the office they held represented a comparatively traditional way of augmenting the empress’s authority at the Landhaus. Trautson was not only an immensely wealthy aristocrat and courtier in the ruler’s own entourage but also the scion of a lineage that had already provided the archduchy below the Enns with a stadholder and a Landmarschall. His numerous manors dotted across the main Habsburg lands from Tyrol to Hungary gave him almost as much an interest in the preservation of an undivided monarchy as the empress herself had. Pergen, though cut from different social cloth and hence criticized by traditionalists at the time of his appointment, descended from a line of officeholders at the Estates extending back to the middle of the previous century. His social-climbing ancestors had come into their own through loyal service to the dynasty and Estates. Both his father and paternal grandfather had passed through the cursus honorum, which meant, perforce, that they had presided over the college of Deputies. His father had also personally attended Charles VI as chamberlain, while Pergen himself was brought up as a page in the households of two dowager empresses, including the ruler’s own mother.61 If not as impressive as Trautson’s, the landed reach of the Pergens extended well beyond the archduchy. As had her predecessors, Maria Theresa needed the social clout of the established nobility. How did the arrangements at the Lower Austrian Estates compare to the ones elsewhere after 1763? No general reform of the Estates across the central lands ensued in these years and, as P. G. M. Dickson perceptively noted, there was a lack of structural uniformity.62 Only in Upper Austria did reform analogous to that in 61 On Pergen’s background, see William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 141–66. For contemporary noble disdain of Pergen’s ancestry, see Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf 1776–1782, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al., 4 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), ii, 166 (2nd pagination), Mar. 26, 1778. 62 Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 274.

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the land below the Enns take place.63 The reduction to one committee suggests that Bohemia served as a model, especially as the grand burgrave/governor presided over the “territorial committee” of the Estates in Prague. But in Lower Austria the offices of Landmarschall and stadholder remained separate, unlike the comparable positions in Bohemia and Moravia.64 In Graz the amalgamation in 1763 of the new Inner Austrian governorship with the presidency of the Styrian Estates provoked corporate protests that induced their division again (1765).65 Maria Theresa then named a Landeshauptmann to officiate at the Estates in her name, an expedient already employed in Upper Austria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Gorizia-Gradisca. The able Count Heinrich Auersperg (1721–93) combined the posts in the latter two provinces, as well as the presidency of the Intendanz in Trieste, in his own person.66 Otherwise the picture looks rather different in Inner Austria. As we saw, Maria Theresa had in the 1750s restricted the chairmanship of the Estates’ directorial committees to lords. The Carniolan sources show no change in what had become the practice by the 1760s. Between 1762 and 1770 the presiding officer (Amtspräsident) of the chamber of Deputies in Laibach was Count Johann Nepomuk Blagay (1732–1810), whose successors included Count Johann Nepomuk Auersperg (on record in July 1772) and Count Carl Liechtenberg (on record in January 1773).67 Landeshauptmann Heinrich Auersperg attended only the so-called “conferences” with the Deputies, an observance usual earlier. Given Auersperg’s many other official duties, more frequent attendance at the chamber would scarcely have been feasible or perhaps even possible—a problem faced in Lower Austria by Trautson and Pergen, each of whom held other offices.68 The most reliable secondary source for Carinthia indicates that the senior noble present, rather than the Landeshauptman, presided over the Deputies in the 1770s.69 The dispositions for the territorial courts of privileged jurisdiction also varied from duchy to duchy. In the land below the Enns, the Landrecht was practically decoupled from the Landmarschall and Estates institutionally. In Carinthia, Carniola, and Upper Austria, the Landeshauptmann as the presiding officer of the local Estates 63 Gerhard Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation in Österreich ob der Enns vom Anfang des 16. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte (Linz, 1978), 58. 64 For Bohemia, Jörg K. Hoensch, Geschichte Böhmens von der slavischen Landnahme bis zur Gegenwart (3rd edn., Munich, 1997), 280. For Moravia, Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 274. 65 Franz Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag des Herzogtums Steiermark unter Maria Theresia und ihren Söhnen,” AÖG 104 (1915): 168. 66 Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., iv, 30. Auersperg had followed an Auersperg cousin from another line as Landeshauptmann. The reforms of the 1740s to 1760s had not loosened the family’s hold on the office. Preinfalk, Auersperg, 164–5. Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 275, pointed out that the reorganization of provincial government in Inner Austria in 1763 “represented a partial return” to the situation obtaining before 1748. 67 “Ordinari Decreten Eintrag=Buch de Anno 1760 bis Anno 1782,” AS 2, I, 926. In 1762 Blagay had negotiated Carniola’s participation in the Estates’ Credit Deputation. Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., iv, 601. 68 The register of business of the Lower Austrian college of Deputies for 1783 shows that one of the two lords rather than the Landmarschall presided at most meetings. NÖLA, StB, 241. 69 Martin Wutte, “Beiträge zur Verwaltungsgeschichte Kärntens,” Carinthia I 131 (1941): 115, based on material in the Estates’ archives.

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chaired the respective tribunals.70 In Styria we find a different modus: an official with the older designation of Landesverweser presided over the Landrecht.71 A conspicuous use of titled nobles with local ties appears to be the common denominator of these expedients. The reform of May 1764 made outside manipulation of the composition of the Lower Austrian college of Deputies easier than under the old cursus honorum. The names of those chosen by the individual curiae now had to be submitted for aulic confirmation, a practice swiftly and successfully established. The Landmarschall notified the Court of election results, while official authorization took the form of a decree.72 Still, intervention was sporadic and not always efficacious. It can nearly always be traced to the empress personally, who kept a close watch on events. In the initial ballots for the reconstituted college, only the lords found their choice formally circumscribed due to their importance—and their defiance over Joseph Volkard Auersperg in 1763. The government communicated five “preferred” names, a device that would not recur. One new Deputy, the loyally Theresan Count Wenzel Breunner, enjoyed the confidence and respect of his fellow nobles as well. But his selection otherwise violated sacred tradition: he had already held the post. Under the previous system, the division of the cake as widely as possible among the territorial elite had discouraged re-election. Like Breunner, the other newly designated lords’ Deputy, Count Leopold Schallenberg, had served on the commission trying to clear up the Mannagetta/Ennß muddle in the receivership general, and he belonged to a well-connected noble family.73 Schallenberg’s early resignation opened the way for renewed intercession. The empress quashed the election of Baron Johann Baptist Gudenus (1721–86), a brother-in-law of the hapless Joseph Volkard Auersperg. In Gudenus’s stead she nominated Count Niklas Falkenhayn, a favorite whose name had been in play the previous year. In an attempt to assuage resentment at this breach of the liberty so recently confirmed, the authorities played up Falkenhayn’s elevated social status as 70

Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 276. Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929), 598; Obersteiner, Theresianische Verwaltungsreformen, 60. It is uncertain whether this remained the case after the appointment of a Landeshauptmann in 1765. 72 Examples of notifications: Landmarschall Trautson to Empress Maria Theresa, Feb. 1, May 10, May 23, 1765; May 6 and 21, and July 9, 1767; NÖLA, StB, 517, f. 33r, 43v, 44r, 100, and 104r; Landmarschall Trautson to Empress Maria Theresa, July 17, 1770, Jan. 11, 1771, May 5 and July 12, 1773, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 26v, 45r, 118r, and 123r: Landmarschall Pergen to Empress Maria Theresa, July 10 and Nov. 7, 1776, Apr. 5, 1777, and July 15, 1779, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 214r, 225v, 242r, and 334v. Examples of confirmations: aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Feb. 16, 1765, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 200–1; aulic decrees to Landmarschall Trautson, May 15 and July 25, 1767, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 81r and 101r; aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Aug. 11, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 199r; aulic decrees to Landmarschall Trautson, Jan. 26, 1771, June 14, 1771, and May 15, 1773, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 10v, 55r, and 269r. 73 Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Sept. 12, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 69r. The other names on the list had been Count Wenzel Sinzendorff (who had been the Court’s candidate for Deputy in opposition to Auersperg the previous year and would later head the reformed Landrecht), Count Wolf Engelbert Auersperg (who became circle captain above the Vienna Woods in Aug. 1764), and Count Niklas Falkenhayn (who would be elected Deputy in 1765). Minutes of Estate of lords, May 23, 1764, NÖLA, HA, Lade XXIIa, vol. 1745–64, pp. 256–60. 71

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a member of the consortium’s “old lineages.” The ancestral objection to Gudenus had in fact been mooted in the lords.74 On one other occasion, Maria Theresa rejected a candidate chosen by the Estates. The reason given was the amount of time already spent in office.75 The knight, Ferdinand Maximilian von Moser, had not only been a Deputy since 1764 but, like Breunner, had served in that same capacity in the 1750s. The factor of time in office worked against the empress’s own protégés. In 1770 Karl von Moser, another son of the deposed Landuntermarschall, carried a curial vote unanimously against Ludwig von Hacqué, a 1764 appointee who enjoyed Maria Theresa’s backing for an extension. Though Landmarschall Trautson himself had transmitted her wishes, the knights obstinately defended their freedom.76 The empress accepted this rebuff, as well as the failure three years later of Falkenhayn’s dogged bid for another term. In this case, the grand aulic chancellor himself had conveyed the message of imperial support.77 Ensuring Hacqué’s re-election at the next opportunity required the monarch’s personal mediation. The affable command she issued to the knights’ presiding officer, summoned to Court for the purpose, found its way into the curial record: “I recommend, recommend (n[ota]b [ene]: twice) Hacqué above all for Deputy, and for this [I] shall remain beholden to the Estate of knights.”78 The knights yielded with less grace, and in later years she interfered less frequently. After the initial uncertainties of 1764/65, the success of imperial intrusion depended largely on whether it was direct and personal, as Hacqué’s history showed. For their part, the prelates chose to ignore an alleged endorsement of the abbot of Montserrat passed along by word of mouth through a lesser official. Like Hacqué, the abbot himself had sought support at the palace. This was known to the chamber of prelates, where Montserrat lacked seniority. None of his abbatial predecessors had been a Deputy.79 In this way, traditional considerations of rank influenced electoral outcomes under the reformed system. Even claims arising out of the old cursus honorum continued to carry weight. While the confirmation in May 1764 of the provost of Klosterneuburg to the post he had held since 1762 is explicable by his close ties to Court, the Schotten abbot advanced to the other position on the basis of his service on the abolished Estates’ committees. The abbot of Melk, presiding at the election, had reminded his fellow clerics of that crucial fact.80 After Klosterneuburg’s resignation, Melk proposed

74 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, May 18, 1765, NÖLA, StB, 582, p. 284. Minutes of Estate of lords, May 10, 1765, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, pp. 6–7. 75 Minutes of Estate of knights, July 8, 1767, NÖLA, RA, HS 15, pp. 118–20. 76 Minutes of Estate of knights, July 11, 1770, NÖLA, RA, HS 15, pp. 203–9. 77 Falkenhayn had refused to submit the obligatory resignation near the end of his first and only tenure. This was reported to the empress by Landmarschall Trautson, Mar. 6, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 51r. The grand aulic chancellor’s démarche is recorded in the minutes of the Estate of lords, May 5, 1773, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, pp. 83–6. 78 Minutes of Estate of knights, July 7, 1773, NÖLA, RA, HS 15, pp. 324–5. 79 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Oct. 30, 1776, NÖLA, PA, HS 4. Maria Theresa later intervened through the Landmarschall on behalf of Montserrat. He would be elected only after her death. Minutes of Estate of prelates, Nov. 27, 1781, NÖLA, PA, HS 4. 80 Minutes of Estate of prelates, May 23, 1764, NÖLA, PA, HS 4.

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either of two former Raitherren—the provost of St. Pölten and the abbot of Seitenstetten—as the proper claimants. The latter received the nod.81 The practice in the knights was similar. In choosing both the younger Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta (1767) and Karl von Moser (1770), the existing “right” (jus quaesitum) of each to the post of Deputy was acknowledged. Mannagetta was a former Raitmarschall; Moser had laid out the high fees for the expectancy to the receivership general without ever gaining the perks of office.82 Though aware of the knights’ reasoning in the Mannagetta case, which had seen the rejection of a candidate more qualified under the reformed system (Circle Captain Mensshengen), the government accepted the results. The social composition of the college of Deputies exhibited signal continuity across the year 1764. Of the eight lords chosen before 1780, the lineages of six (Breunner, Schallenberg, Falkenhayn, Traun, Heissenstein, and Auersperg) had been represented at least once in the college since 1650. Counts Rudolph Traun (in office 1767–73) and Niklas Falkenhayn (in office 1765–71) were the sons of former Deputies. The paternal great-grandfather and uncle of Count Franz Heissenstein (in office 1771–7) had likewise served in the college, the first in the 1670s, the second in the 1750s. Count August Auersperg (elected 1779), another of his family’s converts from Lutheranism to prosper under Maria Theresa, was its fourth Deputy since the 1730s.83 Finally, the two “new” surnames not found in the older lists were newcomers neither to the local establishment nor the aristocracy: Count Johann Leopold Hoyos (in office 1773–9) and Count Zeno Montecuccoli (elected 1777). The knights became if anything more oligarchic. The seven elections to 1780 produced a total of only four officeholders from only three lineages (Moser, Mannagetta, and Hacqué). The two Moser Deputies were sons of the disgraced Landuntermarschall. The prelates continued to elect their grander members. Klosterneuburg and Schotten were represented twice each by successive monastic heads, while Melk, Göttweig, and Seitenstetten each appear once. The capable abbot of Säusenstein was the only lesser cleric in the group. Though the college of Deputies continued to manage a major aspect of government—direct taxation—the educational requirements, in the form of Policeyund Cameralwissenschaften, increasingly prescribed for office beginning in the 1760s did not extend to it. As of 1770, the new rules covered lesser corporate and civic administrators, but not the Estates’ Deputies.84 Nor had the changing parameters of noble education in which time-honored considerations mixed with an emphasis on new knowledge and skills yet made themselves felt.85 In the spring of 1771, 81

Minutes of Estate of prelates, May 20, 1765, NÖLA, PA, HS 4. Minutes of Estate of knights, July 8, 1767 and July 11, 1770, NÖLA, RA, HS 15, pp. 118–23, 203–9. The younger Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta was the eldest son of Circle Captain Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta (the elder) and elder brother of the later circle captain Ferdinand von Mannagetta († 1782). 83 He appears in the family genealogy under the forenames “Wolf Augustin Christian.” Preinfalk, Auersperg, 385–8. In official sources the name “August” is used. 84 Adolf Beer, “Die Finanzverwaltung Oesterreichs, 1749–1816,” MIÖG 15 (1894): 292. Aulic decrees to Deputies, Nov. 3 and Dec. 7, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 237 and 247v–248r. 85 For an illuminating consideration of the way noble education was changing under Maria Theresa, see Olga Khavanova, “Official Policies and Parental Strategies of Educating Hungarian 82

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Landmarschall Trautson summarized the prerequisites for election to the college of Deputies: 1) descent from the “old nobility;” 2) ownership of seigniorial property; 3) “knowledge of the Land:” and 4) acceptability to the monarch.86 Only the lastnamed point was—in certain respects—non-traditional: we recall that in the 1650s Ferdinand III had banned Protestants from the Deputies. But what was “acceptable” in the government’s eyes? Given the large flows of money through the Landhaus and the greater distinction being drawn between public and private interest, financial probity constituted a top priority. After the Auersperg debacle, indebtedness drew special disapproval.87 Simultaneous tenures of close kinsmen were also frowned upon.88 That the Estates were reformed rather than abolished after the Seven Years War reflected not just hard political and financial calculation: native ability and prestige remained essential to the government of a composite monarchy.89 The institutional culture at the Estates evolved in response to cross-currents at the level of personnel. The boundaries between the government and the Landhaus had earlier been permeable; they remained so under Maria Theresa. At the very beginning of this book, we noted that as the Seven Years War was coming to an end the empress revoked a rule that barred officeholders of the Estates from transferring to the provincial government. By the reform of 1764, she placed local nobles in charge of the circle offices, entities that were a key institutional innovation of her reign. By the early 1770s, incumbent or former circle captains were already standing for office in both the lords and knights. In 1773 Count Johann Leopold Hoyos became the first erstwhile circle captain to be elected to the college of Deputies. A few years later, the lords tapped a sitting circle captain, Count August Auersperg, for the same office. In this way, the administrative routines and knowledge of reforming government translated to the Landhaus in ways less perceptible than through the simple imposition of bureaucratic norms from above. In addition, there was heightened awareness among the Estates themselves of the need for qualified administrators given that the greater complexity of business also shifted perspectives. One lord found that the post-reform college of Deputies “had become an important agency” (“seye nunmehr eine wichtige Stelle”).90 In the seventeenth century the Estates had Noblemen in the Age of Maria Theresa,” in Ivo Cerman and Luboš Velek, eds., Adelige Ausbildung: Die Herausforderung der Aufklärung und die Folgen (Munich, 2006), 95–115. The first Deputies to have graduated from the Theresan Academy for noble boys were elected under Joseph II (Anton Joseph von Mayenberg, in office 1782–88, and Count Anton Hoyos, in office 1787–90). Max Freiherr von Gemmel-Flischbach and Camillo Manussi Edler von Montesole, eds., Album der K.K. Theresianischen Akademie (1746–1913) (Vienna, 1913), 22, 33. 86 Minutes of Estate of lords, May 8, 1771, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, p. 63. 87 An objection to an indebted candidate for office was expressed by Count Wenzel Breunner, himself a Deputy confirmed under the new system. Minutes of Estate of lords, May 10, 1765, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, pp. 6–7. 88 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Aug. 18, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 208. 89 For this problem in the context of later eighteenth-century government, see Grete Klingenstein, Karl Graf Zinzendorf: Erster Gouverneur von Triest, 1776–1782: Einführung in seine Tagebücher [vol. i of Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf 1776–1782, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al.] (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), 110–18. 90 Count Norbert Trauttmansdorff, minutes of Estate of lords, June 5, 1771, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, pp. 66–7.

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learned to participate to their advantage in new forms of organizational support for the dynastic standing army. Under the changing auspices of fiscal-military exigency and the more systematic and rationalizing conceptions of government after the Seven Years War, an analogous process was taking place. The later eminent Josephian jurist, Franz Georg von Kees (1747–99), put it thus to his fellow knights: only “practice and experience” could give a Deputy the “knowledge” needed for making “thorough and modest objections” to “the requests of aulic councilors and aulic agencies.”91 The college of Deputies’ task was to safeguard the interests of the Estates as well as the government. The reform of the receivership general in 1764 worked itself out in a way that offers good insight into the strictures on change. Apart from the stipulation that the receiver general no longer be noble, the “three upper Estates” retained the right to choose the incumbent for an office that continued to handle direct taxes, borrowing, and debt service. The accounts still ran into the millions. As with the college of Deputies, the Estates did not necessarily exercise their freedom in conformity with wishes from higher up. In the first election under the new rules, a candidate with the backing of the Aulic Chancellery, Johann Christoph Molz, an accounting official from the City Bank of Vienna, faced Johann Georg Groppenberger, who had spent his career in the service of the financially potent Estate of prelates.92 The Estates overwhelmingly chose Groppenberger. Since 1747 he had been the prelates’ “business agent” (Prälatenstandsagent), a post attained with the abbot of Melk’s backing after long apprenticeship.93 He had also been “secretary” in the college of accounts (Raith Secretario). The controversy surrounding Groppenberger’s election threw the complex political constellation at the Estates into relief. As in the days of Haugwitz and Friedrich Harrach, reform was also a problem of shifting interests built around particular issues. The positions taken by the post-1764 Deputies on Groppenberger are revealing. He received the vote of the senior cleric, Provost Berthold Staudinger of Klosterneuburg, a Theresan stalwart, while another new Deputy, Count Breunner, cast his ballot for the grand chancellor’s nominee. When the government tried to suppress the results, the Estates refused to back down, elected him a second time, now with Breunner’s support, and asked the Landmarschall to finesse the issue at Court—all in time-honored fashion. Six weeks later, Groppenberger received official sanction; he would remain in office until 1781 (see Figure 7.1 for a bond of the Estates issued during Groppenberger’s tenure).94 Ultimately, the autonomy that underlay the Estates’ creditworthiness explains the authorities’ readiness to back down on such a sensitive issue. In this way, the first non-noble since the early seventeenth century became receiver general of the Estates. And Groppenberger’s selection evinced yet another dislocation at the Landhaus under the impact of 91 Quotations from minutes of Estate of knights, July 3, 1776, NÖLA, RA, HS 16, pp. 82–3. For Kees, see Maasburg, Geschichte, 156–60. 92 Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” May 25, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 104. 93 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Mar. 9, 1747, NÖLA, PA, HS 2. 94 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, July 15, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, p. 42. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” June 16 and July 30, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 108, 109v.

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Figure 7.1. Bond of the Lower Austrian Estates made out to Petronilla Lambrechts, sacristan of the Beguines church in Lierre, Brabant, Dec. 22, 1777 (signed by the six Deputies and Receiver General Johann Georg Groppenberger). Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Münzkabinett (Inv. No. MK_WP_016012).

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reform: the prelates in effect supplanted the knights as the force at the Estates’ receivership general. The new state of affairs drew from Landuntermarschall Moser the caustically expressed hope that Groppenberger was “no slave” of the prelates.95

PUTTIN G T HE BO OKS IN ORDER The financial fallout of the Seven Years War lent powerful stimulus to efforts at greater central regulatory control, whereby a delicate balance had to be found between improved coordination and the privileged independence necessary to the Estates’ good offices. The “security of the debt” that they “had contracted to save the state,” the Lower Austrian Estates were assured, was one of Her Majesty’s “principal worries of government.”96 Yet those efforts have attracted comparatively little attention.97 In some Austrian duchies, oversight was entrusted to new “disbursement treasury deputations” (Kassendeputationen) whose nomenclature recalled Haugwitz initiatives. The one in Styria appears in August 1765; a Carinthian version seems to have been created only after the Estates resumed routine fiscal control in the later 1760s.98 Little is known about these entities. The assertion that they were responsible for tax collection is at all events not applicable to the land below the Enns, where no such deputation existed.99 In Styria the new committee was heavily corporate: Maria Theresa put a local count of old family in the chair, and the Estates chose their own representatives. Unlike in Lower Austria, the receiverships general in Inner Austria remained a preserve of the nobility (lords). The Carniolan incumbent in 1764, Count Augustin Rasp, still held office more than a decade later. One of his successors, Count Johann Nepomuk Auersperg (1735–1811), was sometime president of the chamber of Deputies at Laibach.100 The existence of the “deputations” coincided with a period of intensified financial monitoring associated with two new central agencies—the General Disbursement Treasury (Generalkassa) and the Aulic Chamber of Accounts (Hofrechenkammer)— that had both been established late in the Seven Years War.101 This activity has left clear traces in the records of the Lower Austrian Estates. Under Ludwig Zinzendorf, a Kaunitz man and leading advocate in the councils of power for updating the Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” May 25, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 104. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” June 20, 1767, NÖLA, LH, 84. 97 The best treatment is still ÖZV, II/1/1, 403–15. 98 For Stryria: Mell, Grundriß, 598; Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag,” 169–70. For Carinthia: Wutte, “Beiträge,” 117. Wutte also refers to such a “deputation” in Carniola. 99 The assertion in Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 284. 100 For Rasp as receiver general in 1764: “Ordinari Decreten Eintrag=Buch de Anno 1760 bis Anno 1782,” AS 2, I, 926; in 1775/76: “Landschaftlicher Summari=Ausweis von erst abgewichenen militar Jahr 1775 und hiernach formirte Neüer Praeliminar Systemal Entwurf für das eingetrettene militar Jahr 1776 von dem Herzogthume Krain,” July 5, 1776, AS 2, I, 52. For Auersperg, see Preinfalk, Auersperg, 494. 101 The General Disbursement Treasury has been less well-served by the literature than the Aulic Chamber of Accounts. Beer, “Die Finanzverwaltung,” 265–73; ÖZV, II/1/1, 335–8, 482–91; Dickson, Finance and Government, i, 237 and ii, 82–5. 95 96

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monarchy’s finances, the Chamber of Accounts would play a key part in the attempt to provide dependable figures on annual income and expenditure. Given that this task required reliable information from the Estates as leading government creditors, the empress charged the chamber with auditing and ordering their records.102 This involved guidance and cooperation rather than the direct subordination of the Estates’ receivership general and bookkeeper to the Chamber of Accounts.103 Soon after the war, the stream of rules and regulations had picked up. Procedures introduced earlier, including the submission of yearly budget estimates and monthly balance sheets, were refined. The Lower Austrians were expected to emulate regularized bookkeeping techniques tried out elsewhere, such as a “table summarizing the monthly state of Moravia’s Contribution.”104 Printed forms became more common to avoid unnecessary scribbling. In the early postwar years, we find a first reference to a new “accounting method” at the Estates’ receivership general.105 It was part of an improved system of cameralmercantile bookkeeping worked out by Johann Matthias Puchberg (1708–88), a Zinzendorf protégé at the Chamber of Accounts and a key figure in the history of Habsburg public accounting.106 The accounting method was implemented in many agencies in these years, and its introduction in Lower Austria entailed initially reluctant visits by Receiver General Groppenberger and the Estates’ bookkeeper Dietmayr to the Chamber of Accounts for briefing and instruction.107 Puchberg himself was already known at the Landhaus as a participant in the inquiry into the Mannagetta/Ennß affair.108 Pressure on the Estates in the middle 1760s to apply the new modalities remained high, while progress was halting. Only on Christmas Eve 1767 was Zinzendorf able to announce that the receiver general’s accounts for the preceding November fully met expectations. Once again, he enthused, the Lower Austrian Estates had provided an example to the other lands in a matter that concerned the “salvation of the state.”109

102 Explicit references to that charge are found in the aulic decree to Deputies, Apr. 4, 1766, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 517–19; and aulic decree to Deputies, Aug. 1, 1767, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 104r– 105r. Cf. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 82, 84; Eduard Gaston Graf von Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, Minister unter Maria Theresia, Josef II., Leopold II. und Franz I.: Ihre Selbstbiographien nebst einer kurzen Geschichte des Hauses Zinzendorf (Vienna, 1879), 99. 103 On this point, ÖZV, II/1/1, 410, 412, 415. 104 Aulic decree to Lower Austrian Deputies, Mar. 17, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 324r. 105 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Apr. 23, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 332v. 106 On Puchberg and his system, see Hanns Leo Mikoletztky, “Johann Matthias Puechberg und die Anfänge der Hofrechenkammer,” JbVGStW 17/18 (1961/62): 144–5; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 82–7; P. G. M. Dickson, “Count Karl von Zinzendorf ’s ‘New Accountancy’: The Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791,” IHR 29 (2007): 27; Legay, “The Beginnings of Public Management,” 270. See Derek Beales, Joseph II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987/2009), i, 162, for Joseph II’s impatience with the procedures. 107 Aulic decrees to Deputies, Aug. 18 and Sept. 23, 1764, Apr. 4, 1766, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 59, 76–7, 517–19. 108 K.k. Iudicium Delegatum to Deputies, July 16, 1765, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 324–5. Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, 99. 109 Aulic decree to Deputies (signed Ludwig Zinzendorf ), Dec. 24, 1767, NÖLA, LH, 84. Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, 125–7.

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This achievement fits less easily into a linear model of progress than into a pattern of tentative, piecemeal change. Despite Zinzendorf ’s relief in late 1767, guidelines had to be repeated over and over again in succeeding years.110 The college of Deputies sometimes fell behind in forwarding the prescribed monthly balance sheets; the annual budget estimate that should have been handed in the previous fall remained outstanding in the spring of 1768.111 Delays occurred later as well. Onsite inspections of the Estates’ finances by the central authorities initiated in the 1760s did not prove a lasting arrangement.112 After 1768, when Zinzendorf ’s enemies in government were increasingly able to clip his wings, the stream of directives reaching the Landhaus from the Chamber of Accounts slowed. He was pensioned off in 1773 and his institutional creation pared back.113 Yet as Zinzendorf ’s brother, Karl, later noted with satisfaction, his accounting system survived at the Estates.114 The cooperation of the Estates also explained the success. Zinzendorf carefully acknowledged the “patriotic sentiments” that had impelled the Landmarschall and Deputies to facilitate the new procedures.115 For a while at least, the Deputies carried out weekly visitations at the receivership general.116 The new bookkeeping and other control mechanisms offered advantages to the Estates as a corps (as opposed to possibly corrupt individuals).117 In the last resort, they placed the finances and credit upon which their privileged position rested on a more secure footing. Whether they liked it or not, the Estates’ willingness to loan to the Habsburgs in the preceding decades had bound them up in a financial web so dense that there was now no escape if they wanted to survive. Their solvency more than ever depended on the government. On their side, the authorities understood that they had to be seen not to be violating the autonomy upon which financial intermediation hinged. Hence regulation at the Estates was a largely behind-thescenes affair.118 It did not impinge on the public face of independence as embodied

110 Aulic decrees to Deputies, Apr. 28, May 5, Sept. 15, and Dec. 22, 1768, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 167v, 173r, 209v, 233v–234v; aulic decrees to Deputies, Apr. 12, May 17, and Dec. 9, 1769, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 29v, 37r, 102v–103r; aulic decrees to Deputies, Jan. 8 and July 30, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 4v–5r, 63; aulic decree to Deputies, Aug. 28, 1772, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 189v–190r; aulic decree to Deputies, Sept. 3, 1774, NÖLA, StB, 586, f. 130v–131r. 111 Aulic decrees to Deputies, Apr. 28 and May 5, 1768, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 167v, 173r. 112 Aulic decree to Deputies, Nov. 16, 1768, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 224r–225v. For an earlier visitation: aulic decree to Deputies, June 15, 1768, NÖLA, StB, 583, f. 181v–182r. 113 ÖZV, II/1/1, 482–91. 114 Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., ii, 83 (2nd pagination), Dec. 19, 1777. 115 Quotation from the aulic decree (signed Ludwig Zinzendorf ) to Deputies, Dec. 24, 1767, NÖLA, LH, 84. 116 Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Dec. 22, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 517, f. 23r. Further evidence of a “visitation” by the Deputies is found in their communication to Empress Maria Theresa, June 28, 1768, NÖLA, LH, 85. 117 On this point, see Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, 99–100. 118 The need to impress upon the “public” that government-ordered reform was meant to end abuse in the Estates’ finances rather than to take control of them is tellingly expressed in the material compiled for the education of the young archduke Joseph. “Anmerkungen über die kurze Nachricht von der Beschaffenheit und Verfassung des Erz-Herzogthums Oesterreich unter- und ob der Ennß,”

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in the Deputies and receiver general who owed their offices to free election. The debt that circulated under the Estates’ good name bore the signatures of just these authorities. Ludwig Zinzendorf ’s reforms of corporate financial procedures were grounded in a central lesson of the Seven Years War: that the credit of the Estates was vital to Habsburg finances. This recognition received its most striking expression in his proposal for a “political bank” that was debated in the councils of government and agreed by the empress in 1767 before being put on ice, for good as it turned out. Zinzendorf had spent much of his adult life studying European financial systems and their applicability to Austrian conditions. The idea behind the bank was to create a modern, consolidated Habsburg public debt that would be traded on the bourse and backed jointly by the Bohemian-Austrian lands. The Estates would have run the institution through a directorate meant to guarantee the independence necessary to sustaining credit. To objections raised in the Council of State, Zinzendorf highlighted the advantages that the monarchy with its composite structures enjoyed over its Prussian rival: The . . . military form of government of the Prussian state makes an institute founded on the credit of an unlimited monarch seem less strange to its subjects. Our body politic, however, which is composed of provinces, where free Estates have been known for the last 6[00] to 700 years, from whom until the present day the Contribution is postulated, and with whom solemn recesses are concluded, has the special advantage of being a Gouvernement mixte, which, without hindering the ruling prince in the use of his always righteous power for the general good, procures for him at the same time a public credit, which in contrast to a purely military state, offers a double means of defense. In this so happy form of government, our subjects are unused to any other credit operations than those based on solid trust, and built either on Estates or other Puissances intermediaires.119

That he drew a direct parallel between his bank and the Estates of the central lands, on the one hand, and the Bank of England and the British parliament, on the other, surely raised eyebrows and almost certainly contributed to the project’s abortion, which otherwise remains mysterious.120 Dickson noted the planned bank’s political implications, which he referred to as “indeed astonishing,” but he dismissed it as a body that would have been “under oligarchical provincial control.”121 Why that

Apr. 15, 1760, ÖNB 15.291, in the section entitled “Von dem Ständischen Credit, und Einsehen in ihre oeconomie.” 119 “Credits=Vorschläge des Rechen=Cammer=Präsidenten Grafen von Zinzendorf 1ter Theil,” (1767), HHStA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, HS 20, pp. 315–16. 120 For the parallel to Britain: “Credits=Vorschläge des Rechen=Cammer=Präsidenten Grafen von Zinzendorf 1ter Theil,” (1767), HHStA, Nachlass Zinzendorf, HS 20, pp. 146–7. 121 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 68. The best discussion of Zinzendorf ’s bank project in the context of his broader ideas for financial and economic reform is Johann Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des österreichischen Staatskredites in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Innsbruck, 1954), 63–84. For fears in the Council of State that the bank would be dangerous to the ruler’s authority, see Adolf Beer: “Die Staatsschulden und die Ordnung des Staatshaushaltes unter Maria Theresia,” AÖG 82 (1895): 45, 59.

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control in the Habsburg context would have been any more oligarchical than its matching part in the British setting is not clear. It would be going too far to interpret the miscarriage of the scheme—which Zinzendorf resubmitted without success a couple of years later, now with the Lower Austrian Estates as the sole backers—as one of those “lost moments of history” spoken of by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper.122 There were no signs that the Estates were on the cusp of transmogrifying from a social check on absolute power to a proto-parliamentary force controlling the purse strings. To the contrary: the failure of the project confirmed Montesquieu’s observation that absolute monarchy was incompatible with an independent public bank.123 Just before the empress withdrew her approval of the original plan, the Estates themselves had begun to fear for their good name. But the terrible financial aftermath of the war was clearly provoking new thinking in Vienna about the relationship between public finances and political institutions—not long before the intertwined issues of taxation and representation were to become flashpoints in America and France. Zinzendorf admired the systems he had studied in Western Europe, while his writings suggest that he did not adhere to any narrow understanding of Estates in general. In time, his brother, Karl, would become perhaps the most enlightened advocate of the representative tradition in the hereditary lands, a point of view perhaps conditioned by lingering resentment at Catholic-Habsburg “tyranny.”124 Both converts from Lutheranism, the brothers belonged by birth to the Lower Austrian Estates and spent parts of their careers there. At all events, the driving force behind the reform of accounting procedures at the Lower Austrian Landhaus after the Seven Years War foresaw an enhanced rather than reduced role for the Estates. The objective of maintaining the vitality of the Estates at a time of otherwise intense political and financial pressure was apparent in two measures that in some respects would seem to have contradicted one another. In 1765 the empress reconfirmed the Estates’ highly prized right to regulate their own membership.125 The original prerogative, dating to 1572, had been tenaciously defended in the intervening centuries. The Estates in the other Austrian duchies obtained similar sanction.126 Only as privileged bodies clearly distinct from the rest of society did they enjoy the authority necessary to their manifold activities—from gathering at the annual diet to apportioning and collecting taxes to issuing debt. The ability to accept and reject those nobles seeking admission to their ranks—also ones ennobled by the Habsburgs—was a freedom plainly apparent to the world. Where the empress catered here to traditions of corporate exclusivity, the second

122

Adam Sisman, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography (London, 2011), 531. Kathryn Norberg, “The French Fiscal Crisis of 1788 and the Financial Origins of the Revolution of 1789,” in Philip T. Hoffmann and Kathryn Norberg, eds., Fiscal Crises, Liberty, and Representative Government, 1450–1789 (Stanford, CA, 1994), 282. 124 Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., iii, 818–19 (Feb. 9, 1781) for reference to Ferdinand II as a “tyrant.” 125 Aulic decree, Dec. 9, 1765, NÖLA, HA, Lade IV, no. 9. 126 William D. Godsey, “Adelsautonomie, Konfession und Nation im österreichischen Absolutismus ca. 1620–1848,” ZHF 33 (2006): 211 (fn. 45). 123

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measure aimed to diversify the Estates. Perhaps under the influence of her co-regent Joseph II, who wished to see nobles engage in commerce, she began encouraging the induction of well-to-do merchants at the Landhaus.127 While this did not invalidate the privilege she had reconfirmed less than a decade earlier, it did imply an attenuation of previous social practice. It also represented an attempt to infuse commercial know-how and wherewithal into the Estates—not to drain away their lifeblood. The lack of a grand financial or commercial bourgeoisie accounts for the modest success of this initiative.

TURNING T HE FISCAL SCREW The reorganization and improved management at the Estates was one aspect of the wider legacy of wartime spending, the postwar military build-up, and government reform. After the Austrian succession conflict, the army’s needs were prioritized just as the return of peace expanded the government’s room for domestic political maneuver. The pattern repeated itself after 1763. As of the fiscal year 1764 the empress decided to devote her most dependable revenue, the Contribution, wholly to the army. This choice had somehow to be reconciled with a staggering debt of some 285,000,000 florins. Under various titles, nearly half of the debt was owed to the Estates of the central lands for the loans they had raised and for war-related expenditures on the government’s behalf (known as Supererogaten). More than that, the Contribution had been largely mortgaged away through borrowing. It had to be freed up and various wartime expedients still in place in the winter of 1763 replaced with sustainable ones.128 These circumstances augured a renewed fiscal squeeze on the Estates and inhabitants of the archduchy below the Enns. The lack of sentiment in the councils of power for raising the level of the Contribution left extra taxes, indirect taxation, and the implacable collection of all charges as alternatives.129 The first tax specifically for the purpose of liquidating debt had already been imposed during the war: an inheritance tax (Erbschaftssteuer) decreed in the central lands in 1759 and successfully introduced in the early 1760s. It was limited to collateral bequests, and its administration fell in Lower Austria to an aulic commission chaired by the Landmarschall and composed of representatives from the Estates and provincial government.130 Around the time of the Peace of Hubertusburg, it was followed by a 20 percent surcharge on income from older excise taxes on beverages (Taz/Ungeld ) that had been earlier “privatized” by the ruler’s domain. Largely in the 127 “Privilegium für das zu etablirende Gremium der Großhändler in der k.k. Residenzstadt Wien,” May 23, 1774, §3, reproduced in V. F. Gottfried, Chronologisches Verzeichniß sämmtlicher Herren k.k. priv. Großhändler für das Bestehen derselben vom Jahre 1771 bis gegenwärtig mit ihren protocollirten Firmen (Vienna, 1855), 4; Beales, Joseph II, i, 166. 128 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 37, 46. 129 For the sentiment on the Contribution, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 41. 130 Patent for the Bohemian and Austrian lands, June 6, 1759, NÖLA, KP, 34. Patent for Lower Austria, Sept. 26, 1761, NÖLA, KP, 35. For the commission in 1779, see the relevant Hof- und StaatsSchematismus (Vienna, 1779), 203–4.

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hands of the landed establishment, this income had drawn Haugwitz’s attention as early as 1759, to no avail. Over the Estates’ protests, the authorities managed to enforce the charge beginning in 1763.131 That the college of Deputies oversaw intake through manorial administrators may have constituted a concession to the Estates.132 The same period witnessed the extension of taxes across Lower Austria that had been inflicted on the city of Vienna as early as 1761 to help finance the war. These included levies on horses (Pferdesteuer), families (Familiensteuer), and interest income from capital (Interessensteuer). The last of these failed to realize expectations and was soon abandoned.133 There were also income taxes on corporate and civic officials as well as other smaller-scale impositions. The chief postwar fiscal innovation was the so-called “debt tax” (Schuldensteuer) imposed in Lower Austria in November 1763.134 Repeatedly refined over the years, it was the first enduring universal tax in Austrian history and a milestone in the direction of fiscal equality in the Habsburg lands. In its political and symbolic implications, this achievement deserves a place alongside the “Turk tax” of 1683, the recess of 1689, the capitation of 1691, and the reformed Contribution of 1748. The debt tax was in essence a new capitation. Leopold I had imposed the first universal capitation in the archduchy in the early 1690s. Though it had not become permanent, the threat of repetition had subsequently been used as a bargaining chip to negotiate other forms of money out of the diet. After the Seven Years War, tax commutation had become, in Dickson’s words, “politically unthinkable,” while an imposition on flour that would have raised bread prices was abandoned for similar reasons.135 The debt tax offered a way to place part of the burden on the elites. A progressively graduated capitation, the tax divided the entire population, including women and children, into twelve, later twenty-four, classes of persons (hence the name Klassensteuer in the sources). The name artlessly betrayed the purpose: servicing the state debt.136 Circumstance had already forced the French down a similar fiscal path. After 1748 the wartime property tax known as the “twentieth” (vingtième) was left in place to pay off liabilities from the preceding war.137 The debt tax distinguished according to birth and status only in the administrative modalities that provided for comparatively tight control of nobles, clergy, and urban dwellers. Unlike other inhabitants, these groups were directly subordinated to a local aulic commission that supervised the operation. It had counterparts

131 For Haugwitz’s attempt to tax the revenues from Taz /Ungeld, see Chapter Six. The aulic decree of Feb. 12, 1763 imposing the charge was considered by an assembly of the Estates on Feb. 23, 1763. NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 39. Aulic decree to Estates, Mar. 4, 1763, NÖLA, StB, 581, f. 193–4. 132 Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Aug. 29, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 111v. 133 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 52–3. 134 Pettenegg, Ludwig und Karl Grafen und Herren von Zinzendorf, 91; Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 48–9, passim; Peter Claus Hartmann, Das Steuersystem der europäischen Staaten am Ende des Ancien Regime: Eine offizielle französische Enquete (1763–1768) (Munich, 1979), 184–5, 197. 135 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 51 (quotation), 60, 62. 136 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 48–9. 137 James B. Collins, The State in Early Modern France (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2009), li–lii; Michael Kwass, Privilege and the Politics of Taxation in Eighteenth-Century France: Liberté, Égalité, Fiscalité (Cambridge, 2000), 36–7.

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in the other central lands. Under the chairmanship of the aristocratic army officer and former General War Commissary, Count Joseph Balthasar Wilczek († 1787), the commission in the land below the Enns examined declarations and exercised ultimate authority in questions of assessment.138 Here again, the jurisdiction of the regular courts was suspended, much as it had been for other extraordinary levies since the late seventeenth century. The commission united administrative and judicial power. For those who fell under seigniorial or civic control outside Vienna—the vast majority of the common people—the local magistrates who routinely handled the Contribution had immediate charge of the levy in all its facets.139 Whether it was handled as a mere supplement to the Contribution, as occurred with the vingtième to the taille tax in France, is a question for further investigation.140 Remittances passed up through the Estates’ receivership general.141 Special measures again applied to the privileged: their payments were taken in directly by the “Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury” (Universal Staats=Schuldensteuer=Cassa).142 The same unyielding determination to bring in taxes that was apparent after 1748 characterized policy in the even bleaker situation after the Seven Years War. Given the large debt and the rising level of indirect taxation which fell hardest on the poor, the government tried more than ever to ensure the maximum possible receipts from the wealthy and the privileged orders.143 The subsistence crises of Maria Theresa’s later years underscored the threat to public order at a time of fiscal affliction. A revised, harsher order of distraint (Exekutionsordnung) for seigniorial landowners replaced the wartime compromise already discussed, while constraints applied to penalties imposed by lords on subject peasants owing back taxes.144 More than ever, landlords were responsible for making up for arrears out of their own pockets. Clear signals also went out that arbitrary assessments on the rural population would not be tolerated. A commission on “peasant affairs” (Unterthanssachen) was established, while investigations conducted by the circle offices targeted those nobles— Sinzendorff, Dietrichstein, Khevenhüller—who were suspected of collecting more from their subjects than ended up in the state treasury.145 These events presaged

138 The patent of Nov. 24, 1763 refers to a special aulic commission for the debt tax (“wegen dieser Schulden=Steuer angestellten besonderen Hof=Commission”). The patent of Feb. 2, 1771 states that the tax will be administered by the “aulic commission for extra taxes” (“in Extra=Steuersachen aufgestellten Hof=Commission”), an entity in existence since the Seven Years War. Wilczek is listed in each case as chairman. NÖLA, KP, 36, 39. 139 The prelates protested this administrative burden in their Votum on the tax proposition pro 1771, Aug. 10, 1770, NÖLA, LH, 86. The knights did the same in their Votum on the proposition pro 1776, Oct. 25, 1775, NÖLA, LH, 87. 140 Hartmann, Das Steuersystem, 197. 141 Apparent from the “Extrasteuer Protocoll von 1764 bis 1782,” NÖLA, StB, 394. 142 The aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Feb. 19, 1764 refers to the “newly constituted Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury.” NÖLA, LH, 83. 143 For the increasingly regressive taxation of the second half of the eighteenth century, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 98; Roman Sandgruber, Ökonomie und Politik: Österreichische Wirtschaftsgeschichte vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Vienna, 1995), 222. 144 For the order of distraint: aulic decree to Deputies, July 14, 1764, NÖLA, StB, 582, pp. 29–32. 145 Aulic decrees to Deputies, Jan. 19, July 20, Nov. 7, and Nov. 28, 1765, as well as Feb. 13 and Mar. 6, 1766, NÖLA, StB, pp. 189, 329–31, 411–13, 421–2, 485, 504–5.

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the later inquiries into conditions on Bohemian manors and the exemplary punishment famously meted out to one magnate.146 At the Lower Austrian Estates, the bitterest complaints about the new obligations came from the lesser nobility. At the diets of the later 1760s and 1770s, the knights gave the most consistently vexed expression to provincial discontent. According to their calculations, the many extra assessments increased the overall tax load by a third.147 They were not alone in their misery: the testimony of witnesses as well as the research of scholars indicates that the general population labored under an oppressive fiscal weight. The gross revenues from Lower Austria in these years exceeded those of any of the monarchy’s other central European lands except Hungary proper.148 The knights’ protests found their way into the diet’s official declarations in reply to the annual tax demand, one of the few legitimate means of letting off steam. In view of international and budgetary inhibitions, the government had little choice but to ignore the protests. Still, the yearly assemblies furnished a regular venue for explaining to the local establishment why so much money was required. Year after year the justification remained the same: a “sizeable war machine” (“ansehnliche Kriegsmacht”) and debt-service. As part of a larger operation beginning in 1766 to put the public debt on a more sustainable footing, the central authorities concluded formal settlements, known again as “recesses,” with the Estates of Lower Austria and those of the other central lands. The agreements were signed in the fall of 1767.149 As Ludwig Zinzendorf noted at the time, they evidenced the Estates’ continuing autonomy. Unlike in 1748, the aim was not to reset the annual grant, whose level remained unchanged. Instead, the debt held by the Estates was rescheduled at a uniform rate of 4 percent, while the types of bonds in circulation, which had multiplied during the war, were reduced.150 As in the past, the agreements required compromise on both sides. The empress was obliged to abandon her postwar plan of assigning the entire Contribution to the military. The Estates began holding part of it back again to repay their creditors.151 The sum involved was the so-called “cameral Contribution,” 146

Beales, Joseph II, i, 347–8; Szabo, Kaunitz, 166–7. Votum of the Estate of knights, Sept. 23, 1768, NÖLA, LH, 85. Voten of the Estate of knights, Oct. 24, 1770 and Oct. 12, 1771, NÖLA, LH, 86. 148 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 151. See also pp. 100–1 for the comparison of gross revenue in various territories of the monarchy in 1763 and 1783. For the heavy tax burden borne by the population (1770), see the report of a foreign diplomat reproduced in Heinrich Handelmann, ed., “Vom Wiener Hof aus der Zeit der Kaiserin Maria Theresia und Kaiser Josephs II.: Aus ungedruckten Depeschen des Grafen Johann Friedrich Bachoff von Echt, Königlich dänischen Gesandten (von 1750 bis 1781) am kaiserlichen Hof,” AÖG 37 (1867): 461, as well as Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., ii, 144–5 (2nd pagination), Feb. 24, 1778, for the weight of the debt tax on the poorer classes. 149 A copy of the Lower Austrian Recess, Nov. 1, 1767, in NÖLA, LH, 89. For a good discussion of these operations, see Schasching, Staatsbildung und Finanzentwicklung, 40–53. See also Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 30–1. For the arrangements specifically with respect to the city of Vienna, see Eduard Holzmaier, “Die Staatsschuldenregulierung vom Jahre 1767 und die Stadt Wien,” JbVGStW 15/16 (1959/60): 243–50. 150 For an almost contemporary attempt in France to reduce the public interest rate to 4 percent, see Philip T. Hoffman et al., Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago and London, 2000), 109. 151 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 57–60, and the chart on p. 62. 147

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mentioned in connection with the recess of 1748, which in the land below the Enns amounted to around one-tenth (or some 200,000 florins) of the total. On their side, the Estates again assumed a portion of cameral debt as well as accepting a lower yield on their bonds (an undifferentiated 4 rather than 5 or 6 percent)—a qualified form of bankruptcy.152 The confabulations brought a few concessions to specifically Lower Austrian sensibilities, as in respect of Hungarian wine imports, an old bone of contention.153 Under the new arrangements, the cameral Contribution, the debt tax, and the inheritance tax all provided funds for servicing the debt. The upshot of the operations of 1766–7 was to reduce the Estates’ share of total Habsburg liabilities through a transfer of part of their debt to the City Bank of Vienna—and thus to lessen the government’s dependence on them (see Figure 7.2). This attainment may help explain why Zinzendorf ’s bank project, under consideration at the time, was shelved. A new pattern emerged that would hold into the 1770s. The authorities had increasing recourse to the monarchy’s ever more formidable credit abroad, a policy that Zinzendorf sharply criticized for its reliance on foreign money.154 As the historian P. G. M. Dickson has shown, the recovery of the monarchy’s credit so soon after the war was one of the great achievements of Theresan government. It rested in part on the successful conclusion of the recesses of 1767. The debt tax was in some respects a turning point that fits nicely into the old paradigm of absolutism: this charge and other postwar taxes were imposed without consultation of the diet. A precedent for the future was set. In times of emergency, earlier Habsburg rulers had sometimes taxed without asking the Estates, though not in peacetime or on a recurrent basis. The new impositions were justified by reference to the “essential requirements of state,” again the army and debtservice.155 Remarkably, the Estates quickly ceased to protest this tactic.156 Political palsy—not to be discounted in the leaden years after 1763—is not the entire explanation. The circulation of funds raised by the debt tax is illuminating. Given the many wartime loans provided by landowners and other prosperous groups, much of what the new assessment raised was destined to flow back into territorial pockets. The Estates received reimbursement for the war-related expenses incurred on the army’s behalf (the Supererogaten) in the same manner. Early on, Beer, “Die Staatsschulden,” 30–1. Rudimentary minutes have survived of a meeting on Aug. 3, 1767 attended by representatives of the Aulic Chancellery (Grand Aulic Chancellor Count Rudolph Chotek), the Aulic Chamber (Count Karl Friedrich Hatzfeld), the Aulic Chamber of Accounts (Count Ludwig Zinzendorf), the Lower Austrian Estates (the abbot of Melk, Count Niklas Falkenhayn, and Ludwig von Hacqué), and Landmarschall Trautson. The aulic decree to the “three upper Estates” of Aug. 26, 1767 confirms concessions made to the Estates at that meeting. NÖLA, LH, 84. 154 For the shift from domestic to foreign credit, see James C. Riley, International Government Finance and the Amsterdam Capital Market 1740–1815 (Cambridge, 1980), 129. 155 Quotation from the aulic decree to Deputies, Aug. 25, 1764, directing that the tax on profits from Taz /Ungeld be reimposed the following year (NÖLA, StB, 582, p. 56). Also aulic decree to Deputies, [Dec. 1770], NÖLA, StB, 394, f. 173r, directing that “the same extra taxes as in the previous year be imposed and collected for the present military year 1771.” 156 A last protest of the failure to include supplementary taxation in the tax proposition is in the diet’s declaration (Landtagserklärung) of Oct. 30, 1764, NÖLA, LH, 83. 152 153

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350,000,000 300,000,000 250,000,000 200,000,000 150,000,000 100,000,000 50,000,000 0

1 May 1763

1 Nov. 1771

1 Nov. 1781

Bohemian-Austrian Estates’ Treasury Debt Total Habsburg Treasury Debt including Estates’ Debt

Figure 7.2. Habsburg treasury debt borne by the Bohemian-Austrian lands, 1763/1771/ 1781. Source: P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 378–9.

the government drew explicit attention to this flow.157 If the horrendous debt required authoritarian forms of taxation, the material self-interest of local society dictated its acceptance—at a price. Fiscal-military constraint was still narrowing the bounds of politics. The government continued to demand the diet’s yearly approval of the main tax burden, the Contribution established in 1748. After the Seven Years War, Maria Theresa carried on with the public spectacle of personally handing over the tax proposition to a deputation of the Estates. This is revealing given that she was fully prepared to dispense with ceremony that she considered outdated or unnecessary. Though the ritual would be dismissed by later commentators as a formality or charade, the records suggest that participants took it seriously indeed. In her reign’s later years, it was often staged at the palace of Schönbrunn as the place of the Court’s autumn sojourn. Several contemporary descriptions convey the flavor. The one from 1776 is typical. At nine o’clock in the morning of October 6, a cavalcade departed the Landhaus in the center of Vienna for Schönbrunn a few miles west of the city walls.158 Mounted on horseback, the liveried personal servants of the Estates’ deputies, Landmarschall Pergen’s own household officers, and four trumpeters in 157

Aulic decree to Estates, Dec. 1, 1764, NÖLA, LH, 83. “Relation über die den 6ten Octobris 1776 fürgeweste Landtags Audienz zu Schönbrunn,” NÖLA, LH, 87. 158

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festive attire led the procession. Three gala coaches each pulled by six horses carried representatives of the “three upper Estates.” The three ranking members of each order—Abbot Urban Hauer of Melk (for the prelates); the Landmarschall (for the lords); and Ludwig von Hacqué (for the knights)—occupied the first vehicle. Seated in the second were the Schotten abbot Benno Pointner, Count Franz Heissenstein, and the younger Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta, all of whom, like Hacqué, belonged to the college of Deputies. The third conveyance bore two other serving Deputies, Abbot Magnus Klein of Göttweig, and Count Johann Leopold Hoyos, as well as Karl von Moser, a former Deputy included in the absence of his older brother to maintain the balance among the “three upper Estates.” Next came the Estates’ syndic, Franz Anton Bach, in his own carriage, while the three members of the Fourth Estate (Vienna’s syndic and chief treasurer, as well as the joint tax receiver of the eighteen cities and market towns) humiliatingly pulled up the rear in a four-horse coach.159 At Schönbrunn the cortège was met with military honors. The deputation entered the palace up the grand staircase in the main courtyard. It passed through an enfilade of state rooms to the audience chamber, where Grand Chamberlain Rosenberg announced its arrival. After a short pause, Maria Theresa appeared with the grand mistress of her household, Countess Vasquez de Pinos. Standing under a baldachin, the empress listened to a short address by Landmarschall Pergen before amiably replying and personally rendering the tax proposition into his hands. The record carefully noted that the doors remained open during this exchange, endowing it with a public quality in a building bustling with courtiers, lackeys, officials, petitioners, and others. The deputies then kissed hands before the equally ceremonial return to the Landhaus. Occasionally, the ruler used the audience to address other concerns, as when she asked her visitors to consider ways in which bread shortages could be headed off after the crop failure of 1771.160 Why did these usages—and the Estates themselves—survive the ponderous atmosphere of the 1760s? As the financial corset tightened, the same legal, political, and financial considerations operated as before. Also during Maria Theresa’s reign, the Imperial Aulic Council remained a force in the preservation of the Estates in the territories of the wider Holy Roman Empire. The tribunal, located in the Viennese Hofburg, viewed the intermediary powers as a guarantee of the principles of legal certainty and the security of property against despotism and insolvency.161 The

159 The empress had notably settled a conflict over precedence between the Estates’ syndic (supported by the “three upper Estates”) and the Fourth Estate in the former’s favor. Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Sept. 30, 1752, NÖLA, StB, 576, f. 33r–34r. 160 The empress’s démarche is recorded in the minutes of the diet, Oct. 7, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 189v. Also in those of the Estate of lords, Oct. 9, 1771, NÖLA, HA, HB, 2, pp. 71–2. The requested recommendations were passed along to the Aulic Chancellery on Oct. 14, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 67r. 161 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Heiliges Römisches Reich 1776–1806: Reichsverfassung und Staatssouveränität, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1967), i, 29–31; Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich 1648–1806, 3 vols. (2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1997), i, 91–7; Volker Press, “Landtage im Alten Reich und im Deutschen Bund: Voraussetzungen ständischer und konstitutioneller Entwicklungen 1750–1830,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 39 (1980): 106–7. See also Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Landstände im Heiligen Römischen Reich an der Schwelle der Moderne: Zum Problem von Kontinuität und Diskontinuität um 1800,” Historisches Jahrbuch 123 (2003): 58 (fn. 21).

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regular convocation of the tax diets in the Habsburg hereditary lands strongly accorded with that understanding, while at the level of personnel the imperial vicechancellors and some of the tribunal’s assessors belonged to and attended the Estates at the nearby Landhaus. The diet’s meetings themselves evidenced in an ongoing, public way the Estates’ privileged existence. The approval of the annual grant by assemblies composed primarily of landowners legitimized direct taxation in a way otherwise lacking, and the vote (with the resulting tax revenue) offered surety for the debt contracted on the government’s behalf. Corporate assent to the annual grant in essence underwrote the monarchy’s public finances.162 The authorities could dispense with that guarantee less than ever. Nonetheless, the record confirms that formal consultation with the Estates declined as the scope and frequency of legislation increased, while the fiscal-military straightjacket diminished the diet as an arena of communication and negotiation. Gatherings per year were less frequent and poorly attended; Maria Theresa had to admonish the nobility to turn up in greater number.163 A badly attended diet impaired the validity of the agreed tax burden and potentially unsettled bondholders. Yet preserving the Estates, as the government was constrained to do, tied its legislative hands in a little appreciated way. As the historian Werner Buchholz has suggestively written, princes as the decision-makers stand in the political limelight, but often the “real power lay in the hands of the creditors, who were able to spin their threads in such a subtle way that in many cases they are still waiting on history to disclose their identity.”164 In our case, the prerequisites to the continued existence of the Estates as tax gatherers and Habsburg creditors determined legislative bounds ex negativo. Not only did a privileged corporation with claims to territorial representation have to be upheld, but also the agrarian social hierarchy of which it was the capstone. Even under intense fiscal and political pressure, seigniorial landowners in Lower Austria were able to bring their interests to bear. The problem of peasant labor services elucidates this point. Momentum for reform had built with growing official concern about the persistent oppression of the subject population (Unterthanen=Betruckungen). The empress herself gave celebrated vent to her fury at the abysmal conditions that were coming to light in parts of the countryside, particularly in Bohemia, but also in the archduchy. Yet, tellingly, she consulted the Lower Austrian Estates about a legislative solution to the labor services problem.165 Perhaps not illogically, they suggested an “abatement of the Contribution” as the only way to alleviate suffering.166 An abatement was obviously out of the question, 162 See Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Staat—Krieg—Korporation: Zur Genese politischer Strukturen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Historisches Jahrbuch 123 (2003): 221–4. 163 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Trautson, Oct. 13, 1770, NÖLA, LH, 86. This decree was read out in an assembly of the “three upper Estates,” Oct. 24, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 96, f. 183r. 164 Werner Buchholz, Geschichte der öffentlichen Finanzen in Europa in Spätmittelalter und Neuzeit: Darstellung—Analyse—Bibliographie (Berlin, 1996), 20. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 300, remarked that the Habsburg government’s actual creditors were “often concealed behind the Estates.” 165 Lower Austrian provincial government to Deputies, Dec. 16, 1771, and aulic decrees to Deputies, Jan. 18 and 21, 1772, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 101, 118, 119r. 166 College of Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, Mar. 13, 1772, NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 82r.

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taking into account the acute shortage of money in the government’s coffers. The Robot patent that was finally issued in the land below the Enns (1772) set an upper limit on labor services and brought relief to only “a small part of the subject population.”167 To be sure, some abuse was eradicated and the authorities attempted, with the Estates’ support, to rationalize the patchwork patrimonial jurisdiction that had grown up over the centuries in the countryside.168 Still, a state-ordered transformation of the manorial order faced formidable obstacles, not the least of which was the fact that in the absence of an appreciable commercial or financial sector the landowning (and debt-holding) elite remained the monarchy’s political backbone. Reform conserved the essentials of the existing socio-political system. This should not surprise us, given that overturning the system was not in the interests of the dynasty or the Estates—both of them beneficiaries. The Estates’ preservation of routine control of the system of direct taxation went beyond the “concession to political susceptibilities” suspected by Dickson.169 Besides the convenience and cost savings afforded the government by that control, the Estates’ credit activity required autonomous access to an income source (tax revenue) for amortizing their share of the treasury debt. Hence the widely held assumption that their administrative structures were simply “incorporated” into the dynastic state misunderstands the nature of the relationship. It was one of fundamental interdependence rather than assimilation. The authorities could and did undertake closer coordination of corporate structures with the aim of cutting costs, increasing efficiency, and forestalling corruption. In a harsh fiscal climate, the population had to see that its tax money was not being squandered. If public order and domestic stability resulted, then also military readiness was served. Fortified more than ever by the government’s grim determination, the reformed college of Deputies partook of two of the three major areas of government: direct taxation and military administration (especially provisioning).170 Precisely in this period, the enlightened ideas of physiocracy emanating from France foresaw the participation of the landowning elements of society in those parts of public administration related to assessments in money and kind.171 Concerned with the increasing alienation between the regime in Versailles and local society in France, 167 Helmuth Feigl, Die niederösterreichische Grundherrschaft vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zu den theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (2nd edn., St. Pölten, 1998), 259; Jerome Blum, Noble Landowners and Agriculture in Austria, 1815–1848 (Baltimore, MD, 1948), 72. 168 The president of the Imperial Aulic Council and former Lower Austrian Landmarschall, Count Ferdinand Harrach, presided over a large committee at the Landhaus devoted to solving what was perceived to be the problem of one peasant or parcel of land being subject to more than one lord. Aulic decrees to Deputies, July 6, 1771 and Feb. 22, 1772, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 63v–64v, 131v–132v. 169 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 248. 170 The norms that governed the work of the college: “Instruction für das mit Ihro Kais: König: Apostol: Maitt: ag. Genehmhaltung von denen drey Oberen Herren Ständen einer löb: Landschaft des Erzherzogthums Oesterreich unter der Enns aus ihrem Mittel erwählte Verordneten Collegium, was selbes nemlich unter Praesidio eines zeitlichen Herrn Landmarschallens zu handlen, zu beobachten, und zu vollziehen habe,” May 16, 1764, NÖLA, StA, A2, 2. 171 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1976); Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2012), 149–81.

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the new tenets in fact closely resembled the already existing arrangements in the Austrian duchies. The college of Deputies composed of local landowners managed much of the onerous postwar tax burden. Even the new debt tax as paid by the wider rural population fell within its bailiwick. From the square of the Friars Minor, the college organized the imposition, repartition, and collection of assessments throughout the land below the Enns with the help of a growing staff of secretaries, clerks, bookkeepers, stewards, receivers, and others that would continue to expand irregularly into the nineteenth century. After the dissolution of Haugwitz’s Directorium, central management of the Estates had passed to the Bohemian-Austrian Aulic Chancellery, which kept a close eye on the issue of seigniorial taxes. As in Haugwitz’s time, the authorities reserved the right to grant relief from payments and fines, which again took place on the basis of information passed up by the college of Deputies.172 The cases concerned both nobles and peasants.173 The Chancellery also scrutinized the modalities that the Estates recommended for raising the Contribution.174 Because this activity involved flows of information upward as well as downward, the Habsburg government remained firmly grounded locally in matters of great political sensitivity. The college of Deputies furthermore continued to be subject to “resolutions of the Estates.”175 In the negotiations on reimbursement for costs incurred by the Estates during the Seven Years War (the Supererogaten), a wretched problem that the recess of 1767 had not resolved, the college advised a line at variance to that of the government. After its adoption by the “three upper Estates,” the Deputies upheld it in official exchanges.176 The rulers had to appeal to Landmarschall Trautson for help in overcoming the deadlock.177 The institutional rearrangements of the early 1760s did not invest the provincial government with formal supervisory power over the Estates in tax matters, or otherwise. Also in this period, direct subordination to a central rather than provincial agency was a cherished privilege of the Estates. The relationship between the provincial government and the Deputies remained collegial. The problem of tax arrears of clergy and townsmen, over whom that government exercised original

172 Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, June 18, 1773, NÖLA, StB, 518. The so-called Contributions Restanten Consignation was a recurring communication to Court between 1764 and 1780, NÖLA, StB, 517–18. Also register of business of college of Deputies, Apr. 23 and May 4, 1767, NÖLA, StB, 231, f. 60, 70r–71r. 173 Register of business of college of Deputies, June 6, 1767 (concerning the aulic decree of May 30, 1767, directing the college to investigate requests for tax relief by rural people on several estates), NÖLA, StB, 231, f. 93v. Aulic decree to Deputies (regarding forgiveness of penal interest imposed on Baron Karl Gemmingen), Feb. 28, 1778, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 222r. 174 Aulic decree to college of Deputies, June 2, 1764, NÖLA, LH, 83. Evidence of the practice in the aulic decrees of Nov. 18, 1775 and Nov. 30, 1776, NÖLA, LH, 87. 175 Provided for in §1 of the instructions. NÖLA, StA, A2, 2. 176 Deputies to “three upper Estates,” Mar. 26, 1770; Deputies (on behalf of “three upper Estates”) to Empress Maria Theresa, Apr. 2, 1770; aulic decree to Deputies, Apr. 7, 1770; and Deputies to Empress Maria Theresa, May 28, 1770, NÖLA, LH, 86. 177 Autograph letter signed by Joseph II on behalf of Maria Theresa to Landmarschall Trautson, June 28, 1770, NÖLA, LH, 86. A system of compensation was introduced by the aulic decree of Aug. 5, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 200v–201v.

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jurisdiction, entailed routine cooperation between the two bodies. Formal distraint on noble assets, by contrast, involved the college of Deputies and the revamped Landrecht. Privileged (regular) legal authority endured in the case of ordinary taxes—as opposed to extraordinary ones.178 Administrative practice with respect to back taxes exhibited a notable degree of reliability and constancy reflective of the fierce pressure from above.179 If friction between the college of Deputies and the provincial government did obtain, it has left little trace in the record. The circle offices of 1764, endowed with the cachet of local authority by the corporate nobles who now ran them, prospered in a way that the institutions of 1753 had not. They were now formally subordinate to the Estates as well as the provincial government, and offered the college of Deputies essential organizational support. The circle offices published the Estates’ patents and ordinances, collected information on their behalf, and transmitted directives to the localities, in the process becoming the main channel of communication from the Landhaus.180 At the same time, the circle offices played only a tangential role in the daily business of taxation. The allocation of assessments remained the prerogative of the college of Deputies, manors, and local magistrates; the circle offices did not have disbursement treasuries comparable to those maintained by their counterparts in the Bohemian lands; and they did not collect taxes.181 The Contribution in Lower Austria continued to flow directly from the seigniorial level into the Estates’ receivership general in Vienna. After the Seven Years War, there was some effort to use the circle offices to manage extraordinary levies. For example, they were supposed to vet manorial specifications on the payers of the debt tax before the documentation was passed to the aulic commission in Vienna. This experiment proved transient. By the 1770s the procedures called for the routine participation of only corporate structures in what smells like an old-fashioned concession to the Estates.182 In the case of a special levy (a donum gratuitum) during the War of the Bavarian Succession, we find the circle offices endowed with fiscal authority over those not covered by the regular tax system.183 Known as the “Extra-Catastrales” during the Seven Years War, when 178 The distinction is clearly spelled out in the aulic decree to Deputies, Feb. 6, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 128v–129r, and is otherwise manifest in the routine correspondence. 179 Aulic decree to Deputies, Jan. 26, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 7v–8r. Aulic decree to Deputies, Dec. 17, 1774, NÖLA, StB, 586, f. 164v. Lower Austrian provincial government to Deputies, May 10, 1776, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 37r. Aulic decree to Deputies, May 18 and Sept. 7, 1776, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 38 and 67r. 180 Deputies to circle offices, Jan. 28, 1765 and Apr. 24, 1778, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 172, 332. The somewhat misleadingly titled “Protocollum von dem Löbl. NÖ. Ständisch Verordneten Collegio 1764–1772” is a register of communications received by the circle office above the Vienna Woods from the college of Deputies and the steps taken in response. NÖLA, Kreisamt Viertel ober dem Wienerwald, Buch Nr. 23. 181 For a comparison to Bohemia, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 236. 182 The debt tax patents of Nov. 24, 1763 and Dec. 3, 1764 (NÖLA, KP, 36) provide for circle office participation, but that of Feb. 2, 1771 (NÖLA, KP, 39) only for the involvement of the Estates and manorial structures. The college of Deputies used the circle offices in following up arrears on the tax. Deputies to circle captains in the quarters below the Vienna Woods and the Manhartsberg, Nov. 26, 1772, NÖLA, StB, 394, f. 217r. 183 Patent of the Lower Austrian provincial government, Oct. 20, 1778, NÖLA, KP, 42.

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they were under the Estates’ purview, these people had soon acquired the more vividly descriptive administrative label of the “fourth order of man” (quartum genus hominum) as the government intensified and refined its efforts to access the entire population for fiscal purposes.184 Even so, local magistrates were needed to administer the taxes of this group, while the college of Deputies oversaw the levy as paid by those subject to the Contribution. Contemporary testimony gives some idea of the relatively modest possibilities of the circle offices. Ignaz von Mensshengen (1732–1810), the longest-serving Theresan circle captain in Lower Austria, wrote: “The position of circle captain is one of the most useful for the state if it is endowed as required; but it must be given a better foundation than is now the case. For there is a lack of authority, of necessary personal, and even of pay, all of which would be revealed by closer investigation, but is anyway known higher up.”185 Mensshengen had spent seventeen years in office below the Vienna Woods, the quarter, ironically, that contained both the Hofburg and the Landhaus. Contemporary state handbooks corroborate the view that these agencies were run on a shoestring. The records suggest that the circle offices focused on the inexorable follow-up of tax arrears, activity that was of pressing importance to public finances and necessitated the selective use of force. Together with the spectacular, if sporadic, investigations into arbitrary tax charges on the subject population, this work gradually put a premium on good governance by landlords. Haugwitz’s plan to exclude the Estates from any organizational part in maintaining the army—as agreed in the recess of 1748—was not realized during his time in power and remained a dead letter subsequently. The Estates’ military-related activity continued to evolve in response to needs. Their roots in the agrarian world most especially advised their participation in assessments in kind and large-scale provisioning. They were also involved in the Prussian-style conscription famously introduced in the central lands in the early 1770s—another aspect of what Karl Zinzendorf perceived as “fifteen years of military government.”186 The lesson from the failure of the first circle offices had been learned: the authorities sought local input to facilitate and expedite the new methods.187 Soon after the announcement of the new plan, a military “coordinating commission” (Concertations Commission) was called into being in Lower Austria.188 Chaired by the stadholder, it included 184 The aulic decree of Aug. 29, 1778 defined the quartum genus hominum as follows: “holders of capital (Capitalisten) who own no real property; financiers (Wechslern); warehousers (Niederläger); wholesalers (Großhändler); merchants (Kaufleuthe); business agents (Wirtschaftsbeamte); and all other kinds of inhabitants who do not fall under other rubrics.” NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 287v–291v. Cf. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 42. 185 Mensshengen to Deputies, June 30, 1777, NÖLA, StA, A1, 16, f. 319. On Mensshengen’s career, see [Starzer], Beiträge, 462. 186 Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., ii, 158 (2nd pagination), Mar. 14, 1778. On the conscription system, see Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 291–7. 187 This is explicit in the aulic decree to the Lower Austrian college of Deputies, Sept. 14, 1771, NÖLA, StB, 367, p. 1. 188 Minutes have been preserved in NÖLA, StB, 367 (“Concertations Protocoll in Recrutierungssachen von 1771 bis 1783”).

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representatives of the provincial government, the army, and the Estates, as well as the imperial senior war commissary as the highest civilian military administrator in the land below the Enns. In some years it met on a nearly monthly basis (for example 1774 and 1776); it deliberated on the allotment of recruits; and the circle offices implemented its decisions. In the localities, lords continued to influence the choice of recruits.189 At the annual revision of the conscription lists, the authorities demanded that manorial officials be on hand to furnish “information” and “instruction.”190 The extension of the central power into the countryside occurred within a consultative framework that factored in local interests and local people. Wartime territorial support for the Habsburg army returned to the agenda when State Chancellor Kaunitz and Maria Theresa’s co-regent, the emperor Joseph II, blundered into the War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9), the so-called Potato War, in the hopes of increasing the monarchy’s contiguous area by trading the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria.191 The financial outlay of what proved to be an almost farcical adventure was prodigious. P. G. M. Dickson called the outlay for 1779 “by far the largest for any year in the history of the Monarchy” to date.192 The Lower Austrian Estates were called upon to organize immense quantities of produce—mostly fodder in the form of oats and barley (some 500,000 Metzen)— as well as to assist with billeting and military transport.193 To help cover the monetary costs of fielding the troops, the Court appealed in time-honored fashion to the Estates to lure domestic capital into the open, promising the proceeds of both the debt tax and Contribution as security for credit.194 As many as two million florins—the equivalent of an extra Contribution—appear to have been raised in this way.195 Finally, a donum gratuitum was imposed through the Estates, to whom the modalities of collection were conceded under a supervisory commission headed by the stadholder.196 Dickson’s figures show that this attempt to extract funds from a population already battered by wartime tax levels in peacetime did not meet expectations. The last major domestic initiative of Maria Theresa’s reign in Lower Austria suggests how the political pendulum continued to swing. The 1770s saw a number

189

Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 294. Quotations from minutes of the military “coordinating committee,” July 14, 1777, NÖLA, StB, 367, pp. 395–8. 191 Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 195–6; Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars, 364–70. 192 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 149–52 (quotation on p. 150). 193 Aulic decrees to “three upper Estates” or Deputies, Mar. 8, 21, and 31, Aug. 28, Sept. 19, and Dec. 3, 1778, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 229r–230v, 232v–233v, 236r–237v, 297v–303r, 306, 353v–354r. Aulic decree to Deputies, Feb. 23 and Apr. 10, 1779, NÖLA, StB, 588, f. 12, 34. 194 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” June 6, 1778, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 268. 195 Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs] 1776–1782, ed. Klingenstein et al., ii (2nd pagination), 182 (Apr. 19, 1778), placed the Lower Austrian Estates’ treasury debt at 15 million florins. By 1781, it had risen to nearly 17 million. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 379. 196 Aulic decree to Estates, Aug. 29, 1778, NÖLA, StB, 587, f. 287v–291v; patent of the Lower Austrian provincial government, Oct. 20, 1778, NÖLA, KP, 42. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 151. 190

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of attempts to retool taxes in the central lands as part of the lasting fallout of the Seven Years War. In Bohemia fiscal affliction, crop failure, starvation, and peasant uprising prompted the authorities, in conjunction with the Estates, to revise the kingdom’s Contribution. An agreement with the Moravian Estates followed in 1777 that rescinded many supplementary assessments and introduced in their place a levy on alcoholic beverages.197 Following the distraction of the Bavarian entanglement, a similar scheme was launched in the land below the Enns. There too the Estates were sounded out as to feasibility. This approach is especially noteworthy given that indirect taxes in theory fell exclusively within the princely domain. Laid before the “three upper Estates” in late 1779, the plan foresaw a new imposition on drinks in place of the previous extraordinary burdens including the debt tax. In part thanks to the opposition of the leading prelates, who feared the loss of revenues from the older drinks’ taxes that were to be set aside, the debate reanimated political life at the Landhaus. On the day of the key vote— January 26, 1780—Landmarschall Pergen is reported to have been in a state of near panic.198 The arrangements for the new tax bear inspection. First, the patent imposing it was drafted along the lines of a resolution by the Estates and officially approved in that form.199 Second, the Estates were to participate in its administration. The empress appointed a commission under Pergen’s chairmanship and heavily favored the nobility in its membership. Apart from one Deputy from each of the “three upper Estates” (the abbot of Säusenstein, Count August Auersperg, and the younger Philipp Jacob von Mannagetta), she included her old favorite Ludwig von Hacqué, the head of the Estate of knights. The leading prelate was noticeably absent, perhaps to punish the abbot of Melk for his opposition to the project. The government’s people were Grand Aulic Chancellor Blümegen and two provincial councilors, both of whom belonged to the Estates. The Aulic Chancellery exercised general oversight. Third, the administrative organization in the countryside recalled seventeenth-century rather than Theresan practice. On the advice of Count Wenzel Sinzendorff, the president of the reformed Landrecht, local magistrates were to collect the tax.200 More unusually, receivers drawn from the nobility in each quarter were to take in proceeds for transfer to Vienna. Three names preserved in the record (Count Heinrich Khevenhüller in the quarter below the Manhartsberg, Johann Nepomuk Drexler von Schöpfenbrunn in the quarter above the Vienna Woods, and Count Carl Auersperg in the quarter above the Manhartsberg) suggest an attempt to balance the claims of lords and knights.201 A security deposit of 10,000 florins was demanded of each. Continuing hostility to the tax stalled the planned imposition on June 1, 1780, providing Joseph II with an initial problem at the beginning of his sole government.

197 198 199 200 201

On these events, see Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 195–9. Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 200 (fn. 25). Aulic decree to Deputies, May 3, 1780, NÖLA, StB, 395, f. 11r. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Apr. 14, 1780, NÖLA, StB, 97, f. 76r. NÖLA, StB, 395, f. 19r, 21v, 26v.

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For all the sporadic hostility and even open clashes that punctuated Maria Theresa’s reign, neither the empress nor Haugwitz nor Kaunitz seems to have conceived of a political order that did not include the Estates. Needless to say, the dynasty remained the guiding star in the Estates’ political firmament. The Habsburgs and the Estates stood or fell together. Quite beyond the corporate financial powerhouse on the square of the Friars Minor in Vienna, the evidence suggests that the monarchy’s leaders regarded the intermediary powers as useful, indeed essential, to good government. In the later 1760s, during the oppressive postwar years, the Estates of Carinthia reacquired the fiscal authority of which they had been deprived by their stubborn refusal nearly two decades earlier to approve the annual grant that Haugwitz had demanded. In due course, the local chamber of Deputies resumed the routine management of taxation.202 This put an end to a state of affairs regarded on all sides as highly anomalous: assessments in money and kind levied and brought in on the ruler’s sole authority. The approach remained the same later. In the 1770s the government in Vienna drew up plans to introduce Estates modeled on the ones of the central lands to those parts of Poland-Lithuania that had been annexed in the First Partition (1772) and renamed the kingdom of Galicia-Lodomeria. Kaunitz, and even Joseph II, stood behind this project.203 The new diet would meet for the first time in 1782, two years after the empress’s death. In Lower Austria, one of the monarchy’s most important territories, fiscalmilitary exigency in combination with changing conceptions of rule redefined the parameters of the central government’s relationship with the Estates under Maria Theresa. Exceptional dynamism characterized the association throughout her reign. The crisis of the decade and a half after 1733 prompted the reform of the Contribution in 1748. The increased tax revenue in turn underlay the subsequent, almost revolutionary expansion of the Estates’ borrowing facilities. That this outcome was not planned and perhaps even regretted by the empress, her advisors, and the Estates themselves does nothing to change its reality. The Estates’ massive assumption of credit during the Seven Years War, with its implicitly political consequences, rebounded in reform in 1764. Even then, official policy toward the Landhaus remained contingent and discriminating rather than ideologically dogmatic in a later sense. The provisions of postwar reforms reveal the extent to which both sides sought—and maintained—a workable compromise. Despite the financial crisis, the Contribution remained at the 1748 level. Extraordinary taxation serviced the debt owed in part to the Estates. The assignment of local nobles to the circle offices achieved two ends with a single effort: the institutions themselves gained the Wutte, “Beiträge,” 117. Volker Press, “The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 17; Beales, Joseph II, i, 364. 202 203

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needed stature in the countryside, the Estates some recompense for the abolition of various paid offices at the Landhaus. As tax collectors, the Estates incurred public odium, but also exercised public authority. The closer regulation of financial affairs ensured the Estates’ solvency—hence their existence. The Estates’ good offices, which depended upon autonomy incompatible with assimilation of their structures into the state, remained at the government’s disposal. In the late 1770s the Habsburg army numbered more than 300,000 men for the first time, a remarkable expansion of more than one-third in the space of only a few decades.204 The dispensation of power achieved under Maria Theresa’s government capitalized on the advantages and minimized the drawbacks of composite monarchy. It would serve her successors well. Joseph II would command a military of comparable or larger size a decade later. As Louis XVI was tumbling toward bankruptcy in the late 1780s, the emperor was able to make war on the Ottomans in defense of his Russian alliance. Paradoxically, Joseph would shake the foundations on which his might was built. This is the story of the next chapter. 204

For the size of the army, see Table I.2 (p. 19).

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8 “He is working to abolish all Estates,” 1780–90 On October 18, 1783 a cortège of gala carriages escorted by liveried attendants, lackeys, and trumpeters drew up in the main courtyard of the Hofburg, the imperial palace in Vienna. Received with military honors, it bore a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by Landmarschall Pergen and including a dozen members of their four orders (prelates, lords, knights, and townsmen). The group ascended to the ceremonial apartments to be welcomed by the imperial grand chamberlain, who announced its arrival. The emperor’s appearance in the audience chamber prompted a short address by Pergen, to whom Joseph II then personally handed his government’s annual tax demand.1 As his mother, the empress Maria Theresa, had sometimes done on these occasions, he took advantage of the Estates’ attendance to raise a matter of special concern. He exhorted them “avec beaucoup de noblesse” to consider ways of revising the provincial cadaster that underlay the system of direct taxation.2 This démarche prefigured one of his reign’s celebrated initiatives culminating in the great tax and peasant labor services reform of 1789. Joseph’s participation in this Court function largely conformed to later Theresan practice. But this would be the last time that he observed the rite. In the following year he was absent from Vienna, and in 1785 he did away with it.3 Famously, Joseph II was not a man for ceremony, as the scaling back of his own Court to what the historian Derek Beales has labelled “the meanest, most masculine, and the least attractive in Europe” made very apparent.4 No less emphatically, he was no friend to the nobility as a group—a key element of the Estates. His early, secret desire “to humble and impoverish” the nobility and suspend the Estates’ constitutions dated precisely to the months after the Seven Years War in which the magnitude of official financial reliance on corporate good offices was becoming alarmingly apparent.5 As sole ruler, his increasingly despotic

1

Dated Oct. 20, 1783, and a copy is found in NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. Quotation from the diary of Count Karl Zinzendorf, Oct. 23, 1783, HHStA. Zinzendorf recounted what he had heard from the grand chamberlain. The ceremony is described in HHStA, OMeA, ZA, Prot. 36, f. 258r–259r. 3 Aulic decrees, Oct. 4, 1784 and Oct. 13, 1785, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. 4 Derek Beales, Joseph II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987/2009), ii, 56. 5 Expressed in a memorandum of 1763 known as the Rêveries—quotation from Derek Beales, “Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?,” in Derek Beales, Enlightenment and Reform in Eighteenth-century Europe (London and New York, 2005), 169–70. Also Beales, Joseph II, i, 98, 103. 2

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approach to power left little doubt about his attitude to political elites, or anyone else who opposed his plans.6 But the fact that an intermediary corps endured almost within sight of his own office highlights the problem of the Estates in the Habsburg lands during the emperor’s rule. That he continued to submit the usual tax demand to the Lower Austrian diet likewise indicates that it was more than an empty formality. The reign of Joseph II is arguably the best investigated of any eighteenth-century Austrian ruler. The emperor himself secured the most distinguished recent biography of one.7 A large literature deals with reforms seen as particularly enlightened and liberal, such as those that concerned religion, law, and the agrarian world.8 The changing institutional basis of power has also drawn attention.9 By contrast, the assumption that the Estates had already been largely “emasculated” in the previous reign has kept them out of focus. Even the few general surveys of the Estates have little to say about them in this period.10 Admittedly, the paradigm of absolutism seemed more than apt for the decade after 1780. The literature on Joseph’s administrative and judicial reforms takes the Estates in an organizational sense into some account, though mostly on the basis of normative sources produced by the central authority. Orders issued in Vienna have been seen as a reliable reflection of events on the ground. As Joseph’s opponents in his last years, the Estates (or the nobles among them) have found mention. But the actual sources and framework of dissent have remained in the shadows.11 Little is known about diets and other assemblies that might have survived. It is often assumed that they disappeared. The literature contains diametrically conflicting information on this point. Where one

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Beales, Joseph II, ii, 469. Beales, Joseph II. Recent surveys of the biographical literature on Joseph include: Hamish M. Scott, “A Habsburg Emperor for the Next Century,” HJ 53 (2010): 197–216; Franz A. J. Szabo, “Changing Perspectives on the ‘Revolutionary Emperor’: Joseph II Biographies since 1790,” JMH 83 (2011): 111–38. 8 A sample: Ferdinand Maaß, ed., Der Josephinismus: Quellen zu seiner Geschichte in Österreich, 1760–1790, 3 vols. (Vienna, 1951–6); William E. Wright, Serf, Seigneur and Sovereign: Agrarian Reform in Eighteenth-Century Bohemia (Minneapolis, MN, 1966); Elisabeth Kovács, ed., Katholische Aufklärung und Josephinismus (Vienna, 1979); Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, Österreich zur Zeit Kaiser Josephs II: Mitregent Kaiserin Maria Theresias, Kaiser und Landesfürst (Vienna, 1980); Richard Georg Plaschka and Grete Klingenstein, eds., Österreich im Europa der Aufklärung: Kontinuität und Zäsur in Europa zur Zeit Maria Theresias und Josephs II., 2 vols. (Vienna, 1985); Josef Karniel, Die Toleranzpolitik Kaiser Josephs II. (Gerlingen, 1986); Harm Klueting, ed., Der Josephinismus: Ausgewählte Quellen zur Geschichte der theresianisch-josephinischen Reformen (Darmstadt, 1995); P. G. M. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Reshaping of the Austrian Church,” HJ 36 (1993): 89–114. 9 P. G. M. Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy in Late Eighteenth-Century Austria,” EHR 110 (1995): 323–67. Antal Szántay, Regionalpolitik im alten Europa: Die Verwaltungsreformen Josephs II. in Ungarn, in der Lombardei und in den österreichischen Niederlanden 1785–1790 (Budapest, 2005). 10 Herbert Hassinger, “Die Landstände der österreichischen Länder: Zusammensetzung, Organisation und Leistung im 16.–18. Jahrhundert,” JbLkN, new series, 36 (1964): 989–1035; Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 247–85. 11 On this point, see Beales, Joseph II, ii, 623–4. 7

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scholar asserted that Joseph “abolished” the Estates, another reported that the “full diets continued to meet annually.”12 These statements can hardly be reconciled. Well-informed contemporaries held that Joseph II was out to eradicate the Estates. During his stay in Vienna in the summer of 1784, his brother Leopold, the later emperor, reported that Joseph was planning “to introduce in all provinces of the Monarchy an entirely uniform system . . . abolishing all agreements, concordats, statutes and privileges or exemptions . . . To this end he is working to abolish all Estates . . . their meetings, their deputies, their privileges etc.”13 Of early modern Habsburg rulers, Joseph II was in fact the only one to pursue “absolute power” (his words)—if we understand the term “absolute” as “despotic.”14 This understanding differed from the consensual form of “absolute monarchy” that referred to a ruler’s sole right to legislate (after taking counsel). In this way, Joseph’s approach to governing diverged from that of his immediate predecessor, his mother Maria Theresa, or his direct successor, his brother Leopold II. The drive for structural rationalization and direct central control, combined with the animus toward the established elites, was just as incompatible with the endurance of autonomous, representative bodies as scholars have assumed it was. To what extent, then, was Joseph successful in enervating the Estates? How did his initiatives modify their makeup? Who managed them on his behalf ? How did their standing committees, assemblies, and other structures change? What role did these bodies play, if any, in palliating fiscal-military exigency and in the reign’s final crisis? To what extent were the Estates alienated from the Habsburg regime by 1790? The chapter’s conclusion will attempt to assess the emperor’s political legacy. Because of his ambition to create “just one body, uniformly governed,” special attention will be paid to how the emperor’s policies toward the Lower Austrian Estates worked themselves out against the wider background in the central lands and beyond.15 By failing to undergo the traditional inaugurations and coronations in his hereditary lands after 1780, Joseph showed quite clearly that he understood their meaning: in the early modern world, the performance of ritual formulated the overriding legal-political order both as a set of existing socio-political arrangements and as an ideal. Ritual referred to and derived its meaning from that order. Hence constitutional legality and ceremonial practice were not clearly distinguishable.16 Quite logically from his perspective, Joseph refused to take part in events that would have placed limits on the exercise of absolute power. His ruling ancestors (and successors) observed a range of inaugural rites, three of which recurred in 12 For the former assertion: Wilhelm Brauneder, Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte (4th edn., Vienna, 1987), 98. For the latter: Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 328. 13 Quoted in Beales, Joseph II, ii, 372. Cf. Pietro Leopoldo d’Asburgo Lorena, Relazione sullo stato della monarchia (1784), ed. Derek Beales and Renato Pasta (Rome, 2013), 74. 14 For Joseph II as a “despot,” see Beales, “Was Joseph II an Enlightened Despot?”. The quotation “absolute power” is from Joseph’s Rêveries of 1763. Beales, “Joseph II’s Rêveries,” in Beales, Enlightenment and Reform, 169. 15 Quotation in Beales, Joseph II, ii, 477. 16 David I. Kertzer, Ritual, Politics, and Power (New Haven, CT and London, 1988); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider: Verfassungsgeschichte und Symbolsprache des Alten Reiches (Munich, 2008).

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nearly every reign—the act of homage (Erbhuldigung) as archduke of Austria in Vienna and the royal coronations in Bohemia (Prague) and Hungary (Pozsony and other places). Even more, the rejection of the rites signified the rejection of the monarchy’s “composite” character in which the diverse laws, customs, and languages of the various areas conditioned the manner of rule. Here too Joseph broke fundamentally with Habsburg practice. The inaugural ceremony in Vienna had typically been the first solemn initiation experienced by a Habsburg ruler following accession. Constituting a series of rites that included the formal conveyance of the jewel-encrusted, ermine-lined archducal “hat”—a kind of crown—to Vienna from its customary place of safekeeping at the abbey of Klosterneuburg, the inauguration involved a guarantee of the Estates’ liberties and usages in exchange for a pledge of loyalty. At his mother’s accession in 1740, the uncertainty surrounding the extinction of the dynasty’s male line heightened its traditional legitimizing significance.17 For unknown reasons, the Estates neither petitioned that the inauguration take place nor objected that it did not. Perhaps the emperor’s reputation made them hesitate or they were warned informally that protest would be futile or they hoped he might be brought round. In any event, there was no fixed time frame within which the ritual had to be held. We should also remember that Joseph had been his mother’s co-regent. In that capacity he had also been the archduchy’s formal coruler for the previous fifteen years.18 The Estates had additionally faced a stiff and chill political headwind since 1763. In her later years, under the pressure of the monarchy’s financial plight after the Seven Years War, Maria Theresa had shown little tolerance of their remonstrations. But plans near the end of her reign to reconfigure the tax load had revived the Estates. They were invited to consider how an excise tax on drinks might be imposed in the land below the Enns. Difficulties in getting the scheme off the ground even after the diet’s approval confronted Joseph in the first weeks of his sole rule. His government reacted very much in timehonored fashion. It approved an investigation of the situation by a special deputation of the Estates.19

RELIGIOUS R EFORM A ND THE ESTATES Two landmark decisions early in Joseph’s reign were to have a profound impact on the composition of the intermediary powers. Both reforms concerned religion. First, the government famously began appropriating the economic resources of the 17 William D. Godsey, “Herrschaft und politische Kultur im Habsburgerreich: Die niederösterreichische Erbhuldigung (ca. 1648–1848)” in Roland Gehrke, ed., Aufbrüche in die Moderne: Frühparlamentarismus zwischen altständischer Ordnung und monarchischem Konstitutionalismus 1750–1850 (Cologne, Weimar, and Vienna, 2005), 152. 18 For the co-regency, see Derek Beales, “Love and the Empire: Maria Theresa and her Co-regents,” in Robert Oresko et al., eds., Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997), 479–99. 19 Aulic decree, Feb. 22, 1781, NÖLA, StB, 395, f. 78v–79r.

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monasteries for what Joseph considered more useful purposes. This occurred in two ways: either outright suppression or the imposition of an outside administrator known as a “commendatory abbot” after the death of the head of a religious house that was allowed to survive.20 Such an abbot took control of the temporalities to the benefit of the state Religious Fund. More than noble castles, splendid baroque monasteries had dominated the counter-reformation landscape of Lower Austria. In 1780 twenty-six prelates—seven Benedictine, six Augustinian, five Cistercian, three Carthusian, and two Premonstratensian, as well as the provosts of three collegiate churches—belonged to the Estates. Maria Theresa’s reign had seen almost no changes in membership. Only the minor collegiate church at Zwettl (not the Cistercian monastery of the same name) had ceased to exist after the properties that made up the foundation were rededicated to the support of an academy for noble youth. The opulent Benedictine abbot of Melk remained the president of the prelates as well as the Estates’ senior member with the right of speaking and voting first in the diet. The first prelates to disappear from the Lower Austrian Landhaus were the three Carthusians (Mauerbach, Gaming, and Aggsbach) who fell under Joseph’s early ban (1781) on purely contemplative orders. In succeeding years, ten other monasteries represented in the Estates likewise did not meet the emperor’s pre-conceived and exacting utilitarian standards. Among them, the Augustinian canons were hardest hit, with only two of their houses (Klosterneuburg and Herzogenburg) persisting. In contrast, all but two Benedictine houses were saved thanks in part to the usefulness of the schools they ran. Only one dissolved monastery, the Cistercian abbey of Lilienfeld, was re-established in previous form soon after Joseph’s death. In the course of his reign, the Lower Austrian Estate of prelates permanently lost just under half its members.21 Those who survived were generally from the wealthier, more venerable foundations, though good connections could stave off the worst under Joseph as well, as the prelate of the minor collegiate church at Eisgarn learned.22 In the intervening years, the corporate life of the prelates largely ceased. Beginning in 1785, they stopped meeting as an Estate as they had done since at least the Thirty Years War.23 That same year, the abbot of Melk, their traditional head, 20 Derek Beales, Prosperity and Plunder: European Catholic Monasteries in the Age of Revolution, 1650–1815 (Cambridge, 2003), 192–204. See also Dickson, “Joseph II’s Reshaping;” and for Lower Austria specifically, Gerhard Winner, Die Klosteraufhebungen in Niederösterreich und Wien (Vienna and Munich, 1967). 21 In addition to the three Carthusian prelates, losses included the Augustinian provosts of St. Pölten, St. Dorothea, St. Andrä an der Traisen, and Dürnstein; the Cistercian abbot of Säusenstein; the Benedictine abbots of Kleinmariazell and Montserrat; the Premonstratensian abbot of Pernegg; and the provost of the collegiate church of Ardagger. Regularly elected Lower Austrian prelates under Joseph were the provosts of Herzogenburg (1781) and Klosterneuburg (1782) and the abbot of Göttweig (1784). Floridus Röhrig, ed., Die bestehenden Stifte der Augustiner-Chorherren in Österreich, Südtirol und Polen (Klosterneuburg and Vienna, 1997), 52, 186. Sebastian Brunner, Ein Benediktinerbuch: Geschichte und Beschreibung der bestehenden und Anführung der aufgehobenen Benediktinerstifte in Österreich-Ungarn, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Würzburg, 1880), 145. 22 Marktgemeinde Eisgarn, Eisgarn: 50 Jahre Markterhebung—650 Jahre Propstei (Eisgarn, 1980), 23. 23 The last meeting recorded for Joseph’s reign took place on Oct. 20, 1784. NÖLA, PA, HS 4.

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died; his replacement was a commendatory abbot who did not enjoy the same precedence at assemblies. In some places, though not apparently in Lower Austria, Joseph attempted to exclude the commendatory abbots from the Estates (1786).24 The Lower Austrian prelates hence lacked their customary presiding officer, and the diet its ranking member. By 1790 nearly a quarter of the surviving foundations (Melk, Heiligenkreuz, Zwettl, and Geras) had commendatory abbots.25 On Joseph’s death, only about one-third of the religious houses extant in the Estates in 1780 still had regularly elected heads. Whatever the push for symmetry, Joseph’s closure of monasteries had very different results in the Estates of his various realms. Several Inner Austrian lands were practically denuded of monastic houses. In the duchy of Carinthia, major abbots including Ossiach (Benedictine), Arnoldstein (Benedictine), and Viktring (Cistercian) vanished. Indeed, all houses are reported to have been eliminated there.26 In the emperor’s last years, the insignificant provosts of the collegiate churches in Völkermarkt and Gurnitz were the main prelates still attending the diet.27 In neighboring Carniola, eleven of fifteen religious institutions disappeared between 1782 and 1786, apparently including all of those in the Estates such as the grand Cistercian establishments at Sittich (Stična) and Landstrass (Kostanjevica).28 In Moravia the prelates had been the strongest presence at key sessions of the annual diets in the late Theresan and early Josephian periods. By 1784 the liquidation of many important foundations such as Cistercian Velehrad and Premonstratensian Hradisch (Hradisko) had changed the situation dramatically. In the last years of Joseph’s reign, the heads of only two monasteries—Benedictine Raigern (Rajhrad) and the mendicant Augustinian Hermits in Brünn—turned up with some regularity at assemblies. Neither dignitary had earlier been especially senior. Between 1780 and 1790 the number of heads of religious houses habitually attending the margraviate’s Estates diminished by some five-sixths.29 The depletion of the Estate of prelates had various consequences. In Lower Austria we find commendatory abbots, including Melk, attending the diet.30 They 24 Helmuth Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie der österreichischen Landstände,” Anciens pays et assemblées d’états—Standen en landen 53 (1970): 143–4. 25 All four turned up for the first recorded meeting of the Estate of prelates (May 14, 1790) after Joseph’s death. NÖLA, PA, HS 5. 26 Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 143. 27 Minutes of the Carinthian diet, Sept. 6, 1788, Nov. 24, 1788, and Dec. 14, 1789, KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 68–9, 80–3, 88–91. 28 Figures taken from August Dimitz, Geschichte Krains von der ältesten Zeit bis auf das Jahr 1813, part iv (Laibach, 1876), 214. See also Wladimir Milkowicz, “Die Klöster in Krain: Studien zur österreichischen Monasteriologie,” AÖG 74 (1889): 454–63. 29 Minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 25, 1780, Oct. 21, 1782, and Oct. 20, 1783, MZA, A3, 38. Minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 17, 1787, MZA, A4, 51, folder 1788, f. 46r. Minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 26, 1789, MZA, A4, 52, folder 1790, f. 4. For the composition of the Moravian Estate of prelates in the early nineteenth century, see Christian Ritter d’Elvert, Die Desiderien der Mährischen Stände vom Jahre 1790 und ihre Folgen (Brünn, 1864), 218. 30 Minutes of the Lower Austrian diet, Oct. 16, 1786, Oct. 16, 1787, Oct. 20, 1788, and Oct. 26, 1789, NÖLA, StB, 279, pp. 14, 16, 19, 21. No evidence has emerged that the dignitaries of St. Stephen’s cathedral chapter in Vienna were incorporated into the Estates in 1787, as reported by Helmuth Stradal, “Die Prälaten—Grundlagen und Ausbildung der geistlichen Landstandschaft,” in

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ranked behind the regularly elected prelates. The heads of dissolved houses also turned up at meetings in some places.31 In others, the accession of new members transpired. At the Upper Austrian Estates, the incorporation of three dignitaries of Linz’s cathedral chapter did little to make up for the loss of six monasteries.32 To staunch the bleeding, Joseph reversed himself and allowed commendatory abbots to take part in assemblies where it had not been permitted.33 This was obviously relevant only where foundations rooted in the Estates continued to exist. A concomitant formal delineation of those clerics entitled to seats—commendatory abbots, provosts of collegiate churches and regular heads of still-extant religious houses previously represented, and professing knights of the Maltese and Teutonic Orders—failed to take into account certain clerics who had previously attended the Inner Austrian diets, such as the parish priest of St. Egid in Klagenfurt. This interestingly did not alter established practice. More generally, the monastic abolitions of the 1780s heightened the noble profile and narrowed the social basis of the Estates. This change occurred at two levels. First, reform removed a large number of abbots who were peasants or townsmen by birth. Second, many surviving corporate clerics, such as the cathedral canons of Laibach (Carniolan Estates) and Olmütz (Moravian Estates) or the prince-bishop of Gurk (Carinthian Estates), were disproportionately noble by background.34 In Hungary the reorganization of the Church barely affected ecclesiastical representation in the diet. The only three religious houses with places there were “completely overshadowed” by the bishops.35 The second major religious initiative of Joseph’s early years, the toleration granted to non-Catholic Christians (namely Lutherans, Calvinists, and Greek Orthodox), which was promulgated in most territories including Lower Austria in 1781, had less immediate impact on the Estates’ makeup. Ideologically, however, it broke with the Counter-Reformation past. The new legislation allowed accession to the Estates of members of those confessional groups, though applicants

Herrschaftsstruktur und Ständebildung: Beiträge zur Typologie der österreichischen Länder aus ihren mittelalterlichen Grundlagen, ed. Alfred Hoffmann and Michael Mitterauer, iii (Vienna, 1973), 78. 31 The abbot of Sittich in Laibach: minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Sept. 6, 1786 and Jan. 24, 1788, AS 2, Reg. II, 61. The abbot of Montserrat in Vienna: minutes of the Lower Austrian diet, Oct. 20, 1788 and Oct. 26, 1789, NÖLA, StB, 279, pp. 19, 21. The prelate of Doxan in Prague: minutes of the Bohemian diet, June 20, 1789, NA, Český zemský sněm, vol. 1. 32 Franz X. Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden über die Wirksamkeit der Stände von Österreich ob der Enns (Linz, 1884), 169. Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 146. 33 References to the relevant aulic decree (Feb. 21, 1788) are found in the minutes of the Carinthian diet, Sept. 6, 1788, KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 76v–77r, and the minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee (point of business no. 196), Apr. 5, 1788, AS 2, Reg. II, 61. Cf. Carl Freiherr von Hock and Hermann Ignaz Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath (1760–1848) (Vienna, 1879), 440. The Handbuch aller unter der Regierung des Kaisers Joseph des II für die K.K. Erbländer ergangenen Verordnungen und Gesetze, xiii (Vienna, 1789), 224, contains a 1787 decree published in Inner Austria and Bohemia that foresees attendance by the commendatory abbots. 34 In the later 1780s the only two prelates on the committee of the Carniolan Estates were the Laibach cathedral canons Count Seifried Gallenberg and Count Seifried Auersperg. Minutes of the Carniolan diet and Estates’ committee, 1789/90, AS 2, Reg. II, 62. 35 Beales, Prosperity and Plunder, 209.

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needed a dispensation from the government ahead of time.36 In the Austrian duchies, the corporate nobility (lords and knights) had managed to preserve autonomous control over assimilation to its ranks; in the Bohemian lands, the ruler formally exercised the corresponding power; and in Hungary, admissions were a matter for joint resolution by king and diet.37 Thus, where Joseph became relatively free in 1781 to raise non-Catholic Christians into the Estates of some lands that had been Catholicized in the Counter-Reformation, the nobility’s formal approval remained necessary in others. Given that Vienna was a conurbation with religious minorities, the consequences of toleration were soon felt at the local Estates. In 1782 the Lutheran Jacob Friedrich von Stockmayer († 1788), a south German diplomatic envoy with local ties, applied for entry to the Estate of knights. Perhaps not surprisingly, the knights showed acute reluctance to abandon the taboo on Protestants that the dynasty had enforced so implacably since the 1620s. This unwillingness mirrored sentiment in other official provincial circles. The long survival of Lutheran nobles in the archduchy below the Enns thanks to a special provision of the Peace of Osnabrück (1648) will surely have reinforced the reluctance. In other words, unlike in the other Austrian duchies and Bohemia, the question of the nobility’s religion had remained a live issue into the eighteenth century. Successive rulers had made advancement at Court and in the civil administration dependent on belonging to the Church of Rome. The consequence had been the steady depletion of a group that in the mid-seventeenth century had still numbered about a third of the local nobility.38 Among the numerous Lower Austrian converts of later date, the Auerspergs and Zinzendorfs stand out. Ironically, the last remnants of the archduchy’s native Lutheran nobility were vanishing as toleration finally arrived.39 After dragging their feet for more than a year, the knights finally admitted Stockmayer through sleight of hand. On the suggestion of Aulic Councilor von Kees, one of their members as well as a leading advocate of toleration, they agreed to accept him while simultaneously banning him from assemblies as long as he remained the agent of a foreign prince.40 Less than a handful of other Protestants were accepted during Joseph’s reign. Only in 1820 was the first Greek Orthodox

36 Gustav Frank, Die Toleranz-Patent Kaiser Josephs II: Urkundliche Geschichte seiner Entstehung und seiner Folgen (Vienna, 1881), 40. For the circumstances surrounding the promulgation of the legislation in Lower Austria, see Beales, Joseph II, ii, 188. 37 Anton Gindely, Die Entwicklung des böhmischen Adels und der Inkolatsverhältnisse seit dem 16. Jahrhunderte (Prague, 1886), 32. 38 Ines Peper, Konversionen im Umkreis des Wiener Hofes um 1700 (Vienna and Munich, 2010), 52–4. 39 One contemporary, the convert Karl Zinzendorf, noted that the Auerspergs were the last Protestant holdouts in the land below the Enns. Europäische Aufklärung zwischen Wien und Triest: Die Tagebücher des Gouverneurs Karl Graf Zinzendorf 1776–1782, ed. Grete Klingenstein et al., 4 vols. (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2009), iii, 827 (Feb. 25, 1781). 40 Minutes of the Lower Austrian Estate of knights, Jan. 22, 1784, NÖLA, RA, HS 17. See also William D. Godsey, “Adelsautonomie, Konfession und Nation im österreichischen Absolutismus,” ZHF 33 (2006): 221–2. For Franz Georg von Kees, see Michael Friedrich von Maasburg, Geschichte der obersten Justizstelle in Wien (1749–1848) (Prague, 1891), 156–61.

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incorporated.41 Jews did not gain admission. Toleration for them was provided for by a separate law that came into force below the Enns in January 1782. While it relieved some of the more humiliating aspects of discrimination and provided them with new opportunities in education and employment, it did not make them eligible for the Estates.42 Indeed, no Jew had been ennobled. Hence there were no “candidates in waiting” at the time of the law’s enactment. Two noteworthy concessions near the end of the reign nonetheless opened up new perspectives. First, in September 1789, Joseph permitted “well-to-do Jews” to buy state-owned land at public auction in Lower Austria. Israel Hönig (1724–1808), a Jew whose family had acquired a fortune in the Bohemian tobacco monopoly, thereupon purchased the manor of Velm northeast of Vienna on which to establish a factory.43 Previously, Jews had been forbidden to own real property. Second, only a few days later, in October 1789, Joseph ennobled Hönig with the title Edler von Hönigsberg. He became the first of many Jews in the Habsburg monarchy to be so honored.44 At almost a stroke, the emperor eliminated insuperable obstacles to the admission of a Jew to the Estates. Hönig not only possessed a patent of nobility issued by an aulic chancellery of the hereditary lands, a prerequisite for access mandated decades earlier by Maria Theresa, but he also owned noble land with the right to exercise the associated feudal rights. Though landholding was in practice no longer required to enter the Estates, it nonetheless remained a pre-eminent marker of nobility. In the later eighteenth century, its importance was ideologically enhanced by physiocratic theory, which emphasized agriculture as the principal source of a state’s wealth. Some at the Landhaus saw the grants to Hönig as a disgrace, making him their “quasi member.”45 Whether Joseph would actually have tried to force him into the Estates must remain a matter of speculation. The emperor died only months later, while neither Hönig nor any other Jew became a corporate noble before 1848. Joseph had showed no consistent interest in abrogating the admissions autonomy of the nobilities in the Austrian duchies. He did not try to homogenize entrée to the Estates by arrogating the same right of admission in the Austrian territories that he and his ancestors had enjoyed in Bohemia since 1627. Perhaps Joseph was simply indifferent to a matter that he regarded as of little consequence. He repeatedly granted the Inkolat for his Bohemian lands, effectively creating members of the corporate nobility there.46 The Estates of Lower and Inner Austria are all on record Godsey, “Adelsautonomie,” 222. Christoph Lind, “Juden in den habsburgischen Ländern, 1670–1848,” in Eveline Brugger et al., eds., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Vienna, 2006), 394–7; Beales, Joseph II, ii, 203–13. 43 William D. Godsey, “Nation, Government, and ‘Anti-Semitism’ in early nineteenth-century Austria,” HJ 51 (2008): 67–8. 44 Kai Drewes, Jüdischer Adel: Nobilitierungen von Juden im Europa des 19. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main and New York, 2013), 376–85. 45 Quotation from remarks made by the Estates’ presiding officer, the well-known Freemason Count Leopold Schallenberg, in an assembly of the “three upper Estates,” July 31, 1790, NÖLA, StB, 280, p. 90. 46 For example Joseph Friedrich von Tomasoni (1782); Baron Sigmund Lützow (1786); Andreas Gottlieb von Thom (1789). See Karl Friedrich von Frank, Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das 41 42

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as having themselves inducted members during the reign. Changes in customary procedures in these years were a by-product of other factors: fewer assemblies; dwindling numbers of attendees at those meetings that did take place; and the autocratic part taken by provincial governors occupying the chairs at the Estates.47 The situation, again, varied from place to place.

O RG A NI Z AT I O N : PR E SI D I NG O F F I C E RS The question of the governors brings us to the major administrative reforms initiated in the early years of the emperor’s sole rule. Here, the discussion of events in Lower Austria will be embedded as far as possible directly in that of the larger process of provincial reform across the Habsburg lands. The changes had farreaching, if little understood and hardly uniform, consequences for the Estates. As a result of war, two major waves of governmental reorganization had occurred under Maria Theresa, the second of which Joseph had witnessed as a young man in the early 1760s. The changes of the early 1780s, it is worth noting, were less the result of international rivalry and the maintenance of a standing army than following from a desire to rationalize, even as hopes of administrative cost savings remained a vital consideration in view of the debt piled up in earlier conflagrations. As in the empress’s time, the guiding issues behind reform were whether certain affairs—“political” and “cameral” or “administrative” and “judicial”—should be combined in one agency.48 Consolidation again became the watchword. At the highest level, the institutions to which the Estates in the various territories had been subordinate were transformed. The Hungarian and Transylvanian chancelleries merged in 1782. At the beginning of the following year, the Bohemian-Austrian Chancellery, which had handled the ruler’s relations with the Estates in the central lands, was combined with other bodies to form the United Offices (“die Vereinigten Hofstellen”). In respect of the Estates, the new institution assumed the duties of the chancellery, which kept a recognizably separate existence within the larger organization. At the provincial level, Joseph originally foresaw sweeping changes that would have abridged the monarchy’s long-standing composite-territorial character. The plan involved merging the Estates of different lands to correspond to a lesser number of provincial administrations. There was no talk of actually abolishing Deutsche Reich und die österreichischen Erlande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), iii, 167 and v, 105, 115. 47 The admission of Prince Franz Sułkowski to the Lower Austrian Estate of lords occurred after consideration of the application by a poorly attended committee of the consortium rather than its plenum, as had been usual. Minutes of Lower Austrian Estate of lords, July 30, 1784, NÖLA, HA, HB, 3, pp. 137–9. Historically novel as well was an application for admission to the Carniolan Estates that landed first on the desk of the Inner Austrian governor, who forwarded it to Laibach for the diet’s consideration with the remark that he himself had no objections (letter dated Dec. 2, 1789). AS 2, Reg. II, 16, folder 12. The governor signed the diplomas issued to new members. 48 On this point, see Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 327–8.

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the intermediary powers. The Council of State’s objections, based in part on the systems of public credit run by the various intermediary corps, induced the emperor to abandon the idea of combining them (November 1781).49 But the concentration of the monarch’s own provincial authorities also proved less extensive than the older literature suggested.50 In one respect, there was none at all. When Joseph assumed sole power, eight major provincial administrative bodies managed the central lands: Bohemia; Moravia; Silesia; Inner Austria (Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, and Gorizia); Lower and Upper Austria; Trieste; Tyrol and the Further Austrian territories; and Galicia. The number rose by one during Joseph’s reign: Bohemia; Moravia-Silesia; Inner Austria (Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola); Lower Austria; Upper Austria; Trieste-Gorizia; Tyrol; Further Austria; and Galicia.51 The institutions in Moravia and rump Silesia were amalgamated, while Upper Austria was separated from Lower Austria, and Tyrol from Further Austria. Gorizia passed from Inner Austrian authority to Trieste’s. The concentration was apparent in the elimination of subordinate bodies such as the rather elusive “governments” (Regierungen) in Inner and Further Austria as well as the Inner and Upper Austrian posts of Landeshauptmann. The separate administration of Bukovina vanished with its annexation to Galicia in 1787.52 Joseph streamlined the relationship between governors and Estates more successfully. Seizing on an initiative from his mother’s reign, he combined the offices of governor and Estates’ president in the same person. Maria Theresa had imposed such an arrangement in Moravia, Tyrol, and the Further Austrian lands, but had backed down in Styria because of the Estates’ protests.53 This practice had the advantage of establishing a single source of civil authority at the head of both the provincial administration and Estates. But it had two disadvantages. First, in several territories, there was no longer an adequate representative of monarchical authority on hand much of the time. In several Inner Austrian lands, the empress Maria Theresa had addressed this problem by having separate heads of the Estates who bore the title Landeshauptmann and functioned as her proxies at the diets. Joseph dispensed with separate holders of these offices. The Inner Austrian governor with his seat in Graz became simultaneously president of the Estates (again Landeshauptmann) in Klagenfurt and Laibach, as well as in the Styrian capital itself.54 49

ÖZV, II/1/2/1, 12–15; Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 115. Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 329, called attention to this. 51 This information is drawn from a comparison of the information in the respective volumes of the Hof- und Staats-Schematismus (Vienna, 1781/1789). Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 329, gives a slightly different account. 52 Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 329. 53 For Moravia, see Hof- und Staats-Schematismus (1781), 474; for Tyrol, see Werner Köfler, Land—Landschaft—Landtag: Geschichte der Tiroler Landtage von den Anfängen bis zur Aufhebung der landständischen Verfassung 1808 (Innsbruck, 1985), 512; for Further Austria, see Franz Quarthal et al., Die Behördenorganisation Vorderösterreichs von 1753 bis 1805 und die Beamten in Verwaltung, Justiz und Unterrichtswesen (Bühl/Baden, 1977), 73–5; for Styria, see Franz Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag des Herzogtums Steiermark unter Maria Theresia und ihren Söhnen,” AÖG 104 (1915): 166–8. Also Franz A. J. Szabo, Kaunitz and Enlightened Absolutism 1753–1780 (Cambridge, 1994), 95. 54 The Aulic Chancellery pointed out that several territories would no longer have a proper representative of monarchical power in residence. Christine Mueller, The Styrian Estates 1740–1848: 50

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Second, as head of the Estates, the governor was also responsible for directing the diet as well as certain committees and other bodies. The problem was particularly pronounced in Inner Austria, but typical of what Joseph expected from his administrators otherwise. Of the roughly two dozen recorded sessions in 1788 of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, the Inner Austrian governor presided at only one.55 His presence in the corresponding body in Carinthia was equally scarce the following year.56 Even where distance played little role, as in Lower Austria, the press of business will account for Landmarschall Pergen’s frequent absence from Estates’ bodies that he chaired ex officio.57 A little-remarked feature of the new arrangements was that the governor did not always become president of the Estates. In several major territories it was vice versa. Maria Theresa had appointed Count Johann Anton Pergen Landmarschall and thus head of the Lower Austria Estates in 1775; seven years later, Joseph made him in addition “president of the [Lower Austrian provincial] government” (Regierungspräsident), the equivalent of governor elsewhere. He bore both titles between 1782 and 1790.58 A similar solution was found in Prague, where the grand burgrave was appointed governor. Pergen, as well as his counterparts in other provinces including Count Franz Anton Khevenhüller (Inner Austria), Count Ludwig Cavriani (Moravia-Silesia, later Bohemia), and Count Aloysius Ugarte (Moravia), belonged by birth to the aristocracy, the group of dynastically oriented, titled families from which the ruling house had long drawn leading servants. Many governors were landed in the areas over which they exercised authority. Pergen and Khevenhüller both represented the aristocracy that had come of age under Maria Theresa as a prop of strengthened Habsburg government; they would enforce many unpopular Josephian measures at the Estates.59 By the same token, they were hardly slavishly dependent “bureaucrats” shorn of birth, background, and outlook. The aristocracy was continuing to reinvent itself.

A Century of Transition (New York and London, 1987), 77. The leading provincial judges (Oberste Landrichter) were to function as the ruler’s commissioners at the opening of diets. Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 113. This provision did not always correspond to actual practice later in Joseph’s reign. 55 Minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, 1786–8, AS 2, Reg. II, 61. 56 Minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee, 1789, KLA, StA, HS 250. 57 In 1783 the senior lord (Count Zeno Montecuccoli) rather than the Landmarschall presided over most meetings of the college of Deputies. NÖLA, StB, 241. 58 [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 343. Paul P. Bernard’s publications confused Pergen’s Lower Austrian titles: “Von der Aufklärung zum Polizeitstaat: Der Weg des Grafen Johann Anton Pergen,” in Georg Schmidt, ed., Stände und Gesellschaft im alten Reich (Stuttgart, 1989), 193–4; and From the Enlightenment to the Police State: The Public Life of Johann Anton Pergen (Urbana and Chicago, 1991), 116. Both titles typically appear in the official correspondence. 59 R. J. W. Evans, “State and Society in Early Modern Austria,” in Charles Ingrao, ed., State and Society in Early Modern Austria (West Lafayette, IN, 1994), 11; R. J. W. Evans, Austria, Hungary, and the Habsburgs: Essays on Central Europe, c. 1683–1867 (Oxford, 2006), 92–3. For Pergen’s background, see William D. Godsey, “Der Aufstieg des Hauses Pergen: Zu Familie und Bildungsweg des ‘Polizeiministers’ Johann Anton,” in Gabriele Haug-Moritz et al., eds., Adel im “langen” 18. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2009), 141–66.

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Joseph intended that his governors wear three hats. In addition to directing the provincial government and diet, they should chair the tribunals (Landrechte) that exercised privileged jurisdiction over the Estates individually and collectively. Because the principle of the separation of administration and justice that had been an axiom of reform since the 1740s would have been compromised, his advisors persuaded him to discard the plan, at least in some places.60 Only partly abandoned too was the idea of amalgamating various tribunals in the same way that the Estates of certain provinces were to have been merged.61 In Lower Austria Joseph did eliminate an anachronism going back to his mother’s reign when he deprived the Landmarschall of the Landrecht’s honorary presidency (1782). This step severed the last of the historic bonds between the head of the Estates and the tribunal.62 The appointment in the late 1780s of Baron Johann Friedrich Löhr (1734–95) as president of the Landrecht—he bore the title Oberster Landrichter (chief provincial judge)—was a notable departure from custom. Unlike his predecessors, Löhr was neither Lower Austrian nor aristocratic by background.63 In some areas, organizational consolidation won out over the separation of powers. In Upper Austria, Tyrol, and Further Austria, the governors all presided over the local Landrecht, while the Moravian-Silesian governor headed the provincial court of appeal (Appellationsgericht).64 Two other reforms of the law had far-reaching consequences for the Estates. First, the privileged jurisdiction reserved to them in the Landrecht was diluted. Although the emperor did not scrap the distinction between noble and non-noble civil jurisdiction at the primary level, he simplified the court system by assigning the Landrecht additional bailiwicks that themselves had earlier been distinct. In Lower Austria, groups that had fallen under the legal purview of ecclesiastical, academic, and other forums now came under the Landrecht, which simultaneously continued to be responsible for the Estates.65 Similar arrangements obtained in other territories. The courts that constituted the two levels of appeal (provincial and central) above the tribunal of original jurisdiction did not formally take account of social standing. Second, in 1787, Joseph famously abolished the privileged criminal jurisdiction that the Estates had enjoyed.66 Place of residence became the sole determinant of which court had competence in a particular case. The nobility

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Beales, Joseph II, ii, 338–9. For a useful, if surely too simplified, overview (in table form) of the judicial system under Joseph, see Alphons von Domin-Petrushevecz, Neuere österreichische Rechtsgeschichte (Vienna, 1869), 193–6. 62 Aulic decree to Pergen, Apr. 29, 1782, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. Also Sigmund Adler, Das adelige Landrecht in Nieder- u. Oberösterreich und die Gerichtsreformen des XVIII. Jahrhunderts (Vienna and Leipzig, 1912), 52–3. 63 Löhr would be admitted to the Estates in 1790 after the death of Joseph II. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Mar. 26 and 30, and Apr. 3, 1790 (HHStA). 64 Hof- und Staats-Schematismus (1789). 65 See Adler, Das adelige Landrecht, 50–1, 53–4. Also Domin-Petrushevecz, Neuere österreichische Rechtsgeschichte, 94–5. Joseph abolished the requirement that assessors belong to the Estates. Whether he actually made non-corporate appointments is unknown. 66 Adler, Das adelige Landrecht, 54; Domin-Petrushevecz, Neuere österreichische Rechtsgeschichte, 169–73. 61

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regarded this change as a major violation of its liberties and filed repeated, futile protests into the reign of Francis II.67

ORGANIZATION: COMMITTEES A N D FI N AN C I A L O F F IC E R S The consolidation of provincial government of the early 1780s extended to the standing directorial committees of the Estates. At the close of Maria Theresa’s reign, their activity encompassed key areas of state business such as direct taxation, debt-service, and military provisioning managed with the help of large support organizations. Joseph’s reform decisively altered the character of government, which in most places was virtually decoupled from the Estates. The hoary notion that the emperor’s eradication of these panels destroyed intermediary authority is not unfounded—the Lower Austrian Estates themselves spoke of the “complete overthrow” of their “constitution.”68 For it had been through these bodies that their influence had been brought to bear in the routine affairs of dominion. In direct connection with the decision to combine the offices of governor and Estates’ president, Joseph resolved to amalgamate a much-reduced form of the Estates’ directorial committees with his own administrative apparatuses in the central lands. In this way, all business apart from justice was to be united in each territory under one agency directed by the newly enhanced local chief executive. The literature contains at best perfunctory reference to the resulting transformation. Often dated to 1782/83, it is generally portrayed as the knockout blow to already enfeebled “feudal” institutions. Though first mooted in the Council of State in January 1782, the merger was not completed in some places for years.69 The Galician Estates are reported to have been excluded from the new arrangements, while the directorial committees in Silesia and the Further Austrian territory of Breisgau both survived.70 The new system took effect first in the Inner Austrian duchies (1782), followed by Upper Austria (1783), then Lower Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia (1784).71 In Tyrol the situation was more complex; though initial 67 Joseph’s rejection of one such protest was transmitted by Grand Chancellor Kolowrat to Pergen, Feb. 4, 1788, NÖLA, StB, 595, no. 24. 68 Quotations from the communication of the Lower Austrian Estates’ directorial committee to the United Offices, Nov. 4, 1790, NÖLA, StReg 1785–90, StV, 3. Cf. Friedrich Walter, Österreichische Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte von 1500–1955, ed. Adam Wandruszka (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1972), 109; T. C. W. Blanning, Joseph II and Enlightened Despotism (London, 1970), 46–7. 69 Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 116. Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth, Grundriss der österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte (Bamberg, 1899), 324, dated the reform to 1782, a year often cited subsequently. ÖZV, II/1/2/1, 15; Hassinger, “Die Landstände,” 1035; Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy,” 329. 70 For Galicia, see Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 167, 171; for Silesia, Christian d’Elvert, Die Verfassung und Verwaltung von Österreichisch-Schlesien, in ihrer historischen Ausbildung (Brünn, 1854), 203–4; and for Breisgau, Hof- und Staats-Schematismus (1789), 480. 71 A register of business of the Styrian directorial committee is extant for 1782 (Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag,” 174 [fn. 1]). A register of the Carniolan committee is extant for the period 1760 to 1782 (AS 2, Reg. I, 926). Martin Wutte, “Beiträge zur Verwaltungsgeschichte Kärntens,”

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consolidation occurred in 1784, the surviving panel lasted until 1789.72 Joseph’s better-investigated reorganization of the Hungarian county system, which likewise infringed traditional forms of local authority, came at the reign’s midpoint (1785). He amalgamated some Hungarian counties, with their notoriously recalcitrant assemblies, in a way that had notably not been possible with the Estates and diets of the central lands.73 The merging of the Estates’ directorial committees with provincial government allowed for some continuing corporate sway in affairs. The original plan for Lower Austria called for four noble Deputies chosen by the Estates to sit on the provincial government’s council, where they would handle business previously expedited at the Landhaus but also have other duties as needed.74 The Deputies would have made up a third of the council’s planned membership of twelve.75 Given that the college of Deputies had included two prelates in addition to four nobles (two lords and two knights), the disposition would end the clergy’s role in territorial government as well as reduce the number of officeholders in charge of the Estates’ business. The co-option of prelates into the local aulic commission to oversee monastic suppression (“Geistliche Hofkommission”) around this time can hardly have been regarded as compensation.76 The houses of both Lower Austrians chosen (the abbots of Säusenstein and Montserrat) would themselves be broken up.77 While the emperor allowed the nobility to continue to elect its Deputies under the new system, he sharply curtailed its room for maneuver. Candidates for office were to be vetted ahead of time by central authority and required to be in possession of vaguely defined “obligatory attributes.” Professional or educational prerequisites were not specified.78 Carinthia I 131 (1941): 118–19, dates the end of the Carinthian committee to 1782. Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der österreichischen Staatsverwaltung 1740–1848, ed. Alfons Huber, 2 vols. (Innsbruck, 1896/1898), i, 305, and Christian Ritter d’Elvert, Zur Oesterreichischen Finanz-Geschichte mit besonderer Berücksichtigung auf die böhmischen Länder (Brünn, 1881), 637, both report that the Moravian committee disappeared in 1784, and this is confirmed by the archival evidence (minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 20, 1784, MZA, A4, 50, folder 1785). Monthly records of the Bohemian directorial committee have survived down through June 1784: NA, Zemský výbor, 584. Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden, 96, and Gerhard Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation in Österreich ob der Enns vom Anfang des 16. bis zur Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Ein Beitrag zur österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte (Linz, 1978), 58, both cite 1783 for Upper Austria. 72 Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 173–4; Köfler, Land—Landschaft— Landtag, 530; and Miriam J. Levy, Governance and Grievance: Habsburg Policy and Italian Tyrol in the Eighteenth Century (West Lafayette, IN, 1988), 49. 73 Horst Haselsteiner, Joseph II. und die Komitate Ungarns: Herrscherrecht und ständischer Konstitutionalismus (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1983); Szántay, Regionalpolitik, 102–3. 74 Aulic decree, Apr. 7, 1782, NÖLA, StB, 589, f. 160v–163r. 75 [Starzer], Beiträge, 103–4, gives a slightly different figure. 76 Lower Austrian college of Deputies to Joseph II, Feb. 7, 1782, NÖLA, StB, 519, f. 36r. Each of the Inner Austrian duchies was conceded one prelate in the single commission there. Excerpt of the aulic rescript to the Inner Austrian governor from Oct. 31, 1782 (attached to the aulic decree to the president of the Lower Austrian government, July 24, 1783), NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 77 Later evidence mentions only Montserrat as a member of the commission. Pergen to Joseph II, Aug. 5, 1783, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 78 The prerequisites for office remained unknown as late as 1787—a matter about which some lords protested. Minutes of Lower Austrian Estate of lords, Aug. 1, 1787, NÖLA, HA, HB, 3,

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In the event, the plan of 1782 was not fully realized in Lower Austria. The college of Deputies continued to meet and conduct business into 1784, even as the nobles elected at Joseph’s instigation in 1782 took part at Pergen’s bidding in the provincial government’s council.79 Furthermore, the abbots of Säusenstein and Montserrat remained active in the committee, though were no longer remunerated. This solution would be typical of those in other lands where it was easier for Joseph to abolish paid offices than regulate outstanding business. Several circumstances explain the time-lag. First, the circle offices were being adapted to the needs of reformed government. This project received Joseph’s approval only in the summer of 1783.80 Second, Pergen expressed reservations about dissolving the college. Initially these bordered on the principled; while under his direction, he expostulated, the college of Deputies operated to the “all-highest satisfaction.”81 He also worried about undermining the Estates’ borrowing power.82 For this reason, he objected to allowing provincial councilors not in the Estates to have a say in matters in which they had no stake, but also to excluding the prelates. Two prelates, along with four nobles, had countersigned the bonds issued by the Estates. At another level, Pergen regretted losing the services of Abbot Andreas Schrappeneder of Säusenstein (1716–88), whose “industry” and “honesty” he praised and whose expertise in cadaster revision he would miss. With an important exception, these objections were brushed aside and the solution proved more radical than that announced two years previously. The emperor imposed a scheme similar to those already operating in the Upper and Inner Austrian lands. Under its provisions, only two rather than four Deputies of the Estates acquired seats on the provincial council, where they now constituted less than one-fifth rather than the planned one-third of the members (reduced in number from twelve to eleven).83 The lords provided one Deputy, the knights the other.84 Two Deputies managed business that was previously reserved to six— on annual pay reduced from 4,000 to 2,500 fl. The council itself retained its stratified social profile with separate benches for “lords,” “knights,” and the pp. 173–8. The vetting process was not confined to Lower Austria. Cf. Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 167–8. For educational requirements and state service, see Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, i: 1780 bis 1848 (2nd edn., Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 2013), 108–9. 79 This is apparent not only in the report by the Lower Austrian government to Joseph II, Feb. 4, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1, but also in the surviving correspondence (e.g., the aulic decree of Jan. 29, 1784 and the rescript to Count Friedrich August Zinzendorf, Feb. 5, 1784, both in NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 26. A register of the committee’s business exists down through the end of 1783 (NÖLA, StB, 241). 80 [Starzer], Beiträge, 77–82. Also ÖZV, II/1/2/1, 15. 81 Pergen to Joseph II, Aug. 5, 1783, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 82 This was a view shared by members of the Council of State. See Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 116. 83 Aulic decree to Count Pergen, Jan. 15, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. For operations in Styria, see Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag,” 173–4. 84 The lord was Count Anton Hartig, the knight Anton Joseph von Mayenberg. They were succeeded, respectively, by Count Anton Hoyos (1787) and Johann Joseph von Stiebar (1788). Minutes of the Lower Austrian Estate of lords, Aug. 1, 1787, NÖLA, HA, HB, 3, pp. 173–8; and minutes of Lower Austrian Estate of knights, July 14, 1788, NÖLA, RA, HS 18, pp. 79–111.

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“learned.” As late as 1789, the lords still enjoyed precedence in its sessions.85 Pergen foresaw the lords’ Deputy of the Estates, rather than a regular provincial councilor, as being presiding officer in his absence.86 When his failing eyesight prompted the appointment of a stand-in in 1789, the choice fell on Count August Auersperg, a Catholic convert and former member of the college of Deputies now serving as Stadthauptmann of Vienna.87 The attempt to introduce uniform structures across the central lands again did not elicit uniform results. Given that the Estates of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola furnished two Deputies each, the council of the Inner Austrian government (Gubernium) had a disproportionately high number of Deputies in relation to total membership. In 1785 Joseph corrected this by allowing each group of Estates only one Deputy. Corporate weight declined and became socially top-heavy: the three diets predictably chose to send lords rather than knights to the council in Graz.88 In Upper Austria the reorganization of 1783 had a similar effect. Not only did it reduce the number of Estates’ Deputies from eight (two prelates, two lords, two knights, and two townsmen) to two (one lord and one knight), but it also cost the Fourth Estate its only places on a directorial panel in the Austrian duchies.89 The less-privileged were similarly disadvantaged in Moravia. As early as the winter of 1782, a non-noble Carthusian prelate whose monastery had been suppressed forfeited his place on the still-extant committee (Landesausschuß ). The bishop of Brünn, Count Chorinsky, replaced him.90 In both Moravia and Bohemia proper, the clergy, petty nobles, and townsmen again lost out when the boards were disbanded. The Estates in both Prague and Brünn appear to have chosen only lords as their “representatives” to the local Gubernia.91 85 Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 165. For efforts to make precedence dependent on seniority rather than social rank, see ÖZV, II/1/2/1, 51–2; and [Starzer], Beiträge, 104. 86 Pergen to Joseph II, Aug. 5, 1783, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1. 87 Aulic decree to Lower Austrian provincial government, Feb. 9, 1789, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 2. Miha Preinfalk, Auersperg: Geschichte einer europäischen Familie, ed. Ernst Bruckmüller and trans. Irena Bruckmüller-Vilfan (Graz and Stuttgart, 2006), 386–8. 88 At the end of Joseph’s reign, these Deputies were Count Ferdinand Attems (Styria), Baron Ludwig Rechbach (Carinthia), and Count Johann Nepomuk Edling (Carniola). For Attems, see Franz Ilwof, Die Grafen von Attems Freiherren von Heiligenkreuz in ihren Wirken in und für Steiermark, ii (Graz, 1897), 24–136, esp. 35; for Rechbach: minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee, Dec. 14, 1789, KLA, StA, HS 250, f. 313; for Edling: minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Jan. 2, 1790, AS 2, Reg. II, 62. The number of Deputies of the Gorizian Estates attached to the Gubernium in Trieste was likewise reduced from two to one. Carl Freiherr von Czoernig, Das Land Görz und Gradisca (Vienna, 1873), 761. 89 Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden, 96. 90 Aulic decree to Landeshauptmann Count Christoph Blümegen, Feb. 27, 1782, MZA, A8, 45, f. 116. 91 In Bohemia and Moravia, the officeholder equivalent to “Deputy” in the Austrian duchies was known as “representative.” The incumbents in Moravia in 1787 were Barons Roden and Locella. The latter was succeeded the same year by Baron Friedenthal. Minutes of the Moravian diet, May 26, 1787, MZA, A4, 51, folder 1787, f. 2v, 6v, 9r. The election of a knight was possible, at least in Bohemia. See Hugo Toman, Das böhmische Staatsrecht und die Entwicklung der österreichischen Reichsidee vom Jahre 1527 bis 1848 (Prague, 1872), 160. In 1788 the Bohemian “representatives” were Baron MacNeven and Count Cavriani, whose names appear in the aulic decree of Sept. 25, 1788, NA, České gubernium, Dvorské dekrety a reskripty, i, č. 188, 540.

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Although the new “amalgamated” Lower Austrian provincial government took up its work in early May 1784, a complete fusion of business did not occur.92 Most significantly, Joseph conceded that the Estates’ credit could be dealt with outside the council’s plenum by those the Landmarschall designated.93 Pergen chose only members of the Estates. Otherwise, the Estates’ Deputies handled the Estates’ affairs, as the surviving correspondence shows. Even where central authority insisted on an absolute merger, as in respect of record-keeping, custom proved tenacious. The Estates’ business continued to be registered separately, setting a new precedent.94 With respect to the Estates’ financial support staff, historians have followed the nineteenth-century legal scholar Arnold Luschin von Ebengreuth, who noted the merger of corporate bookkeeping with equivalent provincial departments.95 The emperor indeed issued such a directive for Lower Austria.96 The unification embraced the longstanding disbursement treasuries (Kassen) of the “three upper Estates” (prelates, lords, and knights).97 Less has been known about the Estates’ vital receiverships responsible for tax intake and debt-service. The data for Lower Austria, the Inner Austrian duchies, Tyrol, and Moravia indicate that Joseph failed to integrate corporate and cameral finances administratively, even as monarchy and intermediary powers remained inextricably intertwined financially. In Lower Austria the arrangements of 1784 provided that the receiver general, since 1764 a non-noble officer elected by the “three upper Estates,” be demoted to a “paymaster” (Zahlmeister) with a salary of 1,500 rather than 3,000 fl. annually.98 He was to be subordinated to the “provincial disbursement treasury” (Provinzialkassa). Yet even the name did not change. Joseph Rohrwürth († 1794), the receiver general elected by the Estates in the early 1780s, retained his post (and title) and continued to act in an autonomous capacity

92 The aulic decree of Apr. 4, 1784 laid down May 1 of the same year as the effective date. The council’s first session transpired on May 7, as the surviving minutes show. The decree and minutes can be found in NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. Most accounts indicate 1782 as the operational date: Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 117; [Starzer], Beiträge, 76, 103; Johann Ludwig Ehrenreich Graf v. Barth-Barthenheim, Das Ganze der österreichischen politischen Administration, mit vorzüglicher Rücksicht auf das Erzherzogthum Oesterreich unter der Enns, 4 vols. (Vienna, 1838–43), i, 211; Karl Gutkas, Geschichte des Landes Niederösterreich (5th edn., St. Pölten, 1974), 326. Victor Bibl, Die Restauration der Niederösterr: Landesverfassung unter K. Leopold II. (Innsbruck, 1902), 10, reported 1784. 93 Aulic decree to Count Pergen, Jan. 15, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 94 Aulic resolution of Sept. 9, 1784 recorded on the report of the Lower Austrian government dated Aug. 24, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. Separately bound registers of aulic decrees relative to the Estates’ affairs have survived for the period May 1784 through June 1790. NÖLA, StB, 591–7. 95 Luschin, Grundriss, 324; Putschögl, Die landständische Behördenorganisation, 58. 96 Aulic decree to Count Pergen, Jan. 15, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 97 Reference to the relevant aulic decree of Jan. 18, 1784, which provided for amalgamation with the Estates’ receivership general, in the minutes of the Lower Austrian Estate of lords, Apr. 27, 1784, NÖLA, HA, HB, 3, p. 133. For a similar provision in Upper Austria, see Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden, 191. 98 This is apparent from §7 of Pergen’s report to Joseph II, Feb. 4, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1.

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to the end of Joseph’s reign.99 Public patents mandated that manors and local magistrates pay regular direct taxes and extra war levies into “the office of the Estates’ receiver general” (ständisches Obereinnehmeramt).100 With the Turkish war looming in 1787, explicit reference to the Estates’ Deputies again embellished tax patents (“von der k.k. n.ö. Regierung und denen mit selber vereinten Ständischen Verordneten”) for the first time since the college’s dissolution in 1784. Also with respect to bookkeeping, the evidence points to operations fused rather more on paper than in actual fact. Joseph II himself provided for two separate departments in the Lower Austrian “provincial disbursement treasury,” the one for cameral business, the other for that of the Estates. As late as 1786, Count Pergen disputed the government’s right to name a bookkeeper for the department that managed the Estates’ affairs.101 Apart from the institutional infighting that may have informed this clash, the position of the Estates as large-scale borrowers and debt-holders who needed a corresponding apparatus will have influenced his thinking—and have found an echo in the councils of state. Similar contention occurred in Moravia, where the record into the late 1780s—including aulic pronouncements—shows the continued existence of the “Estates’ bookkeeping department” (Landschaftsbuchhalterei), the “Estates disbursement treasury” (Landschaftskassa), and the Estates’ tax receivers (Landschaftseinnehmer).102 The customary practice in Inner Austria and Tyrol is also manifest. Under Joseph, their assemblies continued the long tradition of electing noble receivers general.103 In Upper and Lower Austria the reforms after the Seven Years War had eliminated all standing committees of the Estates with the exception of the colleges of Deputies. In consequence, the restructuring in the 1780s threatened to deprive the Estates of any entity capable of preparing material for their assemblies or offering considered advice either to them or on their behalf. If diets were to continue to exist—and Joseph’s assurances seemed to leave no doubt about 99 Correspondence by Rohrwürth in his official capacity is found in NÖLA, StReg, 6 (“Creditswesen” 1782–9). Aulic decree, Jan. 24, 1789, NÖLA, StB, 596. This decree concerns a transfer of funds from the Estates’ receivership general to the War Payments Office (Kriegszahlamt). 100 The patents for regular direct taxation of Nov. 4, 1785, Nov. 1, 1787, and Nov. 1, 1788, NÖLA, Verordnetenpatente, 22. A special tax levied during the Turkish war was regulated by the patent of Nov. 13, 1788, NÖLA, KP, 47a. 101 This dispute mentioned in ÖZV, II/1/2/1, 49–50. For the separate departments, see also Bibl, Die Restauration, 10. 102 Reference to the conflict about the appointment of a bookkeeper and to the tax receivers is found in the minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 17, 1787 and Aug. 29, 1788, MZA, A4, 51, folder 1788, f. 6v, 8r, 9r, 47v, 49v. For the disbursement treasury: minutes of the Moravian diet, Mar. 3, 1789, MZA, A4, 52, folder 1789, f. 160r. 103 In Inner Austria and Tyrol, the receivers general bore the title Generaleinnehmer rather than Obereinnehmer, the appellation usual in Lower Austria. For Tyrol, see the list of receivers general printed in Köfler, Land—Landschaft—Landtag, 522. In Carniola the post appears to have been held for much of Joseph’s reign by Count Johann Nepomuk Auersperg (minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, 1786, AS 2, Reg. II, 61). The election of Count Johann Polycarp Christalnigg as Carinthian receiver general occurred at the diet of Nov. 3, 1785 (KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 37v–38r). A register of the Carinthian receivership’s business (“protocollum expeditorum”) for the period 1786–90 has survived in KLA, StA, HS 618. Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929), 633, reported that Joseph II abolished the Styrian receivership general.

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that—such bodies remained imperative. A comparable situation existed in Bohemia and Moravia. The emperor therefore allowed the Estates in those lands as well as in the archduchy to maintain what was to be called a “committee” (Ausschuß ) that was nonetheless specifically denied the character of a proper office (Stelle) with staff, regular sessions, and pay.104 Joseph seems to have regarded the new panels as irrelevant consultative organs that were at the disposal of provincial governors. In Lower Austria Pergen took little exception to the idea that the committee might eliminate the need for the “holding of so many diets.” He pointed out that it could in fact take care of some matters “just as well” as the full assembly.105 The emperor left the issue of its membership relatively open, specifying only that the two Deputies seconded to the provincial government must belong ex officio. He did not require the induction of townsmen in a territory where they had been excluded from standing committees since the sixteenth century, just as he made no provision for giving them stronger representation in the diets themselves. Though the full consequences would only become clear in time, Pergen’s provisions for the new board incongruously revived the Estates’ executive committee (also called Ausschuß ) disbanded by Maria Theresa in 1764.106 In 1784 each of the “three upper Estates” elected its own representatives—with the significant difference that the prelates chose only two members as opposed to six each by the lords and knights. Until 1764 each Estate had been allotted four, for a total of twelve. With the reduction in the number of prelates and the exclusion of townsmen, the new committee became yet another corporate body that was heavily and improbably weighted in the nobility’s favor. Pergen felt the need to justify the inclusion of even two prelates with reference to the Estates’ good offices. He stressed the public expectation that the signatures and seals of two prelates appear with those of two lords and two knights on the Estates’ bonds. Though Pergen’s worries were dismissed in the notoriously arrogant and condescending tone of Josephian officialdom, clerical participation endured.107 The Lower Austrian committee remained largely dormant until the fall of 1789 except in one respect: its members countersigned the bonds issued in the Estates’

104 The extract of the rescript to the Upper Austrian Landeshauptmann from July 21, 1783 (attached to the aulic decree to Landmarschall Pergen, July 24, 1783) in NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. For the Upper Austrian committee, see Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden, 159. A request by the Bohemian Estates in 1785 to revive an older ad hoc body known as the “extended committee” (verstärkter Ausschuß ) was denied by the government. Robert Flieder, “Zemský výbor v království Českém: Jeho organisace v letech 1714–83,” Zprávy zemského archivu království Českého V (1918): 97. I am grateful to Anna Schirlbauer (Vienna) for Czech-language help. 105 Quotations from Pergen’s report to Joseph II, Aug. 5, 1783, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 106 This occurred in two ways. First, a surviving member of the old pre-1764 committee (Count Adam Traun) became a member of the new body on the basis of the fact that the lords “still recognized him as such.” Quotation from Pergen’s report to Joseph II, May 3, 1784. Second, Pergen directed that the members of the committee take precedence over the Estates’ Deputies (now attached to the provincial government) as they had “previously [done] in all assemblies.” Quotation from the Landmarschall’s directive, May 23, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 107 Pergen to Joseph II, May 3, 1784; and aulic decree, May 6, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1.

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name.108 In granting its elected members precedence over its ex officio ones (i.e., the Deputies attached to the provincial government), Pergen tried moreover to ensure that the bonds would bear the marks of men affiliated in the public mind with the Estates rather than with the ruler (in the guise of the provincial government) and his historically shaky credit. In Prague the situation was analogous. Members of the ad hoc panel that the Bohemian Estates were allowed after the abolition of their directorial board were likewise needed to endorse bonds.109 In Inner Austria their counterparts had the same task, but the story was otherwise different. In Klagenfurt and Laibach, active committees of the Estates (Ausschüße)—not to be mistaken for the chambers of Deputies—survived reform. These bodies had constituted control organs composed of senior prelates, lords, and knights; their advice had been sought in weighty matters before the diets and they had exercised oversight over the chambers of Deputies. When these bodies disappeared, the more heavily noble boards that endured assumed responsibilities that could not be (or were not) handled by the Deputies attached to the Gubernium in far-off Graz. The steadily expanding minutes of the Carinthian committee through the later 1780s evidence this development. In Carinthia the diet chose the members; in Carniola selfrecruitment appears to have occurred as well. In both places the lords predominated and the governor confirmed appointments. As in Lower Austria, there was no pay for those who served.110 Given the absence of the governor and the Estates’ Deputies from Klagenfurt and Laibach for all but a few weeks of the year, there lacked the immediate personal connection between government and intermediary powers such as existed between Pergen and the Lower Austrian Estates in Vienna. In Carinthia and Carniola the committees stepped into the breach, keeping open the lines of communication to Inner Austrian (and thus central) authority and attending as needed to the business in which the Estates remained involved. At the simplest level, these bodies channeled decrees coming from Graz to the Estates. In 1785 an official edict on the standardization of procedures in the three Inner Austrian receiverships general reached the Carinthian committee, where it was brought to the attention of Receiver General von Litzelhofen.111 At another level, the committees were consulted for information and advice. In 1787 the Inner Austrian Gubernium 108 This is provided for in the Landmarschall’s directive, May 23, 1784, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, StV, 1, folder 1. 109 Toman, Das böhmische Staatsrecht, 161. There is also evidence that members of the Carinthian committee were charged with the same task: minutes of the Carinthian diet, Sept. 6, 1788, KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 72v–73r; minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee (“extra consilium”), Jan. 18, 1790, KLA, StA, HS 251, f. 15. 110 Minutes of the Carinthian committee 1783–90 are preserved in KLA, StA, HS 244–51. Minutes of the Carinthian diet, Sept. 6, 1788, KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 72v–73r (election of members). On Nov. 26, 1787 the Inner Austrian Governor Khevenhüller directed the Carniolan Estates’ committee to recommend a replacement for an empty position because of the “frequent business” (AS 2, Reg. II, 40, folder 50). Records from the surviving Estates’ committees in Breisgau, Silesia, and Galicia would bear investigation as well. 111 Minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee, Mar. 3, 1785, KLA, StA, HS 246, f. 14. Litzelhofen noted on this occasion that the procedures in use in Carinthia were being extended to Styria and Carniola.

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requested a detailed report from the Carniolan committee on the Estates’ assets and liabilities in the previous year, including the issue and repayment of debentures.112 That the government had no direct access to such material is again revealing. At the same time, the committees dealt with matters arising both from the Estates’ obligations to the ruler and from other binding contracts previously supervised by the chambers of Deputies. To maintain roads and bridges in Lower Carniola, the Estates in Laibach had leased out the collection of tolls to third parties. The administrative makeover of 1782 did not invalidate the agreement and the surviving Carniolan committee continued to run the system.113 Paradoxically, it appears that the Carniolan branch of the Bankal Administration, a central financial agency, subleased some if not all of those tolls from the Estates. During the Turkish campaigns of the later 1780s, the committee hired a local entrepreneur, the merchant Joseph Desselbrunner, to organize large deliveries of wheat on the Estates’ behalf to the Office of Military Supply in Laibach (k.k. Militärverpflegsamt). Such provisioning continued to be governed by the agreements between Estates and Court known as “recesses.” Desselbrunner was reimbursed by the Estates’ receivership general, which furthermore soaked up local credit through bond emissions on behalf of the war effort.114 Such activity recalls the better-known revival of Hungarian counties for recruitment purposes under the impact of the Balkan conflict.115 Like Hungary, Carniola was geographically comparatively close to the front. Toward the end of Joseph’s reign, the committees met on average twice a month, usually under the presidency of one of their own members rather than the governor. The committees included one or more advisors (Referenten) who prepared material for consideration, provided counsel and clarification, and saw that decisions were carried out. In Carinthia several members are known to have undertaken this work more or less simultaneously, while in Carniola, Count Georg Jacob Hohenwart performed this function alone between 1787 and 1789. He owed his appointment to the Inner Austrian governor.116 As the war progressed, administrative overload led Hohenwart to ask for an assistant. The approval of the request apparently occurred without reference to Graz.117 In combination with the long-standing 112 Minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Feb. 1, 1787 (point of business no. 226), AS 2, Reg. II, 61. 113 Minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Aug. 25, 1786 (point of business no. 12), Jan. 24, 1787 (point of business no. 221), Feb. 28, 1787 (point of business no. 281), Jan. 9, 1788 (point of business no. 2), June 27, 1788 (point of business no. 421), AS 2, Reg. II, 61. 114 For the wheat delivery: minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, May 13, 1788 (point of business no. 321) and July 5, 1788 (point of business no. 450), AS 2, Reg. II, 61. For the issue of Estates’ bonds: minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Jan. 12, 1789 (point of business no. 1) and Sept. 18, 1789 (point of business no. 496), AS 2, Reg. II, 62. 115 Haselsteiner, Joseph II. und die Komitate Ungarns, 109–216. Matthew Z. Mayer, “The Price for Austria’s Security: Part I—Joseph II, the Russian Alliance, and the Ottoman War, 1787–1789,” IHR 26/2 (2004): 286–8; Matthew Z. Mayer, “The Price for Austria’s Security: Part II—Leopold II, the Prussian Threat, and the Peace of Sistova, 1790–1791,” IHR 26/3 (2004): 478–9. 116 Governor’s edict to the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Graz, Dec. 6, 1787, AS 2, Reg. II, 40. 117 Minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Oct. 9, 1789 (point of business no. 526), AS 2, Reg. II, 62.

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centralization of Inner Austrian government in the Styrian capital, Joseph’s abolition of the Estates’ directorial committees shifted much of the administrative burden, which was undertaken in part on the state’s behalf, onto unpaid, largely underresourced, and increasingly demoralized boards. ORGANIZATION: TH E DIETS Diets were the principal corporate gathering to survive under Joseph. Despite many assertions and assumptions to the contrary, those in the central lands were summoned on a regular basis down through the reign’s end.118 As usual, they met in the fall around the beginning of the fiscal year (November 1) and dealt first and foremost with the annual tax proposition. This was specifically prepared for each territory. Still, the meetings of the diets changed markedly. Procedures were simplified, much as at Court. In Lower Austria the abolition of the personal handover made necessary a new modus by which the Estates might officially come by the postulation. Here Joseph adapted the custom in other territories, where specially appointed commissioners undertook this task. Unlike in the Inner Austrian duchies, Bohemia, and Moravia, the commissioner in Lower Austria was Joseph’s chief proxy at the Estates, the Landmarschall. All the same, the use of a commissioner adjusted the Lower Austrian practice to the one elsewhere, in addition to ending a privilege originally conceded by Maria Theresa. In the land below the Enns, the proposition had traditionally prompted deliberations by the individual Estates, whose “votes” were then combined into the diet’s formal “declaration.” The resulting draft was then approved by the larger assembly, which might later respond to the government’s rejoinder. Having already reduced the number of sessions the previous year, Count Pergen decided in 1785 to eliminate “voting” by Estate. By that time, neither prelates nor knights had a proper presiding officer. The incumbent of Melk had died, while the office of president (Präses) of the knights had been abolished by Joseph on the reasoning that 118 The supposition that the diets were done away with is still widely held. Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Monarchy: A New History (Cambridge and London, 2016), 85; Miloš Řezník, Neuorientierung einer Elite: Aristokratie, Ständewesen und Loyalität in Galizien (1772–1795) (Frankfurt am Main, 2016), 284; John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA, 2015), 45. Also Brauneder, Österreichische Verfassungsgeschichte, 98; and Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Vienna and Munich, 2001), 262. For the statement that Joseph II stopped summoning the Lower Austria diet, see Felix Czeike, ed., Historisches Lexikon Wien, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1992–7), iv, 403. Karl Bosl, Handbuch der Geschichte der böhmischen Länder, 4 vols. (Stuttgart, 1974), ii, 441–2, reported that the Bohemian diet was not called between 1783 and 1789 and the diets of Moravia and Silesia amalgamated in keeping with the administrative mergers. Drawing on Bosl, Jörg K. Hoensch, Geschichte Böhmens von der slavischen Landnahme bis zur Gegenwart (3rd edn., Munich, 1997), 282, passed on the error concerning the Bohemian diet. Siegfried Haider, Geschichte Oberösterreichs (Vienna, 1987), wrote that Joseph II “never summoned” the Upper Austrian diet. But see Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden, 83. For the enduring tax assemblies in Styria, Tyrol, and Silesia in Joseph’s time, see respectively Ilwof, “Der ständische Landtag,” 173; Helmut Reinalter, Aufklärung— Absolutismus—Reaktion: Die Geschichte Tirols in der 2. Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts (Vienna, 1974), 84; Karl Berthold, Schlesiens Landesvertretung und Landeshaushalt von ihren Anfängen bis zur neuesten Zeit, 3 vols. (Troppau, 1909), i, 14.

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the individual Estates did not need distinct heads given that interests apart from those of the state were not to be allowed.119 For the rest of the reign, meetings of the Lower Austrian diet were confined to a mere one day annually.120 This radical reduction paradoxically followed the ruler’s widely publicized “Pastoral Letter” in which he had proclaimed that “the monarch himself [is] accountable to each subject for his management of public money.”121 The fact that “accountability” required a proper political forum obviously did not occur to him as it did to contemporary reformers in France. Whether Pergen was acting on Joseph’s direct orders or only in the spirit of Josephian government is unknown. In Moravia the emperor explicitly approved “abbreviated” observances at the opening of the annual diet.122 Later, he abandoned Czech as a language of formal communication with that body, to the dismay of the Estates.123 Previously, official documents such as his commissioners’ credentials and the tax demand itself had been transmitted to the full assembly— under the emperor’s own signature—in both German and Czech. Joseph’s concern with efficiency and his impatience at having to sign matching documents in different idioms will have dictated this decision, rather than the Germanizing tendencies earlier attributed to him in connection with having made German the administrative language of Hungary. We can easily imagine his annoyance at stacks of papers on his desk concerning institutions that he would have preferred to eradicate. In Bohemia a Czech version of the diet’s closing articles (in German the so-called Landtagsschluß ) ceased to appear, beginning with the assembly summoned in the fall of 1787 (for the military year 1788). Then again, no general reform sought to homogenize procedures and rites of the diets generally. In contrast to the new practice in Lower Austria, the “votes” by the individual Estates on the tax demand in Prague remained customary. Likewise, the diets of Bohemia and Moravia, with one exception, continued to publish closing articles whose preparation required additional exchanges with the government and consequently further gatherings across the year.124 Such articles had not

119 Minutes of the Estate of knights, Apr. 22 and Oct. 20, 1784, NÖLÄ, RA, HS 17, pp. 242–5, 273–5. 120 Minutes of the Lower Austrian diet, Oct. 18 and 20, 1784, Oct. 18, 1785, Oct. 16, 1786, Oct. 16, 1787, Oct. 20, 1788, Oct. 26, 1789, NÖLA, StB, 279, pp. 1–24 (with explicit mention of simplification of procedures on pp. 6 and 11–12). 121 Quoted in Beales, Joseph II, ii, 347. 122 A reference to the “abbreviated” rites (“von Uns begnehmigten abgekürzten Ceremonials”) in Joseph’s “Instruction and Directive” for the Moravian commissioners, Vienna, Oct. 2, 1786, MZA, A4, 51, f. 107–10. A ceremonial reform is mentioned in the minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 21, 1783, MZA, A3, no. 38. 123 Minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 20, 1788, MZA, A4, 52, folder 1789, f. 70r; minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 26, 1789, MZA, A4, 52, folder 1790, f. 5r. 124 Printed articles for the Moravian diets from 1781/82 through 1789/90 are preserved in MZA, A6, 20. Those of the Bohemian diet exist only for the years 1781/82 through 1788/89. Copies are found in NA, Sne˘movní artikule, carton 1771–1788. The last Bohemian diet summoned by Joseph met on Oct. 26, 1789. There are no printed articles for that body, whose agreement to the postulation was revised after Joseph’s successor revoked the tax and labor services reform of 1789. This is apparent from unpublished material for the articles preserved in NA, Desky zemské vehší, vol. 23,

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been, and did not become, usual in Lower Austria. Only one attempt at crossborder standardization has come to light. In late 1787 Joseph decreed that the Estates’ registers of member families (the so-called Matrikel ) rather than aulic honors were to determine precedence at assemblies.125 Previously, possession of the chamberlain’s key or the rank of privy councilor—both in the award of the ruler—had garnered privileged position at some gatherings, though practice across territorial boundaries had been far from integrated. Even so, regularization did not ensue. The complexities associated with such a change in a highly stratified society made outright implementation difficult, as events in Moravia showed. In the consultations to which his decree gave rise, Joseph decided that the privileged bench for his own privy councilors there (the Fürstenbank) should be preserved. Among the lords attending the diet in Brünn, chamberlains of more recent noble vintage such as Count Peter Blümegen continued to outrank grandees such as Count Joseph Dietrichstein who lacked the title of privy councilor.126 The research of recent decades has called into question the sharp distinction formerly made between what was thought of as the relatively insignificant “ritual” surrounding early modern representative bodies and the real “substance” of their negotiations.127 The highly personal nature of authority lent intrinsic political importance to questions of status, hierarchy, and observance. Hence Joseph’s ceremonial reforms at the diets were no mere trifles. Implicit comparisons with modern legislatures in turn helped reinforce the older dichotomy between “form” and “content” and made bodies that had no law-making power appear irrelevant. But this was to misread the nature of representative assemblies in the central Habsburg lands, where the privileges of gathering, remonstrating, being consulted on matters that touched their own interests and those of their territory, and participating in government constituted their essence. In all of these areas, Joseph’s grip gradually became a stranglehold. In the archduchy below the Enns, the ancient, ritualized link between approval of the annual tax demand and the freedom to remonstrate had already loosened noticeably by the late 1770s due to financial exigency. During the emperor’s sole reign, it failed altogether, at least to the fall of 1789.128 Joseph’s personal appeal to the Estates regarding cadaster revision constituted perhaps the most notable appeal for the Estates’ help. The disappearance of their college of Deputies in 1784 distinctly reduced not only their part in f. A28r–B7v. The first proper minutes kept by the Bohemian Estates’ assembly date from 1789 but oddly do not include material on the October diet. NA, Český zemský sněm 1789–1913, vol. 1. 125 The aulic decree dated Dec. 12, 1787 for Lower Austria in NÖLA, StB, 594, no. 152. 126 Minutes of the Moravian diet, Apr. 18, 1788, MZA, A4, 51, folder 1788, f. 36r. Minutes of the Moravian diet, Oct. 24, 1789, MZA, A4, 52, folder 1790, f. 2–3. 127 Stollberg-Rilinger, Des Kaisers alte Kleider; Tim Neu, “Rhetoric and Representation: Reassessing Territorial Diets in Early Modern Germany,” CEH 43 (2010): 1–24. 128 This was somewhat paradoxical given Joseph’s remarkable openness to receiving petitions. Derek Beales, “Joseph II, Petitions, and the Public Sphere,” in Hamish M. Scott and Brendan Simms, eds., Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 2007), 249–68. Near the end of Maria Theresa’s reign, the Lower Austrian diet noted in its official “declaration” (Landtagserklärung) of Oct. 29, 1779 in response to that year’s tax demand that its grievances in the preceding years had been ignored. NÖLA, LH, 8.

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government but also their organized ability to offer counsel. Later, Joseph rarely consulted the Estates, though the practice never ceased altogether. In 1788 he directed that they be sounded out only on express instruction.129 Where standing committees survived, as in Carinthia and Carniola, confabulations of the earlier sort—between those bodies and the Inner Austrian governor—continued. Given that the diets endured, a certain amount of ceremony—trumpet fanfares and formal speeches by commissioners standing on a dais beside Joseph’s portrait— was unavoidable. The questions remain: why did Joseph II, who deplored ritual, continue to call tax diets in his central lands, and why did presumably soundminded clerics, nobles, and townsmen turn up at them? Let us consider three possible explanations. First, there is the argument from customary practice and political legitimacy. Regular diets had been a fixture of Austrian political life at least since the Thirty Years War. But Joseph’s refusal to be inaugurated or crowned (with the associated oaths) brings into question this argument, for which, moreover, no evidence exists. Second, the Court of Vienna, through the judicature of the Imperial Aulic Council, had been a leading force in the preservation of Estates in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, in particular their right to approve taxation. This position guided the Council’s rulings in Joseph’s time as well.130 It is striking that the diets regularly summoned by Joseph lay within the Empire’s boundaries. An exception was the Galician one, which was nonetheless modeled on those in the central lands.131 But it seems unlikely that the Council, to which Habsburg subjects had no appeal, influenced Joseph’s policy. Moreover, the emperor’s fixation on unitary government and distaste for political fragmentation led him to express the hope that he could “get rid of the Reichstag,” the Empire’s foremost assembly.132 There can be little question that Joseph also regarded the diets in his central territories as a bother to be stamped out if possible. That he did not do so was, third, a matter of financial imperative. Yet he did not need their sanction of taxation per se and we can safely assume that he would have dispensed with them if that had been their sole purpose. This was the policy for years at a time in Hungary and Transylvania. Rather, formal assent to regular taxation still underwrote the territorial credit systems upon which Habsburg authority continued to rely, just as in Maria Theresa’s day. The Estates of the central lands had emerged from the Seven 129 Aulic decree, Dec. 1, 1788, NÖLA, StB, 135. An excerpt of an almost identical aulic decree also dated Dec. 1, 1788 is found in the minutes of the Moravian diet (point no. 7), Dec. 16, 1788, MZA, A4, 52, f. 65v, 63r (in this order). On the basis of this or a similar decree from Dec. 1788, both Bibl, Die Restauration, 11, and Bosl, Handbuch, ii, 442, reported that Joseph forbade the assemblies to meet on their “own initiative.” No diet in the central lands had had the right to convoke itself and, as far as I can tell, none attempted to do so. 130 Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, “Die bayerische Landschaftsverordnung 1714–1777,” in Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen, 235. See also Volker Press, “Landtage im Alten Reich und im Deutschen Bund: Voraussetzungen ständischer und konstitutioneller Entwicklungen 1750–1830,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 39 (1980): 102–9. 131 Beginning in 1782, the Galician diet met biennially until 1788. Stanisław Grodziski, Historia ustroju społeczno politycznego Galicji 1772–1848 (Wrocław, 1971), 147. My thanks to Miloš Řzeník (Warsaw) for help with this reference. 132 Beales, Joseph II, ii, 403.

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Figure 8.1. Bond of the Lower Austrian Estates made out to the church in Ried, Feb. 6, 1789 (signed by six members of the Estates including the two Deputies and Receiver General Joseph Rohrwürth). Courtesy of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Münzkabinett (Inv. No. MK_WP_01639).

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Years War as the state’s principal creditors, and their financial significance, though reduced, remained unbroken when Joseph assumed sole power. In 1780 Habsburg debt indeed exceeded that of 1763 thanks to the “Potato War” debacle of 1778–9. Having fallen in the fifteen years following the Peace of Hubertusburg, the treasury liabilities guaranteed by the Lower Austrian Estates began to rise again. In 1781 they amounted to nearly 17 million florins, bond-issues worth nearly two million having taken place in the previous three years.133 The link between the standing army, state debt, and the diet’s approval of the tax proposition was as explicit in Joseph’s tax demands as it had been in his mother’s. The “security and welfare of Our state,” he reported to the Moravian Estates in 1786, depended on maintaining both an “adequate armed force” and the “system” for servicing the “large debts” left from past wars. Almost identical language was standard in the communications to the Estates elsewhere.134 In his reign’s last years, the Ottoman conflict (1788–90) forced him to call on the Estates’ good offices just as his ancestors had done (see Figure 8.1 for a bond issued by the Lower Austrian Estates at this time). It is an irony of history that official expressions of gratitude for the loans they raised during a war exacerbated by the loss of the Austrian Netherlands were among the last acts of Joseph’s government.135

THE R EIGN’S LA S T PHA S E Tensions between the ruler and the elites of his central lands rose as the promulgation of the tax and peasant labor services reform neared. The nobility saw the reform as an attack on its core material interests. The departure from government in February 1788 of one of the ruler’s most distinguished ministers, Count Karl Zinzendorf, should have worried Joseph from the standpoint of both his domestic support and the prospects for the planned reform. For Zinzendorf, as the head of a special commission since 1784, had managed what was surely one of the reign’s worthiest projects: the rectification of the provincial cadasters in the 133 Dickson, Finance and Government, ii, 379. Europäische Auflklarung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., ii, 182 (2nd pagination), Apr. 19, 1778, noted the Lower Austrian Estates’ debt at 15 million florins. 134 “Instruction and directive” for the ruler’s commissioners to the Moravian diet, Vienna, Oct. 2, 1786, MZA, A4, 51, f. 107–10. For example, the Lower Austrian tax proposition for the military year 1789, Oct. 20, 1788, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. The same wording in the Bohemian proposition is apparent from the Artikeln des allgemeinen Landtagsschlusses, welche auf dem k. prager Schlosse am 20ten Tage des Monats Oktober 1788 . . . vorgetragen, sodann von allen vier Ständen des Königreichs Böhmen beschlossen, und am 17ten Januar 1791 publiziret sind (Prague, 1791), ii–iii, NA, Sne˘movní artikule, carton 1771–1788. Cf. Mueller, The Styrian Estates, 80. 135 For the financial extent of this activity, see P. G. M. Dickson, “Count Karl von Zinzendorf ’s ‘New Accountancy’: The Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791,” IHR 29 (2007): 39–40, 55. Cf. Mayer, “The Price for Austria’s Security: Part II,” 485–7. An excerpt of the aulic decree of thanks to the Lower Austrian Estates, Feb. 19, 1790, the day before Joseph’s death, is found in NÖLA, StReg, 6, no. 3921/1083. They were requested to continue their help. Such gratitude to the Carinthian Estates is also on record. Minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee, Mar. 11, 1790, KLA, StA, HS 251, f. 59r.

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Bohemian-Austrian lands in combination with an adjustment of manorial dues and services.136 Taxes and other charges were to be more equitably and efficiently distributed. As the work was nearing completion, Zinzendorf had advised, in keeping with then-current, physiocratic principles of good government, that an assembly of landowners be consulted about the allocation of direct and indirect levies.137 Already highly impatient, Joseph refused to countenance further delay and fired him. Early the next year, another key advisor was lost through the unprecedented resignation of the Bohemian Aulic Chancellor, Count Johann Rudolph Chotek, who found he could no longer support the proposed revision.138 As the historian Julian Swann has shown in the French context, the resignation of a minister in a late eighteenth-century absolute monarchy was a new and dangerous sign of crumbling authority.139 Though Chotek and Zinzendorf have sometimes been portrayed as narrowly noble in motivation, both men were proponents of strong Habsburg government and belonged to families associated with such. Chotek was a nephew of the grand aulic chancellor whose signature adorned the decree of May 1764 that reformed the Lower Austrian Estates. Both the younger Chotek and Zinzendorf were men of the Enlightenment and, more significantly, had grounded official policy in politically relevant circles in the central lands. Zinzendorf regarded representative bodies quite simply as essential to good government. The fact that State Councilor Eger replaced Zinzendorf did not bode well for the project’s ultimate success, which Joseph remained determined to realize.140 With no constituency behind him other than the imperial will, the radical, influential, and non-landed Eger would ill serve his master’s cause as the reign drew to a close. Publication of the tax and labor services patent of February 10, 1789 provoked provincial dissension months before its provisions were due to come into force (November 1, 1789). It arose against the background of growing unrest in Hungary and especially the Austrian Netherlands, where rebellion erupted in the fall. To what extent did the Estates in the central lands become active politically as corporations at this time? The committees that had survived in the Inner Austrian duchies gave the Estates there an advantage in mobilizing. As early as April 1789, the Carinthian body presided over by Baron Sigmund Schoberg raised objections to be passed to Vienna through the Inner Austrian governor.141 In deferential and conciliatory language, 136 Roman Rozdolski, Die grosse Steuer- und Agrarreform Josefs II: Ein Kapitel zur österreichischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte (Warsaw, 1961); Lorenz Mikoletzky, “Der Versuch einer Steuer- und Urbarialregulierung unter Kaiser Joseph II.,” MÖStA 24 (1971): 310–46. P. G. M. Dickson, “Joseph II’s Hungarian Land Survey,” EHR 106 (1991): 611–34. 137 Hock and Bidermann, Der österreichische Staatsrath, 169. 138 For the departures of Zinzendorf and Chotek, see Beales, Joseph II, ii, 566–7, 594–6. 139 Julian Swann, “From Servant of the King to ‘Idol of the Nation’: The Breakdown of Personal Monarchy in Louis XVI’s France,” in Julian Swann and Joël Félix, eds., The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France from Old Regime to Revolution (Oxford, 2013), 63–89. 140 Zinzendorf ’s replacement by Eger noted in the aulic decree of Mar. 1, 1788, NÖLA, StB, 595, no. 38. For Chotek, see Ivo Cerman, Habsburgischer Adel und Aufklärung: Bildungsverhalten des Wiener Hofadels im 18. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 2010), 287–302. 141 Minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ “extended committee,” Apr. 2, 1789, KLA, StA, HS 250, f. 99–105.

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exception was taken to the expected loss of manorial revenue from the cap placed on fees and services. The influence of physiocratic thinking shimmers through the defense of what was portrayed as private property. Governor Khevenhüller appears to have hesitated to pass the protest along, or at least played for time, and only when the committee learned that he had approved a remonstration by neighboring Carniola was the appeal renewed. Khevenhüller himself presided over a Carniolan diet in May 1789 at which complaints acquired written form.142 By the early summer of 1789, the Styrian Estates were active as well; the expression of their dissatisfaction is reported to have “captured the imagination of contemporaries” far beyond provincial or even the monarchy’s borders.143 Joseph summarily rejected the Inner Austrian protests in the fall of 1789 at a time when the Estates of Lower Austria, whose palace was a few hundred feet from the Hofburg, had yet to act.144 Indeed, they had had no formal opportunity of doing so. No assembly had met in the months before the diet was convened on October 26, 1789 to consider the regular tax demand, now based on the rectified cadaster. The remarkable reduction of the direct tax burden on the archduchy below the Enns—by nearly a quarter—by no means reconciled the Estates to the limit placed on peasant dues and labor services. The sharper Lower Austrian reaction also reflected both the growing unease as the patent’s effective date approached and a further radical reform. At State Councilor Eger’s urging, Joseph determined in the late summer of 1789 to exclude manors and local magistrates from their long-standing role in tax collection. To that purpose, a network of state receivers was established in the localities that would have replaced the regime’s traditional landed base in the countryside with a large new administrative class.145 The lesson that Maria Theresa’s government had learned with the circle offices of 1753 had apparently been forgotten. In agreeing to the new Contribution, the Lower Austrian Estates asked to be relieved of any responsibility for seeing that the peasantry paid its taxes. They readily left Joseph to his new and untried administrators, a démarche that he accepted with alacrity. The Theresan policy of making the prelates and nobility financially liable if the peasantry did not pay was scrapped. The emperor’s own appointees continued to distance themselves from him. Landmarschall Pergen, also holder of the portfolio of police minister, presided personally over both the diet and

142 Apparent from the minutes of the Carinthian Estates’ committee, Apr. 16 and May 20, 1789, KLA, StA, HS 250, f. 127–8 and 141–2. Only scanty minutes of the Carniolan diet of May 4, 1789 have survived, with no reference to a remonstration. AS 2, Reg. II, 62. Joseph’s rejection of the Carniolan protest is documented in the minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Oct. 9, 1789 (point of business no. 518), AS 2, Reg. II, 62. 143 Mueller, The Styrian Estates, 91. 144 The Inner Austrian government transmitted the rejection to the Carniolan Estates in a decree of Sept. 23, 1789 (minutes of the Carniolan Estates’ committee, Oct. 9, 1789 [point of business no. 518] AS 2, Reg. II, 62) and to the Carinthian Estates in a decree of Sept. 29, 1789 (“Landtags=Memoriale zu den auf den 14ten xber 1789 allergnädigst ausgeschriebenen Kay. König: extraordinari Landtag,” KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 92–100, point no. 11). 145 Rozdolski, Die grosse Steuer- und Agrarreform, 72–4.

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the committee that polished the final draft of the Estates’ response to the tax demand.146 While the protest it contained fell firmly within traditional political bounds, its chief claim was nonetheless remarkable in Joseph’s Austria: they objected to the fact that “they had so far not even been asked for their advice about this new tax system.”147 And they requested a delay in changes to manorial fees and services for “at least another year,” a typical delaying tactic. While the ruler’s response was more propitiatory in tone than the one to the Inner Austrian Estates months earlier, no concession of substance was made.148 In his last weeks the emperor obviously did not feel he was losing control of the central lands and refused any retreat there, quite in contrast to his collapse before the elites of Hungary and the southern Netherlands. But his resolve impelled a group of Bohemian “cavaliers” to the notable step of appearing of their own accord in Vienna on February 11, 1790 to protest the labor services reform.149 They were filling a vacuum left by the kingdom’s remaining corporate institutions, which played no apparent oppositional role. For reasons that remain unclear, in July 1788 Joseph had abolished the ad hoc panel permitted to the Bohemian Estates after the disbandment of their directorial committee.150 Hence they lacked a body for channeling and giving form to grievances. The diets that met in Prague and Brünn in late October 1789 seem to have remonstrated in no meaningful way; their records contain nothing comparable to the protest filed by the Lower Austrian diet. The “secret” meetings of nobles reported to have occurred in Prague perhaps explain both the abolition of the committee and the informal attempt to protest, which constituted a grave breach of custom. The government regarded it as unlawful, while the emperor’s death a few days later resolved the worst of the tension.151

146 Apart from Pergen, the committee included the provost of Klosterneuburg, the Schotten abbot, Count Anton Hoyos, Count Wenzel Sinzendorff, Baron Ferdinand Sala, Ludwig von Hacqué, and Franz von Aichen. The minutes from this meeting (Nov. 4, 1789) are preserved in NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. The two prelates, Hacqué, and Aichen had all belonged to the committee since its creation in 1784. Since 1787, Hoyos had been the lords’ Deputy attached to the provincial government. A short time later, the faithful Pergen was to offer Joseph a further, devastating critique of his methods of government. Bernard, From the Enlightenment to the Police State, 162–7. 147 Lower Austrian Estates to Joseph II, Nov. 4, 1789, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. 148 Aulic decree, Feb. 4, 1790, NÖLA, StReg 1782–92, 162. 149 Toman, Das böhmische Staatsrecht, 180. There is also mention of the group in the minutes of the Bohemian diet, Mar. 9, 1790, NA, Český zemský sne˘m, vol. 1. 150 Toman, Das böhmische Staatsrecht, 161; Robert Joseph Kerner, Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Political, Economic, and Social History with special reference to the Reign of Leopold II, 1790–1792 (New York, 1932), 124. Bosl, Handbuch, ii, 442, mistakenly reports that Joseph abolished the Estates’ “representatives” attached to the Gubernium. The decree of Sept. 25, 1788 to which Bosl referred in fact outlined the responsibilities of the “representatives.” The decree is found in NA, České gubernium, Dvorské dekrety a reskripty, i, č. 188, 540. 151 Soon after Joseph’s death, Grand Aulic Chancellor Kolowrat granted permission for the formation of an Estates’ committee to give what he called “legal” expression to the discontent. Kolowrat to Bohemian Governor Count Ludwig Cavriani, Mar. 3, 1790, NA, České gubernium, Presidium gubernia, 46, folder 28b. For the “secret” meetings in the months before Joseph’s death, see Kerner, Bohemia, 86.

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As a rule, successful early modern monarchs, such as Louis XIV of France and Joseph’s idol Frederick II of Prussia, but also Maria Theresa, coaxed, coordinated, and compromised with their elites in the interest of sustainable solutions to the problems of government, rather than antagonizing, coercing, or flouting them.152 In the calamitous closing months of his reign, as war dragged on in the Balkans and rebellion erupted in the southern Netherlands, Joseph was lucky that the dispensation of power he inherited from the previous reign held in the monarchy’s central lands. For all the dissatisfaction in the Bohemian-Austrian territories, the nobility still regarded the community of interests with the dynasty as stronger than the differences. In 1789 the Estates of the Austrian duchies were still rallying to the regime with credit and provisions for the army, even as they protested the tax and labor services reform. In part due to this help, Joseph was able to field an army comparable in size to the one that his mother’s government had achieved—a force of more than 300,000 men.153 By contrast, the collapse of the relationship between the emperor and the elites of the southern Netherlands not only deprived him of revenue and credit in time of war but disastrously saddled him with armed revolt. Too late, Joseph was being reminded that a large, composite monarchy depended on (well-managed) local elites for the effective exercise of dominion. But of course Joseph II has often been admired as a leveler and modernizer. In the question of representative bodies, however, he was not a man of his time—or a man far ahead of it. While it would be anachronistic to reproach him for not having been a democrat, other European rulers were trying to place their authority on a broader and firmer basis by creating such bodies to deal with the increasingly entangled knot of problems involving taxation, public finances, state debt, and political legitimacy. In France the issue of representation had by the 1780s become the burning issue. Determined to ensure a politically meaningful expression of public opinion—which meant more than lifting censorship—Director-General Necker had persuaded the king to create provincial assemblies of landed proprietors in some places (Berry [1778] and Haute-Guyenne [1779]), experiments that flourished. His successor Calonne modified and extended the scheme to those parts of the kingdom lacking Estates. But time ran out before the crown could escape its political isolation. In Tuscany the ruling grand duke (Joseph II’s own brother and the later emperor Leopold II) planned a basic law providing for Estates that were based broadly on the propertied rather than on status and birth. Even in autocratic Russia, Catherine II reconciled her claims to absolute power with the devolution of administrative and judicial tasks onto newly fashioned provincial

152 Guy Rowlands, The Dynastic State and the Army under Louis XIV: Royal Service and Private Interest, 1661–1701 (Cambridge, 2002); William Beik, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past & Present 188 (2005): 195–224; Hamish M. Scott, “1763–1786: The Second Reign of Frederick the Great?,” in Philip G. Dwyer, ed., The Rise of Prussia 1700–1830 (Harlow, 2000), 195–6. 153 For the size of the army, see Table I.2 (p. 19).

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chambers of the nobility. Precisely at a time when the incorporation of politically articulate opinion into the decision-making process was coming to be seen as one answer to the ever more complex problems of government, Joseph II was becoming ever less willing to discuss, consult, or compromise.154 The French and Tuscan initiatives were inspired by the physiocrats, who advocated free markets and the dominance of agriculture in the state’s economy. One of the Habsburg monarchy’s most enlightened statesmen, Karl Zinzendorf, was likewise interested in physiocracy. Though such ideas influenced Joseph II too, he, unlike Zinzendorf, ignored the political implications: broadening the basis of representation and invigorating local political life.155 A cautious opening of the old corporate world had occurred under his mother, who had taken the rise of new wealth into account by encouraging the admission of rich Viennese wholesalers and other moneyed parvenus to the Lower Austrian Estates. Several of Joseph’s own measures pointed in the same direction. He abolished the so-called Einstandsrecht, the Estates’ right of first refusal in the sale of manorial property, and dispensed nonnoble buyers of land that previously belonged to monasteries from the usual tax penalty.156 He also allowed Protestants and other religious minorities to join the Estates and outfitted a wealthy Jew (Israel Hönig) with attributes of corporate nobility, which were both noteworthy precedents. Yet the emperor made no organized effort to widen representation by opening up the diets to the owners of demesne land—a move conceivable in the context of the time. To the contrary: his reforms shut out many of the lesser privileged and made the assemblies more heavily noble in composition and assuredly less representative of agricultural wealth as monastic holdings passed into the hands of people who were not part of the Estates. With the notable exception of the implementation of the Galician Estates already planned under his mother, the emperor diminished rather than built on the inheritance of streamlined corporate bodies that in important ways resembled those envisioned by the physiocrats. The new ruler Leopold II would benefit by Joseph’s last-minute concessions to Hungarian and other elites, and would successfully restore the regime’s political footing by revoking key reforms. Still, the impact of the suppression of monasteries on the Estates was not easily reversed and there was no real attempt to do so. It has been argued that Joseph’s thinning out of religious houses modernized the monarchy in a significant way as the revolutionary era approached. Yet these institutions, many of 154 For France, see P. M. Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge, 1995), 37–43; for Tuscany: Adam Wandruszka, Leopold II: Erzherzog von Österreich, Grossherzog von Toskana, König von Ungarn und Böhmen, Römischer Kaiser, 2 vols. (Vienna and Munich, 1963/1965), i, 368–90; for Russia: Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia 1600–1800 (New Haven, CT and London, 1983), 238–42. 155 Zinzendorf ’s interest in Necker’s assemblies in France is apparent in Europäische Aufklärung [Tagebücher Zinzendorfs], ed. Klingenstein et al., iii, 480 (Aug. 9, 1779) and 834 (Mar. 12, 1781). 156 For the right of first refusal, see Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen,” 256–7. The aulic decree of Nov. 29, 1786 providing for the dispensation is recorded in the Carinthian “Landtags=Memoriale zu den, auf den 29ten 8ber [October] 1787 allergnädigst ausgeschriebenen Kay: König: extraordinari Landtag,” KLA, StA, HS 243, f. 63.

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which had been sources of government credit, disappeared just as money to wage war was to be needed more than ever. And the great monasteries had been universalist, cosmopolitan bulwarks of a diverse and expansive monarchy. The emperor’s political legacy is more ambivalent still: a valuable chance at updating representative assemblies had been missed that would only recur under less promising circumstances following a generation of revolution, war, and political paranoia. The momentum was in favor of change, the Estates having repeatedly accepted modifications to their organization and composition over the previous generation with remarkably little open protest. Joseph had possessed advisors, notably Karl Zinzendorf, who, while rooted in the provincial Estates, had supported reform to ensure a strong and viable monarchy. Instead, the emperor chose to rely on administrative fiat, which, in combination with a now weakened representative tradition, would weigh heavily on a Habsburg future under a succession of more preoccupied, less energetic, and sometimes less able rulers.

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9 Renovation and Representation after 1790 On May 12, 1809 a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates led by acting Landmarschall Dietrichstein passed out of Vienna on its way to Schönbrunn palace, a few miles west of the city walls. It was not on its way to receive the annual tax request out of the emperor’s hands. Rather, its mission was to petition Napoleon, now headquartered in the imperial summer residence following the advance of his troops deep into Habsburg territory. The legendary conqueror received the group, which included the archbishop of Vienna, two abbots, an array of nobles, as well as the mayor and other civic notables, in the palace gardens. There the Austrians asked that life and private property be spared, and they transmitted the imperial authorities’ willingness to surrender the city. Napoleon treated them to a display of verbal fireworks on the war’s origins, in particular the emperor’s bad faith, before granting the request provided that the city was handed over in orderly fashion.1 This followed the next day. Less than twenty years after the death of Joseph II, who had bullied and downgraded them as far as possible, the Estates make a highly unusual appearance on the international stage on behalf of the Habsburg establishment and in the interests of the broader population. This scene seems unlikely in view of the persistent image of the Estates sidelined by eighteenth-century reform. To historians they have hardly seemed a worthwhile object of investigation, though we know less about them in the decades between 1790 and 1840 than at any other time in their (early) modern existence. The only substantial studies of the Lower Austrian Estates in this period are those by the originally Liberal historian Viktor Bibl (1870–1947). His pioneering research focused on two key episodes: 1) the “restoration” of the early 1790s against the background of the French Revolution; and 2) the fermentation preceding the revolution of 1848.2 In keeping with the constitutional-historical precepts of

1 A contemporary description of the encounter is found in the minutes of the Estates’ “reinforced executive committee,” May 12, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. Walter Simek, “Das Stift Klosterneuburg unter dem Propste Gaudenz Dunkler,” JbStK, new series, 2 (1962): 123, reported that the archbishop of Vienna headed the deputation. Cf. Eduard Wertheimer, “Zur Geschichte Wiens im Jahre 1809 (Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Krieges von 1809),” AÖG 74 (1889): 185; Leopold Auer, “Die Aufenthalte Napoleons in Niederösterreich in den Jahren 1805 und 1809: Eine Spurensuche,” in Willibald Rosner and Reinelde Motz-Linhart, eds., Niederösterreich und die Franzosenkriege (St. Pölten, 2010), 43–58. 2 Viktor Bibl, Die Restauration der niederösterr: Landesverfassung unter K. Leopold II. (Innsbruck, 1902); Viktor Bibl, Die niederösterreichischen Stände im Vormärz: Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Revolution des Jahres 1848 (Vienna, 1911). Also Viktor Bibl, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die französische Revolution,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 77–97. For Styria, see the dissertation

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his day, Bibl measured the Estates with the yardstick of modern parliamentarianism. Because the Estates did not conform to a law-making entity with sovereign claims, they appeared “insignificant” at best, “imbecile” at worst.3 In their actual activities he exhibited little interest. The catastrophic failure of parliamentary government after 1933 prompted historians of Germany after World War II to return to the question of the representative tradition generally and deliberative assemblies between the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation in particular. In closely contextualizing representative customs, the recent research has underscored the differences between the early modern institutions and their nineteenth-century counterparts without negating the existence of continuities.4 With revolutionary upheaval, the previously inherent relationship between the society of orders and political representation dissolved. Membership in the new representative entities largely ceased to depend on birth or status. Though a few scholars such as Volker Press have taken the Estates of the Habsburg hereditary lands into insightful account, they remain on the margins of this debate. In part this must be seen as a function of the interest in the linguistic-cultural nations (German, Czech, and so forth) that were earlier thought to have taken their final shape around 1800. These groups seemed to point to the immediate future in a way that the old political nations gathered in the Estates did not. More importantly, the revival of the Estates under Leopold II (r. 1790–2) did not seem to alter the basic trajectory of centralized administrative power rising inexorably at the expense of local authority. Historical interest in Habsburg government and society in this period remains firmly focused on the growth of bureaucracy and the implementation of legal reform exemplified by the famous General Civil Code (1811).5 A largely passive society would appear to swallow, in by Christine Mueller, The Styrian Estates 1740–1848: A Century of Transition (New York and London, 1987). 3 Bibl, Die niederösterreichischen Stände, 34, 36. 4 Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Ständische Repräsentation—Kontinuität oder Kontinuitätsfiktion?,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 28 (2006): 279–98; Wolfgang Neugebauer, “Landstände im Heiligen Römischen Reich an der Schwelle der Moderne: Zum Problem von Kontinuität und Diskontinuität um 1800,” Historisches Jahrbuch 123 (2003): 51–86; Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes? Konzepte landständischer Repräsentation in der Spätphase des Alten Reiches (Berlin, 1999); Wolfgang Neugebauer, Standschaft als Verfassungsproblem: Die historischen Grundlagen ständischer Partizipation in ostmitteleuropäischen Regionen (Goldbach bei Aschaffenburg, 1995); Volker Press, “The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 1–22; Eberhard Weis, “Kontinuität und Diskontinuität zwischen den Ständen des 18. Jahrhunderts und den frühkonstitutionellen Parlamenten aufgrund der Verfassungen von 1818/1819 in Bayern und Württemberg,” Parlaments, Estates and Representations 4 (1984): 51–65; Volker Press, “Landtage im Alten Reich und im Deutschen Bund: Voraussetzungen ständischer und konstitutioneller Entwicklungen 1750–1830,” Zeitschrift für Württembergische Landesgeschichte 39 (1980): 100–40; Rudolf Vierhaus, “Von der altständischen zur Repräsentativverfassung: Zum Problem institutioneller und personeller Kontinuität vom 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Karl Bosl and Karl Möckl, eds., Der moderne Parlamentarismus und seine Grundlagen in der ständischen Repräsentation (Berlin, 1977), 177–94. 5 Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Monarchy: A New History (Cambridge, MA and London, 2016), chap. 2; John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the

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radical or conservative doses, the medicine of change prescribed from above. The patient enjoyed the benefit without the privilege of consultation. The fact that warmaking consumed Habsburg energies for a generation after 1790 tends to be disregarded or seen as a distracting byway to a “state-building” path mapped out earlier. Also in this period the central authorities were no more able than their predecessors to engage in years of war without the active support of society. The revolutionary/Napoleonic struggle was the “first total war” not only in France but Austria as well.6 What was still a rudimentary bureaucracy coordinated the war effort—it did not replace the regime’s landed political base that furnished vital elements of its fiscal-military wherewithal.7 This chapter and the following one place the Lower Austrian Estates against the background of a generation of keen international competition and conflagration. The Habsburg monarchy was at war, preparing for war, or recovering from war for the entire period between 1787 and 1815. Joseph II’s last years were consumed by the Turkish campaigns in the Balkans, while Leopold II spent his short reign mastering foreign policy crises linked in part to the precarious domestic situation in the southern Netherlands, Hungary, and elsewhere left behind by his brother.8 Soon after his accession in 1792, Francis II found himself in armed conflict with France, a power that had been Austria’s ally since 1756. In the following twentythree years, the Habsburg monarchy would battle successive regimes in Paris longer than any other European land power. An acute sense of diplomatic isolation, exacerbated by Russian and British eagerness to push the monarchy to the forefront of the Napoleonic struggle, would be the persistent nightmare of Viennese policymakers. These circumstances accentuated the primacy of foreign policy in the monarchy’s councils of state, especially as the enemy was perceived as posing an existential threat. These challenges would require the widest possible mobilization of resources in the form of men, money, and material to maintain the largest armies in Habsburg history to that date. This in turn necessitated the backing of intermediary authority. It will be argued here that the Estates endured not primarily because of ideological predilections or an inherent aversion to change on the part of Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA, 2015), chap. 1; Waltraud Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen: Bürokratie und Beamte in Österreich, i: 1780 bis 1848 (2nd edn., Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 2013), 85–99; Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy from Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2002), 68–73; Helmut Rumpler, Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa: Bürgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 1997), 73, 77, and passim; P. G. M. Dickson, “Monarchy and Bureaucracy in Late Eighteenth-Century Austria,” EHR 110 (1995): 323–67; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 230–42; C. A. Macartney, The House of Austria: The Later Phase 1790–1918 (Edinburgh, 1978), 27–44. 6 David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston and New York, 2007), 252. 7 As late as the 1820s, the total number of officials (minus servants and unpaid trainees) amounted to only a fraction of 1 percent of the total population. Heindl, Gehorsame Rebellen, 151. See the population figures in Harm-Hinrich Brandt, Der österreichische Neoabsolutismus: Staatsfinanzen und Politik 1848–1860, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1978), ii, 1033–4. 8 See Paul Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), chap. 2; Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 401–43.

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the powerful—though these ways of thinking obtained in some cases—but because they were crucial to, and had a basic interest in, the survival of the Habsburg monarchy. And the monarchy, in order to endure, needed the elites of its composite parts. In contrast to the situation in the south German states revolutionized during the Napoleonic era, continuity unquestionably characterized the history of the Lower Austrian Estates. The diet was summoned without interruption from Joseph’s reign through Francis’s and beyond. Leopold II was an enlightened proponent of the representative tradition; he repudiated his brother Joseph’s domestic political legacy with respect to the Estates. Yet his “restoration” of them was not simply a restitution of the status quo ante. His policy reflected the shift in the understanding of intermediary authority in the later eighteenth century, one apparent among the Estates as well. And a generation of armed conflict profoundly affected the Estates no less than previous wars had done. Here too stability did not amount to stasis, a condition sometimes associated with this period of Austrian history. The business and organization of the Estates, their admissions and membership, the internal dynamics at the Landhaus, and the relationship between the Estates and the authorities were all adapting. This chapter divides into two sections. The first deals with what we shall call Leopold II’s “renovation” of the Estates; the resolution of grievances from the previous reign; assemblies and officeholders; and the question of spheres of influence and participation in government. How did the circumstances of the Estates after 1790 differ from those before 1780? The second section treats the Estates’ inherent condition not only in relation to the changing ideas of representation under the impact of the rise of contract theory in natural law and the Atlantic revolutions, but also in view of Austrian social and political conditions generally. To what extent were the Estates an anachronism by 1815? Chapter Ten then examines their contribution to the Habsburg war effort between 1792 and 1815. What was the scope and significance of this contribution? In attempting to answer these questions, events in Lower Austria will again be placed as far as possible in the broader context of the Habsburg central lands.

REN OV AT I ON A corporate revival was already underway in the last phase of Joseph II’s reign. As early as 1787, the Ottoman war had compelled Joseph to recall Hungarian county congregations, suspended two years earlier, to raise recruits. In December 1789, under pressure from those very congregations, his own councilors, and the growing unrest, the emperor agreed to summon the kingdom’s diet.9 Further west, the Estates’ administrative and political activity also intensified. In Lower Austria and elsewhere, the authorities had drawn in the time-honored way on the Estates’ good 9

Derek Beales, Joseph II, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1987/2009), ii, 626–30.

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offices. The widespread opposition to Joseph’s cadaster and labor services reform had galvanized surviving assemblies. On February 20, 1790 the emperor’s demise brought to the throne an advocate of an updated representative tradition, Pietro Leopoldo, grand duke of Tuscany, whose reputation will have heartened the Estates even before his arrival on March 12 in Vienna, some three weeks after his accession. Following his election to the imperial dignity a few months later, he would be known as Leopold II. In the last week of February, the Lower Austrian Estates convened to consider Joseph’s rebuff of their protest of the cadaster and labor services reform, which had come into effect on November 1, 1789. Transmitted by aulic decree, the reply had reached the Estates only days before Joseph’s death. The ensuing gathering, dismissed long ago by one scholar as an anti-reform “protest rally” that met without permission, had in fact been authorized by the senior domestic minister in the Bohemian-Austrian lands under Joseph II, the grand aulic chancellor Count Leopold Kolowrat. It took place on February 27, 1790 under the chairmanship of the governor and Landmarschall, Count Pergen, who had carefully laid out the case for summoning it to the aulic chancellor.10 The high attendance signaled a shift in the political winds. The second half of the 1780s had seen only badly attended tax diets that lasted one day each. Now dozens of members from all four Estates turned out. The leading speaker on that day was no backwoods noble or dispossessed prelate, but an eminent spokesman of enlightened government and scion of an ancient family, Count Karl Zinzendorf, who from 1784 to 1788 had headed the central commission in charge of revising the cadaster and labor services. Opponents of change vilified him for his pains.11 Joseph had dismissed him rather than submit the plan for consideration to an assembly of landowners, as Zinzendorf had urged in keeping with current ideas of responsible and consensual rule. It was this omission that Zinzendorf criticized at the meeting of February 27: “Given the importance of this business to the Estates, it would have been desirable if they had been consulted before the institution of the new cadaster.”12 The gathering also heard from apologists of Joseph, such as Grand Chamberlain Rosenberg and Prince Dietrichstein, as well as the more tradition-minded, including the imperial vicechancellor Colloredo, before charging Zinzendorf and Pergen’s deputy, Count August Auersperg, with drafting a remonstrance to be handed to the new ruler. Largely Zinzendorf ’s work, the document took shape over the following days out of informal consultations with other members of the Estates. It laid the basis for

10 For the dismissal, see Bibl, Die Restauration, 27. In a letter to State Chancellor Kaunitz, Mar. 11, 1790, Pergen mentioned Kolowrat’s permission for the meeting as well as its rationale. NÖLA, NStReg, 162. For a similar course of events in Prague, see Robert Joseph Kerner, Bohemia in the Eighteenth Century: A Study in Political, Economic, and Social History with special reference to the Reign of Leopold II, 1790–1792 (New York, 1932), 86–9. 11 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Mar. 10, 1790 (HHStA). See also P. G. M. Dickson, “Count Karl von Zinzendorf ’s ‘New Accountancy’: The Structure of Austrian Government Finance in Peace and War, 1781–1791,” IHR 29 (2007): 30. 12 Minutes of the diet, Feb. 27, 1790, NÖLA, StB, 279, p. 29.

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the monarchy-wide reputation that he quickly acquired as a defender of “la bonne cause.”13 Due in no small part to his influence, the Estates adopted a moderate and conciliatory line over the following weeks. On March 10, a few days before Leopold reached Vienna, the diet approved his draft.14 Nothing in these proceedings either violated the new ruler’s ideas about the role of representative institutions or overstepped the customary boundaries of the Estates’ activity. Against the backdrop of the upheaval in France, conventional political forms governed the dealings of the Lower Austrian Estates with the government throughout this period. One of Leopold’s initial concerns was to restore stability to the monarchy’s lands in central Europe. This involved redressing the balance with the intermediary powers. He had already let it be known that he intended to undergo the coronation in Hungary. On his progress northward from Florence, he conciliated delegations of the Estates of the territories through which he passed including Mantua, Tyrol, Carinthia, and Styria.15 On March 13, the day after the new ruler’s arrival in Vienna, Zinzendorf learned from his contacts at Court that Leopold wanted to re-establish what he called the “bonds” between lord and peasant that Joseph had sought to dissolve.16 He had little choice in the midst of war and domestic havoc further afield. On March 16 Leopold received a deputation of the Lower Austrian Estates that came bearing the Zinzendorf petition. Zinzendorf himself was not present. The group included Landmarschall Pergen; Provost Floridus Leeb of Klosterneuburg (the highest ranking, regularly elected prelate remaining in the Estates); Count Joseph Khevenhüller-Metsch; Ludwig von Hacqué (head of the consortium of knights); the Schotten abbot Benno Pointner; Count Anton Hoyos; and Johann Joseph von Stiebar. Leopold expressed his intention of refurbishing the authority of landlords. To this end, he pledged to revoke Joseph’s cadaster and labor services reform.17 More than that, Leopold agreed to restore the Estates’ “constitution.”18 As his biographer Adam Wandruszka took care to emphasize, this move reflected the ruler’s own deep-seated commitment to consensual government.19 It would be Leopold’s most fundamental break with his brother’s methods of rule. In the later eighteenth century the term “constitution” (Verfassung) was undergoing a semantic change from the older connotation of “status” or “organization,” which it has never

13 Quotation from the diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Apr. 12, 1790 (HHStA). Representatives of the Estates of Gorizia had so labelled him. His talks with members of the Lower Austrian Estates are recorded in the entries from late Feb. and early Mar. 1790. 14 Bibl, Die Restauration, 28–31, summarizes its contents. 15 Adam Wandruszka, Leopold II: Erzherzog von Österreich, Grossherzog von Toskana, König von Ungarn und Böhmen, Römischer Kaiser, 2 vols. (Vienna and Munich, 1963/1965), ii, 249–52. 16 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Mar. 13, 1790 (HHStA). Another source close to events reports Leopold’s expression of the same concerns on the day that he received representatives of the Lower Austrian Estates: diary of Countess Marie Sidonie Chotek, née Countess Clary-Aldringen, Mar. 16, 1790, SOA De˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers, carton 110, vol. Jan.–May 1790, p. 98. Chotek was the wife of the aulic chancellor who had resigned in 1789. 17 The revocation occurred with stipulations that differed from territory to territory. Bibl, Die Restauration, 76–7. 18 Bibl, Die Restauration, 31, 34. 19 Wandruszka, Leopold II., ii, 250, 257–8, 261.

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entirely lost, to the modern meaning of a fundamental law.20 In the spring of 1790 both understandings were current, given the American and French revolutions. A “constitutional” revival across the central lands offered two advantages quite apart from assuaging the Estates. First, it rolled back a hardly sustainable managerial despotism in a geographically expansive and diverse body politic. Well-coordinated composite structures represented the monarchy’s staying power, as Leopold’s reigning ancestors had recognized. Second, it accorded with the enlightened vision of propertied influence on public (fiscal) affairs, an idea that attracted Leopold and that Theresan government had respected within the given political framework. In a monarchy still largely rooted in the soil, the Estates stood for the larger group of landowners as no other body did. Though the Estates of the Bohemian-Austrian lands did not conform to the newer socio-economic categories of property and profession apparent in Leopold’s project for a Tuscan assembly (1779–82), his admiration for corporate institutions in Hungary and the southern Netherlands would not suggest that he found those based on status inherently unregenerate. Indeed, he thought the constitution of Hungary “superior to all the others in the monarchy.”21 We can infer that this was at least in part the case because of its almost complete domination by landowners in a largely agrarian society. If the organized participation of the propertied in public affairs was a precept of good governance, then the right of subjects to present grievances to the authorities was another. In Lower Austria the privilege of remonstration figured among the most basic of the Estates’ freedoms. Traditionally it had been exercised in two connections: reign changes and the annual diet. As the fiscal-military state extended its coercive reach further and further into everyday lives, the question of formal, structured, and thus politically relevant grievances acquired new significance. The problem was notorious in France, where in the 1770s and 1780s Necker and Calonne desperately tried to find ways to ensure the politically meaningful articulation of public opinion.22 Leopold’s constitutional plan for a Tuscan assembly provided for a generously updated form of the practice.23 Hence the new ruler of the Habsburg hereditary lands invited the Estates at that first meeting on March 16 to submit an official list of grievances for his consideration. The intermediary powers elsewhere received a similar call. Processing the resultant compilations over the following year would give the authorities unparalleled insight into provincial concerns. Leopold followed rhetoric with action by undergoing inauguration as Austrian archduke on April 6. It was the first such ritual in which he partook—coronations as king of Hungary and Bohemia as well as Roman emperor would follow—and the 20 Heinz Mohnhaupt and Dieter Grimm, “Verfassung,” in Otto Brunner et al., eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vi (Stuttgart, 1990), 831–99. 21 Pietro Leopoldo d’Asburgo Lorena, Relazione sullo stato della monarchia (1784), ed. Derek Beales and Renato Pasta (Rome, 2013), xiv, 55. 22 P. M. Jones, Reform and Revolution in France: The Politics of Transition, 1774–1791 (Cambridge, 1995), 37–42. 23 Wandruszka, Leopold II., i, 387–8.

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first investiture in the land below the Enns since Maria Theresa’s a half-century earlier.24 To be sure, the Habsburg-Lorraine dynastic succession was now beyond doubt, but the observance of the rite less than a month after his arrival in Vienna evinced Leopold’s resolve to restore political stability. A clear signal went out far beyond the archduchy’s borders: that he distanced himself from his brother’s approach to power and obliged himself to rule in accordance with established conventions. In contemporary political and legal understanding, the enactment of the ceremony gave formal expression to the socio-political order that had been in suspense under Joseph II. The highpoint involved an oath of allegiance by the Estates in exchange for a guarantee of their liberties and privileges.25 Leopold’s son and successor, Francis II, performed the same rites no less assiduously only two years later, again in circumstances of crisis. His installation as archduke on April 25, 1792 took place as conflict with revolutionary France loomed. Only days earlier (April 20, 1792), the regime in Paris had in fact declared war. The need to cover his domestic political base explains why Francis absolved the Lower Austrian rite as well as coronations in Buda (June 6), Frankfurt (July 14), and Prague (August 9), all in less than four months that year—a logistical achievement that betokened the respect for the law that would be a hallmark of his reign. Leopold’s and Francis’s staging of these ceremonies also manifested confidence in the monarchy’s (reformed) composite structures as a bulwark in dangerous times. Inaugural rites survived in the principal territory of each of the monarchy’s main geographical groups: Lower Austria (in the Austrian lands); Bohemia proper (in the Bohemian lands); and Hungary proper (in the Hungarian lands). They endured in other territories as well, most particularly Tyrol, and were “invented” in places where they were lacking but considered necessary, as in the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia which was created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars.26 In diverse ways, these spectacles symbolized the existing, legal order as a counterpoint to despotic rule, whether of the Josephian, French-revolutionary, or Napoleonic variety. Though sometimes still understood as anti-Estates in thrust, Francis’s assumption in 1804 of the Austrian imperial dignity in fact built firmly on the composite heritage in an integrative way.27 In the proclamation, he confirmed the 24 The Hungarian and imperial coronations were already being planned at this time. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Apr. 2, 1790 (HHStA). 25 An unpublished description of the inauguration commissioned by the Estates has survived: “Ausführliche Beschreibung der Erbhuldigung welche dem Allerdurchlauchtigsten Großmächtigsten Herrn Herrn Leopold dem Zweyten König in Ungarn, Böhmen, Gallizien, und Lodomerien Erzherzoge zu Oesterreich von den vier Ständen des Erzherzogthums Oesterreich unter der Ens den 6ten April 1790 geleistet ward. Mit historisch-diplomatischen Anmerkungen zu Beleuchtung dieser Feyerlichkeit als eines wesentlichen Bestandtheils des Oe[sterreichische]n Staatsrechts. Auf Anordnung der Löbl: drey oberen Herren Stände herausgegeben von Franz Freyherrn von Prandau, Ausschusse des löb. n.ö. Herrenstandes” (NÖLA, HS, 52). Another contemporary description is preserved in the diary of Countess Marie Sidonie Chotek-Clary, Apr. 6, 1790, SOA De˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers, carton 110, vol. Jan.–May 1790, p. 121–6. 26 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). 27 For the supposed “coup d’état” against the Estates, see Brigitte Mazohl, “Gewinner und Verlierer der europäischen Neuordnung: Der Wiener Kongress als Wegbereiter der modernen Machtpolitik,” in Agnes Husslein-Arco et al., eds., Europa in Wien: Der Wiener Kongress 1814/15 (Vienna, 2015), 54.

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“titles, constitutions, privileges, and conditions” not only of the Hungarian lands but also of those provinces that remained in association with the still-extant Holy Roman Empire.28 Even now, Francis adhered to the long-standing imperial jurisprudence, while conspicuously demonstrating faith in the monarchy’s time-tested organization at another moment of high international tension. The “Austrian Empire,” as it came to be known, was a composite monarchy. The Lower Austrian Estates, proud of their status as “the oldest nation” under the Habsburg scepter, sent a deputation on December 7, 1804 to congratulate Francis on becoming what they called “the second founder” of his dynasty.29 As the rituals of Leopold II’s Lower Austrian inauguration proceeded, beginning in the last week of March 1790, the grievances process began to unroll. Oddly, the associated political excitement failed to mobilize the Fourth Estate. The city of Vienna simply asked the “three upper Estates” to pass along its complaints together with the others; the eighteen lesser cities and market towns offered none.30 The prelates, lords, and knights each nominated four members to a “grievances’ deputation” in charge of a joint compilation. Its key figure was in many ways a surprising choice: the same Bohemian aulic chancellor, Count Johann Rudolph Chotek, who had famously quit the government in early 1789 rather than impose Joseph’s cadaster and labor services reform by fiat. His reluctant involvement in the deputation was a coup for the Estates, if also emblematic of changing times. Though his family had belonged to the Estates below the Enns since Maria Theresa’s day and had even held a hereditary territorial great office of state (Landeserbamt) there, his property and connections were primarily Bohemian. Possibly echoing his own misgivings, his wife noted, at the time that Chotek joined the deputation, that the “constitutions” of Lower Austria and Bohemia were very different.31 In time for the inauguration on April 6, the Estates submitted a preliminary set of grievances. The final, voluminous version was handed over on the 22nd.32 The historian Viktor Bibl attributed “the stamp of wise moderation and modesty” it bore to Chotek’s influence.33 But the restraint also reflected the fact that reform enjoyed support among leading nobles at the Estates such as Zinzendorf. By not appearing to aim at undoing change generally and thereby compromising the conciliatory new ruler, the Estates exhibited at all events more political shrewdness than they had shown in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. Similar tact was displayed in having Chotek place further, presumably more ticklish grievances before Leopold in a private interview rather than including them in the official

28 Patent of Aug. 1, 1804, reproduced in Edmund Bernatzik, ed., Die österreichischen Verfassungsgesetze mit Erläuterungen (2nd edn., Vienna, 1911), 30–2. 29 A “description of the audience” is found in NÖLA, StB, 282. 30 City of Vienna to “three upper Estates,” Mar. 29, 1790, NÖLA, NStR, 183. Bibl, Die Restauration, 38. 31 Diary of Countess Marie Sidonie Chotek-Clary, Mar. 18, 1790, SOA De ˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers, carton 110, vol. Jan.–May 1790, pp. 100–1. 32 “Darstellung der Landesbeschwerden. Seiner k.k. apost. Majestät Leopold II. von den nied. oe. drey oberen Ständen überreicht,” 1790, NÖLA, HS 56. 33 Bibl, Die Restauration, 36.

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catalogue.34 In their restraint, the Lower Austrians were not alone among the intermediary corps of the central lands in these months, as a well-informed witness testified.35 And well they might temper their demands given Leopold’s receptiveness to their concerns since his accession. Our principal authority for these events, Viktor Bibl, saw the post-1790 settlement as a pyrrhic victory for the Estates.36 In fact it involved classical kinds of compromise between central and intermediary power. Once the dust had settled, the Estates carried three major points. First, the authorities sacrificed one of the previous reign’s foremost agrarian achievements: the tax and labor services reform of 1789. Second, the archducal inauguration of April 1790 gave renewed legal force to a socio-political order in which the Estates occupied a privileged place. Third, Leopold agreed to the restitution of their influence on daily government through the revival of their organization—including the college of Deputies. Indeed, he augmented the number of paid offices at the Landhaus over that permitted by the reform of 1764. For their part, the Estates would have to accept—after long hesitation and further protest into the mid1790s—that they would not regain privileged criminal jurisdiction. Leopold made more allowances in the question of personnel for the Landrecht whose membership his brother, the emperor Joseph, had opened up to jurists outside of the Estates. In the next reign this would ricochet on the Estates in a surprising way. Otherwise, the government made few concessions in the classical areas of sovereign authority: justice and public order. Much of the legal and agrarian legislation stayed on the books; the premium on good manorial rule in the countryside remained in place. The Estates were still a corporation formally based on birth and status, but the thrust of the Leopoldine settlement pointed in the direction of a body that represented landowners and agrarian concerns.

ORGANIZATION AND OF FICEHO LDERS The Estates’ organization rebounded with comparative speed. The process, which included offices such as bookkeeper and registrar being hived off from the provincial government, was largely complete by the late spring of 1790. As the head of the Chamber of Accounts, Karl Zinzendorf was one of those who favored keeping the Estates’ bookkeeper firmly under official supervision. Like his brother, Ludwig, two decades earlier, he obviously viewed oversight as essential to the Estates’ and 34 This intriguing encounter, about which nothing more is known, is mentioned in the diary of his wife, Countess Marie Sidonie Chotek-Clary, Apr. 23, 1790, SOA De˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers, carton 110, vol. Jan.–May 1790, p. 151. Bibl, Die Restauration, does not refer to it. 35 A member of the central commission for examining the grievances of the various lands, Karl Zinzendorf noted the “reasonable” demands of the Moravians and Silesians, while condemning the “pretensions” of the Styrians. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Apr. 16, 1790 (HHStA). Criticism of the Styrians—and Leopold’s willingness to concede to their demands—is a motif of his recorded observations in these weeks (Apr. 10, Apr. 20, Apr. 21, May 4, May 6, 1790). 36 Bibl, Die Restauration, 36–86.

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monarchy’s financial health, not as a punitive form of control. He failed to carry the point.37 Landmarschall Pergen did not survive the Estates’ administrative revival. Years before, the later emperor Leopold had sketched a devastating picture of the figure known to history as Austria’s first police chief: “a zero of a man, without capacity or talent, confused head, devoted to wine and chatter.”38 Pergen’s loss of authority at the Landhaus nonetheless explains his departure better than the ruler’s dislike. Compromised by his close association with the previous regime, Pergen had been subjected to an enraged tongue-lashing by a fellow noble in an assembly on March 10, 1790. So insulting and distressing—and public—was the incident that he wrote to Kaunitz about it.39 Even before 1780, nobles including Zinzendorf thought that Pergen lacked the social distinction requisite to the position. He left office in the middle of May 1790. His departure ended the experiment by which the governorship and the office of Landmarschall had been combined in one person. An attitude of wait-and-see among potential candidates kept the post vacant until the following year.40 Until then, a ranking noble better remembered for his keen Freemasonry, the indolent Count Leopold Schallenberg, would preside at the Landhaus. A week after the archducal inauguration, several members of the Estates proposed proceeding autonomously with the election of a new college of Deputies, but the large majority, including Zinzendorf and Prince Starhemberg, rejected the idea as being “contrary to the respect due to the king,” as Leopold was called before he became emperor.41 The noble handwringing increased as the Landhaus waited for a sign.42 It came in May, when each of the “three upper Estates” staged ballots in the fashion usual in Maria Theresa’s later years. Central authority no longer vetted candidates ahead of time; there was no discernible discussion about civic representation, as occurred in Styria. And the clergy returned to office—in the guise of the provost of Klosterneuburg and the abbot of Göttweig, two of the grandest, still regularly elected prelates remaining in the land below the Enns. The lords chose as their Deputies two barons, Joseph Penkler (in office 1790–5) and Ferdinand Sala (in office 1790–9), while the knights tapped Johann Joseph von Stiebar (in office 1790–6 and 1799–1805) and Hugo Joseph von Waldstätten (in office 1790–9). Originally chosen in 1788, Stiebar was the only holdover from the Josephian

37 Herbert Hassinger, “Ständische Vertretungen in den althabsburgischen Ländern und Salzburg,” in Dietrich Gerhard, ed., Ständische Vertretungen in Europa im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1969), 284, reported that the Estates’ bookkeeping department remained united with the provincial government after 1790. The fact that it was once again separate and subordinate to the college of Deputies in Lower Austria is clear from the aulic decree, Aug. 16, 1790, NÖLA, StB, 598, p. 63. Zinzendorf ’s disappointment is evident in his diary, Dec. 13, 1790 (HHStA). 38 Pietro Leopoldo, Relazione, 29. 39 An account of the episode is found in Pergen’s letter to State Chancellor Kaunitz, Mar. 11, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg 1782–92, 162. See also ÖZV, II/4, 159–60. 40 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, May 30, 1790 (HHStA). 41 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Apr. 13, 1790 (HHStA). 42 Evidence of the Estates’ “desperation” is found in the diary of Countess Marie Sidonie Chotek-Clary, May 9, 1790, SOA De˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers, carton 110, vol. Jan.– May 1790, p. 168.

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system of noble Deputies seated on the provincial council. According to the historian Bibl, he had sent up the “restorative” flag in March 1790.43 Dividing up activities that had all been handled for years by one agency predictably inflamed rivalry between the now separate college of Deputies and provincial government. But by the mid-1790s this had been dampened by the distinctive traditions, and also the enlightened-physiocratic precept, that local landowners handle affairs relative to the assessment, apportionment, and collection of direct taxes. The centrality of the Estates’ credit facilities to the “state in general” was apparent in the normative “instructions” hammered out for the college of Deputies in negotiations between Court and Landhaus.44 The Estates’ financial intermediation was still intrinsically underlain by their control of tax flows. Military provisioning (Lieferungen) fell explicitly within the college’s bailiwick too, as did a range of matters in connection with the agrarian world and the management of the Estates’ administrative apparatus, including the receivership general. Presided over by the ranking lord, the first meeting of the new college of Deputies took place on June 9, 1790—months before the instructions were actually ready.45 The Deputies drew pay out of the Estates’ own coffers as had earlier been usual: 3,000 fl. annually for each of the six, which was 1,000 fl. less than in 1784, but 500 fl. more than the Deputies attached to the provincial government had received between 1784 and 1790. The college of Deputies resumed its place in the constellation of administrative forces between the Court and localities. The Bohemian-Austrian Aulic Chancellery in its changing guises under the rubric of the “United Offices” was the central institution responsible for the Estates, the implied “immediacy” to the ruler still a highly valued privilege of the Estates.46 The Aulic Chancellery issued directives as well as transmitted orders from other agencies of central government needing legal force, such as the Aulic War Council, to which the Estates were not directly liable. Most business was transacted not by decree through the Chancellery, but through direct “collegial” correspondence. Neither the Estates nor their Deputies were formally subject to the provincial government, the affiliation remaining “collegial.” The consensual nature of authority typical of the Habsburg tradition found further expression in the many ad hoc and standing commissions—such as the “military coordinating commission” (Militär Concertations Commission) and the “aulic commission on inheritance taxes” (Erbsteuer Hofkommission) revived after 1790—in

43

Bibl, Die Restauration, 35. A copy of these instructions, Feb. 9, 1791, is preserved in NÖLA, NStReg, 2. §18 notes that “der ständische Credit mit jenem des Staats überhaupt in Verbindung steht.” The aulic decree of May 27, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg, 2, had authorized the resumption of business by the college of Deputies according to the practice of 1764. Zinzendorf commented that the instructions being drafted “paroit ca et la vouloir limiter le pouvoir des Etats,” but is not specific. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Nov. 19, 1790 (HHStA). 45 The registers of business of the college in the spring/summer of 1790, can be found in NÖLA, NStReg, 2. The “instructions” provided for an alternating presidency of the college by the two lords’ Deputies. In practice, the Landmarschall would resume the chair that he had enjoyed since Maria Theresa’s day. 46 This is explicit in the representation of the “three upper Estates” to Leopold II, Aug. 25, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 4, folder Einrichtung. 44

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which the Estates’ representatives, councilors of the provincial government, and other concerned parties conferred about specific problems.47 With the notable exception of the commission on inheritance taxes, chaired by the Landmarschall, these bodies typically met under the provincial government’s auspices, a state of affairs indicative of its expanding role. Initial attempts by the restored college of Deputies to issue formal directives (Befehle) to the circle offices incited tension between central and intermediary authority of the sort later commentators have sometimes assumed. At the emperor’s express wish, the Aulic Chancellery forbade such action. One circle captain, from a prominent lineage of knights, seems to have relished reminding the Landhaus of its limits.48 The solution to the conflict involved a return to the highly effective compromise of 1764: the circle offices were to be responsible for “following” (“befolgen”) the college’s “instructions” (“Anordnungen”) in those areas of government (“in provincialibus et contributionalibus”) managed by the Estates and for providing information when requested.49 Otherwise the college of Deputies would have had no means of operating beyond the confines of Vienna. For its part, the college was not permitted to send instructions in the form of proper decrees. The only previous historical account of the regulation of the relationship between the Deputies and the circle offices after 1790 was made without knowledge of the precedent of 1764, which had placed the circle offices simultaneously at the disposal of the provincial government and the Estates.50 The same arrangement applied again after 1790. Leopold II confirmed the existence of the Estates’ committee (Ausschuß ) that Joseph II had permitted in 1784.51 It would soon undergo the institutionalization involving remunerated officeholders, staffed meetings, and regular business that Joseph had expressly forbidden. Indeed, the Estates used the opportunity to revive their old “executive committee,” abolished by Maria Theresa. Here too there was no return to the situation of 1764; the “executive committee” after 1790 was rooted in both the Josephian body and the older tradition. Under Joseph, the board had numbered six unpaid members; Leopold allowed twelve (as before 1764), six of whom were to receive yearly remuneration of 1,000 fl. out of the Estates’ coffers. At a stroke, the number of paid offices open to the “three upper Estates” doubled. Again no perceptible outcry came from the towns. Thanks to its membership and size, the committee combined seniority with flexibility. Its voluminously preserved minutes show that it assumed the task of processing and preparing material for the 47 The commission on inheritance taxes was re-established by the aulic decree of Sept. 20, 1790 under the Landmarschall’s presidency and consisted of three Estates’ Deputies, two Landrecht assessors, and two councilors of the provincial government, NÖLA, StB, 598, pp. 85–6. The participation of three representatives of the Estates (the provost of Klosterneuburg, Baron Ferdinand Sala, and Johann Joseph von Stiebar) in the military planning commission is mentioned in the annual report of the college of Deputies pro 1792, Feb. 1, 1793, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 362. 48 Baron Joseph Mannagetta (circle captain in the quarter below the Vienna Woods) to college of Deputies, Traiskirchen, Dec. 7, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg, 3. 49 Quotations from the aulic decree of Sept. 30, 1791 (§1), NÖLA, NStReg, 185. 50 For that account, see Bibl, Die Restauration, 46, 48–9. 51 Aulic decree to Landmarschall Pergen, May 8, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg, 2.

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larger assemblies—without replacing them.52 It issued considered opinions, reports, and draft resolutions at the request of the college of Deputies, the “three upper Estates,” and the diet. Less cumbersome than its pre-1764 predecessor, it would play a key role in the emergencies triggered by the French invasions in the 1800s. Again we can safely assume that Leopold’s provision for this body manifested his commitment to a lively and updated form of representative authority. Less significant was his renewal of the office of Landuntermarschall, unoccupied since the dismissal of the cantankerous Carl Leopold von Moser in 1764. This move did nothing to reverse the knights’ decline, the deeper lying causes of which went unaddressed by what was little more than a cosmetic change. In the prevailing political and ideological climate, the consortium’s lack of manorial landowners was more than ever a drawback. The grand title hardly disguised the fact that its holder did not have the earlier judicial functions and was still not allowed to preside at the Estates in the Landmarschall’s absence.53 He was simply the head of the less important and less prestigious noble Estate. A novelty connected with the appointments beginning in 1790 reflected the office’s comparative unimportance. The knights were allowed to recommend a candidate for office, a break with past practice notably not extended to the Landmarschall’s selection. They chose the aging Theresan favorite, Ludwig von Hacqué (in office 1790–1802), who received the nod from the ruler.54 Hacqué’s successor, Baron Karl Moser (in office 1802–23), a son of the deposed Landuntermarschall, would prove to be a defender of corporate tradition much like his father. The revival of the diet immediately after Joseph II’s death was followed by the renewal of forms that had governed the Estates’ assemblies into the early 1780s. In the fall of 1791, Leopold II resumed the ritual handover of the tax request to a delegation of the Estates led by the Landmarschall.55 Leopold’s successors continued a custom that involved regular personal contact with the Estates. The Contribution again reflected the figure fixed by the recess of 1748—2,029,023 fl. It would remain unchanged until the financial crisis of 1811. Leading members of the Estates, including Zinzendorf and even the younger Moser, worked to ensure that the Contribution, if not reformed, would at least be assessed “plus également.”56 It still constituted a mixture of levies on agrarian income and dwellings. As before 1784, the diet opened in the fall of each year and answered the ruler’s request with a “declaration” culled from the “votes” of the individual Estates whose corporate existences likewise recommenced, at least in the case of the “three The committee’s “instructions” from Feb. 22, 1791 in NÖLA, NStReg, 2. In a communication to acting Landmarschall Fürstenberg, Feb. 4, 1806 (NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363, folder Landmarschall und Landuntermarschall), Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte confirmed the usage fixed in 1791 whereby the senior lord of the executive committee rather than the Landuntermarschall would preside in the absence of a Landmarschall. This was another installment of the long-running conflict between lords and knights about precedence. 54 Hacqué was confirmed as Landuntermarschall in the aulic decree of July 8, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg, 3. 55 Grand Chamberlain Rosenberg to Landmarschall Khevenhüller, Oct. 18, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 163. 56 Quotation from diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Mar. 2, 1790 (HHStA). 52 53

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upper Estates.”57 Still overwhelmingly earmarked for military purposes, the Contribution and the associated tax-gathering power underwrote the Estates’ credit operations. In a “worst case” scenario (“auf den schlimmsten Fall”), the tax flow could be held back.58 Receipts were the Estates’ property until the actual transfer to government, as a dispute over liability after the French plunder of the Landhaus treasury in 1805 was to show.59 The 1790s marked a noteworthy, if passing, change in the social profile of the Estates’ senior officers. For the first time in generations, the college of Deputies contained no aristocrats. The loftier social echelons had invariably supplied the lords’ Deputies, including those chosen in the 1780s. The newly elected Penkler was of relatively modest origin, while both he and Ferdinand Sala (1744–1816) had themselves been admitted to the Estate of lords. Indeed, there was somewhat of a reversal in the social relations among the college’s lords and knights in these years. Johann Joseph von Stiebar belonged to an established, if minor, noble family of long corporate standing; his large landholdings, unusual for a knight, surpassed in scope those of Penkler, Sala, and Baron Franz Prandau, who would follow Penkler in office (1795–1807). In 1795 Stiebar’s wealth garnered him the rank of count, which he did not use at the Landhaus given its incompatibility with the paid office he held as a member of the lesser noble consortium.60 Even so, his new dignity put him in a titular way above the two barons sent by the lords, a one-off occurrence in the college’s history. Since Maria Theresa’s day, the lesser nobility most threatened by change or reform had provided the Estates’ most stubborn diehards, notably the elder Landuntermarschall Moser. We detect a similar, if more sophisticated, reaction to Joseph II. The new Deputies, Barons Penkler and Prandau, personified diverse strands of traditionalist thinking that were in fact novel for the time. Penkler rejected much of the Josephian legacy in the Church and was an early figure in the Catholic revival.61 He owed his uncommonly resounding election in to the college of Deputies to the support of Count Chotek, with whom he served on the “grievances deputation.”62 Likewise a 57 The records contain no “votes” from the eighteen cities and market towns. NÖLA, LandesRegistratur 1793–1904, F. 49, 1. The procedures employed during Joseph II’s reign are apparent in an incident from the first diet after his death. The syndic tried drawing up the declaration without control by the Estates, who raised objections. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Oct. 27, 1790 (HHStA). 58 Quotation from aulic decree, Dec. 11, 1795, NÖLA, StB, 603, pp. 106–8. 59 Documentation on this dispute is found in connection with the petition of the “three upper Estates” to Emperor Francis, Apr. 6, 1811, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 251, bundle Niederösterreich 1812. 60 An early recorded use of the title is found in the minutes of the Estate of knights, Oct. 18, 1802, NÖLA, RA, HS 20. Karl Friedrich von Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das Deutsche Reich und die Österreichischen Erblande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), v, 56. 61 An unpublished dissertation on Penkler that has little to say about his role at the Estates: Brigitta Spiller, “Joseph Freiherr von Penkler (1751–1830),” Phil. diss., University of Vienna, 1966. Also André Robert, L’Idée nationale autrichienne et les guerres de Napoléon: L’Apostolat du baron de Hormayr et le salon de Caroline Pichler (Paris, 1933), 153–7. 62 The friendship with Penkler is reported in the diary of Chotek’s wife, Mar. 18, 1790 (p. 101). Another entry suggests the doctrinal and social objections current in Chotek’s house to Josephian ecclesiastical appointments (Jan. 25, 1790, p. 21): “Si leur doctrine est pure je leur pardoner la

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product of middling officialdom, the scholarly Prandau stood for a different variety of early Romanticism: a form of conservatism inspired by Edmund Burke, whose notion of organic constitutions won currency at the Estates in the 1790s.63 He revivified an older historiographical tradition by writing an account of Leopold II’s inauguration; he quickly emerged as the most articulate spokesman for the Estates’ liberties and prerogatives.64 Yet he was hardly reactionary. His vision of the Estates was neither defensive nor socially exclusive. Like Zinzendorf, Grand Chamberlain Rosenberg, and others, he felt that the Estates should have a comparatively broad social base.65 His eloquent endorsements of admitting new money to the lords betrayed awareness both of the British elite’s supposed openness and of the importance of wealth to the Estates’ standing and influence, also in respect of their creditworthiness.66 His distinguished career, which included a period as acting Landmarschall in 1807/08, testified to the respect accorded at the Landhaus to the relative newcomer’s intellect and abilities. With the election of Count Julius Veterani (in office 1799–1811), the lords again began recruiting their deputies from the ranks of the aristocracy. Several appointees thereafter bore the names of lineages conspicuous at the Estates in earlier times (Pergen, Montecuccoli, and Hoyos). The deputy Count Carl Leonhard (IX) Harrach (in office 1819–31) was the descendant of Count Leonhard (VII) Carl Harrach (1594–1645), who had filled the same position some two centuries earlier. Among the knights, the weak incidence of landowners made Johann Joseph von Stiebar exceptional among Deputies chosen after 1790. Unlike the lords, the knights had to relax the rule that their officeholders possess manorial property.67 With a farm of only “rustical” quality to his name, Baron Joseph Mayenberg would serve in the college for more than four decades (1805–47). His successor in office, the later justice minister Anton von Schmerling (1847–8), carried the corporate past into the parliamentary era. Despite prohibitions on close familial relationships among officeholders dating back decades, the old tendency to oligarchy re-emerged. The election of Ignaz von Kees at a time when his uncle Johann Joseph von Stiebar was still in office violated the spirit, if not the letter, of an ordinance from 1770, prompting the authorities to revise it accordingly.68 But Kees, who had worked on his uncle’s domains and would become one of the Estates’ most capable wartime administrators, remained naissance; mais l’intention de ceux qui les on[t] placés, n’est certainement pas orthodoxe.” SOA De˘čín, Clary-Aldringen Family Papers. 63 Bibl, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 91, 93, noted the influence of both Montesquieu and Burke on thinking at the Estates. 64 The censorship forbade publication of Prandau’s account (title found in this chapter’s fn. 25) unless the critical assessment of Joseph II was left out. The Estates refused and the manuscript remained unpublished. On this episode, see Anton Mayer, “Die zur Erbhuldigung Kaiser Leopolds II. als Prachtausgabe geplante Erbhuldigungsbeschreibung der niederösterreichischen Stände,” MVLkN 9 (1918): 153–63. 65 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, May 29, 1790 (HHStA). 66 William D. Godsey, “Adelsautonomie, Konfession und Nation im österreichischen Absolutismus ca. 1620–1848,” ZHF 33 (2006): 217–18. 67 On Mar. 22, 1813 Landuntermarschall Moser noted that with one exception there had not been a landed Deputy from the knights in some twenty years. NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 68 Excerpt of a communication from the grand aulic chancellor to Landmarschall Zinzendorf, May 5, 1801, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363, folder Verordnete und Ausschüße.

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in office until he drowned in the Danube in 1817. Count Joseph Pergen (in office 1813–19) belonged to the college of Deputies concurrently with his brotherin-law, Count Maximilian Cavriani (in office 1811–23), the son of a Landmarschall. In contrast to his grandmother and uncle, the emperor Francis seldom bothered with the Estates’ electoral contests and then only in the event of a disputed outcome, an age-old scenario for intercession. No educational or professional requirements applied to candidates for the college of Deputies. The qualifications increasingly usual in government still not did obtain, while the cross-fertilization involving transfers between the college and the provincial council that were earlier so common was now rarer. The ideal credentials for noble officeholding remained manorial landownership and frequent attendance at assemblies, qualities thought to ensure the requisite knowledge and experience of local conditions. If the Estates wished to uphold their claims to local authority, they needed functionaries who were equal to the exigencies and increasing complexity of government. In a gathering of the knights shortly after the Peace of Preßburg (1805), the jurist Joseph von Aichen expressed his conviction that: the importance of the . . . position [on the Estates’ executive committee] demanded a man who had the confidence not only of the Estate [of knights] but also of the other Estates, and that especially at the present time one should look for such [a man] given that the Estates’ influence on the state’s public business [“öffentliche Staatsgeschäfte”] has increased, and that they [the Estates] were to be involved in various arrangements, credit operations, and other matters, which required the Estates to choose men of distinction and knowledge.69

Similar considerations had governed the provisions for tenures at the re-establishment of the college of Deputies in 1790. To prevent a complete turnover of experience when the terms of office of the first six-year appointees expired, each Estate was allowed to keep one Deputy on for three additional years.70 In 1796 Franz Prandau praised Ferdinand Sala’s “expertise” in local government (“kreisamtliche Geschäfte”). The increasingly urgent need for practiced administrators all but undermined what had been an almost sacred ban on re-election. After 1800 at least two consecutive six-year terms became usual in both noble consortia, a change that reflected the impact of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars on the Estates and their business. Prandau himself won reappointment in 1801 following a speech by Landmarschall Zinzendorf extolling his abilities and know-how.71 Only the prelates held to the one-term limit. Though the office was separated from the governorship in 1790, the Landmarschall remained more than ever the chief coordinator between the Estates and the central power. And his prestige and authority still presupposed high birth. With the

69

Minutes of Estate of knights, Feb. 25, 1806, NÖLA, RA, HS 20. The Estates’ resolution to this effect is referred to in the minutes of the Estate of lords, May 13, 1796, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 53. The provision was observed by the lords and prelates, but not by the knights. 71 Minutes of Estate of lords, Nov. 6, 1801, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 53. 70

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exception of Prandau (acting 1807–8), Landmarschall Pergen’s successors all hailed from the high nobility: Count Leopold Schallenberg (acting 1790–1); Count Franz Anton Khevenhüller (1791–7); Count Ludwig Cavriani (1798–9); Count Karl Zinzendorf (1800–2); Count Franz Saurau (1803–6); Count Joachim Egon Fürstenberg (acting 1805–7); Count Johann Trauttmansdorff (1808–9); and Count Joseph Dietrichstein (acting 1809, then 1809–25). All but Prandau belonged by birth to seigniorial lineages of the Lower Austrian Estates. Dietrichstein owned fine vineyards in the Wachau valley, among other holdings. All were products of state service, the youngest, Dietrichstein, having launched his career under Joseph II.72 Khevenhüller had been the emperor’s Inner Austrian governor; Cavriani was his Moravian-Silesian, then Bohemian governor; Zinzendorf was of ministerial rank; Dietrichstein had been Moravian-Silesian, then Lower Austrian governor and aulic vice-chancellor. Dietrichstein’s case illustrates how lines of aristocratic patronage radiating out from the center continued to be vital to the structures of power, even as theoretical knowledge and practice were increasingly important at the Estates as well. His long-time sponsor from their days in Moravia together was Count Aloysius Ugarte, the grand aulic chancellor who assigned him to the Lower Austrian Landhaus.73 The longest-serving Landmarschall of this period, Count Dietrichstein, regarded his principal task quite traditionally as reconciling the exigencies of the dynastic power that he served with the liberties and prerogatives of the Estates to which he belonged (see Figure 9.1).74 This involved mobilizing the Estates for participation in the areas of government managed by them. As chairmen of the college of Deputies, he and the other incumbents had an inherent interest in qualified administrators. Recruitment involved forms of friendship and clientage that Dietrichstein’s longdead predecessors would have appreciated. Landmarschall Zinzendorf ’s support for Prandau’s unprecedented second term has been mentioned. Dietrichstein too used his position to sway choice in the lords. Baron Anton Bartenstein was noticeably the only noble Deputy not re-elected on his watch; he is also the only one known to have clashed with the Landmarschall.75 Later, Dietrichstein single-handedly enlisted a fellow aristocrat, Count Ferdinand Colloredo-Mannsfeld, a progressive landowner and former diplomat, to fill in for a Deputy taken ill. Colloredo’s “exact knowledge” of Lower Austria and frequent attendance at assemblies gave him insight into the Estates’ “constitution” and “conduct of business.”76 Maria Theresa or even Joseph II could hardly have asked for more. Colloredo would become the longest-serving

72 For Dietrichstein’s career, see [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 362–3. 73 Dietrichstein’s speech at his installation as Lower Austrian Landmarschall is revealing of his debt to Ugarte. Minutes of the assembly of the Estates, Jan. 9, 1810, NÖLA, StB, 283, p. 386. 74 Expressed in his letter to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, Jan. 31, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung. 75 A sharp written exchange between the two from Mar. 1810 is found in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 365, folder Landmarschall. 76 Aide-mémoire by Landmarschall Dietrichstein, Nov. 13, 1822, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 370, bundle 1822–3.

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Figure 9.1. Count Joseph Dietrichstein: Governor and Landeshauptmann of Moravia and Silesia 1802–4; Lower Austrian governor 1804–5; Aulic Vice-Chancellor 1805–9; Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1809–25; Governor of the Austrian National Bank 1817–25. Courtesy of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.

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lords’ Deputy (in office 1823–47), the Estates’ leading fiscal expert, and arguably their most influential member in the last decades before the revolution of 1848. Dietrichstein and his predecessor Zinzendorf both resorted to well-established interventionist practices to secure suitable nominees in the Estate of knights. Dietrichstein’s link to Ignaz von Kees recalled older lines of patronage operating across curial boundaries. In his ultimately successful bid for an unparalleled third six-year term, Kees enjoyed Dietrichstein’s heavy-handed support.77 In a letter to Landuntermarschall Moser, the Landmarschall pointed out that he knew of no one “at the present moment” who had Kees’s expertise in the highly specialized fields of corporate credit and finance.78 The prickly Moser bristled all the more, given that his own son was set to oppose Kees. The rivalry seems to have stretched back more than a decade.79 With the possibility that Moser might prevent Kees’s re-election, Dietrichstein floated the idea of “permanent” (stabile) appointments to the college. That the grand aulic chancellor rejected it—as not in conformity with the panel’s “nature”—cautions against notions of the state simply absorbing the Estates’ structures.80 Here the leading domestic minister in the Bohemian-Austrian lands rejected a form of “bureaucratization” suggested by his own protégé at the head of the Estates. In any event, the Landmarschall was able to carry the day against a group of knights led by the Mosers, who had appealed Kees’s victory to the Aulic Chancellery.81 Dietrichstein was also not above setting aside the pecking order in his own consortium when he felt it served higher purposes. With official approval, he arranged for Count Fürstenberg rather than the executive committee’s senior noble, Baron Theodor Risenfels, to preside at assemblies in his absence. Risenfels, he objected, was intellectually unfit for the job, whatever his formal claim to it.82 These moves all fell during the Napoleonic era’s unrelenting organizational pressure on what the Landmarschall labelled a “leading [provincial] agency” (“leitende Behörde”). The government’s “frequent needs”—above all the “ceaseless” tax levies and credit operations—reduced Dietrichstein’s room for maneuver and the pool of nobles qualified for office.83 Similarly, the old practice by which prelates 77 Kees’s appeal (Apr. 20, 1812) to Dietrichstein for help in re-election can be found in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 78 Dietrichstein to Moser, Dec. 7, 1812, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 79 Kees’s first appointment to the post of deputy (June 23, 1800), which the authorities voided on grounds of voting irregularities, occurred after Karl Moser declined election to that same office (May 28, 1800). Kees’s opponent on that occasion was a Moser relation. Minutes of Estate of knights, May 28, June 23, Sept. 27, and Oct. 6, 1800, NÖLA, RA, HS 19. Kees finally succeeded in winning election on Nov. 29, 1800 (NÖLA, Verordnetenwappenbuch). He took office in Mar. 1801. 80 Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte to Landmarschall Dietrichstein, Jan. 5, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung. 81 Minutes of Estate of knights (session at which the election took place), Mar. 6, 1813, NÖLA, RA, HS 20. Dietrichstein’s lengthy response to the knights’ complaint is found in his letter of June 28, 1813 to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte. It and the aulic decree confirming Kees’s election on July 15, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 82 Dietrichstein to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, Jan. 31, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung. 83 Quotations from the letter by Dietrichstein to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, Jan. 31, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung.

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had managed their monasteries, which in some cases were large institutions away from the capital, while simultaneously serving at the Landhaus, came under growing strain. With personnel in short supply and the college’s business divided up among its six members, he repeatedly admonished the abbots of Heiligenkreuz and Wiener Neustadt for absenting themselves from business. Sessions of the college attended only by the nobility, he reminded them, violated the “constitution.”84 The imperatives of the dynastic state drove personnel developments at the Estates, even as that same state remained reliant on natives of ability and experience.

T HE C HANGING UN DER STAND I NG OF TH E ESTAT ES AND T HE PROBLEM O F REPRESENTAT ION As the grievances process was winding down, Leopold II decreed on September 7, 1791 that the “three upper Estates” would in future be “heard” concerning “important changes” to the law. Specifically, they would be consulted on the “application of principles.”85 Substantially identical pronouncements were made at that time in the other Bohemian-Austrian territories.86 The classic version of this important episode, influenced by conceptions of the Estates and their relationship to government that must now be regarded as anachronistic, overdrew the novelty of this disposition and provided a highly colored account of it in the Lower Austrian context. Let us briefly consider it.87 In conformity with the inflated influence earlier attributed to him, Joseph von Sonnenfels is made the hero of Leopold’s initiative.88 Led by State Chancellor Kaunitz, the Council of State assumes the role of the choir singing the praises of Sonnenfels’s statesmanlike idea of consulting the Estates on important legislative initiatives. The Estates are depicted, alternately, as the ungrateful recipients of a freely offered act of the ruler’s grace that (pace State Councilor Eger) gave them a right “never” previously “recognized.” Lacking political courage, the Estates themselves had failed to demand it. Once the concession was made, they pushed for its general application, only for their presumption to be sharply and deservedly rebuffed. A fresh consultation of the records does not corroborate this story. The decree of September 7 reflected first and foremost eighteen months of dealing with corporate grievances and the ensuing awareness that despotic government produced 84 Dietrichstein to abbots of Wiener Neustadt and Heiligenkreuz, Dec. 26, 1811, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 364, folder Verordnete; and Apr. 6, 1812, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 85 Aulic decree to (Lower Austrian) “three upper Estates,” Prague, Sept. 7, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 185. 86 The decree to the Bohemian Estates was also dated Sept 7th. It is quoted at length in Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der österreichischen Staatsverwaltung 1740–1848, ed. Alfons Huber, 2 vols. (Innsbruck, 1896/1898), i, 425–6. For Moravia, see Christian Ritter d’Elvert, Die Desiderien der Mährischen Stände vom Jahre 1790 und ihre Folgen (Brünn, 1864), 155, 216. 87 As related in Bibl, Die Restauration, 49–51. 88 For an insightful re-evaluation of Sonnenfels, see Simon Karstens, Lehrer—Schriftsteller— Staatsreformer: Die Karriere des Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733–1817) (Vienna, Cologne, and Weimar, 2011).

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legislation that lacked legitimacy and created discontent. Kaunitz said as much.89 In the wake of the revival of representative life in the Bohemian-Austrian lands, the diet in Prague conducted the liveliest and most far-reaching debate about the Estates’ place in law-making.90 Its highpoint coincided in the winter of 1791 with Leopold’s decision to continue the general revision of the public law code, a project from the previous reign that raised the question of how to allow for territorial particularity.91 Excluding the “representatives” of the hereditary lands from the process would have contradicted the very line pursued since Leopold had assumed power: that their views had somehow to be taken into consideration in the formation of new laws for a diverse monarchy. This had been the essence of the grievances process. Agreement within the councils of government on how this was to be done took shape in the late winter of 1791 and was finalized by the late summer. The ruler retained the sole right to legislate—he was to remain “absolute” in the original sense of the term—even as he agreed to confer with the Estates on significant matters that touched them and their interests. While we might recall that a national assembly with law-making power had established itself in France at this very time, we should also keep in mind that this was still a novel experiment in an explosive political and social laboratory. Events in Bohemia would seem to have conditioned the September decree most strongly. Still, a Lower Austria supplication from the “three upper Estates” lay on the authorities’ desk as it was issued. More than a month earlier, on August 3, they had used an objection to a specific law (on jurisdiction over the clergy) to expound a broader legal-historical case for their right to be consulted “before the creation of general provincial ordinances.” Prandau assuredly framed the argument.92 “Even Maria Theresa of glorious memory,” the government was told, had observed the custom “going back centuries” of asking the Estates for their “opinion” (“Gutachten”) on legal enactments. The recess of 1748, various aulic decrees from 1764 and 1765, as well as actual Theresan practice—specifically in respect of the Robot patent of 1772— were all cited in support of this view. An assurance by Leopold himself in reply to their grievances the previous winter also featured on the list.93 The Estates had not conjured up a novel prerogative out of a fairy-tale past, even if Maria Theresa’s reign gave off a rosier glow in hindsight than it had at the time. The right to be heard was an old one that the Habsburgs had ignored at their peril when legislation needed effecting outside the monarchy’s few urban areas. The fate of the tax and labor services reform of 1789 was the latest illustration of that hard truth. Rather than conceding a new right, Leopold II attempted to breathe fresh life into a practice that had fallen into desuetude in the 1780s. The decree of 89

Bibl, Die Restauration, 50. Kerner, Bohemia, 129–34; Hugo Toman, Das böhmische Staatsrecht und die Entwicklung der österreichischen Reichsidee vom Jahre 1527 bis 1848 (Prague, 1872), 192–4. 91 Stephan Wagner, Der politische Kodex: Die Kodifikationsarbeiten auf dem Gebiet des öffentlichen Rechts in Österreich 1780–1818 (Berlin, 2004), 58–9. 92 “Three upper Estates” to Leopold II, Aug. 3, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 185. 93 In the decree of Mar. 15, 1791 (the relevant passage in this long decree is “bei der dritten Abtheilung [der Beschwerden] ad 11um”), NÖLA, NStReg, 185. 90

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September 7, 1791 explicitly postulated that provincial diversity was reconcilable with the “wellbeing of the entire monarchy,” a view directly contradictory to the spirit of Josephian government, but a long-standing precept of efficacious rule in large and heterogeneous states. That the Estates asked that they be consulted on all laws rather than on just the “important” ones rested on the plausible assumption that there were differing perspectives on what was “important” and on the memory of their own recent experience with administrative fiat.94 In response, the government reaffirmed the decision of September 7 shortly before Leopold’s death in the late winter of 1792.95 Giving force to that guarantee was left to his successor. Here too later parliamentary practice provides a deceptive guide to the early modern consensual modus operandi. In a construction typical of eighteenth-century Habsburg government, a central “aulic commission on legislation” (Gesetzgebungshofkommission or Hofkommission in Gesetzessachen) oversaw the work on the planned public law code. Panels in the various lands complemented this body.96 It was there that the Estates came into play. Called into being in 1792, the Lower Austrian commission included provincial councilors, members of the Estates, and representatives of the magistracy.97 The two associates allowed to the Estates—Barons Penkler and Prandau are on record in that capacity in the 1790s—were charged with ensuring corporate input into the legislative process. They communicated draft laws to the Landhaus and reported back with objections, additions, and corrections. At the Estates’ end, the executive committee, to which Prandau had been elected in 1790, deliberated on the material.98 Over time, the sources show variations on this model. In 1797 the Estates were directed to supply a deputy and an alternate for a panel being established to examine a completed draft of the new civil code.99 As the scholar Dieter Grimm pointed out, the famous General Civil Code of 1811 did not introduce a society of equal citizens even in the legal sense: it left the corporate social order intact “not only de facto but especially de jure.”100 Further research would be needed to clarify the Estates’ role in this outcome. Finally, Landuntermarschall Moser and the knights’ Deputy, Ignaz von Kees, participated in official discussions on a revision of feudal law (Lehensrecht).101 The Estates’ quiescence “Three upper Estates” to Leopold II (draft by Prandau), Oct. 29, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 186. Aulic decree, Feb. 3, 1792, NÖLA, NStReg, 186. 96 For the aulic commission, see Wagner, Der politische Kodex, 55. 97 Aulic decree, June 22, 1792, NÖLA, StB, 600, pp. 72–3. See also Beidtel, Geschichte, i, 426. 98 Reports filed by Prandau relative to his work in the commission have survived in NÖLA, NStReg, 186. Penkler’s attendance of the aulic commission on legislation is noted in the annual report of the college of Deputies pro 1792, Feb. 1, 1793 NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 362. 99 Aulic decree, Feb. 2, 1797, NÖLA, StB, 605, no. 24. 100 Dieter Grimm, “Das Verhältnis von politischer und privater Freiheit bei Zeiller,” in Walter Selb and Herbert Hofmeister, eds., Forschungsband Franz von Zeiller (1751–1828): Beiträge zur Gesetzgebungs- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte (Vienna, Cologne, and Graz, 1980), 100. 101 The Estates had been invited to nominate their representatives by the aulic decree of June 12, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 614, no. 54. Moser and Kees are mentioned in that capacity in the report of the college of Deputies for the years 1807–9, Nov. 29, 1810, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 365. Kees provided a brief summary of his activities in connection with the commission in his “Ausweis über einige wichtigere Bearbeitungen, welche nur mittelbar die n.öst. Herren Stände vorzüglich aber das höchste Aerarium und die öffentliche Staatsverwaltung betreffen,” [1812], NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 94 95

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in these years suggests that their right to be consulted on legislation was indeed being honored.102 The Estates of Lower Austria advanced no title to the legislative power—and sovereignty—that was implicitly denied them by the September decree. Only in Prague had some members of the Estates called for law-making authority, though the (slight) majority favored the traditional right of consultation that would be given formal expression in the decree. A third faction, led by the same Count Chotek who had overseen the compilation of the Lower Austrian grievances in 1790, foresaw a suspensive veto by the Estates.103 Hence the September decree would appear to have reflected the broadest range of elite opinion in the Bohemian-Austrian lands about the nature of the Estates: they were privileged corps within the monarchy’s wider, compositely constituted social order, rather than institutions comparable to the new national assembly in Paris. They exercised “reserved” (rather than sovereign) rights that gave voice to both territorial variety and the landowning interest.104 Only the ruler, the holder of undivided (“absolute”) sovereignty, “represented” the “whole”—also in the individual lands. The older corporation theory by which the Estates had “embodied” their territory, and hence “represented” it, was now largely obsolete.105 Even Count Chotek shared the view that the Estates stood for themselves rather than the “Bohemian nation.”106 His suspensive veto would have been a privileged corporation’s prerogative rather like the one exercised by the parlements of old-regime France. Chotek’s ideas are particularly noteworthy in view of his place in government and influence among the intermediary powers. The Lower Austrian Estates too did not question the assumption behind the September decree that they were neither identical with the “nation” nor represented it: “His Majesty awaits with pleasure the proposals by which the Estates will reconcile the rights that they have been conceded with the rights of the other classes of the nation.”107 The language here indicates how a recent intellectual stream converged with the traditional consensual concerns in the settlement of 1790/91. The school of later eighteenth-century political economy known as physiocracy, which had gained growing intellectual influence after the Seven Years War, postulated that a state’s wealth derived primarily from agriculture. As a correlate, some thinkers endorsed assemblies of landowners—as the producers of that wealth—to supply information, counsel, and administrative support to the government.108 In an agrarian monarchy, This was noted by Press, “Landtage,” 120–1. Kerner, Bohemia, 131–2. Chotek’s idea was known in Vienna by the late summer as is indicated by the mention in Zinzendorf ’s diary, Aug. 2, 1790. 104 Press, “Landtage,” 109. 105 On this point, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Ständische Repräsentation,” 281–9. As far back as 1765, Ludwig Zinzendorf had referred to the Estates as “a corps intermediaire endowed with privileges.” Quotation in Otto Brunner, Land und Herrschaft: Grundfragen der territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Österreichs im Mittelalter (5th edn., Darmstadt, 1963), 415. 106 Mueller, The Styrian Estates, 139–40; Kerner, Bohemia, 133–4. 107 Aulic decree, Prague, Sept. 7, 1791, NÖLA, NStReg, 185. 108 See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolution and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1976); Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes?, 144–51; Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2012), 149–81. 102 103

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the reformers of the 1760s and 1770s had reserved to the Estates in the Bohemian-Austrian lands just such rights, ones that moreover strongly resembled those previously exercised. In part, the physiocrats aimed to secure the legal security of property against administrative caprice as a result of the mounting fiscal burden. In the central European context this too was hardly new: the jurisprudence of the high tribunals of the Holy Roman Empire had long protected the rights of the Estates regarding taxation for very similar reasons. As grand duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo had shown himself to be a good physiocrat; as ruler in Vienna, Leopold II would remain one.109 The emperor enjoyed a key advantage over his counterpart in France, the original home of physiocracy. Whereas Louis XVI had to invent representative bodies based on the new principles, given that the Estates had disappeared in large parts of his kingdom, the emperor was able to draw on a tradition that had survived weakened but unbroken across his hereditary lands. Leopold had merely to reinvigorate the still-extant Estates. The old-style diets in the BohemianAustrian territories and the assemblies envisaged by some physiocrats were mainly distinguishable by mode of representation, the former being based on birth and status, the latter on property (socio-economic category). Scholars have tried to divine what Leopold’s ultimate goal regarding the problem of representation might have been. Given his premature death, no conclusive argument can be made that he planned to reconstitute the diets along physiocratic lines. Still, his main legacy with respect to their composition would be in reinforcing their landed element—a central tenet of contemporary political economy that would remain relevant to the Habsburg monarchy’s nineteenth-century political life. As early as May 1790, Leopold was discussing with Zinzendorf the problem of “representation” at the Lower Austrian Estates.110 At the same time, echoes of the older understanding of the Estates continued to sound. In laying the tax demand before the annual diets, Leopold II and his successors approached them as the lawfully constituted representatives of their territories. In approving the demand, the diets legally bound the inhabitants of their respective lands far beyond the confines of the Estates. These inhabitants encompassed the entire population subject to the provincial land records. At the same time, the notion of the Estates as privileged corps embodying important, vested interests continued to evolve in the revolutionary era. Romantic political philosophy substantiated this change as the Imperial Recess (1803) and the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire (1806) overturned the older representative tradition in much of central Europe outside the Habsburg lands. Two leading theoreticians, the Catholic converts Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and Adam Müller (1779–1829), were to take up residence in Austria during the Napoleonic period. In an ironic twist on physiocracy, both men foresaw corporately organized life rather than the

109 110

Stollberg-Rilinger, Vormünder des Volkes?, 183–4. Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, May 30, 1790 (HHStA).

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enlightened and rational individual as the basis of society. Representative bodies should manifest the interests of “organic” social groups, the monarch the body politic as a whole.111 The increasing application of modern constitutionalist language to the Estates betrayed the inspiration of the contemporary world in another way. In 1795 the knights directed an officeholder to submit his “resignation [of his post in the college of Deputies] in accordance with the constitution.”112 In a dispute with the government over their admissions autonomy, the Estates expressed the official hope “that His Majesty will not be displeased when, in cases that concern the preservation of the constitution confirmed by the all-highest [ruler], the Estates take the liberty of complying with it, also by petitioning even after a decision from on high has been taken.”113 In the same episode, the knights’ concern with “the territorial constitution that has grown into a pragmatic law” betrayed Burkian organic rather than French revolutionary influence.114 After the turn of the century, the prelates could variously describe their vote on the yearly tax demand as having been “pursuant to the Estates’ constitution.”115 While the Estates’ use of constitutional rhetoric was sometimes defensive in nature, the government itself cited the “constitution” in its rulings, or was perceived as upholding its provisions. Baron Penkler worried that the recurrent re-election of the same person to the college of Deputies would provoke official intervention on account of its being “against the constitution.”116 The authorities restricted the wearing of new corporate uniforms to those who were “constitutionally” entitled to a “seat and vote” in the diet.117 The first “codification” of the Estates’ “constitution” dates to this period. Around the turn of the century, the syndic at the Landhaus, the knight Leopold von Fillenbaum (in office 1790–1806), drafted “An Attempt at Practical Observations on the Current Constitution and Affairs of the Lower Austrian Estates after their Re-instatement in the Year 1790.”118 A decade or so later, the knight Franz von Heintl produced a document called “The Estates’ Constitution of the Archduchy below the Enns.” The Estates themselves did not initiate or authorize these works; neither made it into print. Fillenbaum’s was the more old-fashioned, as his equation of “constitution” and “organization” suggests, while an early form of 111 Hartwig Brandt, Landständische Repräsentation im deutschen Vormärz: Politisches Denken im Einflußfeld des monarchischen Prinzips (Neuwied and Berlin, 1968), 64–73. 112 Minutes of Estate of knights, Nov. 25, 1795, NÖLA, RA, HS 19, p. 47. 113 A transcript of the petition is preserved in the minutes of the Estate of knights, Feb. 17, 1797, NÖLA, RA, HS 19, p. 80. 114 Minutes of Estate of knights, Feb. 17, 1797, NÖLA, RA, HS 19, p. 83. 115 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Oct. 18, 1802 and Oct. 17, 1803, NÖLA, PA, HS 5. 116 Minutes of Estate of lords, Nov. 5, 1807, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 54. In 1813, the grand aulic chancellor ruled that the “Estates’ constitution” did not forbid re-election. The relevant directive was made known in a communication from the college of Deputies, Aug. 12, 1813, and quoted in the minutes of the Estate of lords, Nov. 16, 1813, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 55. 117 The aulic decree of Dec. 23, 1807 is quoted in the minutes of Estate of lords, May 19, 1808, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 54. 118 It is preserved in NÖLA, HS 612. A later commentary on the text was provided by Fillenbaum’s successor as syndic, Karl von Schreyber, in a letter to Landmarschall Dietrichstein, Dec. 20, 1817, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 368, folder Ständische Einrichtung.

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liberalism appears to have inspired Heintl. When consulted about Heintl’s text, the abbot of Melk objected to the author’s understanding of the Estates: “Herr von Heintl makes a false assumption when he sees the Estates as representatives of the territory [emphasis original], i.e., also of all subjects, by whom they are neither elected nor accredited. This idea probably results from the transfer of new constitutional thinking onto the old constitution of Austria, with which it has little in common.”119 That Fillenbaum’s work was already dated when offered for publication and Heintl’s was thought to be flawed gave Landmarschall Dietrichstein a pretext to have both suppressed. Ironically, Fillenbaum’s had already passed the censors. Dietrichstein’s move betrayed deeper official ambivalence about such publications at a time when the Estates’ gatherings were not publicly accessible. Even as Heintl’s work suggested the currency of new ideas of representation at the Landhaus, the composition and inner cohesion of the Estates reflected both more recent changes and factors of longer standing typical of privileged corporations. First, the monastic abolitions of Joseph II had shifted the social balance toward the nobility by eliminating nearly half the prelates. Second, though the urban areas were beginning to awaken from their long economic slumber, they were still a political cipher. Vienna was the Habsburg monarchy’s largest city, and yet Leopold II did almost nothing to improve civic representation at the Estates in Lower Austria or elsewhere.120 Vienna’s population had grown substantially over the previous generations, while places such as St. Pölten and Wiener Neustadt remained outside the Estates altogether. The standing committees after 1790 seated no civic dignitaries; only the “three upper Estates” possessed the right of being consulted as specified by the decree of September 7, 1791, a circumstance reflective of the Fourth Estate’s still relatively small tax intake; and the syndic at the Landhaus continued to take ceremonial precedence over the Fourth Estate. If anything, the divide between the townsmen and the other Estates was wider by 1800 than it had ever been. Finally, age-old divisions within the nobility—between lords and knights as well as between poorer and wealthier nobles—persisted or deepened. Even Joseph II had not abrogated the Estates’ admissions autonomy. Leopold II was accordingly reliant on them if representation were to acquire more contemporary form. During his reign novel additions specifically to the Estates of the land below the Enns were in themselves few. He decreed the incorporation of the universities into the respective Estates of the central lands; their rectors were to embody that presence in assemblies.121 In Lower Austria the proposed change 119 Abbot of Melk to Landmarschall Dietrichstein, Melk, Mar. 17, 1818, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 369, folder Ständische Einrichtung. 120 Bibl, Die Restauration, 51–3. The city of Vienna was allowed to send two more representatives than had previously been usual to the archducal inauguration. Aulic decree to Landmarschall Pergen, Mar. 29, 1790, NÖLA, NStReg, 183. For the imbroglio over civic representation in Styria, see Gerda Stacher, “Kaiser Leopold II und die Umgestaltung der ständischen Verfassung: Bestrebungen der Bürger, Bauern und ‘Volksfreunde’ unter den Beamten am Beispiel der Steiermark,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert und Österreich 2 (1985): 43–72. 121 Aulic decrees, Oct. 4, 1790 and Mar. 11, 1791, NÖLA, StB, 598, p. 92; StB, 599, pp. 55–6. Helmuth Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie der österreichischen Landstände,” Anciens pays et assemblées d’états—Standen en landen 53 (1970): 137, 150.

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caused some murmuring, but the fact that the University of Vienna’s “perpetual chancellor”—the provost of St. Stephen’s cathedral chapter—already belonged to the Estate of prelates offered the needed precedent. There was also a desire to accommodate the emperor.122 And there were members such as Zinzendorf who held the enlightened view “que quiconque possede des biens fonds doit avoir voix aux Etats.”123 In keeping with recent thinking, Zinzendorf advocated a voice at the Estates for the owners of demesne land. The university’s rector received the most junior place among the prelates. Ironically, a concession made by Leopold in the question of the Estates’ privileged civil jurisdiction would precipitate an unusual clash between government and Landhaus over membership. During the grievances process, the Estates had petitioned that assessors on the Landrecht be chosen from their own ranks. While Leopold had promised to do so only in the event of equal qualification, he had agreed that the court’s president (Oberstlandrichter) should always belong to the Estates. The unseen hitch was that an incumbent might be forced on them. While the lords accepted the newly appointed Count Stampach without incident in 1792, Stampach’s successor, a lesser noble named Matthias Wilhelm von Haan (1737–1816), took exception to the tax the Estates levied on those admitted.124 Haan’s refusal to pay incited a dispute in the course of which Francis II simply directed the Estates to receive him.125 Failing to compel obedience, he awarded Haan membership in the knights, the noble consortium most susceptible to outside pressure.126 Having overplayed a weak hand, the knights backed down. They admitted Haan, while limiting his affiliation to his term of office and his own person, conditions that broke with the traditions of hereditary membership and luster-enhancing co-options.127 With Joseph von Aichen (in office 1814-18), Haan was succeeded by a representative of a lineage with a historic connection to the tribunal. Nearly a century earlier, Aichen’s paternal grandfather had been Landuntermarschall and thus acting president of the Landrecht of the day. Leopold II’s most significant reform to the Estates’ composition in Lower Austria concerned the local “state domains administrator” (Staatsgüter Administrator), an official who managed properties acquired through the monastic suppressions of the 1780s.128 The idea had originated in the Aulic Chamber, the finance ministry directed since early 1791 by the ubiquitous Count Chotek. The authorities made a

122 The wish to accommodate is apparent in the remarks of the abbot of Melk recorded in the minutes of the Estate of prelates, Mar. 22, 1791, NÖLA, PA, HS 5. 123 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Oct. 30, 1790 (HHStA). 124 The Court directed Stampach to apply for admission to the Estate of lords. Aulic decree, June 22, 1792, NÖLA, StB, 600, p. 73. He was admitted in 1792. 125 Aulic decree, Aug. 20, 1796, NÖLA, StB, 604, no. 102. 126 Frank, Standeserhebungen, ii, 146, reports this bestowal. 127 Minutes of Estate of knights, Feb. 17, 1797, RA, HS 19. 128 Aulic decree, Sept. 23, 1791, NÖLA, StB, 599, pp. 197–8. See Alois Brusatti, “Die Staatsgüterveräußerungen in der Zeit von 1780–1848: Eine wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Untersuchung zum Problem des österreichischen Liberalismus,” MÖStA 11 (1958): 260, for the former monastic properties (called Fondsgüter).

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revealing case for the change after initial opposition at the Estates.129 In a decree near the end of Leopold II’s reign, the Estates learned that the administrator would merely stand in for the proprietor of the holdings in question (the “state”), much as the prelates, who had not personally owned Church realty, had done.130 Hence there could be no question of real modification to their “constitution,” a term used in the sense of both “fundamental law” and “organization.” This argument—that the properties in question had already been represented in the Estates—in fact projected a contemporary principle of political economy into the distant past. Moreover, the authorities contended, the Estates needed qualified participants given that they were no longer purely “ceremonial” as had been the case under Joseph II. The Estates were to “deliberate” on the common weal and offer “advice” to the government. An official who managed “the most properties” and “the most subject peasants” would be able to make an “active” contribution to business at the Landhaus. The Estates accepted these strongly physiocratic arguments; they assigned the domains administrator the bottom rung of the Estate of prelates.131 The objective of reinforcing landed representation with its economic weight and local knowledge becomes even clearer in comparative perspective. A year earlier, the Estates of Styria had with little protest accepted the local state domains administrator into their midst. They had been told that the “most important proprietors of realty have the right to . . . be involved in the Estates’ deliberations.” The particulars differed from the ones adopted the following spring at the Landhaus in Vienna; the Styrian administrator ranked after the Fourth Estate, rather than with the Estate of prelates.132 What was likely the most far-reaching change to the structures of political participation in the central lands under Leopold II transpired in Bohemia at the instigation of the Estates themselves. The lords protested the presence at assemblies of those who did not own seigniorial property. As this question directly impinged on Leopold’s prerogatives as Bohemian king, it was politically delicate. Since the 1620s, Habsburg rulers had reserved to themselves the right to admit new members to the Bohemian Estates—also the non-landed—who thus acquired the right to attend the diet. The provincial government in Prague accordingly counseled against a concession. Yet Leopold overruled his advisors: in August 1791 he limited attendance at the Bohemian diet to seigniorial landowners, their sons, or direct heirs in the ranks of the Estates.133 In the understanding of the day, the new restriction strengthened the diet by rooting it more firmly in local economic interests.

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Estates’ resolution, Nov. 14, 1791, NÖLA, StB, 599, p. 277. Aulic decree, Feb. 24, 1792, NÖLA, StB, 600, pp. 23–6. 131 Estates’ resolution, Apr. 2, 1792, and aulic decree, May 11, 1792, NÖLA, StB, 600, pp. 7, 60–1. Stradal, “Die Prälatenkurie,” 150. As a result of later administrative reorganization, the “cameral income administrator” replaced the “state domains administrator” in the Estate of prelates. College of Deputies to Estate of prelates, Oct. 7, 1831, NÖLA, Landes-Registratur 1793–1904, F. 33, 2, folder 1831–5. 132 Inner Austrian governor’s office to Styrian Estates, Graz, Aug. 3, 1791, and Estates to governor’s office, Graz, Oct. 4, 1791, StLA, Laa.A. Antiquum, Gruppe III, K.2, H.8. 133 Neugebauer, Standschaft, 35. 130

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The shift in the Habsburg lands toward the political representation of property that would initially typify the modern parliamentary era proceeded after the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. The historian Brian Vick has argued that the still popular notion of the Congress of Vienna (1814/15) as an “exercise in restoration and reaction” has obscured the fact that a consensus existed among the powers on the desirability of representative institutions.134 The Austrians too made “concessions to the new constitutional spirit of the age” in their freshly acquired lands.135 Though older status-based elements survived in the diets, noble participants were required to be propertied (landowners). In 1815 the kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia received “central and provincial congregations,” organs that recalled in their makeup and responsibilities the Estates in the Bohemian-Austrian lands and the representative bodies envisioned by enlightened reform. They were consultative organs without law-making power, with the purpose of providing information and advice as well as managing taxation and other local affairs. Only one third of the seats was originally reserved to the landed nobility.136 The charters promulgated for Galicia-Lodomeria together with Bukovina (1817) and Carniola (1818) revived the Estates in those places.137 A manorial-property requirement regulated the right of a noble to a “seat and vote;” in Galicia, the relevant real estate furthermore had to be liable to a minimum annual tax. This provision likewise pointed toward the parliamentary future. Even before the treaty-based undertakings of the Congress, those in power in Vienna could hardly have given more tangible proof of their respect for representative institutions than they did in connection with the Lower Austrian assembly. In the glare of a European public gathered in his residential city, the emperor Francis found time to receive a deputation of the local Estates on November 3, 1814 for the customary handover of the yearly tax proposition. More revealing still is that a few days later, on November 7, Foreign Minister Metternich himself made an appearance at the diet that was called to approve the proposition. In late 1813, as victory over Napoleon was taking shape, the lords in the land below the Enns had in time-tried fashion co-opted Metternich, by birth a member of the Bohemian Estates, into the ranks of their “old lineages.” From Freiburg, whence he was following the progress of the allied armies, the honoree had acknowledged the flattering “recognition” of a “servant of the state” by “the noblest of the nation.”138 134 Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA and London, 2014), 233–77. 135 Vick, The Congress of Vienna, 249; Enno E. Kraehe, Metternich’s German Policy, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1963/1983), ii, 394–5; Wolfram Siemann, Metternich: Stratege und Visionär. Eine Biografie (Munich, 2016), 505, 519. 136 Andreas Gottsmann and Stefan Malfèr, “Die Verwaltungskörperschaften und die Verwaltung in Lombardo-Venetien,” in Helmut Rumpler and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918, vii/2: Verfassung und Parlamentarismus: Die regionalen Repräsentativkörperschaften (Vienna, 2000), 1593–8. 137 A copy of the Galician patent from Apr. 13, 1817 is found at www.verfassungen.de/at/galizien/ galizien17.htm, accessed Jan. 27, 2017. A copy of the Carniolan patent from Aug. 29, 1818 is found in AS 2, Reg. IV, 1. Another copy in the ÖNB (480852-D.Alt Mag). 138 Prince Clemens Metternich to Landmarschall Dietrichstein, Freiburg im Breisgau, Jan. 6, 1814, NÖLA, Landes-Registratur 1793–1904, F. 33, folder 1812–16.

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Now, with the Polish and Saxon questions escalating into one of the great crises of the Congress, Metternich appeared at the Landhaus on the square of the Friars Minor to take his place among his fellow Estates. Before an assembly of several dozen members typical for those years, he was formally “introduced” into their midst “as an abiding witness to their unanimous endeavor to preserve and protect state and throne”—in that order.139 As the historian Wolfram Siemann has shown, Metternich remained an advocate of the consensual political culture characteristic of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy—both composite polities—for much of their history. That culture entailed representative bodies. As a correlate, Metternich rejected the Josephian administrative despotism with which, ironically, he is sometimes associated.140 If the significance ascribed to (landed) wealth by reformers created new dividing lines among nobles, the economic hardships of a generation of war after 1792 accentuated them. With little or no land and reliant on fixed income from officeholding, lesser nobles increasingly suffered under the manifold blight of high taxes, forced loans, and runaway inflation that climaxed in the state default of 1811. Large landowners rode out these hardships with greater success.141 As the crisis intensified, especially after 1805, “speculators” and “foreigners” appeared to pile up ill-gotten fortunes, and usurp noble prerogatives. The arrival in 1802 of the antediluvian Baron Karl Moser in the office of Landuntermarschall portended the coming reaction (see Figure 9.2). Moser must have regarded his success as sweet recompense for the humiliations of his youth. Nearly forty years earlier, Maria Theresa had deposed his father from the same office; he himself had lost the expectancy to the receivership general in the reform of 1764. His career in the Lower Austrian government had sputtered out, while the Theresan favorite, Ludwig von Hacqué, had filched the position in the Estate of knights that his family regarded as its birthright. If that were not enough, Joseph II’s abolition of the college of Deputies in the 1780s had cost him another paid situation. As one of the few landed knights, he could afford to serve on the unpaid committee that was allowed to the Estates as of 1784.142 Near the end of Joseph’s reign, Moser published a tract critical not only of the tax and labor services reform but also of the government’s secretiveness and failure to consult the Estates.143 His past predestined him for the job of compiling the Estate of knights’ grievances in 1790.144 Under Moser’s auspices, the Estate of knights would give a new, if shameful, twist to its admissions autonomy: it banned nobles who descended from Jews (“in 139 Speech of introduction by the lords’ Deputy, Count Max Cavriani, Nov. 7, 1814, NÖLA, HA, Aufnahmeakten M-16, f. 15. Minutes of the diet, Nov. 7, 1814, NÖLA, StB, 284. 140 Siemann, Metternich, 77–8, 507–8, 624–6, 692–3, 812; William D. Godsey, Nobles and Nation in Central Europe: Free Imperial Knights in the Age of Revolution, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2004), 233. 141 Josef Karl Mayr, Wien im Zeitalter Napoleons: Staatsfinanzen, Lebensverhältnisse, Beamte und Militär (Vienna, 1940), 123, 174. 142 [Starzer], Beiträge, 466. 143 Karl Freiherr von Moser, Betrachtungen über alle Theile der neuen landesfürstlichen und obrigkeitlichen Steuerregulirung (Vienna, 1789), 4. 144 Minutes of Estate of knights, Mar. 23, 1790, NÖLA, RA, HS 18, pp. 179–80.

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Figure 9.2. Baron Karl Moser: elected (underage) to the expectancy to the Estates’ receivership general 1760; councilor of the Lower Austrian government 1765–70; knights’ Deputy 1770–6, 1779–82; member of the Estates’ executive committee after 1784 and after 1790; Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1802–23. Original painting by Johann Leonhard Herrlein. In private possession (photograph: David Schriffl).

the third degree”). Candidates for admission had to prove not only their own “Christian birth” but also that of their parents. In upholding this unprecedented ban beginning in 1808, the knights defied an official prohibition on changes to their statutes.145 In earlier years the social insularity propagated by Moser enjoyed limited support among nobles, few of whom could claim ancient or pedigreed ancestry. He had opposed the aspirations of one new noble tainted by manufacturing as incompatible with the “prestige of this Estate.”146 Most of his fellow knights did not follow him on this matter. A broad consensus among the Estates appears to have obtained at this time about the desirability of absorbing commercial and industrial wealth into their ranks. We will recall Baron Prandau’s 145 For fuller consideration of this episode, see William D. Godsey, “Adelige Intoleranz: Die antijüdische Aufnahmeordnung des niederösterreichischen Ritterstandes aus dem Jahr 1808,” in Katrin Keller et al., eds., Adel und Religion in der frühneuzeitlichen Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 2017), 322–37. 146 Minutes of Estate of knights, Apr. 8, 1801, NÖLA, RA, HS 19, p. 214.

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learned speeches to that effect in assemblies. After becoming Landuntermarschall, Moser used his position to revive the now long-dormant distinction between “old” and “new lineages” in vetting admissions.147 In the knights at least, this division was now so incongruous that it did not long hold in practice. Moser’s efforts to dredge up old equestrian claims to ceremonial precedence had even less success.148 Yet by 1808—with the gyrations of the paper currency after the shattering military defeat of 1805, patriotic fever in Vienna inflamed for a renewed war against Napoleon, and rich “foreigners” and “Jews” seen to be feeding off the crisis—the sentiment among the knights changed.149 Precisely among lesser nobles, the vertiginous ascent of financiers with their new titles, land purchases, and social ambitions fueled rising fears. The Jewish wholesaler and banker Baron Nathan Arnstein (1748–1838) and his famous salonnière wife, Fanny, were the most visible representatives of what was in fact a comparatively small group that seemed all the more dangerous because of its ties to the dynastic state. In this atmosphere, the leading members of the Estate of knights agreed to amend the rules of admission. All but Joseph von Aichen, at that time the Landrecht’s vicepresident, favored excluding Christians of Jewish descent. A clause to this effect was included in the new statute of admissions resolved by the knights in April 1808.150 Though the government ultimately forbade the change, even Aichen averred that the knights were an “association” like any other with the right to make and enforce membership guidelines as long as they did not “endanger the state.”151 With this argument he invoked the rules of modern civil society on behalf of a blood-purity paragraph. The knights would ignore the official prohibition and enforce the paragraph until 1827. The story in the Estate of lords was quite different. Though approached by the knights to alter their standards in the same way, the lords declined to do so.152 At the time of the Congress of Vienna, they unanimously admitted a former Dutch Sephardic Jew named Henry PereiraArnstein, a financier who embodied all that the knights around Moser most hated: he had emigrated from abroad, become a baron in Austria, and snapped up a clutch of the archduchy’s manors.153 Long ago, the scholar Viktor Bibl claimed that in the Napoleonic era the Lower Austrian Estates were “of no significance to those above them” and “rootless in relation to those below them.”154 This view has proven remarkably tenacious over time. Let us briefly end this section by considering the second contention before turning to the first in Chapter 10. Apart from Vienna—which was still essentially an early modern conurbation dominated by the imperial Court, the

147

Minutes of Estate of knights, Jan. 17, 1803 and Mar. 18, 1805, NÖLA, RA, HS 20. Settled by the aulic decree of Jan. 31, 1803, NÖLA, StB, 611, no. 68. 149 For the anti-Jewish sentiment at the time, see Adolf Beer, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Prague, 1877), 35. 150 Minutes of Estate of knights, Apr. 27, 1808, NÖLA, RA, HS 20, pp. 216f. 151 Minutes of Estate of knights, Nov. 23, 1811, NÖLA, RA, HS 20, pp. 325–6. 152 Estate of lords to Estate of knights, Mar. 6, 1809, NÖLA, RA, AI, f. 312r. 153 Minutes of Estate of lords, Mar. 18, 1815, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 55. 154 Bibl, Die niederösterreichischen Stände, 36. 148

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establishments of the aristocracy, and throngs of officials, lesser tradesmen, artisans, and servants—the economic basis of society in the land below the Enns remained largely agricultural. Universal tax schedules of the Napoleonic era give good insight into the social stratification of wealth. In 1809 nobles of the rank of count were assessed at 150 fl. each, for example, whereas wholesalers, financiers, and factory owners owed per person merely a tenth of that amount (15 fl.).155 Despite internal divisions within and between the various Estates, the decimation of the prelates in the 1780s, and the decline of manorial wealth in the knights, the Estates continued to embrace the leading exponents of manorial society. Even Landuntermarschall Moser at the head of the consortium of knights was a substantial landowner. In the eyes not only of themselves but of the authorities as well, the Estates “represented” the territory below the Enns through their right to attend the annual diet and approve the grant, their control of taxes and other levies based on the land records kept at the Landhaus, and their credit activity. Thanks to the explosion during the Seven Years War of the debt that they managed and its irregular growth thereafter, the holders of the Estates’ bonds were now more broadly dispersed among the provincial population than had previously been the case. The routine financial records of the Estates of Styria, which are better preserved than those of Lower Austria, show non-noble women, prosperous peasants, and common soldiers, among many others, in possession of corporate paper by the later eighteenth century.156 The situation in the land below the Enns will have been little different. Given the lack of banks, the treasuries of the various intermediary corps offered one of the few investment opportunities open to wider social circles. In this way a far larger number of people than the nobles and prelates, who were the common owners of the Landhaus’s debt in earlier periods, acquired a material interest in the endurance of the Estates. In the later eighteenth century the Estates underwent a double ideological transformation. First, under the impact of changing understandings of the law and representation, they had ceased being the literal incarnation of the Land, though their territorial pretensions were still recognized in important ways. They were now a “mere” privileged corps among other social groups. Second, certain currents of Enlightenment thought and the reforming dynastic state operating under the influence of those currents gradually endowed the Estates with a new ideological raison d’être. Haugwitz’s cameralist policies and other rationalizing impulses within the central administration around mid-century had stripped the Estates, to be sure, of some privileges. Fiscal-military constraint had placed limits

155 Walter Boguth, “Die Okkupation Wiens und Niederösterreichs durch die Franzosen im Jahre 1809 und ihre Folgen für das Land,” JbLkN, new series, 7 (1908): 329–30. 156 “Ärariale 2 ½ % Jänner et Juli 1779–1798 Nro. 1 incl: 271,” StLA, Laa. Obereinnehmeramt, Gruppe 3, Bd. 1 (Aufstellungsnummer 169). Most of the few hundred holders of the Styrian Estates’ paper listed in this volume are non-noble, including the common soldier Michael Zäch (f. 8r) and the subject peasant (Erbhold ) Johann Liebmann (f. 9r).

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on their activity otherwise. Even so, the governments of Maria Theresa, Leopold II, and Francis II all fundamentally agreed that the Estates as representatives of the leading socio-economic (landed) interests had to be preserved, and even fortified, if ruling were to be legitimate and effective at a time of rising fiscal hardship. In the wartime challenges faced by the Habsburg monarchy between 1792 and 1815, the Estates would bring their political, financial, and administrative weight to bear in significant ways for the last time in their history.

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10 Resilience in the Contest with France, 1792–1815 At the nadir of Habsburg fortunes following the Peace of Preßburg (1809), a Lower Austrian knight named Franz von Heintl extolled the Estates as a source of the monarchy’s staying power in an age of armed conflict, military retreat, territorial shrinkage, and domestic distress: The events toward the end of the last century and at the beginning of the present one have conspicuously shown how important the Austrian Estates-based constitution [“österreichische ständische Verfassung”] is for the support of the throne, the salvation of the Fatherland, and forestalling the horrors of anarchy. While popular revolution has toppled thrones, and hallowed monarchs have been killed at both ends of Europe, the Austrian peoples have not ceased loving their monarch and the father of their country during the bitterest tribulations of unhappy wars and chaotic public finances: because the Estates in their unshakable devotion to the throne, the holy person of the monarch, and the old, beneficial order of things have shone brightly as an example to the people. The preservation of the Estates-based constitution is therefore the greatest duty that the Estates have; for its fulfillment they are responsible to the nation, and they will have to render an account of themselves to posterity.1

While we might dismiss this statement as the self-serving rhetoric of a noble reactionary terrified by the advance of French power, the identity of its author gives reason to pause. The originally Moravian Heintl was no backwoods warden of feudal privilege in a time of upheaval. A successful lawyer, an enlightened agronomist, and a political economist, as well as an adroit investor on both the land and bond markets, he corresponded more to the self-made man. He had purchased his own seigniorial property and been ennobled for his services and successes, while his admission to the Estates only shortly before his spirited defense of their existence had ironically occasioned misgivings among some elements in their ranks. Indeed, it had only been with difficulty that he had overcome the skepticism of leading knights who feared being swamped by the newly rich.2

1 Franz Ritter von Heintl to the Lower Austrian Estates, Apr. 16, 1810, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 364. The monarchs “killed at both ends of Europe” refer to Louis XVI of France and Paul I of Russia. 2 Heintl’s undated application for admission (1809) and the knights’ initial hostility documented in NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C-36. See also Gustav Treixler, “Franz Ritter von Heintl,” UH, new series, 9 (1936): 312–20.

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While the spotlight is usually on the weaknesses and deficiency of the emperor Francis’s government, little attention has been paid to the question implicitly posed by Heintl on the sinews of the monarchy’s power. In recent surveys the problem of Habsburg “state-building” has largely been decoupled from the question of what the Habsburg authorities were primarily concerned with.3 In fact, the armed conflicts in the generation after 1792 were the defining experience not only for the rulers but also for the ruled who had to labor under the burden of fiscal-military exigency. The monarchy exhibited at all events remarkable resiliency. It fought France longer than any other continental opponent. With one exception, it participated in all Coalition wars. Unlike Prussia, it endured throughout as a great power, even as its independence and room for maneuver were compromised for a time by French victories. Why did the ostensibly so fractured and frail Habsburg monarchy not dissolve under the strain? Even more, how was it repeatedly able to defy Napoleon and raise large and hugely expensive armies? What domestic factors enabled it to withstand the onslaught? As late as 1809, Austrian troops dealt the conqueror his first major battlefield reverse (at Aspern-Essling). Despite the calamities thereafter, which included the loss of lands and partial bankruptcy, Vienna was able to field the largest—if not the best—allied army in the final assault in 1814 on Napoleon.4 Under their own strength, Habsburg forces were also able to drive the French out of northern Italy. As Heintl suggested, one explanation for Austrian robustness must be sought in the contribution made by provincial society. If Austria’s composite structure was a drawback in the contest with the highly centralized Napoleonic state, it also proved—paradoxically—a source of strength. How was this possible? Little is known about the Estates in connection with the war effort, their role in the patriotic mobilization of 1808/09 being one qualified exception.5 Yet the conflicts in which the monarchy took part in the generation after 1792 would mobilize the Lower Austrian Landhaus as preceding wars had done. Their activity would be concentrated in the area of fiscality as well as the realm of credit that was intrinsically dependent upon tax flows. The debt they bore on the government’s behalf would be one of the few stabilizing factors in the “chaotic public finances” referred to by Heintl. They would also continue to be heavily involved in the upkeep of the army through provisioning, billeting, and other services. After 1792 the Habsburg government was able to rely upon the dispensation of power—and the balance of interests between central and territorial authority underlying it—that had been achieved in the later eighteenth century. Two changes in the character of warfare after 1792 lent the Estates’ fiscal and organizational activity a further vital dimension. First, the French domestic 3 Robin Okey, The Habsburg Monarchy from Enlightenment to Eclipse (New York and Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2002), 68–73; John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA, 2015), 30–6; Pieter Judson, The Habsburg Monarchy: A New History (Cambridge, MA and London, 2016), 89–97. 4 Gunther E. Rothenberg, Napoleon’s Great Adversaries: The Archduke Charles and the Austrian Army, 1792–1814 (London, 1982), 187–8. 5 Helmut Rumpler, Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa: Bürgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 1997), 90–1.

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upheaval and the reactions to it across Europe gradually lent armed struggle an ideological and intransigent edge lacking since the confessional struggles of an earlier age.6 Second, the relatively “limited” character of eighteenth-century conflicts of maneuver and negotiation gave way to the more decisive quality of revolutionary warfare.7 Napoleon would twice occupy Vienna (1805 and 1809), which had last been besieged by the Ottomans in 1683, while French units would penetrate the central lands on two other occasions (1797 and 1800). These changes, together with the concomitant need of extracting unprecedented resources from an increasingly battered and weary population, put a premium on a solid domestic base. In these circumstances, the Estates varyingly assumed a steadying and legitimating role likewise spoken to by Heintl. Though the Habsburg monarchy is commonly portrayed as a “fragile” construction, the evidence from Lower Austria offers a rather different view.8 Even after the disastrous conclusion to the war of 1809 followed by the financial crisis of 1811, the regime did not wobble in any appreciable way despite apparently high levels of discontent. The Napoleonic challenge would menace the Estates themselves in a way that had not been true even under Joseph II, whose reforms stopped just short of undermining the borrowing power on which he too had been reliant. The French not only had no inherent interest in preserving the Estates or their financial autonomy, but were ideologically opposed to such institutions. The Napoleonic occupiers did not shrink from physical intimidation toward representatives of the Landhaus; the Estates’ attempt to meet the harsh exactions in money and material in part through the use of their good offices threatened to bring down the very system of borrowing that had become a prime raison d’être of their existence. Yet the all-clear would not sound with the French withdrawal. The terrible aftermath of the war of 1809 involving runaway inflation in connection with the mass of unsecured paper currency held new risks. The main question confronting Habsburg policymakers concerned who was to foot the bill for bringing the financial situation under control. A default on the long-term public debt would damage the Estates’ creditworthiness on which the central treasury had come to rely, while the remaining monastic lands came within official sights again for the first time since the secularizations of the 1780s. In the end, the stabilizing role of the Estates on the otherwise war-torn public finances would carry the day. As Heintl himself put it in another context, the “illustrious Estates” were “inseparable” from the “state.”9

6 On this point, see Hamish M. Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System 1740–1815 (Harlow, 2006), 245. 7 Jeremy Black, European Warfare in a Global Context, 1660–1815 (London and New York, 2007), 118–41; Alan Forrest, “The French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars,” in Geoff Mortimer, ed., Early Modern Military History, 1450–1815 (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2004), 196–211; John A. Lynn, “Nations in Arms 1763–1815,” in Geoffrey Parker, ed., The Cambridge History of Warfare (rev. edn., Cambridge, 2005), 189–216; David A. Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston and New York, 2007). 8 The quotation is from Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 272. 9 Heintl’s application for admission to the knights, undated [1809], NÖLA, RA, Aufnahmeakten, C-36.

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F I S C A L A D M IN I S T R AT I O N A N D P O L I T IC AL S T A B I L I T Y After the Josephian experiment in provincial government, the restored college of Deputies had reassumed routine management of direct taxation. The Estates’ organization was to be tested to its limits in the following decades. Apart from the Contribution itself, a range of extraordinary levies from surcharges on the regular rates to forced loans to a property tax called the Klassensteuer were raised in large part through the regular tax channels.10 The Estates’ credit operations were frequent and assumed a variety of new forms. All of this activity involved the large, if uneven, growth in the business of the college of Deputies, the bookkeeping division, the receivership general, and other departments.11 Official registers show an increase in the numbers of official documents (“exhibits”) landing on the Deputies’ conference table even in the years of uneasy peace after Lunéville: 3,839 (1800); 4,192 (1802); and 4,516 (1804).12 Still overseen by an appointee of the “three upper Estates” as envisaged by the reform of 1764, the receivership general remained the main conduit for money flowing from the local level into the treasuries of the central government. In 1794 Joseph Rohrwürth died after thirteen years in office during which he had been ennobled for his merits.13 Following a short-lived incumbent, Joseph Mannhart would formally assume the post in 1797 following the usual election by the “three upper Estates,” retaining it until 1818.14 The Estates’ fiscal jurisdiction again extended at times—as during the Seven Years War—to people who were not subordinate to the provincial land records. They continued to be referred to as the quartum genus hominum.15 The sheer scope of revenue-raising during the revolutionary and Napoleonic period in turn necessitated dauntingly complex and today almost impenetrable procedures involving the creation, processing, and issue of myriad assessments, statements, receipts, credit instruments, and other papers, to say nothing of the 10 This is apparent from the provisions of public patents. For example the patent for the BohemianAustrian lands concerning a forced loan, Jan. 13, 1794; and the “Circulare von der k.k. n.ö. in Klassensteuer Sachen cum derogatione omnium instantiarum aufgestellten Hofkommision,” Jan. 20, 1802, in NÖLA, KP, 53, 61. For the Klassensteuer, see Markus Weiss, “Das Verhältnis von direkten und indirekten Steuern hinsichtlich ihrer Erträge und ihrer Bedeutung für den Staatshaushalt unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Belastung der Steuerträger (1781–1847),” in Gustav Otruba and Markus Weiss, eds., Beiträge zur Finanzgeschichte Österreichs (Staatshaushalt und Steuern 1740–1840) (Linz, 1986), 91. Similar practices obtained in Styria. Anton Mell, Grundriß der Verfassungs- und Verwaltungsgeschichte des Landes Steiermark (Graz, Vienna, and Leipzig, 1929), 642. 11 The primary sources contain many explicit references to the rising workload. For example, the annual reports of the college of Deputies pro 1799 (Dec. 6, 1800) and 1807–9 (Nov. 29, 1810), NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363, 365. 12 These figures are drawn from the annual reports (Amtsrelationen) of the official, Alois von Bergenstamm, charged with keeping track of the volume of business. They are preserved in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363. 13 Karl Friedrich von Frank, ed., Standeserhebungen und Gnadenakte für das Deutsche Reich und die Österreichischen Erblande bis 1806 sowie kaiserlich österreichische bis 1823, 5 vols. (Schloss Senftenegg, 1967–74), iv, 184. He was ennobled following the end of the Ottoman war in 1791. 14 Mannhart had filled in for his ill predecessor. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” June 9, 1797, NÖLA, StB, 282, pp. 454–61. 15 For example with respect to a forced loan. Annual report of the college of Deputies pro 1799, Dec. 6, 1800, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363.

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internal accounts, repartitions, and rolls that facilitated this work. Much of it was undertaken by the bookkeepers and receiver general whose records in Lower Austria are imperfectly preserved. The fundamental interdependence of central disbursement treasuries such as the Staatsschuldenkassa and corporate coffers (apparent in the frequent transfers of funds back and forth necessary for maintaining liquidity) required extensive written communication. Into the mid-Napoleonic period, this work fell mostly to the college of Deputies on the Estates’ behalf. Later, Landmarschall Dietrichstein dominated, though did not monopolize, the Estates’ side of these exchanges, a circumstance reflective of his high conception of office and tight grip on affairs. His predecessor, Count Saurau, had absented himself for long periods on both his personal landholdings and official business, leaving the college in the admittedly able charge of Baron Prandau.16 The requirements of war swelled the ranks of subordinate personnel at the Estates, gave rise to more specialized structures, and transformed daily procedures, all processes that we have observed in conflicts back to the seventeenth century. Between the end of the Seven Years War (1763) and the last year of the War of the First Coalition (1797), the Estates’ bookkeeping staff increased threefold—from 10 persons to 30.17 Numbers continued climbing thereafter, with 41 on record in 1813.18 In December 1808 the college of Deputies made allowance for the growth of accounting activity by creating four new departments.19 Both Landmarschall Cavriani (December 1798) and Landmarschall Dietrichstein (January 1810) revised the instructions of the college of Deputies and its subordinate bureaus in response to administrative adjustments at the government level. The previous instructions dated only from 1790; decades had often passed in earlier times before the guidelines were updated.20 The creation of a new central disbursement treasury for extraordinary war-related expenditure induced modified arrangements at the Estates’ tills.21 The key to understanding these changes remains the issue of the Estates’ liquidity rather than central control per se. When first introduced, the tax known as the Klassensteuer flowed into the Estates’ receivership general. Two years later, special revenue chests were established that were directly subordinate to the aulic commission concerned with the levy.22 In due course these were apparently transferred under corporate auspices: four “treasurers” of the Estates are on record as receiving and accounting for the tax after 1807.23

16 Prandau calculated that he had substituted for Saurau as presiding officer of the college of Deputies for a total of three years and seven months. Prandau to Estate of lords, Oct. 15, 1807, NÖLA, HA, Lade LXIV, 54. 17 The numbers are taken from the aulic decree of Feb. 10, 1797, NÖLA, StB, 605, Nr. 22. 18 Hof- und Staats-Schematismus des österreichischen Kaiserthums, 2 parts (Vienna, 1813), i, 565–72. 19 Report of the college of Deputies pro 1807–09, Nov. 29, 1810, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 365. 20 Dietrichstein’s revision of Jan. 4, 1810 preserved in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 364. Dietrichstein mentioned Cavriani’s directive from Dec. 11, 1798. 21 Evidence of the new arrangements can be found in FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 246, bundle Niederösterreich. 22 Aulic decree, Dec. 19, 1801, NÖLA, StB, 609, Nr. 130. 23 Aulic decrees, Apr. 11, 1811 and May 10, 1813, NÖLA, StB, 619, Nr. 82 and 621, Nr. 99.

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As in earlier times, the strains engendered by years of armed conflict undermined procedures meant to ensure better oversight. Toward the end of the Napoleonic wars, the college of Deputies was failing to hand over in a timely fashion the annual budget proposal and other financial information required since the Theresan period.24 For its part, the central government did not inspect corporate bookkeeping during the war years, while the vast flows of money through the Landhaus and the confusion following the default of 1811 did their part to disrupt established practices.25 Though the Habsburg monarchy was at war or anxious peace for the entire period from 1787 to 1814, no evidence has come to light of fraud on the scale that impaired the receivership general during the Seven Years War. In stark contrast to the fate of Joseph Gotthard von Mannagetta, the incumbent whose avarice had climaxed in scandal and reform, the receiver general during the Napoleonic period, Joseph Mannhart, would be ennobled for his services at war’s end.26 The lack of discernible malfeasance as well as the fact that the Estates’ apparatus did not collapse under the pressure must be seen as an achievement of the reformed institutional culture that had been promoted since Maria Theresa’s day. Yet we should not underestimate the extent to which financial probity was still in the basic interests of the Estates themselves qua corporation. By upholding their good name, they sustained the immense public debt in which they individually and collectively possessed a large stake, both financially and politically. Exacting taxes, forced loans, and other resources from the populace through the Estates fundamentally steadied the Habsburg regime through the recurrent shocks of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Though Vienna had grown to an urban center of some 200,000 people, it was still a city of the Court, officialdom, and aristocracy rather than of great commerce, finance, or manufacturing. The economy remained agriculturally based, while landowners embodied local authority. Since the 1760s the government had reinforced that authority through checks and balances aimed at improving the situation of the broader population. The circle offices offered basic protection to the subject peasantry against abuse by landowners, whose reputation will have improved over time by the premium placed on good governance. The Aulic Chancellery consulted the Estates on tax and other rebates for communities and individuals hit by misfortune. In this way, it continued to rely on those familiar with local conditions. The system’s elements were mutually reinforcing, which accounts for its dense, oft-remarked oligarchical character: the college of Deputies gathered information on the worthiness of applications for relief through the circle offices that were in turn still largely managed by indigenous nobles.27 At times of 24

Aulic decrees, Feb. 10, 1812 and Dec. 14, 1813, NÖLA, StB, 620, Nr. 37 and 621, Nr. 206. Aulic decrees, July 16, 1811, Dec. 14, 1813, and Jan. 4, 1814, NÖLA, StB, 619, Nr. 133; 621, Nr. 206; and 622, Nr. 12. The last-cited decree explicitly mentions the lack of inspections after 1783. A “visitation” organized by Landmarschall Khevenhüller is on record, but the Aulic Chancellery criticized it for failure to conform to regulations. Aulic decree, Dec. 4, 1797, NÖLA, StB, 605, Nr. 120. 26 For the ennoblement of Mannhart as “von Mannstein,” see Frank, Standeserhebungen, iii, 188. 27 In 1802, Karl Joseph von Stieler thanked the college of Deputies for its “powerful support” in his appointment as circle captain below the Vienna Woods. The following year saw the selection of the 25

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general distress, the Landhaus exercised its ancient right of petition—an echo of the older concept of the Estates as the incarnation of the territory. In response to one request, the emperor granted a substantial tax abatement to seigniorial and peasant landholders following the war and occupation of 1809.28 Despite the onerous fiscal burden, there was no significant unrest in Lower Austria after 1792. The system of extraction was locally grounded, comparatively thorough, and relatively effective, even as it assuredly did not approach the ruthless efficiency of the new-style French revolutionary state and its Napoleonic successor. It tended to falter in the general exhaustion that followed a war, as when the Contribution failed to come in for a period after the defeat of 1805 and the victories of 1814/15.29 The enervation in the wake of a generation of armed conflict, combined with the bankruptcy of 1811, frazzled the system further. But the view from the provincial level does not confirm the picture of cumbrousness and dilapidation sometimes painted of Habsburg government at this time. The system served the regime’s foreign and domestic interests without the need of resorting to Napoleon’s methods. What we now know of the viciousness of Gallic administration imposed on old-regime societies outside metropolitan France gainsays the classic contention that the number of Austrians who “wished” for the French model increased “significantly” after 1799.30 To the contrary: its advocates will have been as proportionately miniscule in number as the “Jacobins” whom the authorities had persecuted with so much senseless paranoia in the mid-1790s. The experiences with the Napoleonic occupiers in 1805 and 1809 reduced the number further. The monarchy’s subjects in its core areas, including Lower Austria, would conspicuously fail to flock to the revolutionary empereur when he occupied large swathes of their homelands.31

first non-noble, Anton Czech, for the post of circle captain. Coming from the police ministry, he was possibly a protégé of former Landmarschall Pergen. Stieler’s letter from Traiskirchen dated Aug. 1, 1802 and the aulic decree of Mar. 13, 1803 concerning Czech in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363, folder Kreisämter. [Albert Starzer], Beiträge zur Geschichte der niederösterreichischen Statthalterei: Die Landeschefs und Räthe dieser Behörde von 1501 bis 1896 (Vienna, 1897), 475, 496. The perception of “oligarchy” was already a contemporary phenomenon. Tagebücher des Carl Friedrich Freiherrn Kübeck von Kübau, ed. Max Freiherr von Kübeck, 2 vols. in 3 (Vienna, 1909), i/1, 231. 28 Aulic decree, Apr. 26, 1810, NÖLA, StB, 618, Nr. 67. 29 The aulic decree of May 16, 1806 (NÖLA, StB, 614, Nr. 39) mentions that no Contribution came in for the first two quarters of the military year 1806 (Nov. 1805–Apr. 1806). Aulic decrees, July 15 and Nov. 21, 1814, NÖLA, StB, 622, Nrs. 101, 165; aulic decrees, July 14 and Nov. 22, 1816, NÖLA, StB, 624, Nrs. 84, 113. 30 Quotations from Ignaz Beidtel, Geschichte der österreichischen Staatsverwaltung 1740–1848, ed. Alfons Huber, 2 vols. (Innsbruck, 1896/1898), ii, 46. For valuable insight into Napoleonic rule in Italy, see Michael Broers, The Napoleonic Empire in Italy 1796–1814: Cultural Imperialism in a European Context? (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York, 2005). See also T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution in Germany: Occupation and Resistance in the Rhineland 1792–1802 (Oxford, 1983); Michael Rowe, From Reich to State: The Rhineland in the Revolutionary Age 1780–1830 (Cambridge, 2003); Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 388–95. 31 This was notably also true of Hungary. See Eduard Wertheimer, Geschichte Oesterreichs und Ungarns im ersten Jahrzehnt des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1884/1890), ii, 335–7; Schroeder, The Transformation, 366; for Vienna specifically, Leopold Auer, “Die Aufenthalte Napoleons in

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Beyond delivering up the yearly Contribution, the Estates’ greatest material impact on the Habsburg war effort involved financial intermediation. As early as the spring of 1790, one minister, Grand Chamberlain Rosenberg, had proposed that the Estates of the central lands including Galicia raise 30,000,000 fl. on their credit to help cover the costs of the monarchy’s foreign and domestic conflicts.32 Josephian in sympathy, Rosenberg may have wanted the Estates to “pay” for the revival that was underway by that time. While this operation did not come off, the Estates had already been borrowing on Joseph’s behalf in the late 1780s, and they would continue to do so for Francis after 1792. Because the use of corporate credit mitigated fiscal hardship, the government relied on it as a prime source of extraordinary domestic funding into the Second Coalition war (Austrian participation 1799–1801). The Estates agreed in every case to employ their good name in the manner requested. The first application arrived at the Lower Austrian Landhaus (as well as at the Estates of the other central lands) in January 1794 in preparation for a renewed Belgian campaign.33 Devised as a compulsory levy amounting to a supplement on the Contribution of 30 percent for the subject rural population and 60 percent for manorial owners, the emperor Francis rejected the Estates’ disingenuous appeal to the Josephian principle of equal taxation, justifying the heavier burden placed on them by reference to their greater stake in the security of property thought to be under attack by the French.34 The Estates accepted this argument without further demur, averting the charge that others were bearing the financial burden of a conflict that primarily benefited them.35 In keeping with the practice in relation to surcharges on the Contribution dating to the late 1770s, an ad hoc commission presided over by the Lower Austrian governor and including representatives of the Estates (a lord and a knight) oversaw the operation.36 Like previous such bodies, its combination of organizational and judicial authority—no recourse to the regular courts—violated the principle of the separation of administration and justice. Indeed, this arrangement surely remained the most pervasive infringement of that principle in the Habsburg monarchy around 1800. At the same time, the commission exercised oversight rather than replaced the existing structures. Lacking its own administrative apparatus, it relied on the normal channels of direct taxation including the college of Deputies that drew up the repartitions, the bookkeeper who worked out individual assessments,

Niederösterreich in den Jahren 1805 und 1809: Eine Spurensuche,” in Willibald Rosner and Reinelde Motz-Linhart, eds., Niederösterreich und die Franzosenkriege (St. Pölten, 2010), 55, 56. 32 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Apr. 2, 1790 (HHStA). 33 Aulic rescript, Jan. 13, 1794, NÖLA, StB, 602, pp. 6–7. A public patent of the same date is preserved in NÖLA, KP, 53. 34 Aulic decree, Feb. 12, 1794, NÖLA, StB, 602, pp. 11–13. 35 On this point, see Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, “Ständische Repräsentation—Kontinuität oder Kontinuitätsfiktion?,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 28 (2006): 287. 36 The government rejected the Estates’ request that a prelate be seated on the commission. Aulic decree, Mar. 29, 1794, NÖLA, StB, 602, p. 20.

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and the receiver general who issued receipts and notes in the Estates’ name to the involuntary lenders in return for the sums assessed. In the localities, manorial officials and local magistrates managed affairs. The provisions of 1794 set the pattern for the forced loans likewise accepted by the Estates in succeeding years (1796, 1797, and 1798). The principal changes concerned amounts and yields. By late 1798 manorial owners were charged at 100 percent of the Contribution, the wider rural population continuing to pay 30 percent. Rising interest rates on the Estates’ bonds reflected the increasing demands on their credit as the war dragged on: the rate rose from 3 (1794) to 5 percent (1798), where it would hover until 1805.37 The Estates also interposed their credit on the government’s behalf in other ways. In 1795 they undertook to raise a loan of six million florins in connection with a public lottery.38 At an awkward financial moment a few years later, the college of Deputies agreed to use money from the Estates’ treasury as a stopgap to cover a monthly interest payment of 120,000 florins due on the lottery bonds—one of countless daily examples of the interlocked character of central and territorial money flows. The Estates were only too willing “given the current situation,” Baron Prandau reported to the emperor, to prop up the state’s finances “to the best of their ability.”39 The Second Coalition conflict represented another apex in the history of the Estates’ financial intermediation on behalf of the Habsburg war machine. In the three years beginning November 1797, the emperor put his signature to promissory notes made out to the “three upper Estates” worth altogether nearly nine and a half million florins.40 The total in 1798 alone was some five million florins—roughly two and a half times the regular Contribution of the land below the Enns and a sum amounting to around 5 percent of the average annual military budget of some 89 million florins in those years.41 This money was coming in at a time in which other sources of income were starting to dry up after almost continuous warfare since 1788.42 Around the turn of the century, reliance on the now heavily encumbered credit of the Estates dropped off sharply in favor of new forms of taxation. Only in the run-up to the War of the Third Coalition would their good offices be tapped again for fresh money in a significant way: one million florins were needed to mend the roads. The emperor had rejected the suggestion that they take the work in hand themselves. That the repair and maintenance could be done “infinitely better and advantageously” by them was 37 Aulic decree, Sept. 26, 1795; Sept. 2 and Oct. 10, 1797; Oct. 25, 1798, NÖLA, StB, 603, p. 75; 605, Nrs. 78 and 85; 606, Nr. 134. 38 Aulic decrees, Jan. 12 and Feb. 7, 1795, NÖLA, StB, 603, pp. 110–11 and 112–21. 39 College of Deputies (signed Baron Franz Prandau) to Emperor Francis, Jan. 15, 1798, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 246, bundle Niederösterreich. 40 Evidence of this debt can be found in the “Ausweis der mit Ende Oktober 1811 verfallenen, von dem n:öst: ständischen Obereinnehmeramte zu behebenden aerarial=activ=Interessen,” Oct. 26, 1811, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 251, bundle Niederösterreich 1812. 41 For the average military budget, see Adolf Beer, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Prague, 1877), 7. Cf. Michael Hochedlinger, Austria’s Wars of Emergence: War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797 (London, 2003), 286. 42 Martin C. Dean, Austrian Policy during the French Revolutionary Wars 1796–1799 (Vienna, 1993), 23.

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368 700,000,000 600,000,000 500,000,000 400,000,000 300,000,000 200,000,000 100,000,000 -

1810

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Treasury Debt Bohemian-Austrian Lands Total Habsburg Debt including Estates' Debt

Figure 10.1. Habsburg treasury debt borne by the Bohemian-Austrian lands, 1810/1818.

proven, Finance Minister Zichy reasoned to no avail, by the “undeniably better condition” of the roads managed by the Estates under Maria Theresa.43 As it was, the Estates failed to lure enough investors to float the requisite loan. The emperor’s uncle, Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen, came to the rescue. In exchange for 5 percent bonds of the Estates, he agreed to provide the entire sum. In return for arranging the deal, the ducal financial counselor, Joseph Girtler von Kleeborn (1753–1828), gained admission to the Estates on the recommendation of Landmarschall Saurau.44 Money was being translated into status in the old manner. The investment by a member of the ruling house in the paper of the Lower Austrian Estates exemplifies in an unusually vivid way the interlocking financial links between central and territorial power. By the battle of Austerlitz in late 1805, the Estates’ credit was all but exhausted and would remain heavily depleted for much of the following decade, even as it continued to be mobilized in times of crisis. The Landhaus remained responsible for administering the liabilities contracted. A schedule of treasury debt held by the Estates of the central lands in 1810 (see Figures 10.1 and 10.2) shows the archduchy below the Enns liable for 32,858,382 florins, almost twice the sum at the 43 Zichy to Emperor Francis, Apr. 28, 1804, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 248, bundle Niederösterreich. 44 Minutes of Estate of knights, June 1, 1804, NÖLA, RA, HS 20. Aulic decrees, Sept. 13 and Nov. 14, 1804, NÖLA, StB, 612, Nrs. 107 and 135. In a letter to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte before the Saxe-Teschen solution appeared on the horizon, Finance Minister Zichy discussed the “preferential treatment” that the Estates would have to offer investors in order to raise such a large loan. He also mentioned that the Estates of Carniola had opened a loan for roads’ repair. Zichy to Ugarte, Apr. 27, 1804, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 248, bundle Niederösterreich. For Girtler, see Hanns Jäger-Sunstenau, Die Ehrenbürger und Bürger ehrenhalber der Stadt Wien (Vienna, 1992), 26.

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200,000,000 180,000,000 160,000,000 140,000,000 120,000,000 100,000,000 80,000,000 60,000,000 40,000,000 20,000,000 s La

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Fig. 10.2. Habsburg treasury debt borne by selected lands, 1810/1818. Note: The 1810 figure for the treasury debt held by the Estates of the Bohemian-Austrian lands does not include the following: 1) 1,872,600 fl. in paper issued by the Lower Austrian Estates during the Napoleonic invasions; 2) the Lower Austrian Estates’ share of the debt of 12,951,000 fl. emitted together with the city of Vienna and the Lower Austrian government during the Napoleonic invasions; 3) whatever capital in the Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury was owed to the Estates of the Bohemian-Austrian lands. Sources: FHKA, ORH, ZRA 1810; Adolf Beer, Die Finanzen Oesterreichs im XIX. Jahrhundert (Prague, 1877), 404–5.

beginning of Joseph II’s personal rule thirty years earlier and just less than a fifth of the total such debt (177,188,427).45 Only the obligations borne by the Bohemians and Moravians were larger. If we consider the fact that the Lower Austrian Contribution of some two million florins annually underlay debt that had mostly been contracted at between 4 and 5 percent and that the Estates’ total commitments extended beyond the treasury debt proper to encompass their own “domestic” debt, the infeasibility of further credit operations at that time becomes clear. The Estates’ paper was being traded below par by 1805. By the end of the Napoleonic wars, the level of Lower Austrian treasury debt had decreased only 45 This figure is taken from the document “Passiv und Activ Capitalien Stand der gesammten Staats Netto Kaßen mit Ende des Militair Jahrs 1810” with a table (p. 1) called “Kapitalien, welche die Stände in den Provinzen und die Stadt Wien in Niederösterreich auf den Kredit des Cameral Aerarii aufgenommen haben,” FHKA, ORH, ZRA 1810.

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slightly to 30,881,884 florins (of a total 158,959,545). Together with the equivalent consignments in the other Bohemian-Austrian lands, it accounted at the war’s end for just under a quarter of the Habsburg monarchy’s entire, secured domestic liabilities (689,113,056 florins).46 Through their lending power, the Estates shored up the central government’s credit in another, less easily ascertainable way. Since 1770 their disbursement treasury—along with those of the Estates of the other central lands—had been formally linked to the “Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury” (Universalstaatsschuldenkassa), a facility charged with contracting and managing cameral debt. Flows of money from the Estates’ coffers were meant to ensure its liquidity and vice versa. Maria Theresa’s finance minister, Count Hatzfeld, had introduced this mechanism after the rejection of the plan of his rival, Ludwig Zinzendorf, for a consolidated Habsburg debt based on the Bohemian-Austrian Estates. Hatzfeld regarded it as an alternative way of bundling the diverse strands of corporate credit to the benefit of public finance. It would also prove a means of accessing monies brought in by the Estates’ good offices without conceding them the political voice that Zinzendorf ’s bank project might have entailed.47 The Estates had understood the implications and protested Hatzfeld’s project, without success. In fact, the scheme came to constitute one element of the solid credit that the Habsburg monarchy enjoyed as of the 1770s.48 Like the City Bank of Vienna, and indeed the treasuries of the Estates, the Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury sold shares of the public debt to investors. Karl Zinzendorf, who understood Habsburg finances better than most, is known to have placed 3,000 fl. there.49 Unlike the City Bank, the Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury was not an entity formally based on the credit of an autonomous corporation. It was a cameral institution whose operations nonetheless depended de facto on corporate borrowing power. At the end of the Napoleonic era, the central balance sheet recorded its liabilities classified either as “domestic” (innländische) or “Estates-based” (ständische) as totaling 203,678,827 fl. This represented somewhat less than 30 percent of the secured Habsburg debt. The portion owed to the Estates of the central lands generally or the Lower Austrian Estates in particular is unknown. Dickson’s figures for the 1770s indicate that the funds flowing in from the Estates accounted for some 10 to 20 percent of intake. 46 These figures are taken from the rubric “Summarium des gesamten Passiv Capitalien Standes” in the document “Passiv und Activ Capitalien Stand der gesamten Staats Netto Kaßen mit Ende des Militarjahrs 1815 nebst der Vergleichung deßelben mit dem Stande am Ende des Militarjahrs 1814,” FHKA, ORH, ZRA 1815. The figure for total Habsburg debt in the “Summarium” does not include the approximately 100,000,000 florins in loans and subsidies provided by the British. Comparable figures for the year 1818 are found in Beer, Die Finanzen, 404–5. 47 See Adolf Beer, “Die Staatsschulden und die Ordnung des Staatshaushaltes unter Maria Theresia,” AÖG 82 (1895): 63–7; P. G. M. Dickson, Finance and Government under Maria Theresia 1740–1780, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), ii, 329–32. 48 This system was made known to the Lower Austrian Estates by aulic decree, Aug. 5, 1770, NÖLA, StB, 584, f. 200v–201v. They protested on Mar. 12, 1771 (NÖLA, StB, 518, f. 49r). In the aulic decree, May 4, 1771 (NÖLA, StB, 585, f. 42r), the authorities replied that the system had been welcomed in other territories. 49 Diary of Karl Zinzendorf, Oct. 21, 1790 (HHStA). See also the entry for Oct. 6, 1790.

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Beginning in 1792, the Lower Austrian Estates were to furnish the Habsburg army with a multitude of organizational services that themselves sometimes involved complex credit operations. The most important sustenance involved massive, almost yearly consignments of provisions, most often corn and oats, but also rye, wheat, and hay. The amounts ranged from the 100,000 Metzen of corn and 307,912 Metzen of oats postulated at the Lower Austrian diet at the height of the War of the Second Coalition to the 75,518 Metzen and 78,794 Metzen of the same products needed a few years after the Peace of Lunéville.50 To pay for a similar request in 1798, the Estates approved with little discussion an emission of 4 percent bills.51 An attempt beginning in 1806 to convert such requirements into their monetary equivalents (calculated at 821,503 florins in that year) proved as abortive as comparable efforts in earlier periods.52 On this occasion, disagreement arose as to the price of agricultural goods on which to base compensation. The currency gyrations and the chronic want of hard money also explained the conversion difficulties both then and later.53 A wartime reversion to the system of provisioning in kind by the Estates transpired in the fall of 1808. The government’s willingness to accept this was an acknowledgment of the circumstance that supplying produce was a lesser hardship in an agriculture-based society. Here the Estates’ supplications brought popular concerns to official attention. In 1795 the institutional rivalry that had flared up periodically following the reversal of Joseph II’s unification of the college of Deputies with the provincial government induced the central authorities to reaffirm the principle that the Landhaus was to organize military provisioning in Lower Austria. The Estates also had the right to be consulted on relief to the parties liable.54 This conflict was one of several in the first half of the 1790s in which the Aulic Chancellery mediated between the two provincial authorities. All the same, wartime exigency forced the central power to mobilize both parties for comparable or closely related tasks: in late 1800 the acting governor had troops in and around the town of Wiener Neustadt provisioned through the municipal authorities of Vienna.55 To the college of Deputies fell the job of imposition and allocation, which meant taking into consideration crop conditions and other local factors in Lower Austria’s different areas.56 Delivery and storage were elaborate logistical undertakings entailing close coordination between the college, the circle offices, the army

50 Aulic rescript, June 7, 1799, NÖLA, StB, 607, Nr. 77; aulic rescript, Sept. 1, 1803, NÖLA, StB, 611, Nr. 187. 51 Minutes of the “three upper Estates,” Aug. 22, 1798, NÖLA, StB, 282, pp. 558–9. 52 Official postulation, Aug. 9, 1806, and aulic decree, Oct. 23, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 614, Nrs. 109 and 132. The figure is found in the Estates’ resolution of Sept. 11, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 614, Nr. 28. 53 Aulic rescript (with reference to currency uncertainty), Sept. 16, 1811, NÖLA, StB, 619, Nr. 158; the Estates’ resolution (with the statement that a monetary equivalent for agricultural produce was “absolutely uncollectable”), Oct. 20, 1812, NÖLA, StB, 620, Nr. 43. 54 Aulic decree, Apr. 3, 1795, NÖLA, StB, 603, pp. 30–1. 55 [Starzer], Beiträge, 356–7. 56 Apparent in the aulic decree of Sept. 22, 1797, NÖLA, StB, 605, Nr. 76; and aulic rescript, Sept. 16, 1811, NÖLA, StB, 619, Nr. 158.

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(“General-Commando”), and local military supply offices (Verpflegsämter).57 No evidence has come to light to suggest that these arrangements, which were also meant to offer rudimentary protection to the local population and maintain public order, failed to function as planned or constituted a hindrance to military readiness. The Estates remained liable for provisioning in years of harvest failure or poor yields, circumstances that called for flexibility and ingenuity. Between the Wars of the Second and Third Coalition, at a time when a system of “dispersed garrisoning” was in place to maintain troops returning from campaign, agricultural supply within Lower Austria on occasion fell short of official demand. The Estates are known to have operated as entrepreneurs responsible for finding at least part of the needed produce on the open market, also outside of their own borders.58 How they were to go about this the emperor left up to them: We leave the mode of purchase [of victuals] entirely to the astute discretion of the Estates. Because of the devotion they have so often shown to Us and their love of the Fatherland, We have confidence that they will attend . . . to this business of provisioning troops, under notification of the provincial authorities, in a way that meets Our expectations, and this will in turn assure the security and welfare of the state.59

The Estates dispatched Baron Prandau to agriculturally rich Hungary to buy the large quantity of oats lacking due to manorial and peasant crop failures, a mission he is reported to have accomplished at considerable cost savings.60 A few years later, a poor rye harvest in several provinces including Lower Austria prompted a different, centrally managed solution. The Aulic Chamber undertook to buy the requisite goods in Galicia, Hungary, and the Banat; the provinces concerned bore the costs, also for transport. The Estates were authorized to impose a tax to cover them.61

F OR EIGN O CCUPA TIO N AN D D OMEST IC P AT RIO TISM The French invasions of 1805 and 1809 threw the Estates’ vital support for the monarchy into particular relief. Their activity accounted in no small part for the preservation of Habsburg authority during the unprecedented foreign conquest of the imperial residence and heartland. Though he underwent the customary inauguration at the start of his reign, the emperor Francis’s relations to the Estates had in fact gotten off to a rough start. In general, he appears not to have shared his father’s pronounced interest in representative institutions, even as a respect for 57 Determining the “delivery magazines,” for example, was a job jointly coordinated by the Estates and the “General-Commando.” Aulic decree, Sept. 1, 1803, NÖLA, StB, 611, Nr. 187. 58 For “dispersed garrisoning,” see Karl A. Roider, Jr., “The Habsburg Foreign Ministry and Political Reform, 1801–1805,” CEH 22 (1989): 174. 59 Aulic decree, Sept. 1, 1802, NÖLA, StB, 610, Nr. 73. 60 Baron Franz Prandau to the Estate of lords, Oct. 15, 1807, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 54. 61 Aulic decrees, Oct. 10, Nov. 12, Dec. 11, and Dec. 22, 1804, NÖLA, StB, 612, Nrs. 121, 132, 153, 162.

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lessons learned and the rule of law (including the privileges typical of the early modern world) restrained him from taking up where his uncle Joseph had left off. In the early years he inclined to allow Josephian-minded bureaucrats a relatively free hand vis-à-vis the intermediary powers.62 The young ruler’s refusal to restore the nobility’s judicial rights in criminal cases, which had been revoked by Joseph II, aroused particular bitterness. As the wars of the 1790s took on an ideological tinge, the discord subsided and the government and Estates came together in defense of the Habsburg inheritance. We have seen how the Prussian-Protestant threat to the Habsburg-Catholic establishment had brought about a similar constellation of forces several decades earlier. Now the menace of revolution apparent in the abolition of the French monarchy, the execution of the king, and the Terror conjured up a wave of political paranoia that swept over government and Landhaus. These were the years of the infamous Jacobin scare. As early as the winter of 1793, calls resounded at the Landhaus for an ideological front of ruler and Estates against the baleful influences that were supposedly making themselves felt in the Habsburg lands. In an assembly of the “three upper Estates” devoted to the issue of their lost legal freedoms, the imperial vice-chancellor Colloredo argued that they should impress upon Francis that “the security of the throne” depended upon rejection of the “dangerous principles” infecting his own government, which were extravagantly equated with those coming out of revolutionary France.63 Not long before, Landmarschall Khevenhüller had appealed in the name of “religion, privileges, and property” for a voluntary “patriotic” subscription by the Estates to help finance the war. Its handsome proceeds were handed over to the emperor—together with a further protest against Joseph II’s revocation of their legal privileges.64 The eradication of the old social and political order in France followed by the export of revolution beyond the republic’s borders into the Habsburg southern Netherlands and elsewhere gradually reconciled the Estates to the heritage of government-ordered reform in their own country that must by then have begun to appear timely. In the coming years a revived form of Habsburg patriotism would all but smother discontent. As the war intensified, the Estate of lords began dispensing with the customary deliberations on the annual tax demand, straightaway approving the requested sum out of “inborn devotion to its most gracious monarch.”65 This precedent set a pattern in which the sums requested were agreed without discussion, while violations of established procedures, which the government excused with reference to the “force of circumstances” (“Drang der

Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Jan. 16, 1793, NÖLA, StB, 282. Minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Mar. 12, 1793, NÖLA, StB, 282, pp. 48–9. Colloredo is labelled as one “toujours attaché . . . aux anciens usages” in the diary of Karl Zinzendorf, June 25, 1790 (HHStA). 64 Viktor Bibl, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände und die französische Revolution,” JbLkN, new series, 2 (1903): 86–7. The appeal by Landmarschall Khevenhüller is recorded in the minutes of the assembly of the “three upper Estates,” Jan. 16, 1793, NÖLA, StB, 282, p. 12. 65 Votum of the Estate of lords, Oct. 24, 1796, NÖLA, LR 1793–1904, F. 49, 1. 62 63

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Umstände”), were accepted without protest.66 The rallying cry at the Estates became—in the words of Landmarschall Cavriani—“the preservation of the monarchy, religion, clergy, nobility, and property.”67 The addition of “monarchy” to the watchwords invoked by his predecessor Khevenhüller highlighted the evaporation of the earlier tension. The deep trust that prevailed between Hofburg and Landhaus by the early years of the new century explained an unparalleled step taken as a French invasion threatened in 1805. Preparing to withdraw from Vienna, the emperor invited the “three upper Estates” to propose a substitute Landmarschall to replace Count Saurau, who was transferred to Inner Austria for the duration.68 The request was all the more striking given that the occupation would place the person in question in a politically delicate position. For their part, the Estates made a choice calculated to justify official confidence: Count Joachim Egon Fürstenberg, a senior lord and major landowner of progressive views who personified the type of aristocrat which the Habsburgs had historically relied on to govern. Thanks to the Swabian principality that belonged to a Fürstenberg cousin, Joachim Egon moreover bore a resounding name of the Reichsadel with which Napoleon himself was familiar. Fürstenberg would chair the Estates’ committee that remained in session throughout the crisis of late 1805, doing so in a way that was later described as “splendid.”69 Just above Fürstenberg in the line of authority stood Count Rudolph Wrbna, a liberal-minded Austro-Moravian grandee whom the emperor chose as his chief representative in the land below the Enns during his absence. Effectively assuming the place of the Aulic Chancellery (which had left Vienna at the French approach), Wrbna bore the title “aulic commissioner” (Hofkommissar) and supervised those elements of Lower Austrian authority, high and low, that remained in place after the departure of the central government and the arrival of the French. That authority included the Estates.70 At critical moments, Wrbna would be present at meetings of the board that the “three upper Estates” put in place to represent them and oversee their affairs during the occupation. Senior and prominent members of the Estates were chosen to add weight to what was called the “reinforced committee.” Its core constituted the regular members of the college of Deputies and the executive committee.

66 The quotation is found in the aulic decrees of Oct. 10, 1803, NÖLA, StB, 611, Nr. 179; Sept. 1, 1804, NÖLA, StB, 612, Nr. 105; and Sept. 20, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 613, Nr. 133. 67 Bibl, “Die niederösterreichischen Stände,” 97 (fn. 1). 68 Aulic decree to “three upper Estates,” Nov. 5, 1805 (with Estates’ resolution of Nov. 8, 1805), NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 363, folder Landmarschall und Landuntermarschall. 69 Quotation from the letter from Landmarschall Dietrichstein to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, Jan. 31, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung. For the Fürstenberg cousinage, see Erwein H. Eltz and Arno Strohmeyer, eds., Die Fürstenberger: 800 Jahre Herrschaft und Kultur in Mitteleuropa (Korneuburg, 1994). 70 Theophilia Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna als landesfürstlicher Hofkommissär für Niederösterreich während der Besetzung Wiens im Jahre 1805,” MÖStA, supplementary vol. iii/2 (1951): 413–32; minutes of assembly of “three upper Estates,” Nov. 8, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 283, pp. 25–31.

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At most meetings, an impressive assemblage would come together that included two ministers (Count Zinzendorf and Prince Trauttmansdorff, the latter an imperial confidant of Josephian tendency); a handful of Lower Austria’s premier landowners including Prince Sinzendorff, and Counts Hardegg, Seilern, Schönborn, Breunner, and Hoyos; the banker Fries; Landuntermarschall Moser; and four of the archduchy’s grandest prelates (the abbots of Melk, Altenburg, and Seitenstetten as well as the provost of Klosterneuburg). As was necessary, the Viennese Mayor Wohlleben and other members of the city council took part. Between the third week of November and the end of December 1805, the group met on eighteen days, sometimes more than once in twenty-four hours. The frequency was highest when French demands were most incessant—in late November after they took possession of Vienna and in the middle of December in connection with the levy of a war contribution. The college of Deputies met weekly to handle routine affairs not needing the larger body’s attention.71 As the most able and experienced administrator, Baron Prandau would play a leading role at the Estates in seeing that French impositions were met in a way in keeping as far as possible with customary procedure and the preservation of public order. As acting representatives of the archduchy below the Enns, the committee came into early contact with the invaders. Two deputations from the Estates were dispatched across the lines in the second week of November. The first, led by Prince Sinzendorff, met Marshal Murat at St. Pölten; the second and larger one, headed by acting Landmarschall Fürstenberg, reached Napoleon himself near Sieghartskirchen west of the Vienna Woods.72 As in 1809, their mission was to elicit a guarantee of the security of persons and property. Whereas Murat was primarily interested in gaining militarily useful information, Napoleon granted the request, he claimed, in view of the Estates’ “laudable devotion” to their absent ruler. A day later (November 13, 1805), the French marched into Vienna, while Napoleon set up headquarters at nearby Schönbrunn. The French governor-general appointed for Upper and Lower Austria, General Henri Clarke, and the intendant-général of Napoleon’s military household, Pierre Daru, took up residence in the Hofburg. It would be Daru who most frequently transmitted French mandates to the Estates. On November 24 he and Clarke summoned a deputation of the Estates to call on them there. Fürstenberg appeared at the head of a group that included Abbot Berthold Reisinger of Altenburg, Prince Sinzendorff, Baron Prandau, and Ignaz von Kees.73 Reisinger was Lower Austria’s senior abbot, having been head of his monastery since

71

Minutes of the college of Deputies, Nov.–Dec. 1805, NÖLA, StB, 272. Karl August Schimmer, Die französischen Invasionen in Österreich und die Franzosen in Wien in den Jahren 1805 und 1809 (Vienna, 1846), 10–13; Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna,” 415; Walter Simek, “Das Stift Klosterneuburg unter dem Propste Gaudenz Dunkler,” JbStK, new series, 2 (1962): 112. 73 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Nov. 24, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 294. Daru is the French official most often mentioned in the committee’s records in Nov./Dec. 1805. The Estates’ representatives were part of a larger group of Austrian officials that included leading judges who waited on the French that day. Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna,” 416. 72

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the 1760s, while Prosper Sinzendorff, the last of his line, united in his person the entails of an ancient and aristocratic family. The French authorities were clearly curious at becoming acquainted with those responsible for seeing that their requirements were met. The gathering brought agents of the highly centralized Napoleonic state face to face with some of the most knowledgable mid-level representatives of the Austrian composite monarchy, notably Prandau and Kees. By that time, the Estates were wholly involved in trying to meet the insistent demands for oats, hay, and straw, a task made all the more difficult by the occupiers’ sequestration of their disbursement treasury at a cost of nearly two million florins (roughly equivalent to the annual Contribution).74 To meet its obligations, the board turned to outside entrepreneurs, the most important of whom would be the Jewish factor Elkan Reutlinger (1767–1818). In the early weeks of the French presence, the Estates contracted with Reutlinger for provisions. Later they treated with him for 150,000 pairs of shoes required by the French.75 Billeting was another activity organized by the Estates, albeit apparently less intensively. In cooperation with other provincial and civic authorities, Prandau assigned lodgings to both the incoming French in November and the returning Habsburg troops in early January.76 The crushing defeat of the Austro-Russian allies at Austerlitz on December 2 left the archduchy at Napoleon’s mercy. On December 9 the committee learned that a massive war contribution of 32 million francs was to be levied on Lower Austria; the first installment of 12 million (equaling 4,800,000 florins or more than twice the regular Contribution) was due days later.77 Because an armistice had been signed, some at the Landhaus, including Prince Trauttmansdorff, believed that the Estates had no right to concede the requisition: a refusal would have closed the regular channels of taxation to the French. As it was, the Estates lodged a protest with the occupiers, who in response threatened to “shut [them] and other authorities down” and to raise the money by military impressment.78 Direct Napoleonic administration of Lower Austria would have resulted. Under these circumstances and because funds were also needed to finance the unceasing demands for supplies, the Estates’ committee—in the presence of Aulic Commissioner Wrbna—resolved to try to obtain money by imposing a forced loan of 6,200,000 florins at 6 percent on manorial landowners, the clergy, merchants, manufacturers, and the inhabitants 74 Some 1.2 million florins represented tax money that had already come in but had not yet been passed along to the central treasury. The government later refused compensation for the loss on the revealing grounds that the money had not been a public fund, but rather the Estates’ private property. Imperial resolution, Nov. 23, 1811, to the report of Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, June 27, 1811, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 251, bundle Niederösterreich 1812. 75 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Dec. 20, 1805 and Jan. 10, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 294. A contract for shoes was also concluded with Emanuel Baptist Arnstein (c.1778–1838), a convert to Catholicism and younger brother of the banker Baron Nathan Arnstein. For the Estates’ dealings with Reutlinger, see also Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna,” 417, 426–7. 76 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Nov. 24, 1805 and Jan. 4, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 294. Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna,” 417. 77 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Dec. 9–10, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 294. Wassilko, “Rudolph Graf Wrbna,” 418–20. 78 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Dec. 11, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 294.

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of Vienna. The interest rate reflected the corrosion of the credit of the Estates since the early 1790s; their good name nonetheless provided the only available guarantee of repayment. This solution promised to head off the simple confiscation of wealth. A commission chaired by the Landrecht president, Matthias Wilhelm von Haan (himself attached to Wrbna’s commissariat), came into being to oversee implementation, while ranking members of the Estates including Baron Risenfels and Count Breunner, assisted by bookkeepers, collected assessments and issued securities.79 On December 17, this time at Schönbrunn, Napoleon again received a deputation of the Estates, which included both Zinzendorf and Trauttmansdorff. With a personal appeal, the Estates hoped to reduce the financial pressure, if only by the time-honored method of delay. Surrounded by his commanders, the conqueror subjected the group to a long harangue spiced with threats to break up the Austrian inheritance as well as criticism (ironic, coming as it did from him) of the monarchy’s “despotic” character.80 But he also indicated that he might consider a reduction, while at the same time encouraging his listeners to send a delegation to their own emperor, whom he oddly alleged to be hoarding large amounts of money. This was the origin of the notable trek begun on Christmas Eve by Zinzendorf, together with Provost Gaudenz Dunkler of Klosterneuburg, Ignaz von Kees, and the mayor of Vienna, to plead for financial help from Francis, who had withdrawn to the castle of Holics in the hills of north-western Hungary (today Holíč in Slovakia).81 In the meantime, the Estates had recourse to their credit in a new way to meet obligations. The college of Deputies began issuing makeshift promissory notes called Tratten to cover running expenses such as costs for the shoes being made for the occupiers.82 This was an emergency practice employed by the Estates of other Austrian duchies laboring under the French yoke. By the time Zinzendorf ’s delegation returned from Holics carrying a comparatively meagre 200,000 florins, but also a letter of praise and thanks, peace had already been signed at Preßburg. On January 16, 1806, only days after the departure of the French, the emperor re-entered his capital to a thunderous welcome in which the Estates took a leading part. They mounted a guard of honor that together with a deputation of their number escorted Francis and his consort from the city’s outskirts to the Rotenturm gate, where the mayor and other magistrates waited.83 The ensuing festivities lasted for days. The patriotic fervor of

79 By March 1806, by which time the French had withdrawn, almost the entire subscription had been filled, partly thanks to individual subsidies including that of Princess Lubomirska, whose offering of 100,000 gold ducats equaled 775,000 florins. Schimmer, Die französischen Invasionen, 32–6. Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Mar. 11, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 294. In a resolution of Feb. 8, 1806, the Estates thanked Haan for his service. NÖLA, StB, 614, Nr. 8. 80 Hans Wagner, ed., Wien von Maria Theresia bis zur Franzosenzeit: Aus den Tagebüchern des Grafen Karl von Zinzendorf (Vienna, 1972), 15–17; Auer, “Die Aufenthalte Napoleons,” 57–8. 81 Simek, “Das Stift Klosterneuburg,” 115. Napoleon had picked up on a persistent, if unsubstantiated, rumor that the emperor was hording wealth taken with him to Hungary. Paul Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott von 1811 (Vienna, 1912), 67. 82 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Dec. 20, 1805, NÖLA, StB, 294. 83 Schimmer, Die französischen Invasionen, 51–2.

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the coming years that is usually attributed to the activity of the Stadion ministry and its preparations for the renewed fight with Napoleon after 1808 had its origins in the general relief at deliverance and the return of Austrian rule in early 1806. The new foreign minister Stadion witnessed the excitement as he accompanied Francis back to Vienna. The famous imperial proclamation of January 22, 1806, which is ascribed to his influence, sought to sustain popular enthusiasm in the service of Habsburg consolidation and recovery. Within a few months, Stadion was urging that the territorial reservoirs of strength laid bare by the Napoleonic experience be tapped more effectively to the benefit of the general cause.84 Stadion chose the historian and publicist Joseph Hormayr, as his chief ideological collaborator and propagandist, to accompany him into the foreign ministry. In the coming years Hormayr would come to personify the potent fusion of territorial and dynastic patriotism under the impact of both the looming foreign threat and the vivid Romantic interest in historical, literary, and territorial diversity. Hormayr’s homeland, Tyrol, was itself lost to the Habsburgs by the war of 1805. Thanks in part to his restless activity it would rise in 1809 on behalf of its old rights and ancestral dynasty. From Hormayr’s perspective, the Tyrolian inspiration was inseparable from the broader Austrian one. He endeavored “to make an [Austrian] nation” out of the very mixture of the particular (the individual lands) and the general (the wider monarchy).85 Similar impulses underlay Heintl’s rhetoric on Lower Austria quoted at the beginning of this chapter. As the historian Brian Vick has argued, the exclusivist definitions of nation of a later date do little to capture the reality of early nineteenth-century forms of allegiance. The varieties of patriotism and nationalism manifest in the Napoleonic period—dynastic, territorial, regional, linguistic-cultural, and local—were “not mutually exclusive” and might effectively “reinforce one another.”86 Precisely in composite states, in the words of another scholar, “the relationship of component regions and provinces both to each other and to the larger polity itself involve[d] complex and constantly changing shifts in the balance of loyalties.”87 It was to be the correlation of domestic forces achieved over the preceding generations in the Habsburg monarchy that ultimately fed the deep reservoirs of popular constancy upon which the central authorities were able to draw at this time. On the day of his return to Vienna in January 1806, the emperor granted the Estates of Lower Austria the right to wear a special uniform as a privilege and a mark of his esteem. In due course, this would be confirmed by rescript and 84 Hellmuth Rössler, Graf Johann Philipp Stadion: Napoleons deutscher Gegenspieler, 2 vols. (Vienna and Munich, 1966), i, 225, 232–3. 85 André Robert, L’Idée nationale autrichienne et les guerres de Napoléon: L’Apostolat du baron de Hormayr et le salon de Caroline Pichler (Paris, 1933), 273. 86 Brian E. Vick, The Congress of Vienna: Power and Politics after Napoleon (Cambridge, MA and London, 2014), 41. See also Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford, 2014), 24–41. 87 J. H. Elliott, “A Europe of Composite Monarchies,” Past & Present 137 (1992): 70. For patriotic refrains and poems in the years 1808–9, see Karen Hagemann, “ ‘Be Proud and Firm, Citizens of Austria!’: Patriotism and Masculinity in Texts of the ‘Political Romantics’ Written during Austria’s Anti-Napoleonic Wars,” German Studies Review 29 (2006): 41–62.

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complemented by the bestowal of a corresponding gala costume.88 Sometimes taken as evidence of the reduction of the Estates to caparisoned lackeys of the “state,” the award was in fact inspired by the Estates’ own wish for a distinctive uniform that gave sartorial expression to the fact that they had come together around the Habsburg cause in the face of Napoleon. Perhaps more mundanely, the desire reflected changing styles in elite dress. One later commentator reported that the Estates had in earlier times rejected the wearing of uniforms as incompatible with their independence. In fact, military-style garb in the civilian context was largely unknown before the second half of the eighteenth century.89 Joseph II’s rejection of Spanish Court dress in favor of a uniform is legendary. The Estates of the other central lands were not long in applying for and receiving honors similar to those conceded to the Lower Austrians. Suitable for Court occasions and analogous to, if less colorful than, the superb costumes worn by Galician and Hungarian magnates, the new apparel displayed the innate link between provincial fealty and Habsburg loyalty. The military associations of a civilian uniform conferred in the wake of the War of the Third Coalition heralded what would be the most systematic and successful attempt during the Napoleonic period to harness the heightened forms of Habsburg loyalty to the war effort: the creation of a popular militia known as the Landwehr in preparation for the renewed conflict with France. A central initiative planned along territorial lines, it engrossed the Estates individually and collectively as the embodiment of local authority—firmly within the monarchy’s broader composite framework. In the vision propagated by Stadion, Hormayr, and others, the historic lands provided a crucial framework for the popular call to arms. As early as the French incursions of the 1790s, more updated forms of patriotic mobilization in older territorial guise had arisen. When the French, advancing from Italy, overran parts of Inner Austria in 1797, the Lower Austrian Estates agreed to sponsor a cavalry unit.90 Three years later, with the French again approaching, this time from the west, they volunteered to finance the equipment of a light battalion. In gratitude for their “patriotic attitude,” the emperor promised to call it

88 Francis’s oral award of the uniform is referred to in the minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Jan. 20, 1806, NÖLA, StB, 294. The written confirmation for the “three upper Estates” is contained in the aulic rescript, Dec. 20, 1807, NÖLA, StB, 616, Nr. 15. Concerning the gala uniform: Landmarschall Dietrichstein to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, July 28, 1810, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 364. 89 For the claim mentioned in the preceding sentence, see Georg J. Kugler, “Uniform und Mode am Wiener Hof,” in Georg J. Kugler and Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, Des Kaisers teuere Kleider: Festroben und Ornate, Hofuniformen und Livreen vom frühen 18. Jahrhundert bis 1918 (Milan and Vienna, 2000), 49. For the rise of the uniform in eighteenth-century Europe, see Philip Mansel, Dressed to Rule: Royal and Court Costume from Louis XIV to Elizabeth II (New Haven, CT and London, 2005), chap. 2. 90 An eyewitness account in the diary of Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek, Apr. 13–14 and Apr. 22, 1797, SOA Prague, Chotek Family Papers, 147. See Alphons Freiherr von Wrede, Geschichte der K. und K. Wehrmacht: Die Regimenter, Corps, Branchen und Anstalten von 1618 bis Ende des XIX. Jahrhunderts, 5 vols. (Vienna, 1898–1905), v, 18–19; Reinhold Lorenz, Volksbewaffnung und Staatsidee in Österreich (1792–1797) (Vienna and Leipzig, 1926), 128–9.

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the “Lower Austrian Estates battalion.”91 This outfit was destined for the Habsburg standing army rather than an old-style territorial force, while the popular enthusiasm that underpinned these activities augured the response of 1808/09. Symbolically, the intense ferment of dynastic and territorial loyalty in Lower Austria at that time yielded the anthem “God Save the Emperor Francis” set to music specially composed by Haydn. Conceived by the later Landmarschall Saurau, the original idea had been a popular song to boost patriotism.92 In time, the piece would mutate into the Austrian imperial hymn that would be sung until 1918. The territorial militia (Landwehr) summoned into being in June 1808 was a reaction to the dramatic deposition of the Spanish ruling house that both stunned Vienna and heralded a renewal of hostilities with Napoleonic France. While recalling the earlier ad hoc efforts of individual territories, the initiative in fact evidenced the increased organizational abilities of the Habsburg dynastic state in its core lands, now including Salzburg, but also the continuing importance of the composite structures. The emperor’s brother, the archduke John, was given charge of an operation of which he had been the main advocate. Like Hormayr, with whom he collaborated in stirring up the revolt in Bavarian-occupied Tyrol in 1809, he typified the idea that dynastic and territorial patriotism were mutually reinforcing: the Landwehr in support of the common cause was to be realized territory by territory. As the old social incarnation of the lands, the Estates played a collaborative role in organization and mobilization. The Lower Austrian Estates would focus their activity on funding and outfitting.93 In response, the emperor assured them that their “readiness and zeal . . . in preserving Our Monarchy and the territorial constitution (Landesverfassung), which for hundreds of years has guaranteed the happiness and welfare of so many millions, will justify new claims on Our favor and love.”94 In practice, procedures differed from place to place. In Upper Austria corporate help would be required in the matter of weaponry and munitions, a responsibility that was supposed to have lain wholly with the government.95 In the same territory, the Estates sponsored a subscription to pay for the militia; in the duchy of Styria, they set up a “finance commission” that would earn official praise. In a largely agrarian society, landowners as well as bailiffs and other manorial officials were expected to rally local support for the militia and themselves to enlist in leading positions.96 Lower Austria’s most prominent volunteer was one of its foremost landed proprietors, Count Joseph Breunner (1765–1813), lord of the entailed domains of Grafenegg-Neuaigen and Asparn an der Zaya in the quarter below 91

Aulic decree, Oct. 17, 1800, NÖLA, StB, 608, Nr. 93. [Starzer], Beiträge, 350. Cf. Jürg Zimmermann, Handbuch der deutschen Militärgeschichte 1648–1939, i/3: Militärverwaltung und Heeresaufbringung in Österreich bis 1806 (Frankfurt am Main, 1965), 116. 93 Ernst Zehetbauer, Landwehr gegen Napoleon: Österreichs erste Miliz und der Nationalkrieg von 1809 (Vienna, 1999), 81–3; Rössler, Graf Johann Philipp Stadion, i, 292–302. 94 Aulic proposition, Oct. 11, 1808, NÖLA, StB, 616, Nr. 208. 95 This and the following based on Zehetbauer, Landwehr, 84–9. 96 Anton Ernstberger, Böhmens freiwilliger Kriegseinsatz gegen Napoleon 1809 (Munich, 1963), offers insight into popular mobilization in Bohemia, also on a manor-by-manor basis (pp. 93–195). 92

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the Manhartsberg. Breunner preferred his commission as Landwehr battalion commander to the post of Landmarschall for which he had been destined.97 He had commanded the guard of honor that had met the emperor outside Vienna in January 1806. In 1809 he would be taken prisoner in the mountains near Mariazell and, after an exchange that secured his release, promoted to Landwehr brigadier. Despite regional disparities and the difficulties of mounting an operation on such a scale so quickly, the popular call to arms was by most accounts a success. Perhaps more surprisingly, the new militia performed comparatively well under fire. Yet by the second week of May, French troops had again reached the outskirts of Vienna. On this occasion, the delegation sent by the Estates to Napoleon reportedly had to advance through lines of bayonet-pointing soldiers before being admitted to his presence in the palace gardens at Schönbrunn.98 The hostile reception portended the harshness of the coming occupation, which far outdid the treatment meted out in 1805 in terms of length, monetary and material costs, threats of coercion, and actual violence. Initially, the French took possession of Lower Austria’s two southern quarters including Vienna. The fact that in the following weeks Habsburg troops continued to put up bitter resistance, inflicting upon Napoleon his first major battlefield reverse (at Aspern-Essling near Vienna in May), prompted the invaders to tighten the screws. Following the victory of the French at Wagram in July, the two quarters north of the Danube also came largely under Napoleonic control until peace was concluded in early October. Vienna was not evacuated until the middle of November, while the last French soldiers did not leave the archduchy until just before Christmas. The occupation of 1809 lasted for more than six months rather than the six weeks in 1805. On May 8, in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the French before the walls of Vienna, the Estates met for the first time under the chairmanship of the new acting Landmarschall Dietrichstein in what would be the last such assembly until January 1810. As in November 1805, they chose a number of prominent members and illustrious names to bolster the “reinforced executive committee” for the duration.99 But this time the French had other ideas. Governor-General Andréossy, Napoleon’s former ambassador in Vienna, let it be known that, while the Estates were to be confirmed in their administrative activity, the panel’s composition was to be strictly limited and names approved in advance. In addition to the ex officio participants from the “reinforced committee,” the French allowed only six of the fifteen personages foreseen by the Estates.100 They included Karl Zinzendorf, whom Napoleon was known to respect, as well as the privy councilor, Count Wilczek, and the Schotten abbot. With one exception, all would routinely attend the meetings together with the six members of the college of Deputies (the provost of Klosterneuburg, the abbot of Göttweig, Count Veterani, Baron Bartenstein,

97

Wrede, Geschichte der K. und K. Wehrmacht, v, 98. As related in the diary of Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek, May 12, 1809, SOA Prague, Chotek Family Papers, 148, vol. 1809/ii, p. 243. 99 Minutes of the Estates, May 8, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 283. 100 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” May 19, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 98

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Ignaz von Kees, and Joseph von Mayenberg) and a handful of regular executive committee members, most notably Baron Prandau, who would turn up only in late July. In contrast to 1805, when Prandau had been the board’s workhorse, Bartenstein and Kees would be the most active figures in 1809, though neither man had Prandau’s prestige or influence. Kees’s bitter opposition to the use of corporate credit to satisfy French requirements tended to isolate him from his fellow Estates. Early on, the Estates learned that the French planned to have a commissioner take part in the committee’s proceedings. The assignment of the diplomat, Louis Pierre Édouard Bignon, to that purpose did not take place until late June, by which time the Estates were fully involved in trying to meet the ceaseless demands for supplies and provisions. The cooperation already shown perhaps explains why Landmarschall Dietrichstein was able to avert Bignon’s actual presence at deliberations.101 Even so, Bignon, along with intendant-général Daru, would play an important role in transmitting and enforcing French directives—as in connection with the war contribution levied on Lower Austria. Unlike in 1805, when a special aulic commissioner, Count Wrbna, had functioned as the emperor’s highest representative, the Lower Austrian government under its regular president, Count Ferdinand Bissingen, initially remained the senior functioning authority in the land below the Enns.102 Bissingen did not attend the Estates’ meetings, as Wrbna had done in 1805. Still, the provincial government, the Estates, and the Viennese magistrate worked together relatively harmoniously under enormous French pressure.103 Together, Bissingen and Dietrichstein would come in for rough treatment at the occupiers’ hands. After the signature of peace in October, Bissingen would be transferred to Inner Austria and replaced by Wrbna, now imperial grand chamberlain, as the chief exponent of Habsburg power as the French evacuated the archduchy. He again bore the title of aulic commissioner and exercised direct authority over the Estates.104 The violations to their liberties entailed by the limits placed on their committee were quickly overshadowed by the violence that distinguished the second French occupation in relation to the public generally and the Estates in particular. On May 21, in the park known as the Augarten, a French soldier shot down Baron Sala, a kinsman of the former lords’ Deputy of that name, for refusing to heed an order.105 The 101 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” June 21, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. The Estates’ activity in provisioning the French army is less apparent from the sources of 1809 than those of 1805 thanks to the lack of registers of business from the college of Deputies. That it occurred, in part with the help of outside suppliers as in 1805, is evident from the discussions in the “reinforced executive committee” (e.g., May 27, June 21, Aug. 21, and Sept. 2, 1809). In his diary (Oct. 6, 1809) the provincial councilor, Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek, reported on consultations with representatives of the Estates regarding payments to “suppliers.” SOA Prague, Chotek Family Papers, 148, vol. 1809/ii, p. 548. 102 [Starzer], Beiträge, 370–3. 103 Walter Boguth, “Die Okkupation Wiens und Niederösterreichs durch die Franzosen im Jahre 1809 und ihre Folgen für das Land,” JbLkN, new series 7 (1908): 319–26. 104 Diary of Count Johann Nepomuk Chotek, Oct. 20, 1809, SOA Prague, Chotek Family Papers, 148, vol. 1809/ii, pp. 567–8. Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Oct. 21, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 105 Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 307.

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following day the Estates learned that the belongings of Landwehr officers were to be sequestered and their houses torched if they did not abandon their charges and return home straightaway. This was felt to be particularly unjust given that some of the officers in question, including Count Breunner, were prisoners of war. No French minister was willing to pass a supplication in this matter to Napoleon, who declined to receive emissaries led by Zinzendorf appealing the decision.106 This episode would be typical of the hardened attitude to the Estates’ entreaties in 1809 that contrasted with the practice of 1805. The French rightly suspected that petitioning played for time and perhaps also took place at Habsburg instigation. Napoleon’s readiness to relent in one affair in early June was exceptional. In keeping with the way that other parts of occupied Europe were being terrorized by hostage-taking, he ordered that Prince Metternich (the former imperial diplomat and father of the later foreign minister), Count Pergen (the retired police minister and Landmarschall), Count Hieronymus Colloredo (the former prince-bishop of Salzburg), and Count Friedrich Hardegg (the imperial grand master of the hunt) be deported to France.107 Given that all were old men— Pergen was over eighty—there were fears at the Landhaus that they would not survive the journey’s rigors. Following a plea by the Estates, Napoleon reversed the decision, though with the proviso that the men not leave Vienna.108 The conqueror was notorious for feeding his armies off the lands he subjugated and otherwise forcing the enemy to cover his costs. After the battle of Wagram in early July failed to knock Austria out of the war, financial extortion in the territories under Napoleon’s control became a systematic weapon of war. As the intendantgénéral Daru put it to Lower Austria’s representatives: “I have to ruin you in order to make the emperor [Francis] incapable of fighting.”109 In July, soon after a Franco-Austrian truce took effect, the occupiers levied a colossal contribution of 50 million francs on the land below the Enns—18 million more than in 1805.110 Over the following months, remorseless bullying would be employed to have fixed installments of the sum brought in. The Estates had twenty-four hours to raise the first two million; a deadline of ten days was set for a further ten million (one million per day). Three groups came under particular duress in connection with monetary exactions: the provincial authorities and the Estates because of their control of elements of the fiscal system, and the small Viennese banking community because of its access to capital.

Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” May 22 and June 9, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. For hostage-taking elsewhere in French-occupied Europe, see Broers, The Napoleonic Empire, 240, 271–2. Around this same time, the younger Metternich, himself taken prisoner against international convention at the end of his time at the Paris embassy, arrived back in Vienna under guard. For this episode, see Wolfram Siemann, Metternich: Stratege und Visionär. Eine Biografie (Munich, 2016), 293–8. 108 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” June 6, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 109 Eduard Wertheimer, “Zur Geschichte Wiens im Jahre 1809 (Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Krieges von 1809),” AÖG 74 (1889): 199. 110 Landmarschall Dietrichstein made this demand known at the meeting of the “reinforced executive committee” on July 21, 1809. NÖLA, StB, 295. Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 320. 106 107

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Though stalling where possible, the Estates met unavoidable obligations primarily through resort to their frayed credit—again an effort to keep wealth from being stolen or drained away. As early as late June, the “three upper Estates” had agreed to guarantee jointly with the city of Vienna a large issue of paper that essentially constituted IOUs (again known as Tratten, at 6 percent interest) to cover costs connected with the grande armée.111 To pay the war contribution, they raised money through forced loans similar to the one of December 1805. One such was levied on the owners of seigniorial property; a slightly later one also included other groups not hit by a similar imposition on the part of the provincial government.112 The Estates apportioned these burdens. When the desired results failed to materialize, the French adopted a more radical tone. In early August they threatened “forcible means against the nobility, clergy, and bankers.”113 When the first quarter of the contribution had still not been received by late September, they warned that intendants would be sent into the countryside to enforce a tax on manorial landowners at five times the regular rate.114 Against this menacing background one of the more memorable encounters between Napoleonic and Austrian authority during the occupation of 1809 supervened. In an attempt to force the pace, an enraged intendant named Jules-Jean-Baptiste Angelès had the chamber surrounded by troops in which the Landmarschall, the president of the provincial government Bissingen, two Deputies of the Estates (Bartenstein and Kees), and several government councilors were negotiating with eight Viennese bankers. Even a visit to the privy required an armed escort. Another group of soldiers took up position outside Dietrichstein’s personal lodgings.115 The Landmarschall’s sharp protest caused Angelès to deny complicity, but the fact that peace negotiations were underway induced the French to extract as much as possible as quickly as possible. Given the inherent difficulties of raising a tax in unfamiliar rural areas where they might have little local help, the occupiers agreed to accept in lieu of the threatened manorial tax a sum advanced by a consortium of banking houses led by Geymüller and secured by the Estates.116 In the end, the French managed to collect “only” 12,500,000 of the 50 million francs originally imposed (equaling 14,765,551 florins in the inflated currency of the day known as Bancozettel). The Estates furnished or guaranteed around 40 percent (6,041,944 florins) of the amount. The rest came out of the provincial government’s treasury. The total debt contracted by the Estates in 1809 amounted to more than four times their share of the contribution paid to the French and in turn accounted for slightly more than half of all liabilities incurred by them, the provincial government, and the circle offices during the occupation.117 The vast majority of the Estates’ Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 319–20. Copies of the respective public announcements (Kundmachungen) issued by the “reinforced executive committee,” July 28 and Aug. 3, 1809, in NÖLA, VP, 25. Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 323–4. 113 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Aug. 6, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 114 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Sept. 24, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 115 Minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” Sept. 26, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295. 116 Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 320, 325. 117 The figures are found in Boguth, “Die Okkupation,” 326–8. 111 112

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obligations will have been contracted in connection with provisioning a foreign army, large parts of which were concentrated for months in the land below the Enns. The war’s two main battles were fought on Vienna’s outskirts. In the third week of July, the number of men and horses stationed in and around the city was estimated at 42,500 and 9,300 respectively. The figure for soldiers had increased to some 120,000 a month later. Only part of the corporate debt made its way in due course into the central government’s books. This circumstance suggests that the Estates also mobilized what was known as their “domestic credit” to meet expenses.118 The attempt through the use of the Estates’ good offices to avoid the simple confiscation of wealth under the occupiers was not entirely successful, as was shown by the imposition of a levy similar to the Klassensteuer in the second week of September.119 The resort to taxation reflected the virtual exhaustion of corporate credit as well as worries that the borrowing and debt system run by the Estates might collapse under the strain—and with it their prime raison d’être. Since the seventeenth century, they had been purchasing extensions on a privileged existence by placing their good offices at the government’s disposal. This would cease in the event of bankruptcy, fears of which were rife as never before during the French occupation of 1809. No better expression was given of them—or of the general significance of the Estates’ credit—than the response of Ignaz von Kees to the question of whether the Estates should mediate loans to raise the massive contribution demanded by the French in July 1809: As the advisor [Referent] responsible for credit affairs, I regard myself as obliged to declare ahead of time that under such circumstances I can and will not accede to a proposition concerning a loan undertaken with the guarantee of the Estates. Yes! I confess unreservedly that at the moment their credit ceases [to function] I must regard the Estates as dissolved. For their public credit is still the most powerful prop of their existence, and the necessity of protecting it on behalf of the [Habsburg] state’s credit their best protection against those enemies of the Estates who know nothing of the strengths and true interests of the land, as well as against the intrigues of those children of fortune [Glückskinder] who are bounding up the steps.120

In the event, Kees’s advice would not carry the day, just as the social anxiety he articulated, which echoed that of the knights in crafting their anti-Jewish ordinance a year earlier, did not reflect sentiment among the nobility as a whole. Landed nobles most immediately menaced by Napoleonic threats of confiscation called the tune at the Estates.

118 The central government’s accounts for both 1810 and 1815 mention only Tratten issued by the Estates (in the amount of 1,872,600 florins—possibly from 1805) and bonds jointly guaranteed by the provincial government, the Estates, and the city of Vienna (worth 12,951,000 florins). These obligations are moreover not listed under the rubric for the regular treasury debt contracted by the Lower Austrian Estates (1810: 32,858,382 florins, and 1815: 30,881,884). FHKA, ORH, ZRA 1810 and 1815. 119 A copy of the relevant public circular, Sept. 9, 1809, is found in NÖLA, VP, 27. 120 Kees’s Votum from which this quotation is taken is bound together with the minutes of the “reinforced executive committee,” July 25, 1809, NÖLA, StB, 295.

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The disaster of 1809 plunged the Habsburg monarchy into a deep crisis. The gigantic, unsecured debt in the form of a runaway paper currency issued for military spending now jeopardized both the economy and public finances. As an antidote, the councils of power considered remedies of Josephian dimensions.121 Some touched directly on the Estates. Soon after the Peace of Schönbrunn, the streamlining of administrative structures was taken in hand. In early 1810 the Lower Austrian Estates learned that a union of the archduchies above and below the Enns might occur. The original separation dated to the late Middle Ages. The plan foresaw a merger not only of the ruler’s institutions but also the Estates, one that even Joseph II had not entertained seriously when he combined the Silesian and Moravian agencies. In the end, the fears for the Estates’ credit in Lower and Upper Austria, so essential even now to public finances, outweighed the hopes of cost savings. The Estates in Linz proudly pointed out that their credit was so solid that “three invasions and extortions of every kind had not wholly been able to ruin it.”122 But the search for ways to economize—also at the Estates—went on. In early 1813 Francis abolished the annual pay for members of the Lower Austrian Estates’ executive committee that had been initially conceded by Leopold II.123 The Landhaus would repeatedly, if fruitlessly, protest this decision, though the committee continued to function as before. The most difficult political issue facing Vienna after 1809 related to who would foot the terrible bill for the now unavoidable currency reform. Over the previous decade, the printing presses had flooded the market with hundreds of millions in florins in unsecured paper. Whereas the costs of earlier conflicts that could not be met by taxation and other revenues had been paid for through the creation of secured debt whose worth stood in relation to income—much of it with the Estates’ help—the outlays for the existential struggle with Napoleon had broken the pattern. To alleviate the burden on the actual holders of the Bancozettel, the monarchy’s finance minister, Aulic Chamber President O’Donell (in office 1808–10), foresaw the landed classes of the Bohemian-Austrian territories bearing a significant share of the costs in two ways. First, he proposed suppressing the surviving monasteries and using the proceeds from the sale of their holdings to underwrite currency reform. The deliberations on this question in the Aulic Chamber exhibited a distinctly Josephian, even anti-clerical tinge. O’Donell was himself of Josephian stamp.124 The consequences of suppression would have been

121

Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott, 17–20. Quotation from Franz X. Stauber, Historische Ephemeriden über die Wirksamkeit der Stände von Österreich ob der Enns (Linz, 1884), 85. That champion of the Estates’ credit below the Enns, Ignaz von Kees, submitted the advisory opinion (dated May 23, 1810) that served as the basis of the diet’s report to Court on the matter of a merger (July 5, 1810). Both are found in NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 364. 123 Aulic decree, Jan. 5, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Verordnete. 124 Beer, Die Finanzen, 50, 54, 60. Wartime recourse to the lands of the Church had been mooted as early as the War of the Second Coalition. Dean, Austrian Policy during the French Revolutionary Wars, 113. 122

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particularly manifest in Lower Austria, where many major foundations had survived the 1780s. In the end, a ministerial conference watered down the plans by suggesting the sale or mortgage of monastic property, rather than outright institutional dissolution. Even then, ideological and financial reservations persisted further up. There were worries about Austria’s reputation as a defender of the “venerable order of things,” but also about corporate credit given the religious houses that still belonged to the Estates.125 Second, O’Donell devised a 10 percent levy on the assessed value of real property in the central territories (as opposed to a tax on the income from property) that aimed at land as the prime source of wealth in a largely rural society. The levy would have corrected to some extent the stark reliance on regressive indirect rather than direct taxation.126 The proceeds from both the new tax and the monastic sales were to flow into the same sinking fund. To inspire public confidence in the planned new currency, O’Donell resolved to co-opt leading landowners into the actual process of monetary conversion. Almost inevitably, thanks to their financial reputation, the Estates were chosen for this task. Hence the success of O’Donell’s project depended upon a group whose wealth was to be appreciably diminished by the levy on property and whose corporate clout was to be impaired by the sale of monastic lands. In May 1810 the so-called United Redemption and Indemnification Deputation (Vereinigte Einlösungs- und Tilgungs-Deputation) came into being to oversee the planned currency exchange. Nine members came from the Bohemian-Austrian lands that remained under Habsburg rule, three from Hungary, one from Transylvania, and there was one Viennese merchant.127 At a special Lower Austrian assembly attended by some fifty prelates and nobles, Landmarschall Dietrichstein outlined the attributes necessary in their own mandatary: landowning, high birth (so as not to be at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the deputies of other territories), and not in imperial-royal service.128 For what would be the last time before his death a few years later, the Estates called on their most eminent member, Count Zinzendorf, whose reputation and financial expertise seemed to predestine him for the task. But he declined. The second largest number of votes went to the Landwehr hero, Count Joseph Breunner, who was duly elected. As an “independent authority,” the Deputation was to oversee the encashment of the inflated Bancozettel into new paper money (called “redemption bills” or Einlösungsscheine) at a specified rate. It was furthermore empowered to raise money in its own name by mortgaging state and monastic property.129 Presided over by 125 126

216.

Beer, Die Finanzen, 59–60. On the trend in taxation, see Weiss, “Das Verhältnis von direkten und indirekten Steuern,”

127 A list is found in Franz Xaver von Krones, Aus Oesterreichs stillen und bewegten Jahren 1810–1812 und 1813–1815 (Innsbruck, 1892), 17. 128 Minutes of Lower Austrian diet, June 14, 1810, NÖLA, StB, 282, p. 440. Krones’s assertion that the deputies were chosen by the emperor rather than elected by the Estates does not correspond to the record for Lower Austria. Krones, Aus Oesterreichs stillen und bewegten Jahren, 21. But see Beer, Die Finanzen, 64. 129 Quotation from aulic decree, May 19, 1810, NÖLA, StB, 618, Nr. 89. See also Beer, Die Finanzen, 64. Later, Count Julius Veterani appears as the Lower Austrian member of the

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Grand Chamberlain Wrbna, the first session in July 1810 was opened by the Obersthofmeister, Prince Trauttmansdorff: the paradox of an “independent” body meeting under the auspices of the two highest-ranking great officers of state was a quintessentially Austrian one—it exemplified the intrinsically interlocking relationship of central and territorial financial power. The shaky official consensus on O’Donell’s plan was already unwinding before his death in May 1810, though parts of it, including the property assessment and the Deputation, were being put into at least formal effect. In Lower Austria Landmarschall Dietrichstein, a protégé of Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, who opposed the suppression of the religious houses, chaired the panel charged with the valuation of monastic holdings. Quite in contrast to their passivity in the face of the storm in the 1780s, the prelates themselves, led by the provost of Klosterneuburg, Gaudenz Dunkler, responded with delaying tactics.130 Here we discern Dietrichstein’s hand at work given that Dunkler was serving at that time in the college of Deputies under the Landmarschall’s direction. A representative of one of the monarchy’s great landed families and himself the owner of handsome domains, Dietrichstein helped scuttle O’Donell’s 10 percent property tax.131 While it might be possible to construe the Landmarschall’s opposition as simple foot-dragging by the Estates, the decisive political dividing line lay not between them and the government, but between the holders of the devalued currency and the owners of real property. Both groups were represented in the Estates. Not least thanks to their financial potency as creditors of the state, the landed proprietors, including potent interests at the Landhaus, had the better lobby in the halls of power. This was apparent in the appointment of O’Donell’s successor, Count Joseph Wallis, who in his previous capacity as Bohemian grand burgrave had chaired the Estates in Prague. The Bohemian Estates held a greater share of Habsburg treasury debt than any other corporate body.132 Where O’Donell had placed a comparatively heavy burden on the Bohemian-Austrian landed establishment, Wallis’s financial plans redistributed the load toward the currency holders as well as the Hungarian lands not thought to have borne a proportionate share of the war burden. In the expedient to which Wallis finally had recourse, commonly known as the “state bankruptcy” of 1811, the legal tender was effectively reduced in value by four-fifths rather than the two-thirds foreseen by his predecessor.133 The property tax was cancelled; the monastic sales ceased before they had really begun. Most Deputation. Landmarschall Dietrichstein to Grand Aulic Chancellor Ugarte, May 4, 1813, NÖLA, StA, Reihe 2, 366, folder Ständische Einrichtung. 130 Beer, Die Finanzen, 71–4; Simek, “Das Stift Klosterneuburg,” 135–7. 131 At the diet of Oct. 8, 1810, the Estates thanked Dietrichstein for his support in this matter. Minutes of the diet, NÖLA, StB, 283, p. 462. 132 Volker Press, “The System of Estates in the Austrian Hereditary Lands and in the Holy Roman Empire: A Comparison,” in R. J. W. Evans and T. V. Thomas, eds., Crown, Church and Estates: Central European Politics in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke and London, 1991), 18, reported that Wallis’s intervention in the name of the Bohemian Estates after the disaster at Austerlitz in 1805 had “saved the monarchy’s creditworthiness.” 133 Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott, 72. Lothar Höbelt, “ ‘Der Bankrott ist eine Steuer wie jede andere . . . ’: Die Kriegsfinanzierung und die Währungsreform von 1811,” in Claudia

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striking from our perspective, the bankruptcy did not affect the capital value of the interest-bearing public debt, including that under the Estates’ guarantee.134 The intermediary authorities continued to administer their shares as one of the few steadying factors in Habsburg public finances. The ongoing significance of their financial power would be apparent soon after the return of peace in the appointment of Landmarschall Dietrichstein as the first permanent governor of the new National Bank (1817). This foundation purposed a renewed reform of the currency.135 It represented the last of a long line of efforts dating back more than a century to harness the financial repute of the Lower Austrian Estates to the benefit of the central treasury. Under Wallis, O’Donell’s “Redemption and Indemnification Deputation” remained in place to see that the amount of new paper money (called Wiener Währung) did not exceed the publicly specified proportion of one to five of the old currency.136 It was powerless to keep the printing presses from being cranked up again when Austria joined the Allied coalition against Napoleon in 1813. Unlike Wallis, who had staked his reputation on the solidity of the new medium of exchange, the Deputation did not resign and would also play a role in operations related to the postwar National Bank. Though Wallis had shifted the costs of reform away from landowners, they still shouldered a portion of the burden. This was apparent in two ways. First, the interest rates on the long-term state debt, including that managed by the Estates, were halved, a move that itself amounted to a partial default. Until the rate was restored to 4 percent after the war, the interest income from the Estates’ paper decreased accordingly. The second change represented a milestone in the history of Austrian taxation that has been overshadowed by the currency crisis. Wallis provided that all taxes and other charges be quintupled in order to avoid a loss in state revenue following the devaluation of the legal tender to one-fifth of its previous worth.137 In fact, the Lower Austrian Contribution rose in real terms under Wallis from 2,029,033 to 2,705,378 florins.138 This increase of the regular annual grant was the first since the Haugwitz reform of 1748. It was long overdue given the steep rise of indirect taxation in the intervening years as well as the skyrocketing costs of war since the late 1780s. We should also remember that the Estates’ ability to borrow on behalf of the central treasury depended directly on the relationship between their fiscal intake (the Contribution) and the debt already contracted. After the turn of the century, following a decade of war, their borrowing power had severely diminished. For this reason too, the failure to raise the rates of regular direct taxation before Fräss-Ehrfeld, ed., Napoleon und seine Zeit: Kärnten—Innerösterreich—Illyrien (Klagenfurt, 2009), 291–300, points to currency reform as tending to favor the interests of the landed classes. 134 Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott, 74, 85–6. Beer, Die Finanzen, 81, reports that this did not apply to the Tratten that the Estates had issued during the French occupation. 135 Rössler, Graf Johann Philipp Stadion, ii, 171; Siegfried Pressburger, Das österreichische Noteninstitut, i/1 (Vienna, 1959), 121–2. 136 Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott, 72–3. 137 Stiassny, Der österreichische Staatsbankrott, 70. 138 Aulic rescript, Mar. 26, 1811, NÖLA, StB, 619, Nr. 74.

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1811 must be regarded as a major financial lapse—if a politically explicable one. For too long, the government had accepted the financial parameters of the Theresan compromise with the land- and debt-holding classes. Admittedly, there was no new Haugwitz in sight. Still, the rise in the Contribution was not regulated by a new recess as in 1748, nor were the Estates asked for their consent in advance. Yet the option for the Wallis reform rather than the O’Donell one forestalled any basic alienation of those classes, which remained the regime’s political backbone. After 1811 a tax proposition citing the new sum would be submitted annually to the diet for approval. The emperor’s assurance that he did not intend “to circumscribe their privileges” and his appeal to the “urgency of the matter”—justifications accepted until then by the Estates with little dissent—failed to avert a protest of the new tax increase. This protest signaled a move away from the relatively conflict-free and patriotic atmosphere of the years to 1809. Had the regime not continued to have the fundamental support of the elites, it would have found itself in a fatal situation: widespread economic and financial misery coupled with the inability to whip up patriotism. The disastrous outcome of the war of 1809 had forced a shift to a pro-French foreign policy under the new foreign minister Metternich, one that was not conducive to nationalist effervescence.139 Terrified that an incident might provoke Napoleon, the authorities clapped on the censorship. Even more, the tense international situation required continuing military expenditures that had to be squeezed out of a population battered by a generation of conflict. The Estates were still the only channel for the official political expression of grievances. In the spring of 1812, as a Franco-Russian war looked ever more likely, an extra levy of 736,000 florins was imposed on Lower Austria to fund an “observation corps” in Galicia—an operation ostensibly aimed at the preservation of Habsburg neutrality. The Estates again objected to the failure to submit a formal proposal to the diet.140 The old conflict concerning the consumption taxes (Taz/Ungeld ) sold off long before by the princely domain to the Estates flared up again for the first time since Joseph II’s days, the authorities again demanding that those who owned the taxes (primarily landowners) hand over a greater share of what they actually took in.141 Passive resistance was more common, ranging from the slow intake of taxes to requests by the Estates that they not be held responsible when the sums imposed could not be brought in.142 The government countered by threatening cadaster reform and trying to ram through a tougher form of distraint on back taxpayers. The Estates responded by asking that they be consulted on the former and declared 139

Schroeder, The Transformation, 405–8; Scott, The Birth of a Great Power System, 351. Apparent from the aulic rescript of Apr. 26, 1812 and the aulic decree of July 20, 1812, NÖLA, StB, 620, nos. 72 and 120. 141 The imperial decision is recorded on the “Referatsbogen” dated July 8, 1812, FHKA, Kredithofkommissionsakten, rNr. 251, bundle Niederösterreich 1812. 142 Such a request is clear from the aulic decree, Dec. 3, 1812, NÖLA, StB, 620, Nr. 215. The “extraordinary tax arrears in Lower Austria” are mentioned in the aulic decree, Aug. 10, 1812, NÖLA, StB, 620, Nr. 132. 140

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the latter “not practicable.”143 Metternich’s delicate diplomatic negotiations leading up to Austria’s entry into the Allied coalition against Napoleon in the late summer of 1813 were equally unconducive to the patriotic feeling that might have helped paper over the differences, ones that remained apparent after the outbreak of hostilities as well. In August 1813 the central authorities passed down a demand for a consignment of Lower Austrian cattle for the troops in Bohemia directly through the circle offices rather than the Estates, who again asserted their long-standing rights. The protest was brushed off in language reminiscent of the 1780s.144 The deliberations on the tax request in the fall of 1813 marked the first time in years in which there had been anything more than virtually automatic consent. The prelates found that the economic and financial situation made it impossible “to comply exactly with the All-Highest demands.”145 A shadow of the old practice of replying to the tax request with an explication of provincial grievances flickered across the debate in the Estate of knights.146 In the senior noble Estate, the evidence suggests that Landmarschall Dietrichstein used opening remarks, in which he himself touched on the “hard-pressed situation of lords and subjects,” to head off unwelcome discussion—at least in the written record.147 The difficulties in mobilizing authority and resources in one of its most important territories in the years after 1811 explain in part the problems that beset the monarchy’s war effort in 1813/14, even as it managed to field the largest Allied force. But the Habsburg regime retained its domestic footing: the elites did not abandon Francis in the dark years after the bankruptcy of 1811 as their French counterparts had abandoned Louis XVI in comparable circumstances in the late 1780s. And as success against Napoleon began to look possible after all, the Estates rallied again. As early as November 1813, already anticipating the emperor’s triumphant return to his capital, they began planning not only for the event itself but also a lasting monument to the victory.148 After considering various ideas, they settled on charitable donations to needy officers and war widows amounting to several tens of thousands of florins.149 Prince Schwarzenberg, the commander of the Habsburg and Allied armies, was invited to distribute the money as he saw fit. Perhaps aptly in view of their part in the war effort since 1792, only representatives of the Bohemian and Lower Austrian Estates among the privileged corps of the Habsburg lands took part in the festive re-entry of the emperor into Vienna on June 16, 1814 after more than a year’s absence.150 The Bohemian Noble Guard accompanied Francis from Schönbrunn palace to the Theresianum just beyond the glacis outside the city walls. There a procession formed up for the final passage into 143

Estates’ resolutions, both dated Apr. 10, 1813, NÖLA, StB, 621, Nrs. 12, 13. Aulic decree, Aug. 15, 1813, NÖLA, StB, 621, Nr. 160. 145 Minutes of Estate of prelates, Nov. 16, 1813, NÖLA, PA, HS 5. 146 Minutes of Estate of knights, Nov. 16, 1813, NÖLA, RA, HS 20, pp. 380–1. 147 Minutes of Estate of lords, Nov. 16, 1813, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 55. 148 Minutes of “reinforced executive committee,” Nov. 13, 1813, NÖLA, StB, 296. 149 Minutes of “reinforced executive committee,” Mar. 26, 1814, NÖLA, StB, 296; “Feierlichkeiten von Seite der Landstände wegen Ankunft Sr.M.,” Mar. 8, 1814, HHStA, OMeA, ZA Prot. 47, f. 134r–135r. 150 Wiener Zeitung, June 16, 1814. 144

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Vienna. Conspicuous among the participants were the Lower Austrian Estates on horseback, led by Landmarschall Dietrichstein. After sunset that same day, the Landhaus shone in celebratory illumination arranged by the Estates at a cost of more than 20,000 fl. Five days later, the Estates-based deputations of “all provinces of the Austrian imperial state [Kaiserstaat]” gathered in the Hofburg’s ceremonial hall, the palace’s most magnificent space that had been designed a decade earlier by the architect Louis Montoyer on the emperor’s behalf. Standing among a glittering entourage of great officers of state and guards captains, Francis received them in joint audience. A unique sight met the imperial eye: the incarnation of his entire composite monarchy—including the Hungarian lands—stood arrayed before him. Its representatives offered the emperor the “homage of their congratulations” on the successful conclusion to the war.151 For his part, he referred to them as the “keystones of my throne.” This was to be the last such political manifestation of the whole Habsburg polity before 1918. 151

“Audienz der Stände,” June 21, 1814, HHStA, OMeA, ZA Prot 47, f. 158–60.

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Conclusion With the close of the Napoleonic era, our story of war, government, and territorial power in the Habsburg monarchy nears its end. In the years after 1815, the Lower Austrian Estates’ financial prestige would be co-opted for the new National Bank through the appointment of Landmarschall Dietrichstein as its first governor (1817).1 Soon thereafter, the cadaster from Joseph II’s reign would be provisionally reintroduced in preparation for a new survey that would be completed without the political dislocations that accompanied the earlier effort.2 With the exception of what were in effect policing actions in Piedmont and Naples in the 1820s that met little resistance and were paid for by the occupied, the Austrian empire would not wage war again until the summer of the revolutionary year 1848, when Radetzky took the field against Charles Albert of Sardinia. The Estates of the archduchy below the Enns had famously been in session at the start of the domestic upheaval in the Habsburg monarchy in March of that year. They were still meeting in their age-old guise as a corps of prelates, nobles, and townsmen.3 Lower Austria would have to wait until 1861 for a diet based on modern constitutional principles. The period of almost continuous armed conflict between 1787 and 1815 would be the last in which the Estates fully filled the role into which they had grown with the rise of a permanent standing army after the Thirty Years War. In the intervening generations, that role had undergone repeated change under conditions of fiscal-military exigency and shifting conceptions of government, representation, and intermediary power. In the 1650s, under the guidance of Landmarschall Ernst Traun, the former General Field War Commissary, the Estates were only just beginning to adjust to the idea that they would have to help maintain a Habsburg army financially and logistically—also in peacetime. At that time, they remained institutionally involved through the Landmarschall’s tribunal in dispensing justice, a core area of princely authority. The medieval understanding of the Estates as representative of the Land remained current. By the end of our period, they were largely seen as a privileged corps embodying the agrarian, landed interest. And they had become key financiers of the Habsburg dynastic state. In their long history, the Estates were perhaps never more important

1

Siegfried Pressburger, Das österreichische Noteninstitut, i/1 (Vienna, 1959), 122. For cadaster reform, see Helmut Rumpler, Eine Chance für Mitteleuropa: Bürgerliche Emanzipation und Staatsverfall in der Habsburgermonarchie (Vienna, 1997), 152. 3 Karl Hugelmann, “Die Landtagsbewegung des Jahres 1848 in Österreich unter der Enns,” JbLkN, new series, 13/14 (1914/15): 494–530. 2

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than in the half-century or so after 1756. The Seven Years War and the revolutionary and Napoleonic conflicts were high-water marks of their borrowing activity on behalf of the Habsburg cause. The dramatic deepening of the wells of corporate credit was an achievement of the Theresan state that built on rather than overcame the practices of preceding generations. By 1748 the history of the Estates’ ability to raise money under their own good name dated back two centuries. Since the later sixteenth century, they had contracted tens of millions of florins in debt to pay off cameral obligations, fund the military, and for other purposes. With the almost unceasing warfare and the dramatic growth of the army between the 1680s and 1710s, the pattern of borrowing through the Estates took on a new, persistent quality. Given the comparatively favorable rates of interest on their loans, this was a major attainment of Leopold I’s reign that would benefit his successors into the nineteenth century. These credit operations pulled capital out of its hiding places to the benefit of both elites and government. Since the Estates themselves were originally the prime investors in the debt they issued and hence had reason to ensure that it was serviced, they had an intrinsic interest in seeing that the diet’s annual grant, which underlay it, was set at a corresponding level. As liabilities grew, so too did the pressure to increase taxation. This was evidenced by the periodic “recesses” between the government and the Lower Austrian Estates, the first of which was signed in 1689. Even as the diet remained indispensable as an implicit guarantee of the debt, the Estates’ room for maneuver over the regular grant was diminishing long before Haugwitz fixed a wartime Contribution in peacetime. This reform too followed on the increased Habsburg ability after the wars of the later seventeenth century to extract money from the elites. The precedents included not only fast money in the form of loans but also fiscal novelties such as property taxes and a capitation on the wealthy and privileged. Leopold I’s government imposed the first successful universal tax in Habsburg history. These developments were accompanied among the Estates by a more expansive form of pan-monarchical patriotism that had the effect of directing territorial energies to the more general good. Without the reformed Contribution of 1748 and the relentless pressure to bring it in subsequently, the scale of borrowing from and by the Estates during the Seven Years War would not have been possible. By the conflict’s end in 1763, the Estates, together with their counterparts of the other central lands, had mutated into state financiers of the first rank. They were now mediating (forced) credit from a far wider section of the provincial population than the nobles and clergy who had earlier been the prime lenders. Yet fiscal-military constraint also dictated new limits to the Estates’ activity. The army had grown too large and military needs too complex for the commissariats run by the Estates of the Austrian duchies. After stepping into the breach left by the floundering circle offices during the Seven Years War, the Lower Austrian commissariat dating to the Thirty Years War was dissolved in the reform of 1764. The application of cameralist principles of government already apparent under Charles VI acquired greater method in Haugwitz’s time. Also here the Estates and

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individual nobles came up against new boundaries. The old practices of revenue farming were no longer consistent with the need to press every last florin out of the princely domain—especially through the many forms of indirect taxation that had previously been leased out. Still, the corporately organized Estates allowed manorial landowners to hold onto ownership of drinks’ taxes until the later 1820s.4 Changing notions of probity in government that distinguished more clearly between public and private interest combined with financial crisis to yield a new institutional culture that gradually embraced the Landhaus as well. This achievement alleviated the problem of rent-seeking that had intensified in the later years of Charles VI, reinforcing concerns for the general good in a different way. At the Estates, the period immediately following the Seven Years War constituted a watershed in this regard. In the signal clash over the election of Count Volkard Auersperg to the college of Deputies, the Estates learned that venal officeholders would not be tolerated in a body that managed the millions of florins in direct taxation and treasury debt upon which the regime relied. Similar considerations accounted for the institutional separation of the Estates from the reformed Landrecht. As a corps, they were excluded from the administration of justice, a major area of government, even as they retained privileged jurisdiction and the tribunal continued to seat local nobles as assessors. Reform was still largely predicated on the idea that effective rule needed local expertise and local people. The circle offices of 1764 offered proof. If the jurisprudence of the high courts of the Holy Roman Empire continued to uphold the traditions of consensual rule and the rights of property and Estates, also under the auspices of change, enlightened reformers such as the Zinzendorf brothers and Leopold II regarded the political representation of socio-economic interests as a tenet of good government in an agrarian, absolute monarchy. They understood that a substantial overlap existed between the Estates and the landowning interest and sought to reinforce it. The qualification of property-holding increased in weight at the expense of birth and status as a prerequisite for attendance at assemblies. This was manifest across the monarchy—first in Galicia in the 1780s, then in the Bohemian-Austrian lands in the 1790s, and later in LombardyVenetia (1810s)—and foreshadowed the parliamentary practice of propertied suffrage. Through their routine control of the mechanisms of direct taxation and exactions-in-kind and through their credit activity, the Estates, including those in the land below the Enns, rooted the regime firmly in provincial soil in an age of fiscal-military duress and political turmoil. Distinguished figures active at the Lower Austrian Landhaus in the early 1790s such as Karl Zinzendorf and Johann Rudolph Chotek remind us that the lines between reformers and traditionalists ran through the Estates as well as between them and the government. And let us not overlook the fact that the Estates stood for not only the prosperous landholding but also the debt-holding interest. Under reforming government as well, their financial intermediation rested on their status as an autonomous 4 Edith Sauer, Strasse, Schmuggel, Lottospiel: Materielle Kultur- und Staat in Niederösterreich, Böhmen und Lombardo-Venetien im frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1989), chap. 4.

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privileged corporation. Unlike the government in Versailles, which failed to find a lasting solution to its increasingly acute financial problems that originated in some of the very same armed strife in which Vienna was involved, the Habsburgs were able to sustain their ballooning debt with the support of their elites. Two centuries earlier, the French political theorist Bodin had recognized that the king’s borrowing from his own subjects increased their willingness to pay taxes and obviated the possibility of domestic upheaval.5 This was the path that the Habsburgs followed in a way that proved viable politically. At the end of the Seven Years War, the Estates of the central lands bore more than one-third of Habsburg treasury debt. The peacetime decrease in this proportion was a political decision that the authorities in Vienna could afford. In times of need, it could—and would—rise again. In the critical year 1789, the French pays d’états (those lands such as Burgundy that still had Estates) held only around one-sixth of the crown’s long-term liabilities.6 In France, unlike in Austria, a destabilizing rift between the “moneyed” (debt-holding) and other (for example, parlementaire) key interests supervened. Abandoned by its elites, the dynastic state in France collapsed, making way for revolutionary change.7 In the Habsburg monarchy the blend of landed and debt-holding establishments that were carefully coordinated from the center lent the regime a basic stability that survived even the financial chaos of the Napoleonic era and the public default of 1811.8 The Habsburg monarchy’s continuing, if evolving, composite quality was manifest in its central territory—the archduchy below the Enns—which had an autonomous, privileged corporation in possession of potent credit and fiscal facilities; a historic association with the Land in whose name the Estates were addressed and spoke at the yearly diet; the right to participate in government; a long institutional memory; and a base in the main, local economic interest (agriculture). With the exception of Great Britain, whose national debt was administered by the Bank of England and guaranteed by Parliament, no other eighteenth-century European great power accorded the representative tradition such significance in borrowing and finances as the Habsburg monarchy. Of course the Estates exercised no spending oversight and there was none of the political accountability that Ludwig Zinzendorf may have had in mind when he floated his bank project in the late 1760s. The closest continental equivalent to the Habsburg case was the credit system in the United Provinces between the 1540s and 1790s—which, by the seventeenth century, was largely without the coercion that characterized the 5 On this point, see Andreas Schwennicke, “Ohne Steuer kein Staat”: Zur Entwicklung und politischen Funktion des Steuerrechts in den Territorien des Heiligen Römischen Reichs (1500–1800) (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 72–3. 6 Mark Potter and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, “Politics and Public Finance in France: The Estates of Burgundy,” JIH 27 (1997): 586. 7 The “breakdown of the monarchical state” in France, which was intrinsically connected to the credit crisis, is now seen as the prime catalyst of the revolution of 1789. Julian Swann and Joël Félix, eds., The Crisis of the Absolute Monarchy: France from Old Regime to Revolution (Oxford, 2013). 8 In an insightful consideration of the question “why was there no Revolution in Germany?” (including Austria), Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Mastery in Germany, 1779–1850 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 1998), 71, points up the lack of a “fiscal-political crisis” such as existed in France.

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operations in wartime Austria. But, like the Dutch system, the Austrian one was based on well-managed forms of provincial autonomy within a composite polity. With the decisive support of the Estates in its Bohemian-Austrian territories, the Habsburg monarchy became in the course of the eighteenth century a mature fiscal-military state able to tax and borrow effectively. The government of Prussia, whose cameralist practices famously inspired some of Haugwitz’s reforms, notably did not borrow from the Estates of its territories. By the mid-1840s political, social, and economic change was fundamentally undermining the Estates und unravelling their relationship with the Habsburg dynastic state. Their purely consultative and strongly agrarian character corresponded neither to the ideas of Liberal constitutionalism enjoying increasing currency, also at the Landhaus, nor to the rapid expansion of commerce and manufacturing that were giving rise to new social groups with political claims. Politically, if not financially, the monarchical government had emerged strengthened from the Napoleonic wars. Its turn to international high finance to fund deficit spending diminished dependence on the Estates just as its administrative grip on local society was tightening.9 For their part, Lower Austrian landowners, less prosperous than their Bohemian counterparts, were ever less willing to bear the burdens of local government. By the 1830s the costs of the traditional patrimonial structures had famously become a bone of contention between central and intermediary authority in the land below the Enns.10 As the regime’s brittleness grew, there were calls at the Estates by 1847 for it to “publish the general budget” as a way of increasing public confidence—a move that, had it taken place, would have recalled Necker’s publication of the French king’s budget in the early 1780s.11 Still, the Habsburg authorities could hope for little succor at the Estates, quite apart from the spirit of opposition spreading there. A corps dominated by the “three upper Estates” was now an anachronism. What turned out to be last-minute initiatives at the Landhaus to strengthen the representation of the Fourth Estate came to nothing, as did the incongruent idea in official circles that the Estates’ credit facilities be revived to stave off the threatening financial disaster. The events of the spring and summer of 1848 overtook such considerations. The fundamental law (Reichsverfassung) proclaimed by the government of the new emperor Francis Joseph on March 4, 1849 abolished the “Estatesbased constitutions” (ständische Verfassungen) that had been confirmed only the

9 Harm-Hinrich Brandt, Der österreichische Neoabsolutismus: Staatsfinanzen und Politik 1848–1860, 2 vols. (Göttingen, 1978), i, 149. 10 Viktor Bibl, Die niederösterreichischen Stände im Vormärz: Ein Beitrag zur Vorgeschichte der Revolution des Jahres 1848 (Vienna, 1911). For a fine comparative perspective on the structures and problems of patrimonial administration in the Bohemian-Austrian lands in this period, see Ralph Melville, Adel und Revolution in Böhmen: Strukturwandel von Herrschaft und Gesellschaft in Österreich um die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Mainz, 1998), chap. 1. 11 Minutes of Estate of lords, June 7, 1847, NÖLA, HA, Lade XLIV, 60, vol. for 1844–9. See also Victor von Andrian-Werburg, “Österreich wird meine Stimme erkennen lernen wie die Stimme Gottes in der Wüste”: Tagebücher 1839–1858, ed. Franz Adlgasser, 3 vols. (Vienna, 2011), i, 688 ( June 11, 1847).

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previous spring in the so-called Pillerstorff constitution.12 Yet it would prove easier to put an end to the Estates than to do without them in areas for which they had long been responsible. Several of their Deputies remained in office to organize the assessment and repartition of local taxes and manage credit into the early 1860s. The last lords’ Deputy would be Count Johann Anton Pergen, a grandson of the Landmarschall of the same name. His family had stood at the interface of fiscalmilitary exigency and the evolving structures of composite monarchy since the rise of the standing army in the seventeenth century. 12 Edmund Bernatzik, ed., Die österreichischen Verfassungsgesetze mit Erläuterungen (2nd edn., Vienna, 1911), 109, 160. See also Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions, 1848–1851 (2nd edn., Cambridge, 2005).

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APPENDIX

Receivers (Einnehmer) and Receivers General (Obereinnehmer) of the Lower Austrian Estates 1637–1818 receiver (general)

years in office

remarks

Philipp Jacob Carl von Carlshofen († 1666)

beginning 1637

Matthias Wägele (or Wagele) (von Walsegg) († 1661)

1644–8

Carl von Perger (1623–59)

1648–56

Heinrich von Perger (later Pergen) († 1702)

c.1657–61

Hans Jacob von Rafenstein

c.1661–7

Johann Caspar Vogl Caspar Holdt (von Holdegg)

c.1667–8 c.1668–76

Carl Hackelberger von Höchenberg (1643–1710)

1676–80

Arsenius Franz (Schmidt) von Wellenstein († 1713)

c.1680–7

1626 studied law Padua; 1640 admitted to Estate of knights; 1648 Landrecht assessor; 1653 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1657–61 knights’ Deputy; 1661 Klosterrat father was syndic of Wiener Neustadt; 1647 admitted to Estate of knights; 1648 ennobled as “von Walsegg” son of Dr. Carl von Perger, Lower Austrian chancellor; brother-in-law of predecessor Matthias Wägele von Walsegg brother of his predecessor Carl von Perger; 1659 admitted to Estate of knights; 1669 knights’ Deputy; 1673 baron; 1683 count; Reichspfennigmeister son-in-law of Landuntermarschall Geyer von Edlbach; 1655 admitted to Estate of knights; 1667 Lower Austrian government councilor held the receivership “provisorio modo” 1666 imperial weapons’ paymaster (Zeugzahlmeister); 1672 ennobled as “von Holdegg” studied law in Jena, Tübingen, and Strasbourg; 1668 Landrecht assessor; 1673 Raitherr at Estates; 1677 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1681 knights’ Deputy; 1688 baron 1660 councilor in the service of Salzburg (later envoy in Vienna); 1673 permission to drop the family name “Schmidt”; 1673 married daughter of Viennese mayor Holzner; 1673 admitted to Estate of knights; 1683 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1691 knights’ Deputy; 1696 baron (continued )

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Appendix

Continued receiver (general)

years in office

remarks

descended from a line of lesser financial officers also active in Hungary and Styria; 1692 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1695 baron; 1699 knights’ Deputy; 1713 count (as “Löwenburg”) Franz Georg von Koch 1698–9 uncle served the archduke Leopold Wilhelm († 1699) and later in the Aulic Chancellery as councilor responsible for Lower Austria; 1667 family ennobled; 1696 admitted to Estate of knights Franz Adam Werner († 1710) 1699–1705 studied in Ingolstadt; Dr. iur.; 1685 in the Estates’ commissarial service in the quarter below the Vienna Woods; 1688 Landrecht assessor; 1695 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1709 knights’ Deputy Johann Peter von Orelli 1705 father in the Lower Austrian service of the († 1705) bishop of Passau; Landrecht assessor; guardian of the orphaned children of Receiver General Koch Constantin Joseph von c.1705–11 descended from a line of financial officers; Gatterburg (1678–1734) father was Handgraf, later councilor in the Aulic Chamber, and for sixteen years administrator of the Hofzahlamt; brother was Max Servatius von Gatterburg who was elected receiver general of the Lower Austrian Estates but died before taking office; 1691 Landrecht assessor; 1710–16 knights’ Deputy; 1717 count; 1718 admitted to Estate of lords Franz Ignaz (Albrecht) von 1711–17 descended from a line of jurists (also in the Albrechtsburg († 1731) service of the Aulic Chancellery); father Johann Ignaz was councilor in Austrian Aulic Chancellery; brother was provost of Eisgarn, later provost of Zwettl; Landrecht assessor; 1702–31 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1723–9 knights’ Deputy Otto Joseph von Quarient 1717–18 son of Landuntermarschall Quarient during († 1718) whose life he was awarded the expectancy to the receivership general; 1705 Lower Austrian government councilor Carl Richard Joseph von 1718–24 son of a chancellor of Lower Austrian Schmidlin († 1738) government; 1709 Lower Austrian government councilor; second Comitialgesandter in Regensburg

Georg Constantin von Sinnich († 1721)

1688–98

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Carl Leopold von Moser (1688–1770)

1724–9

Johann Ferdinand (Gögger) von Lewenegg (Löwenegg) († 1778)

1729–34

Johann Daniel von Moser († 1769)

1734–40

Johann Raimund (Albrecht) von Albrechtsburg (1697–1757)

1741–6

Ferdinand Maximilian von Moser (1718–79) Johann Baptist von Mensshengen († 1777)

1746–52

Joseph Gotthard von Mannagetta († 1761)

1758–61

Ludwig von Hacqué (1719–1802)

1761–4

Johann Georg Groppenberger (1707–82) Joseph Rohrwürth († 1794) Ignaz Penz Joseph Mannhart (Manhardt)

1764–81

1736 Landrecht assessor; 1739 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1746 Raitherr at Estates; 1760 knights’ Deputy son of a Lower Austrian chancellor who later became councilor in Haugwitz’s Directorium and finished his career as Lower Austrian vice-stadholder; 1759 Lower Austrian government councilor father and maternal grandfather were Aulic Chamber councilors; 1744 admitted to Estate of knights; 1745 Landrecht assessor; 1779 president of Estate of knights; 1790 Landuntermarschall; Hacqué was the last member of the Estates to hold the office of receiver general Prälatenstandsagent 1747–82

c. 1781–94 1794–7 1797–1818

ennobled 1791 as “Edler von” — ennobled 1815 as “Edler von Mannstein”

1752–8

1712 Lower Austrian government councilor; attached to the imperial embassy at the peace negotiations of Utrecht; 1724 Justiz-Bancodeputation councilor; 1729–64 Landuntermarschall; 1764 privy councilor; 1765 baron; father of the later Landuntermarschall Baron Karl Moser (1744–1823) father was Hofquartiermeister; 1714 admitted to Estate of knights; 1715 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1741 knights’ Deputy brother of Receiver General Carl Leopold von Moser ; Lower Austrian government councilor; 1742 knights’ Deputy kinsman of Receiver General Franz Ignaz von Albrechtsburg; father Georg Ernst († 1699) was secretary of the Estates; uncle Joseph Augustin Ignaz († 1758) was an Estates’ officeholder including knights’ Deputy; 1726 admitted to Estate of knights (“new lineages”); 1730 Landrecht assessor; 1735 admitted to the knights’ “old lineages;” 1739 Lower Austrian government councilor; 1753 knights’ Deputy son of Carl Leopold von Moser

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Genealogical Tables Baron Hans (Johann) Trautson († 1589) Obersthofmeister 1567–75

Count Paul Sixtus Trautson († 1621) President of the Imperial Aulic Council 1582–94 Obersthofmarschall 1590–1600 Lower Austrian Stadholder 1608–21 m. Susanna Veronika Meggau (1580–1648) “Obersthofmeisterin der jungen Herrschaft” 1633–47

Baroness Susanna Trautson († 1618) m. Baron Ludwig Gomez Hoyos President of the Aulic Chamber and Lower Austrian Chamber

Count Johann Franz Trautson (1609–63) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1637–42 Lower Austrian Stadholder 1642–63

Count Hans Balthasar Hoyos sen. (1583–1632) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1626–32

Prince Johann Leopold Donat Trautson (1659–1724) Obersthofmeister 1709–11, 1721–4

Count Hans Balthasar Hoyos jun. (1626–81) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1679–81

Prince Johann Wilhelm Trautson (1700–75) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1753–75

Table 1: Trautson-Hoyos affiliation (abbreviated).

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Baron Balthasar Trautson m. Susanna Fugger († 1588)

Count Ernst (Abensperg und) Traun (1608–68) General Field War Commissary 1647–51 Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1651–68 m. Katharina Ursula Weber (dau. of Johann Baptist Weber, Lower Austrian Vice-Stadholder)

Margaretha Traun m.2 Count Theodor Althet Heinrich Stratmann († 1693) Austrian Aulic Chancellor

Katharina Muschinger (dau. of Vinzenz Muschinger) m. Count Peter Ernst Mollart († 1655), lords’ Deputy 1640; Obersthofmeister of Empress Eleonora 1647; Lower Austrian ViceStadholder

Regina Anna Traun Johann Christoph Traun m. Count Ferdinand Sigmund Kurtz († 1659), Imperial Vice Chancellor (m.1 Martha Muschinger, dau. of Vinzenz Muschinger, President of the Aulic Chamber)

Maria Eleonora Kurtz Susanna Regina Traun Count Otto Ehrenreich Traun (1644–1715) m. Hans Ehrenreich Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1690–1715 m. Count Ferdinand Geymann Maximilian Sprinzenstein († 1679) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1668–79

Count Franz Maximilian Mollart (1628–90) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1681–90

Eleonora Mollart m.2 Count Otto Christoph Volkra († 1734) acting Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1728–33

Ehrenreich Traun († 1659) m. Regina Christina Zinzendorf (dau. of Johann Joachim Zinzendorf and Judith Liechtenstein)

Baron Johann Gottfried Geymann, lords’ Deputy 1704–10

Count Franz Anton Traun († 1745) lords’ Deputy 1715–16

Count Johann Adam Traun († 1786) lords’ Deputy 1748–54

Count Franz Joseph Traun elected lords’ Deputy 1744, died before assuming office

Count Rudolph Traun († 1791) lords’ Deputy 1767–73

Table 2: Traun-Sprinzenstein-Mollart-Geymann-Volkra affiliation (abbreviated).

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Sigmund Adam von Traun (1573–1637) Lower Austrian Landmarschall 1632–37

Baron Wolfgang Georg Gilleis († 1651), Protestant m. Baroness Isabella Rueber († 1669)

Maria Theresia Elisabeth (1634–84) converted to Catholicism, lady-in-waiting 1655–8 to Empress Eleonore Gonzaga the Younger m.1658 Baron Hans Carl Fünfkirchen († 1694) lords’ Deputy

Georg Julius (1641–1700) chamberlain; lords’ Deputy 1694–1700 m.1672 Countess Sabina Christina Starhemberg (1655–1725) 1705 lady-in-waiting to widowed Empress Eleonora Magdalena 1715 “Aja,” then “Obersthofmeisterin der jungen Herrschaften”

Maria Anna Elisabetha (or Isabella) m. Count Christoph Carl Heissenstein († 1726) (son of Otto Felician Heissenstein, lords’ Deputy, later Vice-Stadholder)

Maria Oktavia (1689–1762) m. Prince Joseph Esterházy (1688–1721)

Maria Antonia Eusebia Harrach (1698–1768) m. Count Wenzel Breunner, lords’ Deputy 1754–9, 1764–7

Count Carl Joseph Heissenstein (1702–58), lords’ Deputy 1751–6

Prince Nikolaus Esterházy “the Magnificent” (1714–90)

Heinrich Julius (1687–1734) Aulic Chamber councilor, Cameral Director in Transylvania m. Countess Eleonora Kinsky (dau. of Count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky, Bohemian Grand Chancellor)

Maria Antonia (1697–1740) 1721 lady-in-waiting to the empress m. Count Friedrich Lorenz Cavriani (m.2 Countess Maria Rosalia Stürghk, dau. of Count Georg Christoph Stürghk, Austrian Aulic Chancellor)

Georg Franz Anton (1674–1729) lords’ Deputy 1722–8 m.1 Countess Maria Maximiliana Althann (dau. of Count Michael Johann Althann and Princess Maria Theresia Liechtenstein) m.2 Countess Maria Esther Theresia Starhemberg (widow of Count Otto Ferdinand Hohenfeld, lords’ Deputy)

Johann Julius Christoph († 1763), lords’ Deputy 1758–63

Table 3: Gilleis family (abbreviated).

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Maria Josepha Barbara (1673–1760) m. Count Ernst Anton Wenzel Harrach (1665–1718)

Johann Wilhelm Walterskirchen (1615–71) Estates’ Deputy 1654 m.1 Eleonora Elisabeth von Heysperg (sister of Raimund von Heysperg († 1662), knights’ Deputy 1658)

Christoph Ehrenreich Geyer von Edlbach († 1667) Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1654–67 m. Barbara Aemilia Gold von Lampoding (dau. of Erasmus Gold von Lamboding, Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1618–23

Georg Wilhelm Franz Wilhelm Walterskirchen (1633–84) Walterskirchen (1641–1704) knights’ Deputy 1675 Estates’ Deputy 1671 m. Maria Eva Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler (dau. of Wenzeslaus Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler († 1667), knights’ Deputy 1646–51

Franziska Geyer von Edlbach († 1666) m. Franz von Hätzenberg († 1675) (bro. of Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg the elder, knights’ Deputy 1655)

Maria Magdalena Barbara Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler (dau. of Wenzeslaus Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler) m. Johann Adolph von Lempruch († 1716), knights’ Deputy 1697–1701

Table 4: Walterskirchen and affiliated families (abbreviated).

m. 1662

Maria Elisabeth Geyer von Edlbach († 1683)

Anna Geyer von Edlbach m. Hans Jacob von Rafenstein († 1667), receiver general of the Lower Austrian Estates c.1661– 7

Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg the younger (son of Johann Ernst von Hätzenberg the elder); Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1713–17, m. 1678 St. Stephen’s Vienna Rebecca Stainl von Plaßnet (witnesses of this marriage incl. Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall Adam Anton Grundemann v. Falkenberg and Johann Kastner von Sigmundslust, receiver general of the Upper Austrian Estates)

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Georg Christoph von Walterskirchen (1587–1654) Catholic convert, 1643 baron Lower Austrian Landuntermarschall 1631/3–54

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Manuscript Sources Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv, St. Pölten                 

Amtsrelationen Codex Provincialis Familienarchiv (Family Papers) Lamberg Handschriften Herrenstandsarchiv Kaiserliche Patente Landes-Registratur 1793–1904 Landtagshandlungen Neue Ständische Registratur 1782–1792 Niederösterreichische Regierung Prälatenstandsarchiv Ritterstandsarchiv Schloßarchiv Aspang (Pergen Family Papers) Ständische Akten Ständische Akten, Reihe 2 Ständische Bücher Verordnetenpatente

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Finanz- und Hofkammerarchiv, Vienna  Kredithofkommissionsakten  Zentralrechnungsabschlüße Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Vienna  Familienarchiv (Family Papers) Harrach Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Vienna  Obersthofmeisteramt  Nachlass Ludwig Graf Zinzendorf  Tagebuch (Diary) Karl Graf Zinzendorf Kärntner Landesarchiv, Klagenfurt  Ständisches Archiv Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, Graz  Landschaftliches Archiv Antiquum  Landschaftliches Archiv Medium

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408

Manuscript Sources

Stiftsarchiv Herzogenburg, Lower Austria  H.3.1  H.7.2 Stiftsarchiv Melk, Lower Austria  Diary of Abbot Adrian Plieml (3. Äbte, carton 7a) Schottenstift Archiv, Vienna      

Scrinium 3 Scrinium 13 Scrinium 16 Scrinium 67 Scrinium 169 Scrinium 175

Arhiv Republike Slovenije, Ljubljana  Deželni stanovi za Kranjsko Moravský zemský archiv, Brno, Czech Republic    

Fonds A3 Fonds A4 Fonds A6 Fonds A8

Národní archiv, Prague-Chodovec, Czech Republic    

Český zemský sněm 1789–1913 Desky zemské vehší Zemský Výbor Sne˘movní artikule

Národní archiv, Prague-Dejvice, Czech Republic  Presidium gubernia  Stará manipulace Státní oblastní archiv, Prague-Chodovec, Czech Republic  Rodinný archiv (Family Papers) Chotek Státní oblastní archiv, De˘čín, Czech Republic  Rodinný archiv (Family Papers) Clary-Aldringen Institut für Personengeschichte, Bensheim, Germany  Nachlass Hans von Bourcy

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate the location of dates of birth/death (in a few cases of reigns) or illustrations. Nobles are generally listed with their highest title or the one they used at the Estates, if the two differed (e.g. when a titled noble belonged to the Estate of knights). Personal names and substantive material from the footnotes have been included in the index. Abele, Baron Christoph (1627–85) 54, 132 Abensberg und Traun, family, see Traun absolutism, concept of 1–5, 25, 108, 109, 157, 222, 276, 290; revisionist scholarship of 5–13 Acuña, Count Johann Baptist 184 Adriatic Sea 20, 29 Aggsbach, Carthusian monastery in Lower Austria 40 Aggsbach, prior of 40, 44, 87, 293 Aichen, family 92, 102 Aichen, Franz von ({ 1789) 319 Aichen, Johann Joachim von 60–1, 74, 75, 92, 102, 104, 105 Aichen, Joseph von (1745–1818) 339, 350, 355 Aichen, Peter von ({ 1691) 102–3 Aix-la-Chapelle, Treaty of (1748) 108, 190, 206 Alberstorf, Baron 239 Albert of Saxony, duke of Teschen (1738–1822) 368 Albrechtsburg, family 92, 104–5 Albrechtsburg, Franz Ignaz von 104, 400, 401 Albrechtsburg, Georg Ernst von ({ 1699) 401 Albrechtsburg, Johann Bernhard von 126 Albrechtsburg, Johann Ignaz von ({ 1705) 400 Albrechtsburg, Johann Raimund von 126, 401 Albrechtsburg, Joseph Augustin Ignaz von 401 Altenburg, abbot of 40, 43, 44, 87, 88, 89, 90, 138, 375 Altenburg, Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria 30, 40, 43, 91 Althann, family 62, 138 Althann, Count Christoph Hans 92 Althann, Count Michael Adolph 92 Althann, Count Michael Johann (b. 1643) 405 Althann, Count Michael Johann (1679–1722) 98, 197 Althann, Countess Maria Maximiliana 405 Amsterdam 34 Amstetten, town in Lower Austria 233 Andréossy, Antoine François (1761–1828) 381 Angelès, Jules Jean Baptiste (1778–1828) 384 archduchy above the Enns, see Upper Austria archduchy below the Enns, see Lower Austria Ardagger, collegiate church in Lower Austria 41 Ardagger, provost of 40, 44, 87, 141, 293

aristocracy 6, 27, 53, 54, 57, 60, 61–4, 65, 67, 70, 73, 87–8, 92, 93–101, 105–6, 148, 149, 197, 221, 242, 253, 257, 259, 263, 274, 300, 301, 337, 338, 340, 356, 364, 374, 376 army (French) 8, 134, 154, 193 army (Habsburg): as standing formation 18, 156; budget 195, 213; claims of Lower Austrian Estates to officer commissions in 112; nominal and effective strength 19, 156, 189; officers as members of the Estates 61, 105, 228; presence in Lower Austria 20, 67, 69, 111, 157, 162, 173–87, 213, 223, 371–2; size in relation to Lower Austrian Contribution 113; see also barracks, billeting, conscription, Landrekrutenstellung, Landwehr, provisioning, recruitment, winter quarters Arneth, Alfred von 2, 198 Arnold, Baron Johann Georg 61 Arnoldstein, Benedictine monastery in Carinthia 294 Arnstein, Baron Nathan 355 Arnstein, Baroness Fanny (1758–1818) 355 Aspang, manor in Lower Austria 124, 194 Asparn an der Zaya, manor in Lower Austria 380 Aspern-Essling, battle (1809) 360, 381 Attems, Count Ferdinand (1746–1820) 305 Auersperg, family 61, 92, 93, 98, 168, 260, 263 Auersperg, Count Anton Joseph (1696–1772) 219 Auersperg, Count August 93, 263, 264, 285, 305, 327 Auersperg, Count Carl (1721–89) 219 Auersperg, Count Carl 285 Auersperg, Count Ernst Ferdinand 168, 184, 185, 205, 217, 255 Auersperg, Count Franz Joseph 167, 168, 170, 182 Auersperg, Count Heinrich 260 Auersperg, Count Johann Nepomuk 260, 267, 307 Auersperg, Count Joseph 86 Auersperg, Count Joseph Volkard 168, 186, 251, 252, 254, 255, 261, 264, 395

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Index Auersperg, Countess Maria Magdalena (1688–1721) 138 Auersperg, Count Seifried 295 Auersperg, Count Wolf Ehrenreich 168, 181, 182 Auersperg, Count Wolf Engelbert ({ 1771) 255, 261 Augustus II (1670–1733), king of Saxony and Poland 42 Aulic Chamber (Hofkammer) 54, 61, 71, 78, 92, 95, 96, 105, 115, 132, 136, 143, 148, 151, 159, 174, 181, 199, 201, 372, 386 Aulic Chamber of Accounts (Hofrechenkammer) 240–1, 249, 267–9 Aulic Chancelleries Austrian (Österreichische Hofkanzlei) 24–5, 53, 54, 59, 61, 71, 78, 84, 96, 97, 105, 107, 112, 123, 132, 135, 137, 138, 143, 151, 159, 168, 170, 174, 178, 181, 183, 185, 191, 196, 216, 218, 228, 400 Bohemian (Böhmische Hofkanzlei) 100, 132, 195, 196, 202, 204, 210, 213, 216, 265 Bohemian-Austrian 240, 253, 262, 265, 276, 278, 281, 285, 298–9, 302, 317, 319, 327, 328, 331, 334–5, 336, 338, 340, 364, 371 Hungarian 298 Transylvanian 298 United Court Chancellery (Vereinigte Hofkanzlei) 340, 342, 348, 368, 371, 374, 376, 379, 388 see also Directorium in publicis et cameralibus; United Offices (Vereinigte Hofstellen) aulic commissions 79, 132, 146, 198, 218, 230, 252; on capitation 134–5, 236; on debt tax 273–4, 282; on extra taxes 274; Gaisruck commission 208, 217; on inheritance tax 235, 272, 334–5; on Klassensteuer 362; on legal codification 345; on property tax (1703) 143; on supplementary war taxes 235–8, 249; on suppression of monasteries 303; on surcharges on the Contribution 366; on tax rectification 221; on Turk tax (1683) 132–3 Aulic Payments Office (Hofzahlamt) 126–7, 400 Aulic War Council (Hofkriegsrat) 61, 67, 68, 71, 78, 96, 105, 125, 142, 143, 151, 159, 174, 176, 178, 198, 334 Aulic War Payments Office (Hofkriegszahlamt) 135, 143, 307 Austerlitz, battle (1805) 368, 376 Austrian Netherlands 18, 20, 28, 29, 190, 193, 194, 202, 211, 227, 249, 284, 316, 317, 319, 320, 325, 329, 373 Avancini, Nicolaus 93 Bach, Franz Anton 278 Baden bei Wien, town in Lower Austria 31, 42, 64 Bagno, Count Scipio (1660–1721) 148

439

Balaton, lake in Hungary 91 Balkans 133, 142, 157, 190, 310, 320, 325 Baltic Sea 20 Banat, a region divided between Hungary and the Habsburg military frontier 372 Banco del Giro 139 Bancozettel 243, 244, 384, 386, 387 Bank of England 243, 270, 396 banks: plans based on the credit of the Lower Austrian Estates 139, 241, 271, 389; plans based on the credit of the Estates of the Habsburg lands jointly 270–1, 276, 370; see also City Bank of Vienna; Estates Credit Deputation “bankruptcy” of 1811 361, 365, 388–9 barracks 152, 154, 157, 183, 207; construction by the Lower Austrian Estates 179–80; see also billeting Barcelona 107 Bartenstein, Baron Anton ({ 1831) 340, 381, 384 Bartenstein, Baron Johann Christoph (1689–1767) 204, 220, 223, 224, 228, 253 Bartolotti-Partenfeld, family 168 Bartolotti-Partenfeld, Count Carl Ludwig ({ 1734) 167, 168 Batthyány, Prince Karl Joseph (1697–1772) 252 Bavaria 9, 10, 57, 80, 175, 179, 186, 193, 284, 285, 380 Becher, Johann Joachim (1635–82) 132 Beckenstorfer, Dominicus (1705–86), abbot of Lilienfeld 234, 237 Beduzzi, Antonio (1675–1735) 149 Belgrade 127, 133, 134, 181, 184, 190 Berchtold von Sachsengang, Eva Regina 123 Berchtold, Baron Jacob 49–50 Bergenstamm, Alois von 362 Bessel, Gottfried (1672–1749), abbot of Göttweig 88, 90 Bibl, Viktor 323, 324, 332, 334, 355 Biedermeier style 35 Bignon, Louis Pierre Édouard (1771–1841) 382 billeting (military lodgings) 25, 28, 33, 67, 79, 85, 116, 151, 152, 155, 161, 162, 166, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187, 207, 223, 284, 360, 376; see also winter quarters; barracks Bisamberg, manor in Lower Austria 69 Bissingen, Count Ferdinand (1749–1831) 382 Blagay, Count Johann Nepomuk Ursini- 242, 260 Blenheim, battle (1704) 179 Blümegen, Count Christoph (1722–1802) 305 Blümegen, Count Heinrich Kajetan (1715–88) 285 Blümegen, Count Peter (1754–1813) 313 Bodin, Jean (1529/30–96) 130, 396 Bohemia, Estates of 29, 40, 45, 48, 117, 203, 208, 222, 242, 260, 285, 302, 308, 309, 311, 312, 319, 343, 351, 352, 388, 391

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440

Index

Bohemia, grand burgrave 260, 300, 388 Bohemia, kingdom 20, 29, 32, 35, 36, 50, 62, 90, 92, 98, 108, 135, 151, 158, 177, 181, 185, 191, 193, 203, 219, 221–2, 233, 244, 250, 252, 260, 275, 279, 285, 297, 299–300, 302, 305, 308, 311, 313, 330, 343, 368, 380 Bohemian lands 29, 30, 50, 63, 144, 158, 159, 185, 195, 204, 282, 296, 297, 330 bonds (Obligationen): issued by Habsburg government to Lower Austrian Estates 232, 233; of Bank of England 243; of Estates Credit Deputation 241, 243 bonds of Carniolan Estates 310 bonds of Lower Austrian Estates: 209; Contribution as security of 231, 337; endorsed by the six members of college of Deputies 233, 304; endorsed by two prelates, two lords, and two knights 308–9; expanding range of purchasers 356; fall in price of 238; five-percent issue of 368; issued by receivership general 234; issued during French invasion 385; issued during War of the Bavarian Succession 316; lower yield on 275–6; illustrations of 266, 315; rising interest rates on 367; written by hand 232; see also debts bonds of Styrian Estates 356 bookkeepers (of the Estates) 306; in Moravia 307; see also Lower Austria, Estates of Borschitta, Baron Franz Rudolph 99 Bosnia 99 Bourbon, dynasty 147 Brabant, duchy in the Austrian Netherlands 191, 195 Brabant, Estates of 227 Brandenburg 57, 113 Brandis, family 92, 164 Brandis, Count Adam Wilhelm (1636–99) 125 Brandis, Count Franz Jacob 101, 102, 170 Brandis, Count Johann Jakob ({ 1658) 125 Breisgau, region in Further Austria 29, 302, 309 Breslau, Peace of (1742) 201 Breunner, family 62, 98, 138, 160, 168, 263, 375 Breunner, Count Ernst Joseph (1691–1737) 167, 170 Breunner, Count Joseph (1687–1762) 189, 203–4 Breunner, Count Joseph 377, 380, 383, 387 Breunner, Count Philipp Christoph (1643–1708) 56 Breunner, Count Seyfried Christoph (1569–1651) 121 Breunner, Count Wenzel 100, 167, 186, 221, 234, 236, 237, 261, 262, 264, 265, 405 Brittany, region in France 38 Bruck an der Leitha, town in Lower Austria 64, 98, 208, 210 Brünn (Brno) 195, 203, 305, 313, 319

Brünn (Brno), monastery of the Augustinian Hermits in 294 Brunner, Otto 2, 3, 9, 61 Brussels 194, 201, 202, 230 Buda (Ofen), town in Hungary 330 Bukovina, district (later annexed to GaliciaLodomeria) 20, 30, 299, 352 Buquoy, family 63 Buquoy, Count Leopold 242 bureaucracy 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 24, 28, 59, 78, 82, 159, 161, 176, 264, 300, 324, 325, 342, 373 Burgundy, region in France 38, 123, 396 Burke, Edmund (1729–97) 338 cadaster 191, 204, 220, 239, 243, 289, 304, 313, 316, 318, 327, 328, 331, 342, 390, 393; see also tax rectification Calonne, Charles Alexandre de (1734–1802) 320, 329 Cambiasi, banking house 230 cameral debt (Habsburg): and Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury 370; transfer to Estates (1560s) 120; transfer to Estates (1701) 139–40, 145, 230; transfer to Estates (1767) 276; see also debts cameralism 132, 139, 204–5, 216, 223, 224, 226, 237, 356, 394–5, 397 capitation (Leibsteuer, Kopfsteuer) 61, 133–8, 140, 146, 194–5, 235, 236, 239, 273, 356, 394; see also Klassensteuer Carafffa, family 160 Carinthia, duchy 29, 36, 214, 218, 221, 222, 226, 242, 267, 294, 299, 310, 314, 316 Carinthia, Estates of 48, 59, 81, 218, 219, 229, 242, 250, 260, 286, 294, 295, 299–300, 305, 307, 309, 316, 317–18, 321, 328 Carl von Carlshofen, Philipp Jacob 119, 399 Carniola, duchy 29, 42, 48, 49, 60, 81, 123, 219, 222, 242, 250, 255, 260, 267, 294, 299, 307, 310, 314, 318, 352 Carniola, Estates of 149, 158, 218–19, 229, 242, 250, 260, 267, 295, 298, 300, 302, 305, 307, 309, 310, 318, 368 Carretto, family 63 Catherine II (1729–96), empress of Russia 320 Cavriani, family 63, 305 Cavriani, Count Christoph (1715–83) 256, 257 Cavriani, Count Friedrich Lorenz ({ 1745) 405 Cavriani, Count Ludwig (1739–99) 300, 319, 340, 363, 374 Cavriani, Count Maximilian 339, 353 ceremony 7, 248, 289; see ritual Cetto von Kronstorff, Carl Joseph 236, 237, 238 chamberlain (Kämmerer): Court office reserved to lords 55; see also court and courtiers Chaos, Baron Johann Konrad (Richthauser) (1604–63) 55 Charles Albert, (1798–1849) king of Sardinia 393

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Index Charles II (1540–90), archduke 133 Charles II (1661–1700), king of Spain 97 Charles V, emperor 17, 119 Charles VI, emperor 4, 17, 23, 27, 31, 45, 54, 59, 63, 88–9, 90, 91, 93, 98, 100, 101, 105, 109, 142, 145, 146, 147, 149, 171, 173, 174, 189, 190, 191, 193, 197, 198, 199, 200, 216, 226, 227, 258, 259, 394, 395; personal contact with Lower Austrian Estates 107–8 Charles VII, emperor 31 Chorinsky, Count Mathias Franz (1720–86), bishop of Brünn 305 Chotek, family 213 Chotek, Count Johann (1704–87) 223, 224 Chotek, Count Johann Nepomuk (1776–1824) 379, 381 Chotek, Count Johann Rudolph (1748–1828) 317, 330, 331, 337, 346, 350, 395 Chotek, Countess Marie Sidonie, née Countess Clary-Aldringen (1748–1824) 328, 331, 332 Chotek, Count Rudolph (1708–71) 228, 253, 276, 328 Christalnigg, Count Johann Polycarp (1737–1809) 307 Christian August, prince of Saxe-Zeitz, cardinal 42 circle offices (Kreisämter) 35, 151, 158, 176, 177, 185; and the Estates 221–5, 239, 254–6, 282; and the question of tax collection 224–5, 226, 239, 255; in Lower Austria (after1753) 26, 186, 221–6, 229, 239, 250, 254, 394; in Lower Austria following reform of (1764) 248, 254–6, 261, 263, 264, 274, 282–3, 284, 286–7, 304, 318, 325, 335, 364, 365, 371, 372, 391, 395; responsibilities of 222–3, 274, 282–3 City Bank of Vienna (Wiener Stadt-Banco) 12, 109, 139, 148, 197, 198, 209, 217, 235, 238, 243–4, 265, 276, 370 Clarke, Henri (1765–1818) 375 clergy: and the ruler’s domain 41, 43, 64, 141, 217, 226; rising taxation of 141–2, 144, 195; tension with nobility 45–6, 125; see also Lower Austria, Estate of prelates clientele 7, 53, 60, 106, 124–5, 135, 159–60, 170–1, 200, 218, 256–7, 340 see also patronage Cobenzl, family 62 Colbert, Jean-Baptiste (1619–83) 157 Colloredo, Count Hieronymus (1732–1812), archbishop of Salzburg 383 Colloredo-Mannsfeld, Count Ferdinand (1777–1848) 340 Colloredo-Mannsfeld, Prince Franz Gundaker (1738–1807) 252, 327, 373 Comazzi, Giovanni (1654–1715) 150

441

commissary, concept of 157–8 commissaries (Habsburg military), in Lower Austria 159–60, 174–6, 179, 181, 185, 284; see also General Field War Commissariat; Lower Austria, Estates of: commissariat communication 7, 24, 72, 160, 174, 178, 235, 236–7, 279, 281, 282, 309, 363 composite monarchy, concept of 16, 378 Concessus in causis summi principis et commissorum 225, 226 Conferenz in Internis 210 Congress of Vienna (1814/15) 352, 353, 355 conscription 26, 142, 283–4; see also Landrekrutenstellung; recruitment Constantinople 105, 130 constitutions (Estates-based) 10, 23, 36, 38, 242, 289, 291, 302, 331, 338, 340, 342, 343, 351, 352, 359, 380, 397–8; and modern constitutionalism 328–9, 348–9 Contribution (diet’s annual grant), in Lower Austria 27, 81, 110–17, 135; as fixed by recesses 128, 140, 145, 147, 191–2; as guarantee of Estates’ debt 231, 337; as “private property” of Estates 376; during the Turkish and Nine Years’ Wars 136–8; during the Spanish Succession war 142–5; during the Ottoman war 1716–18 146–7; during the wars of the 1730s 190–1; during the War of the Austrian Succession 193–5; during the Seven Years War 213, 231, 234–8, 243–4; after the Seven Years War 255, 270, 274, 276, 277–9, 281, 283, 356, 366; during the War of the Bavarian Succession 284; during the Ottoman war 1788–90 318; during the Napoleonic wars 362–5, 366–7; as an object of credit operations 129, 227, 231; “cameral Contribution” 176, 209, 275; emergence of a permanent minimum grant 128–9; increase over time 113–14; level of 1650–1748 114; mortgage of 272; “non-public” nature of 376; “ordinary” and “extraordinary” grants 114, 147; reform of (1748) 189, 195, 197, 205–12, 215, 219–20, 225, 231; reform of (1811) 389–90; relationship to the Estates’ debt 129, 216, 337, 394; stability of after 1748 231, 277, 286, 336; surcharges on 366 conversion/converts (to Catholicism) 51, 60, 61, 67, 75, 82, 92, 93, 94, 99, 103, 126, 148, 169, 189, 229, 241, 255, 263, 271, 296, 305, 347, 376, 405, 406 coronations (undergone by Habsburg rulers) 291, 292, 329–30 Council of State (Staatsrat) 241, 302, 343; and Estates’ credit 270, 299, 305 Counter-Reformation 6, 39, 45, 89–90, 126, 293, 295–6

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442

Index

Court and courtiers/offices: and Estates 32, 55, 71, 74, 93–101, 105, 137, 202, 203, 219, 228, 251–2, 313, 338, 383, 387–8; and government 24; Court dress and Estates 107, 189, 378–9; ritual/festivities and Estates 107–8, 209–10, 258, 277–8, 289, 336, 352, 377, 391–2; proximity of Court and Lower Austrian Estates 31–2; see also chamberlain Crassius, Michael 120 creditors (of the Lower Austrian Estates) 119, 120, 123–4, 127, 138, 148–9, 233, 279, 356 Croatia, diet 29 Croatia-Slavonia 20 currency 355, 361, 371, 386–9; see also Bancozettel; Wiener Währung Czech, Anton 365 Czernin, family 63 Danube, river 20, 23, 29, 30, 31, 33, 90, 150, 168; military transfers (“water marches”) on 178, 183 Daru, Pierre (1767–1829) 375, 382–3 Daun, Count Leopold Joseph (1705–66) 243 debts: Habsburg 109, 244, 248, 270–1, 272, 368, 370; Habsburg debts borne by the Estates of the various lands (including Lower Austria) 110, 120, 128, 139–40, 145, 208–9, 244, 267, 275–6, 277, 279, 280, 284, 316, 367–70, 388–9; Lower Austrian Estates’ debts 69, 119, 121, 141, 145, 147, 149, 184, 208, 244, 266, 270, 275–6, 315, 316, 367–70, 384–5; see also bonds; debt-service; debt tax; interest; Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury debt-service: and Estates’ accounts 147; and military needs 145; and property tax 143; and recesses 128, 145, 206; and tobacco monopoly 209; as justification for taxation 275; by Estates’ receiver general 265, 306; encumbrance of Contribution by 129, 206 debt tax (Schuldensteuer) 273–4, 275, 276, 281, 282, 284, 285 Desselbrunner, Joseph 310 Dimbruck (Diembruck), Johann von 160 Dietmayr, Berthold (1670–1739), abbot of Melk 90 Dietmayr, Joseph 268 Dietrichstein, family 98, 274 Dietrichstein, Prince Ferdinand Joseph (1655–98) 137 Dietrichstein, Count Joseph (1763–1825) 313, 323, 340, 341, 342, 343, 348, 349, 363, 373, 381–4, 387, 388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393 Dietrichstein, Prince Karl Johann Baptist (1728–1808) 327

Dijon, town in Burgundy 38 Directorium in publicis et cameralibus 210, 213, 220, 221–2, 226, 228–9, 234–5, 237, 240, 254, 281, 401; responsibility for the Estates 24, 216–18 Dizent, Johann (1642–89), abbot of Göttweig 90 domain (ruler’s): and cameralist reform 224–5; and clergy 41, 43, 64, 141, 217; and fiscal jurisdiction 226; and indirect taxes 79, 199, 201, 217, 272; and nobility 141; and townsmen 64, 217 donum gratuitum 193, 282, 284 Doxan (Doksany), prelate of 295 Drexler von Schöpfenbrunn, Johann Nepomuk 285 drinks taxes 120, 285, 292, see also Taz/Ungeld Dunkler, Gaudenz (1746–1829), provost of Klosterneuburg 377, 388 Dürnstein, Augustinian monastery in Lower Austria 40, 43 Dürnstein, provost of 40, 43–4, 293 Dutch Republic 14, 127, 202, 396 dynastic state, concept of 24 dynasticism, concept of 16–17 Ebenfurth, castle in Lower Austria 172 Eberhardt von Aybling, Nikolaus 199 Ebersdorf, manor in Lower Austria 123 Edling, Count Johann Nepomuk (1747–93) 305 Eger, Baron Friedrich (1734–1812) 317, 318, 343 Eger (Cheb), town in Bohemia 151 Eggenberg, family 60, 62 Eggenburg, town in Lower Austria 30, 64, 100, 168, 233 Egloffs, county in Swabia 69 Ehr, David von der 164 Einstandsrecht 39, 46, 128, 140, 321 Eisenburg (Vás), county in Hungary 177 Eisgarn, collegiate church in Lower Austria 41, 293 Eisgarn, provost of 40, 44, 84, 87, 164, 165, 166, 400 Elbe, river 150 Eleonora, empress, née Gonzaga (1598–1655) 96, 404 Eleonore, empress, née Gonzaga (1628–86) 105, 405 Elias, Norbert 6 Elisabeth Christine, empress, née princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1691–1750) 32 Emaus (Emauzy), Benedictine monastery in Prague 45, 90 empire, concept of 16 Engl, Count Franz Friedrich (1688–1767) 186 England 71

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Index Enkevoirth, Count Wenzel Adrian 85, 167, 170, 179 Enns, river 20, 30, 104, 183 Ennß, Franz Anton 252, 261, 268 entails 6, 94, 96, 194, 241, 376, 380 Enzmillner, see Windhag Erbhuldigung, see inauguration Ernst, archduke (1553–95) 96 Escorial 31, 90 Estates (generally in the Habsburg lands) 29–30; eighteenth-century reform and 197, 203, 209, 214–15, 218–19, 229, 240–4, 249–50, 259–61, 284–5, 290–1, 294–5, 298–319, 328, 343–4, 351–2; changing understanding of 326, 343–53; see also Bohemia; Brabant; Carinthia; Carniola; Galicia-Lodomeria; Gorizia; Hungary; Lower Austria; Moravia; Silesia, Styria; Transylvania; Tyrol; Upper Austria Estates Credit Deputation 238, 242–3, 260 Esterházy, family 100, 405 Esterházy, Prince Joseph 405 Esterházy, Count Ladislaus 63 Esterházy, Princess Maria Oktavia, née Baroness Gilleis 100, 405 Esterházy, Prince Nikolaus 100, 405 étapes (Etappen) 152, 180–2; see also provisioning Eugene, prince of Savoy (1663–1736) 51, 54, 97–8, 100, 138, 140, 142, 144, 154, 181, 190, 197, 198, 201, 202, 257 excise taxes 223; as farmed/administered by Estates or manors 139, 198–9, 199–200, 208, 237, 272, 292; see also Taz/Ungeld Exekutionsordnung, see order of distraint Extra-Catastrales 239, 282 Faber, Sebastian ({ 1703), Schotten abbot 88 Falkenhayn, family 263 Falkenhayn, Count August ({ 1764) 93, 167, 169 Falkenhayn, Count Nikolaus 93, 261–2, 263, 276 Falkenstein, manor in Lower Austria 94 Familiensteuer 273 Ferdinand I (1503–64), emperor 94 Ferdinand II (1578–1637), emperor 37, 39, 40, 45, 67, 93–5, 103, 104, 120, 121, 128, 229, 257; and the Lower Austria Estates 42, 49–50, 82, 89, 99, 162 Ferdinand III (1608–57), emperor 17, 32, 53, 63, 67, 89, 96; and the Lower Austrian Estates 82–3, 92, 104, 173, 264 Fetzer Carl ({ 1750), Schotten abbot 90–1, 205 Fillenbaum, Leopold von 348, 349 First Silesian War (1740–2) 184–6, 190 fiscal-military state, concept of 13, 15, 110 Fischer von Erlach, Johann Bernhard (1656–1723) 213 Forbes (Borovany), Augustinian monastery in Bohemia 90

443

forced loans/credit 129, 136, 141, 145, 229, 233–4, 236, 237, 239, 353, 362, 364, 367, 376, 384, 394 Florence 328 France 7, 8, 13, 17, 27, 29, 33, 37, 38, 60, 72, 97, 111, 127, 133, 136, 144, 154, 157, 179, 180, 186, 194, 239, 247, 271, 274, 280, 312, 317, 320, 321, 325, 328, 329, 330, 343, 359, 360, 378, 380; parlements 211, 258, 346, 396 Franche-Comté, region in France 96 Francis I (1708–65), emperor, né Francis Stephen of Lorraine 195, 202, 204, 247 Francis II/I (1768–1835), emperor 17, 242, 325, 326, 337, 339, 350, 360, 366, 367, 368, 377, 380, 383, 386, 391, 392, 397; and the Lower Austrian Estates 330–1, 352, 357, 372–3, 378–9 Francis Joseph (1830–1916), emperor of Austria and king of Hungary 2 Franco-Dutch war (1674–9) 18, 116 Franconia, region in Germany 51 Frankfurt am Main 330 Frankl, Jacob 120 Frederick II (1712–86), king of Prussia 190, 320 Freiburg, town in Further Austria 54 Friars Minor, monastery in Vienna 31–2, 120, 189, 203, 281, 286, 353 Friedenthal, Baron 305 Fries, Baron Johann (1719–85) 234 Fries, Count Moritz (1777–1826) 375 Fuchs, Count Christoph Ernst 51 Fuchs, family 204 Fugger, Susanna 403 Führer, Michael ({ 1745), provost of St. Pölten 87 Fünfkirchen, family 92, 98, 100, 138, 148 Fünfkirchen, Baron Hans Bernhard ({ 1700) 167 Fünfkirchen, Baron Hans Sigmund ({ 1647) 164 Fünfkirchen, Baron Johann Adam (1696–1748) 167 Fünfkirchen, Baron Johann (Hans) Carl 93, 100, 126, 167, 405 Fürstenberg, Count Joachim Egon (1749–1828) 336, 340, 342, 374, 375 Further Austria, region in southern Germany 244, 299, 301 Gaisruck commission 208 Gaisruck, Count Anton ({ 1761) 217 Galicia(-Lodomeria), Estates of 29–30, 216, 286, 299, 302, 314, 321, 366, 395 Galicia(-Lodomeria), kingdom 20, 352, 366, 372, 379, 390 Gallenberg, Count Seifried 295 Gaming, Carthusian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40

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444

Index

Gaming, prior of 40, 44, 87, 148, 293 Gastheimb, Johann Ferdinand von 170 Gatterburg, family 105 Gatterburg, Carl Christoph von 77, 113–15, 127 Gatterburg, Count Constantin Joseph 126–7, 136, 400 Gatterburg, Max Servatius von (1654–98) 126–7, 136, 400 Gemmingen, Baron Karl 281 General Civil Code (1811) 324 General Disbursement Treasury (Generalkassa) 240, 267 General Field War Commissariat (Generalfeldkriegskommissariat) 27, 67, 68, 69, 71, 78, 92, 93, 97, 151, 153, 158–60, 162, 169, 174, 176, 177, 178, 181, 254, 274, 393; headed by Lower Austrian lords 160; see also commissaries Generallandesobrister 67 Generalland- und Hauszeugmeister 125 Genoa, republic of 238 Geras, Premonstratensian monastery in Lower Austria 30, 40, 43, 294 Geras, provost of 40, 43, 44, 87, 294 Gerber, Johann Michael 125 German Confederation 20, 324 Geyer von Edlbach, family 102, 104 Geyer von Edlbach, Anna 406 Geyer von Edlbach, Carl Leopold 125 Geyer von Edlbach, Baron Christoph Ehrenreich 74, 103–4, 124, 399 Geyer von Edlbach, Franziska 406 Geyer von Edlbach, Maria Anna 124 Geyer von Edlbach, Maria Elisabeth 406 Geyer von Osterberg, Christoph Adam 164 Geyersperg, Count Johann Albert (1675–1738) 167 Geymann, family 92, 138 Geymann, Baron Hans Ehrenreich ({ 1678) 404 Geymann, Baron Hans Carl 93, 167 Geymann, Baron Johann Gottfried ({ 1712) 167, 404 Geymüller, banking house 384 Gföhl, manor in Lower Austria 176 Gilleis family 92, 99–101, 168, 405 Gilleis, Baron Georg (Franz Anton) 167, 171, 176, 182, 405 Gilleis, Baron Georg Julius 99–100, 405 Gilleis, Baron Heinrich Julius 405 Gilleis, Baron Julius 86, 100, 167, 170, 185, 186, 405 Gilleis, Baroness Maria Anna Elisabetha (or Isabella) 405 Gilleis, Baroness Maria Antonia 405 Gilleis, Baroness Maria Josepha Barbara 405 Gilleis, Baroness Maria Theresia Elisabeth 405 Gilleis, Baroness Sabina Christina, née Countess Starhemberg 100–1 Gilleis, Baron Wolfgang Georg 405

Girtler von Kleeborn, Josef 368 Glorious Revolution (1688) 13 Gögger, see Lewenegg Gold von Lampoding, Erasmus 103 Gonzaga, ruling family 98 Gorizia, Estates of 29, 219, 242, 260, 305, 328 Gorizia, county of 222, 299 Gotschalkowsky von Gotschalkowitz, Baron Adam Joseph 242 Göttweig, abbot of 40, 42, 43, 44, 87, 88, 90, 263, 278, 293, 333, 381 Göttweig, Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria 31, 91 gouvernement mixte 270 Gradisca 219, 222, 242, 260, see also Gorizia Grafenegg-Neuaigen, manor in Lower Austria 380 Graz, capital of Styria 250, 260, 299, 305, 309, 310–11 Great Britain 13, 325, 396 Great Britain, parliament 243, 270, 396 Greillenstein, castle in Lower Austria 168 grievances (of the Estates) 112, 146, 225, 258, 276, 313, 319, 326, 329, 331–2, 337, 343, 344, 346, 350, 353, 364–5, 390, 391; as customary response to ruler’s demands on the diet 275, 329 Groppenberger, Johann Georg 265–7, 268, 401 Grundemann von Falkenberg, family 104–5, 138 Grundemann von Falkenberg, Adam Anton 61, 74, 75, 84, 103–4, 105, 406 Grundemann von Falkenberg, Constantin 104 Grundemann von Falkenberg, Ernst Konstantin 104 Grundherrschaft, see manorial system Gudenus, Baron Johann Baptist 261, 262 Gült (Gültgebühr) 117–19 Gumpoldskirchen, market town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Güns (Kőszeg), town in western Hungary 148 Gurk, bishop of 295 Gurlandt, family 99 Gurlandt, Count Albrecht Ernst ({ 1698) 99, 167, 170, 173, 183 Gurlandt, Count Johann Anton Ernst ({ 1728) 167, 172 Gurlandt, Niclas von ({ 1648) 99 Gurnitz, collegiate church in Carinthia 294 Gußmann, Dominik (1704–77), abbot of Seitenstetten 221 Haan, Mathias Wilhelm von 350, 377 Habsburg dynasty (house of Austria) 4, 6, 16, 29, 89, 97, 105, 132, 149, 227 Habsburg monarchy: as a composite monarchy 16, 20, 27, 28, 150, 158, 264, 287, 320, 331, 376, 378, 392, 398; as a fiscal military state 15, 28, 105–6, 110,

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Index 201, 264, 329, 397; territorial composition and spheres of geopolitical influence 20; see also patriotism Hackelberg, family 92 Hackelberg, Rudolph von ({ 1766) 234 Hackelberger von Höchenberg, Carl 126, 199, 399 Hackher, Christoph Ferdinand 169, 170, 173 Hacqué, family 263 Hacqué, Ludwig von 254, 258, 262, 276, 278, 285, 319, 328, 336, 353, 401 Hainburg, town in Lower Austria 64 Hamilton, Count Niclas (1715–69) 169, 186 Handgrafenamt 126, 127, 200, 400 Hann von Hannenberg, Matthias Bartholomäus 160 Hardegg, family 61, 98–9, 201, 375 Hardegg, Count Friedrich 383 Harrach, family 62, 92, 98, 195, 199, 200, 211, 224, 405 Harrach, Count Aloys Thomas Raimund: as Lower Austrian Landmarschall 71, 192, 193, 198, 203; as member of Finance Conference 197–8; as minister 198; as tax farmer 198–202; as viceroy of Naples 73, 198; exercise of patronage at the Estates by 60, 170–1, 200–1, 253, 256, 257; family and career 71, 97–8, 197–8 Harrach, Count Carl Anton (1692–1758) 167, 172, 202, 203, 205, 213, 220 Harrach, Count Carl Leonhard (VII) 338 Harrach, Count Carl Leonhard (IX) (1765–1831) 338 Harrach, Count Ferdinand Bonaventura I 98, 197 Harrach, Count Ferdinand Bonaventura II (1708–78) 59, 203, 211, 280 Harrach, Count Franz ({ 1768) 101, 186, 213, 238, 242 Harrach, Count Franz Anton, prince-bishop of Vienna, later archbishop of Salzburg (1665–1727) 98, 197 Harrach, Count Friedrich (1696–1749) 61, 265; as Bohemian grand chancellor 195, 202–3, 210, 216; as interim stadholder in Brussels 201–2; as Lower Austrian Landmarschall 202–3, 210; as tax farmer 201, 210; conflict with Empress Maria Theresa and Haugwitz 195, 196, 197, 198, 203–5, 207–8, 212; death of 211 Harrach, Count Johann Joseph 198 Harrach, Countess Maria Antonia Eusebia 405 Hartig, Count Anton 304 Hartmann, Leopold 185 Hätzenberg, family 92 Hätzenberg, Albrecht Ignaz von 104 Hätzenberg, Franz von 406 Hätzenberg, Johann Ernst von (the elder) 60, 104, 406

445

Hätzenberg, Johann Ernst von (the younger) 74, 75, 92, 104, 105, 406 Hätzenberg, Justinian von 104 Hatzfeld, Count Karl Friedrich (1718–93) 276, 370 Hauer, Urban (1710–85), abbot of Melk 278 Haugwitz, Count Friedrich Wilhelm (1702–65) 24, 25, 27, 145, 149, 194, 230, 243, 244, 248, 249–51, 254, 257, 259, 265, 273, 281, 283, 286, 356, 389, 390, 394, 397, 401; admission to Lower Austrian Estates 228; alleged abolition of Estates’ right to approve taxation 209; as cameralist 204–5, 215, 216; conflict with Friedrich Harrach 195–7, 203–5, 210, 212; dealings with the Lower Austrian Estates 189–90, 206–10, 213, 218–27, 234–40; see Contribution, reform of 1748; Lower Austria, Estates of: reform 1748 and 1740s/1750s Haydn, Joseph (1732–1809) 380 Hayek, see Waldstätten hearth tax (Hausanschlag, Hausaufschlag) 117–19, 125, 140, 180 Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, Johann Rupprecht 74, 75, 76, 103, 104, 105 Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, Maria Eva 406 Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, Maria Magdalena Barbara 406 Hegenmüller von Dubenweiler, Wenzeslaus 406 Heiligenkreuz, abbot of 40, 44, 87, 88, 89, 141, 163, 164, 294, 343 Heiligenkreuz, Cistercian monastery in Lower Austria, 31, 40, 43, 294 Heintl, Franz von (1769–1839) 348–9, 359–61, 378 Heissenstein, family 92, 101, 263 Heissenstein, Count Carl Joseph 100, 167, 169, 185, 186, 405 Heissenstein, Count Christoph Carl 405 Heissenstein, Count Franz (1730–81) 263, 278 Heissenstein, Count Otto Felician ({ 1693) 102, 405 Herb, Maximilian ({ 1709), provost of Herzogenburg 175, 176, 181 Herberstein, family 62, 92, 98–9, 136, 138 Herberstein, Count Ferdinand Leopold (1695–1744) 201, 202, 203 Herberstein, Count Franz 164 Herberstein, Count Georg Jacob 163, 172 Herberstein, Count Johann Ernst (1671–1746) 242 Herberstein, Count Joseph 222 Herberstein, Count Sigismund 56 Herberstein, Count Sigismund Ladislaus ({ 1696) 126, 164, 178 Herzogenburg, Augustinian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40, 45, 293

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446

Index

Herzogenburg, provost of 40, 44, 45, 85, 86, 87, 130, 134, 175, 176, 181, 184, 194, 293 Heysperg, Eleonora Elisabeth von 406 Heysperg, Raimund von 103, 406 Hildebrandt, Johann Lukas von (1668–1745) 200 Hintze, Otto 2, 157, 173 Hirschl, Leopold 170 Hocher, Baron Johann Paul (1616–83) 54, 84, 132, 168 Höckenstall, Matthias Adam von ({ 1694) 164, 165 Hofburg (Habsburg castle in Vienna) 9, 23, 31, 36, 89, 105, 107, 189, 210, 236, 247, 278, 289, 375, 392 Hofmann, Andreas Georg von 160 Hohberg, Baron Wolf Helmhard (1612–88) 3, 51, 61 Hohenfeld, family 92, 98, 138 Hohenfeld, Count Ferdinand 92, 160, 162, 164, 178 Hohenfeld, Count Otto Ferdinand Felix (1674–1741) 167, 405 Hohenwart, Count Georg Jacob 310 Holdt von Holdegg, Caspar 125–6, 399 Holics (Holíč), castle in western Hungary 377 Holy Roman Empire 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 24, 53, 55, 67, 113, 130, 157–8, 278, 314, 324, 331, 347, 353, 395; diet of 29, 314; Estates (Reichsstände) 29, 57, 69, 278; Italien fiefs of 20; see also imperial vice-chancellor; Imperial Aulic Council Holzer, Michael Johann 187 Holzner, Johann Christoph (1616–72) 399 Hönig von Hönigsberg, Israel 297, 321 Hormayr, Baron Joseph (1781–1848) 378–80 Horn, town in Lower Austria 168 Hörnigk, Philipp Wilhelm von (1640–1714) 132 Hoyos, family 62, 93–4, 96, 138, 338, 375, 403 Hoyos, Count Hans Balthasar (the elder) 71, 91, 93, 403 Hoyos, Count Hans Balthasar (the younger) 71, 72, 403 Hoyos, Count Johann Anton (1731–91) 167, 264, 319, 328 Hoyos, Count Johann Leopold (1728–96) 167, 255, 263, 264, 278 Hoyos, Baron Ludwig Gomez (1551–1600) 403 Hoyos, Count Philipp Joseph (1695–1762) 86, 233 Hradisch (Hradisko), Premonstratensian monastery in Moravia 294 Hubertusburg, Peace of (1763) 1, 247, 251, 272, 316 Hundred Days War (1815) 18 Hungary, Estates of 29, 193, 295, 296, 314, 319, 321, 329, 392

Hungary, kingdom 20, 29, 42, 51, 90, 98, 104, 127, 128, 133, 157, 172, 174, 178, 181, 183, 186, 200, 259, 275, 276, 303, 310, 312, 325, 326, 330, 331, 372, 379, 387, 400; border defense by Lower Austria in 111, 143, 155, 177, 194; counties of 303 Imperial Aulic Council (Reichshofrat) 78, 95, 216; judicature relative to Estates in the Holy Roman Empire 9, 10, 216, 278, 314; and Estates in the Habsburg lands 9, 278–9, 314; personnel overlap with the Lower Austrian Estates 51, 57–9, 68, 71, 75, 105, 138, 280, 278–9, 403; see imperial vice-chancellor Imperial General War Disbursement Treasury (Kaiserliche Generalkriegskassa) 131 Imperial Recess (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) (1803) 347 imperial vice-chancellor (Reichsvizekanzler) 9, 211, 252, 279, 327, 373 inauguration in Lower Austria (Erbhuldigung) 23, 82, 150, 192, 291–2, 329–33, 338, 349, 372 income taxes 144, 191, 194, 273 indigenat 104, 228 industrious revolution 34 Ingolstadt, town in Bavaria 400 inheritance tax (Erbschaftssteuer) 235, 272, 276, 334–5 Inkolat 297 Inner Austria, government (Gubernium) 298, 299, 303, 305, 309, 310, 311, 314, 317, 340 instructions 76–9, 124, 177, 223, 280, 281, 334–5, 336, 363 intendants (France) 157, 158, 222, 384 Interessensteuer 273 interest, rate of: on French public debt 275; on Lower Austrian Estates’ debts 136, 138, 146–7, 276, 367, 368, 369, 377, 389 “introduction” (of new members into the diet), see ritual Isabella, archduchess, née princess of BourbonParma (1741–63) 247, 258 Italy 140, 147, 157, 198, 360, 379 Jacobins 365, 373 Janikho, Martin von 160 Jena, town in Thuringia 399 Jesuits 15, 92, 93, 120; and membership in the Estates 45–6, 105 John (Johann), archduke (1782–1859) 380 John Sobieski (1629–96), king of Poland 97, 157 Jörger, family 138 Jörger, Count Johann Quintin (1624–1705) 132, 133 Joseph I (1678–1711), emperor 32, 45, 94, 107, 141, 142, 144

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Index Joseph II (1742–90), emperor 1, 9, 15, 23, 24, 34, 39, 46, 50, 59, 93, 101, 247, 250, 252, 258, 264, 268, 269, 272, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287, 323, 325, 326, 327, 328, 330, 331, 332, 335, 336, 337, 338, 340, 349, 351, 353, 361, 366, 369, 371, 373, 379, 386, 390, 393; and composite monarchy 28, 320; early views on the Estates 248, 289; personal contact with the Lower Austrian Estates 289; policy toward the Estates of the Habsburg lands including Lower Austria 216, 289–322 Josephstadt, suburb of Vienna 235 jurisdiction, privileged criminal (of the nobility): Joseph II’s abolition of 301; Leopold II’s refusal to restore 332; Francis II’s refusal to restore 373 justice: as core area of early modern government 14, 25, 38, 75, 79, 214, 215, 302, 332, 393; lack of separation from administration in extraordinary fiscal affairs 133, 217, 225, 226, 240, 301, 362, 366; see also Landmarschall’s tribunal; Landrecht Kager, see Stampach Karlowitz, Peace of (1699) 77, 127, 138, 140 Kastner von Sigmundslust, Johann 406 Kattau, castle in Lower Austria 100, 168 Kaunitz, family 63 Kaunitz-Rietberg, Prince Wenzel Anton (1711–94) 197, 240, 267, 284, 286, 343, 344 Kees, Franz Bernhard von 256 Kees, Franz Georg von 265, 296 Kees, Ignaz von ({ 1817): as knights’ Deputy 345, 375, 376, 377, 382, 384; background 338–9; client of Landmarschall Dietrichstein 342; on significance of Estates’ credit 385, 386 Kees, Johann Georg von 200, 256 Khevenhüller, Count Franz Anton (1737–97) 300, 309, 318, 336, 340, 373 Khevenhüller, Count Heinrich 285 Khevenhüller, family 274 Khevenhüller-Metsch, Count Joseph 328 Khevenhüller-Metsch, Prince Johann Joseph (1706–76) 204, 211 Khlesl, Melchior (1552–1630), cardinal 41, 82 Kielmannsegg, Baron Heinrich Casimir Ernst 163 Kinsky, Countess Eleonora 405 Kinsky, Count Franz Ferdinand 405 Kinsky, Count Philipp (1700–49) 204 Kinsky, family 63, 100, 405 Kinsky, Prince Franz Ulrich (1726–92) 63 Kirchberg, prioress of 41, 148 Kirnberg an der Mank, collegiate church in Lower Austria 40, 41 Kirnberg an der Mank, dean of 44, 45

447

Klagenfurt, town in Carinthia 59, 218, 226, 295, 299, 309 Klassensteuer (capitation) 273, 362–3, 385 Klein, Magnus (1717–83), abbot of Göttweig 278 Kleinmariazell, abbot of 40, 44, 293 Kleinmariazell, Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria 40 Klosterneuburg, Augustinian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 42–3, 90–1, 292–3, Klosterneuburg, provost of 40, 44, 87, 90, 144, 233, 234, 236, 242, 262, 265, 319, 328, 333, 335, 375, 377, 381, 388 Klosterneuburg, town in Lower Austria 31, 40, 43, 64 Koch, Franz Georg von 251, 400 Koch, Baron Ignaz ({ 1763) 204 Kollmann, Rainer (1699–1776), abbot of Zwettl 213, 237 Kollonitsch, Count Heinrich Carl 151, 164, 166, 172 Kollonitsch, Count Leopold, cardinal 42, 56, 87–8 Kollonitsch, Count Sigismund, cardinal 41, 46 Kollweis, Matthäus, abbot of Lilienfeld 86, 89, 91 Kolowrat, Count Leopold (1727–1809) 302, 319, 327 Kolowrat, Count Philipp 242 Königsegg-Erps, Count Carl Ferdinand (1696–1759) 203, 211, 220, 228 Korneuburg, town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Kornfail, Baron (later Count) Hector Friedrich (1650–1718) 51, 138 Krems, river 176 Krems, town in Lower Austria 30, 64, 78, 179, 199 Kremsmünster, Benedictine monastery in Upper Austria 104 Kreuz, castle in Upper Carniola 219 Kriegl, Georg Christoph 73, 193, 200–1, 205 Kuefstein, family 54, 62, 92, 98, 168 Kuefstein, Baron Georg Adam (1605–56) 162, 164 Kuefstein, Count Hans Carl (1679–1717) 167, 168, 169, 172, 174, 179 Kuefstein, Count Hans Ernst (1683–1742) 167 Kuefstein, Count Hans Georg (1645–99) 84, 151, 164, 177, 183 Kuefstein, Count Hans Leopold (1676–1745) 167, 169, 171, 173, 179–80 Kurtz, family 95–6 Kurtz, Count Ferdinand Siegmund 95, 404 Kurtz, Countess Maria Eleonora 404 kuruc rebellion in Hungary (1672–8) 18, 72; see also Thököly rebellion Laa an der Thaya, town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Lacy, Count Franz Moritz (1725–1801) 228

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448

Index

Laibach (Ljubljana), capital of Carniola 218–19, 260, 267, 295, 298, 309, 310 Laibach (Ljubljana), cathedral canons of 295, 299 Lamberg, family 62, 136 Lamberg, Baron Hans Franz (1624–66) 83, 101, 102, 119 Lamberg, Count Ferdinand 213, 234, 237 Lamberg, Count Franz Joseph 167 Lamberg, Count Johann Maximilian 98 Lamberg, Count Leopold 242 Lambrechts, Petronilla 266 Landau, fortress in the Palatinate 141 Landesaufschläge am Tabor 199 Landesaufschläge zu Ybbs 199 Landesdefension 27, 153, 158; see also Landwehr Landesordnung (in Lower Austria) 112 Landhaus (palace of the Lower Austrian Estates in Vienna) 31–2, 149–50, 392 Landmannsteuer 52 Landmarschall, office of (president of the Lower Austrian Estates) 27, 103, 107–8, 285; activities/duties 70, 72–3, 75, 127, 151, 169, 213, 234, 236, 252, 253, 256, 263–4, 265, 269, 272, 277–8, 281, 308, 311–12, 318–19, 323, 327, 328, 334, 339–40, 342–3, 381, 382; amalgamation with the office of provincial governor (1782) 300; appointment of 70, 374; enhanced authority under Maria Theresa 259, 261; incumbents 71, 203, 211, 339–40; exercise of patronage at the Estates 169, 198–201, 342; as president of college of Deputies 259, 334; separation from the office of provincial governor (1790) 333; social profile of incumbents 67–9, 70, 82, 91–9, 259, 340 Landmarschall ’s tribunal (Landmarschall’sches Gericht) 70, 101, 104, 135, 198, 217, 226, 240, 241, 252, 256–8, 261, 393; as instrument of confessionalization 75; jurisdiction in fiscal affairs 226 Landrecht 25, 70, 126, 217, 285, 335, 355, 377; reformed in Lower Austria 25, 248, 256–8, 260–1, 301, 332, 350, 395; jurisdiction in fiscal affairs 282; see also Landmarschall’s tribunal land register (Landtafel) 226, 229 Landrekrutenstellung (territorial recruitment) 109, 142, 146, 152, 183–4, 207; see also recruitment; conscription Landschreiber 74, 76, 200, 256 Landsteuer (Urbarsteuer) 117–9, 138, 141, 147, 194 Landstrass (Kostanjevica), Cistercian monastery in Carniola 294 Landuntermarschall, office of (head of the Lower Austrian Estate of knights) 27, 69, 73–6, 82, 213, 234, 237, 251, 253, 262, 267,

345, 350, 353–5, 356, 375, 399, 400, 401; holder as client of Landmarschall 60–1, 200; incumbents 74, 336; as presiding officer of the Landmarschall’s tribunal 75–6; revival of (1790) 336; social profile of 73–5, 92, 102–5, 200, 256–8; vacancy of (1764–90) 258 Landwehr 379–81, 383; see Landesdefension Langenlois, town in Lower Austria 30, 64 Languedoc, province of France 38 Lannoy, Count Max Joseph 53 Lanthieri, Count Caspar (1716–1802) 242 Lassberg, Hans Seifried von ({ 1676) 164 Leeb, Floridus (1731–99), provost of Klosterneuburg 328 Leeb, Robert (1688–1755), abbot of Heiligenkreuz 88, 91, 141 Leipzig, town in Saxony 57 Leiss, Benedikt ({ 1658), abbot of Altenburg 89 Leitha, river 30, 172 Lempruch, family 92 Lempruch, Johann Adolph von 406 Leopold I (1640–1705), emperor 4, 27, 28, 45, 51, 54, 56, 59, 71, 83, 91, 96–7, 98, 99, 101, 105, 107, 113, 118, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 167, 177, 194, 197, 225, 235, 273, 394 Leopold II (1747–92), emperor 247, 258, 320, 321, 324, 325, 338, 386, 395; views on Estates 291, 327, 329–30; policy toward the Lower Austrian Estates 326–37, 343–7, 349–51, 357 Leopold of Schleswig-Holstein (1674–1744) 148 Leopold Wilhelm, archduke (1614–62) 103, 400 Leslie, family 62 Leslie, Count Walter (1607–67) 67 Lewenegg, Johann Ferdinand (Gögger) von 401 Lichtenthurn, Baron Joseph Xaver 219 Liechtenberg, Count Carl 260 Liechtenstein, family 31, 62, 70, 99, 139, 148 Liechtenstein, Prince Franz (1726–81) 59 Liechtenstein, Prince Gundaker (1580–1658) 6, 82 Liechtenstein, Prince Joseph Wenzel (1696–1772) 233 Liechtenstein, Princess Maria Theresia 405 Lierre, Beguins church in Brabant 266 Lilienfeld, abbot of 40, 44, 86, 87, 88, 89, 118, 164, 165, 234, 237, 238 Lilienfeld, Cistercian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40, 91, 293 Lindegg, Johann Albrecht von 205, 217–18 Lindegg, Johann Caspar von 164 Linz, cathedral chapter of 295 Litzelhofen, Receiver General von 309 Lobkowitz, family 63 Locella, Baron 305

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Index Löhr, Baron Johann Friedrich 301 Lombardy-Venetia, kingdom 330, 352, 395 London 34 Long Turkish War (1593–1606) 120, 156, 161 Lorraine, duchy 190 Losenstein, Count Georg Achaz (1597–1653) 71 Louis XIV, king of France 8, 13, 97, 110, 116, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 140, 144, 151, 154, 157, 162, 180, 184, 320 Louis XVI (1754–93), king of France 287, 291, 347, 359, 391 Lower Austria (archduchy below the Enns): administrative divisions 30–1; geography 30; social and economic characteristics 32–5 Lower Austria, Estates of admissions/membership 43–6, 47–59, 228–9, 338, 348; and manorial landownership 47–8; and religious tolerance 295–8; confessional requirement for 50; Habsburg influence on 45, 47–51, 95, 228–9, 271–2; of ministers 53–4, 228–9, 352–3; of social climbers 27, 51, 52, 53, 56, 68, 92, 95, 103, 120, 164, 259, 271–2, 321, 338, 354; physiocratic influence on 349–51; privilege of 1572 47, 50, 59; privilege of 1671 56, 59 and aristocracy 61–4, 87–8, 93–101, 105–6 and Protestant nobles 49–51, 54, 57, 60–1, 67, 75, 82–4, 86, 89, 91, 92–3, 257 assemblies 72–81, 111, 236–7, 253–4, 279, 302–5, 308, 311–16, 327, 334–6 bookkeeper 79, 117, 125, 135, 217, 268, 307, 332, 362, 363, 366 college of accounts (Raitkollegium) 69, 79–80, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 250, 253, 256, 258, 265 college of Deputies (Verordnetenkollegium) 27, 43, 69, 76–9, 80, 81–106, 151, 374–5, 376, 388; amalgamation with provincial government (1784) 302–7, 313; and central authorities 78, 81, 234, 242, 248, 259, 261–3, 281, 334; and circle offices 225, 255–6, 264, 282, 335; and credit/borrowing 232–3, 234, 238, 242, 334, 377, 384, 385; and fiscal administration 78–9, 118, 134–5, 194, 199, 217–8, 220–1, 234, 236, 239–40, 259, 263, 269, 273, 280–1, 282, 283, 307, 362–7; and military administration 78, 151, 157, 159, 174–8, 181–4, 185, 187, 223, 224, 280, 334, 391–2; and provincial government 281–2, 334; annual reports to the diet 79; changing institutional culture of 263–5, 395; alleged corruption of individual members 200, 251–2, 395; election of members 76–7, 253, 263–4, 270, 303, 304, 333–4, 339, 340, 348; instructions for 77–9, 280, 282, 334, 363; legal

449 authority in fiscal affairs 226, 281–2; management of the Estates’ administration 78–9, 117, 121, 124, 162–3, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 281, 306; members’ pay 115, 219, 250, 304, 334, 381–2; pace of business 77, 362; presidency of 77, 253, 259, 260, 300; reform of (1764) 248, 251–4, 255, 259–65; relationship to the Estates 76, 78, 175, 218, 281; revival of (1790) 332, 333–5, 336, 337–9; representation in aulic commissions 79, 235–8, 252, 261, 272, 283–4, 303, 334–5, 345–6, 366; social profile of 76–7, 81–106, 261–2, 263, 337–9 commissariat (military administration) 27, 151–87, 248, 254–5; junior commissaries (Unterkommissare) 162–3, 166, 169–70, 172–3, 185, 186, 224; senior commissaries (Oberkommissare) 151, 159, 162–73, 175, 178, 185–6, 224, 251 cursus honorum 85–7, 90, 92, 100–1, 104, 167, 251–2, 254, 259, 261, 262 diet (Landtag) 72; and central authorities 81, 216; annual grant (Landtagsbewilligung) 112; annual meetings 110–11, 113, 278–9, 326; as arena of negotiation with the government 29, 110, 111, 136, 206, 273, 279; attempt to supersede 236–7; attendance 189, 279, 327; closure 115; composition 38, 349–51; convocation 24, 72, 314; “declaration” of (Landtagserklärung) 72, 275, 316, 329, 336, 337; duration 112; failure to consult on taxation 130, 132, 276; guarantee of regular convocation 145, 209, 212; historiography on 290–1, 311; increasing length of 43; minutes of 73; opening 107–8, 209–10; participation of townsmen in 65; persistence under Joseph II 308, 311–12, 314–15, 318–19; presidency of 72, 259, 300–1, 336, 342; as “public” occasion 42, 154; representative character of 39, 347, 356; revival after 1790 336; ruler’s proposition to (Landtagspostulata) 111, 193, 277, 290, 390; shift in social balance toward the nobility 349; see also Contribution Estate of knights (Ritterstand) 38, 65, 73, 82, 91–2, 102–5, 254, 256, 258, 262, 263, 275, 331, 336, 391; admissions/ membership 47–59, 95, 296–7, 350, 353–5; anti-Jewish statute of 353–5; decline of 39, 49, 60, 73, 161, 163–5, 166, 258, 267, 336; officeholders 74, 81–6, 102–5, 263, 264, 265, 304, 308, 333–4; and reform (1764) 253, 258; relationship to Estate of lords 57, 73, 60–1, 106, 124, 218, 336, 342; social profile 51, 52, 53, 55, 60, 74–6, 102, 126

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450

Index

Estate of lords 32, 38, 60–1, 70, 73, 82, 105, 112, 138, 144, 331, 373; admissions/ membership 47–59, 105, 138, 148, 228, 298, 350, 353–3, 355; and aristocracy 61–4, 105; and pedigrees 53; and Protestant members 51, 56–9; bishops/ clergy as members 41–2, 56; election of officeholders 76–7, 82–6, 264, 339, 340–2, 348; growth of 39–40; officeholders 69–72, 91–102, 167, 261–3, 303–5, 308, 319, 333–4, 337–8; social profile 60–4 Estate of prelates 39, 72, 125, 126, 141, 220–1, 265, 267, 274, 285, 311, 331, 348, 350–1, 375, 388, 391; and commendatory abbots 293–5; and suppression of monasteries (1780s) 292–5; election of officeholders 76, 82, 85–6, 262, 263, 333, 339; exclusion from college of Deputies 303, 304; inclusion in new executive committee (1784) 308, 319; membership/admissions 40–6; officeholders 87–91, 163–5, 342–3; presidency of 42–3, 73, 259; restoration to college of Deputies 333; social profile 87, 165; taxation of 134, 141–2 executive committee (Ausschuß) 80–1, 175, 345; abolition (1764) 253, 256, 257; composition 56, 80; continuing Protestant membership in 86; members’ pay 250, 335, 386; qualifications for membership 80, 339, 342; representation on aulic commissions 234, 236, 237, 238; revival (1784/90) 308, 335 “extended finance committee” (großer Wirtschaftsausschuß) 80, 126, 166, 238, 242, 253 financial credit, borrowing, and debt 79, 227, 394; before and during the Thirty Years’ War 119–21; between 1670s and 1720s 136–49; during 1730s and 1740s 191, 193, 195, 208–9, 210, 212; during the Seven Years War 229–34, 238, 239, 240–5; after the Seven Years War 248, 265, 266, 269–71; under the personal rule of Joseph II 308–9, 314–16; during the Napoleonic wars 366–70, 376–7, 384–5, 389; foreign credit markets 230, 238; participation in “composite loans” as of the 1690s 136, 137, 140, 144, 147; personalized nature of 121–7; relationship to recesses successively concluded with ruler 129, 205–6; see also bonds; debts; receiver general; recess; taxes, commutation of Fourth Estate (townsmen) 58, 59, 64–5, 234, 308; lack of ceremonial precedence 278, 339; lack of representation in the college of Deputies 77, 253, 333; political

marginality 64, 85, 205, 208, 331, 369; poverty of 140, 146, 205, 208, 216–17, 369; vote in the diet 92, 112 government-sponsored reform of (1748) 189–212; (late 1740s/ 1750s) 216–29; (1760s) 248, 253–72, 286; (1780s) 289–322; (early 1790s) 326–37, 349–51 limited freedom of religious belief after 1620 49, 50 Matrikel (register of member families) 57, 313 “new lineages” (neue Geschlechter) 52, 102, 103, 355, 401 “old lineages” (alte Geschlechter) 51, 56, 57, 70, 73, 74, 75, 84, 105, 126, 262, 355, 401 organization 18, 27, 30, 67–106, 121–7, 151–87, 212, 214, 228, 253–9, 265–7, 280–2, 283–4, 285, 290, 298–316, 332–6, 348, 351, 362–5 receiver general, office of 74, 77, 121–7, 135, 147, 182, 198, 199, 230, 232, 233, 234, 236, 237, 243, 249, 251–4, 256, 257–8, 261, 263, 265–7, 268, 274, 282, 306–7, 315, 334, 354, 362, 363, 367, 399–401; accounts of 148, 232; as organizational link between tax gathering and borrowing 121; incumbents 265, 306–7, 362, 399–401; holders as members of the Estate of knights 1660s–1760s 124, 126, 253–4, 265, 267; reform (1764) 253–4; 265–7; ties to territorial fiscality 123–7 recesses with, see recess syndic 73, 79, 80, 126, 193, 200, 201, 205, 213, 234, 278, 337, 348, 349 tax authority of 117–8, 133, 134–5, 137, 143, 194, 199, 207, 209, 217–8, 239–40, 244, 259, 267, 273–4, 280–3, 285, 306–7, 316, 334, 335, 336–7, 342, 362–4, 383 “three upper Estates” (a common form of assembly) 65, 72 “two (upper) political estates” 65, 72, 256 uniform 348, 378–9 Lower Austria: Chamber (niederösterreichische Kammer) 71 Lower Austria: chancellor of the provincial government (Regimentskanzler) 74, 76, 103, 121, 124, 400, 401 Lower Austria: see circle offices Lower Austria: monastery council (Klosterrat) 88, 104, 399 Lower Austria: president of the provincial government (Regierungspräsident) 300 Lower Austria: stadholder/governor (Statthalter) 24, 60, 70, 71, 88, 94, 96, 100, 121, 132, 133, 217, 259, 283–4, 341 Lower Austria: territorial/provincial government (Regiment, Regierung) 38, 70, 217, 225, 226, 250; amalgamation with the Estates’

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Index college of Deputies (1784) 303–6, 308–9, 329; and circle offices 222; and the Estates 174, 255, 281–2, 300–1, 334–5, 371, 382; personnel overlap with the Estates 1, 71, 74, 76, 101–2, 104, 172, 242, 264, 399–401; separation from the Estates’ administration (1790) 332–3, 334; tax authority of Estates over personnel of 143 Lower Austria: Vizedom 123, 140, 207 Lubomirska, Princess 377 Lunéville, Peace of (1801) 362, 371 Luschin von Ebengreuth, Arnold (1841–1932) 306 Lützow, Baron Siegmund 297 MacNeven, Baron 305 Madrid 71, 97, 197 magazines (military storage) 179, 372 Mailberg (Lower Austrian commandery of the Order of Malta) 42, 87 Mainz, electorate 243 Malta, order of 42, 295; see Mailberg Manhartsberg 30, see also Quarter above the Manhartsberg; Quarter below the Manhartsberg Mannagetta, family 263 Mannagetta, Baron Ferdinand 263 Mannagetta, Baron Joseph (1699–1764) 221, 236, 237, 238 Mannagetta, Baron Joseph (1756–1813) 335 Mannagetta, Joseph Gotthard von 249, 251–2, 261, 268, 364, 401 Mannagetta, Philipp Jacob von (the elder) 217, 221, 255, 263 Mannagetta, Philipp Jacob von (the younger) (1736–89) 263, 278, 285 Mannhart (von Mannstein), Joseph 362, 364, 401 manorial (seigniorial) administration (Grundherrschaft) 26, 35, 79, 89, 117, 118, 125, 134, 154, 175, 176, 180, 182, 223, 224, 225, 273, 274, 280, 282, 284, 297, 307, 317, 318, 319, 332, 367, 380 manorial (seigniorial) property, ownership of 39, 45, 46, 47–8, 52, 56, 60, 61, 70, 76–7, 99, 140, 163, 166, 169, 211, 222, 225–6, 226–7, 229, 233, 236, 237, 239, 264, 274, 279, 281, 321, 336, 338, 339, 351, 352, 356, 359, 365, 366, 367, 376, 384, 395 Mantua, duke of 157 Mantua, Estates of 328 March, river 30 march-routes (marching routes) 25, 175, 178–80, 186, 223; see also Danube Maria Anna Victoria, princess of Savoy (1683–1763) 51 Maria Elisabeth, archduchess (1680–1741) 202 Maria Theresa (1717–80), empress and ruler of the Habsburg lands 1, 2 ,10, 15, 17, 24,

451

25–6, 29, 32, 39, 46, 52, 93, 94, 96, 99, 110, 149, 160, 169, 189, 190, 192, 193, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201–11, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 222, 225, 227, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 239, 240, 242, 243, 244, 247–8, 250, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 260, 263, 264, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 277–9, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287, 289, 291, 292, 293, 297, 298, 299, 300, 302, 308, 311, 313, 314, 318, 320, 330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 337, 340, 344, 353, 357, 364, 368, 370; conflict with Friedrich Harrach 195–7; 202–4; criticism of Estates’ credit as socially malign 232; her memorials and the paradigm of absolutist state-building 108; memorials of 108, 197, 201, 231; personal interest in appointments at and admissions to the Lower Austrian Estates 220–1, 224, 228–9, 261–2 Mariazell, village in Styria 381 Matthias, emperor (1557–1619) 82, 94, 95 Mauerbach, Carthusian monastery in Lower Austria 40 Mauerbach, prior of 40, 44, 87, 293 Maupeou, René Nicolas Charles Augustin de (1714–92) 211–12 Maximilian I, emperor 2 Maximilian II, emperor 47, 48, 56, 94, 96, 133 Mayenberg, Anton Joseph von (1744–96) 264, 304 Mayenberg, Baron Joseph (1776–1860) 338, 382 Mayer von Mayersberg, Baron Augustin 61 Mayerl, Roman (1686–1751), abbot of Säusenstein 88, 217 Mayr, Zacharias 120 Mediterranean Sea 20 Meggau, family 94 Meggau, Susanna Veronika 403 Melk, abbot of 87, 88, 90, 146, 170, 195, 200, 262–3, 265, 276, 278, 311, 349, 375; as commendatory abbot 293–4; as head of the Estate of prelates 42–3, 73, 259; as lender 148, 233; as ranking member of the Estates after the Landmarschall 40, 44; as tax collector 134, 142, audience with Charles VI 89; tax assessment on 144 Melk, Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40, 42–3, 90, 294 Mensshengen, Ignaz von 255, 263, 283 Mensshengen, Johann Baptist von 213, 238, 401 mercantilism 179, 268 Mercy, comte de 176 Metastasio, Pietro (1698–1782) 234 Metternich, Prince Franz Georg (1746–1818) 383 Metternich, Prince Clemens (1773–1859) 352, 353, 383, 390, 391 Milan, city in Lombardy 29, 203, 211 military, see army; commissaries

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452

Index

military border (Militärgrenze) 30, 111, 155, 177, 194 military coordinating commission (Militär Concertations Commission) 334 military economy 13, 27, 153, 159, 175, 180 military revolution, concept of 12, 152 Mödling, town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Mollart, family 96, 98, 199 Mollart, Countess Eleonora 404 Mollart, Baron Ernst 96 Mollart, Count Franz Maximilian 52, 71, 91, 96, 98, 101, 199, 404 Mollart, Baron Jacob 96 Mollart, Baron Johann 96 Mollart, Baron Peter 96 Mollart, Baron Peter Ernst 83, 96, 404 Mollart, Ludwig von 96 Molz, Johann Christoph 265 monasteries, suppression of 292–5, 321, 361, 386–7, 388 Montecuccoli, family 63, 338 Montecuccoli, Count Hieronymus (1583–1643) 120 Montecuccoli, Count Raimondo (1609–80) 151 Montecuccoli, Count Zeno (1737–97) 263 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de (1689–1755) 271 Montoyer, Louis Joseph ({ 1811) 392 Montpellier, town in Languedoc 38 Montserrat, abbot of 44, 46, 262, 293, 295, 303–4 Montserrat, Benedictine monastery outside the city walls of Vienna 45 Moravia, Estates of 203, 242, 260, 285, 294, 295, 302–3, 305, 307, 308, 311, 312, 314, 316, 319, 386 Moravia, margraviate 20, 29, 62, 92, 97, 98, 104, 126, 168, 177, 186, 203, 204, 222, 226, 238, 242, 260, 268, 294, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 305, 306, 307, 308, 311, 312, 313, 332, 340, 341, 359, 369, 386 mortgage register 227 Mörth, Georg ({ 1664), Schotten abbot 165 Moscow 105 Moser, family 92, 105, 254, 263 Moser, Carl Leopold von 73, 74, 75, 76, 205, 213, 234, 401; as a Harrach client 200; as an opponent of government-sponsored reform 200, 237, 251, 253, 257–8, 267, 336, 337, 353 Moser, Daniel von (1570–1639) 257 Moser, Daniel von 205, 258 Moser, Ferdinand Maximilian von 217, 237, 258, 262, 401 Moser, Johann Daniel von 401 Moser, Karl von (Baron) 258, 263, 278, 336, 338, 342, 345, 353–5, 356, 401

Mostviertel, see quarter above the Vienna Woods Much, Placidus (1685–1756), abbot of Altenburg 90 Mühlwang, Georg Adam von 164 Müller, Adam 347 Münster, town in Westphalia 55 Murat, Joachim (1767–1815) 375 Muschinger, family 96, 98 Muschinger, Katharina von 404 Muschinger, Vinzenz von 95–6, 404 Nantes, town in Brittany 38 Naples 20, 71, 73, 147, 184, 190, 198, 201, 247, 393 Napoleon Bonaparte (1769–1821), emperor of the French 323, 355, 360, 375, 376, 377, 378, 379, 380, 381, 383, 386, 389, 390, 391 National Bank 389, 393 natural law 10, 326 Necker, Jacques (1732–1804) 320, 329, 397 Netherlands, see Austrian Netherlands; Dutch Republic Nettine, Madame (banking house) 230 Neudegg, Baron Ehrenreich Ferdinand 164 Neudegg, Baron Ferdinand Raymund 99 Neuhaus (Jindřichův Hradec), town in southern Bohemia 174, 177 Neuwaldegg, manor in Lower Austria 69 Nine Years War (1689–97) 18, 33, 97, 100, 104, 118, 136, 149 nobility: and capitation 135; and circle offices 226; and commerce 272; and military 61; and fiscal privilege 117, 226, 240; and privileged access to state service 227–8; and privileged jurisdiction 256, 302; dismal reputation of 55; fears of biological extinction of 46, 106; importance of wealth to joining 52; pedigreed 53, 57, 64, 70, 354; social authority of 166, 172, 219, 259; stratification of 6, 64, 73, 349; see also aristocracy; Estates; Lower Austria, Estates of: admissions North Sea 20 Nostitz, Count Johann Hartwig (1610–83) 132 Nostiz-Rieneck, family 63 Nuremberg 93 O’Donell, Count Franz Joseph (1756–1810) 386–90 Obizzi, marchese Ferdinand 53 Ödenburg (Sopron), town in western Hungary 177 Oed, Baron 164 Oettingen, Count Wolfgang (1629–1708) 138 Olmütz, cathedral canons of 295 Oppel, family 92

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Index Oppenheimer, Samuel (1630–1703) 109, 139 opposition, see grievances; reform order of distraint (Exekutionsordnung) 141, 225–6, 229, 274, 282, 390 Orelli, family 256 Orelli, Johann Peter von 400 Osnabrück, Peace of (1648) 84, 92, 296 Ossiach, Benedictine monastery in Carinthia 294 Oßwald, Matthias 160, 174, 179, 181, 182 Ostend Company 147 Ottoman empire 14, 16, 17, 20, 27, 29, 33, 72, 76, 78, 88, 90, 97, 101, 105, 111, 118, 127, 130, 132, 133, 134, 136, 149, 155, 156, 165, 177, 194, 287, 326 Ottoman war (1663–4) 18, 111, 116, 156, 162, 163 Ottoman war (1683–99) 18, 100, 116, 136, 138, 165 Ottoman war (1716–18) 18, 145, 146–7, 171, 191, 198 Ottoman war (1737–9) 18, 89, 186, 190 Ottoman war (1788–91) 18, 307, 310, 316, 326 Paar, family 63 Pactum mutuae successionis (1703) 54, 107 Padua, town in Italy 75, 399 Papal war (1708–9) 18 Papaneck, Martin 148 Paris 34, 325, 330, 346 patriotism 355, 377–80, 390, 391; and Lower Austrian Estates 127, 149–50, 165, 193, 206, 233, 269, 355, 360, 372–4, 379–80, 390, 391, 394 Parma, town in Italy 20 Passarowitz, Peace of (1718) 147, 199 Passau, bishop of 41, 103, 400 patronage 7, 53, 60, 73, 91, 92, 99, 106, 121, 123–6, 149, 159, 161, 168, 169–71, 198, 200, 202, 241, 256, 257, 259, 340, 342; see also clientele Paul I (1754–1801), emperor of Russia 359 pays d’états (France) 29, 38, 135, 396 Pázmany, Peter, cardinal (1570–1637) 120 Peilstein, manor in Lower Austria 168 Pendterriedter von Adelshausen, Anton 160 Pendterriedter, Johann Christoph von (1678–1738) 138 Penkler, Baron Joseph (1751–1830) 333, 337, 345, 348 Penz, Ignaz 401 Perchtoldsdorf, market town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Pergen (Perger), family 54, 63, 92, 95, 99, 338 Pergen, Count Carl (1717–77) 167 Pergen, Count Ferdinand (1684–1766) 101, 102, 167

453

Pergen (Perger), Count Heinrich (1629–1702) 84, 123–4, 399 Pergen, Count Johann Anton (1725–1814) 93, 203, 260, 261, 277–8, 285, 289, 301, 302, 303, 304, 327, 328, 335, 340, 349, 365, 398; absence from business 300; and dissolution of college of Deputies 304–5; and Estates’ financial credit 304, 306, 307, 308–9; and reduction of diet 308, 311–12; as Landmarschall and head of the provincial government 300; as police minister 318; as potential hostage of Napoleon 383; background of 95, 259, 300, 333; characterization of by Leopold II 333; criticism of Joseph II 319; tongue-lashing of 333 Pergen, Count Johann Anton (1804–73) 398 Pergen, Count Johann Baptist (1656–1742) 99, 167, 168, 194 Pergen, Count Joseph (1766–1813) 339 Perger, Carl von (the elder) (1592–1646) 121, 399 Perger, Carl von (the younger) 121, 122–4, 127, 399 Perger, Ernst (1667–1748), provost of Klosterneuburg 90 Pernegg, Premonstratensian monastery in Lower Austria 40 Pernegg, provost of 40, 43, 44, 164, 165, 293 Peter I (1672–1725), tsar/emperor of Russia 14, 17 Peterwardein, battle (1716) 105 petitions 24, 225, 313, 348, 350, 365 Petronell, manor in Lower Austria 69 Petschowitz, family 99 Petschowitz, Baron Casimir 99 Pferdesteuer 273 Philip IV (1605–65), king of Spain 97 physiocracy 26, 28, 216, 280–1, 297, 317, 318, 321, 334, 346–7, 351 Piazoll, Odilo ({ 1769), abbot of Göttweig 91 Piccolomini, Octavio (1599–1656) 67 Piedmont 393 Pillerstorff constitution (1848) 398 Pinell, family 105 Pittersfeld, Joseph Pitterle von 169, 186 Planta, Leopold von ({ 1740), provost of Herzogenburg 85, 86, 126, 184, 194 Plaschke, Joseph 240 Plieml Adrian (1683–1745), abbot of Melk 73, 89, 195, 200 Po, river 150 Pointner, Benno (1722–1807), Schotten abbot 278, 328 Poland, First Partition of (1772) 286 Poland-Lithuania, commonwealth 20, 30, 286 Polheim, family 61 Policey- und Cameralwissenschaften 263 Portugal 97 Pottenburnn, castle in Lower Austria 168

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454

Index

praeliminar=Systema (budget) 249 Pragmatic Sanction (1713) 54, 107, 150 Prague, capital of Bohemia 36, 37, 45, 185, 195, 203, 208, 260, 292, 300, 305, 309, 312, 319, 330, 344, 346, 351, 388 Prandau, Baron Franz (1752–1811): as acting Landmarschall 340; as author of manuscript on Leopold II’s Erbhuldigung 330, 338; as Burkian conservative 337–8, 344; as lords’ Deputy 339, 340, 363, 367, 372, 375–6; as member of Estates’ executive committee 345, 382; background of 337, 340; endorsed admission of new money to Estates 354–5; on aulic commission on legal code 345 Prenner von Flamberg, Simon 143 Preßburg (Pozsony), county in Hungary 177 Preßburg (Pozsony, Bratislava), town in Hungary (today in Slovakia) 93, 193, 292 Preßburg, Peace of (1805) 339, 359 Pricklmayr, Matthias (Baron Goldegg) (1589–1656) 53, 96, 123 privilege 8, 13, 23, 24, 39, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 56, 59, 72, 78, 79, 117, 128, 132, 210, 216, 229, 272, 281, 291, 311, 313, 325, 329, 330, 331, 334, 346, 356, 373, 378, 390; see also jurisdiction; Landmarschall’s tribunal; Landrecht property taxes (Vermögenssteuer) 72, 130–3, 135–7, 140, 143–4, 146, 191, 194–5, 198, 206, 211, 239, 240, 273, 362, 388, 394; see also Turk tax Provence, region in France 39 provisioning (military) 25, 26, 28, 85, 111–12, 115, 116, 123, 136, 151–2, 155, 157, 159, 161, 175, 179–82, 183, 185, 187, 207, 229, 231, 238, 280, 283, 284, 302, 310, 320, 334, 360, 371–2, 376, 380, 382, 385, 391; see also étapes Prugg, castle in Lower Austria 200 Prussia 14, 157, 158, 159, 191, 195, 198, 206, 212, 213, 224, 229, 230, 234, 270, 283, 360, 373, 397 public health 20, 79 Puchberg, Johann Matthias 268 Purgstall, manor in Lower Austria 168 Quarient, Christoph Ignaz von 105 Quarient, Franz Anton von 74, 75–6, 105, 400 Quarient, Otto Joseph von 126, 400 Quarter above the Manhartsberg (Waldviertel) 30, 69, 73, 87, 100, 151, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 176, 180, 182, 183, 185, 186, 255, 285, 381 Quarter above the Vienna Woods (Mostviertel) 30, 31, 161, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175,

178–9, 182, 183, 184, 185, 251, 254, 255, 261, 282, 285, 381 Quarter below the Manhartsberg (Weinviertel) 30–1, 42, 46, 89, 94, 98, 151, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 182, 186, 255, 282, 285, 380–1 Quarter below the Vienna Woods 30, 31, 74, 98, 124, 126, 162, 162, 164, 165, 167, 168, 169, 182, 183, 187, 255, 282, 283, 335, 364, 381, 400 quartum genus hominum 283, 362 Raab (Győr), fortress in western Hungary 111, 143, 155, 177, 194 Rabatta, family 62, 160 Radetzky, Count Joseph Wenzel (1766–1858) 393 Rafenstein, Hans Jacob von 124–5, 126, 399, 406 Raigern (Rajhrad), Benedictine monastery in Moravia 294 Rákóczi (kuruc) rebellion in Hungary (1703–11) 18 Rapottenstein, castle/manor in Lower Austria 69 Rappach, family 148 Rappach, Baron Christoph Ferdinand 164, 166, 167 Rasp, Count Augustin 267 Rastatt, Treaty of (1714) 146 Rauch, Jacob 164 receiverships (tax) of the Estates: Burgundy 123; Carinthia 307, 309; Carniola 218, 267, 307, 310; Moravia 307; Styria 307; Tyrol 307; see also Lower Austria, Estates of recess (formal agreement between government and Estates) 25, 27, 110, 112, 128, 147, 149, 150, 191, 199, 203, 207, 208, 209, 270, 310, 390, 394; with Lower Austria (1689) 128–9, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145, 206, 273, 394; with Lower Austria (1701) 128, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 191, 206; with Lower Austria (1713) 128, 142, 145–6, 148, 191, 206; with Lower Austria (1723) 128, 147–8, 149, 191, 206; with Lower Austria (1730) 128, 148, 190, 191, 206; with Lower Austria (1739) 128, 191, 193, 198, 206; with Lower Austria (1748) 128, 205–10, 211, 212, 213, 216, 219, 227, 229, 231, 234, 239, 276, 283, 336, 344, 390; with Lower Austria (1761) 242; with Lower Austria (1767) 275–6; 281 Rechbach, Baron Ludwig 305 recruitment 25, 159, 207, 283–4, 310; see also Landrekrutenstellung; conscription reform, see Estates; Lower Austria, Estates of regalian rights, see domain Regensburg, town in Franconia 29, 51, 93 Regondi, Raimund (1652–1715), abbot of Altenburg 88 Reichspfennigmeister 399

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Index Reisinger, Berthold (1738–1820), abbot of Altenburg 375 Rennes, town in Brittany 38 rent-seeking 201, 251, 395 representation (political) 10, 245, 271, 279; based on birth and status 38–9, 154, 324; based on property 26, 28, 216, 320–1, 326 Representations and Chambers 204, 215, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 226, 234, 236 Retz, town in Lower Austria 31, 64 Reutlinger, Elkan 376 Reyberger, Johann Lorenz 240 Rhine, river 144, 151 Rialp, family 63 Rialp, marqués 54 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), cardinal 8, 157 Ried, village in Lower Austria 315 Rio de la Plata 150 Risenfels, Baron Theodor 342, 377 ritual 5, 7, 29, 313, 314; coronations 291–2, 328, 329–30; entry of Emperor Francis into Vienna (1806) 377–8; entry of Emperor Francis into Vienna (1814) 391–2; handover of annual tax proposition to Estates 107, 210, 257, 277–8, 289, 311, 336, 352; inauguration (Erbhuldigung) 23, 291–2, 329–30, 331; installation in office of the Landmarschall 70, 73, 95–6; “introduction” of new members into Estates 46, 51, 353; opening of Lower Austrian diet 107–8, 209–10, 314; simplification of ritual at diets under Joseph II 312; service of thanksgiving following the Peace of Hubertusburg 1763 247–8 Ritz, Paul 94, 95 Robot (peasant labor service) 33, 35, 280, 316, 344 Roden, Baron 305 Rohrwürth, Joseph 306–7, 315, 362, 401 Romanov, dynasty 14 Rome 89, 134 Rosenberg, family 62 Rosenberg, Prince Franz Orsini(1723–96) 278, 327, 336, 338, 366 Rosner, Joseph ({ 1759), provost of St. Dorothea 205, 217, 234, 237 Rötzer (Retzer, Rezer), family 173 Rötzer, Johann Joseph 170 road-building and maintenance 15, 78, 156, 176, 179–80, 183, 200, 224, 233, 235, 310, 367–8 Ruckenbaum, Anton von ({ 1745), provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen 85 Rudolf II, emperor 31, 94 Rueber, Baroness Isabella 405 Russia 14, 20, 325 Ryswick, Treaty of (1697) 140

455

St. Andrä an der Traisen, Augustinian monastery in Lower Austria 40, 43, 84 St. Andrä an der Traisen, provost of 40, 43, 44, 85, 88, 293 St. Dorothea, Augustinian monastery in Vienna 31, 40 St. Dorothea, provost of 40, 44, 87, 148, 205, 217, 234, 237, 293 St. Egid in Klagenfurt, parish priest of 295 St. Gotthard, battle (1664) 91, 151 St. Pölten, Augustinian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40 St. Pölten, provost of 40, 43, 44, 87, 120, 138, 263, 293 St. Pölten, town in Lower Austria 31, 64, 184, 240, 349, 375 St. Stephen’s, cathedral in Vienna 23, 247, 250 St. Stephen’s, provost of the cathedral chapter in Vienna 41, 43, 44, 45, 138, 294, 350 St. Valentin, town in Lower Austria 178 Saint-Julien, Count Johann Joseph (1704–94) 252 Sala, family 382 Sala, Baron Ferdinand 319, 333, 335, 337, 339 Salm-Reifferscheidt, Count Anton (1720–69) 186, 224 Salzburg 399 Saurau, Count Franz (1760–1831) 340, 363, 368, 374, 380 Säusenstein, abbot of 40, 44, 88, 165, 217, 263, 285, 293, 303–4 Säusenstein, Cistercian monastery in Lower Austria 40 Sava, river 150 Saxony 78, 230 Schallenberg, family 63, 98, 148, 263 Schallenberg, Count Leopold (1712–1800) 86, 101, 167, 261, 297, 333, 340 Scheffer, Clemens (1629–93), abbot of Heiligenkreuz 163 Scheibbs, town in Lower Austria 31 Schick, Jacob von ({ 1787) 255 Schifer, Baron Alexander 160 Schlegel, Friedrich 347 Schlick, family 160 Schlick, Count Leopold 242 Schmerling, Anton von (1805–93) 338 Schmidlin, Carl Richard Joseph von 148, 400 Schmitzberger, Johann ({ 1683), Schotten abbot 131 Schnabel, Michael (1607–58), abbot of Heiligenkreuz 89 Schoberg, Baron Sigmund 317 Schönborn, family 63, 375 Schönbrunn (Habsburg palace outside Vienna) 257, 277–8, 323, 375, 377, 381, 391 Schönbrunn, Peace of (1809) 386 Schotten abbot 40, 42, 43, 44, 87, 88, 89, 91, 130, 131, 136, 164, 165, 205, 213, 218, 237, 262–3, 278, 319, 328

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456

Index

Schotten, Benedictine monastery in Vienna 31, 40, 43, 130, 136, 165 Schrappeneder, Andreas (1716–88), abbot of Säusenstein 304 Schrattenbach, Count Franz Anton ({ 1783) 242 Schreyber, Karl von 348 Schroeder, Wilhelm von (1640–88) 132, 139 Schwarzenberg, family 63, 138 Schwarzenberg, Prince Karl Philipp (1771–1820) 391 Schwarzenhorn, Baron Johann Rudolph (Schmidt) (1590–1667) 61 Second Northern War (1657–60) 18, 162 Second Silesian War (1744–5) 184–6, 190 Seeau, Aegyd von 123 Seebenstein, manor in Lower Austria 124, 194 seigniorial property, see manorial property seigniorial system, see manorial administration Seilern, family 375 Seilern, Baron Johann Friedrich ({ 1715) 53, 107 Seitenstetten, abbot of 40, 43, 44, 221, 263, 375 Seitenstetten, Benedictine monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40, 43 Selb, Baron Johann Gabriel ({ 1679) 61 Semmering, mountain pass connecting Lower Austria and Styria 157 Seven Years War (1756–63) 1, 18, 26, 27, 32, 34, 102, 186, 215, 217, 224, 229–45, 247–8, 251, 254, 258, 264, 265, 267, 270, 271, 273, 274, 277, 281, 282, 285, 286, 289, 292, 307, 331, 346, 356, 362, 363, 364, 394, 395, 396 Sicily 20, 147, 184, 190 Sieghartskirchen, village in Lower Austria Silesia, duchy 29, 32, 71, 98, 169, 184, 189, 191, 195, 204, 212, 216, 221, 222, 226, 242, 247, 299, 300, 301, 302, 332, 340, 341, 386 Silesia, Estates of 29, 302, 309, 311 Silva-Tarouca, Count Emanuel 204, 228 Sinelli, Emerich (1622–85), prince-bishop of Vienna 132 Sinnich, Georg Constantin von 135, 138, 400 Sinzendorff, family 99, 138, 170, 274 Sinzendorff, Count Georg Ludwig (1616–81) 54 Sinzendorff, Count Hans Carl 164 Sinzendorff, Count Philipp Ludwig Wenzel (1671–1742) 170 Sinzendorff, Prince Prosper (1751–1822) 375 Sinzendorff, Count Wenzel [two persons of this name with the dates (1724–73) and (1724–92)] 167, 186, 252, 256, 261, 285, 319 Sittich (Stična), abbot of 295 Sittich (Stična), Cistercian monastery in Carniola 294

Slavata, family 100 Sobeck, Count Felix 242 Sobek, Baron Maximilian Heinrich 242 Society of Jesus, see Jesuits Sonnau, Baron Johann Ehrenreich 164, 180 Sonnenfels, Joseph von (1732–1817) 343 Spain 13, 97, 127, 132, 140, 147 Spiersch, Balthasar 237, 238 Sprinzenstein, family 62, 94–7, 119 Sprinzenstein, Count Ferdinand Maximilian 54, 61, 70, 71, 72, 73, 83, 84, 94–7, 127, 404 Sprinzenstein, Count Regina Anna, née Countess Traun 94 Stadion-Warthausen, Count Johann Philipp (1763–1824) 378, 379 Stadler, Robert (1706–65), Schotten abbot 213, 237 Stainl von Plaßnet, Rebecca 406 Stampach, Count Franz Wenzel Kager von (1742–1804) 350 standing army, see army (Habsburg) Starhemberg, family 61, 62, 99 Starhemberg, Count Erasmus (the younger) 61, 83, 84 Starhemberg, Count Ernst Rüdiger (1638–1701) 100 Starhemberg, Prince Georg Adam (1724–1807) 333 Starhemberg, Count Guido 100, 105, 149 Starhemberg, Count Gundaker Thomas (1663–1745) 100, 139, 143, 144 Starhemberg, Count Konrad Balthasar 84, 100, 132 Starhemberg, Countess Maria Esther Theresia 405 State Chancellery (Staatskanzlei) 240 State Council (Staatsrat) 240–2, 270, 299, 302, 325, 343 state domains administrator (Staatsgüter Administrator) 350–1 Staudinger, Berthold (1703–66), provost of Klosterneuburg 234, 236, 265 Stein, town in Lower Austria (today part of Krems) 30, 64, 199 Stengelmayer, Stephan ({ 1671), provost of St. Andrä an der Traisen 88 Steyersberg, castle in Lower Austria 57 Stiebar, Johann Joseph von ({ 1825) 304, 328, 333, 335, 337, 338 Stieler, Karl Joseph von (b. 1765) 364–5 Stockerau, town in Lower Austria 103, 187 Stockmayer, Jacob Friedrich von 296 Strasbourg, city in Alsace 399 Stratmann, Count Theodor Heinrich (1637–93) 54, 135, 137, 138, 404 Strauch, Cornelius ({ 1650), abbot of Lilienfeld 88, 165 Stürgkh, Count Georg Christoph (1666–1739) 405

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/10/2017, SPi

Index Stürgkh, Countess Maria Rosalia 405 Sturmberger, Hans 2, 3 Styria, duchy 20, 29, 30, 62, 81, 133, 135, 176, 177, 223, 226, 242, 260–1, 267, 299, 333, 380, 400 Styria, Estates of 48, 136, 218, 242, 260, 261, 302, 305, 307, 311, 328, 351, 356 subsidium praesentaneum 233 Sułkowski, Prince Franz 298 Supererogaten 272, 276, 281 Suttinger zum Thurnhof, Johann Baptist 74, 76, 124 Swabia, region in Germany 68, 69, 95, 98, 211, 374 Swabian Austria 29 Swabian imperial circle (schwäbischer Reichskreis) 157 Sweden 14, 67, 156, 162 Szatmár, Peace of (1711) 177 Tagus, river 150 taille (French tax) 274 Taufferer, Baron Maximilian Anton 219 tax (cadaster) and peasant labor services reform (1789) 289, 320, 327, 328, 331, 353 taxation, see capitation; Contribution; donum gratuitum, debt tax; drinks taxes; excise taxes; Familiensteuer; Gült; hearth tax; income tax; inheritance tax; Interessensteuer; Landsteuer; Pferdesteuer; property tax; taille; Taz/Ungeld; Turk tax; universal taxation; vingtième taxes, commutation of (compounding/buyout): 150; as “politically unthinkable” 273; with loans 140, 143, 144, 146; with property taxes administered by the Estates 191, 193, 194, 195, 239 tax-farming 79, 199–201, 205, 208, 395 tax rectification 220–2, 225, 229; see cadaster Taz/Ungeld (excise taxes on drinks) 237–8, 272–3, 276, 285, 390, 395 Telki, Benedictine monastery in Hungary 91 Teuffel, family 61 Teutonic Order 42, 53, 149, 219, 295 Theresianum, academy for noble youth in Vienna 46, 227, 391 Thirty Years War (1618–48) 3, 16, 17, 18, 20, 32, 46, 67, 69, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 95, 98, 102, 103, 104, 111, 112, 116, 117, 120–3, 128, 151, 152, 153, 156, 158, 160, 161–2, 163, 165, 169, 176, 187, 253, 293, 314, 393, 394 Thököly (kuruc) rebellion in Hungary (1678–87) 18, 130, 133, 155 Thököly, Imre (1657–1705) 130, 133 Thom, Andreas Gottlieb von 297 Thomasberg, manor in Lower Austria 124 Thoren, Theodor von 237, 238 Thürheim, family 160

457

Thurn-Valsassina, family 62 Tihany, Benedictine monastery in Hungary 91 tobacco monopoly 209, 227, 231, 234, 297 Toleration, Patent of (1781) 50, 93, 295–7 Toleration, Patent of (1782) 297 Tomasoni, Joseph Friedrich von 297 Toulouse, town in Languedoc 38, 158, 190 Traisen, river 31 Transylvania, diet of 29 Transylvania, principality 20, 29, 133, 162, 314, 387 Tratten 377, 384, 385, 389 Traun, family 62, 92, 96, 98, 99, 138, 199, 263, 404 Traun, Baron Hans Cyriac 83 Traun, Count Ehrenreich Abensperg und (1610–59) 404 Traun, Emmerich von 164 Traun, Count Ernst Abensperg und: as General Field War Commissary 67, 158–9; as Landmarschall 60, 65, 67–8, 70–1, 74, 76, 77, 83, 85, 94, 124, 125, 199, 393; background/family 67–9, 93, 94–5, 97, 404 Traun, Count Ferdinand Abensperg und (1740–1807) 255 Traun, Count Franz Anton Abensperg und (1676–1745) 167, 179, 199, 404 Traun, Count Franz Joseph Abensperg und (1707–44) 86, 404 Traun, Count Johann Adam Abensperg und (1705–86) 167, 186, 217, 237, 308, 404 Traun, Count Johann Christoph Abensperg und (1598–1654) 404 Traun, Count Johann Wilhelm Abensperg und (1630–90) 92 Traun, Count Julius Abensperg und (1679–1704) 56 Traun, Countess Margaretha Abensperg und (1649–1706) 404 Traun, Count Otto Ehrenreich Abensberg und 71, 73, 92, 97, 98, 107, 139, 149, 160, 199, 404 Traun, Countess Regina Anna Abensperg und (1605–70) 404 Traun, Count Rudolph Abensperg und (1728–91) 263, 404 Traun, Baron Siegmund Adam 67, 71, 91, 94, 404 Traun, Countess Susanna Regina Abensperg und ({ 1670) 404 Trautson, family 94, 96, 403 Trautson, Baron Balthasar 94, 403 Trautson, Count Ernst, prince-bishop of Vienna 41 Trautson, Baron Hans 94, 403

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458

Index

Trautson, Count Johann Franz 70, 71, 94, 403 Trautson, Count Johann Joseph, cardinal (1707–57) 195 Trautson, Prince Johann Leopold Donat 403 Trautson, Prince Johann Wilhelm: and reform at Estates 252, 253, 257, 259, 264; as courtier with lodgings in the Hofburg 236, 259; as head of an aulic commission 235–8; as Landmarschall 1, 203, 211, 213, 224, 228, 234, 242, 243, 247, 249, 260, 261, 262, 265, 276, 279, 281; family and background 94, 259, 403 Trautson, Prince Leopold 94 Trautson, Count Paul Sixt 94, 403 Trautson, Baroness Susanna 403 Trauttmansdorff, family 148 Trauttmansdorff, Prince Ferdinand (1734–1827) 375, 376, 377, 388 Trauttmansdorff, Count Johann (1757–1809) 340 Trauttmansdorff, Count Maximilian 53, 55 Trauttmansdorff, Count Norbert 264 treasury debt, see debts Trieste, Intendanz 260 Trieste, Habsburg town on the Adriatic coast 29, 260, 299, 305, 299 Trinitarians 148 Tschernembl, Baron Georg Erasmus 92 Tübingen, town in Swabia 399 Tulln, town in Lower Austria 30, 64 Turk tax (Türkensteuer) 130–3, 135–6, 137, 138, 143, 145, 235, 273 Tuscany 20, 320, 321, 327, 329, 347 Tyrol, Estates of 302–3, 306, 307, 311, 328 Tyrol, county 29, 222, 244, 259, 299, 301, 302, 306, 307, 330, 378 Tyrrhenian Sea 20 Ugarte, Count Aloysius (1749–1817) 300, 336, 340, 342, 368, 374, 376, 379, 388 Ulfeld, Count Corfiz (1699–1769) 32, 54, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 252 United Provinces, see Dutch Republic United States of America 271, 329 United Offices (Vereinigte Hofstellen) 24, 298, 302, 334 Universal Cameral Payments Office 232 Universal Military Payments Office 249 Universal State Debt Disbursement Treasury (Universalstaatsschuldenkassa) 274, 363, 369, 370 universal taxation 13, 133, 248, 273, 356, 369, 394 universum 193, 235 Unverzagt, family 99 Unverzagt, Baron Ferdinand Ignaz (1671–1721) 167, 169, 179, 187 Unverzagt, Baron Wolf Christoph 164

Upper Austria (archduchy above the Enns) 29, 30, 61, 62, 94, 96, 98, 104, 177, 178, 183, 193, 222, 223, 226, 242, 301, 380 Upper Austria, Estates of 81–2, 219, 242, 250, 259–60, 295, 299, 302, 304, 305, 307–8, 311, 386 Ursenbeck-Massimi, Count Franz Anton Sigmund 242 Ursini-Blagay, see Blagay Utrecht, town in the Netherlands 57, 144 Utrecht, Treaty of (1713) 401 Vasquez de Pinos, Countess Maria Anna, née Countess Kokorzowa (1711–98) 278 Velehrad, Cistercian monastery in Moravia 294 Velm, manor in Lower Austria 297 Venice 20, 139 Verda von Verdenberg, Count Johann Baptist (1582–1630) 53, 54 Verdenberg, family 54 Vereinigte Einlösungs- und TilgungsDeputation 387 Versailles 280, 396 Veszprém, town in Hungary 91 Veterani, Count Julius (1755–1828) 228, 381 Vienna 6, 16, 20, 23, 31, 33, 36, 38, 45, 57, 64, 67, 73, 78, 85, 87, 89, 97, 98, 101, 109, 111, 130, 132, 139, 151, 154, 156, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 183, 185, 200, 202, 205, 210, 213, 217, 227, 273, 274, 277, 282, 285, 286, 289, 290, 291, 309, 317, 318, 323, 327, 330, 331, 335, 347, 349, 364, 369, 371, 374, 375, 377, 378, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 391–2, 396; archbishop of 134, 247, 323; bishopric 42; character as a Residenzstadt 34–5, 355–6; second Ottoman siege of (1683) 11, 90, 100, 108, 116, 127, 136, 155, 157, 161, 199, 361; Stadthauptmann 71, 305; university of 138, 143, 227, 349 Vienna Woods 30, 375 Vienna Woods tolls 128 Viertler, Johann Thaddäus 240 Viktring, Cistercian monastery in Carinthia 294 vingtième (French tax) 273, 274 Vogel, Ezechiel ({ 1699), provost of Eisgarn 87 Vogl, Anton ({ 1751), abbot of Montserrat 45 Vogl, Johann Caspar 399 Völkermarkt, collegiate church in Carinthia 294 Volkra, Count Otto Christoph 71, 73, 404 Vorarlberg 29 Vorster(s), Christoph 160, 174, 176 Wachau, Danube valley in Lower Austria 30, 31, 43, 103, 175, 199, 340 Wägele von Walsegg, Matthias 123, 399 Wägele, see Walsegg Wagensberg, family 62 Wagram, battle (1809) 381, 383

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Index Waidhofen an der Thaya, town in Lower Austria 30, 64 Waidhofen an der Ybbs, town Lower Austria 31 Walderode, Baron Johann 55–6, 59 Waldstätten, Heinrich Xavier Hayek von 242 Waldstätten, Hugo Joseph von 333 Waldstein, family 63; see Wallenstein Waldviertel, see Quarter above the Manhartsberg Wallenstein, Albrecht von (1583–1634) 152, 158 Wallis, Count Joseph (1767–1818) 388–90 Walsegg, family 63 Walsegg, Count Joseph Leopold (1701–42) 167 Walter, Friedrich 2 Walterfinger, Johann ({ 1641), Schotten abbot 89–90 Walterskirchen, family 92, 102, 103, 105 Walterskirchen, Georg Christoph von 74, 75, 103, 406 Walterskirchen, Franz Wilhelm von 406 Walterskirchen, Georg Wilhelm von 406 Walterskirchen, Johann Wilhelm von 406 warfare: changing nature of 360–1 War of Devolution (1667/8) 116 War of the Austrian Succession (1740–8) 18, 118, 151, 155, 171, 180, 184, 185, 187, 190, 193, 195, 206, 215, 235, 244, 272 War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9) 18, 215, 282, 284, 316 War of the Fifth Coalition (1809) 18, 361, 365, 372, 390 War of the First Coalition (1792–7) 18, 363 War of the Polish Succession (1733–8) 18, 156, 175, 184, 190 War of the Second Coalition (1799–1801) 18, 366, 367, 371, 372, 386 War of the Sixth Coalition (1813–14) 18, 365, 389, 391 War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) 13, 18, 33, 71, 76, 77, 98, 100, 104, 108, 109, 118, 127, 140–6, 147, 156, 168, 178, 179, 181, 184, 187, 191, 197 War of the Third Coalition (1805) 18, 361, 365, 367, 371, 372, 379 Weber, Max 2, 13, 78, 159 Weber zu Bisamberg, family 95 Weber zu Bisamberg, Johann Baptist 68, 404 Weber zu Bisamberg, Catharina Ursula ({ 1667) 68, 404 Weinhart, Jacob 170, 172, 173 Weinviertel, see Quarter below the Manhartsberg Weißenwolf, Count Franz Joseph (1719–1803) 242 Wellenstein, Arsenius Franz Schmidt von 126, 138, 399 Welz, family 148 Welz, Baron Ferdinand Jacob (1602–55) 164 Welz, Count Gotthard Helfried ({ 1724) 57 Werner, Franz Adam 126, 182, 400

459

West Flanders 30 Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 50, 55, 84, 92, 108, 156, 162, 296; see also Osnabrück White Mountain, battle (1620) 1, 29, 37, 50, 82 Wiener Neustadt (Neukloster), abbot of 40, 43, 44, 45, 138, 343, 399 Wiener Neustadt (Neukloster), Cistercian monastery in Lower Austria 31, 40, 43 Wiener Neustadt, bishopric 42; military academy 227; town in Lower Austria 31, 64, 194, 349, 371 Wiener Währung 389 Wieselburg (Moson), county in Hungary 177 Wilczek, family 63 Wilczek, Count Johann Joseph (1738–1819) 381 Wilczek, Count Joseph Balthasar 274 Wildenstein, Count Cajetan Augustin (1688–1764) 219 Wilhelmine Amalia (1673–1742), empress, née princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg 32 Wilstock, Conrad 160 Windhag, Count Joachim (Enzmillner) 95–6, 120 Windisch-Graetz, Count Leopold Viktorin (1686–1746) 203 winter quarters 111, 123, 157, 175, 181, 182, 193; see billeting; barracks Wirsberg, Benedict ({ 1687), abbot of Säusenstein 88 Wittingau (Třeboň), town with Augustinian monastery in southern Bohemia 90 Wohlleben Stephan von (1751–1823) 375 Wratislaw, family 63 Wrbna, Count Rudolph (1761–1813) 374, 376, 377, 382, 388 Wurmbrand, Count Johann Wilhelm 56, 57–8, 59 Würnitz, manor in Lower Austria 255 Ybbs, town in Lower Austria 64, 199, 233 Zalavár, Benedictine monastery in Hungary 91 Zaunagg, Melchior (1667–1747), abbot of Melk 90 Zellerndorf, manor in Lower Austria 46 Zichy, Count Carl (1753–1826) 368 Zinzendorf, family 61, 62, 92, 99, 164 Zinzendorf, Count Albrecht (1618–83) 99, 132–3 Zinzendorf, Count Ferdinand (1628–86) 163, 164 Zinzendorf, Count Friedrich August (1733–1804) 304 Zinzendorf, Baron Georg 99 Zinzendorf, Baron Hans Joachim 161 Zinzendorf, Count Karl (1739–1813) 283, 289, 301, 333, 334, 336, 337, 346, 366, 370, 373, 387, 395; activity at Lower

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460

Index

Austrian Estates under Leopold II 327–8, 330, 331, 332; as advocate of reformed accounting at Estates 269, 332–3; as convert to Catholicism 93, 271, 296; as commissioner of Lower Austrian Estate of lords 59; views on representation of landed wealth 216, 271, 338, 347, 350; at Lower Austrian Estates during Napoleonic invasions 375, 377, 381, 383; as Lower Austrian Landmarschall 339, 340, 342; Napoleon’s respect for 381; opposition to Joseph II 316–17; as reformer under Joseph II 316–17, 321, 322 Zinzendorf, Count Ludwig: and Estates Credit Deputation 241–2; and financial reform of

Estates 248, 249, 267–9; and consolidated Habsburg debt 270, 370; as Kaunitz protégé 241; background of 24; bank projects based on Estates 241, 270–1, 276, 396; on Estates’ debt in 1748 209; view of Estates 275, 346 Zirc, Cistercian monastery in Hungary 91 Zwettl, abbot of 40, 44, 87, 90, 138, 213, 237, 294 Zwettl, Cistercian monastery in Lower Austria 30, 40–1, 43, 294 Zwettl, collegiate church in Lower Austria 40–1, 44, 46 Zwettl, provost of 41, 44, 87, 400 Zwettl, town in Lower Austria 41, 64, 175, 233