Class 12. Habsburg Curiosity (1)
- Okay, everybody, greetings.
Welcome. Happy Tuesday.
Our job today is to get through the Habsburgs.
I wanna start with making a few remarks about mistakes,
my own and those of others.
Okay, so the funny thing about giving a class
where there were two million views online
is that I can hear from a large number of people
about things that go on in this class.
So I just wanna say to those of you who are watching online,
you are right.
Milorad Pavic, the author of "Dictionary of the Khazars"
was a Serb and not a Croat.
I'm very sorry.
And on etymology of punch, obviously,
I should have said that's a common Indo-European root
that is shared in the Slavic and other languages.
Okay, as far as errors in the transcription,
please do not email me about errors in the transcription.
Email the people who are doing the transcription,
and that email address is right over there,
and the cameraman is going to give you
that email address there.
So if you find errors in the transcription, do not email me.
Thank you very much.
(class chuckling)
(chuckling) Okay, so we have a really important
and interesting job today,
which is to get through the Habsburg family.
So families matter a lot in history.
Larger forces matter too.
Structural forces matter too.
Climate matters, geology matters, economics matter,
but individuals and families matter very much as well.
This would be a very different war if someone
besides Volodymyr Zelenskyy were president of Ukraine.
This would be a very different war if someone
besides Joe Biden were president in the United States.
Individuals do matter, families do matter,
and it's important to have them inside history as well.
It's an especially easy case to make for the Habsburgs
because they were in power in some form or other
for about 600 years, one place or another,
and for sometimes they were in power over much of the world.
So the historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote
that for about half a millennium,
it wasn't that the Habsburgs turned
around the history of Europe,
it was that the history of Europe turned around them,
and for about a hundred years,
you could even say as much about the history of the world.
So if you are going to be a history major
or if you're going to be someone
especially who's focusing on the history of Europe,
and there's one family name that you should know,
this is probably the family name that you should know.
So we are going to get around
to why the Habsburgs are so important
to the history of Ukraine,
but we're gonna make sure first,
and this is gonna be the bulk of the lecture,
that we have a sense of who the Habsburgs are.
So if the Habsburgs were so important,
why is it that no one talks that much about them,
or, more interestingly, why is it that
of all the peoples around the world,
the people who remember the Habsburgs fondly
tend to be in Western Ukraine?
So the Habsburg touched,
the Habsburgs touch all kinds of people,
including the Aztecs, including the Inca,
they touched all kinds of people,
but they're remembered fondly in Western Ukraine.
By the end of the lecture, you should have a sense
of why it is that they're remembered fondly
in Western Ukraine.
In terms of the overall arguments and method
that we've been using in this class,
this is gonna be one more example of how friction
or contact between larger powers, between empires,
has to do with the creation of the nation.
The Habsburgs are going to turn out to be very important
in the origins of Ukraine, and yet, and yet, and yet,
when the Habsburgs, when Maria Theresia takes part
in the First Partition of Poland in 1772
and brings in a tiny bit of territory
where most people speak Ukrainian,
she is thinking many things,
but she is certainly not thinking about Ukraine
or the history of Ukraine, or the future of Ukraine.
Nevertheless, this little encounter,
one tiny part of where Ukrainian is spoken in the world
and also one tiny part of the Habsburg monarchy,
that overlap between one tiny part
of the zone where Ukrainian is spoken
and one tiny part of the Habsburg world,
that little tiny overlap, which is called Galicia,
is going to turn out to be very, very important
for the history of the Ukrainian nation.
It's gonna be important
for a certain kind of,
a especially certain kind of moment.
I'm gonna say the 1880s to the 1980s, for about a century,
Galicia is going to be the most important part
of what's now Ukraine.
That period comes and that period goes.
It's already gone, so with all due respect
to those of you who are from Halychyna,
that period is now passed.
The center, the natural center, of European politics, sorry,
of Ukrainian politics is actually the East.
It's the East now, and it's the East for most of the time
that we're teaching in this class,
but for a century or so, Galicia is extremely important,
and you might even argue necessary, right?
So you can imagine there might be an essay question,
which would be something like,
if Galicia had not been part of the Habsburg monarchy,
what would've happened to Ukraine, right?
That's how important this zone is.
So we're talking about a moment.
We're talking about a moment
when some Ukrainian-speaking territory is part
of the Habsburg monarchy.
That moment lasts from 1772 to 1918.
And then we're talking about a moment where that zone,
we will be later talking about a moment
where that zone is crucial to Ukraine as a whole,
which is roughly the 1880s to the 1890s.
Okay, so, but my goal here
is to make sure you know who the Habsburgs are
because if you walked away
from this class saying the Habsburgs,
I mean, with all due respect to the history of Ukraine,
if you walked away from this class thinking
the Habsburgs are important
because of this thing they did in Galicia for a few decades,
that would be an unfortunately nationalistic interpretation
of this family, so we're gonna make sure that we know
who the Habsburgs are.
We have talked about a couple of kinds of empires so far.
We've talked about empires that break out
into the Age of Discovery and empires that don't.
So when we think about the success
of the Russian Empire in the 18th century,
one of the broad factors behind that
was that Russia managed to reach the Pacific
and also that Russia, by way of English traders first,
manages to trade West as well into the Atlantic.
Russia breaks out into the world, not just on land,
but also by making contact with the oceans.
A couple of other empires or large states
that don't do that are the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
which comes to an end in the 18th century,
and the Ottoman Empire, which is weakening.
The Ottoman Empire can't break out of the Mediterranean.
The Habsburgs are a very interesting kind of middle case
because the Habsburgs do break out into the wider world.
Indeed, they break out into the wider world more effectively
and more extravagantly and more spectacularly
than any other family.
In the early 16th century, they are governing Spain.
By the late 18th century, sorry, 16th century,
they're also governing Portugal.
They're governing the Netherlands
for much of the 1500s and 1600s.
Why does that matter?
Because the Spanish, the Portuguese,
and the Dutch are the major exploring powers at the time.
If you cast a glance at the bottom part
of the map that I handed out,
which is entitled Habsburg Earth, that gives you an idea.
We think of these things as Spanish history,
the Spanish Empire, Portuguese history,
the Portuguese Empire.
We think of the Dutch traders,
but the Habsburgs actually ruled these countries
in the 1500s and in the 1600s.
So the Habsburgs ruled domains
which break out into the world more powerfully,
more spectacularly than any other single family,
but then it's all broken in 1700,
that the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs dies out,
and the Habsburgs at that point are basically reduced
to being a European power.
That year, 1700, one year after 1699,
which, as you all know,
is the time of the Treaty of Karlowitz,
which marks when the Habsburgs break out
into Southeastern Europe.
So 1699, 1700, you can remember as a kind of turning point
when the Habsburgs are ceasing to be a world power,
but at exactly the same moment becoming a Southeastern,
East Central, or East European power.
The final thing I wanna say about the Habsburgs
before I get into the chronology is that I would ask you
if you have a vision of the Habsburgs in mind,
maybe you don't, maybe this is all completely new,
but if you have a vision of the Habsburgs in mind,
and you come from a francophone or an anglophone background,
the vision that you have in your mind is probably
very much people who were mad, bad, and unfit to rule,
that you probably have in mind the idea
that this was some kind of antique, cantankerous,
doomed monarchy which was anachronistic
because it had lots of nations inside of it at the same time
and fell apart during the First World War.
That's the stereotype,
and that stereotype comes from American and British
and French propaganda during the First World War.
So if you come from,
if you happen to come from those traditions,
a French or a British or American tradition in education,
probably insofar as the Habsburgs figure at all,
it's as a prison of nations, yada, yada, yada.
I mean, I'm gonna puncture that just for a moment,
just one moment.
When the Habsburgs were fighting the Americans
at the end of the First World War,
when Wilson gave his famous speech
in which he was announcing
the principle of self-determination, there were,
okay, I'm gonna put this as a question
'cause you guys look awake.
There were how many African Americans
in the American Congress listening to that speech?
Come on, you can do it.
It's the safest possible guess.
Zero is correct, right?
Zero is correct,
whereas in the Habsburg Parliament at the same time,
all the nationalities were represented, right?
All the nationalities were represented.
So in many ways, the Habsburg monarchy was actually
a more liberal country than the United States of America
at the time when they were waging war.
That's just one little detail.
And when you think about the Habsburgs today,
and you think about that stereotype,
you could also think about it in these terms.
Were the Habsburgs behind the times or,
insofar as these ways of thinking
about things are acceptable,
maybe they were ahead of their time?
Because by the time you get to the 19th century,
the late 19th century, early 20th century,
the Habsburgs were a multinational,
pluralistic liberal zone with very messy politics,
but a growing economy
and not entirely unlike the European Union of today, right?
So is that model of being multinational
and having cranky politics based on compromise
among nationalities, is that a thing of the past,
or is that maybe a thing of the present or the future?
Okay, so, so much for the repair
of the image of the Habsburgs.
Now we're gonna zoom back into the history of the Habsburgs,
and you can make your own judgements.
So the Habsburgs go all the way back.
They really are an old family.
They're not as old as they say they are.
They don't actually go back
to Remus and Romulus and the wolf,
but they do go back to the year 1020.
