Class 12. Habsburg Curiosity (2)
They built a castle called the Habichtsburg,
which is the first sign of their existence,
and that's the year 1020.
So basically their existence is contemporaneous
with the foundation of Kyivan Rus' as we know it,
which is 988.
The Habsburgs have been around for a long time.
Most of this history isn't gonna seem
to have much to do with Ukraine,
but we need to know who they are before they get to Ukraine.
These people make their money
by not from glamorous conquest, and this is sort of a theme.
They make their money at the beginning by tolls over bridges
and by taxing travelers and things like that
in what's now Austria, what's now Switzerland.
The one great or the greatest Austrian Habsburg warlord
was Rudolf von Habsburg, who was born in 1218
and is elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1273.
He's the founder of this dynasty
as a major European dynasty.
What's the Holy Roman Empire?
The Holy Roman Empire is the,
so the title of Holy Roman Emperor is given
to the King of the Franks.
If you'll remember, the initial geopolitics
of this class are the Franks in the West
and the Byzantines in the South or in the East.
Charlemagne is the great King of the Franks.
The idea that there is an emperor is revived in the West
with the Kingdom of the Franks,
and then when that line dies out,
it's restored again in the year 962, when Otto,
who is king of Germany, is named Holy Roman Emperor,
crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 962.
From that point forward, until Napoleon does away with it,
there's going to be something called the Holy Roman Empire.
The Habsburgs are going to claim superiority
over other families largely by being Holy Roman Emperors
and by claiming that they always should be
Holy Roman Emperors.
But many interesting things about the Holy Roman Empire,
that one of them is that the emperor was elected,
admittedly, by a very small group of electors,
of a handful of electors, but nevertheless elected.
The way elections work though
is that they're very closely associated
with bouts of violence, which is, of course,
something we in America don't know anything about.
When Rudolf of Habsburg was elected Holy Roman Emperor
in 1273, and this was immediately contested
by probably the most impressive king
of the most impressive kingdom of the time,
which was the wonderfully named Otakar Premysl II, right?
The name Otakar Premysl was so good
that there had to be at least two of them, right?
So Otakar Premysl II, who was king of the Czechs,
he really was the probably the most impressive ruler
of Europe at the time.
The Czechs have just done this funny thing
where they've claimed that they've hosted, did you see this?
They've claimed that they've hosted
a referendum in Kaliningrad?
(student speaking faintly) Yeah, that goes-
- [Student] Královec.
- Yeah, sorry, Královec.
This goes back to Otakar Premysl II
and the great Czech kingdom of the Middle Ages.
So he immediately contest this, and there's a huge war
in which Rudolf of Habsburg actually wins
and Otakar Premysl II is killed,
which is one of these turning points, right?
I mean, this class is not about this,
but by rights, you could say,
the Czechs probably should have been
the dominant power in Eastern Europe,
and they just had some bad luck at a couple of moments,
and this was one of them.
After Rudolf dies in 1291, his son is not elected,
so his son then contests the election.
That seems like a strangely euphemistic way of putting it.
It makes it seem like I'm holding up a ballot or something
and say, "You didn't count this one,"
but that's not what you mean by contest the election.
I mean that he killed the man who was elected
on the battlefield with his own hands,
spearing him through the face,
and finishing him off with a much feared ballock knife,
which is exactly what it sounds like,
after which he was elected, right?
After which he was elected.
So you can see the history of elections.
In the history of elections,
there's a lot of disentanglement to do
between the peaceful procedure
and the violence that attends elections,
and it's a lot of hard work.
The run of the Habsburgs ends in a meaningful way
in 1346 when another great Czech king,
the greatest Czech king, Charles,
the one after whom the university and the bridge,
if you've ever been there, is named.
King Charles is elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1346.
This is very important for the history the Czechs
and history of Central Europe, but for our purposes,
we just wanna note that the Luxembourgs,
that's Charles' family, yes, the same as the country,
the Luxembourgs now become Holy Roman Emperors for a while,
and this is a big problem for the Habsburgs,
not least because the Luxembourgs do
an extremely good job of it.
Charles promulgates something called the Golden Bull
in 1346, which is a statute of imperial governance,
which straightened things out,
which includes electoral procedures.
I want say that it says no ballock knife,
but it doesn't actually say that,
that would be too good to be true,
but it includes electoral procedures so the transitions
could be a little bit easier in the future.
The Habsburgs respond to this in a way which is poetic
and characteristic, in which I want you to mark
because it is a feature of this family,
as you'll know if you've read "The Red Prince."
They respond to this with a beautiful kind of,
a beautiful nostalgic attack.
They invent something called the Privilegium Maius.
They just make it up.
They just make it up, which is not an unknown theme
in East European history, by the way,
people just making up documents.
There's a lot of this later on,
which is good fun for historians.
So they just make up something called
the Privilegium Maius in 1359,
and the idea is that the Habsburgs are the oldest family,
and the Habsburgs have the right to rule Rome, et cetera,
because they have land grants from Nero
and land grants from Julius Caesar.
Okay, that is not true at all.
It's just completely made up,
but it's a nice story, right?
It's a nice story, and if you have a nice story
and you have power, then sometimes you can make
your nice story seem like it's true.
So the Luxembourgs are gonna be ruling
these Holy Roman Emperors until 1437,
at which point a crisis and a marriage are going
to flip the Holy Roman Empire back to the Habsburgs.
The crisis, which we've run across before,
is the Black Plague, which begins in 1347 in Europe,
wipes out maybe 1/3 of the population.
This crisis, the pestilence, this crisis of disease,
is associated with a spiritual crisis.
This is the time,
if you ever had like a survey European class,
you'll remember there was one pope,
then there were two popes, and there were three popes,
and the popes were in various places,
and they were hostage to kings and so on.
This is that period.
In the 14th century, multiple popes.
As the Black Death had died down,
a council was called in Constance for 1414 to 1415,
and the purpose of the Council in Constance was
to make order in the Christian Church to make order in what?
In the Catholic Church.
And one of the ways that order was to be made
were that these annoying heretics
from Bohemia were going to be brought in,
and the most annoying of these heretics from Bohemia
was a fellow called Jan Hus.
So Jan Hus, J-A-N H-U-S, I think he's on the sheet,
he was a sort of, I mean,
this is anachronistic way of putting it,
but he was a kind of pre-Protestant.
He had many ideas which would be familiar
from radical Protestantism,
like that you can preach in the language of the people,
you can preach in the vernacular,
you should preach facing the people.
He also had the idea that, this is a really radical idea,
the church is not an institution.
As such, the church comes from the people, right?
Therefore, all the property of the church
is kind of up in question.
The church shouldn't be wealthy.
The wealth of the church should be returned to the people.
These kinds of ideas, that's just a sample,
but you can see how that would be understood as a threat
to the established church as it was.
So on the 6th of July, 1415,
Jan Hus was burned at the stake at the Council of Constance
after a trial, which he found unsatisfactory.
And it's for this reason if you go,
again, if you go to Prague, which I urge you to do,
there's a fine statue of Jan Hus with the slogan,
(speaking in foreign language)
the truth with triumph.
The truth will be victorious.
So this is relevant for us because this precipitates
the situation in which the Habsburgs come back.
The Czech nobility in much of the Czech bourgeoisie,
and many Czechs in general, including peasants,
identify with Hus' version of Christianity.
By the way, what was Hus' job?
He was basically the dean of a university.
Interesting, right?
So Hus, oh, and when he lectured,
just fun detail, he lectured in Czech a lot of the time,
but his notes were in Latin.
Yeah, interesting, right?
Okay, so anyway, so Hus is killed,
but many Czechs believe in his version of Christianity,
and they rebel against their own Luxembourg king,
who by this time is called Sigismund,
Sigismund Luxembourg from Luxembourg.
And he picks up the challenge.
He says the heretics will be washed away.
And so there's a kind of civil war
in the Bohemian lands against the Luxembourgs,
which was led by this fantastic guy
who I wish I had more time for, Jan Zizka,
who was a one-eyed military genius,
who invented a whole bunch of military tactics
which were later used by other people,
like, well, stealing all the gold
from the churches is not original, but he did that.
He did things like take, he would take wagons full of hay
and make circles of them, right?
So as kind of mobile fortresses,
and then shoot out from the inside.
Clever things which people hadn't seen before.
He took good advantage of firearms.
So this war goes on for a long time,
and now you see the opening.
This is the opening for the Habsburgs
because the Habsburgs, good Catholics,
volunteer to come in on the side of the Luxembourgs,
and as the Habsburgs tend to do, they manage to get,
they manage to connect it with marriage.
They always managed to, this is their secret.
There's a Hungarian king
I'm gonna mention later called Matthias Corvinus
who wrote, of course in Latin,
"Let others fight wars.
Thou, happy Austria, marry."
That slogan, which is sort of beautiful and concise,
gives you a sense of how they got on
for those 600 years of power.
So the Habsburgs come in on the side
of the Luxembourgs in this war.
They don't actually help very much on the battlefield,
but the leader of the Habsburg family,
the Habsburg family at the time, who is Albert IV,
gets himself the daughter of the Luxembourg ruler,
whose name is Elizabeth, gets her promised as his bride.
And they marry in 1422, which means that Albert von Habsburg
is gonna become the successor, which he does.
He becomes Holy Roman Emperor in 1437,
and then the Habsburgs are going to be Holy Roman Emperors
for the next three centuries after that, right?
So Black Death, religious confusion, religious rebellion.
The Habsburgs sneak in at the last moment,
marry the right person,
and suddenly they're Holy Roman Emperors again
for the next three centuries.
And as Holy Roman Emperors, what do they do?
