Class 12. Habsburg Curiosity (3)
They promulgate this Privilegium Maius.
They just issue it.
They say, "This is true.
This is official. This is law.
We have a special right to rule."
Okay, so I mentioned Corvinus.
He's the one, he mounts the next challenge to the Habsburgs.
He's the greatest of the Hungarian kings, Matthias Corvinus.
He actually drives the Habsburgs
from their own Austrian lands for a while
and does the sort of classic thing
of taking up residence in Vienna.
So he lives in Vienna from 1484,
but he dies in 1490,
and he's succeeded by Wladyslaw Jagiello,
who is, I hope, on your sheets,
because he features four of this fantastic Polish letter,
which Wladyslaw
Jagiello, who is, of course,
from that Lithuanian family which is now ruling Poland.
He becomes king of Hungary.
Now, so interestingly, Corvinus says,
"Thou, happy Austria, marry,"
but it's the happiest marriages actually come
after Corvinus dies.
There are two unbelievably fortunate marriages now
for the Habsburgs which consolidate their place
in Europe and in the world.
The first has to do with Wladyslaw Jagiello.
Wladyslaw Jagiello
enters into a marriage pact
with the head of the Habsburg family,
who at that time is Maximilian I.
Then, unhappily for him but happily for the Habsburgs,
he dies fighting the Ottomans in 1526
at the Battle of Mohacs in a stream under his horse.
That death triggers a marriage pact,
which means that the Habsburgs then get to claim Hungary
as well as the Czech lands, which they do.
They claim those lands.
The Ottomans actually rule most of Hungary
for the next 150 years until 1699,
but the Habsburgs then claim those lands,
and they will eventually effectively rule them.
Then there's an even more extraordinary marriage pact,
which is that Maximilian I's son
marries a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella,
the Ferdinand and Isabella, the ones who united Spain.
That Ferdinand and Isabella.
She's sixth in line to the throne of Spain,
so there's no way this is gonna happen.
I'm sure many of you are married to people
who are sixth in line to some throne or another, right?
That's just casual, right?
You probably didn't even mention that
in your Yale interviews.
You're like, "Ah, no, I'm gonna talk about,
I'm gonna talk about intramural rugby instead.
Don't wanna brag."
So note to video, they all laughed, right?
(class chuckling)
You can't tell when they laugh at my jokes.
They all laughed, including the ones
who are married to someone who's sixth in line.
So but what happens?
All of the men who are ahead of her die.
They all die.
All five of them die, conveniently just in time
for Maximilian's son to become king of Spain,
thereby bringing the Spanish Empire and, shortly thereafter,
the Portuguese Empire and the Netherlands
and all the lands controlled by the Netherlands
under the Habsburgs.
So two unbelievably lucky marriages.
Okay, so that's who the Habsburgs are
until we get to about the year 1700.
The year 1700, 1699, 1700, is when they're established
as a European power, but not an American,
not a world power anymore
'cause the Spanish Habsburgs die out in 1700.
1699, Treaty of Karlowitz,
they control the Balkans as well as the Czech lands,
as well as as Hungary.
They take on a distinct European shape,
which they're more or less gonna have until 1918
with some additions of lands from Poland,
which we're gonna talk about.
After 1700 and the extinction of the Spanish line,
the male line of the Austrian Habsburgs
is also extinguished.
In 1740, there are no more men.
There's no male Habsburg to take the throne.
What do they do?
And again, this is another one of these moments
where a particular person comes to power,
and if it had been somebody else
with maybe a little bit less intelligence and determination,
things would've gone differently.
What the Habsburgs did was they came up
with the aptly named pragmatic sanction,
which meant that if there are no male Habsburgs,
how about a female Habsburg?
Very pragmatic, right?
Pragmatic, I mean, pragmatic from their point of view
because what's always happening to these families
is that the male line dies out and then there's a war,
and then somebody else's male line takes over.
Why not a woman?
So Maria Theresia takes over as empress
of the Habsburg lands in 1740.
She's immediately challenged in a way
which we would now refer to as highly gendered
by Frederick of Prussia, who says that,
he says, this is how it's gendered.
He says, "Sure, you have the right to rule, that's all fine,
but I think I need to decide for you
which territories you get to rule." (chuckling)
So the Prussians make war on the Habsburgs.
Who were the Prussians?
If you can just remember from a couple lectures ago,
Prussia on the Baltic Sea,
successor state of Teutonic Knights,
little tiny thing which the Poles allowed to survive,
but then when the Poles get into trouble,
the Prussians become a kingdom, they start to expand,
and their ruling family, the Hohenzollerns,
are just gonna keep expanding, keep expanding,
keep expanding, until in 1871 they're gonna unify Germany.
So we're kind of in the middle of that story with Frederick.
So Frederick makes war on the Habsburg monarchy in 1740.
The Habsburg monarchy defends itself very well.
They lose one territory,
which Maria Theresia will always want back and never get,
which is called Silesia.
But meanwhile, and there's a lot of meanwhile
for Maria Theresia when it comes to bearing children.
Meanwhile, she does bear a son in 1741,
beginning a new house, Habsburg-Lorraine,
which is gonna rule until 1918.
As the English wits then put it,
the enemy has lost its chance for Austria now wears pants.
So when I tell you all the things
that Maria Theresia has done, I want you to bear in mind
that in the next 19 years,
she's going to have 15 more children, right?
So 16 children in 19 years,
plus the things we're talking about,
and, yes, she had childcare.
Okay, so 1756 to 1763
is the next major conflict
between Prussia and the Habsburgs.
On the world scale, this is the Seven Years' War.
This is the British and the French fighting
in North America.
This is the British gaining dominance over India.
The Seven Years' War, like, it's a world war.
It's a legitimately global conflict,
but for our purposes, it's one more time
when the Habsburgs fight the Prussians to withdraw
under Maria Theresia and continue to survive.
Then politics turns in 1772
with the First Partition of Poland.
Now the slightly unfair thing about the partition of Poland,
as I'm sure all of you Polonophile will have noticed,
is that it's not that long before,
it's 1683 when the Polish armies have come to Vienna
and raised the Ottoman siege and protected Vienna,
and then help the Austrians
to begin this series of victories,
which will end in 1699 with Karlowitz.
Less than 100 years later, 89 years later, 1772,
the Habsburgs are going to take part,
along with the Prussians
and along with the Russian Empire under Catherine,
they're gonna take part in the First Partition,
the First Partition of Poland.
And it is in this partition
that the Austrians take this territory
which they call Galicia, which is a beautiful example
of imperial naming and renaming.
If you are Ukrainian,
you'll know that there's a town called Halych
and that there's a region called Halychyna.
And from Halych, Halychyna,
there's a Latin name, from which you can make in German,
Galytsiya for which we call Galicia, right?
And so they name the territories that they claim in 1772.
They named them Galicia and Lodomeria.
Lodomeria is even more wonderful.
So there's a historical, they're historical crown lands.
As you know in this class, of Galicia,
we call them Galicia and Volhynia.
Volhynia has a town in it called Volodymyr.
From that town Volodymyr, you get the Latin name Lodomeria,
which, let's admit, it sounds kind of cool.
And so the Habsburgs claim
that they're ruling Galicia and Lodomeria.
Galicia and Lodomeria.
In fact, they don't actually rule Lodomeria,
which is another part about imperial.
Always err on the side of claiming more than you actually...
The Habsburgs also were kings of Jerusalem.
You might not have known that,
but they were kings of Jerusalem, right?
There's always a long, no, I mean, this is how you rule.
There's always a long list of things,
and somewhere in that middle of the list,
like it kind of blurs from things that you might control
to things that your uncle controlled,
to things that you never really controlled, right?
But there's always a long list of stuff that you ruled.
Okay, so, okay, where are we?
So Maria Theresia, the partitions.
So it's the First Partition of Poland
that brings Galicia into the Habsburg monarchy, 1772.
The last thing on her mind
were all the Ukrainian speakers there,
or, for that matter, all of the Yiddish speakers there.
This is not this class, but just FYI,
adding Galicia to the Habsburg monarchy brings
in all the families who then a couple of generations later
are going to create German modernity in Vienna, right?
So for example, the Freud family, right?
All these families are going to start in Galicia,
take a station stop in Moravia, end up in Vienna,
and then they're going to create.
They're gonna create Art Nouveau.
They're gonna create German modernism,
zivilisation basically, circa 1900.
So this partition also had that meaning, right?
If the Austrians don't take this territory,
and, let's say, the Russians do,
then there are not gonna be,
there are not gonna be German-speaking Jews in Vienna
around the year 1900 to make Vienna the city
that you're all gonna visit this summer, basically.
Right? Okay.
So there are three partitions of Poland: 1772, 1793, 1795,
and by the time the dust settles,
Russia has taken most of it.
Very roughly speaking,
the Left Bank, that is the western part,
is added to what Russia already gained a century before,
which is the Right Bank or the eastern part.
Almost all of Ukraine is now under the Russian Empire.
The exception, the very, very important exception,
is Galicia, which is now under the Habsburgs
in this new zone.
And this Galicia in the Third Partition is extended
to include what is now basically south-central Poland.
So Krakow.
Krakow, after a little while,
is going to be inside this Galicia.
So this Galicia has Polish speakers, Yiddish speakers,
Ukrainian speakers, and it's now a district in Austria.
So the very last thing we have to do is talk
about what is special in Austria in the 19th century.
Skim over the first part.
The first part is the post-Napoleonic part
when all the European dynasties are embarrassed,
and then they tend to crack down afterwards,
the Age of Metternich,
the age when Austria invents the police state,
the age of systematic censorship, the 1820s and the 1830s.
This comes to an end with the Revolution of 1848,
which is a broad European conflagration
from Belgium through France, through Austria.
It's the time when Karl Marx wrote
this little thing called "The Communist Manifesto."
That was also 1848.
At the end of 1848 in Austria,
the most interesting thing that has happened
is that a teenager, he's 18 at the time, I believe,
Franz Joseph comes to power, and Franz Joseph is going
to be the ruler of Austria from 1848 to 1916.
He's going to be setting the political tone
during all that time.
From our point of view, an interesting thing that happens
in the Revolutions of 1848 has to do with the Poles
and the Ukrainians, and it reveals an Austrian tactic,
which is very important to nation building.
So it's not the most heroic part of nation building,
but it's a very important part of nation building.
In 1848, the Austrians have some reason
to be concerned about the Poles.
Less the Ukrainians, more the Poles.
The Poles have had their own state until 1795.
