Even before Frederick III’s time the house of Habsburg had won much of its standing in Germany and in central Europe through marriages to heiresses. Frederick’s son Maximilian carried that matrimonial policy to heights of unequaled brilliance. First he himself in 1477 married the heiress of Burgundy, Charles the Bold’s daughter Mary, with the result that the house of Habsburg, in the person of their son Philip, inherited the greater part of Charles the Bold’s widespread dominions: not the duchy of Burgundy itself, which the French seized, but Artois, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and the County of Burgundy or Franche Comté. Secondly, though he failed after Mary’s death in 1482 to secure Brittany also by a similar coup (France frustrated his proxy marriage to the Breton heiress Anne), he procured Philip’s marriage, in 1496, to Joan, prospective heiress of Castile and Aragon: thus securing for his family not only Spain, with Naples-Sicily and Sardinia, but also the immense dominions the Spaniards were about to conquer in America. Maximilian’s matrimonial achievements were the occasion of the famous hexameter Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria nube (“Let others wage wars: you, fortunate Austria, marry”).
Since Philip I of Castile died prematurely, his son was already ruler of the Burgundian heritage and of Spain when, in 1519, he succeeded Maximilian as ruler of the Habsburgs’ Austrian territories. In the same year, he was elected Holy Roman emperor as Charles V.
The threat of force as well as an enormous expenditure in bribes was necessary to secure Charles’s election. Besides the fact that many of the German princes were reluctant to saddle themselves with so mighty a sovereign, there was the opposition of France, which saw itself already half-encircled, from the northeast clockwise to the southwest, by Charles’s possessions. Dating from Maximilian’s Burgundian marriage, antagonism between the French kings and the Habsburgs was to persist, to the progressive detriment of the latter, until the middle of the 18th century, and until the second half of the 17th the other European powers would mostly sympathize with France. The Habsburgs in the 16th century were too formidable not to provoke envy and anxiety.
Charles V’s responsibilities at the time of his becoming emperor were moreover too great for one man to assume, as he himself could acknowledge: they had to be divided. By the Treaty of Brussels (1522) he assigned the Habsburg-Austrian hereditary lands to his brother, the future emperor Ferdinand I. In 1521 Ferdinand had married Anna, daughter of Louis II of Hungary and Bohemia; and Louis II’s untimely death in 1526, after his defeat by the Turks in the Battle of Mohács, prompted Ferdinand to stand as candidate for his succession, to which, despite rivals, he was elected.
Power and weakness
The Habsburgs reached the zenith of their power before the end of the 16th century: the duchy of Milan, annexed by Charles V in 1535, was assigned by him to his son, the future Philip II of Spain, in 1540; Philip II conquered Portugal in 1580; and the Spanish dominions in America were ever expanding. There were, however, three faults in the power structure—two of them historical accidents, the third an effect of the Habsburg dynasty’s own measures for self-preservation.
In the first place, the ascendancy of Charles V coincided with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, which was to spread turmoil for decades over Europe from the Netherlands to Hungary. As Charles, from his Spanish upbringing, was imbued with ideas of Catholic uniformity and as his successors, with the exception of the enigmatic Maximilian II, sought also to realize those ideas, religious resistance to the Habsburgs’ authority came to aggravate or to camouflage political resistance. At the same time, the papacy, overawed though it was by the Spanish military presence in Italy, did not always subscribe to the Habsburg’s special policy for Catholicism.
Secondly, Ferdinand’s accession to Hungary meant that the Habsburgs had to bear the brunt of the Ottoman Turkish drive from the Balkans into central Europe, just as Habsburg Spain had to confront Turkish incursions into the western Mediterranean. The great victory of Lepanto (1571), won by Charles V’s natural son, Juan de Austria, did not end those troubles, which were exploited, against the dynasty, by Hungarian dissidents and, more covertly, by France.
The third flaw in the Habsburg edifice was latent in the 16th century. Mindful of what they had won by marriages, the Habsburgs sought to preclude rival dynasties from turning the tables on them by the same means: to keep their heritage in their own hands, they began to intermarry more and more frequently among themselves. The result, in a few generations, was a fatal inbreeding that brought the male line of Charles V to extinction.
