Like all the great powers in early modern Europe, the Habsburg monarchy was involved in what economists call tournament—a competition whose reward structure motivates the participants to make prodigious efforts to win it. The tournament in this case was an international military contest. Between 1650 and 1815, the Habsburg monarchy was involved in twenty-four major armed conflicts. Over that period, the strength of the army grew from 24,000 to 568,000. As the adage went, money was the sinews of war, and meeting the enormous and fast-rising costs imposed by incessant warfare was a top priority for the Habsburgs.
William Godsey argues in this masterful study that what enabled the Habsburgs to pull through and emerge strengthened from this extended string of conflicts was in large part the engagement of the estates. The book focuses on the estates of the archduchy of Austria below the River Enns, or Lower Austria, whose capital, Vienna, was also the seat of the Habsburg government. Relations between the imperial government and the estates were here characterized by an exceptional degree of proximity, geographical and otherwise.
The first chapters of the book describe the composition, structure, and the changing functions of the estates. The latter were shaped by the fiscal-military demands of spiraling international conflicts. The estates gave assistance in provisioning and billeting the standing army and in guiding the troops passing through the archduchy so as to minimize damage to the population, thus reducing the political as well as the economic costs of war. As Godsey points out several times, the fact that the aristocratic members of the estates had landed property in the archduchy and hence “natural” authority and local knowledge was in these and other areas of activity an essential advantage for the government.
Since the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the key area of activity was finance. With the so-called Turk tax of 1683, the agreement (“recess”) of 1689, and the capitation of 1691, the estates were emerging as a major supplier of credit to the government. Although they also managed tax collection and handled debt service, it was their credit that acted as a “brace helping to hold the Habsburg state together” (209). The abrogation by the government of administrative reforms and the concessions it granted to the estates during the Seven Years War (1756–1763) are a testimony to the monarchy's direct stake in the estates’ continued viability. The wars both transformed and preserved the estates.
The Habsburg government well understood that the borrowing capacity of the estates was based on their autonomy, privileged status, and good name. These qualities underlay the intermediary powers of the estates, which gave the rulers legitimate access to resources that would otherwise have been difficult to tap. Here was an inbuilt limit to the government's ability and desire to weaken the estates. To undermine them would have been political folly, and all of the Habsburg rulers in the period under discussion realized this. The estates occasionally reminded the sovereign of the links between the services they rendered and the favors they received. But they understood equally well that their privileged status and continued existence were inextricably tied to the Habsburg monarchy. The two parties were locked in an embrace that sustained them both. Godsey thus disposes of an older view according to which the estates had been emasculated by the Habsburgs. Reforms could not and did not go so far as to change the social order; they worked to preserve the primacy of the landowning interest and the seigneurial and hierarchical structure.
Godsey's arguments, based on an imposing array of documents, touch on several paradigms or perspectives central to the historiography of early modern Europe. One is that of absolutism. The term absolutism has in recent decades come under strong criticism. This study of the estates of Lower Austria is one of the most detailed and convincing expositions of the reality behind the absolutist claim. It demonstrates that Emperor Joseph II was the only Habsburg ruler in the period under discussion who aimed at anything like absolute power. The hard reality of international struggles and financial exigencies put paid to the project. “Absolutism” in Lower Austria and elsewhere was an alliance between monarch and local elites, and in this particular case not as harmful as the French variant.
The second perspective is indebted to John Elliott's classic article “A Europe of Composite Monarchies” (1992). Doubting the validity of “empire” as a description of the Habsburg conglomerate, Godsey attributes the remarkable resilience of the monarchy to its composite structure and, equally important, to the fact that the Habsburgs recognized the advantage as well as the inevitability of working with, rather than against, that structure. Indeed, as the author points out, in the struggle against centralized Napoleonic France, the composite structure proved a source of vigor.
The third paradigm on which the book rests is that of war as the motor of state formation. Godsey's analysis confirms it up to a point. Continuous warfare did lead to the creation or significant enhancement of administrative, fiscal, and financial practices, bolstering monarchical authority along the way. Between them, these changes amounted to the making of a fiscal-military state. But this development should not be equated with the centralized, unitary state. Wars did not lead to the paradigmatic modern state.
The implications of Godsey's arguments thus extend well beyond the confines of Lower Austria. The book is highly suggestive on a whole range of important aspects of early modern European history. Any early modern historian would benefit from reading this outstanding work.
