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This chapter examines the protective measures implemented by merchants and rulers in Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam to deal with violent threats such as theft, robbery, or even outright warfare. It shows that the existence of an international network of commercial cities created strong incentives for local and central governments to offer protection to international traders to enhance the position of individual cities in this network. It also considers how imminent changes in a city's position in the international urban hierarchy led to the massive use of force, citing as examples the Flemish Revolt and the Dutch Revolt. Finally, it discusses the unification of the Habsburgs as rulers of the Netherlands and its impact on the safety of merchants, along with the rise of the Dutch Republic.

The contrasting fates of the Bourbons and Habsburgs, are revealed by the contrasting episodes of October 1789. These are instructive about the culture of power and the power of culture in the late 18th century. It is demonstrated here that in their various ways, and with varying degrees of success, rulers had come to terms with changing conditions. Only in France was the failure almost total. Two episodes in the last decade of the old regime demonstrated the monarchy’s chronic inability to make culture work in its cause. The success of the Horattii and David’s subsequent career as a revolutionary exemplified the failure of the French establishment to adjust the previous century’s cultural institutions to modern requirements. The alliance between regime and public unleashed a combination of culture and power far more potent than anything Europe had yet seen. They tested the monarchies to the very brink of destruction.

This introductory chapter provides a background of the Austrian Habsburgs. Amassed over several centuries by marriage, war, diplomacy, and luck, the eastern realm of the Austrian Habsburgs was an omnium gatherum of tribes and languages—German, Magyar, Slav, Jew, and Romanian—bound together by geographic happenstance, legal entailment, and the person of the emperor who ruled them. The lands inhabited by this multiethnic menagerie were a place of war; in every direction, the Austrian Habsburgs faced enemies. Indeed, the outside environment placed Austria in a position of continual danger while the political and economic structure of the empire narrowed the range of viable tools for responding effectively to external threats and putting it on a secure long-term footing. Yet somehow, despite the seemingly insurmountable threats arrayed against it, the Habsburg Monarchy had survived. It outlasted Ottoman sieges, Bourbon quests for continental hegemony, repeated efforts at dismemberment by Frederick the Great, and no fewer than four failed attempts to defeat Napoleon Bonaparte. Each time, it weathered the threat at hand and more often than not emerged on the winning side. Thus, by virtually any standard measure, the Habsburg Empire must be judged a geopolitical success.

This chapter examines the relationship between Transylvania's princes and Reformed clergy as well as the role of the church in shaping Transylvania's relations with the rest of Protestant Europe. It explores how far a network of international Calvinist connections across Europe informed the development of diplomatic policy at the Transylvanian court during the early seventeenth century. It also considers the degree to which Transylvanian military action against the Habsburgs before 1645, and the catastrophic decision to join the Second Northern War in 1657, were in fact motivated by a desire within the principality to further the international Protestant cause, even though there were few remaining advocates of this cause in European politics and diplomacy by the 1650s. In addition, this chapter outlines ideas within the Hungarian Reformed church about divine judgement and an imminent end of the world. Important parallels are drawn between the fate of Hungary and Israel, which informed notions about a special and predestined role for Hungary and the Transylvanian principality in the apocalypse to come.

This chapter presents the hitherto untold history of the making of George Eglisham's book The Forerunner of Revenge. It follows Eglisham from London to Brussels, from the fringes of the English court to a new circle of friends eager to hear and to use his stories about Buckingham. It then situates Eglisham's book in both short and longer-term polemical contexts — as the latest in a long series of polemical libels and ‘disinformation’ produced in the Spanish Netherlands for English readers, and as a crucial part of a coordinated propaganda campaign designed to sow confusion and mistrust among the Habsburgs' enemies in the mid-1620s. By looking closely at The Forerunner's making — at the men who made it, and the places where it was made — we can finally appreciate the European history of a book that would haunt English and Scottish political culture for decades.

This chapter describes the Habsburg Monarchy’s physical environment, how it influenced Habsburg perceptions of space, and the vulnerabilities and advantages that it created in competition with other major powers. Like all states, the Habsburg Monarchy depended for its survival on the ability to exercise undisputed control over a clearly defined territorial space. This in turn involved two tasks: building a sound political and economic base, and providing security against internal or external attack. In the first task, the Habsburgs enjoyed the advantage of a compact, riparian heartland bounded on most sides by mountains. The second task was made difficult in the extreme by the empire’s wider east-central European security environment. This combination of defensible local terrain and geopolitical vulnerability influenced how Habsburg leaders thought about and conducted strategy by encouraging the development of strategic forms of knowledge to conceptualize space for defensive purposes, and pulling attention outward to the frontiers, while demanding the maintenance of a “big picture” capable of taking in the security position of the Habsburg Empire as a whole.

This chapter looks at the constitutional makeup of the Habsburg state and the limitations it placed on the mobilization of resources. In contrast to its physical geography, the political geography of the Danubian Basin greatly complicated the task of Habsburg empire building. Accumulated in a pell-mell fashion over several centuries, the territorial holdings of the Austrian Habsburgs formed a composite state made up of multiple, historically separate polities, each with its own separate constitutional arrangement with the ruling dynasty. Its human population consisted of more than a dozen ethnic groups, none of which was strong enough to dominate the others. This internal makeup impeded the monarchy’s evolution as a modern state in two ways: by hindering the development of a centralized, efficient state administration and implanting sources of domestic conflict into the social fabric of the state. Both factors shaped Austria’s behavior as a strategic actor, placing it at a disadvantage in competition with more centralized and unified Great Power rivals. Ultimately, these characteristics prevented the monarchy from mobilizing its full power potential, effectively removed territorial expansion as an option for increasing state security, and presented internal vulnerabilities for enemies to exploit in wartime.

This epilogue argues that many of the problems that the Habsburgs faced are present today. Geopolitics remains as a persistent and reintensifying force in which Great Powers seek to survive in competition with other large, purposeful actors. In this contest, geography remains both a key determinant of success and its ultimate prize. Advances in technology have only partially mitigated the effects of geography; even in the era of nuclear weapons, the search for security comes down to a battle for space in which finite resources must be arrayed in time to deal with virtually infinite challenges. As in the Habsburg period, the threats arrayed against today’s West are multidirectional in nature and vary widely in form, ranging from revisionist Great Powers with large conventional armies to economically backward but numerous and religiously motivated enemies employing asymmetrical weapons and tactics. The chapter then considers a few broad principles of Habsburg strategic statecraft which stand out as potentially relevant in any era.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the German-speaking lands were dominated by two states both of which presented considerable difficulties for those attempting to understand them. In the north, the German Reich had been formed in 1871 in the wake of a successful war against France. Its formation was also the final stage in a prolonged struggle for power between the dynastic house of Prussia and the Habsburgs. For German political theorists, the period before the First World War was one of rapid change, politically, economically and socially. It was a period in which the gap between constitutional and legal doctrine and the reality of state and social power expanded in some areas and contracted in others. It was, however, also a period which left many of them ill-prepared for the reality and increasingly ideological character of the First World War.

This chapter describes how the rising Asian demand for Colombian emeralds coincided with the decline of the Spanish Habsburgs. The rebellion of Portugal in 1640 and final capitulation in the Netherlands in 1648 signaled the end of a remarkable era of global maritime dominance. Dutch gains at the Iberians' expense began much earlier and reached as far as Manila, but they avalanched after the Twelve Year Truce expired in 1621. Portuguese trading forts from Elmina to Melaka fell to Dutch cannons, and by 1637, much of Brazil was governed not by the King of Spain or Portugal but by Prince John Maurice of Nassau. Plunder, as in other contemporary gunpowder empires, was only the first step in Holland's larger imperial project. Primitive accumulation of this spectacular kind was followed by the more mundane business of bulk trade.

Focused on medieval-period Austria, this chapter explores how the Central European House of Habsburg deployed ancestors as part of a political strategy to link the dynasty and its members with the illustrious dead. Taking a liberal view of ancestorhood, Habsburgs such as Rudolph I and Maximilian I publicly visited and reused ancient burial places, intermarried with members of other dynasties in order to increase the prestige of their own, and occasionally manufactured—wholesale—the required genealogical documentation to bolster their kinship-based claims to royal status.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, to explore whether the Habsburg' army's reputation for inefficiency, incompetence, general unreliability, and even cruelty, is at all justified. It asks: Can the view that the Austrian armed forces were consistently weak and poorly led compared to most of their opponents really be proven? Were they hopelessly outclassed against Frederick's Prussians, or doomed to be routed by Napoleon and later Moltke? Did the Habsburg armies offer, as one historian recently noted, ‘a truly lamentable performance’ in the First World War, crumbling and melting away? How did an army of so many disparate national elements hold together for so long? What was the secret of the Habsburgs' armies' ability to serve one family in organising the states of Central and Eastern Europe into a coherent and secure single entity whose prosperity and security have been so difficult to replicate in modern times? In the process of answering these questions, a commonly accepted narrative can perhaps be enriched by an unfamiliar perspective on many critical events in modern European history.

This chapter examines the efforts of New Spain’s last Habsburg viceroys to eliminate the Baratillo in the late 1680s and 1690s, focusing on the 1692 riot that ravaged the Plaza Mayor. Following the riot, Spanish authorities sought to re-engineer the Plaza Mayor, forcing the Baratillo out and replacing it with a masonry alcaicería—later known as the Parían—a structure designed for the capital’s elite import merchants. The chapter explores why colonial authorities found the Baratillo so troubling, how they sought to eliminate it, and why that effort ultimately failed.

This chapter examines the efforts by Elizabethan colonizers like Sir Walter Ralegh to define their persona as captain as entailing a calling of considerable providential significance. Drawing on the Renaissance ideal of imperium as the strength needed to pin down the world's sinful inconstancy, sixteenth-century English proponents of colonization argued that captains possessed the manly fortitude and prophetical insight needed to carry out God's will in conquering areas where Elizabeth's sovereignty was sound but not yet realized. An anxiety that underlay the attempts by writers like Richard Hakluyt the clergyman to defend Elizabethan conquest in America was the simmering worry, especially pronounced in an age of religious division and Spanish-Habsburg dominance, that God did not grant sovereignty to female rulers. Thus, her captains took on an especially precarious role in embodying England's imperial crown overseas, and failed colonies like Roanoke would eventually come to epitomize the Elizabethan captains' ignobility for their ineffectuality as conquerors.