Dynasty and Piety. Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars by Luc Duerloo (review) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Patronage, Politics, and Devotion: The Habsburgs of Central Europe and Jesuit Saints
Journal of Jesuit Studies, 2022
The main components of the Habsburgs’ dynastical piety—worship of the Crucified, of the Eucharist, of the Blessed Mary and her spouse St. Joseph—are already well-known. They were common to both branches of the House of Austria, the Spanish as well as the Austrian one. However, they are far from exhausting the variety of manifestations with which they fostered the cult of the saints. More than other sovereigns, Austrian Habsburgs intervened on behalf of patron saints with the popes and the Roman Congregation of Sacred Rites. During the seventeenth century and still in the eighteenth century, they promulgated public feasts in the Austrian hereditary lands as well as in the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia. This paper focuses mainly on the veneration they addressed to the Jesuit saints: Ignatius of Loyola, Francis Xavier, Luigi Gonzaga, Stanisław Kostka, and Peter Canisius using archive and printed materials from Rome, Vienna, Prague, and Budapest.
The Archduke Carl and the Realities of Habsburg Warfare from 1793-1814: Less Change Then You Thought
The Archduke Carl of Teschen, victor of Stockach and Aspern, and the Habsburg Monarchy’s most famous commander of the age, was an unrepentant opponent of unlimited war; the type of war which he believed had been released by the forces of the French Revolution. To counter these new so-called realities, he looked to “limit” the impact of war through a combination of the Early Modern re-invention of Roman military principles, appeals to service, and the tenets of Theresian Catholicism. In the end, Carl responded to the “emotional,” read nationalistic, forces of the French with Habsburg revanche. This paper will look at two main areas. The first is Carl most immediate intellectual influence and a “snapshot” of his actual work. The second is Carl efforts to reject, or at least control, popular participation in the military (the civilian-soldier – or Landwehr). Evidence for these conclusions will be drawn almost exclusively from primary source material, especially the copious work of the ...
This paper reconstructs the education of Emperor Rudolf II and his brother Ernst in Spain. It emphasizes the essentially political character of humanist educational literature, which was intended to cultivate a learned political elite whose decisions would be guided by good morals and unbiased reason. In order to achieve their educational goals, humanists promoted a scientific approach to the rearing and schooling of children, from observation of their essentially non-adult nature to adaptation to their potentials, their character, and their age. The recognition that children could not be forced to be virtuous and needed to be given incentives to pursue study was coupled, however, with a certain degree of anthropological pessimism about their corruptibility and the habitual nature of virtues. This explains why the stress on free will and mild methods was always coupled with an emphasis on discipline and indoctrination. The education of Rudolf and Ernst, which was intended to foster moderation, self-control, diligence, and a love of learning, is a rare example of humanist ideals put into practice. It confirms both the special importance of the ideas of Erasmus for Northern humanism and the strong relationship between Latin learning, moral education, and governing.
In historiography, the predominant portrayal of Charles V is that of a ruler hostile to the Reformation. Various authors, notably those unfavourably inclined towards the Habsburgs, show him as a defender of the Catholic orthodoxy and an opponent of any heresy. He is alleged to have lacked tolerance and endorsed the papacy, as well as to have used military force to combat Lutheranism. In this context, authors draw attention to the Battle of Mühlberg (1547), where the imperial army under Charles V’s command crushed the Protestant forces, leaving the battlefield strewn with the bodies of 8,000 killed and wounded. In this paper, I seek to revise the false and overly demonised image of the Emperor, one that is particularly frequently encountered in authors of evangelical provenance. In my opinion, the notion of a militant Emperor-Catholic which the figure of Charles V has come to evoke effectively diverts one’s attention away from the ideological substrate on which his vision of Christianity evolved: Charles’s religiousness and his association with the teachings of Erasmus of Rotterdam. If this context is disregarded, one cannot hope to understand the approach of the Emperor to Martin Luther and Lutheranism. Consequently, Charles’s idea of Christianity should be outlined in order to demonstrate how it translated into relations with Luther and his movement. The chief proposition I am going to argue is as follows: influenced by Erasmus’ thought, Charles V remained open to Christian humanism, understood Lutherans and sought conciliation with them; however, his attitude was neither appreciated nor acknowledged by the Protestant princes of the Reich, to whom Luther was an instrument allowing to make a bid for greater power and independence, nor was his appeal to the papacy, which rejected everything that was new as a threat to the fossilised dogmas. It is in this light that I will subsequently evaluate the impact that Charles V and Luther had on the Western civilisation.