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Ilse's Reviews > The Habsburgs: To Rule the World
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Reading Progress
June 12, 2024
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Started Reading
June 12, 2024
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June 12, 2024
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20.19%
"Maximilian's daughter,Margaret, married Ferdinand & Isabella's only son, Juan.These were high-stakes unions,for should the marriage have yielded a son,then he, a Spanish prince,would have had a claim to at least a part of Maximilian's possessions. As it happened,it was Juan who died first,so worn out,we are told,by the sexual demands of his bride,that his fate became an advertisement for self-constraint."
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84
June 13, 2024
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43.51%
"Leopold’s achievement would be a military one – the defence of the holy Roman Emire and Christendom against the Turks and the French. He was an unlikely champion. Slight and frail in appearance, he was an accomplished musician and a virtuoso flautist. Many rules are extolled for their talents in musical composition. Leopold retains the distinction of still having his works performed today."
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181
June 15, 2024
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46.88%
"The king's movements were stiff and mannered, his face was fixed in austere solemnity, and he proceeded in silence. Even with his ministers and while at ease in the palace, Philip IV was notoriously unyielding. He admonished his wife for laughing at a buffoon's tricks and was both unmoved and unmoving when a minister collapsed with a stroke before him at a council meeting."
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195
June 15, 2024
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46.88%
"The royal power was constrained both in principle and in practice. It was widely believed that the monarch's right to make law was limited by previous statutes and inherited traditions, the setting aside of which jeopardised the established harmony within the kingdom which it was his duty to preserve. (tbc)"
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195
June 15, 2024
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46.88%
"(ctd) An analogy frequently made was the similarity between royal government and a harp, the strings of which should be tightened or relaxed to produce a melodious consonance among the king's subjects. Other writers compared monarchy to a clockwork engine, which the king was tasked with keeping in running order. It was not for him to innovate but instead to preserve and renew."
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195
June 16, 2024
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47.12%
"'Valimiento' or 'government by valido' continued into the reign of Philip IV. Their mastery of government left Philip IV free to undertake the ceremonial functions of kingship, commission great works of art , and perform what he did best, which was to father illegitimate children, of whom he had no fewer than thirty."
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June 17, 2024
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49.28%
"Baroque church interiors are saturated with allegories and emblems. Christ’s birth also received attention, with the first allegories Christmas nativity scenes. The earliest was set up in Prague in 1562. Within twenty years the custom had reached Spain."
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205
June 17, 2024
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50.48%
"Charles VI did not abandon his dream of recreating the global monarchy of Charles V & of uniting Central Europe,Spain & the New World.He commenced a building programme that replicated the architecture & symbols of his lost Spanish inheritance.He enlarged the Hofburg with the Spanish Riding School and the Imperial Chancellery Wing.This resulted in the Alte Burg being almost entirely lost to view behind new facades."
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June 18, 2024
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52.4%
"In 1743, Maria Theresa treated her court tot the spectacle of the Ladies’ Carousel.16 women of the imperial court,headed by the queen in a tricorn hat,rode through Vienna firing shots into the air.The women astonished the audience by riding ‘in the masculine fashion’.The queen rode sidesaddle. Although only 25,she was already pregnant with her 6th child – she would eventually give birth to 16 in just under 20 years."
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218
June 19, 2024
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52.64%
"Maria Theresa’s ‘womanly’ qualities of motherhood and vulnerability together with her ‘manly’ resilience and courage made her the most celebrated monarch in Europe.In Britain, pub signs displayed her portrait so as to drum up business.Had she known of it, the young Maria Theresa would have doubtless repaid the compliment – despite her pregnancies, she gave over many nights to drinking, dancing, and winning at cards."
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219
June 19, 2024
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53.13%
"Until the 1770s most officials kept irregular hours and worked from home. Joseph II demanded much of the civil servants – that they dedicate their lives to administrative service, strive for the common welfare,have annual appraisals.The reality of work was often quite different. The civil servant and dramatist Franz Grillparzer summed up one of his days:’Into the office at noon. Found nothing to do. Read Thucydides.’"
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June 24, 2024
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57.69%
"Some attempt was made to save the libraries of the monasteries that were dissolved by Joseph II. But librarians were instructed not to bother ‘with books that have no worth, old editions from the 15th century, and the like’, so these were lost. Much was either left to rot or dumped into lakes. Altogether, about 2 1/2 million books were destroyed in Europe’s greatest biblioclasm before the Third Reich."
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240
June 24, 2024
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67.31%
"Obliged (by Metternich) to take an annual oath that they were not members of secret societies,the bureaucrats joined the next best thing, which were the reading clubs,where foreign newspapers and banned books circulated with police approval.The members of the Legal and Political Reading Union could read Rousseau,the works of the early Swiss communists & even Il Progresso,the mouthpiece of revolutionary Young Italy."
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June 25, 2024
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Finished Reading
Comments Showing 1-5 of 5 (5 new)
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Irena
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Jun 17, 2024 03:58AM
I too wanted to read a book about Habsburgs, wasn't sure which one to pick... Looking forward to your review.
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Irena wrote: "I too wanted to read a book about Habsburgs, wasn't sure which one to pick... Looking forward to your review."Irena, the library made chosing easy for me: this one, and a translation into Dutch of Rady's shorter and illustrated The Habsburg Empire: A Very Short Introduction was all I could find there. Apparently many readers find this book a disappointing mess, dryly written and without an encompassing line, but I find it compulsively readable (maybe because what I read for work is really dry :)?) and a good companion piece to the heavy tome on Vienna's art & architecture I'll try to finish before visiting Vienna in September (because of the large format very hard - physically - to read).
Rady walks from monarch to monarch in a quick pace - on some I had liked more thoroughness, like on Maria Theresia and Joseph II - but as an introduction, it seems ok. Nevertheless, I am not that fond of some of Rady's asides to 'spice up' his text that seem particurlary denigratory on women. Take this example on the spouse of Charles VI, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick:
Charles VI had taken care to ensure before his marriage in 1708 that his bride, the astonishingly beautiful Elisabeth Christine, was fertile, making her submit before the wedding to a humiliating gynaecological examination. Thereafter, he had plied her with copious quantities of red wine as an aid to conception. But nothing happened for almost a decade, after which Elisabeth Christine quickly produced three daughters. Then, once more, pregnancy eluded her. Contemporaries blamed Elisabeth Christine’s insincere conversion to Catholicism (she had been brought up as a Lutheran), but the wine she consumed to aid fertility was the more likely cause, for it had rendered the once dazzling ‘Lily White’ (Weisse Liesl) an obese alcoholic.
Thank you so much for this comment, Ilse! Indeed, a rather disparaging spicing up. What book are you reading on Vienna?As I have time mostly for audiobooks, I was with the tiny number of books about Vienna available about Vienna on audible.com. I ended up listening to the only one I could find there that is sort of a comprehensive history of Vienna, written by a British diplomate and politician (Vienna: The International Capital) and another about the Ottoman invasion (The Enemy At the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans and the Battle for Europe), my favorite of the two.
working from home and irregular hours were quite the norm across Europe, in Britain the first government office block was Somerset House - construction started 1776, and I guess in other European countries similar projects probably begun at about the same time, most government oficals would have continued to work from their own houses or those of their bosses well into the 19th century. I recall that under Metternich the main occupation of spies was finding out what Austrian government ministers and their staff were actually doing...
Ilse, my interest in the Habsburgs and the empire continues, so I'm looking forward to your review.
