Early Modern Habsburg Women

Transnational Contexts, Cultural Conflicts, Dynastic Continuities

Anne J. Cruz, Maria Galli Stampino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317146919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Renaissance Art

As the first comprehensive volume devoted entirely to women of both the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg royal dynasties spanning the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates their complex and often contradictory political functions and their interrelations across early modern national borders. The essays in this volume investigate the lives of six Habsburg women who, as queens consort and queen regent, duchesses, a vicereine, and a nun, left an indelible mark on the diplomatic and cultural map of early modern Europe. Contributors examine the national and transnational impact of these notable women through their biographies, and explore how they transferred their cultural, religious, and political traditions as the women moved from one court to another. Early Modern Habsburg Women investigates the complex lives of Philip II's daughter, the Infanta Catalina Micaela (1567-1597); her daughter, Margherita of Savoy, Vicereine of Portugal (1589-1655); and Maria Maddalena of Austria, Grand Duchess of Florence (1589-1631). The second generation of Habsburg women that the volume addresses includes Philip IV's first wife, Isabel of Borbón (1602-1644), who became a Habsburg by marriage; Rudolph II's daughter, Sor Ana Dorotea (1611-1694), the only Habsburg nun in the collection; and Philip IV's second wife, Mariana of Austria (1634-1696), queen regent and mother to the last Spanish Habsburg. Through archival documents, pictorial and historical accounts, literature, and correspondence, as well as cultural artifacts such as paintings, jewelry, and garments, this volume brings to light the impact of Habsburg women in the broader historical, political, and cultural contexts. The essays fill a scholarly need by covering various phases of the lives of early modern royal women, who often struggled to sustain their family loyalty while at the service of a foreign court, even when protecting and preparing their heirs for rule a

PART I
Transnational and Transcultural Ties

Chapter 1
“Bella gerant alii.” Laodamia’s Sisters, Habsburg Brides: Leaving Home for the Sake of the House

Joseph F. Patrouch

Introduction

It has become a commonplace to refer to a specific Latin motto when discussing the marriage strategies of the members of the Habsburg dynasty in the later Middle Ages and early modern periods: Bella gerant alii, tu felix Austria, nube! [Let others fight—you, happy Austria, marry!].¹ This motto, which goes on to state Nam quae Mars aliis, dat tibi diva Venus [For those things that Mars gives to others, the goddess Venus gives to you] is used to underline the significant role of marriage (and therefore women as well as men) in Habsburg history. This essay analyzes aspects of the Habsburg marriage strategies between the later thirteenth and later eighteenth centuries by considering the women who married and left home in the period. These princesses were key players in their family’s international network, as they worked to tie the Habsburgs closely into the political scene of their times. Habsburg daughters were particularly important in the establishment of their family on the imperial throne, in the Habsburg politics against rival dynasties such as the Wittelsbachs in Bavaria, the Valois and Bourbons in France, the Přemysls and Luxembourgs in Bohemia, and the Jagiellons in Bohemia, Hungary and (especially) Poland, and in the rivalries between various branches of the Habsburg dynasty itself. A number of Habsburg daughters also played important roles as rulers or governors of the family’s complicated possessions in the Low Countries.

The sample analyzed for the following discussion consists of sixty-six Habsburg daughters.² These women became empresses, queens, electresses, grand duchesses, duchesses, margravines, countesses, and baronesses. They exercised a variety of political offices such as regent or governor.³ Unlike the women who married into the House of Austria, those who married out of it have often been lost to history; they were subsumed into the narratives spun around their spouses.⁴ The daughters who left home were also essential players in the dynasty’s strategies and helped to shape late medieval and early modern European history in specific ways.

Ironically enough, the famous motto referred to above, Bella gerant alii, may well have been meant as a taunt, derisively attributing to the Habsburgs feminine characteristics and questioning their military might and masculinity. The reading of the apparently straightforward verse, however, hides other aspects that complicate the common understanding of the passage. It is in part a direct quotation from one of the lines of Ovid’s famous Heroides [Heroines], a classical text influential in the early modern period, particularly in France, that rival kingdom to the Habsburgs’.⁵ In what is conventionally numbered as Letter XIII, the tragic heroine Laodamia writes to her absent warrior husband Protesilaus, “bella gerant alii, Protesilaus amet!” [Let others fight; let Protesilaus love].⁶ This was not to be the case: Protesilaus dies a hero’s death, the first Greek warrior to land during the Trojan War. If indeed a sixteenth-century reader had encountered the Habsburg verse, the hortatory nature of the context of this royal daughter’s epistle to a distant husband could have been recalled.

In the case of the late medieval and early modern Habsburg princesses to be discussed here, the (meta)physical space is reversed. It was the women who, like Protesilaus, left their families in the service of some greater good. The words of grieving Laodamia, lamenting her husband’s sailing and pining for the physical proximity of her beloved (a proximity which the gods briefly reinstate, with fatal consequences), may in some way have reflected the feelings of the mothers, sisters, brothers, and fathers who saw their daughters and sisters disappear over the horizon into the wider political world: “Happy as long as you remained in view, / I gladly strained my eyes to follow you.”⁷

Geographic Distribution

When examining the political careers of the sixty-six Habsburg princesses under study, some conclusions may be reached regarding the geographic distribution of the marriage alliances undertaken by the Habsburgs between roughly the 1270s and the 1770s. Not surprisingly, the territories immediately surrounding Austria proper played the largest role in the family’s marital plans.⁸ Habsburg daughters often did not have to travel far on their bridal journeys. In a pattern that will be repeated until almost the final days of the Habsburg empire in the twentieth century, the rulers of the duchy, then electorate (later kingdom) of Bavaria were primary marriage partners. Ten of the Habsburg princesses under study (approximately 15% of the total) married Bavarians starting in the early fourteenth century and continuing to the end of the period of this study in the mid-to-late eighteenth century.

Because the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary were ruled by Habsburgs almost continuously from the 1520s, the numbers have to be handled carefully, but Habsburg princesses ruled as queens of those territories regularly. There were a total of nine Habsburg queens of Hungary and eight Habsburg queens of Bohemia.⁹ They all attained their positions via marriage, not birth, and two of the Hungarian queens as well as one of the Bohemian ones did so before the Habsburgs acquired those kingdoms. If one takes into account Silesia and Moravia (complex political units associated with the Bohemian kingdom), a further four Habsburg princesses must be added to the calculations, placing Bavaria, Bohemia, and Hungary at the top of the list of territories that attracted Habsburg brides.

The position of Holy Roman Emperor was elective. In the period under study most of the emperors were drawn from various branches of the Habsburg family. This is particularly the case from the election of King Albrecht II in 1438 until the death of Emperor Charles VI in 1740. During those three centuries, all of the kings and emperors who ruled the Holy Roman Empire were Habsburgs. During the period of study, eight different Habsburg princesses sat on the imperial throne as empresses-consort. Unlike in some of the other political units discussed above, all of these women took office later in the period, after the Habsburgs had gained the necessary status. The first Habsburg Holy Roman Empress was María, the consort of Emperor Maximilian II. She served from 1562 to 1576.¹⁰ Two Habsburg empresses, Maria Amalie (served 1742–1745) and the famous Maria Theresia (served 1745–1765), were consorts to non-Habsburg emperors.

The rulers of the complex kingdom of Poland were another important set of marriage partners for the early modern Habsburgs. Eight Habsburg princesses served as queens of Poland between 1454 and 1757. Four of them rest today in tombs in the Krakow cathedral; one is buried in Vilnius, recalling the political ties between the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland during the Commonwealth and the reign of the Jagiellons there; one is buried in Dresden, recalling similar ties between the Saxon electorate and Poland; and the other two rest still in Austria, having returned to the land of their birth before their deaths.

The case of the first Habsburg queen of Poland, Elisabeth (1436?–1505), illustrates the pervasive themes associated with these women, who left home to establish political power bases elsewhere (Hamman 86). After marrying King Casimir IV in 1454, she and her husband had a dozen children, firmly establishing the Jagiellon dynasty on the throne.¹¹ Three of Elisabeth’s sons went on to become kings of Poland-Lithuania. She expended her foreign assets to support relatives in ongoing rivalries between branches of the Habsburg dynasty, in this case the so-called Albertine Line against the “Leopoldine Line” represented by her legal guardian as a child, the emperor Frederick III. One of her sons became king of Bohemia, another was canonized.

A number of European courts saw between three and five Habsburg princesses in residence in the later medieval and early modern periods. These include Portugal, with five Habsburg queens or crown princesses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; France with four Habsburg queens; the electorate of Saxony with four Habsburg duchesses; and the newly-unified kingdoms of Spain with three Habsburg queens, one of whom, Maria Anna, the sister of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I (known in Spain as Mariana), is the subject of two chapters in this collection.¹² The duchy of Mantua also was home to three Habsburg archduchesses who had to take a step down in rank as they ascended the throne. Even the northern kingdom of Sweden had a couple of Habsburg queens, three if one counts the titular queen Caecilia Renate, queen of Poland from 1637–1644: she apparently never set foot in the kingdom her husband claimed. Denmark-Norway had a Habsburg queen, too, although Isabella (1501–1526) died shortly after she and her husband were exiled from that kingdom. It was not always safe or easy to be a queen.

When one goes further back into the dynasty’s history, when the Habsburg women and men were attempting with varying degrees of success to maintain the exalted position that Rudolf I had attained for them on the throne of the emperors, one sees that the ranks of the marriage partners for the Habsburg daughters were more modest. By contrast, the spatial distribution continued to be extensive. Habsburg princesses were married to the rulers of Baden, Brandenburg, Calabria, Coucy, Ferrara, Florence (and later the Grand Duchy of Tuscany), Gorizia, Hardegg, Jülich-Cleves-Berg, Lorraine, Öttingen, Palatinate-Neuburg, Parma, Savoy, and even Transylvania. That experiment was short-lived: Archduchess Maria Christierna’s marriage to the Transylvanian ruler Sigmund Bathory in 1595 was annulled only four years after its inception. The important roles of the Habsburg princesses in the governments of Savoy and Tuscany are examined in detail in the pages to follow in the contributions by Magdalena S. Sánchez on Philip II of Spain’s daughter Catalina Micaela and by Maria Galli Stampino on Archduchess Maria Maddalena.

The Imperial Election of 1273

The Habsburgs first reached the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in the late thirteenth century. The marriages of Habsburg daughters played important roles in the realization of this important step in the establishment of the dynasty as a central European, then European, and ultimately worldwide power. The Habsburg count Rudolf married the Swabian countess Gertrud von Hohenberg und Heigerloch (1225–1281) in 1245 and they reportedly had fourteen children together (BLKÖ 6:149).¹³ Their daughters would be important figures in the elaborate system of alliances that laid the foundation for Rudolf’s election as German king at Frankfurt am Main in October, 1273 and his expansion of power and influence toward the east into Austria in the years following.

Rudolf’s primary rival for the imperial throne was the Bohemian king Ottokar II Přemysl, an ambitious ruler who was angling to extend his influence and holdings to the south and west. Ottokar made the tactical mistake of boycotting the election assembly and was outmaneuvered by the influential palatine, Count Ludwig “the Stern” [der Strenge] of Bavaria. He was one of the imperial electors who helped to engineer the victory of Rudolf of Habsburg. As part of the negotiations and base-building associated with Rudolf’s election, in the same year Ludwig married one of Rudolf and Gertrud’s daughters, Mathilde (1251–1304) (Hamann 351–2; BLKÖ 7:88–9). The Saxon elector Albrecht II also married one of his Habsburg candidate’s daughters, Agnes (1257?–1322), also in 1273 (Hamann 28; BLKÖ 6:137).

Within six years, the Habsburgs developed marital ties to the other two secular electors as well: Gertrud and Rudolf’s daughter Hedwig (died 1286) married into the complex family of the margraves-electors of Brandenburg, helping to remove these important northeastern rulers from the sphere of influence of Ottokar and his successors (Hamann 161). Her sister Katharina (died 1282) helped cement the role of the dukes of Lower Bavaria in the imperial corridors of power when she married Otto, the son of the new elector Heinrich, who had gained his position due to the absence of King Ottokar (Hamann 232; BLKÖ 6:400). Of course, the Habsburgs benefitted from having this ally as well.

Moving from this power base among the electors, Rudolf directed his attention, like so many of his successors, toward the influential kingdoms of the crowns of Saint Václav (Bohemia) and Saint István (Hungary). Rudolf and Gertrud’s daughter Clementia (died 1293) married the striving Angevin claimant to the Hungarian and Croatian thrones, Charles Martell, in 1281. They would become the parents of King Charles I of Hungary (Charles Robert). Four years later, Rudolf and Gertrud’s daughter Judith (1271–1297) marri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Transnational and Transcultural Ties
• Part II Epistolary and Spatial Power
• Part III Birthing Habsburgs
• Part IV Visual and Sartorial Politics
• Index