Review : Habsburgs - Embodying Empire

I spent the last week exploring a small Dutch island and going on a hardcore reading binge, so it's time to blog up some of that.

Let's kick off with Andrew Wheatcroft's The Habsburgs : Embodying Empire. Recently I tried to broaden my range of European history knowledge with Simon Winder's Lotharingia, but it was by some margin the most pointless thing I've ever read (at least for non-fiction; The Count of Monte Cristo certainly claims the title in the fiction category). It was so stupendously bad that I couldn't even blog it properly and contented myself with a short rant here. 

Fortunately I picked up a few other titles during the same book-buying spree, which brings us to Habsburgs. This begins very well, with a good mixture of the exciting and the analytical. When he wants to, Wheatcroft can write a battle scene that would equal anything Roger Crawley comes up with - and Crawley is the absolute master of narrative military history, so this is not a comparison to be made lightly.

By the end, though, the book degenerates to something which is... decent, but weird. This actually becomes clear deceptively early on. Wheatcroft chooses to begin by describing the events of 1386, but never links this to any general narrative. It's a perfectly fine bit of narrative, but I was waiting to learn of its broader relevance. And waiting, and waiting... until I finally realised there wasn't one. This is non-linear history without a clear reason for it, something that ought to be studiously avoided.

It's also largely biographical. But not a biography of any one individual, but a haphazard attempt at a biography of the whole family. Now I did learn quite a bit from this, in particular the relations between the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg lines. And the early and middle stages of the book are okay, choosing a few select individuals and examples to go into detail without trying to cover absolutely every emperor, which would have been foolish (though even here it isn't clear how he made his selection). By the end, however, it becomes a somewhat plodding series of mini-biographies which cover far more of the final days and slow deaths of each successive emperor than saying anything about their achievements while they were alive. And I'm not sure what the point of this was supposed to be.

And it falls foul of another pet hate : excessive footnotes (dozens per chapter !) at the back of the book, mixing references and commentary. Worse, Wheatcroft claims that these are the most interesting bits, but they're really not. Oh, a few of them are worth reading, but all of those could have should have been incorporated into the main text. 

In short, it's a mess. The chapter on Charles V is pretty good, but while Wheatcroft explicitly tries to frame his final years as being a tragic failure, nothing he says gives this impression at all. Indeed, it felt to me like he'd been remarkably successful, so for Wheatcroft to arbitrarily decide the exact opposite feels like very bad writing.

Not that it's without merit elsewhere. Wheatcroft argues that the Habsburgs use of symbolism, his principle topic, came about as a response to exclusion from the great circles of power - a retreat into fantasy where they could reimagine themselves as they would wish, which, when their fortunes waxed, they were able to propagate throughout Europe. And Wheatcroft tries hard to get into the mindset of the time. For the rulers of the age, he argues, facts really didn't matter very much at all. The point of their elaborate imagery, from conventional paintings to massive, intricate woodcarvings, was to persuade, not to establish actual truth. The sense of entitlement behind it all was often breathtaking. They knew, deep down, that of course they should be in charge; if forgeries were required then forgeries would be produced without a moment's qualm.

We now enter a shadow-world... and world in which the power of the imagination could outstrip the power of the sword. It is a mental gap almost impossible for the modern mind to bridge. To our eyes the Holy Lance... looks like a broken old spearhead. But the totemic power of these relics was incalculable. In such a world the Habsburg's invisible power had a clear purpose, for it gave them a matchless weapon, a Castle Dauntless that no enemy could conquer or subvert.

Likewise, he makes the point that medieval Europe was transitioning between oral and literate, where the written word was only beginning to supplant spoken testimony. This is often overlooked, perhaps because historians deal so much more frequently in written text than in oral histories. More on the importance of this in one of the next reviews. And on later periods, he notes that while the education of the emperors wasn't at all what we might consider necessary in a rule, it probably wasn't so far off the mark considering what they would actually need to know at the time. Again, he makes a commendable effort to get into the mindset of the era.

Perhaps his most interesting, if somewhat implicit, concern is with the Romanesque imagery. I always find Roman follies in 18th century gardens very melancholy, for reasons I give in suitably melodramatic terms here*, but Wheatcroft does a decent job of trying to explain how it would have been seen at the time : not as trying to recreate a lost mental world, but in jubilantly claiming the theatrics for the then-modern times, using the ancient symbols to represent and enliven contemporary virtues. So confident was the age in its complete destruction of paganism that it could usurp the earlier symbols to create its own images : not an act of recycling but genuine creation. Likewise, when the Habsburgs increased the propagation of their symbols, this should be seen not as insecurity but the opposite : self-consciously, they needed to already feel confident of success before showing their work to a larger audience. "Methinks he doth protest too much" does not seem to apply here.

* My mum and my girlfriend have endless fun teasing my about this, but I don't care.

The way the Habsburgs used power could also be interestingly complex. Of the Emperor Joseph II :

His energy and the cascade of changes that he unleased - the decrees and instruments alone are numbered in the thousands - were in the service of "enlightened" ideals, although Joseph had read very little of the great philosophers and practitioners of "Enlightenment". He abolished serfdom, reduced censorship, restricted the rights and privileges of the nobility, instituted freedom of worship, and created a bureaucracy - of administrators and secret police - to put his programme into effect.

Which is pretty close to being a benevolent despot. There were, says Wheatcroft, no torture chambers, but the censorship even if limited was still powerful and conducive to a climate of fear. If by and large the state would only watch its citizens rather than molesting them, so intently was this done that rarely would any venture out of line, however liberal the limits might be.

When he asked in a most friendly fashion what was so disturbing about the play to warrant its suppression, the censor replied with some animation, "Oh nothing at all; but I thought to myself, 'One can never tell'."

Finally the evolution of the behaviour of the rulers towards their subjects is interesting, even if there's nothing especially Habsburg about it all :

"True greatness is broad, gentle, familiar and popular; it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters."

There is an curious mixture of being almost progressive in some aspects while being domineering and conservative in others. If the modern British monarchy is still distinctly uncomfortable with being seen close-up, and clearly chooses its self-imagery very selectively, it also can't possibly believe this is fooling anyone anymore. The Habsburgs, though they came to terms quite easily with losing their aura of mystique that differentiated the nobility from commoners, nevertheless remained firmly in charge until the end, expecting their propaganda to be successful.

When Wheatcroft tackles specific issues he generally does a good job. He clearly shows that the Habsburgs did not suffer from indecisiveness as is often supposed, but had the exact opposite fault of stubbornness. He also demonstrates that while inbreeding (a topic he overlooks too much) did cause physical infirmity, it did not cause mental problems. 

Wheatcroft's problem is not so much in finding the right words or arguments (though he can sometimes be dull and tedious; the text is often very dense) but in choosing which arguments to tackle, deciding on which bits of history to address in the first place - and, crucially, in how to structure the whole. In these aspects the book must be seen as largely a failure. Most fatally of all is the lack of context : if like me you're not all that familiar with every single period of history on a pan-European scale, you're going to miss a lot. I now know a lot of things happened but remain completely in the dark as to why or how, who was involved, or even what exactly was going on in the first place. This could certainly have been arranged in a much better way.

Overall I have to give it a 6/10. It's not bad, it contains enough bits of interest to be worth a read, but not worth recommending. The author really should have discussed the basic structure with someone a lot more before putting pen to paper.