Meaning well: The curious life of a habsburg idealist.

• Author: Wolff, Larry
• Position: Books

Paula Sutter Ficlitner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 368 PP., $35.

"IN OTHER countries dynasties are episodes in the history of the people; in the Habsburg Empire peoples are complications in the history of the dynasty", epigrammatically wrote A.J.P. Taylor in 1948 in The Habsburg Monarchy.(1) It is notable that in 2001, at a time when the royal biography is not an especially favored genre of professional historians, the Habsburgs can still be approached through that old-fashioned form of historical narrative, which is what Paula Sutter Fichtner has done in writing Emperor Maximilian II. Her portrait of Maximilian offers important insights into pressing 16th century problems that are full of modern relevance, especially the frustrating enterprise of consolidating and sustaining an ethnically and religiously pluralist state.

Fichtner surveys the reign of a single Habsburg ruler, who reigned for a dozen years (from 1564 to 1576), and one whom she herself regards as a "failure" in most of his political enterprises. He is, in some sense, a slender dynastic reed for supporting a comprehensive historical analysis. As it happens, the Yale University Press jacket illustration shows Maximilian standing slenderly in a Renaissance doublet of black and gold, gazing perhaps myopically Out at us, the academic public of five centuries later, whose critical evaluation he must now endure. But Fichtner makes good use of her biographical subject to focus on the problems that the dynasty, and all of Europe, faced in the 16th century: the formation of the institutions of the modern administrative state, the military defense of Christian lands against the Ottoman Turks, and, above all, the tense religious circumstances in a continent divided between Roman Catholicism, seeking to consolidate its authority in the age of the Counter-Reformation, and th e multifarious and theologically volatile forms of Protestantism. Though Fichtner's Emperor Maximilian II is unlikely to rival in public success the other, more glamorous Habsburg biography of 2001--Antonia Fraser's book about Maximilian's collateral descendant, the Habsburg Archduchess Marie Antoinette--each book takes its subject's political mistakes and misfortunes as an opportunity to diagnose some of the crucial systemic tensions in the ancien regime of early modem Europe.

Though Taylor noted that the Habsburg "peoples"--that is, the multinational populations of the monarchy with their virtually irreconcilable nationalisms--were the great "complication" in the history of the dynasty in the 19th century, in the 16th century "peoples" and popular aspirations were not prominent on a monarch's political agenda. National identities in the modern sense were still largely unformed.

Indeed, one might conclude from Fichtner's work that the major "complication" in the history of the Habsburg dynasty in the 16th century was the dynasty itself. She provides fascinating detail on Maximilian's complicated relations with his uncle, Emperor Charles V, whom he accompanied on military campaigns against the German Protestants in the 1540s; with his father, Emperor Ferdinand I, who censured Maximilian's religious equivocations, and even hesitated to include Maximilian in the succession; with his cousin, King Philip II of Spain, whose coercive Catholic commitment stood in stark contrast to Maximilian's pursuit of compromise; with his wife, the Empress Maria, Philip's pious sister and intimate ambassador in Maximilian's imperial bed; and with his brothers, the Archdukes Ferdinand and Charles, who divided the Austrian inheritance with Maximilian and maintained courts and administrations of their own in Innsbruck and Graz, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing with the emperor, who, while based in Vienna, was often out on the road. The Habsburg dynasty was a worldwide enterprise in the 16th century, stretching from Bohemia to Bolivia, and trying to govern it no small challenge. Under the more unified leadership of Charles V, a universal imperial ideal was cultivated, but after his abdication in 1556 the dynasty could not be considered an unequivocal vehicle of streamlined imperial power. Rather, as Fichtner carefully demonstrates, the Habsburg political project was both nourished and occasionally confounded by ongoing family frictions, tensions, and negotiations.

That project was further complicated by the fact that the early modern state was a work in progress. The Habsburgs worked with a rudimentary bureaucracy and the generally haphazard financing of government operations. Maximilian recognized and sought to address such problems in his Hofkammerordnung, the exchequer reform of 1568...