Lordship and State Formation. Bohemia and the Habsburg monarchy from the Thirty Years' War to Charles VI

Abstract

Introduction The decades around 1700 were decisive for both Central Europe and its major power, the Habsburg monarchy� Much has been written about its main events and protagonists from the Ottoman siege of Vienna and the subsequent pushback of Christendom’s „hereditary enemy“ across the Hungarian plains, and the contemporaneous wars against Louis XIV’s France, which culminated in the greatest territorial extent of the Austrian monarchy in the early 18th century�2 Hardly surprising, the historiography of this era is extensive, and in many cases very lopsided, yet despite the amounts of ink that have been spilled over the Habsburg monarchy’s so-called „Age of Heroes“, or Heldenzeitalter, there are also blind spots: Perhaps echoing much of the older literature, even most newer studies continue to focus on „big men“ and their actions at court, in the various diets, or on the many battle fields, often more or less influenced by the Cultural Turn, which resulted in the publication of a wide variety of studies highlighting the serious limitations of Habsburg absolutism, emphasising the symbolic characteristics of their rule, and offering systemic explanations for the changes in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War� This holds particularly true for the Westphalian treaties, viewed by many, historians and scholars in fields as diverse as International Relations, Political Science, Legal History, and Sociology alike as the foundation of our „modern“ era�3 If there is a common thread that unites virtually all of these studies, it is