As befits an imperial family whose empire at one point stretched from Central Europe to the Andes, whose subject peoples bore little love for the imperator, and whose military record tended in its later centuries toward the sub-par, the Habsburgs were obsessed with their own legitimacy. A succession of emperors devoted their attention not to improving the lives of the common folk (riff-raff, all of them) but to filling them with a sense of supernatural awe and dread. To this end, they turned the Habsburg court and its adjuncts into theaters of ritual, and devoted much of their day to ceremonies, like royal banquets and receptions, designed to aggrandize the imperial person. Adorning these theaters were countless relics and cult objects chosen to demonstrate the dynasty’s age, gravitas, and close relationship with the divine or supernatural realm. The imperial wunderkammer included a mantle that allegedly belonged to Charlemagne*; a “unicorn” horn, or rather a narwhal tusk, that Ferdinand I had decreed one of the dynasty’s “inalienable heirlooms”; an agate bowl inscribed with the letters “XRISTO,” which the Habsburgs identified as either the Holy Grail or part of the same dinnerware set; an alleged basilisk in a real bottle; an emerald bottle from South America; two bored ostriches and a live dodo; and a lustrous black sword, engraved with eldritch runes that could devour the souls of its victims. I may have made one of these artifacts up.
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Simon Winder, a popular historian of the dynasty, described Habsburg power as “strangely hieratic and spooky.” The adverb doesn’t necessarily apply. Early modern Europeans often ascribed priestlike powers to monarchs, as for example in the English and French royal custom of curing scrofula, the “king’s evil.” The Habsburgs stood out from their western European contemporaries, however, in their association of legitimacy with royal isolation. Queen Anne (the last English monarch to attempt the cure) and Louis XVI used the laying-on of hands to affirm their divine power, but did so, necessarily, via direct contact with the rank-scented multitude. The Austrian emperors’ treasures and rituals, by contrast, demonstrated the great distance between them and the common folk, and even the nobility. During his very long reign the penultimate emperor, Franz Joseph, believed that he could hold his fractious empire together by invoking his subject peoples’ common love for the royal person. That they all chose instead to join a different set of artificial families, offered by the nationalist movements of the early twentieth century, vexed him but remained beyond his comprehension. Why wouldn’t anyone want to remain under the rule of a family that had such wonderful toys?
Source: Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013), 85-87, 121-125, 156-57
* Actually it was the former possession of Roger II of Sicily. He had it embroidered with gold camels.
