Martyn Rady - The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power

T he Hofburg was the winter palace of the Habsburgs and is now Viennas main tourist attraction. Horse-drawn carriages take sightseers through its arches and along the narrow streets of the neighbouring old city. Crowds press through tight alleys, spilling carelessly into the traffic when they spot the white noses of the Lipizzaner horses in their stables. Apart from the green-domed St Michaels wing, built in the nineteenth century, the palace exterior is unimpressive, comprising consecutive courtyards, now used as carparks, with surrounding facades in a generally subdued Baroque style.

At least todays Hofburg is in good repair. Photographs and lantern slides from the time before 1918, when it was still a working palace, show fallen masonry, cracked walls, and broken windows. For much of its history, the Hofburg has been a building site. Successive emperors added on wings, tore down obstacles to improvement, and rebuilt in stone rather than wood. Until the late seventeenth century, the Hofburg was also integral to the citys defences and rested against one of Viennas bastioned walls. The Ottoman Turks last set siege to the city in 1683. With their defeat, it was finally possible for Habsburg emperors to conceive of the Hofburg as a palace and ceremonial stage and not as a fortified residence.

The Old Fort became the first Habsburg emblem. In origin the Habsburgs were a Central European dynasty and Austria was their heartland. But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they were also rulers of Spain and of Spains possessions in the Low Countries, Italy, and the New World. Although by then militarily obsolete, the design of the Old Fort was reproduced in the great castles that the Habsburgs either commissioned or rebuilt in Spainin Toledo and Madridand it was carried to the Americas. In Mexico, the block house with four towers was a mark of the power wielded by the first royal governorslesser men had to be content with just two towers. In the Holy Roman Empire, over which the Habsburgs ruled as emperors, and which is very roughly where Austria, Germany, and the Czech Republic are today, ambitious princes also built four-tower keeps, as a way of communicating their own prestige.

The Habsburgs were the first rulers whose power encompassed the world, and they achieved greatness by luck and by force. The four-tower keep was in the sixteenth century an expression of their physical mastery of a part of Europe and, by its reproduction overseas, evidence of their global dominion. But it was only one symbol among many that the Habsburgs deployed, for they conceived of their power as both something that they had been predestined for and part of the divine order in which the world was arranged. This required a subtler symbolism than a threat in stone.

The rebuilding of the Hofburg in the early eighteenth century, which saw the Old Fort finally disappear from the horizon, included the construction of the Court Library (Hofbibliothek). Previously, the imperial library had been housed in an abandoned friary in Vienna, in the wing of a private

The new library building was put up in the 1720s, and it remains much the same today, as Emperor Charles VI intended. Some two hundred thousand books and manuscripts were shelved in a single hall, 75 metres (250 feet) long. By this time, the collection included works on theology, church history, law, philosophy, science, and mathematics, and bound manuscripts written in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic. Charles opened his library to scholars, although they had to apply for permission, and visiting hours were restricted to mornings. In return for this act of generosity, Charles imposed a tax on newspapers. Originally temporary, to cover the cost of building, the tax soon became permanent, being ostensibly dedicated to future acquisitions. Printers were also expected to furnish the library with copies of every book they produced. Since many Viennese printers also dealt in pornography, this was an obligation that was often shirked.