ABSTRACT
The Habsburgs were Europe’s greatest dynasty. Between the thirteenth century and the twentieth they provided rulers for empires, kingdoms, duchies and principalities in modern-day Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and Hungary. The history of Western Europe is not so stereotyped after all that one can talk about variants of it; Habsburg history, in any case, forms an intrinsic part of that history, not some mere reflection of it. The Habsburgs, for their part, however, found a new mission to pursue — protecting Central Europe from French and Russian aggression as an essential part of the European balance of power. The Habsburg Monarchy, in other words, was quintessentially a proprietorial affair, a way of preserving a collection of family estates on an international scale, and not in A. J. P. Taylor’s words ‘a device for enabling a number of nationalities to live together’.
