ABSTRACT
The Austrian army had been called the kaiserlich-koniglich or k.k. army since the sixteenth century to emphasize its subordination to Austria's Habsburg monarch, who was emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. The doleful tales of the army's financial straits in the 1860s, which were put about by veterans of Koniggratz and official historians eager to excuse the army's purely military mishaps, were quite false. Political opposition to the Habsburg army stemmed from the Reichsrat's German-speaking Liberal bloc, whose spokesman for military affairs was Baron Karl Giskra, mayor of Brno. The Habsburg war ministry's evidence of the decline of the 'Radetzkyan army' was mostly legerdemain intended to conceal abuses and coax still more funds from a sceptical Reichsrat. In the case of Franz Josephan Austria, it appears that there was little to distinguish the emperor's army from his civil service.
