HOUSE OF HAPSBURG

Greymouth Evening Star, 17 January 1928, Page 9

HOUSE OF HAPSBURG

ONCE RULED HALF CONTINENT.

On a slight eminence not far from the confluence of the Aar and the Rhine stands a grey, lichen-covered ruin. Although the walls are crumbling and in parts have fallen down, the keep rears up its gaunt height to remind the travelled that here a warrior race had their home. The walls that rang to the tramp of men-at-arms now shelter a humble inn; the guardhouse has now become a cow byre, and over ;he ruined archway into the castle-yard might be fitly inscribed a single word —Inchabod. As the traveller pauses on his road he may chance to inquire of the host the name of the castle. “Habichtsburg—the Castle of the Hawk,” will be the reply. “And to whom did it belong?” persists the traveller. “To the Hapsburgs,” his host will answer. For the fast-falling ruin was indeed the ancestral home of that Imperial family. Nine hundred years have passed away since on a summer day in 1027 the warlike Bishop of Strasburg watched his masons lay the foundation stone of his Castle of the Hawk. In years to come the Hapsburgs, like hawks, swooped from their eyrie to make of half Europe their realm. Older even than their ancestral home, tracing their descent from that Duke Contrain who ruled Alsace and Lorraine with a heavy hand in the seventh century, it is “as simple German counts, with scattered, and not too wealthy domains, and far from peaceable subjects, that we first find the Hapsburgs, and this was their condition in the thirteenth century, when Rudolph, Count of Hausburg, was elected Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire,” an empire that Voltaire cynically described as “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.

But before Rudolph had donned the imperial purple, the policy of successful marriages had been inaugurated—that policy was to prove the keystone of the Hapsburg, .as of the Coburg, greatness. The marriage settlement rather than the battlefield of the council chamber was the pathway by which the Hapsburgs attained their preemience among the ruling houses of Europe.

Rudolph was chosen Emperor because of his reputation for sagacity and far-sightedness. He demonstrated his possession of both these qualities in no uncertain manner after his victory over Prmysl Ottocar of Bohemia. Already in possession by force of arms of the Duchies of Austria, Styria and Carinthia, Rudolf resolved that so Heaven-sent an opportunity for aggrandising his family must not be lost. He, therefore, cliamed the Duchies as fiefs of the Empire, and, obtaining the consent of the several estates, promptly conferred them upon his two sons. Of these two sons, Albert eventually united both Duchies in his own person, added Carniola to them, and, in 1306, sought to add Bohemia to the family estates. Albert’s son, Rudolf, still further augmented the possessions of his house; nor did he disdain to resort to forgery to attain his dynastic ends. The Emperor Charles IV., who was his father-in-law, had excluded Austria from the Electoral College of the Empire. “Rudolf accordingly resorted to a stratagem, and by means of an elaborate forgery maintained that the Dukes of Austria had been granted special independence and privileges by previous Emperor, and had electoral rights.”

Early in the fifteenth century the Imperial crown came finally into Hapsburg possession with the accession of Albert, Duke of Austria, in 1438. Twenty years later the Austrian brunch of the family became extinct, and was succeeded in its dignities and territories by the Hapsburg Counts of Styria.* It was one of these Styrian Counts who was responsible for the introduction into the family of that famous physical characteristic —the “Hapsburg lip.” He married Cymburga, a daughter of the Polish Duke of Mazovia, and it was she who bequeathed to her descendants that very unsightly conformation of the lower jaw that still persists in the .family.

Another of these Styrian Hapsburgs was responsible for the family monogram A.E.1.0.U., which is interpreted to mean Austrioe est imperare orbi universe—a boast that very nearly came true in the halcyon days of the Hapsburgs under that visionary among Emperors, Maximilian. Under Charles V. the Hapsburg sun attained its zenith. Great days were still to’tie expected, and great personalities like Maria Theresa to be produced by the House; but never again did its territory stjretch from the ■Straits of Gibraltar to the Leitha Mountains in Hungary, nor include, in addition to the homelands of Austria, Styria, the County of Tyrol, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, Milan, the Netherlands, Franche Comte, and Spain. Of all the great ruling houses of Europe the Hapsburg was the most truly international both in respect of its territory and its relationships, while the possession of the Imperial title gave it a fictitious character of supra-nationality that did not belong to any other family. As Holy Roman Emperors the Hapsburgs claimed for themselves a temporal headship over Europe like that claimed by the Papacy in matters spiritual. Yet for all its great possessions and countless dignities the House of Hapsburg has left few great names upon the roll of history. When the world war swept away the Hapsburgs together with the throne on which they sat, and the last Emperor of the House died in exile in Madeira, scarcely a sigh of regret was heard throughout Europe for the disappearance of a family that had ruled for nigh a thousand years.