Meagher, Jennifer. Zophy, Jonathan W. New York: Greenwood Press, Visiting The Met? Lukas Spielhausen Lucas Cranach the Elder. Celestial globe with clockwork Gerhard Emmoser. Diana and Actaeon Bartholomeus Spranger. Apollo Adriaen de Vries. And, just to confuse matters, some of the other monarchs in Europe also bore the Habsburg name. A branch of the family ruled Spain , for example, from to Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum. Until , however, this collection of central European lands was never formally a single entity or empire at all.
Each land enjoyed various degrees of autonomy, for example. In decline, they provoked modernist revolt. In the last stagnant days of Habsburg Austria, a combination of imperial largesse for decorative schemes in extravagant public buildings with a cynical rejection of authority by artists who saw no future for the society they decorated, unleashed the dream art of Klimt.
Out of the doomed empire came some of the most provocative and brilliant art of the modern age, with Klimt and contemporaries such as Schiele investigating sexuality and the psyche years before the surrealists. The Habsburgs deserve to be remembered. Joseph looked on the tax and land reforms as being interconnected and strove to implement them at the same time.
The various commissions he established to formulate and carry out the reforms met resistance among the nobility, the peasantry, and some officials. In , Joseph issued the Serfdom Patent, which aimed to abolish aspects of the traditional serfdom system of the Habsburg lands through the establishment of basic civil liberties for the serfs.
It was enforced differently in all the various Habsburg lands. The nobility in Bohemia refused to enact its provisions, while the Transylvanian nobles simply refused to notify the peasants in their region about this emancipation document.
Joseph II recognized the importance of further reforms, continually attempting to destroy the economic subjugation through related laws, such as his Tax Decree of Joseph II is plowing the field near Slawikowitz in rural southern Moravia in Joseph inspired a complete reform of the legal system, abolished brutal punishments and the death penalty in most instances, and imposed the principle of complete equality of treatment for all offenders.
He ended censorship of the press and theater. Joseph continued education and public health reforms initiated by his mother. To produce a literate citizenry, elementary education was made compulsory for all boys and girls and higher education on practical lines was offered for a select few. Joseph created scholarships for talented poor students and allowed the establishment of schools for Jews and other religious minorities.
In , he ordered that the country change its language of instruction from Latin to German, a highly controversial step in a multilingual empire. By the 18th century, centralization was the trend in medicine because more and better educated doctors were requesting improved facilities. Cities lacked the budgets to fund local hospitals and the monarchy wanted to end costly epidemics and quarantines.
Joseph attempted to centralize medical care in Vienna through the construction of a single, large hospital, the famous Allgemeines Krankenhaus, which opened in Probably the most unpopular of all his reforms was his attempt to modernize the highly traditional Catholic Church and make the Catholic Church in his empire the tool of the state, independent of Rome.
Clergymen were deprived of the tithe and ordered to study in seminaries under government supervision, while bishops had to take a formal oath of loyalty to the crown. As a man of the Enlightenment, he ridiculed the contemplative monastic orders, which he considered unproductive. Accordingly, he suppressed a third of the monasteries over were closed and reduced the number of monks and nuns from 65, to 27, Marriage was defined as a civil contract outside the jurisdiction of the Church.
Joseph also sharply cut the number of holy days to be observed in the Empire and forcibly simplified the manner in which the Mass the central Catholic act of worship was celebrated.
Opponents of the reforms blamed them for revealing Protestant tendencies, with the rise of Enlightenment rationalism and the emergence of a liberal class of bourgeois officials. Providing the Jewish subjects of the Empire with the right to practice their religion came with the assumption that the freedom would gradually force Jewish men and women into the mainstream German culture.
While it allowed Jewish children to attend schools and universities, adults to engage in jobs from which there had been excluded, and all Jewish men and women not to wear gold stars that marked their identity, it also stipulated that the Jewish languages, the written language Hebrew and the spoken language Yiddish, were to be replaced by the national language of the country. Official documents and school textbooks could not be printed in Hebrew.
Josephinism made many enemies inside the empire—from disaffected ecclesiastical authorities to noblemen. By the later years of his reign, disaffection with his sometimes radical policies was at a high, especially in the Austrian Netherlands and Hungary. Popular revolts and protests—led by nobles, seminary students, writers, and agents of Prussian King Frederick William—stirred throughout the Empire, prompting Joseph to tighten censorship of the press.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. Enlightened Despots. Search for:. The Holy Roman Empire. The Structure of the Holy Roman Empire Although the Habsburgs held the title of Holy Roman Emperor for nearly four centuries, the title was not hereditary and their power over the decentralized empire was limited and separate from their reign over the territories under the Habsburg rule. Learning Objectives Describe the structure of the Holy Roman Empire, focusing on its relation to the Habsburg dynasty and the lands under their rule.
The German prince-electors, the highest-ranking noblemen of the empire, usually elected one of their peers to be the emperor. The empire evolved into a decentralized, limited elective monarchy composed of hundreds of sub-units, and the power of the emperor was limited. Although one family held onto the title for centuries, the Holy Roman Emperor was elected and the position never became hereditary.
Serious attempts at centralization began under Maria Theresa and her son Joseph II, but many of these were abandoned. The Holy Roman Empire was also not a centralized state but its fragmentation was much more dramatic. At its end, Maria Theresa was recognized as the head of the Austrian Monarchy, but it was her husband, Francis I who was eventually granted the title of Holy Roman Emperor.
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire saw significant administrative changes. In doing so, he created a formal overarching structure for the Habsburg Monarchy as he foresaw either the end of the Holy Roman Empire or the eventual accession as Holy Roman Emperor of Napoleon.
In , the leaders of some imperial territories proclaimed their independence and signed a treaty with France. It proved to be the last significant law enacted by the Empire before its dissolution in The law secularized over 70 ecclesiastical states and abolished 45 imperial cities. Confederation of the Rhine : A confederation of client states of the First French Empire formed initially from 16 German states by Napoleon after he defeated Austria and Russia in the Battle of Austerlitz.
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