21 - Early Modern Europe: The Habsburgs and Their Enemies, 1519–1659

Summary

"This chapter will examine the practice of strategy – the relationship between available resources, competing aims and geopolitical realities – by focusing on the Habsburg dynasty in the period from 1500 to 1650. The Habsburg monarchies brought together a diverse series of different concerns focused on dynasty, geopolitics and religion, within a framework of planning, prioritisation and opportunism. I will also seek to examine changes in practice over time. How do strategic conceptions and the pursuit of strategic aims shift in the century between the reign of Charles V and the Spanish and Austrian Habsburg rulers at the time of the Thirty Years War? How did changing political and military circumstances over this century alter the aims and dynamics of strategy? Or were there fundamental continuities in, for example, the constraints on mobilising financial and human resources, sustaining warfare or achieving desired outcomes through war or diplomacy?

The chapter will be based on two case studies. The first of these examines the strategic implications of the transformation to the dynasty enabled by the extraordinary inheritance of Charles V, and the vast European monarchía that this brought into existence. It will look at Charles’s strategic aims and goals; the resources, both material and ideological, that could be mobilised in pursuit of these goals; the enemies that he faced; and the way in which they forced him to prioritise and compromise. Ultimately the largest compromise was the decision to divide his inheritance between two branches of the family. The account will pass over the later sixteenth century and resume with the strategies, priorities and resource mobilisation of the Austrian and Spanish branches of the family during the Thirty Years War. The account will look at the way in which they sought to re-create a strategy based on close family co-operation, and mobilising resources that were significantly different from those of Charles V. The comparison raises a number of themes, both structural and contingent, that I hope will contribute to the larger discussion of the volume.