Chapter XVIII - The Austrian Habsburgs

Summary

In September 1683 the Turks fled from Vienna, in August 1684 the Emperor Leopold I returned there, and the elaborate mechanism of his court and government settled back into its traditional framework. In many ways this altered very little in the next 35 years. Several households, of the emperor, empress, the dowager empress or the emperor's sons, each with a corps of officials, had normally to coexist in the cramped accommodation of the Hofburg. In his private apartments, the retirata, the ruler discussed affairs in confidence: here was the ultimate source of authority. In a series of antechambers he dined publicly, held council, granted investitures and audiences: here that authority was formally displayed. Adjoining the Hofburg was an old irregular cluster of buildings and courtyards where most of the chanceries and councils had premises. Their archives were growing enormously as they recorded judgments or instructions which flowed out to the Empire and the hereditary Habsburg lands of Austria and Bohemia, to Hungary and (after 1700) to Italy, as well as to the ambassadors at foreign courts; but only gradually, from the early eighteenth century onwards, was a real distinction drawn between posts in the ‘court’ and in the ‘government’ Then also, in 1723, Charles VI began his splendid and spacious reconstruction of the Imperial Chancery.

A little further from the Hofburg, the government of the Lower Austrian duchy had its administrative headquarters and the Estates their place of assembly. Elsewhere in the city, tightly surrounded by walls and bastions, the Vienna municipality was in control; but just as the common burghers had long lost their power to a small council of oligarchs, so this council elected its own members to office under the eye of the court.