One is the anachronism of the moniker ‘Habsburg’ itself. There are some explanatory potholes to be negotiated along the way. In his new book, The Habsburgs, he has produced a Rolls-Royce of a narrative that motors through ten centuries of history with an effortlessness that belies the intellectual horsepower beneath the bonnet. Based at University College London, he is a polyglot historian of almost encyclopedic breadth, and his learning is as all-encompassing as it is lightly worn. But in an age when most British historians are monoglot and their researches are monothematic and ever-narrower in chronological range, it is a deficiency that few can even attempt to make good.Īll of which means that Martyn Rady is something of a rarity. Without a knowledge of the Habsburgs and the dynastic union they created, many aspects of contemporary Europe are unfathomable. Throughout Europe, it lingers in the placement of borders, in patterns of confessional belief, in styles of architecture, even in ideas of national and supranational sovereignty, the second of which the English common law mind finds so baffling and strange.
For a thousand years, from the dynasty’s emergence as feudal warlords in northern Switzerland in the 10th century to their ousting as emperors of Austria in the early 20th, they reigned at one time or another in most European countries (including, briefly, England and Ireland), and over colonial possessions that reached across the globe, from Peru to the Philippines (the one nation that still bears the name of a Habsburg king). The House of Habsburg has a plausible claim to having been the most successful ruling dynasty in world history.
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