The Reich proudly considered itself an independent body
politic and refused to serve merely as a passive tool in the hands of its
formal head, the Habsburg Emperor. Despite these structural limitations and the
paralysing effects of confessional strife during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, the Reich’s financial and military help against the Turkish threat
was central to the Habsburgs’ survival and even to their counter-offensive
after 1683.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were
two armies linked to the Reich in some way, but nonetheless distinct. The first
was the Imperial army proper (kaiserliche Armee), the Emperor’s own standing
army which had no direct connection to the Reich except its designation. The
second force was the army of the Empire (Reichsarmee), the true army of the
Reich, raised and paid for by the Imperial Estates and only partially under the
Emperor’s control.
In no way reflecting the true potential of the territories
and almost always unsuccessful in battle, the Reichsarmee embodied the
political and military weakness and fragmentation of the Reich in the eyes of
many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians. Even the most
patriotic eighteenth-century Reich jurists would not deny that the Germany of
the Ancien Régime was suited to anything but waging wars.
Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the
Reichsarmee remained a force only mobilized in times of need, to defend the
Reich’s territory in the case of a formally proclaimed Reichskrieg (as declared
against France in 1674, 1689, 1702, 1734 and 1793) or to secure peace against
domestic trouble-makers formally denounced as such by the Imperial Diet
(Reichsexekution, as for example against Prussia in 1757, but mostly police
actions against lesser disturbers of the peace). The Reichsarmee was an
auxiliary force, normally fighting side by side with the Emperor’s own troops,
and rather unserviceable in case of offensive operations, for which it was
never intended.
The basic troop quota for the Reichsarmee, the Simplum, was
fixed at 24,000 horse and foot in 1521; its monthly pay or Römermonat soon
became the standard unit of account in all financial matters of the Reich.
Depending on the level of danger, the Simplum could be multiplied (Duplum,
Triplum and so forth). With the Imperial Executive Ordinance of 1555, the
executive and thus ultimately the military defence of the Reich was to a
considerable extent devolved to the Imperial Circles.
Yet, for at least a century, civil war came before defence
against external threats. Shortly after 1600, the previous century’s
confessional strife finally produced two formal groupings, the Catholic League
(1609) and the Protestant Union (1608), and both armed at the beginning of the
Thirty Years War. The noble idea of a concerted defence of the Reich was
abandoned in favour of petty actions in defence of the respective confessions.
When the Emperor and the elector of Saxony, the leader of Germany’s Protestant
rulers, concluded the Peace of Prague in 1635, their aim was the restoration of
law and order throughout the Reich and the removal of all foreign armies from
its soil. They agreed to raise a Reichsarmee, organizationally unified but
confessionally mixed, with the Emperor nominally in supreme command. Funded by
contributions from the Imperial Estates, it was to comprise some 80,000 men.
There were problems from the outset, however, particularly regarding the high
command, and many Protestant princes remained lukewarm.
In 1648, the Imperial Estates were granted not only the
right freely to form alliances but also the ius armorum at once exploited by
the more powerful rulers to create standing armies. In the end, the Emperor
himself was to profit from the trained troops of these so-called ‘armed
Estates’, the support of whom Vienna secured by means of subsidy treaties and
political privileges. Such forces, moreover, were generally more effective than
a hastily raised Reichsarmee, which had to be approved by the Imperial Diet and
consisted of a mixed bag of contingents sent by medium-sized and smaller
Estates. The Emperor’s Turkish War of 1663–64 is a good illustration of the
potential kaleidoscope of troops making up the military aid from the Reich. The
Rhenish League sent a 13,500-strong contingent to Hungary, while Saxony,
Bavaria or Brandenburg fell back on units from their standing armies to supply
auxiliary troops (4,500 men). The third element finally came from the Reich
proper: the Diet, summoned to Regensburg for this very purpose in 1663, granted
20,900 soldiers – a sizeable contribution, even if only a small number ever got
as far as Hungary.
During the revived struggle with France in the 1670s, Vienna
tried again to institutionalize a Reichsarmee under the Emperor’s sole command.
The prospects were favourable given the ‘patriotic enthusiasm’ provoked by an
aggressive French policy of annexations along the Reich’s western border, yet
the Emperor soon had to reduce his demands and accept the
Reichsdefensionalordnung of 1681–82, which laid down the future fundamental principles
of the Reich’s new military organization. The Simplum of the Reichsarmee was
increased to 40,000 men (12,000 cavalry and 28,000 infantry), while the
Triplum, i.e. 120,000 men, would usually be granted when a major war broke out.
The Imperial Circles were given the responsibility of raising the contingents
which together made up the Reichsarmee. The Austrian Circle, virtually
identical with the Habsburg Hereditary Lands, alone accounted for 8,000 men of
the 40,000 strong Simplum. The Habsburg contingent was a purely nominal part of
the Reichsarmee, since it would be taken from the Emperor’s own standing army
and operate as a separate force in its own right. The same was true of the
forces to be provided by the ‘armed Estates’ whose territories often belonged
to more than one Circle, but who fielded single contingents rather than divide
their units up and amalgamate them into the Circle troops. Varying from Circle
to Circle, the raising of troops was highly complicated, not least because of
the political fragmentation of the Reich. In the particularly heterogeneous
Swabian Circle, for instance, the fact that some 90 territories were
responsible for raising 4,000 Circle troops resulted in a corresponding lack of
cohesion among the latter. Hence Reiehstruppen were mostly deployed for defence
purposes in order to relieve the actual fighting troops – the Emperor’s own
units and the contingents sent by the ‘armed Estates’.
During the Nine Years War and the War of the Spanish
Succession troops from the so-called ‘anterior Circles’ in fact bore the brunt
of the defence against the French threat from across the Rhine. It was here, in
southern Germany, that the Swabian and Franconian Circles, mustering some
24,000 men in the 1690s, mounted a concerted effort to ward off French
aggression. Alliances between several Circles, so-called Circle Associations,
could field considerable forces and thus play a role in high politics on a
European scale. In 1697, an impressive league was created by the Franconian,
Swabian, Electoral Rhenish, Upper Rhenish and Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circles
(‘Frankfurt Association’) with a view to raising a permanent army of 40,000 men
in times of peace and 60,000 in times of war, but implementation of this scheme
soon came to a standstill. In 1702, the Swabian, Franconian, Upper and
Electoral Rhenish, Austrian and Westphalian Circles once more tried to set up
an efficient association, which was to field more than 53,000 men (including
16,000 from the Austrian Circle alone) to defend southern Germany: via its
individual members, this so-called ‘Nördlingen Association’ joined the Grand
Alliance of 1701.
The disaster of Rossbach in November 1757, where Reich
troops together with a French contingent were routed by the Prussians, was a
serious blow for the ill-fated Reichsarmee, henceforth mocked as ‘Reißausarmee’
(run-away army). However, the scale of the Reich’s military effort should not
be underestimated, and recent scholarship in this field has provided a more
positive assessment.
The structure of the commanding generals (Reichsgeneralität)
of the Reichsarmee, headed by the Imperial Field Marshal
(Reichsgeneralfeldmarschall), was highly complex – particularly since, from the
beginning of the eighteenth century, all positions had to be filled by both a
Catholic and a Protestant. Among the outstanding Reich field marshals Ludwig
Wilhelm von Baden (1655–1707) or Prince Eugene of Savoy (1663–1736) deserve
particular mention. Prince Eugene, succeeding Baden as Catholic Imperial Field
Marshal in 1707, was not only a field marshal in the Emperor’s own standing
army, exactly like his predecessor, but also president of the Aulic War Council
in Vienna. This was a typical overlap: Reich generals and Austrian generals
rapidly came to be one and the same thing. In 1664, only a third of the
Reichsgeneralität was staffed by Habsburg generals, compared to half in the
1670s. Eventually, around 1700, it was exclusively Austrian generals who acted
as Reich generals, and most of them were German princes or members of the south
German aristocracy.
