But the Habsburgs also stood for the grand eloquence of the international Baroque, bringing enlightenment and care to subjects, empowering the state, making Europe safe from revolution, cultivating an architectural style as a universal idiom, and pursuing a civilizing mission within or beyond the territorial limits of its power…Their legacy survives not only in architecture and great collections of art and natural history, but also as a vision that combined power, destiny, and knowledge, and blended earthly and heavenly realms in a universal enterprise that touched every aspect of humanity’s temporal and spiritual existence…” Over almost seven hundred years, impulses and emphases changed – service to the Catholic faith and leading the struggle against heresy and the Turks were the most consistent.
So too did Austria, which under the Babenbergs had developed its own myth of exceptionalism. The Holy Roman Empire embodied one aspect of this idea, hence the Habsburg ambition to fill the supreme office of emperor. At its heart lay the inheritance of Rome and of the Roman Empire, renewed by Charlemagne and the Staufen emperors, whose heirs the first Habsburg rulers imagined themselves to be.
“The Habsburg Empire collapsed in 1918, but the Habsburg idea was always about more than territory and politics.
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