The Pragmatic Sanction of 1713–aka as Girls Can Rule, Too
Back in December, when I was trying to make sense of the tangled succession of the Hapsburg dynasty and Holy Roman Empire, I came across a reference to the Pragmatic Sanction, issued by Emperor Charles VI in 1713. It caught my attention for reasons that will become clear to you in just a moment.
Charles VI, ca 1720/1730
In European political history, the term “pragmatic sanction” refers to a princely decree that deals in a pragmatic way with a situation that cannot be solved by applying the usual rules. The term “the Pragmatic Sanction,” with capital letters and no qualifiers, always refers to the decree issued on April 19, 1713 by the Emperor Charles VI, head of the Hapsburg house, ruler of Austria and all its possessions, and Holy Roman Emperor. The purpose of the edict was to ensure that one of his daughters could inherit the Hapsburg lands, undivided.
Pragmatic is the key word. Charles had no interest in expanding women’s rights.* His only concern was protecting the Austrian succession. At the time that he issued the edict, Charles was the only surviving male member of the House of Hapsburg. Salic law, which previously controlled the Hapsburg succession, precluded inheritance through the female line.** The failure of the male line could lead to a succession dispute and the and the potential dismemberment of the Austrian empire. (The title of Holy Roman Emperor was not part of the discussion because it was an elected office that did not automatically go with the Hapsburg heir.)
The Hapsburgs had already made an attempt to circumvent Salic law during the rule of Charles’ father, Emperor Leopold (1640-1705). In 1703, neither Charles nor his older brother Joseph had sons. The family made an agreement regarding the succession that allowed the throne to pass through the female line if all male lines had become extinct.*** In practical terms, this meant that if Joseph, who had two daughters at the time, died without sons he would be succeeded by Charles. If Charles, in turn, died without a son, Joseph’s oldest surviving daughter would become the ruler of Hapsburg Austria.
Joseph succeeded his father in 1705. Charles succeeded Joseph in 1711, with his niece, Maria Josepha, as his presumptive heir. Two years later, Charles announced the Pragmatic Sanction, which privileged his own daughters over those of Joseph.****
At the time it was an entirely theoretical amendment because Charles and his wife, Elsbeth Christina of Brunswick-Wolfenbütel, had no children. That soon changed. In 1716, the couple had a son, who died a few months later. Three daughters followed: Maria Theresa, in 1717, Maria Anna in 1718, and Maria Amalia in 1724.
Maria Theresa, ca 1730 --not yet the empress
In 1740, Charles VI was succeeded by his daughter, Maria Theresa, who was then 23. Despite the edict, and the carefully negotiated agreements to it, Charles Albert of Bavaria and Frederick the Great of Prussia immediately contested her succession. The War of the Austrian Succession cost Maria Theresa part of her land, but not her throne. She ruled for forty years until her death in 1780. Just to keep things tidy, her husband Francis I was elected Holy Roman Emperor.
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A couple of personal tidbits about the Empress Maria Theresa, who was possibly the most powerful of the Hapsburg rulers of Austria:
- She married for love, not for political power. Her husband, Francis Stephen, was a prince of Lorraine in France—a minor principality by any standard and certainly less powerful than the Hapsburg Empire. Like England’s Queen Victoria, she wore mourning for the rest of her life after his death in 1765.
- She was pregnant at her coronation. She would go on to have sixteen children, the best known of which was the future queen of France, Marie Antoinette.
I have no doubt that we’ll be coming back to her in the future. She is too important and I know so little about her.
*Though it is worth pointing out that the Hapsburgs had already embraced the concept of female rulers on a smaller scale. They regularly appointed unmarried women of their royal house as regents over provinces in their widespread empire. Charles VI appointed his sister, the Archduchess Maria Elisabeth, as regent over the Austrian Netherlands in 1724, a position she held until her death in 1741. (It does make me wonder why Leopold’s original end-run on Salic Law did not name Maria Elisabeth as Charles’s successor ahead of her nieces.)
**Just so you don’t have to look it up: the Salic Law was a medieval law code which was originally issued by Clovis, the first Frankish king, in the fifth century and became the foundation for law in French and German principalities well into the Napoleonic period. One of its most influential clauses, which stated that daughters could not inherit land, was used to prevent women, or anyone descended from a previous ruler through a woman, from succeeding to the throne. After all, if Maria couldn’t inherit her father’s farm, why should the Archduchess Maria be able to inherit her father’s kingdom?
***Extinct appears to be the technical legal term for this, but it always makes me think of dinosaurs.
****Just because Charles announced the change didn’t mean it happened with no political wrangling. Even an emperor couldn’t enforce an edict about his succession without other people on board. In the case of the Pragmatic Sanction, Charles VI had to convince 1) his nieces and their future spouses 2) the various diets and parliaments of the affected Hapsburg lands and 3) the great powers of Europe. It was 1725 before all the affected parties agreed.
Bronislava Nijinska, of the Ballets Russes and Other Dance Companies
I became fascinated by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in my senior year in college thanks to a class run by the music department.* I had already been familiar with some of the music, and a few of the names. That class introduced me to the company as a convergence of modernisms in the hands of great artists, including designer Léon Bakst, poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso (!), composers Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky, dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, and Diaghilev himself, who elevated the role of impresario to an art form in itself. One artist was left out of the line-up: Nijinski’s sister, Bronislava Nijinska, who was also a dancer with the company and an important choreographer in her own right.
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- Nijinska in Petrouchka
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- Nijinska as “the Humming bird Princess”
It was another decade or more before I heard the name Bronislava Nijinska. Nijinska studied ballet in Saint Petersburg alongside her brother. Like her brother, she was a dancer in the Ballet Russe and she created a number of roles in ballets for the company. She choreographed several important works for the Ballets Russes, including Le Spectre de la Rose (featuring her brother), Les Noces ("The Wedding") and Les Biches (literally "The Does", also known as "The House Party"). (All of which we had studied in that college course, with no mention of the choreographer, though we did discuss Nijinski’s role in Le Spectre de la Rose.)
Nijinska in rehearsal, ca 1933
In 1925, she formed her own company, Théâtre Chorégraphic. She also created more than 60 ballets, not only for her own company but on commission for a number of other prominent dance companies of the period, including Anna Pavlova’s company. In 1938, she moved to Los Angeles, where she opened a school. She continued to work as a guest choreographer almost until her death in 1972.
Nijinska in rehearsal, 1968
Her works were experimental in form, and occasionally shocking in theme. (Les Biches explicitly explores the sexual mores of the 1920s.) She used, and expanded, modernist elements in dance, such as rhythmic complexity, innovative movements outside the vocabulary of classical ballet, and increasing abstraction.
She was never forgotten. But Nijinska’s long, productive career has been consistently overshadowed by that of her brother, who succumbed to mental illness at 29 and created only four ballets, including the astonishing The Rite of Spring, in which Nijinska danced the central role. In part, she was relegated to the shadows because only three of her works survive in full—a result of the fact the companies she worked for did not last so her works fell out of the dance repertory. The only work that has consistently been revived is Les Noces, despite his large cast (forty dancers) challenging style, and complex Stravinsky score.
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- Los Noces, in rehearsal, 1923
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- Los Noces, in revival, 1989
But perhaps the style of her work has also played a role. She used the female body in unconventional ways, both as a choreographer and as a dancer. Strong unconventional female voice consigned in the corners of history--who would have thought?
* Ballet caught my imagination long before I became a history bugg. One of my earliest memories is seeing a a dancer on television and knowing that was something I wanted to do.* I started taking lessons as soon as I was old enough, and because I was a budding history bugg I also started reading about the great dancers of the past. My interest in dance history continued long after an in-class accident ended my ability to continue with ballet.
From the Archives: Industrial Espionage
Reading Sarah Rose's account of how British botanist Robert Fortune smuggled tea plants, and tea workers, out of China in the nineteenth century, made me think about another case of materials smuggled to end a Chinese monopoly. This first ran in 2012.
©Trustees of the British Museum
The Chinese produced luxury silk fabrics for several thousand years before they began trading with the west. Scraps of dyed silk gauze found in a neolithic site in Zhejiang Province date from 3600 BCE. Silk fabrics woven in complex patterns were produced in the same region by 2600 BCE. By the time of the Zhou dynasty, which controlled China from the twelfth to the third centuries BCE, silk was an established industry in China.
Wild silk, spun from the short broken fibers found in the cocoons of already-emerged silk moths, was produced throughout Asia. Only the Chinese knew how to domesticate the silk moth, bombyx mori, and turn its long fibers into into thread. They kept close control over the secrets of how to raise the domestic silkworm and create silk from the long fibers in its cocoon. Exporting silkworms, silkworm eggs or mulberry seeds was punishable by death. It was more profitable to export the finished product than the means of production.
The Chinese monopoly on the secrets of silk production and manufacture was eventually broken. According to one story, a Chinese princess, sent to marry a Central Asian king, smuggled out what silk cultivators called the "little treasures" as an unofficial dowry. (In one cringe-inducing version of this story, the princess carried the silkworms in her chignon to escape detection at the border.* It was illegal for a commoner, like a border security agent, to touch the head of a member of the royal family.) A totally different tradition tells of two Nestorian monks who smuggled silkworm eggs out of China in hollow staffs and carried them all the way to Byzantium, traveling in winter so the eggs wouldn't hatch.
However the "little treasures" traveled, the Chinese monopoly on silk production was over by the sixth century CE, when the Middle Eastern cities of Damascus, Beirut, Aleppo, Tyre, and Sidon became famous for their silks.
* Would you want these in your hair? Makes your scalp crawl doesn't it?