Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)

LUND, Erik: The generation of 1683: Habsburg General Officers and the military technical Corps, 1686–1723

The Generation of 1683

niority and the absence of mandatory retirement, this system practically guaranteed the development of a superannuated general officer corps. Another feature of the traditional system had been large scale recruiting and promoting of generals at the outbreak of wars. This practice survived in the Habsburg case until at least 1737, and need not have been invidious. Consideration of Table 2 will reveal just how sharply wartime attrition could cut into such a mobilization. However, it also shows how little affected by attrition was the 1725 mass promotion. This is scarcely surprising, given that the general war which threatened in that year did not, in fact, occur. During this time, the over-inflated Habsburg general officer corps was burdened with low promotion rates, so that by the mid-thirties, something like a gerontocracy had emerged in the Habsburg army. Even the thrusting “young“ officers of the 1723 promotion like Khevenhiiller, and Traun were over fifty in 1740. This geriatric ascendancy has traditionally been attributed to Karl Vi’s preference for his Spanish companions, but this is hardly fair. The influential senior officers of 1737-39 were protégés of Prince Eugene on the one hand, or of Elector Charles Albert of Bavaria on the other. The only Imperial favorite readily identifiable being Reinhard von Neipperg, who was Swabian, not Spanish9.

Although casual reference has been made above to high wartime attrition rates, surprisingly enough the data does not support the supposition. That, is, although high mortality rates are indicated in wartime, on the basis of available evidence, these are only coincidentally linked to the fighting. There is every reason to think that we have a complete (or even inflated) list of all Habsburg generals who died in battle, and this database reveals that battlefield deaths are not statistically significant factors. Even the Generation of 1683, which lost five members in battle, had an average life expectancy of 64, virtually identical to a comparable civilian sample drawn from the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie. This seems intuitively wrong, but it suggests that the demographic effects of campaigning are more complex than a count of battlefield casualties would suggest. It is a commonplace that early modern military fatalities were much more commonly the result of illness, and the effects of illness would be felt primarily by older officers. Unfortunately, contemporaries saw nothing heroic of death by disease while on campaign, and these are recorded only anecdotally. Fortunately, a stronger basis for this claim than anecdote can be found in the Generallisten itself, which is almost complete for the Napoleonic period. Not only can we reconstruct the mortality profile of the entire Austro-Hungarian general officer corps during the Napoleonic Wars, this profile shows an intriguing periodici9 Seniority versus merit see O p i t z -B e 1 a k h a 1, Claudia: Militärreformen zwischen Bürokratisierung und Adelsreaktion. Das französische Kriegsministerium und seine Reformen im Offizierkorps von 1760-1790. Sigmaringen 1994, p. 12f; for a contemporary discussion see Kriegswissenschaftliche Memoiren (hereafter KWM) 7/11 (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, Alte Feldakten); Anonymous: Essay de Projet pour mettre la militaire de Sa M. sur un pied plus avantageux; the annual average promotion rate for 1718-22 was 4.8; there were 69 promotions in 1723; 59 in 1716; 89 in 1733; and 14 in 1735; for Lieutenant Colonel as stop rank, see AFA 1702-Italien: 13/31, Prince Eugene to Archduke Joseph, 1702 March 18; for the mobilization of 1725 see Coxe, William - Hartig, Franz: History of the House of Austria, 3rd ed. Vol. 1-4. London 1847-1853, Vol. 3, p. 136.

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