Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)
LUND, Erik: The generation of 1683: Habsburg General Officers and the military technical Corps, 1686–1723
Erik Lund ty. Thanks to the exigencies of diplomacy and war, the Austro-Hungarian general officer corps fought four discrete conflicts with revolutionary France, each ending in periods of peace of four years or more. If campaigning ruined the health of general officers, we would expect to find elevated mortality rates in the peace years immediately following the cessation of hostilities (i.e. 1802, 1806, 1810, 1813), and the Generallisten does indeed show this pattern. By extension, we can safely say that many of the recorded deaths among the general officer corps in the war years of the 1686- 1741 period are war related, and that the elevated mortality rates in the later war years particularly are campaign related. As for the known distribution of deaths, these are given in Table 3. Given that high mortality rates can be expected in a population of serving generals, the rapid fall off in the course of the War of the Austrian Succession suggests that the large proportion of the sample which survived into the forties and fifties were mostly not in any condition to campaign. However, in the War of the Polish Succession, the Turkish War of 1737-39 and the first years of the War of the Austrian Succession, a large proportion of Habsburg general officers were elderly officers lingering from the mass promotion of 1723. This much, it has already been noted, is well established in the literature. What is not so clearly established, but evident from the data, is that the strains of campaigning soon killed or incapacitated these stragglers. The result was a considerable influx of new blood, and possibly even a measure of relief to the military budget as newer and more junior officers were brought in to replace the aged veterans. Although Maria Theresa’s forceful leadership no doubt played an important role in the rejuvenation of the general officer corps she inherited, the persistence of the promotional cohort of 1725 made her army ripe for a large-scale replacement of general officers. How Representative of the Officer Corps as a Whole is this Sample? There is always the lingering question of how representative the general officer corps actually was. Realistically, a comparison may be impossible. The returns necessary to reconstruct regimental officer lists such as musters, and payrolls, are very rare, although for some unguessable reason control of troop documents pertaining to regiments of Piedmontese regiments occur frequently in the Feldakten. Battle casualty returns, which for this period list only officer names, have not been preserved. However, some few do survive to provide a window into the composition of the Imperial army’s officer corps. One such list, for the 1717 battle of Belgrade, lists 169 officer casualties below the rank of colonel, almost exclusively with German (136 German, 10 Italian, 8 French, 15 not placed) names. These casualties can be broken down by rank or title and by relationship to generals in the sample. Fifteen, almost ten percent, had relatives who were generals promoted up to 1723. A paltry 2 of 169 were of the high nobility (Lieutenant Colonel Prince Lamoral v. Taxis, killed serving in the then-Viard Dragoons, and Cornet Marquis de Geyata, wounded serving in the Caraffa Cuirassiers), but 40 were counts and barons [Freiherren], and 43 bore noble 196
