Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)
LUND, Erik: The generation of 1683: Habsburg General Officers and the military technical Corps, 1686–1723
Erik Lund It might be argued the high nobles mentioned above were patronage appointments without technical ability. It is rarely the case that this argument can be discounted on the basis of any but the most thorough biographic investigation, because even when the individual in question has written on scientific or technical subjects one is free to assume the existence of a ghost writer. In other words, while technical office was sought assiduously, men of higher social status avoided technical training out of fear of class derogation. Fortunately, most of these individuals were educated within the family, and we can at least point to accomplished siblings or other close relations as evidence that they received technical educations. Of the 16 officers cited, Daun, Gschwind von Pöckstein, Harsch, Herberstein, Peroni, and Schmettau, and Starhemberg all had either direct ancestors who served as artillerists or engineers, or siblings who were military engineers, staff officers, or in one case a civilian mathematician20. The idea that technical service was associated with loss of caste takes a further beating when we consider the patronage assets available to members of military dynasties like Peroni, Schmettau, Daun, Herberstein, and Starhemberg. These officers could easily have obtained positions in infantry or cavalry regiments had they chose, and indeed some of them did. We also find the interesting example of Harsches’ descendants, who followed him into technical employment for at least two generations. Other “technical“ military dynasties which do not fall within the temporal parameters of the sample, such as the Lignes and Pallavicinis, will be discussed elsewhere. What do we make of the frequent claim that military engineers were subject to social prejudice? Such claims have long been recognized by historians of professionalization in modem times as being exaggerated for strategic reasons. Recent work on medical professionalization in eighteenth century Germany has indicated that such rhetoric was not unknown under the old regime, so it is possible that military historians have been misled into underestimating the influence of military technicians in the old regime. Prosopographic methods were originally developed to test this kind of claim, and as we have seen, to this point there is no evidence of their validity for the military technicians of the Austrian Habsburg regime21. Another factor said to have marginalized early modern military technicians, Protestant religion, is also absent from the data. This is particularly tme of the engineer 20 Harsch family history see Wurzbach: Biographisches Lexikon, Vol 7, pp. 388f and KW M 11/5la; Peroni had a brother who was also a military engineer — see Feldzüge, Vol. 3, p.86 and Suppl. Vol. 3, p. 10; a descendant who weis a general in 1757, for whom see Asprey, Robert B.: Frederick the Great. The Magnificent Enigma. New York 1986, p. 450; and an ancestor who was a Habsburg military engineer and virtuoso, for whom see Evans: Habsburg Monarchy, p. 330; Schmettaus see Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 31, pp. 640-648; staff career of Field-Marshal Guido Count v. Starhemberg see Feldzüge, Suppl.Vol. 3, pp. 33-37 and Vol. 10, p.521 and AFA 1708-Spanien und Portugal 3/12, 5/38, 7/7 and 7/8; military intellectual activities of Daun’s son, see D a u n, [Leopold Graf v.u.z. ]: Einige Systematische Vorträge [of the military art] see KWM 7/31 (1750); mathematical career of Ferdinand Ernst v. Herberstein see Neue Deutsche Biographie, Vol. 8, p. 577 and Pog- gendorf, Johann Christian: Biographisch-Literarisches Handwörterbuch zur Geschichte der Exakten Wissenschaften. Vol. 1. Leipzig 1863, p. 1074. 21 Broman, Thomas: Rethinking Professionalization. Theory, Practice, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth-Century German Medicine. In: The Journal of Modem History 67 (1995), pp. 835-872. 200
