Birthday Greetings #41

It would appear that God didn't like the Habsburgs to be too intelligent.  The mediocre ones lived, almost forever, whereas those that demonstrated any discernible talent tended to die young.  This was certainly the case with our current birthday boy who seemed to have the makings of a reasonably competent emperor until he contracted smallpox and died at the age of 33.  Having syphilis probably didn't help and we can't really blame God for that.  The church was pretty explicit about not getting involved in too many casual sexual entanglements and doing so before the invention of penicillin was just asking for trouble, and syphilis.

With that as an introduction, happy birthday to Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor.  Like the subject of our previous entry Joseph inherited a sack full of wars from his father which were still going on when he died.  He was simultaneously fighting the War of the Spanish Succession against the French king Louis XIV and dealing with a major revolt in Hungary fostered, not coincidentally by that same Louis.  Fortunately something else he inherited from his father was Prince Eugene of Savoy, one of the foremost military commanders of the day.  The wars thus went rather well (although his idiot brother would bungle them after his death) and his attempts at a conciliatory peace with Hungary were quite well received in Hungary at least by comparison with his father's habit of executing people and sentencing them to be galley slaves (not the same people obviously, it was death or become a galley slave, the man wasn't a monster).

Joseph was a reform minded prince who wanted to improve the machinery of government in his personal territories at least sufficiently so that bits of it stopped dropping off and he even tried to improve the governance of the Holy Roman Empire which was a little difficult as there was very little of that to start with.  As had been the case for a number of generations now the imperial title was little more than hot air and an almost ludicrously large collection of squabbling petty states who spent most of their time ignoring their imperial master.

Still nothing succeeds like success or, to be more specific, nothing succeeds like having a large army commanded by a military genius.  While good governance and obedience within the empire couldn't be assured (or even really attempted) he did manage to make them pull their heads in and be a little less overt about ignoring him.  He also cemented the Habsburg position in Italy (which would end in tears a couple of centuries later but you can hardly blame him for not knowing that). 

When he wasn't reorganising the government, placating Hungarians or cheering Eugene on from the sidelines he seemed to spend quite a lot of time having sex with quite a lot of people without actually managing to produce an heir.  This was a serious problem as the male line of the Habsburgs had dwindled to precisely two, himself and his younger brother.  Infecting his wife with the syphilis he had contracted and rendering her sterile didn't really help that much either.  Then he contracted smallpox as well.  On his deathbed he promised his wife to give up philandering if he recovered which he probably thought was a pretty safe promise to make given the circumstances.  He was right.

With Joseph's death the number of surviving male Habsburgs was reduced to one, his brother and heir Charles.  Still, Charles was a young man, with a healthy wife (and no syphilis) surely he would be able engender a son or two to keep the dynasty staggering along.

Heres a clue:  He didn't.