[Warren]

I finished reading the Wheatcroft book earlier this year (sorry early 2008!) and he gives an interesting account focusing on the family's enduring sense of specialness and "dynasty".
The Habsburgs were quite a dynasty, just hanging on by a thread at times. It was only with Maria Theresia that the family became sprawling and complex to chart dynastically. The author has a very good eye for the detail of the panoply of kingship/emperorship with which the Habsburgs cloaked themselves. They knew exactly what they were doing and were early and avid users of imagery to perpetuate the family myths. "Brand Habsburg" would have been the marketing mantra; they saw themselves as a family apart with special purpose, and reinforced the fact by emphasising the Imperial ancestors as opposed to the focus on the King as an individual as for example Louis XIV.

Even Maria Theresia played a role in image marketing; her fecundity gave rise to Austria Felix - "Happy Austria" and a sense of well-being in family life that Queen Victoria later emulated to give us the middle class bourgeois Victorian era. Portraits of the Empress and her large family reinforced the idea of the stability of Habsburg rule and were used as subtle propaganda. In regards to women, interestingly enough the Habsburg possessions, or 'hereditary states of Austria' did not have Salic Law so M-T succeeded her father Emperor Karl VI as Queen of Hungary and Bohemia (she was actually crowned "King of Hungary") and took her title of Empress from her husband, the former Duke of Lorraine who was elected Holy Roman Emperor. Female members of the Habsburg family were more than marriage objects, they often ruled or administered various parts of the far-flung family possessions. Testament to the family's success as a dynasty is the fact they managed to rule their territories for over 600 years.