A Woman’s Space:

A Woman’s Space:

Rule, Place and Ysabel of Habsburg, 1570-1592

Joseph F. Patrouch

Florida International University

Last year at this conference, I discussed the 1571 portrait by the French painter Francois Clouet of the queen of France, Archduchess Ysabel of Habsburg (lived 1554-1592, reigned 1571-1574).[1] In that paper, I tried to tie an analysis of a painting to the dynastic struggles between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois and how they played themselves out in the Atlantic World, the Caribbean, and on the beaches near the conference hotel in Jacksonville. I wanted to point out how some of the claims and counter-claims to power and authority made by the various representatives of those dynasties were inscribed on the body of the archduchess by the painter and his choices, and also, incidentally but importantly, how these choices were tied to images and thoughts about the sea.

Today’s paper will attempt to build on the location of the conference here in Lake City, “Florida’s Crossroads,” to discuss some aspects of the political, economic, and religious influences during Ysabel’s period of rule as Dowager Queen of France (1574-1592), with particular reference to her activities in her widow’s seat in the Austrian archduchies, Vienna, from 1582-1592. In that Danubian trading center, Ysabel resided in apartments across the street from the Hofburg castle and founded a house of Poor Clares, an important contemplative order. At this time, Vienna was the seat of the princely Habsburg regent, Ysabel’s older brother Archduke Ernst (1553-1595), but not of the primary Habsburg ruler. This fact may have allowed Ysabel more space to develop her influence. (For some time following her widowhood, she resided in the imperial residence of Prague, but that phase of her life will be left out of the analysis today. My research concerning that period still needs to be completed.[2])

I hope to touch upon a number of issues relating to women and space in pre-modern Europe, particularly in early modern European urban environments, and specifically in the spaces defined as the Holy Roman Empire and the city of Vienna. In so doing, I will follow somewhat along the lines suggested so many years ago by Henri Lefebvre who, in the aftermath of the urban upheavals in France in ’68 worked to understand space and the city environment, asking us to combine the physical, mental and social aspects of such an element of analysis.[3] This undertaking is part of my ongoing research projects on the histories and images of the city of Vienna as well as on the histories of this archduchess.[4]

Susanne Claudine Pils in her recent book on the countess Johanna Theresia Harrach (1639-1716) has emphasized the countess’ ties to the city of Vienna and beyond, pointing out the physical limits of this woman’s life. This paper would like to follow Pils’ analysis of wider connections to discuss the various levels of influence/power available to an early modern female aristocrat.[5] It will be shown that physical space indeed had little to do with the broad circles of connections Ysabel of Habsburg negotiated. Pils describes the countess’ world of bedroom audiences, courtyard observation, aristocratic neighborly visits, and court appearances.

While the evidence for the archduchess’ daily activities is scant, the evidence of her various levels of spatial relationships is clear. Documents in the Haus- Hof- u. Staatsarchiv in Vienna and elsewhere, for example, help to “flesh out” a picture of a woman with ties to duchies in France, customs houses on the Hungarian border, pilgrimage activities to Styria, parochial holdings in Upper and Lower Austria, a house of nuns in Vienna (with that house’s ties to Bavaria,) and (of course) relatives throughout central and western Europe, with their ties to the world (including Florida!).[6] It is increasingly being understood how early modern women created themselves through social networks. This paper seeks to also shed light on the spatial characteristics of those networks.[7]

Elizabeth’s mother María was from the increasingly-unified kingdoms of Iberia. She was a sister of the famous king of Spain, Phillip II (ruled, 1556-1598).[8] Ysabel’s older sister had been born there, and her parents had served the dynasty as regents of Spain before Elizabeth was born in Vienna in 1554. The story of the Habsburgs’ dynastic ties between Iberia and central Europe is a well-known and oft-told one, so I will not delve much into it here, except to point out that four of Elizabeth’s brothers and three of her sisters traveled to Spain. While her two older brothers Rudolf (as emperor Rudolf II, ruled 1576-1612) and the aforementioned Archduke Ernst returned after an extensive education there, her other siblings all stayed, including her older sister Anna, who became Queen of Spain and mother to the heir to the throne, the later Phillip III (ruled 1598-1621). While Ysabel never traveled to Iberia herself (an Iberia which included Habsburg Portugal as well as all of the Habsburg overseas possessions in Florida and the Caribbean, Central and South America, Africa and Asia after 1580), her mental universe clearly included these imagined parts of the globe. She is reported to have received boxes of gifts from her Iberian relatives, many of them from the Habsburgs’ overseas possessions, and her library on her death included numerous works by Spanish authors such as Luis de Granada and Teresa of Avila.[9]

Growing up, Ysabel moved between the residences of her grandfather and father, the emperors Ferdinand I and Maximilian II, in Prague, Vienna, Linz and Wiener Neustadt.[10] When she was two, her sister Maria died in Linz where the children were residing while their parents were on dynastic business in the Low Countries. Maria is buried in Linz, and this is only one of the physical reminders of the spatial distribution of Elizabeth’s social worlds. (When she was seven, the family would again stay in Linz, seeking refuge as the plague hit downstream in Vienna.[11]) Over the years, Ysabel would have siblings, a husband, and a daughter buried in various places across Europe, including Prague in Bohemia, St. Denis in France, Vienna in Austria, and Madrid in Iberia.[12] Her spatially-tied social networks extended through the dead as well as through the living.

Ysabel may have had some memories of the processions into Vienna in Spring, 1558 when she was almost four and her grandfather, the Iberian-born Ferdinand (named after King Ferdinand of Aragon, ruled 1556-1564) officially entered his residence city as Holy Roman Emperor.[13] Ceremonial processing through space would be important for a princess such as this, one also to be publicly seen and displayed as part of the potential political networking that the Habsburg archduchesses represented. Ysabel would have many occasions in her lifetime to experience her body displayed and processed through the spaces of early modern Europe, and particularly the elaborate ceremonies which would accompany the ritual crossing of the boundaries between the rural and urban worlds, marked as these passages were by gates and civic guards in finely-burnished breastplates.

Four years later, the eight-year-old archduchess would again experience the entrees and processions associated with the coronations of her parents, first in Prague as King and Queen of Bohemia, and then in Frankfurt am Main as King of the Romans and his consort.[14] The Vienna ceremonies continued as Maximilian entered the city of Vienna in March of 1563, followed in the fall by the elaborate ceremonies surrounding the election of Ysabel’s father as King of Hungary in the new coronation site of Bratislava, ceremonies which began outside the walls of Vienna, not too far upstream from the Hungarian capital.[15]

The funeral ceremonies for her grandfather Emperor Ferdinand, who had died in July, 1564 and was buried in St.Vitus Cathedral in Prague the following year, corresponded with incoming bad news from the Hungarian front. Within months the Ottomans declared war, and Ysabel’s hometown of Vienna changed into a space of military preparation. From celebrating electoral triumphs to preparing for military uncertainties, the city was transformed. The war was brief and the successes few. Vienna, still rebuilding following the Ottoman siege of 1529, was a place of preparation, and these preparations continued years after the official end of the war in 1568.[16]

Two years later Ysabel would be processed and paraded from Vienna to Prague to the Imperial Diet in Speyer and then, the following year, to Paris after having been crowned and annointed Queen of France in St. Denis in March, 1571.[17] The elaborate dual marriage alliance, with Ysabel’s older sister Anna marrying their uncle Philip of Spain by proxy in Prague in May followed by the sixteen-year-old Ysabel’s marriage by proxy to King Charles IX of France at the diet in Speyer in October, 1570 was combined with a ceremonial display of influence, a costly procession across the Empire. Ceremonial festivities marked the imperial entrances to various important cities such as Nuremberg. [18]

Ysabel’s years in France need not concern us much here. She married King Charles IX (born 1550, ruled 1560, died 1574) in the Gothic church Our Lady of Hope in the border city of Mezières shortly after crossing the frontier.[19] Her entrée into Paris in March, 1571 is well documented, and was her chance to play the role she had seen her mother play entering Prague, Vienna, Bratislava, Nuremberg, Speyer, and elsewhere across central Europe.[20] Thrown into a kingdom wracked by religious warfare, ruling as queen during the time of the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, with a mother-in-law Catherine de Medici intent on maintaining influence even as Queen Dowager, the eighteen-year-old Ysabel was also confronted with the difficult political circumstance of giving birth to an infant daughter in October of 1572.[21] Even with Queen Elizabeth I of England as a godmother, this little girl, Marie-Isabelle, had a difficult time in the cutthroat world of late Valois politics. After her husband’s death in May, 1574, Ysabel was no longer able to play a major role in France. Once her brother-in-law Henri made it safely back from his Polish adventure as king of that kingdom, Ysabel took her leave and progressed back into the Empire, this time in a much less ostentatious manner.[22] She attended the Imperial Diet in Regensburg at which her father died and accompanied his body on its ceremonial route up to the Castle Hill in Prague, via Linz. [23]

The big sweeps of symbolic control of space were now over for the dowager queen, but her political ties remained multiple and extensive. As a widow, first in Prague and then in Vienna, Ysabel was able to exercise, directly or indirectly, substantial influence over events. As part of her marriage agreement, the Valois family in France had commited to a widow’s portion for Ysabel, and her chief of staff, the famous diplomat and humanist Oghier de Buscbecq, administered incomes from a number of French properties in Ysabel’s name.[24] Only well into her widowhood, and well into the religious wars and succession conflicts which accompanied them in France, did the incomes from that kingdom begin to dry up. For the first decade or so of her widowhood, it seems that Ysabel had enough income to lead a substantial court, first in Prague and then in Vienna, and to found a convent in the latter city in the early 1580’s.

After her brother Emperor Rudolf II decided to forsake the city of Vienna and move his residence officially to Prague, Ysabel and her brother Ernst were assigned the none-to-easy task of taking on the rebellious, Lutheran- (and somewhat Calvinist-) influenced populations of the city and the surrounding countryside. Vienna in the 1580’s was a tense and none-too-prosperous place. The emperor’s decision to move officially to Prague, the traditional rival to Vienna, had been preceded by the decisions to have the two previous emperors interred in the Prague cathedral, marking already a decline in the relative importance of the city on the Danube in favor of the city on the Vltava. While Jesuits and papal nuntios had been active in the Lower Austrian capital, they also seemed more inclined to trust and support Ysabel’s uncle Karl in Styria and its capital of Graz.[25]

For her support and the support of her house of Poor Clares, which had been founded with personnel support from the Poor Clares in the so-called “Angerkloster” (or the house of St. James on the Anger) in the Bavarian ducal capital of Munich, Ysabel’s brothers agreed to dedicate various resources to her.[26] These included most importantly the properties tied to the abandoned house of Benedictine nuns in the Lower Austrian village of Erlakloster, together with some local Vienna properties which had at one time (before the Ottoman assault of 1529) been tied to previously-existing houses of Poor Clares in the city. (The last of these two houses had gone bottom-up after its main buildings had been confiscated and transferred to the control of the city hospital and its nuns scattered to various houses about the city.[27]) The city had often been overwhelmed by the requirements of lodging the legions of courtiers and the billeting of troops, but now space was available due to the transfer of the imperial court, and Ysabel had space to build up a rather impressive set of apartments, a convent, and a respectable church in which to center Counter-Reformation activities as well as support the undertakings of the overwhelmed Bishop of Vienna from 1574-1594, Johann Caspar von Neubeck.[28] The old pilgrimage across Lower Austria to Mariazell in Styria was also reinvigorated by Ysabel and her supporters, stretching claims of authority from the city streets outside into the Austrian and Styrian countrysides and linking Vienna symbolically to that more-reformed Catholic province.[29]

There is some evidence that Ysabel took her lordly responsibilities in the parishes associated with Erlakloster seriously. The convent had rights of appointment over various parish priests in Upper and Lower Austria, and incomes from forests and vineyards in various places across the province of Lower Austria as well as in the vicinity of Vienna.[30] In addition, after things began to look bad with the incomes coming from France, Ysabel’s brothers turned to writing over customs or toll incomes to her to support her activities. These included incomes from the important Hungarian border fortress of Magyaróvaŕ (Ungarische Altenburg), so Ysabel’s influence extended toward the lands of the Crown of St. Stephen (“Hungary”) as well as into the Kingdom of France.[31] (As stated earlier, she also had influence in the Kingdom of Bohemia (i.e. the lands of the Crown of St. Václav,) but those activities have to be left out of the present analysis.)

Even though there is little evidence of Ysabel’s movement outside of the city of Vienna during her widowhood there, this is not to say that her influence was not felt well beyond that city’s newly-rebuilt walls. One example may suffice: after the death of the Polish king Stephen Báthory in December, 1586, Ysabel supported her brother Maximilian’s candidacy for that elected crown.[32] (Apparently, she even went so far as to provide him with some of her personal silver in order to help support the military undertaking he began in Fall of the next year.) Ysabel had been present when Maximilian had become a Teutonic Knight in a ceremony in Vienna in May, 1585. Since then, he had tried to build up his support as the leader of that order. Habsburg candidates had received substantial local support at the royal elections in Poland in 1573 and 1576 and Archduke Maximilian was optimistic about his chances in 1587.[33] After an unsuccessful military campaign which ended in his capture, however, the Habsburgs were forced to renounce their claims to that country’s throne. He would be released from captivity in 1589.[34]

The final, sad years of Ysabel’s life in Vienna are tied to the development of her house of Poor Clares. A new architect was named to complete the convent in January, 1589, and now reformed Catholic women had a secure and safe space to practice their religion.[35] It seems that Ysabel’s financial situation, probably because of deteriorating conditions and incomes from France, was precarious: it is reported that she had to begin to order the melting down of some of her silver furniture in order to pay her court’s debts.[36] Her brother Ernst was transferred to Styria to lead the government there after the death of Ysabel’s uncle, the archduke Karl, in 1590. A number of Ysabel’s important female relatives, her aunts Magdalena in Hall in Tyrol and Anna in Munich, passed away that year as well. In Rome, the death of Pope Sixtus V in 1590 was quickly followed by that of Pope Gregory XIV a year later and his passing was followed quickly thereafter by the death Pope Innocent IX the next month. In Vienna, the procession associated with Corpus Christi, a procession that would take on increasing importance for Habsburg family piety in the centuries to come, and one which Bishop Neubeck had tried to restart

following Ysabel’s move to Vienna, was disrupted by angry crowds in the streets.[37]

A few months after these riots, Ysabel drew up her will. She passed away in her Viennese apartments on January 22, 1592 at the age of 37 and a half. Widowed and tied to the city of her birth, Vienna, she nonetheless exercised influence over a much wider space than she saw. With relatives across Europe, holdings in France, incomes from Hungary, properties in the Austrian archduchies, and a convent in Vienna, she reveals that space for this early modern Habsburg archduchess was not only tied to her body, like a dress in a portrait, but it was tied to a complex set of experiences, activities, and possibilities; experiences, activities and possibilities tied to spaces stretching from her deathbed across the continent and into the world.

[1] Joseph F. Patrouch, “Pearls in a Portrait: François Clouet’s 1571 Depiction of the Archduchess Elizabeth of Habsburg,” in Will Benedicks and Kyle Eidahl, eds., Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians 10-11 (2004), 109-112.

[2] A preliminary overview of themes associated with this research was presented at the 22nd World Congress of the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic, June, 2004. The paper was titled “Dowager Queen Alzbeta (1554-1592): From the Wars of Religion in France to Prague.” It will appear in the published conference proceedings.

[Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians, Annual Meeting, 2004,]

[3] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space [Original title: “Production de l’espace,” 1974]. Donald Nicholson-Smith, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 11.

[4] For a general overview of some of the themes of the project on Elizabeth, see Joseph F. Patrouch, “Ysabell/Elizabeth/Alzbeta: Erzherzogin. Königin. Forschungsgegenwurff,” Frühneuzeit-Info 10 (1999), 257-265. An overview of the life of Elizabeth is available in Joseph F. Patrouch, “Elizabeth of Habsburg,” in Deborah Klezmer, ed., Women in World History (Waterford, CT: Yorkin Publications, 2000), V: 129-133. For an overview of the history of the city of Vienna in the early modern period, see: Joseph F. Patrouch, “Vienna,” in Jonathan Dewald, ed., Europe 1450-1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World (NY: Scribner’s, 2004), VI, 154-157.

[5] Susanne Claudine Pils, Schreiben über Stadt: Das Wien der Johanna Theresia Harrach 1639-1716 (Vienna: Verein für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 2002).

[6] For a colorful overview of the archduchess’ family, see Andrew Wheatcroft, The Habsburgs (London: Penguin, 1996). Here, esp. Chap. 5, “A War to the Last Extremity.” On the general lives of the members of the family: Lynne Heller and Karl Vocelka, Die Lebenswelt der Habsburger: Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte einer Familie (Graz: Styria, 1997).

[7] See for an overview of recent US work on early modern women: Adele Seeff and Margaret Lael Mikesell, eds, Culture and Change: Attending to Early Modern Women (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2003). In Mikesell’s Introduction she reviews the contributions to the first three collections of papers from conferences sponsored by Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies at the University of Maryland starting in 1990. Mikesell reports on a workshop where it was pointed out that the women “… fashioned their identities in relation to salons, convents, family circles, epistolary communities, and social religious groups,” 36.

[8] The empress María is one of the title figures in Magdalena S. Sánchez, The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

[9] Generally on Elizabeth and Spanish-Austrian dynastic connections: Joseph F. Patrouch, “Archduchess Elizabeth: Where Spain and Austria Met,” 77-90 in Conrad Kent, et al, eds., The Lion and the Eagle: Interdisciplinary Essays on German-Spanish Relations over the Centuries (NY: Berghahn Books, 2000). 22 of the titles of the 57 listed in her library inventory taken after her death were of works in Spanish. (84-85) Two recent exhibitions sponsored by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna have emphasized the specimens from around the world which the Habsburgs collected in central Europe at this time: Wilfried Seipel, ed., Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen im Speigel fürstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, 2000) and Seipel, ed., Alle Wunder dieser Welt: Die kostbarsten Kunstwerke aus der Sammlung Erzherzog Ferdinands II. (1529-1595) (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, 2001).

[10] On these two emperors: Joseph F. Patrouch, “Ferdinand I, (Holy Roman Empire),” II, 372-373;” “Maximilian II (Holy Roman Empire),” IV, 64-65” in Dewald, Europe 1450-1789. Maximilian has been the subject of a recent English-language biography: Paula Sutter Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

[11] The general context of the religious and social histories of this period in Linz and Upper Austria are discussed in Joseph F. Patrouch, A Negotiated Settlement: The Counter-Reformation in the Habsburg Province of Upper Austria (Leiden, Colognevand Boston, 2000).

[12] For specifics concerning the various archdukes and archduchesses, see Brigitte Hamann, ed., Die Habsburger: Ein biographisches Lexikon (Munich: Piper, 1988).

[13] The standard English-language biography of Ferdinand is still Paula Sutter Fichtner, Ferdinand I of Austria (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1982).

[14] For the accession to the thrones of Bohemia and Hungary, see Fichtner, Emperor Maximilian II, 56-58. As was often the case, controversies surrounded the imperial party’s entry into Frankfurt. Who was to accompany the emperor into the city, the representatives of the city council or those of the Archbishop-Elector and Imperial Chancellor, Mainz? Some of the correspondence concerning this controversy is to be found in the Stadtarchiv Frankfurt/Main, Reichssachen II, Nr. 1173. The Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek in Frankfurt/Main contains a number of pamphlets describing the Prague, Frankfurt and Bratislava coronations. For sources describing the return trip from Frankfurt via Wurttemberg, an important territory for Habsburg influence in the southwest of the Empire, see Matthäus Koch, ed., Quellen zur Geschichte des Kaisers Maximilians II. (Leipzig: Voist & Günther, 1857), 6-8. They continued down the Rhine.

[15] The Bratislava trip and ceremonies were described in dispatches from the Venetian ambassador to the Doge in September and October, 1563: Gustav Turba, ed., Venetianische Depeschen vom Kaiserhofe, (1554-1576) (Vienna: Temsky, 1895), III: 233-41.

[16] For an overview of the war, see the official report to the Imperial Circles’ representatives at their assembly in Erfurt in 1567. Reprinted in Koch, Quellen, 86-109: “Summarischer gemeiner Bericht vonn dem Anno 66. Biss Inn das 67 verloffnenn Hungerischen Kriegswesenn. Wider den ErbVeind.”

[17] For some background and many specifics concerning the diet and the wedding, see Joseph F. Patrouch, “Reichstag und Hochzeit (Speyer 1570)” in Václav Bůžek and Pavel Král, eds., Slavnosti a zábavy na dvorech a v rezidenčních mĕstach raného novovĕku (České Budĕjovice: Jihočeská univerzita v Českých Budějovicích, Historický ustav, 2000), 265-80.

[18] Werner Goez points out in his article on the relationship of the city of Nuremberg to the Empire that Aachen, Frankfurt/M., Regensburg and Nuremberg all had particularly important ties to the Empire. Ysabel visited all of them but the disputed (and losing in importance) Aachen during various symbolic trips across the spaces of the Holy Roman Empire between 1562 and 1576. Goez, “Nürnberg—Kaiser und Reich,” 11-16 in the exhibition catalog of the same name, published by the Staatsarchiv Nürnberg, 1986. Her 1570 visit and entrée is discussed in the same catalog by Ursula Schmidt-Fölkersamb, “Kaiserbesuche und Kaisereinzüge in Nürnberg, “ 115-127.

[19] A contemporary pamphlet describing the wedding can be found in the Austrian National Library with the title Veritable Discovrs du marriage de treshaut,Ttrespuissant,&Treschrestien, Charles neusiesme de ce nom …

[20] See, for example, the discussion by Roy Strong in his Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals 1450-1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 109-111.

[21] General background is provided in Michel Simonin, Charles IX (Paris: Fayard, 1995).

[22] This trip is outlined in Louis Adolphe Spach, Deux voyages de Elizabeth d’Autriche, épouse de Charles IX, roi de France (Colmar: Decker, 1855). Ysabel’s brother-in-law ruled as Henri III. He was born in 1551 and assassinated in 1589, ending the rule of the Valois Dynasty in France.

[23] On the Regensburg Diet of 1576, see Hugo Moritz, Die Wahl Rudolfs II., der Reichstag zu Regensburg (1576) und die Freistellungsbewegung (Marburg: N.G. Elwert, 1895), esp. chap. 5.

[24] Busbecq also served as Ysabel’s chief court official immediately after she returned from France. See Hofkammerarchiv, Vienna, Hofzahlamtsbuch, 1576, entry dated last of May. The famous humanist and diplomat is often credited with making central Europe familiar with the tulip and the hyacinth. See Charles Thornton Forster and F.H. Blackburne Daniell, eds, The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (London: C.K. Paul, 1881).

[25] The Styrian branch of the Habsburg Dynasty, led by Ysabel’s uncle Archduke Charles (1540-90) and her cousin Duchess Maria of Bavaria (1551-1608), has often been seen as the center of the Counter-Reformation in the dynasty’s central European lands. Most recently, see Regina Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria 1580-1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[26] This house has been discussed in some length in Charlotte Woodford’s Nuns as Historians in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 51-2, 54-5, 62-3. The historical manuscripts analyzed from the house are outlined on 196-197. On Elizabeth and the cloister in Vienna (the “Queen’s Cloister”): Marie Héyret, “Elisabeth, Königin von Frankreich, die Stifterin des Königsklosters [sic] in Wien,” Katholische Warte 4 (1888-89), 379-84.

[27] For a discussion of this cloister, and the general situation of the houses of female religious in Vienna at the time, see: Joseph F. Patrouch, “Das Königinkloster—Wiener Klosterfrauen um 1580,” Pro Civitate Austriae NF 7 (2002) 45-52. Many of the records of this cloister, which was closed by decree of Emperor Joseph II in 1782, have been lost. Some remain in the Vienna City and State Archive (Klosterakten) and the Vienna Archdiocesan Archive (Wiener Klöster/ Aufgeh./Königinkloster). A substantial number are also now in the Haus- Hof- und Staatsarchiv [HHStA] in Vienna. (See especially Klosterakten, where records concerning Erlakloster are also to be found.) The church is now the place of worship of Vienna’s Lutheran parish. For a brief description which includes a depiction of the convent in 1740, see the anonymous pamphlet Die Lutherische Stadtkirche, 2^nd Ed., (Vienna, 1985).

[28] Roderick Geyer, Dr. Johann Caspar Neubeck (Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1956). When Neubeck took over the troubled diocese, the episcopal office had been vacant for six years. See also Annemarie Fenzl, Die Bibliothek des Wiener Bischofs Dr. Johann Caspar Neubeck (Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1968).

[29] It is reported that Ysabel made a pilgrimage to Mariazell in late Summer, 1583 together with her brother, Archduke Matthias. Geyer, Neubeck, 245.

[30] “Erla,” in Historische Stätten Österreichs, I:246. Evidence of Ysabel’s active attention to the administration of the Erlakloster holdings can be found in HHStA, Handschrift W1099.

[31]Ysabel began to receive income from Magyaróvaŕ in September, 1586. Correspondence about the continued dedication of these incomes to support costs associated with her estate after her death can be found in HHStA FamAkten 75. According to documents under this archival designation, the administrator responsible reported that Ysabel had received the proper amounts from this source for the period 1586-1592. After her death, reports from France concerning Ysabel’s incomes from that kingdom indicate that she had claims over incomes from the duchies of Bourbon and Auvergne and the counties of Forêt, and the two Marches, in addition to other seigneurial rights and incomes. See the letter from Ysabel’s secretary Johann Prossonäck to Archduke Ernst dated 25 August, 1592 under the same archival designation.

[32] Heinz Noflatscher, Glaube, Reich und Dynastie: Maximilian der Deutschmeister (1558-1618) (Marburg: Elwert Verlag, 1987).

[33] On the election of 1572-3 which resulted in the selection of Ysabel’s brother-in-law Henri de Valois, see: Almut Bues, Die habsburgische Kandidatur für den polnischen Thron während des Ersten Interregnums in Polen 1572/73 (Vienna: VWGÖ, 1984). On 1574-76 after Ysabel’s husband’s death and Henri’s hast return to France: Christoph Augustinowicz, Die Kandidaten und Interessen des Hauses Habsburg in Polen-Litauen während des Zweiten Interregnums 1574-1576 (Vienna: WUV-Universitäts Verlag, 2001). See also: R. Nisbeth Bain, “The Polish Interregnum, 1575,” English Historical Review 4 (1889), 645-66 and Eduard Winter, “Die polnischen Königswahlen 1575 und 1587 in der Sicht der Habsburger,” Innsbrucker Historische Studien 1 (1978), 60-76.

[34] In a report dated Vienna, 3 January, 1588, Archduke Maximilian’s head silver official had to report that various pieces of silverware and plate which Ysabel had loaned to her brother for use in his Polish campaign had been lost. HHStA FamAkten 75. The Treasury of the Teutonic Knights in Vienna contains a large number of objects from the collection of Archduke Maximilian. See Room 3 where items from his Kunstkammer are displayed. See the inventory of the collection: Amt des Hochmeisters des Deutschen Ordens, Die Schatzkammer des Deutschen Ordens (Vienna: Deutscher Orden, 2000), 63-74. Maximilian served as Hoch- und Deutschmeister from 1595-1618.

[35] Jacob Vivian reported in an undated supplication found among Ysabel’s posthumous estate records that he had been named her court architect on January 10, 1589. In his supplication Vivian claims to never have received any pay. HHStA FamAkten 75.

[36] Reports of melting down of various parts of a silver table. Some parts were used for incense burners, some for reliquaries, and some for debts, 1590-91. HHStA FamAkten 75.

[37] On the role of Corpus Christi and the Habsburg ideology of pious rule: Wheatcroft, Habsburgs, 29-31. It is reported that Bishop Neubeck organized a Corpus Christi confraternity in 1581 and started public processions again in 1582. See Geyer, Neubeck, 97 and 100.