A Queen’s Piety:  Elizabeth of Habsburg and the Veneration of Saints

Joseph F. Patrouch

Florida International University

This paper continues the discussion of various aspects of the life and contexts of the Habsburg archduchess Ysabel which I began at the FCH meeting in Jacksonville in 2003 and continued in Lake City in 2004. Ysabel lived between 1554-1592. The first paper discussed Ysabel’s portrait by the French court painter Francois Clouet[1] The second tried to place her activities in various spaces of central Europe in the last two decades of her life[2] This paper is the third and last element in what I see as a triptych depicting this archduchess.[3]

I will analyze Ysabel’s saints veneration practices as revealed in sources dealing with her time in Prague and particularly in Vienna in her widowhood following the death of husband King Charles IX of France in 1574. (Charles was born in 1550 and ascended the French throne in 1560 after the death of his older brother, King Francis II.) My analysis will also seek to point out some differences between Ysabel’s piety and that better-known set of religious practices called “Pietas Austriaca” by the Austrian historian Anna Coreth. Coreth’s work has recently been translated into English.[4]The US publication of this important discussion of Habsburg religious practices provides me with the opportunity to discuss some aspects of that dynasty’s piety in a slightly earlier period than the one emphasized by Coreth. As we will see, Ysabel’s activities were similar to those sketched by Coreth as characteristic for the early modern central European Habsburgs. Coreth emphasized devotions to the Eucharist, the Holy Cross, and Mary, and, to some extent, other saints’ cults. Ysabel supported those broad, general devotions, devotions which have often been linked to the Counter-Reformation, as well as those dedicated to specific female saints such as Christina, Anna, and Elizabeth. Even Ysabell’s veneration of St. Leopold, an increasingly-popular cult among the Habsburgs at this time, allowed space for female participation with the presence of St. Leopold’s wife Agnes in his legend.

Presenting the paper at a conference organized under the auspices of Florida’s first Roman Catholic institution of higher learning, St. Leo University, provides the opportunity to detail what evidence exists of Archduchess Ysabell’s particular, individualized pattern of saints veneration. Through an examination of primary sources such as documents dealing with the consecration of her convent in Vienna as well as other archival evidence drawn mostly from Viennese archives and dealing with her activities, some conclusions concerning her identity as depicted in her devotions to particular saints will be attempted. It may be appropriate here to mention that Pope St. Leo IV is legendary for building the walls enclosing Vatican Hill in Rome in the ninth century, and Elizabeth played a role in the refortification of Vienna and the Habsburg lands following the growth in popularity of the teachings of Martin Luther and other Christian reformers, as well as the siege of the city by the Ottoman army, earlier in the sixteenth century.[5]

After leaving her daughter behind in France in the care of her mother-in-law Catherine de Medici and the new king, Henry III (King of Poland 1573, King of France 1574-1589), Ysabel returned to central Europe during the winter of 1575-76. It seems that for some time she resided in Prague with her mother, King Phillip II of Spain’s sister, the soon-widowed Empress Maria. (Ysabel’s father, Emperor Maximilian II, died in October, 1576 during the final stages of the Reichstag which was being held there. He had been King of Hungary and King of Bohemia and had become Holy Roman Emperor in 1564.) While in Prague, Ysabel dedicated some of her resources to the rebuilding of the All Saints Chapel in the Hradchin castle. It had been badly damaged in a fire decades before. With this activity, we see her interest in saints veneration practice physically coming to the fore.[6]

The reconstruction of the Prague castle chapel is evidence of Ysabel’s interest in general practices associated with the veneration of the saints, including their images and relics. These practices had been explicitly permitted (and promoted) fewer than twenty years before at the great Roman Catholic council held in an important episcopal seat located in the southern reaches of the Holy Roman Empire, Trent. That council’s 25^th session 3-4 December, 1563 affirmed saints veneration and outlined the important role that bishops were to play in the supervision of the various practices associated with such veneration.[7]

The evidence to be discussed here centers more about the widowed queen’s undertakings in the city of Vienna. She moved there in the early 1580’s in the wake of the reorganization of residences and jurisdictions which followed the death of her father and the negotiations among her siblings concerning inheritance portions. As part of this reorganization, her older brother, Archduke Ernst, was given administrative responsibilities for the Austrian archduchies on the Danube and, as residence, the Hofburg castle in Vienna.[8]

In Vienna, Elizabeth purchased properties near the castle district and sponsored the building of a Franciscan convent (“Poor Clares”) dedicated to Our Lady Queen of Angels.[9] The cornerstone of the church was laid on 5 March, 1582. The church was consecrated 2 August the following year. Pope Gregory XIII (ruled 1572-1585) announced a particular indulgence associated with the cloister church’s consecration.[10] The convent would become known as the Queen’s Cloister. It was endowed with various properties around the province, mostly those associated with the shut-down house of Benedictine nuns at Erlakloster near the border with Upper Austria. A number of women from the duchy of Bavaria, as well as others associated with Ysabel’s court, would people this important center of reformed Catholic practice.[11] Records associated with the convent show that, while Marian devotion was of course central to the religious practices there (and presumably similarly central to Archduchess Ysabel), there was a rich texture to the widowed queen’s piety, a texture that reveals her particular coloring of the pious practices associated with the Habsburgs by historians such as Coreth.

Sources now in the Viennese archdiocesan archive dated 1583 list the various relics to be found in the three altars of the convent church.[12] The main altar contained fifteen relics, including a part of the belt of the Virgin, a relic of one of the Holy Innocents, and relics of a number of martyrs, including St. Stephen the Protomartyr, an important local cult to which the Viennese diocese and its cathedral was dedicated. In addition to St. Mary and St. Pantaleon, a patron for midwives, Saints Catherine, Ursula and Elizabeth of Hungary were also represented in the list. Important for his ties to the imperial title held by Ysabel’s brother Emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576-1612), a relic of Charlemagne (“S. Carolo Imperatore”) was also at the main altar of the convent. Legend had it that Charlemagne had been in Vienna during one of his campaigns and had played a role in the foundation of St. Peter’s Church there.

A second altar was dedicated to the Holy Cross. This cult seems to have been particularly important to Ysabel’s mother, Empress Maria. Marianne Strakosch, in her unpublished 1965 Vienna dissertation on the life of Archduchess Ysabel, explains that the empress had given Ysabel a Cross reliquary which the empress had received from the duchy of Troppau, Silesia.[13] (Maria held important rights and received incomes from various subsidiary lands of the Bohemian Crown, including Silesia and the Lusatias, as part of her widow’s portion.) In addition to a piece of the Cross, the Queen’s Cloister Holy Cross altar also contained relics of a dozen other saints, including (again) the Innocents.

  Revealing a Bohemian flavor not surprising in a convent sponsored by the daughter of the King and Queen of that kingdom, a royal princess who had resided for some years in Prague and who came to Vienna with a number of Bohemian noble and –altar also contained relics of Saints Vitus and Václav. Two virgin martyrs (Saints Petronella and Cordula) remind us that the community was a strictly-sequestered contemplative society of women dedicated to celibacy.

 Saints Anne and Mary Magdalene shared the dedication of the convent church’s third altar. The documents list thirteen relics. The altar was consecrated by the bishop of Vienna, Johann Caspar Neubeck, together with the Holy Cross altar, on the Festival of Saint Anne 26 July, 1584. (Neubeck served as Bishop of Vienna for two decades, from 1574-1594.[14]) The majority of the relics listed as being at this altar were relics of female saints:  Saints Anne, Mary Magdalene, Margaret, Lucy, Cecilia, Martha, and Elisabeth of Hungary (again). When Bishop Neubeck was at the convent to consecrate these two subsidiary altars, he also took the opportunity to bless the church’s modest steeple and its three bells. He blessed the largest bell in honor of Jesus, the Holy Cross, and Saints Mary and Anne. The second bell was blessed in honor of the Angels and Saints Clare and Elizabeth, and the small bell honored the archangel, St. Michael. (The parish church of St. Michael was right around the corner from the convent, and Saints Mary and Michael were often historically linked.)

The roles of Saints Anne and Elizabeth of Hungary deserve further discussion due to the obvious weight placed on their veneration at the Queen’s Cloister. Ashley and Sheingorn in their edited collection of essays on the importance of the cult of St. Anne in the Later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century, stress, “her function as intercessor for married women and mothers.”[15] They go on to discuss how the legends associated with the cult of St. Anne and her family, and particularly the popular depictions of Anne with her daughter St. Mary and her grandson Jesus, could appeal both to the patrician oligarchy and to nobles with their sense of lineage. In Vienna in the 1580s, it was particularly important to appeal to both of these groups.  Most burghers and nobles in the area, it appears, had accepted Luther’s critiques of traditional Latin Christianity. St. Anne provided the model of an ideal spouse, mother and widow to the middle-class women of the city, as well as to the noblewomen in the castles and estates out in the country.[16]

In addition, linking up with the veneration of St. Anne had a very particular context in Vienna. A pilgrims’ hostel had been endowed by the Viennese burgherwoman Elisabeth Wartenauer in 1418. Between 1518 and 1520 a chapel dedicated to St. Anne had been built as part of this hostel complex.[17] After the destruction of the city hospital outside of the Carinthian Gate during the Ottoman siege in 1529, the local ruler, the Spanish-raised Ferdinand of Habsburg (later as Emperor Ferdinand I, ruled 1556-1564), organized the move of the “Poor Clares” out of their convent near the Pig Market to the cosier confines of St. Anne’s Church and its apartments. The hospital would now be located in the old convent buildings, and the nuns were transferred. It is not known what role Ferdinand’s wife Anna played in all this. 

Over the course of the sixteenth century, with the declining interest in the cloistered life on the part of the Viennese citizens, the last Franciscan nuns were eventually transferred out of the St. Anne complex to the other surviving female houses in the city. Emperor Rudolf II (ruled 1576-1612), opposing his sister Ysabel’s wishes to recover the complex for her new foundation, (which she apparently saw more as a continuation of the previous house of “Poor Clares,”) instead assigned the property in 1582 to the new and vocal order of the Jesuits. In any case, the veneration of St. Anne at the new Queen’s Cloister linked up with previously-existing patterns of female worship in the city.[18]

St. Elizabeth of Hungary seems to have played a particularly important role in the life of the nuns at the Queen’s Cloister. Ysabel, a daughter of the King and Queen of Hungary, clearly saw the parallels between her life and that of her namesake, St. Elizabeth. Both widows, the two women chose not to remarry and instead dedicated themselves to helping the poor and less fortunate. It is not possible here to go into the entire convoluted story, Ysabel’s brother, Archduke Maximilian (1558-1618), had entered the Teutonic Knights in 1584 and quickly was named one of the leaders of that crusading order. In addition, a group of Polish nobles pushed his cause in the tumultuous election to the throne of that country which took place in 1587.[19] Ysabel backed his unsuccessful military campaign to claim the Polish throne and, after he was released from captivity, he returned to the Habsburgs’ lands and donated some of the Teutonic Knights’ relics of St. Elizabeth, their patron, to Ysabel and her cloister. The head of the saint became one of the house’s most prized possessions.[20]

The archival sources in Vienna point to Ysabel’s acquisition of the relics of another female saint in 1587: the virgin martyr St. Christina. While there appears to have been some concern over the way by which the convent acquired the relics, which apparently had been at the castle church in Retz, Austria, Pope Sixtus V (ruled 1585-1590) officially sanctioned the convent’s possession of them. He also reaffirmed the indulgence which had been granted to the cloister by his predecessor. These procedures were tied to the visit of the papal nuncio Aldobrandini in July of the following year.[21] (Aldobrandini would be elected pope a week after Ysabel’s death in January, 1592. He took the name Clement VIII.)

I have pointed to the importance of regulations concerning sexual behavior in the Counter-Reformation in other venues, and Ulrike Strasser has also discussed the issue in some detail in her book on Munich.[22] Here I would simply like to point out that the Queen’s Cloister and its ties to the veneration of celibate widows and virgin martyrs fitted in well with the general emphasis on the policing of clerical behavior. Of necessity I will have to exclude here any discussion of the peculiar aspects of Marian devotion which the sources reveal about Ysabel.[23]

The evidence indicates that, in addition to her support for the veneration of widows and virgins, Ysabel also was connected to a cult which was much more about procreation and fecundity, the cult connected to the Habsburgs’ veneration of the Babenberg Dynasty’s St. Leopold.[24]

St. Leopold died in 1136. He was a member of the Babenberg Dynasty, the ruling family in the area now known as Lower Austria.  He and his wife, the margravine Agnes, (died 1143) founded a monastery at Klosterneuburg, a castle not far outside of Vienna on the Danube River. Agnes was the daughter of the emperor Henry IV and the sister of his son, Emperor Henry V (ruled 1106-1125). The Habsburg emperor Frederick III (ruled 1452-1493) had succeeded in convincing the pope to canonize Leopold and, over the course of centuries, Leopold became a key figure in the legitimization of Habsburg rule in what can loosely be called “Austria.”  St. Leopold was canonized on the Feast of the Epiphany, 1485. By the time of Archduchess Ysabel a century later, it had become an important aspect of the Counter-Reformation in “Austria” to point out the legitimacy and continuity of the claims of the ruling family. In order to do this, elaborate family trees were composed and displayed.

The most important of these was displayed at the Klosterneuburg monastery itself, just outside of Vienna on a hill overlooking the Danube. In fact, at the time of St. Leopold’s canonization in the late fifteenth century, a massive family tree had been composed showing the various male and female members of the Babenberg Dynasty.  This famous wooden screen, over 24 feet in width and ten feet high, was displayed at the monastery.[25]  In 1585, Ysabel received a relic of St. Leopold from her brother, Archduke Ernst. (It was a hipbone.) Ernst had received it from the Provost of Klosterneuburg, Balthasar Polzman. Polzman, together with the bishop of Vienna, Neubeck, were busily trying to reinvigorate devotion to St. Leopold.

Ysabel commissioned an elaborate reliquary:  it would be a complicated piece of embossed metalwork, showing a family tree of saintly relatives rising from a seascape and recalling both the giant wooden panel painting of the Babenberg family tree and the massive seven-armed Romanesque candelabra which still stands in Klosterneuburg and is thought to have originally housed branches of the elderberry tree where, legend has it, Margravine Agnes’ veil was found by St. Leopold, indicating to him where the new monastery should be built.[26]

This rather vague reference to Margravine Agnes touches on a long story of pregnancies and progeny: Ysabel took aspects of the past: bone fragments and fragments of stories. She combined them in the 1580s into something which looks like the picture of Habsburg piety painted by Anna Coreth, but which also reveals a set of local, female connections to the big stories. While the “big picture” looks similar (Coreth’s emphasis on Eucharist, Cross, and Mary), it is in the details that things become more complicated.

While Archduchess Ysabel supported the reformed Catholic positions on the Eucharist, the Cross,  St. Mary, and saints’ veneration more generally, it is also clear that  a detailed analysis of which saints were venerated, and how and where and when, shows spaces for interpretation. It seems that at the Queen’s Cloister, female role models were given ample space. Anna Coreth’s seminal work on “Austrian Piety” does not require a total revision.  But it does require some new vision.

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

[2]“A Woman’s Space: Rule, Place and Ysabel of Habsburg, 1570-1592,” Joseph F. Patrouch, ed., Selected Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians 12 (2005), 113-121. Later that Spring I delivered a second paper on the archduchess at a conference in Olomouc (Czech Republic): “Dowager Queen Alžbeta (1554-1592): From the Wars of Religion in France to Prague,” Mila Rechcigl, ed., Selected Proceedings of the 22^nd World Congress, Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (In Press). For a general introduction to Elizabeth/Ysabel, together with further references, see my article "Elisabeth of Habsburg,". Anne Commire and Deborah Klezmer, eds., Women in World History.  (Waterford, CT:  Yorkin Publications,  2000), V, 129-133.

[3]My thanks to the panel chair, David B. Mock, for his comments. I also benefited from the comments and discussion by my fellow panelists, Leslie Schumacher and Brad Pardue.

[4]Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca. William D. Bowman and Anna Maria Leitgeb, trans. (W. Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2004). Orig. Ed. 1959. Marc R. Forster reviewed the translation in Catholic Historical Review 150 (2004), 798-800.

[5]A number of early modern writers identified Ysabel with walls. For example, in her biography  published by the Franciscan friar Antonio Stöckler a century after her death, the friar wrote of how Ysabel wanted to build a wall between God’s anger and sinners through her support of the poor. Stöckler was responsible for the supervision of the Viennese convent she had founded. Antonio Stöckler, “Das Leben der Durchleuchtigsten Fürstin und Frauen / Frauen Elisabeth ...“ 225-235 in his Der Croniken Der Heiligen Mutter Clara. Anderer Theil (Vienna, n.p.: 1675). Here, 229. Stöckler echoes the theme of the funeral sermon for Elisabeth preached by famous bishop Melchior Khlesl: Christlich unnd Catholische Leichpredigt Uber die Hochkläglich und schmertzlich Begräbnuß / der Durchleuchtigsten Fürstin und Frawen / Frawen Elisabeth ... (Vienna, n. p. 1592).

[6]This phase of Ysabel’s career is discussed in more detail in the paper mentioned above in footnote 2. For a general introduction to the context of the rebuilding of the castle, see Ivan Muchka, “Die Prager Burg zur Zeit Rudolfs II. Neue Forschungsergebnisse,” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 85-86 (1989-90), 95-98.

[7]„On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,“ The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent , H.J. Schroeder, trans. (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1978), 215-217.

[8]Viktor Bibl, “Erzherzog Ernst und die Gegenreformation in Niederösterreich,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 6 (1901), 575-596.

[9]On the general context of female cloistered religious life in the city in the 1580s, see Joseph F. Patrouch, “Das Königinkloster:  Wiener Klosterfrauen um 1580,” Pro Civitate Austriae NF 7 (2002), 45-52.

[10]A copy of Pope Gregory’s letter granting a plenary indulgence to visitors to the Queen’s Cloister on the festival of its consecration (August 2) is dated Rome, 1 April, 1583. It can be found in the Archive of the Archdiocese of Vienna: Wiener Klöster/Aufgehoben Klöster/Königinkloster [DAW/K/AK/K].

[11]For the general situation of females religious in Munich, the capital of the duchy of Bavaria, at this time, see Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2004).The nuns who started the Queen’s Cloister came from the Angerkloster in Munich.

[12]“Copy. Tabella memorialis de Consecratione temple S. Mariae de Angelis @ summi Altaris.” DAW/K/AK/K.

[13]Marianne Strakosch, Materialien zu einer Biographie Elisabeths von Österreich, Königin von Frankreich (Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1965), 105. Strakosch goes on to relate various legends associated with this cross, including one in which it was related that two blasphemers were killed by it, and another that the Christ figure turned toward Ysabel once while she was praying. This Cross reliquary was apparently kept not in the convent church, but in its chapel dedicated to Saint Barbara.

[14]Roderick Geyer, Dr. Johann Caspar Neubeck, Bischof von Wien 1574-1594  (Dissertation, University of Vienna, 1956).

[15]Kathleen Ashley and Pamela Sheingorn, “Introduction,” Interpreting Cultural Symbols: St. Anne in Late Medieval Society (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 48. The authors state that her cult was especially important in the period approximately 1450-1550 and that it began to decline in significance after the Council of Trent.

[16]Ibid., 51-53.

[17]Felix Czeike, Historisches Lexikon Wien (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1992), I: 115-116, 578-79; Ibid., (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1995), IV: 554.

[18]Perhaps it should be pointed out that, of the twelve women listed as nuns at the Queen’s Cloister in June 28, 1584, four of them were named Anna. (The others were: Ursula, Barbara, Maria, Elisabeth, 2x Agnes, 2x Magdalena.) “Summa Unndt Inhallt des Revers briefs des Convents S. Clara Zu Wiens,” DAK/K/AK/K.

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

[20]F. Küch, “Zur Geschichte der Reliquien der Heiligen Elisabeth,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 45 (1926), 198-215.

[21]Letter from Sixtus V dated Rome, 25 September, 1587. Bull dated 22 October, 1587. DAK/K/AK/K.

[22]Joseph F. Patrouch, “Sexualität und Herrschaft: Sexuelles Fehlverhalten in Strafprozessen vor drei grundherrlichen Gerichten Oberösterreichs,” Daniela Erlach, et al, eds., Privatisierung der Triebe?  Sexualität in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1994), 151-165. Strasser, State of Virginity.

[23]The specifics of the cult of “Mary Queen of Angels” would be well beyond the scope of  this paper. This cult is also tied to Pope Sixtus V, it appears, in his advocacy of the veneration of the Virgin’s House at Loreto, and the role of angels in the legend. See “Biblical Basis of Mary’s Queenship of the Angels,” n.a., Dictionary of Mary (NJ: Catholic Book Publishing Company, 1997), 21. See also “Loreto (Italy)” 258-260. Strakosch reports that the Vienna convent had a Loreto chapel, as well as chapels dedicated to St. Mary’s intercession for the poor and St. Mary more generally. Another one housed a copy of the famous Mary portrait from Maria Maggiore in Rome. Strakosch, Materialien, 104. Ysabel’s support for the important pilgrimage to Mariazell should also be mentioned.

[24]A good overview of the cult generally is provided in the exhibition catalog: Amt der Niederösterreichischen Landesregierung, Der heilige Leopold: Landesfürst und Staatssymbol, Katalog des Niederösterreichischen Landesmuseums NF 155 (Vienna: Niederösterreichische Landesregierung, 1985).

[25]Floridus Röhrig, Der Babenberger Stammbaum im Stift Klosterneuburg  (Vienna, n.d.)

[26]On the Leopold reliquary:  NÖ Landesregierung, heilige Leopold, 398-401. (With ill.) On the candelabra: ibid., 167-169.