Introduction
Though weakened by recent scholarship, the paradigm of “absolutist state-building” remains embedded in the thinking about Habsburg history from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The “emasculation” of traditional elite groups such as the Estates by the reforming “state” of the eighteenth century is an especially tenacious assumption. The present study utilizes recent concepts for large, compound political entities in an international context including “fiscal-military state” and “composite monarchy” to throw light on the relationship of government and society over time. It anatomizes the impact of fiscal-military exigency on the relationship between the rulers in Vienna and the Estates of the archduchy below the river Enns (Lower Austria), which geographically, politically, and financially was one of the central Habsburg lands. The thesis is posited that the Habsburg monarchy’s composite-territorial structures in the guise of the Estates constituted an increasingly vital, if changing, element of Habsburg international success and resilience.