I was recently talking to some students about the character Captain von Trapp in the film ‘The Sound of Music’. Students are always curious how someone from a landlocked country like Austria could be a retired naval commander. We also got to talking about his rank, since he is called a baron in the film (and he is initially planning to marry a baroness). It led to an investigation of the term ‘ritter’, which was actually the real Georg von Trapp’s rank in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, akin to ‘baronet’ in the UK system, that is, a knighthood that is hereditary. So we chatted about rank and its place in aristocratic society and looked into his familial relations to see if he was connected to people of much higher rank at the Viennese court—and indeed, it turns out that he was, though almost entirely through the family of his first wife (the mother of all those singing children), Agathe Whitehead. Further research reveals that this Anglo-Austrian aristocrat was related to several families of princely rank, so is worth a look-in on this blogsite: a first cousin was married to a Prince Bismarck (son of the Iron Chancellor), while one of her aunts was married to the Duke of Ratibor and Prince of Corvey (from the hugely sprawling family of the princes of Hohenlohe), and another aunt was married to the Prince of Auersperg.

It is this last connection, Auersperg, that also allows us to look more closely at the area that was once the Von Trapp stomping grounds: Austria’s seacoast, known as the ‘Austrian Littoral’. Formed in 1849 from the old provinces of Istria, Görz/Gorizia and the city of Trieste, the Littoral is divided today between Italy, Croatia and Slovenia. It was a multi-ethnic area, called the Küstenland in German and Primorska by the Croats and Slovenes (just meaning ‘coastland’ in either language). This is where the Austro-Hungarian Navy was based, with its chief port in Pola (now Pula, Croatia), a naval academy in Fiume (now Rijeka) and shipbuilding facilities in Trieste. This is where most of Captain von Trapp’s wife’s money came from. Further inland was the province of Carniola, now (mostly) the Republic of Slovenia, where the Auersperg family ruled large estates for centuries, fairly independently of imperial rule in far-off Vienna. Their formal title here was Duke of Gottschee, which was the historic name for a small German-speaking enclave in what is now southeastern Slovenia. Since the Second World War, the area has been ‘ethnically cleansed’ and the area re-named Kočevsko (and its main town, Kočevje). The name initially referred to the local fir spruce or hvoja in Slovene.

So although the Von Trapps were not dukes or princes, this blog will look at their close cousins, the princes of Auersperg, dukes of Gottschee.

Let’s start though with Agathe Whitehead, the woman who does not appear in ‘The Sound of Music’. Her grandfather, Robert Whitehead, was an English engineer from Bolton who settled in Fiume in the 1850s and developed the first self-propelled torpedo. He soon constructed a large factory building torpedoes and ships for the Austro-Hungarian Navy, a business enterprise continued under his son John. When John died in 1902, most of this fortune passed to Agathe. Robert’s second son, Sir James Whitehead, was a diplomat, who eventually rose to the post of British envoy to the Kingdom of Serbia, 1906-10 (a pretty sensitive time to be in Belgrade); his son Edgar was also famous, a generation later, as Prime Minister of the British colony of Southern Rhodesia, 1958-62 (a pretty sensitive time to be in southern Africa!).

In 1911, Agathe married Georg Ritter von Trapp. Though his family originated in Hesse, in central Germany, he had been born in Zara, further down the Adriatic coast, which was briefly part of Italy after World War I so, oddly (considering the plot of ‘The Sound of Music’), he and his family were given Italian citizenship, but in 1947 it became part of Yugoslavia, and is now Zadar in Croatia. His father was also a naval captain, and had been elevated to the lowest rank of the Austrian nobility, ritter. They had a villa in Pola—in the centre of town, today divided into flats. With his marriage, Georg acquired the Whitehead villa in Fiume, built by Agathe’s grandfather on the Adriatic seafront in 1878, across the road from his factory, and a summer residence, Erlhof on Lake Zell in the Alps, south of Salzburg. Erlhof was a very old country house bought by Agathe’s grandmother in 1900—it has been run as a restaurant and hotel since the 1970s.

Agathe and the children spend World War I at Erlhof, while Georg became the most successful submarine commander. After 1918, Fiume and Pola became parts of the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (after 1929 changed to Yugoslavia), so the von Trapps settled in Klosterneuburg, a suburb of Vienna, where their last child (of seven) was born. That year, five of these children caught scarlet fever, and, in nursing them, so did their mother, and she died of it in September 1922. Georg moved the family in 1924 to a new villa in Aigen, a posh suburb of Salzburg, across the river from the old town, where, in 1926, he hired a young nun as nanny, Maria Agatha Kutschera (whose family was, interestingly in the context of this blog about ethnically blended Austrians, actually Kučera, from Moravia). They married in 1927 and had three more children. In 1935, Georg invested much of his late wife’s fortune in an Austrian bank—it failed and he lost most of his income. This explains in part why the family turned to professional singing. As the political climate in Austria heated up in 1938, the Captain and Maria took their large family on a concert tour to the United States and did not return.

So let’s return to Agathe Whitehead’s other, non-English, family—and it makes you realise that those children dancing around in drapery in Salzburg were actually very well connected to very aristocratic cousins in Vienna (and does also invite the question of who was the character of Baroness Schraeder modelled on…a mysterious ‘Princess Yvonne’?). Agathe’s mother, married to an Englishman born in Austria, was herself a blend of Austrian and Hungarian nobility. Agathe von Breuner’s father was Count August Johann von Breuner-Enckevoirt, and her mother was Countess Agota Széchenyi de Sárvár-Felsővidék, one of the leading Hungarian magnate families. Both the Breuner and Széchenyi families produced powerful statesmen in the nineteenth century: István Széchenyi was one of the greatest champions of progress in Budapest, as in fact was Agathe’s great-grandfather, Count August von Breuner in Vienna, as a leader of the liberal opposition to the ultra-conservative regime of Prince Metternich in the 1840s. One of the Auersperg princes we will encounter below was a key ally (and in fact his son-in-law). Later in the century, the Breuners became extinct, and their lands and their name passed to a cadet branch of the House of Auersperg.

The Breuner family were minor nobles from Styria (the Austrian province south of Vienna, in the Alps). Different origin stories say they originated here or they migrated here from the Rhineland in the Middle Ages. But they were securely situated in Styria by the 1450s, with the lordships and castles of Stübing and Fladnitz. They split into two branches in the sixteenth century. The senior Styrian branch became counts in 1666 and went extinct in 1827. The junior branch moved to Lower Austria and were given the lordship of Staatz in the region north of Vienna, with a prominent castle on a round hilltop overlooking the plain that leads from Austria into Bohemia; this castle was destroyed in the Thirty Years War—and it remains a ruin today—but by then they had acquired the castle of Asparn, a few miles into the hills to the south, and made it their chief residence. Asparn was a much grander residence, owned for a while by the Habsburgs themselves—today it houses a museum of pre-history and medieval archaeology.

The Breuners were elevated to the rank of baron in 1550, then count in the 1620s. They were prominent in Austrian imperial and provincial government in this century, until the senior line (at Asparn) died out in 1716, and the junior line inherited the properties of the Enckevoirt family and added that name to their own. The most prominent member of the family in this period was Philipp Friedrich, Bishop of Vienna, 1639 to 1669, during which time he rebuilt much of the diocese following the Thirty Years War and in particular re-constructed the grand high altar in St. Stephen’s Church in Vienna.

Other built memorials of the Breuner family included a Palais Breuner in Graz for the senior branch, and a Palais Breuner in Vienna for the junior branch—acquired by Count August in 1853 (formerly the Neupauer Palais, built 1715 for Austria’s Lord High Chamberlain), on Singerstrasse, in the neighbourhood behind the Dom. Their country seat was Schloss Grafenegg in Lower Austria (inherited in 1813), originally built in the fifteenth century, which they rebuilt in the 1840s-50s as one of the best examples of romantic historicism in architecture. The castle, near the city of Krems on the Danube, remains a major tourist attraction and concert venue today. This branch of the family died out in 1894, and the Viennese palace and Grafenegg Castle passed to the co-heiress who had married the Duke of Ratibor-Corvey—they still own both today. The rest of the properties (and the name Breuner, though now with two n’s for some reason) passed to the Auerspergs.

The Auersperg family took their name from a castle with an earlier form Ursperg, which may suggest it was named for the ancient mighty wild oxen, the aurochs, which survived in the wilds of eastern Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. The family coat of arms sports an ox’s head, as do the arms of several other Balkan families or states (like Moldavia).

The ancient triangular castle on a hilltop (the ‘berg’ or ‘perg’) has three towers, one of which is named the ‘Ox Tower’. The Slovene word for aurochs (or simply ‘aur’ in German) is ‘tur’, and the Slovene name for the castle is Grad Turjak (and the Auersperg family themselves are referred to locally as the Turjaški). The castle was built and rebuilt several times in the Middle Ages before the current mighty structure, from about 1220. Badly damaged in an earthquake of 1511, it was swiftly rebuilt and withstood and assault by Ottoman Turks in 1528.

Auersperg Castle dominates the valley of a river that flows north into the provincial capital of Ljubljana, today’s capital of Slovenia, but long known in German as Laibach, in the Austrian duchy of Carniola. This province takes its name from the indigenous ancient people here, the Carni, from which its German name, Krain, derives, though this sounds confusingly like the Slavic word for ‘border’, ‘krajina’, and a borderland indeed it was, between Slavs and later Germanic settlers, and between the Austrian realms and the ever-expanding Ottoman Empire to the southeast. The neighbouring province (and they are usually grouped together) is called the Windisch March, or ‘Slavic Border’ (Germans called Slavs Winds or Wends), which incidentally gave its name to another Austro-Slovene princely family, Windischgraetz, who will have their own blog post.

The Ursperg and later Auersperg family of knights defended this frontier for centuries. In the early Middle Ages they served the dukes of Carinthia (the duchy to the north) as chamberlains and marshals, then the Habsburgs in this same capacity once they took over Carinthia and Carniola in the 1330s. They divided into two main branches in the fifteenth century, with the senior line based in their castles of Schönberg and Seisenberg (today called Šumberk and Žužemberk in Slovene) and raised in rank to imperial baron (freiherr) in 1550. The lovely medieval castle of Seisenberg, on the Krka river southeast of Ljubljana, was rebuilt by the local bishop with seven great towers in the 1520s, then purchased by the Auerspergs in 1538. It became the family’s main residence in this region, and over the centuries they developed a significant ironworks industry here. All the family’s lands in Carniola were seized by the Yugoslav government in 1946, and have not been returned.

In the sixteenth century the House of Auersperg provided their Habsburg overlords with several able commanders, most famously Herbard VIII and Andreas, the ‘Carniolan Achilles’. Herbard (or Herward) was Military Governor of Carniola and Captain of the Croatian Frontier. He was also a Protestant and one of the leaders in implanting the reformed faith in this corner of the world; still today considered one of the heroes of Croatia and Slovenia. But in 1575 he took on the might of the Ottoman Empire at a battle in Croatia near Bihać (today’s border between Croatia and Bosnia) and was badly defeated—his head was severed and paraded in triumph back in Constantinople. Nearly two decades later, his cousin Andreas returned to this frontier as Commander-in-Chief of the Croatian Frontier and contributed to a significant defeat of the Turks at Sisak (1593), which effectively put a stop to Ottoman expansion over the River Sava—it was a dramatic victory, with the retreating Turks being forced to swim back across the river and many hundreds drowning.

It is worth noting again that these Auerspergs, like many members of the Austrian nobility, had joined the Protestant faith. Herbard’s father, Trajan, was an early supporter and protected a prominent Lutheran theologian in this region and supported his efforts to create the first translation of the Bible into Slovenian. Other Slovene books were printed here, one of the earliest efforts to bring a Slavic language to an equal footing with German.

In the seventeenth century, most of the Austrian high nobility converted back to Catholicism, and were rewarded by their Habsburg overlords. Two branches were established and raised to the rank of imperial count in 1630. The senior line retained the castle of Auersperg (until 1945) and continue to exist (the ‘comital branch’) today. Auersperg Castle was taken by Yugoslav Partisans in 1943 and badly damaged. Nationalised by the Communist regime that followed, it has only slowly been restored starting in the 1990s.

The junior line consisted of three brothers. The eldest, Wolfgang Engelbert, was a great collector of art and objects in his new grand residence in Ljubljana; he also acquired the County of Gottschee in 1641, the German speaking enclave in the hills of southern Carniola (as noted above) that would become a much more important part of the family’s story later on; its castle was rebuilt in the 1680s, and completely destroyed in World War II. The second brother Herward founded another line of counts (who died out in the early twentieth century); while the youngest brother, Johann Weikhard, founded the princely line that still exists today.

Johann Weikhard von Auersperg was born in Seisenberg Castle in 1615. He became a personal favourite of Emperor Ferdinand III (only a few years older), and in 1640 was appointed chamberlain and tutor to the Emperor’s son, Ferdinand IV, King of the Romans (the title held by the son and assumed successor of the Holy Roman Emperor). Auersperg was then sent to Westphalia to negotiate the settlement of peace for the Thirty Years War. He was rewarded with lands and elevation to the rank of Prince of the Empire in 1653.

But in order to secure this rank, Johann Weikhard needed to acquire an ‘immediate fief’, a territory subject to no other prince than the emperor, and conveniently there was one available: Tengen (or Thengen) near the western shores of Lake Constance in southern Swabia. It was a very small lordship (about 70 m²), but, recognised by the Emperor as a ‘princely county’ in 1654, it was enough to secure the Auerspergs a seat in the Chamber of Princes in the Imperial Diet. Tengen Castle is on a rocky spur above the town, and was already a ruin—the Auerspergs weren’t planning on moving there anyway, so very far from their centre of operations—and it remains a ruin today.

But Ferdinand III also rewarded his friend with another extraordinary gift, the Duchy of Münsterberg, in 1654. Münsterberg, even more than Tengen, was a semi-sovereign duchy, one of the many that made up the Duchy of Silesia, part of the Crown of Bohemia (which was by this point also held by the Habsburg emperor). When Silesia was cut off from the Kingdom of Poland in the early fourteenth century, this was one of the many smaller duchies into which it fragmented. Its castle, known today as Ziębica in Polish, was built around this time. The duchy also included the semi-autonomous city of Frankenstein (Ząbkowice). When the last of the original Polish (Piast) royal dukes died out in 1428, the duchy passed through various hands until it was held by the Czech Poděbrady family, 1456-1569. It then was ruled directly by the Habsburgs until it was given to Auersperg. The town of Münsterberg was prosperous and generated healthy revenues for its new dukes, but the ducal seat was at Frankenstein, where the old medieval castle had been given a Renaissance makeover in the 1520s. It was abandoned as a residence in the 1720s, and has been a ruin ever since.

For a princely residence in Austria itself, the 1^st Prince of Auersperg was given the Castle of Wels, in Upper Austria. The castle or burg of the town of Wels, on the river Traun, a tributary of the Danube, was built by the Babenbergs, the first dukes in this region, in the 1220s, then passed with their possessions to the Habsburgs later in that century. Emperor Maximilian I rebuilt it in Gothic style and died here a few years later in 1519. The Auerspergs would hold the castle and lands as a county (referred to as ‘princely county of Wels’ though I’m unsure why since there’s no sovereignty attached to it) until 1865 when they sold it to another family. Since 1937 it has belonged to the city itself and today houses the Wels City Museum.

Back home in Ljubljana, to celebrate his dramatic rise to the top of the aristocracy, Prince Johann Weikhard built a huge city palace, next door to one already recently built by his older brother Count Wolfgang Engelbert, in what is now the university district of the old town. The Prince’s Palace (Knežji Dvorec) was badly damaged by an earthquake in 1895 and torn down—in the 1930s, the National Library was built in its place. The Auersperg Palace (aka the Turjaška Palača) still exists, but was sold to the city in 1937 and today houses the City Museum.

The 1^st Prince of Auersperg continued his rise, and from 1665 to 1669 was the head of the Aulic Council for Emperor Leopold I, essentially ‘prime minister’ of Austria. Once again acting as an international diplomat, he concluded a secret treaty with Louis XIV by which France and Austria would agree to split the Spanish succession once King Carlos II of Spain would die (which was expected to be soon). But enemies back in Vienna accused the Prince of getting too cozy with the Sun King and making secret deals that would benefit himself and his family, so Emperor Leopold sacked him in 1669 and sent him home to his estates in Carniola, where he died nearly a decade later. His older brother died unmarried, so the Prince added the county of Gottschee to his already very large domains in the region.

The descendants of the middle brother, Herward, remained local and retained the hereditary offices of chamberlain and marshal of Carniola. One of these, Count Anton Alexander, became a leader of the liberal nationalist movement of young Austrians in the 1830s-40s, and a supporter of the revival of Slovene identity and folklore. He wrote poetry (in German) of a political and nationalist nature under the pseudonym ‘Anastasius Grün’.

The 2^nd Prince of Auersperg, Johann Ferdinand, succeeded his father in 1677 and died in 1705, leaving behind only a daughter, so the patrimony passed to his brother, Franz Karl, 3^rd Prince, who died less than a decade later. The latter had made more of an impact as a soldier in the last two decades of the seventeenth century, rising to the rank of Artillery General and Governor of Karlstadt (Karlovac) in Croatia. His son, Heinrich Joseph, 4^th Prince, returned the family to its favoured position at the Habsburg court that had been lost by his grandfather. He rose to the position of Grand Master of the Court under Emperor Charles VI in the 1730s, then served as Grand Equerry then Grand Chamberlain under Empress Maria Theresa in the 1760s-70s, also acting as governor to the young heir, Archduke Joseph (who became Emperor Joseph II). There were setbacks too: in 1742, Austria lost the province of Silesia to Prussia in the War of Austrian Succession—this meant that the Duchy of Münsterberg was converted from a semi-independent principality into a fief of the Hohenzollerns in Berlin. Eventually, the family sold Münsterberg to the King of Prussia, in 1791, and were compensated by the elevation of the County of Gottschee into a duchy by Emperor Leopold II. This is quite extraordinary—there are no other duchies within the territories of the Austrian Habsburgs (they alone were dukes of Carinthia, Styria, etc), with the exception of those in Silesia, like Münsterberg.

Then there were potential gains acquired through matrimony: through his first marriage, in 1719, to a Princess von und zu Liechtenstein, the 4^th Prince acquired several properties in Bohemia and Moravia. None of these became central Auersperg residences, and were sold within the next two generations. By his second marriage in 1726, to a Princess von Trautson, he gained a potential great succession in the Tirol, as well as the county of Falkenstein closer to Vienna in Lower Austria. This succession was secured by his son’s marriage to his step-mother’s niece in 1744—resulting in the creation of a junior line, Auersperg-Trautson, to which we’ll return.

The 4^th Prince of Auersperg died at the grand old age of 85 in 1783. He left many many children who married into the Austrian and Czech high nobility. Karl Joseph, the 5^th Prince, reigned as head of the house until 1800. His younger brother Johann Adam had been raised to the rank of prince on his wedding in 1746 (before this point, only the head of the family was a prince), and acquired a grand palace in Vienna that became the family’s chief residence in the imperial capital. The ‘Rosenkavalier Palace’ or Palais Rofrano had been built in the first decade of the eighteenth century on the western edge of the old city, in a newly developing suburb, Josefstadt (behind what is now the Austrian Parliament building). Johann Adam acquired it in 1777 and it was renamed the Palais Auersperg. Inside, it had a well-known grand hall in which concerts were regularly held: Gluck in the 1760s, and now Mozart and Haydn in the 1770s-80s. The Palace housed the exiled Swedish royal family, 1827-37. During World War II, it was used to hide resistance fighters and today is commemorated as the place where a provisional government committee met to plan the rebirth of postwar Austria. During the war, the Palace had passed to a sister of the Auersperg prince and it is now privately owned, though still used for grand events like balls and concerts.

One of the youngest brothers of the 5^th Prince, Joseph Franz, entered the church and rose through the ranks to become bishop of Lavant then Gurk (in southern Austria), then Prince-Bishop of Passau in 1783, and finally cardinal, 1789. He was a builder, re-fashioning episcopal residences in all his dioceses, notably the Passau summer residence, Schloss Freudenhain. He was also a passionate follower of Enlightenment reform, and was closely aligned to the movement led by Emperor Joseph II: he supported toleration for Jews, religious reforms against superstition in his diocese, and constructed schools, hospitals and theatres, believing the latter to be morally edifying for his flock.

The two eldest sons of the 5^th Prince of Auersperg divided the succession, with the elder brother, Karl, receiving the princely title and the dukedom of Gottschee, and the younger, Karl, taking on the succession of their mother and step-grandmother and adding their name to his own: Auersperg-Trautson. The Trautson family were an old Austrian noble house who were raised to the rank of Imperial princes in 1711—but there were only two holders of this title and the line became extinct in 1775. Trautson history reaches back to the early Middle Ages when they took possession of important castles that guarded either side of the Brenner Pass, once the dividing point between northern and southern Tirol, but now the frontier between Austria and Italy. For several generations they were hereditary Landmarshalls of the County of Tirol (the presiding officer over the local assembly). Castle Trautson, high above the river Sill, dates back to the 1220s, and was largely destroyed by an air raid in World War II by bombers aiming for the Brenner railway bridge and tunnel that passes directly beneath the castle—but an elegant chapel from the 1680s survived. The ruined castle is still owned by the Auersperg-Trautsons, as is Castle Sprechenstein, on the other side of the pass, now in Italy. It is still private and not open to visitors.

In addition to these Tirolean castles, solitary stone fortresses on rocky outcroppings deep in the Alps, the Trautson inheritance also included a more stylish country house, Schloss Goldegg, west of Vienna in Lower Austria (not far from the famous Melk Monastery). A medieval castle here had been rebuilt and enlarged in the early seventeenth century, then purchased by the Trautsons in 1669, and now passed to the Auerspergs. The senior line of princes retained it as their main country seat in Austria until it was inherited by a daughter in 2015 and passed out of the family.

Meanwhile, another house, not far away, has been the seat of the cadet branch of Auersperg-Trautson since they purchased it in 1930: Schloss Wald. It was similarly an old castle expanded in the early modern period, and is still held by the family today. The current head of this branch is Prince Franz Josef (b. 1954) who married Archduchess Maria Constanza in 1994, a granddaughter of Austria’s last emperor.

The other main Trautson estate in Lower Austria was the county of Falkenstein and its ruined castle, which was not retained by the Auersperg family since the inheritance was contested by another princely family, the Lambergs (who happened also to be an old Carniola family), so it was sold in 1799. Across the border in Bohemia, the Trautson succession included several properties that were divided between the senior and junior lines. The most esteemed of these, Vlašim (Wlaschim in German), had been favoured by the first Auersperg to acquire it, the 5^th Prince, Karl Joseph, and his wife, the heiress Maria Josepha von Trautson. Located in the hills southeast of Prague, the castle dates back to about 1300, but had also been remodelled in about 1600. The Prince and Princess developed its gardens in the style of the fashionable English Garden in the 1770s, and included numerous outbuildings for visitors and guests to enjoy, from stone grottoes and Roman temples to a Chinese pavilion. The castle and its gardens were confiscated by the Czechoslovak state in 1945, and today the buildings house a regional museum, happily preserving many of the gardens’ finest features.

The 6^th Prince of Auersperg, Wilhelm I, presided over the family between 1800 and 1822. During this time, the Holy Roman Empire came to an end (1806), and tiny principalities like Tengen were absorbed by their larger neighbours, in this case the Grand Duchy of Baden. The Auerspergs retained the property, but the Prince decided to sell it to the Grand Duke outright in 1811. Meanwhile, the duchy of Gottschee and other castles and estates in Carniola were annexed by the Empire of the French in 1809 as part of its new ‘Illyrian Provinces’. After this territory was regained by the Austrian Empire in 1814 it was renamed the ‘Kingdom of Illyria’, before finally returning to its previous status in 1849 as the Crown Land of Carniola within the Austrian half of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The 7^th Prince, Wilhelm II, was only head of the family for five years, dying relatively young in 1827. His uncle Karl von Auersperg-Trautson had no sons, so this inheritance was transferred to the Prince’s nephew, Vincenz Carl, who assumed the title Prince of Auersperg-Trautson. He became Grand Chamberlain of the Austrian court in 1863. It is his descendants who hold the Trautson lands today.

The new head of the family overall, Karl Wilhelm, 8^th Prince, was only 13, but eventually he grew and by the 1840s emerged as a youthful leader of the liberal or constitutional party, opponents of the arch-conservative Prince Metternich (as we’ve seen with his soon-to-be kinsman, Count von Breuner, above). When a constitution was finally granted in 1861, Emperor Franz Josef thus turned to Prince von Auersperg to serve as the first President of the new Austrian House of Lords. He also served as a member of the Bohemian Landtag and at times as that body’s president. After the Compromise of 1867 (creating an entirely separate Kingdom of Hungary), the Emperor asked Auersperg to form a liberal government for the Austrian half (‘Cisleithania’) of the Dual Monarchy. But he resigned after only a year as Minister-President due to conflicts with concessions being demanded by ethnic minorities, notably the Czechs—for although he considered himself a liberal, like most of his landowning magnate class, he favoured centralisation and a blending of cultures, not the separatism being demanded by nationalist movements. From 1868 to 1879, he resumed his position as President of the Austrian House of Lords. He had no children and died in 1890.

Meanwhile, the Prince’s brother Adolf, was also a political force in Vienna. Born at Vašim, he also served a term as president of the Landtag of Bohemia, 1867-70, then a similar role in the province of Salzburg, 1870. From 1871 to 79, he took on his older brother’s role as Minister-President of Austria, but he too resigned over a question about Slavs, this time in Bosnia (newly occupied in 1878). His resignation effectively marked the end of liberalism as a leading party in Austria.

Adolf’s son Karl took over as 9^th Prince of Auersperg in 1890. He was quite close to Emperor’s son Crown Prince Rudolf (born just a year apart), and was shattered by his friend’s suicide in 1889. He took up his seat in the Austrian House of Lords and rose to be its vice-president from 1897 to 1907. He still sat as a member of the liberal-constitutional party, but never rose to greater prominence in the Imperial government. He turned much of his attentions instead to his estates back in Carniola and his role as president of the diet there, and in 1907 was elected to represent Gottschee in the lower house of the Austrian Parliament. In 1885, he married Countess Eleonore von Breuner, which brings us back to the start of this story and into the orbit of the Von Trapp family.

After 1918, princely and ducal titles were abolished in Austria, and Carniola became Slovenia, one of the component parts of the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The 9^th Prince died in 1927, leaving the now empty titles to his grandson, Karl Adolf—his elder son Adolf had died in 1923, while his younger son Karl assumed the name Auersperg-Breunner, and founded a new branch with the Breunner family properties, many which were surely well known to the Von Trapp cousins—when visiting Vienna for example. The heads of both branches moved to South America after the Second World War, the senior line to Uruguay and the junior to Argentina. Some remain in South America today while others have returned to Europe. The head of the junior branch, Prince Franz-Josef of Auersperg-Breuner (b. 1956), has a son and heir, Camilo, born in Buenos Aires, while the head of the senior branch, Adolf Karl, 11^th Prince von Auersperg (b. 1937), has a son and heir, Carl Adolf, born in Montevideo.

Many Austrian nobles emigrated to the Americas, like the Von Trapps, in the 1940s either for an innocent fresh start after the horrors of the Nazi era in their country or in many cases to escape their darker histories. One of the Auersperg-Trautsons was Alfred, a leading university psychologist in Vienna in the 1930s who became a Nazi Party member and part of the SS, and led some of the more questionable advances in neuroscience in the early 1940s. Fired from his job in 1945, he left for Brazil, then was invited to Chile to set up a psychology clinic in 1949, at a time when Chile’s government was shifting to the right. Another younger son from the Trautson branch rose to prominence, but this time—again making a connection with the Von Trapps—in music: Johannes Auersperg was a double bass player and teacher in Austria in the 1960s-70s. An early supporter of the baroque music revival of that era, he formed the Austrian Barocktrio and later led the Austrian Youth Orchestra and taught at the University of Graz.

Let the sound of music play on!

(images Wikimedia Commons)

Once upon a time, in a far-off forest in Bohemia, a princess was attacked by a ferocious wolf. Her attendant bravely fought off the wild beast, and in gratitude, the princess ennobled her hero and granted him a coat-of-arms depicting the bold swipe of wolf’s claws on a blood-red field (some modern descriptors call these boar’s teeth). Centuries later, his purported descendants, the Kinskys, would rise to the ranks of princes themselves, and by the 19^th century were amongst the richest noble houses in the entire Austro-Hungarian monarchy.

The Kinsky family emerged from legend into history in the early 13^th century with the possession of an estate in northwest Bohemia around the village of Vchynice, from which they took their name. This is just outside the town of Lovosice on the great river Elbe as it flows north towards the mountains separating Bohemia from Saxony. Their lands were downriver from the estates that formed the core of another Czech house that survived the great purge of the native nobility by the Habsburgs in the 1620s, the Lobkowitz family, seen in a previous blog post. By the 14^th century, the owners of Vchynice had taken it as their surname, and eventually dropped the first letter to be instead Chynsky (or ‘Chinitz’ in Latin sources), and added z (‘of’) Vchynic, or von Wchinitz in German. Today the family name in Czech is spelled Kinští, but they are commonly known in other European languages including English as Kinsky. They are not, it should be noted, related in any way to the famous family of actors descended from Klaus Kinski, whose original name was Nakszynski and who emigrated from northern Poland to Germany.

The family from Vchynice gained more lands and took on roles as royal officials in towns and forests in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Jan Vchynsky z Vchynice (d. 1590) was Burggraf (administrator of a royal castle) of Karlštejn, the famous castle built by Emperor Charles IV in the 1340s. His son Radislav (d. 1619) added greatly to his family’s landholdings (though Vchynice itself had been sold in the 1540s) and to its prestige. He was guardian of the orphaned sons of the noble Tetauer of Tetova family, and, noticing the similarity of their coat of arms, decided to claim kinship as well as their noble status (and, in good early modern practice, forged some documents as ‘evidence’), adding the name ‘Tetova’ to his own (c. 1596). Tetova, or Tettau in German, was an old fief in Lusatia, a province for centuries part of the Bohemian Crown, but lost to Saxony in the 1630s (today the town is just across the border, in the Province of Brandenburg). The von Tettau family continued on for centuries, active in Brandenburg and then Prussian court and military service—both families continue to use the same coat of arms, and many genealogies still say one family is an ‘offshoot’ of the other. And maybe they are.

The newly rebranded Radislav Kinsky z Vcynhic a Tetova (or Wchinitz und Tettau in German) was favoured by Emperor Rudolf II, King of Bohemia, and in 1611 was appointed Master of the Court of Bohemia, and given a seat in Bohemian Diet with the rank of ‘lord’ (pán) for himself and his family. His nephews, Radislav, Oldřich and Vilém were all actively involved in the great uprising of the Protestant Bohemian nobility against Habsburg rule in 1618—and the famous ‘defenestration of Prague’ of May 23^rd. When this uprising was crushed after the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, Radislav fled, and Oldřich had his lands confiscated, like so many members of the old Czech nobility, soon replaced by loyal Austrian nobles. Somehow Vilém had sufficiently ‘acted obscurely’ during the revolt, and managed not only to hold on to the family estates, but was promoted in rank to ‘Count Kinsky’ in 1628. This was mostly due to his association with rising Imperial warlord, Albrecht von Wallenstein (or in Czech, z Valdštejna)—his wife’s brother’s wife was Wallenstein’s wife’s sister, if you can follow that (or his brother-in-law was also brother-in-law of Wallenstein). At some point in the early 1630s, Count Kinsky was living in exile in Dresden in Saxony, and tried to get Wallenstein to switch allegiances and join the Protestant side of the Thirty Years War—this did not happen, but they remained close, and were both assassinated by agents of the Emperor who feared the rising independent strength of his own general, at Cheb (Eger) in February 1634. One of his estates that was confiscated was the mighty castle of Teplice (Teplitz) in the mountains of the northwest—it had only been acquired by the family in 1585, but from here on was one of the principal residence of the princely Clary-Aldringen family (so will properly be looked at for that family).

The youngest of all those brothers, Jan Oktavián, in the years before the uprising, had been chamberlain of Emperor Matthias (successor of Rudolf II), and obtained the castle and estate of Chlumec nad Cidlinou, in 1611. This castle on the river Cidlina is northeast of Prague, built in the 15^th century and expanded by the Pernštejn family in the 16^th. It was the Kinsky seat until a new castle was built in 1721-23 just outside the town, Karlova Koruna (see below). The older castle fell into disrepair and was finally town down in the 1960s.

Jan Oktavián was pardoned after the events of 1618-20, and consolidated the landholdings of all the branches over the next several decades, notably the castle of Česká Kamenice in the farthest northern corner of Bohemia. Built in the 1530s by the Vartemberks, it had been purchased by Radislav Kinsky, and stayed in the family until 1945. Since then it has been used as housing for the state forestry administration.

All the current Kinskys descend from Count Jan Oktavián. He took on his father’s office of Master of the Court from 1646—an office passed to his two sons then two grandsons before it was finally confirmed as hereditary by Maria Theresa in 1743. The Kinsky Masters of the Court (Hofmeister in German, Hofmistr in Czech) would thus perform a key role when any Habsburg visited Bohemia, but most importantly at their coronations in Prague. Jan Oktavián was confirmed in his rank of count in 1676 and died three years later.

His son Count František Oldřich (Franz Ulrich) (d. 1699) was thus Master of the Court and also High Chancellor of Bohemia, 1683, and a member of the Emperor’s privy council from 1689. In the 1690s he was one of the leading members of the Imperial court and led important negotiations with the Ottomans. Two other Kinskys held the highest judiciary office in the Kingdom of Bohemia: František Oldřich’s brother Václav Norbert (d. 1719), in 1705-1711, and the latter’s son, František Ferdinand (d. 1741), 1723-36. The latter was a diplomat and organised the election in Frankfurt of the Archduke Charles of Austria as Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1712.

Count František Ferdinand built a new family residence at Chlumec, Karlova Koruna Castle in the early 1720s: named ‘Charles’ Crown’, in honour of the coronation of Emperor as King of Bohemia. This castle, a baroque pleasure palace with a unique floorplan, on a small hill overlooking a park, is still in amazing shape, and was restored to the Kinsky family in 1990 following the period of Communist rule. The nearby hexagonal Chapel of the Annunciation (later of St John the Baptist) became the family sepulchre for many years.

Count František Ferdinand also acquired the Castle of Eckartsau in Lower Austria, 1720, an ancient medieval castle which he remodelled as a in Baroque style. Located on the Danube between Vienna and Pressburg (today’s Bratislava), it made a convenient stopping point for the Imperial family, so Emperor Francis I purchased it in 1760—it was thus only a Kinsky property for 40 years—it later became famous for hosting the last court of Austria-Hungary in 1917-18, and was the place of abdication for the last emperor, Charles I, in November 1918.

František Ferdinand had three sons, all high-ranking military commanders in the second half of the 18^th century. His second son Joseph in particular was Commander of the Army of Hungary in 1787, then of the entire Habsburg army in 1788. His younger brother Franz Joseph became Director of the Theresian Military Academy in Vienna, founder of an army cadet school in Prague, and all-round pedagogical wonder of his century. The eldest, Leopold Ferdinand married a Liechtenstein princess and founded the senior line of the Kinskys, the Chlumsky Branch. There are still several Kinsky counts around descended from this line, but they are not princes.

It was Václav Norbert’s second son, Štepán Vilém (Stephan Wilhelm) (1679-1749) who promoted his branch of the family into the highest ranks of the Habsburg nobility. He served Emperor Charles VI as a diplomat—St Petersburg and Versailles—and was Grand Marshal of Bohemia, 1733, and Grand Master of the Court. In 1746, the Emperor’s grateful daughter and successor, Maria Theresa, as Queen of Bohemia, created him Prince Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau; a year later, he was also created Prince of the Empire by Maria Theresa’s husband, Francis Stephen of Lorraine, recently elected as Emperor Francis I. Unlike most princes of the Empire, the Kinskys did not hold an immediate fief, so the title was attached to the person, and was only held by the senior male (so other children were count/countess). It did not bring the family a vote or a seat in the Imperial Diet.

When the Kinsky estates were divided, the first Prince Kinsky received as his share the castles at Česká Kamenice (see above) and Choceň. Choceň (Chotzen) was located in the Pardubice region. It was a market town with a castle built in the 1560s and rebuilt in the 18^th century, by which point it was in Kinsky hands. The family completely rebuilt it after a fire in 1829, and used it as a favoured summer residence in the next century. Since 1945 it has housed an art school and a history and archaeology museum.

Franz Joseph, 2^nd Prince Kinsky, succeeded his father in 1749, but he died in 1752 at age 26 with no male heir, so the succession passed to a first cousin. The first Prince’s younger brother, Philipp Joseph, had also been a diplomat, notably the Imperial envoy to London, 1728 to 1736. He then served, like so many of his forebears, as High Chancellor of Bohemia, 1738, and one of the close advisors to Empress Maria Theresa in the first years of her reign. But he too died relatively young, in 1749, meaning that the succession went instead to his son, Franz de Paula Ulrich. A younger son, Johann Joseph, became an entrepreneur on his estates—glass and textiles—and founded another line of Kinsky counts.

The 3^rd Prince Kinsky (1726-1792) had a long military career, rising to the rank of General of Artillery in 1767, Director-General of the Austrian Artillery, 1772, then Field Marshal, 1778. He purchased grand residences in two of the Habsburg capitals: Prague and Vienna. The Kinsky Palace in Prague, located right on the Old Town Square (Staroměstské náměstí) in the heart of the historic city, had initially been built in the 1750s by the Golz family, then purchased by the Kinskys in 1768. A distinctive pink and white rococo palace, it also had spaces for shops on the ground floor that opened up onto the square: at the end of the 19^th century, Franz Kafka’s father had a haberdasher’s shop here, and young Franz himself went to secondary school located on a higher floor. In the 1920s-30s it served as the Polish Legation to Czechoslovakia, and since 1949 has been part of the National Gallery.

On the other side of the Vltava River that flows through Prague, the Kinskys built a Summer House, in about 1830, and a Romantic garden with rare trees and waterfalls. Since 1901 the Summer House has housed a museum of ethnography.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, Prince Kinsky purchased in 1784 a palace built by the Daun family in 1713 on the northwest edge of the old city close to the University, facing onto a large square called the Freyung. In the 20^th century, the Palais Kinsky passed out of the family to a daughter who married an Argentine, so it became the Argentine Embassy in the 1960s. Sold by the family in 1987, it was restored and re-opened in the 1990s as an auction house and a place for fancy receptions—its lower levels house shops and restaurants.

The princely line of the Kinskys in the later 18^th and early 19^th centuries was quite limited in terms of the number of sons, meaning that the family’s wealth did not need to be divided amongst heirs. Like many of the great aristocrats in Vienna in this period they were great patrons of music: Joseph, 4^th Prince Kinsky (d. 1798) was a patron of the Czech musician Pavel Wranitzky—who is not very famous, but has wonderfully bold music in the heroic vein of late Haydn—while the 5^th Prince, Ferdinand (d. 1812), was an important patron of Beethoven from 1809—one of the aristocratic trio that included Archduke Rudolf and Prince Josef František von Lobkowitz—the three paid him a pension to enable him to stay permanently in Vienna and not seek employment elsewhere. But he soon died; his widow continued the pension, and was thanked by means of a song, An die Hoffnung (‘to hope’).

Another junior branch was created by Ferdinand’s younger brother, Count Franz de Paula. The most prominent member of this line was his daughter, Franziska, who became Princess-Consort of Liechtenstein as wife of Prince Aloys II (r 1836-58), and then regent of the principality for her son, 1858-60.

Rudolf, the 6^th Prince (d. 1836), was part of the Czech national revival movement that took hold of much of the Bohemian elite society in the 1820s—in particular he supported the creation of a National Museum in Prague. Though mostly still based at Choceň Castle, in 1828, he also added to his family’s estates through the purchase of Heřmanův Městec (Hermannstädtel in German), a town east of Prague towards the hills of Moravia. He improved the town, built and orphanage and hospital, and extended the old castle and developed its English style gardens. Since the 1950s, this castle has housed a retirement home.

The 4^th, 5^th and 6^th princes all died relatively young, in their 30s-40s; in contrast, the 7^th Prince Kinsky, Ferdinand Bonaventura (d. 1904), lived until he was 70. He sat as a hereditary member of the Austrian House of Lords, but was not very political. Instead, he developed his estates in Bohemia, notably its industries, sugar and beer. He had three sons and a daughter, Elisabeth, whose daughter once again connected this family to the House of Liechtenstein: Georgina von Wilczek was Princess-Consort of Liechtenstein from 1938 to 1989.

The eldest son, Karl, 8^th Prince Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau (d. 1919), only outlived his father by 15 years. As heir, he had long made his name as one of the premier equestrians in Europe. In particular, he was passionate about horseracing in England. In 1883, he himself rode his prize-winning horse (Zoedone) to victory at the Grand National.

Horses had in fact been an important aspect of the Kinsky dynastic identity for centuries. A Kinsky was put in charge of the Emperor Charles VI’s newly commissioned stud farm in eastern Bohemia in 1723, to breed horses specifically for elite cavalry units. These were the famous ‘Kinsky Horses’, with a distinctive gold colour and renowned stamina. Count Oktavián, from one of the junior branches, was one of Europe’s most successful breeders in the mid-nineteenth century, and introduced English style racing to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1874—an event still held today (the Grand Pardubice Steeplechase).

The 8^th Prince managed to stay in England for many years by serving in a diplomatic post, as Austrian attaché to Great Britain. He became very close, maybe too close, to Lady Randolph Churchill (the American-born Jennie Jerome). When he was recalled to Austria-Hungary due to the outbreak of World War One, he accepted a military command but arranged it so he would fight only on the Eastern Front against Russia, and never against Britain. In December 1918, noble status was abolished shortly after the declaration of the independent republic of Czechoslovakia; then in April 1919, titles of nobility were abolished for Austria too. In December that same year the 8^th Prince died, and was succeeded by his brother, Rudolf, the 9th Prince, who died in 1930 leaving five daughters.

The princely title thus went to his nephew Ulrich (Oldřich). This prince’s father, Count Ferdinand Vincenz (d. 1916), had served in the last decade of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as Master of the Horse for Emperor Franz Josef. He lived at Moravský Krumlov, inherited from a maternal uncle, and Horažd’ovice. The former, in southern Moravia, is a huge castle from the 13^th century, built by the Lipá noble family and held until 1620—it was then held by the Liechtensteins until passed to Prince Kinsky in 1908 (so it mostly belongs in their story). Today the castle belongs to the town and is slowly being restored back to its former glory. Horažd’ovice Castle is a more modest building, in the far west of Bohemia, bought by Prince Kinsky in 1843. A 13^th-century Gothic castle was replaced in the 15^th century by the Švihovský family, who, as we’ve seen with so many others, had their lands confiscated in 1620. The Kinskys developed local industries here, notably pearl oyster farming. It too belongs to its town and houses a variety of civic spaces: a city museum, gallery, information centre, youth centre, library and a restaurant too!

Prince Ulrich was born at Choceň. Like so many of his ancestors, he did not have a long life (1893-1938), but in his final years he impacted the future of the family through his strong support of the Sudenten German Party which advocated annexation of much of western and northern Bohemia by Nazi Germany, a fateful decision that heavily impacted the future of his dynasty.

His son Franz Ulrich, 11^th Prince Kinsky (1936-2009), emigrated as a child with his mother to Argentina, where he spent most of his life. At the end of the Second World War, his family’s lands were confiscated due to his father’s political stance, first by the restored republic, then by the Communist regime. They were not restored following the ‘Velvet Revolution’ of the 1990s, as many estates were to old Czech noble families. In 2003, many (over 150) lawsuits were filed versus the Czech state, pressing claims totalling over 13 billion Euros. The Prince argued that he was only two in 1940, and that his mother’s family, Bussche-Haddenhausen, were strongly anti-Nazi.

His son, Karel Maximilian (‘Charlie’ or ‘Carlos’), 12^th Prince Kinsky (b. 1967, in Buenos Aires), succeeded in 2009 and renewed the application to the Czech government for restitution of lands in 2012, and the European courts upheld his claim that his father (the child in the 1940s) had not been given a fair trial. It remains pending. He is married and has an heir, Wenzel (Václav) Ferdinand (b. 2002).

Yet another Liechtenstein connection was made by the 11^th Prince’s first cousin, Countess Marie Kinská, who in 1967 married the Hereditary Prince Hans Adam II, who has reigned since 1989. The Princess of Liechtenstein died in 2021.

Today there remain three main lines of the House of Kinsky: the princely branch (nominally based) at Choceň and two branches of counts, at Kostelec and Chlumec. Unlike the princely line, these branches were more firmly identified with Czech nationalism in the 1930s, and although they also had their castles and estates appropriated by the Communist regime after 1945, they were recovered in the 1990s.

The Kostelec branch was founded by a second son of the 5^th Prince Kinsky at the end of the 18^th century. The Castle Kostelec on the Orlice river is in northeast Bohemia, a ‘fortified church’ built in the early 14^th century then held as a castle by various families until purchased by Josef Kinsky in 1796. A newer castle was built here by this branch of the Kinskys in about 1830, in neoclassical style. The two buildings were restored to the Kinskys in the 1990s, and house a gallery and town history museum.

The Chlumec (or Chlumsky) branch, as seen above, is actually the senior line, formed by the elder brother of the 1^st Prince at the start of the 18^th century. One of these, Count Zdenko Radslav Kinsky (d. 1975), was the instigator of the 1938 Declaration of members of the old Czech families proclaiming the inviolability of the territory of the Czech state and protesting any idea of its dismemberment or a takeover by Nazi Germany. His properties were confiscated when this failed and a Nazi protectorate was established in Bohemia. It was returned in 1945, then confiscated again by the Communists in 1948. He emigrated to France and died in Rome.

Count Zdenko’s son, Count Václav Norbert (d. 2008), married an Italian heiress and added her surname, dal Borgo, to his own. Late in life he became active in the Order of Malta—no longer crusading knights, but a global Catholic charity—and served as ambassador from the Order (which is based in Rome) to the Republic of Malta, then as Grand Prior of the Order in the Czech Republic, 2002-2004. The Kinsky-Dal Borgo branch reclaimed Chlumec, Karlova Koruna and other castles in the 1990s, and have been avidly restoring them.

Another member of this cadet branch, Count Christian (d. 2011), married the heiress of a mighty fortress in Austria, Heidenresichstein, in the far north of the country near the border with Bohemia. A moated castle with several towers, it was built in the later twelfth century, and was held by two families—amongst others—for about three centuries each: von Puchheim and Palffy. The latter died out in 1942, and ultimately the inheritance went to the Kinskys, who still own it today.

(images Wikimedia Commons)