Schwarzenberg (Statesman)
From Classic Encyclopedia 1911
SCHWARZENBERG (1586-1646), was an Austrian statesman in the Thirty Years' War. Johann, Freiherr Von Schwarzenberg Und Hohenlandsberg (1463-1528), was a celebrated jurist and a friend of Luther.
morally hostile, and Schwarzenberg gained some minor successes by skilful manoeuvres without a great battle; afterwards, under instructions from Napoleon, he remained for some months inactive at Pultusk. In 1813, when Austria, after many hesitations, took the side of the allies against Napoleon, Schwarzenberg, recently promoted to be field marshal, was appointed commander-in-chief of the allied Grand Army of Bohemia. As such he was the senior of the allied generals who conducted the campaign of1813-1814to the final victory before Paris and the overthrow of Napoleon. It is the fashion to accuse Schwarzenberg of timidity and over-caution, and his operations can easily be made to appear in that colour when contrasted with those of his principal subordinate, the fiery Blucher, but critics often forget that Schwarzenberg was an Austrian general first of all, that his army was practically the whole force that Austria could put into the field in Central Europe, and was therefore not lightly to be risked, and that the motives of his pusillanimity should be sought in the political archives of Vienna rather than in the text-books of strategical theory. In any case his victory, however achieved, was as complete as Austria desired, and his rewards were many, the grand crosses of the Maria Theresa and of many foreign orders, an estate, the position of president of the Hofkriegsrath, and, as a specially remarkable honour, the right to bear the arms of Austria as an escutcheon of pretence. But shortly afterwards, having lost his sister Caroline, to whom he was deeply attached, he fell ill. A stroke of paralysis disabled him in 1817, and in 1820, when revisiting Leipzig, the scene of the V olkerschlacht that he had directed seven years before, he was attacked by a second stroke. He died there on the 15th of October.
His eldest son, Friedrich, Prince Zu Schwarzenberg (1800-1870), had an adventurous career as a soldier, and described his wanderings and campaigns in several interesting works, of which the best known is his Wanderungen eines Lanzknechtes (1844-1845). He took part as an Austrian officer in the campaigns of Galicia 1846,1846, Italy 1848 and Hungary 1848, and as an amateur in the French conquest of Algeria, the Carlist wars in Spain and the Swiss civil war of the Sonderbund. He became a majorgeneral in the Austrian army in 1849, and died after many years of well-filled leisure in 1870. The second son, Karl Philipp (d. 1858), was a Feldzeugmeister; the third, Edmund Leopold Friedrich (1803-1873), a field marshal in the Austrian army. Of Schwarzenberg's nephews, Felix, the statesman, is separately noticed, and Friedrich Johann Josef Coelestin (1809-1885) was a cardinal and a prominent figure in papal and Austrian history.
See Prokesch-Osten, Denkwiirdigkeiten aus dem Leben des Feldmarschall's Fiirsten Schwarzenberg (Vienna, 1823); Berger, Das Fiirstenhaus Schwarzenberg (Vienna, 1866), and a memoir by the same hand in Stre fleur's Ost. Militarzeitschrift, 1863.
