Veritas (Atto Melani)

by Monaldi, Rita

  The Habsburgs were up to their eyes in debt to the Fuggers. And so Maximilian could not get rid of Ilsung that easily.

  “Georg Ilsung was the fountain from which the gold of the emperors flowed,” said Simonis in no uncertain terms. “If they needed money for the war against the Turks, he was the one that found it. If there was a revolt in Hungary and arms were needed, or money to pay off the leaders of the uprising, he would see to it. If a loan had to be bargained from the Fuggers, offering as guarantee the income from customs duties or the revenue of the imperial mercury mines in Idria, he was the one they turned to. If there were debts to pay, Ilsung would contact other financial backers to spread the payment of interest. If he could not find anyone, he would pay from his own pocket and patiently wait for the Emperor or his treasurers to find the time and means to pay him back.”

  “So he had the Emperor under his thumb.”

  “He could do whatever he wanted with him. In the meantime the other powerful counsellor, David Ungnad, travelled to and fro between Constantinople and Vienna, on the pretext of ambassadorial missions.”

  “A spy of the Sublime Porte,” I guessed, without much difficulty.

  “In close contact with Suleiman’s financial backers,” my assistant concluded.

  Maximilian, he went on, felt he was in their power and wondered when they would finally cast him off. He watched with concern as his son Rudolph gradually fell into their clutches, wanting to do something about it but unable to trust anyone. He was divested of all authority, a corpse on the throne.

  He had been a brilliant conversationalist, lively and sociable, full of ideas and projects. Just as the Empire had placed its hopes in him, he had placed his hopes in the future. Now he grew withdrawn, surly, and enigmatic. He no longer opened up to the pleasure of conversation; his eyes, once so lively and penetrating, had become melancholy, his voice dull and flat. The ambassadors of foreign powers reported regularly to their masters that the Emperor was no longer himself, that the reversal he had suffered at Suleiman’s hands had marked him forever. A dead man, the Turkish Sultan, had defeated a living one, and had transformed him into the semblance of a dead man.

  The courageous decision not to persecute the Protestant heretics, and even to accept many of them as counsellors, together now with this sad and impenetrable character, made him unpopular with his own people. By now there were those who suspected that behind this complicated man, behind his tormented nature and his incomprehensible policies, there was nothing but a confused mind.

  Maximilian had never had a strong physique; now he seemed in steep decline. On the way back from the military campaign to Vienna, his old affliction of palpitations had resurfaced. He had fallen out of love with so many things that only one project now seemed close to his heart.

  “He dreamed of a new building,” explained Simonis, “and we are right inside that dream of his: the Place with No Name.”

  He was too conscientious to neglect affairs of State. But every free moment was devoted to the project of his new castle. As time went by he spent ever greater sums on it, and it was said that it became a compulsion, a sort of sweet torment: was it better to use this stone or that marble? This cornice or that frieze? In the façade, was a serliana better than a porch? And in the garden, what trees, what hedges, what rare varieties of roses? The indecision he had been criticised for in the war against Suleiman was now his sweet companion. The Venetian ambassador wrote to his compatriots that the Emperor had just one concern, to which he devoted himself wholeheartedly, a real obsession: creating a garden and a villa, half a league from Vienna, which when completed would be a truly regal and imperial palace.

  Curiously enough, at the planning stage he turned to the same Italian architects he had summoned years ago to reinforce Vienna in view of the war against the Turks. But for the Place With No Name, these ingenious Italians did not design ramparts, ravelins and counterscarps: instead, they planned towers like minarets, oriental half-moons and Ottoman-style seraglios.

  The court and the people were flabbergasted. What on earth was driving the Emperor to pay such sumptuous homage to the architecture of Mahomet?

  But it was no mere caprice, no whim of a melancholy and confused spirit.

  “In 1529, more than thirty years before the defeat of Maximilian, Suleiman the Magnificent had besieged Vienna. It was the first of the two great – and unsuccessful – sieges that the Infidels laid to the Caesarean city. Suleiman had set out from Constantinople accompanied by immense resources of men and money, which he had received from the many people who were hoping, either from greed or from resentment or just out of personal hatred, to see the powerful throne of Peter fall at last. The fortunes of entire families, accumulated from generation to generation, had flowed into the Sultan’s coffers to finance his campaign against the Giaours, as they call us Christians. Suleiman spared no expense: during the siege he chose as his lodgings, not a military tent, but a rich and gigantic camp, almost a reconstruction of his palace in Constantinople, with fountains, water-games, musicians, animals and a harem.”

  To conquer Vienna, and with it the whole Christian world, did not seem an impossible enterprise, explained the Greek: just a hundred years earlier had not Constantinople itself, the New Rome, the Byzantium of the most pious Empress Theodora, Justinian’s beloved consort, fallen into Turkish hands?

  “That ‘lascivious dancer’ – as the treacherous and mendacious scribbler of Caesarea apostrophised her behind her back – with her fervent and shrewd monophysitism had won her place in paradise, and on her premature death had left a lofty testament in political and religious terms: the only unconquerable pockets of the Christian faith in Asia, against which even today the Infidels are powerless. But even Theodora had been unable to save her Byzantium from Mahomet, the Prophet who would be born less than thirty years after her death. And now the basilica of Saint Sophia, erected by Theodora herself, had been raped by the minarets of Allah. Could not the same thing happen to Vienna, the ‘Rome of the Holy Roman Empire’? And then, why not, to Rome itself?”

  My assistant narrated all this with some vehemence, while doing his best, with uncoordinated and awkward (but not inept) movements, to light a bundle of damp wood that stubbornly refused to ignite; and the sharpness of his voice testified to all the suffering the Greeks had undergone at the hands of their Ottoman masters.

  “Instead it all went up in smoke,” concluded the Greek. “Suleiman had not yet managed to overcome the resistance of the besieged city when God hurled against him a colder winter than had ever been seen before, and the Sultan had to go back empty-handed, and, what was worse, with the great risk of perishing amidst the ice storms and floods, as on the Day of Judgement. For his financial backers it spelt ruin.”

  It was the end of the dream. Henceforth there would be less pride and confidence in the cry, “We’ll meet again at the Golden Apple!”, which every new Sultan, at the end of his investiture, launches as a promise to the commander of the janissaries.

  “The Golden Apple?”

  “It’s the name the Ottomans have used since time immemorial for the four capitals of the Giaours: Constantinople of Saint Theodora, Buda of Matthias Corvinus, Vienna of the Holy Roman Emperor and Rome of the Successors of Peter.”

  The Golden Apple, the allegorical name designating the four forbidden fruits of Ottoman yearning, found its incarnation alternately in the gilded domes of Constantinople, in the scintillating orbs atop the roofs of Buda, in the golden sphere surmounted by the cross of Christ that dominated Vienna from the imposing tower of St Stephen’s, and finally in the mighty sphere of pure gold on the dome of the basilica of St Peter’s in Rome, whose golden glow was visible even to sailors off the coast of Latium.

  “And so the sultans, as soon as they ascend the throne,” remarked the Greek sarcastically, “solemnly promise to lead the janissaries very soon to the conquest of those cities, almost as if this were Islam’s very reason for living: to defeat the Christian world.”r />
  The first Golden Apple, Constantinople, had been conquered by the followers of Mahomet, but now Vienna had transformed the situation.

  “Transformed it entirely!” I laughed. “It was a century and a half before the Sublime Porte could put together enough money to threaten Vienna again. And yet again in vain. I know the story of the siege of Suleiman in 1529: last Monday I watched the annual procession of the brotherhood of bakers, which crossed the city with music and banners, in memory of the service they rendered the city during that siege. But what does the 1529 siege have to do with your story? Is it because the families of the ruined backers were the same ones for whom Ungnad would later betray Maximilian?”

  “You’ve guessed it, but only in part. Because there was more to it than that, much more. Do you know where Suleiman’s tent was pitched during the siege, with its fountains, water-games, musicians, animals and all the other luxuries he had brought with him?”

  I looked at Simonis, waiting for the answer.

  “Here, on the plain of Simmering, right where the Place with No Name now stands.”

  At these words, I thought back to the Levantine forms of the pinnacles and domes, to the fountain, the thermal tower and the Mediterranean gardens. Still clutching a bundle of firewood, I went outside, leaving my assistant and apprentice. I gazed upwards. With the story of Maximilian’s drama still echoing in my mind, my eyes roamed the sky and the towering roofs of the Place with No Name. Now I saw what had had been right in front of my eyes all this time but which I had failed to notice before: the roofs reproduced the coruscating glow of the sumptuous pavilion of Suleiman. The tiles of gilded copper once again tormented my eyeballs with their glare, and I almost felt I was admiring the sinister glitter of the Bosphorus and the glint of the scimitars that struck off the head of Count Zriny and the golden reflections of the oriental domes of St Mark’s, which gazed down upon the treacherous city of Venice, which had abandoned Maximilian in the struggle against the Infidel.

  Now I saw what it was, the Place with No Name, known as Neugebäu, or “New Building”: not a hunting lodge, nor an aviary, nor a garden, nor a villa – no: it was an Ottoman seraglio. The towers held the treasure room, the storeroom, the small parlour and large parlour, the inner room, the walls of white marble and porphyry columns, the pages’ rooms and the court guards’ quarters. In each of the towers there was a reproduction of one of the areas into which Suleiman’s camp had been subdivided, including the Turkish bath. And it also included the audience chamber and the law pavilion and the great room of the divan.

  With this grandiose, secret parody of a sultanesque palace it almost seemed as if Maximilian, smiling ruefully, had wished not only to create a masterpiece, but above all quietly to settle the score with his Eastern enemies. At Szigeti he had been defeated by a dead sultan. At Neugebäu he had avenged himself.

  Only then did I recognise the place for what it was: a castle with gleaming roofs like Suleiman’s pavilion, but caged in by classical arcades and flanked on either side by two semicircular keeps, the sign of Christian apses flanking their prisoner like gendarmes. Gathered together in the main building of the Place with No Name were the two cornerstones of Europe: the heritage of the classical world and the Christian faith. They not only besieged Suleiman’s pavilion, but to the south they kept watch over the gardens and the Turkish-style towers, and barred the road to the north; just so the Infidels had never succeeded in overpowering the Christian West. The boreal meadows and woods to the north of the Place with No Name offered no scope for Levantine allusions, eloquently opening out onto a view of the Caesarean city and its ramparts, which the Infidels had never succeeded in conquering.

  “This was how he got his own back on Suleiman,” said Simonis, who had come up behind me with my boy, “but even more on those who had lavished gold on him so that he might move against Europe; the same ones who out of hatred for the Church had led Maximilian to the throne, and had then ditched him, laying the basest of traps for him. It was the masterly revenge of a disempowered Emperor, who did the only thing he still could do: erect an eternal monument to that original defeat of Suleiman, the wound that will never heal.”

  Ilsung sought with every means in his power to deprive Maximilian of funding for Neugebäu, the New Building. Already in 1564 he had got a pupil of his own hired as Court Paymaster: David Hag, who was also related to Ungnad. And so Hag became the brooding presence responsible for every single penny dispensed to the Emperor, and hence to the New Building. Every request for funding for the project met with the reply that there was not enough money, or there were other difficulties. When Maximilian managed by some stratagem to go ahead with the construction, Hag would unsettle the artisans with rumours that they would never be paid, and if they were not convinced he would stir up rivalry and jealousy among them. He also arranged for shoddy materials to be sent instead of the stuff ordered by the Emperor, so that during the construction work parts of the building collapsed. When he died, in 1599, twenty years after Maximilian, it was discovered that Hag had confined himself to marking only the Emperor’s expenses in the accounts books, without ever listing the revenue destined for him.”

  “Not exactly the most faithful way of handling his sovereign’s funds,” I said ironically.

  “Maximilian was probably deprived of large sums of his own money in this way,” the Greek confirmed. “But even so he always found some expedient to carry on with the work, even if slowly and laboriously. And the Place with No Name, the New Building, although incomplete, became the eighth wonder, astonishing every visitor.”

  Failing to grasp the allegorical aims, the Turks loved and venerated the Place with No Name: for them it was nothing other than a faithful reproduction of their glorious Sultan’s camp.

  When Vienna was besieged again in 1683, they even took care not to damage it. There was no ambassadorial mission to Vienna that failed to visit the Place with No Name at least once. Some even pitched camp there, on the plain in front of it, the night before entering the city, in adoration of that sacred place, tearfully caressing and kissing its walls as if it were a sacred relic. When they gazed upon the seraglio, four thousand paces wide, and the sixteen corners with their towers, which dazed and confused the senses, they were moved by what they saw as a perfect imitation of Suleiman’s camp.

  A very different treatment, unfortunately, was meted out to the Place with No Name by the European allies of the Sublime Porte. The Kurucs, the infamous Hungarian rebels, in one of their shameless incursions six or seven years earlier, vented their rage on those poor walls. The castle was looted, defaced and burned down. That which had held out against neglect for over a century was destroyed in just a few minutes.

  “After all those years! Couldn’t it have just been sheer chance? Do you really think the Kurucs destroyed the Place with No Name for its symbolic value?” I asked.

  “As long as there are enemies of Christianity, there will be enemies of this place, Signor Master. The hatred against the Place with No Name still rages.”

  I would have liked to ask him how this hatred was manifested and by whom; but at that moment Frosch arrived to see what point we had reached.

  We told him that the chimneys of the maior domus were not in a disastrous condition, and we would be able to fix some of them immediately. But it would take us some time to draw up a map of all the flues of Neugebäu, and we could not return the next day, I said, on account of some urgent repair work that I had to carry out for clients back in the city.

  After the maior domus we inspected some of the service buildings. We worked hard all day armed with wire brushes, butchers’ brooms, ropes and counterweights, inspecting and cleaning the flues of Neugebäu; we were filthy and exhausted. But in my legs I could still feel the force that was required to satisfy my curiosity, or rather my sense of unfulfilled duty. I almost felt that the strange being, the most bizarre in the whole castle, was expecting (if an inanimate object can ever be said to expect) my visit.

 
I looked around myself; Frosch was nowhere to be seen. I made my way to the ball stadium.

  It was still there, vigilant and motionless, but its threatening beak, so sharp and warlike, looked as if it hoped one day to cleave the cold air of the skies above Vienna again. The Flying Ship, imposing in its guise as bird of prey, rested as ever on its great belly of wooden planks, its wings spread out uselessly. Simonis walked around it several times and then leaped up inside it, taking with him my boy, who was bursting with curiosity.

  Having finished his account of the Place with No Name and its builder, the Greek had reverted to his usual self, asking a host of banal questions not worth answering. Could the ship have flown up into the air thanks to its bird-like shape? And why was it a bird of prey? And if it flew again, would it not scare the lions and the other animals of Neugebäu? And could it float as well? Or would it have to be shaped like a seabird or, even better, a fish in that case?

  I gave only monosyllabic answers. The discovery of the magniloquent symbolism of the Place with No Name and the Greek’s story had filled me with doubts and questions, stirring me to a state of inward excitement, so that my work tired me out earlier than usual. In my heart there was little room left that day for the other host of riddles that made up the feathered sailing ship.

  While I worked in the ball stadium with brushes and counterweights, beginning to clean one of the half-blocked flues, I thought back to Simonis’s story of the Place with No Name. He had referred to its state of neglect. And so even before the devastating raid of the Kurucs, it had been abandoned. Did that mean Ilsung and Hag had won out over Maximilian? In what way? And why had no emperor taken any interest in that wonderful place since then? I put this question to the Greek.