Germania

by Simon Winder

  Other superiority complexes

  This monstrous cloud of dust became the reality for Germany in 1241 with the advent of the Mongol hordes. It cannot be emphasized enough just how tiny Europe and indeed Christianity as a whole remained. Europe’s cities stayed very small compared to those in Asia or indeed even parts of a still unguessed-at America. Shoved into a small corner of Eurasia, their outlying defences in the Near East reduced to almost nothing, Spain still substantially in Muslim hands and the Mediterranean dominated by Muslim corsairs, there was no preordained reason why specific areas of Christian culture should have survived at all.

  And yet there was clearly a confidence and brilliance about German culture, for example, in the first half of the thirteenth century, which is conveyed absolutely intact today. Magdeburg’s tremendous, gnarled cathedral remains one of the great symbols of Christian eastern colonization and arrogance. Following the accidental burning down of the previous cathedral and palace in 1209, work began on an ambitious replacement. What exists now took many years to complete, somehow survived the annihilation of Magdeburg in the Thirty Years War, was used as a stable by Napoleon and devastated in 1945. But despite these vicissitudes or perhaps because of them it seems an authentic survivor of an extremely remote time, the heart of the extensive Archbishopric of Magdeburg, with an explicit military and missionary task. The cathedral was a vast expression in stone of Christianity’s commitment to converting or destroying the pagan tribes to the east and was a sort of high-medieval religious version of the Pentagon. It is impossible to imagine its impact on the small, simple heathen settlements – its size must have appeared non-human.

  The general medieval atmosphere of Magdeburg is pretty much restricted to the cathedral itself, though, and one or two ravaged monastery sites, the rest being acres of Stalinist concrete. When I first came to Germany just after reunification, I used to take a short cut down a notably dank, empty and dreary alleyway to get to the cathedral. It is one of the more confusing aspects of the New Germany that this same alley should now contain a shop guarded by a dummy dressed as one of Elizabeth II’s bearskin-hat guards promoting a shop called Teatime Treats: British Food and More. So many generations of nationalists and communists would find this ghastly that its very existence is something to celebrate, however embarrassing and odd.

  If Magdeburg is the harsh frontier face of the thirteenth century, then Bamberg, in what is now northern Bavaria, is the genial face of German civilization. Of course the town has grown up, mutated and developed over many centuries and does not look even faintly like its earlier self, but it does still keep its original structure, with a major religious building on each of its hills, a monastic hospital, a cathedral, a bishop’s palace, with the red-tiled houses filling the crowded spaces between. The cathedral is clearly a later homage to the Imperial cathedrals on the Rhine, with the same oddity of a choir at either end and towers on each corner. Apart from its being so atmospheric you want to nuzzle your face against the stonework with gratitude (or perhaps not), the cathedral has lurking inside it the Bamberg Rider, the first full-sized equestrian statue made in Europe since the fall of the Roman empire. It was carved around 1230 and nobody really has any idea who it is meant to be. I like it so much because nobody knows who the rider is: given that whoever it was must have been extremely important, historical accident has much improved it by converting him into a contemplation of human vanity. Needless to say the Rider was a nationalist and Nazi favourite, as indicating a pure German fountain for Renaissance-style achievements. The Rider has rather fallen on hard times because of this earlier abuse, but its size and strangeness, alongside a range of other great sculptures (devils hauling the damned into Hell, elaborate tombs, figures of the Church and the Synagogue – the latter erring and blindfolded), lie at the core of a town which remains an acme of German medievalism. It has a bridge over a cheerful little river, a town hall painted with ancient heroes, gnarled pubs (with apparently a greater consumption of beer per head than any other town in the world) and lovely monastery gardens.

  While in Bamberg, I remember delusively trying to work out how my family and I could move there, despite our having no suitable skills and no ability to speak German. Perhaps I could have set up as the new landlord of the Ram’s Head, grown a luxuriant moustache and – steadily wiping the bar with a cloth and frowning with inward concentration – ignored the taunts and execrations of the furious clientele as they failed to make me understand their drink orders. The air would be thick with the smell of burning sauerkraut, possibly unhelpful sarcasms from my wife and the sobs of our children picking over their plates of fried sow stomach. We could have been a rainy and cold but no less deranged version of the unfortunate American family in Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast.

  But to return to the past, German settlement had carried on vigorously in the thirteenth century, with armies, monks and settlers chewing through what is now Brandenburg, Saxony, Pomerania and Austria, solidifying earlier, more isolated bits of conquest. The major rulers of these territories proved almost impossible for any central authority to control and famous figures such as Albert the Bear in Brandenburg and Henry the Lion in Saxony were more or less independent. They were much helped when Emperors chose to live in Italy or went on crusade or became variously ineffective – the slightest loss of concentration would result in the resulting space being filled by gleeful dukes.

  While the Teutonic Knights continued to extend their grip over the Baltic coast and create cities such as Danzig (Gdask), Riga and Reval (Tallinn) as well as what became East Prussia, the thirteenth century marked a clear consolidation of Germanness. Numerous tribes – Sorbs, Lusatians, Pomeranians and so on – had been ploughed under and Germanized, but this relentless processing now seized up in the face of better-organized opponents. Partly through their own natural evolution and partly in the face of the German threat, the groups that became the Poles, the Czechs and the Hungarians were ever more capable of resisting further German encroachment, not least through cunningly accepting Christianity themselves. Individual groups of Germans would continue to move forward into Central Europe, at the invitation of particular rulers, as freelance minor enterprises (or, later, under the wing of the Habsburg Empire), but broadly the shape of the German-speaking lands had now been set – and would stay roughly the same until the German-made disaster of the 1940s resulted in almost all the far descendants of these settler communities being killed or expelled.

  The irruption of the Mongols in the 1240s threatened to change this whole eastward drift – indeed it threatened to devastate European Christianity completely. It is easy to laugh at the Mongols’ bizarre superiority complex. The crusader emissaries sent to them in the hope of forming an anti-Muslim alliance were horrified to discover that the Mongols did not understand the idea of ‘ally’, only really using the term ‘slave-subject’. On the face of it these strange, townless flocks of horsemen could not have been a threat to settled, organized, urban traders and soldiers. But by the time they turned their attention to Europe they had already devastated China, a civilization of far greater density and sophistication than Europe, if it is possible to gauge such a thing. They had smashed to pieces the powerful states of Central Asia and subjugated Russia (in scenes brilliantly imagined in Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev) – and Mongol-descendant groups would go on during the following two centuries to bust up India, Iran and the Ottomans, leaving emptied, burnt-flat towns, pyramids of human skulls, and noblemen crushed slowly to death beneath Mongol feasting-platforms all over Eurasia.

  Could Europe itself have been wiped out? Given the extreme nature of this crisis it is odd, and an interesting example of Europe’s own superiority complex, that Europe’s closeness to disaster is not now more widely known. After all, Russia remained under Mongol rule for centuries, setting it on a drastically different path from the rest of Europe – although how different has been the source of endless, debilitating and unresolvable arguments down to the present day, with
everything unfortunate about Russia being blamed on its ‘Asiatic’ inheritance. Europe’s entire political and cultural history could have gone the same way when worryingly big numbers of Mongols crashed into Poland and Hungary in 1241. A mixed force of Poles, Silesians and Teutonic Knights was annihilated at the Battle of Liegnitz by Subutai and the Blue Horde, with the survivors hauled off into captivity and never heard from again. The entire resources of the Hungarian kingdom were mobilized against the southern of the two Mongol armies and again the result was a massacre. Given the chaotic rumours that had filtered through to Europe about what the Mongols did to those who crossed them, there was a Christianity-wide panic. Subutai had Europe defenceless before him, with a battle method that Europeans could not deal with as their heavy cavalry were simply shot to bits by mobile Mongol horse-archers before they could even bring their weapons to bear. Annexing Hungary, Mongol armies marched into Austria, reaching Wiener Neustadt, poised to drive on into Bavaria or northern Italy. But then a freakish turn of fate came to the rescue – the Great Khan, Ögedai, died in Karakorum and the principal Mongol generals around Eurasia had to pull back. Hungary remained under Mongol supervision for a few years, but the invaders never returned and we will never really know why. One ingenious and plausible suggestion was that in Mongol terms Europe was fairly marginal and boring – even the Hungarian grasslands, on the face of it ideal for their simple needs, were rather paltry when you already owned North Asia. And, to add further insult, you could have more fun loot-wise in bigger, glossier spots such as Baghdad rather than in Wiener Neustadt. Just how much further the Mongols would have got is a crucial what-if in Europe’s history. Perhaps the sheer density of walled cities as they moved further west would have stopped them, but it is cheery to know that this never had to be put to the test.

  A brief note on political structures

  The great size of the Empire and its wildly conflicting requirements always made a strong, unitary structure implausible. Even the most dynamic and talented of its rulers were worn down by the relentless travel required to keep its regional dukes in order. Even when a capital of sorts was created at Vienna, this was merely a reflection of its being a local powerbase for the Habsburg family itself. Imperial functions scattered across Germany, with Wetzlar, Frankfurt and Regensburg having key roles and other cities, such as Schwäbisch Hall, acting as mints. The Empire fits awkwardly onto modern maps as its most important cities included such un-German places as Brussels, Dijon and Milan. The vision behind it (and the idea of an Emperor rather than a king at its head) was always steeped, as already discussed, in a self-conscious and entirely delusive sense of Charlemagne and his successors as true inheritors of Constantine the Great’s Empire of the West.

  The Holy Roman Empire was always therefore a work in progress – it should have included places like France, England, southern Italy and Spain (and at some periods through personal inheritance its rulers did absorb or threaten these places) because that would have replicated the original Roman empire from which it drew its legitimacy. This all seems a bit mad now as there was such a long gap between the collapse of the Western Roman empire and Charlemagne picking up some of the pieces. But the Empire’s rulers were entirely serious, particularly as this forged the crucial link with Rome itself and the Pope, who also based his supremacy over all other bishops, on his inheritance from the Roman empire, also rather dodgy, and sprinkled with low-comedy fakes such as the ‘Donation of Constantine’. The ruinous clashes between Salian emperors and popes in the eleventh century which caused such violence and civil war within the Empire stemmed from this sense that both rulers were the inheritor of this spiritual power, whereas people like the kings of England or France were many rungs lower down, effectively jumped-up barbarian chieftains. That these kings were so wealthy and increasingly strong (and indeed developing their own maximalist ideologies in relation to each other or to the Empire) was seen as a tiresome and transitory nuisance rather than as facts which the Emperor needed to acknowledge in any serious way. Similarly the Emperor was always many rungs higher up the hierarchical ladder than even his most powerful subjects within the Empire. As the rulers of Prussia or Saxony became ever more formidable, the Emperor tried to ignore these political realities in favour of an often ridiculously unrealistic fantasy about his own Caesar-style omnipotence.

  The Holy Roman Empire was so massively devolved therefore because its rulers had little choice. Within Germany large parts of the empire were in the hands of more or less independent marcher lords who had, with their own followers, built substantial states. At different times and under various circumstances they could be very respectful of the Emperor and share all kinds of military and, later, religious concerns but this respect was based on being given a level of freedom which in England had been beaten out of the regional aristocracy by the end of the fifteenth century. The colonial nature of Germany also meant huge swathes of important land were in the hands of the once missionary Church. Fighting bishops ruled substantial towns and had their own revenue and troops, from Cologne and Mainz to Magdeburg and Freising. In addition various towns earned privileges which made them directly responsible to the Emperor. This was a huge source of strength for the Emperor and something ferociously resisted by the dukes whose land tended to surround these places. The status of Free Imperial City created miniature semi-republics across Germany, ranging from important towns such as Lübeck, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and Ulm to much smaller places such as Esslingen and Mühlhausen. The huge imperial eagle set in a stained-glass window in Ulm’s minster is a perfect example of this local autonomy – a successful lucky charm against greedy neighbouring potentates wanting to encroach on a rich town. Behind their walls these semi-independent cities could thrive, safe in the knowledge that their ruler was a man based in Austria, often preoccupied with fighting the Turks and unlikely to bother them too much.

  Ducal territories tended to get split in inheritance disputes, creating an anarchy of competing claims, all mediated through the structures of the Empire which, once individual castles owned by ‘free imperial knights’ were thrown in, was able to absorb hundreds of separate political fragments. There is a wonderful CD-ROM of the Holy Roman Empire as it was before Napoleon abolished it and to anyone who grew up with a London or Paris unitary-state mentality, cruising around its voluminous, brightly coloured maps on a computer screen will provoke something like carsickness. Areas such as Swabia (which was thick with the micro-territories of those sturdily independent Free Imperial Knights) are a wilderness of tiny bits, of fantastically sub-divided and almost meaningless fragments, each reflecting its own complex history. To walk across Germany was to walk past countless boundary markers; to try to get your boat up the Rhine was a sort of absurdity with tolls payable to a wide range of noble families and towns who happened to own a little bit of river bank. I once despairingly stared at the sheer irrationality of a map of the blameless little margraviate of Ansbach (in the Ansbach museum – one of the dullest in Germany), as even this statelet owned for arcane reasons bits of fields in neighbouring states, or specific customs rights here or there. The Dukes of Württemberg owned territory that looked like a cruel accident – bubbles of land all over the south-west, most almost valueless and many in the hands of local notables who took an innocent pleasure in thwarting all attempts by the dukes to make some fiscal or geographical sense of their inheritance. Ludicrous efforts were made by the dukes to protect a handful of enclaves they had inherited in eastern France – none of them more than a herd of pigs and a broken-down church, but of great strategic interest to the duke’s fiscally desperate, constrained and humiliated court.

  But it was the major units, not the brightly coloured detritus, that called the shots. The Empire was established in a recognizable form with the issuing of the Golden Bull in 1356 by the Emperor Karl IV. The Bull laid down definitively that from then on the post of Emperor was to be elective, albeit with a seriously constrained electorate of only seven individuals, each owning majo
r territory. There were the three religious lords: the Archchancellor of Germany (based at Mainz), the Archchancellor of Gaul and Burgundy (Trier) and the Archchancellor of Italy (Cologne, oddly). There were also four secular lords: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine (ruler of a scatter of rich territories based around Heidelberg), the Duke of Saxony and the Margrave of Brandenburg. This line-up changes at various points, with some removals and some additions. The ceremony of choosing the new Emperor happened in the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt. The whole area where the ceremony happened was destroyed in 1944, but rebuilt in the sort of over-tidy approximation which inevitably marks these projects. If only it could be possible to allow some of these immaculate fronts and roofs to slump and decay a bit into a better flavour of what we expect buildings from that era to be like. The electors would come in from their territories, huddle in a special chapel and then vote. After a while, with one serio-farcical exception, this meant voting for a member of the Austria-based Habsburg family. The new Emperor would then be presented on a balcony in the central square, the Römerberg, to a huge crowd, eager for the ox-roasts and fireworks that followed. This was one of the great events in the lifetimes of Frankfurt’s citizens and a source of immense pride. This prestige continued even after the Holy Roman Empire had ended, with Frankfurt the logical choice for the parliament of the nineteenth-century German Confederation as it continued as one of a handful of ‘free cities’.