Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Through many convulsions, setbacks and total implosions, the Empire by the fifteenth century had settled into a pattern which it kept until its dissolution in 1806. Its fringes at all points of the compass generated an alarmingly high percentage of all Europe’s historical ‘events’ and even after 1806 it was a motor for disagreement and warfare like nothing else. Too many historians have found themselves siding uneasily with the idea that the Emperor should be sympathized with when his grand plans are thwarted by pygmy localism, but perhaps this hopeless localism should be celebrated as a great gift to European culture and discourse. It is striking, for example, that the western region of the Empire was so poorly organized that it only ever had a defensive anti-French function and no ability to attack anyone at all. One western territory, Prum, had a defensive capability restricted to the spiritual force field generated by its ownership of a sandal belonging to Jesus while another, Essen (the future home of Krupp armaments), was ruled for centuries by a notably ornery and unhelpful group of aristocratic nuns.

  The territory of the Empire therefore had something of the appearance of a deeply disturbing jigsaw. There were relatively large territories such as Württemberg, which looked impressive but was in practice honeycombed with local special laws and privileges that made the dukes impoverished, bitter and much laughed at. There were more substantial and coherent territories, such as Saxony, which was cursed by frequent bouts of subdivision between different heirs, with one half crumbling into tiny but wonderful fragments. There were the lands of the margraves of Brandenburg in the north-east, which had a personal link to territories in Poland that fell outside the Empire and had a profound effect when they cohered into the Prussian state.

  These larger blocks catch the eye because they had real futures, but far more characteristic of the Empire were oddities such as the Palatinate, a scattering of wealthy territories across the lower middle of Germany whose rulers intervened at key points in Imperial history. They left at Heidelberg one of the quintessential Romantic landscapes, but it is now almost impossible to envisage the Palatinate as a plausible and robust political unit – indeed Heidelberg is so picturesque mainly because its principal castle is in ruins. The Palatinate is an interesting example of what makes the Empire so confusing, with its individual units generally accretions of inherited, bought and nicked bits of land not necessarily even linked together.

  Religious properties, often on land which had belonged to the Emperor but was given to the Church for specific purposes, formed an important category. So the adorable little state of Quedlinburg, ruled by nuns from good families, was endowed with enough territory to pay for its abbey and ensure a daily sequence of prayers for Henry the Fowler, a great slaughterer and forced converter of pagan Saxons in the early tenth century, who was buried there. Sometimes just as small, but far more important, were the Imperial Free Cities, lands generally focused on a single trading town, which had special privileges and were ruled by merchant oligarchies rather than a single lord. Some of these cities were consistently very important and close to the Emperor, such as Frankfurt and Nuremberg, some were quiet backwaters. Others were more remote from Imperial concerns and had extensive links with the outside world, such as the Hanseatic cities in the north, most famously Hamburg and Lübeck. Each had its own specialization, such as Lüneburg with its salt mines or Hall with its mint. Most consistently insignificant of all were the micro-territories: for example, the hundreds of bits owned by Imperial Knights, many in Swabia, and often consisting of just a tumbledown castle, a handful of vineyards and perhaps lucky access to some unfortunate river where the knight could charge a pointless toll for each trading boat rowing past.

  This mass of political entities (hundreds by the later fifteenth century) was all held in place by the authority of the Emperor. As can be imagined, the very small states were frantically loyal as they needed Imperial sanction to survive at all – they tended to have elaborate shields decorating their fortress walls to show their allegiance and warn off casual predators. They supplied tiny packets of troops and often contributed to Imperial entourages in terrific costumes as well as populating many jobs within the Church. But even the larger territories believed in the Emperor, and such a system, as can be imagined, generated a staggering number of legal disputes, whether about inheritance, rights or financial and military contributions, and much of the Emperor’s time was engaged in settling these disputes. This ceaseless, wearying round of hearings and travelling, which, of course, left numerous irritated or alienated losers in its wake, was central to the Empire’s existence and the ability to provide justice was as important as success or failure in war in creating an Emperor’s reputation. Much of the chaos of Frederick III’s long reign stemmed from his losing interest in all this, and one of the reasons that the Habsburgs enjoyed their extraordinary run of success after the fifteenth century was that they felt a surprising and consistent level of inter-generational diligence (with the startling, ruinous exception of Rudolf II with his rooms full of unopened letters). They were always dealing with a stream of grumpy, trigger-happy and often quite poorly educated noblemen waving around forged ‘ancient’ documents of a kind familiar to the Habsburgs themselves and insisting on the application of this or that right. I do not refer much to the issue again in this book, but it should be kept in mind as an important sort of background hum at all times – an always inadequate but prestigious Imperial bureaucracy sorting through land and inheritance disputes which could take generations to resolve and which found its final expression in the great scenes of dusty paperwork in Leoš Janáček and Karel Čapek’s 1926 opera, The Makropoulos Case, with Janáček even coming up with a beautiful, repetitive theme to represent unending Imperial legal processes.

  So the Emperor needed physically to demonstrate his status by moving around his immense lands, and every town had a complex set of obligations to him, later expressed by the often very elaborate ‘Imperial Halls’ which survive in many ex-territories today, consisting of a lavish assembly room (swagged with toadying but chirpy murals extolling the Emperor’s greatness and the extreme personal closeness to him of his host’s ancestors) and an entire wing of bedrooms – sometimes only used once in a century.

  Each Emperor had a power-base, which could be very important to him, even if he was often away. Much of the distinctive appearance of Prague comes from Charles IV making it both a royal (as King of Bohemia) and Imperial capital. His son Sigismund shunted around all over Europe in a long reign of baffling incoherence – if he can be said to have had a base then it was at Buda or Visegrád. But these were only ever personal choices rather than institutional ones. The south-eastern Empire is littered with building projects knocked on the head by the early Habsburgs’ changes of mind or taste, or total insolvency. Maximilian I’s empty tomb in Innsbruck, with his body in Wiener Neustadt and his entrails in a copper pot in Vienna, sums up the problem. As long as the Emperors were on the move then they could keep their legal, military, residential and fiscal rights going – much like a permanently turning mixer being needed to maintain wet concrete. A sustained period of inattention could make the whole thing solidify and even – as the simile is abandoned – ruin the mixer itself.

  The mechanism which sat at the heart of the Empire and which made it work was the strange fact – to our ears – that the Emperor was elected. The Golden Bull stated that when the current Emperor died, the Seven Electors had to gather (either in person or through a proxy) in Frankfurt and, sitting in a specific chapel of the Imperial church of St Bartholomew, vote on the new King of the Romans. Following their choice, an immense festival filled the Römerberg in central Frankfurt, with bonfires and the usual whole roasted animals. The choice of Electors was a clever one as these could only possibly agree on someone mutually acceptable and even if one family might nobble two or even three Electors their locations in different parts of the Empire and different moral views could not be squared readily. The horse-trading and bribes could be breathtaking (altho
ugh much is hidden from the historical record), but the Electors’ eventual choice did have a surprising level of legitimacy, both through the crushing historical weight of precedent and because they were free to choose from a range of rich, capable and adult candidates. This avoided the nightmares of pure heredity faced by France or England, say, which would at irregular intervals wind up being ruled by children or imbeciles.

  The election was hardly an opportunity for any old aspirant who felt lucky to put himself forward, though. The qualifications were formidably difficult, restricting candidature to almost nobody. This was in part because whereas the Emperors of the high Middle Ages had owned extensive lands as part of their job almost all this had by the fifteenth century been given away. The Emperor therefore needed to have access to a huge amount of money in his own right just to maintain his dignity, let alone have the potential to raise armies. In practical terms only two or three families could pass the interview. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Luxemburgs who were the most practical candidates as they could draw on their substantial revenues from also being kings of Bohemia, and in Sigismund’s case also King of Hungary and Croatia. Attempts to make the role of Emperor hereditary within a family had seemed possible when Sigismund had succeeded his father, Charles IV, but Sigismund’s failure to have a male heir and the end of the Luxemburg line meant looking elsewhere. A good candidate was a member of the Habsburg family, Duke Frederick of Inner Austria, who was elected King of the Romans in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 after a number of local difficulties. Without intending to do so the seven Electors of 1440 had locked into the job a single family who would rule, with one short break, for three hundred and sixty-four years.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The heir of Hector » The great wizard » Gnomes on horseback » Juana’s children » Help from the Fuggers » The disaster

  The heir of Hector

  In the late fifteenth century Europe goes into a ferment of change – the economy revs up, the population grows, technology is overhauled, new forms of artistic and intellectual life flourish. Earlier events that appear murky and disconnected to us must have appeared vivid and curious at the time, but now this is all verifiable and uncontentious, simply because of a single, key invention: printing with movable type. Monarchs such as Henry VI of England or Louis XI of France are remote and, however hard we try, not part of our mental landscape because of the thinness of what they left behind them – a handful of stiff portraits, a few letters and dodgy chronicles. We would love to engage more actively with their reigns, which were obviously but tantalizingly fascinating, but cannot.

  Maximilian I, Emperor from 1493, marks this transition exactly. His father, Frederick III, is a baffling figure: we know what he looked like, which is an improvement, but historians are still obliged to cling to a handful of unreliable stories and these are so partisan that his incompetence or cunning can in the end only be dimly guessed at. Maximilian, however, is universally familiar, with his beaky nose, fur cloak, Order of the Golden Fleece chain and shoulder-length hair (one of those fashions for men which tends to be passed over in stunned silence). He looks out from coins and statues and paintings, but also from woodcuts, an older technology but one now much refined, which circulated around Europe in astonishing quantities. Maximilian was obsessed with new technology, whether this applied to fluted armour (‘Maximilian’ armour) or cannon (his arsenal can still be wandered around in Innsbruck) or – most importantly – typography. The famous ‘Gothic’ typeface, called Fraktur by Germans, was designed specifically for him. This typeface created a semi-separate and alienating (for non-Germans) form of book presentation which endured until Hitler banned it in 1941, aware – in an odd burst of sensitivity – that for effective communication with his new world empire Fraktur was too hard to read.

  Maximilian used the new medium to pour out propaganda, both about his deeds and about himself and his family. As with everything he did, he stopped and started, changed his mind, lost interest, so there were countless unfinished projects at the time of his death – but he planned and dictated material on everything from magic to chivalry and genealogy to politics. He used to be much hated by German nationalist historians because he failed to unite Germany and dabbled and dithered in a way that undercuts any coherent, onward-and-upward narrative – but these are the very failings that now make him seem so appealing. We need no longer feel upset that he didn’t create a powerful and independent German army or crush the French.

  Maximilian is an unusual Habsburg in being both a convincing man of action and an intellectual. He was deeply conscious that when he took over the role of Holy Roman Emperor he would set a precedent – what if it could be permanently attached to the Habsburg family? Enormous effort went into making this feasible, much of it via print, and working with a brilliant array of great artists in all media he set out to build an image of himself that would last for ever. The Habsburgs had the most extensive territories of all German rulers, but there were plenty who claimed a better ancestry or were more securely rooted in the Empire itself. A legitimate complaint about them (one that lasted until they finally stepped down) was that their interests were tangled up in the margins of the Empire – in the Low Countries, northern Italy and in the east – and that they misused Imperial funds for narrow family purposes, merely pretending to have German interests at heart. In fact it was their semi-marginality, as well as their wealth, that made the Habsburgs so desirable to many German princes – they were rich enough not to be a burden on other territories, but they would on the whole be too busy fighting the Turks to interfere in Germany itself too much.

  There are many jobs at Maximilian’s court which would have appealed to me. I have never really been outdoorsy enough to make a mercenary landsknecht, although their immense two-handed swords, flowing moustaches and puffed-silk slashed sleeves take some beating. Indeed this is the last period where sheer strength was essential to fighting and I really shy away from this. It would be flattering to think of being one of the Emperor’s humanists, musicians or artists, although a more likely post would have been as the trusted, albeit limited, figure who supervised his bowel movements. But then the ‘groom of the stool’ would have been a dream compared to the really horrible job of court genealogist. If ever there was a role which required fake learning and intellectual supinity it was this. Initially enormous work went into proving Maximilian’s descent from Noah’s family, which required some fairly seamless absurdity. Genealogies were important for the obvious reason that they implied rights and privileges stemming from historical deep background. They were also vulnerable – their circulation at foreign courts could provoke laughter from rival crawly genealogists working for other families (such as the Wittelbachs of Bavaria, who could also point to a time when they had provided an Emperor). The respect felt for a genealogy therefore was a side-effect of how, more generally, its issuer was viewed by potential rivals, but in itself it needed to be a plausible document.

  When the Emperor Charles IV had come up with a genealogy for himself, he had suggested that his family were derived not only from Noah but also from Saturn, but this sort of enjoyable silliness would no longer wash in the more stringent atmosphere of the late fifteenth century. Now, after much mulling over his own lineage, Maximilian decided he was not in fact descended from Noah, but from the Trojan hero Hector. Presumably the court humanists, rather than rolling their eyes and making farting noises with their cheeks, must have smiled at the Emperor’s perspicacity, bowed deeply and returned to their library to start all over again. One of the key figures at court was noted for his rigour in creating these family trees, but given their essentially made-up quality this was a rigour which could only be admired so far. Hector was important because of a series of wholly uncanonical (as in fabricated) stories about his sons. Loosely nodding at the Aeneid, these proposed that while Aeneas was founding Rome, a brother called Francio was excitedly heading further north, with his children settling on the R
iver Main and building the City of the Franks, Frankfurt. This stuff was valuable because it tried to give Germany equal prestige to Italy, and Frankfurt a sacral value closer to that of Rome. The family tree then descended through a series of dubious byways down to the deeply prestigious and real Clovis, King of the Franks and then swerved down through one of Clovis’s younger children (to avoid the obvious confusion that the Habsburgs would otherwise be claiming to have been kings of France, a fact that might have been noticed elsewhere) to emerge in the relative safety of Maximilian’s direct real Swabian ancestors. Presumably feeling pretty sullied, the humanists had now established a direct link from Troy to Innsbruck.

  It may seem odd to spend so much time describing so implausible a project, but genealogy lay at the heart of royal power. It had been crucial to the other great Habsburg fabrication, the fourteenth-century bundle of documents called the Privilegium Maius, some signed by Julius Caesar and Nero no less, which established the inviolability of the Austrian lands and created the special title of ‘Archduke’ for the Habsburg ruler, which put him on the same level as the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. This was laughed at as an obvious fake at the time and much of it had been ignored by Charles IV, but when Frederick III was made Emperor he was able to take advantage of this to approve the Privilegium Maius in effect for himself, making his lands inalienable through the male line and allowing the wearing of a special, made-up archduke’s crown. As, from now on, the Emperor was a Habsburg this comedy document stuck, and all discussion of its authenticity was viewed as treason. So, descended from Hector and Clovis, given the thumbs up by Roman emperors, the Habsburgs had arrived.