Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The statues are a mixed bag. Some are fairly routine and others are perhaps the greatest of all German sculptures, including hypnotically charismatic figures of King Arthur, Duke Albrecht and King Theoderic designed by Dürer. Rudolf I, the first Habsburg Emperor, back in the thirteenth century, has the strange indignity of a prominent codpiece that visitors over the centuries have found it impossible not to touch, making the blackened bronze of his armour an unsettling contrast to the glowing orange of his cock. Various favourites are present – Ernest ‘the Iron Man’, his wife the Jagiellonian princess Zymburgis, who was so strong she could tear nails out of walls and straighten horseshoes, Philip ‘the Handsome’, Maximilian’s son, who was sketched for his statue before his premature death, a rather conjectural statue of Clovis, Ferdinand of Aragon, Juana ‘the Mad’ – all providing back-up for Habsburg universalist claims that would come to full fruition under Maximilian’s successor, his grandson Charles V, who could draw on all these figures for sustenance.

  Some of the statues have been designed to hold candles in their hands for special occasions. In a sense it is ideal that Maximilian himself, although represented by a superb kneeling statue on top of the cenotaph, has his body elsewhere as it means that these bronze ancestors (watched over too by a medley of little busts of Roman emperors, making their own nod-and-a-wink point about Maximilian’s pedigree) are witnessing something more universal than simply one of their descendants. The more I look at them the more hair-raising they become, watchmen almost untouched (except in the case of Rudolf I) by five centuries of warfare, chaos and, ultimately, the end of the dynasty they were sent to protect.

  Juana’s children

  For the generation alert by 1490 and still alive by 1530 the world would have struck them as convulsed by unparalleled, freakish change. The monarchs of the period often seem immobilized by the sheer complexity of their situation, with bold initiatives coming to nothing, inertia rewarded, and uneasy blends of the two. It is not as though Europe had previously been static, but there had been many more certainties. The Hundred Years War, most obviously, had been played out with painful predictability, with the inhabitants of Aquitaine, Normandy and Picardy barely bothering to look up as another bunch of mud-spattered characters in plate armour galloped into view. Despite some breaks, the sheer mulishness of English attempts to take over France gave a fixed character to reign after reign.

  Through a queasy mix of luck and ruthlessness the Habsburg family wound up as the great beneficiaries of this process. Charles V felt that his long reign had ended in failure and he bequeathed all kinds of problems, but by the time of his resignation and retreat to an Extremaduran monastery to pray, admire the view and wistfully spin a globe of the world, his family ruled an empire of a size with no European precedent.

  One good place to start explaining this rise in the family fortunes is with Maximilian staring in fascination at the unfolding situation in Spain. In Barcelona in 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had combined the thrones of Castile and Aragon and whose forces had destroyed the last Muslim state in Spain the year before, stood on a set of palace steps, which are still there (perhaps one of the more thrilling and perplexing places to stand in the world). There they met and congratulated Christopher Columbus, who presented them with a selection of Caribbean exotica and unhappy Hispaniola ‘Indians’. As, over the following decades, it became clear that humankind’s entire mental experience was about to be hit by a flood of slavery, sugar, gold, silver, genocide, jungles, pirate ships, howler monkeys, Brazil nuts and toucans, the old Europe in which English and French knights hit each other over the head for ownership of some drizzle-washed hamlet in the Pas de Calais suddenly seemed a bit old-fashioned. The fixed-term, zero-sum atmosphere of Europe was at an end, particularly once Aztec gold and silver started arriving in uncontrollable quantities in the 1520s.

  Maximilian had married his only son, Philip ‘the Handsome’, to Juana, the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, as an aspect of his policy to try to shut in France. It was never intended as a dynastic checkmate, however – Philip was made Duke of Burgundy and positioned to replace Maximilian in due course with the existing Habsburg lands and, with luck and management, as Holy Roman Emperor. But a rapid sequence of surprise deaths between 1497 and 1500 revolutionized Philip’s fortunes. Castile and Aragon were still separate kingdoms and after Isabella’s death in childbirth, shortly followed by the death of the male child she had given birth to, the clear heir to Castile became Juana (under laws that, unlike those followed by the Habsburgs, did not prevent female inheritance). Ferdinand looked on in horror from his own kingdom of Aragon, realizing that through this bleak sequence a Habsburg would now take not only Castile but, if he did not himself have a son, Aragon too. The last part of Ferdinand’s life was grim. Spare a thought for the teenager Germaine de Foix, who was rushed to Barcelona as the new wife and had to spend ten years in the arms of the hard-breathing old dynast trying to conceive a son who could shut the Habsburgs out of Aragon. For a few hours in May 1509 a son, Juan, existed and the entire course of history could have been changed. Juan’s survival would have split Spain permanently between an eastern, Mediterranean kingdom based on Barcelona and a western, Atlantic kingdom based on Toledo and Granada. But the baby died and in 1516 a despairing Ferdinand also died.

  Ferdinand’s only satisfaction must have been that at least by then Philip ‘the Handsome’ had died too, apparently of typhoid although there were persistent rumours that Ferdinand had poisoned him. Philip had been much admired as the acme of Burgundian chivalry but, as far as we can tell, he was no great loss as an individual or a political actor. Juana seems to have suffered from bouts of gloomy mental incapacity of a kind that later genetically leapt up and ravaged a random sequence of her descendants. Just how unable to rule she really was is tangled up in the motives of Philip, Ferdinand and then her own children for finding reasons for sidelining her. As Juana ‘the Mad’ she stalked the first half of the sixteenth century, refusing to part with her husband’s coffin, praying obsessively and eventually confined for decades in a convent, both the most dynastically important figure in Europe and a melancholy cipher.

  Philip and Juana had six children. Their four daughters were variously married to kings of Portugal and France, Denmark, Hungary and Bohemia, and a further King of Portugal. One of these daughters, Mary, had an extraordinarily varied and surprising life, and after early Hungarian adventures became a great patron of the arts and the regent of the Netherlands. The two sons scooped the pool: Charles and Ferdinand.

  In the gnarled, Escher-like and chaotic old prince-bishop’s palace in Trento, Buonconsiglio Castle, there is, among many other wonders, a room with a ceiling fresco by Dosso Dossi. I have always been frustrated by the stiff grandeur of the official paintings of Charles V, most obviously the ones by Titian which may be bravura displays but make Charles seem trapped beneath the costumes. But to my total surprise, here, commissioned by Prince-Bishop Bernardo III Clesio, are paintings of Bernardo himself – looking every inch the sort of tough, Cardinal Wolsey-style operator who had quite brief openings in his crowded calendar set aside for prayer – and of the young Charles and Ferdinand. The two young men are in beautiful armour and have been painted with astonishing informality, having just taken off their helmets, sitting on a bench with Charles caught in mid-sentence. As character portraits they seem absolutely convincing – Charles, with his cripplingly swollen jaw and his air of ill-focused and over-eager earnestness, Ferdinand more conventionally beefy and military, like a rugby player or an army commander who loves shouting. They were raised separately, Charles in Burgundy and Ferdinand in Spain, but their sometimes tense partnership shaped a large part of world history and – whether or not that was a good thing – it is extraordinarily moving to have this frescoed snapshot of the two of them in their early twenties, as yet unbattered by the implacable weight of their responsibilities.

  Juana’s incapacity meant that her father acted as a de
eply resentful regent in the period between Philip’s death and his own. The extreme difficulty after Ferdinand’s funeral of having Juana sole monarch meant that in a series of broadly unconstitutional coups her son Charles arrived from his Burgundian lands and made himself not just regent but king, definitively uniting Spain in the face of widespread incredulity and resentment from its inhabitants. This meant his ownership of Aragonese territory scattered across the western Mediterranean and Italy and, of course, chunk after chunk of American coastline as each returning ship came back having found yet more. Oddly, in his uninvolving autobiography (dictated largely during an idle five days with his entourage, being rowed from Cologne to Mainz in June 1550) Charles does not even mention America, but by that time Europe’s economy had already been completely reshaped by Mexican and Peruvian bullion – he probably felt it was tacky to talk about economic issues.

  After three and a half years of ruling Spain and its empire (plus of course his Burgundian inheritance along France’s eastern frontier and the whole of the Netherlands) Charles then had to take on (still only nineteen years old) the consequences of his grandfather Maximilian’s death. In the first instance this meant inheriting all the traditional Habsburg lands in and around Austria. It then, after a series of eye-watering bribes, meant becoming Holy Roman Emperor as well. This fluky sequence of events handed power of an unexampled kind to a young, well-educated, thoughtful and diligent man. Nobody involved intended this to happen – at several points a much more modest inheritance would have been possible. The new, and only slightly older, King of France, Francis I, could only look on in stupefied anger. The England of the also very young Henry VIII appeared almost an irrelevance (which despite Henry’s bullfrog-like puffing continued generally to be the case). Quite by accident almost the whole of Europe now found itself ruled by dressy young show-offs, with the last remaining Gothic smells of their predecessors suddenly gone. But if this was not enough, Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand was about to get a surprise bonus.

  Help from the Fuggers

  This is perhaps a peculiar admission, but I have never much liked the Mediterranean and have been there rarely. It always seems a bit too out-of-doors and broad-chested for me. Just thinking of all that burning sunshine and ability to navigate in small boats makes me instinctively shrink back. I recently and reluctantly agreed to go to there on a family holiday and at once felt trapped in the sort of novel in which a young curate sits on his own in his hotel room, leafing through his fine edition of Robert Browning, while his beautiful wife hangs out with dockside minotaurs, feeling their deltoids. The novel ends in Bacchic delirium with none of the frenzied participants able to hear the reedy cries for help from the curate as – in a hopeless and ignored attempt to show his wife his prowess at swimming – he is swept out to sea by a current which, the novelist implies, was conjured up by an ancient god to expel such spindle-shanked weakness from his domain. I hasten to add that I felt this based on the unhealthy influence of British Mediterranean fiction rather than because my wife has untreatable stevedore issues.

  I am really not saying that I am antagonistic to the south with any sense of pride or aggression, just to record a basic inadequacy. More often than not, particularly when in Italy, I feel irritable and unengaged and in relation to every branch of the arts am just hugely happier to be further north. This does not mean that I am idiotically against the Renaissance, but I do like it better when under more leaden skies. This recoil even affects my otherwise unbridled admiration for Henry James. If only he could have been prevented from sending his fabulous heroines to Italy and instead routed them to Prague or Budapest. The light may be less immense and golden, but they would have been pleasantly surprised by how attractive these cities are, and they probably would not have got sick.

  The Habsburgs’ engagement in Italy – much more substantial and long-lasting than my own – has always been viewed as awkward. By the time of Charles V they had owned the little Adriatic port of Trieste for more than a century, but it was completely hemmed in by Venetian territory, from the Terrafirma in the west and Istria and Dalmatia in the east. With the Adriatic as a Venetian preserve the Habsburgs were helpless here and Trieste only started to have real value as a side-effect of Venice’s eighteenth-century decay. There was also the little territory of Görz or Gorizia to the north of Trieste, whose rulers first conceded a small portion of their lands to the Habsburgs that allowed Tyrol and Styria to be linked up and then in the will of the last, heirless, half-Magyar count the remaining territory was left to Maximilian in 1500, who promptly occupied it, much to Venetian fury. This whole area remains today a sort of linguistic mudslide, particularly once you throw in the eastern territory of Carniola (now the nucleus of Slovenia and itself partly comprised of the Windic March, a defunct political term that sounds so lovely that it is almost as much to be regretted as the old Balkan Principality of Hum). Italian, Slovene, German, Friulian, Ladin and Croatian have always competed in highly unstable ways, but for much of Habsburg history Venetian power meant that this area was an agreeable dead end, a territorial appendix that provided some manpower and some revenue and some very beautiful little towns.

  The line of the Alps meant that the Venetians blocked the eastern end of Italy, the French blocked the west except through the vulnerable County of Burgundy and much of the rest was taken up by contemptuous, crazily anti-Habsburg and self-sufficient Swiss. Once they had defeated Maximilian in 1499 the Swiss lived in a strange legal limbo, with the surrounding states effectively pretending they were not there. In practical terms the only way the Habsburgs could get into Italy was in their role as Holy Roman Emperor, using the Brenner Pass and down through the Imperial territories of Brixen and Trento, the former mainly German-speaking, the latter Italian. It still required transit through a small area of Venetian territory, but this was unproblematic: if the Empire was at war with Venice too then it could trample regardless.

  So the Habsburg interest in Italy was always a very uneasy one. It had powerful if somewhat notional origins in the link between the Emperor and the Pope, plus the niggling sense that a revival of the Roman Empire which did not include Italy was a bit odd. As it turned out Frederick III was the last Emperor to be crowned in Rome by the Pope, with Maximilian agreeing with the Pope that he should simply be considered Holy Roman Emperor without the ceremony and Charles V crowned at Bologna in an atmosphere of some acrimony as his troops had recently sacked Rome. After that there were sometimes distant and sometimes close links with the Pope, but there was no attempt to make the Holy element in the Empire’s name reliant on a specific blessing.

  The Italian Wars which traditionally marked the end of the Renaissance and ushered in generations of helpless misery for Italy were a classic example of the mix-up in Habsburg interests. Maximilian’s personal links to Milan (he was married to the duke’s daughter) made him concerned as head of the Habsburg monarchy, but also with the hope (unrealized for a further three centuries) of destroying Venice.

  The sense that this period sees all the pieces being thrown into the air perhaps kicks off with the unpleasant Pope Innocent VIII’s proposal in 1489 to the young French king Charles VIII that he would be sure of a warm welcome if he tried to invade and take over Naples. This initiated a devastating sequence of events that ruined perhaps the most economically dynamic area of Europe to no great purpose beyond ushering in centuries of chaotic and inconclusive foreign meddling. The tin ear for power politics exhibited by a sequence of Popes worsened the mess, but by the time of the Sack of Rome in 1527 the Vatican had long lost control of the proceedings, and a key contributor to the Reformation was less papal demands for money to rebuild St Peter’s and more a sense that the leader of the Universal Church had been reduced to a failed and eccentric power-monger.

  The arrival of a huge, artillery-toting French army in the peninsula was like the introduction of a fresh predator into some biogeographically sheltered island – its inhabitants had created a series of city states of
great complexity, beauty and belligerence but they were militarily governed by codes and values which could not compete with this horde. Historical events can often seem completely pointless, and there can be few better examples in the period than the Italian Wars. In a strategy of shocking dimness the French barrelled through the northern and central Italian states, ending up at the bottom of the peninsula and seemingly without realizing that this meant they were now trapped there by all the vengeful territory they had just laid waste.

  The many different actors in Italy formed and re-formed a series of highly unstable alliances. The League of Venice was created by the Pope to expel the French and included Maximilian – this was the first of many leagues which were such a feature of European states whether fighting each other or the Ottomans. It fulfilled its purpose and the bankrupt Charles VIII retreated back to France where he accidentally banged his head while playing tennis and died, but having established a French role in Italy, as well as an undying Habsburg enmity that stretched with small gaps until the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The dismaying contest carried on, with successful interventions tending to automatically generate fresh coalitions to take on the new winner. Maximilian did not shine in all this, a nadir being his attempt to take the Venetian city of Padua (in a short-lived alliance with France). His army lumbered along from Trento, many troops deserted from lack of pay and he was defeated by a scratch group of Venetian troops who had survived an earlier battle. Maximilian’s retreat was an unedifying spectacle, but it was part of a general melee of uselessness which has caused historians to tear their hair out with frustration at the ferocious yet absurd events they are obliged to recount. Troops deserted, Swiss mercenaries arrived, decided they didn’t fancy the situation and left again, monarchs staked their entire reputations in hysteria-ridden, chivalric band-of-brothers ceremonies but then wandered off again once their reputations began to tarnish.