Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  A new generation of protagonists, Francis I of France and Charles V, renewed Italy’s disasters in 1521. It is fair to say that Francis hated Charles. A series of outrageous bribes, funded by the Fugger family in Augsburg, had allowed Charles to become Holy Roman Emperor despite Francis’s best efforts to make himself Maximilian’s successor. We will never know the private arguments among the Electors – Maximilian may have been an appealing figure and a great and imaginative intellectual patron, but his rule had hardly been a success for the Empire even if it was a few notches up from the chaos of his father’s reign. There was certainly a case that the Habsburgs had tried and failed, but an at-heart German-speaking empire stomaching a French leader was even at this point a bit implausible and while Charles was young and untried this was also true of Francis. It could be that the vast bribes were not needed, although such figures as the Prince-Archbishop of Cologne must have received them with smiles – but in fact this proved to be the last real chance to wrest the job away from the Habsburg family until the mid-eighteenth century, as the chaotic and ad hoc arrangements which had prevailed were now superseded by Charles V’s long-term planning.

  In Italy one of the most spectacular instances of the France–Habsburg rivalry was resolved in 1525 at the epochal Battle of Pavia. It was then that Charles’ extraordinary status as inheritor of both Spain and the Habsburg lands and the Empire came into play, with both sides amassing huge forces. Many thousands of men in wildly varied uniforms and weapons – and with equally varied levels of commitment – marched and countermarched and in a cataclysmic encounter Francis’ army was utterly defeated by the Imperial–Spanish force, with Francis suffering the humiliation, extremely rare among monarchs, of being personally captured.

  This was the early high point of Charles’s career, an event immortalized in the slightly non-instantaneous media of tapestries and oil paintings, generally of questionable accuracy, which flashed – or lumbered – the message of Habsburg victory across Europe. Its longer-term impact was muted though by the Pope’s anxiety that he had encouraged a monster he could no longer control. The Pope therefore conjured up a fresh anti-Charles alliance, the League of Cognac, which looked like pure quality on paper – France, Venice, Florence and others all joining together with a cynicism which even the most hard-bitten mercenary should have blushed at – but which rapidly collapsed, resulting in Charles’ unpaid troops running amok in Rome, killing thousands of troops and citizens. It was a benchmark low in Papal–Imperial relations and ended the Roman Renaissance.

  Much of Italy had been destroyed and its wealth drained off. By various criteria it did not really recover until the twentieth century, and outside Naples and the north-west it became a byword for backwardness and failure, split between a shifting cast of partitionary powers. This disaster was in many ways mere collateral damage from Franco-Imperial rivalry and an inability to dig out from under this galvanized Italian nationalists in the nineteenth century just as much as the parallel later story of German humiliation and failure in the Thirty Years War did for their northern colleagues. But events in Italy now appear very low-key and low-risk. Charles V had – as so often – concentrated his energies in the wrong place. There were only two adversaries who really mattered: Martin Luther and Suleiman the Magnificent.

  The disaster

  In this period, pitched battles in which one side feared it would lose were very rare. Except in an ambush, battles rarely happened except when both commanders were confident. But the speed with which one side is suddenly proven wrong in their calculations must be terrifying. Years of tournaments, musters, borrowing to buy weapons, the inter-generational transfers of fighting skills, arguments over dinner about formations, commanders, the value of heavy artillery over light artillery and then, suddenly, one last inspirational harangue and it is all put to the test. A major battle was an unusual event and rulers could feel crushed beneath the weight of historical expectation with everybody hauled back and forth between the sense of their acute danger and the opportunity for the great heroic act.

  The marshy plain south of Mohács in southern Hungary is a perfect example of why visiting battlefields is a waste of time. Some twentieth-century monuments there tell you nothing, but it is unclear what one could expect to find here, or indeed on any battlefield. It would be a peculiar mind that could accurately imagine the twenty-five thousand Hungarian troops’ catastrophic interaction with fifty-five thousand Ottoman ones on the afternoon of 29 August 1526 as they moved across the fields and woods, particularly as we have little accurate information about any aspect of the battle beyond its disastrous outcome. Much of the Hungarian nobility was killed in the fighting and most of those who survived were captured and executed. The king, Lajos II, fled the field and was either killed or drowned, the subject of numerous later Hungarian paintings, generally showing a poignantly futile figure in brilliant armour and ostrich feathers being hauled from a stream. In the somnolent nearby town of Mohács there is an excellent modern sculpture of the unfortunate monarch, his face creased with suffering, his body consisting only of elaborate decorative armour – the only oddity being that Lajos is shown as worn and grizzled rather than what he really was, a neurotic, uncertain and twerpy twenty-year-old. As had so often been Ottoman practice against earlier opponents, the aim of winning the battle was not to discuss a treaty or extract ransoms but to eradicate the existing ruling order and start afresh.

  This catastrophe ended the old Hungarian kingdom, and the rage and distress discussions of the battle have always caused come not least from a sense that it was absolutely avoidable. We see the battle as an overwhelming defeat for Christendom which buried swathes of the Balkans under Turkish rule for centuries, but for contemporaries it cannot have seemed like that for a moment. Indeed, the run-up to Mohács is a near perfect example of how unuseful the term ‘Europe’ is as a collective description, with almost every court at odds with every other. The only hope in facing the Ottomans lay in unified action, but this never happened. Throughout the long emergency there were gaps in the fighting, but these were generally caused by rebellions in other parts of the Ottoman Empire. As the sultan’s troops went off to Egypt or Persia, everyone in Europe seems to have relaxed, clapped their hands to get the court musicians on their little balcony to start playing again and then sat for yet another technically accomplished royal portrait (Lajos nonetheless looking a berk in every single one). For at least a generation it had been clear that the Turks were on the move. A brilliant holding action by the key eastern ally, Ştepan the Great of Moldavia, had bought time, but Ştepan found himself as much threatened by Poles and Hungarians as by the Turks. He eventually concluded that the best advice he could give his descendants was to cut a deal with the more reliable Turks, a deal finalized in 1512. Moldavia therefore became an Ottoman vassal state and the Christian west waved goodbye to what had been a friendly bulwark just through sheer stupidity. Throughout these years the steady chewing sound of Ottoman forces working their way through the map of Europe could be heard – Venice forced out of her Aegean islands, Montenegro surrendering in 1499, Rhodes giving out after a heroic siege in 1522 … But the response was confused and helpless and had little sense of urgency, with events in Italy and elsewhere seeming more compelling.

  Hungary spectacularly tore itself into bits, convulsed with hatred between the monarchy and many nobles and between the nobles and their peasants. There are too many depressing indications of decline to enumerate them in full, but as usual at times of great stress rival groups stepped forward with ideas for national renewal incompatible with one another. One was the creation of the Tripartitum, a disastrous document that equated the Hungarian nation simply with the Hungarian nobility. This was a by-product of disaffection between monarch and nobles, claiming an absolute authenticity for the Hungarians as against their, admittedly often dubious, foreign monarchs. But the result was in the very long term legally to alienate huge numbers of poorer Hungarians as well as – less surprisingly –
the mass of non-Hungarian peasants. Given the ruins into which Hungary was about to fall, the Tripartitum was blindly clung to by surviving, traumatized noble families and became a sort of poisonous mantra for the True Way which would warp the brains of the ruling class until that class’s destruction in the twentieth century. This sense of fear and distrust that undermined Hungary showed through most horribly in the wake of the Archbishop of Esztergom’s seemingly sensible plan to launch a crusade against the Turks in 1514. This promptly got completely out of control, with over forty thousand peasants and minor nobles rallying and given weapons under the leadership of the charismatic Szekely soldier György Dózsa. The more substantial aristocracy stayed away from the crusade and this so enraged the soldiers that they devastated the countryside, massacring every real and imagined opponent in their path before being exterminated by a professional army from eastern Hungary. The aftermath is hardly believable, with the captured Dózsa strapped naked before a huge crowd onto a red-hot ‘throne’ and then mockingly made king with a red-hot crown. His key surviving lieutenants were forced to eat roasted strips of his flesh before being themselves executed. This was a society literally devouring itself without needing any help from the notionally Satanic and uncivilized Ottomans.

  The fall of Belgrade in 1521 made a mockery of the young Lajos’s regime. The citadel which an earlier generation had so magnificently defended became – partly through bickering and treachery between its defending commanders – a key Ottoman redoubt for nearly three hundred years, with its entire Christian population shipped off to Istanbul as slaves. The devastation caused by Dózsa’s war, fear and dislike of the court and simple lack of resources made it impossible for Hungary to defend itself. The court did its bit by setting out to alienate every conceivable source of help, spurning Ottoman proposals for a truce, and potential Polish and Venetian alliances. On top of this the court accused the Fuggers of embezzling from the mines it controlled in Hungary, thereby also alienating perhaps Europe’s most powerful family and much of the Holy Roman Empire with it.

  Lajos strutted about at the centre of events, but was too inexperienced and unimpressive to gain any real loyalty. He was the king not just of Hungary but also Croatia and the Bohemian lands – Bohemia itself, Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia. Feuding and chaos meant that while he was notionally one of the most powerful men in Europe, he was in practice a short-lived pawn of his two great neighbours, Charles V’s brother Archduke Ferdinand and Suleiman the Magnificent. Ferdinand and Suleiman’s long reigns would define the future of Central Europe and carve out political units and structures of great durability. Ferdinand acted as his brother’s deputy in the east, but Charles was so frequently absorbed in fighting in other parts of the Empire that Ferdinand, with his compact but relatively small Austrian and Tyrolean territories, had to deal on his own with the wave upon wave of catastrophes that threatened to swamp Europe. Both Charles and Suleiman had more sprawling, sumptuous and world-historical sorts of reigns, but it was Ferdinand who had the task of creating the Habsburg monarchy in the form in which it persisted to 1918, eventually himself becoming Emperor.

  Maximilian’s brilliantly engineered family compact of 1515 meant that in the event of Lajos having no heir his kingdoms would switch to Habsburg rule. The court at Buda was in any event suffused with Habsburg influence because Lajos’s wife Mary was Ferdinand’s sister and Ferdinand was married to Lajos’s sister, Anna. Indeed, a core grounds for dissention among the Hungarian nobles was that they had their own proud anti-Habsburg tradition, most brutally expressed when their King Matthias Corvinus had marched his army into Vienna as recently as 1485, one of Frederick III’s many less good moments.

  Ferdinand fulfils in Hungarian demonology the role of both saviour and scavenger on national disaster. Events moved with hideous speed after Mohács, with this fundamental breach opening up a seemingly unstoppable western and north-western campaign area for the Ottomans. In 1527, Suleiman’s army besieged Vienna, retreated and then returned again in 1529 to finish the task. It was this campaign which initiated the first of the great, self-immolating acts of sacrifice which were all that Hungarians could take away from their general disaster – the siege of Kőszeg.

  Driving through the dozy Hobbitons on the hilly borders between the Austrian Burgenland and far western Hungary, it is very hard to imagine that this backwater among backwaters could have been chosen as 1529’s focus of destiny. The doziness is now much enhanced by the woodlands which so thickly flourish as part of the principal Cold War border and indeed the trees seem to cut off the area like the spell in Sleeping Beauty. But it is also a great linguistic border, bitterly fought over in the earlier twentieth century, so perhaps the placing of Kőszeg is not quite accidental. In any event an enormous Ottoman army stopped there to dispose of its small fortress before moving on to Vienna. The fortress, manned by some seven hundred Hungarian-Croatian troops with no artillery, managed to hold off repeated assaults. The Ottomans were always at a disadvantage because of their short campaigning season, much of it spent getting from Istanbul to, say, Kőszeg and the rest spent getting back before the weather deteriorated dangerously, and the delay at Kőszeg proved fatal. The exact details of the siege are mysterious, and wandering around the little reconstructed fort now it seems completely impossible that it really proved difficult to raze. The Ottoman commanders were so embarrassed by their situation that they exaggerated the size of the garrison and claimed the fort was on a steep hill, making it hard to assault, as opposed to being on a flat piece of land just a bit down from the car park. The deaths of many defenders set a benchmark for ever more extreme sieges, most spectacularly at Eger (1552) and Szigetvár (1566), the defence of the latter being so fervent, reckless and prolonged that Suleiman the magnificent actually died of a seizure, presumably brought on by sheer exasperation that another campaigning season lay in tatters thanks to a Hungarian refusal to be reasonable. Instead of surrendering, the last surviving elements in the garrison, under their magnificent Hungarian-Croat commander Zrínyi, charged out to their deaths, taking as many Turkish soldiers with them as they could, an event immortalized in any number of poems, novels and histories and by perhaps the most magnificent of all the great historicist paintings in Hungary’s National Gallery, Johann Peter Krafft’s Zrínyi’s Last Charge – a brilliantly coloured cataclysm with fiendish, orc-like Turks cringeing, gawping and tumbling to their deaths before the sheer tangerine-and-scarlet beauty of Zrínyi’s costume.

  For every heroic stand there were dozens of now-forgotten disasters, as Ottoman troops spread out across Hungary and destroyed it. But the Turks, within their new and extensive lands, remained boxed in by the Adriatic to the south-west and by a thickening chain of Habsburg forts and obstacles that protected the area behind Buda (taken by the Ottomans in 1541) and stabilized the frontier. In the midst of these catastrophes perhaps the only beneficiary was Ferdinand, who stepped into the vacated shoes of Lajos, and changed overnight from a major prince along the lines of the dukes of Bavaria to unquestionably the greatest ruler in Central Europe. The kingdoms he now ruled were all elective monarchies, but it was under these emergency conditions not difficult to persuade the panicked, surviving electoral diets.

  After many reverses, betrayals and plots, the Peace of Edirne in 1547 formally split Hungary into three sections. The largest, encompassing the Great Plain, the Hungarian Danube and Croatia, became a full part of the Ottoman Empire. Transylvania became a vassal state, much like Moldavia or the cunning Dalmatian entrepôt of Ragusa/Dubrovnik, and the heart of a subservient but nonetheless vigorous Hungarian area of rule. For many Hungarian nobles Transylvania had clear continuity as the surviving piece of Lajos’s kingdom, the rest reduced to alien Habsburg colonial rule. The remaining pieces, including most importantly the Hungarian coronation site of Pozsony (later Bratislava), and comprising very roughly what is now Slovakia and western Hungary, became a new element in the Habsburg monarchy: Royal Hungary. For those living in this rump remnant
, it was comparable to an Englishman suddenly finding himself confined to Kent and Sussex and ruled by a Frenchman. As usual such analogies do not work, as the comparison could be both better and worse, but this remnant became the nucleus for the reconquest of Hungary, which would take many reigns. In return for control of it, Ferdinand (initially on behalf of Charles) agreed to pay an annual tribute to the Ottomans of thirty thousand gold florins. This was worth it. Ferdinand could not beat the Ottomans but he could try to pay them off and in the meantime establish the defences which would mark out the new, shockingly mutilated Hungarian borders, borders which continued to impact on the life of Central Europe until the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and perhaps beyond.

  Ferdinand can be thought of as the key ideologue of Habsburg rule. Charles had in one of his frequent acts of intelligent improvisation made him his deputy in the traditional eastern Habsburg lands – initially for the merely expedient reason that Ferdinand needed ownership of a block of territory to give him sufficient status to marry into the Hungarian/Bohemian royal family, as arranged by Maximilian when Ferdinand and Anna were children. Ferdinand sorted out the defence of his massively increased dominions against the Ottomans and had with Anna a tremendous number of children who were dispersed across the whole of Europe, creating a dynastic bedrock. Charles V’s role as sort of Habsburg super-chief turned out to be a temporary one, as Ferdinand’s growing seniority, aggression and importance made it ever more likely that Charles would be obliged to split his empire in half – with his only son taking over the Spanish and Burgundian elements and Ferdinand keeping the traditional hereditary lands and his two new kingdoms. But this – as with so much Habsburg history at the time – required a lot of luck and many other outcomes always stayed possible, not the least being the total collapse of the eastern territories to Ottoman depredation.