Charles saw only disasters around him after the Peace and, shattered and sick, took the unprecedented step of actually resigning. The Pope thought this ‘the strangest thing that ever happened’. The whole point of hereditary office was that the decline and death of the ruler was a central part of the pattern – to bail out in favour of others made no sense. Charles is usually seen as rather noble and impressive, standing there in Brussels, surrounded by sobbing noblemen, making his great act of renunciation. But it could be argued that this just showed his startling family arrogance – thinking about both his predecessors and his successors, Charles seems genuinely to have seen himself as a mere link in a great Habsburg chain. Rather than dying in office surrounded by the usual hypocrites and impatient whispering, how much more imposing to hand out his offices in person. The process took a satisfying eleven months to complete as, in a series of grand pronouncements, he gave Burgundy to Philip in October 1555, Spain to Philip in January the following year (plus of course the Americas), the Franche-Comté (the confusing, separate ‘County of Burgundy’ as opposed to the Duchy) to Philip in April and the job of Holy Roman Emperor to Ferdinand (who already owned the Habsburg hereditary lands as well as being King of Bohemia and King of Hungary) in September.
As with many other Habsburg subdivisions there always lay open the chance that the two parts of the family might reunite at some future date. It was extremely unclear which of them should be seen as the senior branch: the Holy Roman Emperor trumps everyone, but it was impossible not to notice what was happening in Spain, now united fully and with a proper resident monarch at last, who in 1581 tacked on Portugal and its own American and Asian empires just for good measure. Both branches of the Habsburgs behaved as though they were senior, and this was a key factor in keeping them apart. Philip II in Madrid was undoubtedly the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. Spain’s culture had a decisive influence – the rich, sombre gloominess of its court totally shaped Vienna’s atmosphere into the eighteenth century, and Vienna had in turn little impact on Madrid. Maximilian II lived at the Spanish court for years before he became Emperor and his son and successor Rudolf II was raised there. There was a sense in which the Austrian lands were a bit of a backwater – a dreary fighting frontier not comparable to the greatness of the Spanish Empire. The key moment was Ferdinand’s death, after only a short reign. Charles’s deal had been that Philip would take over, but Ferdinand instead insisted on keeping with his direct line. It is hard to imagine the Electors accepting a Spaniard as Emperor, particularly one so very powerful and Catholic. So it could be that Ferdinand’s move to have himself replaced with his son, who would become Maximilian II, was necessary to the Habsburgs holding on to the office at all. This in some measure estranged the families, but it did not prevent them marrying each other in a notably creepy way. It became part of their arrogance that nobody else was good enough. So Maximilian II married Philip II’s sister Maria (so that makes them first cousins) and later Philip II married Anna, one of Maximilian’s children (that makes him her uncle!). Mercifully there then followed a group of bachelor or outlying Emperors, but the two branches were back intermarrying by the 1630s with catastrophic genetic results, birth problems and big jaws scattered everywhere.
With a strong sense of regret, the scene now shifts from the incense-laden grandeur of the Spanish court – a separate story with its own trajectory, featuring silver mines, chocolate, and electric eels – to the snowbound, fortified, inland territories which Ferdinand’s descendants ruled into the twentieth century.
The armour of heroes
In one of the saddest events of 1665, a ship heading along the Danube to Vienna foundered and sank, taking with it the entire music library of the Habsburg court at Innsbruck. The dissolution into the murky water of many thousands of irreplaceable handwritten sheets of music was the final act winding up the Tyrolean Habsburg family. The exact nature of this catastrophe is unknown but Innsbruck had been as important a musical centre as Salzburg or Vienna and attracted generations of brilliant Italian players and composers. One of these was Giovanni Pandolfi, who we only know about at all because he happened to publish two sets of violin sonatas which had a substantial impact on composers such as Purcell and Bach (indeed, Purcell stole one of his most beautiful tunes from Pandolfi). The sonatas’ publication in Innsbruck in 1660, dedicated to the reigning archduke and archduchess, is the only information we have. Pandolfi may have been the elderly and prolific composer of many great masses and an unparalleled sequence of works for all the major instruments, and single-handedly made seventeenth-century opera a whole lot more interesting than it turned out to be. Or he may have been a pettish, violent and gruesome child prodigy who turned out a handful of sonatas before his disgusted guardians quietly sold him off to a man scouting around for reliable galley-rowers. We will never know – whatever was on that ship is lost.
The sonatas themselves conjure up a magical, deeply refined world. They are dedicated to key Italian musicians at the court: violinists, castrati and the great Antonio Cesti, whose work obsessed the Emperor Leopold I in the following decade. But as usual they show the stark limits to what music can tell us – we have literally no knowledge at all about the composer, his intentions in the sonatas and what his relationships were with any of the dedicatees.
His patron, Archduke Ferdinand Karl, was by any measure a deeply unpleasant absolutist, who even in his great portrait by Frans Luycz – a mass of delirious scarlet cloth and brocade and perhaps the most beautifully designed boots in European history – sneers at posterity. It was Ferdinand Karl’s sudden early death, followed by his younger brother’s equally early death three years later, which ended the dynasty. The latter, Sigismund Franz, who had been Bishop of Trent, with all speed chucked in the ecclesiastical jobs, set himself up in Innsbruck and got married so as to sire a son. But it was too late: he died only twelve days after the marriage ceremony. Innsbruck itself now became a mere provincial outpost of Vienna – hence the unhappy decision to try to relocate its musical archives – now a cultural backwater after a long golden period that stretched at least from Maximilian I’s great funerary statue array to Ferdinand Karl’s composers.
The Innsbruck court was the heart of the Habsburg territories entangled in the Alps south of Bavaria, at that time ruling both Tyrol and the zany smorgasbord of Further Austria. Much of the Habsburg inheritance had a superficial coherence (proper kingdoms, directly ruled duchies next to each other), which makes it quite different from the rest of the Holy Roman Empire. But as someone who has spent too much time wandering around such political absurdities as Schaumburg-Lippe or Hohenlohe-Weikersheim it is with a little cry of happy recognition that I recognize the friendly oddness of Further Austria. On a map the Tyrol itself seems compact enough and has a sort of plausibility, but in practice it was a demented mass of particularisms, parcels of Alpine valleys seasonally cut off from one another, self-reliant and with very specific ideas about outsiders. It is symptomatic of the Tyrol that the celebrated Copper Age human ‘Ötzi’ should have had his mummified corpse dug out of the ice there – both because of Ötzi’s air of rather priggish, rugged self-reliance (his furs, his bag of healing herbs) and because he had an arrow stuck in his back.
If the map of Tyrol could be coloured in by some measure of ‘usefulness’ then it would appear, instead of as a compact block, as a series of small strands and spills hedged in by ferocious mountains, enjoyable as a whole only to late-nineteenth-century railway builders of the kind who relished expensive challenges. This patchiness continued in the rest of Further Austria, to scattered, tiny territories between Augsburg and Strasbourg and intermittently around the Danube and on to Lake Constance without any rhyme or reason. These were picked up by Habsburg ancestors after the original south German ‘Big Bang’ that fragmented Swabia after the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1268. Even the most detailed historical maps lose patience in trying to convey the mass of ‘forest towns’, strong-points, religious
foundations and pointless villages that made up Further Austria. The small populations of the region meant that at various levels it just did not matter very much. As this was the Habsburgs’ original home (even if chunks had been bitten off by the Swiss) its awkwardness was not allowed to stand in the way of its defence. In many ways it was the existence of such arbitrary chunks as the Sundgau (a very ancient family possession – part of Alsace) that made the Habsburgs into a western European power, building in a core Habsburg–French animosity. But perhaps the key point of this book is to shelter the reader from topics such as ‘the strategic value of the Sundgau’, although, naturally, they do have their own fascination.
Just to polish off Further Austria for ever, various blocks would be given to the Spanish Habsburgs as bribes for not pursuing their own claim to Vienna’s territories and to allow the Spanish to communicate with the Low Countries. As a result the Sundgau was almost eradicated by criss-crossing Imperial, Swedish and French troops during the Thirty Years War and the unpopulated ruins sold to the French in 1648, with the money paying for Archduke Ferdinand Karl’s penchant for Italian music. Most of the Sundgau and other scraps were later handed over to the Duke of Baden and King of Württemberg by Napoleon, and at the Congress of Vienna the Austrians decided they needed these rulers’ good will and would not ask for Further Austria to be handed back. The one exception was the small chunk of land at the end of Lake Constance – the Vorarlberg – with its main town of Bregenz, which stayed on as a western extension of the Tyrol. This region made no further contribution to world history, except for an ungrateful and thwarted bid at the end of the First World War to detach itself from Austria and become part of Switzerland. I promise to never ever raise the issue of the outlying territories of Further Austria again.
The oddness of these lands and the challenges they posed to their rulers cannot detract from the importance of Innsbruck itself, which is both hedged round by daunting geographical obstacles, and the key to the great trading route from Bavaria to Italy. Indeed, as the city controlling access to the Brenner Pass, it was one of those chokepoints at which European culture was most fluid and creative – the German-speaking Ferdinand Karl had followed his father’s example by marrying a member of the Medici family and the German–Italian blend of Innsbruck is exactly what would be expected. In my own small way I felt this, having travelled there after a few days of sitting in the sunny world of Gorizia and the Trentino eating risotto and delicious tomato salads. To mark the crossing of such an exciting cultural watershed I ordered a ‘Tyrolean farmer’s omelette’ which proved to be of an enormity and fattiness that would strike dead – mottled, puce and bolt-upright in his tractor cabin – any farmer stupid enough to make it his lunchtime choice.
Discussion of the Tyrol Habsburgs has to go somewhere in a single section and it is here rather than later because Innsbruck’s real claim on everyone’s time is the great Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol, who ruled from 1564 to his death in 1595. The separate Tyrolean line came and went and at various points was absorbed back under direct control in Vienna. Indeed Ferdinand himself married a very beautiful commoner whose sons were not allowed to inherit, and a late second marriage only produced daughters, so his own death ended this one patch of Tyrolean independence. Ferdinand had been given the job after an adventurous youth fighting the Turks and helping his father, the Emperor Ferdinand I (there are too many Ferdinands). At the Emperor’s death, he made Ferdinand ruler of the Tyrol and Further Austria, while his elder brother, Maximilian, ruling from Vienna, became Emperor Maximilian II. Ferdinand set out to do something remarkable at Innsbruck and it is a shame that the city today is so far off the cultural trail rather than just on the skiing trail, as Ferdinand’s home, Schloss Ambras, is such a marvel, one of the few places where it is possible to get an almost unalloyed sense of walking about in a Renaissance patron’s mind.
Because Ferdinand had no successor his collections were much messed about, with his nephew the Emperor Rudolf II taking for his own collection some of the choicest armour and curiosities, these first going to Prague and then on to Vienna under Rudolf’s successors (and with some heading to Stockholm thanks to marauding Swedish troops in the Thirty Years War). Flood, fire and insects have disposed of some of the remainder, with some further bad input from the catastrophic sunken boat full of music. But Ambras has also preserved a lot and the courtyards and halls still feel convincingly Ferdinandine.
The collections include the earliest painting of Dracula and a huge sequence of Habsburg family portraits where the dreadful chin can be followed down the generations. A mass of peculiar objects from various sources recreate an approximation of Ferdinand’s cabinet of curiosities, including two perfect memento mori – an archer skeleton carved from pearwood by Hans Leinberger, commissioned by Ferdinand’s great-great-grandfather Maximilian I, and a little carved skeleton in a frame, his hand resting on his chin in a mock philosophical pose which you can only see properly by looking up close, when you see your own face reflected in the mirror behind him. I have always loved this sort of slightly goth-metal object, but on my last trip to Ambras realized I was getting old enough for memento mori to have a bit too much bite and found myself more dismissive and impatient of them than before. Like wedding or graduation photos they sit there patiently over the years, waiting to have their full impact.
An important piece of family history is told in an oddly naive narrative painting of young Ferdinand being sent by his father all the way to Brussels to plead with his uncle Charles V not to resign. The mission was of course a failure, but worth it for this picture, with its little image of a house through the window of which you can see the poorly Charles, and over there is a ruffed Ferdinand on his big journey. The whole thing seems to cry out for simple captioning in big letters. I also cannot prevent myself from mentioning the extraordinary portraits of Petrus Gonzalez and his family, natives of Tenerife who were cursed by a total covering of thick hair and who adorned a number of courts, from Paris to Brussels to Parma, spending much of their time with Ferdinand’s aunt Margaret. The sheer, irreducible strangeness of their genetic condition (now called ‘Ambras syndrome’) is perfectly preserved in these paintings, the family members looking dignified but uncanny in their elegant court clothing.
At the core of Ferdinand’s collection were stories of heroism – bravery in battle, chivalric courtesy and flamboyant generosity. He paid out huge sums, called in favours from across Europe, inherited earlier collections and was given the most extraordinary presents by other rulers to allow him to fulfil this obsession. The collection is now a fraction of what it was, but still remarkable – a sequence of elaborate armours worn by the greatest paragons of the age: the fire-blackened armour of the Marquess of Mantua, who expelled the horrible Charles VIII from Italy at the Battle of Fornovo; the armour of the Count Palatine of the Rhine, commander of the German cavalry at the relief of the Siege of Vienna in 1529; the armour of Ferdinand’s key aide during the 1556 Turkish campaign; the armour of the young and glamorous Archduke Matthias, decades before he became the petulant, elderly Emperor of the Thirty Years War. It would all be better with the lighting a bit lower, indeed ideally viewed with a flaming torch, but even so these elaborate and beautiful armours, like historical exoskeletons, keep their resonance. For Ferdinand these were the armours of a Golden Age around which exemplary stories could be told. There is also a mass of tournament equipment, Ottoman weapons, ‘Turkish’ masks worn in chivalric melees and the colossal armour of Bartlmä Bon, the giant who accompanied him (to sensational effect) at the great 1560 tournament at Vienna. Ferdinand seems to have been racked by a form of obsessive military melancholy, of great deeds and companionship, a soldierly equivalent of the sort of weepiness that hits rugby players in middle age.
This tone lurks everywhere. There is a huge painting of the admirals at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the greatest event in Ferdinand’s lifetime, when the forces of the Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet and ended the Turk
s’ psychological death-grip. There, against a suitable backdrop of sinking and burning Turkish galleys, are the heroes of Christian Europe – Ferdinand’s bastard uncle Don John, Marcantonio Colonna and Sebastiano Veniero, all with an air of trying not to smirk with pride. As with the armour it remains very easy to see Ferdinand talking through the details of the victory for the nth time to his latest visitors.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 11