Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  It could be that Ferdinand was in fact a dreadful man, but whenever I am at Schloss Ambras it seems clear that he was one of the Habsburgs who make the family worthwhile, who more than balance all the pious timeservers who congest the family tree – a figure up there with Maximilian I. His willingness to agree to disinherit his successors so that he could marry a commoner also gives him an immediate chic. It is appropriate therefore that he is buried in an upstairs chapel of the Hofkirche, which his father, Emperor Ferdinand I, had built to house Maximilian’s cenotaph. Alexander Colyn, a Flemish sculptor, carved the reliefs of battles and marriages (designed by Dürer generations before) which cover the cenotaph’s sides, but also Ferdinand of Tyrol’s first wife’s tomb, and then Archduke Ferdinand’s own. As a final odd but happy touch a step juts out of the chapel wall and a full suit of Ferdinand’s own armour kneels to a statue of the Virgin Mary on the altar. This stylized piece of Renaissance mystical courtesy feels eerie and immediate, as though Innsbruck was still successfully signalling to us the strange ideas of the past.

  Europe under siege

  The frontier zone that marked the border between the Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire was a shifting, frightening reality from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. A straggling line from the Adriatic to the Carpathians, prone to violent bends westward in the face of Turkish attacks, dominated the lives of countless families who, simply to survive, organized themselves around permanent war-readiness. However distracted the Emperor might be by concerns in the Low Countries or Tunisia or Germany, a permanent war council, based at Graz, tried in his absence and quite often failed to regulate this huge region. After the disaster at Mohács the Turks often ravaged areas of what became known as the Military Frontier and made some further gains but the zone broadly held.

  The sheer awfulness of front-line life is preserved in a remarkable wall-painting on the outside of the cathedral in the Styrian city of Graz. The year 1480 had been so grim that it was felt appropriate to pay the painter Thomas of Villach to commemorate the survivors’ awareness of their debt to God for watching over them (although, as with plague monuments, there is mixed in an inevitable air of reproach about just how attentive God was being in practical terms). Although much faded it is still possible to see a heavenly host hovering above Graz, as plague, Turkish raiders and harvest failure hideously combine to carry off a large part of the population. The famine was caused by a plague of locusts, appearing in the picture particularly horrible as they are the size of crows (a not unreasonable distortion by the painter as they would be invisible at their true size). Plague victims are shown being put in their coffins and 1480 was a not untypical example of these devastating, random blows that might in a few weeks kill a quarter of a town’s entire population, a level of natural catastrophe for which we now simply have no comparison.

  The third element in Graz’s 1480 martyrdom is a Turkish raid, and little figures are shown in a slave-pen prior to being strung together in lines and led back into Ottoman territory, the fate of hundreds of thousands of Germans, Croats and Hungarians. The penalties of defeat were therefore extraordinarily high in Central Europe. For troops fighting, say, across Italy the general penalty for losing was to be offered a place in the winner’s army; with some infrequent exceptions, civilians on the losing side tended to be left alone or made to pay an exorbitant tax. On the Frontier to lose meant to become a slave. Most of Graz’s fortifications have been taken down but for centuries it bristled with ever more elaborate walls, towers, water obstacles and artillery platforms. It was the central place from which troops, supplies, money and orders were sent out to the zigzag of smaller forts to the south and east and its successful defence was crucial if the Habsburg southern flank was to hold. It remains, despite the loss of much of its military kit, a startling place, its defensive origins clearly still seen in the colossal central rock on which the castle used to stand.

  A frequent subject of conversation in families across the region must have been the quiet suggestion that it might make sense to move somewhere a bit nicer and the Graz authorities constantly had to battle to keep an adequate population in place. This was done by lavishing the most remarkable privileges on those who could be persuaded to move there, with land, money and prestige in return for a high level of military readiness. Many refugees from Ottoman-held Serbia and Bosnia moved, sometimes in large groups, over to the Habsburg side, the origins of the very mixed cultures of areas such as Slavonia which were to be so brutally unmixed in 1992. Systems of scouts, watchers, spies, couriers and alarm towers formed the Frontier’s nerve-ends, but a large Turkish raiding party could move at the same speed as the news of its arrival and could smudge out whole communities in a couple of hours. The only defences were walls sufficiently thick and well-manned and provisioned to hold up the raiders until help arrived, with the usual nightmare, carefully exploited by the Turks, of having somehow to keep up a state of readiness over the course of decades of quiet (and therefore, in practice, often letting readiness slip), waiting for that fatal attack.

  A completely extraordinary survival is the Armoury in Graz. This truly disturbing sequence of rooms consists of thousands upon thousands of weapons, hung in row upon row. Most of the weapons have no decorative features at all and they fall into a quite different category from the aristocratic showpieces surviving in museums. A pistol covered in pretty silver chasing is a pleasure to look at, but the Arsenal weapons are simply there to kill people – sickeningly utilitarian spears piled up in uncountable numbers; those disgusting spiked frames known as ‘Spanish riders’ designed to cripple horses; shelf after shelf of robot-like grey metal breastplates; an infinity of muskets. The older and simpler equipment, which runs every imaginable sadistic variation on sharpened edges and points, is the more sinister as its power to do terrible things is undimmed after four or five centuries. I can think of nowhere else which gives anywhere close to so vivid a sense of the workaday business of fighting – of the frightening emergencies that would have activated this great mass of equipment.

  This standardized turning-out of just-good-enough basic equipment for militia use was quite separate from the elaborate weapons and armour carried by commanders and their retinues. These men were a mix of local families and adventurers who would come from all over Europe, sometimes taking a turn in defending the East to gain prestige or as part of a crusading vow. It was rare for any serious fighting man not to turn up here at some point in his career and the structures of the Empire encouraged this. In the Vienna Armour and Weapons Museum there is a spectacular portrait of the landsknecht Konrad von Boyneburg, painted in old age in the 1560s. He is wearing the most beautiful decorative armour and – in a heroic coup – the museum shows this actual armour next to the picture. Konrad knocked about everywhere, working for Charles V on the whole, and he looks like a perfect Christian knight, except for the tiny giveaway details of the commander’s batons scattered about proudly at his feet to indicate his campaigns. These have written on them the places he fought in: southern Germany, northern Italy and – most completely disgracefully – Rome, where he was a key figure in the city’s sack in 1527, a shameful event which he seems pleased enough by. But Konrad boasts too of having fought in Hungary, the northern part of the Frontier, and he was one of many highly mobile, brilliantly equipped freebooters and scoundrels crucial to the world of raids and counter-raids that formed Christendom’s first line of defence.

  The pirates’ nest

  The brutal glamour of figures like Konrad formed a very different world from the woollier and more remote regions of the Frontier. The most famous holders of the far southern flank, in the murky network of Dalmatian islands and fortresses – with names like Bag, Klis and Krk – were the immortal Christian irregulars known as the Uskoks of Senj. The authorities in Graz were rarely able to impose any real authority on Senj and luckless Habsburg envoys would sometimes be sent down there to be either disregarded or murdered. The Uskoks used the maze of channels
and bays to harass Ottoman shipping and occasionally raid the mainland. It was a very peculiar, hothouse society of fervent Catholicism entangled in flagrant piracy. Papal delegates had to deal with thorny issues here, such as the rights and wrongs of taking a battle-axe into church, of priests blessing Uskok ships and weapons – even instances of priests actually taking part in raids. There was also the exquisite problem presented by the tithe, the tax which paid for the churches, being paid out as a percentage of stolen goods, the goods often being taken after the summary execution of a luckless ship’s crew. The showy Uskok habit of using their victims’ blood to flavour their bread was another talking point.

  As favoured children of the Church then, doing God’s work, the Uskoks were definitely falling into an ‘at risk’ category. Because so many reports were written about them to Rome by badly shaken official visitors throughout the sixteenth century, we accidentally have really good evidence for one isolated area of the Military Frontier. Most striking is the way the reports show the extreme malleability of ethnic tagging, with Italians and Bosnians rapidly becoming Croats in name and language once they settled into the society of Senj. This suggests in microcosm how in a pre-literate society the markers that became sacred to later nationalists were in practice almost without meaning – what you spoke, what you called yourself and where you went to church were shaped by what happened to be nearby rather than by genetic coding. For centuries Dalmatia was celebrated for such mobility, but in the twentieth century this became unacceptable to at least five different kinds of nationalism with tragic results.

  Both Christians and Ottomans resorted to extreme levels of cruelty of a Grand Guignol kind. The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive, but for much of the century it was in effect these bags that made it clear how useful the Uskoks were. Their sheer excessive savagery allowed them, from Graz’s point of view, to act in a semi-deniable way, a tendency exacerbated by Graz’s lack of money or supplies, which meant that they had no leverage anyway with Senj. Unfortunately, Uskok proclamations about destroying the commerce of the Muslim infidel in the name of Jesus tended to provoke hollow mirth in the Venetian Republic. The Uskoks – like reformed alcoholics brought face to face with row upon row of brightly coloured liqueur miniatures – were simply unable to avoid helping themselves to passing Venetian Christian ships. When the Habsburgs and Venetians were hostile to each other this was not a problem. Graz found itself having to make weak excuses along the – embarrassingly not inaccurate – lines that they could not control the Uskoks anyway. As Senj was simply a pirates’ nest there was another acute issue: that regular Habsburg ports further up the Adriatic, such as Rijeka, made a great deal of money from fencing excess Uskok goods, whatever the source. An entire stolen cargo of ostrich feathers, for example, caused mayhem as it made its way up the Adriatic from Senj – which had little use for ostrich feathers – to Istria, where Habsburg merchants sold them on to the highly specialized group in Venice who dealt in ostrich feathers, presumably the same people who had first ordered them, or indeed owned the original ship whose crew had been butchered by the Uskoks. It is easy to imagine grave and richly dressed Venetian patricians banging their fists on pearl-inlay tables. After ever more unmanageable outrages the Uskoks were finally shut down in 1618 by joint Venetian and Habsburg action and the era of lolling, pantalooned figures, battle-axes in church and funny-tasting bread was at an end. Resettled in family groups along the rest of the Military Frontier, the Uskoks of Senj became a folkloric memory.

  The sheer, long-term violence of the Military Frontier is astonishing. The Uskoks pinned down its furthest southern point, but irregularly, along swathes of modern Croatia and western Hungary, spasms of extraordinary ferocity laid waste to regions which, while always quite tough places to live, had before the disaster of Mohács been good farmland, with the usual accompaniment of small castles, mills and monasteries. The inhabitants were faced with impossible problems of loyalty. A powerful strand within the Hungarian lands found itself terrified of Muslim rule but also dubious about Habsburg legitimacy (a dubiety fuelled heavily by Rudolf II’s incompetence) and driven mad by the collapse of any hope for a normal existence. It is not surprising that a chiliastic dementia took root, with even basic civilization breaking down in the 1570s in the face of the fearsome reign of the ‘Black Man of Debrecen’ and desperate armed bands laying waste to Croatia and Slavonia. These were countered by bouts of Habsburg ferocity that through pouring in German mercenaries – who had also been defenders of Senj – gradually brought the region back under control. After decades of ‘peace’ – meaning that armed slave-raiding by Tatar bands was acceptable, but nothing by more formal armies – Rudolf II and his allies in 1593 initiated what became known as ‘the Long War’, a wearying grind that embittered and disappointed everyone involved. The fighting scarred and blackened the entire landscape, leaving large areas of Hungary and Croatia with no remaining populations. A further layer of horror came from a rebellion by Hungarian aristocrats against Habsburg rule, provoked both by a dourly unintelligent policy of re-Catholicizing Royal Hungary and by a continuing feeling that the Habsburgs were simply not legitimate – that they had stolen the Hungarian crown. This resulted in a further round of frenzied violence, famous for the role of Hungarian irregulars known as Hajduks. After a peace treaty was signed, the Hajduks were brought under control and became another important element in the Habsburg armies, on the Military Frontier and elsewhere, coming gradually to mean in very general terms a swaggering, semi-detached and picturesquely clothed irregular of an Uskok kind.

  It could be argued that until the Ottomans were finally pushed back in the late seventeenth century the frontier never really stabilized. Graz relied on militia (increasingly useless), aristocratic followers, mercenaries, temporary European crusade tourists, smaller Imperial states whose rulers sought to find favour or who just loved fighting and a complex mix of military settlers. Long periods of formal peace between the two sides never prevented large-scale raids and one of the many functions of the monasteries that dot Carinthia and Slovenia was to take in thousands of traumatized refugees that might follow a successful Ottoman incursion. From their principal bases at Sarajevo, Belgrade and Buda, none of which was seriously threatened by the Habsburgs until the late seventeenth century, the Ottomans funnelled countless prisoners into the slave-markets. In scenes more familiar to us in descriptions of West Indian slave auctions, Serb or German men would be stripped naked and whipped across Belgrade’s main square to demonstrate their fitness to potential buyers.

  We know much less about the impact of comparable Habsburg raids into Ottoman territory as they did not attract the same outraged pamphlet literature, but the two sides formed mirror images of one another and the obsessive depravity of the Uskoks and Hajduks was let loose on the Ottoman regions of northern Serbia and southern Hungary. A landscape today associated with endless corn and sunflowers and dusty little villages soon ceased to have any viable population. Until the end of the eighteenth century, this zone, with its malarial marshes, enveloping new forest cover and great packs of wolves, became a nightmarish part of Europe into which whole armies could march and become sick, starving, lost and demoralized with terrifying speed.

  Perhaps the final heroes of the Military Frontier were the Pandurs, a fighting force of shakoed raiders under the charismatic, albeit psychopathic, leadership of Baron Franz von der Trenck. Trenck brought together a group of mainly Croat fighting men in the 1730s, and used them to fight everyone faintly inimical to Habsburg authority, whether Turkish or Prussian. The Pandurs became famous more perhaps for their picturesque and motley uniforms than their actual exploits, tapping into old Uskok or Hajduk nostalgia as a last hurrah for irregular fighters in a now boringly regimented world. To this day an infinity of cheap prints of Pandurs smoking pipes or wearing hats at rakish angles takes up valuable space on the walls of provincial museums
and fly-blown hotels across the old Habsburg lands.

  Trenck ended his short, violent, wandering life locked in the Špilberk fortress in Brno, a thoroughly disgraced figure. However, he has enjoyed a long and peculiar afterlife as the prime exhibit in the freakish vault of the Capuchin monastery in the town. This odd place contains the mummified corpses of monks, laid out in rows, their heads resting on bricks, dressed in their habits and holding crucifixes, the whole place having the air of a deeply unsuccessful hospital. But before visitors get to the severe example of the monks, there is a very ornate open-topped coffin with Trenck in it. With his hell-raising reputation, Trenck could not be a more exemplary figure to see reduced to a blackened mummy, naked except for a modesty loin-flap, and lying on a ‘bed’ with ruffled fancy sheets of a griminess perhaps more nauseating than the corpse itself. The rest of the vault contains a selection of mummified judges, architects and generals including one Baron Filiberti still looking dashing in his cavalry boots. Trenck was always there just as a raree show as his body was brought to the vault only in 1872, long after the crypt had been closed to fresher residents. There is an excellent pre-First World War photo of monks solemnly taking off the glass lid of Trenck’s coffin so that some extra-special visitors can take a closer look, an option now luckily no longer available.

  Trenck’s remains put us, in a distant, shrivelled way, in touch with the final gasp of the Military Frontier – a place that had rewarded violence, luck and recklessness for some three centuries and which now became merely historical. For Croatians, Albanians and Serbs particularly it would in due course become a model for their proto-nationalisms, even if this needed a highly selective reading, pretending that there was no German or Hungarian element. It encouraged a devil-may-care, big-moustached, big-shirted Romanticism which for much of the region’s later history was pleasantly at odds with the stolid, farming reality of most of the old Military Frontier – a dullness perked up by ballads about the quintessential Uskok Ivo Senjanin and the Hajduk Mijat Tomić, hammer of the Turks. These figures have enjoyed a fresh life in post-Communist Central Europe where both scholarly and popular enthusiasm for these totemic fighters has taken root, and statues, often with a strongly heavy-metal flavour, scatter town squares and parks wherever there was notable Christian–Muslim fighting. Indeed, the Capuchin vault in Brno was crowded with heavy metal fans looking at the grisly selections and this seemed to me a charming, if nutty, example of cultural history’s wending ways. In the summer of 2010 I was spending a happy few days in Cluj and was almost dazed at my good fortune at having just missed Iron Maiden playing there at the central arena on their head-bursting, Earth-girdling ‘Final Frontier’ tour. It is not perhaps something that can withstand even the most cursory scepticism, but I feel it might just be possible to create a richly textured explanation for continuing Central European devotion to such leather-clad British dinosaurs as Iron Maiden via the shared Hajduk heritage across the region. Or not.