Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The Long War was a hideous, endless grind. There was one major battle, at Mezőkeresztes in 1596, the largest since Mohács, and the Christian forces came painfully close to winning before losing discipline, falling to looting and then being cut to bits. Some hundred and fifty thousand troops seem to have been present and casualties on both sides were enormous – but the Ottomans had a much larger army and this proved decisive. Mutual massacres, sieges and the usual mass deaths by disease sapped both sides but the fighting went on interminably. Rudolf was notionally in charge but never went to the front, with members of his family, most notably his brother Maximilian, doing the heavy, if inept, work. From a Habsburg or Christian point of view the Long War was a disaster and its prosecution shameful, but there was a separate story, not clear at the time, of matching Ottoman desperation. It is not unreasonable to say that the fighting burned out the Ottomans, with the febrile hysteria in Constantinople that greeted the news of the narrow victory at Mezőkeresztes symptomatic of an empire no longer the confident wonder of the world it had been under Suleiman. Army after expensive army trudged from Constantinople to the Hungarian frontier, but with no longer anything much to show for it. The 1606 Peace of Zsitvatorok ended the wretched conflict, signed by Murad’s successor Ahmed and Rudolf’s younger brother Archduke Matthias. It recognized minor changes in the frontier, but the Ottomans kept everything that was important. The bitter Habsburg signatories were not to know that the Ottoman threat (aside from the desperate throw of the Siege of Vienna seventy-seven years later) had hit its peak.

  Hunting with cheetahs

  The Star Hunting Lodge, in what is now a suburb of Prague, was built by Rudolf II’s uncle, the man who became the great Castle Ambras collector Ferdinand of Tyrol. When still a teenager he was appointed Governor of Bohemia by his father, the Emperor Ferdinand I, and he needed a rural base. There is even his sketch showing how he wanted it to look: a ground plan of a six-pointed star, probably based on a building he had seen in Rome. The lodge survived the most extraordinary rigours over five centuries and is still surrounded by a park used by generations of invaders – Swedish, Prussian, French, German and Soviet. As a fancy command post many an invader has found it impossible to resist setting up there – but in some odd way it must be cursed, as every single one has left. The lodge has been a gunpowder magazine and the park used both for Wehrmacht vehicle repair and for herds of cattle to feed Soviet troops. The Lodge roof has been stripped of its copper by mercenaries during the Thirty Years War, given a baroque cupola (now removed), neglected and abused. Its heyday was the latter half of the sixteenth century, when Ferdinand and his older brother the Emperor Maximilian II and then Rudolf used it for hunting and entertainments. In a completely extraordinary scene, Rudolf once hunted deer around the park with cheetahs – an image almost infantily exotic – as he and his followers orchestrated this no doubt mutually baffling encounter between fearsome, if chilly, African megafauna and some appalled Bohemian ungulates.

  The Star Lodge’s mystery and absolute oddness lies in its six-pointed structure. It is as though it has battled through every vicissitude for many hundreds of years just so that at last its design can make sense when looked at on Google Earth. Originally the surrounding parkland was arranged in screens of vegetation in the same star shape, which must have made the building more conventionally decorative, but now in isolation, at the end of a long alley, it has the air of something that has been donated by a civilization from another planet. It seems to have no link to any architectural period and provides none of the interaction with the viewer that normal buildings have. It is almost as though it neither absorbs nor reflects light, the star’s arms angling sun and shadow in ways unrelated to normal physical experience. It is uncanny, and a perfect instance of the world of the sixteenth century, more potent than any cabinet of curiosities: an exercise in mathematics drifting through history.

  I wanted to see it because I had read about the cheetah hunt. This hunt was both a classic Rudolfine conceit and at the heart of the mystery of Rudolf. Did he often go hunting with cheetahs? Was this a one-off after which he lost interest, decided to focus instead on perusing sketches of the Bohemian forests, and left the unfortunate cheetah whippers-in undisturbed with their restive and hungry charges? How is it possible to reconcile Rudolf’s introversion with something so exuberant? Clearly as his reign progressed Rudolf tended less towards cheetahs and more towards gem-stones and small, immaculate drawings. As the unanswered business heaped up and the Empire juddered to a halt, with the Turkish war going on for year after year like some grinding constant in a science-fiction novel, the exuberance around the Star Lodge became a very distant memory. Rudolf would be seen by nobody for weeks and the entire structure of both the Empire and the Habsburg lands began to cave in.

  The Habsburgs’ astonishing longevity stemmed above all from the ability of the senior male to produce heirs and avoid going mad. A successor and a reasonable level of bureaucratic and kingly ability in a world based around heredity and hierarchy meant that, with a couple of spectacular wobbles, they were able to keep going without the British or Spanish habit of the principal stem simply running out. There were many reasons for hating the Habsburgs or being bored by them, but the family itself gave very few chances for its enemies to bring it down on dynastic or competence grounds – the children arrived, the wearying court protocol kept trundling on. The senior Habsburgs also stuck together. Behind every ruler there were a group of relatives whose importance we can now only guess at in most cases – dowagers, sisters, brothers who, whatever their private vexations, defaulted to a blank family solidarity.

  Rudolf’s collapse created a huge crisis, and one which broke that solidarity. With no heirs apparent and even the alchemists left twiddling their thumbs, Rudolf’s personal terrors and melancholy meant that Central Europe was under threat. By the end of the century Maximilian II and Maria of Spain’s once prize-winning phalanx of nine Habsburg children was not what it had been. Maria had gone back to Spain (glad to live in a land without any heretics) and two of the children were in the Spanish Habsburg orbit (one as a governor of the Netherlands, another as a nun). Four of the remainder had died, leaving only Rudolf, Matthias and Maximilian. Both Matthias and Maximilian had led lives of action, the former fighting the Turks in the Long War and the latter trying and failing to become King of Poland and serving as Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. The situation was poisonous both because Rudolf disliked his surviving brothers and because they were all close in age and none had children. This meant that while Matthias was the heir, he was also old and a stop-gap and hardly worth investing the energy in sorting out the bribes, robes and jewellery for everyone to anoint him to his different jobs on Rudolf’s death. So just below the immediate successor were a variety of predators – most alarmingly Philip III of Spain, who could claim the whole lot through being the son of one of Maximilian II’s daughters, or Ferdinand, the ruler in Graz, whose father was another of Maximilian’s offspring.

  This uncertainty became tangled in vicious, gloomy religious issues. Maximilian II, like many of his courtiers in each of his kingdoms, had been prey to ill-defined Protestant sympathies. Following from his father’s short reign, Rudolf found himself ruling over lands in which so many leading families in Bohemia, Austria and Hungary had become Protestant that his own more orthodox Catholic leanings were irrelevant. In many areas there was now a clear majority of non-Catholics, whether old Utraquists or Lutherans or Calvinists. Both Rudolf and Matthias understood that messing with the Peace of Augsburg, however distasteful Protestantism might be, was simply too dangerous. The latter half of the sixteenth century became a tense but intellectually respectable exercise in semi-tolerance. This was not the case for the post-Rudolf generation, with both Philip III and Ferdinand seeing Protestants simply as inspired by the Devil. For many people across the Habsburg lands the succession was therefore extremely worrying, with both of the most obvious successors liking to occupy themselves with e
xpelling, killing and disinheriting Protestants.

  We can always rely on Bartholemeus Spranger to paint something odd for every occasion and he certainly does not disappoint after the Peace of Zsitvatorok brought the Long War to an end in 1606. The final phase of the war was a hideous bloodbath, as rebellious Hungarians supported by the Ottomans fought against Habsburg forces, with the entire conflict taking on an ever more messianic Protestant versus Catholic fervour. Overruled by Matthias, who concluded the Peace, Rudolf commissioned Spranger to create an allegory of his own unhappiness. On a huge canvas, Spranger painted perhaps the most amazingly desirable figure of Victory ever. She is trampling on a prostrate Turk who is either dead or simply dazed and gawping because of the bits of Victory he can see from his vantage point. But Victory’s lissom feet unfortunately balance only on unstable blocks of stone and the Imperial eagle with sceptre and orb squats sadly on the ground next to the lucky Turk rather than soaring up into the air, as is more traditional. Such a direct and personal piece of work is an extraordinary survival – there is no doubt that Spranger was following very precise instructions from Rudolf. Instead of the usual, vacant suck-up allegories, here is one designed to make a very clear point: that the defining Central European event of Rudolf’s reign had ended in massacres, compromises and failure, and in his own authority ignored.

  The rest of Rudolf’s reign was a desperately sad diminuendo. Matthias’s cynicism allowed him to work with the Protestants in ways that Rudolf could not. He recognized religious freedom in Transylvania and the rest of Habsburg-ruled Hungary and during the final years of Rudolf’s life (he died in 1612) edged him out of each of his titles. The deals done with each part of the Habsburg patrimony meant that in return for Protestant support Matthias got each job. We would of course see this as being positive, but the reality was feverish, vicious and chaotic. 1611 was the nadir. The peculiarly belligerent and quarrelsome Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Passau (and younger brother of Archduke Ferdinand in Graz) came to Rudolf’s aid. An engraving in the Prague City Museum shows the Catholic Passauer mercenaries running amok in the Lesser Town, with smoke pouring from the houses, corpses everywhere and house-to-house gun-fights. In a perfect example of the use of the Charles Bridge, the heavy fortifications at its eastern end prevented the Passauers from getting into the Old Town and eventually they were bribed to leave. Meanwhile Protestants lashed out in the Old Town, with Franciscan monks at Our Lady of the Snow hacked to death or gunned down from the roof and with attacks on the Jewish Town. The Thirty Years War would not start for another seven years, but all the ingredients were already there. At the end of 1611, Matthias, frantic to have an heir, at last married, although in his mid-fifties, a luckless first cousin. Rudolf died a few days later and was buried alongside his parents and grandparents in the Habsburg tombs in St Vitus’s Cathedral, the last Habsburg ruler, as it turned out, to be buried in Prague or use it as his capital.

  It seems a shame to end on such a glum note. In one of the most imaginative meditations on Rudolf II, in 1922, Karel Čapek wrote the play The Makropoulos Case, quickly turned into a strange and marvellous opera by Janáček. The story revolves around Dr Makropoulos, one of the mountebanks and oddities at Rudolf’s court, who invents a potion that gives its user eternal life. He offers the potion to Rudolf, but he fears it is a poison and orders Makropoulos to try it first on his own daughter. In a typically ingenious Čapek twist this, of course, does not help Rudolf at all. The drink may not be a poison, but its potency can only be proven long after Rudolf has himself died anyway of natural causes. He is doomed never to know if the potion is real, or just another of his alchemists’ failed fakes. The play/opera is set in Čapek’s modern Czechoslovakia, with a beautiful woman arriving in Prague who seems to know a remarkable amount about the city’s past centuries …

  The seven fortresses

  One of the world’s most introvert, besieged landscapes, south-east Transylvania is like a physical expression of mental breakdown. It bristles with bastions, walls, watchtowers and crumbling gateways – and these are a mere fraction of what was once there, left as picturesque reminders of a stiflingly militarized and suspicious past. It is beautiful but it is not happy.

  Where you lived in the Empire was always sifted by language and religion. The glowering old German merchant city of Kronstadt (now Braşov), wedged between two mountains, still keeps some of the old security paraphernalia along its northern boundary, which kept Romanians outside the walls. The rhythm of life was set by systems of passes and privileges as heavily armed convoys of goods (cloth, weapons, cereals) moved from strongpoint to strongpoint. Braşov was the last one before the Carpathians and the Ottoman territories beyond, from which – at enormous risk and in intervals between wars – huge fortunes could be made selling exotic northern goods to Constantinople.

  Transylvania was under Hungarian rule for centuries and sometimes close to being an independent state, but it generally fell resentfully into the orbit of either Vienna or Constantinople. From the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, it was a society based around defensive war, using the natural fortress of the mountains to the south and east, with Braşov in the crook where the ranges joined. The Transylvanians never solved the problem which always dogged such crenellated, reveted defensive measures – that it was not economically possible to have troops standing on hundreds of miles of platforms perhaps for decades between attacks. The attacker always had the advantage, being able to pick his moment and location, leaving most of the defenders helplessly in the wrong place. The principal nightmare for the region was the Tatars – either fighting on their own account or as direct allies of the Ottoman Empire, latterly through the Khanate of Crimea. Clouds of these steppe horsemen, lightly armed and focused on human and non-human loot rather than holding territory, could arrive at any moment. Even when there was notional peace between Transylvania and its eastern neighbours, the raiders tended to pay no attention.

  As with much of the frontier, the population was at irregular intervals eradicated. A successful Tatar raid (successful from the Tatar point of view) resulted in the killing of everybody who would not be of use as a slave. Into the late eighteenth century, Habsburg-sponsored colonization projects could go absolutely wrong as a change in military fortunes would expose an entire population to catastrophe – with areas such as what is now south-west Romania (the Banat) first filling with new German farmers and then being completely ravaged. From the twelfth century onwards the only way to start afresh was to offer extraordinary privileges to a new and hopeful group – generally from sufficiently far away that they might not have a clear grasp of what they were letting themselves in for. The ‘Saxons’ were only in part from Saxony – indeed many seem to have come from as far away as Flanders – but in return for a range of incentives they were given land for their own towns. This was the origin of the ‘Seven Fortresses’, Siebenbürgen being the German name for the region still (Transylvania is a Latinized version of the Magyar Erdély: beyond the woods). Some of these seven towns thrived, others did not, but they included the two famous lynchpins of German life, Schässburg and Hermannstadt (now Sighişoara and Sibiu) and the mixed Hungarian–German town of Kolozsvár or Klausenburg (now Cluj-Napoca). Schässburg’s straightforwardly military origins are shown in its Latin name, Castrum Sex, Encampment Number Six. The settlers brought with them German town-law codes – Schässburg’s and Klausenburg’s the ‘South German Law’, and Hermannstadt’s from Iglau (Jihlava) in Bohemia, with specific norms, laws and responsibilities shaping them in much the same way that new towns were laid down across the American West in the nineteenth century, but without the open, lung-clearing and optimistic aspect.

  This promotion of new settlers was not restricted to Transylvania. Repeated depopulation meant that the medieval kings of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary and their Habsburg descendants were obliged to offer special privileges, leaving much of the running of each town to its inhabitants in return for specific defensive dutie
s and fixed annual sums. This resulted in a great fan of German towns across the Baltic, Poland and the Habsburg lands and created a new landscape. Some of these were specifically mining colonies, such as Kuttenberg/Kutná Hora in Bohemia or the Zips/Spiš towns in what is now Slovakia. This Germanness extended to surprising places such as Kraków (Krakau), which developed under Magdeburg Law from 1257 and which only lost its German character in the later Middle Ages.

  It is, of course, almost impossible not to think of these Germans in terrible 1940s terms, with ‘Krakau’ as capital of the Nazi General-Government. Of all Central European subjects it is perhaps the most difficult on which to exercise intellectual discipline. But a huge effort has to be made to think of these Germans simply as ‘people who happened to speak German’ and unlinked to later nationalism. They could have arrived from anywhere in the Holy Roman Empire from Ypres to Steyr, bringing with them all kinds of political, social and linguistic ideas from wildly different regions. It was only in their new towns that they became ‘Saxon’ and therefore self-consciously German rather than just Bavarian, Hamburger or Holsteiner. In Transylvania the Saxons only lost the last of their special privileges in the mid-nineteenth century – an astonishing run for a clannish, excluding and oligarchic way of life now quite baffling and alien to us.

  This strange Saxon atmosphere is still most clearly visible in their fortified villages. The bigger places are marvellous, but Sibiu and Braşov are now unquestionably Romanian towns with a lot of effort put into their becoming thriving and modern, however dotted with Saxon survivals. By contrast the intense conservatism of the Saxon villages has pickled them in about 1650 or so. Many of their defensive structures survived for at least a century after technological changes made them useless against even the smallest raiding party, and then for at least three centuries during which the threat had in fact disappeared. The villages are melancholy places. After seven centuries of Saxon life, most survivors left for Germany from 1990 after years of Romanian collectivization and discrimination. Many villages have now mostly empty houses, groups of transient Roma and no imaginable future, despite extensive renovation work. But they are very beautiful and extremely strange.