Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  A famous example is Deutschweißkirch (Viscri) near Sighişoara. (Incidentally, that last sentence shows the almost impossible problem of naming in this region: Viscri is its correct modern Romanian name, but in the context of its Saxon past Deutschweißkirch is also right – but as is the Hungarian Szászfehéregyháza.) The village gives a startling glimpse of the isolation and self-sufficiency of much of Central European life, away from the handful of properly maintained roads, and even today only reachable from one side down a long dirt track. Two rows of low, chunky houses face each other across a strip of land. This central strip, long converted in most places to a proper road, is visible still in many late-nineteenth-century photos of Habsburg villages: a messy communal zone for geese, chickens, ducks and fruit trees, and perfect for riding through on a horse. Every house was a miniature factory for turning out clothing, bedding and food: inescapable, intricate monotony pegging every week of the year to specific tasks and functions. Extremely precise instructions were laid down as to who did what and when, with almost every job being genuinely essential to the security and indeed survival of the village, which would have been absolutely cut off from the outside world for months each winter. Indeed, wandering around Viscri, there is an odd feeling of being directly in touch with the forms of human behaviour which shaped most history until very recently: ruthlessly enforced conformity, the centrality of the Church, literacy as a specific skill needed by a handful of people but irrelevant to the rest – and more broadly the aportioning of tasks across the village, often to specific families, each one essential to the whole. Also, strikingly, the great importance of women in a huge range of roles – a division of labour which valued pickling as much as scything or stitching as much as setting snares. Each day would spring into existence with everyone carrying out their appointed business: feeding animals, mending clothes, preserving cherries, checking the hay. Except at very specific times the work was not intensive and it could often be sociable, but it was relentless and narrow, punctuated only by the major personal and religious commemorations, which themselves created huge demands on all the village’s inhabitants. If everyone capably contributed their element then the village survived, but there was only a limited margin of error. It all sounds dreadful, and it is hardly surprising that as their way of life diverged ever more crazily from the rest of Europe during the twentieth century, the Saxons all headed off to a better life in Stuttgart.

  The more time I spent in Viscri, the more it seemed to suggest interesting things: a context for suspicion of strangers, the importance of Jews and Roma as the itinerant links that tied the country together, and the significance of that quintessential folk-tale moment, the arrival of the tinker’s cart with its manufactured, brightly coloured materials which could make young male or female villagers dream of a life beyond their one muddy street. These outsiders could bring scissors, dyes, salt, but also plague, which could, with one unlucky visit, kill almost everyone within a week. Above all what is so chilling about these villages is their insecurity: that far more even than plague, it was images of lawless bands, whether Magyar rebels, undisciplined Imperial troops or, most of all, Tatar raiders that filled villagers’ heads as they spent their long, cold, relentless and weary winter months endlessly pickling footstools and adzing geese, or whatever.

  This insecurity is famously expressed in the Saxons’ fortified churches. These are addictively fascinating and it would be possible to spend many happy weeks wandering from village to village comparing watchtowers, portcullises and escarpments. The churches are somehow both plain and practical and strange works of art. Sometimes, as in the great church at Biertan (Birthälm), they have burst free of their origins and become quite grandiose – but most, such as Viscri and Prejmer (Tartlau), keep a white-washed simplicity which is deeply appealing. The dramatic heart of the Saxon experience is the seating arrangement. Prejmer preserves this perfectly. The entire village would attend service each Sunday, with the women obliged by their elaborate skirts to sit on long backless benches in the middle and the men ranged around the edge of the nave so that if the alarm bell was rung they could more quickly grab their weapons and run to their battle stations.

  I climbed up into the top of Viscri church tower (‘You can visit nothing like this anywhere else in Europe’; ‘Oh, why’s that?’; ‘Because it is so incredibly dangerous’), a wilderness of yawing planks, spindly ladders and missing but important-seeming structural elements. It is an odd but fascinating feeling to be standing in a space that exactly dramatized the battle between height and distance that dominated all pre-telegraph combat. Church towers have always had crucial defensive roles, but the toytown element in Viscri makes it more personal and imaginable. The view of the surrounding country makes the critical calculation clear: how each extra foot of height in the tower would buy a view of some hundred and twenty-five further feet of distance from the town. The sentry’s vigilance would therefore be matched against the speed at which a party of horsemen could rush the village before the inhabitants got to the safety of the fortified church. In the larger towns, such as Braşov, in times of tension any groups of horsemen approaching the city gates, unannounced or undismounted, would be shot down, but this was a luxury for well-appointed big places with actual garrisons, rather than resource-poor villages, whose defenders were simply farmers taking a turn on the walls. The plan was never to defeat attackers, but to hold them up long enough to make it not worth their while. Slave-raiders had no interest in Viscri per se and if checked would simply head off to find a less well-defended place to attack. A proper army would not want to be distracted or pinned down by besieging such minor obstacles, even for the time it took to bring up the artillery. So the defences were in some measure a bluff, albeit a bluff which if called would result in a defence to the last villager, as the stakes were understood to be the highest. Until the very end of Habsburg–Ottoman fighting in the 1790s it was understood that defeat meant invariably the murder of the wounded and enslavement of the rest, an entirely different war code to that in western Europe.

  Despite their still formidable carapaces today quite a bit has been taken down: the extreme conservatism of the villagers has at least conceded that moats, rows of anti-horse stakes and outer defensive walls should probably be dismantled. The fantasy church at Prejmer, brilliantly restored, is still entered through a thirty-metre fortified gallery with portcullis, leading to the massively thick walls and towers protecting the main enclosure. These walls are dotted with slots for crossbows and would have had various fighting platforms built around them. The real miracle of Prejmer is the inside of the walls, which still has the emergency dwellings for each household in galleried rows – tiny rooms, each with its number matching that of the house back in the village. Other rooms would have been filled with supplies to withstand a siege, everything from hams to crossbow quarrels. And in the centre of the fort is an exceptionally beautiful and simple church, built on a Greek cross pattern, and with a usefully high tower.

  The oppressive mournfulness of these villages is inescapable: it would be impossible to view them as fun specifically. But the simplicity of the walls and towers of Cincşor (Kleinschenk) or Homorod (Hammeroden) seems (to this male anyway) a fulfilment of a most basic child’s fantasy of being able to walk around in a life-sized version of a toy fortress (or of being shrunk to fit inside the toy).

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A surprise visit from a flying hut » ‘His divine name will be inscribed in the stars’ » Death in Eger » Burial rites and fox-clubbing » The devil-doll » How to build the Tower of Babel

  A surprise visit from a flying hut

  The elderly Matthias became Emperor at last in 1612, but, in a marvellously awful fashion (having at last outlived his brother Rudolf and wrested from him the job he had craved for so long), he was now face to face with the mockery of all his once-vaunting ambition. The court atmosphere must have been even worse than in the closing years of Rudolf. The increasingly decrepit Matthias, with no child
ren, and his even more elderly adviser Cardinal Klesl were besieged by a whirl of much younger figures, chatting, praying, conspiring and occasionally looking in to see if he had died yet. In a frantic attempt to leave an heir, Matthias had married the unfortunate, much younger Tyrolean Habsburg Anna, but she died childless shortly before Matthias himself, making the final weeks of his reign possibly the Habsburg nadir. The impatient younger court around Ferdinand of Styria was a clear example of generational change. The mix of cynicism, accommodation, fervour, experimentation and mysticism which had dominated Habsburg thinking through the reigns of Maximilian, Rudolph and Matthias was now discarded. The new tone was one of disgust at what Ferdinand saw as the backsliding weakness and confusion that had led Europe into a heretical morass.

  Ferdinand as ruler of southern Austria had already cut a hideous swathe through a region then riddled with Protestantism. His minions left a landscape of blown-up churches and pyres of burnt books, with the corpses of Protestants dug up from their graveyards and scattered across roads and draped over fences. From his base in Graz, Ferdinand imposed a ferocious orthodoxy, still captured in a remarkably chilling portrait now in Schloss Eggenberg, home of one of his most dankly creepy lieutenants. Here the pale-eyed, impassive young ruler is shown, sword and crucifix in hand, crushing heresy under foot, flanked by the approving figures of Minerva and Father Time (not usually central to Christological ideas) and bathed in glory. Ferdinand therefore had form, even before it became clear he would inherit the Habsburg lands and potentially become Emperor. The smaller Austrian territories he already ruled – Styria, Carniola and Carinthia – were by now effectively ‘clean’. To the Protestants who formed a substantial majority in many areas of Austria and Bohemia, this man, educated by Jesuits, a passionate and unyielding Catholic, was a mortal danger.

  A fair measure of Ferdinand’s problematic nature can be understood from his having gone on the pilgrimage to the church at Loreto. This crazy shrine was meant to mark the point where the hut in which the Virgin Mary had once lived came to rest after it whirled up into the air and, after several bounces, landed in Italy, having successfully escaped the Muslims who had invaded the Holy Land. As a rule of thumb, if you do not find the story of the Holy House completely absurd then you have failed some basic test, Catholic or not. Ferdinand believed in it fervently. He and his gruesomely pious companions seemed to egg each other on – both his surviving siblings and his equally unattractive Bavarian relatives favouring showy excesses of personal spirituality.

  In so many ways Europe seems to have settled into a harsh, wretched period even before war broke out. It is as though an era of intellectual and cultural excitement had burnt itself out, with the Protestant ideas that had so fascinated the previous century hardening into sour orthodoxies. The assumption that Protestantism was the wave of the future had proved untrue, with much of Europe still Catholic. In part Protestant success had been caused by Catholic disarray. Protestants had imagined their religious vision had a self-evident truth which would sweep everything before it, that Catholicism had become a mummified shell to be kicked in. Given that both sides were dealing in absolutes – the nature of salvation, man’s duty to God, authority and obedience – the stakes were inconceivably high. Effectively, by the early seventeenth century the Protestants had shot their bolt, with many powerful, highly intelligent and motivated rulers simply unconvinced by their claims, and indeed both contemptuous of and angered by them.

  In this exhausted and static world Ferdinand was new, vigorous and crushingly self-confident. Having first secured the Bohemian throne, he made a secret deal with the Spanish Habsburgs: they would give their blessing to his becoming Emperor after Matthias’s death, in return for crucial scraps of western Habsburg territory along the fault line between France and Germany. This would revive the ‘Spanish Road’, the supply route which would allow endless troops to be securely funnelled north from Spanish-held Italy up to the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands. All Ferdinand’s arrangements can be seen in a religious-political light. The secret treaty secured Ferdinand’s throne – with his track-record of anti-Protestant unpleasantness – and released the forces of Spain on a similar track to dispose of their own heretic rebels. Now the arteries of Europe could flow freely again, expelling the Protestant poison. All the new regime had to do was wait for Matthias to die.

  After years of tolerance under Rudolf, the Protestants were therefore right to be alarmed – a coordinated Habsburg attack across the continent seemed to be threatened. For the Bohemian Protestants, staring at Ferdinand’s devastation of southern Austria, it was clear what would be in store. As soon as he was their king he insisted on specific Catholic rights and there was no reason to imagine he would not go for broke once he became Emperor. It was in this context that the summer of 1618 saw the Defenestration of Prague, with Catholic councillors sent by Ferdinand flung out of a window of Prague Castle by enraged Protestant nobles, surviving only because their fall was broken by angels rushing to their aid (at least, according to Catholic accounts) or because they landed in a dung heap (the post-match analysis preferred by Protestants). Egged on by the Dutch, the Bohemians then deposed Ferdinand as their king and asked the young Frederick, Elector of the Palatinate, to become the new ruler of independent, and no longer Habsburg Bohemia.

  There is something frustratingly useless about this rebellion. Under Rudolf and Matthias the general decay and drift made the Bohemians feel far more secure than they really were. They had a deeply rooted non-Catholic tradition and in the Utraquists something close to a national Church, one with Protestant roots long predating Luther and with services in Czech. But although most Bohemians were non-Catholic they were split in all kinds of ways. Each Protestant group saw little reason to help the others and many were disgusted by their new king who, as a Calvinist, alienated many who should have been close supporters, particularly when his retinue started smashing idolatrous statues and shrines in a way specifically enraging to the Bohemian mainstream. It must have been clear to the Bohemians that breaking from the Habsburgs (who had ruled them for a century) and the Empire (whose constitution they were messing up completely) could not be achieved without some titanic struggle, yet little had been done to secure sufficient allies. After hearing even more masses than usual and private conversations with his Jesuit friends, Ferdinand opted unsurprisingly for war. Matthias died in March 1619, Ferdinand was crowned Emperor in Frankfurt in September and his rival Frederick was crowned as the usurper King of Bohemia in Prague in November.

  The Bohemian rebels’ position was extremely poor – even major Protestant states such as Saxony were outraged at the illegality of their actions and supported the Emperor. There is a sad contemporary cartoon showing the two-tailed heraldic Bohemian Lion trapped in a thicket of thorns. Along comes the new king Frederick, clad in terrific clothes and a stylish hat, to release the Lion, pull out the thorns and nurse it back to health. This wishful Protestant fantasy almost comes across as mere sarcasm as the Lion was going to need a great deal more protection than that provided by a fop from the Palatinate. Even England & Scotland, where Frederick’s father-in-law, the weird James I & VI, ruled were nervous and unsympathetic about his rash decision to go to Prague. The Dutch were constrained from providing much military assistance by their continuing truce with the Spanish. The following year, at the painfully lopsided Battle of the White Mountain, the Bohemian army was destroyed and Bohemia disappeared under the same bleak, ferocious rule Ferdinand had imposed in Styria.

  The mainly Czech-speaking upper class were forced to convert or go into exile. In horrifying scenes, Prague’s Old Town Square was the site of mass executions of leading rebels, any dying exhortations or yells of defiance drowned out by massed drummers. Many German-speaking associates of Ferdinand were given large estates and quite rapidly Czech became the language of the countryside and the dispossessed. The whole kingdom made a model of conformity – a dream of successful ideological erasure that later rulers marvel
led at. The German-speaking Catholic carpetbaggers who swept in grabbing all the castles were never able to extinguish Czech, but they came close. Of course, there were many much older German communities scattered across Bohemia, but it was after the Battle of the White Mountain that German became the language of bureaucracy and command, seemingly as terminally as in Austria or Bavaria. A great medieval kingdom was stubbed out and reduced to a mere province – a source of revenue and troops, but with Prague an ever more insignificant and rustic place, with Rudolf II, hunting with his cheetahs and chatting with necromancers, a very distant memory. The entire Catholic package was Chinooked in, not least lowering into place a Holy Hut of Loreto – with one for Brno too – which still wackily dominates the area behind the Castle’s aristocratic quarter today.

  One remarkable reminder of this period remains inside St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague. Despite the battering of sieges, invasions and waves of neo-Czech fervour, two massive wooden panels can still be seen flanking the altar, preserving the new regime’s view of Frederick’s brief reign. One of the panels is interesting but routine, showing the Calvinists in Frederick’s entourage demolishing sacred images inside the cathedral. But this is nothing compared to the same carver’s astonishing panorama of the whole of Prague: a bristling mass of glowering, contemptuous church towers looking down on a tiny, almost invisible procession of mere men and carts on the Charles Bridge: Frederick and his regime fleeing the city with their finery and loot, never to return. Prague is shown as a once more pure and healthy organism, free of the human fleas who so pitifully tried to challenge the True Church. The effect is genuinely frightening – as haughty and crushing as anything twentieth-century dictatorships could come up with and a perfect example of victor’s art.