Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The reasons why the Thirty Years War was so catastrophic can be seen in its origins. Once the Bohemians had been disposed of, a band of European rulers from Spain to Transylvania, goaded by motives holy, cunning or idiotic, saw good reasons to fight, golden if will-o’-the-wisp opportunities, political principles worth standing up for. In this churn of ambition and fear, the question of whether Ferdinand II was a sort of proto-Hitler can never be resolved. For some later German nationalists he was bravely trying to tie together the German lands – a giant brought down by pygmies, and by the perfidy of France. For Catholics he was the man who stopped the rot – remade Austria and Bohemia as pure countries – a giant brought down … etc. For Protestants he was a dangerous, vicious zealot, blinkered and beyond reason. The modern era’s lack of enthusiasm for a Europe either under German military rule or forcibly placed under uniform Catholicism tends to tip the argument today in favour of the Protestant view.

  The extent of Ferdinand’s war aims was never clear as he was obliged to fight such a range of opponents. For a while he was able to dispose of them with the ease of a marksman shooting plastic ducks at a fairground. For the loss of Alsace (to the Spanish) and the two Lusatias (a thank-you present to Saxony for joining in the invasion of Bohemia) he secured the rest of the Habsburg inheritance and regalvanized the role of Emperor in a way not imagined since the time of Charles V. Under Rudolf II the Empire had fallen into almost total disarray except as a context for channelling troops into the Turkish war, but Ferdinand was working in a broad, pan-European context, using his Habsburg resources to back up his wish to subjugate anyone who resisted his absolutist and Catholic policies. All his initial enemies were defeated: a Protestant Danish attempt to hold him back ended in complete disaster and the Emperor’s principal warlord, Generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein, conjured up armies on a scale not seen in Europe since the Roman Empire. With his Jesuit friends baying and convulsing with excitement, builders and decorators starting on a great wave of Catholic building and rebuilding, Ferdinand understandably – but fatally – overreached himself. In 1629 he recklessly announced an Edict of Restitution which transferred a vast mass of property and territory from the Protestants back to the Catholics. Using a start point of 1555 to establish religious ownership, this visionary scheme alienated all but the most zealous or supine. Many Protestant rulers had grabbed territories from the Catholics since 1555 and major cities such as Bremen and Magdeburg were at stake. Allies or neutrals were appalled at Ferdinand’s hubris – but also by a clear sense that this was only an instalment: that the nature of his faith meant that even the 1555 benchmark would be sooner or later superseded by a wish to take back all land in the Empire. And then, responding to cries of help from the Protestants, in the following year Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedish army arrived in northern Germany to change Europe’s history.

  ‘His divine name will be inscribed in the stars’

  The Thirty Years War threw up some strange heroes and villains, generally transient, but who caught the contemporary imagination and have been transmitted down to us as vague echoes of the excited news-sheets and sermons of the time. One of these is Bethlen Gábor, the Calvinist ruler of Transylvania who is probably unique in being enshrined in British histories with his name in the correct Hungarian sequence (surname first, Christian name second) – but out of sheer ignorance rather than sensitivity. This is the only time that Transylvania really impinged on Britain’s consciousness – the heroic prince’s attempts to destroy the Habsburgs in the early stages of the war were used by Puritans to contrast with the supine policy of James I. Bethlen’s principality formed one of the two surviving Christian-held remnants of the old Kingdom of Hungary, carved out of the disaster of the Ottoman invasion a century before. Both parts had ‘East Germany’ problems in being viewed by the rival half as illegitimate and quisling. Royal Hungary was under Habsburg rule while Transylvania was a semi-independent Ottoman vassal state. The rest of Hungary was simply carved into Turkish eyalets with no special status. Bethlen Gábor’s Hungarians saw themselves as the final, unextinguished bastion of Magyardom, whereas Royal Hungary was a mere haggard adjunct to Habsburg pretensions. Some aristocrats in Royal Hungary rather agreed with the Transylvanians, but others – a sufficient number – were relieved to be under Habsburg protection and saw Transylvania as semi-orientalized, disloyal and religiously funambulesque. These divergent regimes protected many Hungarians from the Habsburgs’ Catholic uniformism – and by the time Transylvania ultimately fell into Habsburg hands at the end of the seventeenth century it was far too late to give it the treatment that had been meted out to the Czechs. Bethlen and his predecessors carved out for themselves an autonomy from the Turks sufficient to make them rulers of an at least semi-independent Hungarian state, although one that always operated in the knowledge that it could be annihilated by Constantinople if it stepped too far out of line.

  Transylvania was remarkably tolerant. The princes themselves favoured Calvinism and supported the Calvinist power-house town of Debrecen, paying for religious students to stay in other friendly European states. The crazy-paving linguistic and religious structure of Transylvania made tolerance a necessity as the alternative would have been civil war. This tolerance was not extended to the Orthodox Romanians, who were generally serfs, but it became a defining element in the Transylvanian state, which allowed it to contrast itself with the ferocious homogenization imposed by Ferdinand II.

  As usual religion and politics are so intricately tangled that it is impossible to assign clear-cut motives to anybody. Religion was so important and the stakes of personal salvation so high that a merely cynical reading of belief is on the whole implausible. But the Calvinism of Transylvania’s rulers became a crucial, perhaps unintended, element in Hungarian resistance to Habsburg rule. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the shelter provided by the Ottomans for Hungarian Calvinism at this time that kept Hungary alive as an idea and prevented the whole lot from succumbing to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style fate as pliant Austrian Catholic peasants. The implosion of the independent principality later in the seventeenth century did not change this: as long as the Habsburgs defined themselves by their Catholicism (which they always did now, despite occasional gestures), the plurality of Transylvania remained as an alternative model and core of Hungarian self-belief. The anti-Habsburg rebel Imre Thököly would be happy to fight alongside Turkish troops against the Habsburgs in defence of Transylvanian Hungarian independence and in the generation after that Francis II Rákóczi, from another proud Habsburg-loathing family, allied himself with both the Ottomans and the French. Both men died in Turkish exile, but their examples would powerfully feed later nationalist ideology.

  The region has been rolled so flat by centuries of violence and looting that traces of Bethlen Gábor are scarce, with one wonderful exception. Transylvania is crisply delineated by its surrounding mountains, but there is a region to the west and north-west that was known in this period as Partium and ruled by the princes of Transylvania – an arc of land from Carpathian Ruthenia (now in Ukraine), consisting of cities such as Debrecen and Arad, down to dusty bits-and-bobs in south-western Romania. One of Bethlen Gábor’s most important strongholds was the city of Oradea. Like many of the major towns, it is home to a citadel – a monstrous walled pentangle which dominates the southern half. In burning summer sun, the citadel has an appealingly Indian atmosphere, its crumbling battlements implying the death of all human vanity as effectively as the walls of Tughlaqabad, say, but minus the cobras. As always at such sites the crows are an immense help (in this case jackdaws) without whose desolate, clanging chuks the spell of ruin would be much less potent. The Citadel was the site of the original treaty between the Habsburgs and the princes of Transylvania splitting Hungary and of several valiant sieges, with the scars of repairs after Turkish and rebel attacks still visible. On one bastion there is a small surviving plaque. Somewhat mutilated, it still reads:

  GABOR OF PANNONIA, DE
SCENDANT OF HERCULES, BUILT OUT OF LOVE FOR HIS COUNTRY THESE WALLS OF A GIGANTIC STRENGTH, WHICH WOULD REVERSE EVEN THE FATE OF THE GREAT MYTHOLOGICAL WARS: TROY, THE TARPEIAN ROCK, BABYLON. HEAVEN ECHOES HIS MERITS, HIS DIVINE NAME WILL BE INSCRIBED IN THE STARS.

  Of course it is very easy to see this as loopy Ozymandias-style presumption and foolishness, but surely it is far better simply to revel in these magnificent words, somehow preserved since the 1620s?

  Bethlen came close to defeating the Habsburgs, his army on three occasions crashing into their lands and at one point reaching the gates of Vienna. Transylvania’s role was characteristic of the reasons the Thirty Years War became so horrendously destructive and unstoppable. Not unlike the First World War it more or less accidentally pitted against one another rival forces whose alliances were fatally complementary. The absolute disarray of the Emperor’s initial situation appeared to give what proved a chimerical sense of limitless possibility to his enemies. As happy predators swept in (including Bethlen) they were in turn defeated, but the Emperor lacked the power to go after them and finish them off. Bethlen was able to intervene at will, not least because a direct Habsburg invasion of Transylvania could have triggered a response from its Ottoman overlords. This would not have been brilliant for Ferdinand’s plans – indeed one of the oddities of the Thirty Years War is that the accident of the Ottomans’ distraction in this period prevented them from taking advantage of what was probably their best shot at finishing the Habsburgs off.1

  Over the course of the war most European countries thought they saw an opening for personal gain and joined in, but they had a disastrous tendency to take turns and then be defeated in turn, or run into a stalemate. But, at last, after so many humiliations, occupations and setbacks, Gustavus Adolphus and his army transformed the anti-Ferdinand forces. A pan-European victory for Ferdinand II now became impossible. In a few months the Swedes did so much damage to the Imperial forces that even Gustavus’s death in battle in 1632 could not change the situation – and what became a rapidly deepening French involvement was way beyond Ferdinand’s strength, even when he was allied to Spain. But Habsburg resources remained sufficiently powerful that a defeat serious enough to knock Ferdinand out of the war was also implausible. The sheer complexity of the war drove it forward, with individual countries making peace terms only to be replaced by others. Semi-independent mercenary armies ravaged the countryside and the Swedes moved from Protestant heroes to violent and extortionist menace.

  Death in Eger

  If Bethlen Gábor and Gustavus Adolphus are two of the most enduring Protestant heroes, then perhaps the greatest villain (aside from the Jesuit-fuddled Ferdinand himself) must be ‘the Generalissimo’, Wallenstein. A turncoat minor Bohemian nobleman, Wallenstein benefited hugely from Ferdinand’s confiscation of rebel territory, great chunks of which he gave to Wallenstein partly as thanks, but also as a sub-contracting arrangement by which he was authorized to raise ever vaster armies on a scale far beyond the reach of Vienna itself. Funded by ‘contributions’ (in other words, protection money against the threat of having your town destroyed), these forces marched and counter-marched across Central Europe, powerful enough to prevent anti-Habsburg forces from winning but, even as they ballooned out of control, not strong enough to land a winning punch either.

  A very long way to the west of Bethlen’s Oradea lies the Czech town of Cheb, formerly called Eger. This is an extremely interesting if dispiriting place, very much in the front line for everything that went wrong in the first half of the twentieth century. For many years though it was famous for one major event enshrined in its town museum. Hardly able to control my excitement, I tried to stay focused and walk around the museum in the right order, starting in Room One with actually rather absorbing displays of ancient Obotrite storage vessels, bracelets and the rest. But staring at a black and white photo of some people excavating a pot I could stand it no longer and bounded up the stairs two at a time to get to the museum’s real point: the bedchamber in which Wallenstein was assassinated! Naturally this has been completely reconstructed and with magnificent stylishness – wood panels, a big bed and a halberd (of a kind perhaps used by one of the killers) hanging from wires in the middle of the room, threatening a similarly hanging nightgown (to represent the Generalissimo).

  Given his importance to Ferdinand, Wallenstein’s relations with the Emperor seem to have been fairly distant and unsympathetic. In 1633 there were growing fears that with his vast resources, wealth and troops he might break free from Vienna’s control and seize control of the Holy Roman Empire himself. His motives remain oddly opaque and for such an important figure it is frustrating how little we know about him. It could be that he was just a rather uninteresting military man with a lot of cash. He was certainly rescued and given a major wash-and-brush-up by Schiller in his great trilogy of plays from 1799, where he becomes a complex, flawed, astrologically obsessed figure betrayed by mediocrities. In any event, Ferdinand and his advisers, in the general gloom and paranoia of the period, after some fifteen years of fighting, came to believe perhaps correctly that Wallenstein was planning to betray his notional masters. A conspiracy was hatched and a group of Scottish and Irish soldiers massacred Wallenstein and his supporters in Cheb in a scene dramatized in a thousand cheap woodcuts.

  The murder room’s lack of authenticity doesn’t stop it being a treat – and in an amazing and totally unexpected bonus the museum also has one of Wallenstein’s horses stuffed. I am a big fan of Gustavus Adolphus’s stuffed horse in Ingolstadt (taken as a trophy after the Catholic inhabitants shot it from under him during his unsuccessful siege of the town), which I had previously thought must be the oldest preserved animal in the world. But it looks as though Wallenstein’s wins by a nose. Sadly it is in rather too good a state of repair, whereas Gustavus’s has charismatic patches all over it and what must be wine stains from feasts at which it was once used as a centrepiece. I feel something of the same sense of suspicion in fact around Wallenstein’s horse as I do about the famous Brno crocodile, which hangs in the Old Town Hall, a gift to the Emperor Matthias from the Turks, but one which has an unavoidable air of careful Victorian taxidermy. The crazy mess of the Ingolstadt horse seems much more authentic and enjoyable – although the motives behind actually faking elements in a Wallenstein horse (or indeed a Matthias crocodile) seem hard to fathom.

  Ferdinand II died in 1637 and his son Ferdinand III supervised the further eleven years of the conflict, much of it a weary, futile, nightmarish shambles as anarchic military forces sought out undamaged areas to loot. The latter phases of the war are chiefly famous for a general uh-oh feeling across Europe that the France of Richelieu and Mazarin had become enormously powerful again, having been internationally a negligible force for generations. So a war fought in part to hold back what had appeared an unstoppable Catholic Habsburg revanche had – in the traditional European manner – simply resulted in helping along the career of a new bugbear.

  When the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 almost all the leaders who had begun the war were dead, except for the gruesome old Catholic zealot Maximilian of Bavaria, who kept gloomily praying away for a further three years. Nobody really knows how many people were killed, but a reasonable guess would be eight million, making it in relation to population quite as horrifying as the wars of the twentieth century. Many regions were so devastated that they only really recovered with the spread of industrialization over two hundred years later. The fighting had burned out the religious impulse that had begun it. Ferdinand II seems genuinely to have believed (as did many of his Protestant opponents) that the war was related in some way to the end of the world, and that what was at stake was religious salvation itself. Such an idea was almost immediately undermined by other factors, from personal loyalty (Protestants nonetheless supporting the Emperor) to realpolitik (Catholic France supporting the Protestants). By the time it ended the Habsburgs had indeed successfully cleansed most of their direct dominions – Austria and Boh
emia had been substantially Protestant and would from now on be famously not Protestant. But for the wider Holy Roman Empire the project failed and Europe remained politically and religiously hostile but exhausted.

  In the wooded hills above Prague are the remains of several exhibits from a late-nineteenth-century festival. My favourite is a Hall of Mirrors. With the mirrors still kept in place by lovely woodwork and with its air of genteel entertainment it almost perfectly preserves that late-Habsburg atmosphere dear to so many novels and films. It is difficult wandering through the Hall of Mirrors not to feel as though I should be wearing a swallow-tail coat and perhaps a monocle. At its heart lies one of those completely random things beloved of the period – an enormous painting of the defence of the Charles Bridge in 1648, dramatically showing the students and Jesuits fighting back against vicious Swedish mercenaries. It is almost comically uninvolving and leaden and it is hard to imagine it ever provoked gasps even from an original audience whose bar was probably set a lot lower than those of us raised on Titanic 3D. The diorama atmosphere is helped by a woeful little cannon and a few bits of armour strewn in front of the painting. The battle it commemorates was one of the last actions of the war as the Swedes, having ransacked the castle (and taken back to Stockholm a lot of loot from Rudolf’s era, including his best Arcimboldos), tried to break into the Old Town. The solidity of the defence showed how much Prague had changed during the war. From being the core of Protestant resistance, drawing on its deep-seated Hussite roots, it had become a docile Catholic town, filled with monasteries, rededicated and rebuilt churches and numerous German-speaking newcomers. The Swedes who would have been embraced in 1619 with grateful tears were now shut out. It was two centuries before Czech nationalists began to rediscover this older, dissenting past and built an entire ideology around it. But for now much of Central Europe had been successfully religiously cleansed and the Habsburgs were back in the saddle.