Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Each of these actions simply fed into the Jews’ own worst fears and a rich parallel argument developed over what level of cooperation was permissible under Torah and to what extent any leeway at all was going to simply spring the trap which would result in a Jew ceasing to be a Jew. These anxieties expressed themselves in countless ways. For example, Habsburg moves to make Jews write accounts in German not Yiddish were motivated by a genuine wish for greater accountability, but they forced Jews to learn German – which could easily be seen as the high road to a disastrous and shameful assimilation. Each of the stages by which legal disabilities were lessened triggered both creative and sterile fights within each Jewish community as to what would or would not be appropriate as a compromise with the Christian authorities. Each Habsburg dispensation was seen as bountiful, but also – by both sides – as cunning. Perhaps this would be the gesture that at last would persuade the Jews to convert? Some dispensations were provoked by the wish for greater efficiency but they were never provoked by an active concern for the actual welfare of Jewish subjects. With the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the Habsburgs found themselves with three times as many Jewish subjects and a new era arrived but, however rational and even secular, it was not one from which the disgusting little figure of Simon of Trento ever entirely disappeared.

  How to build the Tower of Babel

  At the end of the Thirty Years War the papacy’s authority lay in ruins. The Pope’s bull attacking the Treaty of Westphalia’s religious toleration clauses was simply ignored and he was increasingly viewed as just the inept ruler of a backward Italian state. The anomaly of the Pope’s still being an elected and generally quite elderly figure also caused problems – in the seventeenth century the papacy appeared almost a revolving door for semi-cadavers, with twelve popes in the saddle as against only five Emperors. These men avoided the low comedy of corruption, stabbings and poison enjoyed by their predecessors and were in some cases intelligent and thoughtful figures, but they seldom had much control over events and the world twisted and turned in ways which they were unable to catch up with.

  None of this is to deny the spectacular vibrancy and aggression of Catholicism itself in the century and a half between the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution, but this was achieved with the Pope’s acquiescence rather than through his leadership. Above all, this was the great era of the Society of Jesus. This extraordinary organization has left its stamp all over the Habsburg Empire, and the Jesuits’ distinctive flat-fronted churches and bulky colleges still dot the landscape. A perfect example is in the central Bohemian town of Kutná Hora, left a haggard ruin by the Thirty Years War but put back on its feet as a stronghold of Catholicism with a glowering set of Jesuit buildings at its heart, decorated with the inevitable statues of martyred saints. Each of these colleges was, as one Jesuit perfectly put it, ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven’. Brilliantly educated, self-confident, conniving, the Jesuits dominated teaching across Catholic Europe and specialized in all sorts of town-square spectaculars with fluttering banners, marching and self-examination, sifting the population for conformity and obedience.

  Originating in the first shock of the Reformation, the Jesuits fanned out across the globe, converting and studying, ensuring that much of Christianity’s presence would be Catholic rather than Protestant. This global mission put the Jesuits under an intolerable amount of torque, as the world they did so much to analyse and explain, particularly India and China, raised a host of ever more awkward questions about the exclusive claims of Christianity. This would turn into a more general problem for Western religion by the later eighteenth century, with the researches of the Jesuits contributing so much to their own diminution. In the meantime the Jesuits ruled the roost and nowhere more so than in the Habsburg lands.

  The Jesuits’ mode of operation is now very hard to sympathize with. One confusion comes from the sense that if some of these highly intelligent men were gathered around a table and we could listen in, almost everything they said would appear to be nonsense – by which I don’t mean a cheap jibe against religion, but their entire understanding of society, science, education: everything would appear to us questionable or odd. They did not have the sort of Gestapo function of the Inquisition, and indeed always kept a distance from that bizarre body, the Society having suffered from investigation itself in its early days. But they did have a deep contempt for other Christian variants, let alone other religions, and pursued ruthlessly any form of intellectual backsliding – generally through teaching and exhortation rather than the rack and thumb-screw. Their churches, often the greatest examples of baroque decoration, may seem to us headache-inducing explosions of gold paint and cherubs, but this Jesuit feeling of emotional excess was all in the service of teaching, and needed the images of exemplary lives and events that littered the ceilings and side-chapels. Above all, they had the Virgin Mary, a figure of extraordinary power whose cult could not really be countered by Protestants, who were left looking rather male and wooden.

  The Jesuits’ sheer oddness and distance from us is summed up in the career of the great Athanasius Kircher, a German who died in 1680 having spent his adult life as a Jesuit, mostly living in Rome under the protection of the Pope and with the Emperors Ferdinand III and Leopold I as the sponsors of his publications. It would be possible to spend a profitable lifetime just delving around in Kircher’s work. A polymath of scarcely credible range, a prolific author and owner of a museum in Rome, Kircher managed in modern scientific terms to be wrong about almost every subject he turned his attention to. Through the many engravings he commissioned to accompany his work, however, he conjured into being a whole world, plausible and peculiar and with its own value system, which allows us to see something of a Jesuit world-view. As an opener Kircher wrote a series of poems and acclamations to Ferdinand III in forty-seven different languages, including one notionally in Egyptian hieroglyphs (Ferdinand is ‘the Austrian Osiris … the Austrian Momphta, etc’) and prettily laid out on an engraved obelisk, with the hieroglyphs all completely wrong. He was obsessed with labyrinths, mirrors, volcanoes (he was one of the first men to descend into the crater of Vesuvius), magnets (the frontispiece of his book Magnets features the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, but with metal crowns and sceptres hanging together, magnetized, from the claws of the double-headed eagle), music amplification and freaks of nature. He drew on the Jesuits’ international network for images of Egypt, of Mexican temples, of Chinese wonders.

  In some of this it is possible to see exciting glimpses into scientific method, with Kircher’s magnificent curiosity trumping any attempt at derision. He is also one of the key figures in imagining the ancient world, with superb renderings of the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the rest. But at the heart of his research lay a demented enthusiasm for the literal nature of the Bible. In one of his greatest and most futile images, he showed how the Ark’s interior could be subdivided to find space for all living things, with conditions much eased by the exclusion of many animals which could have been created by post-diluvian cross-mating: e.g., giraffes because they are a cross of panther and camel, armadillos of tortoise and hedgehog and so on. The sheer craziness and beauty of the picture of the Ark, with its countless little animals and its seemingly sensibly calculated jars and barrels of provisions, is one of the highlights of the seventeenth century. But it is in his work on the Tower of Babel that everything comes to a head and we are left wondering what is a practical joke and what is just spectacularly misapplied effort. Kircher commissioned a lovely illustration of the Tower but then became immersed in zany thoughts about the full practical implications of the frustratingly fleeting mention of the Tower in the Bible. He assumed it was built by Nimrod (on no evidence) and that the Tower’s reaching ‘heaven’ meant ‘the moon’. He then did some calculations to prove that this was never practical, as the Earth did not contain enough material for bricks to build such a structure. Even if it were technically possible
to build such a tower (see here), Kircher carefully established that it would need 374,731,250,000,000 bricks, with such further headaches as the horses needing eight hundred years to haul them up to the top even at a gallop.

  Before being lost in such marvellous material for ever, we should move on. As the eighteenth century progressed, the Jesuits became ever more hemmed-in by enemies. Their intellectual methods were reduced to tatters by the influence of figures as varied as Descartes and Pascal and just as the papacy had become viewed as an unacceptable type of rival by many secular rulers, so the Society’s transnational nature made it ever more anomalous. In a catastrophic period, it was first expelled from Portugal in 1759 and then from most of the rest of Europe by 1773. A great, curious and brilliant organization had come to an end, its muted re-creation in 1814 rendering it into a far more normal and minor part of European society. The Jesuit role within the Habsburg Empire as religious shock-troops and intellectuals was so important that, as with so much else in Central Europe, we are looking today at a landscape with crucial components missing.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Genetic terrors » The struggle for mastery in Europe » A new frontier » Zeremonialprotokoll » Bad news if you are a cockatrice » Private pleasures

  Genetic terrors

  In December 1666 in Vienna in the main courtyard of the Hofburg an attempt was made to crunch together all the grandeur, solemnity and extravagance available to human ingenuity to mark the marriage of the young Emperor Leopold I and the Spanish infanta, Margarita Teresa. We have pictures of the event and some of the music has been preserved and recorded, most strikingly Schmelzer’s thunderous Cavalry Ballet, heaped with trumpets, bombastic in a good way. The music accompanied hundreds of men pulling carts with the usual woebegone giant carvings of allegorical figures, a float featuring a mock-up of a battleship and tons of horsemen in elaborate costume. Flares, explosions, kettledrums – and as the finale the young Emperor himself stormed forward on horseback, followed by over a hundred musicians blaring and pounding away, to greet his Spanish bride.

  The sense of fear and anxiety in the courtyard on that day is completely lost to us, merely reading about these events centuries later. We after all know the vast pattern of historical, political, personal and geographical events that will play out from this meeting of Leopold and Margarita Teresa. But the nature of what followed was of course absolutely unknown to the struggling crowds of grandees, musicians, symbolic statues and brightly decorated horses in the Hofburg.

  As good a starting point as any for understanding this ceremony would be Rubens’ commission to paint the meeting of the two branches of the Habsburg family before the decisive Imperial victory at Nördlingen in 1634. The foreground and sky stiff with allegorical figures, the son of the Emperor Ferdinand II and the son of King Philip III eagerly shake hands, their joint forces about to crush their Protestant enemies. The painting dates from the same year as Velásquez’s even more majestic The Surrender of Breda, celebrating one of the greatest triumphs of the Spanish Habsburgs in the war with the Netherlands. Both these paintings have an unintended vanitas quality, cruelly freezing in time what seemed a high-water mark for Habsburg fortunes in the Thirty Years War. It all ended up as so much dust – with the dismantling of Ferdinand II’s dreams of a universal Catholic empire and Breda’s absorption into the independent Dutch state. But, putting aside these setbacks, Rubens’ painting shows both branches of the Habsburg family in good shape: rulers of most of Europe, confident and glamorous. A little over thirty years later both branches had been overtaken by genetic disaster and were threatened with extinction: what was being played out in the Hofburg courtyard in 1666 was potentially the last gasp of a catastrophically inbred and unlucky family.

  Leopold was the last survivor of an extraordinary massacre of Austrian Habsburgs. His father, Ferdinand III, married three times; his first two wives were killed by childbirth and three daughters and three sons died as babies. This was a horrible sequence of events, but in 1654 there were still seven males, some of them seemingly in good order. But Leopold (who had been in training for a blameless career in the Church) witnessed the sudden deaths of his elder brother Ferdinand (the heir), his father Ferdinand (the emperor), his uncle Leopold Wilhelm (the military commander and great patron of the arts – key originator of the Kunsthistorisches Museum) and his younger brother Karl Joseph (aged fourteen). In a further twist the brothers Ferdinand Karl and Sigismund Franz had, as described earlier, died in their thirties, both sonless, ending with shocking speed the Tyrolean branch of the family. The long-term importance of the Tyrolean disaster was that Leopold now took over all their territories and these became fully integrated under Vienna’s rule until 1918, but in the short term it eradicated the only other source of male ‘supply’.

  Margarita Teresa, Leopold’s Spanish bride, came from a similar family disaster. Her father, Philip IV, had six daughters with his first wife with only one surviving infancy and one son, who died in his teens of smallpox. His second marriage (this is where things get very odd) was to his niece Mariana, Ferdinand III’s daughter. In a development that would not surprise modern biologists, of their five children only two survived: Margarita Teresa herself and her younger brother, the overwhelmingly handicapped Charles.

  So at the Hofburg, Europe was face to face with the Habsburg family’s last chance: a marriage between the two final fully functional members, albeit with Margarita (in the same style as her mother) being Leopold’s niece. Leopold was no oil painting and she was little better. Both inherited the distorted Habsburg face – the tiny Leopold’s jaw so distended that his mouth would fill with water if it rained. If they could have a son then (assuming the sickly little Charles died) that boy might recreate the huge empire of Charles V, inheriting both Vienna’s and Madrid’s realms. But if they failed then the Habsburg family would vanish and this – much crisper and shorter – book would end in the next few pages. If Leopold had swept into the Hofburg celebration on his horse and had fatally fallen off then the entire course of European history would have flowed into a fresh channel.

  But Leopold lived, his strangely shaped head familiar in profile on innumerable coins over nearly half a century. Despite his awkward habit of fleeing at key moments in his reign, he has a fair claim to be the most successful of all the Austrian Habsburgs and he did indeed have the male children to succeed him; but not with Margarita Teresa. She has become immeasurably famous – far more widely recognized than her husband – as the little five-year-old girl at the centre of Velázquez’s Las Meninas, a painting only known at the time to those who could enter a specific room in Madrid’s royal palaces, but which to us must have a fair claim to be one of the greatest paintings ever made: the – presumably unintentional – shadowed swansong of the Spanish Habsburgs.

  As the wife of Leopold (who she correctly but very peculiarly called ‘Uncle’ throughout their marriage), Margarita Teresa suffered the same unavoidable curse as her relatives. At this point in the family’s history each confinement must have been treated with far more terror than hope. She suffered many miscarriages, and gave birth to two sons who died at or shortly after birth, to a daughter who survived and then a further daughter who was born by caesarean section after Margarita Teresa herself had died, aged twenty-one, and who then also died. The surviving daughter, Maria Antonia, lived long enough to marry the Elector of Bavaria and herself have two sons who died at birth before dying aged twenty-three shortly after giving birth to Joseph Ferdinand. This boy, as the only great-grandson of Philip IV, would have become King of Spain but he foiled the plans of Europe by dying aged six.

  This truly awful sequence of events was the reality which is so often hidden by the self-confident sequence of official portraits of men with wigs, armour, swords and horses that fills the conventional European history of the period. A parallel but unbearable history could be written of the human byways and culs-de-sac, pain and humiliation that lay behind this facade. A book could be written which told
the Habsburg story just from the point of view of the disregarded queen mothers, the terrified wives, the daughters used as trans-national pawns, the widows and daughters who vanish from history as they are put into convents or into little-frequented palace wings: all those moments of bored irritation when the child being born proved to be merely female and the grand witnesses to the mother’s agonizing labour hurriedly dispersed. But there is also the story of the devastating sequence of dead children. Even in an era of high infant mortality there were clearly special factors around Habsburg inbreeding that made things far worse. The worst focal point for all this is the ‘Children’s Columbarium’ in the Imperial Crypt, put together in the 1960s in a cold fit of tidiness to corral into one place eleven prematurely dead sons and daughters of Ferdinand III and Leopold I.

  In the Kunsthistorisches Museum there is a marvellous portrait by Jan Thomas van Ieperin of Margarita Teresa in fancy dress in a sylvan setting, shortly after her marriage, her warped face smiling from under an enormous white-and-orange feathered crown and in a dress of matchless charisma. She shared her uncle-husband’s enthusiasm for music and masques and they seem to have been a cheerful couple during their short marriage, but the forces bearing down on her – familial, sexual, genetic – were really beyond human capacity.

  The struggle for mastery in Europe

  A very slow train trundles through southern Hungary and northern Serbia (the old Hungarian county of Bács-Bodrog). The flat, bleak landscape becomes hypnotic – hours go by with eyes jumping at anything like a house, or a clump of trees. Occasional very small towns, storks and buzzards perk things up and there is, of course, the usual cowardice of doing this sort of trip in the summer, when it is at least a plausible region to be, rather than in the winter months when it is one of those places like Nebraska which are only tolerable if you are inured to them from birth. Its big fields and oppressively broad skies make it seem, like so many places in the former Empire, ‘remote’ – but there is the usual problem with the term in that it begs the follow-up, ‘remote from where?’ In the later seventeenth century this was part of a huge, thinly populated area that was briefly very busy, with fantastically dressed soldiers in their many thousands struggling across bogs, always on the verge of running out of food and leaving a trail of small, ruined settlements behind them. Colossal armed clashes (Harsány 1687, Slankamen 1691, Zenta 1697, Petrovaradin 1716) featured combined forces far larger than the population of Vienna. These were wars which were won as much by disease levels and supply chains as military valour. For a generation, this was the most exciting, frightening and mythic region in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died here before the entire zone reverted to being the backwater’s backwater.