Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  For much of the seventeenth century the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been relatively quiet – relatively in the sense that large-scale raiding did happen (baking in a level of violence which we would consider scarcely credible) but it was not by the standards of the time serious. Between the disappointments of the end of the Long War under Rudolf and Matthias and the eruption of the 1680s everyone had plenty to do (e.g., the Thirty Years War) but little of it involved direct Christian–Muslim hostilities. A short, curious war in 1664 broke out over Transylvania (which just about held onto its unstable semi-vassal status). This war had little practical result as both sides had other preoccupations which brought it to an end, but it was striking from the Habsburgs’ side because at St Gotthard, east of Graz, they actually defeated an invading Turkish army – the first serious indicator in a century and a half of fighting that Ottoman fighting power might at last be depleting. The Habsburgs also constructed a worthwhile alliance system, with troops from all over Europe (even France), and a serious sense within the Empire and elsewhere that holding back the Turks was a shared venture. The end of the war was a humiliating one, with Leopold paying tribute and the Ottomans keeping Transylvania. But it was an interesting precedent.

  The problem that the Habsburgs faced both now and during the forthcoming Great Turkish War was how to deal in practical terms with a thinly populated area four times the size of their hereditary Austrian holdings. Once a few obviously headline-grabbing things had been achieved (the taking of a handful of specific fortresses, such as Belgrade or Buda), there could never be agreement as to just how much fighting was needed to ensure the Turks no longer menaced Europe – this was simply too existential a question. It would be another two centuries before the idea of taking Constantinople itself became plausible. The great advantage the Habsburg and later ‘Holy League’ armies had in the fighting was a relatively short supply chain – but as they moved forward this stretched and the Turks moved closer to their own forward base. Each advance merely generated a fresh security problem, another line of fortresses to man. It is fair to say as a summary that the Habsburgs never had any serious plans for Constantinople, whereas the Ottomans had plenty for Vienna.

  The nearly twenty years of Habsburg–Ottoman peace after St Gotthard were filled by heavy fighting in Poland which, under its charismatic Grand Hetman Jan Sobieski, also managed to fend off the Ottoman assaults. By the time Sobieski was elected king he was a European hero who seemed to have ended a horrific era of evisceration for Poland. He mulled over his options and had elaborate plans to absorb Transylvania into Poland, or perhaps to ally with the Turks against the Habsburgs. Fortunately for everyone he decided instead to become the saviour of Christendom.

  The monstrous Ottoman invasion army which Sobieski’s spies reported as assembling outside Constantinople in the summer of 1682 could have been heading for Poland again – security in these cases seems to have been extraordinarily tight, with most of the Ottoman commanders themselves totally in the dark. Sobieski and Leopold agreed a pact to send troops to defend the other, depending on the army’s movements. As it proved, the Ottomans were concerned by the heavy skirmishing between Habsburg and Transylvanian forces: if they could not protect their vassal then Ottoman prestige could only wither further. So the army marched to Belgrade and then straight into Austria, ignoring the usual fortresses designed to hold it up. Light Tatar forces caused chaos across Lower Austria, killing and burning so widely that after the campaign much of the area had to be resettled almost from scratch. No real figures exist but a rough guess would be that a hundred thousand people were killed or taken off as slaves. Disastrously the alarm systems – signal guns and beacon chains – had fallen into disrepair and there had been no local warning: how can you keep a system of watchers going over entire generations on the off-chance? At one chilling moment, the Imperial commander, Charles of Lorraine, was with his army just west of Bratislava when he saw ahead a great cloud of red dust. This proved to be the approaching Ottoman army of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand men. And then behind he could look back and see, between him and Vienna, the smoke of innumerable fires from Tatar-burned towns.

  Leopold has been much laughed at for the way that he scarpered to Passau, but his core skills were music appreciation and paying for masses to be sung. He had been raised for the priesthood, was tiny, and never claimed to know much about guns. He had only two very young sons (from a third marriage) and no living brothers or uncles, so if Vienna had fallen he could have been executed by the Ottomans like the King of Bosnia or died in battle like the King of Hungary, and his dynasty would have ended. The little chapel to the Virgin Mary, thanking her that things worked out, which he and his wife put up in the hills above Passau, is still there and a well-judged humble gesture.

  The defence of Vienna was in the hands of a garrison who had the advantage of recently completed defensive walls and a fanatical attitude that envisaged building-to-building fighting if the Turks broke through. For Charles of Lorraine the key concern was to keep his army intact until it could be added to on a large enough scale to try to break the siege. Three increasingly desperate months in, Charles’s plans came to fruition. In an orgy of military swagger with few equals in European history a group of substantial royal egos came together on the summit of the Kahlenberg, a hill north of the city. A monument to mark the meeting’s bicentenary records how King Jan III Sobieski, Duke Charles V of Lorraine, Elector Johann Georg III of Saxony, Elector Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria, Prince George Frederick of Waldeck, Margrave Louis William of Baden and (evasively) ‘the troops of Leopold I’ met. This extraordinary multi-national force was a triumph for Habsburg diplomacy and an intelligent use of the Holy Roman Empire. After a special mass the forces poured down the Kahlenberg in what is generally reckoned to be the largest cavalry charge in world history, and, in one of those rare absolutely decisive battles, destroyed the Turkish army.

  In Charles of Lorraine’s army was the annoyingly young officer Eugene of Savoy. He would turn out to be not only the hammer of all the Emperor’s other enemies, but would, as he was swiftly promoted, cause untold damage to the Ottoman forces. It is striking that despite the crushing of the original siege army, the Ottomans were still able to mobilize a vast stream of replacements and the following decades probably marked Europe’s heaviest level of militarization to that date. In a sequence of sieges and battles of overwhelming brutality these Ottoman relief armies were destroyed one by one and Central Europe fell into Habsburg hands. The ethnic balance of the region was completely changed. Muslims who had lived there for many generations fled with the retreating fragments of their armies; massacres cleared out whole towns; mosques were destroyed. Buda, substantially Muslim and Jewish, became a Christian city, in a series of barely recorded horrors. As Hungary fell, a great upwelling of excitement hit the nobility who (to their later regret) voted to make the Hungarian crown hereditary in the Habsburg family, ending (theoretically) a huge area of uncertainty. In one of Eugene’s greatest set-pieces, the Battle of Zenta in 1697, some thirty thousand Ottoman troops were killed or drowned and Eugene could begin to enjoy himself by doing things like building the Belvedere Palace back in Vienna.

  In the southern outskirts of the attractive Serbian town of Sremski Karlovci (Karlowitz) there is a strange little chapel built to commemorate the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz. It is meant to imitate the Turkish campaign tent in which the ‘Holy League’ and Ottoman negotiations (under British and Dutch mediation) took place, with the lead roof entertainingly shaped to seem to be falling in folds. The building has four doors to match the original tent, which was designed so that the four groups could walk in simultaneously, thereby giving nobody precedence. Inside (for the first time) a round table was used to prevent there being any chance of a negotiator looking dominant – a curious breakthrough in diplomatic practice. These in themselves were astonishing concessions by the Ottomans, who were not used to viewing their enemies as other than helpless
supplicants, but from a European point of view it also acknowledged the Ottomans as a legitimate European great power. The treaty transformed the map – not just with the Habsburg acquisition of Hungary and Slavonia, but also the Venetians getting the Peloponnese and Dalmatia and Poland recovering Podolia, a region it had lost in Sobieski’s earlier war with the Ottomans. The treaty was a disaster for the Ottomans, and the little dignity the negotiators retained was from their successful insistence on the documents being signed at 11.45 on 26 January 1699, following instructions from a court astrologer. As the town of Sremski Karlovci has spread out, the little chapel is surrounded now by new houses and looks very odd, with the building’s general air of goofiness played up by its workaday context. Further north, on a great bend in the Danube, is a far more imposing monument to the era.

  An early eighteenth-century map shows just how awful the region must have been to operate in. The lack of features, the sheer relentless flat marshiness north of the river, meant there was no point that could be defended and a trapped army could starve to death or be wracked by malaria with little intervention needed from the enemy. The sheer, wild ungovernability of the Danube can even now still be seen in the chillingly alien bogs visible from the Sremski Karlovci bus – an unpassable mess of water, mud and thick reeds, itself a relatively tiny residue of what dominated the area before nineteenth-century drainage and canalization. The map shows a tiny area of higher ground on the north bank marked ‘Serbian town’ (Rätzen-Stadt), and a separate south-bank sliver marked ‘Village of the Croats’ and another ‘Village of the Swabians’ (i.e., Germans) – but it is easy to see that these populations must have been in the low hundreds. The truly boggling feature of the area is Petrovaradin, the vast bulk of the only serious Danube rock outcrop before you get to Belgrade. This outcrop, which had for so long been well inside Ottoman territory, now became the front line and the Habsburgs spent the next eighty years turning it into a fortress of extraordinary size and complexity.

  Walking over the bridge from Novi Sad (the charismatic and very much larger successor of the old Rätzen-Stadt) I realized that (perhaps rather pathetically) I had been waiting for this moment for some years, ever since I had first heard of the place. The fortress complex seemed a perfect example of the sort of giant feature which, like so many townscapes or paintings, cannot be reproduced in any adequate way and which can only be experienced face to face. Initially, it has to be said that Petrovaradin was a bit disappointing, with the brick bastions looking rather like Claes-Oldenburg-style wedges of cake. But then you noticed that the very thin line of colour along the top was in fact people looking over the fortifications and the tiny, moving blocks of colour catching the sunlight were cars at the rock’s base, and the complex suddenly appeared very disturbing (but, of course, also exhilarating) and almost non-human in scale.

  The approach to the fortress is via a dusty, neglected little town, up some stairs by the church and then through a long, steep tunnel carved into the rock. A big puzzle was the sheer numbers of children making the same journey with me – and as more and more squeaking tinies threatened to choke the tunnel I was briefly impressed at the idea that so many Serbian schoolchildren should take an interest in Habsburg defensive architecture. This perception was, alas, rapidly proved wrong. Quite by accident my visit coincided with the extraordinarily frenzied world of the Baby Exit Festival. This is a children’s version of the very adult annual summer Exit rock festival held in the fortress (where, enjoyably, the Scottish group Franz Ferdinand played some years back). Baby Exit1 is a sight to behold, with virtually every child in northern Serbia screaming and hula-hooping, surrounded by gigantic plastic inflated models of cheese tethered there by the sponsors. The children pour over the fortifications in an irresistible torrent, clearing gallons of face paint, grosses of kazoos, stickers, pencils, funny hats. Van after van of juice boxes, popcorn and sausages ground slowly up the narrow road to the top of the fortress, disgorged their cargoes and went back for more. A single, terrified donkey seemed in danger of being patted to death. A folk-dance competition of near murderous seriousness dominated the proceedings, complete with the sort of blank-faced, bayingly competitive parents familiar to my corner of south-west London, albeit more in a children’s football than a polka context. A haggard accordion player wiped his forehead, waiting for the last-minute sweaty pep-talk to finish for each little squad of bonneted and blousoned hopefuls. The whole festival was completely charming and it was such a relief to find that Petrovaradin had at last, after so many years, found a sensible purpose.

  The fortress itself endlessly and as it turned out pointlessly proliferated throughout the eighteenth century in preparation for a Turkish attack. In one of Prince Eugene’s masterpieces, a Turkish army of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand men was completely thwarted – unable to break into the fortress and encircled. This defeat then opened up the Banat to Habsburg conquest. Petrovaradin itself seems to have become a hobby for generations of military engineers. There are mile upon mile of tunnels, in sections separated by blocks and twisted passageways. The fiendish idea was arrived at that each military section commander would simply not know how to get into the next bit, so even if caught and tortured he could not tell the Turks how to proceed further into the fortress’s bowels. This kind of sick military ingenuity never came to anything: the dream of thousands upon thousands of Ottoman troops being soaked into the fortress like water into a sponge, of whole armies vanishing, locked inside, and being massacred at leisure, came to nothing, with the front line moving far away. It was held by Hungarian troops during the 1848–49 War of Independence. They kept themselves entertained, while defying all attempts by the Habsburgs to root them out, by using their heavy cannon to gradually destroy most of Novi Sad on the far bank, which must have provoked some bitter laughter from the Viennese military authorities after they had spent all that money on fortress upgrades. It was also a prison and at the beginning of the First World War the young Tito, then just Sergeant Broz, was briefly imprisoned there.

  On his release Tito rejoined the Habsburg army and fought against the Russians on the eastern front, which brings us to the obvious problem the Habsburgs faced even back during the heroic years of Prince Eugene. As the prince’s forces stormed into the Balkans, an immediate question arose: just how weak did the Habsburgs really want the Ottomans to be? As great swathes of Central Europe became organized as new territories, as Transylvania became ruled from Vienna, as thousands of colonists came from all over Europe to areas whose populations had been erased in the fighting or fled, the Russians stepped forward. As Orthodox co-religionists and as Slavs, could a case be made for the Russians having a special mission to protect the native peoples of the region from the Catholic, German-Hungarian hordes now threatening their lands? As post-Sobieski Poland and the Ottoman Empire became weaker, what would an appropriate division between Habsburgs and Romanovs be? As usual with military strategic issues no sooner is the ‘to do’ list complete then you get handed another one: all that trouble to dispose of the Turks merely to find yourself threatened by a new neighbour. For the next two centuries (ending with the erasure by the Russians of the Austro-Hungarian army) this would be the single most important issue for the Habsburgs. But mercifully it does not loom large at all for the happy characters at Baby Exit.

  A new frontier

  In a moment of really shameful childishness, I once found myself on Castle Hill in Budapest about equidistant between the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Military History – two institutions which in their different ways are so stimulating that they put everything else in the shade. Like the fabled donkey that starved between two equally delicious bales of hay, I stood there frozen and incapable. A new temporary exhibition at the Museum of Military History on the Ottoman–Magyar military relationship promised to be a happy wilderness of hedging, blurring and tip-toeing about. But in the end the National Gallery had to win – I could not let another hour go by without seeing again that mos
t sprawling and heady of late-nineteenth-century blowout paintings, Gyula Benczúr’s The Recapture of Buda Castle.

  This demented canvas shows the moment when, after a siege of startling cruelty and destructiveness, the ‘Holy League’ commanders led by Charles of Lorraine stand in the shattered ruins of Buda Castle, its grand and honourable Ottoman commander Abdul Pasha dead on his back, his snowy beard providing a pleasing contrast to the skin of the African archer’s corpse he is lying on. A herald blows a trumpet, a monk looks piercingly at a crucifix, troopers cheer and surviving exotics are led off into captivity. After a hundred and forty-three years Buda is once more a Hungarian city and the Ottoman past lies dead on the ground.

  The end of Ottoman rule in Central Europe raised immensely difficult questions about whether or not these new conquests were a reintegration of lost lands that had in the past been undoubtedly part of ‘the West’ or whether these were lands irredeemably tainted by ‘Easternness’. The old Habsburg core, running from Lake Constance in the west to the Military Frontier in the east, was some three hundred miles across. The addition in a generation of the old Ottoman territories more than doubled the monarchy’s width, taking it to only a hundred and fifty miles from the Black Sea. The monarchy which had once been unmistakably Alpine, German and Italianate was now very different. Most ‘eastern’ of all was that the new territories were religiously pluralistic and in that sense liberal, with Lutheran Saxons, Jewish Jews, Calvinist Hungarians and Orthodox Serbs and Romanians. This picture would have been even more complicated if so many Muslims had not fled the advance of the ‘Holy League’, seeking safety in Bosnia and Thrace.