Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  These events were recorded by Claude in his almost miraculous prints, conveying the explosions, crumpling stage-sets and general grandeur and silliness with uncanny plausibility. Each European dynasty had its own interest in classical imagery, but in the Roman festival the link is very clear: that despite being based in Prague and Vienna for many years, the Habsburg family remained true to the original fib of Charlemagne, that they ruled an empire that had its legitimacy from ancient Rome, and that being King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor, despite the awkwardness of not directly ruling Rome, was part of their job description. Classical imagery therefore could not have been more appropriate, once shorn carefully of any actual religious value.

  Classical subjects also allowed an easy and obvious route into pornography, with many of Rudolf II’s pictures of ‘The Loves of Jupiter’ clearly for private use. But there is definitely something odd about the way that the greatest painter of the Counter-Reformation, Rubens, widely used by various Habsburgs, seemed to be able to turn his hand with equal ease from images of saints racked with suffering being welcomed into Heaven by God the Father to big, nude Dutch girls pretending to be the Three Graces. But then, his career disguises the whole, otherwise grim, era of Ferdinand II and III by its sheer outrageousness, his paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum creating a sort of blast zone around them where everything else hung nearby seems plodding and drained of colour.

  The Emperors tended to see themselves as Jupiter. Their double-headed eagle symbol, on endless flags, allegories and walls across the Holy Roman Empire, could be seen as the Roman eagle (a claim of descent it shared with the similar Russian eagle) and Jupiter in the form of an eagle. The Habsburgs owned it as Emperors, but they brazenly pinched it after Napoleon (another eagle) destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and they managed to get the eagle to set up shop in Vienna as simply their personal symbol. This eagle hovers over everything from prints of victorious Habsburg battlefields to witless fireworks displays in Rome. It was one of those intangible yet powerful indicators of legitimacy which are hard mentally or emotionally to recapture once a dynasty has collapsed, the potency of the two being so closely intertwined. In one of the very stylish gestures which Charles V could pull off, he once spent some time in Genoa, carrying out his official business in the Palazzo Andrea Doria beneath the freshly painted (and astounding) ceiling frescoes by Perino del Vaga. These showed Jupiter defeating with effortless authority the rebellious Titans, who are scattered, naked and cringing, at the bottom of the picture while a phalanx of haughty gods look on. Charles could not have found a more devastating vision of his own role or of the clods who dared to take him on.

  Jupiter keeps bobbing up, but with surprising frequency the Emperor preferred to be seen as Hercules. I should say in brackets here that I have always loved Hercules, and his Labours have haunted my imagination from a young age. My only anxiety was the one that I felt too about Theseus, that at some level he rather humourlessly cleared Greece of some enjoyable creatures and people. These heroes may be making Greece safe for civilization, but as they wander about there is a price to pay: Procrustes with his bed at least had a sense of humour, and the killing of the Giant Crommyonian Sow was a straight loss. Being such a parodically English middle-class child I had a big book of Greek myths and became so obsessed with the Twelve Labours of Hercules that they became a sort of Stations of the Cross for me – an immutable sequence of story-telling excellence. Even most of a lifetime later, excitedly looking at yet another Habsburg palace ceiling featuring a giant painting of the labours, I would find myself bristling whenever I saw a labour that was non-canonical and it was only when doing a final round of research for this book that I finally realized why there were several versions. In retrospect it is obvious: no painter could possibly paint for his patron, on some colossal ceiling under which dances, banquets and flower-strewn betrothals would be held, Hercules battling to clear up hundreds of tons of cattle excrement from King Augeas’s stables. There is really no way of doing it: a small pile simply would not be heroic – Hercules would look like a farmer doing a little light composting – whereas a mountain of steaming brown so big as to be worth diverting a river to clean up, spread across half the ceiling, would make for a very unpleasant visual experience.

  The Liechtenstein garden palace in the suburbs of Vienna has one of the greatest of all Hercules ceilings, painted by Andrea Pozzo in 1707. This extravaganza deals with the labours in one corner, with such magnificent creatures as the Lernean Hydra and Nemian Lion reduced to looking like funny stuffed toys. This enthusiasm for being identified with Hercules is in some ways peculiar: it could at least be argued that, unlike Jupiter’s, his tasks, given his superpowers, were a bit one-sided and easy – even, to take the argument to its extreme, that Hercules was a bit thick. His enemies do not seem to have ever stood the slightest chance and, wandering the countryside, tearing a lion’s head apart or feeding the creepy Diomedes to his anthropophagous horses, Hercules seems engaged more in the nature of routine, if showy, police work than anything more exalted.

  But in my enthusiasm for the labours, I had not noticed Hercules’ role as son of Jupiter, law-giver, hero, defender of Olympus, all of which fitted in much better with the Habsburg world-view than his role as pest-controller. The glowering bronze bust of Rudolf II by Adriaen de Vries shows him wearing Hercules’ lion-skin, as Defender of Christendom against the Turk (savagery, non-civilization), an implausible pose for a man famous mostly for pottering around his seashell collections and chatting with mountebanks. The labours in this context become a kind of pictorial shorthand in the Habsburg lands, showing the range of punishments and foresight available to such great rulers. This is definitely the message of Ferdinand II of Tyrol’s Spanish Hall at Innsbruck. There, paintings of ancient members of the Habsburg family, the current family, and Hercules’ battles are intertwined, using an ‘alternative’ labour of his killing Antaeus to avoid a picture of him washing away heaps of excrement. Effectively the pictures are saying: we will crush you, cut off your heads, drag you out of Hell or feed you to your own horses if you dare to defy us.

  At the heart of Habsburg interest in Hercules lay one of the labours most usually forgotten about – the mysterious expedition to cross via Libya to the far west of the Mediterranean, defeat the multi-headed Geryon and his ugly friends (a dog and an odd-looking herdsman) before rounding up his cattle and bringing the herd back to civilization. This was the furthest point of the labours and the story became tangled up with the Pillars of Hercules, in some traditions seen as the point where he pushed the two shores of the Mediterranean apart to form the Straits of Gibraltar. In another tradition Hercules actually builds two enormous pillars to mark the end of the Mediterranean. This in turn tangled him in the story of the founding of Cadiz by the Phoenicians and a strange mishmash of associations which meant that Charles V took Hercules as his personal symbol, expressed in a design of two pillars. The pillars at the Strait were supposed to have carved on them Non plus ultra (‘Nothing beyond this’). So Charles took as his motto Plus ultra (in effect ‘Go further’) to boast that his subjects had passed the Straits and conquered the New World. In other words he had exceeded Hercules and laid claim to be the law-giver not just of Europe but of perhaps the whole planet. These formed part of the heraldic battery that so spooked his opponents and added to the sense of limitless Habsburg power.

  Very oddly Plus ultra remains the national motto of Spain, featuring on the royal coat of arms when, perhaps, some adjustment should have been made for changed circumstances long ago. Most sad are the symbols on the ceiling of Klosterneuburg in the huge stump of Charles VI’s partially built palace outside Vienna, abandoned on Charles’ death in 1740. As a teenager he had hopes of being King of Spain and nearly inherited much of his earlier namesake’s empire, so he revived the Pillars of Hercules as his own personal symbol. By the time Klosterneuburg was being built this dream had long been swept away by a tidal wave of military and diplomatic humiliation
and the pillars must have seemed intolerably sarcastic. Indeed if Charles had decided to have a great Hercules ceiling fresco painted then I fear the brown would have just uncontrollably heaped up.

  The first will

  A thought-experiment – and a very unenjoyable one – I have been trying lately is to imagine what might have happened in the mind of the Emperor Charles VI as he woke up each morning. This may just be a sign of the madness which is creeping in while trying to keep this book under control, but it is really worth pursuing. All hereditary rulers face the same blood-freezing problem: of being inescapably and for every moment of each day both the key political actor and the symbolic heart of a vast sequence of ritual – personal, religious, dynastic – by which that political role is made valid. This implacable orrery only ceases to function at the ruler’s death – and only then in the sense that the ruler himself is no longer able to appreciate the actions of the thousands of individuals who are engaging in a further series of actions, like singing in a sad way, or burying his body, heart and guts in three different Vienna locations. Of all the Emperors, Charles VI must have suffered from the most cruel hypnopompic shudders – teetering on the verge of consciousness with yesterday’s cock-ups waving at him again and the coming day’s cruelly guessable. Did sleep provide any real respite – were the Emperor’s dreams different from our own? It is probably fair to assume a separate but related world of courtly functions unfolding inside the unconscious – perhaps, in Charles VI’s case, a world in which he is a much-loved figure, a successful warlord with numerous male heirs, a witty man with a full treasure chest. But now the servants and courtiers approach the enormous, canopied bed once more, the dream stops, the day begins.

  For potential biographers, Charles has always been a sort of giant tar-baby with the Order of the Golden Fleece around its neck: they have all run off after other less depressing subjects with less complicated and gruelling reigns. We therefore know relatively little about him and he looms very small in the public imagination compared to his father Leopold or his daughter Maria Theresa. And yet, as long as some of the numbing detail is missed out, his life, almost entirely lived stretched out on a rack of fiascos, is a remarkable one.

  Charles’s existence was spent trapped in the orbits created by two failed wills, each of overwhelming importance for the entire future of Europe. His inability to impose himself on either document doomed him. The first of these wills was one issued by King Carlos II, the last Spanish Habsburg. This figure, both terrifying and pitiable, was the final survivor of genetic experiments engaged in by generations of Habsburgs marrying each other, so that Carlos II’s mother was also his cousin (I think) or, taking his mother as the main line, his father was also his uncle. The unfolding disaster of the Spanish royal family was caught in a series of brilliant snapshot portraits by Velázquez, showing the once dashing and masterful-looking Philip IV getting older and older and ever more haggard. Philip had to face the death of nine children by two marriages, leaving two daughters and the severely handicapped infant Carlos. The two daughters married Louis XIV and Leopold I. The former, Maria Theresa, had two offspring who died as children, but crucially also had one son who survived – Louis. The latter, Margarita Theresa, as we saw earlier, married her uncle Leopold. Predictable genetic disaster sprung from this, as she died at the age of twenty-one having had four children, three of whom (including both her two sons) were by then already dead. Leopold’s brief second marriage, to a more distant relative, resulted in two children dead and the mother also dead aged only twenty-two. These horrors at last convinced the Habsburgs to marry ‘out’ next and Leopold married a devout princess from far-off Düsseldorf and a notably fertile family. She had a long life and successfully restocked the dynasty.

  But Leopold’s own dynastic move was too late for the Spanish Habsburgs. Carlos II, who could hardly speak, could not eat solid food, was generally carried around and who was unable to even try procreating with either of his two unfortunate spouses, marked the end of the line. His achievement was simply to stay alive. What was assumed would prove a brief and sorry interlude when it began in 1665 proved to be a wearying thirty-five-year reign marked by gloom, hysteria, decay and frantic exorcisms in the hope of curing the king. Carlos’s only substantive action was the irregular announcement of yet another new will. These documents were ignored by his gleeful royal neighbours, aware that the largest conceivable land grab was at hand. Plotters and emissaries – in the enormous wigs and buckles favoured by the period – stalked across Europe, cooking up all sorts of plans. These plans are complex, but worth following as none were less likely than the final outcome and each would have created a quite dazingly different world for us today. As early as 1668 the young Louis XIV and young Leopold I had realized that without an agreement war on a cosmic scale could result. The two monarchs had married the two surviving sisters of Carlos II just to keep their hand in, and in conditions of the strictest secrecy agreed that on Carlos’s surely imminent death Leopold would receive Spain, America and northern Italy and Louis the Spanish Netherlands, Franche-Comté, Navarre, southern Italy and the Spanish bases in north Africa. The plan was both an interesting measure of how relatively unimportant America was still felt to be at this point and a mad vision of a future that never happened. This was quite possibly a future in which Paris and Vienna were so much more powerful that Britain could never have prospered as it did in the gaps and failures in the two empires’ security arrangements. In a further twist, in 1670, with Leopold still without a male heir, Louis did another secret deal, this time with the Elector of Bavaria, the entertainingly named Ferdinand Maria (apparently a sensible boy’s name in Catholic countries). Recognizing the coming extinction of both branches of the Habsburg family, this deal allowed Louis to take the entire Spanish Empire in return for helping Ferdinand Maria to take the Habsburg lands after Leopold’s death while also keeping Bavaria – the nightmare reverse of the usual Habsburg dream of adding Bavaria to their own domains. This scenario was only chased away by Leopold’s finally having a son and heir, Joseph, in 1678.

  Louis and Leopold got older and older, still waiting for Carlos to die, and by the 1690s an entirely different solution had been reached, with the Spanish throne going by a neat and clever compromise to Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Philip IV via Leopold’s daughter. But we need to move on quickly before wearying genealogical tables are dragged out to establish why on earth that would be the case, as it just does not matter: Joseph Ferdinand suddenly and highly unfortunately died in 1699, predeceasing Carlos II himself by nearly two years – a gap just long enough for the now elderly, jaded and exhausted Louis and Leopold to initiate what proved to be the War of the Spanish Succession, the most brutal and wide-ranging conflict experienced by Europe since the Thirty Years War. Leopold’s army came close to disaster but in 1704, at the great Anglo-Habsburg triumph of the Battle of Blenheim, the allied French and Bavarian armies were devastated and the Habsburg lands secured from invasion.

  In parallel with events in Bavaria, the original purpose of the war was being grimly played out in Spain. Charles, Leopold I’s younger son, who began this section, was the Habsburg candidate for the Spanish throne in opposition to Louis’s new candidate, his grandson Philippe of Anjou. Louis, in a spirit of haggard recklessness, announced that Philippe would in due course inherit everything and therefore become the ruler of a new globe-girdling Franco-Spanish superpower. Leopold more frugally announced that he wished Charles only have the current Spanish domains (which meant he would be supported militarily by a badly frightened Britain, Holland and Portugal) – even though this was a lie and a secret plan (again) was hatched which would mean that if either Charles or his elder brother, Joseph, were to die without a son the other branch would get the whole lot, creating an Austro-Spanish superpower, a further souped-up version of Charles V’s old empire.

  Charles, aged eighteen and now rebranded as Carlos III, arrived in Lisbon in 1705, at the head of an Anglo-Imperial-Portuguese
army. Philippe of Anjou, backed by France and rebranded Felipe V, faced him. What followed was a catastrophe for Spain as both sides drew on local loyalties to create a civil and regional war that completed Spain’s collapse as a great power – as the fighting continued, the prize got ever smaller. Britain happily pocketed Gibraltar in what was to prove a permanent piece of opportunism. The war in Spain resulted in both France and the Empire pouring in resources, latterly at the instigation of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, who had succeeded as Emperor on the death of Leopold in 1705. At its height there were over fifteen thousand Imperial troops in Spain. Fighting in different forms and on various excuses devastated much of Europe. Charles was boosted by his marriage in Barcelona to the tough Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, a Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, and been pushed on Charles by her formidable grandfather Duke Anton Ulrich, who readers of Germania may remember for his enthusiasm for paintings of nude women dying under oddly orgasmic circumstances.