Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  The town of Cieszyn (known as Teschen in German) was the site of a brief but vicious war between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1919 which partitioned the town along its river. This was one of thousands of injustices of the period but a particularly harsh one, with the bridges across the river choked with barbed wire and relatives who had happened to live in different parts of the town cut off from one another for a generation, often not allowed even to communicate by post. In the centre of the town today a shop displays a very beautiful Austro-Hungarian map from about 1910 showing the town whole, bound together across the river at its heart by an elaborate figure-of-eight of tramways. The splitting of the town for those living in it must have been something akin to having a stroke. A little-remembered aspect of the Munich Agreement was Poland’s absorption of the whole of Cieszyn as part of the general tearing-apart of Czechoslovakia, the possession of which was enjoyed for less than a year before Poland was in turn invaded and the area became part of Germany. The old border was then re-established in 1945. It is a very peculiar feeling today to walk between the Czech Republic and Poland over a river border that once generated such hatred and misery but which is now utterly harmless. The harmlessness has been achieved though through ethnic cleansing, with Cieszyn now an entirely Polish-speaking town and Český Těšín Czech.

  There is a lot to say about Cieszyn but here I must confine myself to mentioning the remarkable museum, now called the Museum of Cieszyn Silesia and housed in a late-eighteenth-century mansion in the middle of town. The core of the collection was established by a local Jesuit in 1802 and is one of the oldest Central European public museums. The entire building is completely fascinating. Some of the rooms have kept their decorations from when it was a nobleman’s house. There are wacky, naive frescoes on very loosely ‘Ancient World’ themes, including a notably loopy Egyptian Room, with sphinxes and a rough shot at hieroglyphs. In what I hope will be permanently kept as a reminder of past wretchedness, the Roman-themed Ballroom is severely damaged, with large chunks of the decoration missing – the result of a Hitler Youth party in 1942 at which a fire got out of control. This is not the only shock in the museum. Much of the original collection has been kept in a sequence of beautiful cabinets and more vividly than anywhere else in the former Habsburg lands it gives a sense of the last non-scientific period of collecting, the absolute end of the Rudolfine tradition before it all became more systematic and rational. So here, for example, is a whale’s penis (an alarming object), the jaw of a young mammoth, an ammonite, a hopeless attempt to make a unicorn by tacking a narwhal horn onto a horse’s head, the shoes of a geisha. This is all fun – but in one of the cases there is what seems to be a strange, umber-coloured rectangle of paper. I battle for a moment with the Polish caption: it says ‘a piece of Turkish skin’.

  The process by which the Ottomans went from being the terror of Christendom to a strange absence (or merely a sick curio) was long drawn out. After the battles that cleared Hungary they were routinely seen as in decline, and yet they continued to rule a huge block of Europe for over two more centuries. Vienna would never be threatened again but the Ottomans had a powerful defensive capacity and were, of course, themselves European. A huge number of the troops defending Oriental despotism were themselves Greek or Serb, Albanian or Bulgarian and ethnically identical to many of their Habsburg opposite numbers. Whether being ordered about by some Rhineland German general in a big wig or a beylerbey in a turban, those actually fighting were in many cases the same. Ottomans could pretty much wave at Catholics across the Straits of Otranto and the rich tangle of areas such as Bosnia was as much a pluralist glory of European civilization as was Transylvania. And yet it was essential to the whole Habsburg project that somehow the Ottomans were infinitely remote and alien (you would not see ‘a piece of Austrian skin’ in a museum). This was notable in the early 1990s during the break-up of Yugoslavia, when the EU behaved as though these notional ‘ancient Balkan hatreds’ were bubbling up somewhere almost on Mars, when the serious fighting was only a short boat-trip from Italy or a gentle morning drive from Austria. This sense of the Ottomans as being alien was always of course very powerful in Central Europe, but what was new after the Battle of Vienna was that at last they could also be seen as beatable and wretched. In Jan III Sobieski’s superb tomb in the Wawel Cathedral he is shown carved in all his glory below a pile of guns and battle-flags, while below these huddle chained and fearful Turks, their moustaches drooping helplessly and – a very odd touch – with their teeth broken, as though Jan had actually beaten them up.

  A similar and contemporaneous tone is set in the grand ceiling painting of the Abbey of St Florian, where the Emperor Charles VI is in all his glory and with similar chained and fearful Turks cowering at his feet. As so often in Charles’s life he wished to be painted as a victor, but all the images of him as a new Caesar, as a dashing young prince on a cavalry horse, and so on, all came back to mock him, like some awful dream where all you can hear are unexplained and coldly derisive giggling sounds.

  Despite being ejected from Spain after the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles seemed to have good prospects once he got back to Vienna and accustomed himself to his surprise new role as Emperor. The settlement that ended the war was on the face of it attractive. Charles added to the Habsburg Empire a remarkable spread of fresh territory, from the old Spanish Netherlands, to Milan, Naples and a selection of small Italian bits and pieces. In a further triumph, a war with the Turks commemorated at St Florian heaped the Empire with further lands, including the great prize of Belgrade and stretching down into what is now south-western Romania (‘Little Wallachia’) – a region which today dozes in total obscurity, but which, if it had remained in Habsburg hands, would have had a drastic impact on how nationalism developed in the Balkans. The Habsburg crusade against the severely weakened Ottomans gave glimpses of future glory: a potential, vastly enlarged empire stretching perhaps to the Black Sea and the Aegean, and perhaps even to Constantinople itself. Sculptors specializing in statues of chained and turbanned captives sharpened their chisels.

  This seeming triumph for Charles sadly petered out in multiple humiliations. The new Austrian Netherlands was peculiarly hedged around with disaster, geographically entangled in the independent territory of Liège and glowered at by powerful neighbours. This region had once driven the Spanish Habsburgs mad and virtually bankrupted them, and now this cursed inheritance was transferred to the Austrian branch. It was also galling to Charles to know that the British only favoured his rule there because they knew it would be weak and ineffective – their only concern for the area since the time of the Armada. The sheer absurdity of trying to defend what would become roughly Belgium, a defence only possible in alliance either with Britain/Holland or France, meant that the Habsburgs were always trying to swap it for somewhere else (generally Bavaria), an attitude which did little to foster local self-esteem or pro-Habsburg sentiment. These new territories, with decent sea coasts, meant that Charles had to become involved with naval issues – a real first for a previously near landlocked power, and not a happy adaptation. A major initiative, the Imperial and Royal Company of the Indies, based in Ostend, was the principal effort to make the Austrian Netherlands a paying concern. It started out well, began trading with India and China and had two small bases in the Bay of Bengal. The Company even planned to take over the Nicobar Islands, which implies a very odd parallel universe in which the Bay of Bengal becomes synonymous with raw, freebooting Habsburg colonial power and Vienna fills up with nabobs and curries. This was not to be, however, as Britain simply insisted the whole thing be shut down, permanently putting an end to the sound of Flemish in the Asian Torrid Zone.

  Ownership of Naples and the rest of southern Italy turned out to be just as bad. In a further trade Charles had cashed in Sardinia, an island with a small population that produced only a sort of fish sauce, for what looked to be the much more worthwhile Sicily. This whole southern Italian expansion could all have been a gre
at boon – perversely Naples was now the largest Habsburg city. The ongoing influence of southern Italy on the cultural life of Central Europe continued to be all-consuming, musically and visually, but actual ownership was a nightmare. It was a truculent place and impossible to defend; most of the revenue raised from the area went on the costs of the troops stationed there, which must have made everything feel rather bitterly futile. In just one humiliation tucked away in a heap of them, Charles could not even reinforce these troops without asking for a lift from the Royal Navy. He built a small Habsburg navy but unfortunately the only role of small navies is to be sunk by bigger ones; it was never used and eventually rotted at anchor. As it was, during the War of the Polish Succession, Charles was obliged to hand over southern Italy, getting the tiny and very landlocked Duchy of Parma instead, probably to his relief. This entire war was a disaster for Charles, who was savaged on all sides with his British and Dutch allies remaining neutral. To try to regain some credit and somewhat in the spirit of the Habsburgs ‘putting together the old band’, he launched yet another war against the Ottoman Empire. This seemed an easy option as the Turks were already fighting the Russians. It became another total shambles, with the Battle of Banja Luka and, even more so, the Battle of Grocka devastating the Habsburg armies. The only good news was that at least Prince Eugene had died the year before this fiasco unfolded and so was spared knowing that his life’s work had been made such a monkey of. Belgrade, Little Wallachia and other hard-won prizes gained by the previous generation were handed back to the Ottomans and a fresh wave of Serbian refugees and embittered German colonial farming families headed north and helped repopulate southern Hungary instead.

  Charles VI’s court then was one where bad news arrived at regular intervals. As bad in its way was the ghost that hung over everything: that of Charles’s elder brother, the short-lived Emperor Joseph I. Joseph in his short reign was a startling and inspiring figure – hard-drinking, reckless, adoring warfare, sexually chaotic: it is hard to imagine a less Habsburg Habsburg. He didn’t even have the giant chin. While he had been impatiently waiting for his father Leopold I to get out of his way, Joseph had developed a clear, very German ideology and saw his role as Emperor as central. Once Emperor, and when not grabbing desirable noblewomen or firing guns, Joseph was also disposing of the gloomy and obsessive credulity of the old court and hacking at the sclerotic and weary calendar of religious observances. A Jesuit, appalled that Joseph had given a prominent position to a Protestant, dressed up as a ghost and lurched into the Emperor’s bedroom urging him to dismiss the heretic. Joseph simply called his servants and had the Jesuit thrown out of the window. This curious story reflects well on the new atmosphere at court, but also reflects terribly on the Jesuits, that one-time intellectual power-house now reduced to camping it up in sheets and grease-paint.

  Joseph both came to the throne and died with the War of the Spanish Succession still going on, but his short reign was vigorous, stylish and successful with the devastating victories pouring in from his commander Prince Eugene more than outweighing rebellions in Hungary. Charles, by contrast, stomped back into Vienna as an embarrassing failure and having been away during the six years of reform under his brother. The shocked and confused court started off with him on the wrong foot and, as Charles never even tried the other foot, the tone of his reign never really changed. It is hard not to feel a bit sorry for him. His chief and permanent torment was to be surrounded by huge numbers of often resentful and privately derisive women. These included his wife, two dowager empresses (the wives of Leopold I – i.e., Charles’s mother – and Joseph I), several sisters and two nieces. Of course, not all of these were at home all the time, but the tone of the court was definitely wall-to-wall female with Charles as the single, unlovely male. This need not have been a problem, except for the obvious one – that the Habsburg titles could only pass through the male line. The title of Emperor was elective, so this was not a problem – except that the Electors would not elect a landless woman. This was the point at which the Habsburgs were condemned by their own ridiculous fourteenth-century forgeries signed by Julius Caesar which had almost incidentally specified descent through the male line. The lack of men had worried Leopold I, who had first arranged that in the event of Joseph and Charles dying, descent would be through Joseph’s elder daughter. But how anyone would agree to this remained unclear.

  The chief aim of the Habsburg monarchy during the weary twenty-nine years of Charles VI’s rule was to persuade Europe’s rulers to sign the document which would permit female inheritance. Known as the Pragmatic Sanction, it was perhaps the most useless document ever dreamed up. Charles’s representatives fanned out to all the courts they could think of and in return for bribes, threats, concessions and pleading got some signatures. But these signatures were all given by figures putting on their most lizard-like and blank expressions. As everybody knew, the only guarantee came from Charles being alive. The moment he died everyone would crack their knuckles, rub their hands together and see what they could most readily pick from the wreckage. There were two moments of excitement, when Charles and his wife had in quick succession two children – but these were also daughters. In a moment of characteristic idiocy, he then changed the terms of the Sanction: instead of descent running through Joseph’s daughters, this was now switched to his own elder daughter. As can be imagined, the atmosphere between members of the Imperial family now turned icy. Apparently, whenever petitioners requested something of Charles he would only ever reply in a brief, incoherent mumble and it is easy to see why. And in a further, absolutely baffling failure, as his daughter Maria Theresa grew up he did nothing to train her in her future duties – he hardly talked to her, did not include her in any of his roles at court and left her absolutely unprepared for her position. His mulish obsession with the Sanction became a vindication of his own, otherwise wretched record, but in his attitude towards Maria Theresa he showed that he did not really believe that she should inherit either.

  All this gaucherie made Charles’s rule the least successful in the entire Habsburg experience. He even managed to alienate himself from the affairs of the Empire, again a startling contrast to his predecessor, focusing almost exclusively on Habsburg family concerns. As it turned out, Joseph I’s reign was the last point at which the Empire really functioned properly and for the rest of the eighteenth century, before its final destruction, it was in many ways robust, culturally brilliant and admirable, but this had little to do with the last Emperors. It must be the case that if Joseph had not got smallpox the shape of Europe would have been very different – although not, of course, necessarily better. As it was, a large part of Europe floundered under the last male Habsburg, who finally came to an unlamented end gorging on mushrooms in oil.

  As usual, political and dynastic tone has very little to do with artistic tone. This was the era of great architects – Prandtauer, Hildebrandt, Fischer von Erlach, father and son; great painters – Rottmayr, Gran and Troger, who between them made Austrian ceiling frescoes into wonderlands; and heroic sculptors including Matielli and Moll. Balthasar Moll was originally employed as a talented maker of public entertainments – floats, zany sledges and so on – but then used his Disney-like talents to make Charles VI and his wife Elisabeth Christine into the absolute star turns once they were down in the Imperial Vault. Posthumous fame is not ideal, but all the gloom and failure of the reign itself can be swept away by these two great decorated bronze caskets. Elisabeth Christine’s is decorated with the heads of mourning women with their faces smothered by veils, an effect in bronze which is both violent and erotic in a way not generally looked for by people visiting crypts. And even these masterpieces are trumped by Charles’s matching figures: bronze skulls wearing the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It is perhaps the different, implicit textures in these sculptures – gold, jewels, bone, hair, damask, skin – all reduced to tarnished bronze that makes them so extraordinary. They seem to sum up, and then tip over the edge, a whole L
ate Baroque atmosphere.

  Above the great Imperial staircase at Göttweig Abbey, Troger made one last giant fresco of Charles right at the end of his reign. Gods, putti and the Arts lounge about on clouds in a brilliant sky, Error is, as usual, chased away and Charles is Apollo, rushed across the sky by champing white horses seemingly carved from marshmallow, in a great gold chariot with sun-rays bursting behind his head. It is both a masterpiece and a sorry spectacle. The sullen Turkish captives from the St Florian ceiling fresco have been tactfully taken away given how that didn’t work out, and Charles himself is shown in what seems a deliberately ludicrous light – half-nude, wearing a sort of toga but also a wig and with his haggard face a congested puce colour. He looks like someone living in a very expensive, but also very oddly run care home. And that is probably where we should leave him.

  Zips and Piasts

  The upper geographical edge of the Habsburg territories holds a number of politico-geographic oddities of a kind that could easily swamp this book, and should in a fit of self-discipline be corralled together. Compared to much of the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchy’s own territories tended to consist of reasonably compact units and there is little to match the sheer pleasure of the little Wettin and Reuss states of Thuringia, say, where each valley had its own colourful ruler. The nearest approximations are on this upper edge. One total weirdness is the Zips (Szepes) region – now part of Slovakia, but for centuries a string of mostly German mining settlements under Hungarian rule. I kept planning to visit it, but was prevented for one petty reason or another. I eventually realized it would be a literal-minded and rather sad thing to go to the towns, as it could only be a disappointment compared to the sort of cheerful-blacksmith, birds-whistling-in-the-forest, Snow White atmosphere they increasingly had in my mind. For very short-term gain the Emperor Sigismund, abusing his title as King of Hungary, had mortgaged them in 1412 to the King of Poland in return for seven tonnes of silver (an interesting indication of the resources then available in Poland) to allow him to fight some futile war with Venice. The money had long been spent and there was never any serious prospect of paying back this immense sum. So quite unintentionally the Zipsers found themselves under Polish rule for some three hundred and sixty years, entire populations effectively the equivalent of some unredeemed old clock on a high shelf in a pawnbroker’s. Maria Theresa eventually marched in without bothering with repayments and three years later her rule was confirmed in the First Partition of Poland and the Zips towns became part of the Kingdom of Hungary again, maintaining their somnolent oddness in the face of all subsequent change, until, as ‘Carpathian Germans’, the Zipsers fled or were expelled in 1945.