Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  As peculiar was the territory west and north-west of the Zips: the ancient amalgam of Silesia. I pride myself on having an unlimited enthusiasm for this sort of political rubble, but even I blanch at the ins and outs of the Piast dukes and their tiny territories. The whole lot were shovelled together and handed by the Polish king Casimir the Great to the Bohemian king John the Blind as an intelligent bribe to stop John’s insistent claim to own the Polish crown himself. So in 1335 at the Treaty of Trentschin these splintered pieces became part of Bohemia, with a single hold-out in the appealingly named Bolko the Small, ruler of Schweidnitz, who carried on until his death in 1368 (you can begin to see the bog of information into which one can sink). For Casimir this was a small decision (Poland was enormous and had any amount of land to play with – and indeed his successors would pick up the Zips!), but it alienated a block of Polish land for some six centuries, with the region’s complete return only in 1945. For John the Blind, with his much smaller lands, it was a sizeable chunk – roughly the same size as Bohemia itself and with a wealthy population. John, despite his blindness, went for chivalric reasons to fight at the French court where he was killed in the crushing English victory at Crécy with his personal motto (‘Ich dien’) being picked up by the Prince of Wales, who has used it ever since.

  In any event, like the rest of the Bohemian crownlands the Silesian territory was collected by the Habsburgs after the death of Lajos II and it became a useful, productive element in the monarchy for more than two centuries. Their rule was protected by their very solid legal claim, but also by the weakness of the other rulers flanking Silesia – this weakness indeed being a key reason for Habsburg strength in more cases than the monarchy itself would like to have imagined. The Polish kings were too preoccupied both by the Ottoman Empire and the increasing menace from Russia to be concerned about Silesia; and the Brandenburg rulers to the north were a classic Holy Roman Empire joke-shop outfit: easily the most financially feeble and geographically incoherent of the Electors. In the later seventeenth century the Brandenburg situation began to change with alarming speed. The Electors were an odd bunch but their territories (added to by guile, luck and marriage) grew in a curious echo of the Habsburgs’ own good fortune many years before. They gained the title of ‘King in Prussia’ from the elderly Leopold I and, as Charles VI floundered around trying to get the rulers of Europe to support his daughter’s accession, there was one of those traditional discussions by which intellectuals in the service of power disgrace themselves, in this case digging out weird old Prussian documents to show the possible illegality of Habsburg rule over Silesia. As soon as he heard the news of Charles’s death, the very young new Prussian king, Frederick II, saw that here was a chance to grab a major piece of land. This decision was to shape a generation.

  Silesia in the right hands was extraordinarily valuable – in the Habsburgs’ it allowed them to threaten Brandenburg; in Brandenburgs’ it made the Habsburg lands vulnerable; in either case it separated Saxony from Poland and fatally weakened that relationship. It undoubtedly had a large and economically worthwhile population, but given how many thousands of lives were lost struggling for it and the wider wars which drew in almost every country in Europe, Silesia became ever more of an abstraction. In the nineteenth century its value as an industrial zone was considerable, but it was rapidly overtaken by the Ruhr, and its eventual reabsorption into Poland in 1945 was accompanied by much suffering but little international interest. Just looking at it on a map Silesia has a fuzzy inability to cohere under whichever rule: it is a between-land and has suffered accordingly. But in 1740 it was the true centre of Europe and for the young Frederick II and the even younger Maria Theresa it was a fight to the death.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The great crisis » Austria wears trousers » The Gloriette » The war on Christmas cribs » Illustrious corpses » Carving up the world

  The great crisis

  I once read a truly harrowing account by marine scientists of an attack by a pod of some thirty killer whales on a blue whale. The attackers repeatedly smashed into the sides of the whale, twisting off great lumps of blubber to get at its internal organs. The whale swam grimly along, gradually falling apart like a cheap home-assembly sofa-bed, with stuff trailing everywhere and randomly exposed angled bits of rib. Reading this really made me feel that, having given up whaling, humans should now start intervening actively to make the oceans less awful – perhaps by dropping enormous blocks of buoyed-up, nutritious tofu as an alternative for the killer whales to enjoy. Oh no – you think – he is typing rubbish about tofu to put off confirmation of the awful truth: that he is about to foist on us the feared Habsburg monarchy sea-mammal analogy. Maria Theresa’s lands are that krill-loving but increasingly incoherent behemoth and people like Frederick the Great and the Prince-Elector Charles Albert are toothed whales. Such an assumption would be unfair – I had a different, more geopolitical analogy in mind which is a bit more thoughtful. What seems so nightmarish to me about the blue whale’s plight is that he has nowhere to go: he shares the medium inhabited by his attackers. Once wounded, he cannot dive, he cannot hide and can only plough along, hoping his attackers get full and pack it in. This variant sea-mammal analogy does seem marginally worthwhile as it shows how Habsburg strategy had to be entirely different from that of many other countries. Britain’s and the United States’ entire histories are based around their ability to opt in or out of conflict – their isolation making them near invulnerable. France and Spain also have a mixture of sea-coast and mountains that make them fiendishly hard to attack: nobody successfully invaded France between the early medieval period and the end of Napoleon’s empire. The Habsburg territories, however, like the blue whale (I’ll now drop this) have only a single element in which to operate – in their case: land. As an accidental and tacked-together cluster of hereditary possessions sprawled across Europe the potential vulnerabilities are almost infinite and the neighbours unavoidable. Britain’s only consistent interests have been to keep the European coast opposite Kent and Essex weak or friendly and allow nobody to invade Ireland – beyond this Britain could dip in and out of continental affairs as it wished. The Habsburgs never had such a pick-and-mix option.

  The year 1740 was a supreme challenge for the Habsburgs, but it was also something they were used to. Being surrounded by numerous, changeable kings and dukes seems like an unworkably vulnerable and head-spinning nightmare to us, but for them it was normal. I really am trying not to load up this book with too many battles and readers may not be aware just how much I am sheltering them from. In any event there is a tedium about eighteenth-century fighting which makes it hard to engage with. There is a British narrative which is upbeat because, with a few setbacks, Britain wins, but it wins in ways which are broadly unavailable to mainland Europe itself, helped by the way their allies the Prussians or Russians in the end were not very interested in who ruled Bengal or some Caribbean island. Even the French and Dutch when under pressure had to choose the security of their own borders over anything more exotic. Only the Spanish cared as passionately as the British about colonial issues – but even they valued them because they provide much of the revenue which allowed them to pursue their ruinous policies within Europe, policies which reduced Spain by the end of the eighteenth century to a burnt-out shell.

  It takes a curious effort then, from a narrowly British perspective, to understand the degree to which Europe’s concerns were different. The Habsburgs were vulnerable to invasion from almost every angle. And even the destruction of one opponent would reveal another behind it: most famously, the more they weakened the Poles and Ottomans, the closer they got to the Russians.

  Britain was often a valued Habsburg ally and source of money, but it was also a mischievous outsider whose obsession with what it saw as the ‘balance of power’ tended to mean a manipulation of short-term allies to ensure a Europe mutually weakened in ways which allowed Britain to get on with its own imperial projects undisturbed by any wo
uld-be European hegemon. So the rather exciting British story in the eighteenth century tends to be contrasted with the sheer, stultifying inconclusiveness of European fighting – an inconclusiveness that Britain itself encouraged. The Habsburgs were always deeply aware of this and resentful of their reliance on Britain, which they knew was at most levels simply using them – if Maria Theresa’s war effort had collapsed, the British would have happily moved on to some other ally who could help them take on France. Indeed, after the eight grinding years of the War of the Austrian Succession, the British did not even bother to tell Maria Theresa that they had come to terms. Meanwhile the Habsburgs still lived in their very different natural environment, with a constantly changing constellation of enemies, friends, threats and opportunities; with the same rhythm imposed by mountain passes, fortresses, winter, summer, money, provisions and the distance an army can march in a day.

  The military intricacies of the War of the Austrian Succession are famously soporific. A quick glance at one of those monuments favoured in the eighteenth century, of heaped military trophies looked down upon by the uncaring figures of Time and Fame, gives much the same effect as slogging through hundreds of pages about glum sieges with people marching about in wigs. Of course, just writing this makes me feel ashamed as I am fascinated by it and have a dark side that cannot be happier than reading a crazily detailed account of the Siege of Bergen-op-Zoom. European cities were all still a great mass of fortifications, with the working and shopping areas crowded inside walls, and towers that were a constant focus of expensive fixing and upgrading, quite probably to no avail. Not least through the genius of the French commander Maurice de Saxe (as his name suggests a Saxon in fact, a bastard child of Augustus the Strong), city after city found its elaborate defences ruined by artillery and trenches. This direct and specific sense of panic in the war makes it gripping. Prague, for example, after being left alone and sinking gradually into the provincial marginality that has preserved so many of its great buildings, found itself occupied first by Franco-Bavarian troops and then by Prussians. The usual city-dwellers’ terrors emerged – not just violence, rape and looting, but the more insidious problem of whether or not to cooperate with the invaders. The Franco-Bavarians were there because the Bavarian ruler had made himself King of Bohemia. Should the inhabitants of Prague be loyal to Vienna or to Munich? Once all the invaders were cleared out, Maria Theresa was ferocious in her reaction – expelling the entire, ancient Jewish community, confiscating properties and humiliating and ruining anyone she felt had been even slightly disloyal. It is this sort of terrible, specific grief and turmoil that should somehow sit at the heart of thinking about eighteenth-century warfare, but it inevitably gets swamped by the sheer strategic complexity of the larger picture, with its dreary emphasis on armies marching and countermarching, with one side or the other taking turns to be shot up.

  The drama of 1740 came from the rapid realization that Charles VI’s endless efforts to get signatures on the Pragmatic Sanction were all for nothing. Across Europe rulers got down to the serious business of working out how to defraud Maria Theresa of her inheritance. 1740 saw a major change in the European cast list, with Frederick William of Prussia and the Empress Anna of Russia dying. This led to a curious fluidity and sense of possibilities, fuelled too by France appearing to be in one of its brief ineffective and non-hegemonic moods.

  Maria Theresa faced a nightmare on almost every frontier, the only good news being that at least the Ottomans were quiet. In Italy she faced the machinations of the peculiarly single-minded and obtuse Elizabeth Farnese, the Spanish queen who was determined to get her sons Italian possessions to rule. She had already settled one in Naples (as a result of the Parma swap with Charles VI) and now wanted to get Parma back for the other. Bewildering, heroic and baffling battles followed from this determination, with the potential excitement of Maria Theresa’s expulsion from the whole of her northern Italian lands. With the invaluable help of the now hard-to-visualize but stubborn Duchy of Savoy, Maria Theresa ended up holding on to the parts of Italy squeezed between Savoy and Venice, but giving up Parma to Elizabeth Farnese’s son Felipe, who had unedifyingly been carried around in the baggage of various armies for much of the conflict before at last getting his rather small prize.

  It is impossible to exaggerate just how little Maria Theresa understood her position initially and how much she was betrayed by the feebleness and deceit of those around her. From a standing start, though, she learned at a tremendous pace and the vacillating cipher of 1740 rapidly became formidable. She may in later life have appeared a bit of a mouton sublime in her portraits, but this is totally misleading. Despite bouts of despair in her battle to defend her family inheritance, she seemed to have an extraordinary ability to be refuelled by her outrage at the knaves who, with their usual fake legal pronouncements, were coming up with reasons for snatching her lands. The newly crowned Frederick II of Prussia never bothered to take seriously the rubbish his lawyers had come up with to justify his ‘ancient right’ to Silesia. In a lightning campaign he snatched almost the entire province and grimly held on to it in three wars with Maria Theresa, separated by intervals that allowed her to trounce her other enemies. His ability to humiliate Austrian armies rapidly became legendary, his risk-taking and bravura making him seem almost a demonic figure to Vienna. All efforts to get Silesia back proved to be futile (including a Third Silesian War of 1756–63, a subset of the far, far wider Seven Years War) and eventually treaties recognized the loss of everything except some southern fragments which ended up as the tiny region called Austrian Silesia. Just to round off this part of the world, the Duchy of Auschwitz, to the north of Teschen, was owned by Maria Theresa separately, snatched from the Polish crown in 1772. It is hard to work out what impact the loss of Silesia had on the Habsburgs. Perhaps the oddest counterfactual would be to think what would have happened if Maria Theresa had won (and it was only Frederick’s peculiar genius that prevented this – and one lucky bullet or a fall from a horse could have changed everything), and this concerns 1918. When the Empire broke apart at the end of the First World War, a substantial German-speaking state could have been made from Silesia–Moravia–Austria (the main towns of Moravia, Brno and Olomouc were still substantially German) and all subsequent human history perhaps have been different. But then so many things would also have been different that perhaps such speculation is just too tiresome.

  The Habsburgs could lose Silesia and bits of Italy without fatal damage (indeed, losing bits of Italy was to become as regular a feature for them as Christmas), but the mortal threat came from Charles Albert, the Elector of Bavaria. As a woman, Maria Theresa legally could not become Emperor. She conceded this and worked on the assumption that her husband, Franz, should take the job. Unfortunately, as a Habsburg only by marriage, he had in himself none of the qualifications, being merely a jobbing princeling who had already knocked about Europe trying his hand at running a number of small territories. The disappointment here is that the contest was such a battle of mediocrities. Charles Albert seems to have disappointed everyone he met, while Franz was clearly charming (his portraits radiate a chump-like sympathy), but mainly of value as a collector of minerals and delightful objets and father of Maria Theresa’s innumerable children, rather than a political actor in his own right.

  Charles Albert, as a member of the ancient Wittelsbach family, saw the Habsburgs as mere late-medieval carpetbaggers, and with substantial and mischievous French help was able to get elected Emperor, as Charles VII, thereby ending the unbroken sequence of Habsburgs since Frederick III. Even more catastrophically he marched into Maria Theresa’s lands claiming them also as his own. This was a highly unfortunate result of Charles VI’s decision to ignore the daughters of his older brother, Joseph I. He established the Pragmatic Sanction through his own daughter, Maria Theresa. Charles Albert, who was married to one of Joseph I’s daughters, could rightfully point out that she had the better claim. All the bickering and iciness of Char
les VI’s court now came to fruition (if iciness can fruit) with Maria Amalia taking revenge on behalf of her sisters.

  With an invaluable French army at his side Charles Albert marched east, and threatened an absolutely different European future. His success would have made his joint capitals of Munich, Prague, Vienna and Buda into an almost unrelated power configuration, closely allied to the French and probably more than enough to have changed the course of all subsequent wars, cultural movements and so on. His army charged through Upper Austria, conquering Linz, and marching on to St Pölten – still, to this very day, one of Central Europe’s least interesting towns – and paused and then panicked. If he had headed straight to Vienna he could perhaps have destroyed Maria Theresa’s claims, with many key figures changing sides to (in effect) the other female branch of the family. Instead, worried that Vienna was too strongly defended, that it was late in the campaigning season and that he was a long way from his base, he headed back to Bohemia, took Prague, and was acclaimed and crowned there as king. As King of Bohemia he had an extra vote for himself in the Imperial election, but this was not enough to get him the far bigger prize of subsuming Central Europe into Bavaria. From then on nothing went right – Maria Theresa counterattacked, threw him out of Prague, invaded Bavaria and occupied Munich. The short remainder of Charles Albert’s life was a sort of nightmare of humiliation as he huddled in Frankfurt, with the by-now purely symbolic value of being Emperor starkly clear. The Habsburg hold on the title could be enforced by their own troops and money and the Electors had over the years, sometimes only grudgingly, admitted that this was the case. The last glory days of being Emperor, under Leopold I and Joseph I, had allowed the two roles of Emperor and Habsburg ruler to be attractively mixed in a way that demanded intermittent but genuine fealty. Charles Albert had neither the resources nor the prestige and his taking the job had the hideous effect (hideous particularly for him) of making it clear that being Emperor was a bit pointless. He had some attractive coins made, briefly returned to Munich and then died. The suitably chastened Electors replaced him with Maria Theresa’s husband, as Franz I. He was entirely happy to treat the job as an honorific one, sitting in a pavilion at Schönbrunn sipping hot chocolate and admiring his giraffes. Europe’s grandest title was grand no longer.