Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  An alternative Joseph found was to put a thousand or more prisoners to useful work pulling barges up the Danube. This was little better than the dark cells, with two-thirds dying of malaria, malnutrition and exhaustion from hauling barges in ropes and chains sometimes through chest-deep water. All one can say about these initiatives was that they represented a very peculiar sort of reformism. But they also offered a preliminary rough sketch for all the forms of chilling, pseudo-rational zeal which convulsed Europe at irregular intervals from now on.

  A more attractive example of the pace of intellectual change in the eighteenth century can perhaps best be shown by coming back to Clement and Frederick, the catacomb saints, still shivering in the Danube valley, many miles north of their warm Roman home. It was only sixteen years after his mother donated St Frederick to Melk that Joseph was staying in Florence with his younger brother Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He saw there some extraordinary wax anatomical models and commissioned their creators, Paolo Mascagni and Felice Fontana, to fabricate a far larger, more complex and more detailed group of wax corpses for his new military medical college in Vienna. It was probably only very recent descendants of the mules that had hauled St Frederick over the Brenner Pass who spent the 1780s carrying more than a thousand wax models over the same route. Now displayed in the great medical museum at the Josephinum, these astounding objects have a fair claim to be some of the greatest artworks of the later eighteenth century, both as reimagined Italian religious sculpture and in their revolutionary new attitude to the human body.

  Certainly, too, as pieces of theatre they are brilliantly presented. I had no way of telling if this was a legitimate odour in a medical faculty or a stroke of camp genius by the curator, but the slight smell of ether in the rooms adds immeasurably to the sense of Frankensteiny art-yoked-to-science. Far simpler and cruder preparations of the nervous system or arteries in, say, the Ingolstadt medical museum or the Hunterian in London are alarming enough, but the Josephinum presents an endlessly varied set of memento mori. Lying on their sides, even sharing the same pose as the catacomb saints, these pulled-open and cut-apart people, the wax as vividly coloured as when they were first made, come startlingly close to being real. A room of standing male figures, even with much of their skin removed and internal organs on display, stare right back at the viewer, their eyes enormous in their flayed faces, in a challenging and oddly noble way. They make the most accomplished normal sculptural statues of the same period seem merely inert and formulaic. There is even a sequence of random, dreadful wax chunks of human torso to help military surgeons identify the appearance of entry points for different wounds. The models make humans into functioning (or malfunctioning) machines instead of divinely ordered receptacles. It is impossible to keep your composure when admiring how the sculptor has made the muscles stretch correctly when the skin is pulled away from the upper leg, or when coming face to face with a big wax prostate. The effect for the spectator is both religious and scientific: quite soon these ruined yet grand and moving people create their own complete world and you walk back out onto the cold streets of Vienna, with cheerful, duffel-coated students and normal busyness, feeling expelled from something almost too powerful.

  Carving up the world

  Being a monarch was by any conventional measure not all fun. But if one had to pinpoint the absolute summit of the fun monarchical experience, then it would undoubtedly be found on a bend of the River Dniepr in 1787. It was here that Catherine the Great embarked on her magnificent voyage to the south, eager to inspect her newly acquired territory of Crimea.

  Catherine is one of that elite handful of rulers who really loved her role. A German from the micro-state of Anhalt-Zerbst, she came to Russia to marry the heir to the throne, Peter, also a German, from no less micro Holstein-Gottorp, but more importantly a grandson of Peter the Great. It was perhaps as an outsider that she came to so relish becoming a Russian, revelling in the strangeness and grandeur, joining the Orthodox Church, changing her name from Sophie to Catherine and having her husband murdered. Catherine always seems to be on some huge golden juggernaut, hauled along by representatives of the different subject nationalities, while girls throw petals over the entire ensemble and specially trained doves fly in formation overhead, holding in their beaks silk banners embroidered with positive statements in Latin. In 1787 she was living her allegorical fantasy to the full. Heaped in furs and jewels, she watched cheering crowds line the banks of the river, enormous firework displays go off and thousands of Cossacks carry out mock battles, all under the direction of her former lover Prince Potemkin. The River Dniepr, now associated more with rusting hydroelectric plants, can never have looked more glamorous. As Catherine and her guests enjoyed themselves designing triumphal arches, admiring Potemkin’s chirpy, all-girl ‘Amazon’ light cavalry troupe and chatting about which neighbouring state should be attacked next, the only fly in the ointment was a dour Habsburg visitor.

  Joseph II, simply attired and travelling incognito, was just the sort of Mr Boring whom the tittering gang on the barge could not stand. Grumbling snobbishly about ‘this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst’ he did everything he could to lower the temperature. But even with Joseph on board, measuring everything, asking statistical questions and trying to find fault, it must still have been perhaps the world’s best outing. The idea of the fake ‘Potemkin villages’ put up to trick the Tsaritsa, which have been part of everyone’s consciousness ever since, was itself in fact a spiteful fabrication. Potemkin had built real palaces, real farms and real cities, albeit sometimes still in rather embryo form. What astounded Joseph as they reached the Crimea was that here was a huge new territory only just snatched from the Ottomans and already teeming with energy and glamour in a way quite beyond Habsburg power. Sebastopol had only been founded four years before and yet already had fortifications and a battle fleet. When they weren’t trying out tasty new drinks or clowning around in the former Khan of Crimea’s palace – where Joseph seems to have bought himself a Circassian slave girl, a rare but almost welcome lapse into mere hypocrisy – there was serious business to be discussed.

  Since Joseph had become Holy Roman Emperor in 1765 there had been an astounding and unnerving transformation in the world to the east of Vienna: two entities fundamental to European history for centuries, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, suddenly looked vulnerable. The first to crack was Poland. The eighteenth century had been full of schemes for partition of various European states. Catherine’s predecessor, the Tsaritsa Elizabeth, had intended to end the existence of Prussia, splitting it up between its neighbours: a fate Frederick the Great only avoided through her death and one which the kingdom would only miss by inches once Napoleon invaded it. Bits of Italy were always being hacked about or swapped, and Sweden’s empire had been liquidated earlier in the century. Poland was different: a big, ancient state whose rulers had held the eastern marches against Tatar raids and who had rescued the Habsburg monarchy in lifting the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The country had been weakened since that high point, not least through its catastrophic seventy-year period of rule by the vainglorious and inept Electors of Saxony.

  The Russians simply used the Saxon kings of Poland as puppets. The Poles tried everything to get out of their terrible position, but neither the Prussians to the north-west nor the Russians to the east had an interest in helping them. When the Poles tried to set up a customs service, Frederick the Great built a fort on the Vistula to fire on the customs vessels. Frederick also entertained himself by flooding Poland with debased fake coinage as a technocratic way of destroying its economy. By the mid-eighteenth-century wars Russian and Prussian troops simply ignored Poland’s sovereignty, marching across its lands, requisitioning and plundering without reference to the authorities.

  The chaos, bitterness and bad faith came to a head in 1773. Surrounded by stronger states, its economy in ruins and its towns actually shrinking at a time when much of the rest of Europe was booming, Poland was carved up between Prus
sia, Russia and Austria. The term ‘the First Partition’ sounds rational and almost surgical, but it was achieved with enormous violence against heavy Polish resistance. Engineered principally by Frederick the Great, the partition took the form of Prussia cutting out a block of land in the north-west and the Russians a far larger, but more thinly settled piece in the east. Maria Theresa was unhappy about the idea (justifiably, given that it was a moral outrage) but in the end she, Joseph and particularly her key adviser Kaunitz could not resist such enrichment and took a broad chunk of territory in the south-east, running along the far side of the Carpathians. This removed about a third of Poland’s territory and rendered the remains, which were now to all practical purposes a Russian protectorate, unviable.

  We do not know the details of the discussions that Joseph had with Catherine as they meandered down through the Crimea, but once the first partition had gone by without incident (and no European power had objected) there was little reason not to grab the rest. Both Catherine and Joseph could see the possibility of further happy pickings. The interesting question lay in whether or not they could successfully cooperate, or whether they might wind up as enemies. In the short to medium term both sides concluded that there was more than enough cake for everyone. Indeed as the French Revolution and its aftershocks came to dominate all other events, the rest of Poland disappeared almost unnoticed by the wider world, with two further partitions disposing of it – the second not involving the Habsburgs, but the third giving them a huge new area stretching almost to Warsaw.

  The issue of the Ottoman Empire was what really enthralled Catherine and which now tempted her to dream of enormous projects. The highly satisfactory Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 had opened the way to her snatching the Crimea. She now explained to Joseph her new plans: to create a Kingdom of Dacia out of the eastern Balkans and a Byzantine kingdom at Constantinople, ruled by her grandson, helpfully called Constantine in anticipation. She and Potemkin had already celebrated the Greek heritage which Russia laid claim to by renaming the Crimean Khanate the Taurida Governate and founding or renaming towns with Greek names: Sebastopol (venerable city), Simferopol (useful city), Yevpatoria (a title of Mithradates VI) and so on. It was a mad project, but there seemed little to stop it and each new, enormous accretion of Russian territory made the next jump logical. Joseph returned to Vienna shaken and impressed, confronted by the issue which would dominate the Habsburgs’ nightmares until their own lands were in turn partitioned in 1918. He was of course well aware that Prussia had been out of control for decades, so this was a given and Frederick the Great’s further aggrandizement in Poland just depressing. But his truly horrible realization was that an independent Poland, however compromised, had been a valuable barrier of sorts and that inviting Russia so far west was a serious mistake. The Kingdom of Dacia did not sound appealing either as it would control the mouth of the Danube which, once cleared of its current unhelpful Ottoman owners, had the potential to become the Habsburgs’ key trade route. Were the Habsburgs in danger of being permanently boxed in by a monster?

  Bound by alliance with Russia, immediately Joseph reached home he was faced by a renewed Ottoman war. Constantinople had sensibly decided it should attack first rather than just wait for the Russians to chew it up again. Joseph marched into the Balkans at the head of an enormous army of some two hundred and fifty thousand men, full of chiliastic dreams about trumping Catherine’s vision. Unfortunately the army rapidly began to get ill and to starve – at least thirty thousand men died in the first year just of disease – and seemed set to achieve nothing. Joseph himself became very ill and returned to Vienna, where he died in 1790. He lived long enough to hear of a sensational series of Russian victories and then a Habsburg one, the successful storming of Belgrade. These events were marked by no fewer than five celebratory pieces by Mozart and then a Te Deum in St Stephen’s Cathedral, attended by a very unwell and chagrined Joseph, who had prepared all his life to lead his great, dynastic army to glory and found himself instead coughing in Vienna.

  The Ottoman Empire was now finished as a serious menace to Austria and the principal shield-of-Europe purpose of the monarchy for some three hundred years came to an end. But, as usual, you have to be careful what you wish for and the Habsburgs now owned simply a new, impoverished, hard-to-defend block of Balkan land. This bound them, just as carved-up Poland did, to Russian goodwill at the same time as they were desperate to keep Russia away from the Danube. The collapse of the Ottomans also had curious implications for the Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburgs’ call on the resources of Germany had been as Christendom’s front line and countless Germans had fought on the eastern frontier. There were many reasons for the Holy Roman Empire to collapse in the decade after the old frontier shut down, but it is nonetheless curious that it should have been so soon. A similar dynamic can be seen in 1914, with the last Ottoman troops leaving most of the southern Balkans only a year before the beginning of the First World War. It is as though Constantinople provided a sort of discipline to Central Europe which, once removed, resulted not in the fruits of peace but in imbecilic mayhem.

  Joseph, as he lay dying, was horrified to hear that his younger sister Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette) was now under house arrest in Paris – but the responsibility for dealing with this would lie with his descendants.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘Sunrise’ » An interlude of rational thoughtfulness » Defeat by Napoleon, part one » Defeat by Napoleon, part two » Things somehow get even worse » An intimate family wedding » Back to nature

  ‘Sunrise’

  Joseph II spent his reign at the heart of a gimcrack, exhausting machine of his own invention, which required him to pull all the levers and crank all the handles. It was as though he was personally atoning for all his predecessors’ blank-faced lack of interest in administrative reform. The effort killed him and there is something a bit mad and depressing about the whole performance. His view of himself as ‘first commoner’, albeit a first commoner who had to be unquestioningly obeyed in all things, led to any number of humiliations. Most enjoyable perhaps was his insistence on dressing in simple military uniform, which once resulted when he was walking outside St Stephen’s Cathedral in a priest sidling up to sell him pornographic pictures – which put the priest pretty much at the eye of the storm of all Joseph’s hang-ups.

  But setting aside all the hectoring and oddness these inconsistencies had some happy results. Joseph’s enthusiasm for promoting new German opera resulted in Mozart’s The Escape from the Seraglio, the opera’s jokey Turkism itself an indicator of the Ottomans’ declining threat status. Then a further change of mind resulted in a more traditional switch back to Italian and Joseph’s personal authorization for The Marriage of Figaro, a story whose subversiveness is now almost invisible but at the time seemed a swingeing attack on the aristocracy, and therefore in line with Joseph’s own loopy antagonisms. The opera’s commission could not have been more traditionally Habsburg – a couple of bright outsiders of a kind who would have been familiar to Rudolph II, the Venetian Lorenzo da Ponte and the Salzburger Mozart. This wonderful magic box remains Joseph’s great gift to the world – a softened adaptation of a scathing French play that had notionally been set in Spain (i.e., ‘not France’), and turned into an Italian opera still set in Spain (i.e., ‘not the Habsburg monarchy’), but which in performance is almost always relocated to a patently Viennese milieu. Joseph’s world of short wigs and buckled shoes, all that quite dashing pre-Revolution flummery, is permanently preserved through the accident of its being hitched to a stream of the most beautiful, various and heartbreaking music and singing ever conjured up.

  Vienna’s ability to attract a disproportionately large percentage of great composers, meaning perhaps ten people in a couple of centuries, is striking. Certain cultures at particular times provide the right facilities – the connoisseurship, the range of players, singers, copyists, venues, instrument-makers and, of course, audiences. Much of this is very alien
to us. Our far, far broader access to such music makes us oblivious to how different the circumstances were under which it first appeared. In many cases it was exclusively for aristocratic audiences, or often for almost no audience at all, with a string quartet perhaps produced simply for one patron’s personal needs, or a piece designed for a specific player to unfurl in front of some tiny group.

  This can be seen most clearly in the career of Joseph Haydn, much of which was spent tucked away in the private employment of the mighty Esterházy family on their estates south-east of Vienna. Here Haydn churned out a simply baffling, almost frightening, amount of music to order. A friend once gave me a boxed set of every one of Haydn’s symphonies and even these are unmanageable – like a nightmare where you are trying to cram into your mouth a sandwich the size of a dinner table. I have now spent years trying to take these pieces in, some four hundred movements of music, and it cannot be done. People have done their best to help – they have numbered and ordered them and some have jaunty nicknames (‘the Clock’, ‘the Hen’, ‘Hornsignal’, ‘la Chasse’), but the sheer scale defeats even these well-meaning efforts. Some of the symphonies are in practice quite boring and reek of loveless background music for the aristocratic soirées of yesteryear, with brocaded people who have not washed for quite a while kissing hands, fluttering fans and peering through quizzing-glasses. You can hit a really rough patch where you suddenly feel you have overdosed on lavender-flavoured comfits. But it is always worth persevering as something will turn up – a trio that sounds like an overheard, melancholy field-song (67th), a grand blaze of sound which is just right (75th), a strange droning that sounds like Sibelius (88th). It just goes on and on – there’s a bit that sounds like the opening of The Valkyries, another like nineteenth-century French salon music – but a lot of it, fair enough, sounds like Haydn.