Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Mapping out the future

  The obsessive conservatism of the Empire under Franz Joseph had many sources, but perhaps the key driver was its unhappy involvement with the Balkans. The last great land-grabs under Joseph II had (in collaboration with the Russians) finally wrecked Ottoman fighting power. From Vienna’s point of view the future for the Balkans had to lie in a sort of picturesque, unthreatening decay – Turks lolling in caravanserai, sipping coffee and reminiscing about past greatness. Any other outcome was simply a threat. For the Hungarians it became axiomatic that any actual extension of the Empire would be a disaster – to bite off a bigger bit would just result in more Slavs or Romanians, who would further dilute a Hungarian presence already spread thin. Locked into such a view was its opposite: for those still actually under Ottoman rule living south of the Empire’s borders there were for many two clear goals – first to remove the Ottomans and then to liberate their fellows trapped inside the Habsburg Empire. The Habsburgs were equally clear that a Russian presence in the region was unacceptable. With the Ottoman Empire’s decay looking ever less picturesque, the vacuum would logically be filled by a partition between the Habsburgs and the Russians, much as with Poland. But the Habsburgs’ distaste both for further territory and for any hint that the Russians might control the mouths of the Danube led to a freakish result. Having spent centuries fighting the Ottomans, the Habsburgs suddenly became solicitous of their health and conspired with the British to prop them up and keep the Russians away. If Vienna had historically often felt humiliated by being London’s patsy, then one can only imagine the humiliation in Constantinople, as the whole place filled up with vulpine false-friends from Europe swearing eternal friendship with the Sublime Porte purely to mess up St Petersburg. It was this stand-off which created a peculiar force-field around the Balkans in which nationalisms that might otherwise have been stamped out came to full bloom. It created a slow-motion disaster for the Empire, which during a century or so first threatened (if blooms can threaten) and then destroyed it.

  The four hundred years of Ottoman rule in the Balkans had created a very different society. The ruling class was entirely separate from the bulk of the population, in language, religion and culture. The areas bordering Habsburg territory consisted of Serbs ruled by Muslims, and Romanians ruled until the 1820s by Greeks (the Phanariots) on behalf of Constantinople. In the Slavic areas (Serbia and southwards – the Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia never had a Muslim presence) Christians operated under all kinds of constraints, with elaborate codes for where they could live, what they could wear and what jobs they could do. A mounted Christian had to get off his horse in the presence of a Muslim, a Christian could not wear the colour green, no new Christian churches could be built (giving an ever-deeper cultic reverence to those kept going since the original invasion). This started to crumble in the eighteenth century as the stuffing fell out of the Ottoman project. Military defeat, disease, economic failure and banditry (both through renegade Turks and restive Serbs) thinned out the population, but gave particularly good reasons for Muslims to pack up and move nearer to the capital, decisions which brought economic life almost to a total halt.

  The Serbs started the great home-grown rejection of the Ottomans, carving out their own autonomous zone in the early nineteenth century and in sudden surges picking up further land and independence. Western Europe always treats the Balkans as alien, and it is true that it had a very different atmosphere. A couple of examples are music and food. The court cultures of western Europe, right up to the south-east fringes of the Empire, were saturated in fine music and fine food. The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvořák in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartók and Kodály in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the ‘French restaurant’ in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods – with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms. In the Balkans the old Muslim ruling class were so remote from the population they ruled that their expulsion or killing ended any connection with such a world, with all those pilaffs, sherbets and baklavas once enjoyed in Pécs or Belgrade retreating to Constantinople together with the great Ottoman music, clothing and rituals that had accompanied them.

  The Ottoman collapse left a peasant society, extremely poor, with very little education, eating basic, local foods washed down with fruit brandies. This was true throughout the entire region, as much in Albania as in Greece, Macedonia or Bulgaria. A very flat social system created an atmosphere very remote from that of Hampshire, say, or Saxony. The two Romanian-speaking principalities of Wallachia (the area south of Transylvania) and Moldavia (to the east) were somewhat different as they had managed to keep enough independence to have elements of a Romanian land-owning class, albeit under Greek-speaking control. But even Romania battled against poor education, an alien court and the far worse problem of being in the way of the invasion route in any fighting between Russians and Ottomans.

  The nineteenth century played out a highly complex battle for independence and control, which gave the Habsburgs kittens. In its simplest form the Habsburgs provided tutelage and support for the Serbs, the Russians for the Romanians. As both nationalities became better educated and more economically complex (shifting to cash rather than local barter) so relations became strained. The Habsburg south of Hungary, around what is now called Novi Sad, had many Serbs living there, mainly the result of previous mass movements to escape Ottoman control in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These Serbs provided bureaucrats, thinkers and soldiers for the new autonomous Serbian state to the south, but they also lived in what would logically be a potential area of Serbian expansion. By 1867 the last Ottoman troops had left Serbia and Serbia was truly independent. The Habsburgs used their control over the country (buying all its pigs and plums) to keep a friendly regime there, but the resentments were overwhelming and the still explicitly Catholic ideology of the Empire in any event repulsed the Serbians. Serbian attempts to expand into Ottoman Bosnia and to gain access to the sea were blocked in 1878 by a ‘temporary’ Habsburg occupation of the territory and in 1913 by the Habsburg creation of Albania – perhaps the only state to be invented simply as an act of spite.

  The Romanian story had a related trajectory. There, Romanians in the Habsburg Empire (in Transylvania, the Banat and Partium) provided intellectual fuel for Romanian nationalism and, despite the Carpathians splitting them from other Romanians, gradually began to make sense of a single language-based entity. The two Romanian principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, under Russian influence, worked towards some form of union from the 1840s and as remaining Ottoman privileges crumbled, a single state seemed likely. Russia, as a protector, did not have the exquisite scruples of the Habsburgs about chewing through fresh territory. During the Napoleonic Wars Russia had accidentally on purpose absorbed eastern Moldavia, calling it Bessarabia – the core of what is now the grim country of Moldova. On the face of it there was little to stop Russia absorbing the rest of Moldavia and moving on. The Russians also had plans to turn Bulgaria into a further, massive satellite, to be followed by Constantinople. This never happened, but the boundaries in the area remained very fluid. The rival intentions and fears of the three empires circling the region created an elaborate magnetic field of sufficient, if erratic, repelling power to allow the relatively small nationalities to keep some hold over their own destinies. Britain and Russia’s mutual dislike and suspicion, everywhere from the Mediterranean to the Himalayas, made
Britain a natural ally for the Habsburgs, but there was no avoiding the problem that Britain’s navy could not have much impact on Russia, whereas any land war would involve the Habsburgs doing the heavy lifting. The Crimean War saw a high tide of cooperation, but the British only seriously damaged a small area along the Black Sea with their fleet, and the Habsburgs realized they were simply not strong enough to fight the Russians alone on land with any chance of success. So although they reached the Black Sea, they maintained neutrality against Russia. The notional monarchical solidarity between Moscow and Vienna now came to an end, but the latter’s timidity meant that they at least did not fight each other until 1914.

  In the later nineteenth century as Belgrade and Bucharest were transformed into ever more plausible and sophisticated capitals it became clear to some key elements in their elites that their national revolutions were incomplete and that their brothers trapped within the Habsburg Empire cried out for redemption. The disparity in military force between these small countries and the Empire made this seem a somewhat comic aspiration, but so much of the national legend of both territories came from Sremski Karlovci, the principal Serbian town in southern Hungary, and Sibiu, which had a similar role for Romanians in Transylvania, that this was a powerful rather than frivolous or marginal aspiration. The Serbian revolution of 1903 ended any cooperation with the Habsburgs and eventually led to the wars which partitioned the remaining Ottoman territories in Europe. As the Habsburgs used every diplomatic trick to box in the Serbs and kick them away from Albania, the Serbs found themselves permanently trapped inland. Straightforward Serbian nationalism, in this pressure-cooker, mutated into Yugoslavism. If the Serbs were not strong enough to take on the Empire, perhaps they should ally with other Slav peoples? This would make it legitimate to absorb Habsburg-ruled and substantially still Muslim Bosnia (the temporary occupation had become permanent in 1908), and Croatia and Slovenia, even though none of them had any real historical links with Belgrade, aside from the usual medieval nonsense. As with almost all Balkan issues this would need a fatal weakening of the Imperial power. This seemed unlikely until the Serbian-sponsored killing of Franz Ferdinand in Bosnia in 1914, perhaps the most amazingly successful terrorist act in modern history, one which – after terrible suffering – fulfilled all the most far-fetched Serbian fantasies, and those of Romania too.

  This is a very brief summary – the whole subject is so fascinating that it deserves much more space – but it is curious that whereas the Habsburgs could lose out in Italy in the 1850s and in Germany in 1866 without any serious questions about their future, it was in their traditional backyard, impoverished and with a small population, that their nemesis lurked.

  The lure of the Orient

  I may have just been in an unusually good mood because the Gregor Mendel (father of genetics) Museum was unexpectedly closed, but with a spare afternoon in Brno I found myself radiating benignity as I went into a courtyard and up some stairs and through the door of what may be one of the nicest places in the world: the Good Teahouse (Dobrá čajovna). Brno is a civilized and beautiful city and the Good Teahouse clinches its case. A series of rooms filled with wall-hangings and Persian carpets, heaped cushions and little tables, the teahouse may teeter on the verge of parody, but it is nonetheless a remarkably complete Orientalist fantasy. Moravian students smoke hookahs and sip tea, the latter ordered by tinkling a small bell on each table. There are few enough opportunities in Central Europe to loll, and here at last is a place which is a sort of essence of lolling.

  Orientalism, with its uneasy mixture of languor, sex and cruelty, is one of the great organizing principles in Western life. It is, of course, unrelated to any actual, real part of the world but is instead constructed from vague ideas about Ottoman or Arab or Persian or Moghul or Chinese life (most of the world, in fact) as filtered through various texts, objects and paintings. Its beauty lies in its immense range – within each country, indeed within each individual, there is a private Orientalism, (with a bit of a male bias) from munching pistachios while lying in a pile of girls to the conquest of whole races in an epic of cruelty – and all achieved just by letting the imagination roam a bit while sitting on the bus. Much of my own Orientalism came from the comparatively real experience of having spent some months selling books in the actual Middle East. I have the happiest memories of sitting around (lolling even) with booksellers in Jeddah or Riyadh, sipping the most perfect mint tea and swapping courteous and engaging stories with my elegant host (Sudanese servants and Indian accountants lurking in the background) before eventually getting down to business. To be honest I am unsure that I contributed much myself in the way of courteous and engaging stories, but the experience had a profound impact on me – couple this with an enthusiasm for Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters, the paintings of John Frederick Lewis and Eugène Delacroix and an infinite tolerance for The Arabian Nights and I had my complete kit.

  Central Europe’s fascination with the Orient has its own specific flavour – although again it has to be emphasized that Orientalism is so various that it would be horrible and depressing to claim a simply Austro-Hungarian form of it. Most obviously it was based on a specific and direct fear of the Ottomans. There is a lovely seventeenth-century engraving of Pécs in southern Hungary, showing it as a completely Turkish place – a quite small, walled town filled with domes and minarets, the picture decorated with camels (then common as beasts of burden right across the Balkans) and slippered Turks preparing coffee. The ‘cultural exchange’ between Christians and Ottomans in Central Europe (principally desperate, fanatical fighting plus large-scale slave-raiding) was a vigorous one. One very odd aspect of this can still be seen in churches on the old border, in the crook of the Carpathians in south-east Transylvania. Here the entire human landscape is designed around defence against Turkish raids. But because of the severe Protestantism embraced by many Transylvanians and the accompanying hostility to all images (a hostility, of course, shared by much of Islam) many churches in the region have very surprising decorations. This is most famously the case with the great Black Church of Braşov, the final, craggy, massive western Christian church before the mountain passes marking the crucial frontier with the eastern world of Orthodoxy and Islam. Despite the Black Church’s almost oppressive symbolic importance, the interior is decorated with Turkish carpets, nailed to or hanging from the walls – their beauty but also their abstract design making them permissible embellishments, despite their obvious Islamic symbolism.

  Central Europe’s relations with the East were based on fighting and on trade, forming one of the key conduits (along with Venice) for the transfer of beautiful fabrics, coffee, Turkish tobacco, jewels and all the other rather worrying indications that the Ottoman Empire was a great (and for very many years unbeatable) civilization. I have already written about the actively military aspect of this relationship, but fighting had fallen into almost total abeyance by the nineteenth century. The concern with the Ottoman Empire now became for Vienna an awkward mixture of wanting to prop it up as a threat to Russia and wanting to carve it up to gain territory (a plan always vetoed by the Hungarians): a dilemma never resolved until the collapse of the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires within a few months of each other.

  The Hungarians had a particularly odd relationship with the East because by the 1840s they felt under so much pressure on so many fronts. The highly influential ideas of German intellectuals, from a number of perspectives, stated that the Hungarians would shortly die out, doomed as a linguistic oddity to be swamped in a sea of Germans and Slavs. This suggestion understandably added a nerve-racked edge to Hungarian nationalism. The Ottomans shared some of this view of Hungarian terminality and after the Russian invasion of 1849 stamped out the last embers of Hungary’s bid for independence there were high hopes in Constantinople and among the large Muslim communities along the eastern reaches of the Danube that the logical thing for the Hungarians to do was to convert en masse to Islam.

  At a tim
e when all the peoples of Central Europe were scouting around for bogus stories of national origin, one clear embarrassment was the thinness of everyone’s roots when compared to the deeply ancient and complex worlds of the eastern empires. The Hungarians had a particular interest in this as they felt they could trump the Slavs by making a virtue of their own presumed origins in Central Asia. This had many fascinating spin-offs – and indeed could make in its own right a long book – and is a topic not helped by my own susceptibility to the gravitational pull of all things eastern.

  Sándor Csoma de Kőrös was a polylingual Transylvanian, born in 1784, who became obsessed with the long-standing idea that the Magyars were descended from the Huns and decided to travel to Central Asia looking for clues. He ended up trapped in a grim, completely unmanageable piece of intellectual machinery of his own devising, battling with Tibetan texts in remote monasteries, subsisting on handfuls of rice, swathed in woollens, unfolding the mysteries of Vajrayana Buddhism and doing very little, as it turned out, to prove Magyar origins in the high Pamirs. Intermittently supported by the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, Csoma de Kőrös revolutionized understanding of Tibet, creating a grammar and Tibetan–English dictionary as well as engaging in the rather thankless task of translating infinite amounts of stuff about Vajrayana Buddhist ritual, his work being described by the French traveller Victor Jacquemont as ‘unspeakably boring … there are some twenty chapters on what sort of shoes it is fitting for lamas to wear’. This engaging, modest man, almost incredibly far from home and without another Magyar for thousands of miles, is one of the great heroes of Oriental studies and should have a little shrine to him in the Good Teahouse as a key initiator of the hippie obsession with Kathmandu. He eventually died of fever in the Terai jungles on a final, fraught expedition.