Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  Already at this point Louis had transformed his situation. Having outlived his sullen brother and paid off Edward IV, only Charles the Bold was left. The curious question is whether, if Charles had stopped at some point, he could really have stabilized his lands and in effect recreated Lotharingia. Very briefly there is a huge arc, from the reacquired Somme towns all the way round to the Swiss borders. He buys from old Arnold of Egmont the lands which are now the Dutch province of Gelderland (the Duchy of Guelders, the County of Zutphen and the area known as the Veluwe – ‘the Wasteland’); he has under his thumb the ecclesiastical lands of Liège and Utrecht (the latter what are now the provinces of Utrecht and Overijssel, plus the then submerged Flevoland); he invades Lorraine and Bar and already has a mortgage from a cash-strapped Habsburg on the medley of lands around the Upper Rhine based around the Sundgau (the ‘southern county’ – now southern Alsace).

  As news of Charles’s death at the Battle of Nancy reached Louis he could not really believe his luck. The entire vast inheritance swam before his eyes. Charles’s nineteen-year-old sole heir Mary ‘the Rich’ (as she was now known) stood to get everything. Both Louis and the Emperor had sons who could marry the heiress. Mary herself seems to have been a tough, icy character, ably backed up by her stepmother Margaret of York (Edward IV’s sister). (This is just in brackets, but one of the countless wonders of the Aachen Treasury is Margaret of York’s crown, a staggeringly beautiful and haughty object, which she wore in Bruges at her wedding celebrations. It is particularly striking because all other English crowns had their jewels plucked out and were then melted down during the English Civil War.) In the blizzard of rumours, messages, threats and horrors that followed Charles’s death, Margaret took the key decisions. Louis’s formidable messenger system meant that he knew Charles was dead on 10 January, whereas Margaret and Mary in Ghent were still hoping he might be alive a fortnight later.

  The feudal consequences of Charles’s death were crucial. Louis XI immediately declared that all the French lands that had been under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy were now returning to his direct control: Picardy, Artois, Flanders and the Duchy of Burgundy itself. Leading his own army he massacred garrisons to frighten others into surrender and bribed local leaders to betray their trust. In a few heady months town after town, from the line of the Somme to Boulogne, was in French hands: Amiens, Arras, Béthune, Lens, the palace of Hesdin, with its chirpy water-squirting devices. French troops invaded the Duchy of Burgundy, ending over a century of alienation and adding it to Guyenne, Berry and Normandy as another huge region in Louis’s collection. Every possible alarm bell went off in London as the French looked as though they might engulf Flanders too – but Louis played off Edward IV brilliantly with vague, value-free promises and further bags of money.

  The downside to all this violence, as Louis himself later admitted to Commynes, was that it proved less than ideal as a means of wooing little Mary. Margaret of York’s brother the Duke of Clarence put himself forward as a suitor and Emperor Frederick III dusted down his earlier discussions with Charles during the Siege of Neuss. Margaret knew that Clarence, her brother-in-law, was a useless character so he was crossed off (he went on to future fame, a few months later, for his murder in a butt of malmsey). Louis also had to deal with the powerful response to his rampages from the elites in the northern Burgundian territories who saw their privileges under sudden and acute threat from the French. In emotional and drastic scenes on 11 February, Margaret and Mary finished negotiating in Ghent the ‘Great Privilege’, a document that crossed out much of Charles’s more oppressive legislation and created a new basis for Mary’s rule over Flanders, Brabant and the rest. One clause stated that Dutch would now be used exclusively for the government of the Dutch-speaking provinces, an issue already old and bad-tempered then, but which continues to dog us today. Margaret was appalled by Louis’s invasion of the duchy – but in any event Louis’s wish to get Mary and marry her to his own heir Charles was hobbled by Charles only being seven years old and Mary nineteen. Under normal circumstances his age would be a standard bit of royal grotesquery, but this was an emergency with almost no precedent and chaos breaking out everywhere: the Duchy of Guelders declared its independence; French troops moved into the Franche-Comté, an Imperial territory which was nothing to do with France. A grown-up man was needed for the job with a lot of resources, not the strange little dauphin. Frederick III’s son Maximilian was only slightly younger than Mary, and therefore they could quickly have children at a dynastically very attenuated moment. Maximilian and Mary were married in Ghent in August, the Habsburgs scooped the pool and a new era began.

  Commynes, writing some twenty years later, looked back on this whole time with incredulity and dismay. For four reigns the dukes had extended and managed their domains – and created a prosperity and security which now seemed like a distant dream. All this destruction and misery had happened, Commynes said, referring to the tiny dispute which first caused Charles to turn his attention to the far south of his lands, ‘on account of a wagon of sheepskins which the lord of Romont took from a Swiss, who was passing through his territory.’

  Mary the Rich and the future of the world

  The Church of Our Lady in Bruges is in the middle of a complicated makeover at the moment and is a mass of wires, plastic sheeting, plywood screens and apologetic signs. Once you battle through to the choir area, it is poignant to see the church’s two most imperious and distinguished inhabitants – Charles the Bold and Mary the Rich – lying passively in their tombs and unable even to offer a mild complaint about all the drills and hammering. Charles used to unwind in the quiet of the evening before going to bed by having someone read to him about the great generals of the ancient world (after Charles’s catastrophic defeat at Grandson, his jester called out to him, riskily, ‘My lord, we are well Hannibal’d this time!’). He would certainly not have appreciated this chaos, and even more so he would not have appreciated just how few visitors seem to notice his or his daughter’s tombs – everyone photographed Michelangelo’s Madonna but I didn’t see anybody more than glance at the discreetly grand bronze effigies lying on marble coffins, the tombs’ sides encrusted with elaborate genealogies.

  This was once one of the principal sacred sites in the Low Countries. The two figures are placed side by side to show the transmission belt of legitimacy from the Valois dukes to the Habsburg family. Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian shifted the great tangle of Charles’s non-French lands across to a family who were not only Holy Roman Emperors but also the great landowners of Central Europe, making the Habsburgs the most powerful figures in European history since the Roman Empire. Their marriage was brief – Mary broke her back in a hunting accident aged only twenty-five, dying only five years after her father’s death on the battlefield. It is fair to say that the decisions she took in her short life, in cahoots with her stepmother Margaret of York, directed the history of the world. This was partly negative: if she had married King Louis XI of France, as had been planned, her enormous legacy would have been added to France, making a coherent, readily defended super-state. But by marrying Maximilian she shifted Europe into an era of chaos, with arguments around the future of the Burgundian legacy continuing well into the twentieth century. Of course, the moment you posit a Mary & Louis outcome so many more possible outcomes come into play that it becomes silly to speculate about the events seconds after the betrothal is announced, let alone ten or twenty years later. But it is fair to say that the French now spent three centuries trying to capture the territories to their north: centuries of grinding warfare, bankruptcies, revolution, countless deaths and literally thousands of uninvolving paintings featuring men in wigs on horses, as they battled to get what Louis XI might have had in return for a little civility, a gold ring and a fair-to-middling banquet. I have not been able to find such a quote, but some historically literate officer in the Revolutionary army, marching at last into Amsterdam in 1795, must have surely said something
pretty sardonic.

  Mary died before most of the Habsburg marriage gambles had come off, but she had nonetheless ensured the future with an efficiency which her father had lacked by having two children: a son and heir, Philip, and a peculiarly impressive and interesting daughter, Margaret, who is discussed later. Mary’s father-in-law the Emperor Frederick III at the age of seventy-seven died after she did, disappearing into his strange, marmalade-coloured tomb in Vienna, having bridged in his own person the entire period from the Battle of Agincourt to the discovery of America. Her husband Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in Frankfurt and crowned in Aachen during Frederick’s lifetime specifically to take over most of the running of the Empire from him. In doing so he created a tradition that the Habsburgs followed from now on, ensuring overlapping dynastic stability by having the electoral bit out of the way before the current owner’s death, then leaving the Pope’s ceremony that made him Emperor until whenever convenient.

  I have tried very hard not to make this a book about endless warfare, but the warfare really is endless. The disappearance of the Dukes of Burgundy made critical again the line in the north that ran down vertically, splitting the areas which were in practice part of the Empire and those that owed allegiance to France. Brutal fighting between Maximilian and Louis devastated the region north of the Somme. A series of epic sieges and battles wrecked prosperous towns, with each year further reducing the value to the winner of what was left. The awkward complication was that Mary’s inheritance went to her son Philip with Maximilian acting only as regent. As someone new to the neighbourhood and with Philip at this point a four-year-old with only sketchy views on enfeoffment, Maximilian had a poor hold on the local nobility. He also had to handle a rebellious Ghent (as usual). He also had to deal with the financial problems that dogged him throughout his life: everybody would be lined up in battle order, properly equipped, with attractive matching banners snapping in the crisp wind, and then word would get out that Maximilian had run out of money again – and the troops would start to drift off home or, even worse, start chatting to the other side. It was all so hopeless that, despite spending years working with Dürer and others on his own tremendous mausoleum at Innsbruck, he wound up completely bankrupt three hundred miles further to the east and was buried in Wiener Neustadt, where he remains today with nobody in the following centuries ever coming up with the funds to cart him back to Innsbruck to lie decently inside his greatest artistic legacy.

  After many clashes and false starts the Treaty of Senlis was signed in 1493 between the representatives of two unpleasant teenagers, the now close-to-grown-up Philip (known as Philip the Handsome) and Charles VIII of France, both representing the next and not very impressive generation, but both still under the control of regencies at this point. The treaty confirmed Habsburg ownership of the Franche-Comté, Artois (which had for a time fallen under French control) and the little County of Saint-Pol. The Habsburgs also got to keep the County of Charolais, a small area under the now French-controlled Duchy of Burgundy, which had an unenviable future, knocking about under various lords until finally becoming fully integrated into France in 1760. The Somme towns and Boulogne fell to France in the agreement and stayed that way. As usual, whatever agreement might be made about Flanders, the French monarchy always kept the mental reservation that really it was part of France – if it was now under Habsburg control, this was only ever like putting a piece of fruit pie in the fridge with the intention of taking it out again later.

  Charles VIII would direct his silly energies elsewhere than northern France and Habsburg control was consolidated. Under the Dukes of Burgundy the area had gradually developed its own identity. It was, for example, invaluable that otherwise rival entities such as the County of Holland and the County of Flanders were obliged to cooperate against the threat from France. Holland had become fundamentally different from other Imperial counties, such as Mark or Lippe, or even quite large territories such as the Palatinate, in that, whatever its special privileges and exceptions, it had been forced into a dynastic frame where it simply could not directly antagonize, say, Brabant. The bickering that made the rest of the Empire so unmanageable was in the new Habsburg lands much more muted. This came from a habit acquired under the Dukes, but also from anxiety. Places such as Holland knew they had to cling to the other Habsburg possessions or risk a French visit. Maximilian also took over key Burgundian institutions, most notably the Order of the Golden Fleece, which bound together aristocrats and allies and which would always be the most prominent decoration – in both processions and portraits – around the necks of the Habsburg Emperors.

  Philip the Handsome, like his mother, died young – possibly poisoned. But, also like Mary, he lived long enough to have a powerful impact on Europe’s future. In another sensational agglomerative Habsburg marriage he had wed a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and, following a series of surprise deaths, found himself as Philip I, King of Spain. He reigned only briefly before his own death, but he and his wife had six children, including future consorts of the French, Portuguese and Scandinavian kings, the Emperor Charles V, the Emperor Ferdinand I and Mary of Hungary. In terms of playing poker this falls outside the realms of the possible – a super-imperial-royal-cheat flush. It meant that Charles V inherited all the Burgundian, Habsburg and Spanish lands – including of course America, the potential of which was beginning to become apparent under Philip. Nobody had ever ruled so widely and on so rickety a set of chances.

  New management at Hawk Castle

  German historians of the nineteenth century loved to talk about the five ‘tribal duchies’ or ‘stem duchies’, the great chunks of land created by the Frankish eastern conquests: Lotharingia, Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia. This sort of stuff, with its flavour of winged helmets, rough fellowship, drooping beer-stained moustaches and warriors beating their swords on their shields to acclaim their chief, was enough to have followers of Wagner in ecstasies. In their different ways the ghosts of these five entities have endured to the present, but with only Bavaria maintaining a steady and substantial political shape. Swabia and Lotharingia detonated into fragments with parts of both coalescing into Switzerland.

  This original, galactic event happened in Swabia’s case in the chaotic winding-up of the intensely tangled House of Hohenstaufen in the 1250s. The resulting interregnum was long remembered as a terrifying disaster, with the entire Empire reduced to a period of anarchic sauve-qui-peut. In the far north of the Empire, this provided the opening for William II, Count of Holland, appointed at one point as a widely unacknowledged ‘anti-king’, to donate to himself the County of Zeeland, with great future implications, and start setting up a suitably posh court in line with his wobbly new status, creating the Binnenhof and the origins of the city of The Hague. This was characteristic of the shambles: all over the Empire violence, betrayal and uncertainty ruled and its memory would be a key element in the relative (only relative) discipline under which the Empire kept itself once re-united under Rudolf I, the first Habsburg family Emperor, in 1273.

  During the anarchy Swabia broke into an amazing medley of different micro-states as everyone turned on everyone else, from individual castles to small groups of confederates for mutual defence – the latter of course readily being converted to the purpose of mutual attack. It was in the fallout that one set of small territories banded together – Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden – and, uniquely, remained together. The earliest elements in what became Switzerland coalesced partly by default: sheltered by the political incoherence of the rest of Swabia, by the underpopulated County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté) and by the great spooky belt of the Black Forest – then made even more spooky by its being fronted by a much wider and more turbulent Rhine. But they also clung together to deal with a serious threat.

  The cooperation between various valley communities was galvanized by the Emperor Rudolf I, who had his family castle in Swabia (the original Habsburg Castle, where the clan’s fortunes began) and
extensive entangled lands round about. Each of the Swiss communities had its own special attribute which belied its small size. For example Uri controlled access to the Gotthard Pass, the keys to which it had managed to buy from the cash-strapped last Hohenstaufen Emperor. As discussed earlier, the opening up of Alpine passes was like a magic wand, comparable to Holland’s ability to fill in bits of sea to conjure up farmland. The new trade meant that Luzern, most strikingly, within a few years became almost as large as it would be in its crazy touristic heyday in the nineteenth century. It was the fate of the Habsburg family to find itself endlessly at odds with these ornery and self-sufficient people, both as local landowners and as emperors. If time travel were ever invented (which by definition, sadly, it cannot be as otherwise our history books would be filled with random silver-foil-wrapped busybodies handing out bazookas to King Harold’s thegns at the Battle of Hastings, etc.) then the first traveller’s job might be to nip back to the later Middle Ages and tip off both the Habsburgs and the Dukes of Burgundy about not messing with the Swiss.