Lotharingia

by Simon Winder

  Habsburg Castle is still there, now part of the very Swiss canton of Aargau. An attractive foresty walk away from the town of Brugg, the castle frowns down on the valley of the almost synthetically bright blue River Aare shortly before it hits the more conventionally coloured Rhine. I have spent so many years thinking about and writing about the Habsburg family that it seemed a bit bathetic at last getting to the original ‘Castle of the Hawk’ after which they named themselves. I almost expected special singing, a rainbow and some sort of commemorative goblet. The castle itself was also a bit low-key, with a little drinks terrace and a handful of instructive information boards.

  The interaction between the Habsburgs and the people who became known in the end as the Swiss was crucial to shaping both sides, but positive only for the latter. The Habsburgs were entangled with non-Habsburg interests from the east in the Tyrol, in part with the ‘safe space’ of Lake Konstanz in the way, and from the north through their ownership of the area around Habsburg Castle and the oddly named (only from a Western European perspective) ‘Further Austria’, which in the fourteenth century included such places as Belfort, various bits of Alsace and Freiburg-im-Breisgau with its associated ‘forest towns’ in the Black Forest. The Habsburgs could, even before they permanently became the Holy Roman Emperors from 1452, call on all manner of family friends, neighbours and mercenary troops to take on the Swiss.

  These efforts invariably resulted in humiliation. The peculiar ability of ‘Lotharingian’ particularism to humble the mighty was as powerful in the south as it would prove elsewhere. Generations of clanking, bearded generalissimos must have stared at maps and laughed at the ease with which these small areas could be subjugated. Not so! One cliché about the Swiss is to link their particularly harsh form of Protestantism to its associated sense of discipline and single-mindedness – but almost all the heavy damage they inflicted on Europe was done as good, conventional Catholics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Swiss use of the halberd – a very long pole with razor-edged hooked and slicing surfaces at its tip – absolutely confounded the flower of chivalry, with expensive knights slaughtered en brochette. As with the French being mown down by English archers, it was odd how long it took for the losing side to react to their technological failing. It must have been after a while quite boring for both sides as yet another Swabian count dolled himself up in steel plates, prettily coloured heraldic festoons, various things made of leather and my lady’s favour tied to his sleeve. Trained in sword-play and the handling of a war-charger since childhood, the count galloped towards the Swiss front line. Meanwhile, some Appenzeller rustic finished his delicious cheese sandwich, spat on his hands, gripped his halberd and awaited his inevitable victory. Ultimately the Habsburgs pretty much ran out of motivated Swabian knights and both sides would instead field great mobs of these halberdiers who would engage in horrifying shoving matches, with the first side to falter suddenly run through at random angles. Almost inevitably, a gaggle of mercenaries and feudal levies versus soldier-citizens defending their families and farms tended to result in the former losing motivation first and getting kebabed.

  All these Habsburg invasions simply bounced off. There were always plenty of minor rebellions dealt with successfully elsewhere in the Empire and throughout the whole sequence of conflicts there was incredulity at this specifically Swiss form of resistance and its solidity of purpose. In 1315 Leopold I, Duke of Austria, came galloping in and had his army devastated and then butchered at the Battle of Morgarten. In 1386 it was the turn of Leopold III, Duke of Austria, who brought with him a specialized detachment of scythe-troops to destroy the harvests as they headed south from Brugg. The Swiss killed him, together with a rich selection of local noblemen and most of his troops (including presumably the ones awkwardly carrying only grass-cutting equipment) at the Battle of Sempach. In 1415 the Aargau, including Habsburg Castle, fell to Swiss control, never to be returned. In 1460 the Swiss seized from the Habsburg the Thurgau – the area east of Zürich – leaving the city of Konstanz as the enclave it has remained ever since and giving the Swiss attractive lakefront views. Having in 1477 destroyed Charles the Bold and therefore transformed the entire story of Europe – ironically, elsewhere at least, in the Habsburgs’ favour – the Swiss then in 1499 spent an enjoyable six months massacring all the troops that the Habsburg Maximilian I could send their way. After the cataclysmic Battle of Dornach, where even Maximilian’s commander was killed, the Habsburgs essentially decided to pretend the Swiss were not there. They acknowledged that that these truculent Swabians were no longer part of the Holy Roman Empire, but only in the sense of their being in a not-to- be-brought-up-in-conversation, haven’t-heard-from-them-in-a-while limbo. As a final and crucial element in the northern Swiss story Basle and Schaffhausen also jumped ship after Dornach, taking advantage of Maximilian’s exhausted demoralization.

  One consistent advantage the Swiss had (and which would later be shared by the Dutch) was that while they were undoubtedly important to the Habsburgs, they tended to be less important than other family concerns. When they became the Empire’s serious retributory focus they could defeat the invaders – but often they could rely on Imperial financial exhaustion or the Empire having battles to fight elsewhere. Figures such as Leopold III’s son, Frederick IV ‘of the Empty Pockets’, were swamped by such a sea of troubles in the 1410s that it was only one humiliation among many when he too lost various bits and bobs to the Swiss. Each one of these blows though was like a lesson in civics for the Swiss themselves – despite moments of murderous disagreement, once their initial alliance had held, it made sense to extend it, with each member aware of its wider responsibility. Oddly it became a tiny version of the Habsburg Empire itself, with micro-acrimonies about which canton should rule over which field, rural areas subject to ruthlessly extractive urban oligarchies and bad blood that could endure for centuries. But what ultimately became known as Switzerland was a fascinating experiment in non-noble, non-royal existence and hung a durable question mark over the management of other European political entities. It also created a thick black line under southern Germany which was not to be crossed. The agreements of 1499 turned out to make this permanent. The following century would present the same agonies and opportunities to another tangle of cities, counties and Church properties at the drastically less mountainous and more watery far northern end of Lotharingia.

  ‘Beware, beware, God sees!’

  One of the smaller events of the malevolent year of 1567 was the hunt by special agents of the Duke of Alva for Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Owned and probably commissioned by the Counts of Nassau, it had been removed from the palace at Brussels and concealed from the Spanish invaders. The agents captured the palace’s head of household and tortured him nearly to death. Alva himself owned a tapestry version of the picture (the equivalent of a smudged photocopy) and there was clearly something about it that drove people mad. The torture must have worked as the following year the great triptych was on its way to Madrid, where it has been ever since.

  Bosch’s paintings have always provoked strong feelings. I am probably writing this book because of the accident of working in a bookshop when I was sixteen with a copy of a lavish edition of Bosch’s complete works and his imitators near the till. My interest in the Habsburgs came from an amazed first visit to Vienna – but while I would like to claim it was provoked by enthusiasm for Musil and Mahler, what really drove me along was knowing that Bosch’s The Last Judgement was there, and, not far behind, Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. It was not until two years ago that I at last made the pilgrimage to ’s-Hertogenbosch, and felt almost nervous doing so. My mind has been cluttered for so long with minor details from Bosch’s work that I felt his home town must in some way have the same bright, pinnacle-filled and entangling atmosphere – and was worried that it might instead foreground things like traffic lights and kebab shops. After the initial shock (traffic lights and kebab shops) it seemed just right –
in other words a real place with a fascinating history. A lot of its old military defences are still standing and a spectacular set of water meadows give a view unchanged since the seventeenth century: it can be seen in a painting of the 1629 siege, which led to ’s-Hertogenbosch now being part of the Netherlands rather than Belgium. But as usual with artists, they just happen to live somewhere – and their private vision of the world does not mean that in some weird way it would end up tinting or shaping the place itself.

  Hieronymus Bosch’s real name was Jheronimus von Aken but he gave as his signature a slightly classicized version of his first name and then an abbreviated version of his town’s name (still used today: Den Bosch). He could be further anglicized and called Jerry Wood, although in practice that would be silly. The name ’s-Hertogenbosch simply means ‘The Duke’s Woods’ and is from its founder, the vigorous and erratic crusader Henry I, Duke of Brabant and Lower Lotharingia, who in the early thirteenth century founded a number of towns to extend and consolidate his dominions.

  Bosch died in 1516, only a couple of years before the Emperor Maximilian, in a world filled with communication, bureaucracy, letter-writing, diaries, and yet very little is known about him. He must always have appeared remarkable, but equally he was once surrounded by all kinds of exceptional artists in other media. At the time his pictures were simply one expression of an all-consuming agony about the fall of mankind shown equally in personal prayer, song, processions, sermons, charitable work, the building, maintenance and beautifying of churches, prayer circles for family or friends, the mass itself. A woman who decided to live the rest of her life in a community of beguines, helping the sick and reading the Bible, was a living, human equivalent of the canvas, wood and oil paint of Bosch’s The Hay Wain – but working in a medium that has left no physical trace. Bosch’s paintings were not designed to create an aesthetic reaction, but to drive you down onto your knees, to think about your fate in a fallen world.

  A lot depends on whether or not Bosch had a sense of humour – were his visions of Hell and its torments supposed to be entertaining or serious? For myself, I realized with a certain amount of self-congratulation, that having reached my fifties I had finally lost interest in the more lip-smacking, heavy-metal elements in Bosch. A naked glutton having his mouth filled from a barrel of ghoul’s diarrhoea for ever is undoubtedly a striking image, but Bosch’s lasting greatness is not as an inventor of grotesques, but as a painter of the uncannily beautiful – as a visual equivalent to Milton. Just his birds: how could he invent so many little birds, or bird-like creatures? And his plants: where on earth does the egg-like spiked plant come from in St John in the Wilderness which so helpfully dispenses both locusts and wild honey? And his visions of Heaven: as a sort of light-filled cone, or as a place from which Lucifer’s rebels are expelled, turning into great insects as they fall? He also invented the best ever trumpeting angels, almost invisibly floating above the mayhem of The Last Judgement. It is these happy creations that somehow balance entertainment and seriousness – hundreds of small details which are almost needlessly bravura but which successfully make the taken-for-granted sensational again. He must almost certainly win the Best Garden of Eden competition too, against some tough local competition.

  The one clue to Bosch provided by ’s-Hertogenbosch itself is the sprawling, weird and much patched-up St John’s Cathedral. The ancient church was being demolished and rebuilt during Bosch’s lifetime and the result is a fabulous labyrinth of Gothic oddities. It still dominates the town, but when built it must have lorded it over all human endeavour. This was the whole effort and focus of the town’s people: to create a building so big, grand and expensive, so economically debilitating, that no supernatural authority could misunderstand the town’s commitment to redemption. As Bosch inscribes on his painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things: ‘Beware, beware, God sees.’ This little phrase would take on a quite different meaning after the Reformation – Luther would send his famous letter containing the Ninety-five Theses to the Archbishop of Mainz in 1517, a bit over a year after Bosch’s death. Very soon, for the most rigorous reformers, what God saw in the image-and-incense-filled cathedrals was mere magniloquence and grotesque human pride. Rather than investing in a gigantic, tangled Gesamtkunstwerk like St John’s, the role of a church building would in the future, at its most radical, be simply to act as ‘a rain shelter’. An entire sensibility would soon be under siege.

  But during the actual St John’s rebuilding this would have been a surreally remote philosophy. Maximilian I held a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece there, for which a painted shield survives for Edward IV of England, who sadly did not attend – but on which the calligraphy matches that on Bosch’s The Stone Operation, which makes clear that there was at least in this instance collaboration between Bosch and the shield’s painter, Pierre Coustain. Bosch designed floats for the town’s Lenten parade which, it must be safe to assume, would have been totally fantastic and perhaps the best floats ever made, but which are completely unrecorded. Particularly tantalizing are the cathedral’s most famous feature, the dozens of statues of sinners on the roof, clambering upwards in pursuit of Heaven. In an inspired decision, when these much corroded figures were replaced during restoration work by new stone copies, they were put in a small museum next to the cathedral. We can never know whether or not Bosch was involved with these statues – I like to think that Bosch and his anonymous sculptor vied with one other for rival compelling mutant effects in their different media. As with the Charlemagne sculpture in Zürich, there can be few more atmospheric objects than statues designed for high places but now brought down after centuries of erosion and smoke, to be seen close up. The museum is packed with oddities: a ‘backwards-tilting man’, convulsed in agony with his back arched and his head staring up, mockingly dressed in elegant shoes and a slashed jerkin. There is a winged dragon with a second monster on its back, a unicorn killing a dragon, a monster with large ears scratching itself, a monk creeping on his knees, a devil with a book, a bear with a beehive, a woman chained up by a Wildman, a howling dog, a violin player. And just when you realize that fifteenth-century northern sculpture was just as great as its painting, the museum throws in an ancient statue of Godefroy of Bouillon and a thirteenth-century cow’s jaw used as an ice skate – the last one of these giving a permanent moment of enlightenment: you suddenly notice in innumerable Netherlandish ice and snow paintings that indeed the skaters have jaws strapped to their feet.

  The museum made me feel as though I was backstage at some chaotically maintained theatre, heaped with discarded props for productions long forgotten and poorly advised about the use of lightweight materials. One of the many oddities of the clambering statues in their proper place on the roof is that they are really very hard to see. Particularly in a world before the telescope their impact is remote. But this is where the past becomes really confusing: the statues were purely religious objects and it was the process of making them and paying for them that was central to their point – indeed large parts of any cathedral have always been invisible, but for the guildsmen working on each pinnacle or choir-stall detail it was the work itself that created the virtue. Bosch would have felt the same about his paintings: the act of making them was a religious one and his unfettered inventiveness a gift from God. Some of the paintings were for public display in churches (although these were often only revealed on specific feast days) but others were for private prayer. Access to The Garden of Earthly Delights was only for a handful of friends and guests of the Counts of Nassau. This was a world of rarity and an aesthetic almost wholly alien to our own.

  The rarity has been much increased by the passage of five often very rough centuries. There are tantalizing glimpses of lost Bosch paintings. A large and elaborate Christ Carrying the Cross was in a church in Ghent and we know it from a drawing made in 1556 by an artist who ‘converted’ Bosch’s figures into a much more fluid, Renaissance style. Nonetheless, you can tell it must have b
een an astounding object – some thirty figures in elaborate armour, with flags, trumpets and weird spears. It was almost certainly destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts. This may well have been the case too with the large set of paintings of the Sixth Day of Creation he created with his elder brother for St John’s Cathedral itself. Can you imagine how wonderful they could have been? These have vanished – as has a large Last Judgement commissioned by Philip the Fair, who was in town during a war with Guelders. With Philip was his boon companion Henry III, Count of Nassau and Lord of Breda, and it was either him or his uncle and predecessor as count who commissioned The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting passed on his death to his younger brother William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Revolt. Perversely, much more of Bosch’s work would probably have been destroyed if it had not been for the swivel-eyed enthusiasm of the Duke of Alva, whose brutal actions opened this section. So many things remain mysterious. The first art historical reference to the painting is in an inventory of 1593, ‘A painting of the world’s variety, which they call The Strawberry ’: so even its usual title is a later fabrication and a piece of misdirection.

  I imagine that intermittently I will (in common with many others) spend the rest of my life mulling over these mysterious and very beautiful pictures. I have only just noticed how in The Vagabond there is on a distant hill a brightly coloured crowd gathered around a gallows – but the gallows are to scale at least a couple of hundred feet high and could only be built to hang a giant or a whale. What is going on? We shall never know.