by Simon Winder
Countless global voyages ended up dumping their stuff in Antwerp. The Scheldt was perfect as it took your ship to a secure anchorage with sophisticated services a long way inland, with easy travel on to all the cities Dürer visits. He himself has an infinite appetite for the exotic, buying ‘a wooden weapon from Calicut’, an Indian coconut, ‘an old Turkish whip’, a baboon – in a very few words linking Antwerp to India, the Levant and Africa. But earlier in the year the most astounding cargo of all had been unloaded there as a gift for Charles: the first treasure from Hernán Cortés’ invasion of the Aztec Empire. This was now on display in Brussels and Dürer went to see it. Almost no trace of the treasure remains today (the Spanish melted it all down), its greatness undermined both by greed and by religious distaste. All that is left is a beautiful quetzal-feather Mexican object known as Montezuma’s Head Dress which was first noted in 1575 in a Habsburg collection in the Tyrol – but it could easily have come from any number of later Spanish bloodbaths in the region.
Dürer is rapt in the face of the things from ‘the new land of gold’, staring at the clothing, weapons, darts, armour, a huge sun made from gold and a matching moon made of silver: ‘All the days of my life I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle Ingenia of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.’
Margaret of Austria
There are so many striking things lurking in Dürer’s diary that this book could be hopelessly capsized by them. I will restrict myself to one further line from his time in Brussels: ‘the King of Denmark gave a great banquet to the Emperor [Charles V], Lady Margaret, and the Queen of Spain, and he bade me in and I dined there also.’ This simple report bursts with possibilities. The king was Christian II, chaotic, mercurial and dithering, who was in Brabant with his wife Isabella, the Emperor’s younger sister. A superb drawing of him by Dürer still exists, accidentally preserving the odd way that the male fashions of the 1520s – long, pretty hair, a full beard – go underground shortly thereafter until re-emerging again only in about 1967. He would soon return to Denmark, ultimately alienating everyone and ending up imprisoned for the last thirty-six years of his life. The Emperor’s being mentioned raises the usual awkwardness that despite the countless banquets he attended he could not, because of his clog-like Habsburg jaw, eat or drink at them as he made so much mess. He seemed to have retreated to a private room to eat, but understandably court records gloss over this issue and I have been thwarted for some years in my attempts to work out how Imperial dignity was maintained on these public occasions, with their elaborate dainties and frequent toasts.
The two really interesting guests of honour though are ‘Lady Margaret, and the Queen of Spain’. It is fun to see the latter in town. Formerly pretty Germaine of Foix, she had spent her late teens in the gruesome embraces of the enormously older King Ferdinand of Aragon. A series of deaths meant that Ferdinand, to his horror, had become the last of his dynasty and that on his death the Aragonese throne would fall to the hated Habsburg dynasty via his daughter, Joanna the Mad. Festooned in love potions and urged on by countless high masses and the prayers of the court, each act of intercourse held the hope that this would have preserved Aragon as a separate kingdom. In a nightmarish twist a son was indeed born, but then died a few hours later. The despairing Ferdinand died, meaning that Joanna’s son, Charles, therefore scooped the lot, confirming that Spain was now a united kingdom (albeit with fissures which have continued off and on ever since). Germaine, now dowager queen, was through the oddities of her situation Charles’s step-grandmother, although only twelve years older. This is a murky topic, but she seems to have welcomed Charles to his Spanish inheritance by having an affair with him which resulted in a mystery daughter. She was married off in 1519 to a minor member of the Hohenzollern family and the two of them would be packed off to Spain to rule Valencia a couple of years after the banquet.
But in this fascinating group, the star turn is definitely ‘Lady Margaret’. One of the great figures in early sixteenth-century Europe, Margaret of Austria was Maximilian and Mary the Rich’s daughter. She had ruled the Netherlands on Maximilian’s behalf, been sacked by Charles on his inheriting the region, but then reinstated as the sprawling and unmanageable nature of his empire became clear. Like Germaine she had had a miserable married existence. She had been raised at the French court with the intention that she would marry the future, deeply unpleasant Charles VIII. After years of toadying from courtiers and elaborate ceremonial she was suddenly dumped as political priorities changed and missed out on weird Charles. Maximilian then shipped her to Spain to marry Ferdinand and Isabella’s son Juan, Prince of Asturias. He then died (creating the crisis that Germaine was meant to fix) and Margaret gave birth to their daughter, who also died. Then, in what was her great piece of luck, she married the dashing and entertaining Philibert II, Duke of Savoy. Detailed accounts exist of their glamorous progress, as the principal towns from Geneva to Chambéry to Turin paid homage to their new Burgundian duchess. As usual it is hard not to feel that the endless allegorical pageants must have worn a bit thin after a while. But who could not have enjoyed the monks who had the surprising idea of building a fountain consisting of a gigantic carved maiden whose breasts squirted streams of wine; or not have felt special when the Turin Shroud was brought over to adorn her personal chapel?
But she had hardly got used to her fun new court when the overheated twenty-four-year-old Philibert, on one of his many boar-hunting expeditions, took the fatal decision to drink from the icy fountain of St Vulbas. As usual the real medical issues are opaque, but for whatever reason he seized up and – despite vows, prayers and the potentially unhelpful decision to dose him with ground-up pearls – he died. This catastrophe was the end of Margaret’s peripatetic marriage adventures. Only a few days older than her late husband, she went through a crisis during which she tried to kill herself, cut off her hair and decided to become a nun.
Margaret does seem to have been pursued by bad luck. While she was visiting her father Maximilian in Strasbourg her favourite pet parrot was eaten by a big dog. She also came disturbingly close to being married off to the avaricious old paranoiac Henry VII of England. Her chance for greatness came with a Habsburg family disaster. Two years after Philibert died, her only sibling, King Philip I of Castile, Lord of the Netherlands, Duke of Burgundy (inherited from his mother Mary the Rich) and heir of Aragon (hence Ferdinand and Germaine’s activities), suddenly died too. All of Maximilian’s plans were under threat, with Philip and Joanna’s son, the tiny Charles, needing an absurdly complex set of regency arrangements to ensure he might one day inherit much of the world. Margaret now became invaluable: she had the prestige, immediacy and experience to help patch up a mounting Habsburg fiasco, as Joanna refused to acknowledge her husband’s death and descended into insanity. In 1507 Margaret became ruler of the Habsburg Netherlands and, after the period when Charles injudiciously sacked her, was back in the saddle from 1519 to her death in 1530. So when she was sitting round the table talking with Charles, Germaine and Christian II, being looked at by Dürer in 1521, she was the most experienced ruler there, still only in her early forties.
Rather amazingly, the palace from which she ruled the Netherlands, at Mechelen, is still there – or at least its front. This front shows one of her problems, as it preserves her attempt to overhaul the embarrassingly late-medieval building to make it more upscale and Renaissance-friendly but she ran out of money, so it is partly gnarled and turrety and then has a delicate and pretty bit stuck on the end. In a way this accidentally enshrines her virtues – a sense of someone doing their best in a reasonable and thoughtful way rather than going nuts and pouring all the taxes into self-aggrandizement. Her court attracted artists and composers from across the Holy Roman Empire, and, given the Netherlands’ central role in northern Europe’s trade, many curious characters passed through. During Margaret’s
first stint as ruler, the young Anne Boleyn was at her court – before going on to her extraordinary role as the catalyst for English Protestantism. Earlier in the summer of 1520 Dürer visited her himself in Mechelen. He records that he showed her his portrait of the Emperor Maximilian. Dürer and Maximilian went back many years and he was deeply entangled in the Emperor’s many artistic projects, but this portrait is perhaps the greatest of all Habsburg images – Maximilian as a sort of beak-nosed wizard in furs, holding a pomegranate. It was painted in Augsburg in 1519, just before Maximilian’s death. One of Dürer’s principal aims for his tour, since even when rolled up the portrait was far from small and not a simple thing to transport, must have been to give it to Margaret. In any event, confronted with this painting of her father, ‘she so disliked it that I took it away with me’. In recompense she showed him some of her own collection, which included treasures like van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage – which, along with other paintings, Dürer describes simply as ‘good’, which is a bit disappointing.
Margaret’s rule was looked back on with ever greater nostalgia by later generations as life in the Netherlands degenerated into a ferocious nightmare. As an authentic Burgundian, born in Brussels, granddaughter of Charles the Bold, daughter of Mary the Rich, she had her own prestige and made Mechelen a plausible capital. She sheltered her subjects in some measure from their problematic role as small if wealthy elements in a vast, fundamentally absurd dynastic agglomeration. She probably died just in time, as her nephew Charles V staggered along, trying to run everything from Peru to Apulia, and taking or failing to take the fatal decisions that would tear much of Europe to pieces.
The life and adventures of Charles V
Freiburg’s Minster is a building so packed with amazing stuff that it seems a bit insulting ever to leave it. I have sometimes wondered whether instead of just floundering around from city to city I could pick up precisely the same wealth of information by standing still. The Minster’s chancel would certainly be one place where, with the tiniest investment in footsteps, whole worlds of artistic greatness and historical gravity unfold. Hans Baldung Grien’s triptych for the high altar is a sort of summary of and farewell to the German Late Gothic, filled with characteristically weird, startling figures and would continue to be rewarding if looked at continuously for days: a fervent yet wacky series of meditations on the life of Mary, it features, among many other things, the best ever Flight into Egypt, with a grizzled tramping Joseph in an orange pixie hood, an adorable donkey and several putti clowning about in a palm tree. It was painted between 1512 and 1516 and this whole part of the building must have then been a mass of sawing, hammering and shouting as not only was the gigantic triptych being fitted, but also a set of overwhelming stained-glass windows. These were a gift from the Emperor Maximilian extolling the virtues of the Habsburg family. With the sun in the right position, the emblems of the Holy Roman Empire, even though the Empire ceased to exist two centuries ago, still blaze into the church, above Grien’s paintings. In the side chapels behind the Grien a particular moment in Habsburg history is preserved, showing Maximilian I (wearing early designer spectacles), his son Philip the Handsome and his grandsons the future Charles V and Ferdinand I, praying before their respective saints. The saints are far bigger than the Habsburgs but, despite wearing the most tremendous robes and hovering in space, they seem to be trying too hard, like failing genies or unsuccessful candidates to be a department store Father Christmas. They swirl and glower, failing to batter down the insolent self-regard of Europe’s most arrogant family.
This ensemble (and countless other carvings and paintings scattered throughout the other chapels) forms just one sensational aspect to a sensational building, but it is striking that these were being fitted during the Reformation – and survived the Reformation unsmashed, with Freiburg remaining a Catholic city today. Places like the Minster show the great vigour and confidence of Catholicism in parallel to the spread of Luther’s ideas (initiated far to the east, in Wittenberg, in 1517). Just up the road Matthias Grünewald was creating his Isenheim Altarpiece for an Alsatian monastery. The composer Ludwig Senfl, born in Basle and raised in Zürich, was creating his Missa Paschalis, one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, and turning out fantastic pieces for Maximilian – including as a finale a great lament on his death (‘Howl then, boys; prelates weep; cantors lament, soldiers and nobles bewail it and say: Maximilian rest in peace ’). In Bern and Basle the last two great Dances of Death were being created – the former a huge painting by Niklaus Manuel Deutsch, the latter a set of tiny bestselling prints by the young Hans Holbein. These Holbein Dances are often seen as satirical as fat abbots and prettily clothed countesses are mocked and led on by a derisive Death, but the overall effect is chilling and levelling: whoever you are (an emperor or a ploughman) you will meet the same fate.
The Reformation tore through the region, but with a surprising range of results. Zürich was cleared of images by 1523, Basle reformed in 1529, with Catholic refugees – including Erasmus – moving to Freiburg for safety. The speed of these changes stunned everyone. Once Luther had established the idea that the Church should be reformed, an explosive burst of entirely contradictory ideas engulfed Western Europe, with Luther ever more furious that his leadership was being so widely ignored. Other reformers popped up everywhere, revealing hidden beliefs, celebrating older strands such as Hussitism, or going completely bananas. It must have been an uncanny period. Strasbourg became a great hub for reform ideas, but this was preceded by the inexplicable episode in 1518 when all together some four hundred people danced themselves to death. No plausible explanation has ever been given for what happened: people simply kept dancing until they had seizures or heart attacks. In 1524–5 much of Germany was engulfed by the Great Peasants’ War, which also swept through Freiburg and Alsace and which ended with the massacre of some two hundred thousand peasants by noblemen and their loyal retinues. Luther was horrified when peasants cited his teachings and (in a move that itself helped split reform apart) sided with the princes.
If you were a fan of smashing things up it must have been a brilliant time as acres of stained glass were destroyed and great bonfires of images filled town squares. Of course, Luther’s aim was to reform, to make the One Church better, but this did not work out. Some rulers switched to reform for the most outrageously cynical reasons, others did so devoutly, others followed Luther’s rivals. The Emperor Maximilian, with the sort of chic which defined his whole reign, died just in time to not have to bother with it all, leaving his grandson Charles V to clear up. Just looking at the stained glass of the Habsburgs in Freiburg you can see that there was a less than zero chance that Charles would give five minutes of serious consideration to Protestant riff-raff. The entire structure for his family’s rule was supported by Rome. He and his family poured money into artworks, monasteries, great cycles of prayer – Charles stood at the apex of a religio-political frame just as complex and far-reaching as that of Montezuma in Mexico (whose reign had violently ended thanks to Charles’s soldiers a few months before).
One curiosity of Reformation ideas is that they were thoroughly unsuccessful. Much of Europe remained placidly Catholic, given a wash-and-brush-up by the Council of Trent (Trento), which rejigged the Church without reference to Luther. As the century progressed Reformation became a means to end a marriage without the Pope’s agreement (England), a way of grabbing a great swathe of property (Prussia), a further expression of localist orneriness (the northern Swiss cities) and a way to sustain an anti-Habsburg identity (the Low Countries). Of course, it was also genuinely, powerfully religious too. In a context where almost all Europeans spent many hours a week preparing for the afterlife, the shattering of unity raised horrific problems: if a specific set of practices, ideas, texts was the route to Heaven, the others had to be wrong.
Charles V ruled over the heartland of reform – whether as Emperor or as a duke or count – and he completely mishandled it. In France the s
tate was ravaged by religious issues, but reform was, over several reigns, marginalized and defeated. In Charles’s territories in Spain, Portugal, the New World and Italy it never mattered much. But in the Empire itself Charles never successfully imposed his will. Even though he had a clear run from the Diet of Worms onwards, and although he was the most powerful figure to date in Europe’s history, with ships full of American treasure and resources undreamed of by his predecessors, he was always hopelessly distracted by some fresh scheme in some other part of the world and turned on the Protestants too late.
There is no good recent biography of Charles and it is easy to see why – his interests spread in every direction, but at some level he was not himself terribly compelling. He left voluminous material on himself, but often seems merely stiff and unimaginative. He inherited Maximilian’s semi-comic failings over money but on a cosmic scale. In terms of his reach and ambition, he lived in a dizzyingly different world from his great-grandfather and namesake Charles the Bold. Whereas the latter strained every sinew to besiege just one Rhineland town, the former was as busy with the affairs of Peru as with Tunis. One day his troops were (somewhat unfortunately) sacking Rome, the next they were fighting France. He seems to have never taken any interest at all in the sources of his wealth, viewing lack of money as something that could never hold back a prince from ‘heroic action’. At one point he mortgaged the spice island of Ternate to the King of Portugal for 350,000 ducats, but then had his entire campaigning season wrecked by failing to factor in the understandably slow pace at which the Portuguese ducat-laden mule-train was able to get from Lisbon to Barcelona.
