Well, in fact such a work was written, and it is of monumental proportions, consisting of twelve large manuscript volumes. Fate – or rather Emperor Charles VI, Joseph’s brother – decreed that it should remain in manuscript form buried deep in an archive, unknown to everyone. Re-examining the affair, as we have done, helps to reveal how the threads of history, fastened in remote ages, can remain taut and tense until the present day.
The time and place were Vienna in the spring of 1738. Twenty-seven years had elapsed since Joseph’s death, and two since the death of Eugene of Savoy. On the imperial throne sat Charles, Joseph’s brother. A learned man of letters, Gottfried Philipp Spannagel, wrote a series of pressing letters to a noblewoman, the Countess of Clenck (National Library of Vienna, Handschriftensammlung, manuscript Codex 8434). Spannagel was one of the superintendents of the imperial library, a post that he had obtained thanks to his great erudition in matters of law, genealogy and history. He had spent several years in Italy and wrote fluently not only in Latin, German and French, but also in Italian. Eleven years earlier, in 1727, he had obtained the post of court historian, and then that of custodian of the imperial library. In addition, Spannagel had also held a very sensitive appointment: for two years he had given history lessons to Archduchess Maria Theresa, Charles’s daughter. It was she who, thanks to the Pragmatic Sanction mentioned by the chimney-sweep, was to succeed to her father’s throne, trampling over the natural rights of Joseph’s daughters. Gifted with greater virtues than her father, Maria Theresa was to become known to history as the great reformer of the Austrian monarchy. Spannagel, the learned scholar and preceptor of the imperial family, wrote to the Countess of Clenck to arrange a meeting with Charles: the Countess apparently had excellent relations both with the Emperor and his consort. Spannagel was concluding an impressive historical work in twelve books, which he wished to bring to the Emperor’s attention. The work was written in Italian, the language his protagonist had been so fond of. The title was Della vita e del regno di Josefo il vittorioso, Re et Imperadore dei Romani, Re di Ungheria e di Boemia e Arciduca d’Austria (Of the Life and Reign of Joseph the Victorious, King and Emperor of the Romans, King of Hungary and of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria; National Library of Vienna, Handschriften Sammlung Codex 8431–8435 e 7713–7722). It was the first biography of Joseph in which full light was thrown on his heroic deeds, within the great historic framework of the years ranging from his boyhood to his death. In order to publish it Spannagel needed not only permission but also material support from the imperial crown. He therefore repeatedly asked the Countess of Clenck to arrange a meeting with Charles, or at least a recommendation to his consort. But after a whole year, in spring 1739, the librarian was still waiting for some sign of agreement from on high, indispensable for the publication of his lengthy work. We have just a short note from the Countess in which, in addition to vague reassurances, the lady fixed an appointment with Spannagel to inform him of the answer he had so long been waiting for. What this answer was, we learn from subsequent events.
Della vita e del regno di Josefo il vittorioso is the moving testimony of a sincere admirer of Joseph I, who, in the correspondence attached to the work (Codex 8434, paper 272 ff.), several times calls Joseph “my hero”. Without falling into mere apologia, Spannagel’s biography offers a lively and full-blooded portrait of its subject, and highlights his intellectual, moral and military virtues. Three episodes are studied with particular attention: the victories in the two sieges of Landau of 1702 and 1704, and the failed participation in the 1703 campaign, in which the Bavarian fortress was reconquered by the French, exactly as recounted by Atto Melani.
Spannagel asks himself: why was Joseph not able to participate in the military campaign of 1703? The answer is highly significant. Within the court there were those who wanted to keep him at home, and not for good reasons. The motives adduced for this opposition (Codex 7713, p. 105, c. 239r and ff.) were, of course, “the lack of necessary things” and the “insufficiency of the revenue”, as well as the “considerable number of enemies” together with the “abundance of all things they had to make war well”. But this did not explain everything, says Spannagel. One must also consider whether the men who were in charge of political and military affairs on the imperial side were really giving of their best. “Such an examination and comparison would be a bold, odious and arduous enterprise,” because it would also be necessary to “scrutinise the will, spirit and heart, which have hundreds and hundreds of inscrutable expedients”. So inscrutable that Joseph’s true friends had some doubt whether “the enemies were served with much greater fidelity than were the Emperor and the King of the Romans; and that without this defect there would never have been so many difficulties and so many disasters.”
In short, someone was playing the traitor. Or at least, was consciously avoiding doing his duty. For what reason? In the end, it came down to the lack of “good harmony” between Joseph and his father’s ministers, as well as “some kind of jealousy”, on account of which the ministers closest to Leopold were “on their guard against ministers of the rising sun” – that is to say, Joseph’s ministers. But according to these latter, the only way to “preserve the House of Austria from final ruin” was for “the King of the Romans to be able to put into effect great things, worthy of his noble talents”. If anything was to change, and if there was to be a real shift of direction at the head of government, Joseph’s star needed to shine brightly at last: exactly what had begun to happen at the capture of Landau in 1702.
Spannagel, whose date of birth is not known, but who probably died in 1749 (Ig. Fr. V. Mosler, Geschichte der k.k. Hofbibliothek zu Wien, Vienna 1835, p. 148) was a contemporary of Joseph I, and had been present at many of the events he reports. He could have spoken by hearsay, or he could have cited oral testimony, but from extreme scrupulousness he cites (Codex 7713, pp. 124–26; Appendix to Book V – Letter Z) documentary sources provided by the Chancellor himself: letters from Prince Salm, Joseph’s old educator, to the Count of Sinzendorf during the early months of 1703. Here there are open references to the “bad designs of this government”, and to the “extreme necessity” of a change in the ministers and the urgency to replace them with “capable people, upright and accredited, who can alter things and stop abuses”. Writing to Sinzendorf, Salm adds bluntly that “given the hostility of the present government towards the King of the Romans, until this is changed, I say frankly that I cannot advise the King to join the military campaign.”
Therefore it is true, as the preceptor of Charles’s family says, that Joseph was the victim of “bad designs” – or, to put it more bluntly, of envy. For this reason he was prevented from going to war in 1703, and hence from making his star blaze anew.
Charles did not like the biography of Josefo il vittorioso, Re et Imperadore dei Romani, Re di Ungheria e di Boemia e Arciduca d’Austria. Negotiations were soon held. Through the Chancellor, Charles suggested some cuts to Spannagel (Codex 8434, papers 280–86), above all, the part explaining why Joseph was prevented from going to war himself in the 1703 campaign: an affair that Spannagel had reconstructed also thanks to documents provided by the Chancellor, reproduced in the appendix to the work. Despite his sovereign’s insistence, Spannagel courageously refused to make any cuts, because that would have jeopardised the integrity of the work. He might eventually take the advice given, but only after completing the work.
But something else disturbed the Emperor. The historian must apologise (Codex 8434 papers 297r–298v e 292r) for having “made a mistake” in describing Charles’s education: it is not true that he defined it as “modest”. In any case, the passage would be immediately corrected, and Spannagel recorded that he was still awaiting documents that he had requested in order to describe the youthful years of the current emperor more accurately.
Spannagel was perhaps too courageous, too keen to tackle delicate subjects, and perhaps he unwittingly committed the crime of lèse majesté. The seed of envy is always
fresh: in the end the historian was never received by the Emperor, and his biography was never to be published.
Perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Emperor, Spannagel began to write a history of the reign of Charles himself, in Latin. But the work was never completed, and the pages of the work actually devoted to Joseph’s brother (cf. Susanne Pum, Die Biographie Karls VI. Von Gottfried Philipp Spannagel. Ihr Wert als Geschichtsquelle, unpublished dissertation, Vienna 1980) are ridiculously few. The historian who had loved Joseph must have found it hard to appreciate Charles.
The censoriousness of the successor of Joseph the Victorious did not end here. In 1715, four years after Joseph’s death, Charles had already carried out a singular operation: he assigned two functionaries to go through all the correspondence preserved in the desks and in other furniture belonging to his father Leopold and his deceased brother. This meticulous examination lasted almost four months (from 28th January to 20th April, and from 26th August to 19th September).
In the end, having received the list of documents, Charles ordered that a large portion of them be burned, personally noting, page by page, which papers must not be passed down to his descendants: primarily, anything of personal or family interest. The State Archive of Vienna still holds the careful record of this examination with Charles’s annotations (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Familienakten, Karton 105 n.239). What is striking, among the private papers of Joseph listed by the functionaries, is the great number of letters and memoirs concerning Landau: a simple glance is enough to show just how important the double triumph in Bavaria was for the young condottiere. Among the papers sent to the bonfire were dozens and dozens of letters between Joseph and Charles, between the brothers and their father and their wives, plus many more whose contents are not clear. When it is a matter of personal correspondence, the following words are written in the margin: “burn so it does not reach the public.”
Why had such a great mass of documents been abandoned for four years? (This is even odder when one considers that not only papers but also jewels are listed among the items examined.) What mysterious force drove Charles to destroy so many valuable family memories? Was the truth of the relations between the two brothers concealed there? Or was there something revealing about Joseph’s death? The bonfire Charles ordered means that we will never know the answer to these questions.
Atto Melani
The news of the arrival of a certain Milani in Vienna at the beginning of April, which the chimney-sweep tells us that he read with amazement in the newspaper, is not invented. According to the Wiennerisches Diarium of 8–10 April 1711, page 4, on 8th April a certain Signor Milan, an official of the imperial post from Milan, entered the city by the so-called Scottish Gate, and he settled at the post station. (Schottenthor . . . Herr Milan / kayserl. Postmeister / komt auß Italien / gehet ins Posthauß). Anyone in Vienna can check this item at the National Library, or in the city library of the Rathaus, as with all other quotations from newspapers of the day.
By a strange coincidence, both Atto Melani and Joseph I had their funerals in a church of the Barefoot Augustinians: in Vienna the Augustinerkirche, in Paris the church of the Barefoot Augustinians of Nôtre Dame des Victoires. Atto’s funeral monument (a work by the Florentine Rastrelli, as the chimney-sweep correctly notes), can no longer be seen; it was probably destroyed during the 1789 revolution. His remains are thus forever lost, thrown into the Seine during the revolutionary frenzy, as happened with the royal family of France, including the corpses of Mazarin and Richelieu. However, a copy of the monument can be seen in Pistoia, in the Melani chapel inside the church of San Domenico. The Pistoia cenotaph gives us the only surviving portrait, among the many that existed, of Atto Melani: a bust representing him in his abbot’s robes, with a proud stare, and a capricious cleft in his chin. The authors published it for the first time in the volume they edited, I segreti dei conclavi, Amsterdam 2005.
All the details of the relations between Atto and his relatives (including the sending of candied oranges and mortadellas), the aches and pains of old age, his passion for expatiating on his haemorrhoids, the circumstances of his death, his contacts with the Connestabilessa, the account of the great famine in France in 1709, the financial crisis of 1713, his last words before dying, his burial and a thousand other details, are confirmed in his letters kept in Florence in the State Archive (fondo Mediceo del Principato 4812, lettere al Granduca di Toscana e al suo segretario, l’abate Gondi) and in the Biblioteca Marucelliana (Manoscritti Melani vol.9, lettere ai parenti in Toscana). As regards the relations between Atto Melani and Connestabilessa Maria Mancini Colonna, see the historical notes in the appendix to Monaldi & Sorti, Secretum, Edinburgh 2009, where many passages from Melani’s letters are published for the first time.
In Atto’s correspondence one also learns that in 1711 he was indeed one of those who collaborated with Torcy, the powerful prime minister of the Sun King, as he proudly recounts on the third day. But the letters sent from France to Tuscany during those years reveal that at the French court his opinions were no longer heeded, which is not surprising, given his advanced age. In a letter from Paris to Gondi on 23rd February 1711, for example, Atto reveals that he travelled to Versailles but that Torcy did not receive him.
Atto’s desire, despite his extreme old age, to end his days in Tuscany is also expressed (cf. also the notes in the appendix to Secretum, op. cit.). On 17th December 1713, eighteen days before his death, he wrote:
I have already resolved to go to Versailles to beseech the King to grant me permission to spend two years in Tuscany, to see if my native air will restore my strength and, what is most pressing, my sight; because not being able to write by hand myself, I am no longer of any use to His Majesty and His Ministers; in particular because the older ones, whose confidence I had, like M.r di Lione, Tellier and Pompone, have passed away; they acted as protectors with the King, whereas now, if I do not go and speak to him myself, it comes into no one’s mind to do so. I could hope that Signor Marchese de Torcy would favour me, but he is so circumspect that I have never been able to get him to present M. de Maretz with a memorandum for the payment of my pension.
In Florence Atto was not held in any great esteem either. On 30th of the preceding March, Gondi wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany:
[Abbot Melani] takes the trouble to give me his opinion . . . thinking that I wish to be so enlightened.
However, Gondi let him have his way just to appease Atto’s relatives in Tuscany.
From the family’s correspondence one learns that on 12th April 1711 Atto did indeed have the colic, as described by the chimney-sweep. The false blindness, which he adopts mainly to reject his relatives’ requests for financial support, is confirmed by the letters that he sent in those years from Paris to Tuscany. On 23rd March 1711 he wrote to Gondi: “My health is always vacillating on account of the variety of weathers that we have here, but even more because of my great age, considering that although I can no longer read or write with my own hand, God grants me the grace of retaining my mental faculties at the age of eighty-five, which I will attain on 30th of this month.”
His blindness, which in 1711 already seemed to be well advanced, only started in actuality two years later: on 6th February 1713, when he had truly lost his sight, Atto wrote to Luigi Melani, Domenico’s brother: “And then as a last stroke of ill luck, I can no longer read or write. And yet Monsieur de la Haye, my friend, regained his sight at eighty!” Afflicted by faltering memory, like so many old men, Abbot Melani had forgotten that he had been claiming to be blind for quite some time now.
Camilla de’ Rossi
The spelling today is Camilla de Rossi, without the apostrophe.
A certain Camilla de Rossi was born and lived in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. She was a shopkeeper, from whom Franz de Rossi borrowed his bride’s new name. Her will is still in existence (Archivio Capitolino of Rome, 6th December 1708, deeds of notary Francesco Madesciro).
As the C
hormaisterin herself recounts, Franz de Rossi was a musician at the court of Vienna and died of Lünglsucht (phthisis) at the age of forty, on 7th November 1703, in an apartment block in the centre of the city, the Niffisches Haus. The Vienna City Archive holds the deed (Totenbeschauprotokoll) certifying the death of Franz de Rossy, using the spelling often found in public administration documents for foreign names:
Der Herr Frantz de Rossy königlich Musicus im Nüffischen Haus, in der Wollzeile, ist an Lünglsucht beschaut. Alt 40 Jahre.
Franz de Rossi is referred to as “königlicher Musicus”, a musician of the King and not of the Emperor; he was therefore in the service of Joseph I, who in 1703 was still King of the Romans, and not of his father, Emperor Leopold I.
The death is also reported in the Wiennerisches Diarium, 1703, n. 28, 7–10 November 1703:
Den 7. November 1703 starb Herr Frantz Rosij / Königlicher Musicus im Nivischen Haus in der Wohlzeil / alt 40. Jahr.
However, almost no trace remains of the Chormaisterin, apart from the scores and libretti of her oratorios. What Gaetano Orsini tells the chimney-sweep is true: the composer never received any payment for her musical services. The lack of any mention in the books of the imperial administration makes the figure of Camilla almost invisible. Fortunately the Wiennerisches Diarium, as the authors have discovered, reports the performances of oratorios on Good Friday in the same years that Camilla de’ Rossi’s oratorios are dated (1707–1710), and it is no accident that Joseph I attended them, as he appears to have commissioned Camilla’s four oratorios. Apart from this indirect confirmation of the activity and presence of the composer in Vienna, all of the authors’ searches in the archives have proved fruitless: Vienna State Archive – Hofarchiv, OMaA (Obristhofmarschallamtabhandlungen) Bd. 643 (Index 1611–1749); Bd.180 (Inventaria 1611–1749); Bd.181 (the valet Vinzenz Rossi, probably the cousin of Franz mentioned also by the chimney-sweep, appears there); OMeA (Obristhofmarschallamt), Protokolle 6 e 7; Karton 654, Abhandlungen 1702–1704; Hofkammerarchiv, NÖHA (Niederösterreichische Herrschaftsakten), W-61/A, 32/B, 1635–1749, Fol. 455–929: list of various writings by musicians employed by Hofkapelle, Kammermusik and Hofoper (some years are missing, with a large gap from 1691 to 1771); Gedenksbücher, 1700–1712. No trace of Camilla in the birth, marriage and death certificates (Geburts-Trauung- und Sterbematriken), which start from the second half of the eighteenth century; the same is true of the Conscriptionsbögen (a sort of census of homes and occupiers), which do not start until 1805; above all, there is no trace of any payment to Camilla in the private coffer (Privatkassa) of Joseph I, from which payments were made to various musicians. Susanne and Theophil Antonicek (Drei Dokumente, op. cit.) have published the list of musicians paid by Marquis Scipione Publicola di Santa Croce in the years 1709–1711 as “music superintendent” of Joseph I. No mention is made in these documents (pp. 11–29) of Camilla de Rossi.
Veritas (Atto Melani) Page 81
