by Simon Winder
Later history played out this situation. The Habsburg lands (as they now were) created a highly desirable, hard-to-defend belt of land. It was intermittently very wealthy – particularly what became slowly the Southern Netherlands/Belgium; it gave many rulers complexes about the Habsburgs having a plan to rule the whole of Europe, whereas each ruler in practice spent his life battling with a fragmentary and unruly shambles. The Habsburgs always ruled the land independent of their function as Holy Roman Emperor and indeed the sheer weight of rule meant splitting their inheritance, particularly once it included the entire Spanish Empire. This split meant that in the later sixteenth century, for some fifty years a very attenuated version of Burgundy – the ‘Spanish Road’ – lay in Spanish hands. This was a wobbly little selection of valleys and bridges allowing troops to be fed from the western Alps up to the Netherlands where they could be massacred by rebellious Dutch Protestants. It seems unlikely many of these Castilian musketeers particularly enjoyed the undoubtedly bracing and varied scenery.
The problem of ‘Burgundy’ lay in its unresolvable nature. The French kings always saw the border as a joke imposed at a time of French weakness – a zone up to and even beyond the Rhine legitimately French but which cunning nobles and interlopers had prised away. As the French king with greater or lesser success rubbed out independent-minded lords inside France, it always became a temptation to apply similar discipline to legally dodgy but in some cases slightly plausible Burgundian territories too. The joint Franco-German names for many of the towns lying between Paris and France’s ‘natural’ borders on the Rhine (Mainz/Mayence, Aachen/Aix-la-Chapelle, Trier/Trèves, Koblenz/Coblence and so on) reflect a competing set of nationalist fantasies fuelled by maps. This seemed to peak first with Louis XIV grabbing or smashing up as much as he could, but reached its apogee under Napoleon where it all became an official part of France. With the clearing up of the rubble of tiny German states in the same period, the way was clear for a matching German nationalism to which, approached from the other direction, French ‘Burgundian’ pretentions were intolerable.
With Napoleon’s departure further doomed efforts were made to fix in place this awkward band of territory. Belgium came into a stable existence in 1830 under British protection. Luxembourg, a piece of land linked to the Dutch king, stabilized in 1867, nearly provoking a war and to everyone’s surprise somehow becoming independent. The remaining ‘Burgundian’ issues fuelled Franco-German hatred down to 1956. The Moselle–Saarland territories were always fatally wobbly and changed hands repeatedly, with much of the Saarland tantalizingly in French hands in 1814 but taken away again as punishment for Napoleon’s brief reappearance, then handed to Austria, who gave it to Prussia, who used it to invade France in 1870. A gloomy chunk of woods and coalmines, the Saarland was batted back and forth, with the French always hoping to hang onto it, before a final (we must all hope) referendum in 1956 returned it to Germany. The rest of the Burgundian territory, before reaching the mercifully neutral Swiss border, consisted of Elsaß-Lothringen/Alsace-Lorraine, the dramas around which formed a classic piece of pseudo-medievalist, map-fuelled idiocy, killing and displacing countless individuals in pursuit of terrifying levels of abstraction. The French may have picked through this territory in a piecemeal, cynical and opportunistic fashion, but the key cities of Metz and Strasbourg had for practical purposes been French for centuries. Bismarck, wanting to make some tangible and crushing gain from the Franco-Prussian War, decided to annex a chunk of the Moselle valley and Alsace, creating the Reich Territory of Elsaß-Lothringen, forcing out some hundred thousand French refugees. Most of those who remained spoke German dialects and it was probably no worse being ruled from Berlin than from Paris. But the effect in Paris was transformative. So great was the sense of anger and humiliation at Alsace-Lorraine’s disappearance that no government could ever view Germany as anything other than its permanent and bitter enemy. The first French act of the First World War was the suicidal charge of thousands of troops into Alsace-Lorraine in a bid to get it back. So, over five hundred years after Charles the Bold’s death Lotharingian–Burgundian issues continued to dominate Europe. The French got the territory back in 1918 and then had it taken from them again in 1940. The Free French used the Cross of Lorraine as their symbol, and in the spring of 1941, in the Libyan desert when the very idea of destroying Nazi Germany must have seemed hideously distant, General Leclerc of the Free French swore that he would never put down his weapons until Metz and Strasbourg were liberated. Leclerc achieved just this in the winter of 1944 – an extraordinary piece of single-mindedness but also the end of over seventy years of mutual trauma and weirdness based on spending far too long staring at maps and thinking about history.
I once went to an architecture exhibition in Frankfurt of some of the Nazi plans for how they would rebuild Europe once victory had been finally secured. Inevitably at the heart of it was Strasbourg – with a great, mad map packed with triumphal gateways and axial military routes smashing through the old town, celebrating Straßburg, the Reich’s true western frontier. This sort of rubbish has gone on now for so many centuries that it can only be hoped that 1945 represented a fundamental defanging of Europe, which might at last allow these issues finally to fall asleep.
Happy families
The history of much of Central Europe can be explained through the fates of just four families: the north-east-German Hohenzollerns, the east-German Wettins, the south-east-German Habsburgs and the south-German Wittelsbachs. These families mattered so much because their grandeurs and miseries dictated from the High Middle Ages to the end of the First World War who would be responsible for countless fates across a swathe of territory that extended across the whole of mainland Europe. Generation after generation found themselves through these families’ marriages, victories, defeats, reforms and tax needs, either better off or worse off. Of course there were many Germans who dodged these people, living in the rubble of political bits and bobs (and often very appealing bobs, of course), but generally even these territories had rulers either themselves related to these core families (such as many of the prince-archbishops) or doomed to cringe before them in a more or less unappealing way just to keep in business.
Only in a computer game (perhaps not, in all honesty, a very profitable one), called something like Liege Lord, could the immensely complex patterns created by generation after generation of these families’ goings-on be adequately expressed. Whole chunks of the families would sometimes break away, fortunate marriages would conjure up huge new territories, a political or religious decision could in a snakes-and-ladders manner dazzle or ruin in a few weeks. But always the motor for the families was the fecund mum. Only through a male heir plus ancillary sons and daughters for dynastic marriage could the show stay on the road. Accidents, gayness or lunacy could blow devastating holes in the family trees (which were kept up obsessively and, even by the seventeenth century, had reached demented levels of multifurcation), but if children kept coming the dynasty was safe. And so over centuries the Habsburgs, for example, would sometimes bloom into myriad archdukes and eligible girls, the former stuffing up the army and Church, the latter putting a layer of drone Catholic piety into many an unfortunate husband’s previously amusing court, and at other times would flatline, teetering on the verge of extinction, with predators on all sides waving their own family trees to explain their sudden interest in ascending this or that throne.
Dynastic history is very unfashionable. Attempts to explain history through national rulers, their marriages and children has an air of simple-minded idiocy now, merely gossip of a particularly pedantic kind. But this is a shame. Perhaps it could be said that it is defeated not by its chattiness, but the degree to which its chattiness comes from the sheer impossibility of conveying court life in its real, kaleidoscopic complexity. This was a world in which the ruler had huge power, but in which that power was hedged by advice from family – the way that brothers and sisters would convert for the next generation
down into father, mother, aunts and uncles, the way that wildly different longevities, experiences, mental aptitudes would shape court life, decisions for war, decisions for marriage, building decisions, religious decisions. All this weighs down dynastic history so heavily that it can hardly move. As readers we can understand someone like the Emperor Charles V, we can concentrate on understanding his personality, his aims, his piety, his interests – but can we really fully encompass his often shadowy kin, his leading nobles, his changing and mercurial relations with a huge gallery of family and other figures, shifting through the years in their levels of influence? It is just too much; there are too many things going on. Any quarter-way coherent account of the reign of Charles V would need to be many thousands of pages long, just to give a sniff of the atmosphere of his complex, fascinating reign. It would need chapter after chapter just to give a sense of what was felt by those who compared him to his grandfather, the unbelievably canny and beguiling Maximilian I. In any event nobody could write such books and nobody could print or read them, and so instead we cling to the single figure of the ruler, flanked by his barren or child-generating consort, and with the odd shadowy brother or uncle or mother who may or may not have carried huge influence in casual, invariably unrecorded conversations, not to mention great, barely sorted piles of noblemen, confessors, tutors, visiting royals who at different times may (or may not) have done so much to shape real European history, almost unnoticed by the blankly staring or hunting-obsessed oddball who happened to be on the throne.
Of course, even allowing for the huge oversimplification created by clinging to crowned heads, German history is just endlessly more interesting and funny simply because the Wettins, Hohenzollerns, Wittelsbachs and Habsburgs between them generate a madly complex gimcrack of genealogies, competing, interrelating, rising, falling, dying on the battlefield, going mad, doing nothing much at all. This provides a pleasure denied to those whose interests are narrowed to the no doubt instructive, but also tiresomely unitary histories of France and England. English royal history is mad too, but it is after a bit just not nutritious enough: only four murdered kings (with a possible fifth) in almost a thousand years, a clearly defined core inheritance, and no really serious internal conflict for three and a half centuries. How can this possibly compare to, say, the mind-blowing switchback-ride of the Saxon Wettins?
German royal history is of a very different kind from Britain’s. Probably since the death of William III in 1702 it has been possible in Britain to ignore the monarch – the real story lies with parliament and a network of soldiers and businessmen. In Germany this was not the case. Some of the hundreds of rulers dealt with very small territories in which they could do as they liked, sometimes creating brilliant courts without which European culture makes little sense. Others were very substantial, commanded great armies and settled the fates of millions. This extreme diversity is impossible to encompass, even while admitting a general failure to understand their flanking families and advisers. A slice through any given month in Germany’s history could turn up a staggering array of rulers: a discredited soldier humiliated in an incompetently handled battle in his youth, still carrying on his gloomy, undermined reign forty years later; a genuinely pious archbishop obsessed with designing his own monumental tomb; a clearly sickly boy whose regent hopes will die soon in the – as it proves mistaken – belief that he will grab the throne; a half-demented miser, obsessed with alchemy, leaving whole rooms of correspondence unopened for years; and so on.
This characteristic of Germany provides the core of its strange historical flavour – a flavour progressively altered by Napoleon and then Bismarck. It comes up at every key point in its history – what will the individual reactions of a host of rulers be in the face of the next challenge? Will they be resolute? Does being resolute turn out to be a bad plan? And resolute against whom? Is a ruler just too old/too young to seize an opportunity? Or too mad? Or ill-advisedly in the Holy Land, or fighting the Turks and unable to get back in time? Does loyalty lie with the neighbour whose palace is further up the river or in the next valley or does it lie with the Emperor in Vienna? Or with the brother who is Archbishop of Würzburg? These anxieties meant that each of the great convulsions in Germany’s history, from its meaningful founding in the early Middle Ages perhaps even until the fall of the Berlin Wall (and therefore, presumably beyond), was peculiarly, unstably reactive. The lack of a defining focal point (a London, a Paris) led both to chaos and to space for great creativity and potential entertainment.
It is possible to get too hung up about this point. In, for example, the genealogical multiple pile-up of Swabia with almost every hill under its own prince, it is possible to imagine a feudal version of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library, a world of so many hundreds of rulers that every variation of behaviour is possible, or indeed certain, in any given moment. So somewhere a ruler with a huge grey beard is dying surrounded by his weeping family and retainers; somewhere else a bored figure is irritably shooting bits off the plaster decorations in the ballroom; another is making an improper suggestion to a stable boy; another is telling an anecdote about fighting the Turks, staring into space, girding for battle, converting to Calvinism, wishing he had a just slightly bigger palace, and so on. This dizzying multiplicity makes each of hundreds of castles a frightening challenge – with the possibility of the guide making my head explode with the dizzying details of how the young duchess had been walled up in a tower for being caught in a non-spiritual context with her confessor and how as a result the Strelitz-Nortibitz inheritance had passed, unexpectedly, to a cousin resident in Livonia who, on his way home to claim the dukedom, died of plague in a tavern near Rothenberg thus activating the claim of the very odd dowager’s niece, long resident in a convent outside Bamberg. But it is probably time to move on.
Rampant folk costume
The Germany of the later Middle Ages has much more body and texture than earlier periods. Of course physically this is substantially an illusion – everything has been much rebuilt and every town has been through so many paroxysms since, but something that might approach a flavour of the fifteenth century still hangs around some places. It is impossible not to be aware that earlier survivals – cathedrals, monasteries, fragments of palaces – are not unlike dinosaur bones or objects crashed from outer space. They have been so abused, denatured, worn, encrusted and their whole social and political context so heavily scoured away, that they appear as strange, isolated and unfathomable, often in very winning fashions. But while there are many wars, plagues and fires between us and the fifteenth century, it was clearly a time when there was a level of urban pride and a confidence about how buildings should appear – what was appropriate to a market square – that a sort of ideal of town living was created which many later generations were happy to reconstruct after later disasters.
Schwäbisch Hall – a town really just called Hall, but with the folklorique Schwäbisch (Swabian) added in the 1930s – is a perfect example of this illusion. A famously successful and prosperous medieval town, it was a mint for the Emperor and a maker of salt. It kept its independence as a Free Imperial City until being folded into Württemberg by Napoleon. Hall sits on a steeply pitched site over a little river, a landscape of high, wooden-framed houses. It is impossible not to be taken in by the sheer agreeableness of everything, with the little covered bridges, the herons fishing in the middle of town, the battlements, the bright colours, the lovely churches. Hall even had the surprising distinction of having been home to Germany’s only portrait painter who, lacking arms, painted his commissions with his feet. And yet, behind the charm, here is a town which has been devastated by fires, bankrupted by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years War, suffered long periods of total failure. The town as it now appears has been through a lot. And as so often with cute, well-maintained little German towns, it had a concentration camp nearby and a Messerschmitt factory. Today its cuteness is paid for with a slurry of cash from a mortgage-company headquarters, carefully
tucked out of sight down the river.
For me these towns have an infinite appeal – they are scattered around and come from the general complexity and prosperousness of late-medieval German life. Despite political mayhem, the arteries of trading routes stretching from Britain to Turkey, from Africa to Russia, all wound their way through these German towns, with their inns, markets and specializations, like mule-pace conveyor belts rolling through mountain passes, down river valleys, around great forests, with each walled town representing both safety and sales for hordes of carters, porters and merchants. Periods of extreme bad luck have tended to preserve some of these towns in aspic, but others have simply decided that their appearance in a particular era represented a sort of ideal of ‘townness’ and kept the layout of walls, gates, market place, town-hall square and big church through thick and thin, sometimes with a minor convulsion of new, posh, classical buildings popping up in the eighteenth century, but generally left alone. Marburg, Freiberg, Hall, Hildesheim, Gmünd, Weikersheim, Goslar, the list is more or less endless.
