A Time of Gifts

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

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  ‘When the right vertuous E.W. and I were at the Emperour’s court togither, wee gave our selves to learne horsemanship of Ion Pietro Pugliano.’ It was the opening sentence of Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesie; he was talking of Vienna in the winter of his twentieth year—1574—when he and Edward Wotton were on some unexacting mission from Elizabeth to Maximilian II: Their duties left them plenty of free hours for the riding school and for listening to the fertile Italian wit of their friend and instructor. ‘He said...horsemen were the noblest of soldiers...they were the maisters of war, and ornaments of peace, speedie goers, and strong abiders, triumphers both in Camps and Courts: nay, to so unbleeved a point he proceeded, as that no earthly thing bred such wonder to a Prince, as to be a good horseman. Skill of government were but a Pedanteria, in comparison; then would he adde several praises, by telling what a peerless beast the horse was, the only serviceable Courtier without flattery, the beast of most bewtie, faithfulnesse, courage, and such more, that if I had not beene a peece of a Logician before I came to him, I think he would have perswaded mee to have wished my selfe a horse.’ Basset Parry-Jones had read the passage aloud to show that Vienna had always been a temple for the cult of horsemanship. It had been an imported Italian skill in Renaissance times, like fencing, sonnet-writing, building loggias and the technique of foreshortening; but in later centuries the passion rioted like a native growth all over the Empire and there were still plenty of Austrians with a horsy gait and bearing—and of Hungarians, even more, as I was to learn during the coming months—who had a soft spot for the British Isles on purely equestrian grounds. There, they felt, lay the central shrine: not of dressage and haute école, but of speed and huge fences and broken necks, and their eyes would cloud over at the memory of antediluvian seasons in the shires. Hard-bitten centaurs from both parts of the Dual Monarchy recalled with just pride how their great-uncle Kinsky had won the Grand National on Zoedone in 1883. Among these earnest experts omniscience in horse-genealogy ran neck and neck with mastery of the Almanach of Gotha, and they fondly cherished the many equine links between the two countries. Why, an Austrian affirmed, three Turkish mares, seized from the rout of the Turkish cavalry at the relief of Vienna, had been sent to England in 1684, several years before any of the famous founding sires of English bloodstock had set a hoof in the kingdom. Where was the Godolphin Barb then, or the Byerly Turk, and where the Darley Arabian? That was nothing, a grizzled Hungarian would protest, his brows beetling: what about the Lister Turk, the stallion the Duke of Berwick had captured from the Ottomans at the siege of Buda a couple of years later, and taken back to James II’s stables?

  It was our visit to the Spanish Riding School that had given rise to all this. (The beautiful wing of the Hofburg was built a century and a half later than the oval where Sidney and Wotton must have practised, but Maximilian’s stables were up already; they are resonant still with whinnying and munching.) We had lolled over the balcony like Romans at the games while virtuosi in glistening jackboots and brown frock-coats—the scarlet was kept for Sundays—evolved beneath us. They wore their bicornes sideways like Napoleon and sat erect and still as tin horsemen in the saddles of their Lipizzaner greys. These horses were traditionally derived from the noblest Spanish or Neapolitan strains—which probably means they were Arabs, like the godlike Barbs and Arabians and Turks we were talking about—and they used to be bred at Lipizza, in the Slovenian hills and oak-woods to the north-east of Fiume.[5] Slightly darker in hue when young, they get paler as they grow and the juvenile dappling fades from their quarters like freckles from children’s cheeks. Fully grown, they are snow white creatures of great beauty, strong, elegant, compact and mettlesome, wide-eyed under their taciturn riders and with manes and tails as sleekly combed and as rippling as the tresses of Rhine-maidens.

  They moved with grace and precision about the glaucous concavity of the school: caracoling across the raked and muffling tan, rhythmically changing step, passaging, advancing as though double-jointed, flicking out their forelegs as straight as match-sticks, slewing over the manège in side-stepped hesitation waltzes, pawing the air as they backed slowly on their haunches and taking to the air at last like Pegasus and seeming to remain there for long moments of suspension and stasis. Except when a recondite feat evoked a crackle of applause, the sequence unfolded in a stilly hush. Learned writers derive the style from the classical school of the seventeenth century and, in particular, from the principles elaborated in the Duke of Newcastle’s great work. He wrote and published it during the Commonwealth when he was a Royalist general in exile at Antwerp. Anyone turning over the plates in the splendid folio, especially when he gazes on engravings of the author himself in action, will notice the kinship at once. (The dales and the queer rusticated façade of Bolsover sweep across the background and the solitary cavalier, periwigged, ribanded and plumed and as cool as a cucumber, is levitated in patrician aloofness astride a mount with its mane tied in neat bows and curvetting in mid-air with the resilience of a dolphin. Watching his lavoltas and corantos, expert hidalgos from Castille with rowels the size of Michaelmas daisies would make the sign of the cross and cry “Miraculo!”) These later Viennese evolutions were as precise and as complex and as unhastening as the Spanish etiquette which, so the survivors say, constricted the Habsburg court till the end. Poker-faces froze the riders’ features into masks which were symbolic of the arcane and introvert madness which pervades all haute école; and a spell-bound aura, as of four-footed zombies, clothed their neurotic and ravishing steeds. A vision of haunting wonder.

  There was much talk of this obsolete Spanish etiquette. It is hard to imagine when one is surrounded by the easy-going charm of present-day Austrian ways, but portraits are lavish with hints. It is clear that something new and strange was planted in the Habsburg Empire at the marriage of Philip the Handsome to Joan the Mad. She brought Castille and Aragon and all Spain and an array of new kingdoms as a dowry, and Sicily and half Italy and a slice of North Africa and nearly all the new-found Americas; and ceremoniousness as well, and black clothes and the high Spanish punctilio. With the lapse of generations, when lantern jaws and pendulous underlips held sway in both capitals and infantas and archduchesses were almost interchangeable, sombre capes with the scarlet crosses of Santiago and Calatrava began to mingle with the gaudy plumes and slashes of the Landsknecht captains; Escurial solemnity threw the shadows of ritual postures along the Hofburg flagstones and the Holy Roman Empire and the Most Catholic Kingdom were fused. Was Don John a Spanish or an Austrian hero? Above the cavernous bends of the Tagus, hewn or picked out in coloured scales on the barbicans of Toledo, the great double-headed eagle of the Empire opens its feathers wider, even today, than any kindred emblem by the Danube or in Tyrol. Crossing the Atlantic with its wings heraldically spread on the sails of his fleets, the same bird was emblematic of the sudden expanse of Charles V’s amazing inheritance. Cut in volcanic stone and crumbling among the lianas, that display of stone feathers still puzzles the Quetzal-conscious Maya; four centuries of earthquakes have spared them from ruin by Lake Titikaka. Charles was the epitome of the double heritage, a living symbol of the Teutonic and the Latin compound and the whole age. Darkly clad against a dark background, wearied with governing and campaigning, standing with one hand resting on his dog’s head, how thoughtfully and sombrely the great Emperor looks out from Titian’s picture! When he retired after his abdication, it fitted the prevailing duality that he should settle neither in Melk nor Göttweig nor St. Florian nor in any of the famous Austrian abbeys, but in a small royal annexe which he attached like a limpet to the walls of the little Hieronymite monastery of Yuste, among the beech and ilex woods of Estremadura.

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  I had never understood till now how near the Turks had got to taking Vienna. Of the first siege in Tudor times there were few mementoes in the museums. But the evidence of the second, more than a century later, and of the narrow escape of the city, was compellingly laid o
ut. There were quivers and arrows and quarrels and bow-cases and tartar bows; scimitars, khanjars, yatagans, lances, bucklers, drums; helmets damascened and spiked and fitted with arrowy nasal-pieces; the turbans of janissaries, a pasha’s tent, cannon and flags and horsetail banners with their bright brass crescents. Charles of Lorraine and John Sobiesky caracoled in their gilded frames and the breastplate of Rüdiger v. Starhemberg, the town’s brave defender, gleamed with oiling and burnishing. (When John Sobiesky of Poland met the Emperor on horseback in the fields after the city was saved, the two sovereigns conversed in Latin for want of a common tongue.) There, too, was the mace of Suleiman the Magnificent, and the skull of Kara Mustafa, the Grand Vizir strangled and decapitated at Belgrade by Suleiman’s descendant for his failure to take Vienna; and beside it, the executioner’s silken bowstring. The great drama had taken place in 1683, eighteen years after the Great Fire of London; but all the corroborative detail, the masses of old maps, the prints and the models of the city, turned it into a real and a recent event.

  A huge wall encircled the roofs of the city. Eagle banners fluttered from the gables and the battlements and above them loomed many of the towers and steeples I could see when I looked out of the windows. The trenches and the mines of Turkish sappers, all heading for the two key bastions, wriggled across mezzotints like a tangle of wormcasts; the moats, the glacis, the ruins, and the bitterly contested ravelins had all been tilted by the engravers as though for the convenience of a studious bird. Hundreds of tents encompassed the walls; spahis and janissaries pressed forward; the wild cavalry of the Khan of Krim Tartary scoured the woods and bristling regiments of lancers moved about like counter-marching cornfields. Tethered beyond the fascines and the gabions and the stacked powder-kegs, a score of camels that had padded all the way from Arabia and Bactria gazed at the scene and then at each other, while turbaned gunners simultaneously plied their linstocks and clouds of smoke burst out of the cannon. And lo! even as I looked, the same guns, captured and melted down and recast as bells when the Moslems were driven downstream, were peacefully chiming the hour from the steeple of St. Stephen’s.

  It had been a close run thing. What if the Turks had taken Vienna, as they nearly did, and advanced westward? And suppose the Sultan, with half the east at heel, had pitched his tents outside Calais? A few years before, the Dutch had burnt a flotilla of men-of-war at Chatham. Might St. Paul’s, only half re-built, have ended with minarets instead of its two bell-towers and a different emblem twinkling on the dome? The muezzin’s wail over Ludgate Hill? The moment of retrospective defeatism set off new speculations: that wall—fortifications two and a half miles in length and sixty yards wide—had once enclosed the Inner City with a girdle of rampart and fosse. Like the fortifications of Paris which gave way to the outer boulevards in the last century, they were pulled down and replaced by the leafy thoroughfare of the Ring. Very much in character, the Viennese of the late ’50’s whirled and galloped about their ballrooms to the beat of Strauss’s new ‘Demolition-Polka,’ composed in celebration of the change. But, for as long as it stood, that massive wall of defensive masonry, twice battered by the Turkish guns and twice manned by the desperate Viennese, had been, for all its additions, materially the same as the great wall of the thirteenth century; and the cost of building it, I learnt with excitement, had been paid for by the English ransom of Richard Coeur de Lion. So the King’s fury on the battlements of Acre had been the first link in a chain which, five centuries later, had helped to save Christendom from the paynims! The thought of this unconscious and delayed-action crusading filled me with keen delight.

  Martial spoils apart, the great contest has left little trace. It was the beginning of coffee-drinking in the West, or so the Viennese maintain. The earliest coffee houses, they insist, were kept by some of the Sultan’s Greek and Serbian subjects who had sought sanctuary in Vienna. But the rolls which the Viennese dipped in the new drink were modelled on the half-moons of the Sultan’s flag. The shape caught on all over the world. They mark the end of the age-old struggle between the hot-cross-bun and the croissant.

  * * *

  Waking one morning, I saw that it was March 3rd. It was impossible to believe that I’d been in Vienna three weeks! The days had sped by. They had simultaneously spun themselves into a miniature lifetime and turned me into a temporary Viennese. (Unlike halts in summer, winter sojourns bestow a kind of honorary citizenship.) There is little to account for this long lapse of days; there seldom is, in the towns on this journey. I had met many people of different kinds, had eaten meals in a number of hospitable houses, above all, I had seen a lot. Later, when I read about this period in Vienna, I was struck by the melancholy which seems to have impressed the writers so strongly. It owed less to the prevailing political uncertainty than to the fallen fortunes of the old imperial city. These writers knew the town better than I, and they must have been right; and I did have momentary inklings of this sadness. But my impression of infinite and glowing charm is probably the result of a total immersion in the past coupled with joyful dissipation. I felt a touch of guilt about my long halt; I had made friends, and departure would be a deracination. Bent on setting off next day, I began assembling my scattered gear.

  What was the name of the village on that penultimate morning, and where was it? West of Vienna, and certainly higher; but all the other details have gone. It was Saturday; everybody was free; we drove there in two motor-cars and feasted in an inn perched on the edge of a beech forest. Then, tingling with glühwein and himbeergeist, we toiled in high spirits and with the snow halfway up our shanks down a long forest ride. We halted in clouds of our own breath and looked north-east and across Vienna towards Czechoslovakia and the dim line of the Little Carpathians; and, just as the sun was beginning to set, we came on a tarn in a ghostly wood of rime-feathered saplings as two-dimensional and brittle-seeming as white ferns. The water was solid, like a rink. Breaking icicles off the trees, we sent the fragments bounding across the surface and into the assembling shadows with an eerie twittering sound and an echo that took half a minute to die away. It was dark when we drove back, talking and singing with the prospect of a cheerful last evening ahead. How different it seemed from my first arrival, under the tarpaulin with Trudi! Where was Konrad? It might have been a year ago. Prompted by my recent preoccupations, perhaps, the conversation veered to Charles V’s grandfather, the first Maximilian: The Last of the Knights, as he was called, half-landsknecht, and, until you looked more carefully at Dürer’s drawing, half playing-card monarch. Someone was describing how he used to escape from the business of the Empire now and then by retiring to a remote castle in the Tyrolese or Styrian forests. Scorning muskets and crossbows and armed only with a long spear, he would set out for days after stag and wild boar. It was during one of these holidays that he composed a four-line poem, and inscribed it with chalk, or in lampblack, on the walls of the castle cellar. It was still there, the speaker said.

  Who told us all this? Einer? One of the Austrian couple who were with us? Probably not Robin or Lee or Basset...I’ve forgotten, just as I’ve forgotten the place we were coming from and the name of the castle. Whoever it was, I must have asked him to write it out, for here it is, transcribed inside the cover of a diary I began a fortnight later—frayed and battered now—with the old Austrian spelling painstakingly intact. There was something talismanic about these lines, I thought.

  Leb, waiss nit wie lang,

  Und stürb, waiss nit wann

  Muess fahren, waiss nit wohin

  Mich wundert, das ich so frelich bin.[6]

  They have a more hopeful drift than the comparable five lines by an earlier Caesar, especially the last line. I preferred Maximilian’s end to Hadrian’s desolating

  Nec ut soles dabis jocos.

  [1] It was closed years ago and a new hostel was opened in the Schiffgasse, in the Second District.

  [2] “Good morning, Madam! I am an English student walking to Constantinople on foot, and I would so mu
ch like to do a sketch of you.”

  [3] Florence, Milan, Venice, Trieste, Fiume, Lubljana, Zagreb, Ragusa, Sarajevo, Budapest, Clausenburg, Csernovitz, Lvov, Brno, Prague...all of them, for varying periods, were part of the Empire. The influx of their citizens to Vienna is the other side of the medal from endemic irredentism and sporadic revolt. (Habsburg absolutism, backed by Metternich’s secret police and the dread Moravian fortress-prison of Spielberg were the villains of much nineteenth-century literature: Browning, Meredith and Stendhal spring to mind.)

  [4] I only learnt with certainty that Einer had survived the battle when his admirable book about it came out. Daedalus Returned (Hutchinson, 1958) gives a thoughtful, sympathetic and compelling picture of the anxieties and dangers of those days. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross after the battalion he commanded had been the first to enter Canea. Following many operations on the Russian front, he was taken prisoner in 1944 during the Ardennes counter-offensive. I. Mc. D. G. Stewart, in his The Struggle for Crete, says: ‘Von der Heydte’s...barely disguised distaste for the leaders of the regime was said to have blocked his promotion.’ He is now a professor of International Law at Würzburg University, and in a recent letter posted during a journey across Ethiopia, he writes: “I hope we may meet soon and wander once more along the silver streets of our youth.”

  [5] It is in Yugoslavia now. When I went there two years ago, it was a soaking day, so I could only catch a glimpse of the lovely spectres through a film of rain.