Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  Charles eventually conceded that Ferdinand would inherit not only the eastern territories but also the role of Emperor. This was both at Ferdinand’s insistence and through the logic that the links between the largely German-speaking Empire and Vienna were more obvious than those with Spain. One of the fun bits of mumbo-jumbo now carried out by Ferdinand was the announcement of the ‘inalienable heirlooms’. These are now in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna, fittingly in the section of the Hofburg built by Ferdinand and which still proclaims his name and titles in its marvellous gateway. The two ‘inalienable heirlooms’ were a giant narwhal tusk and an elaborate agate bowl. Ferdinand was anxious that these be ‘inalienable’ as so many members of the family had a poor record when it came to pawning stuff. These objects therefore had a special status – held by the entire family across all future generations in a way that put them beyond the reach of any specific member. The tusk was a simple piece of necromancy, something that would have been recognized as workaday and unremarkable to some laughing Inuit, turned by distance and ignorance into a unicorn horn giving great potency and virtue to its owner. The agate bowl was far more interesting – this was believed to be the Holy Grail, not least because the letters XRISTO appeared to shimmer inside its translucent stone in certain light conditions (and seemingly only visible to certain individuals). It was in fact made during the reign of Constantine the Great, in the fourth century, and had almost certainly reached Europe as a result of the disgraceful events of the Fourth Crusade – but both tusk and bowl show the strangely hieratic and spooky nature of Habsburg imperial power, with Ferdinand now a fine successor to his grandfather Maximilian.

  The Treasury is filled with such cultic objects. That they are viewable today behind glass to anyone with a ticket is, of course, a spectacular collapse in their aura. They would have been shown only to favoured individuals on key occasions, together with such later additions as a colossal emerald from South America carved into a rather tacky green goblet. The physical ownership of such things had a power which no longer has an equivalent. It was on a par with a sense that the Emperor had a more direct relationship with God than others, that he was almost more than human. The Habsburgs could manage this trick better than everyone else because from Ferdinand onward they successfully entangled their own importance as kings and dukes of many territories with the separate cultic power of the Imperial regalia.

  During the life of the Empire the coronation regalia were kept in Nuremberg but they are now in the Vienna Treasury, stolen by the Habsburgs at the dissolution of the Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. These objects, which added to their sacral power by being mostly hidden away, sit at the heart of the Habsburg legend and, even in the cold neutrality of a modern museum, are awe-inspiring. For example, a gold scabbard made in Italy in the 1080s for the coronation of the Emperor Henry IV and decorated with images of his predecessors back to Charlemagne. Or a pair of red samite gloves covered in jewels made for the Emperor Frederick II in 1220. Or – my favourite – the scarcely credibly beautiful Imperial mantle decorated with stylized gold camels, a palm tree and Arabic script made by Islamic artists in Sicily for King Roger II of Sicily in the 1130s. This marvel is celebrated now as one of the greatest examples of medieval Sicily’s multicultural tangle (the culture immortalized in Szymanowski’s delirious 1926 opera King Roger). But – as with the historical and zoological confusions over the Holy Grail and the unicorn horn – at the time the mantle was believed to be a battle trophy of Charlemagne’s, won in a campaign against the Moors. This is why Charlemagne is shown wearing the mantle in Dürer’s wonderful imaginary portrait. In reality it is safe to assume it became associated with the Emperor’s coronation quite straightforwardly in the era of Frederick II, whose mother was Roger II’s daughter. It is a tribute to the somewhat wonky and chaotic nature of these notionally immemorial and top-of-the-line ceremonies that even such basic information at some point got lost.

  Rather liberatingly I think I do not have to mention ever again Habsburg ceremonial and cultic issues. To us the Habsburg rulers – many quite mediocre or merely dutiful – can seem as specialized and helpless as koala bears and their claims to grandeur and the highest place in Europe an obvious try-on. But while they were always hated and schemed against they hardly ever lost their very powerful force-field. Once they successfully established themselves under Charles V and Ferdinand I they remained somehow exceptional. This was achieved through practical measures (bribes, threats, soldiers, presents, marriages) but also through the creation of this formidable magic circle, which each generation reinforced through manipulation of special objects, events and ceremonies. The genius lay in corralling together both the great family symbols (the walls of shields in Innsbruck and Wiener Neustadt, the various tombs, the Babenberger family tree at Klosterneuburg, the ‘inalienable heirlooms’) and the Imperial symbols. Ferdinand for most of his life was overshadowed by his elder brother and was only actually Emperor for eight years, but the solidity of Habsburg succession in their core lands stayed in place into the twentieth century and Ferdinand effectively ensured that this bizarre, unfolding drama was played out from Vienna, the focus of resistance to the Ottomans. He may have misunderstood the origins or purpose of the symbols he surrounded himself with and given too much credit to a wacky-looking sea-mammal’s tooth, but his power was real enough and quite immune to the smirks of twenty-first-century literalists.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Mille regretz’ » ‘The strangest thing that ever happened’ » The armour of heroes » Europe under siege » The pirates’ nest » A real bear-moat

  ‘Mille regretz’

  It is frustratingly unclear how much Charles V enjoyed his decades as Emperor. He seems never to have let his Imperial mask drop and this public impassivity became the model for later members of his family. His court wandered from place to place, and although raised in the Low Countries and often surrounded by soldiers, advisers and musicians from around Flanders, Charles in the end became a sort of adopted Spaniard, revelling in the rich, Stygian, formal court style which was to become the essence of Habsburg rule when his son, Philip II, made Madrid the unified country’s capital. In European history Charles can only really be compared to Napoleon and Hitler in his grip on the continent – but he never seems to have revelled in such a role and, as it came to him through the deft machinations of his grandfather rather than through conquest, his efforts to defend it have an air of weary dutifulness rather than megalomania. Maximilian had dreamed of so many combinations – at one point pondering whether he should have a shot at making himself Pope as well – but always suffered from an appealing inability to follow through on anything except his board-game-like marriage alliances. Charles inherited a genuinely vast and unprecedented sprawl of territories from Maximilian, but no serious effort was made to give them any unity. He scurried from place to place, swapping around hats, crowns, necklaces and special cloaks. He was always reading up constitutions and mottos and being drilled on the membership and peccadillos of dozens of prickly aristocracies and urban oligarchies in different bits of Europe. At every turn he had to face rebellious townsfolk, Ottoman pirates, annoying Protestants, double-dealing German princelings and problematic family members.

  Charles’s frequent illnesses, his inability to eat in public (because of his enormous jaw) and his personal, very knowledgeable enthusiasm for gloomy music suggest a long-wished-for private existence, perhaps as the abbot of some deeply refined and closeted monastic order – a wish he was able to grant himself after his resignation. His favourite song seems to have been ‘Mille Regretz’, described in his lifetime as ‘the Song of the Emperor’ (‘So great is my suffering and painful woe / That my days will soon be ended’), which about summed it up. Charles always lived under the shadow of his mother’s mental illness – but a quick look at his in-box would have given quite enough of a basis in itself for lapses, silences and indecisions. Another favourite was the tune ‘Belle qui tiens ma vie’, a much more chee
rful, albeit wistful, piece which must be (and I will be immediately contradicted here by dozens of more knowledgeable readers) one of the earliest of all European melodies still familiar and widely recognized.

  We will never know, during one of the key crisis points of his reign, when in 1521 he was face to face with Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, whether he was thinking more about the perils of heresy or about the almost unimaginable great shiploads of Mexican treasure which had arrived for him in Brussels. His need to be stiff-necked and decisive year in, year out (and at Worms he was still only twenty-one years old), created a great, chiselled facade and a form of kingship which his successors copied, whether or not that facade hid an intellectual ferment akin to Charles’s or mere vacuity. Charles’s enterprises sprawled crazily in every conceivable direction, with his 1535 invasion of Tunis being funded by tons of gold extorted from the Great Inca. He presided over a staggering increase in the range and experience of Europe – a process by which blamelessly downtrodden Castilian peasants and Flemish bureaucrats found themselves shipped off to the New World and pushed into behaviours, foods and sights for which there were no precedents. The creation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru under Charles (their flag the Cross of Burgundy) made existing European political arrangements something of a joke, with the area taken up by Henry VIII’s England tuckable into a small part of Central America. Francis I has always been much condemned for his Christianity-betraying alliance with the Ottomans, but really what choice did he have in the face of this haughty, unbeatable champion of an unstoppable family? Things were even worse than his contemporaries knew. In Regensburg to attend a meeting of the Imperial diet, Charles slept with the daughter of a local burgher. The result, a bastard son who grew up to become Don John of Austria, commanded the fleet that destroyed the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto, long after Charles’s death. So even in his down time he was shaping the world’s history.

  But Charles seems to have quite rapidly realized that there was no future for all this pan-European excitement, shedding and sub-contracting whatever he could. As on other occasions, the secret mechanisms that lurk in Europe’s political structure ensured that enemies of a universal monarchy generated like antibodies. The history of Protestantism simply cannot be disentangled from Charles’s own prominence and power. He faced off against Luther at Worms and made his great speech: ‘What is true and a great shame and offence to Us is that a single monk, going against God, mistaken in his opinion, which is against what all of Christendom has held for over a thousand years to the present, wishes to pervert Us.’ Charles was acting here both as a true son of the Church and as a figure whose resources already threatened to destroy all dissent.

  How better to resist such a man than by embracing Protestantism? The decision by Charles at Worms to spurn Luther clearly saved the Pope from potential Armageddon, but it also created a situation where religious dissent could also mean dissent from Habsburg rule. Distracted on a thousand fronts, by the time Charles took clear military action against the Protestant threat in the brief Schmalkaldic War twenty-five years later it was all too late and despite his victory Europe was awash with anti-Catholic forces. Even the famous portrait Charles commissioned from Titian to mark his triumph, in plumes and full armour on what must be one of the greatest of all ramping steeds in Western art, is a study in failure. Charles’s small, grey-bearded head looks unconvincing, as though, like those painted boards at the seaside, he has popped it through the hole and is unaware whether he is being portrayed as a Catholic Champion or in a comic red-striped one-piece bathing costume. Sadder still, Charles had in fact been too ill even to mount a horse during the battle and had been carried in a litter – so Titian’s incomparable vision would have been known to everyone at the time as a bought polite lie.

  ‘The strangest thing that ever happened’

  The sheer speed of the Reformation seems almost as alarming now as it did then. In 1517 the unknown Martin Luther was nailing up his Theses in a Saxon university town, by the 1520s there were mass conversions as far south as Slovenia and by the 1530s the charming polymath Johannes Honterus was instilling the Word in the far south-east of Transylvania, the ‘infection’ already some seven hundred and fifty miles from its source. This religious cataclysm flowed at its heart from a collapse of authority. The actual details of what the new religion would involve were acrimoniously thrashed out over the following century, but for Central Europe there was a sudden change not unlike that of 1918 or the end of the Cold War in 1989, with a broad coalescence around the idea that the status quo no longer made sense. To many people with many motives the Pope became almost overnight a fat, sinister brute, the figure in a thousand woodcuts, covered in rich vestments and jewels being chased down into Hell.

  As the entire structure of obedience caved in, some secular rulers could not believe their luck as the dazzling array of properties and treasures under Rome’s protection looked vulnerable. All over Europe, most famously in England, figures in power just helped themselves. None of this came from a crisis in faith itself – Europe had experienced a huge burst of rebuilding and decorating churches just before Wittenberg (after all, the crisis was caused in part by the Pope’s wish to raise cash to rebuild St Peter’s), including hundreds of the sensational just-pre-Reformation painted altarpieces that now fill Central European art galleries. But faith took a new direction, with ferocious arguments within an ever larger number of camps, including an intellectually recovered and aggressive Catholic one.

  Within the Habsburg framework there was never a real chance that the Reformation would be accepted – the apex of power was so entangled in Rome’s sanction that it was inconceivable that Charles V could change his allegiance. But for many powerful aristocrats the situation was different, with an unstable blend of personal devotion and greed giving an irresistible momentum to fresh arrangements. Not entirely unlike the Communist revolutions of 1917–19, there was a sense of being part of a wave of the future. With both Protestants and Catholics proclaiming a universal truth, the success of the former dismayed and demoralized the latter, and it was a shock from which Protestantism never recovered that its new and universal truth was ignored in places such as Spain and Italy, embraced confusedly in England and in the end scornfully rejected by both the Habsburgs and the kings of France. As the New Jerusalem stubbornly failed to turn up, Protestant doctrine became so self-contradictory that an enormous intellectual and spiritual space opened up – spotted by the reforming Council of Trento (Trent) – for a successful Catholic fight-back.

  Charles and Ferdinand were now stirring up great fear and anxiety. Composite ownership of territory had always been a commonplace, but Maximilian I’s scheming had created a family network of extraordinary power and with fluky extras he cannot have guessed at. It had been routine for royal families to criss-cross Europe and generate curious combinations, claims and possibilities. Lajos II of Hungary had parents born in Poland and France and Charles V himself united all kinds of strange pan-European flavours. But the Habsburgs seem at this point on their way to being the genuine heirs of the Roman Empire, with other surviving monarchies reduced to subservience or (like the once great thrones of Hungary and Bohemia) total absorption.

  There was a great gap between the grandeur of Charles’s political inheritance and the misery of his personal one. It seems to have been his great-grandmother, the Masovian Piast princess Cymburgis, who introduced the terrible Habsburg jaw which afflicted Charles and so many of his descendants. The men could try to hide it with extravagant beards, but the women in portrait after portrait appear to have a sort of awful pink shoe attached to their lower faces. He also seems to have been crushed by the same melancholy that ravaged both his mother’s and his grandfather’s sides of the family and which would again emerge among his descendants, most famously in his great-nephew (and grandson!) Rudolf II.

  Europe was now raddled with Protestantism and this split in Christianity became linked to one’s
attitude to Habsburg hegemony. But it was not simply a question of two religious sides. At the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 that followed Charles’ crushing of the Lutheran princes, it was at last decided that each territory in the Empire would have its own religious practices and that they would be those of its ruler. This was already inadequate since both sides chose to pretend that Calvinism did not exist, a serious problem as this austere form of Protestantism was becoming all the rage and would reshape countries as far apart as Scotland and Transylvania. It also fudged the problem of Catholic religious territories. In a jaw-dropping coup back in 1525 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, the Hohenzollern Prince Albert of Prussia, had spent long hours talking with Luther and searching his soul before coming up with the idea that God had told him to become Lutheran and make the monastic territories he had been elected to rule on the Baltic into his family’s private hereditary possession. This sort of outrage, where a great crusading Catholic bastion could simply be pocketed by a cheeky individual, set other rulers across Europe stroking their beards. Henry VIII, for example, realized that if he made a leap like Albert’s he could cash in his old wife, get a delightful new one and grab all his kingdom’s monastic property for himself: to break with the Pope certainly seemed something worth thinking about.

  The Peace of Augsburg therefore tried to hammer into place a deal which benefited many individual, current rulers; but what level of Protestant abuse, sincere or cynical, would provoke a violent Catholic response? Charles and Ferdinand’s successors, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, were both, in the manner of the period, live-and-let-live on religious issues and in that sense the Peace was a success, but religion, inheritance and personality were all tangled up in ways that under the right circumstances could prove catastrophic. From Charles’s point of view the Peace was a failure – there was probably nothing he could have done to arrest Protestantism’s progress, but he was definitely too late by 1555. His private agonies, exhaustion and premature ageing had little impact on his opponents, all of whom could only see the sheer power of the Habsburg family. Even notional Catholic allies among the German princes turned on him. One last curious inheritance gambit went wrong. In yet another total surprise the fifteen-year-old Edward VI of England suddenly died and his much older sister, the very Catholic Mary I, became queen. Charles arranged for her to marry his son Philip. Philip’s role in England was carefully hedged about but it is generally forgotten in a frenzy of English nationalist huffing that he was at the time called the King of England and features equally with Mary on the coinage. Nothing was fully settled but Charles mulled over the idea that if Philip and Mary had a son he would inherit England and Burgundy, creating a formidable, coherent and curious new state – but also making England permanently into a Catholic Habsburg province. This chilling what-if came to nothing: Mary was already very old to have a first child, seems to have suffered from a phantom pregnancy which if real could have had the most astounding consequences, and died after only five years on the throne, taking a possible Habsburg England with her. Phew.