Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Winder, Simon

  This was a very complete world while it lasted and innumerable engravings of these Ottoman towns show an alternative and alluring reality – of minarets, turbaned officials and camels filling Belgrade or Sarajevo or Pećs. Pećs is even now still surrounded by the descendants of the fig trees planted by the Ottomans. Some changes are relatively recent. Budapest has become much less Turkish through two huge changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the switch from a cuisine based on mutton to one based on beef – chewing through the huge new Hungarian herds of cattle – and the spread of the espresso machine, which did so much to push to one side Turkish-style coffee. Perhaps the only major remaining Ottoman legacy is the bathhouse.

  One of the many torments of the Bosnian War was seeing this Ottoman heritage blown to pieces in a deliberate and self-conscious element in the conflict, driven by mystical and corrupted historians, whether it was the destruction of the bridge at Mostar or the targeting of the Orient Institute in Sarajevo. These were attempts to deny the legitimacy of Muslims as European citizens at all, when of course they are ancient European citizens, drawing on a great, refined and beautiful culture which ruled much of south-east Europe for far longer than any of its successor states.

  Bezoars and nightclub hostesses

  Tucked into a corner of the Natural History Museum in Vienna is a small glass jar containing a basilisk preserved in spirits. It is of course a fake, created by some specialist figure in a far-away seaport buying a ray from a fisherman and cutting, folding and sewing it to make legs, wings and horns. Its teetering plausibility comes from the much abused creature’s underside having holes that seem somewhat like a pair of eyes, with its strange smiling mouth arranged below them. It looks just hopeless, and yet hundreds of miles inland, perhaps seen through murkier glass, it might have seemed a slightly curious object and perhaps the merchants who dealt in basilisks – a small and evasive group unlikely to have even met up for an annual Christmas lunch – shared information on particularly credulous customers or trainee alchemists looking to add a little tone to their labs.

  Vienna and Prague are almost as far inland as it is possible to get in Europe and perhaps it is not surprising that the court of Rudolf II, located initially in the one city and then in the other, became the greatest locus for strangeness and magic in the later sixteenth century. Some of this reputation is undeserved, a nineteenth-century confection looking back wistfully on the last time that a city had been great. One of its classic showpiece narratives, Rabbi Loew’s clay monster, the Golem, seems only to have been invented in the 1840s, sadly, and indeed much of Loew’s long and brilliant career was spent outside Prague. There were many courts dotted about Europe with similar obsessions, but somehow all the wizardly and alchemical preoccupations of the period have long been imaginatively delegated to Rudolf’s Prague.

  The bottled basilisk shows, in perhaps its most acute form, the difficulty of making sense of the era. Any attempt to grapple with the scientific and magical preoccupations of the court founder on the Further Reading problem. Given that even the most simple alchemical issue makes no sense to us, we can only hope to understand it by reading books from the tradition that led to the belief that, say, powdered gems were a legitimate medicine. But as soon as you start on the Further Reading it is clear that these intellectual streams are themselves so rich, various and contradictory that they can offer no help: that you are simply wading deeper and deeper into what seems to be ever worse nonsense. What are we to make of the Steganographica of Trithemius, Ficino’s translation of the Hermetica, Hermes Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet, Paracelsus’s Archidoxa, or the sickening Picatrix, a compendium of Persian and Arabic spells viewed for many years as too dangerous to transfer from manuscript to printed form? We have little information on who read what or how widely they were circulated, and have to cling instead to specific endorsements or denigrations of these books preserved in other writings, in a context where most key discussions would have been oral. There is also the impossible problem of having somehow to come up with an intellectual recovery point before 1600, when a more densely plausible modern science starts to accrete.

  We simply do not have the intellectual equipment to spot when contemporaries themselves started to scoff at Pseudo-Balinus’s Secret of Creation. Presumably there were always those who thought basilisks were rubbish and who heard reliably that unicorn horns came from narwhals. Dürer was sketching a walrus brought in by Dutch fishermen in 1521 and Arctic fishing trips were now common, so the word on the street about unicorn issues must have been increasingly adverse. Horns and tinkered-with fish are at least solid objects, but we despair in the face of trying to chart the rise and fall of belief in hidden arcana. A final disaster stems from our now having the ability to create a plausible pattern across Prague, as though viewed from high in the air, where we can simultaneously see all the different lines of alchemical enquiry – whereas, at the time, speculations within the Jewish Town or the Jesuit observatories or within the Castle would have been carried out in almost complete ignorance of each another. And even within these separate worlds there were backbiting, grandstanding and intellectual nervous breakdowns, with even figures as distinguished as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler at each other’s throats. It is a shame that we cannot get closer to the sheer chaos of Prague in this period, its streets thick with mountebanks, zanies, mercenaries from the Turkish wars, religious fanatics of every stripe, zoo-keepers, exotically dressed ambassadors and even the occasional serious scientist.

  At the heart of it all sat the peculiar Emperor. His father, the amiable crypto-Protestant Maximilian II, was buried in Prague and Rudolf decided early in his own reign to move the court permanently there, partly because it was safer from Turkish attack than Vienna, partly because the Bohemian nobles had urged that he should, and partly because he could do whatever he liked. Rudolf does not seem to have been an appealing figure by most criteria – secretive, changeable, swinging between bouts of Imperial activism and total lethargy. He shared with his English contemporary, Elizabeth I, the peculiar problem of having no clear-cut successor – he never married but, unhelpfully, had several bastard children so could potentially have procreated to Habsburg ends. His five brothers also failed to have legitimate children, so Rudolf was in the unattractive situation of being hemmed in by a sterile generation of irritable siblings who could die in any sequence, with one or more potentially becoming Emperor. This was a particularly dire issue as after 1600 or so Rudolf withdrew from serious decision-making, with the unique result that Habsburg solidarity totally broke down. But this only happened because Rudolf was so useless as Emperor, disappearing for months and simply unable to carry out normal business. Compared to the ferocious Catholic activism of his successors he can now seem amiable, but in a world split between Christian and Muslim and between Catholic and Protestant it is an unfortunate example of where being reasonable and laid back seems to create not tolerance but merely deferred viciousness.

  As he left no account himself and those near him wrote frustratingly little we can only project our own likes and dislikes on Rudolf’s private mental world. In many ways he seems to have been one of the most fortunate men who ever lived, taking more advantage than anyone else of the golden age of exploration and excitement that reached its apogee in the later sixteenth century. He was a lot richer and more focused than Elizabeth I, a lot less desiccated and pious than Philip II and lived longer and more agreeably than the chaotic French kings of the period. The inspiration for his collections came from the intellectual atmosphere of the time, but had specific roots too. Growing up at Philip’s court in Madrid he would have had the great luck to have been able to spend as much time as he wished staring at the pride of Philip’s collection, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a sort of vade mecum of Rudolf’s later interests. And en route from Madrid to Prague he had stopped off in Innsbruck and stayed with his uncle Ferdinand of Tyrol and so would have enjoyed the sensational guided tour av
ailable there. Once he had settled in Prague Castle, word went out that he was interested in effectively anything strange or unusual and entire businesses sprung up just to furnish him with fancies that might please him. These decades were host to a riotous sprawl of fresh information, sourced from the very smallest (with the invention of the microscope) to the largest (with the invention of the telescope). This new knowledge involved the reordering of most of the world’s men, creatures and plants, with tomatoes, potatoes, sunflowers and corncobs stumbling ashore and taking their first steps in what would prove their all-conquering invasion of Europe. It was an era as happy speculating on the nature of a supernova (a term derived from Tycho Brahe’s work, with the quintessential supernova observed and argued over in Prague in 1604) as on the nature of a naked flame.

  There seems to have been no limit to Rudolf’s curiosity. At some point it must have toppled into a mere mania for heaping up room after room of Stuff, but until his final decade there is a clear sense of someone who must have grinned with excitement at the opportunities available to him. The great banking family, the Fuggers, had a busy warehouse in Antwerp lined with cages to deal with the exotic creatures brought in by enterprising Dutch ships, and soon Prague Castle was full of extraordinary exotica – macaws, lories, lovebirds and cockatoos all shivering away in their bleak new homeland. Rudolf had a dodo, birds of paradise and a cassowary. This last had gone through endless adventures, starting off as a diplomatic gift for the ruler of Java from an unknown king or vassal even further east and in turn given to a Dutch sea-captain. This enormous, violent and rather made-up-looking bird caused a sensation when it landed and Rudolf eventually secured it for himself, with its own specially decorated house. Two traumatized ostriches made the journey from Africa to Venice and then up through the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck and then, ultimately, to Prague. None of these creatures, unsurprisingly, lasted long.

  There was an unedifying and futile quarrel with Philip II that lasted decades to get hold of an Indian rhinoceros that had landed in Lisbon. The rhino wound up being sent by Philip on a prolonged tour of Castile together with an elephant to show his subjects something of the power and majesty of the Spanish Habsburgs (a relatively rare surviving clue to the sorts of processions, displays and special events thick with symbolism that must have been part of the everyday business of projecting royal might). Eventually, when the rhino died, a deal was done to let Rudolf get hold of its hide, but given that nobody knew how to cure rhino hide it unsurprisingly and spectacularly rotted to pieces and the only bits that reached Prague for Rudolf’s pleasure were the horn and a few bones.

  It is a measure of the problems of Rudolf’s reign that we are happy thinking of him, ruffed and in black, in some semi-darkened room slowly turning in his hand a bezoar (an animal gallstone meant to be a poison antidote), but cannot see him as the aggressive, fussy and well-organized collector he must in fact have been, constantly badgering, articulating and making demands. How could someone who seems introvert to the point of stasis have been such a great organizer of things and people? What drove him on? Perhaps at heart he had a perturbing, deeply hidden sense of humour, revelling in a very odd, secret way in unlimited power. This can be the only explanation for his having a lion and a tiger which wandered around Prague Castle more or less as they wished. For years these menaces were both a matchless representation of royal power and, presumably, a cause for innumerable scullions, vintners and linkboys going about their tasks in the gloom of the Castle corridors, trying to hold a silver drinks tray level while their legs went bandy with terror. Indeed surviving account books are dotted with references to compensation paid to surviving family members or to mutilated attack-survivors.

  Allied to Rudolf’s obsession with living things – which were soon, on their deaths, converted into dried-out members of the cabinet of curiosities – was an all-encompassing mania for the decorative and the curious. The shorthand for Rudolf’s reign has always been the bizarre paintings of Arcimboldo, with the Emperor’s portrait a complex assemblage of fruit and vegetables (his nose a pear, his throat two courgettes and a turnip), but this Milanese oddball was in fact inherited from Maximilian II, for whom he produced some of his greatest work and who had become merely formulaic by Rudolf’s reign. The real tragedy is that we can never recover Arcimboldo’s almost certainly brilliant contribution as a decorator for parties and banquets – Maximilian had revelled in elaborate entertainments on classical themes. Perhaps these ephemera were his greatest works? More generally, it is galling that we have inherited only the sorts of objects (such as easily rolled-up paintings on canvas) readily taken by the generations of looters who dismantled Rudolf’s collections after his death, but not the things which at the time would have been most miraculous and all-encompassing – like rooms filled with dazzling painted decoration and matchingly uniformed servants, or connecting corridors down which you might have to walk past a tiger.

  Setting aside Arcimboldo, Rudolf’s needs were tended to by dozens of peculiar geniuses. He had calligraphers, etchers, costume-designers, zoo-keepers, goldsmiths, print-makers. He had Bartholomeus Spranger (from Antwerp – another figure he inherited from his father) to paint some of the most aggressively pornographic paintings of the late sixteenth century, now livening up a back corridor of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. These are based naturally on ‘classical themes’ and include his celebrated Minerva, whose steel-fur-weapon outfit and posture would cause issues even for the most niche contemporary members-only club. There is also a Spranger painting in Prague Castle of Christ wearing a flimsy mantle and in the same sort of nightclub hostess pose as Minerva, his foot on a glass sphere with a human skull inside it and a flush-faced angel grabbing in an appreciative way one of his nude buttocks. Some very odd things were going on.

  Rudolf seems to have been obsessed with glyptics, the art of carving on precious stones. This is perhaps the quintessential private artistic obsession, immune to modern museum display as it only really works through someone holding the tiny object in their hand and turning it in the light. He poured money into accumulating jewels – his agents fanned out across Europe and beyond to intercept and divert the flow of diamonds, pearls and sapphires to Prague, with the sapphires coming from as far away as Kashmir. The spectacular Crown of Rudolf II seems never to have been designed to be worn, but again simply to be handled by its owner. It was designed by Jan Vermeyen (also from Antwerp), who was brought to Prague to create this remarkably untacky (by crown standards) and beautiful object with the golden panels of its mitre celebrating the key regal events in Rudolf’s life: coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Regensburg, marching through Pressburg (Bratislava) as King of Hungary and through Prague as King of Bohemia. The last panel shows him as victor over the Turks which, unfortunately, was not true and the real root of his reign’s disaster.

  Among his great ancestors there had been men, most notably Maximilian I and Charles V, who had combined vigorous military, procreational and artistic policies. Rudolf managed only the last of these. The time he spent chatting to John Dee about his magic mirror made from Aztec obsidian should probably have been spent more wisely. His role as Holy Roman Emperor lapsed almost completely. His tolerance of – or more probably indifference to – religious issues meant that as his reign progressed the Catholic position in Bohemia caved in; it was perhaps nine-tenths Protestant by 1600. Rudolf’s failure to marry gave the latter part of his reign an air of ruinous stasis, even setting aside his own personal inactivity, with the future religious direction of the Habsburg lands depending on the views of his successor. This meant an extraordinary array of religious belief blossomed in Prague. Tolerance also made it a great shelter for wizards of a kind who were simply killed by the ruler of any surrounding state they were rash enough to wander into – the exotic fraud Marko Bragadino’s luck ran out when he was beheaded in Munich in 1591, dressed in a suit decorated with fool’s gold.

  Rudolf’s one major foreign-policy initiative was a disaster
. In 1591 the Ottoman frontier became vigorously active once more with the fall of the key Hungarian fortresses of Komárom, on the Danube, and Győr, seventy-five miles from Vienna. A significant but highly misleading raid at Sisak in 1593, principally involving Croatian troops, resulted in an Ottoman defeat and the first hint that the implacable enemy might in fact be placable. Determined to recover from this humiliation, Sultan Murad III declared war on Rudolf and initiated a wearying and horrible conflict that lasted for thirteen years. The initial coalition (brought together by the Pope rather than the Emperor) was formidable, with troops arriving from all over Europe as well as alliances with the eastern tier of principalities – Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania – which now turned on their Ottoman protectors. Remarkably little is written about this war, but it was perhaps one of the most important fought in Central Europe, a training school for the Thirty Years War for an entire generation and one of the main reasons that the region became so depopulated, with city after city and surrounding countryside left empty after ceaseless terror-raiding and mutual ferocity. So complete was this depopulation that it reshaped the ethnic map, as new linguistic groups moved into areas left empty by the extermination of their predecessors.