Burial rites and fox-clubbing
In the later stages of the Thirty Years War the dynasty finally and conclusively settled in Vienna. Exhausted by seemingly endless fighting, on the verge of bankruptcy, Ferdinand III sat in his austere, bad-news Viennese court and somehow ended up staying. Prague, in many ways a more imposing city and with plenty of office space honeycombing the Castle Hill, was too tainted, both with Rudolf’s weirdness and as a former nest of heresy. There never seem to have been any discussions about moving to somewhere more Imperial and less Habsburg – one of the obvious German cities such as Regensburg or Nuremburg or Frankfurt. The shift from Prague to Vienna, some two hundred miles further south-east, meant the archducal family lands were what really mattered and gave the Habsburgs a decisively eastern focus. Since France was for almost two centuries their principal enemy, it also provided an enormous defensive glacis of territory which was to be repeatedly helpful, but it also put them alarmingly near the Ottoman border. The constant wanderings of the earlier court, where Frederick III or Maximilian I and their locustine merrie band would turn up, filled with hungry kettle-drummers and mounted-archer bodyguards, looking for hospitality from some despairing local grandee, were long gone. A town that Ferdinand I and Maximilian II had used on a somewhat provisional, emergency basis now became the permanent court.
The shift to Vienna was reflected in all kinds of cultic ways. Indeed, one of Matthias’s few permanent acts of value was to marry the deeply religious and very much younger Anna of Tyrol (daughter of the enchanting Ferdinand II of Tyrol). She died young and left in her will provision for a church of the Capuchins, a famously ascetic monastic order who had come to the Empire during Rudolf II’s reign and whose leader, the later canonized Lawrence of Brindisi, had acted as Imperial Chaplain during the Long War. The Capuchin church was built on New Market Square, and there the monks would look after her and her husband’s tombs. Building was delayed by the Thirty Years War, but completed in 1632. Ungratefully, Ferdinand II had himself buried in his beloved Graz, but as a further indication that Vienna was stabilizing as the genuine capital Ferdinand III and almost all his successors were in due course carried unresisting into the Capuchin Crypt.
Their bodies were buried in the Crypt; their hearts were buried in the Augustinian Church next to the Hofburg Palace; their intestines were pickled in copper canisters under St Stephen’s Cathedral (with little labels on: Leopold I, Joseph I, etc. – it seems a shame not to be able to pick a canister and give it a shake to see what sort of sound it makes). With these gestures the Habsburgs definitively staked out Vienna as their dynastic ground. Indeed, much of the city centre is a sequence of mystical spaces for the Habsburg family: the Stephansplatz, the Graben, Am Hof, the courtyards of the Hofburg and all the connecting routes were for centuries part of the intricate clockwork of court ritual.
The Habsburg public calendar became ever more crazily packed as the seventeenth century progressed, with the canopies, incense and choristers dusted off at the drop of a hat. There were annual processions to mark victory over the Turks, victory over the French, a lucky escape by Leopold I from a lightning bolt, and at the Holy Trinity Pillar in the Graben every October to commemorate the end of the great 1679 plague. In the later eighteenth century Maria Theresa and then Joseph II swept a lot of this stuff away, but right to the First World War there was still a sort of zodiac chart of absurdity by which Franz Joseph measured out his sacerdotal duties.
It is generally reckoned that the Habsburg court was not much fun. Most gallingly it had very much less money than its seventeenth-century French rival, where state-of-the-art palaces would fill up with perfumed courtiers lightly tapping their gloved fingers together in appreciation of all the coloured fountains, special drinks, peacock-strewn parterres and mirrored halls being laid on for them. Indeed, the relentless Habsburg emphasis on prayer could have just been filling up some of the moneyless stretches of time. It certainly made a different aesthetic, with the Hofburg as a whole always having the air of cheerless functionality it keeps today. A further startling difference with France was the general lack of mistresses – the severe morality of the court was often genuine, and there was much less of the gossip or factionalism that made Versailles so distinctive. Instead, the Habsburgs had a far less threatening but baffling enthusiasm for court dwarves, a form of chic imported like so much else from Spain. These men (with names like ‘Baron Klein’) were unthreatening confidants, jesters and factotums, their size making clear their distance from the real world of high-rank noblemen. Indeed the dwarves must have been among the few who could kick back and relax at court, with most of its other members mere parts in a grinding machinery of precedence, cap-doffing, bows, curtsies and stylized movements fetishizingly borrowed from Madrid.
Emperors could be in danger of becoming trapped in this machinery. From an anally retentive chamberlain’s point of view the court performed like some brocade-trimmed orrery, with the annual sequences of religious festivals evenly rotating round and intersecting with the daily sequences of meals, prayers, audiences and council meetings. If the Emperor were to just sit there like Father Christmas this would be fatal, and the unaccountable gesture (a sudden demand for music, an act of spectacular and spontaneous generosity, a decision to go riding in the Prater) was critical both to keeping everyone sane and to illustrating the Emperor’s ungovernable nature. When Joseph I spent the equivalent of the entire year’s food and banquet budget at the Hofburg on a diamond he fancied, this may have caused seizures among his staff, but it was part of a long tradition of the Emperor showing through his actions how little he cared for bourgeois plodding. This sort of financial recklessness was shared with an aristocracy similarly addicted to grand gesture and conspicuous display.
A huge amount of card-playing and dice games filled up the court’s time. This kept everyone happy by creating patches of the day (like listening to opera) during which the Emperor did not need to talk to anyone. Surrounded by odd-looking ambassadors, professional toadies and drunken former military heroes day in day out, the Emperor was constantly obliged to find reasons for not engaging, not promising anything to yet another of an effectively infinite supply of supplicants. A sudden decision for war could have simply been provoked by a wish for something to break the monotony – and indeed one of the key ways in which a court failed to be a clockwork mechanism was its periodic emptying out for major campaigns and emergencies, the great tests of the cohesion, fellowship and trust that could be developed by a successful ruler.
Enormous stretches of time, when there was no piquet and no fighting, were spent hunting. The Habsburgs were enthusiastic about some odd forms – the annual use of falcons at Schloss Laxenburg to kill herons is perhaps the oddest. Herons in flight always have an air of a spindly, poorly constructed balsawood model covered in feathers and it seems an at best tepid achievement to bring them down with a sinister, compact fist-of-fury sort of bird like a falcon. It is hard too to see the pleasure in having beaters chase dozens of deer into pools of deep water and then take them out with crossbows, or in tossing foxes in blankets before clubbing them to death (Leopold I used to enjoy this particularly, aided by his game-for-a-laugh dwarfs). Presumably these forms of the hunt were meant to show aristocratic mastery over the largest forms of life, but also not risk the Emperor with personal embarrassment. So the heron is the largest bird, but if shot in a normal way with a gun would presumably go all over the place like some exploding spindly chair and the Emperor’s hunt would appear mean rather than masterful; a proper, uncontrolled deer-hunt is simply far too dangerous and is in any event not something that can be watched by spectators, so the deer need to be brought to the Emperor; foxes are too nimble to kill in an honourable way so they need to be stunned and rolled up in a blanket. So the Emperor was obliged in everything he did to take actions which appeared masterful and yet, in practice, were not. But perhaps this was the supreme form of masterfulness: did anyone at court, for example, dare think it ridiculous
when Leopold tossed a fox in a blanket? Presumably not. The more we read about the past the more completely odd it appears.
The devil-doll
In scattered pockets in the southern Tyrol lie the territories of the old Imperial bishopric based around the town of Brixen, now called Bressanone, a German-speaking part of Italy. Brixen formed, with its southern neighbour Trento, the ‘plug’ that secured the Brenner Pass for the Emperor. For those who enjoy such things, the Brixen diocesan museum is an absolute classic of its kind, crammed with tortured, worm-eaten wooden panels of biblical suffering of a kind churned out by the region’s sculptors and painters for centuries. Its unique, and indeed demented, claim on everyone’s time however is its extensive and elaborate sequence of crib scenes, little panoramas crammed with tiny people and commissioned by the bishops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. ‘Crib’ generally just implies Baby Jesus, and there are many renderings of him, but the sculptors in wood and wax soon tired of such simplicities and branched out into areas of ever greater mania. There is one amazing ensemble of Herod, with the face of a gold-painted monkey, laughing dementedly as his chariot is escorted by demons (with spitted babies on their spears) into the Mouth of Hell. There is a bizarre scene of Jesus helping his father to cut up timber, with some angels assisting – not a scene I remember from the Bible. And, even more apocryphally, a masterpiece Flight into Egypt, an event which conventionally has all the interest and excitement of a long family car journey on a motorway, but which is spectacularly bought to life here by showing the Holy Family on a rickety bridge with their donkey, crossing the Valley of Wild Beasts, with dozens of little model lions, tigers and porcupines (oddly) waiting below to eat them if they fall off. This is a fate fended off by a hit-squad of angels wielding swords of flame to secure the area – another scene I really cannot remember from the Bible.
Chuckling at the wilder shores of popular Catholicism and taking in yet another room crowded with saints and martyrs, suddenly the mood went all wrong as I found myself face to face with something truly horrible: a small carving from about 1495 of the child martyr-saint Simon of Trento. Most of these devil-dolls have long been chucked away or boxed up and the Vatican itself finally disowned him in the 1960s, but here was a brilliantly extreme rendering of what was once a ubiquitous image. Early in the reign of Maximilian I the sensational discovery was made in Trento, apparently in the cellar of a Jewish family, of the body of a missing two-year-old boy. The story got around that the Jews had killed him and had used his blood to mix into their matzo bread. The little statue shows the child covered in dozens of knife nicks with blood dripping from them and holding up a sign showing the pincers, augers and so on used by the Jews. The result of the discovery was a spasm of violent hysteria which resulted in eight Jewish men being executed and a ninth committing suicide in prison (three of Simon’s assailants are shown as tiny figures beneath his feet). The entire Jewish community was then arrested and a further fifteen Jews burned at the stake.
The devotional cult of Simon of Trento spread rapidly, with altars and churches and shrines in his name scattered everywhere. The notorious Old Bridge Tower in Frankfurt was decorated into the nineteenth century not only with its horrendous portrayal of the ‘Jewish Pig’ but also with an image of Simon’s corpse and the instruments of his death. This cult proved unstoppable, with dozens of miracles assigned to Simon’s intercession, and it popularized anti-Semitic fantasies which bubbled up at seemingly random intervals across the Empire.
The real reasons for the blood libel turning up in Trento in 1495 can never be recovered, but it was an important example of the often unstable and vicious links between popular Catholicism and anti-Semitism which littered Habsburg history (and which would also, of course, implicate Protestants). There is no correct place in this book for a discussion of the Jews of the Empire, but here is as good a one as any. By the seventeenth century the events in Trento may have seemed a long time ago, but they existed too in a sort of permanent present, folded into a Counter-Reformation iconography which created a Manichaean opposition between Christian and Jew, but which nonetheless could not hide the enduring, long-standing nature of an oddly stable relationship.
Under the intolerable shadow of the 1940s it is extremely hard but necessary to reimagine a world of sometimes violent and yet not genocidal oppression. In his general ban on all forms of religion in the Empire except Catholicism, even Ferdinand II made an exception for Judaism. The Jewish communities were as ancient as, often far more ancient than, any other settler group in Central Europe, and they held a place of confused respect because of their crucial role in the Christian story. Jews could not be understood simply as heretics if they shared the religion of Jesus himself and they fell into a quite separate category from simple evil-doers such as Muslims. But this category was nonetheless not an enviable one, with Jewish ‘stubbornness’ and engagement in businesses forbidden to Christians (such as money-lending) making their presence intermittently unacceptable and with the threat of massacre or expulsion always waiting in the wings.
From the point of view of Jews themselves this ‘stubbornness’ was at the very heart of their identity, since their European diaspora in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple by the Emperor Titus. This exodus gave them a separate narrative of great power – of an endless, generationally renewed act to maintain themselves in a hostile, cold and forbidding environment. For Christians much of the Old Testament provided simply a picturesque and enthralling sequence of dramas suitable for wall decorations and engravings. It was understood that the Old Testament was crammed with clues that, in an immense effort of futile scholarship, were made anticipations of the New Testament. For the Jews the same material, grotesquely abused and misunderstood by Christians, was an endlessly rich source of reassurance and challenge, a constant reminder of the need for constancy in exile and the keeping of the laws maintained at such cost by their ancestors. This oddly shared inheritance, however much mutually denied and contested, is of course one of the defining and most powerful and creative threads in European history. But except for short periods (under Rudolf II in Prague, most obviously, but even then for in many ways trivial and freaky reasons) there was almost no dialogue. The Jews could draw on a rich range of louche and brutal stereotypes from across the Hebrew Bible who could easily be seen as prefiguring of the richly clad and mounted European princes who either threatened or patronized them. In theory a densely nuanced alternative history of the Habsburgs could be reconstructed through Jewish eyes, except for the basic problem that the events we consider ‘history’ were viewed by them as irrelevant, the ‘abomination of the land’, a mere backdrop of meaningless European savagery against which their real life could be carried out.
The story of Simon of Trento is merely one incident, albeit a particularly disgusting one, in a centuries-long argument within Christianity about what to do with Judaism. The Habsburgs had special tribunals to look after issues of financial or administrative concern: these dealt variously with mines, vineyards, forests, rivers, soldiers and Jews. So just as colonies of German miners in northern Hungary reported in directly to the Emperor, so did they. This protection was real and meant that except at times of civil collapse it was rare for Jews to suffer genuine violence. But it was also far from benign, with often crushing levels of taxation and impoverishment in return for being otherwise left alone. The sheer restrictiveness under which Jews operated is very hard to conceive, but was much less extreme than it appears to us, as for centuries everyone lived within a highly constrained society with many duties and few privileges. But as these ‘feudal’ shackles fell off and gentiles and landlords and guilds lost their power, the disabilities of the Jews became ever starker, with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Emperors twisting themselves in knots over how to deal with them legally.
What is striking throughout the arguments about the right place for Jews in society is that the Jews themselves were never consulted. The Emperor and his
advisers, generally key Catholic notables, were driven by an odd mixture of piety and efficiency, but almost never by curiosity. The actual needs of Jews were not relevant to their decisions. There was a scholastic strand which valued the Jews almost as living fossils. This saw them not just as the much-debased inheritors of Old Testament traditions but also as intermediaries with ancient Egyptian magic, through the Kabbala and, even more bizarrely, as the unwitting descendants of the ‘Land of Cham’ with access to the secrets hidden within the still-undecoded world of hieroglyphics. These very odd forms of esoteric study bothered few people, but it did mean that there was an active academic curiosity which could border almost on respect within Catholic university circles, and which again made Judaism quite different from any other religion. The other powerful strand within Christianity was a sense that certain actions might result in the final removal of this anomaly scattered across the Empire, through some dazzling act which would at last convert the Jews. In the fervent and peculiar world of Ferdinand II there were attempts to force Jews to listen to sermons, grand gestures such as the establishment of a privileged new ghetto on the opposite bank of the Danube from Vienna, offers of money.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 18
