The triumph of the West therefore perversely released a huge wave of Catholic intolerance on these religiously patchwork territories. This renewed religious intolerance had begun even before the Siege of Vienna with increasing discrimination against Protestants in Royal Hungary – leading, in a spectacular piece of cruel lunacy, to hundreds of Protestant pastors being sold to Naples as galley-slaves. This unusual transfer of skills may have resulted for a short while in some agreeable devotional hymns wafting across the Mediterranean, but was a public-relations disaster. There was also the unwelcome suggestion that the Habsburgs had no specific right to the new territories, as it had been a pan-European alliance that had cleared out the Turks. A series of ferocious uprisings contested their claim – three waves of ‘Kuruc’ rebellions (between 1672 and 1711) devastated an already haggard region, with a particularly disastrous impact on the previously intact area of Upper Hungary (Slovakia). These were serious rebellions with major goals, supported and interfered with by a range of outsiders, from Poland to France to the Ottomans who wished to use the Kurucs to damage Leopold I. Outside interference gave the Kuruc rebels more weight and power, but was fatal to their chances of success. The Habsburgs would never allow the new territories to fall outside their orbit. The Kurucs could inflict local setbacks on Habsburg forces, but were reliant for eventual success on a crushing defeat by either the French or the Ottomans of a kind which would make an independent Hungarian buffer-state part of a resulting peace treaty. As so often was the case with Hungary, external powers in the end were not particularly fussed about this issue and the circumstances for Kuruc success never emerged.
The initial rebellion was an uncoordinated gesture of despair, mainly by Protestants, at Habsburg encroachment on their civic and religious practices. This event will always be remembered by those of us who collect funnily named Habsburg military leaders for the role of the inglorious General Paris von Spankau. This was followed by a second rebellion under Imre Thököly, which became fatally reliant on Ottoman backing and was a minor casualty of the Ottoman catastrophe at the Siege of Vienna. The third, under the leadership of Ferenc II Rákóczi, appeared close to success, occupying much of Hungary and seeming to be on the verge of international recognition, but in a classic instance of the Hungarian problem, its territory was only held because most of the Habsburg army was otherwise engaged. The overwhelming Anglo-Habsburg victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim both devastated Rákóczi’s main sponsor and allowed Habsburg troops to stream back eastward and defeat him at the thoroughly lopsided Battle of Trencsén. Rákóczi spent the rest of his long life abroad, another common Hungarian rebel topos, latterly under Ottoman protection as leader of a Hungarian exile colony in Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara.
Each rebellion was damaged by the fatal quietism of so much of the Hungarian nobility. No matter how severe the emergency the nation always refused to do as it was told and never rose up as it was supposed to. In part this was a genuine backwoods nuttiness, a refusal to engage even with the next valley. In part it was fear of a popular uprising in a society which in many places had Magyar-speaking landowners with potentially very unreliable Slovak, Romanian, Serb or Ruthene peasants, who might very well be in favour of a Habsburg rescue from local oppression. There was also a religious split – did the Kurucs really support religious freedom or were they in practice anti-Catholic, in which case would Hungarian Catholics by definition have to support the Habsburgs?
The rebellions did just enough to ensure that the Habsburgs would always treat Hungary as a separate state – but in every other way were a disaster, leaving huge areas as a wilderness of burned-out estates, castles and towns, with many dispossessed families and a depopulation as bad as in the areas fought over with the Ottomans. They offered too the first taste of post-liberation ethnic tension, as many Serbs chose to rally to the Habsburgs rather than the rebels, making it clear that an external ruler could, through careful distribution of favours and punishments, keep in play antagonisms that made successful uprisings impossible. This became one of the chief pleasures of various regents and governors over the coming two centuries. Many Hungarian noblemen who survived the purges and religious discrimination that followed the wars became deeply ambivalent about the idea of national independence: with the departure of the Ottomans there were simply too many non-Hungarians around to guarantee that the future would be theirs.
This uncertainty was much enhanced by the mass migrations that ran alongside the rebellions and which changed the landscape drastically. Just how terrible the situation was in the new territories during the early eighteenth century was captured in a series of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as she travelled south-east from Vienna en route to her husband’s diplomatic posting in Istanbul. She describes the region as ‘for the most part desert and uncultivated, laid waste by the long war between the Turk and the Emperor, and the more cruel civil war occasioned by the barbarous persecution of the Protestant religion by the Emperor Leopold’. The towns she passed through were ruins, the fields uncultivated, the woods filled with wolves; a major battlefield from twenty years before was still strewn with the skeletons of men, horses and camels.
It was this unpropitious environment which now became the focus for as major a movement of Europeans as the contemporaneous ones by settlers into the Thirteen Colonies. The Hungarians themselves moved south-east, repopulating large areas of what would become modern Hungary, alongside many Slovaks who moved into the regions north and east of Buda. Romanians headed west, into Partium and the Banat – in such numbers that they would be able to make a sketchy case for absorbing much of this land into Romania after the First World War. As significant was the mass migration of Serbs north, to avoid continuing life under Ottoman rule, who eventually settled in the region of southern Hungary now called the Voivodina, home of the Petrovaradin fortress.
Each of the great rebellions against the Habsburgs has been burnt into the Hungarian national consciousness, the landscape dotted with statues of Thököly and Rákóczi, poems, novels, paintings. But most of these events happened outside modern Hungary – the sieges and battles almost all took place in what are now Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine and in a completely unrecognizable political landscape. The hope for the Hungarian nobility as the Ottoman period came to an end was that they would get their old kingdom back, but the settlement made by the Emperor Ferdinand I after the death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 rather surprisingly still held, with even the long semi-independence of Transylvania (Rákóczi proved to be its last prince) now abruptly ended. The new borders established under Habsburg rule seemed to guarantee a Hungarian sphere, but this turned out to be based on the transnational power project of Vienna and have little to do with Buda. The fantasy that this enormous new land was in fact ‘Hungary’ would be cruelly exposed within moments of the last Habsburg Emperor resigning in 1918.
Zeremonialprotokoll
In many ways the enormously long reign of Leopold I was the acme of the Habsburg experience – lots going on, exciting geopolitical changes, good music. Leopold was one of the very few of his family who managed to get the yin and yang of his duties about right – balancing his role as Emperor and his role as ruler of the Habsburg lands. This distinction, between Reich and Österreich, was often forgotten, not least by the Emperors themselves. Leopold’s predecessors, Ferdinand II and to a lesser degree Ferdinand III, had tried to use Imperial forces – meaning the troops they could call on across the Empire – to pursue a narrowly Catholic goal, which ended in what was effectively a giant civil war within the Empire. Ferdinand II’s attempts to beat his subjects into submission showed the stark limits of his power. Ferdinand’s principal goal was to destroy Protestantism, but to achieve this he had to hammer all his notional Imperial subjects into accepting his authority in a way that had never been true in the past, and it did not work. Even Charles V had been reduced to blowing up whole sections of cities in the Low Countries trying to get them to do as
they were told. The pettifogging and obscurantism of the Empire, with its stubborn micro-states and interminable, dust-covered legal cases, was designed to keep the forms of the Empire in place (to prevent little states being swallowed by bigger neighbours) and to keep the Emperor at bay except when needed. Its efficiency was not brilliant, but this is our own perceptual difficulty rather than that of the time.
Historians and economists impatient with the Empire assume that if only innovation x or reform y had been carried out then a greater financial rationality would have emerged, but it is unclear that anybody at the time was much interested. Of course all rulers wanted more money, but their attitude towards it seems quite astonishingly chaotic, with sudden decisions to build yet another monster baroque church or give a courtier a new house far more central to ideas of how a sovereign should behave than grindy book-keeping.
Leopold I’s Imperial and Habsburg roles fitted like a glove, and he sometimes seems invisible at the heart of the great, cold circuit of his ritual calendar and its obsessive Zeremonialprotokoll, as chamberlains herded around aristocrats, ambassadors, visiting soldiers, confessors and the minor members of the royal family so that they all stood or sat or kneeled in the right places and nobody felt slighted. There were some sixty grand religious ceremonies played out annually, and major events such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and the annual Feast of the Order of the Golden Fleece at which the Emperor had to eat in public. He had to be seen, he had to exchange a few words with the noblemen who expected this (with immediate gossip if he appeared to slight someone), he had to talk to petitioners. It must have been a very peculiar life, and perhaps the bouts of hunting and even declaring war were just attempts to shake off the humdrum aspects of being in charge and being obliged to make small talk. Margarita Teresa pointed out that things like card-games, concerts and operas were excellent ways of avoiding speaking to anyone and she filled up as much time as possible with them.
This sense of tedium, of endless bowing and scraping, of ritual hand-kissing, of special clothes for court, of pretty compliments, was in practice interrupted the whole time, but these and the endless masses were the backdrop against which the Emperor took his decisions. He met his council, his key generals, his confessor (a crucial but now wholly mysterious figure), members of his family, but all the time the final say on any important subject lay with him alone. He sat at the hub of this highly complex but thoroughly wobbly wheel while large stretches of Europe waited. I would have myself plumped for a masterful inactivity, with plenty of leisure time set aside for music, mistresses, big jewels, a private library with a very comfortable chair and lots of talented painters to chat to about the iconography to be used for triumphant ceiling-paintings featuring me. Some of this worthwhile programme would undoubtedly have appealed to Leopold, but his key decisions were taken for him: by his belligerent neighbours to the east (the Ottomans) and to the west (the French).
The twin threats Leopold faced allowed him to make brilliant use of Imperial resources to block both Louis XIV and the Turks. He was an effective member of the great coalition including England, Spain and the Netherlands that was able to contain Louis during the Nine Years War. Leopold brought on board the band-of-brothers military element that had successfully defeated the Turks at the Battle of Vienna and its follow-ups, swung this to the west to wreck Louis, and then shifted it back east to do further damage to the Ottoman Empire. In fact, racking my brain, this is one of the very few cases where the Empire–Habsburg linkage across Europe worked fairly well, albeit as part of a much bigger coalition. Leopold was effective at using his Imperial position to horse-trade and took two decisions crucial to the future of Europe. The first was to allow Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Elector of Brandenburg, in return for support in fighting Louis, to become a king. This was a startling change – the only people called king in the Empire were all Habsburgs (two of the Emperor’s titles: King of Bohemia and German King; the other owned by his heir: King of the Romans), otherwise it was all a rubble of princes, knights, burgraves and what not. Friedrich Wilhelm may have been called by the strange title of ‘King in Prussia’ (it was changed to of after the whole of Polish Prussia fell into his hands), but it still provided a unique status and glamour for the family who would become the Habsburgs’ nemesis. Almost as significantly Leopold agreed to make the north-west German ruler Ernst August, who fought in the Turkish wars, an Elector. This was a momentous change and one much resented by other rulers in the Empire, who only agreed to verify it after Ernst August’s death. But his son and successor Georg I Ludwig, Elector of Hannover, also became George I of Great Britain in 1714 and this surprising twist gave Britain a major voice in the Empire, albeit an Empire that was rapidly decomposing. It also further solidified the somewhat abusive but nonetheless crucial relationship between London and Vienna, which I will come back to in a little while.
Bad news if you are a cockatrice
Putti have a peculiar and confused lineage. They have been around since Renaissance artists copied classical originals and are often mixed up with Cupid, an altogether more sexual, fateful figure, and barely related in practice to these small, tumbling babies with wings. They zoom about looking vaguely serious in religious paintings, and throw flowers, fall off clouds and perform other light duties in hundreds of painted ceilings featuring rulers and ancient gods. They can look wistfully appealing (most famously in Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Dresden) but generally they just add lightness, charm and variety to what might otherwise be somewhat plodding canvases. They seem to have more or less disappeared around the time of Napoleon and this is probably something else he can be blamed for.
I was thinking in a slight state of panic about putti because they feature so oddly in the weighty Marian column in the square called Am Hof in Vienna. It was originally erected by Ferdinand III to thank the Virgin Mary for her intercession in preventing the Swedes from breaking into Vienna during the Thirty Years War. It is a very strange monument and still the focus of pilgrimage and special masses. Pope Benedict XVI gave prayers next to it in 2007 to mark its three hundred and sixtieth anniversary, exclaiming to a huge crowd: ‘How many persons, over the years, have stood before this column and lifted their gaze to Mary in prayer!’ This is a very moving idea and it is easy to imagine many moments, both national and personal, where this might have happened. The Marian column has been through a lot but has come out the other side of the most extraordinary political convulsions unscathed, unlike the matching one in Prague, which a gleeful crowd heaved over and smashed in 1919 as soon as Czechoslovakia got its independence.
The Prague crowd had perfectly good motives for toppling the column, but the strongest one was the Marian column’s extremely nasty imagery. In Vienna, Mary herself on top seems harmless enough, but she has her foot on a writhing dragon (with a beautiful jet of gold flame coming from his mouth) which she is presumably treading flat, like it is a giant squeaky toy. The putti are around the base and something seems to have gone very wrong. Far from welcoming a saint into heaven or flinging garlands about they seem to have emerged from some sort of experimental farm. These putti, despite keeping their chubby little cheeks and dimpled arms, have been put into heavy murmillo-style armour and given hacking swords with which they dispose of various disgusting, squirmy creatures such as cockatrices. It becomes clear that when the pope said that the column was raised by Ferdinand III ‘in thanksgiving for the liberation of Vienna at a time of great danger’ he was referring not just to Swedes but to the contagion they brought with them – Protestantism.
Each special-forces putto is dispatching Error with its little sword just as Mary herself, in an unusually active move for her, is crushing the dragon of Heresy. So much explicitly anti-Protestant material has been destroyed or quietly put away that it is strange coming face to face with it here, but there is another column surviving and just as bad in Munich. The idea that Protestantism can be represented by a wriggling freak with a cock’s head and two scaly legs is not ideal, nor
is an ideology which ropes in putti to do its dirty work. There is too the delusive sense that this was a problem that could be fixed by a sword blow – if brought to life the puttis’ falling swords would have ended the Protestant threat a split-second after the statues had been carved, whereas in practice the Habsburgs hacked and hacked at heretics for hundreds of years before at last giving up. The Prague column had stood near the marvellous memorial to Jan Hus, unveiled in 1915 and one of the great symbols of a Czech nationhood snuffed out by Ferdinand II. When the crowd pulled down their Marian column it was both an anti-Habsburg act and a futile gesture against the outcome of the Thirty Years War.
There seems to have been a general rush of enthusiasm for showy but oddly abstract public monuments under Ferdinand III and Leopold I. The Empire is still littered with Plague columns and it is a minor pleasure of wandering from place to place to see if the Plague column is still around, with a perfunctory but charming one in Graz and an extraordinary one in Olomouc which has the air of a baroque design for a surface-to-air missile. The status of these columns is always a bit unclear. They marked thanks to the Holy Trinity for ending a specific plague. As he ignominiously fled Vienna in 1679 Leopold I promised to build a column and this amazing welter of clouds and saints now fills up the middle of the Graben, its impact somewhat reduced by the hordes of mimes and human statues dotted around it. But, given that the plague was going to end anyway, it seems a bit sarcastic to put up such an elaborate object just because it stopped after only a quarter of the population had been killed. It would surely have been preferable to have put one up because a town was miraculously spared – although that would not have washed I suppose with nearby towns ravaged by sickness. In any event they are very peculiar objects and in many cases have survived just through accident of location and durability, their original function of course long gone. During one of the Silesian Wars the Prussians besieged Olomouc and some cannonballs crashed into the Plague column. The horrified inhabitants sent out a delegation pleading with the Prussians to redirect their fire away from it. This they agreed to do, presumably resulting in random, pointless deaths and homes and shops being destroyed, whereas previously the only casualties were chunks being knocked out of gnarled and over-expressive statues of saints, plus the odd putto.
Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Page 21
