by Jan Morris
85 The return of Islam?
Perhaps all that is why, in the last years of the twentieth century, Europeans look towards Islam with fascinated apprehension. An element of love-hate is involved, because wherever it settled Islam left something alluring. In Spain its influence has proved inexpungible, not only in glorious buildings, but in a whole climate of thought and manners, making Andalusia still one of the most seductive regions of the continent. Steam still drifts from the shallow copper domes of the Király baths in Budapest, once the garrison baths of a Turkish army of occupation, much later to be a popular gay rendezvous: up the hill behind, through all the centuries, Muslim pilgrims have come to the tomb of the holy man Gül Baba, who died during the thanksgiving service for the Turkish capture of Buda in 1541. In eastern Europe, in Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania and the countries of the old Yugoslavia, Islam itself was to live on for centuries, and in some places lives still. Nothing could be more evocatively Islamic than the spectacle of the Friday worshippers thronging the terrace of the Mosque of Mahmud Dashi in Skanderbeg Square in Tirana: the constantly shifting crowd of men, the sense of grave devotion, the low hum of male voices, the beggars at the gate, the imam stalking through the crowd to disappear into the shadows of the mosque – all this in a country which was, only a few years ago, officially godless.
For in the last decades of the twentieth century, Islam has been resurgent in Europe, frightening the more nervous Europeans once again, and reinforcing in some minds the idea of the continent as a Christian bastion. North Africans in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain – all have brought with them a devotion to their faith that has fatefully affected the native cultures. The Islamic Centre is one of the most striking new buildings in Paris. The London Mosque towers grandly over Regent’s Park. In Granada, once the capital of Moorish Spain, Islamic missionaries are at work once more. And one of the most surprising experiences of European travel is to drive out of the Yorkshire hills, out of the country of Harry’s Challenge and the Ripon Wakeman, into the old wool town of Bradford, and to find it full of Muslims – respectable Muslim families, disenchanted Muslim youths, militant mullahs and rich entrepreneurs. It is an Islamic sphere of influence.
But as for the bridge at Mostar, the last time I was there it was just a pile of rubble in the river, surrounded by ruins: and many of the Muslims of the town had died in the course of ethnic cleansing.
86 The full blast
It was a Power from over the ocean, anyway, that really changed the manners of Europe during my own fifty years. Far more persuasive, far more revolutionary in its effects than anything before it, outclassing all the old examples of French finesse, English reserve, German efficiency, Italian style, Russian ideology, Islamic dedication, there arrived in Europe in full blast, just when I arrived on the mainland of Europe myself, the engine of the American Way. The Europeans would never be the same again. The fun, dazzle, violence, opportunism, energy, generosity, deception, idealism, swagger, push and inanity of American life would mark the peoples of the old continent for ever after, and paradoxically bring them closer to one another. All Europe’s graffiti-artists now scrawled in the same style, derived from the street calligraphers of Manhattan, and no European could be altogether a foreigner to another when they were both munching a hamburger, wearing identical baseball caps back to front, knowledgeably discussing the works of Woody Allen, or talking California computer-speak.
5
SPASMS OF UNITY
*
It is possible to consider Trieste as a totem of European disunity. During the past couple of centuries it has been incessantly squabbled over by rival Powers, States, nations and factions. Churchill saw it as the southern end of his Iron Curtain, and it stands at the edge of the ever fissiparous Balkans, almost within sight of the battlefields of the twentieth century’s last European wars. I prefer, however, to hang around at the Caffè degli Specchi, by the waterfront, down the hill from the castle and the cathedral, and to think of the city as a pledge of eventual European unity. I could go and feel Latinate by drinking a Campari at the bar; this morning I shall feel Germanic by having a hot chocolate with a sticky cake at a terrace table – across half Europe, at this very moment, ladies are ordering chocolate and Strudel of one sort or another, undoing their coats, tidying their hair, and settling down for half an hour of self-indulgence.
The square I am sitting in, the Piazza dell’Unità d’Italia, was once a showpiece of that immense multinational organism the Austro-Hungarian Empire – and thus by descent, by way of the almost indestructible Habsburgs, of the Holy Roman Empire. Next door to the café is the ornate old palace of the Austrian Governors. Around the corner is the opera house, Teatro Verdi, one of whose first productions was an opera by Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s rival. Over the way is the splendid former headquarters of the Lloyd Triestino shipping line (formerly Lloyd Austriaco), which once took the dual eagle of the Habsburgs into all the world’s oceans. At the bandstand which used to stand in the square the band of the Austrian 87th Infantry was frequently conducted by Franz Lehár of The Merry Widow, and in a laboratory along the quay Sigmund Freud, with a research grant from the University of Vienna, tried unsuccessfully to discover the testes of the eel. In some lights, in some moods, Trieste is a living relic of the old Empire.
But then almost everyone who has hoped to make a unity of Europe, whether by hook or by crook, by force or by ideology, has left his mark in Trieste. A plaque on a house just out of sight from my table records the fact that Napoleon stayed there once. In the 1930s the Italian Fascists foresaw a grand future for the city as an imperial port of a new kind: an instrument of Italian expansion, an armoury and an emporium, as one Fascist official wrote, to sustain ‘the armed emigrants on the Black Continent’. In 1944, following the Italian collapse in the Second World War, the Germans annexed Trieste and its surroundings as an integral part of their Reich, and along by the docks at San Sabba are the remains of their only extermination camp in Italy; Trieste would again know a time of splendour‚ declared the local Nazi newspaper, Deutsche Adria Zeitung – ‘the European idea’ would see to that. Communism very nearly got its hands on Trieste in 1945, to put it on a par with Belgrade, Bucharest, Sofia, Prague and the other cities of Marx’s half-Europe. It is one of those places, like Memel (Klaipeda), Danzig (Gdańsk), Fiume (Rijeka) or Königsberg (Kaliningrad), which get their own inset maps in old atlases, signifying their especially flexible status in Europe’s history.
The faces around me, as I crumbily eat my cake, are an ethnic muddle – heavily Germanic faces, lean Latin faces, Slav faces with blue eyes and high cheekbones – and among the Italian conversations I shall probably hear some in Slovenian, and some in Serbo-Croat, and perhaps some German too. This is a mélange-city, where things are seldom absolute: in Trieste one can experience Gemütlichkeit with a sting to it, calm Latinity and bourgeois Slavdom! if there is a public festivity of some kind, as there very often is – an anniversary of the Audace’s arrival, for instance – there may well be a military parade in the square, with trumpet-calls, bersaglieri marching at the double, Italian flags everywhere, and perhaps a warship moored at the Molo; but it always seems to me that on these occasions the Italian Government doth protest too much, knowing as well as everyone else that Trieste is really far more than just an Italian city, but a city of many races, loyalties and histories.
So it is that I sit here, drinking coffee from Brazil (Trieste is still one of Europe’s chief importers of coffees), looking across to Miramare (from where the doomed Habsburgian Archduke Maximilian sailed away to found an empire in Mexico), and thinking not about Europe’s incorrigible instincts for quarrelling, but about its successive impulses to unite. The relics of five such varied spasms, in particular, I distinguish in my mind – the Carolingian, the Habsburgian, the Napoleonic, the Prussian, the Hitlerian. Before I pay my bill and make for my lodgings, I let my imagination dwell too upon a sixth: what we fondly like to call, at the end of my ha
lf-century, the European Union.
1 Euro-dreams
When I first set out for Aachen, I am ashamed to admit, I was not at all sure where it was. Was it the same place as Aken? Could it be Aix-la-Chapelle? Was it in Belgium, the Netherlands, or Germany? On the map all three countries seemed to meet about there, with France and Luxembourg just over the map-fold. All was soon made clear to me, however. As I walked into town from the railway station, I heard rollicking male voices singing ‘Ach, Du Lieber Augustin’, as students used to sing it after duels at Heidelberg in romantic comedies. Between a McDonald’s and Schinkel’s spa buildings I found the source of it. There on a temporary stage twenty or thirty well-built burghers, dressed in elaborate and extravagant fancy dress – here a prince in a feathered hat, there a jester or a helmeted general – were celebrating the start of the Rhineland carnival, accompanied by a chorus of eighteenth-century soldiers in periwigs; and around them half the populace of Aachen was tapping its feet, swaying rhythmically arm in arm, convivially smiling and drinking foaming tankards of beer. Germany it was.
I had gone there as to a grail, for in Aachen had been born, eleven centuries before, the first modern expression of a European whole: which is itself, of course, only a facet of the universal instinct, among all mature people anywhere on earth, to form part of one community. In Aachen half the peoples of this spiteful continent had once acknowledged a political focus, and their leaders had come to pay allegiance to a common loyalty. I had a lunch at a beamy Rhineland pub (kept by Greeks, as it happened), and afterwards I walked over the square to the cathedral. Rumbustious songs still sounded from somewhere across the city, but the building was shadowy, silent and almost empty. Only a few visitors wandered around the famous octagonal chapel – the ‘Chapelle’ of Aix-la-Chapelle, and the first dome north of the Alps. A single tour group whispered in the glass choir, marvelling at the jewelled and golden reliquary that stood on a dais in the centre of it. I leant against a pillar, though, with my back to the altar, looking up to the gallery of the chapel: for there I could just make out, palely in the shadows, a rough-cut seat of stone. It looked at once primeval and indestructible. There was no elaboration to it, no ornamentation, none of the gilt, silver and gems that encrusted the treasures down below. It was like one of those holy rocks of the ancients, I thought: powerful, and simple, and magnanimous. It was the throne of Charlemagne, the First European, and so the stuff of Euro-dreams.
2 Un-holy, un-Roman, un-imperial
The Holy Roman Empire was institutionalized at Rome on Christmas Day 800, with the coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor: but it really began its career at Aachen. As Voltaire famously said, it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire. It remained always a confederation of sovereign States, nearly all German by nationality, owing a more or less voluntary allegiance to an emperor elected by a panel of member princes and ecclesiasts. It assumed its resounding name because it professed to be not only the secular agent of that holiest of sovereignties, the Catholic Church, but also a legitimate successor to the Roman Empire. Its glory was essentially the glory of once upon a time, a mystical, lyrical glory: until the time of Louis XIV every king of France sent the funeral pall of his predecessor to be laid upon Charlemagne’s tomb at Aachen. It was nevertheless the original attempt at a political union of Europe, extending out of the continent’s Germanic heartlands – my first pan-European spasm.
Charlemagne – Great Charles – gave political meaning to the name ‘Europa’, hitherto hardly more than a character of Greek mythology, and he made Aachen Europe’s original capital. He brought there Christ’s swaddling-clothes and loincloths, which are in the cathedral still, and which together with his own remains (now upon that dais in the chapel) made the city one of Christendom’s most famous centres. Amidst this holiness thirty-one successor emperors were crowned, and Aachen has never forgotten its glory days. A heroic figure of Charlemagne dominates the main square. The Town Hall opposite, built on the site of his palace, contains all manner of imperial reminders – swords, crowns, electoral portraits, dynastic mementoes, a Coronation Hall – and this is where they present the Charlemagne Prize, awarded to statesmen who have contributed notably to the peaceful unity of Europe. All this because, long ago, a charismatic Germanic chieftain chose this agreeable watering-place to be the centre of his imaginary empire.
Imaginary or not, after a hiatus following Charlemagne’s death it was to survive in one form or another for a thousand years. To some it always remained a secular branch of Christendom; visionaries supposed that at the end of all things the last of the emperors would battle it out with the Antichrist! Others saw it as an embodiment of German civilization, something (as Ludwig II of Valhalla thought) that rose above mere States to have a universal value. All over Europe its influence potently lingers. At Frankfurt, where the last of all the emperors was crowned in 1792, they still proudly display the roster of sovereigns anointed in the cathedral there, and the forty-five imperial portraits in the Kaisersaal, and the stumpy sandstone figure of Charlemagne outside the Historical Museum, which had its head blown off during the Second World War but has been recapitated. At Regensburg, long the seat of the Imperial Diet, they love to explain the layout of the Imperial Hall, fitted out in meticulous protocol to seat the princes, dukes, counts, bishops and abbots of the assembly. The Empire’s supranational orders of chivalry died a very slow death, if indeed they have died at all. When in 1872 Isabel Burton went to live in Trieste (under Austrian rule then), as wife of the British Consul, she thought it expedient to resume the honorific ‘geborene Gräfin’, inherited from a remote ancestor ennobled by the Emperor Rudolf II in 1595; and the celebrated Irish tenor John McCormack called himself a Count of the Holy Roman Empire until the day of his death in 1945.
Many a European phenomenon has its roots in Charlemagne’s imperium. The archdioceses of Mainz, Cologne and Trier assumed their consequence because for generations their archbishops were ex officio Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The princely house of Thurn und Taxis got so rich because it operated the only officially licensed postal service in the Holy Roman Empire. The great inland port of Magdeburg, on the Elbe, was originally important because it was a frontier town of the Holy Roman Empire. For better or for worse the Holy Roman Empire, whatever it was, cast its spell across Europe for centuries, and after its demise it was to inspire both Napoleon and Hitler to have their own try at creating a European unity. The vulgar Napoleon crowned himself with a replica of Charlemagne’s crown. The lunatic Hitler called his Nazi Empire the Third Reich – the Second was the Prussian kaisers’ empire of the nineteenth century; the First was born in that dim-lit chapel in Aachen.
3 From Faust, 1808, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, translated by David Luke
ALTMAYER: Tra la la la la!
FROSCH: We’re in good voice; commence! [Sings] The Holy Roman Empire, we all love it so; But how it holds together, that’s what we don’t know.
BRANDER: A filthy song! Shame! A political song! A tedious song! My lads, thank God in daily prayer That running the Empire isn’t your affair.
4 Clouded mystery
That’s what they sang in Auerbach’s Leipzig pub (which still exists, by the way, and thrives upon the Faust connection). I agree with Frosch. I cannot keep up with the Holy Roman Empire. Dutifully though I visit its historic sites, examine its sacred relics, view the lists of its emperors, I cannot really grasp it. It had no permanent capital to explore. Its frontiers were too variable to follow. Its emperors often sound fictional, and sometimes its possessions too. Was there really a country called Lotharingia? Did Charles the Fat really succeed Charles the Bald? What was the cause of the rivalry between Barbarossa and Henry the Lion? When was Arnulf? Why was Berengar? Who fought the battle of Lechfeld? What was the Investiture Controversy? How many Counts Palatine were there? I have dreamt sometimes that I am being subjected to some frightful examination about the Holy Roman Empire. Like Frosch and his friends, I would calamitously fail such a test
, but I do not give up. Nor do my kind cicerones all across Germany. ‘It was in this very room,’ they solicitously tell me (more or less), ‘that the Princely Electors, led by the Margrave of Württemberg-Coburg, together with the prelates of lower Saxony and the delegates of Pope Pius IV, met with Arnulf the Good to discuss the extension of the Golden Bull to imperial territories beyond the Elbe.’ ‘Fascinating!’ I gratefully say, looking around me at the gilded stalls, the dark imperial portraits and the jewelled candelabra that formed part of the dowry of the Princess Caroline of Lotharingia when she married the Berengarian Prince-Elector.
5 Among the Habsburgs
Things get a little simpler for the historical wanderer when the Habsburgs, a family with a power-base in Austria, take over the Holy Roman Empire in the fifteenth century, more or less combine it with an empire of their own, and largely by matrimonial manipulation extend its German lands to include not only Spain at one end but Hungary at the other – my second spasm of unity. We all know the Habsburgs. The pretender to the throne of the Habsburgs is, as I write, a well-known member of the European Parliament, as are his two sons, and anyway the very faces of the clan are familiar to us from a hundred paintings: those bulging eyes, that underhung jaw, that expression of pallid fatalism. We know them even when they disguise themselves with mutton-chop whiskers, like Franz Josef.
