by Jan Morris
The Habsburgs enthusiastically became Holy Roman Emperors in 1437, after one or two false starts, and they kept the title ever after, largely because the imperial territories were so wide and scattered that they had the Electors in their pockets. ‘Sit fast, Lord God,’ the Bishop of Basle reputedly warned his Creator about the first Habsburg emperor, ‘or Rudolf will occupy thy throne!’ The family’s cryptic cipher ‘AEIOU’ still occurs in many parts of Europe, and has been most commonly interpreted as meaning ‘Austria Est Imperari Orbi Universo’, implying I suppose that Austria was destined to rule the entire world. The Habsburg monarchs certainly saw themselves as universal monarchs, and for generations the family really did preside over most of the continent of Europe, with members on the thrones of Germany, the Low Countries, Spain and Portugal, southern Italy and Sardinia, Bohemia, Austria and Hungary. When the Emperor Charles V visited England in the sixteenth century, they called him frankly ‘Charles of Europe’. Even Franz Josef, who died only a decade before I was born, could still be dubbed not just His Imperial, Royal and Apostolic Majesty, not merely Emperor of Austria and of Hungary, but also King of several kingdoms, Margrave of here and there, Duke of a score of dukedoms and Lord of numberless lordships. For generations the Habsburg regime in Vienna was known simply, all over Europe, as ‘The Monarchy’, and when I first went to the United States, in the 1950s, if you mentioned ‘The Empire’ people generally assumed you to mean the empire of the Habsburgs, so many of whose citizens had run away to America. The first Habsburg monarch was born in Switzerland; the last died on the isle of Madeira; if any clan could claim to be a genuinely European family it was the clan of the Habsburgs.
The curse of the house, wrote the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer in the 1850s, was ‘to strive irresolute, halfway, with half-deeds and half-measures’, but that is not at all how the Habsburgs strike me now. For a thousand years they seem to have been animated by an insatiable ambition for power, deliberately veiled in a suggestion of sanctity, and so irrepressible that even in the 1990s there was talk of reviving the Habsburg Empire. I first came face to face with the family, as it were, in their vault at the Kapuzinerkirche, the Capuchin Church, in Vienna, where 125 of them (minus their hearts and viscera, which went elsewhere) lie in enormously grand coffins in the half-light, trailed among by still respectful Austrians. Above the door was inscribed that mysterious cipher, and this powerfully engaged my imagination – so elemental and powerful, so easy to remember, so regally enigmatic. AEIOU! I have since learnt that, although there have been more than 300 different interpretations of the cipher, to this day nobody knows for sure what it was intended to mean.
6 A beginning, a middle and an end
On the top of a hill near Brugg in Switzerland stands Habichtsburg, the Castle of the Hawk, which is where the Habsburgs began their climb to glory. The Rhine, the supreme European river, flows nearby, and both France and Germany are within artillery range, making it a thoroughly European monument. Today the castle is hardly more than a tower with a few ancillary ruins, much of it turned into a restaurant, but its significance is certainly not forgotten: in its little museum a panoramic map shows how the legacy of this small fortress was eventually to extend across the entire continent and halfway across the world.
The place where the Habsburgs reached the climax of their power is more ironically suggestive. Philip II, of the Spanish branch of the family, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, built the Escorial outside Madrid to be at once a palace, a monastery and a family tomb. On my very first visit to Madrid I had trouble finding a hotel room, and a friendly concierge suggested I might get accommodation out at the village of Escorial. Taking me to the door of his own hotel, he pointed out to me a faint blur on the distant hills. ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘You’re sure to find something there, and while you’re there you can take a look at the Escorial itself. That’s something nice.’ Something nice! What I saw outside my window up there, when I had checked into my pension, was the greatest memento mori in the world, a terrible reminder that even the majestic pretensions of kingship, let alone the petty frivolities of commoners, can end only in tears. From here the Spanish Habsburgs ruled not only much of Europe but also much of what is now the United States, the Philippines, and islands and settlements from Sumatra to the Azores – Europe’s first great extension of power into the wider world. There are a hundred miles of passages in the Escorial and more than a thousand doors, and in it Philip the Habsburg lived abstemiously in work and prayer, surrounded by all the dossiers of State, the code keys, the dispatches, the files of secret information. It gave me quite a turn when I entered this palace-mausoleum next morning. I thought I could almost see Philip there still, receiving ambassadors with a high brimless hat on his head and his foot upon a gout-stool. Something nice!
The place where the power of the Habsburgs came to an end, on the other hand, and with it the second of my pan-European spasms, seems to me almost pathetically inadequate. Karl IV, the very last of the Habsburg rulers, lost all his thrones and principalities in the First World War, and having made rather a nuisance of himself in the aftermath, was exiled by the victorious Western Powers to the island of Madeira. There he died, in 1922, and he was buried not in the Capuchin Church in Vienna, like so many of his forebears, nor even in the local cathedral of Funchal, but in the small pilgrimage church of St Nicolas, on the slopes of the hill above the town. Madeiran people still frequent this church to petition its miracle-working image of the Virgin, sometimes making the last part of the journey on their knees: foreigners chiefly know it because of the pleasant gardens of the district, the alfresco coffee-shops nearby, and the wooden transport sledges which here begin their grating voyages, loaded now only with tourists, down the steep cobbled lanes to the seashore. Only a few visitors, in my observation, spare more than a brief puzzled glance at the tomb of poor Karl, behind a grille in the left-hand aisle of the church. There is a plaque above its door, and various imperial mementoes are to be glimpsed within the grille, making it rather like a provincial annexe to that portentous vault in Vienna: but few strangers realize who lies there, or know that he was a last successor to the Holy Roman Emperors themselves.
7 The internationalists
The Habsburgs stopped being Holy Roman Emperors, actually, in 1806, when the Emperor Francis II abolished the title to prevent the jumped-up usurper Napoleon acquiring it. They had already lost, or were soon to lose, their family possessions in Spain, the Low Countries and Italy. But their own empire in the East remained astonishingly cosmopolitan. They were German themselves, or Germanic anyway, but their domains in eastern and central Europe contained people of many races, languages, creeds and customs – a hundred races and a thousand languages, James Joyce said complainingly. (He added that the Habsburgs were the most physically corrupt royal house in Europe, but I don’t know what he meant by that.) Vienna was truly an imperial capital, and still is, its streets leading not just to provincial towns but to ancient satrapies and fields of action – the Oststrasse Autobahn striking grandly out for Budapest and Prague, Triestestrasse leading to the Adriatic, Metternich’s Landstrasse marking the beginning of Asia itself. The tug between the German and the Slav was never really to be resolved, but for a couple of hundred years the races of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy of the Habsburgs, were at least kept in equilibrium. The ramshackle imperial system remained an improbable demonstration of Europeanism: Mussolini said of one of its progeny, the post-Habsburgian republic of Czechoslovakia, that it ought really to be called ‘Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyar-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia’.
Like the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire still crops up all over the place. For example the Corfu villa of Kaiser Wilhelm II that we visited on page 305 was built not for the All-Highest but for the Empress Elizabeth, wayward and half-estranged wife of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef – who is herself commemorated on the quayside in Geneva where she was assassinated in 1898. In the Boboli Gardens, the gra
nd pleasance of the Pitti Palace above the Arno at Florence, there is a delightful little café, housed in an elegant circular kiosk, with an oriental-looking dome and a weather-vane on top. This is another unlikely memento of the Habsburgs. How the clan came to rule in Florence at all is as puzzling to me as it probably was to the Florentines at the time: but it seems to have been the result of some tricky bartering between the Elector of Saxony and the King of Poland – characteristic European diplomacy of the time. It was the Archduke Leopold, later the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, who built this engaging caprice in 1776. He also opened the gardens to the public, and it is a reminder of his sensible attitudes that the kiosk is still called, to this day, the Kaffeehaus – one of the very few reminders, for the average visitor, that the Habsburgs were ever in Tuscany at all.
8 Habsburg horses
Here’s another glimpse of Habsburgdom. In Vienna the imperial court was supplied with horses from Slovenia, one of the Empire’s obscurer provinces, where a particularly splendid breed had been cherished since ancient times. These were the Lippizaner horses, glorious white animals, trained into impeccable dressage by the riding-masters of the court (and now performing for the tourists, most days of the week, in the Spanish Riding School – followed as to the imperial manner born, as they canter round and round their palatial ring, by a lackey with a shovel to remove their noble defecations).
In 1918, when the Habsburg Empire was dissolved, half the Lippizaner horses were taken to Graz, within Austria, but the other half remained at their original home, which became the village of Lipica, first in the kingdom of Yugoslavia, then in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, finally in the independent Republic of Slovenia. There one day I went to see their descendants. An imperial estate had been established around the breeding-stables in the days of the Empire, with its own Governor, its own hierarchy of officials, and a gentlemanly park. By the time I got there, long afterwards, a casino had been built, together with a couple of hotels, and people were having picnics here and there, and drinking beer on terraces; but the park survived, wide grassland speckled with somewhat scrubby trees, and in the heart of it dimly I could discern, like some spectral dispensation, the remnants of the Habsburgs’ stud-farm. Here was the modest mansion of the Governor (not, after all, a very senior imperial functionary), and here was the riding-track where the horses had been broken in down the generations, and here in their long stables, fluttered through by swallows, were the horses themselves, the original Lippizaners, on their own soil. They were magnificent creatures still, born to a curious destiny: there in the Republic of Slovenia to spend their whole lives honouring the heritage of a vanished dynasty – disciplined to bear themselves always, to lift their hoofs, to hold their patrician heads in the exact way prescribed for them so long ago by the equerries of the Habsburgs.
9 To the four corners!
For myself, the most exciting of Habsburgian sites concern the coronations of the emperors as Kings or Queens of Hungary. This happened generally at the Danube castle-town of Pozsony, now Bratislava (where the spire of St Martin’s Cathedral is still topped by a replica of the Hungarian crown), until in 1867 Franz Josef was crowned at the shortly-to-be-united capital of Buda-Pest. In both cities they remember still the mound that was always erected on the banks of the Danube for the culminating ritual of the ceremony. It was made of soil brought from all parts of the Hungarian kingdom, and there after the coronation service the King would proceed on horseback. Dressed in his coronation robes, his crown upon his head, he would spur his horse to the top of the mound, and drawing his sword from its scabbard would flourish it defiantly towards the four corners of his kingdom. For horse-mad extrovert Magyars it must have been easy – just their style: but I find it hard to see the whiskered Franz Josef, a born desk-emperor, performing the ancient rite with much conviction.
10 K.u.K.
What most people now associate with Habsburg government is the vast bureaucracy and military system by which, in their latter years, the Habsburgs administered their eastern territories – a rambling instrument of supranationalism, mustered in infinite grades of protocol. It was defined by the Viennese politician Viktor Adler as ‘a despotism softened by muddle’. It had its grim aspects – Kafka immortalized some of them in Prague – and its comic aspects, which make The Good Soldier Švejk one of literature’s funniest novels. It preened itself in fancy uniforms and incessant military parades: Franz Josef thought constant parading was a way of exorcizing war. It documented itself in the ‘chancery double’, an exactly prescribed sheet of paper, available at any tobacconist’s, upon which every imperial transaction, even the most trivial personal request to Authority, had to be written. But it survived innumerable onslaughts of conflicts and nationalism to leave its living echoes behind when the last of the Habsburg monarchs had long gone to his grave in Madeira. If you want a taste of it even now, come and loiter with me along the Ringstrasse in Vienna, at the very heart of Habsburgism in its last century.
The Ringstrasse itself, the wide ceremonial street which surrounds the old city of Vienna, was built in the nineteenth century as a deliberate declaration of imperial assurance. Like some megalomaniac’s dream (Hitler’s perhaps – he loved it), its buildings rise one after another preposterously into view, Gothic or Grecian or baroque, plastered in kitsch or writhing with classical allusion, here a titanic opera house, here a refulgent Attic assembly, a university more utterly academic than Heidelberg, Cambridge and Salamanca put together, museums as overwhelmingly museumy as museums could possibly be, and all appearing to curve deferentially, even obsequiously, around the immense pillared and rambling sprawl of the Hofburg, the imperial palace – where for nearly seventy years Franz Josef, the last Habsburg emperor that anyone remembers, toiled at his simple desk, dressed always in his severe military uniform and addicted to boiled beef and potatoes.
This was a Habsburg trademark: simplicity allied to total power, and not infrequently to total ruthlessness too. But just as the buildings of the Ringstrasse, grouped around that palace, certainly expressed no architectural modesty, so the immense army of officialdom which sustained the throne shared none of Franz Josef’s homely style. The Austro-Hungarian Establishment adored its grades, ranks and honorifics, the myriad layers of social and official import, Excellencies and Herr Professors and guilds and orders and nuances of precedence. There were the letters ‘K.u.K.’, for instance, often to be encountered still in memorials of the old Empire, and in pastiche – a retro-café in Zagreb is called K.u.K. They unfortunately lent themselves to the derivative ‘Kakania’, devised by the Austrian novelist Robert Musil, which meant in effect ‘The Kingdom of Shit’, but they really stood for ‘Kaiserlich und Königlich’, ‘Imperial and Royal’, referring to the Empire of Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary. Infinite gradations of etiquette and formality formed an intricate measured ladder from the humblest clerk to the grandest councillor. Watch now – stand back – here, in the 1990s, come a couple of ministers down the staircase from the Council Chamber in Parliament, portly important men, deep in portly and important matters of State – and, swoosh, like a rocket from his office leaps the porter, buttoning his jacket, panting heavily, urgently smoothing his hair, down the steps two at a time to overtake them, in the peculiarly Austrian movement once described by Joseph Roth as being a leap, a bow and a stiffening all at once – ‘Bitte, bitte’ – just in time, my goodness, only just in time to open the door for Their Excellencies, who acknowledge his grovel only with slight declinations of their heads, so as not to interrupt the flow of their discourse, as they lumber out between the figures of Minerva and her attendant sages to their waiting limousine in the Ringstrasse.
That porter is abasing himself to a couple of petty politicians in one of the smallest of republics: but down that very same staircase his great-grandfather similarly leapt, bowed and stiffened his humility to the rulers of half Europe.
11 From the funeral service of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef I, St Step
hen’s Cathedral, Vienna, 1916
THE FATHER SUPERIOR: Who art thou? Who asks to be admitted here?
THE GREAT CHAMBERLAIN: I am His Majesty the Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary.
THE FATHER SUPERIOR: I know him not. Who asks to be admitted here?
THE GREAT CHAMBERLAIN: I am the Emperor Franz Josef, Apostolic King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, King of Jerusalem, Prince of Transylvania, Grand Duke of Tuscany and Kraców, Duke of Lorraine.
THE FATHER SUPERIOR: I know him not. Who asks to be admitted here?
THE GREAT CHAMBERLAIN: I am Franz Josef, a poor sinner, and I implore the mercy of Lord God.
THE FATHER SUPERIOR: Then thou mayest enter.
12 The wedding list
The Habsburgs achieved their hegemony over Europe with a minimum of bloodshed and a maximum of advantageous marriages. ‘Bella gerant alii,’ it was famously said of them, ‘tu felix Austria nube’ – ‘Let others go to war, lucky Austria, you get married.’ Queen Mary I of England was married to a Habsburg. Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg. Here is a list of the European sovereignties which appeared on the matrimonial records of the Habsburgs between 1415 and 1740: Portugal, Burgundy, Brittany, Bavaria, Castile, Aragon, Savoy, France, Denmark, Bohemia, Hungary, Mantua, Austria, Poland, Ferrara, The Netherlands, Tyrol, Palatinate-Neuburg, Lorraine, Brunswick, Saxony, Tuscany, Parma, Saxe-Teschen, Spain, Naples, Cologne, Württemberg, Sicily, Nassau-Weilburg, Salerno, Sardinia, Belgium, Braganza, Liechtenstein, Saxe-Meiningen, Mecklenburg, England.
13 Marriage plans
