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The family’s end came with Ladislaus Posthumous, whose father was the Habsburg Albert II and whose mother was the only daughter of the Emperor Sigismund, the last male Luxemburg dynast. Ladislaus’s strange second name enshrined his being born after his father’s death.
The arrival of a huge, artillery-toting French army in the peninsula was like the introduction of a fresh predator into some biogeographically sheltered island – its inhabitants had created a series of city states of great complexity, beauty and belligerence but they were militarily governed by codes and values which could not compete with this horde.
The marshy plain south of Mohács in southern Hungary is a perfect example of why visiting battlefields is a waste of time. Some twentieth-century monuments there tell you nothing, but it is unclear what one could expect to
The Ottomans were always at a disadvantage because of their short campaigning season, much of it spent getting from Istanbul to, say, Kőszeg and the rest spent getting back before the weather deteriorated dangerously, and the delay at Kőszeg proved fatal.
Their sheer excessive savagery allowed them, from Graz’s point of view, to act in a semi-deniable way, a tendency exacerbated by Graz’s lack of money or supplies, which meant that they had no leverage anyway with Senj.
This resulted in a further round of frenzied violence, famous for the role of Hungarian
Indeed, the Capuchin vault in Brno was crowded with heavy metal fans looking at the grisly selections and this seemed to me a charming, if nutty, example of cultural history’s wending ways.
The Military Frontier really did shut off the two parts of Europe from each other and there were brutally enforced rules by both sides against trade with one another – the tiny but curious exception being the Ragusan Republic (Dubrovnik), kept by the Ottomans in much the same way as Communist China permitted Hong Kong, as a readily controllable and dependent window on the West.
The Ottomans had no problem with Christian subjects and there were only intermittent attempts to convert anyone to Islam. For reasons which will never be fully understood there were nonetheless substantial conversions by the Albanians and Bosnians in the late seventeenth century.
In the wake of Habsburg battlefield setbacks some two hundred thousand Orthodox Serbs moved north into Hungary, leaving empty lands filled by new Albanian emigrants, thereby creating the Kosovo issue which has dogged post-Cold War Europe – but these were only two of many confusing shifts, as Romanians headed north into Transylvania and north-west into the Banat; Bulgarians and Albanians moved west and east respectively; and Jews, Vlachs and Gypsies migrated, split and changed
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.
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.
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.
what we missed in vienna
The Habsburgs’ astonishing longevity stemmed above all from the ability of the senior male to produce heirs and avoid going mad.
Not unlike the First World War it more or less accidentally pitted against one another rival forces whose alliances were fatally complementary.
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.
As the wife of Leopold (who she correctly but very peculiarly called ‘Uncle’ throughout their marriage), Margarita Teresa suffered the same unavoidable curse as her relatives.
Buda, substantially Muslim and Jewish, became a Christian city, in a series of barely recorded horrors.
The building has four doors to match the original tent, which was designed so that the four groups could walk in simultaneously, thereby giving nobody precedence. Inside (for the first time) a round table was used to prevent there being any chance of a negotiator looking dominant – a curious breakthrough in diplomatic practice. These in themselves were astonishing
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.
There is also a problem with so much seventeenth-century music working within such tight, Sudoku-like compositional rules that perhaps anyone could have a go and come up with a nice result. But even so, for Emperors who could have just filled their time slurping from ostrich-egg goblets or killing herons, it is striking that their leisure should have been filled with the infinitely unfolding, almost alchemical world of instruments and annotation. Leopold I was undoubtedly
Charles, aged eighteen and now rebranded as Carlos III, arrived in Lisbon in 1705, at the head of an Anglo-Imperial-Portuguese army. Philippe of Anjou, backed by France and rebranded Felipe V, faced him.
But then, in another completely surprising twist, the Emperor Joseph I, after only a six-year reign, suddenly died of smallpox – and Charles jumped on a ship to make himself Emperor in the place of his sonless brother. Elisabeth Christine was left behind in Barcelona to rule Charles’s collapsing patrimony as now only the Catalans and a mixed bag of anti-French loyalists kept faith with his claim, and the rest of Spain was made to fall in line behind Philippe.
Charles dressed in gloomy black and red, praying ostentatiously at all hours of the day in the Spanish manner. The only good thing to come out of his experiences was the re-establishment of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna in a lovely new building.
The sheer absurdity of trying to defend what would become roughly Belgium, a defence only possible in alliance either with Britain/Holland or France, meant that the Habsburgs were always trying to swap it for somewhere else (generally Bavaria), an attitude which did little to foster local
Britain’s and the United States’ entire histories are based around their ability to opt in or out of conflict – their isolation making them near invulnerable.
Frederick also entertained himself by flooding Poland with debased fake coinage as a technocratic way of destroying its economy.
She and Potemkin had already celebrated the Greek heritage which Russia laid claim to by renaming the Crimean Khanate the Taurida Governate and founding or renaming towns with Greek names: Sebastopol (venerable city), Simferopol (useful city), Yevpatoria (a title of Mithradates VI) and so on. It was a mad project, but there seemed little to stop it and each new, enormous accretion of Russian territory made the next jump logical.
Venice’s revolution has never been part of the heroic history of Italian liberation because its leaders had no interest – except in extremis – in the rest of the Italians, with whom Venice had never shared a political history. It remained a north-eastern, Adriatic, Croatian-tinged sort of place a million miles from Milan.
If it is not acceptable for everyone in the Empire to use German to communicate, then any counter-suggestion excludes another range of languages. In Hungary the Croats pleaded for Latin to be kept as the official language because they knew that the alternative was that they would have to learn Hungarian. The strange role of Latin in Hungary had itself originated in the Middle Ages as elsewhere in Europe, but somehow it had maintained itself as a lingua franca that stretched across the kingdom, allowing Slovak to speak to Romanian.
Serbian attempts to expand into Ottoman Bosnia and to gain access to the sea were blocked in 1878 by a ‘temporary’ Habsburg occupation of the territory and in 1913 by the Habsburg creation of Albania – perhaps the only state to be invented simply as an act of spite.
Yugoslavism. If the Serbs were not strong enough to take on the Empire, perhaps they should ally with other Slav peoples? This would make it legitimate to absorb Habsburg-ruled and substantially still Muslim Bosnia (the temporary occupation had become permanent in 1908), and Croatia and Slovenia, even though none of them had any real historical links with Belgrade, aside from the usual medieval nonsense.
Between around 1870 and 1910 places such as Lviv, Graz, Brno and Trieste doubled in size, Prague grew by four hundred thousand inhabitants, Budapest by five hundred thousand, Vienna by twelve hundred thousand. There was no precedent for this astounding flood of people.
Its famous beer was created by a Bavarian, Joseph Groll, and lager was viewed as an entirely German drink (as was the case too in the predominantly German town of Budweis, now České Budějovice).
As merely one of many holdings in the depressing SABMiller multinational’s portfolio, Pilsner Urquell is at this point just a brand meant to convey a vague sense of Central European pub chumminess – a good fellowship cruelly mocked both by the factory and its ownership and grimly remote from the old ideals of the Velvet Revolution.
Even worse, in 1866 Emil Škoda was made chief engineer of Count Waldstein’s weapons factory in the town. Within three years Škoda bought out Waldstein, and then become one of that extraordinary group of capitalist inventors who presided over the vast explosion in things involving metal and electricity.
One oddity of the Hungarians’ own focus on land-ownership and estates and of so many historical reversals was a consistent lack of an urban culture, with Germans, Jews, Serbs and Armenians at different times and places doing most of the civic work.
Our sheer familiarity with specific pieces of music in a specific performance is completely at odds with the spirit in which they were both composed and appreciated.
So much of the great artistic life of Vienna, Budapest and Prague consisted of ‘luxury modernism’ reliant on small groups of patrons quite as pettish and weird as any of their predecessors. We are today looking at scraps which survive because of the material they are made from: the infinitely reproducible book or music score, the ability to turn Klimt’s pictures into posters, drinks mats, key-fobs, paper napkins.
As all Hungarians now lived inside the Empire any territorial extension would result in a larger percentage of non-Hungarians – and the addition of yet more Slavs. This pathological, zero-sum, ethnographic obsessiveness drove Vienna mad and resulted in Franz Ferdinand’s secret dreams of marking his future coronation by invading Hungary.
Fortunately other European powers could see that this would not be brilliant for them either and cooperated to create an Albanian buffer-state, with Serbia nonetheless keeping the Kosovo vilayet, a decision which would have profound consequences in the 1990s. The old Sanjak was split between Serbia and Montenegro.
One indicative fruit to drop from this peculiar tree was perhaps the most futile of all declarations of war when, during the Russo-Japanese War, Montenegro, in solidarity with its ‘big brother’, declared war on Japan.
Against the solidity of the French–Russian alliance Germany invented a fantasy whereby most of its troops would invade France and defeat it in a few weeks so that the troops could then be redeployed east to defeat the Russians. The Austro-Hungarian variant was that
