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The annihilation of this part of Roman Europe is the founding background to everything that follows. What would become the southern zone of the Habsburg Empire was for centuries a world without writing, without towns, with only residual, short-distance trade, without Christianity. Some people probably always lived in the ruins of towns because walls provided some security and shelter, but the water-systems and markets that had allowed them to exist disappeared.
Each nationality in Central Europe defines itself by being more echt than any other: as having a unique claim to ownership of the land through some superior martial talent or more powerful culture or, most importantly, from having arrived in a particular valley first. Objectively, the carbon-dating of your language-group’s European debut would seem of interest only to a handful of mouldering antiquaries. But through the labours of these fusty figures, it has become everybody’s concern – and a concern that has led to countless violent deaths.
Archaeological studies of Lusatia show that Germanic tribes lived here, comfortably outside the reach of the Roman Empire, from about 400 BC to AD 200, but that for some six centuries after that no humans seem to have lived there at all. It could of course be that these were humans who lived so simply that they no longer left burials, swords, pots, fort outlines or anything – but this seems implausible. For whatever reason there seem to have been very few or no people and the default forest cover which blanketed Europe grew back over earlier settlements, leaving nothing but wolves, bison and
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But as was the case for everybody else, it seems in fact the Romanians arrived from elsewhere – probably from the more Latinized areas south of the Danube, modern Serbia or Croatia, which would explain why so rough and marginal an area of the old Roman Empire as Dacia should have kept its Latin flavour in an otherwise drastically changed region: it didn’t. This unwelcome result should make all the rival nationalist historians throw up their hands in jokey horror, call it quits and have a non-ethnically specific drink together. If the Romanians have a mystic heartland that turns out actually to
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we may as well all just go home.
The extreme mobility of all these tribes is bewildering and the almost total lack of written records for centuries does not help. The overall picture seems to be a retreat by Germanic tribes into the west and the arrival of Slavic tribes, seemingly from a start-point in what is now eastern Poland, mixed in with further post-Hun invaders from various steppe tribes, from the Avars to the Magyars. Indeed, in a despairing variant, the elites of the original Croats and Serbs may have been speaking an Iranian language, which is the point where I think anybody sensible just gives up.
Bavaria, of which Passau is now the easternmost point, is one of those strange semi-kingdoms that has throughout its history come close to being a real and independent state but has always been subsumed or subverted. It
The Magyar defeat at the Lech proved absolutely decisive for the shape of Europe. The retreating Magyar army tried to attack the Bohemian Slavs but were again defeated, headed back along the Danube and then stuck there. Germans and Magyars found a demarcation line east of Vienna and the two groups clicked together like a seatbelt, separating the northern Slavs (Bohemians, Moravians, Poles) from the southern Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs), and inventing what became Austria and Hungary.
Géza’s decision to plump for Rome rather than Constantinople was another of those small decisions with deep consequences, tying Hungary to the west and giving its entire culture a different shape and flavour from its eastern and southern neighbours.
The word ‘Austria’ is a Latinized form of ‘Eastern Land’.
An aggressive southern German ruler, Rudolf of Habsburg, was eventually elected Emperor in 1273. As had happened a number of times, the Electors had chosen someone quite weak – in Rudolf’s case both through not having a large power base and through already being in his mid-fifties and therefore unlikely to do much damage. This proved to be a major miscalculation for everyone involved except Rudolf himself.
In many ways Rudolf I was a classic German minor ruler. He had accumulated or inherited territories dotted around Alsace, Swabia and what is now northern Switzerland (including the ‘Habichtsburg’, the ‘hawk’s fortress’ that probably gave the family their name – the Swiss kicked them out of it in 1415). He proved to be a successful Emperor and took an army into Austria to expel King Ottakar. After several twists and turns Rudolf allied with the Hungarians to defeat the Bohemians and killed Ottakar at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278.
Rudolf then decided to resolve the Babenberger inheritance problem by simply taking most of the lands for himself in 1282 – these lands stayed in the family for the next six centuries. This began the Habsburg rise to power, but there were many cock-ups and dead-ends to follow what might have proved to be the high point in the family fortunes – assassinations, deaths in battle, splits in the inheritance.
The role of Emperor varied in importance depending on the personality of the job’s holder and his luck with events.
The seven Electors would be the Archbishop of Cologne, the Archbishop of Mainz, the Archbishop of Trier, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the King of Bohemia. They met in Frankfurt to vote on who would be ‘King of the Romans’, the idea being that it was only the Pope could crown an Emperor – a distinction that would be dropped by the Habsburgs, who generally had their heir voted as King with the title of Emperor automatically being acceded to on the current holder’s death.
The long rule of the Emperor Frederick III is the point at which the Habsburg family come into focus.
Frederick’s reign, and indeed the whole of the fifteenth century, is intensely vulnerable to two problems for historians: the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress Effect’ and the ‘Christmas Pantomime Syndrome’. The first of these views the individual monarch as a figure who needs in his lifetime to reach a specific goal – invariably the creation of a coherent state as much as possible like the modern empire or country as it would emerge in the nineteenth century. Rulers are therefore judged on the degree to which they remain on this path and are not seduced, waylaid or discouraged by other temptations, like
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The Pilgrim’s Progress Effect is very powerful with Frederick III because we know that he is the true founder of a dynasty which will rule Central Europe and many other places for four centuries – and yet he himself so often does not seem to know this (as, of course, he could not). Rather than heading to the Celestial City – in other words to Vienna to create a rational and centralized administration, the heart of a great empire – Frederick meanders about helplessly, and for long periods becomes virtually inert while mayhem breaks out all around him.
We all know that Central Europe is going to be devastated by the Turks and there is a version of history where everybody yells at the stage: ‘Look behind you!’ as the hero fails to notice the monster/goblin/witch sneaking up and then disappearing each time he turns round. In fact someone might have usefully yelled it too at little Ladislaus. As Frederick is preoccupied by yet more petty fighting around the Swiss Confederation it is impossible not to cry out: ‘Sort out your eastern border defences and make yourself head of a serious Christian coalition with a single purpose,’ or something like
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The other great early Habsburg cultic site is the small town of Klosterneuburg (New Castle Monastery), just north of Vienna. For centuries an unvarying part of the calendar was the annual pilgrimage by the senior family member to the ancient Augustinian abbey founded by the Babenberg margrave of the region, Leopold III, to attend services to pray for the souls of their Babenberg predecessors. It is this complex of buildings which gives the Habsburgs their legitimacy, conferring on an extinct prior dynasty, an ugly civil war and an Imperial land-grab all the majesty of religious endorsement.
The Babenberg family were freebooting German fighters, working for the Duke of Bavaria as Christian forces hacked their way east, pushing back the Hungarians. The records are so poor that beyond the most basic outline almost everything they did is merely bright coloured romance. And this is exactly what the canons’ painting provides – here they are praying, heading off on crusade, the victims of treachery, in a picturesquely mounted battle. The great weight of the past is brilliantly conveyed in the picture – a dynastic sequence of events stretching down through the centuries.
It is not difficult to see why the Habsburgs were so obsessed with Klosterneuburg. Their legitimacy was deeply bound up in the bald assertion that they were the true heirs to the Babenbergs and the elaborate ceremonies here allowed them to stare down anyone who dared even think that they were mere Swabian carpetbaggers. The Habsburgs never forgot that the basis for their greatness was this Austrian core and that Klosterneuburg was the site they had to lay claim to.
Christianity provided a written, judicial and intellectual link to the Roman Empire, but the lands which Charlemagne and his successors conquered were in many cases outside the old empire and making this new construction into the successor state was much more an act of will than a genuine revival. These notional Roman origins were always a crucial element for the thousand years that the new Empire existed. It tangled the Emperor in an important relationship with the Pope, with whom he could swap honest notes about bare-faced assertions of authority based on ancient links to Rome.
Its fringes at all points of the compass generated an alarmingly high percentage of all Europe’s historical ‘events’ and even after 1806 it was a motor for disagreement and warfare like nothing else. Too many historians have found themselves siding uneasily with the idea that the Emperor should be sympathized with when his grand plans are thwarted by pygmy localism, but perhaps this hopeless localism should be celebrated as a great gift to European culture and discourse.
The territory of the Empire therefore had something of the appearance of a deeply disturbing jigsaw. There were relatively large territories such as Württemberg, which looked impressive but was in practice honeycombed with local special laws and privileges that made the dukes impoverished, bitter and much laughed at. There were more substantial and coherent territories, such as Saxony, which was cursed by frequent bouts of subdivision between different heirs, with one half crumbling into tiny but wonderful fragments. There were the lands of the margraves of Brandenburg in the north-east, which
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These larger blocks catch the eye because they had real futures, but far more characteristic of the Empire were oddities such as the Palatinate, a scattering of wealthy territories across the lower middle of Germany whose rulers intervened at key points in Imperial history.
This mass of political entities (hundreds by the later fifteenth century) was all held in place by the authority of the Emperor. As can be imagined, the very small states were frantically loyal as they needed Imperial sanction to survive at all – they tended to have elaborate shields decorating their fortress walls to show their allegiance and warn off casual predators. They supplied tiny packets of troops and often contributed to Imperial entourages in terrific costumes as well as populating many jobs within the Church. But even the larger territories believed in the Emperor, and such a
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Each Emperor had a power-base, which could be very important to him, even if he was often away.
strange fact – to our ears – that the Emperor was elected. The Golden Bull stated that when the current Emperor died, the Seven Electors had to gather (either in person or through a proxy) in Frankfurt and, sitting in a specific chapel of the Imperial church of St Bartholomew, vote on the new King of the Romans. Following their choice, an immense festival filled the Römerberg in central Frankfurt, with bonfires and the usual whole roasted animals. The choice of Electors was a clever one as these could only possibly agree on someone mutually acceptable and even if one family might nobble two or
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This was in part because whereas the Emperors of the high Middle Ages had owned extensive lands as part of their job almost all this had by the fifteenth century been given away. The Emperor therefore needed to have access to a huge amount of money in his own right just to maintain his dignity, let alone have the potential to raise armies. In practical terms only two or three families could pass the interview.
Without intending to do so the seven Electors of 1440 had locked into the job a single family who would rule, with one short break, for three hundred and sixty-four years.
Monarchs such as Henry VI of England or Louis XI of France are remote and, however hard we try, not part of our mental landscape because of the thinness of what they left behind them – a handful of stiff portraits, a few letters and dodgy chronicles. We would love to engage more actively with their reigns, which were obviously but tantalizingly fascinating, but cannot.
He used to be much hated by German nationalist historians because he failed to unite Germany and dabbled and dithered in a way that undercuts any coherent, onward-and-upward narrative – but these are the very failings that now make him seem so appealing. We need no longer feel upset that he didn’t create a powerful and independent German army or crush the French.
Maximilian is an unusual Habsburg in being both a convincing man of action and an intellectual. He was deeply conscious that when he took over the role of Holy Roman Emperor he would set a precedent – what if it could be permanently attached to the Habsburg family? Enormous effort went into making this feasible, much of it via print, and working with a brilliant array of great artists in all media he set out to build an image of himself that would last for ever.
It may seem odd to spend so much time describing so implausible a project, but genealogy lay at the heart of royal power. It had been crucial to the other great Habsburg fabrication, the fourteenth-century bundle of documents called the Privilegium Maius, some signed by Julius Caesar and Nero no less, which established the inviolability of the Austrian lands and created the special title of ‘Archduke’ for the Habsburg ruler, which put him on the same level as the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
Many Habsburg rulers could be faulted for their almost aggressive hostility towards the arts and their refusal to use their unique position to create extraordinary things – Franz Joseph was notoriously depressing in this respect – but there were a number of exceptions: Charles V and Titian, Rudolf II and a whole panoply of mountebanks and oddballs, Ferdinand III and Rubens. None can really match up to Maximilian, though – his work with Dürer, Burgkmair and Altdorfer and a host of less well-known figures, as well as his support for the extraordinary music of Isaac and Senfl, makes him one of
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The late fifteenth century was notable among many other things as the sole point during which the Swiss had a fundamental role in European life. The sheer obstreperousness of the cantons allied to their military skill allowed them to carve out an increasingly independent niche within the Empire. Their spreading territory was partly taken from Habsburg land and one of the ways in which the old Emperors had used to keep the Habsburgs down was turning a blind eye to Swiss behaviour. This was highly unfortunate for the Swiss once the Habsburgs became the Emperors and looked for revenge.
It gave the Habsburgs territory which now spread from the Danube to the North Sea and made them far more powerful than any other ruler, apart from the Ottoman sultan and perhaps, in some moods, the French king. It also shows the annoying nature of dynastic history – Burgundy in itself was a plausible political unit, but now it was part of a far wider, sprawling tangle of lands which would cause countless problems for everyone concerned.
Both Philip ‘the Handsome’ and Philip’s son Charles of Ghent (the future Charles V) would grow up in the Low Countries and this fundamentally changed the Habsburg style – indeed for many Germans their Germanness became thoroughly suspect from this point on, and their transnational quality would become a key element in their appeal and success, but not to Germans.
To a degree now hard to imagine each Habsburg ruler viewed himself in relation both to his predecessors and his successors. His ancestors might be dead in this world, but they judged him and he would meet them when he in turn died. The elaborate family charts, trees of Jesse and sequences of coats of arms created an aura of absolute power and certainty which a successful Emperor could milk through processions, feasts, tournaments and, above all, a constant round of church services.
As the second Habsburg Emperor in a row Maximilian wanted to make a point about his pedigree that would reach centuries into the future and validate all his successors, trying to ensure that these too would be Habsburgs.
For the generation alert by 1490 and still alive by 1530 the world would have struck them as convulsed by unparalleled, freakish change. The monarchs of the period often seem immobilized by the sheer complexity of their situation, with bold initiatives coming to nothing, inertia rewarded, and uneasy blends of the two.
Through a queasy mix of luck and ruthlessness the Habsburg family wound up as the great beneficiaries of this process. Charles V felt that his long reign had ended in failure and he bequeathed all kinds of problems, but by the time of his resignation and retreat to an Extremaduran monastery to pray, admire the view and wistfully spin a globe of the world, his family ruled an empire of a size with no European precedent.
The Habsburgs’ engagement in Italy – much more substantial and long-lasting than my own – has always been viewed as awkward.
Once they had defeated Maximilian in 1499 the Swiss lived in a strange legal limbo, with the surrounding states effectively pretending they were not there. In practical terms the only way the Habsburgs could get into Italy was in their role as Holy Roman Emperor, using the Brenner Pass and down through the Imperial territories of Brixen and Trento, the former mainly German-speaking, the latter Italian. It still required transit through a small area of Venetian territory, but this was unproblematic: if the Empire was at war with Venice too then it could trample regardless.
The tin ear for power politics exhibited by a sequence of Popes worsened the mess, but by the time of the Sack of Rome in 1527 the Vatican had long lost control of the proceedings, and a key contributor to the Reformation was less papal demands for money to rebuild St Peter’s and more a sense that the leader of the Universal Church had been reduced to a failed and eccentric power-monger.
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. Historical events can often seem completely pointless, and there can be few better examples in the period than the Italian Wars. In a strategy of shocking dimness the French barrelled through the northern and central Italian states, ending up at
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We will never know the private arguments among the Electors – Maximilian may have been an appealing figure and a great and imaginative intellectual patron, but his rule had hardly been a success for the Empire even if it was a few notches up from the chaos of his father’s reign. There was certainly a case that the Habsburgs had tried and failed, but an at-heart German-speaking empire stomaching a French leader was even at this point a bit implausible and while Charles was young and untried this was also true of Francis.
Its longer-term impact was muted though by the Pope’s anxiety that he had encouraged a monster he could no longer control. The Pope therefore conjured up a fresh anti-Charles alliance, the League of Cognac, which looked like pure quality on paper – France, Venice, Florence and others all joining together with a cynicism which even the most hard-bitten mercenary should have blushed at – but which rapidly collapsed, resulting in Charles’ unpaid troops running amok in Rome, killing thousands of troops and citizens. It was a benchmark low in Papal–Imperial relations and ended the Roman
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Much of Italy had been destroyed and its wealth drained off. By various criteria it did not really recover until the twentieth century, and outside Naples and the north-west it became a byword for backwardness and failure, split between a shifting cast of partitionary powers.
