Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

Charles V had – as so often – concentrated his energies in the wrong place. There were only two adversaries who really mattered: Martin Luther and Suleiman the Magnificent.

In this period, pitched battles in which one side feared it would lose were very rare. Except in an ambush, battles rarely happened except when both commanders were confident. But the speed with which one side is suddenly proven wrong in their calculations must be terrifying. Years of tournaments, musters, borrowing to buy weapons, the inter-generational transfers of fighting skills, arguments over dinner about formations, commanders, the value of heavy artillery over light artillery and then, suddenly, one last inspirational harangue and it is all put to the test. A major battle was an unusual event and rulers could feel crushed beneath the weight of historical expectation with everybody hauled back and forth between the sense of their acute danger and the opportunity for the great heroic act.

Indeed, the run-up to Mohács is a near perfect example of how unuseful the term ‘Europe’ is as a collective description, with almost every court at odds with every other. The only hope in facing the Ottomans lay in unified action, but this never happened.

As the sultan’s troops went off to Egypt or Persia, everyone in Europe seems to have relaxed, clapped their hands to get the court musicians on their little balcony to start playing again and then sat for yet another technically accomplished royal portrait

Hungary spectacularly tore itself into bits, convulsed with hatred between the monarchy and many nobles and between the nobles and their peasants. There are too many depressing indications of decline to enumerate them in full, but as usual at times of great stress rival groups stepped forward with ideas for national renewal incompatible with one another.

Ferdinand fulfils in Hungarian demonology the role of both saviour and scavenger on national disaster. Events moved with hideous speed after Mohács, with this fundamental breach opening up a seemingly unstoppable western and north-western campaign area for the Ottomans. In 1527, Suleiman’s army besieged Vienna, retreated and then returned again in 1529 to finish the task. It was this campaign which initiated the first of the great, self-immolating acts of sacrifice which were all that Hungarians could take away from their general disaster – the siege of Kőszeg.

For every heroic stand there were dozens of now-forgotten disasters, as Ottoman troops spread out across Hungary and destroyed it. But the Turks, within their new and extensive lands, remained boxed in by the Adriatic to the south-west and by a thickening chain of Habsburg forts and obstacles that protected the area behind Buda (taken by the Ottomans in 1541) and stabilized the frontier. In the midst of these catastrophes perhaps the only beneficiary was Ferdinand, who stepped into the vacated shoes of Lajos, and changed overnight from a major prince along the lines of the dukes of Bavaria to unquestionably the greatest ruler in Central Europe. The kingdoms he now ruled were all elective monarchies, but it was under these emergency conditions not difficult to persuade the panicked, surviving electoral diets.

Ferdinand can be thought of as the key ideologue of Habsburg rule. Charles had in one of his frequent acts of intelligent improvisation made him his deputy in the traditional eastern Habsburg lands – initially for the merely expedient reason that Ferdinand needed ownership of a block of territory to give him sufficient status to marry into the Hungarian/Bohemian royal family, as arranged by Maximilian when Ferdinand and Anna were children.

Charles eventually conceded that Ferdinand would inherit not only the eastern territories but also the role of Emperor. This was both at Ferdinand’s insistence and through the logic that the links between the largely German-speaking Empire and Vienna were more obvious than those with Spain.

During the life of the Empire the coronation regalia were kept in Nuremberg but they are now in the Vienna Treasury, stolen by the Habsburgs at the dissolution of the Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. These objects, which added to their sacral power by being mostly hidden away, sit at the heart of the Habsburg legend and, even in the cold neutrality of a modern museum, are awe-inspiring.

To us the Habsburg rulers – many quite mediocre or merely dutiful – can seem as specialized and helpless as koala bears and their claims to grandeur and the highest place in Europe an obvious try-on. But while they were always hated and schemed against they hardly ever lost their very powerful force-field. Once they successfully established themselves under Charles V and Ferdinand I they remained somehow exceptional.

It is frustratingly unclear how much Charles V enjoyed his decades as Emperor. He seems never to have let his Imperial mask drop and this public impassivity became the model for later members of his family.

Charles inherited a genuinely vast and unprecedented sprawl of territories from Maximilian, but no serious effort was made to give them any unity. He scurried from place to place, swapping around hats, crowns, necklaces and special cloaks. He was always reading up constitutions and mottos and being drilled on the membership and peccadillos of dozens of prickly aristocracies and urban oligarchies in different bits of Europe. At every turn he had to face rebellious townsfolk, Ottoman pirates, annoying Protestants, double-dealing German princelings and problematic family members.

As on other occasions, the secret mechanisms that lurk in Europe’s political structure ensured that enemies of a universal monarchy generated like antibodies. The history of Protestantism simply cannot be disentangled from Charles’s own prominence and power.

The decision by Charles at Worms to spurn Luther clearly saved the Pope from potential Armageddon, but it also created a situation where religious dissent could also mean dissent from Habsburg rule. Distracted on a thousand fronts, by the time Charles took clear military action against the Protestant threat in the brief Schmalkaldic War twenty-five years later it was all too late and despite his victory Europe was awash with anti-Catholic forces.

As the entire structure of obedience caved in, some secular rulers could not believe their luck as the dazzling array of properties and treasures under Rome’s protection looked vulnerable. All over Europe, most famously in England, figures in power just helped themselves. None of this came from a crisis in faith itself – Europe had experienced a huge burst of rebuilding and decorating churches just before Wittenberg (after all, the crisis was caused in part by the Pope’s wish to raise cash to rebuild St Peter’s), including hundreds of the sensational just-pre-Reformation painted altarpieces that now fill Central European art galleries. But faith took a new direction, with ferocious arguments within an ever larger number of camps, including an intellectually recovered and aggressive Catholic one.

Within the Habsburg framework there was never a real chance that the Reformation would be accepted – the apex of power was so entangled in Rome’s sanction that it was inconceivable that Charles V could change his allegiance. But for many powerful aristocrats the situation was different, with an unstable blend of personal devotion and greed giving an irresistible momentum to fresh arrangements.

There was a great gap between the grandeur of Charles’s political inheritance and the misery of his personal one. It seems to have been his great-grandmother, the Masovian Piast princess Cymburgis, who introduced the terrible Habsburg jaw which afflicted Charles and so many of his descendants.

At the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 that followed Charles’ crushing of the Lutheran princes, it was at last decided that each territory in the Empire would have its own religious practices and that they would be those of its ruler. This was already inadequate since both sides chose to pretend that Calvinism did not exist, a serious problem as this austere form of Protestantism was becoming all the rage and would reshape countries as far apart as Scotland and Transylvania.

Charles and Ferdinand’s successors, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, were both, in the manner of the period, live-and-let-live on religious issues and in that sense the Peace was a success, but religion, inheritance and personality were all tangled up in ways that under the right circumstances could prove catastrophic.

From Charles’s point of view the Peace was a failure – there was probably nothing he could have done to arrest Protestantism’s progress, but he was definitely too late by 1555.

The whole point of hereditary office was that the decline and death of the ruler was a central part of the pattern – to bail out in favour of others made no sense. Charles is usually seen as rather noble and impressive, standing there in Brussels, surrounded by sobbing noblemen, making his great act of renunciation. But it could be argued that this just showed his startling family arrogance – thinking about both his predecessors and his successors, Charles seems genuinely to have seen himself as a mere link in a great Habsburg chain.

As with many other Habsburg subdivisions there always lay open the chance that the two parts of the family might reunite at some future date. It was extremely unclear which of them should be seen as the senior branch: the Holy Roman Emperor trumps everyone, but it was impossible not to notice what was happening in Spain, now united fully and with a proper resident monarch at last, who in 1581 tacked on Portugal and its own American and Asian empires just for good measure. Both branches of the Habsburgs behaved as though they were senior, and this was a key factor in keeping them apart.

So it could be that Ferdinand’s move to have himself replaced with his son, who would become Maximilian II, was necessary to the Habsburgs holding on to the office at all. This in some measure estranged the families, but it did not prevent them marrying each other in a notably creepy way. It became part of their arrogance that nobody else was good enough.

The frontier zone that marked the border between the Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire was a shifting, frightening reality from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. A straggling line from the Adriatic to the Carpathians, prone to violent bends westward in the face of Turkish attacks, dominated the lives of countless families who, simply to survive, organized themselves around permanent war-readiness.

The brutal glamour of figures like Konrad formed a very different world from the woollier and more remote regions of the Frontier. The most famous holders of the far southern flank, in the murky network of Dalmatian islands and fortresses – with names like Bag, Klis and Krk – were the immortal Christian irregulars known as the Uskoks of Senj.

It was a very peculiar, hothouse society of fervent Catholicism entangled in flagrant piracy. Papal delegates had to deal with thorny issues here, such as the rights and wrongs of taking a battle-axe into church, of priests blessing Uskok ships and weapons – even instances of priests actually taking part in raids. There was also the exquisite problem presented by the tithe, the tax which paid for the churches, being paid out as a percentage of stolen goods, the goods often being taken after the summary execution of a luckless ship’s crew. The showy Uskok habit of using their victims’ blood to flavour their bread was another talking point.

Both Christians and Ottomans resorted to extreme levels of cruelty of a Grand Guignol kind. The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive, but for much of the century it was in effect these bags that made it clear how useful the Uskoks were. 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.

The sheer, long-term violence of the Military Frontier is astonishing. The Uskoks pinned down its furthest southern point, but irregularly, along swathes of modern Croatia and western Hungary, spasms of extraordinary ferocity laid waste to regions which, while always quite tough places to live, had before the disaster of Mohács been good farmland, with the usual accompaniment of small castles, mills and monasteries. The inhabitants were faced with impossible problems of loyalty. A powerful strand within the Hungarian lands found itself terrified of Muslim rule but also dubious about Habsburg legitimacy (a dubiety fuelled heavily by Rudolf II’s incompetence) and driven mad by the collapse of any hope for a normal existence.

It could be argued that until the Ottomans were finally pushed back in the late seventeenth century the frontier never really stabilized.

We know much less about the impact of comparable Habsburg raids into Ottoman territory as they did not attract the same outraged pamphlet literature, but the two sides formed mirror images of one another and the obsessive depravity of the Uskoks and Hajduks was let loose on the Ottoman regions of northern Serbia and southern Hungary. A landscape today associated with endless corn and sunflowers and dusty little villages soon ceased to have any viable population. Until the end of the eighteenth century, this zone, with its malarial marshes, enveloping new forest cover and great packs of wolves, became a nightmarish part of Europe into which whole armies could march and become sick, starving, lost and demoralized with terrifying speed.

For Croatians, Albanians and Serbs particularly it would in due course become a model for their proto-nationalisms, even if this needed a highly selective reading, pretending that there was no German or Hungarian element. It encouraged a devil-may-care, big-moustached, big-shirted Romanticism which for much of the region’s later history was pleasantly at odds with the stolid, farming reality of most of the old Military Frontier – a dullness perked up by ballads about the quintessential Uskok Ivo Senjanin and the Hajduk Mijat Tomić, hammer of the Turks.

The reality of Ottoman rule over a huge swathe of central and south-eastern Europe remains at the heart of the Habsburg experience, but also more broadly as an awkward and confusing issue for all European history. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are supposed to represent the triumphant expansion of Europe, with great areas of North and South America cleared providentially for Christian enjoyment, then why in Europe itself is there a similar experience being inflicted on Europeans themselves?

Since the nineteenth century, nationalist historians have stared into this closed system trying to perceive the fates of their proto-countrymen under Ottoman rule. As late as the terrible Bosnian War of the early 1990s, these topics had a sickening relevance as Bosnian Muslims were accused of being Ottoman quislings, not real Europeans and so on. In nationalist terms the stakes have therefore always been very high. The gradual liberation of these areas by Habsburg forces (often working with Imperial or Polish allies) was meant to rescue from bondage populations who would spring back upright and be much as before – but in practice not only were these peoples quite different from their pre-conquest forebears, but these forebears had themselves only carried the faintest resemblance to what these nationalist historians imagined.

One revolting claim that bobbed up during the implosion of Yugoslavia was that the Balkans were riven by ‘ancient hatreds’, implying something almost biological and permanent about fighting in the Balkans, with the corollary that there was no point engaging with such irrational bandits. The centuries of Ottoman rule of course show no such pattern at all, as virtually every party involved was a powerless and much discriminated-against group, viewed with an even-handed contempt by Muslims.

Long-distance trade across Ottoman Europe tended to be in the hands of specific groups that had privileges in particular territories or commodities: Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Armenians and Ragusans all acted as middlemen. The Ottomans were particularly favourable to Jews for the uninspiring reason that they had no external sponsor and were therefore quite helpless in the face of whatever demands might be made of them.

The Orthodox Christians were allowed to worship, but their churches had to be smaller and lower than mosques and have no towers.

Behind the Military Frontier this Ottoman world had settled down by the later sixteenth century into an effective, well-run and civilized sphere. The distinctive landscape of mosque, madrasa, caravanserai, coffee-house, public bath, hospital, fountain and market dotted innumerable small towns, maintained in many cases by the vakifs, the charitable Islamic foundations run by important citizens. Small elements from these can still be seen in scattered, dusty and battered buildings or in mosques converted to use as churches.

One of the many torments of the Bosnian War was seeing this Ottoman heritage blown to pieces in a deliberate and self-conscious element in the conflict, driven by mystical and corrupted historians, whether it was the destruction of the bridge at Mostar or the targeting of the Orient Institute in Sarajevo. These were attempts to deny the legitimacy of Muslims as European citizens at all, when of course they are ancient European citizens, drawing on a great, refined and beautiful culture which ruled much of south-east Europe for far longer than any of its successor states.

Vienna and Prague are almost as far inland as it is possible to get in Europe and perhaps it is not surprising that the court of Rudolf II, located initially in the one city and then in the other, became the greatest locus for strangeness and magic in the later sixteenth century. Some of this reputation is undeserved, a nineteenth-century confection looking back wistfully on the last time that a city had been great.

In many ways he seems to have been one of the most fortunate men who ever lived, taking more advantage than anyone else of the golden age of exploration and excitement that reached its apogee in the later sixteenth century. He was a lot richer and more focused than Elizabeth I, a lot less desiccated and pious than Philip II and lived longer and more agreeably than the chaotic French kings of the period.

The Habsburgs’ astonishing longevity stemmed above all from the ability of the senior male to produce heirs and avoid going mad. A successor and a reasonable level of bureaucratic and kingly ability in a world based around heredity and hierarchy meant that, with a couple of spectacular wobbles, they were able to keep going without the British or Spanish habit of the principal stem simply running out. There were many reasons for hating the Habsburgs or being bored by them, but the family itself gave very few chances for its enemies to bring it down on dynastic or competence grounds – the children arrived, the wearying court protocol kept trundling on. The senior Habsburgs also stuck together. Behind every ruler there were a group of relatives whose importance we can now only guess at in most cases – dowagers, sisters, brothers who, whatever their private vexations, defaulted to a blank family solidarity.

Where you lived in the Empire was always sifted by language and religion. The glowering old German merchant city of Kronstadt (now Braşov), wedged between two mountains, still keeps some of the old security paraphernalia along its northern boundary, which kept Romanians outside the walls. The rhythm of life was set by systems of passes and privileges as heavily armed convoys of goods (cloth, weapons, cereals) moved from strongpoint to strongpoint. Braşov was the last one before the Carpathians and the Ottoman territories beyond, from which – at enormous risk and in intervals between wars – huge fortunes could be made selling exotic northern goods to Constantinople.

Transylvania was under Hungarian rule for centuries and sometimes close to being an independent state, but it generally fell resentfully into the orbit of either Vienna or Constantinople.

It is, of course, almost impossible not to think of these Germans in terrible 1940s terms, with ‘Krakau’ as capital of the Nazi General-Government. Of all Central European subjects it is perhaps the most difficult on which to exercise intellectual discipline. But a huge effort has to be made to think of these Germans simply as ‘people who happened to speak German’ and unlinked to later nationalism.

This strange Saxon atmosphere is still most clearly visible in their fortified villages. The bigger places are marvellous, but Sibiu and Braşov are now unquestionably Romanian towns with a lot of effort put into their becoming thriving and modern, however dotted with Saxon survivals. By contrast the intense conservatism of the Saxon villages has pickled them in about 1650 or so. Many of their defensive structures survived for at least a century after technological changes made them useless against even the smallest raiding party, and then for at least three centuries during which the threat had in fact disappeared.

Indeed, wandering around Viscri, there is an odd feeling of being directly in touch with the forms of human behaviour which shaped most history until very recently: ruthlessly enforced conformity, the centrality of the Church, literacy as a specific skill needed by a handful of people but irrelevant to the rest – and more broadly the apportioning of tasks across the village, often to specific families, each one essential to the whole.

The more time I spent in Viscri, the more it seemed to suggest interesting things: a context for suspicion of strangers, the importance of Jews and Roma as the itinerant links that tied the country together, and the significance of that quintessential folk-tale moment, the arrival of the tinker’s cart with its manufactured, brightly coloured materials which could make young male or female villagers dream of a life beyond their one muddy street. These outsiders could bring scissors, dyes, salt, but also plague, which could, with one unlucky visit, kill almost everyone within a week. Above all what is so chilling about these villages is their insecurity: that far more even than plague, it was images of lawless bands, whether Magyar rebels, undisciplined Imperial troops or, most of all, Tatar raiders that filled villagers’ heads as they spent their long, cold, relentless and weary winter months endlessly pickling footstools and adzing geese, or whatever.

The oppressive mournfulness of these villages is inescapable: it would be impossible to view them as fun specifically. But the simplicity of the walls and towers of Cincşor (Kleinschenk) or Homorod (Hammeroden) seems (to this male anyway) a fulfilment of a most basic child’s fantasy of being able to walk around in a life-sized version of a toy fortress (or of being shrunk to fit inside the toy).

The reasons why the Thirty Years War was so catastrophic can be seen in its origins. Once the Bohemians had been disposed of, a band of European rulers from Spain to Transylvania, goaded by motives holy, cunning or idiotic, saw good reasons to fight, golden if will-o’-the-wisp opportunities, political principles worth standing up for. In this churn of ambition and fear, the question of whether Ferdinand II was a sort of proto-Hitler can never be resolved.