Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

For some later German nationalists he was bravely trying to tie together the German lands – a giant brought down by pygmies, and by the perfidy of France. For Catholics he was the man who stopped the rot – remade Austria and Bohemia as pure countries – a giant brought down … etc. For Protestants he was a dangerous, vicious zealot, blinkered and beyond reason. The modern era’s lack of enthusiasm for a Europe either under German military rule or forcibly placed under uniform Catholicism tends to tip the argument today in favour of the Protestant view.

himself. In 1629 he recklessly announced an Edict of Restitution which transferred a vast mass of property and territory from the Protestants back to the Catholics. Using a start point of 1555 to establish religious ownership, this visionary scheme alienated all but the most zealous or supine. Many Protestant rulers had grabbed territories from the Catholics since 1555 and major cities such as Bremen and Magdeburg were at stake. Allies or neutrals were appalled at Ferdinand’s hubris – but also by a clear sense that this was only an instalment: that the nature of his faith meant that even the 1555 benchmark would be sooner or later superseded by a wish to take back all land in the Empire.

Transylvania was remarkably tolerant. The princes themselves favoured Calvinism and supported the Calvinist power-house town of Debrecen, paying for religious students to stay in other friendly European states. The crazy-paving linguistic and religious structure of Transylvania made tolerance a necessity as the alternative would have been civil war. This tolerance was not extended to the Orthodox Romanians, who were generally serfs, but it became a defining element in the Transylvanian state, which allowed it to contrast itself with the ferocious homogenization imposed by Ferdinand II.

As usual religion and politics are so intricately tangled that it is impossible to assign clear-cut motives to anybody. Religion was so important and the stakes of personal salvation so high that a merely cynical reading of belief is on the whole implausible. But the Calvinism of Transylvania’s rulers became a crucial, perhaps unintended, element in Hungarian resistance to Habsburg rule. Indeed, it could be argued that it was the shelter provided by the Ottomans for Hungarian Calvinism at this time that kept Hungary alive as an idea and prevented the whole lot from succumbing to an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style fate as pliant Austrian Catholic peasants.

Over the course of the war most European countries thought they saw an opening for personal gain and joined in, but they had a disastrous tendency to take turns and then be defeated in turn, or run into a stalemate. But, at last, after so many humiliations, occupations and setbacks, Gustavus Adolphus and his army transformed the anti-Ferdinand forces. A pan-European victory for Ferdinand II now became impossible. In a few months the Swedes did so much damage to the Imperial forces that even Gustavus’s death in battle in 1632 could not change the situation – and what became a rapidly deepening French involvement was way beyond Ferdinand’s strength, even when he was allied to Spain.

The sheer complexity of the war drove it forward, with individual countries making peace terms only to be replaced by others. Semi-independent mercenary armies ravaged the countryside and the Swedes moved from Protestant heroes to violent and extortionist menace. Death in Eger

In the later stages of the Thirty Years War the dynasty finally and conclusively settled in Vienna. Exhausted by seemingly endless fighting, on the verge of bankruptcy, Ferdinand III sat in his austere, bad-news Viennese court and somehow ended up staying. Prague, in many ways a more imposing city and with plenty of office space honeycombing the Castle Hill, was too tainted, both with Rudolf’s weirdness and as a former nest of heresy. There never seem to have been any discussions about moving to somewhere more Imperial and less Habsburg – one of the obvious German cities such as Regensburg or Nuremburg or Frankfurt. The shift from Prague to Vienna, some two hundred miles further south-east, meant the archducal family lands were what really mattered and gave the Habsburgs a decisively eastern focus.

It is generally reckoned that the Habsburg court was not much fun. Most gallingly it had very much less money than its seventeenth-century French rival, where state-of-the-art palaces would fill up with perfumed courtiers lightly tapping their gloved fingers together in appreciation of all the coloured fountains, special drinks, peacock-strewn parterres and mirrored halls being laid on for them. Indeed, the relentless Habsburg emphasis on prayer could have just been filling up some of the moneyless stretches of time. It certainly made a different aesthetic, with the Hofburg as a whole always having the air of cheerless functionality it keeps today.

Emperors could be in danger of becoming trapped in this machinery. From an anally retentive chamberlain’s point of view the court performed like some brocade-trimmed orrery, with the annual sequences of religious festivals evenly rotating round and intersecting with the daily sequences of meals, prayers, audiences and council meetings. If the Emperor were to just sit there like Father Christmas this would be fatal, and the unaccountable gesture (a sudden demand for music, an act of spectacular and spontaneous generosity, a decision to go riding in the Prater) was critical both to keeping everyone sane and to illustrating the Emperor’s ungovernable nature.

A huge amount of card-playing and dice games filled up the court’s time. This kept everyone happy by creating patches of the day (like listening to opera) during which the Emperor did not need to talk to anyone. Surrounded by odd-looking ambassadors, professional toadies and drunken former military heroes day in day out, the Emperor was constantly obliged to find reasons for not engaging, not promising anything to yet another of an effectively infinite supply of supplicants.

Under the intolerable shadow of the 1940s it is extremely hard but necessary to reimagine a world of sometimes violent and yet not genocidal oppression. In his general ban on all forms of religion in the Empire except Catholicism, even Ferdinand II made an exception for Judaism. The Jewish communities were as ancient as, often far more ancient than, any other settler group in Central Europe, and they held a place of confused respect because of their crucial role in the Christian story. Jews could not be understood simply as heretics if they shared the religion of Jesus himself and they fell into a quite separate category from simple evil-doers such as Muslims. But this category was nonetheless not an enviable one, with Jewish ‘stubbornness’ and engagement in businesses forbidden to Christians (such as money-lending) making their presence intermittently unacceptable and with the threat of massacre or expulsion always waiting in the wings.

What is striking throughout the arguments about the right place for Jews in society is that the Jews themselves were never consulted. The Emperor and his advisers, generally key Catholic notables, were driven by an odd mixture of piety and efficiency, but almost never by curiosity. The actual needs of Jews were not relevant to their decisions. There was a scholastic strand which valued the Jews almost as living fossils.

The Pope’s bull attacking the Treaty of Westphalia’s religious toleration clauses was simply ignored and he was increasingly viewed as just the inept ruler of a backward Italian state. The anomaly of the Pope’s still being an elected and generally quite elderly figure also caused problems – in the seventeenth century the papacy appeared almost a revolving door for semi-cadavers, with twelve popes in the saddle as against only five Emperors. These men avoided the low comedy of corruption, stabbings and poison enjoyed by their predecessors and were in some cases intelligent and thoughtful figures, but they seldom had much control over events and the world twisted and turned in ways which they were unable to catch up with. None of this is to deny the spectacular vibrancy and aggression of Catholicism itself in the century and a half between the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution, but this was achieved with the Pope’s acquiescence rather than through his leadership.

They did not have the sort of Gestapo function of the Inquisition, and indeed always kept a distance from that bizarre body, the Society having suffered from investigation itself in its early days. But they did have a deep contempt for other Christian variants, let alone other religions, and pursued ruthlessly any form of intellectual backsliding – generally through teaching and exhortation rather than the rack and thumb-screw. Their churches, often the greatest examples of baroque decoration, may seem to us headache-inducing explosions of gold paint and cherubs, but this Jesuit feeling of emotional excess was all in the service of teaching, and needed the images of exemplary lives and events that littered the ceilings and side-chapels. Above all, they had the Virgin Mary, a figure of extraordinary power whose cult could not really be countered by Protestants, who were left looking rather male and wooden.

As the eighteenth century progressed, the Jesuits became ever more hemmed-in by enemies. Their intellectual methods were reduced to tatters by the influence of figures as varied as Descartes and Pascal and just as the papacy had become viewed as an unacceptable type of rival by many secular rulers, so the Society’s transnational nature made it ever more anomalous. In a catastrophic period, it was first expelled from Portugal in 1759 and then from most of the rest of Europe by 1773. A great, curious and brilliant organization had come to an end, its muted re-creation in 1814 rendering it into a far more normal and minor part of European society.

It is striking that despite the crushing of the original siege army, the Ottomans were still able to mobilize a vast stream of replacements and the following decades probably marked Europe’s heaviest level of militarization to that date. In a sequence of sieges and battles of overwhelming brutality these Ottoman relief armies were destroyed one by one and Central Europe fell into Habsburg hands. The ethnic balance of the region was completely changed. Muslims who had lived there for many generations fled with the retreating fragments of their armies; massacres cleared out whole towns; mosques were destroyed. Buda, substantially Muslim and Jewish, became a Christian city, in a series of barely recorded horrors.

An early eighteenth-century map shows just how awful the region must have been to operate in. The lack of features, the sheer relentless flat marshiness north of the river, meant there was no point that could be defended and a trapped army could starve to death or be wracked by malaria with little intervention needed from the enemy. The sheer, wild ungovernability of the Danube can even now still be seen in the chillingly alien bogs visible from the Sremski Karlovci bus – an unpassable mess of water, mud and thick reeds, itself a relatively tiny residue of what dominated the area before nineteenth-century drainage and canalization.

The triumph of the West therefore perversely released a huge wave of Catholic intolerance on these religiously patchwork territories. This renewed religious intolerance had begun even before the Siege of Vienna with increasing discrimination against Protestants in Royal Hungary – leading, in a spectacular piece of cruel lunacy, to hundreds of Protestant pastors being sold to Naples as galley-slaves.

Each rebellion was damaged by the fatal quietism of so much of the Hungarian nobility. No matter how severe the emergency the nation always refused to do as it was told and never rose up as it was supposed

The rebellions did just enough to ensure that the Habsburgs would always treat Hungary as a separate state – but in every other way were a disaster, leaving huge areas as a wilderness of burned-out estates, castles and towns, with many dispossessed families and a depopulation as bad as in the areas fought over with the Ottomans. They offered too the first taste of post-liberation ethnic tension, as many Serbs chose to rally to the Habsburgs rather than the rebels, making it clear that an external ruler could, through careful distribution of favours and punishments, keep in play antagonisms that made successful uprisings impossible.

Leopold was one of the very few of his family who managed to get the yin and yang of his duties about right – balancing his role as Emperor and his role as ruler of the Habsburg lands. This distinction, between Reich and Österreich, was often forgotten, not least by the Emperors themselves.

This sense of tedium, of endless bowing and scraping, of ritual hand-kissing, of special clothes for court, of pretty compliments, was in practice interrupted the whole time, but these and the endless masses were the backdrop against which the Emperor took his decisions. He met his council, his key generals, his confessor (a crucial but now wholly mysterious figure), members of his family, but all the time the final say on any important subject lay with him alone. He sat at the hub of this highly complex but thoroughly wobbly wheel while large stretches of Europe waited.

Leopold was effective at using his Imperial position to horse-trade and took two decisions crucial to the future of Europe. The first was to allow Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Elector of Brandenburg, in return for support in fighting Louis, to become a king. This was a startling change – the only people called king in the Empire were all Habsburgs (two of the Emperor’s titles: King of Bohemia and German King; the other owned by his heir: King of the Romans), otherwise it was all a rubble of princes, knights, burgraves and what not. Friedrich Wilhelm may have been called by the strange title of ‘King in Prussia’ (it was changed to of after the whole of Polish Prussia fell into his hands), but it still provided a unique status and glamour for the family who would become the Habsburgs’ nemesis. Almost as significantly Leopold agreed to make the north-west German ruler Ernst August, who fought in the Turkish wars, an Elector. This was a momentous change and one much resented by other rulers in the Empire, who only agreed to verify it after Ernst August’s death.

If you have effectively infinite money and nobody to tell you what to do, is that fun? Generally these are walls we cannot look over. The sheer oddness for the Emperor of having public and private roles almost perfectly overlaying each other is beyond imagining. He lived out most of the day in symbolic duties both secular and religious and was circled by men whose sole task it was to make sure he was wearing the right diadem, pendant or decorative cape. He had an acute personal awareness of precedence and the degree to which a simple exchange of words in public with a given individual would be viewed as a sign of potentially life-changing honour.

Perhaps the real reason for valuing some of the Habsburg family was as commissioners of beautiful things. The great collectors have left a boggling legacy. It is the most obvious source of enjoyment to us today and these things must have been enjoyed by their initiators in a way or degree closed to others. Areas of expertise such as the collecting of small, fine objects – coins, jewels, intaglios, seals – are by definition based around holding them in the hand.

Perhaps the other major and mysterious aspect of private artistic pleasure was music. There was a whole world of public music – fanfares, marches, mass settings, associated with the different Imperial and archducal offices – and these were regularly updated, with the result that earlier generations of music tended to just moulder in cupboards.

It is a shame that the almost apostolic succession of musical greatness is so relentlessly established, as there are so many wonders that fell out of circulation for the simplest reasons of function and fashion.

Cesti’s peculiar status, a Franciscan monk writing operas about the ancient gods, is a good example of an important but very baffling aspect of court life across Europe, certainly from the fifteenth century and in many ways not really expiring fully until the nineteenth century. How was it possible to square a triumphant, militant and no-nonsense Holy Trinity with all these palaces being cluttered up with people like Jupiter?

Everywhere in the Habsburg lands the classical gods and their helpers have almost as secure a presence as their modern, jealous and notionally monotheistic replacement, God. They writhe in fountains, hold up doorways, festoon ceilings.

Each European dynasty had its own interest in classical imagery, but in the Roman festival the link is very clear: that despite being based in Prague and Vienna for many years, the Habsburg family remained true to the original fib of Charlemagne, that they ruled an empire that had its legitimacy from ancient Rome, and that being King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor, despite the awkwardness of not directly ruling Rome, was part of their job description. Classical imagery therefore could not have been more appropriate, once shorn carefully of any actual religious value.

The Emperors tended to see themselves as Jupiter. Their double-headed eagle symbol, on endless flags, allegories and walls across the Holy Roman Empire, could be seen as the Roman eagle (a claim of descent it shared with the similar Russian eagle) and Jupiter in the form of an eagle. The Habsburgs owned it as Emperors, but they brazenly pinched it after Napoleon (another eagle) destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and they managed to get the eagle to set up shop in Vienna as simply their personal symbol. This eagle hovers over everything from prints of victorious Habsburg battlefields to witless fireworks displays in Rome. It was one of those intangible yet powerful indicators of legitimacy which are hard mentally or emotionally to recapture once a dynasty has collapsed, the potency of the two being so closely intertwined.

The pillars at the Strait were supposed to have carved on them Non plus ultra (‘Nothing beyond this’). So Charles took as his motto Plus ultra (in effect ‘Go further’) to boast that his subjects had passed the Straits and conquered the New World. In other words he had exceeded Hercules and laid claim to be the law-giver not just of Europe but of perhaps the whole planet. These formed part of the heraldic battery that so spooked his opponents and added to the sense of limitless Habsburg power.

Very oddly Plus ultra remains the national motto of Spain, featuring on the royal coat of arms when, perhaps, some adjustment should have been made for changed circumstances

All hereditary rulers face the same blood-freezing problem: of being inescapably and for every moment of each day both the key political actor and the symbolic heart of a vast sequence of ritual – personal, religious, dynastic – by which that political role is made valid. This implacable orrery only ceases to function at the ruler’s death – and only then in the sense that the ruler himself is no longer able to appreciate the actions of the thousands of individuals who are engaging in a further series of actions, like singing in a sad way, or burying his body, heart and guts in three different Vienna locations.

The reason I mention this at best tangential story is that it has always raised in my mind interesting thoughts about the nature of change in religious settings – the tension between a church building’s authority being based around a sense of its unchanging, indomitable sanctity and the need, keenly felt at particular times and in specific cultures, to radically overhaul and renew. This is a particular problem for Catholicism, which invests so heavily in images, while at the other end of the spectrum Protestantism in some flavours can be close to indifferent, with churches merely seen as roofs under which to pray.

Charles VI might have been a dreary and unpleasant man, but he is aesthetically the most interesting of the Habsburgs by miles. A striking patron of major buildings, he encouraged a form of ‘representation’ which has not really been seen since. Later libraries or churches or palaces may be more practical, but each seems a diminution of what was confected across the Habsburg lands in the early eighteenth century.

There is almost no large-scale architecture of a later date to look at, and it is fair to say that with the end of this frenzied round of rebuilding there is a cooling-off of ambition and confidence, both within the Habsburg family itself and within a Catholicism which was as the eighteenth century progressed once more put under siege.

The chief aim of the Habsburg monarchy during the weary twenty-nine years of Charles VI’s rule was to persuade Europe’s rulers to sign the document which would permit female inheritance. Known as the Pragmatic Sanction, it was perhaps the most useless document ever dreamed

As usual, political and dynastic tone has very little to do with artistic tone. This was the era of great architects – Prandtauer, Hildebrandt, Fischer von Erlach, father and son; great painters – Rottmayr, Gran and Troger, who between them made Austrian ceiling frescoes into wonderlands; and heroic sculptors including Matielli and Moll. Balthasar Moll was originally employed as a talented maker of public entertainments – floats, zany sledges and so on – but then used his Disney-like talents to make Charles VI and his wife Elisabeth Christine into the absolute star turns once they were down in the Imperial Vault. Posthumous fame is not ideal, but all the gloom and failure of the reign itself can be swept away by these two great decorated bronze caskets.

Silesia in the right hands was extraordinarily valuable – in the Habsburgs’ it allowed them to threaten Brandenburg; in Brandenburgs’ it made the Habsburg lands vulnerable; in either case it separated Saxony from Poland and fatally weakened that relationship. It undoubtedly had a large and economically worthwhile population, but given how many thousands of lives were lost struggling for it and the wider wars which drew in almost every country in Europe, Silesia became ever more of an abstraction. In the nineteenth century its value as an industrial zone was considerable, but it was rapidly overtaken by the Ruhr, and its eventual reabsorption into Poland in 1945 was accompanied by much suffering but little international interest.

Habsburg territories, however, like the blue whale (I’ll now drop this) have only a single element in which to operate – in their case: land. As an accidental and tacked-together cluster of hereditary possessions sprawled across Europe the potential vulnerabilities are almost infinite and the neighbours unavoidable. Britain’s only consistent interests have been to keep the European coast opposite Kent and Essex weak or friendly and allow nobody to invade Ireland – beyond this Britain could dip in and out of continental affairs as it wished. The Habsburgs never had such a pick-and-mix option.

The year 1740 was a supreme challenge for the Habsburgs, but it was also something they were used to. Being surrounded by numerous, changeable kings and dukes seems like an unworkably vulnerable and head-spinning nightmare to us, but for them it was normal.

Britain was often a valued Habsburg ally and source of money, but it was also a mischievous outsider whose obsession with what it saw as the ‘balance of power’ tended to mean a manipulation of short-term allies to ensure a Europe mutually weakened in ways which allowed Britain to get on with its own imperial projects undisturbed by any would-be European hegemon. So the rather exciting British story in the eighteenth century tends to be contrasted with the sheer, stultifying inconclusiveness of European fighting – an inconclusiveness that Britain itself encouraged.

The military intricacies of the War of the Austrian Succession are famously soporific. A quick glance at one of those monuments favoured in the eighteenth century, of heaped military trophies looked down upon by the uncaring figures of Time and Fame, gives much the same effect as slogging through hundreds of pages about glum sieges with people marching about in wigs.

These manoeuvres between Germans and Hungarians (with other minorities effectively invisible through overwhelming legal disabilities, religious isolation and illiteracy – a situation that would soon change) gave a recognizably more modern form to the Habsburg lands. In many ways it was not until the nineteenth century that the Hungarian regions became fully settled again and this enormous, cellular, diurnal process has to be imagined ticking away in the background.

A visit to the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna is in many ways a disappointing and confusing experience. Here is the heart of the Habsburg world – a sumptuous summer residence expressing both grandeur and leisure. And yet even a completist such as me cannot get very excited by the building itself.

Wandering around Maria Theresa’s rooms one has a niggling feeling that the Habsburgs are getting a bit tone deaf when commissioning artists and decorators – with a bit more cash and a lot more taste everything could have been so much better. This frustration evaporates once outside, where it becomes possible to appreciate the beauty of the palace building itself, but even more to enjoy the amazing grounds.

Joseph II himself exemplified this move towards a more intellectual Church. Often wrongly thought of as anti-Catholic, he simply wished to sweep away the dirty clutter of superstition and peeling gilt that made places like Melk seem deeply old-fashioned by the time of Maria Theresa’s death in 1780.

The Catholic Church – an institution in every way the ideological partner of the monarchy – was thrown into chaos by a great heap of edicts from Joseph.

The Catholic Church was a landowner on a vast scale, owning half of Carniola and at least a third of Moravia: Joseph was driven mad with rage by what he viewed as idle ecclesiastical land and grabbed whatever he could. It was a truly revolutionary act, and it was one which would prove to have an unexpected and devastating effect on the rest of the Holy Roman Empire.