Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

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. A 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. These men (with names like ‘Baron Klein’) were unthreatening confidants, jesters and factotums, their size making clear their distance from the real world of high-rank noblemen. Indeed the dwarves must have been among the few who could kick back and relax at court, with most of its other members mere parts in a grinding machinery of precedence, cap-doffing, bows, curtsies and stylized movements fetishizingly borrowed from Madrid.