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young French king Charles VIII that he would be sure of a warm welcome if he tried to invade and take over Naples. This initiated a
is fair to say that Francis hated Charles. A series of outrageous bribes, funded by the Fugger family in Augsburg, had allowed Charles to become Holy Roman Emperor despite Francis’s best efforts to make himself Maximilian’s successor. We will never know the private arguments among the Electors – Maximilian may
marched and countermarched and in a cataclysmic encounter Francis’ army was utterly defeated by the Imperial–Spanish force, with Francis suffering the humiliation, extremely rare among monarchs, of being personally captured. This was the early high point of Charles’s
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.
plain south of Mohács in southern Hungary is a perfect example of why visiting battlefields is a waste of time.
imagine the twenty-five thousand Hungarian troops’ catastrophic interaction with fifty-five thousand Ottoman ones on the afternoon of 29 August 1526 as they moved across the fields and woods, particularly
The king, Lajos II, fled the field and was either killed or drowned, the subject of numerous later Hungarian paintings, generally showing a poignantly futile figure in brilliant armour and ostrich feathers being hauled from a stream. In the somnolent nearby town of Mohács there is an excellent modern sculpture of the unfortunate
only oddity being that Lajos is shown as worn and grizzled rather than what he really
was, a neurotic, uncertain and twerpy twenty-year-old.
defeat for Christendom which buried swathes of the Balkans under Turkish rule for centuries, but for contemporaries
The only hope in facing the Ottomans lay in unified action, but this never happened. Throughout the long emergency
sultan’s troops went off to Egypt or Persia, everyone in Europe seems to have relaxed, clapped their hands to get the court musicians
Ştepan the Great of Moldavia, had bought time, but Ştepan found himself as much threatened by Poles and Hungarians as by the Turks. He eventually concluded that
Ottoman forces working their way through the map of Europe could be heard – Venice forced out of her Aegean islands, Montenegro surrendering in 1499, Rhodes giving out after a heroic siege in 1522 … But the
Cold War border and indeed the trees seem to cut off the area like the spell in Sleeping Beauty. But it is also a great linguistic border, bitterly fought over
an event immortalized in any number of poems, novels and histories and by perhaps the most magnificent of all the great historicist paintings in Hungary’s National Gallery, Johann Peter Krafft’s Zrínyi’s Last Charge – a brilliantly coloured cataclysm with fiendish, orc-like Turks cringeing, gawping and tumbling to their deaths before the sheer tangerine-and-scarlet beauty of Zrínyi’s costume.
1521 he was face to face with Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, whether he was thinking more about the perils of heresy or about the almost unimaginable great shiploads
Charles’s enterprises sprawled crazily in every conceivable direction, with his 1535 invasion of Tunis being funded by tons of gold extorted from the Great Inca. He presided over a staggering increase in the range
area taken up by Henry VIII’s England tuckable into a small part of Central America. Francis I has always
much condemned for his Christianity-betraying alliance with the Ottomans, but really
In Regensburg to attend a meeting of the Imperial diet, Charles slept with the daughter of a local burgher. The result, a bastard son who grew up to become Don John of Austria, commanded the fleet that destroyed the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto, long after Charles’s death. So even in his down time he was shaping the world’s history.
The history of Protestantism simply cannot be disentangled from Charles’s own prominence and power. He faced off against Luther at Worms
How better to resist such a man than by embracing Protestantism? 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
Even the famous portrait Charles commissioned from Titian to mark
those painted boards at the seaside, he has
Central Europe there was a sudden change not unlike that of 1918 or the end of the Cold War in 1989, with a broad coalescence around the idea that the status
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
Not entirely unlike the Communist revolutions of 1917–19, there was a sense of being part of a wave of the future. With both Protestants and Catholics proclaiming a universal truth, the success of the former dismayed
ignored in places such as Spain and Italy, embraced confusedly in England and in the end scornfully rejected by both the Habsburgs and the kings of France. As the New Jerusalem stubbornly failed to turn up, Protestant doctrine
Lajos II of Hungary had parents born in Poland and France and Charles V himself united all kinds of strange pan-European flavours.
(like the once great thrones of Hungary and Bohemia) total absorption.
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.
women in portrait after portrait appear to have a sort of awful pink shoe attached to their lower faces. He also seems to have been crushed by the same melancholy that ravaged both his mother’s and his grandfather’s sides of the family and which would again emerge among his descendants, most famously in his great-nephew (and grandson!) Rudolf II. Europe was now
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
Scotland and Transylvania. It also fudged the problem of Catholic religious territories. In a jaw-dropping coup back in 1525 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, the Hohenzollern Prince Albert of Prussia, had spent long hours talking with Luther and searching his soul before coming
Henry VIII, for example, realized that if he made a leap like Albert’s he could cash in his old wife, get a delightful new one and grab all his kingdom’s monastic property for himself: to break with the Pope certainly seemed something worth thinking about.
In yet another total surprise the fifteen-year-old Edward VI of England suddenly died and his much older sister, the very Catholic Mary I, became queen. Charles arranged for her to marry his son Philip. Philip’s role in England was carefully hedged about but it is generally forgotten
grand pronouncements, he gave Burgundy to Philip in October 1555, Spain to Philip in January the following year (plus of course the Americas), the Franche-Comté (the confusing, separate ‘County of Burgundy’ as opposed to the Duchy) to Philip in April and the job of Holy Roman Emperor to Ferdinand (who already owned the Habsburg hereditary lands as well as being King of Bohemia and King of Hungary) in September. As with many other Habsburg subdivisions there
Philip II in Madrid was undoubtedly the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. Spain’s culture had a decisive influence
the rich, sombre gloominess of its court totally shaped Vienna’s atmosphere into the eighteenth century, and Vienna had in turn little impact on Madrid. Maximilian II lived at the Spanish court for years before
became Emperor and his son and successor Rudolf II was raised there. There was a sense in which the Austrian lands were a bit of a backwater – a dreary fighting...
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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
So Maximilian II married Philip II’s sister Maria (so that makes them first cousins) and later Philip II married Anna, one of Maximilian’s children (that makes him her uncle!). Mercifully there then followed a group of bachelor or outlying Emperors, but the two branches were back intermarrying by the 1630s with catastrophic
perhaps the most beautifully designed boots in European history – sneers at posterity. It was Ferdinand Karl’s sudden early death, followed by his younger brother’s
now a cultural backwater after a long golden period that stretched at least from Maximilian I’s great funerary statue array to Ferdinand Karl’s composers.
political absurdities as Schaumburg-Lippe or Hohenlohe-Weikersheim it is with a little cry
arbitrary chunks as the Sundgau (a very ancient family possession – part of Alsace) that made the Habsburgs into a western European power, building in a core Habsburg–French animosity. But perhaps the key point of this book is to shelter the reader from topics such as ‘the strategic value of the Sundgau’, although, naturally, they do have their own fascination.
Most of the Sundgau and other scraps were later handed over to the Duke of Baden and King of Württemberg by Napoleon, and at the Congress of Vienna the Austrians decided they needed these rulers’ good will and would not ask for Further Austria to be handed back. The one exception was the small chunk of land at the end of Lake Constance – the Vorarlberg – with its main town of Bregenz, which stayed on as a western extension of the Tyrol. This region made no further contribution
European culture was most fluid and creative – the German-speaking Ferdinand Karl had followed his father’s example by marrying a member of the Medici family and the German–Italian blend of Innsbruck is exactly what would be expected. In
Indeed Ferdinand himself married a very beautiful commoner whose sons were not allowed to inherit, and a late second marriage only produced daughters, so his own death ended this one patch of Tyrolean independence. Ferdinand had
