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off the cultural trail rather than just on the skiing trail, as Ferdinand’s home, Schloss Ambras,
Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the greatest event in Ferdinand’s lifetime, when the forces of the Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet and ended the Turks’ psychological death-grip.
who more than balance all the pious timeservers who congest the family tree – a figure up
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
based at Graz,
sheer awfulness of front-line life is preserved in a remarkable wall-painting on the outside of the cathedral in the Styrian city of Graz. The year 1480 had been so grim that it was felt appropriate to pay the painter Thomas of Villach to commemorate
make sense to move somewhere a bit nicer and the Graz authorities constantly had to battle to keep an adequate population in place. This was done by lavishing the most remarkable privileges on those who could be persuaded to move there, with land, money and prestige in return for a high level of military readiness. Many refugees from Ottoman-held Serbia and Bosnia moved, sometimes in large groups,
so brutally unmixed in 1992.
and alarm
Rome, where he was a key figure in the city’s sack in 1527, a
leverage anyway with Senj. Unfortunately, Uskok proclamations about destroying the commerce of the Muslim infidel in the name of Jesus tended to provoke hollow mirth in the Venetian Republic. The Uskoks – like reformed alcoholics brought
ports further up the Adriatic, such as Rijeka,
for ostrich feathers – to Istria, where Habsburg merchants sold them on to the highly specialized group in Venice who dealt in ostrich feathers, presumably the
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.
Rudolf II and his allies in 1593 initiated what became known as ‘the Long War’, a wearying grind that embittered and disappointed
layer of horror came from a rebellion by Hungarian aristocrats against Habsburg rule, provoked both by a dourly unintelligent policy of re-Catholicizing Royal Hungary and by a continuing feeling that the Habsburgs were simply not legitimate – that
It could be argued that until the Ottomans were finally pushed back in the late seventeenth century the frontier never really stabilized. Graz
many functions of the monasteries that dot Carinthia and Slovenia was to take in thousands of traumatized refugees that might follow a successful Ottoman incursion.
From their principal bases at Sarajevo, Belgrade and Buda, none of which was seriously threatened by the Habsburgs until the late seventeenth century,
dullness perked up by ballads about the quintessential Uskok Ivo Senjanin and the Hajduk Mijat Tomić, hammer of the Turks. These figures have enjoyed a fresh life
huge cleft filled by the crowded red roofs of the town of Český Krumlov: a switchback bend in the lacquer-black Vltava River and a glowering cliff on which is heaped a castle complex of ineffable charisma.
On the whole castles tend to have more impact in the imagination than in real life. Kafka’s castle or Sleeping Beauty’s or Gormenghast are all in their different ways far more extensive and spooky and to be savoured in a way unrelated to disadvantaged actual buildings, where the walls are never quite
Franz Ferdinand’s old castle at Konopiště
sixteenth century, when the Rožmberk family did a deal with the infinitely rich and greedy Orsini family, who in return for some money allowed the Rožmberks to pretend
of orso being Italian for bear. Presumably a Rožmberk would gesture
the pleasures of Český Krumlov really are almost too great. It is still not really part of anyone’s consciousness even though it has been easy to visit since 1989. The whole area of southern Bohemia was thinly settled and mainly German-speaking – Egon Schiele’s mother came from the town and he lived there for a time, creating some of his most wonderful pictures. Like many Bohemian castles, Český
battled for four centuries to deal with an Ottoman enemy which, until the later seventeenth century, seemed unbeatable, and which was only finally expelled
terrible Bosnian War of the early 1990s, these topics had a sickening relevance as
Albanians and Bosnians in the late seventeenth century. In the wake of Habsburg battlefield setbacks some two hundred thousand Orthodox Serbs moved north into Hungary, leaving empty lands filled by new Albanian emigrants, thereby creating the Kosovo issue which has dogged post-Cold War Europe – but these were only two of many confusing shifts, as Romanians
Transylvania and north-west into the Banat; Bulgarians and Albanians moved west and east respectively; and Jews, Vlachs and Gypsies migrated, split and changed identity in often barely recorded ways. Attempts
This unmanageable confusion is perhaps summed up by Buda, which by the seventeenth century was, far from being the unsinkable bastion of Magyardom, a predominantly Serb-speaking Bosnian Muslim town, leavened by a few
Turkmenistan, who generally formed elite groups across the region.
great Ottoman centres in Edirne, Istanbul and Bursa. Military service also shifted groups – so that, for instance,
So Doğancis raised hunting falcons, Bulgarian Voynuks raised horses for the Imperial palace, Derbencis guarded mountain passes and bridges, and so on – all with very
prominent in western European minds were the Martolos, who manned
the Morlachs, a group hotly contested by various nationalists, otherwise described as Vlachs. They seem originally to have been pastoralists, surviving the
Slav invasions of the Dark Ages as shepherds in the higher hills, and maintaining their Latin-influenced
descended from Roman legionaries from Morocco, settled in Illyria in the ancient days. As the Vlachs never had reason to write
Constantinople and could not therefore imagine a context for independence, but in 1691 the Serbs managed to persuade the Emperor Leopold I to give them a church headquarters in Slavonia (the lovely town of Sremski Karlovci) which through
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
Szigetvár, site of one of the great immolatory encounters between Hungarians and Ottomans, there are still occasional scraps of
minarets, turbaned officials and camels filling Belgrade or Sarajevo or Pećs. Pećs is even now still surrounded by the descendants of the fig trees planted by the Ottomans.
Budapest has become much less Turkish through two huge changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the switch from a cuisine based on mutton to one based on beef – chewing through the huge new Hungarian herds of cattle – and the spread of the espresso machine, which did so much to push to one side Turkish-style coffee. Perhaps the only major remaining Ottoman legacy is the bathhouse.
destruction of the bridge at Mostar or the targeting of the Orient Institute in Sarajevo. These were attempts to deny the legitimacy of Muslims
beautiful culture which ruled much of south-east Europe for far longer than any of its successor states.
Natural History Museum in Vienna is a small glass jar containing a basilisk preserved in spirits. It is of course a fake,
court of Rudolf II, located
became the greatest locus for strangeness and magic in the later sixteenth century. Some of this reputation is undeserved, a
Europe with similar obsessions, but somehow all the wizardly and alchemical preoccupations of the period have long been imaginatively delegated to Rudolf’s Prague.
What are we to make of the Steganographica of Trithemius, Ficino’s translation of the Hermetica, Hermes Trismegistus’s Emerald Tablet, Paracelsus’s Archidoxa, or the sickening Picatrix, a compendium of Persian and Arabic spells viewed for many years as too dangerous to transfer from manuscript to printed form? We
