Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

sheer chaos of Prague in this period, its streets thick with mountebanks, zanies, mercenaries from the Turkish wars, religious fanatics of every stripe, zoo-keepers, exotically dressed ambassadors and even the occasional serious scientist.

His father, the amiable crypto-Protestant Maximilian II, was buried in Prague and Rudolf decided

secretive, changeable, swinging between bouts of Imperial activism and total lethargy. He shared with his English

His five brothers also failed to

after 1600 or so Rudolf withdrew from serious decision-making, with the unique result that Habsburg solidarity totally broke down. But this only happened because Rudolf

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 inspiration for his collections

pride of Philip’s collection, Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, a sort

with his uncle Ferdinand of Tyrol and so would have enjoyed the sensational guided tour available there. Once

had settled in Prague Castle,

for heaping up room after room of Stuff, but until his final decade there is a clear sense of someone

banking family, the Fuggers, had

exotic creatures brought in by enterprising Dutch ships, and soon Prague Castle was full of extraordinary exotica – macaws, lories, lovebirds and cockatoos all shivering away in their bleak new homeland. Rudolf had a ...

Two traumatized ostriches made the journey from Africa to Venice and then up through the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck and then, ultimately, to Prague. None of these creatures, unsurprisingly, lasted long.

seems introvert to the

point of stasis have been such

This can be the only explanation for his having a lion and a tiger which wandered around Prague Castle more or less as they wished. For

celebrating the key regal events in Rudolf’s life: coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Regensburg, marching through Pressburg (Bratislava) as King of Hungary and through Prague as King of Bohemia. The last panel shows him as victor over the Turks which,

In 1591 the Ottoman frontier became vigorously active once more with the fall of the key Hungarian fortresses of Komárom, on the Danube, and Győr, seventy-five miles from Vienna. A significant but highly misleading raid at Sisak in 1593, principally involving Croatian troops, resulted in an Ottoman defeat and the first hint that the implacable enemy might in fact be placable. Determined to recover from this humiliation, Sultan Murad III declared war on Rudolf and initiated a wearying and horrible conflict that lasted for thirteen years. The initial coalition (brought together

1606 Peace of Zsitvatorok ended the wretched conflict, signed by Murad’s successor Ahmed and Rudolf’s younger brother Archduke Matthias.

The Star Hunting Lodge, in what is now a suburb of Prague, was built by Rudolf II’s uncle, the man who became the great Castle Ambras collector Ferdinand of Tyrol. When still a teenager he was appointed Governor of Bohemia by his father, the Emperor Ferdinand I, and he needed a rural base. There is even his sketch showing

Ferdinand and his older brother the Emperor Maximilian II and then Rudolf used it for hunting and entertainments. In

By the end of the century Maximilian II and Maria of Spain’s once prize-winning phalanx of nine Habsburg children was not what

alarmingly Philip III of Spain, who could claim the whole lot through being the son of one of Maximilian II’s daughters, or Ferdinand, the ruler in Graz, whose father was another of Maximilian’s offspring.

The peculiarly belligerent and quarrelsome Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Passau (and younger brother of Archduke Ferdinand in Graz) came to Rudolf’s aid. An engraving in the Prague City Museum shows the

In one of the most imaginative meditations on Rudolf II, in 1922, Karel Čapek wrote the play The

Makropoulos Case, quickly turned into a strange and marvellous opera by Janáček. The story

(Transylvania is a Latinized version of the Magyar Erdély: beyond the woods). Some of these seven towns thrived, others

It is, of course, almost impossible not to think of these Germans in terrible 1940s terms, with ‘Krakau’ as capital

the Nazi General-Government. Of

is visible still in many late-nineteenth-century photos of Habsburg villages: a messy communal zone for geese, chickens, ducks and fruit trees, and perfect for riding through on a horse. Every house was a miniature factory for turning

The impatient younger court around Ferdinand of Styria was a clear example of generational

Schloss Eggenberg, home of one of his most dankly

smaller Austrian territories he already ruled – Styria, Carniola and Carinthia – were by now

summer of 1618 saw the Defenestration of Prague, with Catholic councillors sent by Ferdinand flung out of a window of Prague Castle by enraged Protestant nobles, surviving only because their

deposed Ferdinand as their king and asked the young Frederick, Elector of the Palatinate, to become the new ruler of independent, and no longer Habsburg Bohemia.

clear to the Bohemians that breaking from the Habsburgs (who had ruled them for a century) and the Empire (whose constitution they were messing up completely) could not

Ferdinand opted unsurprisingly for war. Matthias died in March 1619, Ferdinand was crowned Emperor in Frankfurt in September and his rival Frederick was crowned as the usurper King of Bohemia in Prague in November.

is a sad contemporary cartoon showing the two-tailed heraldic

Bohemian Lion

trapped in a thicket of thorns. Along comes the new king Frederick, clad in terrific clothes and a stylish hat, to release the Lion, pull out the thorns and nurse it back to health. T...

fop from the Palatinate. Even England & Scotland, where Frederick’s father-in-law, the weird James I & VI, ruled were nervous and unsympathetic

painfully lopsided Battle of the White Mountain, the Bohemian army was destroyed and Bohemia disappeared under the same bleak, ferocious rule Ferdinand had imposed in Styria. The mainly Czech-speaking upper class were forced to convert or go into exile. In horrifying scenes, Prague’s Old Town Square was the site

German-speaking Catholic carpetbaggers who swept in grabbing all the castles were never able to extinguish Czech, but they came close. Of course, there were many much older German communities scattered across Bohemia, but it was after the Battle of the White Mountain that German became the language of bureaucracy and command, seemingly as terminally as in Austria or Bavaria. A great medieval kingdom was stubbed out and reduced

Holy Hut of Loreto – with one for Brno too – which still wackily dominates the area behind the Castle’s aristocratic quarter today.

St Vitus’s Cathedral in Prague. Despite the battering

the altar, preserving the new regime’s view of Frederick’s brief reign. One of the panels is interesting

but routine, showing the Calvinists in Frederick’s entourage demolishing sacred images inside the cathedral. But this is nothing compared to the

same carver’s astonishing panorama of the whole of Prague: a bristling mass of glowering, contemptuous church towers looking down on a tiny, almost invisible procession of mer...

secured the rest of the Habsburg inheritance and regalvanized the role of Emperor in a way not imagined since the time of Charles V. Under Rudolf II the

Emperor’s principal warlord, Generalissimo Albrecht von Wallenstein, conjured up armies on a scale not seen in Europe