Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

the Roman Empire. With his Jesuit friends baying and convulsing with

Gustavus Adolphus and his Swedish army arrived in northern Germany to change Europe’s history. ‘His divine name will be

Bethlen Gábor, the Calvinist ruler of Transylvania who is probably unique in being enshrined in British histories

his name in the correct Hungarian sequence (surname first, Christian name second) – but out of sheer ignorance rather

used by Puritans to contrast with the supine policy of James I. Bethlen’s principality formed one of the two surviving Christian-held remnants of the old Kingdom of Hungary, carved out of the disaster of the Ottoman invasion a century before. Both parts had ‘East Germany’ problems in being viewed by the rival half as illegitimate and quisling. Royal Hungary was under Habsburg rule while Transylvania was a semi-independent Ottoman vassal state. The rest of Hungary was simply carved into Turkish eyalets with no special status. Bethlen Gábor’s Hungarians saw themselves as the final, unextinguished bastion of Magyardom, whereas Royal Hungary was a mere haggard adjunct to Habsburg pretensions. Some aristocrats

Partium and ruled by the princes of Transylvania – an arc of land from Carpathian Ruthenia (now in Ukraine), consisting of cities such as Debrecen and Arad, down to dusty bits-and-bobs in south-western Romania. One of Bethlen Gábor’s

walls of Tughlaqabad, say, but minus the cobras.

As always at such sites the crows are an immense help (in this case jackdaws) without whose desolate, clanging chuks the spell of ruin would be much less potent.

The Citadel was the site of the original treaty between the Habsburgs and the princes of Tra...

GREAT MYTHOLOGICAL WARS: TROY, THE TARPEIAN ROCK, BABYLON. HEAVEN

loopy Ozymandias-style presumption

Transylvania’s role was characteristic of the reasons the Thirty Years War became so horrendously destructive and unstoppable. Not unlike the First

chimerical sense of limitless

direct Habsburg invasion of Transylvania could have triggered a response from its Ottoman

Ferdinand II died in 1637 and his son Ferdinand III supervised the further

France of Richelieu and Mazarin had become enormously powerful

Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 almost all the leaders who had begun the

late-Habsburg atmosphere dear to so many novels and films. It is difficult wandering through

painting of the defence of the Charles Bridge in 1648, dramatically showing the students and Jesuits fighting back against vicious Swedish

diorama atmosphere is helped by a woeful little cannon

Swedes, having ransacked the castle (and taken back to Stockholm a lot of loot from Rudolf’s era, including his best Arcimboldos), tried

It was two centuries before Czech nationalists began to rediscover this older, dissenting past and built an entire ideology around it. But for now much of Central Europe

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

plenty of office space honeycombing the Castle Hill, was too tainted, both with Rudolf’s weirdness and as a former nest of heresy. There

more Imperial and less Habsburg – one ...

Prague to Vienna, some two hundred miles further ...

alarmingly near the Ottoman border. The constant wanderings

of the earlier court, where Frederick III or Maximilian I and their locustine merrie band would turn up, filled with

A town that Ferdinand I and Maximilian II had used on a somewhat

(daughter of the enchanting Ferdinand II of Tyrol). She died young and left in her will

Ungratefully, Ferdinand II had himself buried in his beloved Graz, but as a further indication that Vienna was stabilizing as the genuine capital Ferdinand III and almost

Indeed, much of the city centre is a sequence of mystical spaces for the Habsburg family: the Stephansplatz, the Graben, Am Hof, the courtyards of the Hofburg and all the connecting routes were for centuries part of the intricate clockwork of court ritual.

annual processions to mark victory over the Turks, victory over the French, a lucky escape by Leopold I from a lightning bolt, and at the Holy

Trinity Pillar in the Graben every October to commemorate the end of the great 1679 plague. In

later eighteenth century Maria Theresa and then Joseph II swept a lot of this stuff away, but right to the First World War there was still a so...

Franz Joseph measured out his sacerdotal duties. 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...

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

France was the general lack

of mistresses – the severe morality of the ...

less of the gossip or factionalism that made Versailles so distinctive. ...

fetishizingly borrowed from Madrid.

brocade-trimmed orrery, with

decision to go riding in the Prater)

Joseph I spent the equivalent of the entire year’s food and banquet budget at the Hofburg on a diamond he fancied, this may have caused seizures among his staff, but it was part of a long tradition of the Emperor showing through his actions how little he cared for bourgeois plodding.

financial recklessness was shared with an aristocracy similarly addicted to grand gesture and conspicuous display.

spent hunting.

The Habsburgs were enthusiastic about some odd forms – the annual use of falcons at Schloss Laxenburg to kill herons is perhaps the oddest. Herons in flight always

sinister, compact fist-of-fury sort of

bird like a falcon.

hard too to see the pleasure in having beaters chase dozens of deer into pools of deep water and then take them out with crossbows, or in tossing foxes in blankets before clubbing them to dea...