Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

foxes are too nimble to kill in an honourable way so they need to be stunned and rolled up in a blanket.

Emperor was obliged in everything he did to take actions which appeared masterful and yet, in practice,

The more we read about the past the more completely odd it appears.

Brixen diocesan museum is an absolute classic of its kind, crammed with tortured,

extensive and elaborate sequence of crib scenes, little panoramas crammed with tiny people and commissioned by the bishops in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

‘Crib’ generally just implies Baby Jesus,

amazing ensemble of Herod, with the face of a gold-painted monkey, laughing dementedly as his chariot is escorted by demons (with spitted babies on their spears) into the Mouth of Hell. There is a bizarre

Flight into Egypt, an event which conventionally has all the interest and

showing the Holy Family on a rickety bridge with their donkey, crossing the Valley of Wild Beasts, with dozens of little model lions, tigers and porcupines (oddly) waiting below

angels wielding swords of flame to secure the area – another scene I really cannot remember from the Bible.

There is no correct place in this book for a discussion of the Jews of the Empire, but here is as good a one as any. By the seventeenth century the events in Trento may

Manichaean opposition between Christian and Jew,

Under the intolerable shadow of the 1940s it is extremely hard but necessary to reimagine a world of sometimes violent and yet not genocidal oppression. In his general ban on all forms of religion

in the Empire except Catholicism, even Ferdinand II made an exception for Judaism. The Jewish communities were

quite separate category from simple evil-doers such as Muslims. But

category was nonetheless not an enviable one, with Jewish ‘stubbornness’ and engagement in businesses forbidden to Christians (such as money-lending) making their presence intermittently unacceptable and with the threat of massacre or expulsion always waiting in the wings.

since their European diaspora in the centuries after the destruction of the Temple by the Emperor Titus. This exodus gave them

one of the defining and most powerful and creative threads in European history. But except for short periods (under Rudolf II in Prague,

There was a scholastic strand which valued the Jews almost as living fossils. This saw them not just as the much-debased inheritors of Old Testament traditions but also as intermediaries with ancient Egyptian magic, through the Kabbala and, even more bizarrely, as the unwitting descendants of the ‘Land of Cham’ with access to the secrets hidden within the still-undecoded world of hieroglyphics. These very odd forms of esoteric

grand gestures such as the establishment of a privileged new ghetto on the opposite bank of the Danube from Vienna, offers of money.

Habsburg moves to make Jews write accounts in German not Yiddish were motivated by a genuine wish for greater accountability, but they forced Jews to learn German

Each Habsburg dispensation was seen as bountiful, but also – by both sides – as cunning. Perhaps

spectacular vibrancy and aggression of Catholicism itself in the century and a half between the Treaty of Westphalia and the French Revolution, but this was achieved with

Each of these colleges was, as one Jesuit perfectly put it, ‘a Trojan horse filled with soldiers from heaven’. Brilliantly educated, self-confident, conniving, the Jesuits dominated teaching across Catholic Europe and specialized in all sorts of town-square spectaculars with fluttering banners, marching and self-examination, sifting the population for conformity and obedience.

did not have the sort of Gestapo function of the Inquisition, and

Their churches, often the greatest examples of baroque decoration, may seem to us headache-inducing explosions of gold paint and cherubs, but this Jesuit feeling of emotional excess was all in

the service of teaching, and needed the images of exemplary lives and events that littered the ceilings and side-chapels. Above all, they had the Virgin Mary, a figure of extraordinary power whose cult could not really be

Kircher wrote a series of poems and acclamations to Ferdinand III in forty-seven different languages, including one notionally in Egyptian hieroglyphs (Ferdinand is ‘the Austrian Osiris … the Austrian Momphta, etc’) and prettily laid out on an engraved obelisk, with the hieroglyphs all completely wrong. He was obsessed with labyrinths, mirrors,

Vesuvius), magnets (the frontispiece of his book Magnets features the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, but with metal crowns and sceptres hanging together, magnetized, from the claws of the double-headed eagle), music amplification and freaks of nature. He drew on the Jesuits’ international network for images of Egypt, of Mexican temples, of Chinese wonders.

Gyula Benczúr’s The Recapture of Buda Castle.

As someone who grew up with the simple and exciting tales of Greek and Roman heroes it became a chief pleasure

The inspiration of Rome was central to Charlemagne’s insistence that Europe was its true inheritor and the ancient gods were in practice religiously neutral. This has to

despairing of getting my great seventeenth-century hero, the painter Claude Lorrain, into this book as his long career of painting matchless landscapes filled with classical (and occasional

series of prints to celebrate the lavish festivities in Rome which marked Ferdinand III’s election as King of the Romans at the end of 1636, so I can just wedge him in. Ferdinand was crowned with little time to spare, as his father, Ferdinand

Protestant army at Nördlingen (the scene immortalized by Rubens) with its aftermath offering a chimerical chance that the Thirty Years War might be at an end. As the war was fought in the name of Catholicism,

The objects assembled in the principal squares of Rome could not have been more explicit about the link between the classical world and the present. In the area now dominated by the Spanish Steps there was a twelve-metre-high statue of Neptune with sea monsters and a Habsburg eagle, floating on an artificial sea filled with artificial fish. Nearby was a smaller but

bulkier square castle with a Habsburg eagle on top and

allegories of the four continents at i...

This last scene must have been happily redolent of the immortal Horror Hotel ghost-train ride on Brighton Pier. These events were recorded by Claude in his almost miraculous prints, conveying

Each European dynasty had its own interest in classical imagery, but in the Roman festival the link is very clear: that despite being based in Prague and Vienna for many years, the Habsburg family remained true to the original fib of Charlemagne, that they ruled an empire that had its legitimacy from ancient Rome, and that being King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor, despite the awkwardness of not directly ruling Rome, was part

many of Rudolf II’s pictures of ‘The Loves of Jupiter’ clearly for private use. But there is definitely something odd about the way that the greatest painter of the Counter-Reformation,

Rubens,

But then, his career disguises the whole, otherwise grim, era of Ferdinand II and III by its sheer outrageousness, his paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum creating a sort of blast zone around them where everything else hung nearby

The Emperors tended to see themselves as Jupiter. Their double-headed eagle symbol, on endless flags,

could be seen as the Roman eagle (a claim of descent it shared with the similar R...

they brazenly pinched it after Napoleon (another eagle) destroyed the Holy Roman Empire and they managed to ...

final round of research for this book that I finally

The Liechtenstein garden palace in the suburbs of Vienna has one of the greatest of all Hercules ceilings,

Hercules’ role as son of Jupiter, law-giver, hero, defender of Olympus, all of which fitted in much better with the Habsburg world-view than his

glowering bronze bust of Rudolf II by Adriaen de Vries shows him wearing Hercules’ lion-skin, as Defender of Christendom against the Turk (savagery, non-civilization), an implausible