Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

by Simon Winder

Franz was clearly charming (his portraits radiate a chump-like sympathy), but mainly of value as a collector of minerals and delightful objets and father of Maria Theresa’s innumerable children, rather than a political actor in his own

This was a highly unfortunate result of Charles VI’s decision to ignore the daughters of his older brother, Joseph I. He established the Pragmatic Sanction through his own daughter, Maria Theresa. Charles Albert, who was married to one of Joseph I’s daughters, could rightfully point out that she had the better claim. All the bickering and iciness of Charles VI’s court

headed back to Bohemia, took Prague, and was acclaimed and crowned there as king. As King

From then on nothing went right – Maria Theresa counterattacked, threw him out of Prague, invaded Bavaria and occupied Munich. The short

The last glory days of being Emperor, under Leopold I and Joseph I, had allowed the two roles of Emperor and Habsburg ruler to be attractively mixed in a way that demanded intermittent but

The suitably chastened Electors replaced him with Maria Theresa’s husband, as Franz I. He was entirely happy to treat the job as an honorific one, sitting in a pavilion at Schönbrunn sipping hot chocolate and admiring his giraffes. Europe’s grandest title was grand no longer.

protect Hannover and the Austrian Netherlands, which

although George II was there at least as much as Elector of Hannover. This was the theatre in

made a treaty with Saxony’s Augustus III (a marzipan-like figure) in which the Saxons guaranteed her ownership of the Austrian lands, and in return Maria Theresa agreed that if her heirs were to die her titles would pass to Maria Josepha, Augustus III’s long-suffering wife, and another of Joseph I’s children? As Augustus was also King of Poland it is possible

But as it was, Maria Theresa ruled for forty highly successful years and had sixteen children.

the long Turkish occupation of much of Hungary, its inhabitants were returned to the Christian (and Catholic) fold and the rule of their king, Leopold I (or I.

Vienna sat at the heart of a predominantly German-speaking, Imperial hub of power. Once the siege of 1683 had been lifted, Leopold’s reign saw the rebuilding of Vienna, including many of the boggling aristocratic palaces still there

Large groups of Serbs left Ottoman territory and settled in Szentendre, north of Buda, where they were given special privileges and left behind them, after their twentieth-century return south, a particularly beautiful and iconostasis-packed town. Many

mercy of the Hungarian Diet. In two great visits to Bratislava in 1741 she wiped away many decades of loathing between Germans and Hungarians. Dressed in mourning for her father,

holding the crucifix that had so comforted Ferdinand II at the beginning of the Thirty Years War (a poor precedent on the face of it), and

She camped it up magnificently, travelling down the Danube for her coronation in a barge festooned in Hungarian colours, galloping on a horse (a requirement of being crowned Monarch of Hungary!) and breathtakingly playing to the gallery. In a perhaps even more hysterical trip later in the year she held up her super-weapon before the Diet: a son, the tiny Joseph, whose existence ensured the continuity of the Habsburg line (albeit via the mother, which remained contentious

Austria now wears trousers’, or at least a nappy.

acquired a moral compass and an ability to inspire trust and respect. The Hungarians reneged on much of the deal and provided a fraction of

visit to the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna is in many ways a disappointing and confusing experience. Here is the heart of the Habsburg world – a sumptuous summer residence expressing both grandeur and leisure. And yet even a completist such as me cannot get very excited by the building itself. Franz

Joseph

spent far too long there and much of it is tainted with his own dreary, railway-waiting-room aesthetic. Even the more showy bits decorated by Maria Theresa have a cold dullness to th...

fully embrace the trivial nature of her and her husband’s brief regime. Those running

the Empress Elisabeth’s hand-made saddles which set up such a sexual-fetishistic and oddly direct relationship

Wandering around Maria Theresa’s rooms one has a niggling feeling that the Habsburgs are getting a bit tone deaf when commissioning artists and decorators – with a bit more cash and a lot more taste everything could have been so much better. This

breakfast house and radiating pavilions filled with rococo exotica.

Gloriette, a pleasure house and viewing platform on the steep hill above the palace. The Gloriette has many

celebrates the Battle of Kolín, where in 1757 Frederick the Great, during the Third Silesian War, at last met his comeuppance and was forced to abort his invasion of Bohemia. This was, of course, a very rare Austrian victory and Frederick himself

There were many Austrian humiliations at the hands of the Prussians still to come but these were generally in Silesia or Saxony.

carved bull skulls, hacked out of Maximilian II’s old Neugebäude Palace in the suburb of Simmering. But its extravagant and charming pointlessness makes it nearly as

fine a monument to Maria Theresa’s reign as her breakfast house in the zoo and a happy contrast to her fusty and banal interior decorations. An Allied bombing raid on Vienna wrecked the

The Jesuits were suppressed across Europe by the Pope in the following decade, except (in a perverse result) in Prussia and in Russia, where Catherine the Great once may have been anti-Catholic but was damned if she was going to be told what to do by some man living in Italy. A new austerity and prayerful privacy reigned.

By some definitions one of the most talented of Habsburg rulers, Joseph in everything he did seemed to lurch and overreach. The shape of his reign was a very odd one. After Franz I’s death in 1765 he became Holy Roman Emperor, seemingly re-establishing the Habsburg grip on a stable basis. But he then

deal with his mother’s contemporary, Frederick the Great, who hung like some appalling spectre over his life, the man who had humiliated his family, but who was also a figure to be admired and whose rationalism and austerity formed a rather sadly obvious model for the strange

views on everything from banning the making of cribs in the Tyrol to forcing priests to switch to practical and

Frederick III’s entrails in Linz now became the city’s cathedral. The Catholic Church was a landowner on a vast scale, owning half of Carniola and at least a third of Moravia: Joseph was driven mad with rage by what he viewed

ownership of the Austrian Netherlands, the Catholic renewal movement of Jansenism which originated there had made rapid inroads in Vienna. Jansenism, with its cold austerity and

Habsburg Empire as it emerged during the following decade, then not only would Vienna have controlled the only major hub in the northern Balkans, but the Serbs would have become an important group in the Empire much like the Czechs, rather than just a small element in parts of Hungary. The history of the nineteenth century then takes a dazingly different turn. As it was, the Serbs soon revolted and pushed the Turks out of Belgrade on their own. This formed the kernel of an independent state that would never have been allowed to exist if it had still been under Habsburg rule. But this shows the limits of counterfactual history – a contentious, but seemingly not earth-shaking decision back in 1791 to hand back a shattered fortress to the Turks put Serbia on a course which ended in the killing of Franz Ferdinand in 1914 and

The tone is almost unchanged from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s great paintings of the seasons (most famously Hunters in the Snow), which came into the collection of Rudolf II’s younger brother Ernst when he was ruler of the Spanish Netherlands in the 1590s and which now make visiting Vienna worthwhile just in themselves. Rudolf himself, as one would expect, festooned

principal enjoyment of researching this book has been to engage in a cock-eyed interpretation of The Seasons by wandering around the countryside at different times of year, and revelling in more extreme weather patterns than those generally felt in south-east England. All countries furnish their own musical, literary and painterly hymns to their countryside, but it is done very well in Central Europe. I have often found myself humming extracts from Schubert’s The Beautiful Mill-Girl as I wander along by some blameless stream and it only needs to get a little bit Alpine and heroic before incoherent chunks of Mahler’s Third pop up. An otherwise perhaps almost featureless Bohemian valley is ennobled by Dvořák and bleak bits of Transylvania turn spectral and highly flavoured thanks to Ligeti.