Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (13 page)

For every heroic stand there were dozens of now-forgotten disasters, as Ottoman troops spread out across Hungary and destroyed it. But the Turks, within their new and extensive lands, remained boxed in by the Adriatic to the south-west and by a thickening chain of Habsburg forts and obstacles that protected the area behind Buda (taken by the Ottomans in 1541) and stabilized the frontier. In the midst of these catastrophes perhaps the only beneficiary was Ferdinand, who stepped into the vacated shoes of Lajos, and changed overnight from a major prince along the lines of the dukes of Bavaria to unquestionably the greatest ruler in Central Europe. The kingdoms he now ruled were all elective monarchies, but it was under these emergency conditions not difficult to persuade the panicked, surviving electoral diets.

After many reverses, betrayals and plots, the Peace of Edirne in 1547 formally split Hungary into three sections. The largest, encompassing the Great Plain, the Hungarian Danube and Croatia, became a full part of the Ottoman Empire. Transylvania became a vassal state, much like Moldavia or the cunning Dalmatian entrepôt of Ragusa/Dubrovnik, and the heart of a subservient but nonetheless vigorous Hungarian area of rule. For many Hungarian nobles Transylvania had clear continuity as the surviving piece of Lajos’s kingdom, the rest reduced to alien Habsburg colonial rule. The remaining pieces, including most importantly the Hungarian coronation site of Pozsony (later Bratislava), and comprising very roughly what is now Slovakia and western Hungary, became a new element in the Habsburg monarchy: Royal Hungary. For those living in this rump remnant, it was comparable to an Englishman suddenly finding himself confined to Kent and Sussex and ruled by a Frenchman. As usual such analogies do not work, as the comparison could be both better and worse, but this remnant became the nucleus for the reconquest of Hungary, which would take many reigns. In return for control of it, Ferdinand (initially on behalf of Charles) agreed to pay an annual tribute to the Ottomans of thirty thousand gold florins. This was worth it. Ferdinand could not beat the Ottomans but he could try to pay them off and in the meantime establish the defences which would mark out the new, shockingly mutilated Hungarian borders, borders which continued to impact on the life of Central Europe until the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and perhaps beyond.

Ferdinand can be thought of as the key ideologue of Habsburg rule. Charles had in one of his frequent acts of intelligent improvisation made him his deputy in the traditional eastern Habsburg lands – initially for the merely expedient reason that Ferdinand needed ownership of a block of territory to give him sufficient status to marry into the Hungarian/Bohemian royal family, as arranged by Maximilian when Ferdinand and Anna were children. Ferdinand sorted out the defence of his massively increased dominions against the Ottomans and had with Anna a tremendous number of children who were dispersed across the whole of Europe, creating a dynastic bedrock. Charles V’s role as sort of Habsburg super-chief turned out to be a temporary one, as Ferdinand’s growing seniority, aggression and importance made it ever more likely that Charles would be obliged to split his empire in half – with his only son taking over the Spanish and Burgundian elements and Ferdinand keeping the traditional hereditary lands and his two new kingdoms. But this – as with so much Habsburg history at the time – required a lot of luck and many other outcomes always stayed possible, not the least being the total collapse of the eastern territories to Ottoman depredation.

Charles eventually conceded that Ferdinand would inherit not only the eastern territories but also the role of Emperor. This was both at Ferdinand’s insistence and through the logic that the links between the largely German-speaking Empire and Vienna were more obvious than those with Spain. One of the fun bits of mumbo-jumbo now carried out by Ferdinand was the announcement of the ‘inalienable heirlooms’. These are now in the Imperial Treasury in Vienna, fittingly in the section of the Hofburg built by Ferdinand and which still proclaims his name and titles in its marvellous gateway. The two ‘inalienable heirlooms’ were a giant narwhal tusk and an elaborate agate bowl. Ferdinand was anxious that these be ‘inalienable’ as so many members of the family had a poor record when it came to pawning stuff. These objects therefore had a special status – held by the entire family across all future generations in a way that put them beyond the reach of any specific member. The tusk was a simple piece of necromancy, something that would have been recognized as workaday and unremarkable to some laughing Inuit, turned by distance and ignorance into a unicorn horn giving great potency and virtue to its owner. The agate bowl was far more interesting – this was believed to be the Holy Grail, not least because the letters XRISTO appeared to shimmer inside its translucent stone in certain light conditions (and seemingly only visible to certain individuals). It was in fact made during the reign of Constantine the Great, in the fourth century, and had almost certainly reached Europe as a result of the disgraceful events of the Fourth Crusade – but both tusk and bowl show the strangely hieratic and spooky nature of Habsburg imperial power, with Ferdinand now a fine successor to his grandfather Maximilian.

The Treasury is filled with such cultic objects. That they are viewable today behind glass to anyone with a ticket is, of course, a spectacular collapse in their aura. They would have been shown only to favoured individuals on key occasions, together with such later additions as a colossal emerald from South America carved into a rather tacky green goblet. The physical ownership of such things had a power which no longer has an equivalent. It was on a par with a sense that the Emperor had a more direct relationship with God than others, that he was almost more than human. The Habsburgs could manage this trick better than everyone else because from Ferdinand onward they successfully entangled their own importance as kings and dukes of many territories with the separate cultic power of the Imperial regalia.

During the life of the Empire the coronation regalia were kept in Nuremberg but they are now in the Vienna Treasury, stolen by the Habsburgs at the dissolution of the Empire during the Napoleonic Wars. These objects, which added to their sacral power by being mostly hidden away, sit at the heart of the Habsburg legend and, even in the cold neutrality of a modern museum, are awe-inspiring. For example, a gold scabbard made in Italy in the 1080s for the coronation of the Emperor Henry IV and decorated with images of his predecessors back to Charlemagne. Or a pair of red samite gloves covered in jewels made for the Emperor Frederick II in 1220. Or – my favourite – the scarcely credibly beautiful Imperial mantle decorated with stylized gold camels, a palm tree and Arabic script made by Islamic artists in Sicily for King Roger II of Sicily in the 1130s. This marvel is celebrated now as one of the greatest examples of medieval Sicily’s multicultural tangle (the culture immortalized in Szymanowski’s delirious 1926 opera
King Roger
). But – as with the historical and zoological confusions over the Holy Grail and the unicorn horn – at the time the mantle was believed to be a battle trophy of Charlemagne’s, won in a campaign against the Moors. This is why Charlemagne is shown wearing the mantle in Dürer’s wonderful imaginary portrait. In reality it is safe to assume it became associated with the Emperor’s coronation quite straightforwardly in the era of Frederick II, whose mother was Roger II’s daughter. It is a tribute to the somewhat wonky and chaotic nature of these notionally immemorial and top-of-the-line ceremonies that even such basic information at some point got lost.

Rather liberatingly I think I do not have to mention ever again Habsburg ceremonial and cultic issues. To us the Habsburg rulers – many quite mediocre or merely dutiful – can seem as specialized and helpless as koala bears and their claims to grandeur and the highest place in Europe an obvious try-on. But while they were always hated and schemed against they hardly ever lost their very powerful force-field. Once they successfully established themselves under Charles V and Ferdinand I they remained somehow exceptional. This was achieved through practical measures (bribes, threats, soldiers, presents, marriages) but also through the creation of this formidable magic circle, which each generation reinforced through manipulation of special objects, events and ceremonies. The genius lay in corralling together both the great family symbols (the walls of shields in Innsbruck and Wiener Neustadt, the various tombs, the Babenberger family tree at Klosterneuburg, the ‘inalienable heirlooms’) and the Imperial symbols. Ferdinand for most of his life was overshadowed by his elder brother and was only actually Emperor for eight years, but the solidity of Habsburg succession in their core lands stayed in place into the twentieth century and Ferdinand effectively ensured that this bizarre, unfolding drama was played out from Vienna, the focus of resistance to the Ottomans. He may have misunderstood the origins or purpose of the symbols he surrounded himself with and given too much credit to a wacky-looking sea-mammal’s tooth, but his power was real enough and quite immune to the smirks of twenty-first-century literalists.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Mille regretz’
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‘The strangest thing that ever happened’
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The armour of heroes
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Europe under siege
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The pirates’ nest
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A real bear-moat

‘Mille regretz’

It is frustratingly unclear how much Charles V enjoyed his decades as Emperor. He seems never to have let his Imperial mask drop and this public impassivity became the model for later members of his family. His court wandered from place to place, and although raised in the Low Countries and often surrounded by soldiers, advisers and musicians from around Flanders, Charles in the end became a sort of adopted Spaniard, revelling in the rich, Stygian, formal court style which was to become the essence of Habsburg rule when his son, Philip II, made Madrid the unified country’s capital. In European history Charles can only really be compared to Napoleon and Hitler in his grip on the continent – but he never seems to have revelled in such a role and, as it came to him through the deft machinations of his grandfather rather than through conquest, his efforts to defend it have an air of weary dutifulness rather than megalomania. Maximilian had dreamed of so many combinations – at one point pondering whether he should have a shot at making himself Pope as well – but always suffered from an appealing inability to follow through on anything except his board-game-like marriage alliances. Charles inherited a genuinely vast and unprecedented sprawl of territories from Maximilian, but no serious effort was made to give them any unity. He scurried from place to place, swapping around hats, crowns, necklaces and special cloaks. He was always reading up constitutions and mottos and being drilled on the membership and peccadillos of dozens of prickly aristocracies and urban oligarchies in different bits of Europe. At every turn he had to face rebellious townsfolk, Ottoman pirates, annoying Protestants, double-dealing German princelings and problematic family members.

Charles’s frequent illnesses, his inability to eat in public (because of his enormous jaw) and his personal, very knowledgeable enthusiasm for gloomy music suggest a long-wished-for private existence, perhaps as the abbot of some deeply refined and closeted monastic order – a wish he was able to grant himself after his resignation. His favourite song seems to have been ‘Mille Regretz’, described in his lifetime as ‘the Song of the Emperor’ (‘So great is my suffering and painful woe / That my days will soon be ended’), which about summed it up. Charles always lived under the shadow of his mother’s mental illness – but a quick look at his in-box would have given quite enough of a basis in itself for lapses, silences and indecisions. Another favourite was the tune ‘Belle qui tiens ma vie’, a much more cheerful, albeit wistful, piece which must be (and I will be immediately contradicted here by dozens of more knowledgeable readers) one of the earliest of all European melodies still familiar and widely recognized.

We will never know, during one of the key crisis points of his reign, when in 1521 he was face to face with Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms, whether he was thinking more about the perils of heresy or about the almost unimaginable great shiploads of Mexican treasure which had arrived for him in Brussels. His need to be stiff-necked and decisive year in, year out (and at Worms he was still only twenty-one years old), created a great, chiselled facade and a form of kingship which his successors copied, whether or not that facade hid an intellectual ferment akin to Charles’s or mere vacuity. Charles’s enterprises sprawled crazily in every conceivable direction, with his 1535 invasion of Tunis being funded by tons of gold extorted from the Great Inca. He presided over a staggering increase in the range and experience of Europe – a process by which blamelessly downtrodden Castilian peasants and Flemish bureaucrats found themselves shipped off to the New World and pushed into behaviours, foods and sights for which there were no precedents. The creation of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru under Charles (their flag the Cross of Burgundy) made existing European political arrangements something of a joke, with the area taken up by Henry VIII’s England tuckable into a small part of Central America. Francis I has always been much condemned for his Christianity-betraying alliance with the Ottomans, but really what choice did he have in the face of this haughty, unbeatable champion of an unstoppable family? Things were even worse than his contemporaries knew. In Regensburg to attend a meeting of the Imperial diet, Charles slept with the daughter of a local burgher. The result, a bastard son who grew up to become Don John of Austria, commanded the fleet that destroyed the Ottoman navy at the Battle of Lepanto, long after Charles’s death. So even in his down time he was shaping the world’s history.