Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (17 page)

Trenck’s remains put us, in a distant, shrivelled way, in touch with the final gasp of the Military Frontier – a place that had rewarded violence, luck and recklessness for some three centuries and which now became merely historical. For Croatians, Albanians and Serbs particularly it would in due course become a model for their proto-nationalisms, even if this needed a highly selective reading, pretending that there was no German or Hungarian element. It encouraged a devil-may-care, big-moustached, big-shirted Romanticism which for much of the region’s later history was pleasantly at odds with the stolid, farming reality of most of the old Military Frontier – a dullness perked up by ballads about the quintessential Uskok Ivo Senjanin and the Hajduk Mijat Tomić, hammer of the Turks. These figures have enjoyed a fresh life in post-Communist Central Europe where both scholarly and popular enthusiasm for these totemic fighters has taken root, and statues, often with a strongly heavy-metal flavour, scatter town squares and parks wherever there was notable Christian–Muslim fighting. Indeed, the Capuchin vault in Brno was crowded with heavy metal fans looking at the grisly selections and this seemed to me a charming, if nutty, example of cultural history’s wending ways. In the summer of 2010 I was spending a happy few days in Cluj and was almost dazed at my good fortune at having just missed Iron Maiden playing there at the central arena on their head-bursting, Earth-girdling ‘Final Frontier’ tour. It is not perhaps something that can withstand even the most cursory scepticism, but I feel it might just be possible to create a richly textured explanation for continuing Central European devotion to such leather-clad British dinosaurs as Iron Maiden via the shared Hajduk heritage across the region. Or not.

A real bear-moat

Sometimes my endless travelling around on trains can be rewarded in a way that makes up for all the indignities, smells and boredom. A good instance was taking one south from České Budějovice, through torpid countryside, often on a single track and that track nearly engulfed by trees. At one stop there appeared to be no settlement of any kind, as though the tiny train was halting simply in memory of an earlier village – which is not impossible in such a vexed, resettled part of Bohemia. The train finally reached a little wooden station and I walked down a nondescript street, struggling with a bag which was to be the bane of the rest of a long trip as it held not just a toothbrush and clothes, but an immensely heavy illustrated history of the Škoda works which I had just bought with feelings of great (and correct) excitement but without thinking through the weight implications. In any event, panting and gasping and increasingly unkeen on Czech industrialization, I came to a small park: and to one of Central Europe’s great sights – a huge cleft filled by the crowded red roofs of the town of Český Krumlov: a switchback bend in the lacquer-black Vltava River and a glowering cliff on which is heaped a castle complex of ineffable charisma.

On the whole castles tend to have more impact in the imagination than in real life. Kafka’s castle or Sleeping Beauty’s or Gormenghast are all in their different ways far more extensive and spooky and to be savoured in a way unrelated to disadvantaged actual buildings, where the walls are never quite sheer enough or the car park is too prominent. Český Krumlov is an exception, mostly because once you are down inside the town the castle walls loom so high over it and seem so organically linked into the huge, sheer cliffs above the river that there is no question as to its absolute, almost sneering authority. It is topped off by a bulky yet pretty watchtower, conjured up from sgraffito, colonnades, pink paint and gold bobbles, which soars above the already unfeasibly high-up battlements.

There is also, it turns out, a real bear-moat. I excitedly texted my family, who replied asking for clarification: was this a moat with bears
in
or a moat to keep bears
out
. I could see where the confusion had arisen, although a few moments’ thought would show that bears could be kept out just by a door with a little latch as this would in itself trump bear intelligence, but still: the fact of a genuine bear-moat does take a while to sink in. The drawbridge used to be put up each night, making the bears in the moat the first line of defence: albeit a possibly flawed one as they could be neutralized with a drugged honey sandwich. Sadly the bears have been put in a standard zoo environment with healthful rocks, a tree-trunk and a little pond to pace listlessly around – but in the past bear-moat bears would have enjoyed more baroque surroundings. There is a delirious seventeenth-century picture of the Elector of Saxony’s bear-moat, where the bears clamber onto trees with high platforms and a pretty fountain. Presumably there must always have been a tension between bears as a decorative element and all the lumps of shit, mange and half-eaten food which had to be rapidly whisked away to maintain a picturesque effect.

Understandably bear-moats are now very rare as there is little call for them – one has been re-established at Franz Ferdinand’s old castle at Konopiště but there is just a single bear and its deterrent role is compromised by its being penned in a small corner of a moat now mainly devoted to a witless archery feature. Even the famous Bear Pits of Bern are now empty, with the final, elderly bear killed in 2009. The Český Krumlov bears are peculiar because they genuinely date to the sixteenth century, when the Rožmberk family did a deal with the infinitely rich and greedy Orsini family, who in return for some money allowed the Rožmberks to pretend to be their relatives. To mark this absurd deal, the Rožmberks put bears in their castle moat because of
orso
being Italian for bear. Presumably a Rožmberk would gesture casually from the wall and wait for his guest to say: ‘Why on earth do you have bears in your moat?’ before pointing out the pretty pun and its apposite nature. The bears have therefore been listlessly pacing back and forth for some five centuries, having long outlived the Rožmberks themselves, who died out four centuries ago, a last, extraordinarily tenacious survival of an infantile branding exercise.

The Rožmberks were one of the greatest of all Bohemian aristocratic families and did not need to pay for an Orsini endorsement. Their last leader, Vilém of Rožmberk, worked for Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II and was a diplomat, adviser and the most senior ceremonial figure in Bohemia. He was a great polymath, collector and obsessive alchemist and built a state-of-the-art laboratory in his castle at Třeboň. He also built the vast carp ponds which still dot southern Bohemia and are drained annually for the fish which so many Czech families eat at Christmas rather than turkey, and the very idea of which just seems upsetting.

Despite marrying four times Vilém had no children and rooms remain decorated with charming but despairing illustrations of childlessness or the wish for children taken from the Old Testament. His younger brother, Petr Vok, was already old when he took over after a lifetime of extravagance. He was obliged to sell the castle to Rudolf II and then in a final act of courtly self-sacrifice used all his remaining money to pay off a mercenary army that had invaded Prague (as part of Rudolf’s quarrel with his brothers) before dying in 1611.

I would hate to appear to be working for the Czech tourist board, but the pleasures of Český Krumlov really are almost too great. It is still not really part of anyone’s consciousness even though it has been easy to visit since 1989. The whole area of southern Bohemia was thinly settled and mainly German-speaking – Egon Schiele’s mother came from the town and he lived there for a time, creating some of his most wonderful pictures. Like many Bohemian castles, Český Krumlov was expropriated for use by the Nazis and then fell into disrepair. The ravages of the 1945 expulsion of German-speakers added to the feeling of it dropping off the map. In the Cold War the town was the front line, with a deserted zone to the south between itself and Austria. Part of me would be happy to live here – although this is a doubtful and promiscuous favour I feel like extending to at least two dozen other former Habsburg towns.

CHAPTER FOUR

The other Europe
»
Bezoars and nightclub hostesses
»
Hunting with cheetahs
»
The seven fortresses

The other Europe

The reality of Ottoman rule over a huge swathe of central and south-eastern Europe remains at the heart of the Habsburg experience, but also more broadly as an awkward and confusing issue for all European history. If the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are supposed to represent the triumphant expansion of Europe, with great areas of North and South America cleared providentially for Christian enjoyment, then why in Europe itself is there a similar experience being inflicted on Europeans themselves? Slave-raiding, frontier warfare and terror tactics of a kind used by the Spanish Habsburgs in Mexico and Peru were themselves inflicted on the Austrian Habsburgs as they battled for four centuries to deal with an Ottoman enemy which, until the later seventeenth century, seemed unbeatable, and which was only finally expelled from Europe just before the First World War.

After the destruction of Hungary and some final mopping-up operations in Bosnia, there was a great surge of settlement and rebuilding by the Ottomans across their new lands. Sarajevo had been founded in the mid-fifteenth century and Belgrade (or the
Dar al-Harb
: the House of War) had effectively been re-founded after its capture from the Habsburgs in 1522 following the entire population being sent to Istanbul as slaves. The Military Frontier really did shut off the two parts of Europe from each other and there were brutally enforced rules by both sides against trade with one another – the tiny but curious exception being the Ragusan Republic (Dubrovnik), kept by the Ottomans in much the same way as Communist China permitted Hong Kong, as a readily controllable and dependent window on the West.

Since the nineteenth century, nationalist historians have stared into this closed system trying to perceive the fates of their proto-countrymen under Ottoman rule. As late as the terrible Bosnian War of the early 1990s, these topics had a sickening relevance as Bosnian Muslims were accused of being Ottoman quislings, not real Europeans and so on. In nationalist terms the stakes have therefore always been very high. The gradual liberation of these areas by Habsburg forces (often working with Imperial or Polish allies) was meant to rescue from bondage populations who would spring back upright and be much as before – but in practice not only were these peoples quite different from their pre-conquest forebears, but these forebears had themselves only carried the faintest resemblance to what these nationalist historians imagined.

The initial conquest was extraordinarily brutal. The heroic last stands of Magyar garrisons ended with localized forms of Armageddon. So many noblemen were killed at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 that there was administrative chaos even without the mass appropriations and ravaging of land: towns effectively disappeared, the process of food distribution caved in. The Great Hungarian Plain has never really recovered from this period – decades of fighting and raiding chased off almost the entire population, its elaborate irrigation systems were destroyed and it became a semi-desert. The plain’s wearying flatness may be natural, but its catastrophic emptiness was man-made in the sixteenth century. Populations moved to fill some of the spaces created by the Ottomans, but the incessant fighting, insecurity and bouts of plague never made this very attractive. It is not as though these lands ever enjoyed some prelapsarian golden age, but their particularly shocking harshness became normal in this period.

The Ottomans had no problem with Christian subjects and there were only intermittent attempts to convert anyone to Islam. For reasons which will never be fully understood there were nonetheless substantial conversions by the Albanians and Bosnians in the late seventeenth century. In the wake of Habsburg battlefield setbacks some two hundred thousand Orthodox Serbs moved north into Hungary, leaving empty lands filled by new Albanian emigrants, thereby creating the Kosovo issue which has dogged post-Cold War Europe – but these were only two of many confusing shifts, as Romanians headed north into Transylvania and north-west into the Banat; Bulgarians and Albanians moved west and east respectively; and Jews, Vlachs and Gypsies migrated, split and changed identity in often barely recorded ways. Attempts to impose order and after-the-fact nationalist tidiness on these groups have generated first a highly tendentious historiography and then, in the historians’ wake, massacres and deportations of staggering viciousness and futility. This unmanageable confusion is perhaps summed up by Buda, which by the seventeenth century was, far from being the unsinkable bastion of Magyardom, a predominantly Serb-speaking Bosnian Muslim town, leavened by a few Jewish and Armenian merchants. Beyond Slav converts across the Balkans there were also many genuine, new Muslim settlers, some from as far away as Turkmenistan, who generally formed elite groups across the region. Disentangling these from converts has proven impossible – particularly as settlement was never permanent and ambitious Muslims growing up in rural Hungary might well move on to the great Ottoman centres in Edirne, Istanbul and Bursa. Military service also shifted groups – so that, for instance, in 1723 some five thousand Bosnians marched off to fight in the war with Persia, of whom only five hundred came back. Many of these presumably died in battle, but there is no reason not to think that others simply settled elsewhere in the Ottoman domains.