Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (18 page)

One revolting claim that bobbed up during the implosion of Yugoslavia was that the Balkans were riven by ‘ancient hatreds’, implying something almost biological and permanent about fighting in the Balkans, with the corollary that there was no point engaging with such irrational bandits. The centuries of Ottoman rule of course show no such pattern at all, as virtually
every
party involved was a powerless and much discriminated-against group, viewed with an even-handed contempt by Muslims. The central core of the regime was a road system that headed west, linking Istanbul to Edirne to Plovdiv to Sofia to Niš to Belgrade to Buda. Christians, in return for specific but not glowingly generous privileges, had to maintain this road and its key spurs, not with trade in mind, but for the swift movement of troops and messengers. An elaborate system of legal disability much more familiar to the inhabitants of Europe’s overseas colonial empires was practised on Ottoman Christians. They could not bring law suits against Muslims or act as witnesses, they could not ride or fish or hunt or race, they had to wear specific clothing, live in specific parts of town, and – the classic colonial under-pinning – always show sufficient ‘respect’ to Muslims. Particular Christian groups tended to be given hereditary tasks in a way that makes the Ottoman Europe sound rather attractive in a Legoland sort of way. So Doğancis raised hunting falcons, Bulgarian Voynuks raised horses for the Imperial palace, Derbencis guarded mountain passes and bridges, and so on – all with very carefully laid down clothing requirements and tax privileges. Most prominent in western European minds were the Martolos, who manned the anti-Habsburg frontiers often purely in return for plunder and who ran, among other things, immensely byzantine ransom systems whereby hostages would be sold to their families on the Habsburg side or sold as slaves if a deal could not be reached.

A further element in the border defenders were the Morlachs, a group hotly contested by various nationalists, otherwise described as Vlachs. They seem originally to have been pastoralists, surviving the Slav invasions of the Dark Ages as shepherds in the higher hills, and maintaining their Latin-influenced language, which clearly related them in some direct or indirect way to the Romanians further east. This fairly straightforward explanation has not prevented their origins being turned into an ethnographic rough-house of predictable dottiness, with one Romanian theory being that their dark skin showed they were descended from Roman legionaries from Morocco, settled in Illyria in the ancient days. As the Vlachs never had reason to write down their language they readily assumed whichever ethnicity was dominant in any town they settled in, with many becoming Serbs – a particularly clear-cut instance of how religion and language as markers of immemorial identity are more or less useless.

Long-distance trade across Ottoman Europe tended to be in the hands of specific groups that had privileges in particular territories or commodities: Greeks, Serbs, Jews, Armenians and Ragusans all acted as middlemen. The Ottomans were particularly favourable to Jews for the uninspiring reason that they had no external sponsor and were therefore quite helpless in the face of whatever demands might be made of them. The Orthodox Christians were allowed to worship, but their churches had to be smaller and lower than mosques and have no towers. Most Orthodox leaders were under the thumb of the Ottomans in Constantinople and could not therefore imagine a context for independence, but in 1691 the Serbs managed to persuade the Emperor Leopold I to give them a church headquarters in Slavonia (the lovely town of Sremski Karlovci) which through many twists and turns was to give them a focus with important future implications. It is reckoned that during the course of Ottoman rule in the Balkans some two hundred thousand Christian children were taken from their parents and sent to Constantinople to be raised as Muslims and work in the administration and army there, a considerable privilege by some definitions, but not brilliant by others.

Behind the Military Frontier this Ottoman world had settled down by the later sixteenth century into an effective, well-run and civilized sphere. The distinctive landscape of mosque, madrasa, caravanserai, coffee-house, public bath, hospital, fountain and market dotted innumerable small towns, maintained in many cases by the
vakifs
, the charitable Islamic foundations run by important citizens. Small elements from these can still be seen in scattered, dusty and battered buildings or in mosques converted to use as churches. In Szigetvár, site of one of the great immolatory encounters between Hungarians and Ottomans, there are still occasional scraps of Muslim buildings – a house that once formed part of a caravanserai, a Roman Catholic church with some very slight indications of its former role as a mosque, another church where the font is an old Turkish wash-basin.

This world was far from static, but it seems to have had its great period in the seventeenth century and then fallen into increasing disrepair, with towns such as Belgrade and Skopje undergoing catastrophic population losses from military strain and from an inability to renew Muslim populations hammered by plague. The revival of Persia meant that the key traditional eastern source of settlers for the Ottoman domains was shut off and there were simply more attractive parts than the northern Balkans to settle anyway. It was also clear that as the Habsburgs were breaking through into this parallel Europe, the Ottomans failed to react to the sort of freewheeling trading environments ever more rife in the West. These decorative arrangements of yellow tunics with red hats, the neat division of towns by occupation and religion just did not work any more. Once the Ottoman armies gave way in the face of the vast, annihilatory campaigns in the north-west at the end of the seventeenth century, the lands they were defending turned out to offer little but desolation and malarial marshes. Everywhere, the Muslim population gradually drifted down and what had once been almost entirely Islamic towns, such as Banja Luka, had large Christian majorities by 1800 or so.

This was a very complete world while it lasted and innumerable engravings of these Ottoman towns show an alternative and alluring reality – of minarets, turbaned officials and camels filling Belgrade or Sarajevo or Pećs. Pećs is even now still surrounded by the descendants of the fig trees planted by the Ottomans. Some changes are relatively recent. Budapest has become much less Turkish through two huge changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the switch from a cuisine based on mutton to one based on beef – chewing through the huge new Hungarian herds of cattle – and the spread of the espresso machine, which did so much to push to one side Turkish-style coffee. Perhaps the only major remaining Ottoman legacy is the bathhouse.

One of the many torments of the Bosnian War was seeing this Ottoman heritage blown to pieces in a deliberate and self-conscious element in the conflict, driven by mystical and corrupted historians, whether it was the destruction of the bridge at Mostar or the targeting of the Orient Institute in Sarajevo. These were attempts to deny the legitimacy of Muslims as European citizens at all, when of course they are ancient European citizens, drawing on a great, refined and beautiful culture which ruled much of south-east Europe for far longer than any of its successor states.

Bezoars and nightclub hostesses

Tucked into a corner of the Natural History Museum in Vienna is a small glass jar containing a basilisk preserved in spirits. It is of course a fake, created by some specialist figure in a far-away seaport buying a ray from a fisherman and cutting, folding and sewing it to make legs, wings and horns. Its teetering plausibility comes from the much abused creature’s underside having holes that seem somewhat like a pair of eyes, with its strange smiling mouth arranged below them. It looks just hopeless, and yet hundreds of miles inland, perhaps seen through murkier glass, it might have seemed a
slightly
curious object and perhaps the merchants who dealt in basilisks – a small and evasive group unlikely to have even met up for an annual Christmas lunch – shared information on particularly credulous customers or trainee alchemists looking to add a little tone to their labs.

Vienna and Prague are almost as far inland as it is possible to get in Europe and perhaps it is not surprising that the court of Rudolf II, located initially in the one city and then in the other, became the greatest locus for strangeness and magic in the later sixteenth century. Some of this reputation is undeserved, a nineteenth-century confection looking back wistfully on the last time that a city had been great. One of its classic showpiece narratives, Rabbi Loew’s clay monster, the Golem, seems only to have been invented in the 1840s, sadly, and indeed much of Loew’s long and brilliant career was spent outside Prague. There were many courts dotted about Europe with similar obsessions, but somehow all the wizardly and alchemical preoccupations of the period have long been imaginatively delegated to Rudolf’s Prague.

The bottled basilisk shows, in perhaps its most acute form, the difficulty of making sense of the era. Any attempt to grapple with the scientific and magical preoccupations of the court founder on the Further Reading problem. Given that even the most simple alchemical issue makes no sense to us, we can only hope to understand it by reading books from the tradition that led to the belief that, say, powdered gems were a legitimate medicine. But as soon as you start on the Further Reading it is clear that these intellectual streams are themselves so rich, various and contradictory that they can offer no help: that you are simply wading deeper and deeper into what seems to be ever worse nonsense. What are we to make of the
Steganographica
of Trithemius, Ficino’s translation of the
Hermetica
, Hermes Trismegistus’s
Emerald Tablet
, Paracelsus’s
Archidoxa
, or the sickening
Picatrix,
a compendium of Persian and Arabic spells viewed for many years as too dangerous to transfer from manuscript to printed form? We have little information on who read what or how widely they were circulated, and have to cling instead to specific endorsements or denigrations of these books preserved in other writings, in a context where most key discussions would have been oral. There is also the impossible problem of having somehow to come up with an intellectual recovery point before 1600, when a more densely plausible modern science starts to accrete.

We simply do not have the intellectual equipment to spot when contemporaries themselves started to scoff at Pseudo-Balinus’s
Secret of Creation
. Presumably there were always those who thought basilisks were rubbish and who heard reliably that unicorn horns came from narwhals. Dürer was sketching a walrus brought in by Dutch fishermen in 1521 and Arctic fishing trips were now common, so the word on the street about unicorn issues must have been increasingly adverse. Horns and tinkered-with fish are at least solid objects, but we despair in the face of trying to chart the rise and fall of belief in hidden arcana. A final disaster stems from our now having the ability to create a plausible pattern across Prague, as though viewed from high in the air, where we can simultaneously see all the different lines of alchemical enquiry – whereas, at the time, speculations within the Jewish Town or the Jesuit observatories or within the Castle would have been carried out in almost complete ignorance of each another. And even within these separate worlds there were backbiting, grandstanding and intellectual nervous breakdowns, with even figures as distinguished as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler at each other’s throats. It is a shame that we cannot get closer to the sheer chaos of Prague in this period, its streets thick with mountebanks, zanies, mercenaries from the Turkish wars, religious fanatics of every stripe, zoo-keepers, exotically dressed ambassadors and even the occasional serious scientist.

At the heart of it all sat the peculiar Emperor. His father, the amiable crypto-Protestant Maximilian II, was buried in Prague and Rudolf decided early in his own reign to move the court permanently there, partly because it was safer from Turkish attack than Vienna, partly because the Bohemian nobles had urged that he should, and partly because he could do whatever he liked. Rudolf does not seem to have been an appealing figure by most criteria – secretive, changeable, swinging between bouts of Imperial activism and total lethargy. He shared with his English contemporary, Elizabeth I, the peculiar problem of having no clear-cut successor – he never married but, unhelpfully, had several bastard children so
could
potentially have procreated to Habsburg ends. His five brothers also failed to have legitimate children, so Rudolf was in the unattractive situation of being hemmed in by a sterile generation of irritable siblings who could die in any sequence, with one or more potentially becoming Emperor. This was a particularly dire issue as after 1600 or so Rudolf withdrew from serious decision-making, with the unique result that Habsburg solidarity totally broke down. But this only happened because Rudolf was so useless as Emperor, disappearing for months and simply unable to carry out normal business. Compared to the ferocious Catholic activism of his successors he can now seem amiable, but in a world split between Christian and Muslim and between Catholic and Protestant it is an unfortunate example of where being reasonable and laid back seems to create not tolerance but merely deferred viciousness.

As he left no account himself and those near him wrote frustratingly little we can only project our own likes and dislikes on Rudolf’s private mental world. In many ways he seems to have been one of the most fortunate men who ever lived, taking more advantage than anyone else of the golden age of exploration and excitement that reached its apogee in the later sixteenth century. He was a lot richer and more focused than Elizabeth I, a lot less desiccated and pious than Philip II and lived longer and more agreeably than the chaotic French kings of the period. The inspiration for his collections came from the intellectual atmosphere of the time, but had specific roots too. Growing up at Philip’s court in Madrid he would have had the great luck to have been able to spend as much time as he wished staring at the pride of Philip’s collection, Hieronymus Bosch’s
The Garden of Earthly Delights
, a sort of vade mecum of Rudolf’s later interests. And en route from Madrid to Prague he had stopped off in Innsbruck and stayed with his uncle Ferdinand of Tyrol and so would have enjoyed the sensational guided tour available there. Once he had settled in Prague Castle, word went out that he was interested in effectively
anything
strange or unusual and entire businesses sprung up just to furnish him with fancies that might please him. These decades were host to a riotous sprawl of fresh information, sourced from the very smallest (with the invention of the microscope) to the largest (with the invention of the telescope). This new knowledge involved the reordering of most of the world’s men, creatures and plants, with tomatoes, potatoes, sunflowers and corncobs stumbling ashore and taking their first steps in what would prove their all-conquering invasion of Europe. It was an era as happy speculating on the nature of a supernova (a term derived from Tycho Brahe’s work, with the quintessential supernova observed and argued over in Prague in 1604) as on the nature of a naked flame.