Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (19 page)

There seems to have been no limit to Rudolf’s curiosity. At some point it must have toppled into a mere mania for heaping up room after room of Stuff, but until his final decade there is a clear sense of someone who must have grinned with excitement at the opportunities available to him. The great banking family, the Fuggers, had a busy warehouse in Antwerp lined with cages to deal with the exotic creatures brought in by enterprising Dutch ships, and soon Prague Castle was full of extraordinary exotica – macaws, lories, lovebirds and cockatoos all shivering away in their bleak new homeland. Rudolf had a dodo, birds of paradise and a cassowary. This last had gone through endless adventures, starting off as a diplomatic gift for the ruler of Java from an unknown king or vassal even further east and in turn given to a Dutch sea-captain. This enormous, violent and rather made-up-looking bird caused a sensation when it landed and Rudolf eventually secured it for himself, with its own specially decorated house. Two traumatized ostriches made the journey from Africa to Venice and then up through the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck and then, ultimately, to Prague. None of these creatures, unsurprisingly, lasted long.

There was an unedifying and futile quarrel with Philip II that lasted decades to get hold of an Indian rhinoceros that had landed in Lisbon. The rhino wound up being sent by Philip on a prolonged tour of Castile together with an elephant to show his subjects something of the power and majesty of the Spanish Habsburgs (a relatively rare surviving clue to the sorts of processions, displays and special events thick with symbolism that must have been part of the everyday business of projecting royal might). Eventually, when the rhino died, a deal was done to let Rudolf get hold of its hide, but given that nobody knew how to cure rhino hide it unsurprisingly and spectacularly rotted to pieces and the only bits that reached Prague for Rudolf’s pleasure were the horn and a few bones.

It is a measure of the problems of Rudolf’s reign that we are happy thinking of him, ruffed and in black, in some semi-darkened room slowly turning in his hand a bezoar (an animal gallstone meant to be a poison antidote), but cannot see him as the aggressive, fussy and well-organized collector he must in fact have been, constantly badgering, articulating and making demands. How could someone who seems introvert to the point of stasis have been such a great organizer of things and people? What drove him on? Perhaps at heart he had a perturbing, deeply hidden sense of humour, revelling in a very odd, secret way in unlimited power. This can be the only explanation for his having a lion and a tiger which wandered around Prague Castle more or less as they wished. For years these menaces were both a matchless representation of royal power and, presumably, a cause for innumerable scullions, vintners and linkboys going about their tasks in the gloom of the Castle corridors, trying to hold a silver drinks tray level while their legs went bandy with terror. Indeed surviving account books are dotted with references to compensation paid to surviving family members or to mutilated attack-survivors.

Allied to Rudolf’s obsession with living things – which were soon, on their deaths, converted into dried-out members of the cabinet of curiosities – was an all-encompassing mania for the decorative and the curious. The shorthand for Rudolf’s reign has always been the bizarre paintings of Arcimboldo, with the Emperor’s portrait a complex assemblage of fruit and vegetables (his nose a pear, his throat two courgettes and a turnip), but this Milanese oddball was in fact inherited from Maximilian II, for whom he produced some of his greatest work and who had become merely formulaic by Rudolf’s reign. The real tragedy is that we can never recover Arcimboldo’s almost certainly brilliant contribution as a decorator for parties and banquets – Maximilian had revelled in elaborate entertainments on classical themes. Perhaps these ephemera were his greatest works? More generally, it is galling that we have inherited only the sorts of objects (such as easily rolled-up paintings on canvas) readily taken by the generations of looters who dismantled Rudolf’s collections after his death, but not the things which at the time would have been most miraculous and all-encompassing – like rooms filled with dazzling painted decoration and matchingly uniformed servants, or connecting corridors down which you might have to walk past a tiger.

Setting aside Arcimboldo, Rudolf’s needs were tended to by dozens of peculiar geniuses. He had calligraphers, etchers, costume-designers, zoo-keepers, goldsmiths, print-makers. He had Bartholomeus Spranger (from Antwerp – another figure he inherited from his father) to paint some of the most aggressively pornographic paintings of the late sixteenth century, now livening up a back corridor of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. These are based naturally on ‘classical themes’ and include his celebrated Minerva, whose steel-fur-weapon outfit and posture would cause issues even for the most niche contemporary members-only club. There is also a Spranger painting in Prague Castle of Christ wearing a flimsy mantle and in the same sort of nightclub hostess pose as Minerva, his foot on a glass sphere with a human skull inside it and a flush-faced angel grabbing in an appreciative way one of his nude buttocks. Some very odd things were going on.

Rudolf seems to have been obsessed with glyptics, the art of carving on precious stones. This is perhaps the quintessential private artistic obsession, immune to modern museum display as it only really works through someone holding the tiny object in their hand and turning it in the light. He poured money into accumulating jewels – his agents fanned out across Europe and beyond to intercept and divert the flow of diamonds, pearls and sapphires to Prague, with the sapphires coming from as far away as Kashmir. The spectacular Crown of Rudolf II seems never to have been designed to be worn, but again simply to be handled by its owner. It was designed by Jan Vermeyen (also from Antwerp), who was brought to Prague to create this remarkably untacky (by crown standards) and beautiful object with the golden panels of its mitre celebrating the key regal events in Rudolf’s life: coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in Regensburg, marching through Pressburg (Bratislava) as King of Hungary and through Prague as King of Bohemia. The last panel shows him as victor over the Turks which, unfortunately, was not true and the real root of his reign’s disaster.

Among his great ancestors there had been men, most notably Maximilian I and Charles V, who had combined vigorous military, procreational and artistic policies. Rudolf managed only the last of these. The time he spent chatting to John Dee about his magic mirror made from Aztec obsidian should probably have been spent more wisely. His role as Holy Roman Emperor lapsed almost completely. His tolerance of – or more probably indifference to – religious issues meant that as his reign progressed the Catholic position in Bohemia caved in; it was perhaps nine-tenths Protestant by 1600. Rudolf’s failure to marry gave the latter part of his reign an air of ruinous stasis, even setting aside his own personal inactivity, with the future religious direction of the Habsburg lands depending on the views of his successor. This meant an extraordinary array of religious belief blossomed in Prague. Tolerance also made it a great shelter for wizards of a kind who were simply killed by the ruler of any surrounding state they were rash enough to wander into – the exotic fraud Marko Bragadino’s luck ran out when he was beheaded in Munich in 1591, dressed in a suit decorated with fool’s gold.

Rudolf’s one major foreign-policy initiative was a disaster. In 1591 the Ottoman frontier became vigorously active once more with the fall of the key Hungarian fortresses of Komárom, on the Danube, and Győr, seventy-five miles from Vienna. A significant but highly misleading raid at Sisak in 1593, principally involving Croatian troops, resulted in an Ottoman defeat and the first hint that the implacable enemy might in fact be placable. Determined to recover from this humiliation, Sultan Murad III declared war on Rudolf and initiated a wearying and horrible conflict that lasted for thirteen years. The initial coalition (brought together by the Pope rather than the Emperor) was formidable, with troops arriving from all over Europe as well as alliances with the eastern tier of principalities – Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania – which now turned on their Ottoman protectors. Remarkably little is written about this war, but it was perhaps one of the most important fought in Central Europe, a training school for the Thirty Years War for an entire generation and one of the main reasons that the region became so depopulated, with city after city and surrounding countryside left empty after ceaseless terror-raiding and mutual ferocity. So complete was this depopulation that it reshaped the ethnic map, as new linguistic groups moved into areas left empty by the extermination of their predecessors.

The Long War was a hideous, endless grind. There was one major battle, at Mezőkeresztes in 1596, the largest since Mohács, and the Christian forces came painfully close to winning before losing discipline, falling to looting and then being cut to bits. Some hundred and fifty thousand troops seem to have been present and casualties on both sides were enormous – but the Ottomans had a much larger army and this proved decisive. Mutual massacres, sieges and the usual mass deaths by disease sapped both sides but the fighting went on interminably. Rudolf was notionally in charge but never went to the front, with members of his family, most notably his brother Maximilian, doing the heavy, if inept, work. From a Habsburg or Christian point of view the Long War was a disaster and its prosecution shameful, but there was a separate story, not clear at the time, of matching Ottoman desperation. It is not unreasonable to say that the fighting burned out the Ottomans, with the febrile hysteria in Constantinople that greeted the news of the narrow victory at Mezőkeresztes symptomatic of an empire no longer the confident wonder of the world it had been under Suleiman. Army after expensive army trudged from Constantinople to the Hungarian frontier, but with no longer anything much to show for it. The 1606 Peace of Zsitvatorok ended the wretched conflict, signed by Murad’s successor Ahmed and Rudolf’s younger brother Archduke Matthias. It recognized minor changes in the frontier, but the Ottomans kept everything that was important. The bitter Habsburg signatories were not to know that the Ottoman threat (aside from the desperate throw of the Siege of Vienna seventy-seven years later) had hit its peak.

Hunting with cheetahs

The Star Hunting Lodge, in what is now a suburb of Prague, was built by Rudolf II’s uncle, the man who became the great Castle Ambras collector Ferdinand of Tyrol. When still a teenager he was appointed Governor of Bohemia by his father, the Emperor Ferdinand I, and he needed a rural base. There is even his sketch showing how he wanted it to look: a ground plan of a six-pointed star, probably based on a building he had seen in Rome. The lodge survived the most extraordinary rigours over five centuries and is still surrounded by a park used by generations of invaders – Swedish, Prussian, French, German and Soviet. As a fancy command post many an invader has found it impossible to resist setting up there – but in some odd way it must be cursed, as every single one has left. The lodge has been a gunpowder magazine and the park used both for Wehrmacht vehicle repair and for herds of cattle to feed Soviet troops. The Lodge roof has been stripped of its copper by mercenaries during the Thirty Years War, given a baroque cupola (now removed), neglected and abused. Its heyday was the latter half of the sixteenth century, when Ferdinand and his older brother the Emperor Maximilian II and then Rudolf used it for hunting and entertainments. In a completely extraordinary scene, Rudolf once hunted deer around the park with cheetahs – an image almost infantily exotic – as he and his followers orchestrated this no doubt mutually baffling encounter between fearsome, if chilly, African megafauna and some appalled Bohemian ungulates.

The Star Lodge’s mystery and absolute oddness lies in its six-pointed structure. It is as though it has battled through every vicissitude for many hundreds of years just so that at last its design can make sense when looked at on Google Earth. Originally the surrounding parkland was arranged in screens of vegetation in the same star shape, which must have made the building more conventionally decorative, but now in isolation, at the end of a long alley, it has the air of something that has been donated by a civilization from another planet. It seems to have no link to any architectural period and provides none of the interaction with the viewer that normal buildings have. It is almost as though it neither absorbs nor reflects light, the star’s arms angling sun and shadow in ways unrelated to normal physical experience. It is uncanny, and a perfect instance of the world of the sixteenth century, more potent than any cabinet of curiosities: an exercise in mathematics drifting through history.

I wanted to see it because I had read about the cheetah hunt. This hunt was both a classic Rudolfine conceit and at the heart of the mystery of Rudolf. Did he
often
go hunting with cheetahs? Was this a one-off after which he lost interest, decided to focus instead on perusing sketches of the Bohemian forests, and left the unfortunate cheetah whippers-in undisturbed with their restive and hungry charges? How is it possible to reconcile Rudolf’s introversion with something so exuberant? Clearly as his reign progressed Rudolf tended less towards cheetahs and more towards gem-stones and small, immaculate drawings. As the unanswered business heaped up and the Empire juddered to a halt, with the Turkish war going on for year after year like some grinding constant in a science-fiction novel, the exuberance around the Star Lodge became a very distant memory. Rudolf would be seen by nobody for weeks and the entire structure of both the Empire and the Habsburg lands began to cave in.

The Habsburgs’ astonishing longevity stemmed above all from the ability of the senior male to produce heirs and avoid going mad. A successor and a reasonable level of bureaucratic and kingly ability in a world based around heredity and hierarchy meant that, with a couple of spectacular wobbles, they were able to keep going without the British or Spanish habit of the principal stem simply running out. There were many reasons for hating the Habsburgs or being bored by them, but the family itself gave very few chances for its enemies to bring it down on dynastic or competence grounds – the children arrived, the wearying court protocol kept trundling on. The senior Habsburgs also stuck together. Behind every ruler there were a group of relatives whose importance we can now only guess at in most cases – dowagers, sisters, brothers who, whatever their private vexations, defaulted to a blank family solidarity.