Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (20 page)

Rudolf’s collapse created a huge crisis, and one which broke that solidarity. With no heirs apparent and even the alchemists left twiddling their thumbs, Rudolf’s personal terrors and melancholy meant that Central Europe was under threat. By the end of the century Maximilian II and Maria of Spain’s once prize-winning phalanx of nine Habsburg children was not what it had been. Maria had gone back to Spain (glad to live in a land without any heretics) and two of the children were in the Spanish Habsburg orbit (one as a governor of the Netherlands, another as a nun). Four of the remainder had died, leaving only Rudolf, Matthias and Maximilian. Both Matthias and Maximilian had led lives of action, the former fighting the Turks in the Long War and the latter trying and failing to become King of Poland and serving as Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. The situation was poisonous both because Rudolf disliked his surviving brothers and because they were all close in age and none had children. This meant that while Matthias was the heir, he was also old and a stop-gap and hardly worth investing the energy in sorting out the bribes, robes and jewellery for everyone to anoint him to his different jobs on Rudolf’s death. So just below the immediate successor were a variety of predators – most alarmingly Philip III of Spain, who could claim the whole lot through being the son of one of Maximilian II’s daughters, or Ferdinand, the ruler in Graz, whose father was another of Maximilian’s offspring.

This uncertainty became tangled in vicious, gloomy religious issues. Maximilian II, like many of his courtiers in each of his kingdoms, had been prey to ill-defined Protestant sympathies. Following from his father’s short reign, Rudolf found himself ruling over lands in which so many leading families in Bohemia, Austria and Hungary had become Protestant that his own more orthodox Catholic leanings were irrelevant. In many areas there was now a clear majority of non-Catholics, whether old Utraquists or Lutherans or Calvinists. Both Rudolf and Matthias understood that messing with the Peace of Augsburg, however distasteful Protestantism might be, was simply too dangerous. The latter half of the sixteenth century became a tense but intellectually respectable exercise in semi-tolerance. This was not the case for the post-Rudolf generation, with both Philip III and Ferdinand seeing Protestants simply as inspired by the Devil. For many people across the Habsburg lands the succession was therefore extremely worrying, with both of the most obvious successors liking to occupy themselves with expelling, killing and disinheriting Protestants.

We can always rely on Bartholemeus Spranger to paint something odd for every occasion and he certainly does not disappoint after the Peace of Zsitvatorok brought the Long War to an end in 1606. The final phase of the war was a hideous bloodbath, as rebellious Hungarians supported by the Ottomans fought against Habsburg forces, with the entire conflict taking on an ever more messianic Protestant versus Catholic fervour. Overruled by Matthias, who concluded the Peace, Rudolf commissioned Spranger to create an allegory of his own unhappiness. On a huge canvas, Spranger painted perhaps the most amazingly desirable figure of Victory ever. She is trampling on a prostrate Turk who is either dead or simply dazed and gawping because of the bits of Victory he can see from his vantage point. But Victory’s lissom feet unfortunately balance only on unstable blocks of stone and the Imperial eagle with sceptre and orb squats sadly on the ground next to the lucky Turk rather than soaring up into the air, as is more traditional. Such a direct and personal piece of work is an extraordinary survival – there is no doubt that Spranger was following very precise instructions from Rudolf. Instead of the usual, vacant suck-up allegories, here is one designed to make a very clear point: that the defining Central European event of Rudolf’s reign had ended in massacres, compromises and failure, and in his own authority ignored.

The rest of Rudolf’s reign was a desperately sad diminuendo. Matthias’s cynicism allowed him to work with the Protestants in ways that Rudolf could not. He recognized religious freedom in Transylvania and the rest of Habsburg-ruled Hungary and during the final years of Rudolf’s life (he died in 1612) edged him out of each of his titles. The deals done with each part of the Habsburg patrimony meant that in return for Protestant support Matthias got each job. We would of course see this as being positive, but the reality was feverish, vicious and chaotic. 1611 was the nadir. The peculiarly belligerent and quarrelsome Archduke Leopold, Bishop of Passau (and younger brother of Archduke Ferdinand in Graz) came to Rudolf’s aid. An engraving in the Prague City Museum shows the Catholic Passauer mercenaries running amok in the Lesser Town, with smoke pouring from the houses, corpses everywhere and house-to-house gun-fights. In a perfect example of the use of the Charles Bridge, the heavy fortifications at its eastern end prevented the Passauers from getting into the Old Town and eventually they were bribed to leave. Meanwhile Protestants lashed out in the Old Town, with Franciscan monks at Our Lady of the Snow hacked to death or gunned down from the roof and with attacks on the Jewish Town. The Thirty Years War would not start for another seven years, but all the ingredients were already there. At the end of 1611, Matthias, frantic to have an heir, at last married, although in his mid-fifties, a luckless first cousin. Rudolf died a few days later and was buried alongside his parents and grandparents in the Habsburg tombs in St Vitus’s Cathedral, the last Habsburg ruler, as it turned out, to be buried in Prague or use it as his capital.

It seems a shame to end on such a glum note. In one of the most imaginative meditations on Rudolf II, in 1922, Karel Čapek wrote the play
The Makropoulos Case
, quickly turned into a strange and marvellous opera by Janáček. The story revolves around Dr Makropoulos, one of the mountebanks and oddities at Rudolf’s court, who invents a potion that gives its user eternal life. He offers the potion to Rudolf, but he fears it is a poison and orders Makropoulos to try it first on his own daughter. In a typically ingenious Čapek twist this, of course, does not help Rudolf at all. The drink may not be a poison, but its potency can only be proven long after Rudolf has himself died anyway of natural causes. He is doomed never to know if the potion is real, or just another of his alchemists’ failed fakes. The play/opera is set in Čapek’s modern Czechoslovakia, with a beautiful woman arriving in Prague who seems to know a remarkable amount about the city’s past centuries …

The seven fortresses

One of the world’s most introvert, besieged landscapes, south-east Transylvania is like a physical expression of mental breakdown. It bristles with bastions, walls, watchtowers and crumbling gateways – and these are a mere fraction of what was once there, left as picturesque reminders of a stiflingly militarized and suspicious past. It is beautiful but it is not happy.

Where you lived in the Empire was always sifted by language and religion. The glowering old German merchant city of Kronstadt (now Braşov), wedged between two mountains, still keeps some of the old security paraphernalia along its northern boundary, which kept Romanians outside the walls. The rhythm of life was set by systems of passes and privileges as heavily armed convoys of goods (cloth, weapons, cereals) moved from strongpoint to strongpoint. Braşov was the last one before the Carpathians and the Ottoman territories beyond, from which – at enormous risk and in intervals between wars – huge fortunes could be made selling exotic northern goods to Constantinople.

Transylvania was under Hungarian rule for centuries and sometimes close to being an independent state, but it generally fell resentfully into the orbit of either Vienna or Constantinople. From the Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, it was a society based around defensive war, using the natural fortress of the mountains to the south and east, with Braşov in the crook where the ranges joined. The Transylvanians never solved the problem which always dogged such crenellated, reveted defensive measures – that it was not economically possible to have troops standing on hundreds of miles of platforms perhaps for
decades
between attacks. The attacker always had the advantage, being able to pick his moment and location, leaving most of the defenders helplessly in the wrong place. The principal nightmare for the region was the Tatars – either fighting on their own account or as direct allies of the Ottoman Empire, latterly through the Khanate of Crimea. Clouds of these steppe horsemen, lightly armed and focused on human and non-human loot rather than holding territory, could arrive at any moment. Even when there was notional peace between Transylvania and its eastern neighbours, the raiders tended to pay no attention.

As with much of the frontier, the population was at irregular intervals eradicated. A successful Tatar raid (successful from the Tatar point of view) resulted in the killing of everybody who would not be of use as a slave. Into the late eighteenth century, Habsburg-sponsored colonization projects could go absolutely wrong as a change in military fortunes would expose an entire population to catastrophe – with areas such as what is now south-west Romania (the Banat) first filling with new German farmers and then being completely ravaged. From the twelfth century onwards the only way to start afresh was to offer extraordinary privileges to a new and hopeful group – generally from sufficiently far away that they might not have a clear grasp of what they were letting themselves in for. The ‘Saxons’ were only in part from Saxony – indeed many seem to have come from as far away as Flanders – but in return for a range of incentives they were given land for their own towns. This was the origin of the ‘Seven Fortresses’, Siebenbürgen
being the German name for the region still (Transylvania is a Latinized version of the Magyar Erdély: beyond the woods). Some of these seven towns thrived, others did not, but they included the two famous lynchpins of German life, Schässburg and Hermannstadt (now Sighişoara and Sibiu) and the mixed Hungarian–German town of Kolozsvár or Klausenburg (now Cluj-Napoca). Schässburg’s straightforwardly military origins are shown in its Latin name, Castrum Sex, Encampment Number Six. The settlers brought with them German town-law codes – Schässburg’s and Klausenburg’s the ‘South German Law’, and Hermannstadt’s from Iglau (Jihlava) in Bohemia, with specific norms, laws and responsibilities shaping them in much the same way that new towns were laid down across the American West in the nineteenth century, but without the open, lung-clearing and optimistic aspect.

This promotion of new settlers was not restricted to Transylvania. Repeated depopulation meant that the medieval kings of Bohemia, Poland and Hungary and their Habsburg descendants were obliged to offer special privileges, leaving much of the running of each town to its inhabitants in return for specific defensive duties and fixed annual sums. This resulted in a great fan of German towns across the Baltic, Poland and the Habsburg lands and created a new landscape. Some of these were specifically mining colonies, such as Kuttenberg/Kutná Hora in Bohemia or the Zips/Spiš towns in what is now Slovakia. This Germanness extended to surprising places such as Kraków (Krakau), which developed under Magdeburg Law from 1257 and which only lost its German character in the later Middle Ages.

It is, of course, almost impossible not to think of these Germans in terrible 1940s terms, with ‘Krakau’ as capital of the Nazi General-Government. Of all Central European subjects it is perhaps the most difficult on which to exercise intellectual discipline. But a huge effort has to be made to think of these Germans simply as ‘people who happened to speak German’ and unlinked to later nationalism. They could have arrived from anywhere in the Holy Roman Empire from Ypres to Steyr, bringing with them all kinds of political, social and linguistic ideas from wildly different regions. It was only in their new towns that they became ‘Saxon’ and therefore self-consciously German rather than just Bavarian, Hamburger or Holsteiner. In Transylvania the Saxons only lost the last of their special privileges in the mid-nineteenth century – an astonishing run for a clannish, excluding and oligarchic way of life now quite baffling and alien to us.

This strange Saxon atmosphere is still most clearly visible in their fortified villages. The bigger places are marvellous, but Sibiu and Braşov are now unquestionably Romanian towns with a lot of effort put into their becoming thriving and modern, however dotted with Saxon survivals. By contrast the intense conservatism of the Saxon villages has pickled them in about 1650 or so. Many of their defensive structures survived for at least a century after technological changes made them useless against even the smallest raiding party, and then for at least three centuries during which the threat had in fact disappeared. The villages are melancholy places. After seven centuries of Saxon life, most survivors left for Germany from 1990 after years of Romanian collectivization and discrimination. Many villages have now mostly empty houses, groups of transient Roma and no imaginable future, despite extensive renovation work. But they are very beautiful and extremely strange.

A famous example is Deutschweißkirch (Viscri) near Sighişoara. (Incidentally, that last sentence shows the almost impossible problem of naming in this region: Viscri is its correct modern Romanian name, but in the context of its Saxon past Deutschweißkirch is also right – but as is the Hungarian Szászfehéregyháza.) The village gives a startling glimpse of the isolation and self-sufficiency of much of Central European life, away from the handful of properly maintained roads, and even today only reachable from one side down a long dirt track. Two rows of low, chunky houses face each other across a strip of land. This central strip, long converted in most places to a proper road, is visible still in many late-nineteenth-century photos of Habsburg villages: a messy communal zone for geese, chickens, ducks and fruit trees, and perfect for riding through on a horse. Every house was a miniature factory for turning out clothing, bedding and food: inescapable, intricate monotony pegging every week of the year to specific tasks and functions. Extremely precise instructions were laid down as to who did what and when, with almost every job being genuinely essential to the security and indeed survival of the village, which would have been absolutely cut off from the outside world for months each winter. Indeed, wandering around Viscri, there is an odd feeling of being directly in touch with the forms of human behaviour which shaped most history until very recently: ruthlessly enforced conformity, the centrality of the Church, literacy as a specific skill needed by a handful of people but irrelevant to the rest – and more broadly the aportioning of tasks across the village, often to specific families, each one essential to the whole. Also, strikingly, the great importance of women in a huge range of roles – a division of labour which valued pickling as much as scything or stitching as much as setting snares. Each day would spring into existence with everyone carrying out their appointed business: feeding animals, mending clothes, preserving cherries, checking the hay. Except at very specific times the work was not intensive and it could often be sociable, but it was relentless and narrow, punctuated only by the major personal and religious commemorations, which themselves created huge demands on all the village’s inhabitants. If everyone capably contributed their element then the village survived, but there was only a limited margin of error. It all sounds dreadful, and it is hardly surprising that as their way of life diverged ever more crazily from the rest of Europe during the twentieth century, the Saxons all headed off to a better life in Stuttgart.