Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (28 page)

Historians and economists impatient with the Empire assume that if only innovation
x
or reform
y
had been carried out then a greater financial rationality would have emerged, but it is unclear that anybody at the time was much interested. Of course all rulers wanted more money, but their attitude towards it seems quite astonishingly chaotic, with sudden decisions to build yet another monster baroque church or give a courtier a new house far more central to ideas of how a sovereign should behave than grindy book-keeping.

Leopold I’s Imperial and Habsburg roles fitted like a glove, and he sometimes seems invisible at the heart of the great, cold circuit of his ritual calendar and its obsessive
Zeremonialprotokoll
, as chamberlains herded around aristocrats, ambassadors, visiting soldiers, confessors and the minor members of the royal family so that they all stood or sat or kneeled in the right places and nobody felt slighted. There were some sixty grand religious ceremonies played out annually, and major events such as Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and the annual Feast of the Order of the Golden Fleece at which the Emperor had to eat in public. He had to be seen, he had to exchange a few words with the noblemen who expected this (with immediate gossip if he appeared to slight someone), he had to talk to petitioners. It must have been a very peculiar life, and perhaps the bouts of hunting and even declaring war were just attempts to shake off the humdrum aspects of being in charge and being obliged to make small talk. Margarita Teresa pointed out that things like card-games, concerts and operas were excellent ways of avoiding speaking to anyone and she filled up as much time as possible with them.

This sense of tedium, of endless bowing and scraping, of ritual hand-kissing, of special clothes for court, of pretty compliments, was in practice interrupted the whole time, but these and the endless masses were the backdrop against which the Emperor took his decisions. He met his council, his key generals, his confessor (a crucial but now wholly mysterious figure), members of his family, but all the time the final say on any important subject lay with him alone. He sat at the hub of this highly complex but thoroughly wobbly wheel while large stretches of Europe waited. I would have myself plumped for a masterful inactivity, with plenty of leisure time set aside for music, mistresses, big jewels, a private library with a very comfortable chair and lots of talented painters to chat to about the iconography to be used for triumphant ceiling-paintings featuring me. Some of this worthwhile programme would undoubtedly have appealed to Leopold, but his key decisions were taken for him: by his belligerent neighbours to the east (the Ottomans) and to the west (the French).

The twin threats Leopold faced allowed him to make brilliant use of Imperial resources to block both Louis XIV and the Turks. He was an effective member of the great coalition including England, Spain and the Netherlands that was able to contain Louis during the Nine Years War. Leopold brought on board the band-of-brothers military element that had successfully defeated the Turks at the Battle of Vienna and its follow-ups, swung this to the west to wreck Louis, and then shifted it back east to do further damage to the Ottoman Empire. In fact, racking my brain, this is one of the
very
few cases where the Empire–Habsburg linkage across Europe worked fairly well, albeit as part of a much bigger coalition. Leopold was effective at using his Imperial position to horse-trade and took two decisions crucial to the future of Europe. The first was to allow Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Elector of Brandenburg, in return for support in fighting Louis, to become a king. This was a startling change – the only people called king in the Empire were all Habsburgs (two of the Emperor’s titles: King of Bohemia and German King; the other owned by his heir: King of the Romans), otherwise it was all a rubble of princes, knights, burgraves and what not. Friedrich Wilhelm may have been called by the strange title of ‘King
in
Prussia’ (it was changed to
of
after the whole of Polish Prussia fell into his hands), but it still provided a unique status and glamour for the family who would become the Habsburgs’ nemesis. Almost as significantly Leopold agreed to make the north-west German ruler Ernst August, who fought in the Turkish wars, an Elector. This was a momentous change and one much resented by other rulers in the Empire, who only agreed to verify it after Ernst August’s death. But his son and successor Georg I Ludwig, Elector of Hannover, also became George I of Great Britain in 1714 and this surprising twist gave Britain a major voice in the Empire, albeit an Empire that was rapidly decomposing. It also further solidified the somewhat abusive but nonetheless crucial relationship between London and Vienna, which I will come back to in a little while.

Bad news if you are a cockatrice

Putti
have a peculiar and confused lineage. They have been around since Renaissance artists copied classical originals and are often mixed up with Cupid, an altogether more sexual, fateful figure, and barely related in practice to these small, tumbling babies with wings. They zoom about looking vaguely serious in religious paintings, and throw flowers, fall off clouds and perform other light duties in hundreds of painted ceilings featuring rulers and ancient gods. They can look wistfully appealing (most famously in Raphael’s
Sistine Madonna
in Dresden) but generally they just add lightness, charm and variety to what might otherwise be somewhat plodding canvases. They seem to have more or less disappeared around the time of Napoleon and this is probably something else he can be blamed for.

I was thinking in a slight state of panic about
putti
because they feature so oddly in the weighty Marian column in the square called Am Hof in Vienna. It was originally erected by Ferdinand III to thank the Virgin Mary for her intercession in preventing the Swedes from breaking into Vienna during the Thirty Years War. It is a very strange monument and still the focus of pilgrimage and special masses. Pope Benedict XVI gave prayers next to it in 2007 to mark its three hundred and sixtieth anniversary, exclaiming to a huge crowd: ‘How many persons, over the years, have stood before this column and lifted their gaze to Mary in prayer!’ This is a very moving idea and it is easy to imagine many moments, both national and personal, where this might have happened. The Marian column has been through a lot but has come out the other side of the most extraordinary political convulsions unscathed, unlike the matching one in Prague, which a gleeful crowd heaved over and smashed in 1919 as soon as Czechoslovakia got its independence.

The Prague crowd had perfectly good motives for toppling the column, but the strongest one was the Marian column’s extremely nasty imagery. In Vienna, Mary herself on top seems harmless enough, but she has her foot on a writhing dragon (with a beautiful jet of gold flame coming from his mouth) which she is presumably treading flat, like it is a giant squeaky toy. The
putti
are around the base and something seems to have gone very wrong. Far from welcoming a saint into heaven or flinging garlands about they seem to have emerged from some sort of experimental farm. These
putti
, despite keeping their chubby little cheeks and dimpled arms, have been put into heavy murmillo-style armour and given hacking swords with which they dispose of various disgusting, squirmy creatures such as cockatrices. It becomes clear that when the pope said that the column was raised by Ferdinand III ‘in thanksgiving for the liberation of Vienna at a time of great danger’ he was referring not just to Swedes but to the contagion they brought with them – Protestantism.

Each special-forces
putto
is dispatching Error with its little sword just as Mary herself, in an unusually active move for her, is crushing the dragon of Heresy. So much explicitly anti-Protestant material has been destroyed or quietly put away that it is strange coming face to face with it here, but there is another column surviving and just as bad in Munich. The idea that Protestantism can be represented by a wriggling freak with a cock’s head and two scaly legs is not ideal, nor is an ideology which ropes in
putti
to do its dirty work. There is too the delusive sense that this was a problem that could be fixed by a sword blow – if brought to life the
puttis
’ falling swords would have ended the Protestant threat a split-second after the statues had been carved, whereas in practice the Habsburgs hacked and hacked at heretics for hundreds of years before at last giving up. The Prague column had stood near the marvellous memorial to Jan Hus, unveiled in 1915 and one of the great symbols of a Czech nationhood snuffed out by Ferdinand II. When the crowd pulled down their Marian column it was both an anti-Habsburg act and a futile gesture against the outcome of the Thirty Years War.

There seems to have been a general rush of enthusiasm for showy but oddly abstract public monuments under Ferdinand III and Leopold I. The Empire is still littered with Plague columns and it is a minor pleasure of wandering from place to place to see if the Plague column is still around, with a perfunctory but charming one in Graz and an extraordinary one in Olomouc which has the air of a baroque design for a surface-to-air missile. The status of these columns is always a bit unclear. They marked thanks to the Holy Trinity for ending a specific plague. As he ignominiously fled Vienna in 1679 Leopold I promised to build a column and this amazing welter of clouds and saints now fills up the middle of the Graben, its impact somewhat reduced by the hordes of mimes and human statues dotted around it. But, given that the plague was going to end anyway, it seems a bit sarcastic to put up such an elaborate object just because it stopped after only a quarter of the population had been killed. It would surely have been preferable to have put one up because a town was miraculously spared – although that would not have washed I suppose with nearby towns ravaged by sickness. In any event they are very peculiar objects and in many cases have survived just through accident of location and durability, their original function of course long gone. During one of the Silesian Wars the Prussians besieged Olomouc and some cannonballs crashed into the Plague column. The horrified inhabitants sent out a delegation pleading with the Prussians to redirect their fire away from it. This they agreed to do, presumably resulting in random, pointless deaths and homes and shops being destroyed, whereas previously the only casualties were chunks being knocked out of gnarled and over-expressive statues of saints, plus the odd
putto
.

Private pleasures

One question that must bug anyone entangled in Habsburg issues is the question of pleasure. If you have effectively infinite money and nobody to tell you what to do, is that fun? Generally these are walls we cannot look over. The sheer oddness for the Emperor of having public and private roles almost perfectly overlaying each other is beyond imagining. He lived out most of the day in symbolic duties both secular and religious and was circled by men whose sole task it was to make sure he was wearing the right diadem, pendant or decorative cape. He had an acute personal awareness of precedence and the degree to which a simple exchange of words in public with a given individual would be viewed as a sign of potentially life-changing honour. And finally, of course, there is the alarming idea that it is only his own death that releases him from this jewel-encrusted treadmill, a death at which you only get one shot, but which must also be symbolically ‘good’ (surrounded by family, confessing at the right moment, holding a crucifix). On the face of it this would all have been fairly grim, particularly when a pile of bitter, costive relatives is thrown in, plus the grand old Habsburg tradition of having at irregular intervals to listen to really terrible military news from some out-of-breath messenger.

Perhaps the real reason for valuing some of the Habsburg family was as commissioners of beautiful things. The great collectors have left a boggling legacy. It is the most obvious source of enjoyment to us today and these things must have been enjoyed by their initiators in a way or degree closed to others. Areas of expertise such as the collecting of small, fine objects – coins, jewels, intaglios, seals – are by definition based around holding them in the hand. At one point I carried out a rather abortive few afternoons of research into Habsburg coins and medals (there is not really all that much to say about them, it turns out) and the whole business of little wooden trays, tiny handwritten labels and special thin white gloves was such fun. Of course, part of that fun is merely snobbish and self-grooming, but the better part is the solitary contemplation of something designed to be angled to the light, slowly turned and hefted. The strange
weight
of a small gold disc (particularly to someone used only to handling chocolate gold coins) is in itself alarming, as though some rule of gravity has been contravened. Coins too are startling because from the late fifteenth century onwards the image of the ruler is really expected to be realistic. A coin’s role is to be circulatory: a travelling assertion throughout his domains of the monarch’s power and legitimacy. So the exact face of the Emperor, familiar to those bowing and scraping to him on his throne in Vienna, ripples out to the woolliest bits of the Tyrol. On fine-art gold coins and medals issued as rewards or to mark Imperial successions, victories or marriages, their artwork transmitted these events to specific families and high-end individuals, who would in turn show them to favoured visitors to their castles or palaces, making these too a strikingly direct enforcement of Imperial rule. Holding such discs at the right angle (in special gloves!) it is almost a miracle to see with no loss across the centuries the tiny details of hair, jewellery and ruffs on the spectacular, late-sixteenth-century coins made for Archduke Albert (son of Maximilian II) and his wife, the Infanta Isabella (daughter of Philip II), during their rule over the Spanish Netherlands, all their haughty glamour preserved, whereas all their palaces, music, values and political power have otherwise utterly dissipated. And, at the opposite end metallurgically speaking, a worn and battered cheap coin of Maximilian I still preserves the distinctive hair and nose in a jauntily charismatic way half a millennium after his death. Because coins had to be realistic, they are also the one place where you are most likely to encounter Habsburg ugliness. Cursed by inheriting the Roman coin tradition of the head and shoulders profile shot, the coins catch the almost frighteningly swollen jaw in a way that is otherwise fixed up with angles, lighting, beard and moustache in the more familiar paintings. Leopold I’s long reign and the military victories of his reign meant numerous Caesar-style appearances on all kinds of coins, medals and decorative schemes where his dignity is undercut by his unhappy profile.