Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (33 page)

Charles VI’s court then was one where bad news arrived at regular intervals. As bad in its way was the ghost that hung over everything: that of Charles’s elder brother, the short-lived Emperor Joseph I. Joseph in his short reign was a startling and inspiring figure – hard-drinking, reckless, adoring warfare, sexually chaotic: it is hard to imagine a less Habsburg Habsburg. He didn’t even have the giant chin. While he had been impatiently waiting for his father Leopold I to get out of his way, Joseph had developed a clear, very German ideology and saw his role as Emperor as central. Once Emperor, and when not grabbing desirable noblewomen or firing guns, Joseph was also disposing of the gloomy and obsessive credulity of the old court and hacking at the sclerotic and weary calendar of religious observances. A Jesuit, appalled that Joseph had given a prominent position to a Protestant, dressed up as a ghost and lurched into the Emperor’s bedroom urging him to dismiss the heretic. Joseph simply called his servants and had the Jesuit thrown out of the window. This curious story reflects well on the new atmosphere at court, but also reflects terribly on the Jesuits, that one-time intellectual power-house now reduced to camping it up in sheets and grease-paint.

Joseph both came to the throne and died with the War of the Spanish Succession still going on, but his short reign was vigorous, stylish and successful with the devastating victories pouring in from his commander Prince Eugene more than outweighing rebellions in Hungary. Charles, by contrast, stomped back into Vienna as an embarrassing failure and having been away during the six years of reform under his brother. The shocked and confused court started off with him on the wrong foot and, as Charles never even tried the other foot, the tone of his reign never really changed. It is hard not to feel a bit sorry for him. His chief and permanent torment was to be surrounded by huge numbers of often resentful and privately derisive women. These included his wife, two dowager empresses (the wives of Leopold I – i.e., Charles’s mother – and Joseph I), several sisters and two nieces. Of course, not all of these were at home all the time, but the tone of the court was definitely wall-to-wall female with Charles as the single, unlovely male. This need not have been a problem, except for the obvious one – that the Habsburg titles could only pass through the male line. The title of Emperor was elective, so this was not a problem – except that the Electors would not elect a landless woman. This was the point at which the Habsburgs were condemned by their own ridiculous fourteenth-century forgeries signed by Julius Caesar which had almost incidentally specified descent through the male line. The lack of men had worried Leopold I, who had first arranged that in the event of Joseph and Charles dying, descent would be through Joseph’s elder daughter. But how anyone would agree to this remained unclear.

The chief aim of the Habsburg monarchy during the weary twenty-nine years of Charles VI’s rule was to persuade Europe’s rulers to sign the document which would permit female inheritance. Known as the Pragmatic Sanction, it was perhaps the most useless document ever dreamed up. Charles’s representatives fanned out to all the courts they could think of and in return for bribes, threats, concessions and pleading got
some
signatures. But these signatures were all given by figures putting on their most lizard-like and blank expressions. As everybody knew, the only guarantee came from Charles being alive. The moment he died everyone would crack their knuckles, rub their hands together and see what they could most readily pick from the wreckage. There were two moments of excitement, when Charles and his wife had in quick succession two children – but these were also daughters. In a moment of characteristic idiocy, he then changed the terms of the Sanction: instead of descent running through Joseph’s daughters, this was now switched to his own elder daughter. As can be imagined, the atmosphere between members of the Imperial family now turned icy. Apparently, whenever petitioners requested something of Charles he would only ever reply in a brief, incoherent mumble and it is easy to see why. And in a further, absolutely baffling failure, as his daughter Maria Theresa grew up he did nothing to train her in her future duties – he hardly talked to her, did not include her in any of his roles at court and left her absolutely unprepared for her position. His mulish obsession with the Sanction became a vindication of his own, otherwise wretched record, but in his attitude towards Maria Theresa he showed that he did not really believe that she should inherit either.

All this gaucherie made Charles’s rule the least successful in the entire Habsburg experience. He even managed to alienate himself from the affairs of the Empire, again a startling contrast to his predecessor, focusing almost exclusively on Habsburg family concerns. As it turned out, Joseph I’s reign was the last point at which the Empire really functioned properly and for the rest of the eighteenth century, before its final destruction, it was in many ways robust, culturally brilliant and admirable, but this had little to do with the last Emperors. It must be the case that if Joseph had not got smallpox the shape of Europe would have been very different – although not, of course, necessarily better. As it was, a large part of Europe floundered under the last male Habsburg, who finally came to an unlamented end gorging on mushrooms in oil.

As usual, political and dynastic tone has very little to do with artistic tone. This was the era of great architects – Prandtauer, Hildebrandt, Fischer von Erlach, father and son; great painters – Rottmayr, Gran and Troger, who between them made Austrian ceiling frescoes into wonderlands; and heroic sculptors including Matielli and Moll. Balthasar Moll was originally employed as a talented maker of public entertainments – floats, zany sledges and so on – but then used his Disney-like talents to make Charles VI and his wife Elisabeth Christine into the absolute star turns once they were down in the Imperial Vault. Posthumous fame is not ideal, but all the gloom and failure of the reign itself can be swept away by these two great decorated bronze caskets. Elisabeth Christine’s is decorated with the heads of mourning women with their faces smothered by veils, an effect in bronze which is both violent and erotic in a way not generally looked for by people visiting crypts. And even these masterpieces are trumped by Charles’s matching figures: bronze skulls wearing the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It is perhaps the different, implicit textures in these sculptures – gold, jewels, bone, hair, damask, skin – all reduced to tarnished bronze that makes them so extraordinary. They seem to sum up, and then tip over the edge, a whole Late Baroque atmosphere.

Above the great Imperial staircase at Göttweig Abbey, Troger made one last giant fresco of Charles right at the end of his reign. Gods,
putti
and the Arts lounge about on clouds in a brilliant sky, Error is, as usual, chased away and Charles is Apollo, rushed across the sky by champing white horses seemingly carved from marshmallow, in a great gold chariot with sun-rays bursting behind his head. It is both a masterpiece and a sorry spectacle. The sullen Turkish captives from the St Florian ceiling fresco have been tactfully taken away given how that didn’t work out, and Charles himself is shown in what seems a deliberately ludicrous light – half-nude, wearing a sort of toga but also a wig and with his haggard face a congested puce colour. He looks like someone living in a very expensive, but also very oddly run care home. And that is probably where we should leave him.

Zips and Piasts

The upper geographical edge of the Habsburg territories holds a number of politico-geographic oddities of a kind that could easily swamp this book, and should in a fit of self-discipline be corralled together. Compared to much of the rest of the Holy Roman Empire, the monarchy’s own territories tended to consist of reasonably compact units and there is little to match the sheer pleasure of the little Wettin and Reuss states of Thuringia, say, where each valley had its own colourful ruler. The nearest approximations are on this upper edge. One total weirdness is the Zips (Szepes) region – now part of Slovakia, but for centuries a string of mostly German mining settlements under Hungarian rule. I kept planning to visit it, but was prevented for one petty reason or another. I eventually realized it would be a literal-minded and rather sad thing to go to the towns, as it could only be a disappointment compared to the sort of cheerful-blacksmith, birds-whistling-in-the-forest,
Snow White
atmosphere they increasingly had in my mind. For very short-term gain the Emperor Sigismund, abusing his title as King of Hungary, had mortgaged them in 1412 to the King of Poland in return for seven tonnes of silver (an interesting indication of the resources then available in Poland) to allow him to fight some futile war with Venice. The money had long been spent and there was never any serious prospect of paying back this immense sum. So quite unintentionally the Zipsers found themselves under Polish rule for some three hundred and sixty years, entire populations effectively the equivalent of some unredeemed old clock on a high shelf in a pawnbroker’s. Maria Theresa eventually marched in without bothering with repayments and three years later her rule was confirmed in the First Partition of Poland and the Zips towns became part of the Kingdom of Hungary again, maintaining their somnolent oddness in the face of all subsequent change, until, as ‘Carpathian Germans’, the Zipsers fled or were expelled in 1945.

As peculiar was the territory west and north-west of the Zips: the ancient amalgam of Silesia. I pride myself on having an unlimited enthusiasm for this sort of political rubble, but even I blanch at the ins and outs of the Piast dukes and their tiny territories. The whole lot were shovelled together and handed by the Polish king Casimir the Great to the Bohemian king John the Blind as an intelligent bribe to stop John’s insistent claim to own the Polish crown himself. So in 1335 at the Treaty of Trentschin these splintered pieces became part of Bohemia, with a single hold-out in the appealingly named Bolko the Small, ruler of Schweidnitz, who carried on until his death in 1368 (you can begin to see the bog of information into which one can sink). For Casimir this was a small decision (Poland was enormous and had any amount of land to play with – and indeed his successors would pick up the Zips!), but it alienated a block of Polish land for some six centuries, with the region’s complete return only in 1945. For John the Blind, with his much smaller lands, it was a sizeable chunk – roughly the same size as Bohemia itself and with a wealthy population. John, despite his blindness, went for chivalric reasons to fight at the French court where he was killed in the crushing English victory at Crécy with his personal motto (‘Ich dien’) being picked up by the Prince of Wales, who has used it ever since.

In any event, like the rest of the Bohemian crownlands the Silesian territory was collected by the Habsburgs after the death of Lajos II and it became a useful, productive element in the monarchy for more than two centuries. Their rule was protected by their very solid legal claim, but also by the weakness of the other rulers flanking Silesia – this weakness indeed being a key reason for Habsburg strength in more cases than the monarchy itself would like to have imagined. The Polish kings were too preoccupied both by the Ottoman Empire and the increasing menace from Russia to be concerned about Silesia; and the Brandenburg rulers to the north were a classic Holy Roman Empire joke-shop outfit: easily the most financially feeble and geographically incoherent of the Electors. In the later seventeenth century the Brandenburg situation began to change with alarming speed. The Electors were an odd bunch but their territories (added to by guile, luck and marriage) grew in a curious echo of the Habsburgs’ own good fortune many years before. They gained the title of ‘King in Prussia’ from the elderly Leopold I and, as Charles VI floundered around trying to get the rulers of Europe to support his daughter’s accession, there was one of those traditional discussions by which intellectuals in the service of power disgrace themselves, in this case digging out weird old Prussian documents to show the possible illegality of Habsburg rule over Silesia. As soon as he heard the news of Charles’s death, the very young new Prussian king, Frederick II, saw that here was a chance to grab a major piece of land. This decision was to shape a generation.

Silesia in the right hands was extraordinarily valuable – in the Habsburgs’ it allowed them to threaten Brandenburg; in Brandenburgs’ it made the Habsburg lands vulnerable; in either case it separated Saxony from Poland and fatally weakened that relationship. It undoubtedly had a large and economically worthwhile population, but given how many thousands of lives were lost struggling for it and the wider wars which drew in almost every country in Europe, Silesia became ever more of an abstraction. In the nineteenth century its value as an industrial zone was considerable, but it was rapidly overtaken by the Ruhr, and its eventual reabsorption into Poland in 1945 was accompanied by much suffering but little international interest. Just looking at it on a map Silesia has a fuzzy inability to cohere under whichever rule: it is a between-land and has suffered accordingly. But in 1740 it was the true centre of Europe and for the young Frederick II and the even younger Maria Theresa it was a fight to the death.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The great crisis
»
Austria wears trousers
»
The Gloriette
»
The war on Christmas cribs
»
Illustrious corpses
»
Carving up the world