Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (35 page)

The final theatre of fighting (north-west Europe) always looms large in British accounts because of the ‘Pragmatic Army’, a mixed force sent to protect Hannover and the Austrian Netherlands, which sparred with the French and, at the Battle of Dettingen, saw the last time a British monarch led his own army – although George II was there at least as much as Elector of Hannover. This was the theatre in which Maurice de Saxe shone, but the fighting had in the end little impact, beyond making it clear that the United Provinces (the Netherlands) was spent as the great and dynamic military and cultural force that it had been in the previous century. It also began in earnest the humiliating process by which the inhabitants of the Austrian Netherlands came to realize they were so little valued by Maria Theresa (and then by her son Joseph II) that they were open to pretty much
any
bid for a swap of some kind. To go about one’s business in Brussels or Ghent dimly aware that your ruler would gladly be shot of you cannot be particularly enjoyable and it would end with the Belgian Revolution, but only after generations of shame. Austrian rule there was erratic and mean-minded, just using up the province’s inherent wealth. But it did make Austria into the only truly pan-European power and therefore Britain’s natural associate, however bumpy.

The War of the Austrian Succession was stuffed with strange forks in the road. In the end it is extraordinary that from such weak beginnings, Maria Theresa, despite huge threats, did hold on to most of her territories and became a highly successful and impressive ruler, keeping the Habsburg lands intact in the face of their most overwhelming threat before 1914–18. But there is one more what-if: what if in 1744 Maria Theresa had made a treaty with Saxony’s Augustus III (a marzipan-like figure) in which the Saxons guaranteed her ownership of the Austrian lands, and in return Maria Theresa agreed that if her heirs were to die her titles would pass to Maria Josepha, Augustus III’s long-suffering wife, and another of Joseph I’s children? As Augustus was also King of Poland it is possible to see a new state coming into being which might have perhaps permanently tied together the existing Habsburg monarchy with the whole of Poland (at that point, of course, an enormous state) and Saxony – at which point Europe’s future would, yet again, have been entirely different. But as it was, Maria Theresa ruled for forty highly successful years and had sixteen children.

Austria wears trousers

Some years ago, wandering around the annual wine festival in the Hungarian town of Szekszárd, with its tiny, pony-fuelled carousel and heart-valve-furring snacks, it was impossible not to notice how many of the folk-craft stalls featured a strange silhouette, in the shape perhaps of an ink-blot or an elaborate cut of meat. On bags, bumper-stickers, jeans patches, drinks coasters – indeed on anything even vaguely plausible (I once saw it incorporated into a rasta woolly hat) – there was the same perturbing shape. I soon started to see it everywhere and it has now (2013) become omnipresent. The silhouette is a map of the ‘Crown Lands of St Stephen’ and its use is an impotent nationalist cry of rage against the hacking about of Hungarian territory after the First World War, when the enormous territory ruled from Budapest – a sprawling entity on a grander scale than Arizona – was reduced to a traumatized rump no bigger than South Carolina. This sense of fury has waxed and waned and was, for obvious reasons, stamped on hard by the Communists – but it never went away. The many Hungarians trapped on the wrong side of the borders have lived with discrimination, violence and contempt from their new rulers and you do not need to be all that crazily right-wing to feel that
some
small territorial adjustments would be wise. In the northern suburbs of Debrecen there is a classic expression of this sense of betrayal: a truly obnoxious statue put up in the 1930s showing a beautiful nude woman (Hungary) with an arm and a leg as bleeding stumps.

It is perhaps only possible to learn so much from a jeans patch, but the symbolic weight of that shape, wherever it is displayed, pins the wish for Hungarians to have a clearly defined, ethnically complete state. But the ‘Crown Lands of St Stephen’ are a fantasy, giving a sense of ancient destiny to an arena of political power for Budapest that in practice only existed from 1867 to 1918 and which therefore has no more God-given legitimacy than any other random date bracket. It would be an eccentric history lesson, but with scissors one could come up with jeans patches of pretty much every imaginable shape to express the borders of the true Hungarian state, and it is this tragic uncertainty that has been the true motor for the region’s fate.

Maria Theresa’s coming to the throne in 1740 gave the Hungarians a startling opportunity to improve their lot, but this was in the wake of a horrendous century or more. The Habsburg narrative for the Hungarians has always been about their treachery, mendacity, religious splitism and lack of gratitude. As the armies of the Holy League ended the long Turkish occupation of much of Hungary, its inhabitants were returned to the Christian (and Catholic) fold and the rule of their king, Leopold I (or I. Lipót). Very few Hungarians saw this as good. The Principality of Transylvania had maintained, albeit in flickering form, the flame of a separate Hungarian political identity. This was an identity closely linked to Protestantism, and as Habsburg forces marched into Sibiu and immediately began setting about building the – rather beautiful, if identikit – Catholic church on the Great Square, that identity was under acute threat. A frightening precedent had been set in Royal Hungary, the western areas (principally what are now Slovakia and Transdanubia) that had always stayed under Habsburg control. These had been subjected from the 1670s to the same iron-fist-in-an-iron-glove re-Catholicizing that Bohemia had experienced in the 1620s. In what amounted sometimes to an ethnic war, generations of soldiers and Jesuits hammered Royal Hungary. This ended up creating loyal, Catholic, pro-Habsburg Hungarians, but it also threatened, as it had for Czech-speakers, what seemed a permanent crushing of ethnic identity. It was hard to be loyal if the price of that loyalty was effectively to become German.

By the 1690s, as the Habsburgs enforced their rule on Transylvania, the once impressive principality of Bethlen Gábor was a distant memory: catastrophic decisions by its rulers had left it devastated by the Ottomans (who lost patience with the pretensions of their vassals) before a counter-devastation by the Holy League. The presence of Transylvanian troops with the Ottoman armies besieging Vienna meant that there was no chance of Leopold’s having the faintest interest in leniency. The new rulers set up their headquarters in Sibiu and the once glamorous old capital of Alba Iulia became a mere minor town.

The third and final part of the Hungarian lands – most of the modern state, in fact – as it came under Habsburg control following Turkish retreat was viewed as mere colonial territory rather than a proud Hungarian inheritance. The devastation of this area during the fighting was almost total, with places like Esztergom and Buda effectively re-founded. Swarms of irregular troops from both sides had filled their spare moments by destroying all human existence in their path, with many ancient villages simply ceasing to exist. Indeed, after a while, it becomes baffling as to where fresh Hungarian settlers could come from, so many areas were so utterly burned over.

The seventeenth century saw a number of uprisings and plots by the Hungarians to contest Habsburg presumption and in many ways the issues they raised remained the same until the end of the First World War. Even for Catholic Hungarians the problem was a terrible one. Vienna sat at the heart of a predominantly German-speaking, Imperial hub of power. Once the siege of 1683 had been lifted, Leopold’s reign saw the rebuilding of Vienna, including many of the boggling aristocratic palaces still there today – it started to become a great capital for the first time. It swarmed with Germans,
¹
whether from the Habsburg hereditary lands or from the Empire, together with Italian craftsmen, military advisers and mercenaries. There was a near perfect match between the needs of the Habsburg dynasty and the German aristocracy, who filled almost all military and official jobs and who issued a great flow of orders, proclamations and instructions, and who dominated scientific and religious ideas. Some of these were translated into Hungarian, but most were not. To even understand what was going on in the Habsburg lands, Hungarians had little choice but to learn German and, with this, ponder whether they would be better off totally Germanized.

Ever since the original disaster at the Battle of Mohács the Hungarian lands had been used as a buffer and their inhabitants seen as expendable. Now, with the string of great victories, all Hungarians fell into Habsburg hands for the first time. Leopold saw these as his natural spoils, but there were many other views. The truly horrible revolt of Ferenc II Rákóczi, which lasted from 1703 to 1711, caused staggering levels of further devastation, some eighty-five thousand of his Kurucs dying in battle and perhaps four hundred thousand civilians dying from plague and famine. It is hard to imagine that in an era which in western Europe preferred quite formalized combat there could in parallel (often with the same Habsburg troops) be such a bloodbath. Rákóczi’s attempt to create an independent state foundered on what would prove the usual basis. The other great powers were willing to use Hungarian discontent to cause trouble for Vienna (variously Russia, France, Poland and Sweden) but lost interest in that discontent once they had achieved their own goals. Hungarians suffered the painful fate of being too few in number and too distant to generate much sympathy. This was coupled with a refusal by those other linguistic groups in the ‘Crown Lands of St Stephen’ necessarily to fancy Hungarian rule. Having seen the departure of the Turks, it did not seem axiomatic that Hungarian masters were necessarily an upgrade. Rákóczi found himself dealing with widespread Transylvanian Saxon indifference, Serbian and Croatian hostility and a lack of unanimity even among Hungarians. Once the Habsburgs under Joseph I could spare the forces to concentrate on him they defeated him. But what choice did Rákóczi have? If the Hungarian nobility were not simply to submit to being a group of politically neutered fancy-dress-shop yokels, then a serious gesture had to be made against German Habsburg hegemony. The Hungarians were clinging to the very edge of political power and – excluded by prejudice, religious bars and language – threatened to become non-people, not unlike the Romanians whom they in turn kept down. The hysterical flavour of much of Hungarian political life, the costumes and obscurantism, stemmed from this sense of danger. As it was, every Hungarian ‘rebel’ leader until the later nineteenth century wound up exiled, dead in battle or executed. Rákóczi spent the latter part of his life in a town on the Sea of Marmara. It is an incredible sequence of failure, but it did mean that the Hungarians were never eviscerated like the Czechs. And, as with other risings, Rákóczi’s created a mythology which made him a near religious figure for later nationalist Hungarians.

The end of the rebellion saw a further overwhelming surge of thousands of colonists into what were now empty lands. This was a substantially hidden epic, as waves of Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks, Serbs, Bulgarians and even Cossacks filled the new territories, taking generations to clear, dyke and build town after town, often from scratch. Large groups of Serbs left Ottoman territory and settled in Szentendre, north of Buda, where they were given special privileges and left behind them, after their twentieth-century return south, a particularly beautiful and iconostasis-packed town. Many merchants were Jews, Greeks and Armenians and the strange process by which Hungarians tended to ignore economic activity of a non-agrarian kind began.

The great Hungarian opportunity for redemption came with the disasters that nearly overwhelmed Maria Theresa on her father’s death. Betrayed on every side, she had the brilliant idea of theatrically throwing herself, a notionally poor, weak woman, on the mercy of the Hungarian Diet. In two great visits to Bratislava in 1741 she wiped away many decades of loathing between Germans and Hungarians. Dressed in mourning for her father, holding the crucifix that had so comforted Ferdinand II at the beginning of the Thirty Years War (a poor precedent on the face of it), and bargaining ruthlessly, Maria Theresa ensured money, men and supplies and at least one loyal corner of the Habsburg lands. She camped it up magnificently, travelling down the Danube for her coronation in a barge festooned in Hungarian colours, galloping on a horse (a requirement of being crowned Monarch of Hungary!) and breathtakingly playing to the gallery. In a perhaps even more hysterical trip later in the year she held up her super-weapon before the Diet: a son, the tiny Joseph, whose existence ensured the continuity of the Habsburg line (albeit via the mother, which remained contentious for some). As the loyal phrase ran: ‘The enemy has lost his chance, for Austria now wears trousers’, or at least a nappy. Naturally these occasions in practice must have oozed the most terrible bad faith, but much to everyone’s surprise it turned out that Maria Theresa was a genius who had, despite her crapulous father, somehow acquired a moral compass and an ability to inspire trust and respect. The Hungarians reneged on much of the deal and provided a fraction of what they promised, but a new model of pro-Habsburg loyalism suddenly became available and for the first time Hungarian troops were sent into western Europe, with sometimes devastating effect.

Any attempt to discuss history purely in terms of jeans patches must come to grief, but it is not a wholly useless idea. The patch for eighteenth-century Hungarians would have been drastically different – with Transylvania under Vienna’s rule and a large block of the south forming a new and extended Military Frontier against further Turkish threats, again a vast zone outside Hungarian control. The oddities of the Polish-controlled Zips towns peppered northern Hungary and only a small part of what is now Croatia had some form of Hungarian jurisdiction. In a friendly gesture Maria Theresa handed over the port of Rijeka (Fiume) to Hungarian control, giving access to the sea for the first time since the Middle Ages, and making sense of at least the little hook-shape on the jeans patch.