Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (37 page)

Joseph was probably lucky to have died when he did, as even without the French Revolution, his actions had clearly run completely out of control by then. As the streets filled with homeless nuns, crib-smugglers and angry noblemen, it was unclear if Joseph might in fact have provoked his own revolution. Attempts to abolish serfdom for example flushed out another massive area of disability based on language. The Hungarians of Transylvania dealt with Romanians every day, with most of their serfs being Romanian (or Wallachian as they were then called). Indeed, Romanians were the largest group in Transylvania’s tumultuous ethnic mix. The Hungarians themselves hardly formed a coherent group, split like any complex society into competing elements, with noble landowners, an often poor gentry and many small farmers. There was also the very large, separate group known as Székelys, who had traditionally defended the eastern frontiers and, while speaking Hungarian, had little in common with the aristos in Cluj. At some basic mental level, however, the Hungarians pretended the Romanians did not exist and that Transylvania was a thoroughly Magyar land. This tension (or fantasy) was to continue until the cataclysm of 1918, having some of the same flavour as twentieth-century South Africa. In 1784 the hideous Revolt of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan erupted. These men led some thirty-six thousand Wallachian followers across western Transylvania in a fury of anti-Hungarian violence, animated by the excitement around Joseph’s reforms. Thousands of Hungarians were murdered and troops sent in with the usual massacres. Horea and Cloşca were ultimately broken with a hammer on the wheel, quartered and then displayed in smaller chunks on poles along the roadside. Crişan managed to kill himself in gaol to avoid this fate. These events suggested that Joseph might be leading the Monarchy into total chaos. Certainly this was the conclusion drawn by his successors, who clamped down and deradicalized, with the French Revolution providing excuse enough to drop further reform. The Revolt of Horea, Cloşca and Crişan, though, would have a long future.

Illustrious corpses

Joseph’s reforms were always a strange mixture of the well-meaning and the merely peculiar. A fine (if terrible) example has been preserved in the Piranesi-like gloom of the Špilberk fortress in Brno. The fortress has a long history of infamy, and while it is promoted locally as a family day out, it cannot shake off its miserable role as both Habsburg and Nazi barracks and prison. One of its worst rooms demonstrates the strange results of what should have been Joseph’s finest hour – the abolition of the death penalty.

The death penalty had always stemmed in part from the unwillingness of the authorities to fund long prison sentences. Most criminals’ sentences were fines, confiscation of property or expulsion from their city or even country. They could also be mutilated in some disgusting way, or publicly humiliated, either in the stocks or through being forced to wear freakish and peculiar metal masks. Some chilling examples of these survive in Salzburg castle, and to be forced to walk the streets for a week, humiliated and half stifled, looking like some shunned relative of the Tin Man must have been a horrible ordeal. Some religious criminals could be burned alive, and for crimes against the state they were sent off to be galley-slaves or executed in the sort of dreadful and exemplary ways used for the Romanian rebels. So the state had many forms of punishment, but long terms in gaol were not among them. Except in the case of debtors, potentially useful political prisoners or errant noble family members, the idea of long-term incarceration, feeding and looking after criminals for decades at public expense was not part of the repertoire.

There was, however, a quite widespread feeling that executions were degrading and unenlightened. Their point was to be great public spectacles, a stage-managed, living-flesh version of the moral stories in cheap prints, books and sermons about duty, obedience and the need to curb pride, but they would often get out of control. We do not know the feelings of the crowd watching Cloşca’s and Horea’s prolonged agony, but it is fair to assume that their status as Romanian folk-heroes was established as much by the execution as by the rebellion. But if there were not to be these horrible fiestas what would replace them? Joseph’s abolition of the death penalty was therefore a problem as it meant an alternative had to be found, presumably long-term incarceration.

Parts of the Špilberk fortress were taken out of use in 1858 and its military governor opened it up as a tourist attraction, having blacksmiths make fake torture instruments, fabricating a barely interesting legend about unfaithful wives being walled up in one of the rooms and putting in such fitted-as-standard features as a strappado’d shop dummy. A more serious reconstruction was of Joseph II’s ‘dark cells’ for those murderers who were now spared execution. The new enlightened regime meant that the prisoner spent the rest of his life chained inside a wooden box in total darkness and silence (beyond the distant sound of church bells), with bread and water shoved through a slot by a soundless gaoler. After only weeks of this, prisoners would go completely mad or else simply will their own deaths.

An alternative Joseph found was to put a thousand or more prisoners to useful work pulling barges up the Danube. This was little better than the dark cells, with two-thirds dying of malaria, malnutrition and exhaustion from hauling barges in ropes and chains sometimes through chest-deep water. All one can say about these initiatives was that they represented a very peculiar sort of reformism. But they also offered a preliminary rough sketch for all the forms of chilling, pseudo-rational zeal which convulsed Europe at irregular intervals from now on.

A more attractive example of the pace of intellectual change in the eighteenth century can perhaps best be shown by coming back to Clement and Frederick, the catacomb saints, still shivering in the Danube valley, many miles north of their warm Roman home. It was only sixteen years after his mother donated St Frederick to Melk that Joseph was staying in Florence with his younger brother Leopold, the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He saw there some extraordinary wax anatomical models and commissioned their creators, Paolo Mascagni and Felice Fontana, to fabricate a far larger, more complex and more detailed group of wax corpses for his new military medical college in Vienna. It was probably only very recent descendants of the mules that had hauled St Frederick over the Brenner Pass who spent the 1780s carrying more than a thousand wax models over the same route. Now displayed in the great medical museum at the Josephinum, these astounding objects have a fair claim to be some of the greatest artworks of the later eighteenth century, both as reimagined Italian religious sculpture and in their revolutionary new attitude to the human body.

Certainly, too, as pieces of theatre they are brilliantly presented. I had no way of telling if this was a legitimate odour in a medical faculty or a stroke of camp genius by the curator, but the slight smell of ether in the rooms adds immeasurably to the sense of Frankensteiny art-yoked-to-science. Far simpler and cruder preparations of the nervous system or arteries in, say, the Ingolstadt medical museum or the Hunterian in London are alarming enough, but the Josephinum presents an endlessly varied set of memento mori. Lying on their sides, even sharing the same pose as the catacomb saints, these pulled-open and cut-apart people, the wax as vividly coloured as when they were first made, come startlingly close to being real. A room of standing male figures, even with much of their skin removed and internal organs on display, stare right back at the viewer, their eyes enormous in their flayed faces, in a challenging and oddly noble way. They make the most accomplished normal sculptural statues of the same period seem merely inert and formulaic. There is even a sequence of random, dreadful wax chunks of human torso to help military surgeons identify the appearance of entry points for different wounds. The models make humans into functioning (or malfunctioning) machines instead of divinely ordered receptacles. It is impossible to keep your composure when admiring how the sculptor has made the muscles stretch correctly when the skin is pulled away from the upper leg, or when coming face to face with a big wax prostate. The effect for the spectator is both religious and scientific: quite soon these ruined yet grand and moving people create their own complete world and you walk back out onto the cold streets of Vienna, with cheerful, duffel-coated students and normal busyness, feeling expelled from something almost too powerful.

Carving up the world

Being a monarch was by any conventional measure not all fun. But if one had to pinpoint the absolute summit of the fun monarchical experience, then it would undoubtedly be found on a bend of the River Dniepr in 1787. It was here that Catherine the Great embarked on her magnificent voyage to the south, eager to inspect her newly acquired territory of Crimea.

Catherine is one of that elite handful of rulers who really loved her role. A German from the micro-state of Anhalt-Zerbst, she came to Russia to marry the heir to the throne, Peter, also a German, from no less micro Holstein-Gottorp, but more importantly a grandson of Peter the Great. It was perhaps as an outsider that she came to so relish becoming a Russian, revelling in the strangeness and grandeur, joining the Orthodox Church, changing her name from Sophie to Catherine and having her husband murdered. Catherine always seems to be on some huge golden juggernaut, hauled along by representatives of the different subject nationalities, while girls throw petals over the entire ensemble and specially trained doves fly in formation overhead, holding in their beaks silk banners embroidered with positive statements in Latin. In 1787 she was living her allegorical fantasy to the full. Heaped in furs and jewels, she watched cheering crowds line the banks of the river, enormous firework displays go off and thousands of Cossacks carry out mock battles, all under the direction of her former lover Prince Potemkin. The River Dniepr, now associated more with rusting hydroelectric plants, can never have looked more glamorous. As Catherine and her guests enjoyed themselves designing triumphal arches, admiring Potemkin’s chirpy, all-girl ‘Amazon’ light cavalry troupe and chatting about which neighbouring state should be attacked next, the only fly in the ointment was a dour Habsburg visitor.

Joseph II, simply attired and travelling incognito, was just the sort of Mr Boring whom the tittering gang on the barge could not stand. Grumbling snobbishly about ‘this Catherinized Princess of Zerbst’ he did everything he could to lower the temperature. But even with Joseph on board, measuring everything, asking statistical questions and trying to find fault, it must still have been perhaps the world’s best outing. The idea of the fake ‘Potemkin villages’ put up to trick the Tsaritsa, which have been part of everyone’s consciousness ever since, was itself in fact a spiteful fabrication. Potemkin had built real palaces, real farms and real cities, albeit sometimes still in rather embryo form. What astounded Joseph as they reached the Crimea was that here was a huge new territory only just snatched from the Ottomans and already teeming with energy and glamour in a way quite beyond Habsburg power. Sebastopol had only been founded four years before and yet already had fortifications and a battle fleet. When they weren’t trying out tasty new drinks or clowning around in the former Khan of Crimea’s palace – where Joseph seems to have bought himself a Circassian slave girl, a rare but almost welcome lapse into mere hypocrisy – there was serious business to be discussed.

Since Joseph had become Holy Roman Emperor in 1765 there had been an astounding and unnerving transformation in the world to the east of Vienna: two entities fundamental to European history for centuries, Poland and the Ottoman Empire, suddenly looked vulnerable. The first to crack was Poland. The eighteenth century had been full of schemes for partition of various European states. Catherine’s predecessor, the Tsaritsa Elizabeth, had intended to end the existence of Prussia, splitting it up between its neighbours: a fate Frederick the Great only avoided through her death and one which the kingdom would only miss by inches once Napoleon invaded it. Bits of Italy were always being hacked about or swapped, and Sweden’s empire had been liquidated earlier in the century. Poland was different: a big, ancient state whose rulers had held the eastern marches against Tatar raids and who had rescued the Habsburg monarchy in lifting the Siege of Vienna in 1683. The country had been weakened since that high point, not least through its catastrophic seventy-year period of rule by the vainglorious and inept Electors of Saxony.

The Russians simply used the Saxon kings of Poland as puppets. The Poles tried everything to get out of their terrible position, but neither the Prussians to the north-west nor the Russians to the east had an interest in helping them. When the Poles tried to set up a customs service, Frederick the Great built a fort on the Vistula to fire on the customs vessels. Frederick also entertained himself by flooding Poland with debased fake coinage as a technocratic way of destroying its economy. By the mid-eighteenth-century wars Russian and Prussian troops simply ignored Poland’s sovereignty, marching across its lands, requisitioning and plundering without reference to the authorities.

The chaos, bitterness and bad faith came to a head in 1773. Surrounded by stronger states, its economy in ruins and its towns actually shrinking at a time when much of the rest of Europe was booming, Poland was carved up between Prussia, Russia and Austria. The term ‘the First Partition’ sounds rational and almost surgical, but it was achieved with enormous violence against heavy Polish resistance. Engineered principally by Frederick the Great, the partition took the form of Prussia cutting out a block of land in the north-west and the Russians a far larger, but more thinly settled piece in the east. Maria Theresa was unhappy about the idea (justifiably, given that it was a moral outrage) but in the end she, Joseph and particularly her key adviser Kaunitz could not resist such enrichment and took a broad chunk of territory in the south-east, running along the far side of the Carpathians. This removed about a third of Poland’s territory and rendered the remains, which were now to all practical purposes a Russian protectorate, unviable.