Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (7 page)

The other trap, Christmas Pantomime Syndrome, is more straightforward. We all know that Central Europe is going to be devastated by the Turks and there is a version of history where everybody yells at the stage: ‘Look behind you!’ as the hero fails to notice the monster/goblin/witch sneaking up and then disappearing each time he turns round. In fact someone might have usefully yelled it too at little Ladislaus. As Frederick is preoccupied by yet more petty fighting around the Swiss Confederation it is impossible not to cry out: ‘Sort out your eastern border defences and make yourself head of a serious Christian coalition with a single purpose,’ or something like that. This frustration is almost a constant in Central European history and one that has to be resisted at every turn. When the King of France actually allies with the Ottomans in order to stitch up the Habsburgs there is almost no modern historical account which can stop itself from shaking its head in incredulity. When there is a long lull in the fighting we know that this is only because the Ottomans are having a change of scenery and destroying their opponents in Anatolia or Persia and that when these issues have been sorted out they will turn their fatal attention back to the West. But, of course, there was no means by which anything other than shreds of intelligence about this could get back to the Habsburgs or their discordant semi-allies. News of a massive new Turkish army might unfortunately be received only slightly in advance of the massive new Turkish army.

The Habsburgs were in due course to become the great defenders of Europe against the Ottomans, but Frederick III seems to have had no interest in the staggering heroics of the Siege of Belgrade in 1456 or the attempted Turkish invasion of Italy, and carried on just pootling around regardless. We know that the seventy-year breathing space created by the failure of the Ottomans at Belgrade was a mirage and that something much worse would ultimately be on its way, but nobody at the time had any means of knowing how long the breathing space would be, or indeed whether it might not simply be permanent – which it might have been.

Cultic sites

Wiener Neustadt is an extremely haggard industrial town south of Vienna, ravaged during the Second World War and rebuilt in a way that permanently enshrines a sense of exhaustion and despair. One extraordinary and painstaking reconstruction is the Military Academy, founded by Maria Theresa but built around Frederick III’s castle and chapel. Wiener Neustadt was one of Frederick’s several capitals as he wandered from opportunity to crisis and from crisis to opportunity and his son, the future Emperor Maximilian I, was both born and buried there, his simple tomb still in the Chapel of St George at the heart of the academy – a chapel otherwise dominated by an immense, ugly reliquary, a cuboid on stumpy legs, covered in little glass windows behind each of which is a saint’s skull, with an effect more Borneo than Lower Austria.

As the Military Academy is still fully functioning, visiting it is a strange process. Instead of the usual ticket-turnstile-postcard-shop-cafe nexus, visitors have to ring a bell outside the South Gate. I stood there waiting to be buzzed in, but instead, after a long pause, there was the sound of marching boots and a cadet with a gun slung across his back unlocked the door and escorted me round. Just walking down the darkened corridor with him set my mind racing about this parallel world of order, actual skills, professionalism, of uniforms, technical training, hierarchy. We came up to a group of cadets who were on duty, all of whom radiated level-headed competence, physical fitness and pride in appearance, and lived on a different planet from the one defined by general weak tittering, the oxygen levels of which I was more used to.

As we marched (or he marched) smartly into the brilliantly sunlit central courtyard of the academy the point of being there came into view: the great Heraldic Wall of Frederick III, much re-carved and renovated, but still his extraordinary personal statement and with the same impact it must have had on its first being unveiled. At the base of the wall there is a statue of Frederick and then a sequence of eighty-seven coats of arms all the way up the side of the chapel, with some of the shields representing specks on the map, but others substantial chunks of territory. Visitors could have been in no doubt of the crushing superiority of Frederick’s possessions. But mainly it has the air of something which he personally enjoyed. We will never know but it is easy to think of him sitting in the courtyard, his eyes wandering over all the places he owned.

As my escort marched me out he casually threw at another cadet a great, medieval-looking bunch of keys which must have weighed the same as a piece of armour. The fellow cadet caught it in one hand without looking up. I felt a surge of panic at being surrounded by so much tough competence and eagerly waited to be allowed back into the world of casual ineptitude.

The other great early Habsburg cultic site is the small town of Klosterneuburg (New Castle Monastery), just north of Vienna. For centuries an unvarying part of the calendar was the annual pilgrimage by the senior family member to the ancient Augustinian abbey founded by the Babenberg margrave of the region, Leopold III, to attend services to pray for the souls of their Babenberg predecessors. It is this complex of buildings which gives the Habsburgs their legitimacy, conferring on an extinct prior dynasty, an ugly civil war and an Imperial land-grab all the majesty of religious endorsement.

According to an ancient story, the deeply pious Leopold’s new bride’s veil was blown away and he swore to build an abbey wherever it was found. Years later, while out hunting, he discovered the veil on an elderberry bush and building began. This story features in innumerable carvings and miniatures and can never surmount the problem that a piece of cloth on a bush is hard to represent in an engaging way, a problem generally solved by showing the extra pointer of the Virgin Mary and tons of angels blazing away in the sky above the bush.

The abbey was apparently very beautiful, but today it is little more than a devastated carcass. The insides were given a tremendous pimping by eighteenth-century craftsmen who smothered it in stucco and paintings of acrobatic saints, before putting baroque towers on the outside. This outrage was then balanced in the nineteenth century by architects who left the inside alone, but made the outside look much more satisfactorily medieval and replaced the towers with proper Gothic ones, which of course look grindingly Sir Walter Scott and inauthentic. A final disaster came later in the nineteenth century when frescoes were put in the gaps left in the interior by the earlier baroque vandals. These were filled by scenes from the life of Jesus of hideous sweetness, with the Saviour as a sort of weedy Khalil Gibran figure.

But in the small museum in the unfinished fragment of palace that surrounds the abbey there is a single, miraculous object which brushes aside kitsch issues. This is a colossal painted panel commissioned by the canons in 1485 to mark the founder Leopold III’s canonization, an image in a series of brilliantly bright roundels of all the rulers of the Babenberg family set into a great family tree. Frederick III, with his restless, anxious interest in genealogy and legitimacy, was obsessed with Leopold and it was under his reign that a standard-issue image of the new saint was invented, with an oversized beard and implausibly grand crown, often looking somewhat distracted so as to suggest holiness. And in the great painting there he is in a definitive rendering, like a proto-Father Christmas. His wife, Agnes, is in one of the side panels and is always shown as both devout and desirable. She exemplifies the usual confusion about how to deal with queens – even better exemplified by the contemporaneous tomb of Eleanor of Portugal, Frederick III’s wife, tucked behind the main altar at the Neukloster in Wiener Neustadt, which features a carved statue of her as a sort of cream-of-the-crop supercatch
and
nothing less than a saint.

The Babenberg family were freebooting German fighters, working for the Duke of Bavaria as Christian forces hacked their way east, pushing back the Hungarians. The records are so poor that beyond the most basic outline almost everything they did is merely bright coloured romance. And this is exactly what the canons’ painting provides – here they are praying, heading off on crusade, the victims of treachery, in a picturesquely mounted battle. The great weight of the past is brilliantly conveyed in the picture – a dynastic sequence of events stretching down through the centuries. Here is a scene of the marcher state of which they were margraves being turned into a duchy under Henry II Jasomirgott, who has made his capital at Vienna. One Babenberger died in Italy and had his corpse boiled up and his bones put in a casket and returned to Austria, another thoughtfully rendered scene. There too is the implausibly named Leopold the Virtuous – the only Babenberg to be famous in England, as the kidnapper of Richard the Lionheart, who he hated for having slighted him on the Third Crusade. In a move that defies common sense, Richard tried to get back to England overland after the crusade in disguise, crossing Austrian territory and being captured by Leopold, who insisted on an immense ransom (at least twenty tons of silver). There is hardly an old fortress wall in Austria which is not said to have been built using this money. Leopold’s more lasting claim to importance was inheriting Styria (a larger block of land than the modern state, taking in much of Slovenia). He was also, and this is getting very legendary, the origin of the Babenberger flag, reputedly inspired by his white crusader surcoat getting soaked in blood, which made a nice striped pattern. This flag had minor uses under the Habsburgs (whose own colours were black and yellow) but re-emerged in 1918 as the flag of the new Republic of Austria – a piece of deep continuity which makes even something as banal as a simple flag curious and strange.

Any dynasty if you wait a sufficient number of lifetimes hits disaster and sure enough, after many adventures, here is the chaotic Frederick the Quarrelsome dying fighting the Hungarians and with no heir in 1246. The Babenbergs were finished and the Habsburgs began their clamber to greatness.

It is not difficult to see why the Habsburgs were so obsessed with Klosterneuburg. Their legitimacy was deeply bound up in the bald assertion that they were the true heirs to the Babenbergs and the elaborate ceremonies here allowed them to stare down anyone who dared even think that they were mere Swabian carpetbaggers. The Habsburgs never forgot that the basis for their greatness was this Austrian core and that Klosterneuburg was the site they had to lay claim to. Carefully maintained for centuries, the canons’ painting of the Babenbergs may have the air of a giant comic book, but it sits at the cultic heart of Frederick III and his successors’ view of the world. It was also oppressive: both Frederick and his son Maximilian I were mesmerized by medieval chivalry and the adventures shown in the painting had a profound resonance for them, a magical world of saintly acts and knightly derring-do in summer landscapes, a long way from their own indebtedness, depressing new guns and political scramblings.

The elected Caesars

There is a crucial preliminary which needs to be dealt with for this book to make sense: a description of the Holy Roman Empire. I apologize for this, but really there is no way round it and it is a helpful test. I could devote much of my life to thinking about the Empire but if, like many people, you rightly find the whole business boring then this section will flush out whether or not you might be more cheerily employed reading something else.

*   *   *

The Empire covered a vast zone of Europe and was for many centuries the key motor of the continent’s history. For anyone growing up in a British, French or American framework the whole thing was an outrage – a wilderness of absurd micro-states, potty valleys run by monks and ritualistic obscurantism which made nineteenth-century German writers, who were at the heart of reconstructing its history, scarlet with shame. Indeed by the time it was wound up by Napoleon it was widely execrated, but this was of course without the knowledge of how unstable and brutal the successor states would be. The long-running prejudice against the Empire now seems odd. Its sheer longevity, and role from Charlemagne to Napoleon as the flywheel of Europe’s cultural, political and cultural existence – for good and bad – makes it inadequate merely to laugh at some of its more dust-covered and sclerotic features.

As already discussed, the Empire’s distant origins lay in the highly successful rule of Charlemagne, a Frankish warlord of infinite ambition who carved his way across Europe and decided that his realm was in fact the reincarnation of the long-defunct Western Roman Empire. As usual when such figures arise, packs of smiling intellectuals shimmer into view to provide the sermons and chronicles to back up such surprising claims. We can only imagine now the landscape through which Charlemagne and his shaggy henchmen rode – a landscape of very small settlements, but also of great, devastated Roman fragments, most impressively at Constantine’s old western capital of Trier. The Roman palace, cathedral and fortifications there must have had some of the impact felt by H. G. Wells’s traveller in
The Time Machine
as he wandered through the unguessably vast remnants of Late Human civilization in the eight-hundredth century.

Christianity provided a written, judicial and intellectual link to the Roman Empire, but the lands which Charlemagne and his successors conquered were in many cases outside the old empire and making this new construction into the successor state was much more an act of will than a genuine revival. These notional Roman origins were always a crucial element for the thousand years that the new Empire existed. It tangled the Emperor in an important relationship with the Pope, with whom he could swap honest notes about bare-faced assertions of authority based on ancient links to Rome. It also gave many Emperors an almost mystical attachment to Italy, driven in part by embarrassment at a neo-Rome being based on foggy chunks of the north rather than the region of Europe most people would – off the top of their heads – think of as Roman. The degree to which Italians themselves failed to cooperate with this vision, tending to see the Emperor as merely a rapacious and peculiar visitor from the north, formed one of several critical dynamics along the Empire’s edge.