Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (9 page)

Maximilian I, Emperor from 1493, marks this transition exactly. His father, Frederick III, is a baffling figure: we know what he looked like, which is an improvement, but historians are still obliged to cling to a handful of unreliable stories and these are so partisan that his incompetence or cunning can in the end only be dimly guessed at. Maximilian, however, is universally familiar, with his beaky nose, fur cloak, Order of the Golden Fleece chain and shoulder-length hair (one of those fashions for men which tends to be passed over in stunned silence). He looks out from coins and statues and paintings, but also from woodcuts, an older technology but one now much refined, which circulated around Europe in astonishing quantities. Maximilian was obsessed with new technology, whether this applied to fluted armour (‘Maximilian’ armour) or cannon (his arsenal can still be wandered around in Innsbruck) or – most importantly – typography. The famous ‘Gothic’ typeface, called Fraktur by Germans, was designed specifically for him. This typeface created a semi-separate and alienating (for non-Germans) form of book presentation which endured until Hitler banned it in 1941, aware – in an odd burst of sensitivity – that for effective communication with his new world empire Fraktur
was too hard to read.

Maximilian used the new medium to pour out propaganda, both about his deeds and about himself and his family. As with everything he did, he stopped and started, changed his mind, lost interest, so there were countless unfinished projects at the time of his death – but he planned and dictated material on everything from magic to chivalry and genealogy to politics. He used to be much hated by German nationalist historians because he failed to unite Germany and dabbled and dithered in a way that undercuts any coherent, onward-and-upward narrative – but these are the very failings that now make him seem so appealing. We need no longer feel upset that he didn’t create a powerful and independent German army or crush the French.

Maximilian is an unusual Habsburg in being both a convincing man of action and an intellectual. He was deeply conscious that when he took over the role of Holy Roman Emperor he would set a precedent – what if it could be permanently attached to the Habsburg family? Enormous effort went into making this feasible, much of it via print, and working with a brilliant array of great artists in all media he set out to build an image of himself that would last for ever. The Habsburgs had the most extensive territories of all German rulers, but there were plenty who claimed a better ancestry or were more securely rooted in the Empire itself. A legitimate complaint about them (one that lasted until they finally stepped down) was that their interests were tangled up in the margins of the Empire – in the Low Countries, northern Italy and in the east – and that they misused Imperial funds for narrow family purposes, merely pretending to have German interests at heart. In fact it was their semi-marginality, as well as their wealth, that made the Habsburgs so desirable to many German princes – they were rich enough not to be a burden on other territories, but they would on the whole be too busy fighting the Turks to interfere in Germany itself too much.

There are many jobs at Maximilian’s court which would have appealed to me. I have never really been outdoorsy enough to make a mercenary landsknecht, although their immense two-handed swords, flowing moustaches and puffed-silk slashed sleeves take some beating. Indeed this is the last period where sheer
strength
was essential to fighting and I really shy away from this. It would be flattering to think of being one of the Emperor’s humanists, musicians or artists, although a more likely post would have been as the trusted, albeit limited, figure who supervised his bowel movements. But then the ‘groom of the stool’ would have been a dream compared to the really horrible job of court genealogist. If ever there was a role which required fake learning and intellectual supinity it was this. Initially enormous work went into proving Maximilian’s descent from Noah’s family, which required some fairly seamless absurdity. Genealogies were important for the obvious reason that they implied rights and privileges stemming from historical deep background. They were also vulnerable – their circulation at foreign courts could provoke laughter from rival crawly genealogists working for other families (such as the Wittelbachs of Bavaria, who could also point to a time when they had provided an Emperor). The respect felt for a genealogy therefore was a side-effect of how, more generally, its issuer was viewed by potential rivals, but in itself it needed to be a plausible document.

When the Emperor Charles IV had come up with a genealogy for himself, he had suggested that his family were derived not only from Noah but also from Saturn, but this sort of enjoyable silliness would no longer wash in the more stringent atmosphere of the late fifteenth century. Now, after much mulling over his own lineage, Maximilian decided he was not in fact descended from Noah, but from the Trojan hero Hector. Presumably the court humanists, rather than rolling their eyes and making farting noises with their cheeks, must have smiled at the Emperor’s perspicacity, bowed deeply and returned to their library to start all over again. One of the key figures at court was noted for his rigour in creating these family trees, but given their essentially made-up quality this was a rigour which could only be admired so far. Hector was important because of a series of wholly uncanonical (as in fabricated) stories about his sons. Loosely nodding at the
Aeneid
, these proposed that while Aeneas was founding Rome, a brother called Francio was excitedly heading further north, with his children settling on the River Main and building the City of the Franks, Frankfurt. This stuff was valuable because it tried to give Germany equal prestige to Italy, and Frankfurt a sacral value closer to that of Rome. The family tree then descended through a series of dubious byways down to the deeply prestigious and real Clovis, King of the Franks and then swerved down through one of Clovis’s
younger
children (to avoid the obvious confusion that the Habsburgs would otherwise be claiming to have been kings of France, a fact that might have been noticed elsewhere) to emerge in the relative safety of Maximilian’s direct real Swabian ancestors. Presumably feeling pretty sullied, the humanists had now established a direct link from Troy to Innsbruck.

It may seem odd to spend so much time describing so implausible a project, but genealogy lay at the heart of royal power. It had been crucial to the other great Habsburg fabrication, the fourteenth-century bundle of documents called the
Privilegium Maius
, some signed by Julius Caesar and Nero no less, which established the inviolability of the Austrian lands and created the special title of ‘Archduke’ for the Habsburg ruler, which put him on the same level as the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. This was laughed at as an obvious fake at the time and much of it had been ignored by Charles IV, but when Frederick III was made Emperor he was able to take advantage of this to approve the
Privilegium Maius
in effect for himself, making his lands inalienable through the male line and allowing the wearing of a special, made-up archduke’s crown. As, from now on, the Emperor
was
a Habsburg this comedy document stuck, and all discussion of its authenticity was viewed as treason. So, descended from Hector and Clovis, given the thumbs up by Roman emperors, the Habsburgs had arrived.

The great wizard

Many Habsburg rulers could be faulted for their almost aggressive hostility towards the arts and their refusal to use their unique position to create extraordinary things – Franz Joseph was notoriously depressing in this respect – but there were a number of exceptions: Charles V and Titian, Rudolf II and a whole panoply of mountebanks and oddballs, Ferdinand III and Rubens. None can really match up to Maximilian, though – his work with Dürer, Burgkmair and Altdorfer and a host of less well-known figures, as well as his support for the extraordinary music of Isaac and Senfl, makes him one of the greatest patrons. These do not seem to be merely the random sideswipes of aggrandizement either, but based around a close personal involvement, albeit one involving the same sort of untrustworthy changeability that afflicted his political zig-zagging. Some very brilliant figures spent huge amounts of their time designing for Maximilian half-finished projects for books, statues and images that were only circulated or seen, if at all, thanks to the devoted work of his grandson, Ferdinand I, many years after all those concerned had died. Almost everything that Maximilian did was hamstrung both by his own restlessness and by his frequent and unwanted experiences of the cashless economy.

As good a way as any to understand the key political events of Maximilian’s life is through his own artistic vision of it. This was expressed in a number of places – not least in Altdorfer’s very odd but wonderful drawings for
The History of Frederick and Maximilian
, showing the baby Maximilian astonishing the court by standing upright while having his first bath – but nowhere more vividly than in Dürer and his workshop’s unmanageably enormous (twelve foot high and ten foot wide) woodcut triumphal arch. Something of a dead end as an idea, this was a highly complex set of paper sheets which could be put together like a mammoth jigsaw on a wall and which was a seething mass of allegory, decoration and history. Its semi-portability may well have appealed to Maximilian as his court moved around, but it will always remain unclear how such a strange object was meant to be viewed – it is both too large to take in and too small in its detail. Indeed, the entire
Arch of Honour
has the air of something dreamed up by the Emperor as a reaction to improvements in woodcut technology, and which was then sub-contracted to Dürer’s team in Nuremberg with nobody daring to point out the borderline idiocy of the concept. In any event, a staggering amount of work went into it and the individual panels of events from Maximilian’s life are fabulous. Indeed they form a very straightforward way of explaining why his reign was so important to the Habsburgs’ fortunes and save a lot of tedious exposition.

The first group of images in the
Arch of Honour
give the story of Maximilian and his father’s great coup in securing Burgundy for the family. The late fifteenth century was notable among many other things as the sole point during which the Swiss had a fundamental role in European life. The sheer obstreperousness of the cantons allied to their military skill allowed them to carve out an increasingly independent niche within the Empire. Their spreading territory was partly taken from Habsburg land and one of the ways in which the old Emperors had used to keep the Habsburgs down was turning a blind eye to Swiss behaviour. This was highly unfortunate for the Swiss once the Habsburgs became the Emperors and looked for revenge. In the meantime the Swiss had changed the face of European history at the Battle of Nancy in 1477 when they had managed to hack to bits Charles the Bold, the last (as it turned out) of the highly successful Valois dukes of Burgundy, who ruled a broad swath of land from the Swiss borders to Holland. The Burgundians had created a state which, if it had stabilized, could have formed a permanent barrier between France and Germany. It was rich, industrious, coherent and had a great mercantile, military and artistic tradition.

Charles the Bold had become a sort of enraged animal by the time of his death, dreaming of creating a vast Kingdom of Lotharingia and doomed to fight with great cruelty and without end against coalitions of less-than-impressed neighbours opposed to incoherent visions that needed their territory to be realized. His disappearance was welcomed, but it created a crisis and opportunity of a very rare kind: a large and desirable territory with no male heir. Despite being married three times Charles had only been able to have one child, Mary of Burgundy, or Mary ‘the Rich’ as she now became known, in a tiresome Burgundian tradition of naming (‘the Good’, ‘the Fearless’, ‘the Bold’) which would mercifully soon end. Mary, aged nineteen, suddenly became a figure of overwhelming importance. Louis XI seems to have uncharacteristically panicked, and instead of offering to marry his son to the heiress invaded her territory. This ungallant blunder threw her into the arms of Maximilian, at that time simply the teenage son of the Emperor Frederick III.

The marriage reshaped Europe. It gave the Habsburgs territory which now spread from the Danube to the North Sea and made them far more powerful than any other ruler, apart from the Ottoman sultan and perhaps, in some moods, the French king. It also shows the annoying nature of dynastic history – Burgundy in itself was a plausible political unit, but now it was part of a far wider, sprawling tangle of lands which would cause countless problems for everyone concerned. Mary died, crushed by her horse, less than five years after her marriage, but her decisions and those of her and Maximilian’s son Philip ‘the Handsome’ (the last of these add-on names) would vastly aggrandize the Habsburgs in absolutely unpredictable ways.

Despite her early death, therefore, Maximilian kicks off his pictorial account of his life with an image of his and Mary’s betrothal, both looking very dashing. This is the foundation of his fortune, as he takes on the legacy of the Burgundian dukes and their mystique, particularly the Order of the Golden Fleece and the musical and artistic quality that transforms the previously rather backward Austrian court. Both Philip ‘the Handsome’ and Philip’s son Charles of Ghent (the future Charles V) would grow up in the Low Countries and this fundamentally changed the Habsburg style – indeed for many Germans their Germanness became thoroughly suspect from this point on, and their transnational quality would become a key element in their appeal and success, but not to Germans.

Of the sixteen pictures, a large group now deal with the downside of Maximilian’s marriage – the long era of fighting from 1477 off-and-on to 1489 to stabilize the new inheritance, beat off rivals and tame truculent townspeople. Each image shows another blood-soaked opportunity for heroism – fighting in Utrecht, Guelders, Bruges, Liège, and a laboriously made snapshot of Maximilian posing with his dubious and intermittent ally Henry VIII of England after the Battle of the Spurs. They then show him crowned as King of the Romans at Aachen and therefore formally heir apparent to his father as Emperor (a particularly wonderful Dürer workshop woodcut with the young, beautifully dressed king surrounded by happy Electors) and marching back into Austria to retake the core lands embarrassingly snatched by the Hungarians while he was distracted in the Low Countries. There is also a picture of his worst humiliation – the Swiss War of 1499 where the traditional Swiss–Habsburg hatred found its finest expression and the Swiss gained their independence (a new concept in Europe and its novelty so confusing that it was not ratified until 1648). Other images show him being crowned in Trent by the Pope (not in Rome as, embarrassingly, the Venetians would not let him through), fighting to defend Bavaria on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire (a rare example of his actually doing his job as Emperor rather than as head of his own clan) and fighting the French in Italy.