Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (10 page)

The most important by far though are two further marriage pictures, both by Dürer himself and with a level of detail and heraldry that marks the events out as exceptional. The first shows Maximilian, weighed down by his Imperial crown, chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece and glamorous robes, looking justifiably pleased as his son Philip ‘the Handsome’ marries Juana, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. The second shows the 1515 Congress of Vienna and the double wedding of two of Maximilian’s grandchildren, Ferdinand and Mary, to the two children of King Vladislaus of Hungary and Bohemia. Through an unforeseeable series of disasters and chances these two weddings would shape much of the future of Europe.

Maximilian’s ability to project a brilliant image of himself was most influentially achieved by Dürer’s great painting and woodcut, based on a sketch of Maximilian presiding at the Diet of Augsburg and published after the Emperor’s sudden death. It has enshrined the image of him as a sort of charismatic and charming wizard and has given him an unfair advantage over descendants who made the mistake of using journeyman hacks for their portraits. He was obsessed with death, carried his coffin with him wherever he travelled and even in his final illness was adding refinements to the astounding cenotaph for himself, which he had spent much of his reign designing. He seems to have been happiest in a way designing funeral monuments – the colossal marmalade marble cuboid for his father in Vienna cathedral was only completed shortly before Maximilian’s own death.

This settled sense of gloom around Maximilian is of course what makes him so attractive too. Some of his court music has a burnished, sacerdotal,
capo di capi
quality which makes everything later seem either too shrill or too pompous. To be able to ask musicians to play such stuff, while idly flicking through pictures of yourself by Dürer and taking sips from a jewel-studded goblet filled with something reassuringly exclusive is a fantasy that may not appeal to everyone, but it certainly finds a mental and emotional home in my corner of south-west London.

Gnomes on horseback

On the road snaking out of the Alpine town of Bolzano there is a crag topped off by a truly perfect little castle. Bolzano was until 1918 part of the Tyrol and entirely German-speaking. As part of its loot for supporting the Triple Entente in the First World War, Italy took over the southern Tyrol and has clung to it in the face of endless appeals from Austria and intermittent terrorism from its inhabitants. It has only been in the past ten years or so that Italy has adopted a non-coercive, bilingual attitude towards one of the handful of regions in Europe where Germans were the people threatened and discriminated against. This new bilingualism has had a bizarre effect on the castle. In Italian it is called Castel Roncolo, which implies a pretty turfed courtyard with maidens in gauzy outfits skipping about to tambourines and lutes with weedy youths in coloured tights looking on. In German it is called Schloß Runkelstein, which implies a brandy-deranged old soldier-baron with a purple face and leg-iron lurching around darkened dank corridors, beating a servant to death with his crutch. Seeing the two names everywhere side by side is deeply confusing, like having one eye always out of focus.

The castle is famous both as a locus of nineteenth-century Romanticism, a cult bowed to by Franz Joseph when he rebuilt it after an embarrassing incident when Alpine road-widening resulted in one of the castle’s walls falling down its crag, and for its role in fights between local noblemen and the Habsburgs in the fifteenth century. This Romantic love of the castle came partly from its being such a quintessential pile, but also because of the survival of its early fifteenth-century frescoes. Commissioned by the two brothers who originally owned Runkelstein, these frescoes somehow battled through sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century indifference until they landed in the safe arms of the post-Walter-Scott-neo-medieval world.

As you would expect, Maximilian appreciated the frescoes, sending an artist to the castle to restore them. His shields (Burgundy, Austria, Tyrol) are still carved over a fireplace. It is safe to say that what Maximilian liked about the frescoes was that they vividly enshrined a medieval Europe which now seemed very remote from his own mercenaries-and-gunpowder world. There is something engagingly semi-competent about the pictures and they cannot claim to be high art for a second. They are all entirely secular in their subject matter and show jousts, hunts, stars and suns, parades, men and women talking. There is a brilliantly silly sequence of events from
Tristan
with the hero killing Morald and the dragon and the voyage to Cornwall (or rather, Cornovaglia) and so on. There is also the story of the brave knight Garel, whose adventures are truncated by most of them having slid off the crag together with the wall on which they were painted in the embarrassing road-widening disaster. Most weird of all is a deeply mysterious sequence of painted triplings in the castle courtyard – the Three Ancient Heroes (Hector, Alexander and Caesar), the Three Old Testament Heroes (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus) and the Three Medieval Heroes (Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon). The triplings continue with Arthurian heroes, great lovers,
Nibelungenlied
heroes and end with a zany set of three male giants, three female giants and three gnomes on horseback, figures whose meaning will never be recovered. These are all painted with limited skill and are much faded, but their very survival dips us into an ancient and peculiar aesthetic based on obsessive number-patterns, attributes, virtues and morality.

Like their contemporaries, the Habsburgs saw themselves in a direct succession from these figures (the heroes more than the gnomes). As discussed earlier, Maximilian went to huge trouble to show his descent, which was both physical and spiritual. The castle embodies the cult of ancestors, courtly behaviour and knightly prowess which haunted the Habsburg court as an ideal rarely matched but nonetheless lurking always as either an aspiration or a reproach. The repulsive, incompetent grind of the Italian Wars may have been the daily reality, but there was always a place for jousting, and lordly behaviour.

To a degree now hard to imagine each Habsburg ruler viewed himself in relation both to his predecessors and his successors. His ancestors might be dead in this world, but they judged him and he would meet them when he in turn died. The elaborate family charts, trees of Jesse and sequences of coats of arms created an aura of absolute power and certainty which a successful Emperor could milk through processions, feasts, tournaments and, above all, a constant round of church services. Across the Habsburg lands there were elaborate shrines to key predecessors, such as the tomb of Ernest ‘the Man of Iron’, Maximilian’s grandfather, at the Cistercian abbey of Rein in Styria, where monks were paid to pray
for ever
for the ruler’s soul. Equal prestige was gained from the tombs of non-Habsburg Emperors such as Otto I at Magdeburg. This
for ever
is hard for us to take, but the landscape was dotted with chantries which did do this job for extraordinary periods of time – the nuns who prayed for the Emperor Henry I at Quedlinburg kept at it for nearly nine hundred years before being asked to pack up. These heroes of the past were like a colossal battery of prestige which the current ruler could draw on. The ancestors’ continuing presence was filtered through innumerable statues, paintings, poems and plays and the maintenance of their burial places was a key family concern. The idea – which his subjects generally bought into except in the face of overwhelming ineptitude – was that when the Emperor appeared he was merely the current embodiment of a great stream of grandeur stretching back to the Old Testament, the
Aeneid
, Charlemagne, the Ottonians, the Salians and the Babenberger and Habsburg inheritance. In a series of ceremonies in specific great towns (Aachen, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg and others) this continuity was celebrated, often with the attendance of the Electors, or as many of them as were on speaking terms with the Emperor at the time, and a panoply of family members who as mothers, wives, soldiers or clerics would have had specific forms of prestige now long forgotten but immediately obvious and powerful at the time.

Maximilian left the greatest of these in the Court Church at Innsbruck. In its creator’s spirit of havering and lack of funds his monument is not what it should have been. Intended as his tomb and as a summa of Habsburg majesty, it is in fact empty, with Maximilian winding up broke, dying and then buried at the other end of Austria in Wiener Neustadt. Its statues forlornly stood around for many years until his grandson Ferdinand I turned his attention to finishing the mausoleum and creating a suitable building for it. The result is very odd as the tomb and its figures are clearly taken from the gloomier elements in the Northern Renaissance whereas the church is Italianate and Counter-Reformation. I was reminded of a video that used to be played at the Banqueting House in Whitehall which told the story of Charles I’s execution outside that building in 1649 accompanied on the soundtrack by Purcell’s music for the funeral of Charles’ granddaughter Mary II in 1694; such a jump in sensibility was not unlike a documentary on World War One accompanied by ‘Rock around the Clock’.

So the surroundings are all wrong in Innsbruck – but this does not matter too much as the monument itself is astounding enough. Maximilian endlessly fiddled with the design, surely one of the most fun parts of being an Emperor, and some of the giant bronze ancestor statues were cast in his lifetime with most of the remainder agreed at least as design sketches. They reflect in many ways a Burgundian aesthetic and in the history of sculpture are an odd sort of dead end, not taken up by his successors, who preferred something a bit less mad. But perhaps there was only a need to go to such lengths once. As the second Habsburg Emperor in a row Maximilian wanted to make a point about his pedigree that would reach centuries into the future and validate all his successors, trying to ensure that these too would be Habsburgs. They stand around the empty tomb like immense and alarming deactivated robots – particularly the amazing figure of Ferdinand I, the last Burgundian King of Portugal, whose lack of a surviving portrait meant that he had to be shown in a colossal suit of armour with the visor down and fantastic bronze decoration swarming over every surface.

The statues are a mixed bag. Some are fairly routine and others are perhaps the greatest of all German sculptures, including hypnotically charismatic figures of King Arthur, Duke Albrecht and King Theoderic designed by Dürer. Rudolf I, the first Habsburg Emperor, back in the thirteenth century, has the strange indignity of a prominent codpiece that visitors over the centuries have found it impossible not to touch, making the blackened bronze of his armour an unsettling contrast to the glowing orange of his cock. Various favourites are present – Ernest ‘the Iron Man’, his wife the Jagiellonian princess Zymburgis, who was so strong she could tear nails out of walls and straighten horseshoes, Philip ‘the Handsome’, Maximilian’s son, who was sketched for his statue before his premature death, a rather conjectural statue of Clovis, Ferdinand of Aragon, Juana ‘the Mad’ – all providing back-up for Habsburg universalist claims that would come to full fruition under Maximilian’s successor, his grandson Charles V, who could draw on all these figures for sustenance.

Some of the statues have been designed to hold candles in their hands for special occasions. In a sense it is ideal that Maximilian himself, although represented by a superb kneeling statue on top of the cenotaph, has his body elsewhere as it means that these bronze ancestors (watched over too by a medley of little busts of Roman emperors, making their own nod-and-a-wink point about Maximilian’s pedigree) are witnessing something more universal than simply one of their descendants. The more I look at them the more hair-raising they become, watchmen almost untouched (except in the case of Rudolf I) by five centuries of warfare, chaos and, ultimately, the end of the dynasty they were sent to protect.

Juana’s children

For the generation alert by 1490 and still alive by 1530 the world would have struck them as convulsed by unparalleled, freakish change. The monarchs of the period often seem immobilized by the sheer complexity of their situation, with bold initiatives coming to nothing, inertia rewarded, and uneasy blends of the two. It is not as though Europe had previously been static, but there had been many more certainties. The Hundred Years War, most obviously, had been played out with painful predictability, with the inhabitants of Aquitaine, Normandy and Picardy barely bothering to look up as another bunch of mud-spattered characters in plate armour galloped into view. Despite some breaks, the sheer mulishness of English attempts to take over France gave a fixed character to reign after reign.

Through a queasy mix of luck and ruthlessness the Habsburg family wound up as the great beneficiaries of this process. Charles V felt that his long reign had ended in failure and he bequeathed all kinds of problems, but by the time of his resignation and retreat to an Extremaduran monastery to pray, admire the view and wistfully spin a globe of the world, his family ruled an empire of a size with no European precedent.

One good place to start explaining this rise in the family fortunes is with Maximilian staring in fascination at the unfolding situation in Spain. In Barcelona in 1493, Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had combined the thrones of Castile and Aragon and whose forces had destroyed the last Muslim state in Spain the year before, stood on a set of palace steps, which are still there (perhaps one of the more thrilling and perplexing places to stand in the world). There they met and congratulated Christopher Columbus, who presented them with a selection of Caribbean exotica and unhappy Hispaniola ‘Indians’. As, over the following decades, it became clear that humankind’s entire mental experience was about to be hit by a flood of slavery, sugar, gold, silver, genocide, jungles, pirate ships, howler monkeys, Brazil nuts and toucans, the old Europe in which English and French knights hit each other over the head for ownership of some drizzle-washed hamlet in the Pas de Calais suddenly seemed a bit old-fashioned. The fixed-term, zero-sum atmosphere of Europe was at an end, particularly once Aztec gold and silver started arriving in uncontrollable quantities in the 1520s.