Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (23 page)

A very long way to the west of Bethlen’s Oradea lies the Czech town of Cheb, formerly called Eger. This is an extremely interesting if dispiriting place, very much in the front line for everything that went wrong in the first half of the twentieth century. For many years though it was famous for one major event enshrined in its town museum. Hardly able to control my excitement, I tried to stay focused and walk around the museum in the right order, starting in Room One with actually rather absorbing displays of ancient Obotrite storage vessels, bracelets and the rest. But staring at a black and white photo of some people excavating a pot I could stand it no longer and bounded up the stairs two at a time to get to the museum’s real point: the bedchamber in which Wallenstein was assassinated! Naturally this has been completely reconstructed and with magnificent stylishness – wood panels, a big bed and a halberd (of a kind perhaps used by one of the killers) hanging from wires in the middle of the room, threatening a similarly hanging nightgown (to represent the Generalissimo).

Given his importance to Ferdinand, Wallenstein’s relations with the Emperor seem to have been fairly distant and unsympathetic. In 1633 there were growing fears that with his vast resources, wealth and troops he might break free from Vienna’s control and seize control of the Holy Roman Empire himself. His motives remain oddly opaque and for such an important figure it is frustrating how little we know about him. It could be that he was just a rather uninteresting military man with a lot of cash. He was certainly rescued and given a major wash-and-brush-up by Schiller in his great trilogy of plays from 1799, where he becomes a complex, flawed, astrologically obsessed figure betrayed by mediocrities. In any event, Ferdinand and his advisers, in the general gloom and paranoia of the period, after some fifteen years of fighting, came to believe perhaps correctly that Wallenstein was planning to betray his notional masters. A conspiracy was hatched and a group of Scottish and Irish soldiers massacred Wallenstein and his supporters in Cheb in a scene dramatized in a thousand cheap woodcuts.

The murder room’s lack of authenticity doesn’t stop it being a treat – and in an amazing and totally unexpected bonus the museum also has one of Wallenstein’s horses stuffed. I am a big fan of Gustavus Adolphus’s stuffed horse in Ingolstadt (taken as a trophy after the Catholic inhabitants shot it from under him during his unsuccessful siege of the town), which I had previously thought must be the oldest preserved animal in the world. But it looks as though Wallenstein’s wins by a nose. Sadly it is in rather too good a state of repair, whereas Gustavus’s has charismatic patches all over it and what must be wine stains from feasts at which it was once used as a centrepiece. I feel something of the same sense of suspicion in fact around Wallenstein’s horse as I do about the famous Brno crocodile, which hangs in the Old Town Hall, a gift to the Emperor Matthias from the Turks, but one which has an unavoidable air of careful Victorian taxidermy. The crazy mess of the Ingolstadt horse seems much more authentic and enjoyable – although the motives behind actually faking elements in a Wallenstein horse (or indeed a Matthias crocodile) seem hard to fathom.

Ferdinand II died in 1637 and his son Ferdinand III supervised the further eleven years of the conflict, much of it a weary, futile, nightmarish shambles as anarchic military forces sought out undamaged areas to loot. The latter phases of the war are chiefly famous for a general uh-oh feeling across Europe that the France of Richelieu and Mazarin had become enormously powerful again, having been internationally a negligible force for generations. So a war fought in part to hold back what had appeared an unstoppable Catholic Habsburg revanche had – in the traditional European manner – simply resulted in helping along the career of a new bugbear.

When the Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 almost all the leaders who had begun the war were dead, except for the gruesome old Catholic zealot Maximilian of Bavaria, who kept gloomily praying away for a further three years. Nobody really knows how many people were killed, but a reasonable guess would be eight million, making it in relation to population quite as horrifying as the wars of the twentieth century. Many regions were so devastated that they only really recovered with the spread of industrialization over two hundred years later. The fighting had burned out the religious impulse that had begun it. Ferdinand II seems genuinely to have believed (as did many of his Protestant opponents) that the war was related in some way to the end of the world, and that what was at stake was religious salvation itself. Such an idea was almost immediately undermined by other factors, from personal loyalty (Protestants nonetheless supporting the Emperor) to realpolitik (Catholic France supporting the Protestants). By the time it ended the Habsburgs had indeed successfully cleansed most of their direct dominions – Austria and Bohemia had been substantially Protestant and would from now on be famously not Protestant. But for the wider Holy Roman Empire the project failed and Europe remained politically and religiously hostile but exhausted.

In the wooded hills above Prague are the remains of several exhibits from a late-nineteenth-century festival. My favourite is a Hall of Mirrors. With the mirrors still kept in place by lovely woodwork and with its air of genteel entertainment it almost perfectly preserves that late-Habsburg atmosphere dear to so many novels and films. It is difficult wandering through the Hall of Mirrors not to feel as though I should be wearing a swallow-tail coat and perhaps a monocle. At its heart lies one of those completely random things beloved of the period – an enormous painting of the defence of the Charles Bridge in 1648, dramatically showing the students and Jesuits fighting back against vicious Swedish mercenaries. It is almost comically uninvolving and leaden and it is hard to imagine it ever provoked gasps even from an original audience whose bar was probably set a lot lower than those of us raised on
Titanic 3D
. The diorama atmosphere is helped by a woeful little cannon and a few bits of armour strewn in front of the painting. The battle it commemorates was one of the last actions of the war as the Swedes, having ransacked the castle (and taken back to Stockholm a lot of loot from Rudolf’s era, including his best Arcimboldos), tried to break into the Old Town. The solidity of the defence showed how much Prague had changed during the war. From being the core of Protestant resistance, drawing on its deep-seated Hussite roots, it had become a docile Catholic town, filled with monasteries, rededicated and rebuilt churches and numerous German-speaking newcomers. The Swedes who would have been embraced in 1619 with grateful tears were now shut out. It was two centuries before Czech nationalists began to rediscover this older, dissenting past and built an entire ideology around it. But for now much of Central Europe had been successfully religiously cleansed and the Habsburgs were back in the saddle.

Burial rites and fox-clubbing

In the later stages of the Thirty Years War the dynasty finally and conclusively settled in Vienna. Exhausted by seemingly endless fighting, on the verge of bankruptcy, Ferdinand III sat in his austere, bad-news Viennese court and somehow ended up staying. Prague, in many ways a more imposing city and with plenty of office space honeycombing the Castle Hill, was too tainted, both with Rudolf’s weirdness and as a former nest of heresy. There never seem to have been any discussions about moving to somewhere more Imperial and less Habsburg – one of the obvious German cities such as Regensburg or Nuremburg or Frankfurt. The shift from Prague to Vienna, some two hundred miles further south-east, meant the archducal family lands were what really mattered and gave the Habsburgs a decisively eastern focus. Since France was for almost two centuries their principal enemy, it also provided an enormous defensive glacis of territory which was to be repeatedly helpful, but it also put them alarmingly near the Ottoman border. The constant wanderings of the earlier court, where Frederick III or Maximilian I and their locustine merrie band would turn up, filled with hungry kettle-drummers and mounted-archer bodyguards, looking for hospitality from some despairing local grandee, were long gone. A town that Ferdinand I and Maximilian II had used on a somewhat provisional, emergency basis now became the permanent court.

The shift to Vienna was reflected in all kinds of cultic ways. Indeed, one of Matthias’s few permanent acts of value was to marry the deeply religious and very much younger Anna of Tyrol (daughter of the enchanting Ferdinand II of Tyrol). She died young and left in her will provision for a church of the Capuchins, a famously ascetic monastic order who had come to the Empire during Rudolf II’s reign and whose leader, the later canonized Lawrence of Brindisi, had acted as Imperial Chaplain during the Long War. The Capuchin church was built on New Market Square, and there the monks would look after her and her husband’s tombs. Building was delayed by the Thirty Years War, but completed in 1632. Ungratefully, Ferdinand II had himself buried in his beloved Graz, but as a further indication that Vienna was stabilizing as the genuine capital Ferdinand III and almost all his successors were in due course carried unresisting into the Capuchin Crypt.

Their bodies were buried in the Crypt; their hearts were buried in the Augustinian Church next to the Hofburg Palace; their intestines were pickled in copper canisters under St Stephen’s Cathedral (with little labels on:
Leopold I
,
Joseph I
, etc. – it seems a shame not to be able to pick a canister and give it a shake to see what sort of sound it makes). With these gestures the Habsburgs definitively staked out Vienna as their dynastic ground. Indeed, much of the city centre is a sequence of mystical spaces for the Habsburg family: the Stephansplatz, the Graben, Am Hof, the courtyards of the Hofburg and all the connecting routes were for centuries part of the intricate clockwork of court ritual.

The Habsburg public calendar became ever more crazily packed as the seventeenth century progressed, with the canopies, incense and choristers dusted off at the drop of a hat. There were annual processions to mark victory over the Turks, victory over the French, a lucky escape by Leopold I from a lightning bolt, and at the Holy Trinity Pillar in the Graben every October to commemorate the end of the great 1679 plague. In the later eighteenth century Maria Theresa and then Joseph II swept a lot of this stuff away, but right to the First World War there was still a sort of zodiac chart of absurdity by which Franz Joseph measured out his sacerdotal duties.

It is generally reckoned that the Habsburg court was not much fun. Most gallingly it had very much less money than its seventeenth-century French rival, where state-of-the-art palaces would fill up with perfumed courtiers lightly tapping their gloved fingers together in appreciation of all the coloured fountains, special drinks, peacock-strewn parterres and mirrored halls being laid on for them. Indeed, the relentless Habsburg emphasis on prayer could have just been filling up some of the moneyless stretches of time. It certainly made a different aesthetic, with the Hofburg as a whole always having the air of cheerless functionality it keeps today. A further startling difference with France was the general lack of mistresses – the severe morality of the court was often genuine, and there was much less of the gossip or factionalism that made Versailles so distinctive. Instead, the Habsburgs had a far less threatening but baffling enthusiasm for court dwarves, a form of chic imported like so much else from Spain. These men (with names like ‘Baron Klein’) were unthreatening confidants, jesters and factotums, their size making clear their distance from the real world of high-rank noblemen. Indeed the dwarves must have been among the few who could kick back and relax at court, with most of its other members mere parts in a grinding machinery of precedence, cap-doffing, bows, curtsies and stylized movements fetishizingly borrowed from Madrid.

Emperors could be in danger of becoming trapped in this machinery. From an anally retentive chamberlain’s point of view the court performed like some brocade-trimmed orrery, with the annual sequences of religious festivals evenly rotating round and intersecting with the daily sequences of meals, prayers, audiences and council meetings. If the Emperor were to just sit there like Father Christmas this would be fatal, and the unaccountable gesture (a sudden demand for music, an act of spectacular and spontaneous generosity, a decision to go riding in the Prater) was critical both to keeping everyone sane and to illustrating the Emperor’s ungovernable nature. When Joseph I spent the equivalent of the entire year’s food and banquet budget at the Hofburg on a diamond he fancied, this may have caused seizures among his staff, but it was part of a long tradition of the Emperor showing through his actions how little he cared for bourgeois plodding. This sort of financial recklessness was shared with an aristocracy similarly addicted to grand gesture and conspicuous display.

A huge amount of card-playing and dice games filled up the court’s time. This kept everyone happy by creating patches of the day (like listening to opera) during which the Emperor did not need to talk to anyone. Surrounded by odd-looking ambassadors, professional toadies and drunken former military heroes day in day out, the Emperor was constantly obliged to find reasons for
not
engaging,
not
promising anything to yet another of an effectively infinite supply of supplicants. A sudden decision for war could have simply been provoked by a wish for something to break the monotony – and indeed one of the key ways in which a court
failed
to be a clockwork mechanism was its periodic emptying out for major campaigns and emergencies, the great tests of the cohesion, fellowship and trust that could be developed by a successful ruler.

Enormous stretches of time, when there was no piquet and no fighting, were spent hunting. The Habsburgs were enthusiastic about some odd forms – the annual use of falcons at Schloss Laxenburg to kill herons is perhaps the oddest. Herons in flight always have an air of a spindly, poorly constructed balsawood model covered in feathers and it seems an at best tepid achievement to bring them down with a sinister, compact fist-of-fury sort of bird like a falcon. It is hard too to see the pleasure in having beaters chase dozens of deer into pools of deep water and then take them out with crossbows, or in tossing foxes in blankets before clubbing them to death (Leopold I used to enjoy this particularly, aided by his game-for-a-laugh dwarfs). Presumably these forms of the hunt were meant to show aristocratic mastery over the largest forms of life, but also not risk the Emperor with personal embarrassment. So the heron is the largest bird, but if shot in a normal way with a gun would presumably go all over the place like some exploding spindly chair and the Emperor’s hunt would appear mean rather than masterful; a proper, uncontrolled deer-hunt is simply far too dangerous and is in any event not something that can be watched by spectators, so the deer need to be brought to the Emperor; foxes are too nimble to kill in an honourable way so they need to be stunned and rolled up in a blanket. So the Emperor was obliged in everything he did to take actions which appeared masterful and yet, in practice, were not. But perhaps this was the supreme form of masterfulness: did anyone at court, for example,
dare
think it ridiculous when Leopold tossed a fox in a blanket? Presumably not. The more we read about the past the more completely odd it appears.