Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (25 page)

The Jesuits’ sheer oddness and distance from us is summed up in the career of the great Athanasius Kircher, a German who died in 1680 having spent his adult life as a Jesuit, mostly living in Rome under the protection of the Pope and with the Emperors Ferdinand III and Leopold I as the sponsors of his publications. It would be possible to spend a profitable lifetime just delving around in Kircher’s work. A polymath of scarcely credible range, a prolific author and owner of a museum in Rome, Kircher managed in modern scientific terms to be wrong about almost every subject he turned his attention to. Through the many engravings he commissioned to accompany his work, however, he conjured into being a whole world, plausible and peculiar and with its own value system, which allows us to see something of a Jesuit world-view. As an opener Kircher wrote a series of poems and acclamations to Ferdinand III in forty-seven different languages, including one notionally in Egyptian hieroglyphs (Ferdinand is ‘the Austrian Osiris … the Austrian Momphta, etc’) and prettily laid out on an engraved obelisk, with the hieroglyphs all completely wrong. He was obsessed with labyrinths, mirrors, volcanoes (he was one of the first men to descend into the crater of Vesuvius), magnets (the frontispiece of his book
Magnets
features the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor, but with metal crowns and sceptres hanging together, magnetized, from the claws of the double-headed eagle), music amplification and freaks of nature. He drew on the Jesuits’ international network for images of Egypt, of Mexican temples, of Chinese wonders.

In some of this it is possible to see exciting glimpses into scientific method, with Kircher’s magnificent curiosity trumping any attempt at derision. He is also one of the key figures in imagining the ancient world, with superb renderings of the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the rest. But at the heart of his research lay a demented enthusiasm for the literal nature of the Bible. In one of his greatest and most futile images, he showed how the Ark’s interior could be subdivided to find space for all living things, with conditions much eased by the exclusion of many animals which could have been created by post-diluvian cross-mating: e.g., giraffes because they are a cross of panther and camel, armadillos of tortoise and hedgehog and so on. The sheer craziness and beauty of the picture of the Ark, with its countless little animals and its seemingly sensibly calculated jars and barrels of provisions, is one of the highlights of the seventeenth century. But it is in his work on the Tower of Babel that everything comes to a head and we are left wondering what is a practical joke and what is just spectacularly misapplied effort. Kircher commissioned a lovely illustration of the Tower but then became immersed in zany thoughts about the full practical implications of the frustratingly fleeting mention of the Tower in the Bible. He assumed it was built by Nimrod (on no evidence) and that the Tower’s reaching ‘heaven’ meant ‘the moon’. He then did some calculations to prove that this was never practical, as the Earth did not contain enough material for bricks to build such a structure. Even if it
were
technically possible to build such a tower (see
here
), Kircher carefully established that it would need 374,731,250,000,000 bricks, with such further headaches as the horses needing eight hundred years to haul them up to the top even at a gallop.

Before being lost in such marvellous material for ever, we should move on. As the eighteenth century progressed, the Jesuits became ever more hemmed-in by enemies. Their intellectual methods were reduced to tatters by the influence of figures as varied as Descartes and Pascal and just as the papacy had become viewed as an unacceptable type of rival by many secular rulers, so the Society’s transnational nature made it ever more anomalous. In a catastrophic period, it was first expelled from Portugal in 1759 and then from most of the rest of Europe by 1773. A great, curious and brilliant organization had come to an end, its muted re-creation in 1814 rendering it into a far more normal and minor part of European society. The Jesuit role within the Habsburg Empire as religious shock-troops and intellectuals was so important that, as with so much else in Central Europe, we are looking today at a landscape with crucial components missing.

CHAPTER SIX

Genetic terrors
»
The struggle for mastery in Europe
»
A new frontier
»
Zeremonialprotokoll
»
Bad news if you are a cockatrice
»
Private pleasures

Genetic terrors

In December 1666 in Vienna in the main courtyard of the Hofburg an attempt was made to crunch together all the grandeur, solemnity and extravagance available to human ingenuity to mark the marriage of the young Emperor Leopold I and the Spanish infanta, Margarita Teresa. We have pictures of the event and some of the music has been preserved and recorded, most strikingly Schmelzer’s thunderous
Cavalry Ballet
, heaped with trumpets, bombastic in a good way. The music accompanied hundreds of men pulling carts with the usual woebegone giant carvings of allegorical figures, a float featuring a mock-up of a battleship and tons of horsemen in elaborate costume. Flares, explosions, kettledrums – and as the finale the young Emperor himself stormed forward on horseback, followed by over a hundred musicians blaring and pounding away, to greet his Spanish bride.

The sense of fear and anxiety in the courtyard on that day is completely lost to us, merely reading about these events centuries later. We after all know the vast pattern of historical, political, personal and geographical events that will play out from this meeting of Leopold and Margarita Teresa. But the nature of what followed was of course absolutely unknown to the struggling crowds of grandees, musicians, symbolic statues and brightly decorated horses in the Hofburg.

As good a starting point as any for understanding this ceremony would be Rubens’ commission to paint the meeting of the two branches of the Habsburg family before the decisive Imperial victory at Nördlingen in 1634. The foreground and sky stiff with allegorical figures, the son of the Emperor Ferdinand II and the son of King Philip III eagerly shake hands, their joint forces about to crush their Protestant enemies. The painting dates from the same year as Velásquez’s even more majestic
The Surrender of Breda
, celebrating one of the greatest triumphs of the Spanish Habsburgs in the war with the Netherlands. Both these paintings have an unintended
vanitas
quality, cruelly freezing in time what seemed a high-water mark for Habsburg fortunes in the Thirty Years War. It all ended up as so much dust – with the dismantling of Ferdinand II’s dreams of a universal Catholic empire and Breda’s absorption into the independent Dutch state. But, putting aside these setbacks, Rubens’ painting shows both branches of the Habsburg family in good shape: rulers of most of Europe, confident and glamorous. A little over thirty years later both branches had been overtaken by genetic disaster and were threatened with extinction: what was being played out in the Hofburg courtyard in 1666 was potentially the last gasp of a catastrophically inbred and unlucky family.

Leopold was the last survivor of an extraordinary massacre of Austrian Habsburgs. His father, Ferdinand III, married three times; his first two wives were killed by childbirth and three daughters and three sons died as babies. This was a horrible sequence of events, but in 1654 there were still seven males, some of them seemingly in good order. But Leopold (who had been in training for a blameless career in the Church) witnessed the sudden deaths of his elder brother Ferdinand (the heir), his father Ferdinand (the emperor), his uncle Leopold Wilhelm (the military commander and great patron of the arts – key originator of the Kunsthistorisches Museum) and his younger brother Karl Joseph (aged fourteen). In a further twist the brothers Ferdinand Karl and Sigismund Franz had, as described earlier, died in their thirties, both sonless, ending with shocking speed the Tyrolean branch of the family. The long-term importance of the Tyrolean disaster was that Leopold now took over all their territories and these became fully integrated under Vienna’s rule until 1918, but in the short term it eradicated the only other source of male ‘supply’.

Margarita Teresa, Leopold’s Spanish bride, came from a similar family disaster. Her father, Philip IV, had six daughters with his first wife with only one surviving infancy and one son, who died in his teens of smallpox. His second marriage (this is where things get very odd) was to his niece Mariana, Ferdinand III’s daughter. In a development that would not surprise modern biologists, of their five children only two survived: Margarita Teresa herself and her younger brother, the overwhelmingly handicapped Charles.

So at the Hofburg, Europe was face to face with the Habsburg family’s last chance: a marriage between the two final fully functional members, albeit with Margarita (in the same style as her mother) being Leopold’s niece. Leopold was no oil painting and she was little better. Both inherited the distorted Habsburg face – the tiny Leopold’s jaw so distended that his mouth would fill with water if it rained. If they could have a son then (assuming the sickly little Charles died) that boy might recreate the huge empire of Charles V, inheriting both Vienna’s and Madrid’s realms. But if they failed then the Habsburg family would vanish and this – much crisper and shorter – book would end in the next few pages. If Leopold had swept into the Hofburg celebration on his horse and had fatally fallen off then the entire course of European history would have flowed into a fresh channel.

But Leopold lived, his strangely shaped head familiar in profile on innumerable coins over nearly half a century. Despite his awkward habit of fleeing at key moments in his reign, he has a fair claim to be the most successful of all the Austrian Habsburgs and he did indeed have the male children to succeed him; but not with Margarita Teresa. She has become immeasurably famous – far more widely recognized than her husband – as the little five-year-old girl at the centre of Velázquez’s
Las Meninas
, a painting only known at the time to those who could enter a specific room in Madrid’s royal palaces, but which to us must have a fair claim to be one of the greatest paintings ever made: the – presumably unintentional – shadowed swansong of the Spanish Habsburgs.

As the wife of Leopold (who she correctly but very peculiarly called ‘Uncle’ throughout their marriage), Margarita Teresa suffered the same unavoidable curse as her relatives. At this point in the family’s history each confinement must have been treated with far more terror than hope. She suffered many miscarriages, and gave birth to two sons who died at or shortly after birth, to a daughter who survived and then a further daughter who was born by caesarean section after Margarita Teresa herself had died, aged twenty-one, and who then also died. The surviving daughter, Maria Antonia, lived long enough to marry the Elector of Bavaria and herself have two sons who died at birth before dying aged twenty-three shortly after giving birth to Joseph Ferdinand. This boy, as the only great-grandson of Philip IV, would have become King of Spain but he foiled the plans of Europe by dying aged six.

This truly awful sequence of events was the reality which is so often hidden by the self-confident sequence of official portraits of men with wigs, armour, swords and horses that fills the conventional European history of the period. A parallel but unbearable history could be written of the human byways and culs-de-sac, pain and humiliation that lay behind this facade. A book could be written which told the Habsburg story just from the point of view of the disregarded queen mothers, the terrified wives, the daughters used as trans-national pawns, the widows and daughters who vanish from history as they are put into convents or into little-frequented palace wings: all those moments of bored irritation when the child being born proved to be merely female and the grand witnesses to the mother’s agonizing labour hurriedly dispersed. But there is also the story of the devastating sequence of dead children. Even in an era of high infant mortality there were clearly special factors around Habsburg inbreeding that made things far worse. The worst focal point for all this is the ‘Children’s Columbarium’ in the Imperial Crypt, put together in the 1960s in a cold fit of tidiness to corral into one place eleven prematurely dead sons and daughters of Ferdinand III and Leopold I.