Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (8 page)

From Charlemagne’s death the Empire, like all European states, suffered from a near constant, dynamic wish to fall into smaller units. This tension is extremely difficult for historians to deal with as it flushes out the basic attitude in the writer to the nature of political events: is each threat to central authority a good or a bad thing? For example, the conventional British account of France’s history makes the hyper-centralized state of Louis XIV into something almost Mongol in its disgusting blank amoralism – and yet comparable accounts of Britain’s own militarily fuelled centralization and ruthlessness mysteriously become a splendid tale of pluck and decency.

At the heart of the Empire was the realization that it was enormously too large and diverse to be directly ruled by a single figure. Its origins lay in Charlemagne and his successors’ conquests, from their western bases heading east, north-east and south-east. It encompassed most of German-speaking Europe, plus the Low Countries, a zone of what is now northern, eastern and south-eastern France, Bohemia, Moravia, Lusatia and a chunk of northern Italy. Large and small grants of land by the Emperor endowed various of his followers with territory which they defended and consolidated both on his behalf and for their own benefit. The bigger and more obstreperous nobles might seek greater freedom from Imperial control but there was never a suggestion of actual independence. Indeed, however powerful states such as Saxony or Bavaria might have become, their rulers always kept a keen sense that their own status and security were deeply woven into the overall Imperial structure. By the time the Habsburg family permanently secured the title of Emperor it was a secular and religious post of incomparable prestige, backed up by a hieratic, ambulatory calendar of events and places: the election at Frankfurt and the Imperial gatherings at places suffused with the history of great predecessors such as Aachen, Worms, Nuremberg and Augsburg.

Through many convulsions, setbacks and total implosions, the Empire by the fifteenth century had settled into a pattern which it kept until its dissolution in 1806. Its fringes at all points of the compass generated an alarmingly high percentage of all Europe’s historical ‘events’ and even after 1806 it was a motor for disagreement and warfare like nothing else. Too many historians have found themselves siding uneasily with the idea that the Emperor should be sympathized with when his grand plans are thwarted by pygmy localism, but perhaps this hopeless localism should be celebrated as a great gift to European culture and discourse. It is striking, for example, that the western region of the Empire was so poorly organized that it only ever had a defensive anti-French function and no ability to attack anyone at all. One western territory, Prum, had a defensive capability restricted to the spiritual force field generated by its ownership of a sandal belonging to Jesus while another, Essen (the future home of Krupp armaments), was ruled for centuries by a notably ornery and unhelpful group of aristocratic nuns.

The territory of the Empire therefore had something of the appearance of a deeply disturbing jigsaw. There were relatively large territories such as Württemberg, which looked impressive but was in practice honeycombed with local special laws and privileges that made the dukes impoverished, bitter and much laughed at. There were more substantial and coherent territories, such as Saxony, which was cursed by frequent bouts of subdivision between different heirs, with one half crumbling into tiny but wonderful fragments. There were the lands of the margraves of Brandenburg in the north-east, which had a personal link to territories in Poland that fell outside the Empire and had a profound effect when they cohered into the Prussian state.

These larger blocks catch the eye because they had real futures, but far more characteristic of the Empire were oddities such as the Palatinate, a scattering of wealthy territories across the lower middle of Germany whose rulers intervened at key points in Imperial history. They left at Heidelberg one of the quintessential Romantic landscapes, but it is now almost impossible to envisage the Palatinate as a plausible and robust political unit – indeed Heidelberg is so picturesque mainly because its principal castle is in ruins. The Palatinate is an interesting example of what makes the Empire so confusing, with its individual units generally accretions of inherited, bought and nicked bits of land not necessarily even linked together.

Religious properties, often on land which had belonged to the Emperor but was given to the Church for specific purposes, formed an important category. So the adorable little state of Quedlinburg, ruled by nuns from good families, was endowed with enough territory to pay for its abbey and ensure a daily sequence of prayers for Henry the Fowler, a great slaughterer and forced converter of pagan Saxons in the early tenth century, who was buried there. Sometimes just as small, but far more important, were the Imperial Free Cities, lands generally focused on a single trading town, which had special privileges and were ruled by merchant oligarchies rather than a single lord. Some of these cities were consistently very important and close to the Emperor, such as Frankfurt and Nuremberg, some were quiet backwaters. Others were more remote from Imperial concerns and had extensive links with the outside world, such as the Hanseatic cities in the north, most famously Hamburg and Lübeck. Each had its own specialization, such as Lüneburg with its salt mines or Hall with its mint. Most consistently insignificant of all were the micro-territories: for example, the hundreds of bits owned by Imperial Knights, many in Swabia, and often consisting of just a tumbledown castle, a handful of vineyards and perhaps lucky access to some unfortunate river where the knight could charge a pointless toll for each trading boat rowing past.

This mass of political entities (hundreds by the later fifteenth century) was all held in place by the authority of the Emperor. As can be imagined, the very small states were frantically loyal as they needed Imperial sanction to survive at all – they tended to have elaborate shields decorating their fortress walls to show their allegiance and warn off casual predators. They supplied tiny packets of troops and often contributed to Imperial entourages in terrific costumes as well as populating many jobs within the Church. But even the larger territories believed in the Emperor, and such a system, as can be imagined, generated a staggering number of legal disputes, whether about inheritance, rights or financial and military contributions, and much of the Emperor’s time was engaged in settling these disputes. This ceaseless, wearying round of hearings and travelling, which, of course, left numerous irritated or alienated losers in its wake, was central to the Empire’s existence and the ability to provide justice was as important as success or failure in war in creating an Emperor’s reputation. Much of the chaos of Frederick III’s long reign stemmed from his losing interest in all this, and one of the reasons that the Habsburgs enjoyed their extraordinary run of success after the fifteenth century was that they felt a surprising and consistent level of inter-generational diligence (with the startling, ruinous exception of Rudolf II with his rooms full of unopened letters). They were always dealing with a stream of grumpy, trigger-happy and often quite poorly educated noblemen waving around forged ‘ancient’ documents of a kind familiar to the Habsburgs themselves and insisting on the application of this or that right. I do not refer much to the issue again in this book, but it should be kept in mind as an important sort of background hum at all times – an always inadequate but prestigious Imperial bureaucracy sorting through land and inheritance disputes which could take generations to resolve and which found its final expression in the great scenes of dusty paperwork in Leoš Janáček and Karel Čapek’s 1926 opera,
The Makropoulos Case
, with Janáček even coming up with a beautiful, repetitive theme to represent unending Imperial legal processes.

So the Emperor needed physically to demonstrate his status by moving around his immense lands, and every town had a complex set of obligations to him, later expressed by the often very elaborate ‘Imperial Halls’ which survive in many ex-territories today, consisting of a lavish assembly room (swagged with toadying but chirpy murals extolling the Emperor’s greatness and the extreme personal closeness to him of his host’s ancestors) and an entire wing of bedrooms – sometimes only used once in a century.

Each Emperor had a power-base, which could be very important to him, even if he was often away. Much of the distinctive appearance of Prague comes from Charles IV making it both a royal (as King of Bohemia) and Imperial capital. His son Sigismund shunted around all over Europe in a long reign of baffling incoherence – if he can be said to have had a base then it was at Buda or Visegrád. But these were only ever personal choices rather than institutional ones. The south-eastern Empire is littered with building projects knocked on the head by the early Habsburgs’ changes of mind or taste, or total insolvency. Maximilian I’s empty tomb in Innsbruck, with his body in Wiener Neustadt and his entrails in a copper pot in Vienna, sums up the problem. As long as the Emperors were on the move then they could keep their legal, military, residential and fiscal rights going – much like a permanently turning mixer being needed to maintain wet concrete. A sustained period of inattention could make the whole thing solidify and even – as the simile is abandoned – ruin the mixer itself.

The mechanism which sat at the heart of the Empire and which made it work was the strange fact – to our ears – that the Emperor was elected. The Golden Bull stated that when the current Emperor died, the Seven Electors had to gather (either in person or through a proxy) in Frankfurt and, sitting in a specific chapel of the Imperial church of St Bartholomew, vote on the new King of the Romans. Following their choice, an immense festival filled the Römerberg in central Frankfurt, with bonfires and the usual whole roasted animals. The choice of Electors was a clever one as these could only possibly agree on someone mutually acceptable and even if one family might nobble two or even three Electors their locations in different parts of the Empire and different moral views could not be squared readily. The horse-trading and bribes could be breathtaking (although much is hidden from the historical record), but the Electors’ eventual choice did have a surprising level of legitimacy, both through the crushing historical weight of precedent and because they were free to choose from a range of rich, capable and adult candidates. This avoided the nightmares of pure heredity faced by France or England, say, which would at irregular intervals wind up being ruled by children or imbeciles.

The election was hardly an opportunity for any old aspirant who felt lucky to put himself forward, though. The qualifications were formidably difficult, restricting candidature to almost nobody. This was in part because whereas the Emperors of the high Middle Ages had owned extensive lands as part of their job almost all this had by the fifteenth century been given away. The Emperor therefore needed to have access to a huge amount of money in his own right just to maintain his dignity, let alone have the potential to raise armies. In practical terms only two or three families could pass the interview. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Luxemburgs who were the most practical candidates as they could draw on their substantial revenues from also being kings of Bohemia, and in Sigismund’s case also King of Hungary and Croatia. Attempts to make the role of Emperor hereditary within a family had seemed possible when Sigismund had succeeded his father, Charles IV, but Sigismund’s failure to have a male heir and the end of the Luxemburg line meant looking elsewhere. A good candidate was a member of the Habsburg family, Duke Frederick of Inner Austria, who was elected King of the Romans in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 after a number of local difficulties. Without intending to do so the seven Electors of 1440 had locked into the job a single family who would rule, with one short break, for three hundred and sixty-four years.

CHAPTER TWO

The heir of Hector
»
The great wizard
»
Gnomes on horseback
»
Juana’s children
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Help from the Fuggers
»
The disaster

The heir of Hector

In the late fifteenth century Europe goes into a ferment of change – the economy revs up, the population grows, technology is overhauled, new forms of artistic and intellectual life flourish. Earlier events that appear murky and disconnected to us must have appeared vivid and curious at the time, but now this is all verifiable and uncontentious, simply because of a single, key invention: printing with movable type. Monarchs such as Henry VI of England or Louis XI of France are remote and, however hard we try, not part of our mental landscape because of the thinness of what they left behind them – a handful of stiff portraits, a few letters and dodgy chronicles. We would love to engage more actively with their reigns, which were obviously but tantalizingly fascinating, but cannot.