Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (6 page)

The final elements in the building of Central Europe were the Bavarians, who continued to pour into the region south of Bohemia either through Passau or through the Tirol. The settlement of this area had a very American atmosphere – a constantly shifting frontier, violent setbacks, enormous riches for those with ferocity and luck. Otto I appointed Margrave Luitpold to supervise the new territory exposed by the Hungarians’ defeat and a series of ‘marks’ or marcher, defensive states was created to organize the land and defend it. For almost two centuries this was done by the Babenberg family and others as vassals of Bavaria (and therefore at two removes from the Emperor). It was only in 1156 that the Babenbergs were made dukes (one remove from the Emperor).

The word ‘Austria’ is a Latinized form of ‘Eastern Land’. As usual we have no clear idea how the region’s population became mostly Bavarian. There were surprises for the colonists – surviving Roman Christians were found living around Salzburg, for example, and these presumably required some re-education. The flood of settlers within a couple of centuries seems to have absorbed the native population, leaving a mixed German–Hungarian border area to the east of Vienna and a mixed German–Slovenian border area in the south. The region was a classic German political patchwork and the separate territories of places such as Carinthia and Styria (‘the Mark of Steyr’ – the main fortress) only fell into Babenberger hands after many years. Salzburg and Passau remained separate ecclesiastical territories and there were all kinds of privileges for the great Benedictine and (later) Cistercian monasteries being founded along the Danube valley.

It is alarming to imagine just how few people there must have been: much of Central Europe hardly supported anything more than villages. But now a fresh population was being generated by southern Germany, with a great cavalcade of heavily armed chancers, psychopaths, clerics, handymen and farmers all heading through the passes. Enormous areas remained barely inhabited – a forest of unimaginable size still separated Bohemia and Austria and random outcrops of mountain made communication very tiresome. The monasteries became engines for transforming the landscape, with armies of peasants converting waste land into farm land through generations of hideous toil. Genuine towns rather than merely fortified residences became visible – the key one being Vienna, sited on the Danube at the last point where the eastern Alps still offer some protection. In 1221 it was given control of the river trade between Germans and Hungarians and became very rich.

The hawk’s fortress

In 1246 after a long run of excellent luck the Babenberg dynasty at last tripped up, with Duke Frederick II’s death in battle fighting the Hungarians. Very unfortunately the Emperor died in 1250 and a deeply miserable and violent era swamped much of Central Europe. Battling with the breakdown of the Austrian lands, several nobles approached Ottakar II, the King of Bohemia, to take over. An aggressive southern German ruler, Rudolf of Habsburg, was eventually elected Emperor in 1273. As had happened a number of times, the Electors had chosen someone quite weak – in Rudolf’s case both through not having a large power base and through already being in his mid-fifties and therefore unlikely to do much damage. This proved to be a major miscalculation for everyone involved except Rudolf himself.

Rudolf died at Speyer and is buried in the Imperial cathedral there. I was lucky enough to arrive in Speyer late in the evening in winter and slip into the cathedral shortly before it shut. It is a staggeringly powerful, harsh and threatening building with its sheer weight of stone a perfect symbol of Imperial power. For anyone growing up in England or France and used to Gothic it is very alarming to be surrounded by Romanesque gigantism, particularly when made expressionist by malevolent pools of darkness and weird echoes from shuffling feet. At one point the place filled with a truly hair-raising, other-worldly sound – which turned out to be the susurration of hundreds of little foil candle-holders being poured into bin bags. In any event, the highlight is Rudolf’s tomb figure. He looks exactly as anyone would hope the Emperor to look – austere, eagle-nosed, calm, holding his orb and sceptre, an Imperial eagle symbol on his chest and a lion at his feet. It helps that at some point he has been put upright against the wall rather than lying flat, making him look more conversational.

In many ways Rudolf I was a classic German minor ruler. He had accumulated or inherited territories dotted around Alsace, Swabia and what is now northern Switzerland (including the ‘Habichtsburg’, the ‘hawk’s fortress’ that probably gave the family their name – the Swiss kicked them out of it in 1415). He proved to be a successful Emperor and took an army into Austria to expel King Ottakar. After several twists and turns Rudolf allied with the Hungarians to defeat the Bohemians and killed Ottakar at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278.

Rudolf then decided to resolve the Babenberger inheritance problem by simply taking most of the lands for himself in 1282 – these lands stayed in the family for the next six centuries. This began the Habsburg rise to power, but there were many cock-ups and dead-ends to follow what might have proved to be the high point in the family fortunes – assassinations, deaths in battle, splits in the inheritance. The Habsburgs rapidly came to treat their old south German lands as less important than their new Austrian holdings. They picked up Tyrol in 1363 and Trieste in 1382, so the family got a first glimpse of the sea. Before they re-secured for good the title of Emperor in 1452 the Habsburgs were certainly an interesting bunch, but not exceptional, with the rival Luxemburg family having a far larger geographical spread and prestige. It was the Luxemburg Emperor Charles IV who, as King of Bohemia, had been largely responsible for making Prague such an extraordinary place – with a grandeur of vision that the Habsburgs could not yet match.

The role of Emperor varied in importance depending on the personality of the job’s holder and his luck with events. Charles IV had only become incontrovertibly emperor once his bitter rival, Louis the Bavarian, died of a seizure while out bear-hunting, which decisively shifted the luck in Charles’s direction. The job was by the fifteenth century a thankless one and it had often been so too in the past. It was nonetheless key in holding together the shifting slurry of small territories which filled much of Europe, from Flanders to Vienna. These small territories were a mocking reproof to Charlemagne’s original vision of a new Roman Empire. Centuries of infighting, family squabbles, natural disaster, bribes and special needs had broken up his old empire into an incoherent mass. Any part of it would have powerful independent towns, extensive monastic holdings, individual castles with zones of land around them and very occasional serious blocks of land such as Bavaria or Saxony, but even these were a mass of cracks and sub-subdivisions. The Emperor held the system together, but with hundreds of individual territories reporting to him it was from a Human Resources point of view a poor management structure. Charles IV used his power on becoming Emperor to create the Golden Bull in 1356, which pinned into place all future arrangements. Most importantly it codified the seven figures who would in future elect the Emperor and, as significantly, laid down the rule that these men’s territories could not be split or alienated, giving the seven Electors solid power-bases of their own and preventing any possibility of a pretender or rival Elector messing up the election as had been the case with the shambles around his own election. The seven Electors would be the Archbishop of Cologne, the Archbishop of Mainz, the Archbishop of Trier, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the King of Bohemia. They met in Frankfurt to vote on who would be ‘King of the Romans’, the idea being that it was only the Pope could crown an Emperor – a distinction that would be dropped by the Habsburgs, who generally had their heir voted as King with the title of Emperor automatically being acceded to on the current holder’s death.

It was definitely important to be Emperor, but it was a long way from being the incontrovertibly classy role familiar to readers of books about Ancient Rome. Every effort was made to link the job with the glory of Charlemagne, using Charlemagne’s throne at Aachen (which is still there, amazingly – a very plain but venerable object) and with as many flags and trumpets as could be mustered. But none of the other leading figures at these grand ceremonies had a strong sense of being drastically inferior to the Emperor or would necessarily tremble at his displeasure.

‘Look behind you!’

The long rule of the Emperor Frederick III is the point at which the Habsburg family come into focus. This is for the accidental reason that standards of painted portraiture improve in the fifteenth century so that we have a clear idea what Frederick looked like. There is a very strange and beautiful portrait of his predecessor Sigismund – the last of the Luxemburg family – wearing an outsize fur hat with the hardened yet vacant expression of someone who has spent too much time experimenting with mushrooms, say, or on the road with a band. I am not suggesting this just to be silly: his face is absolutely baffling – there are no clues as to what the painter was trying to achieve by giving him such an odd expression. The fur hat and outdoorsy complexion make him look, well,
Canadian
. Frederick’s immediate predecessor, Albert II, was short-lived (he died fighting the Turks) and is known only from a portrait which could have been painted by someone at primary school, although his clothing is beautifully done. With Frederick, however, technical skill and patronage combine to produce a number of images where we have a clear sense of what he himself wanted to convey (perhaps the key point about any portrait): authority, serenity, an aura of Imperial power.

Frederick’s reign, and indeed the whole of the fifteenth century, is intensely vulnerable to two problems for historians: the ‘
Pilgrim’s Progress
Effect’ and the ‘Christmas Pantomime Syndrome’. The first of these views the individual monarch as a figure who needs in his lifetime to reach a specific goal – invariably the creation of a coherent state as much as possible like the modern empire or country as it would emerge in the nineteenth century. Rulers are therefore judged on the degree to which they remain on this path and are not seduced, waylaid or discouraged by other temptations, like Christian in Bunyan’s allegory. In the case of England this is most painfully clear in the endless attempts to establish Henry VI as King of France – we all now know this is ridiculous and that the English should just go home; we groan at the narrative point when Joan of Arc turns up, we rally a little when she goes up in smoke. But we are over-aware that the ruler in London will never actually rule in Paris and cringe as in 1429, aged seven, Henry is crowned at Notre Dame, knowing that he is going to fritter decades in a futile bloodbath, a total distraction from England’s majestic, etc. destiny.

The
Pilgrim’s Progress
Effect is very powerful with Frederick III because we know that he is the true founder of a dynasty which will rule Central Europe and many other places for four centuries – and yet he himself so often does not seem to know this (as, of course, he could not). Rather than heading to the Celestial City – in other words to Vienna to create a rational and centralized administration, the heart of a great empire – Frederick meanders about helplessly, and for long periods becomes virtually inert while mayhem breaks out all around him. He founds a monastery here, repairs a castle there and intervenes half-heartedly elsewhere, and seems to wander off the True Path at the least opportunity. His enemies and friends were driven mad by his changeable nature, his lethargy and inability to do more than a very few things at once. In what must be something of a record, although he was Holy Roman Emperor, he managed to spend a somewhat insulting twenty-seven years in a row not visiting Germany at all: leagues rose and fell, towns collapsed into anarchy, technological innovations were made and castles exploded, and yet none of this seemed to impinge much on Frederick as he had another memorial designed or listened to a bit of music.

It is attractive in a way that historians have inherited the rage felt by many of Frederick’s contemporaries. You do see yourself getting increasingly hoarse from shouting: ‘What you are doing in
Linz
– have you
even noticed
what is happening in Nuremberg – why can’t you
help
these people!’ and so on. He is definitely the most annoying Holy Roman Emperor until Charles VI. But the
Pilgrim’s Progress
Effect has to be resisted. The goal of a dynasty is never reached – each generation has very narrow and immediate aims and these can be undermined or enhanced through overwhelming strokes of disaster or luck far beyond its control. It is not surprising that these people spent so much time in church: the outcome of each year’s events so clearly rested, whether favourable or unfavourable, on immense and unguessable currents controlled only by God. The great rivals of the Habsburg family, the Luxemburgs, had provided highly successful Emperors and, indeed, in Charles IV there is a dynastic founding figure of a complete kind. But, as it turned out, the Luxemburg dynasty, with its sprawling holdings across Central and western Europe (including the area now covered by the tiny country which – through a crazy sequence of events – still preserves their name), through bad luck simply died out. The family’s end came with Ladislaus Posthumous, whose father was the Habsburg Albert II and whose mother was the only daughter of the Emperor Sigismund, the last male Luxemburg dynast. Ladislaus’s strange second name enshrined his being born after his father’s death. The little lad, with his distinctive golden curls, was carefully looked after by his bluff and helpful second cousin the future Frederick III, then a Habsburg duke. Ladislaus discovered that Frederick’s hospitality in practice seemed to revolve around not letting him talk to anyone or do anything, and although he managed to escape, he was never more than a pawn of various factions until his thoroughly accidental death aged seventeen.