Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Read online

  An intermittent theme of Central European history is this very high level of violent uncertainty, an uncertainty that could lead to an entire elite being wiped out. This has rarely been the western European or English-speakers’ story. France, for example, has avoided successful invasion for most of its existence and has almost always been ruled by French people. The political decisions of most English-speaking countries have always been taken from positions of remarkable security. The Habsburg lands, however, were always vulnerable on almost every frontier, with dozens of easy and well-posted invasion routes. Allies became enemies and a long-somnolent border zone could go critical overnight. The Habsburgs’ principal purpose was therefore military: from its origins to its collapse their empire was a machine to resist its tough neighbours and to control its often truculent inhabitants. When not fighting, it was preparing to fight. The idea, propagated particularly in the period just before 1914, that the Empire was somehow backward and ineffectual in a cake-and-waltzes way was untrue. The dynasty was never anything other than narrow-mindedly ruthless and harsh in its wish to hold itself together against all-comers. The seemingly genial, bewhiskered old Franz Joseph’s obsession was with the Empire as a vast military organism: his life was a series of parades, war-games, medal ceremonies and arguments about the huge funds needed for his army. All of this would have been familiar to his predecessors two hundred or even four hundred years earlier. A further bout of absolute insecurity was always round the corner and the Habsburgs were endlessly monitoring their neighbours’ military preparedness and mood-swings. There were plenty of examples of related states whose rulers had blundered and then been expunged. The Habsburgs indeed themselves frequently finessed the setbacks of others to their territorial advantage before themselves taking decisions which resulted in their own disappearance and partition in 1918.

  It is important to remember just how vague much rule over Europe was until mass literacy, telegraphs and railways started to tie together regions and countries. The Habsburgs loved to look at maps, genealogies and heraldic shields, making sweeping hand gestures over these symbolic shorthands for their ownership, but there is little reason to believe such gestures had much substance. Apart from a few mountain and forest communities, nobody was left completely alone, but the sense of obligation to Vienna was often remote and convoluted, with innumerable local, noble and religious privileges making a mockery of modern dreams of unitary efficiency. Many histories tend to present a narrative angled from the perspective of the ruler. Most dramatically this is expressed in the term ‘rebellion’, a word which presupposes failure (by definition: if it succeeds then it is a change of dynasty). It is too easy to see a narrative where any rebellion is an annoyance, a drain on resources, a desperate piece of backwardness, and so on. But this is to take a man wearing a crown in Vienna too seriously and I hope to make it clear just how many perfectly reasonable arguments against Habsburg rule there were. Indeed, at one point or another (and repeatedly in Hungary) virtually everybody took a turn at being ‘disloyal’ and this should be a valuable clue. Joseph II’s war with the Turks went so badly wrong in 1788 because the Hungarian nobles would not supply him with food, because they hated him and thought he was a tiresome creep. As his vast army fell apart and he raged impotently, it is impossible from a world-historical point of view not to feel a bit sorry for him, but Europe is filled with groups of all kinds who are annoyingly insubordinate, and they should be celebrated a bit more.

  One much-loved figure in so many anecdotes and novels is the Hungarian minor nobleman who lives only to drink and hunt, and refuses to open any letters or telegrams he receives, on the grounds that they are mere insolent intrusions into the life of a gentleman. The Habsburgs were always dealing with variants on such characters: defenders of feudal rights, stubborn communes, bizarre religious groups and obstreperous guildsmen. Even great aristocrats might plump for the high-risk pleasures of treason with the Turks. Generations of Viennese officials would bang their heads on their cherry-wood desktops with fury: why won’t these people just do as they’re told? But theirs was just a sickness generated by too many maps, charts and budget projections. A possible novelty of this book is that it attempts to avoid seeing Vienna as the clearinghouse for all right-minded political, religious, social or strategic thinking. A Styrian farmer, Transylvanian serf or Adriatic pirate each saw Vienna in a different way, and that view was not necessarily wrong.

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  Danubia is designed to be read quite separately from Germania. Naturally it has to cover some of the same ground, and I deal with the overlap by using different angles and examples, but there are a number of basic definitions about how Europe functioned via the Holy Roman Empire which will need to be repeated.

  There are three assurances I need to give. This is not a dynastic family history. You will not be obliged to read through endless marriage treaties, dusty gossip about what an archduke said to another archduke or how so-and-so never got on with her sister-in-law. This is a book about some interesting things that specific rulers did, and sometimes these undoubtedly involve marriage treaties (too often involving people called either Maria or Charles), but I try to avoid the sort of hearsay and harpsichordy, Quality Street royal chit-chat which has sometimes blighted consideration of the Habsburgs. I have dumped all the hand-kissing, beauty spots, heel-clicking and discreet glances over fluttered fans (‘Oh, you are too forward, Count’), and I hope this will win me some gratitude.

  This is also not a book which attempts to define specific ethnic groups by some clutch of imagined characteristics. You will not find sentences opening with assertions such as ‘Like that fiery yet noble spice they tend so lovingly, known the world over as “paprika”, the Hungarian people are…’ No specific nationality will give you the very clothes off their backs; none has natural melancholy; none is instinctively musical; no linguistic groups are implacable enemies yet also sure friends; and absolutely nobody gives herself with a self-immolating urgency rooted in her people’s fatalism. This sort of rubbish has been going on for centuries – Franz Ferdinand even had a helpful list of national attributes over his desk to remind him – and it has to stop. An immediate improvement can be made to Europe’s existence if we restrict qualities such as being laughter-filled, moody, built for love, quick to find fault and so on to individuals rather than entire populations, avoiding the associated ludicrous ethnic implication that whole cities must be packed with the musically gifted or valleys swift-to-anger. I started to feel vehemently about this while writing Germania. I listened to so many British and American friends stating as axiomatic that Germans have no sense of humour, when I had myself just come from yet another Bierkeller where most of the occupants were laughing so much they had turned mauve and their limbs were about to fall off; which does not, of course, mean that all Germans do in fact have a sense of humour.

  And, finally, this is not an attempt at an exhaustive guide to Central Europe. I have restricted myself simply to writing about some of the things I personally find fascinating. There is a reasonably clear narrative, but inevitably there are huge numbers of subjects I hardly touch. There is a fair amount on music, for example, but the text reflects my love of Haydn and Wolf rather than my merely remote, ignorant admiration for Beethoven or Bruckner. This will annoy some readers and I apologize, but there seems no point in dutifully faking up topics to take up scarce space that would then threaten more interesting material with excision. Similarly, some emperors are simply more alluring than others and I have preferred to spend time on a fascinating handful rather than colour in all the duds too.

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  I feel quite dazed by my good fortune in being able to write this book. I have been obsessed with the cultures of Central Europe for most of my adult life, but to have a legitimate excuse to wander everywhere from Bohemia to Ukraine and read, think, talk and write about so many subjects for so long has been an absurd privilege. I very much hope that I can convey something of what I felt when at regular in
tervals I found myself in the magnificently restored buffet of Budapest’s Eastern Station, chewing on a McChickwich and wondering what adventure would befall me next.

  Place names

  The naming of towns has always been a key weapon for establishing dominance over a region. The name you use for a town can imply either that you have simply a specific ethnicity or that you are making an aggressive or nostalgic political point. A good modern example is the Transylvanian town of Cluj-Napoca. Cluj is the Romanian form; Cluj-Napoca was faked up in the 1970s as Napoca had been the name of a Roman town on the same site; Klausenburg is how Germans refer to it; Klazin in Yiddish; Kolozsvár in Hungarian. They all have related roots but with very different political weights. A Hungarian would say that to refer to Kolozsvár is simply to give the name in Magyar – but a Romanian would view this as an irredentist provocation, the rejection of rule by Romania and a sentimental wish to return to the good old days when it was a major Hungarian town. The Romanian is right to bristle, but not necessarily. A similar story applies to the ancient town of Pozsony, where the Hungarian kings used to be crowned, known as Preßburg in German. The Czechs and Slovaks grabbed Pozsony and in 1919 fabricated the name Bratislava, thereby making it no longer German or Hungarian. Perhaps the worst instance is the way that the Czech Republic is obliged to have such an unsatisfactory name for itself because the obvious alternative, Bohemia and Moravia, is impossibly besmirched by its Nazi usage during the ‘protectorate’.

  There is no way out of this minefield: what is now Lviv can be Lemberg, Lemberik, Lwów, Lvov; what is now Ivano-Frankivsk can be Stanislau, Stanisławów, Stanislavov – each of these variants provoke different forms of pain for different excluded groups. So I will use the modern official name in each case in as bland a fashion as possible and without implying either fondness or aversion.

  There is a lot of very unfamiliar historical geography in this book. Units such as Carniola or Upper Lusatia existed for centuries and need to be thought of as having a quite startling tensile strength, with their own traditions, shields, aristocratic families and duties towards their rulers. A famous example is the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, viewed by Poles and many others as a terrible colonial disgrace and entirely illegitimate, and yet lasting nearly a hundred and fifty years – in other words for a longer period than a united German state has existed. The mental exercise needed to think of Galicia not as a doomed and nutty fly-by-night but as a durable reality for many generations of its inhabitants is a crucial precondition to thinking about Europe’s history.

  Many older political entities seem small now, but most of Central Europe was made up of such units until the nineteenth century. Indeed, until the unification of Germany and Italy, somewhere like Switzerland looked fairly chunky. If Europeans in 1900 could have had a sneak preview of the continent’s appearance in 2000 they would have been astonished, not just by the re-emergence of formerly independent states such as Poland and Ireland (which would have then seemed safely under the heel of superpowers), but by such fantastical new creations as Slovakia and Macedonia. These last would have had simply no meaning in 1900, one being a mere highland area of northern Hungary, the other tucked into a few folds of the Ottoman Empire. But just as striking would be the disappearance of such medieval stalwarts as the County of Görz or the Duchy of Teschen, now almost unlocatable under fresh frontiers. It is not an exercise to everyone’s taste, but this book is meant to urge its readers to think about Europe as a place with strange and various borders, multiple possible outcomes and with geography and ownership up for grabs. The maps should help, but for a truly dizzying vision of how twentieth-century Central Europe might have been refixed it is worth looking here.

  The Habsburg family

  Rather than defeat the reader with a family tree which would look like an illustration of the veins and arteries of the human body drawn by a poorly informed maniac, I thought it better to start with this summary of just the heads of the family, so the sequence is clear. I give the year each ruler became Emperor and the year the ruler died. It all looks very straightforward and natural, but of course the list hides away all kinds of back-stabbing, reckless subdivision, hatred, fake piety and general failure, which can readily be relegated to the main text.

  To save everyone’s brains I have simplified all titles. Some fuss in this area is inevitable but I will cling under almost all circumstances to a single title for each character. To give you a little glimpse of the chaos, the unattractive Philip ‘the Handsome’ was Philip I of Castile, Philip II of Luxemburg, Philip III of Brabant, Philip IV of Burgundy, Philip V of Namur, Philip VI of Artois as well as assorted Is, IIs, IIIs and so on for other places. So when I just refer to Philip ‘the Handsome’ you should feel grateful and briefly ponder the pedantic horror-show you are spared. Perhaps the most significant omission is the important one that in their critical roles as kings of Hungary and kings of Bohemia some rulers had different numbers – so Rudolf II was Rudolf I in Hungary, and Charles VI was Charles III (or III. Károly). The style given therefore is always as Emperor, whether as Holy Roman Emperor (until 1806) or Emperor of Austria (from 1804 to 1918).

  The list below shows that it is not possible to have a consistent treatment of actual names. To call Charles V Karl or Carlos would be self-defeating, as he is famous in English as Charles V. Maria Theresia is always Maria Theresa in English. For much of his reign Franz Joseph (the ‘-ph’ rather than ‘-f’ is in the German too) was known to English-speakers as an Anglicized Francis Joseph, but as an enemy ruler in the First World War he was Germanized back to Franz, simply because it sounded worse. The same applies to his successor, Charles I, who has always been Karl I. By using criteria remote from rationality, Karl I was beatified by the Catholic Church in 2004 and is now called the Blessed Karl of Austria, the first and – it is a fair assumption – last member of his family to be en route to sainthood.

  Until 1806 ‘the Empire’ means the vast Holy Roman Empire, of which the senior member of the Habsburg family was almost always elected Emperor. He ruled the ‘Habsburg lands’ or ‘Habsburg possessions’ personally and quite separately. Even these lands were far less coherent than they appear, with much of them in practice under the control of various aristocrats and religious enterprises and sometimes embarrassingly small bits actually ‘owned’ by the family. ‘Rule’ often meant navigating through a wilderness of privileges, favours, exemptions and ossified feudal niceties. Important parts of these personal lands were within the Holy Roman Empire, but others (such as Hungary) were not. ‘Imperial troops’ were therefore forces sanctioned by the vote of the Holy Roman Empire, and were not the same as the Habsburgs’ own armies. For anyone reading this under the age of fifty or so, ‘the Empire’ and ‘Imperial’ will immediately summon up visions of highly organized evil from Star Wars. Indeed, the recent revival of interest in the history of the Holy Roman Empire might be attributed to this subconscious link. But it is important to remember whenever these terms are used that the human Empire was a few notches down from its space-based rival in efficiency, motivation and wickedness, although the two could certainly swap notes about the irritating way they both seem so prone to needless defeat.

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  Frederick III (1452–1493) was succeeded, after a period of joint rule, by his son, Maximilian I (1493–1519). He was succeeded by his grandson Charles V (1519–1558). Charles V decided to split his unmanageable inheritance: the Spain-based branch of the family under the leadership of his son, Philip II, went its own way while the eastern lands fell to Charles’ brother, Ferdinand I (1558–1564). He was succeeded by his son Maximilian II (1564–1576), who was succeeded in turn by his son Rudolf II (1576–1612). After a coup Rudolf’s brother Matthias (1612–1619) briefly became Emperor. Neither Rudolf nor Matthias had children so the head of the family then became their cousin Ferdinand II (1619–1637), who was succeeded in easy stages by a straight generational dynastic run of eldest surviving sons: Ferdinand III (1637–1657), Leopol
d I (1657–1705) and Joseph I (1705–1711). Following the sudden, premature death of Joseph, his brother took over as Charles VI (1711–1740). Charles had no surviving male children, meaning that in the face of immense quantities of faithlessness and bloodshed, his daughter Maria Theresa (ruler of the Habsburg lands 1740–1780) battled to inherit a number of titles while her husband Franz I (1745–1765), after an embarrassing gap, became Emperor. This re-founded the dynasty as the House of Habsburg-Lorraine. Their son inherited in the normal way as Joseph II (1765–1790) and was succeeded by his brother, Leopold II (1790–1792), who was in turn succeeded by his son Franz II (1792–1806), who switched from being Holy Roman Emperor to Emperor of Austria, reset the numbering and started calling himself Franz I (1804–1835). He was succeeded by his son Ferdinand I (1835–1848), who was set aside in 1848 in a coup that brought to power his nephew, Franz Joseph I (1848–1916). After complex and famous dynastic setbacks he was succeeded by his great-nephew Karl I (1916–1918). Although Hungary was run until 1944 as a kingdom which claimed to be a regency on behalf of the Habsburgs, it is fair to say that when Karl stepped down in 1918 the dynasty left the stage.