Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe Read online

  The great wizard

  Many Habsburg rulers could be faulted for their almost aggressive hostility towards the arts and their refusal to use their unique position to create extraordinary things – Franz Joseph was notoriously depressing in this respect – but there were a number of exceptions: Charles V and Titian, Rudolf II and a whole panoply of mountebanks and oddballs, Ferdinand III and Rubens. None can really match up to Maximilian, though – his work with Dürer, Burgkmair and Altdorfer and a host of less well-known figures, as well as his support for the extraordinary music of Isaac and Senfl, makes him one of the greatest patrons. These do not seem to be merely the random sideswipes of aggrandizement either, but based around a close personal involvement, albeit one involving the same sort of untrustworthy changeability that afflicted his political zig-zagging. Some very brilliant figures spent huge amounts of their time designing for Maximilian half-finished projects for books, statues and images that were only circulated or seen, if at all, thanks to the devoted work of his grandson, Ferdinand I, many years after all those concerned had died. Almost everything that Maximilian did was hamstrung both by his own restlessness and by his frequent and unwanted experiences of the cashless economy.

  As good a way as any to understand the key political events of Maximilian’s life is through his own artistic vision of it. This was expressed in a number of places – not least in Altdorfer’s very odd but wonderful drawings for The History of Frederick and Maximilian, showing the baby Maximilian astonishing the court by standing upright while having his first bath – but nowhere more vividly than in Dürer and his workshop’s unmanageably enormous (twelve foot high and ten foot wide) woodcut triumphal arch. Something of a dead end as an idea, this was a highly complex set of paper sheets which could be put together like a mammoth jigsaw on a wall and which was a seething mass of allegory, decoration and history. Its semi-portability may well have appealed to Maximilian as his court moved around, but it will always remain unclear how such a strange object was meant to be viewed – it is both too large to take in and too small in its detail. Indeed, the entire Arch of Honour has the air of something dreamed up by the Emperor as a reaction to improvements in woodcut technology, and which was then sub-contracted to Dürer’s team in Nuremberg with nobody daring to point out the borderline idiocy of the concept. In any event, a staggering amount of work went into it and the individual panels of events from Maximilian’s life are fabulous. Indeed they form a very straightforward way of explaining why his reign was so important to the Habsburgs’ fortunes and save a lot of tedious exposition.

  The first group of images in the Arch of Honour give the story of Maximilian and his father’s great coup in securing Burgundy for the family. The late fifteenth century was notable among many other things as the sole point during which the Swiss had a fundamental role in European life. The sheer obstreperousness of the cantons allied to their military skill allowed them to carve out an increasingly independent niche within the Empire. Their spreading territory was partly taken from Habsburg land and one of the ways in which the old Emperors had used to keep the Habsburgs down was turning a blind eye to Swiss behaviour. This was highly unfortunate for the Swiss once the Habsburgs became the Emperors and looked for revenge. In the meantime the Swiss had changed the face of European history at the Battle of Nancy in 1477 when they had managed to hack to bits Charles the Bold, the last (as it turned out) of the highly successful Valois dukes of Burgundy, who ruled a broad swath of land from the Swiss borders to Holland. The Burgundians had created a state which, if it had stabilized, could have formed a permanent barrier between France and Germany. It was rich, industrious, coherent and had a great mercantile, military and artistic tradition.

  Charles the Bold had become a sort of enraged animal by the time of his death, dreaming of creating a vast Kingdom of Lotharingia and doomed to fight with great cruelty and without end against coalitions of less-than-impressed neighbours opposed to incoherent visions that needed their territory to be realized. His disappearance was welcomed, but it created a crisis and opportunity of a very rare kind: a large and desirable territory with no male heir. Despite being married three times Charles had only been able to have one child, Mary of Burgundy, or Mary ‘the Rich’ as she now became known, in a tiresome Burgundian tradition of naming (‘the Good’, ‘the Fearless’, ‘the Bold’) which would mercifully soon end. Mary, aged nineteen, suddenly became a figure of overwhelming importance. Louis XI seems to have uncharacteristically panicked, and instead of offering to marry his son to the heiress invaded her territory. This ungallant blunder threw her into the arms of Maximilian, at that time simply the teenage son of the Emperor Frederick III.

  The marriage reshaped Europe. It gave the Habsburgs territory which now spread from the Danube to the North Sea and made them far more powerful than any other ruler, apart from the Ottoman sultan and perhaps, in some moods, the French king. It also shows the annoying nature of dynastic history – Burgundy in itself was a plausible political unit, but now it was part of a far wider, sprawling tangle of lands which would cause countless problems for everyone concerned. Mary died, crushed by her horse, less than five years after her marriage, but her decisions and those of her and Maximilian’s son Philip ‘the Handsome’ (the last of these add-on names) would vastly aggrandize the Habsburgs in absolutely unpredictable ways.

  Despite her early death, therefore, Maximilian kicks off his pictorial account of his life with an image of his and Mary’s betrothal, both looking very dashing. This is the foundation of his fortune, as he takes on the legacy of the Burgundian dukes and their mystique, particularly the Order of the Golden Fleece and the musical and artistic quality that transforms the previously rather backward Austrian court. Both Philip ‘the Handsome’ and Philip’s son Charles of Ghent (the future Charles V) would grow up in the Low Countries and this fundamentally changed the Habsburg style – indeed for many Germans their Germanness became thoroughly suspect from this point on, and their transnational quality would become a key element in their appeal and success, but not to Germans.

  Of the sixteen pictures, a large group now deal with the downside of Maximilian’s marriage – the long era of fighting from 1477 off-and-on to 1489 to stabilize the new inheritance, beat off rivals and tame truculent townspeople. Each image shows another blood-soaked opportunity for heroism – fighting in Utrecht, Guelders, Bruges, Liège, and a laboriously made snapshot of Maximilian posing with his dubious and intermittent ally Henry VIII of England after the Battle of the Spurs. They then show him crowned as King of the Romans at Aachen and therefore formally heir apparent to his father as Emperor (a particularly wonderful Dürer workshop woodcut with the young, beautifully dressed king surrounded by happy Electors) and marching back into Austria to retake the core lands embarrassingly snatched by the Hungarians while he was distracted in the Low Countries. There is also a picture of his worst humiliation – the Swiss War of 1499 where the traditional Swiss–Habsburg hatred found its finest expression and the Swiss gained their independence (a new concept in Europe and its novelty so confusing that it was not ratified until 1648). Other images show him being crowned in Trent by the Pope (not in Rome as, embarrassingly, the Venetians would not let him through), fighting to defend Bavaria on behalf of the Holy Roman Empire (a rare example of his actually doing his job as Emperor rather than as head of his own clan) and fighting the French in Italy.

  The most important by far though are two further marriage pictures, both by Dürer himself and with a level of detail and heraldry that marks the events out as exceptional. The first shows Maximilian, weighed down by his Imperial crown, chain of the Order of the Golden Fleece and glamorous robes, looking justifiably pleased as his son Philip ‘the Handsome’ marries Juana, the daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. The second shows the 1515 Congress of Vienna and the double wedding of two of Maximilian’s grandchildren, Ferdinand and Mary, to the two children of King Vladislaus of Hungary and Bohemia. Through an unforeseeabl
e series of disasters and chances these two weddings would shape much of the future of Europe.

  Maximilian’s ability to project a brilliant image of himself was most influentially achieved by Dürer’s great painting and woodcut, based on a sketch of Maximilian presiding at the Diet of Augsburg and published after the Emperor’s sudden death. It has enshrined the image of him as a sort of charismatic and charming wizard and has given him an unfair advantage over descendants who made the mistake of using journeyman hacks for their portraits. He was obsessed with death, carried his coffin with him wherever he travelled and even in his final illness was adding refinements to the astounding cenotaph for himself, which he had spent much of his reign designing. He seems to have been happiest in a way designing funeral monuments – the colossal marmalade marble cuboid for his father in Vienna cathedral was only completed shortly before Maximilian’s own death.

  This settled sense of gloom around Maximilian is of course what makes him so attractive too. Some of his court music has a burnished, sacerdotal, capo di capi quality which makes everything later seem either too shrill or too pompous. To be able to ask musicians to play such stuff, while idly flicking through pictures of yourself by Dürer and taking sips from a jewel-studded goblet filled with something reassuringly exclusive is a fantasy that may not appeal to everyone, but it certainly finds a mental and emotional home in my corner of south-west London.

  Gnomes on horseback

  On the road snaking out of the Alpine town of Bolzano there is a crag topped off by a truly perfect little castle. Bolzano was until 1918 part of the Tyrol and entirely German-speaking. As part of its loot for supporting the Triple Entente in the First World War, Italy took over the southern Tyrol and has clung to it in the face of endless appeals from Austria and intermittent terrorism from its inhabitants. It has only been in the past ten years or so that Italy has adopted a non-coercive, bilingual attitude towards one of the handful of regions in Europe where Germans were the people threatened and discriminated against. This new bilingualism has had a bizarre effect on the castle. In Italian it is called Castel Roncolo, which implies a pretty turfed courtyard with maidens in gauzy outfits skipping about to tambourines and lutes with weedy youths in coloured tights looking on. In German it is called Schloß Runkelstein, which implies a brandy-deranged old soldier-baron with a purple face and leg-iron lurching around darkened dank corridors, beating a servant to death with his crutch. Seeing the two names everywhere side by side is deeply confusing, like having one eye always out of focus.

  The castle is famous both as a locus of nineteenth-century Romanticism, a cult bowed to by Franz Joseph when he rebuilt it after an embarrassing incident when Alpine road-widening resulted in one of the castle’s walls falling down its crag, and for its role in fights between local noblemen and the Habsburgs in the fifteenth century. This Romantic love of the castle came partly from its being such a quintessential pile, but also because of the survival of its early fifteenth-century frescoes. Commissioned by the two brothers who originally owned Runkelstein, these frescoes somehow battled through sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century indifference until they landed in the safe arms of the post-Walter-Scott-neo-medieval world.

  As you would expect, Maximilian appreciated the frescoes, sending an artist to the castle to restore them. His shields (Burgundy, Austria, Tyrol) are still carved over a fireplace. It is safe to say that what Maximilian liked about the frescoes was that they vividly enshrined a medieval Europe which now seemed very remote from his own mercenaries-and-gunpowder world. There is something engagingly semi-competent about the pictures and they cannot claim to be high art for a second. They are all entirely secular in their subject matter and show jousts, hunts, stars and suns, parades, men and women talking. There is a brilliantly silly sequence of events from Tristan with the hero killing Morald and the dragon and the voyage to Cornwall (or rather, Cornovaglia) and so on. There is also the story of the brave knight Garel, whose adventures are truncated by most of them having slid off the crag together with the wall on which they were painted in the embarrassing road-widening disaster. Most weird of all is a deeply mysterious sequence of painted triplings in the castle courtyard – the Three Ancient Heroes (Hector, Alexander and Caesar), the Three Old Testament Heroes (Joshua, David, Judas Maccabeus) and the Three Medieval Heroes (Arthur, Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon). The triplings continue with Arthurian heroes, great lovers, Nibelungenlied heroes and end with a zany set of three male giants, three female giants and three gnomes on horseback, figures whose meaning will never be recovered. These are all painted with limited skill and are much faded, but their very survival dips us into an ancient and peculiar aesthetic based on obsessive number-patterns, attributes, virtues and morality.

  Like their contemporaries, the Habsburgs saw themselves in a direct succession from these figures (the heroes more than the gnomes). As discussed earlier, Maximilian went to huge trouble to show his descent, which was both physical and spiritual. The castle embodies the cult of ancestors, courtly behaviour and knightly prowess which haunted the Habsburg court as an ideal rarely matched but nonetheless lurking always as either an aspiration or a reproach. The repulsive, incompetent grind of the Italian Wars may have been the daily reality, but there was always a place for jousting, and lordly behaviour.

  To a degree now hard to imagine each Habsburg ruler viewed himself in relation both to his predecessors and his successors. His ancestors might be dead in this world, but they judged him and he would meet them when he in turn died. The elaborate family charts, trees of Jesse and sequences of coats of arms created an aura of absolute power and certainty which a successful Emperor could milk through processions, feasts, tournaments and, above all, a constant round of church services. Across the Habsburg lands there were elaborate shrines to key predecessors, such as the tomb of Ernest ‘the Man of Iron’, Maximilian’s grandfather, at the Cistercian abbey of Rein in Styria, where monks were paid to pray for ever for the ruler’s soul. Equal prestige was gained from the tombs of non-Habsburg Emperors such as Otto I at Magdeburg. This for ever is hard for us to take, but the landscape was dotted with chantries which did do this job for extraordinary periods of time – the nuns who prayed for the Emperor Henry I at Quedlinburg kept at it for nearly nine hundred years before being asked to pack up. These heroes of the past were like a colossal battery of prestige which the current ruler could draw on. The ancestors’ continuing presence was filtered through innumerable statues, paintings, poems and plays and the maintenance of their burial places was a key family concern. The idea – which his subjects generally bought into except in the face of overwhelming ineptitude – was that when the Emperor appeared he was merely the current embodiment of a great stream of grandeur stretching back to the Old Testament, the Aeneid, Charlemagne, the Ottonians, the Salians and the Babenberger and Habsburg inheritance. In a series of ceremonies in specific great towns (Aachen, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg, Regensburg and others) this continuity was celebrated, often with the attendance of the Electors, or as many of them as were on speaking terms with the Emperor at the time, and a panoply of family members who as mothers, wives, soldiers or clerics would have had specific forms of prestige now long forgotten but immediately obvious and powerful at the time.

  Maximilian left the greatest of these in the Court Church at Innsbruck. In its creator’s spirit of havering and lack of funds his monument is not what it should have been. Intended as his tomb and as a summa of Habsburg majesty, it is in fact empty, with Maximilian winding up broke, dying and then buried at the other end of Austria in Wiener Neustadt. Its statues forlornly stood around for many years until his grandson Ferdinand I turned his attention to finishing the mausoleum and creating a suitable building for it. The result is very odd as the tomb and its figures are clearly taken from the gloomier elements in the Northern Renaissance whereas the church is Italianate and Counter-Reformation. I was reminded of a video that used to be played at the Banqueting House in Whitehall which to
ld the story of Charles I’s execution outside that building in 1649 accompanied on the soundtrack by Purcell’s music for the funeral of Charles’ granddaughter Mary II in 1694; such a jump in sensibility was not unlike a documentary on World War One accompanied by ‘Rock around the Clock’.

  So the surroundings are all wrong in Innsbruck – but this does not matter too much as the monument itself is astounding enough. Maximilian endlessly fiddled with the design, surely one of the most fun parts of being an Emperor, and some of the giant bronze ancestor statues were cast in his lifetime with most of the remainder agreed at least as design sketches. They reflect in many ways a Burgundian aesthetic and in the history of sculpture are an odd sort of dead end, not taken up by his successors, who preferred something a bit less mad. But perhaps there was only a need to go to such lengths once. As the second Habsburg Emperor in a row Maximilian wanted to make a point about his pedigree that would reach centuries into the future and validate all his successors, trying to ensure that these too would be Habsburgs. They stand around the empty tomb like immense and alarming deactivated robots – particularly the amazing figure of Ferdinand I, the last Burgundian King of Portugal, whose lack of a surviving portrait meant that he had to be shown in a colossal suit of armour with the visor down and fantastic bronze decoration swarming over every surface.