Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (14 page)

But Charles seems to have quite rapidly realized that there was no future for all this pan-European excitement, shedding and sub-contracting whatever he could. As on other occasions, the secret mechanisms that lurk in Europe’s political structure ensured that enemies of a universal monarchy generated like antibodies. The history of Protestantism simply
cannot
be disentangled from Charles’s own prominence and power. He faced off against Luther at Worms and made his great speech: ‘What is true and a great shame and offence to Us is that a single monk, going against God, mistaken in his opinion, which is against what all of Christendom has held for over a thousand years to the present, wishes to pervert Us.’ Charles was acting here both as a true son of the Church and as a figure whose resources already threatened to destroy all dissent.

How better to resist such a man than by embracing Protestantism? The decision by Charles at Worms to spurn Luther clearly saved the Pope from potential Armageddon, but it also created a situation where religious dissent could also mean dissent from Habsburg rule. Distracted on a thousand fronts, by the time Charles took clear military action against the Protestant threat in the brief Schmalkaldic War twenty-five years later it was all too late and despite his victory Europe was awash with anti-Catholic forces. Even the famous portrait Charles commissioned from Titian to mark his triumph, in plumes and full armour on what must be one of the greatest of all ramping steeds in Western art, is a study in failure. Charles’s small, grey-bearded head looks unconvincing, as though, like those painted boards at the seaside, he has popped it through the hole and is unaware whether he is being portrayed as a Catholic Champion or in a comic red-striped one-piece bathing costume. Sadder still, Charles had in fact been too ill even to mount a horse during the battle and had been carried in a litter – so Titian’s incomparable vision would have been known to everyone at the time as a bought polite lie.

‘The strangest thing that ever happened’

The sheer speed of the Reformation seems almost as alarming now as it did then. In 1517 the unknown Martin Luther was nailing up his Theses
in a Saxon university town, by the 1520s there were mass conversions as far south as Slovenia and by the 1530s the charming polymath Johannes Honterus was instilling the Word in the far south-east of Transylvania, the ‘infection’ already some seven hundred and fifty miles from its source. This religious cataclysm flowed at its heart from a collapse of authority. The actual details of what the new religion would involve were acrimoniously thrashed out over the following century, but for Central Europe there was a sudden change not unlike that of 1918 or the end of the Cold War in 1989, with a broad coalescence around the idea that the status quo no longer made sense. To many people with many motives the Pope became almost overnight a fat, sinister brute, the figure in a thousand woodcuts, covered in rich vestments and jewels being chased down into Hell.

As the entire structure of obedience caved in, some secular rulers could not believe their luck as the dazzling array of properties and treasures under Rome’s protection looked vulnerable. All over Europe, most famously in England, figures in power just helped themselves. None of this came from a crisis in faith itself – Europe had experienced a huge burst of rebuilding and decorating churches just before Wittenberg (after all, the crisis was caused in part by the Pope’s wish to raise cash to rebuild St Peter’s), including hundreds of the sensational just-pre-Reformation painted altarpieces that now fill Central European art galleries. But faith took a new direction, with ferocious arguments within an ever larger number of camps, including an intellectually recovered and aggressive Catholic one.

Within the Habsburg framework there was never a real chance that the Reformation would be accepted – the apex of power was so entangled in Rome’s sanction that it was inconceivable that Charles V could change his allegiance. But for many powerful aristocrats the situation was different, with an unstable blend of personal devotion and greed giving an irresistible momentum to fresh arrangements. Not entirely unlike the Communist revolutions of 1917–19, there was a sense of being part of a wave of the future. With both Protestants and Catholics proclaiming a universal truth, the success of the former dismayed and demoralized the latter, and it was a shock from which Protestantism never recovered that its new and universal truth was ignored in places such as Spain and Italy, embraced confusedly in England and in the end scornfully rejected by both the Habsburgs and the kings of France. As the New Jerusalem stubbornly failed to turn up, Protestant doctrine became so self-contradictory that an enormous intellectual and spiritual space opened up – spotted by the reforming Council of Trento (Trent) – for a successful Catholic fight-back.

Charles and Ferdinand were now stirring up great fear and anxiety. Composite ownership of territory had always been a commonplace, but Maximilian I’s scheming had created a family network of extraordinary power and with fluky extras he cannot have guessed at. It had been routine for royal families to criss-cross Europe and generate curious combinations, claims and possibilities. Lajos II of Hungary had parents born in Poland and France and Charles V himself united all kinds of strange pan-European flavours. But the Habsburgs seem at this point on their way to being the genuine heirs of the Roman Empire, with other surviving monarchies reduced to subservience or (like the once great thrones of Hungary and Bohemia) total absorption.

There was a great gap between the grandeur of Charles’s political inheritance and the misery of his personal one. It seems to have been his great-grandmother, the Masovian Piast princess Cymburgis, who introduced the terrible Habsburg jaw which afflicted Charles and so many of his descendants. The men could try to hide it with extravagant beards, but the women in portrait after portrait appear to have a sort of awful pink shoe attached to their lower faces. He also seems to have been crushed by the same melancholy that ravaged both his mother’s and his grandfather’s sides of the family and which would again emerge among his descendants, most famously in his great-nephew (and grandson!) Rudolf II.

Europe was now raddled with Protestantism and this split in Christianity became linked to one’s attitude to Habsburg hegemony. But it was not simply a question of two religious sides. At the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 that followed Charles’ crushing of the Lutheran princes, it was at last decided that each territory in the Empire would have its own religious practices and that they would be those of its ruler. This was already inadequate since both sides chose to pretend that Calvinism did not exist, a serious problem as this austere form of Protestantism was becoming all the rage and would reshape countries as far apart as Scotland and Transylvania. It also fudged the problem of Catholic religious territories. In a jaw-dropping coup back in 1525 the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, the Hohenzollern Prince Albert of Prussia, had spent long hours talking with Luther and searching his soul before coming up with the idea that God had told him to become Lutheran and make the monastic territories he had been elected to rule on the Baltic into his family’s private hereditary possession. This sort of outrage, where a great crusading Catholic bastion could simply be pocketed by a cheeky individual, set other rulers across Europe stroking their beards. Henry VIII, for example, realized that if he made a leap like Albert’s he could cash in his old wife, get a delightful new one
and
grab all his kingdom’s monastic property for himself: to break with the Pope certainly seemed something worth thinking about.

The Peace of Augsburg therefore tried to hammer into place a deal which benefited many individual, current rulers; but what level of Protestant abuse, sincere or cynical, would provoke a violent Catholic response? Charles and Ferdinand’s successors, Maximilian II and Rudolf II, were both, in the manner of the period, live-and-let-live on religious issues and in that sense the Peace was a success, but religion, inheritance and personality were all tangled up in ways that under the right circumstances could prove catastrophic. From Charles’s point of view the Peace was a failure – there was probably nothing he could have done to arrest Protestantism’s progress, but he was definitely too late by 1555. His private agonies, exhaustion and premature ageing had little impact on his opponents, all of whom could only see the sheer power of the Habsburg family. Even notional Catholic allies among the German princes turned on him. One last curious inheritance gambit went wrong. In yet another total surprise the fifteen-year-old Edward VI of England suddenly died and his much older sister, the very Catholic Mary I, became queen. Charles arranged for her to marry his son Philip. Philip’s role in England was carefully hedged about but it is generally forgotten in a frenzy of English nationalist huffing that he was at the time called the King of England and features equally with Mary on the coinage. Nothing was fully settled but Charles mulled over the idea that if Philip and Mary had a son he would inherit England and Burgundy, creating a formidable, coherent and curious new state – but also making England permanently into a Catholic Habsburg province. This chilling what-if came to nothing: Mary was already very old to have a first child, seems to have suffered from a phantom pregnancy which if real could have had the most astounding consequences, and died after only five years on the throne, taking a possible Habsburg England with her. Phew.

Charles saw only disasters around him after the Peace and, shattered and sick, took the unprecedented step of actually resigning. The Pope thought this ‘the strangest thing that ever happened’. The whole point of hereditary office was that the decline and death of the ruler was a central part of the pattern – to bail out in favour of others made no sense. Charles is usually seen as rather noble and impressive, standing there in Brussels, surrounded by sobbing noblemen, making his great act of renunciation. But it could be argued that this just showed his startling family arrogance – thinking about both his predecessors and his successors, Charles seems genuinely to have seen himself as a mere link in a great Habsburg chain. Rather than dying in office surrounded by the usual hypocrites and impatient whispering, how much more imposing to hand out his offices in person. The process took a satisfying eleven months to complete as, in a series of grand pronouncements, he gave Burgundy to Philip in October 1555, Spain to Philip in January the following year (plus of course the Americas), the Franche-Comté (the confusing, separate ‘County of Burgundy’ as opposed to the Duchy) to Philip in April and the job of Holy Roman Emperor to Ferdinand (who already owned the Habsburg hereditary lands as well as being King of Bohemia and King of Hungary) in September.

As with many other Habsburg subdivisions there always lay open the chance that the two parts of the family might reunite at some future date. It was extremely unclear which of them should be seen as the senior branch: the Holy Roman Emperor trumps everyone, but it was impossible not to notice what was happening in Spain, now united fully and with a proper resident monarch at last, who in 1581 tacked on Portugal and its own American and Asian empires just for good measure. Both branches of the Habsburgs behaved as though they were senior, and this was a key factor in keeping them apart. Philip II in Madrid was undoubtedly the wealthiest and most powerful man in Europe. Spain’s culture had a decisive influence – the rich, sombre gloominess of its court totally shaped Vienna’s atmosphere into the eighteenth century, and Vienna had in turn little impact on Madrid. Maximilian II lived at the Spanish court for years before he became Emperor and his son and successor Rudolf II was raised there. There was a sense in which the Austrian lands were a bit of a backwater – a dreary fighting frontier not comparable to the greatness of the Spanish Empire. The key moment was Ferdinand’s death, after only a short reign. Charles’s deal had been that Philip would take over, but Ferdinand instead insisted on keeping with his direct line. It is hard to imagine the Electors accepting a Spaniard as Emperor, particularly one so very powerful and Catholic. So it could be that Ferdinand’s move to have himself replaced with his son, who would become Maximilian II, was necessary to the Habsburgs holding on to the office at all. This in some measure estranged the families, but it did not prevent them marrying each other in a notably creepy way. It became part of their arrogance that nobody else was good enough. So Maximilian II married Philip II’s sister Maria (so that makes them first cousins) and later Philip II married Anna, one of Maximilian’s children (that makes him her uncle!). Mercifully there then followed a group of bachelor or outlying Emperors, but the two branches were back intermarrying by the 1630s with catastrophic genetic results, birth problems and big jaws scattered everywhere.

With a strong sense of regret, the scene now shifts from the incense-laden grandeur of the Spanish court – a separate story with its own trajectory, featuring silver mines, chocolate, and electric eels – to the snowbound, fortified, inland territories which Ferdinand’s descendants ruled into the twentieth century.

The armour of heroes

In one of the saddest events of 1665, a ship heading along the Danube to Vienna foundered and sank, taking with it the entire music library of the Habsburg court at Innsbruck. The dissolution into the murky water of many thousands of irreplaceable handwritten sheets of music was the final act winding up the Tyrolean Habsburg family. The exact nature of this catastrophe is unknown but Innsbruck had been as important a musical centre as Salzburg or Vienna and attracted generations of brilliant Italian players and composers. One of these was Giovanni Pandolfi, who we only know about at all because he happened to publish two sets of violin sonatas which had a substantial impact on composers such as Purcell and Bach (indeed, Purcell stole one of his most beautiful tunes from Pandolfi). The sonatas’ publication in Innsbruck in 1660, dedicated to the reigning archduke and archduchess, is the only information we have. Pandolfi may have been the elderly and prolific composer of many great masses and an unparalleled sequence of works for all the major instruments, and single-handedly made seventeenth-century opera a whole lot more interesting than it turned out to be. Or he may have been a pettish, violent and gruesome child prodigy who turned out a handful of sonatas before his disgusted guardians quietly sold him off to a man scouting around for reliable galley-rowers. We will never know – whatever was on that ship is lost.