Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (27 page)

The fortress itself endlessly and as it turned out pointlessly proliferated throughout the eighteenth century in preparation for a Turkish attack. In one of Prince Eugene’s masterpieces, a Turkish army of perhaps a hundred and fifty thousand men was completely thwarted – unable to break into the fortress and encircled. This defeat then opened up the Banat to Habsburg conquest. Petrovaradin itself seems to have become a hobby for generations of military engineers. There are mile upon mile of tunnels, in sections separated by blocks and twisted passageways. The fiendish idea was arrived at that each military section commander would simply not
know
how to get into the next bit, so even if caught and tortured he could not tell the Turks how to proceed further into the fortress’s bowels. This kind of sick military ingenuity never came to anything: the dream of thousands upon thousands of Ottoman troops being soaked into the fortress like water into a sponge, of whole armies vanishing, locked inside, and being massacred at leisure, came to nothing, with the front line moving far away. It was held by Hungarian troops during the 1848–49 War of Independence. They kept themselves entertained, while defying all attempts by the Habsburgs to root them out, by using their heavy cannon to gradually destroy most of Novi Sad on the far bank, which must have provoked some bitter laughter from the Viennese military authorities after they had spent all that money on fortress upgrades. It was also a prison and at the beginning of the First World War the young Tito, then just Sergeant Broz, was briefly imprisoned there.

On his release Tito rejoined the Habsburg army and fought against the Russians on the eastern front, which brings us to the obvious problem the Habsburgs faced even back during the heroic years of Prince Eugene. As the prince’s forces stormed into the Balkans, an immediate question arose: just how weak did the Habsburgs really want the Ottomans to be? As great swathes of Central Europe became organized as new territories, as Transylvania became ruled from Vienna, as thousands of colonists came from all over Europe to areas whose populations had been erased in the fighting or fled, the Russians stepped forward. As Orthodox co-religionists and as Slavs, could a case be made for the Russians having a special mission to protect the native peoples of the region from the Catholic, German-Hungarian hordes now threatening their lands? As post-Sobieski Poland and the Ottoman Empire became weaker, what would an appropriate division between Habsburgs and Romanovs be? As usual with military strategic issues no sooner is the ‘to do’ list complete then you get handed another one: all that trouble to dispose of the Turks merely to find yourself threatened by a new neighbour. For the next two centuries (ending with the erasure by the Russians of the Austro-Hungarian army) this would be the single most important issue for the Habsburgs. But mercifully it does not loom large at all for the happy characters at Baby Exit.

A new frontier

In a moment of really shameful childishness, I once found myself on Castle Hill in Budapest about equidistant between the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Military History – two institutions which in their different ways are so stimulating that they put everything else in the shade. Like the fabled donkey that starved between two equally delicious bales of hay, I stood there frozen and incapable. A new temporary exhibition at the Museum of Military History on the Ottoman–Magyar military relationship promised to be a happy wilderness of hedging, blurring and tip-toeing about. But in the end the National Gallery had to win – I could not let another hour go by without seeing again that most sprawling and heady of late-nineteenth-century blowout paintings, Gyula Benczúr’s
The Recapture of Buda Castle
.

This demented canvas shows the moment when, after a siege of startling cruelty and destructiveness, the ‘Holy League’ commanders led by Charles of Lorraine stand in the shattered ruins of Buda Castle, its grand and honourable Ottoman commander Abdul Pasha dead on his back, his snowy beard providing a pleasing contrast to the skin of the African archer’s corpse he is lying on. A herald blows a trumpet, a monk looks piercingly at a crucifix, troopers cheer and surviving exotics are led off into captivity. After a hundred and forty-three years Buda is once more a Hungarian city and the Ottoman past lies dead on the ground.

The end of Ottoman rule in Central Europe raised immensely difficult questions about whether or not these new conquests were a reintegration of lost lands that had in the past been undoubtedly part of ‘the West’ or whether these were lands irredeemably tainted by ‘Easternness’. The old Habsburg core, running from Lake Constance in the west to the Military Frontier in the east, was some three hundred miles across. The addition in a generation of the old Ottoman territories more than doubled the monarchy’s width, taking it to only a hundred and fifty miles from the Black Sea. The monarchy which had once been unmistakably Alpine, German and Italianate was now very different. Most ‘eastern’ of all was that the new territories were religiously pluralistic and in that sense liberal, with Lutheran Saxons, Jewish Jews, Calvinist Hungarians and Orthodox Serbs and Romanians. This picture would have been even more complicated if so many Muslims had not fled the advance of the ‘Holy League’, seeking safety in Bosnia and Thrace.

The triumph of the West therefore perversely released a huge wave of Catholic intolerance on these religiously patchwork territories. This renewed religious intolerance had begun even before the Siege of Vienna with increasing discrimination against Protestants in Royal Hungary – leading, in a spectacular piece of cruel lunacy, to hundreds of Protestant pastors being sold to Naples as galley-slaves. This unusual transfer of skills may have resulted for a short while in some agreeable devotional hymns wafting across the Mediterranean, but was a public-relations disaster. There was also the unwelcome suggestion that the Habsburgs had no specific right to the new territories, as it had been a pan-European alliance that had cleared out the Turks. A series of ferocious uprisings contested their claim – three waves of ‘Kuruc’ rebellions (between 1672 and 1711) devastated an already haggard region, with a particularly disastrous impact on the previously intact area of Upper Hungary (Slovakia). These were serious rebellions with major goals, supported and interfered with by a range of outsiders, from Poland to France to the Ottomans who wished to use the Kurucs to damage Leopold I. Outside interference gave the Kuruc rebels more weight and power, but was fatal to their chances of success. The Habsburgs would never allow the new territories to fall outside their orbit. The Kurucs could inflict local setbacks on Habsburg forces, but were reliant for eventual success on a crushing defeat by either the French or the Ottomans of a kind which would make an independent Hungarian buffer-state part of a resulting peace treaty. As so often was the case with Hungary, external powers in the end were not particularly fussed about this issue and the circumstances for Kuruc success never emerged.

The initial rebellion was an uncoordinated gesture of despair, mainly by Protestants, at Habsburg encroachment on their civic and religious practices. This event will always be remembered by those of us who collect funnily named Habsburg military leaders for the role of the inglorious General Paris von Spankau. This was followed by a second rebellion under Imre Thököly, which became fatally reliant on Ottoman backing and was a minor casualty of the Ottoman catastrophe at the Siege of Vienna. The third, under the leadership of Ferenc II Rákóczi, appeared close to success, occupying much of Hungary and seeming to be on the verge of international recognition, but in a classic instance of the Hungarian problem, its territory was only held because most of the Habsburg army was otherwise engaged. The overwhelming Anglo-Habsburg victory over the French at the Battle of Blenheim both devastated Rákóczi’s main sponsor and allowed Habsburg troops to stream back eastward and defeat him at the thoroughly lopsided Battle of Trencsén. Rákóczi spent the rest of his long life abroad, another common Hungarian rebel topos, latterly under Ottoman protection as leader of a Hungarian exile colony in Tekirdağ on the Sea of Marmara.

Each rebellion was damaged by the fatal quietism of so much of the Hungarian nobility. No matter how severe the emergency the nation always refused to do as it was told and never rose up as it was supposed to. In part this was a genuine backwoods nuttiness, a refusal to engage even with the next valley. In part it was fear of a popular uprising in a society which in many places had Magyar-speaking landowners with potentially very unreliable Slovak, Romanian, Serb or Ruthene peasants, who might very well be in favour of a Habsburg rescue from local oppression. There was also a religious split – did the Kurucs really support religious freedom or were they in practice anti-Catholic, in which case would Hungarian Catholics by definition have to support the Habsburgs?

The rebellions did just enough to ensure that the Habsburgs would always treat Hungary as a separate state – but in every other way were a disaster, leaving huge areas as a wilderness of burned-out estates, castles and towns, with many dispossessed families and a depopulation as bad as in the areas fought over with the Ottomans. They offered too the first taste of post-liberation ethnic tension, as many Serbs chose to rally to the Habsburgs rather than the rebels, making it clear that an external ruler could, through careful distribution of favours and punishments, keep in play antagonisms that made successful uprisings impossible. This became one of the chief pleasures of various regents and governors over the coming two centuries. Many Hungarian noblemen who survived the purges and religious discrimination that followed the wars became deeply ambivalent about the idea of national independence: with the departure of the Ottomans there were simply too many non-Hungarians around to guarantee that the future would be theirs.

This uncertainty was much enhanced by the mass migrations that ran alongside the rebellions and which changed the landscape drastically. Just how terrible the situation was in the new territories during the early eighteenth century was captured in a series of letters by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu as she travelled south-east from Vienna en route to her husband’s diplomatic posting in Istanbul. She describes the region as ‘for the most part desert and uncultivated, laid waste by the long war between the Turk and the Emperor, and the more cruel civil war occasioned by the barbarous persecution of the Protestant religion by the Emperor Leopold’. The towns she passed through were ruins, the fields uncultivated, the woods filled with wolves; a major battlefield from twenty years before was still strewn with the skeletons of men, horses and camels.

It was this unpropitious environment which now became the focus for as major a movement of Europeans as the contemporaneous ones by settlers into the Thirteen Colonies. The Hungarians themselves moved south-east, repopulating large areas of what would become modern Hungary, alongside many Slovaks who moved into the regions north and east of Buda. Romanians headed west, into Partium and the Banat – in such numbers that they would be able to make a sketchy case for absorbing much of this land into Romania after the First World War. As significant was the mass migration of Serbs north, to avoid continuing life under Ottoman rule, who eventually settled in the region of southern Hungary now called the Voivodina, home of the Petrovaradin fortress.

Each of the great rebellions against the Habsburgs has been burnt into the Hungarian national consciousness, the landscape dotted with statues of Thököly and Rákóczi, poems, novels, paintings. But most of these events happened outside modern Hungary – the sieges and battles almost all took place in what are now Slovakia, Romania and Ukraine and in a completely unrecognizable political landscape. The hope for the Hungarian nobility as the Ottoman period came to an end was that they would get their old kingdom back, but the settlement made by the Emperor Ferdinand I after the death of King Louis II at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 rather surprisingly still held, with even the long semi-independence of Transylvania (Rákóczi proved to be its last prince) now abruptly ended. The new borders established under Habsburg rule seemed to guarantee a Hungarian sphere, but this turned out to be based on the transnational power project of Vienna and have little to do with Buda. The fantasy that this enormous new land was in fact ‘Hungary’ would be cruelly exposed within moments of the last Habsburg Emperor resigning in 1918.

Zeremonialprotokoll

In many ways the enormously long reign of Leopold I was the acme of the Habsburg experience – lots going on, exciting geopolitical changes, good music. Leopold was one of the very few of his family who managed to get the yin and yang of his duties about right – balancing his role as Emperor and his role as ruler of the Habsburg lands. This distinction, between Reich
and Österreich, was often forgotten, not least by the Emperors themselves. Leopold’s predecessors, Ferdinand II and to a lesser degree Ferdinand III, had tried to use Imperial forces – meaning the troops they could call on across the Empire – to pursue a narrowly Catholic goal, which ended in what was effectively a giant civil war within the Empire. Ferdinand II’s attempts to beat his subjects into submission showed the stark limits of his power. Ferdinand’s principal goal was to destroy Protestantism, but to achieve this he had to hammer all his notional Imperial subjects into accepting his authority in a way that had never been true in the past, and it did not work. Even Charles V had been reduced to blowing up whole sections of cities in the Low Countries trying to get them to do as they were told. The pettifogging and obscurantism of the Empire, with its stubborn micro-states and interminable, dust-covered legal cases, was designed to keep the forms of the Empire in place (to prevent little states being swallowed by bigger neighbours) and to keep the Emperor at bay except when needed. Its efficiency was not brilliant, but this is our own perceptual difficulty rather than that of the time.