Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (31 page)

Louis and Leopold got older and older, still waiting for Carlos to die, and by the 1690s an entirely different solution had been reached, with the Spanish throne going by a neat and clever compromise to Joseph Ferdinand, a grandson of Philip IV via Leopold’s daughter. But we need to move on quickly before wearying genealogical tables are dragged out to establish why on earth that would be the case, as it just does not matter: Joseph Ferdinand suddenly and highly unfortunately died in 1699, predeceasing Carlos II himself by nearly two years – a gap just long enough for the now elderly, jaded and exhausted Louis and Leopold to initiate what proved to be the War of the Spanish Succession, the most brutal and wide-ranging conflict experienced by Europe since the Thirty Years War. Leopold’s army came close to disaster but in 1704, at the great Anglo-Habsburg triumph of the Battle of Blenheim, the allied French and Bavarian armies were devastated and the Habsburg lands secured from invasion.

In parallel with events in Bavaria, the original purpose of the war was being grimly played out in Spain. Charles, Leopold I’s younger son, who began this section, was the Habsburg candidate for the Spanish throne in opposition to Louis’s new candidate, his grandson Philippe of Anjou. Louis, in a spirit of haggard recklessness, announced that Philippe would in due course inherit
everything
and therefore become the ruler of a new globe-girdling Franco-Spanish superpower. Leopold more frugally announced that he wished Charles only have the current Spanish domains (which meant he would be supported militarily by a badly frightened Britain, Holland and Portugal) – even though this was a lie and a secret plan (again) was hatched which would mean that if either Charles or his elder brother, Joseph, were to die without a son the other branch would get the whole lot, creating an Austro-Spanish superpower, a further souped-up version of Charles V’s old empire.

Charles, aged eighteen and now rebranded as Carlos III, arrived in Lisbon in 1705, at the head of an Anglo-Imperial-Portuguese army. Philippe of Anjou, backed by France and rebranded Felipe V, faced him. What followed was a catastrophe for Spain as both sides drew on local loyalties to create a civil and regional war that completed Spain’s collapse as a great power – as the fighting continued, the prize got ever smaller. Britain happily pocketed Gibraltar in what was to prove a permanent piece of opportunism. The war in Spain resulted in both France and the Empire pouring in resources, latterly at the instigation of Charles’s elder brother Joseph I, who had succeeded as Emperor on the death of Leopold in 1705. At its height there were over fifteen thousand Imperial troops in Spain. Fighting in different forms and on various excuses devastated much of Europe. Charles was boosted by his marriage in Barcelona to the tough Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, a Protestant who had converted to Catholicism, and been pushed on Charles by her formidable grandfather Duke Anton Ulrich, who readers of
Germania
may remember for his enthusiasm for paintings of nude women dying under oddly orgasmic circumstances.

With the ebb and flow of his military fortunes, Charles had the exquisite humiliation of marching triumphantly into Madrid twice (once in 1706, and again in 1710), the second time presumably having to listen to somewhat ragged and ironic cheering from the crowds. But then, in another completely surprising twist, the Emperor Joseph I, after only a six-year reign, suddenly died of smallpox – and Charles jumped on a ship to make himself Emperor in the place of his sonless brother. Elisabeth Christine was left behind in Barcelona to rule Charles’s collapsing patrimony as now only the Catalans and a mixed bag of anti-French loyalists kept faith with his claim, and the rest of Spain was made to fall in line behind Philippe. In 1714 agreement was finally reached over a reasonable split of the Spanish Empire which would not create a single superpower, with Philippe cutting himself off from succession to the French throne and Charles gaining the Spanish Netherlands, Milan, Naples and a sprinkling of smaller pieces of Italy.

But as Emperor, Charles VI stubbornly refused to give up his claim to be also Carlos III. Vienna filled with Spanish refugees and Charles dressed in gloomy black and red, praying ostentatiously at all hours of the day in the Spanish manner. The only good thing to come out of his experiences was the re-establishment of the Spanish Riding School in Vienna in a lovely new building. But religiose maundering was the order of the day: the French ambassador worked out irritably that in the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter Monday he had been obliged to spend over a hundred hours in church with the Emperor. Perhaps it was only prayer that allowed Charles to function at all – a clear space in which substantial choirs and his ballooning court could all join together to extol his greatness and call on God to protect him. As his disastrous reign unfolded, Charles must have wished to spend an ever-larger portion of his life either in the midst of mass, or asleep.

Devotional interiors

Some years ago I went to a choral concert in Chicago in which a friend was one of the singers. The music was much enhanced by the venue: a startlingly harsh, sombre Catholic neo-Gothic church – nothing but whitewash, chairs, a small font and a simple altar. Tactlessly enthusing afterwards more about the beautiful building than the singing, I was told that in fact the church had only just been given a severe makeover and that it was completely unrecognizable to its parishioners. For many years the church interior had been famously dominated by two immense macramé and cloth panel hangings, put up in the early 1970s, high on the left and right sides of the nave, and depicting Jesus with his disciples as fishers of men. This awoke all kinds of ghastly memories for me, having myself gone to a Catholic primary school and attended mass for years in a church built in the 1970s with an excessive fondness for macramé. I also had clear memories of doing paper collages of the ‘Fishers of Men’, a topic chosen in a daft subordination of content to form because it was easy to make nice effects with fish-shapes and the patterns of the fishing-net. In retrospect of course the topic has a vaguely hippy quality appropriate to the era.

In any event, the enormous Chicago panels started to go wrong quite quickly, as damp made them balloon and sag. Jesus and his friends were apparently never very clearly defined even at the best of times, but the internal catastrophe straining the materials reduced them to spade beards, a blessing hand and a chaos of fisherfolk-style clothing elements – plus of course the readily identifiable catch and netting. Each service became a nightmare as these things generated ever odder smells and yawed and spasmed, and – in hot weather – huge communities of centipedes, silverfish and other vermin raced about under the unsavoury, crusted surfaces. It is possible that my informant was exaggerating slightly, but his interesting point was that the congregation, the priests and the macramé artist had invested heavily in these monsters and for many years, despite their disruptive and ultimately even dangerous and frightening role in the mass, the hangings stayed. In the end some off-duty firemen were asked to come in and in full protective gear, wielding hooked poles and industrial shears, carved the hangings into chunks, hauled them into the yard and burned them. In scenes seared into the memories of all who saw them, the huge pile of parti-coloured macramé started off by emitting a layer of disturbingly low-lying, viscous smoke, causing everyone to get way back before suddenly the whole lot – emitting well-nigh intolerable squeals – went up like a bombed fuel-dump, jetting freakish carmine and ochre flames into the sky.

The reason I mention this at best tangential story is that it has always raised in my mind interesting thoughts about the nature of change in religious settings – the tension between a church building’s authority being based around a sense of its unchanging, indomitable sanctity and the need, keenly felt at particular times and in specific cultures, to radically overhaul and renew. This is a particular problem for Catholicism, which invests so heavily in images, while at the other end of the spectrum Protestantism in some flavours can be close to indifferent, with churches merely seen as roofs under which to pray. For the latter the issues were resolved in the sixteenth century by wave upon wave of the most savage iconoclasm – an iconoclasm which in countries such as Scotland and Switzerland led to the smashing or burning of almost all art produced up to that point. Once this clearing out was achieved the question of the design of the church’s interior by definition rather fell into abeyance. But for Catholics the nature of church decoration, when to change it and how to use it, lies at the heart of worship, and wandering around Austria it is an issue which cannot be shaken off.

A beautiful, if lurid, example is the Piarist church that looms above the Danube town of Krems. The Piarists (or, in full, the Order of Poor Clerics Regular of the Mother of God of the Pious Schools, understandably shortened) are one of the great Catholic monastic teaching orders, lying at the heart of the Counter-Reformation and an element in the renewal that has little resonance to anyone raised in a Protestant country, but which has shaped much of the rest of Europe. This church at Krems bristles with teaching tools. The outside is devoted to ancient, naive sculptures of key events from Jesus’s life, with statues and painted backdrops (including a particularly charismatic fantasy of the Jerusalem townscape) so that anybody walking past the church would receive an automatic lesson in the key points. But it is the interior that is amazing. Every surface – every wall, ledge, pinnacle and window – is a mass of instructive biblical or martyrological anecdote. It must have been pure pleasure to give sermons here, pointing with a vehement finger at one of the many extraordinary images and engaging the congregation with tales of extreme moral choice, heroism, resignation and courage.

My own children went to a genial Anglican Sunday school where they mostly learned about things like ‘sharing’ or, in an admittedly uncharacteristic nadir, mulled over the meaning of the Marriage at Cana by playing musical bumps (because you have a party at weddings). How different to be a charity-foundation Kremser child in the seventeenth century! This was a world in which the fates of the good thief and the bad thief flanking Christ at the crucifixion became central and personal challenges, where each martyr’s steadfastness under torment became a focus for personal meditation as intense as that felt by Buddhists for a specific bodhisattva. Here is St Roch with his pustulant leg and strange dog; an oddly insouciant St Sebastian; St Donatus holding an appallingly realistic human heart squeezed in his hand (or perhaps a bunch of grapes – it’s a bit dark in here); St Elizabeth of Thuringia, a princess who worked herself to death helping the sick and the poor. Here too are the towering figures of the Counter-Reformation, who devoted everything to God and transformed Catholicism: St Ignatius of Loyola, St Aloysius Gonzaga and St Francis Xavier of the Jesuits, whose exemplary and tortured lives would have been known inside out by generation after generation of Piarist-taught children. There is also an oil painting of a girl with a sword sticking into her chest which I have been completely unable to place, but presumably she must have viewed this by some obscure measure as a positive experience.

A side altar features a painting of St Joseph Calasanz himself, the founder of the Piarists, surrounded by grateful children and smiled down on by the Virgin Mary. Children educated by the Piarists included figures such as Mozart, Goya, Schubert, Haydn, Hugo and Mendel so, in ways quite hard to recover, such teaching lies at the very heart of European culture. What struck me at the Krems church is that many of the sculptures and paintings are major works of art (mixed in with some dreadful tat), but, as so often in Catholic contexts, there is an active discouragement from viewing them aesthetically – they are simply meditational and teaching tools, well made only to ensure that they are more effective. While staying in Krems I found myself heading to this church a lot – it seemed a particularly striking demonstration of the weak, partial nature of Weberian Protestant history and it really bugged me. Here was an entire world of teaching, prayer and ideology of a kind which had produced extraordinary results, but within a framework which eluded me and which required forms of belief I was incapable of.

This Piarist church could not be a more swarming instance of these surges of religious confidence and change that mark sacred buildings across Europe. Only a very specific sequence of events can allow a medieval building such as this was to have been so drastically hacked about, not only with the addition of all those side chapels and statues, but with the delicate, narrow-windowed east end being swamped in the eighteenth century by a colossal, lurid, pink, scarlet and gold altarpiece festooned in angels and crowns and saints, like some Car of Jaggernath with the wheels off. But almost as interesting is that the convulsion which allowed these changes was never followed up by any further change beyond electrical wiring. We will never know what exactly was destroyed to make way for the Counter-Reformation fittings. Presumably some of it was rescued for other chapels and religious interiors and some went up in smoke like the Chicago macramé – but what we are left with today is the point at which each church decided to stick rather than twist, a high-water mark of confidence which has never been approached since.

This issue haunts the valley of the Danube around Vienna which forms a very self-consciously planned sacred landscape, dotted with abbeys of great size and grandeur and generally finding their final shape in the frenzy of building that marked Joseph I’s and Charles VI’s reigns. The region must have once been packed with the sound of hammering, the clopping of hooves from the horses pulling huge carts filled with gold-leafed cherubs and marble columns and teams of first-responder fresco-experts from the four corners of the monarchy. As usual the building work tangled up money, history, faith and aesthetics in a highly complex cat’s cradle, with backbiting, politics and genuine inspiration shaping each site. The immediate occasion for this rebuilding was the end of the 1683 Turkish emergency, the need to repair battle damage (as at the Tatar-wrecked Abbey of Melk), the wish to give thanks for deliverance and a willingness to spend eye-watering sums of money for the glory of the Habsburg regime. Some of these projects came a-cropper. Charles’s Herculean plans for Klosterneuburg stopped with his death, leaving the chronically under-realized stump still there today. Others (such as at Göttweig) ran out of money embarrassingly early, starting off well with an enormous, triumphant Imperial staircase (up which Napoleon once rode his horse in a fit of sheer exuberance), but then flanked by a perfectly ordinary set of rooms of a kind familiar from business conference centres. But the astounding, more fully realized set-pieces at St Florian, Kremsmünster, Altenburg and Melk freeze in time a particular aesthetic, a deliriously rich and showy celebration of monasticism just at the point when many people began to wonder, first, why exactly monks needed quite such gorgeous surroundings – and, more broadly, why have monks?