Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (32 page)

Charles VI might have been a dreary and unpleasant man, but he is aesthetically the most interesting of the Habsburgs by miles. A striking patron of major buildings, he encouraged a form of ‘representation’ which has not really been seen since. Later libraries or churches or palaces may be more practical, but each seems a diminution of what was confected across the Habsburg lands in the early eighteenth century. If you want to represent the control, ownership and mastery of books, then the Court Library in Vienna or the monastic library at Melk are two of the world’s greatest buildings. If you want to represent the control, ownership and mastery of horses, then the Spanish Riding School in Vienna has the same status. And if you want to represent the control, ownership and mastery of religion, then this applies too to the abbeys and monastic Imperial halls and Imperial staircases of Charles’s reign, as well as his wonderful church in Vienna, the Karlskirche. The group of architects, sculptors, masons, decorators and painters who did the heavy lifting for these projects created elaborate and all-consuming works of art of a kind which subsequent generations had simply had no interest in repeating. The projects have a fervour and almost pantomime quality quite out of place in all subsequent Habsburg courts (which tended to be austere, often to the point of mediocrity). Later rulers and builders may have found the demented waves of gold leaf that fill Melk abbey either exhilarating or disgusting, but never an aesthetic to engage with seriously in a spirit of actual prayer (churches) or learning (libraries).

Almost all this construction was achieved during a single, long lifetime, with St Florian and Kremsmünster under way in the 1680s and places like Göttweig grinding to a halt in the 1730s. Like all major innovative movements it is startling how rapidly it goes from a peak of glory into softness and decline. The inventiveness that could handle heaped angels, balconies, elaborate organs and drastically foreshortened painted renderings of saints’ lives in the 1710s soon came to grief. St Florian’s abbey church is possibly the most magical of these buildings – prayerful and imperial, monastic and aristocratic, with its Brobdignagian columns and strangely erotic angels holding aspects of St Florian’s martyrdom: Florian’s Roman
fasces
and soldier’s sword, and the millwheel tied round his neck before he was thrown into the River Inn for refusing to pray to pagan gods. (Incidentally, St Florian cheers up churches all over the Empire as the patron saint of firefighters, with a sword or lance in one hand and – an area of happy interpretive licence for sculptors – a little bucket of water in the other, which he is tipping over some flaming building.) St Florian commands absolute respect and its aim is to strike the visitor artistically and religiously to the ground – you feel stunned somewhat in the manner of Saul, but with less lasting effect.

By stark contrast, by the time you climb, panting, up the forest trail to Göttweig, it is clear that decay has set in. The Abbey Church is no less grand than St Florian, and equally engaging, until it becomes clear that the painters have reached an unacceptable level of silliness: a painting of Babel which makes it look like a high-end holiday-camp, another of the Last Supper which has the air of a gala meal among friends. The last straw is a picture of the touching little scene in the gospel where Mary Magdalene in her panic assumes that a figure she sees by Christ’s empty tomb must be a gardener, before realizing that he is in fact the risen Christ. Here is Mary, and here is Jesus, but he is wearing a floppy hat and carrying a spade, neither of which features in the Bible. He is actually
disguised
as a gardener, a very different, eccentric move perhaps reflecting the mental confusion attending resurrection. Admittedly other painters do similarly silly things with this rarely used scene, but it was the point for me, having spent a week drenched in this stuff, that the dream came to an end. The Göttweig pictures were merely ridiculous (if of course very enjoyable) and, shortly before Charles VI’s death, the whole tradition had caved in. A cult of ever more elaboration, decorative daring and symbolic obscurantism had come to a perhaps merciful halt, setting aside the dazzling (if non-Habsburg) aftershock of Tiepolo.

The sheer size and grandeur of places such as Melk, a monastery notionally devoted to private prayer and the teaching work of a small group of celibates, makes its inhabitants mere collateral damage from its main purpose: to celebrate the triumph of the Habsburgs and of Austria over the forces of both Protestantism and Islam. Any journey across the old Austrian heartlands would now be marked by rebuilt, often onion-domed, parish churches, interspersed with the massively overhauled abbey complexes. Because much of this stretch of the Danube valley remains a rural backwater – its only resource seemingly the production of apricot liqueur – little has changed today. There is almost no large-scale architecture of a later date to look at, and it is fair to say that with the end of this frenzied round of rebuilding there is a cooling-off of ambition and confidence, both within the Habsburg family itself and within a Catholicism which was as the eighteenth century progressed once more put under siege.

The second will

An attractive place with a grim history, the Polish town of Cieszyn was once one of the duchies of Silesia – a large region stretching north of Bohemia composed of small duchies under separate members of the Piast family. Many of these dukes came to hold their land from the King of Bohemia so after the 1526 catastrophe at the Battle of Mohács they owed allegiance to the Habsburg family. Over the following century the dukes’ families died out and one by one the territories reverted to direct Habsburg rule. Some chunks went elsewhere – Crossen to Brandenburg (later Prussia) and Zator and Auschwitz were linked to the Polish crown. The region was historically a tangle of Poles, Germans and Czechs and its fate in the twentieth century was a terrible one.

The town of Cieszyn (known as Teschen in German) was the site of a brief but vicious war between Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1919 which partitioned the town along its river. This was one of thousands of injustices of the period but a particularly harsh one, with the bridges across the river choked with barbed wire and relatives who had happened to live in different parts of the town cut off from one another for a generation, often not allowed even to communicate by post. In the centre of the town today a shop displays a very beautiful Austro-Hungarian map from about 1910 showing the town whole, bound together across the river at its heart by an elaborate figure-of-eight of tramways. The splitting of the town for those living in it must have been something akin to having a stroke. A little-remembered aspect of the Munich Agreement was Poland’s absorption of the whole of Cieszyn as part of the general tearing-apart of Czechoslovakia, the possession of which was enjoyed for less than a year before Poland was in turn invaded and the area became part of Germany. The old border was then re-established in 1945. It is a very peculiar feeling today to walk between the Czech Republic and Poland over a river border that once generated such hatred and misery but which is now utterly harmless. The harmlessness has been achieved though through ethnic cleansing, with Cieszyn now an entirely Polish-speaking town and Český Těšín Czech.

There is a lot to say about Cieszyn but here I must confine myself to mentioning the remarkable museum, now called the Museum of Cieszyn Silesia and housed in a late-eighteenth-century mansion in the middle of town. The core of the collection was established by a local Jesuit in 1802 and is one of the oldest Central European public museums. The entire building is completely fascinating. Some of the rooms have kept their decorations from when it was a nobleman’s house. There are wacky, naive frescoes on very loosely ‘Ancient World’ themes, including a notably loopy Egyptian Room, with sphinxes and a rough shot at hieroglyphs. In what I hope will be permanently kept as a reminder of past wretchedness, the Roman-themed Ballroom is severely damaged, with large chunks of the decoration missing – the result of a Hitler Youth party in 1942 at which a fire got out of control. This is not the only shock in the museum. Much of the original collection has been kept in a sequence of beautiful cabinets and more vividly than anywhere else in the former Habsburg lands it gives a sense of the last non-scientific period of collecting, the absolute end of the Rudolfine tradition before it all became more systematic and rational. So here, for example, is a whale’s penis (an alarming object), the jaw of a young mammoth, an ammonite, a hopeless attempt to make a unicorn by tacking a narwhal horn onto a horse’s head, the shoes of a geisha. This is all fun – but in one of the cases there is what seems to be a strange, umber-coloured rectangle of paper. I battle for a moment with the Polish caption: it says ‘a piece of Turkish skin’.

The process by which the Ottomans went from being the terror of Christendom to a strange absence (or merely a sick curio) was long drawn out. After the battles that cleared Hungary they were routinely seen as in decline, and yet they continued to rule a huge block of Europe for over two more centuries. Vienna would never be threatened again but the Ottomans had a powerful defensive capacity and were, of course, themselves European. A huge number of the troops defending Oriental despotism were themselves Greek or Serb, Albanian or Bulgarian and ethnically identical to many of their Habsburg opposite numbers. Whether being ordered about by some Rhineland German general in a big wig or a beylerbey in a turban, those actually fighting were in many cases the same. Ottomans could pretty much wave at Catholics across the Straits of Otranto and the rich tangle of areas such as Bosnia was as much a pluralist glory of European civilization as was Transylvania. And yet it was essential to the whole Habsburg project that somehow the Ottomans were infinitely remote and alien (you would not see ‘a piece of Austrian skin’ in a museum). This was notable in the early 1990s during the break-up of Yugoslavia, when the EU behaved as though these notional ‘ancient Balkan hatreds’ were bubbling up somewhere almost on Mars, when the serious fighting was only a short boat-trip from Italy or a gentle morning drive from Austria. This sense of the Ottomans as being alien was always of course very powerful in Central Europe, but what was new after the Battle of Vienna was that at last they could also be seen as beatable and wretched. In Jan III Sobieski’s superb tomb in the Wawel Cathedral he is shown carved in all his glory below a pile of guns and battle-flags, while below these huddle chained and fearful Turks, their moustaches drooping helplessly and – a very odd touch – with their teeth broken, as though Jan had actually beaten them up.

A similar and contemporaneous tone is set in the grand ceiling painting of the Abbey of St Florian, where the Emperor Charles VI is in all his glory and with similar chained and fearful Turks cowering at his feet. As so often in Charles’s life he wished to be painted as a victor, but all the images of him as a new Caesar, as a dashing young prince on a cavalry horse, and so on, all came back to mock him, like some awful dream where all you can hear are unexplained and coldly derisive giggling sounds.

Despite being ejected from Spain after the War of the Spanish Succession, Charles seemed to have good prospects once he got back to Vienna and accustomed himself to his surprise new role as Emperor. The settlement that ended the war was on the face of it attractive. Charles added to the Habsburg Empire a remarkable spread of fresh territory, from the old Spanish Netherlands, to Milan, Naples and a selection of small Italian bits and pieces. In a further triumph, a war with the Turks commemorated at St Florian heaped the Empire with further lands, including the great prize of Belgrade and stretching down into what is now south-western Romania (‘Little Wallachia’) – a region which today dozes in total obscurity, but which, if it had remained in Habsburg hands, would have had a drastic impact on how nationalism developed in the Balkans. The Habsburg crusade against the severely weakened Ottomans gave glimpses of future glory: a potential, vastly enlarged empire stretching perhaps to the Black Sea and the Aegean, and perhaps even to Constantinople itself. Sculptors specializing in statues of chained and turbanned captives sharpened their chisels.

This seeming triumph for Charles sadly petered out in multiple humiliations. The new Austrian Netherlands was peculiarly hedged around with disaster, geographically entangled in the independent territory of Liège and glowered at by powerful neighbours. This region had once driven the Spanish Habsburgs mad and virtually bankrupted them, and now this cursed inheritance was transferred to the Austrian branch. It was also galling to Charles to know that the British only favoured his rule there because they knew it would be weak and ineffective – their only concern for the area since the time of the Armada. The sheer absurdity of trying to defend what would become roughly Belgium, a defence only possible in alliance either with Britain/Holland or France, meant that the Habsburgs were always trying to swap it for somewhere else (generally Bavaria), an attitude which did little to foster local self-esteem or pro-Habsburg sentiment. These new territories, with decent sea coasts, meant that Charles had to become involved with naval issues – a real first for a previously near landlocked power, and not a happy adaptation. A major initiative, the Imperial and Royal Company of the Indies, based in Ostend, was the principal effort to make the Austrian Netherlands a paying concern. It started out well, began trading with India and China and had two small bases in the Bay of Bengal. The Company even planned to take over the Nicobar Islands, which implies a very odd parallel universe in which the Bay of Bengal becomes synonymous with raw, freebooting Habsburg colonial power and Vienna fills up with nabobs and curries. This was not to be, however, as Britain simply insisted the whole thing be shut down, permanently putting an end to the sound of Flemish in the Asian Torrid Zone.

Ownership of Naples and the rest of southern Italy turned out to be just as bad. In a further trade Charles had cashed in Sardinia, an island with a small population that produced only a sort of fish sauce, for what looked to be the much more worthwhile Sicily. This whole southern Italian expansion could all have been a great boon – perversely Naples was now the largest Habsburg city. The ongoing influence of southern Italy on the cultural life of Central Europe continued to be all-consuming, musically and visually, but actual ownership was a nightmare. It was a truculent place and impossible to defend; most of the revenue raised from the area went on the costs of the troops stationed there, which must have made everything feel rather bitterly futile. In just one humiliation tucked away in a heap of them, Charles could not even reinforce these troops without asking for a lift from the Royal Navy. He built a small Habsburg navy but unfortunately the only role of small navies is to be sunk by bigger ones; it was never used and eventually rotted at anchor. As it was, during the War of the Polish Succession, Charles was obliged to hand over southern Italy, getting the tiny and very landlocked Duchy of Parma instead, probably to his relief. This entire war was a disaster for Charles, who was savaged on all sides with his British and Dutch allies remaining neutral. To try to regain some credit and somewhat in the spirit of the Habsburgs ‘putting together the old band’, he launched yet another war against the Ottoman Empire. This seemed an easy option as the Turks were already fighting the Russians. It became another total shambles, with the Battle of Banja Luka and, even more so, the Battle of Grocka devastating the Habsburg armies. The only good news was that at least Prince Eugene had died the year before this fiasco unfolded and so was spared knowing that his life’s work had been made such a monkey of. Belgrade, Little Wallachia and other hard-won prizes gained by the previous generation were handed back to the Ottomans and a fresh wave of Serbian refugees and embittered German colonial farming families headed north and helped repopulate southern Hungary instead.