Heart of Europe: A History of the Roman Empire (29 page)

After 1536 Süleyman progressively abandoned western trappings in favour of a more Islamic Ottoman style distinct from both the Christian imperial tradition and that of Safavid Persia. The Ottoman conquests of Egypt and Arabia had redressed the religious balance, while the majority of Anatolian and Balkan elites had converted to Islam. Sultans had already presented themselves as new caliphs since 1453 in a bid for leadership of the entire Muslim world. Byzantine distinctions between civilization and barbarism were sublimated within the Islamic division of the world into antagonistic ‘Houses’ of Islam and War, making permanent peace with Christians politically impossible.

The fault line ran through Hungary, where Habsburg efforts at reconquest stalled by 1541, compounded by the failures of Charles V’s expensive expeditions to Tunis and Algiers.
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The Habsburgs were obliged to accept a tripartite division between imperial (Habsburg) Hungary in the west (including Croatia), Ottoman Hungary in the centre and south-east, and Transylvania in the north-east. Possession of Transylvania and the right to use the Hungarian royal title remained contested until 1699, further hindering permanent peace. Ferdinand I
bought a truce by paying 30,000 florins in tribute to the Ottomans in 1541. Further defeats forced him to pay this annually after 1547. The sultan refused to recognize the Habsburgs as emperors, claiming they were merely his tributaries. The truce forbade major military operations, but allowed raiding by militia across the frontier. The constant friction provided a ready excuse for war, but Habsburg efforts to end tribute to the Ottomans through renewed campaigns from 1565 to 1567 and 1593 to 1606 failed.
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Although not full crusades, Habsburg operations were backed by the papacy and drew strong support from across Europe, attracting foreign volunteers such as John Smith, the future founder of Virginia.
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Days of prayer and penance were decreed from the 1530s to tackle the perceived causes of the Turkish menace in the sin of the Christian population. So-called Turkish Bells were rung throughout the Empire daily at midday during campaigns to remind people to pray for the success of imperial armies. The ideological impossibility of peace encouraged acceptance of the Empire’s structural reforms, requiring all imperial Estates to contribute to collective defence (see
pp. 398–406
and
445–62
).

Relations between east and west nonetheless fell short of a ‘clash of civilizations’. Not only did Hungarians and the Empire’s subjects continue to trade with the Ottomans, but the emperor regarded Shiite Persia as a potential ally. The Persian shah first proposed an alliance to Charles V in 1523. Intermittent contacts intensified around 1600 as a large Persian embassy arrived in Prague. Talks ultimately collapsed in 1610 due to differing expectations. Shah Abbas mistook vague Habsburg expressions of friendship for firm commitment and attacked Ottoman Kurdistan in 1603. He regarded the Habsburgs’ separate peace with the Ottomans at Zsitva Torok in 1606 as a betrayal, leaving long-standing resentment and wrecking all attempts to renew contact between the Habsburgs and the Persians.
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Zsitva Torok extended the pre-war truce between Habsburgs and Ottomans, but required that both parties ‘should address each other as emperor, not just as King’.
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It was renewed five times by 1642, improving relations by granting Habsburg subjects favourable trading status within the Ottoman empire. The annual tribute paid to the Ottomans ended in 1606, but each renewal of the truce cost the Habsburgs 200,000 florins. Good relations proved vital for the Habsburgs’
survival, since the sultan, preoccupied with his own problems, rejected opportunities to exploit the Thirty Years War, having toyed with the idea of backing the Bohemian rebels. The truce was renewed again for 20 years in July 1649 when the Habsburgs’ ‘free gift’ was reduced to 40,000 florins. Friction persisted, because Habsburg efforts to crush malcontents in their part of Hungary opened the door to Ottoman intervention, which escalated into full war by 1662. The need to coordinate aid from the Empire consolidated the constitutional changes enacted through the Westphalian settlement and led to the Reichstag remaining permanently in session after 1663.
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The Habsburgs bought another 20 years’ truce by paying 200,000 florins in 1664, but this time the sultan also sent gifts, suggesting a more equal relationship.

The pattern appeared to repeat itself in 1683 when the Ottoman leadership attacked Vienna again in the hope of reasserting authority after prolonged internal unrest in their empire. Instead, the city resisted until it was relieved by Polish and imperial troops in a truly international victory, hailed in the west as another Lepanto. The huge amount of booty included tents, carpets and at least 500 Turkish prisoners who were forcibly settled in Germany. Orientalism swept central Europe well before the better-known wave following Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798.
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It was hoped that even Jerusalem might be recovered, but the initial euphoria instead soon gave way to a long, successful but grinding war of reconquest in Hungary between 1684 and 1699.

Internally, this continued the trend towards mixed monarchy in the Empire. Internationally, it represented a significant shift in the Habsburgs relative to the Ottomans, who finally accepted a permanent peace at Karlowitz in 1699. The Habsburgs secured all Hungary and Transylvania, swiftly eradicating all trace of 150 years of Muslim presence. The sultan also promised better treatment of Catholics in his territories. However, the religious element was waning. The emperor continued to receive German and Italian aid in further Turkish wars into the 1730s, but these conflicts were increasingly regarded as purely Austrian concerns. The Turkish Bells rang for the last time during the 1736–9 war, and suggestions of repeating this in the next conflict (1787–91) were rejected as unenlightened.
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Meanwhile, further gains from the Turks in 1716–18 cemented the Habsburgs as a great power independent of the imperial title, transforming their relationship to the Empire and other European powers.

The Tsar

The prolonged warfare against the Ottomans between 1683 and 1718 drew in Russia, hastening that country’s integration within the nascent European states system. Although initially regarded as a useful ally against the Ottomans, it soon became clear that the tsar was replacing the sultan as chief challenger to the Habsburgs’ claim to be Europe’s pre-eminent monarchs.

Russia originated in the Varangians (Vikings) who conquered Kiev and were called Rus by the Slavs. The ruling Rurik family were wooed by Byzantine and Latin missionaries and they ultimately adopted eastern Christianity, which allowed them to use a Slavonic liturgy. The conversion of Prince Vladimir in 988 established the basis of a highly personalized sacral monarchy. Rurik princes contributed one third of the 180 Russian saints from the tenth to thirteenth centuries.
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Internal disputes produced rival Rurik principalities after 1054, all of which were conquered by the Mongols, who overcame the fearsome Russian winter by using the frozen rivers as roads for their cavalry. The Mongols established themselves by 1240 as the Golden Horde on the Lower Volga, extorting tribute from the Rurik princes. The principality of Moscovy emerged from the wreckage after 1325, facilitated subsequent to 1438 by the fragmentation of the Golden Horde. Tribute was stopped in 1480. Five years later, Moscovy took Novgorod, eliminating a major rival and signalling a desire to extend towards the Baltic.

As with the Ottomans, rapid expansion encouraged ambitions to formalize prestige through more overt imperial imagery. Ivan III ‘the Great’ married Zoe Palaiologina, niece of the last Byzantine emperor, in 1472 and proclaimed himself ruler of all the Russias. He took the title
tsar
, again a word derived from
Caesar
, which had been used before but was now employed more consciously to mean emperor in contrast to the old Kievan title
knyaz
, meaning prince or king.
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The link to ancient Rome was reinforced by the Russian Orthodox church’s rejection of the brief reunification of the Greek and Latin churches imposed by the Byzantine emperor in 1439. Philotheus, abbot of Pskov, developed his own version of imperial translation, arguing that the first Rome fell through heresy, the second (Constantinople) was conquered by the infidel, but the third (Moscow) would endure until Judgement Day. Like their western equivalents, such ideas derived their importance not as
practical programmes, but through fostering an intellectual climate conducive to imperialism. Russian rulers aimed to ‘liberate’ Constantinople and claimed to protect Christian holy places – both as late as 1853 contributory factors in the outbreak of the Crimean War.
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Byzantine traditions were readily adaptable to Russian circumstances, as they did not challenge the idea of a sacred ruler. The tsar already exercised greater control over his metropolitan than the Byzantine emperor over his patriarch – one metropolitan was strangled in 1568 for daring to criticize the tsar. The Russian church secured full autonomy in 1685 when the tsar declared the metropolitan independent from the Greek patriarch, who still lived under Ottoman rule in Constantinople. The move deliberately undercut the sultan’s authority over his Christian subjects whilst bolstering his Russian rival’s pretensions as champion of the true church.

The imperial double eagle first appeared as a tsarist symbol in 1480, though it only became the primary one under Peter I ‘the Great’, displaying icons and other religious symbols on military flags around 1700.
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Ivan IV ‘the Terrible’ staged a coronation 14 years into his rule, in 1561, that deliberately asserted Russia as a continuation of ancient Rome. The ceremony used a Slavonic translation of the Byzantine coronation service, while the regalia were presented as those of the former Byzantine emperor. Ivan regarded himself as a direct descendant of Emperor Augustus, and even the tsar’s notorious terror was influenced by ancient examples.
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Assumption of the Byzantine legacy reinforced western perceptions of Russia as an alien civilization, but it also raised the tsar’s profile as a potential ally. The first imperial embassy to Russia was despatched in 1488 by Frederick III. This revealed how the two-emperor problem had also translated to Moscow. Frederick approached negotiations from the perspective of his pre-eminence, while Tsar Ivan III (rightly) stressed that neither he nor his ancestors had ever been imperial vassals. Ivan and his successors wanted international recognition that their title of tsar meant emperor, while westerners continued to ignore it and to refer to Russian rulers as merely ‘dukes’. Civil wars eventually saw the Ruriks replaced by the Romanovs in 1613, but these events simply reinforced westerners’ prejudices of Russia as barbaric and discouraged acceptance that its new rulers directly continued Romano-Byzantine imperialism. Russians for their part remained baffled by the Empire, despite
increasing efforts to understand it – for example, the tsar’s government obtained copies of the Peace of Westphalia just three months after its conclusion in 1648. The Empire’s constitution contained many elements for which there was no Russian equivalent, and the tsar and his advisors found it hard to understand that feudal relations did not mean the princes’ servitude under the emperor.
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The desire to learn more grew as Russia’s frontiers advanced westwards after 1653, bringing greater influence in Poland and direct contact with the eastern edge of the Ottoman empire by 1667. German traders and immigrants were an important source of information, but the main shift came with Peter the Great, who personally travelled across the Empire on his famous European tour in 1697–8. Russia’s involvement in the Great Northern War (1700–1721) not only secured access to the Baltic but brought direct contact with imperial politics as Peter’s army pursued the Swedes across northern Germany. On 19 April 1716, Peter the Great’s niece Ekaterina Ivanovna married Duke Carl Leopold of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, initiating two centuries of close dynastic relations between the Romanovs and German princely families.
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Russian imperial imagery became increasingly western, though without entirely jettisoning Byzantine elements. Peter issued a two-rouble coin depicting himself as an ancient Roman emperor to celebrate his victory over Swedish forces at Poltava in 1709. His officials then discovered a letter from Maximilian I sent in 1514 seeking an alliance. Whether by accident or design, the Habsburg chancellery had addressed Vasily III as
Kayser
, implicitly recognizing the Russians’ insistence on translating tsar as emperor. Peter had the letter published in 1718 as part of the careful preparations culminating in his self-proclamation as
imperator
in October 1721.
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The coincidence of this act with the successful outcome of the Great Northern War underscored Russia as an imperial power.

The Habsburgs persisted in refusing to recognize the Russian emperor as their equal, rebuffing a proposal that the two emperors alternate as Europe’s foremost monarch. Backed diplomatically by France, Emperor Charles VI recycled old arguments that Europe could not have two emperors.
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Deteriorating relations with western European powers forced Charles to compromise, recognizing the tsar’s imperial title as part of a wider alliance in 1726, though Charles still claimed formal pre-eminence. Russia remained content until 1762, because it saw Austria as a useful ally against the still-powerful Ottomans. The alliance
drew it deeper into imperial politics. Russian troops thrice entered the Empire to assist Austria in wars between 1733 and 1762. The Romanovs were now closely related to the princely families of Mecklenburg, Holstein, Württemberg, Hessen-Darmstadt and Anhalt-Zerbst, with the last providing the princess who ruled Russia as Catherine II ‘the Great’ between 1762 and 1796. The purpose of involvement shifted from payback for Austrian assistance in the Balkans to a growing concern for the Empire’s internal political balance as a factor in Russia’s own wider strategic interests. Russia brokered the Peace of Teschen ending the Austro-Prussian War of the Bavarian Succession (1778–9), and thereafter claimed this made it a guarantor of the Peace of Westphalia. Although he was never fully recognized, a permanent envoy at the Reichstag was maintained by Russia after 1782 to safeguard its interests.
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