Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (15 page)

The sonatas themselves conjure up a magical, deeply refined world. They are dedicated to key Italian musicians at the court: violinists, castrati and the great Antonio Cesti, whose work obsessed the Emperor Leopold I in the following decade. But as usual they show the stark limits to what music can tell us – we have literally no knowledge at all about the composer, his intentions in the sonatas and what his relationships were with any of the dedicatees.

His patron, Archduke Ferdinand Karl, was by any measure a deeply unpleasant absolutist, who even in his great portrait by Frans Luycz – a mass of delirious scarlet cloth and brocade and perhaps the most beautifully designed boots in European history – sneers at posterity. It was Ferdinand Karl’s sudden early death, followed by his younger brother’s equally early death three years later, which ended the dynasty. The latter, Sigismund Franz, who had been Bishop of Trent, with all speed chucked in the ecclesiastical jobs, set himself up in Innsbruck and got married so as to sire a son. But it was too late: he died only twelve days after the marriage ceremony. Innsbruck itself now became a mere provincial outpost of Vienna – hence the unhappy decision to try to relocate its musical archives – now a cultural backwater after a long golden period that stretched at least from Maximilian I’s great funerary statue array to Ferdinand Karl’s composers.

The Innsbruck court was the heart of the Habsburg territories entangled in the Alps south of Bavaria, at that time ruling both Tyrol and the zany smorgasbord of Further Austria. Much of the Habsburg inheritance had a superficial coherence (proper kingdoms, directly ruled duchies next to each other), which makes it quite different from the rest of the Holy Roman Empire. But as someone who has spent too much time wandering around such political absurdities as Schaumburg-Lippe or Hohenlohe-Weikersheim it is with a little cry of happy recognition that I recognize the friendly oddness of Further Austria. On a map the Tyrol itself seems compact enough and has a sort of plausibility, but in practice it was a demented mass of particularisms, parcels of Alpine valleys seasonally cut off from one another, self-reliant and with very specific ideas about outsiders. It is symptomatic of the Tyrol that the celebrated Copper Age human ‘Ötzi’ should have had his mummified corpse dug out of the ice there – both because of Ötzi’s air of rather priggish, rugged self-reliance (his furs, his bag of healing herbs) and because he had an arrow stuck in his back.

If the map of Tyrol could be coloured in by some measure of ‘usefulness’ then it would appear, instead of as a compact block, as a series of small strands and spills hedged in by ferocious mountains, enjoyable as a whole only to late-nineteenth-century railway builders of the kind who relished expensive challenges. This patchiness continued in the rest of Further Austria, to scattered, tiny territories between Augsburg and Strasbourg and intermittently around the Danube and on to Lake Constance without any rhyme or reason. These were picked up by Habsburg ancestors after the original south German ‘Big Bang’ that fragmented Swabia after the extinction of the Hohenstaufen dynasty in 1268. Even the most detailed historical maps lose patience in trying to convey the mass of ‘forest towns’, strong-points, religious foundations and pointless villages that made up Further Austria. The small populations of the region meant that at various levels it just did not matter very much. As this was the Habsburgs’ original home (even if chunks had been bitten off by the Swiss) its awkwardness was not allowed to stand in the way of its defence. In many ways it was the existence of such arbitrary chunks as the Sundgau (a very ancient family possession – part of Alsace) that made the Habsburgs into a western European power, building in a core Habsburg–French animosity. But perhaps the key point of this book is to shelter the reader from topics such as ‘the strategic value of the Sundgau’, although, naturally, they do have their own fascination.

Just to polish off Further Austria for ever, various blocks would be given to the Spanish Habsburgs as bribes for not pursuing their own claim to Vienna’s territories and to allow the Spanish to communicate with the Low Countries. As a result the Sundgau was almost eradicated by criss-crossing Imperial, Swedish and French troops during the Thirty Years War and the unpopulated ruins sold to the French in 1648, with the money paying for Archduke Ferdinand Karl’s penchant for Italian music. Most of the Sundgau and other scraps were later handed over to the Duke of Baden and King of Württemberg by Napoleon, and at the Congress of Vienna the Austrians decided they needed these rulers’ good will and would not ask for Further Austria to be handed back. The one exception was the small chunk of land at the end of Lake Constance – the Vorarlberg – with its main town of Bregenz, which stayed on as a western extension of the Tyrol. This region made no further contribution to world history, except for an ungrateful and thwarted bid at the end of the First World War to detach itself from Austria and become part of Switzerland. I promise to never ever raise the issue of the outlying territories of Further Austria again.

The oddness of these lands and the challenges they posed to their rulers cannot detract from the importance of Innsbruck itself, which is both hedged round by daunting geographical obstacles, and the key to the great trading route from Bavaria to Italy. Indeed, as the city controlling access to the Brenner Pass, it was one of those chokepoints at which European culture was most fluid and creative – the German-speaking Ferdinand Karl had followed his father’s example by marrying a member of the Medici family and the German–Italian blend of Innsbruck is exactly what would be expected. In my own small way I felt this, having travelled there after a few days of sitting in the sunny world of Gorizia and the Trentino eating risotto and delicious tomato salads. To mark the crossing of such an exciting cultural watershed I ordered a ‘Tyrolean farmer’s omelette’ which proved to be of an enormity and fattiness that would strike dead – mottled, puce and bolt-upright in his tractor cabin – any farmer stupid enough to make it his lunchtime choice.

Discussion of the Tyrol Habsburgs has to go somewhere in a single section and it is here rather than later because Innsbruck’s real claim on everyone’s time is the great Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol, who ruled from 1564 to his death in 1595. The separate Tyrolean line came and went and at various points was absorbed back under direct control in Vienna. Indeed Ferdinand himself married a very beautiful commoner whose sons were not allowed to inherit, and a late second marriage only produced daughters, so his own death ended this one patch of Tyrolean independence. Ferdinand had been given the job after an adventurous youth fighting the Turks and helping his father, the Emperor Ferdinand I (there are too many Ferdinands). At the Emperor’s death, he made Ferdinand ruler of the Tyrol and Further Austria, while his elder brother, Maximilian, ruling from Vienna, became Emperor Maximilian II. Ferdinand set out to do something remarkable at Innsbruck and it is a shame that the city today is so far off the cultural trail rather than just on the skiing trail, as Ferdinand’s home, Schloss Ambras, is such a marvel, one of the few places where it is possible to get an almost unalloyed sense of walking about in a Renaissance patron’s mind.

Because Ferdinand had no successor his collections were much messed about, with his nephew the Emperor Rudolf II taking for his own collection some of the choicest armour and curiosities, these first going to Prague and then on to Vienna under Rudolf’s successors (and with some heading to Stockholm thanks to marauding Swedish troops in the Thirty Years War). Flood, fire and insects have disposed of some of the remainder, with some further bad input from the catastrophic sunken boat full of music. But Ambras has also preserved a lot and the courtyards and halls still feel convincingly Ferdinandine.

The collections include the earliest painting of Dracula and a huge sequence of Habsburg family portraits where the dreadful chin can be followed down the generations. A mass of peculiar objects from various sources recreate an approximation of Ferdinand’s cabinet of curiosities, including two perfect memento mori – an archer skeleton carved from pearwood by Hans Leinberger, commissioned by Ferdinand’s great-great-grandfather Maximilian I, and a little carved skeleton in a frame, his hand resting on his chin in a mock philosophical pose which you can only see properly by looking up close, when you see
your own face
reflected in the mirror behind him. I have always loved this sort of slightly goth-metal object, but on my last trip to Ambras realized I was getting old enough for memento mori to have a bit too much bite and found myself more dismissive and impatient of them than before. Like wedding or graduation photos they sit there patiently over the years, waiting to have their full impact.

An important piece of family history is told in an oddly naive narrative painting of young Ferdinand being sent by his father all the way to Brussels to plead with his uncle Charles V not to resign. The mission was of course a failure, but worth it for this picture, with its little image of a house through the window of which you can see the poorly Charles, and over there is a ruffed Ferdinand on his big journey. The whole thing seems to cry out for simple captioning in big letters. I also cannot prevent myself from mentioning the extraordinary portraits of Petrus Gonzalez and his family, natives of Tenerife who were cursed by a total covering of thick hair and who adorned a number of courts, from Paris to Brussels to Parma, spending much of their time with Ferdinand’s aunt Margaret. The sheer, irreducible strangeness of their genetic condition (now called ‘Ambras syndrome’) is perfectly preserved in these paintings, the family members looking dignified but uncanny in their elegant court clothing.

At the core of Ferdinand’s collection were stories of heroism – bravery in battle, chivalric courtesy and flamboyant generosity. He paid out huge sums, called in favours from across Europe, inherited earlier collections and was given the most extraordinary presents by other rulers to allow him to fulfil this obsession. The collection is now a fraction of what it was, but still remarkable – a sequence of elaborate armours worn by the greatest paragons of the age: the fire-blackened armour of the Marquess of Mantua, who expelled the horrible Charles VIII from Italy at the Battle of Fornovo; the armour of the Count Palatine of the Rhine, commander of the German cavalry at the relief of the Siege of Vienna in 1529; the armour of Ferdinand’s key aide during the 1556 Turkish campaign; the armour of the young and glamorous Archduke Matthias, decades before he became the petulant, elderly Emperor of the Thirty Years War. It would all be better with the lighting a bit lower, indeed ideally viewed with a flaming torch, but even so these elaborate and beautiful armours, like historical exoskeletons, keep their resonance. For Ferdinand these were the armours of a Golden Age around which exemplary stories could be told. There is also a mass of tournament equipment, Ottoman weapons, ‘Turkish’ masks worn in chivalric melees and the colossal armour of Bartlmä Bon, the giant who accompanied him (to sensational effect) at the great 1560 tournament at Vienna. Ferdinand seems to have been racked by a form of obsessive military melancholy, of great deeds and companionship, a soldierly equivalent of the sort of weepiness that hits rugby players in middle age.

This tone lurks everywhere. There is a huge painting of the admirals at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the greatest event in Ferdinand’s lifetime, when the forces of the Holy League destroyed the Ottoman fleet and ended the Turks’ psychological death-grip. There, against a suitable backdrop of sinking and burning Turkish galleys, are the heroes of Christian Europe – Ferdinand’s bastard uncle Don John, Marcantonio Colonna and Sebastiano Veniero, all with an air of trying not to smirk with pride. As with the armour it remains very easy to see Ferdinand talking through the details of the victory for the
n
th time to his latest visitors.

It could be that Ferdinand was in fact a dreadful man, but whenever I am at Schloss Ambras it seems clear that he was one of the Habsburgs who make the family worthwhile, who more than balance all the pious timeservers who congest the family tree – a figure up there with Maximilian I. His willingness to agree to disinherit his successors so that he could marry a commoner also gives him an immediate chic. It is appropriate therefore that he is buried in an upstairs chapel of the Hofkirche, which his father, Emperor Ferdinand I, had built to house Maximilian’s cenotaph. Alexander Colyn, a Flemish sculptor, carved the reliefs of battles and marriages (designed by Dürer generations before) which cover the cenotaph’s sides, but also Ferdinand of Tyrol’s first wife’s tomb, and then Archduke Ferdinand’s own. As a final odd but happy touch a step juts out of the chapel wall and a full suit of Ferdinand’s own armour kneels to a statue of the Virgin Mary on the altar. This stylized piece of Renaissance mystical courtesy feels eerie and immediate, as though Innsbruck was still successfully signalling to us the strange ideas of the past.

Europe under siege

The frontier zone that marked the border between the Habsburg lands and the Ottoman Empire was a shifting, frightening reality from the fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth. A straggling line from the Adriatic to the Carpathians, prone to violent bends westward in the face of Turkish attacks, dominated the lives of countless families who, simply to survive, organized themselves around permanent war-readiness. However distracted the Emperor might be by concerns in the Low Countries or Tunisia or Germany, a permanent war council, based at Graz, tried in his absence and quite often failed to regulate this huge region. After the disaster at Mohács the Turks often ravaged areas of what became known as the Military Frontier and made some further gains but the zone broadly held.

The sheer awfulness of front-line life is preserved in a remarkable wall-painting on the outside of the cathedral in the Styrian city of Graz. The year 1480 had been so grim that it was felt appropriate to pay the painter Thomas of Villach to commemorate the survivors’ awareness of their debt to God for watching over them (although, as with plague monuments, there is mixed in an inevitable air of reproach about just how attentive God was being in practical terms). Although much faded it is still possible to see a heavenly host hovering above Graz, as plague, Turkish raiders and harvest failure hideously combine to carry off a large part of the population. The famine was caused by a plague of locusts, appearing in the picture particularly horrible as they are the size of crows (a not unreasonable distortion by the painter as they would be invisible at their true size). Plague victims are shown being put in their coffins and 1480 was a not untypical example of these devastating, random blows that might in a few weeks kill a quarter of a town’s entire population, a level of natural catastrophe for which we now simply have no comparison.