INTRODUCTION
Danubia is a history of the huge swathes of Europe which accumulated
in the hands of the Habsburg family. The story runs from the
end of the Middle Ages to the end of the First World War, when
the Habsburgs' empire fell to pieces and they fl ed.
Through cunning, dimness, luck and brilliance the Habsburgs
had an extraordinarily long run. All empires are in some measure
accidental, but theirs was particularly so, as sexual failure, madness
or death in battle tipped a great pile of kingdoms, dukedoms and
assorted marches and counties into their laps. They found themselves
ruling territories from the North Sea to the Adriatic, from
the Carpathians to Peru. They had many bases scattered across
Europe, but their heartland was always the Danube, the vast river
that runs through modern Upper and Lower Austria, their principal
capital at Vienna, then Bratislava, where they were crowned kings
of Hungary, and on to Budapest, which became one of their other
great capitals.
For more than four centuries there was hardly a twist in
Europe's history to which they did not contribute. For millions of
modern Europeans the language they speak, the religion they practise,
the appearance of their city and the boundaries of their
country are disturbingly reliant on the squabbles, vagaries and
afterthoughts of Habsburgs whose names are now barely remembered.
They defended Central Europe against wave upon wave of
Ottoman attacks. They intervened decisively against Protestantism.
They came to stand – against their will – as champions of tolerance
in a nineteenth-century Europe driven mad by ethnic
nationalism. They developed marital or military relations with
pretty much every part of Europe they did not already own. From
most European states' perspective, the family bewilderingly
swapped costumes so many times that they could appear as everything
from rock-like ally to something approaching the Antichrist.
Indeed, the Habsburgs' infl uence has been so multifarious and
complex as to be almost beyond moral judgement, running
through the entire gamut of human behaviours available.
In the fi rst half of the sixteenth century the family seemed to
come close – as the inheritances heaped up so crazily that designers
of coats of arms could hardly keep up – to ruling the whole
of Europe, suggesting a ‘Chinese' future in which the continent
would become a single unifi ed state. As it was, the Emperor
Charles V's supremacy collapsed, under assault from innumerable
factors, his lands' accidental origins swamping him in contradictory
needs and demands. In 1555, Charles was obliged much
against his will to break up his enormous inheritance, with one
half going to his son, Philip, based in his new capital of Madrid,
and the other going to his brother, Ferdinand, based in Vienna. At
this break-point I follow the story of Ferdinand's descendants,
although the Madrid relatives continue to intrude now and then
until their hideous implosion in 1700.
While writing my last book, Germania, I would sometimes fi nd
myself in a sort of trance of anxiety, knowing that it was based on
a sleight of hand. With a few self-indulgent exceptions I kept its
geographical focus inside the boundaries of the current Federal
Republic of Germany. This was necessary for a coherent narrative,
but historically ridiculous. Indeed, the structure humiliatingly
mocked my main point: that ‘Germany' was a very recent creation
and only a hacked-out part of the chaos of small and medium
feudal states which had covered much of Europe. These hundreds
of squabbling jurisdictions existed under the protective framework
of the Holy Roman Emperors, who ruled, with admittedly only
sputtering success, for a millennium. For the last three hundred and
fi fty years of the Empire's existence, the Emperor was almost
always the senior member of the Habsburg family. He had this role
because he personally ruled immense tracts of land, indeed at dif-
ferent times owning parts or all of nineteen modern European
countries.* This meant that he was unique in having a large enough
personal fi nancial and military base to be plausible as Emperor. But
it also meant that he was often distracted: responsible for great
blocks of territory inside the Holy Roman Empire (such as modern
Austria and the Czech Republic) but also for unrelated places such
as Croatia, say, and Mexico. This distraction, it can be argued, was
the key motor for Europe's political history.
The Habsburg story, of Europe's most persistent and powerful
dynastic family ruling the world of Germania from bases which
were in fact well outside the modern state of Germany, was just too
complex to be alluded to except in passing in the earlier book. The
Habsburgs' infl uence across Europe was overwhelming, but often
the ‘great events' of the continent's history were generated as much
by their uselessness or apparent prostration as by any actual family
initiative. Indeed it is quite striking how baffl ed or inadequate
many of the Emperors were, and yet an almost uncountable heap
of would-be carnivorous rivals ended up in the dustbin while the
Habsburgs just kept plodding along. Through unwarranted luck,
short bursts of vigour and events often way outside their control
they held on until their defeat by Napoleon. Moving fast, they
then cunningly switched the title of Emperor so it referred to what
could now be called ‘the Habsburg Empire', meaning just the family's
personal holdings, itself still the second largest European state
after Russia. They kept going for a further, rather battered century,
until fi nal catastrophe as one of the defeated Central Powers in the
First World War. The aftershocks from the in many ways accidental
end of this accidental empire continue to the present. I allude to
some of these in the text, but eff ectively the narrative ends in 1918
as the diff erent parts of the Empire go their own ways.
This is a less sunny book than Germania. Visiting cities in the
Rhineland, say, it is clear that however damaged they were in the
twentieth century (both physically and morally) they remain great
historical urban spaces fi lled with Germans. Their inhabitants can
fully acknowledge complicity in the horrors of 1933–45 while
also drawing a line connecting themselves and much older history.
The great majority of Germans also escaped the impact of Soviet
occupation, making their period of trauma very much shorter. The
memory of the prosperity and solidity of the summer of 1914 was
active for many West Germans in the late 1940s, who could go
about their normal lives once more. For the inhabitants of much of
the former Habsburg Empire there was no such reprieve, forced at
irregular intervals during the century to endure massacres, migrations,
invasions, terror and Babylonian exercises in state building
and rebuilding.
Emerging from these burned-over zones in the 1990s, the
descendants of the survivors had only the weakest links with the
Empire whose architectural remnants still surrounded them. The narrowly
thwarted plan in 2011 to demolish the last remnants of the
ancient Golden Rose Synagogue in Lviv to make way for a hotel
is only the most extreme instance of a numbness about the past
that affl icts much of the former Empire. Scattered from the western
Czech Republic to beyond the Carpathians there are towns where
eff ectively the entire populations are post-1945 settlers. What
would it take for Romanians to view abandoned German villages
as part of their patrimony, or for Ukrainians to cherish former
Polish churches? What a visitor can view as picturesque, a local
can view with loathing or (a distinct improvement) indiff erence.
Inevitably these tensions and discontinuities have an impact on
the book's text.
The degree to which one can enjoy places that have suff ered
such fates is obviously a problem. But in four years of travelling
around the territories of the old Empire I have never stopped feeling
that I was on a mission to convey to readers why so many of
these towns and cities – still in many cases hidden from Englishspeakers,
even with the Cold War long gone – stand at the heart
of Europe and the continent's experience, both for good and ill,
and how fascinating they remain. By understanding something of
their history before 1918 we can actively reclaim what the later
totalitarian regimes wished to erase for ever: the plural, anarchic,
polyglot Europe once supervised in a dizzying blend of ineptitude,
viciousness and occasional benignity by the Habsburg family.
In October 2008 there was a football match in the UEFA Champions
League between Chelsea FC and CFR Cluj. Chelsea fans
fl ying into Transylvania for the game thought it would be hilarious
to dress up in capes and plastic fangs and duly got off the plane
lurching around, fl apping their arms and putting on funny accents
(‘Ach, the cheeeldren of the night – I hear their call!' and so on).
In an interview on a British radio station the next day, a memorably
outraged Cluj disc jockey spluttered in perfect English (albeit
– fair play – with a slightly funny accent) about how this was a
national disgrace, an insult to his people, how Dracula had been
the invention ‘merely of some Irish novelist' and how vampirism
was quite unknown in Transylvania.
All this was true enough, but the interview has hung in my
mind ever since because of my own severe anxiety that I am myself
merely a Chelsea fan with plastic fangs stumbling off the plane.
The former Habsburg lands are places where a principal battlefi eld
has been the interpretation of history. Indeed the very idea of the
study of history has been fuelled by animosities and fantasies
about ethnic, religious and class privileges. For me to enter this
highly charged arena is, I am fully aware, foolish. It is very easy
to be contemptuous of someone else's nationalism and unaware
of one's own. The extraordinarily toxic legacy of the Empire's
obsession with linguistics, archaeology, ethnography, sigillography,
numismatics, cartography and so on makes me feel, in my darker
moods, that the spread of these subjects and the use to which they
were put was nothing but a disaster for Central Europe and that
academics more than anyone else are (with help from priests) some
of the greatest villains. Indeed, in comparison with academics, the
politicians and military men were mere puppets, with even Hitler
simply a disgusting by-product of various poisonous Viennese
nationalist and scientifi c teachings.
The stakes have been so high because each linguistic group has
obsessively picked over its past not merely out of a wish to entertain
itself with fancy-that facts about ancestors, but to use it as the
key weapon in establishing its ascendancy over other groups.
While the Hungarians poured resources into charting their grand
ancestry to somewhere out on the Asian steppe and in 1896 celebrated
the thousandth anniversary of their arrival in Europe,
Romanian academics in parallel scoured excavations for evidence
that they were themselves the true owners of the same region, the
descendants of soldiers and settlers from the Roman army (even
inventing their country's name to make this point). What should
have been harmless, indeed loopy, antiquarianism became instead
the motive force behind terrible events, the least harmful being the
abuse shouted by Romanians during anti-Hungarian rallies in the
last years of the Empire, ‘Go back to Asia!' Of course, the end logic
of this rhetoric was to highlight those groups – Jews, Gypsies –
who had no ‘home', and the break-up of the Habsburg Empire
into bitter nationalist mini-states in 1918 immediately created a
highly threatening situation for anyone caught in the overlaps.
Parts of this book are devoted to picking over the truly horrible
consequences of these nationalisms, but this does not mean I have
some nostalgic wish to return to the time of the Empire. That
would be meaningless. Intellectually it seems much better to
acknowledge the substantial foul streak within modernity, without
dreaming of a return to some aristocratic world lacking newspapers
or mass literacy. After all, a vast number of these terrible ideas
fl owered within the Habsburg Empire, which can in that sense be
blamed, but then so did the intellectual means to fi ght them (from
Zionism, to anarchism, to the understanding of the unconscious).
A related purpose in writing this book was also to dramatize
the sheer awfulness of living in Central Europe for some muchearlier
periods, when extreme, savage violence to the point of
near-total depopulation did damage of a kind not unrelated to that
of the twentieth century. Such ferocity has been generally alien to
the ‘home' experiences of western Europeans, although they have
of course themselves blithely carried out actions of comparable
ferocity on other continents. To see Europe itself as an arena for
slavery, punishment raids, forcible resettlement, piracy and religiously
sanctioned public mutilation and execution is, to say the
least, interesting. I hope I have written about it with suffi cient
understanding not to be off ensive, but also to make it clear that
such fates are central to Europe's story and not rooted in some mere
weird ‘eastern' barbarism.
In the summer of 1463 the King of Bosnia, Stephen Tomaševic´,
was besieged by the army of the Ottoman ruler Mehmet II in the
fortress of Kljuc?. Eventually the King surrendered under agreement
of safe conduct. But once in Mehmet's hands Stephen and his
entourage were killed and the surviving Bosnian nobility made
into galley-slaves. The Ottoman view was that the entire Bosnian
ruling class had lost its function and should be liquidated – Bosnia's
new role as a small eyalet (province) in the Ottoman Empire
was permanent and fi nal. The safe conduct had been off ered to a
king, but now he had become a mere subject and could be disposed
of at will. Indeed Bosnia, a respectable medieval kingdom,
lost its independence for over fi ve centuries. Poland was another
famous example. When, in a series of negotiations of breathtaking
coldness at the end of the eighteenth century, the Habsburgs,
Prussians and Russians decided to split Poland between them, the
intention was that this would be for ever, with the very name of
Poland disappearing beneath the administrative inventions of ‘West
Prussia', ‘Western Russia' and ‘Galicia and Lodomeria'. Poland's
new owners cooperated in the killing, rendition or imprisonment
of anyone who threatened the new arrangement.
An intermittent theme of Central European history is this very
high level of violent uncertainty, an uncertainty that could lead to
an entire elite being wiped out. This has rarely been the western
European or English-speakers' story. France, for example, has
avoided successful invasion for most of its existence and has almost
always been ruled by French people. The political decisions of
most English-speaking countries have always been taken from
positions of remarkable security. The Habsburg lands, however,
were always vulnerable on almost every frontier, with dozens of
easy and well-posted invasion routes. Allies became enemies and
a long-somnolent border zone could go critical overnight. The
Habsburgs' principal purpose was therefore military: from its origins
to its collapse their empire was a machine to resist its tough
neighbours and to control its often truculent inhabitants. When not
fi ghting, it was preparing to fi ght. The idea, propagated particularly
in the period just before 1914, that the Empire was somehow
backward and ineff ectual in a cake-and-waltzes way was untrue.
The dynasty was never anything other than narrow-mindedly ruthless
and harsh in its wish to hold itself together against all-comers.
The seemingly genial, bewhiskered old Franz Joseph's obsession
was with the Empire as a vast military organism: his life was a
series of parades, war-games, medal ceremonies and arguments
about the huge funds needed for his army. All of this would have
been familiar to his predecessors two hundred or even four hundred
years earlier. A further bout of absolute insecurity was always
round the corner and the Habsburgs were endlessly monitoring
their neighbours' military preparedness and mood-swings. There
were plenty of examples of related states whose rulers had blundered
and then been expunged. The Habsburgs indeed themselves
frequently fi nessed the setbacks of others to their territorial advantage
before themselves taking decisions which resulted in their
own disappearance and partition in 1918.
It is important to remember just how vague much rule over
Europe was until mass literacy, telegraphs and railways started to
tie together regions and countries. The Habsburgs loved to look at
maps, genealogies and heraldic shields, making sweeping hand
gestures over these symbolic shorthands for their ownership, but
there is little reason to believe such gestures had much substance.
Apart from a few mountain and forest communities, nobody was
left completely alone, but the sense of obligation to Vienna was
often remote and convoluted, with innumerable local, noble and
religious privileges making a mockery of modern dreams of uni-
tary effi ciency. Many histories tend to present a narrative angled
from the perspective of the ruler. Most dramatically this is ex -
pressed in the term ‘rebellion', a word which presupposes failure
(by defi nition: if it succeeds then it is a change of dynasty). It is too
easy to see a narrative where any rebellion is an annoyance, a drain
on resources, a desperate piece of backwardness, and so on. But
this is to take a man wearing a crown in Vienna too seriously and
I hope to make it clear just how many perfectly reasonable arguments
against Habsburg rule there were. Indeed, at one point or
another (and repeatedly in Hungary) virtually everybody took a
turn at being ‘disloyal' and this should be a valuable clue. Joseph
II's war with the Turks went so badly wrong in 1788 because the
Hungarian nobles would not supply him with food, because they
hated him and thought he was a tiresome creep. As his vast army
fell apart and he raged impotently, it is impossible from a worldhistorical
point of view not to feel a bit sorry for him, but Europe
is fi lled with groups of all kinds who are annoyingly insubordinate,
and they should be celebrated a bit more.
One much-loved fi gure in so many anecdotes and novels is the
Hungarian minor nobleman who lives only to drink and hunt, and
refuses to open any letters or telegrams he receives, on the grounds
that they are mere insolent intrusions into the life of a gentleman.
The Habsburgs were always dealing with variants on such characters:
defenders of feudal rights, stubborn communes, bizarre
religious groups and obstreperous guildsmen. Even great aristocrats
might plump for the high-risk pleasures of treason with the Turks.
Generations of Viennese offi cials would bang their heads on their
cherry-wood desktops with fury: why won't these people just do as
they're told? But theirs was just a sickness generated by too many
maps, charts and budget projections. A possible novelty of this
book is that it attempts to avoid seeing Vienna as the clearinghouse
for all right-minded political, religious, social or strategic
thinking. A Styrian farmer, Transylvanian serf or Adriatic pirate
each saw Vienna in a diff erent way, and that view was not necessarily
wrong.
*
Danubia is designed to be read quite separately from Germania.
Naturally it has to cover some of the same ground, and I deal with
the overlap by using diff erent angles and examples, but there are a
number of basic defi nitions about how Europe functioned via the
Holy Roman Empire which will need to be repeated.
There are three assurances I need to give. This is not a dynastic
family history. You will not be obliged to read through endless
marriage treaties, dusty gossip about what an archduke said to
another archduke or how so-and-so never got on with her sisterin-
law. This is a book about some interesting things that specifi c
rulers did, and sometimes these undoubtedly involve marriage
treaties (too often involving people called either Maria or Charles),
but I try to avoid the sort of hearsay and harpsichordy, Quality
Street royal chit-chat which has sometimes blighted consideration of
the Habsburgs. I have dumped all the hand-kissing, beauty spots,
heel-clicking and discreet glances over fl uttered fans (‘Oh, you are
too forward, Count'), and I hope this will win me some gratitude.
This is also not a book which attempts to defi ne specifi c ethnic
groups by some clutch of imagined characteristics. You will not
fi nd sentences opening with assertions such as ‘Like that fi ery yet
noble spice they tend so lovingly, known the world over as
"paprika", the Hungarian people are . . .' No specifi c nationality
will give you the very clothes off their backs; none has natural
melancholy; none is instinctively musical; no linguistic groups are
implacable enemies yet also sure friends; and absolutely nobody
gives herself with a self-immolating urgency rooted in her people's
fatalism. This sort of rubbish has been going on for centuries –
Franz Ferdinand even had a helpful list of national attributes over
his desk to remind him – and it has to stop. An immediate
improvement can be made to Europe's existence if we restrict
qualities such as being laughter-fi lled, moody, built for love, quick
to fi nd fault and so on to individuals rather than entire populations,
avoiding the associated ludicrous ethnic implication that
whole cities must be packed with the musically gifted or valleys
swift-to-anger. I started to feel vehemently about this while writ -
ing Germania. I listened to so many British and American friends
stating as axiomatic that Germans have no sense of humour, when
I had myself just come from yet another Bierkeller where most of
the occupants were laughing so much they had turned mauve and
their limbs were about to fall off ; which does not, of course, mean
that all Germans do in fact have a sense of humour.
And, finally, this is not an attempt at an exhaustive guide to
Central Europe. I have restricted myself simply to writing about
some of the things I personally fi nd fascinating. There is a reasonably
clear narrative, but inevitably there are huge numbers of
subjects I hardly touch. There is a fair amount on music, for example,
but the text refl ects my love of Haydn and Wolf rather than my
merely remote, ignorant admiration for Beethoven or Bruckner.
This will annoy some readers and I apologize, but there seems no
point in dutifully faking up topics to take up scarce space that
would then threaten more interesting material with excision. Similarly,
some emperors are simply more alluring than others and I
have preferred to spend time on a fascinating handful rather than
colour in all the duds too.
I feel quite dazed by my good fortune in being able to write this
book. I have been obsessed with the cultures of Central Europe for
most of my adult life, but to have a legitimate excuse to wander
everywhere from Bohemia to Ukraine and read, think, talk and
write about so many subjects for so long has been an absurd
privilege. I very much hope that I can convey something of what I
felt when at regular intervals I found myself in the magnifi cently
restored buff et of Budapest's Eastern Station, chewing on a
McChickwich and wondering what adventure would befall me
next.