Danubia

CHAPTER ONE

Tombs, trees and a swamp » Wandering peoples »

The hawk’s fortress » ‘Look behind you!’ »

Cultic sites » The elected Caesars

The southern Hungarian town of Pécs is as good a place as any to start a history of Habsburg Europe. It is hard to believe that it has ever been anything other than a genial provincial town – the unfortunate butt of wider international events, but not a place to initiate anything much. It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, glum and thinly settled, so it has an oasis or frontier atmosphere and a sense that the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won. The scattering of great, much-mutilated buildings dotted about Pécs have all been repeatedly patched up in the wake of various disasters and the main square’s charisma is much enhanced by the gnarled bulk of an endlessly hacked-about mosque converted unconvincingly into a church when the Turkish rulers surrendered the town’s smoking ruins in 1686.

There is one quite extraordinary survival: a necropolis from when Pécs was a wine colony called Sopianae, capital of the Roman province of Pannonia Valeria. The most famous of these tombs was only uncovered in the late eighteenth century and features a set of frescos of scenes from the Bible. These were painted with the colour and sensibility of a mildly gifted nine-year-old child but rescued from inanity by the pictures’ age and mournful patchiness. There are Adam and Eve, Noah and his Ark, St Peter and St Paul all somehow clinging on – bits falling off here and there – through fourteen hundred years of life underground.

When the necropolis was built in the fourth century Sopianae must have been a fairly anxious place because of the nearness of the very restive Imperial frontier. It was not a strongpoint in any sense and if one of the Danube forts had given way then the news would presumably have reached Sopianae via a terrified horseman galloping only a few yards ahead of large numbers of terrifying horsemen. The people living here were Latinized, Christian Germanic Imperial subjects and had been part of the empire for four centuries. The very term ‘wine colony’ obviously sounds cheerful. There were baths, an aqueduct, a basilica – the usual Roman fittings – and it perhaps had a jaunty Asterix-like atmosphere.

One element in the Pécs necropolis is gripping not because it features pictures or any curious decoration, but because of something it lacks. One tomb, reasonably dated to about AD 400, had been prepared for plastering, but never plastered: somebody had gone to considerable expense to build it for a wealthy relative, but then left it incomplete. This is just speculation, but more than plausibly the tomb was left in this state because this was the year when Sopianae ceased to exist. Everyone involved with commissioning or building that tomb either fled or was killed or enslaved by Hun raiders. The next reference to the town is in a document some half a millennium later and there is not even a single brick that can be dated to after 400. Centuries of rain and soil accumulation buried the tombs.

The annihilation of this part of Roman Europe is the founding background to everything that follows. What would become the southern zone of the Habsburg Empire was for centuries a world without writing, without towns, with only residual, short-distance trade, without Christianity. Some people probably always lived in the ruins of towns because walls provided some security and shelter, but the water-systems and markets that had allowed them to exist disappeared. There was nobody who could repair an aqueduct once it broke so there must have been some final day when the cisterns simply stopped filling. Ephemeral chieftains might use a surviving chunk of a grand building as a backdrop for a semi-realized palace, but nobody knew how to dress stone and therefore nothing new could be built. For centuries the only towns were wooden palisaded structures protected by a ditch. It was against this backdrop that the notional ancestors of Central Europe’s modern nations appeared, wandering in from the east in what must have been pretty ripe-smelling military caravans.

Some clues about the fate of Europe after the Romans left can be found in Bautzen, in south-east Saxony. The town sits in gloomy woods and hills – and indeed is itself so gloomy that the great chasm that dominates it soaks up all colour, making even as lurid a bird as a jay flying into it go oddly monochrome. The chasm is created by the River Spree, a long way yet from its more famous role in Berlin. Even on a map, Bautzen looks an unlucky place – with mountain passes to the south which would tend to channel armies passing west or east into its vicinity. And indeed, in a crowded field, Bautzen must have a fair claim to be the most frequently burnt down place in the region, both on purpose and through accident.

Bautzen is interesting in all kinds of ways. It is part of the area known as Upper Lusatia, once ruled by the Habsburg Emperor (there is still a fetching image of Rudolf II decorating a watch-tower) but given to the ruler of Saxony as a thank-you during the Thirty Years War in 1635. At a jumbled linguistic crook in Central Europe’s geography, Upper Lusatia was a partly Germanic, partly Slavic territory which would find itself inside the borders of modern Germany. Because of this most of Upper Lusatia’s inhabitants were sheltered from the massive ethnic cleansing that turned neighbouring Czechoslovakia and Poland monoglot in 1945. This accidentally preserved the old pattern, once common across the entire region, of German-speaking town-dwellers and Slav-speaking country-dwellers, in Upper Lusatia’s case a small group known as the Sorbs. So Bautzen is also Budyšin and the Spree the Sprjewja.

The town’s great value is in its origins – and what it says about the origins of the whole of Central Europe. This is an issue where the stakes could not be higher. Each nationality in Central Europe defines itself by being more echt than any other: as having a unique claim to ownership of the land through some superior martial talent or more powerful culture or, most importantly, from having arrived in a particular valley first. Objectively, the carbon-dating of your language-group’s European debut would seem of interest only to a handful of mouldering antiquaries. But through the labours of these fusty figures, it has become everybody’s concern – and a concern that has led to countless violent deaths.

This hunt for origins became obsessive in the nineteenth century as a literate and aggressive language-nationalism came to dominate Central Europe. Town squares filled up with statues of heroic, shaggy forebears and town halls became oppressively decorated with murals of the same forebears engaged in i) frowningly breasting a hill and looking down on the promised land; ii) engaging in some ceremony with a flag or sword to found a town; and iii) successfully killing everybody who was there already. Schools rang to the sound of children reciting heroic epics. This was at the same time a great efflorescence of European culture and a disaster as the twentieth century played out these early medieval fantasies using modern weapons.

The Bautzen region is so curious because it shows what was at stake in the Dark Ages in which all these nationalities could find their roots. Archaeological studies of Lusatia show that Germanic tribes lived here, comfortably outside the reach of the Roman Empire, from about 400 BC to AD 200, but that for some six centuries after that no humans seem to have lived there at all. It could of course be that these were humans who lived so simply that they no longer left burials, swords, pots, fort outlines or anything – but this seems implausible. For whatever reason there seem to have been very few or no people and the default forest cover which blanketed Europe grew back over earlier settlements, leaving nothing but wolves, bison and giant oxen to roam through the picturesque fog. The situation in Lusatia was extreme, but more broadly the population of much of inland Europe does seem to have collapsed. Barbarian raiders, Huns and others, who terminated Roman towns like Pécs seem to have also killed or driven off those living in the always quite small settlements north of the frontier.

In much of Central Europe trees are now merely a pretty adjunct to human habitation, although some thick cover remains in Bohemia and Slovakia. But the ancient tree cover used to be almost total except on very high, bleak land. If humans failed to cut the trees back then they would quickly return: a small settlement that failed through a bad harvest or through a massacre would vanish, its cleared land picked apart by millions of roots. The need to clear space and fight back the trees remained a major concern well into the Middle Ages, with lords offering land to peasants at a bargain rent if mattocks were needed (to clear tree roots), with the rent shooting up once the land could at last be ploughed. Even such famously grim and empty areas as the Hungarian Great Plain were smothered in trees.

The Germanic tribes which lived in a massive swathe from the North Sea to the Balkans seem to have seized up, retreated, diminished or moved to Britain, both because of attacks by Asian nomads and as a side-effect of the failure of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, as economic links frayed and vanished. A final major horror was the arrival in the mid-sixth century of plague. We have records of its devastating impact on the major towns of the eastern Mediterranean, but it clearly must have swept through trading routes deep into areas with none of the tradition of literacy that would have allowed the victims to record their own demise. There is a parallel with North America, where many tribal groups died of European diseases years before they were even in direct contact with Europeans. I remember a tiny, mournful display in a western Canadian museum, of moccasins and beads from inland Athabascans who all seem to have died, scattered unnoticed throughout the interior valleys. It is easy to imagine something very similar in the European interior, with plague following the thin trade routes up through the Balkans and settlements being destroyed and then their very existence smudged out by the relentless trees. The ease therefore with which small groups of Slavs, Magyars and Vlachs and others infiltrated Central Europe came from its sheer emptiness.

A striking glimpse into this untamed Europe can still be found in the Gemenc Forest in southern Hungary. When most of the Danube was reshaped and made navigable and predictable in the nineteenth century, the oxbows of the Gemenc region were left, both because they are so totally intractable and so they could be used as an archducal hunting ground. Arriving there on a hot summer day, it seemed placid enough. A helpful map on a board outside the forest marked out coloured trails and was neatly decorated with drawings of the forest’s massive deer plus some imperious eagles and an oddly frisking wild boar up on its hind legs like a circus poodle. This schematic and rational exposition was already under threat though because the board was itself covered in dozens of twitching, buzzing beetles – fetchingly, half ultramarine and half copper – which skittered about all over the lettering. The sunlight flaring off the beetles already made things seem a bit peculiar and threatening, but this was nothing compared to the reality of the forest. Within moments the neatly marked paths became almost overwhelmed: human order giving way to nature run mad, a foetid dementia of plant life, with hoots, squeaks and grunts filling the air and everything cloaked in stifling semi-darkness by the old trees. Within minutes I had already come across an immense, completely out-of-control pond, its surface choked in millions of seeds and with frogs mucking about on floating debris. A further pond flooded the path and only a few hundred yards in I had to turn back. This was a riotous deciduous jungle of a kind that seemed more Brazilian than Hungarian. I could suddenly see why centuries of drainage courses, weirs, mattock-wielders, grazing animals, the ceaseless, boring, human patrol-work needed to create our societies, were much more important than mere fleeting political events. In the end I walked for several miles on top of an earth dam next to the forest (the dam itself a colossal response to the oxbows’ periodic convulsive floods) and was rewarded with eagles, a brass-coloured doe of alarming size, a fox skeleton and a cowherd with his cattle and cowdog – but no boars. The lack of these noble animals could not detract from the extraordinary nature of the Gemenc Forest. Here was a small indication of what most river valleys must have been like in an era of very few humans. Just as the Ganges valley, now a burnt-brown treeless plain, used to be a tiger-filled mayhem of flooded, impassable forest, so much of lowland Europe was threatening to people and unusable. Most big European animals evolved for this habitat and would disappear along with it. But it was into a very swampy, tree-clogged and unrenovated world that small bands of warriors and their families began to infiltrate in the eighth century AD.

There is a particularly hysteria-edged frieze in the Western Bohemia Museum in Plzeň by V. Saff, carved in 1900, imagining the arrival of the ancient Czechs in a forest, torturing and killing their enemies, tying them to trees, strangling them. In the usual proto-Art-Nouveau style, the sculptor follows through on an ethnographic hunch that surprising numbers of the tribal womenfolk would be in their late teens and free of clothing. The sadism of the carving is oddly reckless and preserves the nationalist mania of its period: urging the Czechs to stop sitting around reading newspapers and sipping herbal liqueurs and instead to embrace the burly virtues of their forebears. In practice we do not of course have any sense at all of what these ancient Czechs were like and Saff may not be entirely wrong about their savagery: although occasions on which women with amazing breasts swung around a severed human head by its top-knot were probably infrequent.

Romanian nationalists cleverly trumped everybody by claiming descent from the Romans, inhabitants of the old province of Dacia. This messed up all the Slav groups and the Hungarians, who had between them established a fairly clear AD 600–900 arrival date. A feature of several Romanian towns is a copy of the Roman statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by their adopted wolf mother. This bizarre gift was handed out by Mussolini in the early 1920s to suggest none too subtly that his own new empire had a racial ally, a fellow Child of Rome. There will be plenty more of this sort of stuff as the book progresses, but I hope it is already clear to every reader just how freakish and peculiar history’s uses have been in the region.

But as was the case for everybody else, it seems in fact the Romanians arrived from elsewhere – probably from the more Latinized areas south of the Danube, modern Serbia or Croatia, which would explain why so rough and marginal an area of the old Roman Empire as Dacia should have kept its Latin flavour in an otherwise drastically changed region: it didn’t. This unwelcome result should make all the rival nationalist historians throw up their hands in jokey horror, call it quits and have a non-ethnically specific drink together. If the Romanians have a mystic heartland that turns out actually to belong to another country then we may as well all just go home.

To take too strong an interest in this subject is to set out on the high road to madness. The extreme mobility of all these tribes is bewildering and the almost total lack of written records for centuries does not help. The overall picture seems to be a retreat by Germanic tribes into the west and the arrival of Slavic tribes, seemingly from a start-point in what is now eastern Poland, mixed in with further post-Hun invaders from various steppe tribes, from the Avars to the Magyars. Indeed, in a despairing variant, the elites of the original Croats and Serbs may have been speaking an Iranian language, which is the point where I think anybody sensible just gives up. Arrows drawn on maps build up into an astonishing spaghetti of population movement, charted through pot-fragments, house-post remnants and casual, perhaps frivolously made-up comments written down by poorly informed monks living centuries later and far away. The net result of these migrations can clearly be seen today. The ancestors of the Czechs settled in a region protected by a crescent of mountains (the Iron Mountains and the Bohemian Forest Mountains) that happened to shield them from German and Frankish predation. Their fellow Slavs in the north and south, the Saxons and the Carantanians, were destroyed by invading Germans and the survivors converted into German-speaking Christians, bequeathing only the names Saxony and Carinthia. Further east and south the early Moravians, Slovakians, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Bulgars, Poles, Ruthenes, Croats and Serbs spread out (and in themselves had numerous further subdivisions which have since been erased), generally under Avar overlordship.

The Avars were fast-moving Asian nomads of a kind wearyingly familiar to anyone trying to settle down and earn an honest living in Central Europe. We know almost nothing about them at all. They hit a high point when they besieged Constantinople in 626, but they were driven off by the Byzantines and settled in a broad swath from Bohemia to Bulgaria. The Avar khaganate in many ways exemplifies why the Dark Ages are so irritating – the Avars can be seen in tiny glimpses in chronicles or in a handful of surviving, utterly context-free decorative objects and yet for two centuries they were the main overlords directing Slav settlement in Central Europe. An Avar ambassador met Charlemagne at his court on the Rhine in 790 and agreed the border between the Frankish Empire and the Avar Empire, but this was clearly just a truce and the Franks defeated the Avars in a cataclysmic battle notable for the heaps of treasure handed out to Charlemagne’s friends, a substantial shift of gold from the east to the long-denuded west. There is a final reference to the Avars in a chronicle in 822 but then the name simply disappears from the record. I would love to have some sense of what that Avar ambassador speaking with Charlemagne actually looked like – we don’t even know what language he would have used or how he dressed. The Avars could have as readily been from Mars – and ultimately they vanished, dissolving into the Slavic population.

By the ninth century key elements in Central Europe were now in place. The evanescent Great Moravia was a Slavic confederation which managed to be both profoundly important and frustratingly vague – it is not even clear what lands it ruled, although it is fairly certain it did include modern Moravia and Slovakia and probably a circle of lands around that core. Czech nationalists have endlessly argued over this. It lasted only a few decades, but was culturally crucial as the home first of the beautiful and strange Glagolitic script which would render SIMON, for example, as something like

(the M seems particularly lovely in its general unsustainability) and then, thanks to the tireless Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius, as the home of the first Slavic script – an alphabetic decision which has ever since decisively carved out a different zone, both in itself and as a signifier for allegiance to Orthodoxy. Indeed the missionary work of this period in shifting a large block of Europe towards Constantinople and out of Rome’s reach created a fault line with implications into the present.

Each attempt to settle down and create a lasting dynastic state and even a little economic growth was thwarted by the sheer motility of these Eurasian bands. There may not have been a large European population yet (the nearest approach to a town being simply a large armed camp or a cluster of buildings around a fortress) but those that were there remained willing to travel great distances and take great risks. Two threats prevented Central European coalescence, one from the west and one from the east.

Passau, on the Bavarian–Austrian border, is a town of such absurd scenic grandeur and geophysical significance that it seems a shame to find its streets lined only with little shops selling devotional trinkets and bird-whistles – the inhabitants should be cut from some more heroic cloth. Passau’s fame stems from its location on a spit of land which at its tapered point joins together two monstrous rivers, the Danube and the Inn, the former all the way from a squashy meadow in Swabia, the latter from the Alps. There is also a third river, the extremely less impressive Ilz, which dribbles down from the north – making Passau ‘the city of three rivers’. The great significance of the Ilz is that it comes down from the watershed of the forests on the edge of the Bohemian Forest Mountains to the north, just as the Inn comes down from the Swiss Alps, with the Danube itself heading straight west–east along the northern side of the Alps. This combination of converging waters shows there is a gap in the mountains, and it was from here that German-speaking Europe extruded into the Slavic lands to the east.

Bavaria, of which Passau is now the easternmost point, is one of those strange semi-kingdoms that has throughout its history come close to being a real and independent state but has always been subsumed or subverted. It has some of the same advantages of countries such as England or France in having a number of thorny borders. England’s sea coasts and France’s sea coasts and mountains have given their rulers a militarily happy situation and it has not been an accident that both these countries have been so hard to invade. This is entirely unlike most Central European states, which have been obliged militarily to turn round and round like a dizzy dog trying to defend its drinking bowl. Bavaria had coherence because of its impenetrable southern mountains and reasonably chunky eastern ones. It emerged from the Dark Ages as a well-run, Germanic, naturally wealthy place under the rule of the Agilolfing family. In the eighth century Bavaria stretched much further east than Passau and German-speaking colonists debouched into Tirol and Salzburg.

As so often in Bavaria’s history, the country’s wealth and security attracted envious eyes. On the face of it a safe distance away, Charlemagne on the Lower Rhine, a Frankish chieftain, had reestablished through a sheer act of the imagination a direct link between himself and the Roman Empire that had collapsed in the west over three centuries before. His ambition, his court’s pomp, wealth and learning, and his military success proclaimed the end of the Dark Ages and a new direction for Europe. Instead of being a shattered jigsaw of petty chieftainships and dubious Asiatic over-lords, Europe would revive as a new Roman Empire re-founded with Charlemagne as emperor. The Bavarians and the Franks had fought each other a number of times, but in an astounding decade from 785 Charlemagne completed the conquest of the Saxons in the north, deposed the long-serving ruler of Bavaria, Tassilo, in the south and then destroyed the Avar Khaganate.

The snuffing-out of the Agilolfing family in Bavaria and the absorption of the whole region into Charlemagne’s empire created a fresh eastward dynamic. Massacring, Germanizing and Christianizing their way east, the Franks created new marches and duchies, pushing back the Slavs so that by the mid-ninth century something not dissimilar to the modern language map existed, with much of Austria in Germanic hands. But before the linguistic patchwork settled into place there was one more, thoroughly startling intrusion.

The Magyars were not the last of the new arrivals in an already crowded and chaotic neighbourhood, but they were certainly one of the most spectacular. Chased out of their home in the Khazar khaganate the Magyars shifted ever further west until they hurtled into Europe with their innovative cavalry skills and entirely unrelated language. They caused mayhem, defeating the Bavarian and East Frank armies sent against them and raiding deep into France and Italy before finally and decisively being stopped in their tracks by the Emperor Otto I at the Battle of the Lech in 955.

The final Magyar raids have a somewhat nostalgic air to them – as though the older warriors could not resist calls to put the old band back together again. After being chased away by Otto I they abandoned raiding western Europe but continued to carve out an ever-larger territory for themselves, reinforced by fresh arrivals from Central Asia including many of their former enemies, the enjoyably named Pechenegs.

As usual with these groups it is impossible now to unpick the true circumstances of their arrival. Everyone has an automatic picture of streams of wagons filled with seer elders, opulent wives, lisping daughters and young sons practising with wooden swords on their own tiny ponies. This is at odds with the patently rather male-only, rugby-match atmosphere of the Magyar raids themselves. We will never know, for example, what balance of the settled population managed to escape: were those unable to move fast enough killed or just enslaved? Did the Magyar men massacre the Slav and Avar men they found and take over their surviving families? Identity shifts very rapidly. In the late nineteenth century many Germans, Jews, Slovaks and others became Hungarians, changing language and religion across two generations with the same ease that other members of the same groups emigrated and became Americans. Clearly a much more local and wholly illiterate society could be blended in different combinations (particularly when imposed by terrible violence) with great speed. The chances of anybody today being a ‘pure’ example of any specific medieval ‘race’ must be close to zero, quite aside from the category being patently meaningless.

The Magyar defeat at the Lech proved absolutely decisive for the shape of Europe. The retreating Magyar army tried to attack the Bohemian Slavs but were again defeated, headed back along the Danube and then stuck there. Germans and Magyars found a demarcation line east of Vienna and the two groups clicked together like a seatbelt, separating the northern Slavs (Bohemians, Moravians, Poles) from the southern Slavs (Slovenes, Croats, Serbs), and inventing what became Austria and Hungary. And then, in a stroke of genius, the Magyar prince Géza converted to Christianity in around 972. This was a purely political gesture, but nonetheless Magyars began genuinely to convert in large numbers and therefore put themselves out of bounds for the traditional Frankish anti-pagan campaigning season. Géza’s decision to plump for Rome rather than Constantinople was another of those small decisions with deep consequences, tying Hungary to the west and giving its entire culture a different shape and flavour from its eastern and southern neighbours.

The final elements in the building of Central Europe were the Bavarians, who continued to pour into the region south of Bohemia either through Passau or through the Tirol. The settlement of this area had a very American atmosphere – a constantly shifting frontier, violent setbacks, enormous riches for those with ferocity and luck. Otto I appointed Margrave Luitpold to supervise the new territory exposed by the Hungarians’ defeat and a series of ‘marks’ or marcher, defensive states was created to organize the land and defend it. For almost two centuries this was done by the Babenberg family and others as vassals of Bavaria (and therefore at two removes from the Emperor). It was only in 1156 that the Babenbergs were made dukes (one remove from the Emperor).

The word ‘Austria’ is a Latinized form of ‘Eastern Land’. As usual we have no clear idea how the region’s population became mostly Bavarian. There were surprises for the colonists – surviving Roman Christians were found living around Salzburg, for example, and these presumably required some re-education. The flood of settlers within a couple of centuries seems to have absorbed the native population, leaving a mixed German–Hungarian border area to the east of Vienna and a mixed German–Slovenian border area in the south. The region was a classic German political patchwork and the separate territories of places such as Carinthia and Styria (‘the Mark of Steyr’ – the main fortress) only fell into Babenberger hands after many years. Salzburg and Passau remained separate ecclesiastical territories and there were all kinds of privileges for the great Benedictine and (later) Cistercian monasteries being founded along the Danube valley.

It is alarming to imagine just how few people there must have been: much of Central Europe hardly supported anything more than villages. But now a fresh population was being generated by southern Germany, with a great cavalcade of heavily armed chancers, psychopaths, clerics, handymen and farmers all heading through the passes. Enormous areas remained barely inhabited – a forest of unimaginable size still separated Bohemia and Austria and random outcrops of mountain made communication very tiresome. The monasteries became engines for transforming the landscape, with armies of peasants converting waste land into farm land through generations of hideous toil. Genuine towns rather than merely fortified residences became visible – the key one being Vienna, sited on the Danube at the last point where the eastern Alps still offer some protection. In 1221 it was given control of the river trade between Germans and Hungarians and became very rich.

In 1246 after a long run of excellent luck the Babenberg dynasty at last tripped up, with Duke Frederick II’s death in battle fighting the Hungarians. Very unfortunately the Emperor died in 1250 and a deeply miserable and violent era swamped much of Central Europe. Battling with the breakdown of the Austrian lands, several nobles approached Ottakar II, the King of Bohemia, to take over. An aggressive southern German ruler, Rudolf of Habsburg, was eventually elected Emperor in 1273. As had happened a number of times, the Electors had chosen someone quite weak – in Rudolf ’s case both through not having a large power base and through already being in his mid-fifties and therefore unlikely to do much damage. This proved to be a major miscalculation for everyone involved except Rudolf himself.

Rudolf died at Speyer and is buried in the Imperial cathedral there. I was lucky enough to arrive in Speyer late in the evening in winter and slip into the cathedral shortly before it shut. It is a stag-geringly powerful, harsh and threatening building with its sheer weight of stone a perfect symbol of Imperial power. For anyone growing up in England or France and used to Gothic it is very alarming to be surrounded by Romanesque gigantism, particularly when made expressionist by malevolent pools of darkness and weird echoes from shuffling feet. At one point the place filled with a truly hair-raising, other-worldly sound – which turned out to be the susurration of hundreds of little foil candle-holders being poured into bin bags. In any event, the highlight is Rudolf ’s tomb figure. He looks exactly as anyone would hope the Emperor to look – austere, eagle-nosed, calm, holding his orb and sceptre, an Imperial eagle symbol on his chest and a lion at his feet. It helps that at some point he has been put upright against the wall rather than lying flat, making him look more conversational.

In many ways Rudolf I was a classic German minor ruler. He had accumulated or inherited territories dotted around Alsace, Swabia and what is now northern Switzerland (including the ‘Habichtsburg’, the ‘hawk’s fortress’ that probably gave the family their name – the Swiss kicked them out of it in 1415). He proved to be a successful Emperor and took an army into Austria to expel King Ottakar. After several twists and turns Rudolf allied with the Hungarians to defeat the Bohemians and killed Ottakar at the Battle on the Marchfeld in 1278.

Rudolf then decided to resolve the Babenberger inheritance problem by simply taking most of the lands for himself in 1282 – these lands stayed in the family for the next six centuries. This began the Habsburg rise to power, but there were many cock-ups and dead-ends to follow what might have proved to be the high point in the family fortunes – assassinations, deaths in battle, splits in the inheritance. The Habsburgs rapidly came to treat their old south German lands as less important than their new Austrian holdings. They picked up Tyrol in 1363 and Trieste in 1382, so the family got a first glimpse of the sea. Before they re-secured for good the title of Emperor in 1452 the Habsburgs were certainly an interesting bunch, but not exceptional, with the rival Luxemburg family having a far larger geographical spread and prestige. It was the Luxemburg Emperor Charles IV who, as King of Bohemia, had been largely responsible for making Prague such an extraordinary place – with a grandeur of vision that the Habsburgs could not yet match.

The role of Emperor varied in importance depending on the personality of the job’s holder and his luck with events. Charles IV had only become incontrovertibly emperor once his bitter rival, Louis the Bavarian, died of a seizure while out bear-hunting, which decisively shifted the luck in Charles’s direction. The job was by the fifteenth century a thankless one and it had often been so too in the past. It was nonetheless key in holding together the shifting slurry of small territories which filled much of Europe, from Flanders to Vienna. These small territories were a mocking reproof to Charlemagne’s original vision of a new Roman Empire. Centuries of infighting, family squabbles, natural disaster, bribes and special needs had broken up his old empire into an incoherent mass. Any part of it would have powerful independent towns, extensive monastic holdings, individual castles with zones of land around them and very occasional serious blocks of land such as Bavaria or Saxony, but even these were a mass of cracks and sub-subdivisions. The Emperor held the system together, but with hundreds of individual territories reporting to him it was from a Human Resources point of view a poor management structure. Charles IV used his power on becoming Emperor to create the Golden Bull in 1356, which pinned into place all future arrangements. Most importantly it codified the seven figures who would in future elect the Emperor and, as significantly, laid down the rule that these men’s territories could not be split or alienated, giving the seven Electors solid power-bases of their own and preventing any possibility of a pretender or rival Elector messing up the election as had been the case with the shambles around his own election. The seven Electors would be the Archbishop of Cologne, the Archbishop of Mainz, the Archbishop of Trier, the Margrave of Brandenburg, the Duke of Saxony, the Count Palatine of the Rhine and the King of Bohemia. They met in Frankfurt to vote on who would be ‘King of the Romans’, the idea being that it was only the Pope could crown an Emperor – a distinction that would be dropped by the Habsburgs, who generally had their heir voted as King with the title of Emperor automatically being acceded to on the current holder’s death.

It was definitely important to be Emperor, but it was a long way from being the incontrovertibly classy role familiar to readers of books about Ancient Rome. Every effort was made to link the job with the glory of Charlemagne, using Charlemagne’s throne at Aachen (which is still there, amazingly – a very plain but venerable object) and with as many flags and trumpets as could be mustered. But none of the other leading figures at these grand ceremonies had a strong sense of being drastically inferior to the Emperor or would necessarily tremble at his displeasure.

The long rule of the Emperor Frederick III is the point at which the Habsburg family come into focus. This is for the accidental reason that standards of painted portraiture improve in the fifteenth century so that we have a clear idea what Frederick looked like. There is a very strange and beautiful portrait of his predecessor Sigismund – the last of the Luxemburg family – wearing an out-size fur hat with the hardened yet vacant expression of someone who has spent too much time experimenting with mushrooms, say, or on the road with a band. I am not suggesting this just to be silly: his face is absolutely baffling – there are no clues as to what the painter was trying to achieve by giving him such an odd expression. The fur hat and outdoorsy complexion make him look, well, Canadian. Frederick’s immediate predecessor, Albert II, was short-lived (he died fighting the Turks) and is known only from a portrait which could have been painted by someone at primary school, although his clothing is beautifully done. With Frederick, however, technical skill and patronage combine to produce a number of images where we have a clear sense of what he himself wanted to convey (perhaps the key point about any portrait): authority, serenity, an aura of Imperial power.

Frederick’s reign, and indeed the whole of the fifteenth century, is intensely vulnerable to two problems for historians: the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress Effect’ and the ‘Christmas Pantomime Syndrome’. The first of these views the individual monarch as a figure who needs in his lifetime to reach a specific goal – invariably the creation of a coherent state as much as possible like the modern empire or country as it would emerge in the nineteenth century. Rulers are therefore judged on the degree to which they remain on this path and are not seduced, waylaid or discouraged by other temptations, like Christian in Bunyan’s allegory. In the case of England this is most painfully clear in the endless attempts to establish Henry VI as King of France – we all now know this is ridiculous and that the English should just go home; we groan at the narrative point when Joan of Arc turns up, we rally a little when she goes up in smoke. But we are over-aware that the ruler in London will never actually rule in Paris and cringe as in 1429, aged seven, Henry is crowned at Notre Dame, knowing that he is going to fritter decades in a futile bloodbath, a total distraction from England’s majestic, etc. destiny.

The Pilgrim’s Progress Effect is very powerful with Frederick III because we know that he is the true founder of a dynasty which will rule Central Europe and many other places for four centuries – and yet he himself so often does not seem to know this (as, of course, he could not). Rather than heading to the Celestial City – in other words to Vienna to create a rational and centralized administration, the heart of a great empire – Frederick meanders about helplessly, and for long periods becomes virtually inert while mayhem breaks out all around him. He founds a monastery here, repairs a castle there and intervenes half-heartedly elsewhere, and seems to wander off the True Path at the least opportunity. His enemies and friends were driven mad by his changeable nature, his lethargy and inability to do more than a very few things at once. In what must be something of a record, although he was Holy Roman Emperor, he managed to spend a somewhat insulting twenty-seven years in a row not visiting Germany at all: leagues rose and fell, towns collapsed into anarchy, technological innovations were made and castles exploded, and yet none of this seemed to impinge much on Frederick as he had another memorial designed or listened to a bit of music.

It is attractive in a way that historians have inherited the rage felt by many of Frederick’s contemporaries. You do see yourself getting increasingly hoarse from shouting: ‘What you are doing in Linz – have you even noticed what is happening in Nuremberg – why can’t you help these people!’ and so on. He is definitely the most annoying Holy Roman Emperor until Charles VI. But the Pilgrim’s Progress Effect has to be resisted. The goal of a dynasty is never reached – each generation has very narrow and immediate aims and these can be undermined or enhanced through overwhelming strokes of disaster or luck far beyond its control. It is not surprising that these people spent so much time in church: the outcome of each year’s events so clearly rested, whether favourable or unfavourable, on immense and unguessable currents controlled only by God. The great rivals of the Habsburg family, the Luxemburgs, had provided highly successful Emperors and, indeed, in Charles IV there is a dynastic founding figure of a complete kind. But, as it turned out, the Luxemburg dynasty, with its sprawling holdings across Central and western Europe (including the area now covered by the tiny country which – through a crazy sequence of events – still preserves their name), through bad luck simply died out. The family’s end came with Ladislaus Posthumous, whose father was the Habsburg Albert II and whose mother was the only daughter of the Emperor Sigismund, the last male Luxemburg dynast. Ladislaus’s strange second name enshrined his being born after his father’s death. The little lad, with his distinctive golden curls, was carefully looked after by his bluff and helpful second cousin the future Frederick III, then a Habsburg duke. Ladislaus discovered that Frederick’s hospitality in practice seemed to revolve around not letting him talk to anyone or do anything, and although he managed to escape, he was never more than a pawn of various factions until his thoroughly accidental death aged seventeen.

The other trap, Christmas Pantomime Syndrome, is more straightforward. We all know that Central Europe is going to be devastated by the Turks and there is a version of history where everybody yells at the stage: ‘Look behind you!’ as the hero fails to notice the monster/goblin/witch sneaking up and then disappearing each time he turns round. In fact someone might have usefully yelled it too at little Ladislaus. As Frederick is preoccupied by yet more petty fighting around the Swiss Confederation it is impossible not to cry out: ‘Sort out your eastern border defences and make yourself head of a serious Christian coalition with a single purpose,’ or something like that. This frustration is almost a constant in Central European history and one that has to be resisted at every turn. When the King of France actually allies with the Ottomans in order to stitch up the Habsburgs there is almost no modern historical account which can stop itself from shaking its head in incredulity. When there is a long lull in the fighting we know that this is only because the Ottomans are having a change of scenery and destroying their opponents in Anatolia or Persia and that when these issues have been sorted out they will turn their fatal attention back to the West. But, of course, there was no means by which anything other than shreds of intelligence about this could get back to the Habsburgs or their discordant semi-allies. News of a massive new Turkish army might unfortunately be received only slightly in advance of the massive new Turkish army.

The Habsburgs were in due course to become the great defenders of Europe against the Ottomans, but Frederick III seems to have had no interest in the staggering heroics of the Siege of Belgrade in 1456 or the attempted Turkish invasion of Italy, and carried on just pootling around regardless. We know that the seventy-year breathing space created by the failure of the Ottomans at Belgrade was a mirage and that something much worse would ultimately be on its way, but nobody at the time had any means of knowing how long the breathing space would be, or indeed whether it might not simply be permanent – which it might have been.

Wiener Neustadt is an extremely haggard industrial town south of Vienna, ravaged during the Second World War and rebuilt in a way that permanently enshrines a sense of exhaustion and despair. One extraordinary and painstaking reconstruction is the Military Academy, founded by Maria Theresa but built around Frederick III’s castle and chapel. Wiener Neustadt was one of Frederick’s several capitals as he wandered from opportunity to crisis and from crisis to opportunity and his son, the future Emperor Maximilian I, was both born and buried there, his simple tomb still in the Chapel of St George at the heart of the academy – a chapel otherwise dominated by an immense, ugly reliquary, a cuboid on stumpy legs, covered in little glass windows behind each of which is a saint’s skull, with an effect more Borneo than Lower Austria.

As the Military Academy is still fully functioning, visiting it is a strange process. Instead of the usual ticket-turnstile-postcard-shop-cafe nexus, visitors have to ring a bell outside the South Gate. I stood there waiting to be buzzed in, but instead, after a long pause, there was the sound of marching boots and a cadet with a gun slung across his back unlocked the door and escorted me round. Just walking down the darkened corridor with him set my mind racing about this parallel world of order, actual skills, professionalism, of uniforms, technical training, hierarchy. We came up to a group of cadets who were on duty, all of whom radiated level-headed competence, physical fitness and pride in appearance, and lived on a different planet from the one defined by general weak tittering, the oxygen levels of which I was more used to.

As we marched (or he marched) smartly into the brilliantly sunlit central courtyard of the academy the point of being there came into view: the great Heraldic Wall of Frederick III, much re-carved and renovated, but still his extraordinary personal statement and with the same impact it must have had on its first being unveiled. At the base of the wall there is a statue of Frederick and then a sequence of eighty-seven coats of arms all the way up the side of the chapel, with some of the shields representing specks on the map, but others substantial chunks of territory. Visitors could have been in no doubt of the crushing superiority of Frederick’s possessions. But mainly it has the air of something which he personally enjoyed. We will never know but it is easy to think of him sitting in the courtyard, his eyes wandering over all the places he owned.

As my escort marched me out he casually threw at another cadet a great, medieval-looking bunch of keys which must have weighed the same as a piece of armour. The fellow cadet caught it in one hand without looking up. I felt a surge of panic at being surrounded by so much tough competence and eagerly waited to be allowed back into the world of casual ineptitude.

The other great early Habsburg cultic site is the small town of Klosterneuburg (New Castle Monastery), just north of Vienna. For centuries an unvarying part of the calendar was the annual pilgrimage by the senior family member to the ancient Augustinian abbey founded by the Babenberg margrave of the region, Leopold III, to attend services to pray for the souls of their Babenberg predecessors. It is this complex of buildings which gives the Habsburgs their legitimacy, conferring on an extinct prior dynasty, an ugly civil war and an Imperial land-grab all the majesty of religious endorsement.

According to an ancient story, the deeply pious Leopold’s new bride’s veil was blown away and he swore to build an abbey wherever it was found. Years later, while out hunting, he discovered the veil on an elderberry bush and building began. This story features in innumerable carvings and miniatures and can never surmount the problem that a piece of cloth on a bush is hard to represent in an engaging way, a problem generally solved by showing the extra pointer of the Virgin Mary and tons of angels blazing away in the sky above the bush.

The abbey was apparently very beautiful, but today it is little more than a devastated carcass. The insides were given a tremendous pimping by eighteenth-century craftsmen who smothered it in stucco and paintings of acrobatic saints, before putting baroque towers on the outside. This outrage was then balanced in the nineteenth century by architects who left the inside alone, but made the outside look much more satisfactorily medieval and replaced the towers with proper Gothic ones, which of course look grindingly Sir Walter Scott and inauthentic. A final disaster came later in the nineteenth century when frescoes were put in the gaps left in the interior by the earlier baroque vandals. These were filled by scenes from the life of Jesus of hideous sweetness, with the Saviour as a sort of weedy Khalil Gibran figure.

But in the small museum in the unfinished fragment of palace that surrounds the abbey there is a single, miraculous object which brushes aside kitsch issues. This is a colossal painted panel commissioned by the canons in 1485 to mark the founder Leopold III’s canonization, an image in a series of brilliantly bright roundels of all the rulers of the Babenberg family set into a great family tree. Frederick III, with his restless, anxious interest in genealogy and legitimacy, was obsessed with Leopold and it was under his reign that a standard-issue image of the new saint was invented, with an oversized beard and implausibly grand crown, often looking somewhat distracted so as to suggest holiness. And in the great painting there he is in a definitive rendering, like a proto-Father Christmas. His wife, Agnes, is in one of the side panels and is always shown as both devout and desirable. She exemplifies the usual confusion about how to deal with queens – even better exemplified by the contemporaneous tomb of Eleanor of Portugal, Frederick III’s wife, tucked behind the main altar at the Neukloster in Wiener Neustadt, which features a carved statue of her as a sort of cream-of-the-crop supercatch and nothing less than a saint.

The Babenberg family were freebooting German fighters, working for the Duke of Bavaria as Christian forces hacked their way east, pushing back the Hungarians. The records are so poor that beyond the most basic outline almost everything they did is merely bright coloured romance. And this is exactly what the canons’ painting provides – here they are praying, heading off on crusade, the victims of treachery, in a picturesquely mounted battle. The great weight of the past is brilliantly conveyed in the picture – a dynastic sequence of events stretching down through the centuries. Here is a scene of the marcher state of which they were margraves being turned into a duchy under Henry II Jasomirgott, who has made his capital at Vienna. One Babenberger died in Italy and had his corpse boiled up and his bones put in a casket and returned to Austria, another thoughtfully rendered scene. There too is the implausibly named Leopold the Virtuous – the only Babenberg to be famous in England, as the kidnapper of Richard the Lionheart, who he hated for having slighted him on the Third Crusade. In a move that defies common sense, Richard tried to get back to England overland after the crusade in disguise, crossing Austrian territory and being captured by Leopold, who insisted on an immense ransom (at least twenty tons of silver). There is hardly an old fortress wall in Austria which is not said to have been built using this money. Leopold’s more lasting claim to importance was inheriting Styria (a larger block of land than the modern state, taking in much of Slovenia). He was also, and this is getting very legendary, the origin of the Babenberger flag, reputedly inspired by his white crusader surcoat getting soaked in blood, which made a nice striped pattern. This flag had minor uses under the Habsburgs (whose own colours were black and yellow) but re-emerged in 1918 as the flag of the new Republic of Austria – a piece of deep continuity which makes even something as banal as a simple flag curious and strange.

Any dynasty if you wait a sufficient number of lifetimes hits disaster and sure enough, after many adventures, here is the chaotic Frederick the Quarrelsome dying fighting the Hungarians and with no heir in 1246. The Babenbergs were finished and the Habsburgs began their clamber to greatness.

It is not difficult to see why the Habsburgs were so obsessed with Klosterneuburg. Their legitimacy was deeply bound up in the bald assertion that they were the true heirs to the Babenbergs and the elaborate ceremonies here allowed them to stare down anyone who dared even think that they were mere Swabian carpetbaggers. The Habsburgs never forgot that the basis for their greatness was this Austrian core and that Klosterneuburg was the site they had to lay claim to. Carefully maintained for centuries, the canons’ painting of the Babenbergs may have the air of a giant comic book, but it sits at the cultic heart of Frederick III and his successors’ view of the world. It was also oppressive: both Frederick and his son Maximilian I were mesmerized by medieval chivalry and the adventures shown in the painting had a profound resonance for them, a magical world of saintly acts and knightly derring-do in summer landscapes, a long way from their own indebtedness, depressing new guns and political scramblings.

There is a crucial preliminary which needs to be dealt with for this book to make sense: a description of the Holy Roman Empire. I apologize for this, but really there is no way round it and it is a helpful test. I could devote much of my life to thinking about the Empire but if, like many people, you rightly find the whole business boring then this section will flush out whether or not you might be more cheerily employed reading something else.

The Empire covered a vast zone of Europe and was for many centuries the key motor of the continent’s history. For anyone growing up in a British, French or American framework the whole thing was an outrage – a wilderness of absurd micro-states, potty valleys run by monks and ritualistic obscurantism which made nineteenth-century German writers, who were at the heart of reconstructing its history, scarlet with shame. Indeed by the time it was wound up by Napoleon it was widely execrated, but this was of course without the knowledge of how unstable and brutal the successor states would be. The long-running prejudice against the Empire now seems odd. Its sheer longevity, and role from Charlemagne to Napoleon as the flywheel of Europe’s cultural, political and cultural existence – for good and bad – makes it inadequate merely to laugh at some of its more dust-covered and sclerotic features.

As already discussed, the Empire’s distant origins lay in the highly successful rule of Charlemagne, a Frankish warlord of infinite ambition who carved his way across Europe and decided that his realm was in fact the reincarnation of the long-defunct Western Roman Empire. As usual when such figures arise, packs of smiling intellectuals shimmer into view to provide the sermons and chronicles to back up such surprising claims. We can only imagine now the landscape through which Charlemagne and his shaggy henchmen rode – a landscape of very small settlements, but also of great, devastated Roman fragments, most impressively at Constantine’s old western capital of Trier. The Roman palace, cathedral and fortifications there must have had some of the impact felt by H. G. Wells’s traveller in The Time Machine as he wandered through the unguessably vast remnants of Late Human civilization in the eight-hundredth century.

Christianity provided a written, judicial and intellectual link to the Roman Empire, but the lands which Charlemagne and his successors conquered were in many cases outside the old empire and making this new construction into the successor state was much more an act of will than a genuine revival. These notional Roman origins were always a crucial element for the thousand years that the new Empire existed. It tangled the Emperor in an important relationship with the Pope, with whom he could swap honest notes about bare-faced assertions of authority based on ancient links to Rome. It also gave many Emperors an almost mystical attachment to Italy, driven in part by embarrassment at a neo-Rome being based on foggy chunks of the north rather than the region of Europe most people would – off the top of their heads – think of as Roman. The degree to which Italians themselves failed to cooperate with this vision, tending to see the Emperor as merely a rapacious and peculiar visitor from the north, formed one of several critical dynamics along the Empire’s edge.

From Charlemagne’s death the Empire, like all European states, suffered from a near constant, dynamic wish to fall into smaller units. This tension is extremely difficult for historians to deal with as it flushes out the basic attitude in the writer to the nature of political events: is each threat to central authority a good or a bad thing? For example, the conventional British account of France’s history makes the hyper-centralized state of Louis XIV into something almost Mongol in its disgusting blank amoralism – and yet comparable accounts of Britain’s own militarily fuelled centralization and ruthlessness mysteriously become a splendid tale of pluck and decency.

At the heart of the Empire was the realization that it was enormously too large and diverse to be directly ruled by a single figure. Its origins lay in Charlemagne and his successors’ conquests, from their western bases heading east, north-east and south-east. It encompassed most of German-speaking Europe, plus the Low Countries, a zone of what is now northern, eastern and southeastern France, Bohemia, Moravia, Lusatia and a chunk of northern Italy. Large and small grants of land by the Emperor endowed various of his followers with territory which they defended and consolidated both on his behalf and for their own benefit. The bigger and more obstreperous nobles might seek greater freedom from Imperial control but there was never a suggestion of actual independence. Indeed, however powerful states such as Saxony or Bavaria might have become, their rulers always kept a keen sense that their own status and security were deeply woven into the overall Imperial structure. By the time the Habsburg family permanently secured the title of Emperor it was a secular and religious post of incomparable prestige, backed up by a hieratic, ambulatory calendar of events and places: the election at Frankfurt and the Imperial gatherings at places suffused with the history of great predecessors such as Aachen, Worms, Nuremberg and Augsburg.

Through many convulsions, setbacks and total implosions, the Empire by the fifteenth century had settled into a pattern which it kept until its dissolution in 1806. Its fringes at all points of the compass generated an alarmingly high percentage of all Europe’s historical ‘events’ and even after 1806 it was a motor for disagreement and warfare like nothing else. Too many historians have found themselves siding uneasily with the idea that the Emperor should be sympathized with when his grand plans are thwarted by pygmy localism, but perhaps this hopeless localism should be celebrated as a great gift to European culture and discourse. It is striking, for example, that the western region of the Empire was so poorly organized that it only ever had a defensive anti-French function and no ability to attack anyone at all. One western territory, Prum, had a defensive capability restricted to the spiritual force field generated by its ownership of a sandal belonging to Jesus while another, Essen (the future home of Krupp armaments), was ruled for centuries by a notably ornery and unhelpful group of aristocratic nuns.

The territory of the Empire therefore had something of the appearance of a deeply disturbing jigsaw. There were relatively large territories such as Württemberg, which looked impressive but was in practice honeycombed with local special laws and privileges that made the dukes impoverished, bitter and much laughed at. There were more substantial and coherent territories, such as Saxony, which was cursed by frequent bouts of subdivision between different heirs, with one half crumbling into tiny but wonderful fragments. There were the lands of the margraves of Brandenburg in the north-east, which had a personal link to territories in Poland that fell outside the Empire and had a profound effect when they cohered into the Prussian state.

These larger blocks catch the eye because they had real futures, but far more characteristic of the Empire were oddities such as the Palatinate, a scattering of wealthy territories across the lower middle of Germany whose rulers intervened at key points in Imperial history. They left at Heidelberg one of the quintessential Romantic landscapes, but it is now almost impossible to envisage the Palatinate as a plausible and robust political unit – indeed Heidelberg is so picturesque mainly because its principal castle is in ruins. The Palatinate is an interesting example of what makes the Empire so confusing, with its individual units generally accretions of inherited, bought and nicked bits of land not necessarily even linked together.

Religious properties, often on land which had belonged to the Emperor but was given to the Church for specific purposes, formed an important category. So the adorable little state of Quedlinburg, ruled by nuns from good families, was endowed with enough territory to pay for its abbey and ensure a daily sequence of prayers for Henry the Fowler, a great slaughterer and forced converter of pagan Saxons in the early tenth century, who was buried there. Sometimes just as small, but far more important, were the Imperial Free Cities, lands generally focused on a single trading town, which had special privileges and were ruled by merchant oligarchies rather than a single lord. Some of these cities were consistently very important and close to the Emperor, such as Frankfurt and Nuremberg, some were quiet backwaters. Others were more remote from Imperial concerns and had extensive links with the outside world, such as the Hanseatic cities in the north, most famously Hamburg and Lübeck. Each had its own specialization, such as Lüneburg with its salt mines or Hall with its mint. Most consistently insignificant of all were the micro-territories: for example, the hundreds of bits owned by Imperial Knights, many in Swabia, and often consisting of just a tumbledown castle, a handful of vineyards and perhaps lucky access to some unfortunate river where the knight could charge a pointless toll for each trading boat rowing past.

This mass of political entities (hundreds by the later fifteenth century) was all held in place by the authority of the Emperor. As can be imagined, the very small states were frantically loyal as they needed Imperial sanction to survive at all – they tended to have elaborate shields decorating their fortress walls to show their allegiance and warn off casual predators. They supplied tiny packets of troops and often contributed to Imperial entourages in terrific costumes as well as populating many jobs within the Church. But even the larger territories believed in the Emperor, and such a system, as can be imagined, generated a staggering number of legal disputes, whether about inheritance, rights or financial and military contributions, and much of the Emperor’s time was engaged in settling these disputes. This ceaseless, wearying round of hearings and travelling, which, of course, left numerous irritated or alienated losers in its wake, was central to the Empire’s existence and the ability to provide justice was as important as success or failure in war in creating an Emperor’s reputation. Much of the chaos of Frederick III’s long reign stemmed from his losing interest in all this, and one of the reasons that the Habsburgs enjoyed their extraordinary run of success after the fifteenth century was that they felt a surprising and consistent level of inter-generational diligence (with the startling, ruinous exception of Rudolf II with his rooms full of unopened letters). They were always dealing with a stream of grumpy, trigger-happy and often quite poorly educated noblemen waving around forged ‘ancient’ documents of a kind familiar to the Habsburgs themselves and insisting on the application of this or that right. I do not refer much to the issue again in this book, but it should be kept in mind as an important sort of background hum at all times – an always inadequate but prestigious Imperial bureaucracy sorting through land and inheritance disputes which could take generations to resolve and which found its final expression in the great scenes of dusty paperwork in Leoš Janáček and Karel Čapek’s 1926 opera, The Makropoulos Case, with Janáček even coming up with a beautiful, repetitive theme to represent unending Imperial legal processes.

So the Emperor needed physically to demonstrate his status by moving around his immense lands, and every town had a complex set of obligations to him, later expressed by the often very elaborate ‘Imperial Halls’ which survive in many ex-territories today, consisting of a lavish assembly room (swagged with toadying but chirpy murals extolling the Emperor’s greatness and the extreme personal closeness to him of his host’s ancestors) and an entire wing of bedrooms – sometimes only used once in a century.

Each Emperor had a power-base, which could be very important to him, even if he was often away. Much of the distinctive appearance of Prague comes from Charles IV making it both a royal (as King of Bohemia) and Imperial capital. His son Sigismund shunted around all over Europe in a long reign of baffling incoherence – if he can be said to have had a base then it was at Buda or Visegrád. But these were only ever personal choices rather than institutional ones. The south-eastern Empire is littered with building projects knocked on the head by the early Habsburgs’ changes of mind or taste, or total insolvency. Maximilian I’s empty tomb in Innsbruck, with his body in Wiener Neustadt and his entrails in a copper pot in Vienna, sums up the problem. As long as the Emperors were on the move then they could keep their legal, military, residential and fiscal rights going – much like a permanently turning mixer being needed to maintain wet concrete. A sustained period of inattention could make the whole thing solidify and even – as the simile is abandoned – ruin the mixer itself.

The mechanism which sat at the heart of the Empire and which made it work was the strange fact – to our ears – that the Emperor was elected. The Golden Bull stated that when the current Emperor died, the Seven Electors had to gather (either in person or through a proxy) in Frankfurt and, sitting in a specific chapel of the Imperial church of St Bartholomew, vote on the new King of the Romans. Following their choice, an immense festival filled the Römerberg in central Frankfurt, with bonfires and the usual whole roasted animals. The choice of Electors was a clever one as these could only possibly agree on someone mutually acceptable and even if one family might nobble two or even three Electors their locations in different parts of the Empire and different moral views could not be squared readily. The horse-trading and bribes could be breathtaking (although much is hidden from the historical record), but the Electors’ eventual choice did have a surprising level of legitimacy, both through the crushing historical weight of precedent and because they were free to choose from a range of rich, capable and adult candidates. This avoided the nightmares of pure heredity faced by France or England, say, which would at irregular intervals wind up being ruled by children or imbeciles.

The election was hardly an opportunity for any old aspirant who felt lucky to put himself forward, though. The qualifications were formidably difficult, restricting candidature to almost nobody. This was in part because whereas the Emperors of the high Middle Ages had owned extensive lands as part of their job almost all this had by the fifteenth century been given away. The Emperor therefore needed to have access to a huge amount of money in his own right just to maintain his dignity, let alone have the potential to raise armies. In practical terms only two or three families could pass the interview. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Luxemburgs who were the most practical candidates as they could draw on their substantial revenues from also being kings of Bohemia, and in Sigismund’s case also King of Hungary and Croatia. Attempts to make the role of Emperor hereditary within a family had seemed possible when Sigismund had succeeded his father, Charles IV, but Sigismund’s failure to have a male heir and the end of the Luxemburg line meant looking elsewhere. A good candidate was a member of the Habsburg family, Duke Frederick of Inner Austria, who was elected King of the Romans in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 after a number of local difficulties. Without intending to do so the seven Electors of 1440 had locked into the job a single family who would rule, with one short break, for three hundred and sixty-four years.