Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder Page A
Authors: Simon Winder
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player or an army commander who loves shouting. They were raised separately, Charles in Burgundy and Ferdinand in Spain, but their sometimes tense partnership shaped a large part of world history and – whether or not that was a good thing – it is extraordinarily moving to have this frescoed snapshot of the two of them in their early twenties, as yet unbattered by the implacable weight of their responsibilities.
Juana’s incapacity meant that her father acted as a deeply resentful regent in the period between Philip’s death and his own. The extreme difficulty after Ferdinand’s funeral of having Juana sole monarch meant that in a series of broadly unconstitutional coups her son Charles arrived from his Burgundian lands and made himself not just regent but king, definitively uniting Spain in the face of widespread incredulity and resentment from its inhabitants. This meant his ownership of Aragonese territory scattered across the western Mediterranean and Italy and, of course, chunk after chunk of American coastline as each returning ship came back having found yet more. Oddly, in his uninvolving autobiography (dictated largely during an idle five days with his entourage, being rowed from Cologne to Mainz in June 1550) Charles does not even mention America, but by that time Europe’s economy had already been completely reshaped by Mexican and Peruvian bullion – he probably felt it was tacky to talk about economic issues.
After three and a half years of ruling Spain and its empire (plus of course his Burgundian inheritance along France’s eastern frontier and the whole of the Netherlands) Charles then had to take on (still only nineteen years old) the consequences of his grandfather Maximilian’s death. In the first instance this meant inheriting all the traditional Habsburg lands in and around Austria. It then, after a series of eye-watering bribes, meant becoming Holy Roman Emperor as well. This fluky sequence of events handed power of an unexampled kind to a young, well-educated, thoughtful and diligent man. Nobody involved intended this to happen – at several points a much more modest inheritance would have been possible. The new, and only slightly older, King of France, Francis I, could only look on in stupefied anger. The England of the also very young Henry VIII appeared almost an irrelevance (which despite Henry’s bullfrog-like puffing continued generally to be the case). Quite by accident almost the whole of Europe now found itself ruled by dressy young show-offs, with the last remaining Gothic smells of their predecessors suddenly gone. But if this was not enough, Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand was about to get a surprise bonus.
Help from the Fuggers
This is perhaps a peculiar admission, but I have never much liked the Mediterranean and have been there rarely. It always seems a bit too out-of-doors and broad-chested for me. Just thinking of all that burning sunshine and ability to navigate in small boats makes me instinctively shrink back. I recently and reluctantly agreed to go to there on a family holiday and at once felt trapped in the sort of novel in which a young curate sits on his own in his hotel room, leafing through his fine edition of Robert Browning, while his beautiful wife hangs out with dockside minotaurs, feeling their deltoids. The novel ends in Bacchic delirium with none of the frenzied participants able to hear the reedy cries for help from the curate as – in a hopeless and ignored attempt to show his wife his prowess at swimming – he is swept out to sea by a current which, the novelist implies, was conjured up by an ancient god to expel such spindle-shanked weakness from his domain. I hasten to add that I felt this based on the unhealthy influence of British Mediterranean fiction rather than because my wife has untreatable stevedore issues.
I am really not saying that I am antagonistic to the south with any sense of pride or aggression, just to record a basic
Juana’s incapacity meant that her father acted as a deeply resentful regent in the period between Philip’s death and his own. The extreme difficulty after Ferdinand’s funeral of having Juana sole monarch meant that in a series of broadly unconstitutional coups her son Charles arrived from his Burgundian lands and made himself not just regent but king, definitively uniting Spain in the face of widespread incredulity and resentment from its inhabitants. This meant his ownership of Aragonese territory scattered across the western Mediterranean and Italy and, of course, chunk after chunk of American coastline as each returning ship came back having found yet more. Oddly, in his uninvolving autobiography (dictated largely during an idle five days with his entourage, being rowed from Cologne to Mainz in June 1550) Charles does not even mention America, but by that time Europe’s economy had already been completely reshaped by Mexican and Peruvian bullion – he probably felt it was tacky to talk about economic issues.
After three and a half years of ruling Spain and its empire (plus of course his Burgundian inheritance along France’s eastern frontier and the whole of the Netherlands) Charles then had to take on (still only nineteen years old) the consequences of his grandfather Maximilian’s death. In the first instance this meant inheriting all the traditional Habsburg lands in and around Austria. It then, after a series of eye-watering bribes, meant becoming Holy Roman Emperor as well. This fluky sequence of events handed power of an unexampled kind to a young, well-educated, thoughtful and diligent man. Nobody involved intended this to happen – at several points a much more modest inheritance would have been possible. The new, and only slightly older, King of France, Francis I, could only look on in stupefied anger. The England of the also very young Henry VIII appeared almost an irrelevance (which despite Henry’s bullfrog-like puffing continued generally to be the case). Quite by accident almost the whole of Europe now found itself ruled by dressy young show-offs, with the last remaining Gothic smells of their predecessors suddenly gone. But if this was not enough, Charles’s younger brother Ferdinand was about to get a surprise bonus.
Help from the Fuggers
This is perhaps a peculiar admission, but I have never much liked the Mediterranean and have been there rarely. It always seems a bit too out-of-doors and broad-chested for me. Just thinking of all that burning sunshine and ability to navigate in small boats makes me instinctively shrink back. I recently and reluctantly agreed to go to there on a family holiday and at once felt trapped in the sort of novel in which a young curate sits on his own in his hotel room, leafing through his fine edition of Robert Browning, while his beautiful wife hangs out with dockside minotaurs, feeling their deltoids. The novel ends in Bacchic delirium with none of the frenzied participants able to hear the reedy cries for help from the curate as – in a hopeless and ignored attempt to show his wife his prowess at swimming – he is swept out to sea by a current which, the novelist implies, was conjured up by an ancient god to expel such spindle-shanked weakness from his domain. I hasten to add that I felt this based on the unhealthy influence of British Mediterranean fiction rather than because my wife has untreatable stevedore issues.
I am really not saying that I am antagonistic to the south with any sense of pride or aggression, just to record a basic
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