Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder Page B
Authors: Simon Winder
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inadequacy. More often than not, particularly when in Italy, I feel irritable and unengaged and in relation to every branch of the arts am just hugely happier to be further north. This does not mean that I am idiotically against the Renaissance, but I do like it better when under more leaden skies. This recoil even affects my otherwise unbridled admiration for Henry James. If only he could have been prevented from sending his fabulous heroines to Italy and instead routed them to Prague or Budapest. The light may be less immense and golden, but they would have been pleasantly surprised by how attractive these cities are, and they probably would not have got sick.
The Habsburgs’ engagement in Italy – much more substantial and long-lasting than my own – has always been viewed as awkward. By the time of Charles V they had owned the little Adriatic port of Trieste for more than a century, but it was completely hemmed in by Venetian territory, from the Terrafirma in the west and Istria and Dalmatia in the east. With the Adriatic as a Venetian preserve the Habsburgs were helpless here and Trieste only started to have real value as a side-effect of Venice’s eighteenth-century decay. There was also the little territory of Görz or Gorizia to the north of Trieste, whose rulers first conceded a small portion of their lands to the Habsburgs that allowed Tyrol and Styria to be linked up and then in the will of the last, heirless, half-Magyar count the remaining territory was left to Maximilian in 1500, who promptly occupied it, much to Venetian fury. This whole area remains today a sort of linguistic mudslide, particularly once you throw in the eastern territory of Carniola (now the nucleus of Slovenia and itself partly comprised of the Windic March, a defunct political term that sounds so lovely that it is almost as much to be regretted as the old Balkan Principality of Hum). Italian, Slovene, German, Friulian, Ladin and Croatian have always competed in highly unstable ways, but for much of Habsburg history Venetian power meant that this area was an agreeable dead end, a territorial appendix that provided some manpower and some revenue and some very beautiful little towns.
The line of the Alps meant that the Venetians blocked the eastern end of Italy, the French blocked the west except through the vulnerable County of Burgundy and much of the rest was taken up by contemptuous, crazily anti-Habsburg and self-sufficient Swiss. Once they had defeated Maximilian in 1499 the Swiss lived in a strange legal limbo, with the surrounding states effectively pretending they were not there. In practical terms the only way the Habsburgs could get into Italy was in their role as Holy Roman Emperor, using the Brenner Pass and down through the Imperial territories of Brixen and Trento, the former mainly German-speaking, the latter Italian. It still required transit through a small area of Venetian territory, but this was unproblematic: if the Empire was at war with Venice too then it could trample regardless.
So the Habsburg interest in Italy was always a very uneasy one. It had powerful if somewhat notional origins in the link between the Emperor and the Pope, plus the niggling sense that a revival of the Roman Empire which did not include Italy was a bit odd. As it turned out Frederick III was the last Emperor to be crowned in Rome by the Pope, with Maximilian agreeing with the Pope that he should simply be considered Holy Roman Emperor without the ceremony and Charles V crowned at Bologna in an atmosphere of some acrimony as his troops had recently sacked Rome. After that there were sometimes distant and sometimes close links with the Pope, but there was no attempt to make the Holy element in the Empire’s name reliant on a specific blessing.
The Italian Wars which traditionally marked the end of the Renaissance and ushered in generations of helpless misery for Italy were a classic example of the mix-up in Habsburg interests.
The Habsburgs’ engagement in Italy – much more substantial and long-lasting than my own – has always been viewed as awkward. By the time of Charles V they had owned the little Adriatic port of Trieste for more than a century, but it was completely hemmed in by Venetian territory, from the Terrafirma in the west and Istria and Dalmatia in the east. With the Adriatic as a Venetian preserve the Habsburgs were helpless here and Trieste only started to have real value as a side-effect of Venice’s eighteenth-century decay. There was also the little territory of Görz or Gorizia to the north of Trieste, whose rulers first conceded a small portion of their lands to the Habsburgs that allowed Tyrol and Styria to be linked up and then in the will of the last, heirless, half-Magyar count the remaining territory was left to Maximilian in 1500, who promptly occupied it, much to Venetian fury. This whole area remains today a sort of linguistic mudslide, particularly once you throw in the eastern territory of Carniola (now the nucleus of Slovenia and itself partly comprised of the Windic March, a defunct political term that sounds so lovely that it is almost as much to be regretted as the old Balkan Principality of Hum). Italian, Slovene, German, Friulian, Ladin and Croatian have always competed in highly unstable ways, but for much of Habsburg history Venetian power meant that this area was an agreeable dead end, a territorial appendix that provided some manpower and some revenue and some very beautiful little towns.
The line of the Alps meant that the Venetians blocked the eastern end of Italy, the French blocked the west except through the vulnerable County of Burgundy and much of the rest was taken up by contemptuous, crazily anti-Habsburg and self-sufficient Swiss. Once they had defeated Maximilian in 1499 the Swiss lived in a strange legal limbo, with the surrounding states effectively pretending they were not there. In practical terms the only way the Habsburgs could get into Italy was in their role as Holy Roman Emperor, using the Brenner Pass and down through the Imperial territories of Brixen and Trento, the former mainly German-speaking, the latter Italian. It still required transit through a small area of Venetian territory, but this was unproblematic: if the Empire was at war with Venice too then it could trample regardless.
So the Habsburg interest in Italy was always a very uneasy one. It had powerful if somewhat notional origins in the link between the Emperor and the Pope, plus the niggling sense that a revival of the Roman Empire which did not include Italy was a bit odd. As it turned out Frederick III was the last Emperor to be crowned in Rome by the Pope, with Maximilian agreeing with the Pope that he should simply be considered Holy Roman Emperor without the ceremony and Charles V crowned at Bologna in an atmosphere of some acrimony as his troops had recently sacked Rome. After that there were sometimes distant and sometimes close links with the Pope, but there was no attempt to make the Holy element in the Empire’s name reliant on a specific blessing.
The Italian Wars which traditionally marked the end of the Renaissance and ushered in generations of helpless misery for Italy were a classic example of the mix-up in Habsburg interests.
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