The Habsburgs

1

CASTLE HABSBURG AND THE ‘FORTINBRAS EFFECT’

At the beginning of the last century, an unusually diligent student set himself the task of establishing the descent of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was at that time Emperor Franz Joseph’s heir. The genealogy he established ran to thirty-three tables and listed more than 4,000 of Franz Ferdinand’s ancestors, going back to the sixteenth century. On account of intermarriage, however, there were so many overlaps that the student found only 1,500 separate individuals, for many husbands were also cousins, and wives were often nieces several times over. So Franz Ferdinand was related to the sixteenth-century Emperor Ferdinand I through more than a hundred separate descents and to Ferdinand’s distant cousin, the unmemorable but deeply pious Renate of Lorraine, by twenty-five.¹

Dedicating his research to Franz Ferdinand, the student glossed over the extent of Habsburg intermarriage by demonstrating statistically that all the ruling families of Europe had in the past been equally incestuous. He also apologized that he had been unable to take his investigations further back into the Middle Ages. But had he tried to track the archduke’s descent back to the eleventh century, he would have had to fill in the names of several hundred thousand ancestors, for every generation back yields double the number of forebears. Even so, our student’s task would in some ways have been made easier the further back he dug, for the written record becomes correspondingly sparser and the blanks accumulate. By the tenth century, the ancestry of the Habsburgs contracts from, in theory, the hundreds of thousands to, in practice, just a few shadowy individuals.

Books on early Habsburg history often read like mystery thrillers, with speculations that trace a Habsburg bloodline back through the shadowy Etichonid family of Alsatian counts to the French Merovingian kings, whose mythical fifth-century progenitor was a quinotaur, or bull with five horns. In fact, the earliest Habsburgs can only be tracked back to the late tenth century, when they lived in the region of the Upper Rhine and Alsace, on the present border between France and Germany, and in the Aargau, in today’s northern Switzerland. All this territory constituted a part of the Holy Roman Empire, belonging to the duchy of Swabia, and was divided into largely self-governing counties or gaus, each with several counts. The first Habsburg of whom we have definite knowledge was a certain Kanzelin (sometimes given as Lanzelin), who is associated in later accounts with a small fort at Altenburg, near the town of Brugg in the Swiss Aargau.²

On Kanzelin’s death around 990, his two sons, Radbot (985–1045) and Rudolf, divided up his lands. Among Radbot’s possessions was the village of Muri, twenty-five kilometres (fifteen miles) south of Altenburg. Upon his marriage, Radbot gave Muri as a wedding gift to his bride, Ita (Idda), who in 1027 founded there an abbey of Benedictine monks. Ita’s piety was rewarded with a resting place next to the altar of the abbey church. Notwithstanding the sack of the abbey by Protestant Berne in 1531, Ita’s grave survives to this day. She is joined there in death by the partial presence of the last Habsburg emperor and empress, Karl and Zita, whose hearts are kept in urns in a chapel by the altar. Since it was not allowed to be returned to Austria after the First World War, the rest of Karl’s body is on the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he died in 1922, although Zita’s is in the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna.

The abbey at Muri prospered from the generosity of the faithful and of its founders. It accumulated property in more than forty neighbouring villages as well as a treasury of relics, which included the bones of over a hundred saints and martyrs as well as fragments of the True Cross, of the tablets on which the Ten Commandments had been written, and of the pillar beside which Pontius Pilate had judged Christ. Radbot and Ita’s descendants considered all this, however, to be their own. Established and made rich by their family, the abbey counted as a ‘proprietary monastery’—a place of burial where masses were said for their forebears and over which they appointed an abbot of their choosing. They also assumed the duties of protector or Vogt (sometimes rendered as ‘steward’ or ‘advocate’), in return for which they extracted an income from the abbey.³

Radbot’s son, Werner (1025–1096), later called ‘the Pious’, was alert to the new trends in monastic life emanating from the great abbeys of Cluny and Hirsau, which favoured obedience, continuous prayer, and disengagement from the world. Disappointed by the brothers of Muri, who (we are told) came and went as they pleased, Werner brought to Muri disciplined monks from the Black Forest to set an example. But Werner’s reverent act backfired. The monastic reform movement was never concerned only with monkish morals. It also stressed the right of ecclesiastical superiors to oversee religious houses, and it opposed the practice of having laymen treat monasteries as their own private property. This directly affected the interests of Werner, who foresaw that he would lose all control over a monastery in whose foundation his family had invested.⁴

During the mid-1080s, Werner forged a charter, which he pretended had been written six decades earlier by his uncle (or possibly, great-uncle), Bishop Werner of Strasbourg. The charter gave its alleged author, the bishop, credit for founding the abbey and vested the office of Vogt in perpetuity in his family. The fake charter was recorded at an assembly of the principal men of the Aargau and later confirmed in Rome by the College of Cardinals. To add credence to their story, a group of monks loyal to Werner composed a necrology, which listed the dead for whom masses should be said. The necrology highlighted in red Bishop Werner but omitted Ita entirely. The foundation of the abbey was thus linked not to Ita but to the bishop and so, by implication, to the rights enumerated in the charter that had been forged in his name.⁵

The terms of the fake charter were approved in 1114 by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V. On this occasion, however, the emperor added the proviso that the abbey’s protectors should neither profit from their duties nor interfere in the running of the abbey. From this point onwards, Werner’s heirs were gradually stripped of their powers over the abbey. In order to make sure that they did not go off with the abbey’s property in the meantime, the monks composed a detailed list of their lands and itemized their precious relics. They also put together an account of Muri’s early history, which depicted its founding family as plunderers and thieves, who had given land to the abbey to relieve their guilty consciences. Although there may be some truth in the stories the monks of Muri told, their work fostered the belief that the earliest Habsburgs were no more than robber barons, who in one modern description ‘rode across the countryside, murdering and looting.’⁶

Landowners founded monasteries as prayer factories where masses would be endlessly rehearsed to speed their souls through Purgatory. To protect themselves on this Earth they built castles. Whereas fortifications had in the past been mostly earthworks, the fashion from the eleventh century onwards was for keeps of wood and stone. Their purpose was to defend, dominate, and overawe the surrounding countryside, but castles also stood as symbols of the increasingly independent power of counts and lords. The Swiss Aargau had one of the densest concentrations of castles in medieval Europe. One late-nineteenth-century antiquary counted no fewer than seventy stone forts, most of which had their origin before 1300, in an area of just 1,400 square kilometres (550 square miles). The Aargau needed them, for its rich pastures and control over the roads leading through the Alps made it the prey of avaricious neighbours.⁷

Legend has it that Radbot was out hunting one day when he lost his favourite hawk. Searching for it, he came by chance on a rocky outcrop, next to the River Aare, on the very edge of his properties, which seemed an ideal site for a stronghold. Radbot named the fort that he built there the Habichtsburg or Hawk’s Castle (in Old High German, a hawk is a Habicht or Habuh). This, in the contracted form of Habsburg, became its name and thus, over time, the toponymic embraced by Radbot’s heirs. Centuries later, the tale of Radbot’s hawk and of the castle’s origins still excited the romantic imagination. The earliest English historian to write a history of the Habsburgs, Archdeacon William Coxe (1748–1828), ascribed his own inspiration to the sight of Castle Habsburg and likened himself to Edward Gibbon surveying the ruins of the Roman Forum.⁸

Set on a steep escarpment, Castle Habsburg is still an imposing structure, notwithstanding its conversion into a restaurant, with parasols on the battlements. The story, however, of Radbot’s hawk is plainly borrowed from elsewhere. The name of Habichtsburg first occurs only in the 1080s. In origin, it probably had nothing to do with a hawk, but instead with a ford or Hafen, the castle being located close to a crossing point on the River Aare. Moreover, ‘Habsburg’ in its various early forms (Havechisburg, Havichsberg, Havesborc, and so forth) was only one of several places referred to in the family’s preferred list of titles. Once the family began to accumulate properties elsewhere, reference to the Habsburg slid down the list, eventually to be lost in the thicket of the family’s other properties and possessions. The name of Habsburg was revived only in the eighteenth century, at a time when it was fashionable to recall ancestral origins, and it became common currency with Schiller’s popular historical ballad, ‘The Count of Habsburg’ (1803). Until that time, the only family to have consistently embraced the name of Habsburg were the earls of Denbigh from Warwickshire in England. Complete parvenus, they made up ambitious descents and cultivated spurious foreign titles in the hope of adding lustre to their name.⁹

Castle Habsburg was not a ‘robbers’ nest’ but intended to be a home as much as a military stronghold. The original heart of the castle was a rectangular stone keep, measuring over eighteen metres by thirteen metres (sixty by forty feet), with walls almost two metres (six feet) thick at the base. Over this was later built a four-storey residence, which was connected on its north-eastern side to a square tower. In the late twelfth century, both the keep and the tower were surrounded by a long flanking wall, which served also to create a courtyard. A second tower was constructed around this time to the west of the main keep, which subsequently became the kernel of a separate complex, to which a hall and living quarters were attached. It is this more recent construction that tourists now visit, the rest consisting only of heaps of stones.

During the second half of the thirteenth century, the Habsburgs relinquished the castle, preferring the Lenzburg, which lay ten kilometres to the south. But they also had seats at Brugg, where Werner’s great-grandson, Albert the Rich (died 1199), had previously built the so-called Black Tower (which survives) and later the hilltop castle at Baden in Aargau (which is a ruin). Both Brugg and Baden were preferable to Castle Habsburg as residences, since their proximity to marketplaces made their provisioning easier. Meanwhile, the old Castle Habsburg was assigned to vassals of the Habsburgs, being subsequently divided into two separate redoubts. It was finally captured by the city of Berne in 1415.

The Habsburg heartland lay around the confluence of the Aare, Limmat, and Reuss, all of which were in the Middle Ages navigable rivers. The region was also situated at a crossroads that connected the mountains of Inner Switzerland to the lowlands of the plain. The opening of the Alpine St Gotthard Pass at the beginning of the thirteenth century drew the commerce of northern Italy through Lucerne and the Aargau to the great fairs of Champagne and Flanders. Altogether, the Habsburgs owned several dozen toll stations which milked this trade, which was at this time mostly in wool, cloth, metals, and fish. The table land of the Aargau was also agriculturally lush, and the peasants who worked its fields paid the Habsburgs rents, in cash and kind, as well as dues for rights to forage, milling, and pasture. Hence, from one early fourteenth-century register for a village close by Castle Habsburg, ‘The two crofters at Windisch shall give annually as rent two pecks of rye each, making a bushel, two pigs, one of which shall be worth eight shillings and the other seven shillings, two lambs, each worth eighteen pennies, four hens and forty eggs.’ (Twelve pennies make one shilling, and one bushel is sixty-five pints or thirty-five litres).¹⁰