Read Online Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder - Free Book Online
Authors: Simon Winder
Ads: Link
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
* * *
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
Similar Books
