Read Online Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder - Free Book Online Page A

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 south-eastern 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