CHAPTER FIVE

The great inheritance » Mary the Rich and the future of the world » New management at Hawk Castle » ‘Beware, beware, God sees!’ » Uses for paper

 

 

The great inheritance

It is striking how much of France’s history is not involved with its sea coasts. During various points in the Hundred Years War, France had hardly any access to the Atlantic, with every harbour in English, Breton or Burgundian hands. It was only in the sixteenth century that the great port of Le Havre was founded and it was reckoned that Louis XIV in his entire, interminable reign only ever actually saw the sea himself on three occasions, all his bewigged adventures being played out in purely inland locations. A general theory could be proposed that the sea coasts were simply not vital organs of the French state and that it was a naturally inland power. In the centuries-long struggles between France and England, England won the immediate issue of the security of the English Channel because it was life-and-death for that country, whereas for France the Channel was always something of an optional extra. A matching general theory would be that English armies whenever they were marching inland through France always suffered from a lack of belief back in London and felt less and less convinced by their role with every step they took. Temporary triumphs always seemed to end in a fiasco for the English, even if it might take a few years for the French state to rally itself to throw them out. The two periods of most thrilling possibility, after Crécy and after Agincourt, proved in the end equally ephemeral. Indeed, one of the reasons Agincourt still has such resonance in the memory of the English was that so many years went by with no comparable victory (nearly three centuries, with the Battle of Blenheim). For the English armies there always seems to be another round of rousing speeches and cheers at Calais followed a few months later by everyone dying of starvation, plague or wounds.

In the later fifteenth century a period of extraordinary fluidity and action was played out in the French, Flemish and English Channel ports. Rather like Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays there is simply too much of a crush of people rushing on and off stage in a blur of wimples, tabards and plate armour for it to be particularly involving. One of the reasons that Philippe de Commynes’ memoirs are so entertaining is that he looks back on his lifetime and shrugs his shoulders in disbelief – the hand of God seems by miles the best answer to every outcome, as one year’s proud horseman becomes next year’s trampled corpse. Calais is particularly busy (‘Say, shipmate, bain’t that Margaret of Anjou again?’) with a version of the Wars of the Roses which is rather like being confined backstage as everyone jostles and gets ready for their turn in the main story. At one point a nerve-racked Edward IV landed in Calais with his younger brother (the future Richard III) with no cash or further prospects and was forced to pay the ship’s captain with his fur-lined coat before heading off to shiver in The Hague as Charles the Bold’s indigent guest (‘never such a beggarly company’, Commynes sniffs). But then Charles packed Edward off to Zeeland, hired him an Easterling escort fleet and he headed back to England and triumphed.

The greatest drama lay entirely in the mind of Louis XI. This extraordinary man, encircled by belligerent opportunists on every side, ended up dishing them all. He is not a figure who has any resonance in the English-speaking world, but is much relished in France as a figure of succulent pantomime horror. In Paris the incomparable waxworks at the Musée Grévin enshrine this very beautifully – with one of its oldest tableaux showing a macabre Louis XI in his tights and furs mocking the despairing Cardinal de la Balue in the hideous crate-like iron cage where he was confined for eleven years. This scene is apparently a little bit untrue, but it has filled generations of Parisian schoolchildren with the right general idea about Louis. More broadly these waxworks have given my own family permanent happiness with photos we have had on a wall for many years of our young sons in cafe conversation with a wax Jean-Paul Sartre and an even waxier Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Louis had an extraordinary ability to frighten people, but also to know when simply to wait – for years if necessary. Each concession he made, surrendering the Somme towns and Amiens to Charles the Bold for example, he viewed as a temporary expedient. His greatest asset was to stay alive, steering France for twenty-two years until its situation was completely transformed. He was someone who loved special prison cages, but also misdirection, secret letters, dropped hints, embassies with false instructions. Commynes was intimate with him and was astounded above all by the sheer, needless complexity of his master’s proliferating schemes.

One of Louis’s key enemies was his own younger brother, Charles. He was the heir to the throne and in various twists and turns gained tremendous territories, becoming Duke of Berry, Guyenne and Normandy. In conjunction with the Burgundians and Bretons he thought he was running rings around Louis, but was not. Chatting with Commynes one day Charles joked about how ‘Instead of the one King there is, I would like there to be six’, the credo of all those who relished French disunity. Charles lost his role as heir in 1470 when Louis had a son (the future Charles VIII) and then died in 1472, probably of venereal disease, aged twenty-five, and his three duchies reverted to Louis. The uneasy but real alliance between Edward IV of England and Charles the Bold resulted in 1475 in an enormous English army arriving at Calais, planning to crush Louis for good. This was the result of Edward’s rather drunk/tearful, we’re-putting-together-the-old-band wish to reignite the Henry V St Crispin’s Day magic. It all ended in shameful farce as Louis, instead of obligingly marching out to battle as part of an Agincourt Re-enactment Society, simply offered Edward and his key entourage a huge sum of money to go away. The negotiations outside Amiens were carried out between Edward and Louis on a fun-sounding specially built bridge, with the two halves separated by a lattice (and without a little door of the kind that had resulted in John the Fearless being hacked to death under similar circumstances – everyone was very alert to that story). Charles the Bold had misunderstood the situation and remained distant from Edward’s army, never imagining such a treacherous deal could be done. Edward demanded to be made the next King of France (‘as usual’ says Commynes), but then settled for cash. The busy sailors of the Calais squadron must have allowed themselves some small expressions of irritation as the low-self-esteem but very rich army commanders slunk back on board.

Already at this point Louis had transformed his situation. Having outlived his sullen brother and paid off Edward IV, only Charles the Bold was left. The curious question is whether, if Charles had stopped at some point, he could really have stabilized his lands and in effect recreated Lotharingia. Very briefly there is a huge arc, from the reacquired Somme towns all the way round to the Swiss borders. He buys from old Arnold of Egmont the lands which are now the Dutch province of Gelderland (the Duchy of Guelders, the County of Zutphen and the area known as the Veluwe – ‘the Wasteland’); he has under his thumb the ecclesiastical lands of Liège and Utrecht (the latter what are now the provinces of Utrecht and Overijssel, plus the then submerged Flevoland); he invades Lorraine and Bar and already has a mortgage from a cash-strapped Habsburg on the medley of lands around the Upper Rhine based around the Sundgau (the ‘southern county’ – now southern Alsace).

As news of Charles’s death at the Battle of Nancy reached Louis he could not really believe his luck. The entire vast inheritance swam before his eyes. Charles’s nineteen-year-old sole heir Mary ‘the Rich’ (as she was now known) stood to get everything. Both Louis and the Emperor had sons who could marry the heiress. Mary herself seems to have been a tough, icy character, ably backed up by her stepmother Margaret of York (Edward IV’s sister). (This is just in brackets, but one of the countless wonders of the Aachen Treasury is Margaret of York’s crown, a staggeringly beautiful and haughty object, which she wore in Bruges at her wedding celebrations. It is particularly striking because all other English crowns had their jewels plucked out and were then melted down during the English Civil War.) In the blizzard of rumours, messages, threats and horrors that followed Charles’s death, Margaret took the key decisions. Louis’s formidable messenger system meant that he knew Charles was dead on 10 January, whereas Margaret and Mary in Ghent were still hoping he might be alive a fortnight later.

The feudal consequences of Charles’s death were crucial. Louis XI immediately declared that all the French lands that had been under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy were now returning to his direct control: Picardy, Artois, Flanders and the Duchy of Burgundy itself. Leading his own army he massacred garrisons to frighten others into surrender and bribed local leaders to betray their trust. In a few heady months town after town, from the line of the Somme to Boulogne, was in French hands: Amiens, Arras, Béthune, Lens, the palace of Hesdin, with its chirpy water-squirting devices. French troops invaded the Duchy of Burgundy, ending over a century of alienation and adding it to Guyenne, Berry and Normandy as another huge region in Louis’s collection. Every possible alarm bell went off in London as the French looked as though they might engulf Flanders too – but Louis played off Edward IV brilliantly with vague, value-free promises and further bags of money.

The downside to all this violence, as Louis himself later admitted to Commynes, was that it proved less than ideal as a means of wooing little Mary. Margaret of York’s brother the Duke of Clarence put himself forward as a suitor and Emperor Frederick III dusted down his earlier discussions with Charles during the Siege of Neuss. Margaret knew that Clarence, her brother-in-law, was a useless character so he was crossed off (he went on to future fame, a few months later, for his murder in a butt of malmsey). Louis also had to deal with the powerful response to his rampages from the elites in the northern Burgundian territories who saw their privileges under sudden and acute threat from the French. In emotional and drastic scenes on 11 February, Margaret and Mary finished negotiating in Ghent the ‘Great Privilege’, a document that crossed out much of Charles’s more oppressive legislation and created a new basis for Mary’s rule over Flanders, Brabant and the rest. One clause stated that Dutch would now be used exclusively for the government of the Dutch-speaking provinces, an issue already old and bad-tempered then, but which continues to dog us today. Margaret was appalled by Louis’s invasion of the duchy – but in any event Louis’s wish to get Mary and marry her to his own heir Charles was hobbled by Charles only being seven years old and Mary nineteen. Under normal circumstances his age would be a standard bit of royal grotesquery, but this was an emergency with almost no precedent and chaos breaking out everywhere: the Duchy of Guelders declared its independence; French troops moved into the Franche-Comté, an Imperial territory which was nothing to do with France. A grown-up man was needed for the job with a lot of resources, not the strange little dauphin. Frederick III’s son Maximilian was only slightly younger than Mary, and therefore they could quickly have children at a dynastically very attenuated moment. Maximilian and Mary were married in Ghent in August, the Habsburgs scooped the pool and a new era began.

Commynes, writing some twenty years later, looked back on this whole time with incredulity and dismay. For four reigns the dukes had extended and managed their domains – and created a prosperity and security which now seemed like a distant dream. All this destruction and misery had happened, Commynes said, referring to the tiny dispute which first caused Charles to turn his attention to the far south of his lands, ‘on account of a wagon of sheepskins which the lord of Romont took from a Swiss, who was passing through his territory.’

Mary the Rich and the future of the world

The Church of Our Lady in Bruges is in the middle of a complicated makeover at the moment and is a mass of wires, plastic sheeting, plywood screens and apologetic signs. Once you battle through to the choir area, it is poignant to see the church’s two most imperious and distinguished inhabitants – Charles the Bold and Mary the Rich – lying passively in their tombs and unable even to offer a mild complaint about all the drills and hammering. Charles used to unwind in the quiet of the evening before going to bed by having someone read to him about the great generals of the ancient world (after Charles’s catastrophic defeat at Grandson, his jester called out to him, riskily, ‘My lord, we are well Hannibal’d this time!’). He would certainly not have appreciated this chaos, and even more so he would not have appreciated just how few visitors seem to notice his or his daughter’s tombs – everyone photographed Michelangelo’s Madonna but I didn’t see anybody more than glance at the discreetly grand bronze effigies lying on marble coffins, the tombs’ sides encrusted with elaborate genealogies.

This was once one of the principal sacred sites in the Low Countries. The two figures are placed side by side to show the transmission belt of legitimacy from the Valois dukes to the Habsburg family. Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian shifted the great tangle of Charles’s non-French lands across to a family who were not only Holy Roman Emperors but also the great landowners of Central Europe, making the Habsburgs the most powerful figures in European history since the Roman Empire. Their marriage was brief – Mary broke her back in a hunting accident aged only twenty-five, dying only five years after her father’s death on the battlefield. It is fair to say that the decisions she took in her short life, in cahoots with her stepmother Margaret of York, directed the history of the world. This was partly negative: if she had married King Louis XI of France, as had been planned, her enormous legacy would have been added to France, making a coherent, readily defended super-state. But by marrying Maximilian she shifted Europe into an era of chaos, with arguments around the future of the Burgundian legacy continuing well into the twentieth century. Of course, the moment you posit a Mary & Louis outcome so many more possible outcomes come into play that it becomes silly to speculate about the events seconds after the betrothal is announced, let alone ten or twenty years later. But it is fair to say that the French now spent three centuries trying to capture the territories to their north: centuries of grinding warfare, bankruptcies, revolution, countless deaths and literally thousands of uninvolving paintings featuring men in wigs on horses, as they battled to get what Louis XI might have had in return for a little civility, a gold ring and a fair-to-middling banquet. I have not been able to find such a quote, but some historically literate officer in the Revolutionary army, marching at last into Amsterdam in 1795, must have surely said something pretty sardonic.

Mary died before most of the Habsburg marriage gambles had come off, but she had nonetheless ensured the future with an efficiency which her father had lacked by having two children: a son and heir, Philip, and a peculiarly impressive and interesting daughter, Margaret, who is discussed later. Mary’s father-in-law the Emperor Frederick III at the age of seventy-seven died after she did, disappearing into his strange, marmalade-coloured tomb in Vienna, having bridged in his own person the entire period from the Battle of Agincourt to the discovery of America. Her husband Maximilian had been elected King of the Romans in Frankfurt and crowned in Aachen during Frederick’s lifetime specifically to take over most of the running of the Empire from him. In doing so he created a tradition that the Habsburgs followed from now on, ensuring overlapping dynastic stability by having the electoral bit out of the way before the current owner’s death, then leaving the Pope’s ceremony that made him Emperor until whenever convenient.

I have tried very hard not to make this a book about endless warfare, but the warfare really is endless. The disappearance of the Dukes of Burgundy made critical again the line in the north that ran down vertically, splitting the areas which were in practice part of the Empire and those that owed allegiance to France. Brutal fighting between Maximilian and Louis devastated the region north of the Somme. A series of epic sieges and battles wrecked prosperous towns, with each year further reducing the value to the winner of what was left. The awkward complication was that Mary’s inheritance went to her son Philip with Maximilian acting only as regent. As someone new to the neighbourhood and with Philip at this point a four-year-old with only sketchy views on enfeoffment, Maximilian had a poor hold on the local nobility. He also had to handle a rebellious Ghent (as usual). He also had to deal with the financial problems that dogged him throughout his life: everybody would be lined up in battle order, properly equipped, with attractive matching banners snapping in the crisp wind, and then word would get out that Maximilian had run out of money again – and the troops would start to drift off home or, even worse, start chatting to the other side. It was all so hopeless that, despite spending years working with Dürer and others on his own tremendous mausoleum at Innsbruck, he wound up completely bankrupt three hundred miles further to the east and was buried in Wiener Neustadt, where he remains today with nobody in the following centuries ever coming up with the funds to cart him back to Innsbruck to lie decently inside his greatest artistic legacy.

After many clashes and false starts the Treaty of Senlis was signed in 1493 between the representatives of two unpleasant teenagers, the now close-to-grown-up Philip (known as Philip the Handsome) and Charles VIII of France, both representing the next and not very impressive generation, but both still under the control of regencies at this point. The treaty confirmed Habsburg ownership of the Franche-Comté, Artois (which had for a time fallen under French control) and the little County of Saint-Pol. The Habsburgs also got to keep the County of Charolais, a small area under the now French-controlled Duchy of Burgundy, which had an unenviable future, knocking about under various lords until finally becoming fully integrated into France in 1760. The Somme towns and Boulogne fell to France in the agreement and stayed that way. As usual, whatever agreement might be made about Flanders, the French monarchy always kept the mental reservation that really it was part of France – if it was now under Habsburg control, this was only ever like putting a piece of fruit pie in the fridge with the intention of taking it out again later.

Charles VIII would direct his silly energies elsewhere than northern France and Habsburg control was consolidated. Under the Dukes of Burgundy the area had gradually developed its own identity. It was, for example, invaluable that otherwise rival entities such as the County of Holland and the County of Flanders were obliged to cooperate against the threat from France. Holland had become fundamentally different from other Imperial counties, such as Mark or Lippe, or even quite large territories such as the Palatinate, in that, whatever its special privileges and exceptions, it had been forced into a dynastic frame where it simply could not directly antagonize, say, Brabant. The bickering that made the rest of the Empire so unmanageable was in the new Habsburg lands much more muted. This came from a habit acquired under the Dukes, but also from anxiety. Places such as Holland knew they had to cling to the other Habsburg possessions or risk a French visit. Maximilian also took over key Burgundian institutions, most notably the Order of the Golden Fleece, which bound together aristocrats and allies and which would always be the most prominent decoration – in both processions and portraits – around the necks of the Habsburg Emperors.

Philip the Handsome, like his mother, died young – possibly poisoned. But, also like Mary, he lived long enough to have a powerful impact on Europe’s future. In another sensational agglomerative Habsburg marriage he had wed a daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and, following a series of surprise deaths, found himself as Philip I, King of Spain. He reigned only briefly before his own death, but he and his wife had six children, including future consorts of the French, Portuguese and Scandinavian kings, the Emperor Charles V, the Emperor Ferdinand I and Mary of Hungary. In terms of playing poker this falls outside the realms of the possible – a super-imperial-royal-cheat flush. It meant that Charles V inherited all the Burgundian, Habsburg and Spanish lands – including of course America, the potential of which was beginning to become apparent under Philip. Nobody had ever ruled so widely and on so rickety a set of chances.

New management at Hawk Castle

German historians of the nineteenth century loved to talk about the five ‘tribal duchies’ or ‘stem duchies’, the great chunks of land created by the Frankish eastern conquests: Lotharingia, Saxony, Bavaria, Franconia and Swabia. This sort of stuff, with its flavour of winged helmets, rough fellowship, drooping beer-stained moustaches and warriors beating their swords on their shields to acclaim their chief, was enough to have followers of Wagner in ecstasies. In their different ways the ghosts of these five entities have endured to the present, but with only Bavaria maintaining a steady and substantial political shape. Swabia and Lotharingia detonated into fragments with parts of both coalescing into Switzerland.

This original, galactic event happened in Swabia’s case in the chaotic winding-up of the intensely tangled House of Hohenstaufen in the 1250s. The resulting interregnum was long remembered as a terrifying disaster, with the entire Empire reduced to a period of anarchic sauve-qui-peut. In the far north of the Empire, this provided the opening for William II, Count of Holland, appointed at one point as a widely unacknowledged ‘anti-king’, to donate to himself the County of Zeeland, with great future implications, and start setting up a suitably posh court in line with his wobbly new status, creating the Binnenhof and the origins of the city of The Hague. This was characteristic of the shambles: all over the Empire violence, betrayal and uncertainty ruled and its memory would be a key element in the relative (only relative) discipline under which the Empire kept itself once re-united under Rudolf I, the first Habsburg family Emperor, in 1273.

During the anarchy Swabia broke into an amazing medley of different micro-states as everyone turned on everyone else, from individual castles to small groups of confederates for mutual defence – the latter of course readily being converted to the purpose of mutual attack. It was in the fallout that one set of small territories banded together – Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden – and, uniquely, remained together. The earliest elements in what became Switzerland coalesced partly by default: sheltered by the political incoherence of the rest of Swabia, by the underpopulated County of Burgundy (the Franche-Comté) and by the great spooky belt of the Black Forest – then made even more spooky by its being fronted by a much wider and more turbulent Rhine. But they also clung together to deal with a serious threat.

The cooperation between various valley communities was galvanized by the Emperor Rudolf I, who had his family castle in Swabia (the original Habsburg Castle, where the clan’s fortunes began) and extensive entangled lands round about. Each of the Swiss communities had its own special attribute which belied its small size. For example Uri controlled access to the Gotthard Pass, the keys to which it had managed to buy from the cash-strapped last Hohenstaufen Emperor. As discussed earlier, the opening up of Alpine passes was like a magic wand, comparable to Holland’s ability to fill in bits of sea to conjure up farmland. The new trade meant that Luzern, most strikingly, within a few years became almost as large as it would be in its crazy touristic heyday in the nineteenth century. It was the fate of the Habsburg family to find itself endlessly at odds with these ornery and self-sufficient people, both as local landowners and as emperors. If time travel were ever invented (which by definition, sadly, it cannot be as otherwise our history books would be filled with random silver-foil-wrapped busybodies handing out bazookas to King Harold’s thegns at the Battle of Hastings, etc.) then the first traveller’s job might be to nip back to the later Middle Ages and tip off both the Habsburgs and the Dukes of Burgundy about not messing with the Swiss.

Habsburg Castle is still there, now part of the very Swiss canton of Aargau. An attractive foresty walk away from the town of Brugg, the castle frowns down on the valley of the almost synthetically bright blue River Aare shortly before it hits the more conventionally coloured Rhine. I have spent so many years thinking about and writing about the Habsburg family that it seemed a bit bathetic at last getting to the original ‘Castle of the Hawk’ after which they named themselves. I almost expected special singing, a rainbow and some sort of commemorative goblet. The castle itself was also a bit low-key, with a little drinks terrace and a handful of instructive information boards.

The interaction between the Habsburgs and the people who became known in the end as the Swiss was crucial to shaping both sides, but positive only for the latter. The Habsburgs were entangled with non-Habsburg interests from the east in the Tyrol, in part with the ‘safe space’ of Lake Konstanz in the way, and from the north through their ownership of the area around Habsburg Castle and the oddly named (only from a Western European perspective) ‘Further Austria’, which in the fourteenth century included such places as Belfort, various bits of Alsace and Freiburg-im-Breisgau with its associated ‘forest towns’ in the Black Forest. The Habsburgs could, even before they permanently became the Holy Roman Emperors from 1452, call on all manner of family friends, neighbours and mercenary troops to take on the Swiss.

These efforts invariably resulted in humiliation. The peculiar ability of ‘Lotharingian’ particularism to humble the mighty was as powerful in the south as it would prove elsewhere. Generations of clanking, bearded generalissimos must have stared at maps and laughed at the ease with which these small areas could be subjugated. Not so! One cliché about the Swiss is to link their particularly harsh form of Protestantism to its associated sense of discipline and single-mindedness – but almost all the heavy damage they inflicted on Europe was done as good, conventional Catholics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Swiss use of the halberd – a very long pole with razor-edged hooked and slicing surfaces at its tip – absolutely confounded the flower of chivalry, with expensive knights slaughtered en brochette. As with the French being mown down by English archers, it was odd how long it took for the losing side to react to their technological failing. It must have been after a while quite boring for both sides as yet another Swabian count dolled himself up in steel plates, prettily coloured heraldic festoons, various things made of leather and my lady’s favour tied to his sleeve. Trained in sword-play and the handling of a war-charger since childhood, the count galloped towards the Swiss front line. Meanwhile, some Appenzeller rustic finished his delicious cheese sandwich, spat on his hands, gripped his halberd and awaited his inevitable victory. Ultimately the Habsburgs pretty much ran out of motivated Swabian knights and both sides would instead field great mobs of these halberdiers who would engage in horrifying shoving matches, with the first side to falter suddenly run through at random angles. Almost inevitably, a gaggle of mercenaries and feudal levies versus soldier-citizens defending their families and farms tended to result in the former losing motivation first and getting kebabed.

All these Habsburg invasions simply bounced off. There were always plenty of minor rebellions dealt with successfully elsewhere in the Empire and throughout the whole sequence of conflicts there was incredulity at this specifically Swiss form of resistance and its solidity of purpose. In 1315 Leopold I, Duke of Austria, came galloping in and had his army devastated and then butchered at the Battle of Morgarten. In 1386 it was the turn of Leopold III, Duke of Austria, who brought with him a specialized detachment of scythe-troops to destroy the harvests as they headed south from Brugg. The Swiss killed him, together with a rich selection of local noblemen and most of his troops (including presumably the ones awkwardly carrying only grass-cutting equipment) at the Battle of Sempach. In 1415 the Aargau, including Habsburg Castle, fell to Swiss control, never to be returned. In 1460 the Swiss seized from the Habsburg the Thurgau – the area east of Zürich – leaving the city of Konstanz as the enclave it has remained ever since and giving the Swiss attractive lakefront views. Having in 1477 destroyed Charles the Bold and therefore transformed the entire story of Europe – ironically, elsewhere at least, in the Habsburgs’ favour – the Swiss then in 1499 spent an enjoyable six months massacring all the troops that the Habsburg Maximilian I could send their way. After the cataclysmic Battle of Dornach, where even Maximilian’s commander was killed, the Habsburgs essentially decided to pretend the Swiss were not there. They acknowledged that that these truculent Swabians were no longer part of the Holy Roman Empire, but only in the sense of their being in a not-to- be-brought-up-in-conversation, haven’t-heard-from-them-in-a-while limbo. As a final and crucial element in the northern Swiss story Basle and Schaffhausen also jumped ship after Dornach, taking advantage of Maximilian’s exhausted demoralization.

One consistent advantage the Swiss had (and which would later be shared by the Dutch) was that while they were undoubtedly important to the Habsburgs, they tended to be less important than other family concerns. When they became the Empire’s serious retributory focus they could defeat the invaders – but often they could rely on Imperial financial exhaustion or the Empire having battles to fight elsewhere. Figures such as Leopold III’s son, Frederick IV ‘of the Empty Pockets’, were swamped by such a sea of troubles in the 1410s that it was only one humiliation among many when he too lost various bits and bobs to the Swiss. Each one of these blows though was like a lesson in civics for the Swiss themselves – despite moments of murderous disagreement, once their initial alliance had held, it made sense to extend it, with each member aware of its wider responsibility. Oddly it became a tiny version of the Habsburg Empire itself, with micro-acrimonies about which canton should rule over which field, rural areas subject to ruthlessly extractive urban oligarchies and bad blood that could endure for centuries. But what ultimately became known as Switzerland was a fascinating experiment in non-noble, non-royal existence and hung a durable question mark over the management of other European political entities. It also created a thick black line under southern Germany which was not to be crossed. The agreements of 1499 turned out to make this permanent. The following century would present the same agonies and opportunities to another tangle of cities, counties and Church properties at the drastically less mountainous and more watery far northern end of Lotharingia.

‘Beware, beware, God sees!’

One of the smaller events of the malevolent year of 1567 was the hunt by special agents of the Duke of Alva for Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Owned and probably commissioned by the Counts of Nassau, it had been removed from the palace at Brussels and concealed from the Spanish invaders. The agents captured the palace’s head of household and tortured him nearly to death. Alva himself owned a tapestry version of the picture (the equivalent of a smudged photocopy) and there was clearly something about it that drove people mad. The torture must have worked as the following year the great triptych was on its way to Madrid, where it has been ever since.

Bosch’s paintings have always provoked strong feelings. I am probably writing this book because of the accident of working in a bookshop when I was sixteen with a copy of a lavish edition of Bosch’s complete works and his imitators near the till. My interest in the Habsburgs came from an amazed first visit to Vienna – but while I would like to claim it was provoked by enthusiasm for Musil and Mahler, what really drove me along was knowing that Bosch’s The Last Judgement was there, and, not far behind, Brueghel’s Tower of Babel. It was not until two years ago that I at last made the pilgrimage to ’s-Hertogenbosch, and felt almost nervous doing so. My mind has been cluttered for so long with minor details from Bosch’s work that I felt his home town must in some way have the same bright, pinnacle-filled and entangling atmosphere – and was worried that it might instead foreground things like traffic lights and kebab shops. After the initial shock (traffic lights and kebab shops) it seemed just right – in other words a real place with a fascinating history. A lot of its old military defences are still standing and a spectacular set of water meadows give a view unchanged since the seventeenth century: it can be seen in a painting of the 1629 siege, which led to ’s-Hertogenbosch now being part of the Netherlands rather than Belgium. But as usual with artists, they just happen to live somewhere – and their private vision of the world does not mean that in some weird way it would end up tinting or shaping the place itself.

Hieronymus Bosch’s real name was Jheronimus von Aken but he gave as his signature a slightly classicized version of his first name and then an abbreviated version of his town’s name (still used today: Den Bosch). He could be further anglicized and called Jerry Wood, although in practice that would be silly. The name ’s-Hertogenbosch simply means ‘The Duke’s Woods’ and is from its founder, the vigorous and erratic crusader Henry I, Duke of Brabant and Lower Lotharingia, who in the early thirteenth century founded a number of towns to extend and consolidate his dominions.

Bosch died in 1516, only a couple of years before the Emperor Maximilian, in a world filled with communication, bureaucracy, letter-writing, diaries, and yet very little is known about him. He must always have appeared remarkable, but equally he was once surrounded by all kinds of exceptional artists in other media. At the time his pictures were simply one expression of an all-consuming agony about the fall of mankind shown equally in personal prayer, song, processions, sermons, charitable work, the building, maintenance and beautifying of churches, prayer circles for family or friends, the mass itself. A woman who decided to live the rest of her life in a community of beguines, helping the sick and reading the Bible, was a living, human equivalent of the canvas, wood and oil paint of Bosch’s The Hay Wain – but working in a medium that has left no physical trace. Bosch’s paintings were not designed to create an aesthetic reaction, but to drive you down onto your knees, to think about your fate in a fallen world.

A lot depends on whether or not Bosch had a sense of humour – were his visions of Hell and its torments supposed to be entertaining or serious? For myself, I realized with a certain amount of self-congratulation, that having reached my fifties I had finally lost interest in the more lip-smacking, heavy-metal elements in Bosch. A naked glutton having his mouth filled from a barrel of ghoul’s diarrhoea for ever is undoubtedly a striking image, but Bosch’s lasting greatness is not as an inventor of grotesques, but as a painter of the uncannily beautiful – as a visual equivalent to Milton. Just his birds: how could he invent so many little birds, or bird-like creatures? And his plants: where on earth does the egg-like spiked plant come from in St John in the Wilderness which so helpfully dispenses both locusts and wild honey? And his visions of Heaven: as a sort of light-filled cone, or as a place from which Lucifer’s rebels are expelled, turning into great insects as they fall? He also invented the best ever trumpeting angels, almost invisibly floating above the mayhem of The Last Judgement. It is these happy creations that somehow balance entertainment and seriousness – hundreds of small details which are almost needlessly bravura but which successfully make the taken-for-granted sensational again. He must almost certainly win the Best Garden of Eden competition too, against some tough local competition.

The one clue to Bosch provided by ’s-Hertogenbosch itself is the sprawling, weird and much patched-up St John’s Cathedral. The ancient church was being demolished and rebuilt during Bosch’s lifetime and the result is a fabulous labyrinth of Gothic oddities. It still dominates the town, but when built it must have lorded it over all human endeavour. This was the whole effort and focus of the town’s people: to create a building so big, grand and expensive, so economically debilitating, that no supernatural authority could misunderstand the town’s commitment to redemption. As Bosch inscribes on his painting The Seven Deadly Sins and the Four Last Things: ‘Beware, beware, God sees.’ This little phrase would take on a quite different meaning after the Reformation – Luther would send his famous letter containing the Ninety-five Theses to the Archbishop of Mainz in 1517, a bit over a year after Bosch’s death. Very soon, for the most rigorous reformers, what God saw in the image-and-incense-filled cathedrals was mere magniloquence and grotesque human pride. Rather than investing in a gigantic, tangled Gesamtkunstwerk like St John’s, the role of a church building would in the future, at its most radical, be simply to act as ‘a rain shelter’. An entire sensibility would soon be under siege.

But during the actual St John’s rebuilding this would have been a surreally remote philosophy. Maximilian I held a meeting of the Order of the Golden Fleece there, for which a painted shield survives for Edward IV of England, who sadly did not attend – but on which the calligraphy matches that on Bosch’s The Stone Operation, which makes clear that there was at least in this instance collaboration between Bosch and the shield’s painter, Pierre Coustain. Bosch designed floats for the town’s Lenten parade which, it must be safe to assume, would have been totally fantastic and perhaps the best floats ever made, but which are completely unrecorded. Particularly tantalizing are the cathedral’s most famous feature, the dozens of statues of sinners on the roof, clambering upwards in pursuit of Heaven. In an inspired decision, when these much corroded figures were replaced during restoration work by new stone copies, they were put in a small museum next to the cathedral. We can never know whether or not Bosch was involved with these statues – I like to think that Bosch and his anonymous sculptor vied with one other for rival compelling mutant effects in their different media. As with the Charlemagne sculpture in Zürich, there can be few more atmospheric objects than statues designed for high places but now brought down after centuries of erosion and smoke, to be seen close up. The museum is packed with oddities: a ‘backwards-tilting man’, convulsed in agony with his back arched and his head staring up, mockingly dressed in elegant shoes and a slashed jerkin. There is a winged dragon with a second monster on its back, a unicorn killing a dragon, a monster with large ears scratching itself, a monk creeping on his knees, a devil with a book, a bear with a beehive, a woman chained up by a Wildman, a howling dog, a violin player. And just when you realize that fifteenth-century northern sculpture was just as great as its painting, the museum throws in an ancient statue of Godefroy of Bouillon and a thirteenth-century cow’s jaw used as an ice skate – the last one of these giving a permanent moment of enlightenment: you suddenly notice in innumerable Netherlandish ice and snow paintings that indeed the skaters have jaws strapped to their feet.

The museum made me feel as though I was backstage at some chaotically maintained theatre, heaped with discarded props for productions long forgotten and poorly advised about the use of lightweight materials. One of the many oddities of the clambering statues in their proper place on the roof is that they are really very hard to see. Particularly in a world before the telescope their impact is remote. But this is where the past becomes really confusing: the statues were purely religious objects and it was the process of making them and paying for them that was central to their point – indeed large parts of any cathedral have always been invisible, but for the guildsmen working on each pinnacle or choir-stall detail it was the work itself that created the virtue. Bosch would have felt the same about his paintings: the act of making them was a religious one and his unfettered inventiveness a gift from God. Some of the paintings were for public display in churches (although these were often only revealed on specific feast days) but others were for private prayer. Access to The Garden of Earthly Delights was only for a handful of friends and guests of the Counts of Nassau. This was a world of rarity and an aesthetic almost wholly alien to our own.

The rarity has been much increased by the passage of five often very rough centuries. There are tantalizing glimpses of lost Bosch paintings. A large and elaborate Christ Carrying the Cross was in a church in Ghent and we know it from a drawing made in 1556 by an artist who ‘converted’ Bosch’s figures into a much more fluid, Renaissance style. Nonetheless, you can tell it must have been an astounding object – some thirty figures in elaborate armour, with flags, trumpets and weird spears. It was almost certainly destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts. This may well have been the case too with the large set of paintings of the Sixth Day of Creation he created with his elder brother for St John’s Cathedral itself. Can you imagine how wonderful they could have been? These have vanished – as has a large Last Judgement commissioned by Philip the Fair, who was in town during a war with Guelders. With Philip was his boon companion Henry III, Count of Nassau and Lord of Breda, and it was either him or his uncle and predecessor as count who commissioned The Garden of Earthly Delights. This painting passed on his death to his younger brother William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Revolt. Perversely, much more of Bosch’s work would probably have been destroyed if it had not been for the swivel-eyed enthusiasm of the Duke of Alva, whose brutal actions opened this section. So many things remain mysterious. The first art historical reference to the painting is in an inventory of 1593, ‘A painting of the world’s variety, which they call The Strawberry ’: so even its usual title is a later fabrication and a piece of misdirection.

I imagine that intermittently I will (in common with many others) spend the rest of my life mulling over these mysterious and very beautiful pictures. I have only just noticed how in The Vagabond there is on a distant hill a brightly coloured crowd gathered around a gallows – but the gallows are to scale at least a couple of hundred feet high and could only be built to hang a giant or a whale. What is going on? We shall never know.

Uses for paper

Just south of Basle there is a wonderfully engaging paper mill, powered by a mossy, thunderous waterwheel. Inside, you can easily follow the different rotating shafts linked to the wheel as they lift and drop the hammers which pound the rags into paper: perhaps the only example of a technical process I have been able to fully understand. Seeing how paper in its liquid form is so closely akin to pancake batter brought together two of my lifelong priorities in a way that was uniquely satisfying. The rest of the mill was devoted to instructive displays about the many uses of paper, but unfortunately ruined it all with a statement about how Americans and Europeans use toilet paper in different ways to wipe their bottoms. This may or may not be true, but I refuse to share the details.

The paper mill is Basle’s best shot in the long-running battle between Mainz, Strasbourg and Basle about who was most important in the invention and diffusion of printing. The details will always be obscure. It is true that Johannes Gensfleisch, known as Gutenberg, unhelpfully moved around between Mainz and Strasbourg allowing starchy civic patriots in the nineteenth century to commission statues for both cities. It is also true that Basle became an extremely important source of printed books very quickly. But so did many places. The speed with which printing raced across Europe from 1440 remains astonishing. In the space of a generation the way in which books were understood was transformed. From an English point of view, the key figure was William Caxton, living in Bruges as part of the entourage of Margaret of York. He seems to have first seen a printing press on a business trip to Cologne.

Gutenberg’s creation was fed by many sources. He was himself a goldsmith, but the forms of precision needed were common across many aspects of fifteenth-century life – the fitting of a wagon wheel (or indeed mill wheel) required precision, albeit on a robust scale; a suit of armour had many minutely tooled parts. My own hunch, for which there is no evidence, is that a key spur was the technological battle across the century for ever more precision in gun-making, where being fractions of an inch out one way could result in a weapon that squirted burning gasses all over its user or, the other way, made it blow up. Famously, Gutenberg’s initial experiments used a wine press, so a key element to the invention already existed.

In everyone’s minds there is always a direct line between printing and the Reformation: the new technology running rings around the authorities and spreading the Word in forms which simply could not be stopped. The great encounter in April 1521 between the Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther at Worms (in an imposing hall next to the cathedral, alas burned down by Louis XIV’s troops in 1689) becomes a face-off between hierarchical, medieval Latinate stuffiness and a demotic, modern, populist future; fussy illuminated manuscripts versus cheap, amusing prints showing the Pope being laughed at by devils. This also then becomes the transition between two entire worlds, with everyone wallowing in more than Gothic ignorance on one side and reading attractive novels on the other.

There is no doubt that the future of Europe was indeed played out in the consequence of Charles’s decision at Worms to outlaw Luther and that these consequences play out too through Gutenberg’s invention and had their most profound impact along the course of the Rhine. But there is much more to what happened than a mere Luther–Pope clash for the future of modernity. We cry out of course for a Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster narrative and Protestantism wants this to be true (even as Protestantism itself, of course, shattered into pieces), but it never was. In the notionally prelapsarian pre-Worms world Christianity already suffered from severe difficulties unrelated to printing presses. Most obviously it was a religion that had always been split. The Western European view (including that of the Pope) was on the whole to pretend that the Eastern Church did not exist, and hum loudly with fingers in ears each time that Constantinople made noises suggesting that Rome was merely its Johnny-come-lately low-comedy offshoot. Much of the elaborate ceremony around the Pope crowning Charlemagne and his successors as Roman Emperor and the elaborate iconography around the Theban Legion martyrs and ancient sites associated with Constantine was to counter the obvious problem that the real Roman Empire had had a continuous existence under a very different management in the East. This had been a key tension during the crusades. Part of these expeditions’ failure lay, not just in catastrophes like the crusader sacking of Constantinople in 1204, but in a linked series of fiascos that put an end to the entire realm of eastern Christianity – with Russia disappearing under Mongol rule and the Ottomans engulfing everything to the south, culminating in the final disaster of Constantinople falling in 1453.

While the Pope might have allowed himself a small sherry at this last news, the wider story could only be that Christianity was fading. Both Mongols and Ottomans may have still permitted Christianity, but it was a subjects’ faith. In 1529 the Ottomans would try and fail to take Vienna and their failure stabilized the zone of the Pope’s domains; but another way of looking at it would be that the Ottomans now ruled a vast area containing many of the key centres of human civilization, from just east of Vienna to the Indian Ocean and Red Sea, whereas if they were to successfully fight their way through the Holy Roman Empire there would only be France left before they reached the Atlantic. The dramas of Christian Europe happened in a small space.

This sense of Christianity being penned in, its universalism mocked, was made far worse by the way that there were innumerable forms of heresy even within its heartlands. The Waldensians had survived through countless persecutions, twisting and turning since the twelfth century and suffering a further round of massacres in the late fifteenth century. Most awkwardly, the Kingdom of Bohemia was in the hands of the thoroughly non-papal Hussites, who had successfully fought off several major crusades to get them out.

There was also the degree to which, regardless of Luther, the Pope’s authority had been under attack for centuries, at times reducing him to a laughably self-inflated Italian baron. Everyone has their favourite Pope story (it is always worth reading about the Cadaver Synod, obviously) but the Great Schism from 1378, which featured three rival popes, had a ruinous impact on the prestige of the office. This was finally resolved at the Council of Konstanz in 1417, but this did nothing to assuage an elaborate, intellectually powerful view that the Pope should only operate in conjunction with the important men who elected him. Curiously, some of the territories which were most critical of the papacy, particularly the Rhineland, in practice proved most impervious to Luther: in other words, being sceptical of the Pope’s special powers was a long, honourable and purely Catholic tradition. The Council of Konstanz was also important because it provided the key, unencouraging precedent for Luther. It was here that Jan Hus came under safe conduct from the Emperor to make the Hussite case, only to end up wearing a paper hat covered in drawings of devils and being burned alive. Hus hung heavily in the air at Worms for both sides – killing him had not ended Hussitism and it had damaged the Emperor’s status. But, still, Luther was kind of annoying … His being whisked away by his allies, disguised and hidden in a Saxon castle, may well have prevented him from being imprisoned or executed, but it also made him into even more of a European celebrity.

The deepest critiques of Catholicism lay in the lands of the Bishop of Utrecht, a large exclave of territory east of Utrecht itself which since the sixteenth century has been called the Overijssel. Many forms of private devotion were scattered throughout Europe. The great majority of prayers did not involve the structure of a church, but private shrines, pamphlets, images in households, books of hours. There was simply no serious means of regulating any of this activity, with potentially any amount of heresy in just one street of houses. Overijssel turned out to be important as the home of the inward, private world of the Brotherhood of the Common Life and because it was the source of The Imitation of Christ, a book attributed to Thomas à Kempis, whose alarmingly scrambled-up bones are now kept in a box in a church in Zwolle together with a charming little painting of him being inspired. One of the most popular books ever written, it is an extraordinarily spiky, strange experience filled with the most crushing direct demands and awkward questions. It is disturbingly self-sufficient and plunges the reader into a world where The Imitation of Christ and the Bible are all a poor sinner needs. The Pope’s plan to build a glossy new St Peter’s Cathedral seems to be happening on a different planet.

The Imitation was a bestseller in manuscript – hundreds of copies still survive today. This was, of course, a much smaller circulation than print, but it was also a different habit, with each copy being read by many dozens of individuals before it fell apart. Before Gutenberg there was in other words a very effective, ancient habit of widespread reading, sharing and access. Orthodox Catholics could also embrace à Kempis – it became with the Bible one of the two books always on the desk of Ignatius of Loyola, Superior General of the Jesuits. But it nonetheless was a symptom of a Christianity dangerously (from the Vatican’s point of view) unreliant on the Vatican.

I feel I need to make one last, totally unprovable pre-Lutheran and non-Gutenberg assertion, the result of spending two decades wandering the art galleries of the Rhine and Low Countries. There seems to be an absolute explosion of very vivid, high-quality altar paintings from around the 1490s. Fifteenth-century art is often extremely special and high end (van Eyck, van der Weyden) but associated with the court and wealthy donors, whereas now suddenly every small church seems to be getting a picture. They are piled waist-deep in the Frankfurt City Museum, gathered in from countless Hessian villages. Often anonymous, they are works of incredibly direct emotional shock – appalling scenes of the Crown of Thorns being crushed onto Jesus’s head (a German speciality as a subject). Even today, to look at them feels like being slapped in the face. They are designed to break the viewer’s complacency, a visual version of The Imitation of Christ, demanding a direct, unmediated relationship between the emotional extremity of the events painted and the individual looking at them. There is no way of knowing if this is true, of course, but even if printing is set aside, by the time Luther gets to Worms there were already many important ways in which the Church as an institution has been undermined and in which countless Christians felt a direct relationship to the Bible not requiring any more elaborate framework than perhaps a comfy chair. The ‘Protest’ as it was refined by Luther’s followers was meant to provoke the total overhaul of Christianity. This failed: the Protest itself split incoherently and, in a totally unanticipated move, Catholicism itself successfully reformed, broke out of its Western European confines and conquered much of the world. The nature and parameters of that failure would be fought over at the cost of millions of lives for the next hundred and fifty years.