Free Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe by Simon Winder

used once in a century.
    Each Emperor had a power-base, which could be very important to him, even if he was often away. Much of the distinctive appearance of Prague comes from Charles IV making it both a royal (as King of Bohemia) and Imperial capital. His son Sigismund shunted around all over Europe in a long reign of baffling incoherence – if he can be said to have had a base then it was at Buda or Visegrád. But these were only ever personal choices rather than institutional ones. The south-eastern Empire is littered with building projects knocked on the head by the early Habsburgs’ changes of mind or taste, or total insolvency. Maximilian I’s empty tomb in Innsbruck, with his body in Wiener Neustadt and his entrails in a copper pot in Vienna, sums up the problem. As long as the Emperors were on the move then they could keep their legal, military, residential and fiscal rights going – much like a permanently turning mixer being needed to maintain wet concrete. A sustained period of inattention could make the whole thing solidify and even – as the simile is abandoned – ruin the mixer itself.
    The mechanism which sat at the heart of the Empire and which made it work was the strange fact – to our ears – that the Emperor was elected. The Golden Bull stated that when the current Emperor died, the Seven Electors had to gather (either in person or through a proxy) in Frankfurt and, sitting in a specific chapel of the Imperial church of St Bartholomew, vote on the new King of the Romans. Following their choice, an immense festival filled the Römerberg in central Frankfurt, with bonfires and the usual whole roasted animals. The choice of Electors was a clever one as these could only possibly agree on someone mutually acceptable and even if one family might nobble two or even three Electors their locations in different parts of the Empire and different moral views could not be squared readily. The horse-trading and bribes could be breathtaking (although much is hidden from the historical record), but the Electors’ eventual choice did have a surprising level of legitimacy, both through the crushing historical weight of precedent and because they were free to choose from a range of rich, capable and adult candidates. This avoided the nightmares of pure heredity faced by France or England, say, which would at irregular intervals wind up being ruled by children or imbeciles.
    The election was hardly an opportunity for any old aspirant who felt lucky to put himself forward, though. The qualifications were formidably difficult, restricting candidature to almost nobody. This was in part because whereas the Emperors of the high Middle Ages had owned extensive lands as part of their job almost all this had by the fifteenth century been given away. The Emperor therefore needed to have access to a huge amount of money in his own right just to maintain his dignity, let alone have the potential to raise armies. In practical terms only two or three families could pass the interview. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was the Luxemburgs who were the most practical candidates as they could draw on their substantial revenues from also being kings of Bohemia, and in Sigismund’s case also King of Hungary and Croatia. Attempts to make the role of Emperor hereditary within a family had seemed possible when Sigismund had succeeded his father, Charles IV, but Sigismund’s failure to have a male heir and the end of the Luxemburg line meant looking elsewhere. A good candidate was a member of the Habsburg family, Duke Frederick of Inner Austria, who was elected King of the Romans in 1440 and crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1452 after a number of local difficulties. Without intending to do so the seven Electors of 1440 had locked into the job a single family who would rule, with one short break, for three hundred and sixty-four years.



 
    The heir of Hector
    In the late fifteenth century Europe goes into a ferment of change