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

busy fighting the Turks to interfere in Germany itself too much.
    There are many jobs at Maximilian’s court which would have appealed to me. I have never really been outdoorsy enough to make a mercenary landsknecht, although their immense two-handed swords, flowing moustaches and puffed-silk slashed sleeves take some beating. Indeed this is the last period where sheer strength was essential to fighting and I really shy away from this. It would be flattering to think of being one of the Emperor’s humanists, musicians or artists, although a more likely post would have been as the trusted, albeit limited, figure who supervised his bowel movements. But then the ‘groom of the stool’ would have been a dream compared to the really horrible job of court genealogist. If ever there was a role which required fake learning and intellectual supinity it was this. Initially enormous work went into proving Maximilian’s descent from Noah’s family, which required some fairly seamless absurdity. Genealogies were important for the obvious reason that they implied rights and privileges stemming from historical deep background. They were also vulnerable – their circulation at foreign courts could provoke laughter from rival crawly genealogists working for other families (such as the Wittelbachs of Bavaria, who could also point to a time when they had provided an Emperor). The respect felt for a genealogy therefore was a side-effect of how, more generally, its issuer was viewed by potential rivals, but in itself it needed to be a plausible document.
    When the Emperor Charles IV had come up with a genealogy for himself, he had suggested that his family were derived not only from Noah but also from Saturn, but this sort of enjoyable silliness would no longer wash in the more stringent atmosphere of the late fifteenth century. Now, after much mulling over his own lineage, Maximilian decided he was not in fact descended from Noah, but from the Trojan hero Hector. Presumably the court humanists, rather than rolling their eyes and making farting noises with their cheeks, must have smiled at the Emperor’s perspicacity, bowed deeply and returned to their library to start all over again. One of the key figures at court was noted for his rigour in creating these family trees, but given their essentially made-up quality this was a rigour which could only be admired so far. Hector was important because of a series of wholly uncanonical (as in fabricated) stories about his sons. Loosely nodding at the Aeneid , these proposed that while Aeneas was founding Rome, a brother called Francio was excitedly heading further north, with his children settling on the River Main and building the City of the Franks, Frankfurt. This stuff was valuable because it tried to give Germany equal prestige to Italy, and Frankfurt a sacral value closer to that of Rome. The family tree then descended through a series of dubious byways down to the deeply prestigious and real Clovis, King of the Franks and then swerved down through one of Clovis’s younger children (to avoid the obvious confusion that the Habsburgs would otherwise be claiming to have been kings of France, a fact that might have been noticed elsewhere) to emerge in the relative safety of Maximilian’s direct real Swabian ancestors. Presumably feeling pretty sullied, the humanists had now established a direct link from Troy to Innsbruck.
    It may seem odd to spend so much time describing so implausible a project, but genealogy lay at the heart of royal power. It had been crucial to the other great Habsburg fabrication, the fourteenth-century bundle of documents called the Privilegium Maius , some signed by Julius Caesar and Nero no less, which established the inviolability of the Austrian lands and created the special title of ‘Archduke’ for the Habsburg ruler, which put him on the same level as the Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. This was laughed at as an obvious fake at the time and much of it had