Europe: A History (107 page)
DOLLAR
J
ACHIMOV
is a small Bohemian town in the Joachimsthal, some 80 km north of Plzen (Pilsen). In 1518 Count von Schlick was granted an imperial patent to mine silver there and to establish a mint. His silver coins were produced by
Walzenwerke
or ‘rolling machines’, and were formally classed as ‘large groats’. Their popular name was
Joachimsthaler
, soon shortened to
thaler
.
By the seventeenth century the thaler had become a unit of currency all over central Europe. It had also been copied in Habsburg Spain, whose
taleros
or ‘pieces of eight’ circulated throughout the Americas. They were known in English as ‘dollars’. The 30 shilling silver piece of James VI of Scotland was dubbed ‘the Sword Dollar’. In the eighteenth century silver thalers were widely replaced by copper ‘plate money’ imported from Sweden, which acquired the Swedish name of
daler
. A copper
daler
of 1720 was equivalent in value to a silver thaler, even though its weight was 250 times greater; and it could only be transported by horse and cart.
1
The acknowledged masterpiece of the series, however, was the Maria Theresa dollar of 1751. This superb coin bore the bust of the Empress, with the two-headed eagle on the reverse, and the inscription:
R[omae] IMP[eratrix] * HU[ngariae et] BO[hemiae] REG[ina] * M[aria] THERESIA * D[ei] G[ratia] ARCHID[ux] AUST[riae] * DUX BURG[undiae] *COM[es] TUR[olis]*
It continued to be minted in millions throughout the nineteenth century, all posthumous issues bearing the date of the Empress’s death in 1780. It was minted by Mussolini in 1936 to finance the invasion of Abyssinia, and by the British in Bombay. Two hundred years later, it still circulates in parts of Asia as an international trade currency.
2
The dollar was adopted as the currency of the USA in 1787, and of Canada in 1871. But it figures no longer among the currency units of Europe.
Charles V (Emperor 1519–56), whose realms stretched from the Philippines to Peru, was gradually overwhelmed by the multiplicity of competing problems. Physically, he was most unimperial: weak adenoids gave him a whining voice and a permanently drooping mouth, which an insolent Spanish grandee once told him to shut ‘to keep the flies out’. Yet he possessed many talents for governing his vast dominions, speaking Flemish by choice, Spanish, French, and Italian to his officials, ‘and German to his horse’. And he was not lacking in fortitude. ‘Name me an emperor who was ever struck by a cannon-ball,’ he retorted when refusing to remain in the rear at Mühlberg. As the accepted leader of the Catholic princes, he headed the strongest cause which might have held Christendom together. Yet the sheer size and complexity of the internal and external crises defied coordinated action. In the Church, though successful in launching the General Council, he realized that the deliberations at Trent were only hardening divided opinions. His plans for restoring religious unity in the Empire were disastrously delayed. Despite the victory at Mühlberg, the wars of the Schmalkaldic League ended with the stalemate of the Peace of Augsburg (1555). In Spain, where he reigned as co-king with his mentally disturbed mother, he wrestled with the revolt of the
comuneros
and then with the divergent interests of Castile and Aragon. In the New World he fought a losing battle to protect the Amerindians. In the Netherlands, which he had left in the hands of his aunt, Margaret, he was painfully obliged to suppress the revolt of his native Ghent by force (1540). In the main hereditary Habsburg lands—Austria, Bohemia, and Hungary—which he had consigned to his brother Ferdinand, he faced constant opposition from local leaders, such as Jan Zapolyai in Transylvania, and in 1546–7 the first Bohemian Revolt. Everywhere he had to struggle with provincial diets, fractious nobles, particularist interests. On the strategic scale, he had to cope with the hostility of France, with the expansion of the Turks, and with the threat of Franco-Ottoman co-operation.
Rivalry with France engendered five wars, fought at all the points of territorial contact—in the Netherlands, in Lorraine, in Savoy, in the Pyrenees, and in Italy— and, indirectly, to the great shame of his life, the Sack of Rome (1527). Fear of the Turks led to Habsburg takeovers in Hungary and Bohemia; in the longer run, however, they produced an endless series of exhausting complications, both in the Balkans and in the Mediterranean,
[ORANGE]
In his last decade, Charles V might have had some grounds for optimism. But the Peace of Augsburg was a disappointment; and, endlessly frustrated, he abdicated. He left Spain and the Netherlands to his son Philip, the rest to his brother. He died in retreat at Yuste. He was the last Emperor to cherish a dream of universal unity, and has been invoked by some in contemporary times as patron of a united Europe. ‘Charles V, once regarded as the last fighter of a rearguard action,’ writes an interested party, ‘is suddenly seen to have been a forerunner.’
40
After the abdication, the Austrian Habsburgs forgot Charles’s universal vision. Maximilian II (r. 1564–76), grandson of the Jagiellons, gained nothing from his nominal election as King of Poland-Lithuania. His two sons, Rudolf II (r.
1576–1612), the eccentric hermit of Prague, and Matthias (r. 1612–19), were fully absorbed by their mutual suspicions and by religious discord. Over 200 religious revolts or riots took place in the decade after the Donauworth Incident of 1607. Ferdinand II (r. 1619–37), Ferdinand III (r. 1637–57), and Leopold I (r. 1658–1705) were entirely consumed by the Thirty Years War and its aftermath. With the emergence of a permanent and separate Austrian chancellery in Vienna, the centre of gravity of their operation was shifting decisively to the East, whilst the Empire itself seemed to teeter on the edge of imminent dissolution. As the drinkers in the tavern of Goethe’s
Faust
were given to singing:
ORANGE
I
N
1544, at the height of the Franco-Imperial wars, an officer of the Imperial Army, René von Nassau, was killed at St Dizier by a French bullet. His death was to drive events that would affect the history not only of his native Nassau but of Provence, the Netherlands, and Ireland.
Nassau was a small German duchy on the right bank of the middle Rhine. Between the Westerwald forests and the rugged Taunus Mountains north of Wiesbaden, Nassau’s fertile Rheingau contained some of Germany’s finest vineyards, including Johanisberg and Rudesheim. René’s father, Heinrich von Nassau, resided at Siegen, sharing the duchy with the cadet branch of the family at Dillenberg. René’s mother, Claudia, was the sister and heiress of an imperial general, Philibert de Châlons, who had led the sack of Rome and who had been richly rewarded by Charles V with lands in Brabant. Moreover, she had taken over Philibert’s title to the Principality of Orange. When the heirless René was killed, it emerged that he had bequeathed his collection of lands and titles to his eleven-year-old cousin, William of Nassau-Dillenburg.
Orange was a small sovereign principality on the left bank of the Rhône north of Avignon. (See Appendix III, p. 1254.) Bordered to the east by the heights of Mont Ventoux, it was a rich wine-growing district, several of whose villages, such as Gigondas and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, were to become famous. Its tiny capital, ancient Arausio, was dominated by the huge Roman arch erected by Tiberius. From the twelfth century it was a fief of the counts of Provence, and hence of the Empire. But in 1393 the heiress to Orange, Marie de Baux, was given in marriage to the Burgundian Jean de Châlons; and it was their descendants who thereafter became the principality’s absentee rulers. In 1431, when the Count of Provence needed a ransom in a hurry, he agreed to sell off the Châlons’ obligation to homage, thereby making them princes of Orange in their own right. As an independent enclave within the Kingdom of France, Orange attracted many Italian and Jewish merchants, and in the mid-sixteenth century it was fast becoming a Protestant bastion.
1
It would eventually be suppressed by Louis XIV, who decided to put an end to this nest of Huguenots in 1703.
Thanks to his inheritances in Germany, Provence, and Brabant, William of Nassau-Dillenburg (1533–84) became one of the richest men in Europe. He even held a claim to the defunct Kingdom of Arles. Born a Lutheran but raised as a Catholic at the imperial court in Brussels, where he called the Regent Margaret ‘mother’, he set up his own affluent residence at Breda in north Brabant. In 1555 he held the arm of the ailing Charles V during the abdication ceremony; and in 1559 he served as imperial plenipotentiary to the Treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. He then went to Paris as one of three sureties for the Treaty’s implementation. To all appearances he was a pillar of the Catholic, imperial Establishment. But in Paris, he heard of Spanish plans to subdue the Netherlands; and he contracted a lifelong distaste for Spanish machinations. He is known to history as ‘William the Silent’ (see pp. 536–8).
2
Despite its subsequent Dutch connections, therefore, the House of Orange-Nassau, which William founded, was not Dutch in origin. It was a typical dynastic multinational amalgam founded by accident and perpetuated by good fortune. Of William’s three sons only one was to keep the line intact. That child was conceived by William’s fourth wife in between two attempts by Spanish agents to have William murdered. (William had once granted a pardon to his adulterous second wife’s lover, who then went off to father Peter Paul Rubens.) William’s great-grandson, also William of Orange (1650–1702), who became King William III of England, was born in the middle of a Dutch revolution, eight days after his father had died of smallpox.
The Orange Order was founded in Armagh in 1795. Like the earlier ‘Peep o’ Day Boys’, it aimed to preserve the Protestant (Episcopalian) supremacy in Ireland. Its hero was ‘King Billy’ (William III): its watchword, ‘No Surrender!’ At a time when British law discriminated against Catholics and Presbyterians alike, the Order saw itself as the shield of an isolated elite against the growing popularity of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen. Tone (1763–98), a moderate Protestant, sought the twin goals of universal toleration and a sovereign Irish republic. He had appealed for military aid from France.
In the bitter fighting of 1795–8, the Orange Order played a leading part in British plans to repel invasion and suppress sedition. Faced by incompetent adversaries, it prevailed. The expedition of General Hoche, which sailed from Brest in 1796, came to grief in Bantry Bay. The successful landing by General Humbert at Killala in County Mayo was short-lived. The armed rising in Wicklow and Wexford collapsed after the Battle of Vinegar Hill (June 1798). Tone, captured in French naval uniform, committed suicide.
In these and all subsequent events, the Orangemen followed their own exclusive agenda. They opposed both the Act of Union (1801) and Daniel O’Connell. They were not converted to the Union until the prospect arose after 1829 that an autonomous Ireland might be run by emancipated Catholics. Yet they rejected mainstream British Unionism. In 1912–14, they provided the backbone of the Ulster Volunteers who were training to defy Westminster and the Irish Home Rule Bill (see p. 831). Their greatest influence was exerted when Northern Ireland ruled itself within the United Kingdom from 1920 to 1976.
For 200 years, the Orange Order has held its annual parades on the anniversary of the Boyne (see p. 631). Marchers in bowler hats and orange sashes tramp defiantly through Catholic quarters to the whistle and beat of fife and drum. And the old toast is raised:
“To the glorious, pious and immortal memory of the great and good King William, who saved us from popery, slavery, knavery, brass money, and wooden shoes. And a fig to the Bishop of Cork!”
The dear old Holy Roman Empire,
How does it hang together?
The answer, in the view of a distinguished British historian, lay less in the political sphere than in a ‘civilisation’, a set of shared attitudes and sensibilities.
41
The Emperor Rudolf II assembled a court at Prague that really was a wonderful curiosity. His chosen companions, the most brilliant artists and scientists of the age, were men who took natural and supernatural to be part and parcel of their everyday researches. Apart from Kepler, Brahe, Campion, and Bruno, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1537–93) achieved fame as the founder of surrealist painting (see Plate 54), and Cornelius Drebber (1572–1633), illusionist and opera designer, as inventor of a perpetual-motion machine. Drebber, who visited London, promised James I a telescope which could read books at a mile’s distance. He is thought to have been the model for Prospero, ‘rapt in secret studies’, in Shakespeare’s
Tempest
, just as Rudolf himself may have inspired the Duke in
Measure for Measure.
42
Rudolf’s fabulous art collection became a strategic target of the Swedish army during the latter stages of the Thirty Years’ War.
[ALCHEMIA] [OPERA]
Spain
passed from grandeur to decline in little more than a century. ‘For a few fabulous decades Spain was to be the greatest power on earth’ and ‘all but the master of Europe.’
43
Under Charles V/Carlos I (r. 1516–56) it lived through the age
of the
crucero
, the
conquistadores
, and the
tercio
, there being a clear correlation between the supply of American gold and the upkeep of the finest army in Europe. Under Philip II (r. 1556–98) it stood at the pinnacle of its political and cultural power, until undermined by internal resistance, by the hostility of France and England, and by the revolt of the Netherlands. Under Philip’s successors— Philip III (r. 1598–1621), Philip IV (r. 1621–65), and the imbecile Charles II (r. 1665–1700)—it never recovered from a decadent dynasty, from noble faction, or from its debilitating involvement in the Thirty Years War. The fall was so sudden that Spaniards themselves were apt to wonder: ‘was the original achievement no more than an
engaño
—an illusion?’
44
[FLAMENCO]
