Veritas (Atto Melani) (114 page)

The description of Eugene’s palace in Porta Coeli Street (today’s Himmelpfortgasse, where the Prince’s former residence now hosts the Austrian finance ministry) is also
entirely accurate, including the position of the future library on the first floor: it was in those rooms that the Prince’s rich collection of books was started, which later became part of
the imperial library and subsequently the National Library of Vienna.

Joseph the Victorious

The descriptions of the sieges of Landau led by Joseph and all the details relating to it, including the story of the coins that the French commander Melac ordered to be made
from his silverware, are confirmed by G. Heuser,
Die Belagerungen von Landau
, Landau (2 vols.) 1894–96.

The procession that forced Penicek’s cart to slow down on the afternoon of the fourth day really happened. A leaflet on the death of Joseph I (
Umständliche Beschreibung von
Weyland Ihrer Mayestät / JOSEPH / Dieses Namens des Ersten / Römischen Kayser / Auch zu Ungarn und Böheim Könih / u. Erz-Herzogen zu Oesterreich / u. u. Glorwürdigsten
Angedenckens Ausgestandener Kranckheit / Höchst-seeligstem Ableiben / Und dann erfolgter Prächtigsten Leich-Begängnuß / zusammengetragen / und verlegt durch Johann Baptist
Schönwetter
, Vienna 1711, p. 6) provides the list of orders and confraternities that took part in the Forty Hours prayer. On 12th April, at that hour, shortly after five p.m., the
Oratorian brothers were swarming towards St Stephen’s, along with the confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and the corporation of knife-makers; their turn for prayers was from six to
seven p.m.

The name of the Caesarean Proto-Medicus Von Hertod is confirmed in the above-cited
Umständliche Beschreibung
, which faithfully reports every detail on the death of Joseph and on
the long funeral ceremony.

For the funeral apparatus described at the beginning, everything is taken from
Apparatus Funebris quem JOSEPHI I. Gloriosissim. Memoriae
. . ., Vienna 1711.

The enemies of Joseph I did indeed include the Jesuits, as Atto Melani claims. The account of the expulsion of the Jesuit Wiedemann by the young emperor, as given by the chimney-sweep on the
third day while looking through his collection of writings on Joseph, is authentic (cf. Eduard Winter,
Frühaufklärung
, East Berlin 1966, p. 177). None of the panegyrics and the
gazettes mentioned by the chimney-sweep are invented: every reader familiar with the history of the periodical press will have recognised the famous
Englischer Wahrsager
(“The
English Fortune-Teller”), the calendar whose fatal prophecy for 1711 is reported by the chimney-sweep.

The story of the sun rising with a bloody tinge is not an invention either: it is reported by Count Sigmund Friedrich Khevenhüller-Metsch, reproduced in the diary of Prince Johann Josef
Khevenhüller-Metsch:
Aus der Zeit Maria Theresias. Tagebuch 1742–1776
, Vienna-Leipzig 1907, p. 71):

This strange phenomenon is very similar to something that happened in Russia in 1936, a circumstance recalled at the beginning of the 1994 film
Burned by the Sun
, by
the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, about one of the Stalinist purges.

As the chimney-sweep recounts, after foretelling the death of Joseph, the
Englischer Wahrsager
seems to have sold in great quantities: judging by the copies still preserved today, up
until the end of the eighteenth century it enjoyed a far wider circulation than the other almanacs of the time.

The story Atto Melani narrates of the proposed kidnapping of Joseph is also true. The traitor Raueskoet made the suggestion to Louis XIV, who rejected it (cf. Charles W. Ingrao,
Josef I.,
der “vergessene Kaiser”
, Graz-Vienna-Cologne, 1982, p. 243 n.98, and Philipp Röder von Diersburg,
Freiherr, Kriegs und Staatsschriften des Markgrafen Ludwig Wilhelm von
Baden über den spanischen Erbfolgekrieg aus den Archiven von Karlsruhe, Wien und Paris
, Karlsruhe 1850, vol. 3 p. 97).

The Censored Biography and the Secrets of Charles

Eugene’s envy, Charles’s rivalry: why has no historian ever investigated the hostility that surrounded Joseph the Victorious? Did the glory he gained in Landau cost
him dear, as Atto Melani suggests to his friend the chimney-sweep?

According to Susanne and Theophil Antonicek (
Drei Dokumente zu Musik und Theater unter Kaiser Joseph I
in “Festschrift Othmar Wessely zum 60. Geburtstag”, Tutzing 1966, p.
11–12), when Joseph was alive a sort of underground war over music developed between the young emperor and his brother (and consequently also among their counsellors): Charles accused his
brother, quite openly, of wastefulness. After Joseph’s death, the superindendent of music Scipione Publicola di Santa Croce was ordered to present the accounts of his directorship, and many
of the deceased emperor’s favourites (including Santa Croce himself) were dismissed, but once the purge had been effected Charles’s regime of austerity softened rapidly, and the golden
period of court music that Joseph had inaugurated continued as before.

There had always been jealousy and quarrels between the two brothers. Joseph was probaby surrounded by other hostile and secretly malevolent individuals. There should have been a historian to
recount his great victories at Landau, illuminating the prestige that the young emperor achieved there, and the secret malice that it had unleashed among those present. A work of this sort would
perhaps have prevented Joseph from being condemned to oblivion.

Well, in fact such a work was written, and it is of monumental proportions, consisting of twelve large manuscript volumes. Fate – or rather Emperor Charles VI, Joseph’s brother
– decreed that it should remain in manuscript form buried deep in an archive, unknown to everyone. Re-examining the affair, as we have done, helps to reveal how the threads of history,
fastened in remote ages, can remain taut and tense until the present day.

The time and place were Vienna in the spring of 1738. Twenty-seven years had elapsed since Joseph’s death, and two since the death of Eugene of Savoy. On the imperial throne sat Charles,
Joseph’s brother. A learned man of letters, Gottfried Philipp Spannagel, wrote a series of pressing letters to a noblewoman, the Countess of Clenck (National Library of Vienna,
Handschriftensammlung, manuscript Codex 8434). Spannagel was one of the superintendents of the imperial library, a post that he had obtained thanks to his great erudition in matters of law,
genealogy and history. He had spent several years in Italy and wrote fluently not only in Latin, German and French, but also in Italian. Eleven years earlier, in 1727, he had obtained the post of
court historian, and then that of custodian of the imperial library. In addition, Spannagel had also held a very sensitive appointment: for two years he had given history lessons to Archduchess
Maria Theresa, Charles’s daughter. It was she who, thanks to the Pragmatic Sanction mentioned by the chimney-sweep, was to succeed to her father’s throne, trampling over the natural
rights of Joseph’s daughters. Gifted with greater virtues than her father, Maria Theresa was to become known to history as the great reformer of the Austrian monarchy. Spannagel, the learned
scholar and preceptor of the imperial family, wrote to the Countess of Clenck to arrange a meeting with Charles: the Countess apparently had excellent relations both with the Emperor and his
consort. Spannagel was concluding an impressive historical work in twelve books, which he wished to bring to the Emperor’s attention. The work was written in Italian, the language his
protagonist had been so fond of. The title was
Della vita e del regno di Josefo il vittorioso, Re et Imperadore dei Romani, Re di Ungheria e di Boemia e Arciduca d’Austria
(
Of
the Life and Reign of Joseph the Victorious, King and Emperor of the Romans, King of Hungary and of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria
; National Library of Vienna, Handschriften Sammlung Codex
8431–8435 e 7713–7722). It was the first biography of Joseph in which full light was thrown on his heroic deeds, within the great historic framework of the years ranging from his
boyhood to his death. In order to publish it Spannagel needed not only permission but also material support from the imperial crown. He therefore repeatedly asked the Countess of Clenck to arrange
a meeting with Charles, or at least a recommendation to his consort. But after a whole year, in spring 1739, the librarian was still waiting for some sign of agreement from on high, indispensable
for the publication of his lengthy work. We have just a short note from the Countess in which, in addition to vague reassurances, the lady fixed an appointment with Spannagel to inform him of the
answer he had so long been waiting for. What this answer was, we learn from subsequent events.

Della vita e del regno di Josefo il vittorioso
is the moving testimony of a sincere admirer of Joseph I, who, in the correspondence attached to the work (Codex 8434, paper 272 ff.),
several times calls Joseph “my hero”. Without falling into mere apologia, Spannagel’s biography offers a lively and full-blooded portrait of its subject, and highlights his
intellectual, moral and military virtues. Three episodes are studied with particular attention: the victories in the two sieges of Landau of 1702 and 1704, and the failed participation in the 1703
campaign, in which the Bavarian fortress was reconquered by the French, exactly as recounted by Atto Melani.

Spannagel asks himself: why was Joseph not able to participate in the military campaign of 1703? The answer is highly significant. Within the court there were those who wanted to keep him at
home, and not for good reasons. The motives adduced for this opposition (Codex 7713, p. 105, c. 239r and ff.) were, of course, “the lack of necessary things” and the
“insufficiency of the revenue”, as well as the “considerable number of enemies” together with the “abundance of all things they had to make war well”. But this
did not explain everything, says Spannagel. One must also consider whether the men who were in charge of political and military affairs on the imperial side were really giving of their best.
“Such an examination and comparison would be a bold, odious and arduous enterprise,” because it would also be necessary to “scrutinise the will, spirit and heart, which have
hundreds and hundreds of inscrutable expedients”. So inscrutable that Joseph’s true friends had some doubt whether “the enemies were served with much greater fidelity than were
the Emperor and the King of the Romans; and that without this defect there would never have been so many difficulties and so many disasters.”

In short, someone was playing the traitor. Or at least, was consciously avoiding doing his duty. For what reason? In the end, it came down to the lack of “good harmony” between
Joseph and his father’s ministers, as well as “some kind of jealousy”, on account of which the ministers closest to Leopold were “on their guard against ministers of the
rising sun” – that is to say, Joseph’s ministers. But according to these latter, the only way to “preserve the House of Austria from final ruin” was for “the
King of the Romans to be able to put into effect great things, worthy of his noble talents”. If anything was to change, and if there was to be a real shift of direction at the head of
government, Joseph’s star needed to shine brightly at last: exactly what had begun to happen at the capture of Landau in 1702.

Spannagel, whose date of birth is not known, but who probably died in 1749 (Ig. Fr. V. Mosler,
Geschichte der k.k. Hofbibliothek zu Wien
, Vienna 1835, p. 148) was a contemporary of
Joseph I, and had been present at many of the events he reports. He could have spoken by hearsay, or he could have cited oral testimony, but from extreme scrupulousness he cites (Codex 7713, pp.
124–26; Appendix to Book V – Letter Z) documentary sources provided by the Chancellor himself: letters from Prince Salm, Joseph’s old educator, to the Count of Sinzendorf during
the early months of 1703. Here there are open references to the “bad designs of this government”, and to the “extreme necessity” of a change in the ministers and the urgency
to replace them with “capable people, upright and accredited, who can alter things and stop abuses”. Writing to Sinzendorf, Salm adds bluntly that “given the hostility of the
present government towards the King of the Romans, until this is changed, I say frankly that I cannot advise the King to join the military campaign.”

Therefore it is true, as the preceptor of Charles’s family says, that Joseph was the victim of “bad designs” – or, to put it more bluntly, of envy. For this reason he was
prevented from going to war in 1703, and hence from making his star blaze anew.

Charles did not like the biography of
Josefo il vittorioso, Re et Imperadore dei Romani, Re di Ungheria e di Boemia e Arciduca d’Austria
. Negotiations were soon held. Through the
Chancellor, Charles suggested some cuts to Spannagel (Codex 8434, papers 280–86), above all, the part explaining why Joseph was prevented from going to war himself in the 1703 campaign: an
affair that Spannagel had reconstructed also thanks to documents provided by the Chancellor, reproduced in the appendix to the work. Despite his sovereign’s insistence, Spannagel courageously
refused to make any cuts, because that would have jeopardised the integrity of the work. He might eventually take the advice given, but only after completing the work.

But something else disturbed the Emperor. The historian must apologise (Codex 8434 papers 297r–298v e 292r) for having “made a mistake” in describing Charles’s education:
it is not true that he defined it as “modest”. In any case, the passage would be immediately corrected, and Spannagel recorded that he was still awaiting documents that he had requested
in order to describe the youthful years of the current emperor more accurately.