StemCell Therapy

Otto von Habsburg never got to be emperor. Born in 1912, he watched as his familys grasp on political power slipped, and the dynasty that once dominated central Europe and beyond became just another surname that whispered of a greater history. A vocal participant in Europes postwar politics, he couldnt forget the legacy hed been born into: once, on being asked if he planned to watch an Austria-Hungary football match, he is said to have responded Perhaps who are we playing?

Otto, who spoke seven languages and whose heart was buried in Hungary while the rest of him reposed in Austria, was among the last of a line that can be traced at least to the 10th century, to the first Habsburg we can speak of with any certainty: Kanzelin (or possibly Lanzelin) of Altenburg, a small-time magnate in what today is Switzerland. Martyn Radys panoramic history narrates how Kanzelin and his descendants made money, territorial gains and enemies: the monks of a monastery they themselves had founded spread the idea that the earliest Habsburgs were no more than robber barons.

The family took their name from the Habichtsburg or Hawks Castle, from which heartlands they fitfully expanded their influence, until by the 15th century they were rulers of the Holy Roman empire, a great patchwork of princedoms and territories and the premier power in Europe next to France. Charles V, who became King of Spain in 1516 and was elected emperor in 1519, had as his motto plus ultra, meaning still further. In the 16th and 17th centuries Habsburg power spread across the globe, with the dynasty establishing a presence in sites from Brazil, Mexico and Peru to Goa, the Philippines and Taiwan, at the same time as their forces fought for dominance against those of the Ottoman sultans to the east. In 1700 Habsburg power came to an end in Spain and its associated territories, but the central European branch of the family would remain a pre-eminent force for two centuries yet.

The Habsburgs are often remembered for their dogged insistence on keeping power within the family. Between the 15th and the 18th century, the family branches assiduously married their young off to each other (after receiving papal permission for these incestuous unions). Rady notes that between 1450 and 1750, there were four uncle-niece marriages, 11 marriages between first cousins, four marriages between first cousins-once-removed, eight between second cousins, and many other marriages with more remote kinship. This genetic feedback loop contributed to a high incidence of mental illness, epilepsy, birth defects and other illnesses among Habsburg children, as well as the notorious Habsburg jaw, which even sympathetic portraitists struggled to conceal.

In telling a family history that spans a thousand years and almost every continent, Rady sets himself an almost impossible task. The Mbius strip of their family tree and the extent and variety of the lands and peoples they ruled over make writing any Habsburg history a kind of choose-your-own-adventure exercise, where the historians own interests and expertise will always shape the broader story. The backbone of Radys narrative is a fairly traditional chronological account, sketching the character of rulers and reigns since the end of the 10th century. Some chapters pause the action, leaving high politics to one side to allow time to discuss cultural and social questions, from the Peruvian baroque to an early 18th-century Serbian vampire craze. The effect is that of a well-polished lecture course, offering a digestible narrative of the familys rise and fall, leavened with some material that sets the central political story in its wider context. Whats missing is a sustained sense of what life was like for the millions who lived under the Habsburgs: how their wars, reforms, assassinations, and peccadilloes made themselves felt (when they did) among their subjects. What did the Habsburg story mean to those they ruled over?

Maybe its natural that historians would struggle to pin down the experience of life under the Habsburgs, since the breadth and sprawl of their lands meant that they themselves often felt as if they reigned over a paper empire. Great swathes of their lands would not see a rulers physical presence for decades or centuries, but a great central mechanism of chanceries, secretaries and civil servants toiled to record and regulate affairs. In the earliest days of the dynasty, they bolstered their power by drawing up histories and genealogies that boasted of their noble origins. When a little more was needed, they werent above faking the necessary evidence: in the 14th century, Rudolf of Habsburg had his scribes draw up fake charters that helped seal his familys claims to political power and regional control. Their paper empire would only grow, with Philip II of Spain a 16th-century royal micromanager who tried in vain to follow a global empire from his desk in Madrid. By the 1850s, about 50,000 civil servants came to work every day to track and tweak the operations of empire in a bewildering variety of languages.

From 19th-century censored texts to the royal propaganda of 400 years previously, Rady has managed to make sense of an empire and its archives in a way that its own rulers often struggled to. A real strength of this account is its attention to Habsburg stories outside Europe, from attempts to meddle in the 17th-century kingdom of Kongo, and the brief period in which emperor Franz Joseph became the colonial ruler of the Chinese port of Tianjin, to the role of Austrian ships in transporting hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans into the eastern Mediterranean and beyond in the 19th century.

But all glory fades and when it did, the Habsburgs were a family who knew how to die. The posthumous journey of Otto von Habsburgs heart was part of a family tradition: from 1619 onwards, Habsburg rulers bodies would be divided in three, with the heart going to the Loreto chapel of the Augustinian church in Vienna, and much of the rest of the body going to the crypt of the nearby Capuchin church, while the citys imposing Stephansdom housed a growing collection of Habsburg intestines deep in its own sacred bowels. Their death throes were felt around the world, with early modern royal deaths plunging communities from Madrid to Mexico City into mourning, and inspiring the construction of towering catafalques which memorialised dead monarchs and their achievements.

Grief and loss were a part of the Habsburg experience, not least for the emperor Franz Joseph, who lost his son Rudolf to suicide, his wife Sisi to assassination by an Italian anarchist, and his brother, Maximilian, at the hands of a Mexican firing squad after four years as the countrys unlikely emperor he died with the words Viva Mexico! Viva independencia! on his lips. Maximilians nephew, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, would be gunned down in Sarajevo in 1914: the dynastys dying days had begun. When the last emperor, Karl I, was ushered out of Viennas Schnbrunn Palace by the socialist leader Karl Renner, it was with the words: Herr Habsburg the taxi is waiting.

The Habsburgs: The Rise and Fall of a World Power is published by Allen Lane (30). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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The Habsburgs by Martyn Rady review negative genetic feedback loop - The Guardian

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