The Age of Louis XIV by Durant Will & Durant Ariel

Author:Durant, Will & Durant, Ariel [Durant, Ariel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-06-03T20:00:00+00:00

IV. AUSTRIA AND THE TURKS

Vienna is so beautiful today that we find it hard to picture it after the Thirty Years’ War. Austria had not suffered so severely as Germany, but its treasury was exhausted, its armies were in disgrace, and the Peace of Westphalia had lowered the prestige and power of the emperors. One circumstance was favorable: Leopold I succeeded his father Ferdinand III on the Imperial throne in 1658, and held it for forty-seven years; and though that long reign heard the Turks again knocking at Vienna’s gates, the recovery of Austria was proceeding rapidly. Only formally sovereign over the German principalities, Leopold was actual king of Bohemia and western Hungary, and governed the duchies of Styria, Carinthia, and Carniola, and the county of Tirol. He was not a great ruler; he labored dutifully in administration and the formation of policy, but he lacked the far vision of his Hapsburg forebears, inheriting only their theology and their chin. He had originally been trained for the priesthood; he never lost his affection for the Jesuits, or strayed much from their guidance. Though himself of irreproachable morals, he accepted the principle that all his subjects must be made Catholic; and he enforced this policy with hard autocracy in Bohemia and Hungary. He was inclined to peace, but was forced or led into a succession of wars by the aggressions of Louis XIV and the Turks. Between these bloodlettings he found time for poetry, art, and music; he composed music himself, and encouraged opera in Vienna; four hundred new operas were presented there in the fifty years after his accession. An engraving of 1667 shows already a sumptuous opera house, with three tiers of boxes, every seat taken; so old is that pleasant scaffolding for song.

We must think of Austria in this age as defending the West against resurgent Turkey, and harassed by the enmity of the strongest ruler in the West; the struggle of Christendom against Islam was hampered and confused by the old conflict of the Hapsburgs with France. Hungary further complicated the problem, for only the western third of it was under the emperor, part of this was Protestant, and all of it longed to be free. The Hungarians had their own nationalist sentiment, fed by their literature and their proud traditions of Hunyadi János and Matthias Corvinus; only recently (1651) Miklós Zrinyi had published an epic throbbing with patriotism. Insulted and oppressed by Austrian rule and Catholic domination, the Hungarians were half inclined to welcome the Turks when these decided to attempt the conquest of all Hungary.

A succession of powerful viziers had interrupted the decline of Turkey, and resumed the harrowing of the West. It was one symptom of the recovery that a major Turkish poet, Nabi, sang the praises of the viziers who filled his palm; another that Turkish funds and taste and piety could raise the lovely Mosque of Yeni-Validé in Stamboul (1651–80). Sultan Mohammed IV appointed as his grand vizier (1656) Mohammed Kuprili, who at the age of seventy inaugurated half a century of rule by his Albanian family.

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