NOTES
Emperor Joseph the First’s smallpox — The Flying Ship and its inventor — Ciezeber-Palatine — The Place with No Name and its enemies — Eugene of Savoy — Joseph the Victorious — The censored biography and the secrets of Charles — Atto Melani — Camilla de’ Rossi — Ottoman customs, embassies and legends — Ilsung, Hag, Ungnad, Marsili — Bettelstudenten and chimney-sweeps — Free time, taverns, feasts and other details — The Viennese and their history
Emperor Joseph the First’s Smallpox
Emperor Joseph I died at 10.15 on Friday 17th April 1711. He was not yet thirty-three years old. The official diagnosis was smallpox.
A preliminary observation: smallpox, a horrific disease which has now (almost completely) disappeared, has never been overcome by any treatment. In short, there is no cure for smallpox.
If you consult the famous Harrison’s Manual (Dennis L. Kasper, Harrison’s Manual of Medicine, 16th edition, New York 2005), a basic study text for every medical student, you will read that smallpox is, along with anthrax, one of the ten class-A (the most dangerous), “special surveillance” viruses in the struggle against bio-terrorism.
In 1996, delegates from 190 nations passed a resolution: on 30th June 1999 all smallpox samples still existing in the world would be destroyed. This did not happen. At the CDC in Atlanta, USA (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), they still exist.
When Joseph fell ill on 7th April 1711, no one at court was sick with smallpox. Later studies (see, e.g., C. Ingrao, Joseph I. der “vergessene Kaiser”, Graz-Vienna-Cologne, 1982) report that at that time a smallpox epidemic was raging throughout Vienna. This is not true.
The historian Hermann Joseph Fenger, in his report on all the epidemics that affected Vienna from 1224 (Historiam Pestilentiarum Vindobonensis, Vienna 1817), makes no mention of a smallpox epidemic in 1711. Neither does Erich Zöllner (Geschichte Österreichs, pp. 275–278).
But we wished to check this for ourselves. At the Vienna City Archives we consulted the Totenbeschauprotokolle, the reports compiled by the city’s medical authorities for every death. We examined the reports for the months of March, April and May 1711 thoroughly: there was no smallpox epidemic. What is more, the number of deaths remained average for the period.
Until ten days before he died, Joseph I was a young man at the height of his powers and in a state of perfect health, an active sportsman and a great hunter.
The medical report describes the corpse’s face as covered by copious pustules. However, no mention is made of them in the printed gazette of the day, which described the Emperor’s death and his body as put on display (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). Besides, a face disfigured by blisters would certainly not have been shown to his subjects. Could this have been the work of the embalmers?
According to the medical diary kept in Latin by Doctor Franz Holler von Doblhof (Vienna State Archive, Haus-Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Familienakten, Karton 67), with the onset of the earliest symptoms the Emperor was vomiting mucus and blood. As soon as he died, the diary reads, “from both nostrils and from the mouth blood dripped for a long while.” The neck was swollen and “atro livore soffuso”: dark blue from an internal haemorrhage. At the autopsy, carried out by the same doctor, the liver and lungs are described as “blue and gangrenous, lacking natural colour” (“amisso colore naturali, lividum et gangrenosum”): another haemorrhage, it would seem. On account of the unbearable smell, the autopsy was concluded without opening the skull.
This medical description is catalogued today as “haemorrhagic smallpox”, a particularly virulent and deadly variant. The strange thing, however, is that this type of smallpox has not always existed.
Before Joseph’s death, no medical treatise refers to smallpox having a haemorrhagic tendency.
The first to talk of smallpox was Galen, followed by the doctors of the tenth century, the Persian Rhazes, Alì Ben el Abbas and Avicenna, and then, in the eleventh century, Costantine the African, secretary to Robert Guiscard. All of them engage in lengthy and detailed descriptions of smallpox and the possible complications and progressions, but none of them mentions the possibility of a haemorrhage. Quite the reverse: the progress of smallpox is described as usually benign; only in a few cases where the patients are already weak does it lead to death. This remains true right up to the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Ambroise Paré, Niccolò Massa, Girolamo Fracastoro, l’Alpinus, Ochi Rizetti, Scipione Mercuri and Sydenham, to mention just some of the best-known names, all devote long chapters of their works to smallpox, but there is no trace of haemorrhagic smallpox. They, too, describe the illness as very common and benign: it was fatal only in the huge pandemics unleashed by wars and famines. Smallpox is usually described in the chapters dealing with infant diseases, and is often lumped together with chickenpox and measles. Rhazes, in his Treatise on Smallpox and Measles, makes a very detailed distinction between the two illnesses: “restlessness, nausea and anxiety are more frequent in measles than in smallpox; pain in the back is more characteristic of smallpox.” Ambroise Paré (Oeuvres, Lyon 1664, livre XX, chap. 1–2) devotes no more than a chapter to smallpox along with measles, expostulating on the details in order to distinguish between the two illnesses. Such clarifications seem totally incomprehensible to modern readers: today smallpox is, unfortunately, completely different from the almost always harmless measles. The horrible pustules of smallpox and the terrible syndrome as a whole are totally unrelated to the little red spots of measles and the accompanying discomforts. Sydenham, too, drew a differential diagnosis between smallpox and measles: a sign that from the tenth to the sixteenth century smallpox remained the same, a contagious disease that could be confused with measles. Joseph’s own daughter, Maria Josepha, had contracted it in January 1711, three months before her father, and recovered from it: on this occasion, too, there was no sign of any haemorrhages.
The first testimony that we have of haemorrhagic smallpox is, in fact, the medical report on Joseph I.
Two years later, in 1713, the Greek doctor (some say he was from Bologna), Emanuele Timoni, in his treatise entitled Historia Variolarum quae per insitionem excitantur, refers for the first time to a new practice adopted in Constantinople: subcutaneous inoculation.
A preliminary remark: inoculation is simply the term to indicate the ancient means of immunising, before the English doctor, Edward Jenner, at the end of the eighteenth century, established the method of vaccination that is still in use today. Inoculation consisted in taking a serum from smallpox pustules where the course of the illness was milder and more benign, and by means of a cutaneous incision injecting it into a healthy patient, with the aim of provoking a form of smallpox that would also be mild. The patient treated in this manner should fall slightly ill for a short time, thus protecting himself or herself permanently from the risk of contracting smallpox in a serious form. It was universally known that smallpox never struck the same individual twice.
Obviously subcutaneous inoculation can also be carried out with intentions that are not preventive but criminal — using a more lethal form of the virus.
Timoni reports the presence in Constantinople of two old female fortune-tellers of Greek origin, known as the Thessalian and the Philippoupolis, who had been carrying out inoculations in the Ottoman capital on the “Frankish” — which is to say, non-Muslim — population since the end of the seventeenth century. The Muslims refused to be inoculated. In 1701 and 1709, a few years after this practice had begun to spread in the city, Constantinople suffered the first mass outbreaks of death from smallpox. However, the two fortune-tellers were not lynched but acclaimed. Certain well-known doctors had arrived declaring that without the intervention of the two Greek women the epidemic would have been even worse. And very soon this notion was endorsed by the local clergy, which opened the way for inoculation en masse.
The year after the events reported by Timoni, in 1714, the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople reported the practice of inoculation in his work Nova et tuta variolas excitandi per transplantationem methodus nuper inventa et in usum tracta.
Subcutaneous inoculation spread throughout Europe two years later, between 1716 and 1718, when the wife of the English ambassador in Constantinpole, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, officially imported it from Turkey into England. On her travels she promoted inoculation in all the European courts with great enthusiasm, even having her own children inoculated. In 1716 she passed through Vienna, where, as her diary informs us, she met Joseph’s widow and daughters. In 1720 in England she persuaded the King to have some prisoners inoculated. From 1723 inoculation became widespread.
However, in those same years, smallpox, rather than getting weaker, ceased to be a “benign illness” and became mortal in almost all cases. It was no longer considered an infant disease. The symptoms were much more serious than those described in the preceding centuries and above all were unmistakeably hideous: there was no longer any likelihood of confusing the horrible smallpox pustules with those of chickenpox or, even less likely, with the little red spots of measles.
Marco Cesare Nannini’s essay, La storia del vaiolo (Modena 1963), provides some terrifying statistics. In the twenty-five years following upon the introduction of inoculation, 10 per cent of the world’s population died. There were numerous cases of haemorrhagic smallpox. Inoculation soon proved to be an excellent instrument of colonial conquest: the Indians of America were decimated in this fashion, from the Redskins to the Indios. E. Bertarelli (Jenner e la scoperta della vaccinazione, Milan 1932) reports that in Santo Domingo alone, for example, 60 per cent of the population died in the space of a few months. In Haiti, smallpox, imported in 1767, rapidly killed two-thirds of the inhabitants; in Greenland it exterminated three-quarters of the population in 1733.
In Europe, between the introduction of subcutaneous inoculation and the end of the eighteenth century, sixty million people died of smallpox (H.J. Parish, A History of Immunization, London 1965, p. 21). At the end of the eighteenth century very similar estimates were formulated (D. Faust, Communication au congrès de Rastadt sur l’extirpation de la petite vérole, 1798, Archives Nationaux de France, F8 124). In 1716 smallpox caused 14,000 deaths in Paris, and another 20,000 in 1723; in 1756 mass deaths occurred in Russia, as they had done in 1730 in England, where in little more than four decades 80,505 deaths were recorded from smallpox; in Naples, in 1768, in a few weeks, there were 6,000 deaths; in Rome, in 1762, another 6,000; in Modena, in 1778, following upon a single instance of subcutaneous inoculation, an epidemic was unleashed that decimated the city in the space of eight months; in Amsterdam, in 1784, there were 2,000 deaths; in Germany in 1798, 42,379; in Berlin alone, in 1766, 1,077 deaths; in London, in 1763, 3,528. England did great business with inoculation: Daniel Sutton had founded a flourishing inoculation business, with branches that spread to the remote western territories of New England and Jamaica during the second half of the century.
How many people died from smallpox before inoculation? A few examples from London: 38 deaths in 1666, 60 in 1684, 82 in 1636. In short, hardly any.
At the court of Vienna, before Joseph’s case, smallpox had struck only Ferdinand IV. But after Joseph the disease exploded, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had killed nine more Habsburgs. There were countless cases of haemorrhagic smallpox in those years, and all ended with the death of the patient.
Here are two descriptions of the illness for the sake of comparison. The first is by Scipione Mercuri, the famous Roman doctor who lived from 1540 to 1615 (La commare, Venezia 1676, libro terzo, cap. XXIV, p. 276, Delle Varole e cura loro), and therefore prior to the introduction of inoculation. It will be noted that Mercuri, too, considers smallpox and measles as similar (he deals with them extensively also in De morbis puerorum, lib. I, De variolis et de morbillis, Venetiis, 1588).
The second description of smallpox is by Doctor Faust, taken from the essay already cited of 1798, and therefore at the height of the vaccinatory euphoria.
Here is Mercuri:
I will now deal with the universal external illnesses; and first of all the commonest, which is the ‘roviglione’ known in this country as ‘varole’. Between ‘varole’ and measles there are some differences: nonetheless because both of them receive the same treatment, I will deal with them together. ‘Roviglioni’ or ‘varole’ are little pustules, or blisters, which break out all over the body, particularly spontaneously with pain, itching and fever, and when they break they become sores. . The signs that pre-announce their arrival are stomach ache, hoarseness, redness in the face, headache, copious sneezing. The signs that reveal them as having already arrived are delirium, little pustules or blisters over the whole body, now white, now red, now larger, now smaller, depending on the different bodies of the patients. ‘Varole’ for the most part do not kill, except occasionally when, either because of the air or due to other mistakes committed by the doctors, as many people die as in a plague.
And here is Faust’s description in 1798:
With countless pustules, smallpox presses in from head to foot. It is as if the body is immersed in boiling oil, the pain is atrocious. With suppuration, the face becomes monstrously swollen and disfigured; the eyes are closed, the throat enflamed, blocked and unable to swallow water which the rale demands incessantly. The invalid is therefore deprived at the same time of light, air and water; his eyes emit pus and tears; the lungs exhale a fetid smell; the dribble turns acrid and involuntary; the excrement corrupt and purulent, and the urine is equally thick. The body is all pus and pustules and cannot move or be touched; it moans and lies motionless, while the part on which it lies is often gangrenous.
There is an equally horrific verse description that Abbot Jean-Joseph Roman wrote in 1773 in his poem L’inoculation about a sufferer from smallpox:
A pain not felt before attacks him now,
His eyes are filled with seething scorching liquid;
And dribble, running from his foaming mouth,
Does naught to quench the thirst that burns his palate:
He has no longer use of his chained senses,
Amid dark clouds he only sees grim shades,
His voice is toneless, and his mangled body
Is but the prison of a downcast spirit.
The description of the haemorrhage found in Joseph I appears very similar to the “smallpox purpura” described by Dr Gerhard Buchwald, a German doctor almost ninety years old now, in his book Vaccination. A Business Based on Fear, 2003 (original German title: Impfen: Das Geschäft mit der Angst, Munich 2000). Dr Buchwald is one of the rare doctors still alive to have personally observed and studied smallpox cases. In 2004 we sent him the documentation concerning Joseph’s illness. We then had a long conversation on the telephone. Based on his own experience Buchwald claims that damage to the blood vessels is only and exclusively found in cases of smallpox induced by viruses injected into the vessels. The same conclusion can be read in his book (p. 50 of the German edition), which states that the haemorrhagic course of the disease is to be attributed to the recent injection of the virus and always ends in death.
In short, for Buchwald there is no such thing as naturally occurring haemorrhagic smallpox; it is caused by the introduction of the practice of inoculation/vaccination.
There are numerous studies on smallpox that make the claim that subcutaneous inoculation had been known in China and India for millennia. The same propaganda was spread in the eighteenth century to inspire confidence in the practice. It is false.
As far as China is concerned, the Jesuit father D’Entrecolles, a missionary in Peking, is often cited as a source. But he wrote in May 1726, no earlier than that, and does nothing but quote a passage from a Chinese book which describes the practice of immunisation from smallpox, but by inhalation and not inoculation. There is no connection with inoculation, therefore; indeed, the Jesuit specifies that according to Chinese doctors it would be lethal for smallpox to enter the body by means that were not natural (like the nose), but through an incision in the skin. The famous treatise of the history of Chinese medicine by Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-Teh (History of Chinese Medicine, Shangai 1936) makes the same claim and adds that some medical historians point to India as the place where inoculation began.
The famous Indian doctor, a professor at the University of Calcutta, Girindranath Mukhopadhyaya, in his History of Indian Medicine (Delhi 1922-29, vol. I, pp. 113-33), examines all the claims about the practice of inoculation in India having its roots in the distant past. Mukhopadhyaya reaches the same conclusion as us: there is no evidence of this. There are doctors — nearly all English — who have written studies in which they claim to have heard stories from ancient times that refer to this practice. One of them, a certain Doctor Gillman, has even unearthed a Sanskrit treatise of medicine that mentions inoculation. Mukhopadhyaya had the text examined by two Sanskrit scholars, who recognised it as an “interpolation”: a blatant forgery, in short. In the ancient Indian treatises of medicine by Caraka, Suśruta, Vāgbhata, Mādhava, Vrnda Mādhava, Cakradatta, Bhāva Miśra and others, Mukhopadhyaya could not find the slightest allusion to the practice of smallpox inoculation. Furthermore, in the hymns to the Goddess Śitalā, taken from the Kāikhanda by Skanda Purāna, it is explicitly stated that there is no remedy for smallpox except prayers to the goddess. And yet Mukhopadhyaya says emphatically, “no one has yet questioned the notion that inoculation was frequently practised in India.”
Mukhopadhyaya suspects, as we do, a conspiracy to provide a pedigree first for inoculation and subsequently for vaccination, so that the masses would be induced to trust these practices and to let them be carried out on themselves and on their children.
(In addition to forgeries, the history of smallpox contains numerous embarrassing silences. The inventor of vaccination — which was what inoculation subsequently developed into — the famous English doctor, Edward Jenner, vaccinated his own ten-month-old son with material extracted from the pustules of a smallpox victim, and the child was left mentally handicapped and died at the age of twenty-one. Later on, in 1798, Jenner vaccinated a child aged five, who died almost immediately, and an eight-month pregnant woman, who just a month later miscarried a baby covered in pustules similar to smallpox. Despite these experiences, Jenner sent samples of the material used for these experiments to the ruling houses of Europe, which made widespread use of them on orphan children to develop new diseases in order to be able to extract new samples of infected material. Every manual of medical history carefully avoids reporting these facts.)
Let us return to the eighteenth century. Soon several voices were raised against inoculation. The tragic case of Madame de Sévigné was pointed to; she, too, fell ill of smallpox and died in 1711. However, it was not the illness that killed her but, amid atrocious suffering, the doctors’ treatment of it (cf. J. Chambon, Traité des métaux et des minéraux, Paris 1714, p. 408 ff.). In the mid-eighteenth century Luigi Gatti, an Italian doctor in Paris, treated Madame Helvétius’s smallpox, performing all sorts of somersaults and pirouettes in front of the invalid, firmly convinced that cheerfulness was the only possible remedy, and that it was only medical treatment that made smallpox fatal. For mysterious reasons, Gatti was to change his opinion drastically, suddenly becoming a highly active (and extremely wealthy) inoculator.
Van Swieten, in the nineteenth century, reported that noble and wealthy patients almost all died, while the common people, who did not undergo any treatment, survived (cf. Rapport de l’Académie de Médecine sur les vaccinations pour l’année 1856, p. 35).
That was not all: rumours began to circulate that inoculation, when it did not kill, was entirely useless. There were cases of people who, despite having undergone inoculation and having suffered the smallpox caused by it, nonetheless fell ill of the disease, even years later. The Mercure de France of January 1765 (vol. II, p. 148), for example, reports the case of the Duchess of Boufflers.
But the worst fear was yet to come: did inoculation unleash smallpox even in people who had already had it? It was well known, as Avicenna himself said, that “smallpox only strikes once in a lifetime”, granting perpetual immunity. According to numerous doctors opposed to inoculation, artificially induced smallpox subverts this law of nature. The proof? A very famous case: Louis XV of France, who had had smallpox at the age of eighteen, died in 1774 aged sixty-four. Of smallpox. In circumstances almost identical to those of Joseph I.
There was something special about Louis XV: as a child he was the only one who survived the incredible outbreak of fatal diseases that struck the children and grandchildren of his grandfather the Sun King, decimating the Bourbon House of France between 1711 and 1712. Count De Mérode-Westerloo (Mémoires, Brussels 1840) reports that Palatine had prophesied these deaths to him in 1706, describing them as murders. Little Louis in 1712 was just two years old, the second-born of the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne. His parents and elder brother had died of smallpox, but Louis had been saved: his nurses, at the first signs of the child’s illness, had literally barricaded themselves in the bedroom with him, preventing the doctors from even seeing him. They were convinced that it was the doctors themselves who had killed the other members of the royal family. And so Louis was spared Palatine’s prophecy, and when he attained his majority he ascended the throne of France as successor to his grandfather Louis XIV. France, in the meantime, had been afflicted by years and years of Regency rule, during which the malign John Law, the inventor of banknotes, had been given free rein, leading the kingdom to an unprecedented financial disaster, as recounted by the chimney-sweep.
But certain “prophecies”, sooner or later, always come true. . At the age of sixty-four, Louis XV no longer had any brave wet nurses to protect him.
His death closely recalls that of Joseph I. Both were enemies of the Jesuits (Louis XV actually suppressed the Society of Jesus) and Louis XV, like Joseph, had to endure the menacing announcement of his own death, unfortunately accurate, from a preacher. It was 1st April 1774, a Thursday in Lent, and the Bishop of Senez pointed at the King from the pulpit and exclaimed: “Another forty days and Niniveh will be destroyed!” Exactly forty days later, on 10th May, Louis XV breathed his last (Pierre Darmon, La variole, les nobles et les princes, Brussels 1989, pp. 93-4).
Up to a week earlier, examining his boils, he had continued to murmur in amazement: “If I had not already had it, I would swear that this was smallpox.” Finally on 3rd May, realisation struck him: “It is smallpox!. . It is smallpox.” With the mute assent of those around him, he turned his face away and said, “This is truly incredible.”
A bitterly ironic death in many ways, not least for the fact that Louis XV had always been a tenacious opponent of the practice of inoculation.
Having concluded our historical research into smallpox and having received Dr Buchwald’s opinion on Joseph’s death, we passed on to the final stage: the search for a pathologist who would support our request to exhume the Emperor’s body and who would be prepared to analyse it.
We at once rejected the medical exhumers who are so fashionable today: they exhume the bodies of historical figures from the past essentially to develop new vaccines, and are usually sponsored by the colossi of the pharmaceutical industry.
We turned to various Italian and Austrian university professors, but nobody was interested in the matter; indeed in many cases they actually seemed annoyed.
There was something familiar in all this: in 2003, when we needed to find graphological experts to examine the last will and testament of the King of Spain Charles II of Habsburg, most of the experts had run a mile for fear of annoying the present Spanish king, Juan Carlos of Bourbon. So when it came to a matter of smallpox. .
Meanwhile we sent an application by registered mail to the Denkmalamt of Vienna (the office in charge of preserving historical monuments) to start the paperwork for the exhumation of the body of Joseph I. We knew that the procedure would be a long one and did not wish to lose any time.
In the hope of finding someone a little more courageous, we proceeded through mutual acquaintances. And so we hit upon the name of Professor Andrea Amorosi, a pathologist from the same city as one of us. Amorosi works at the Department of Experimental Medicine and the clinic of the “Magna Grecia” University of Catanzaro, in southern Italy. Initially we had a very good relationship. Professor Amorosi was attentive and helpful. After studying all the documentation that we sent him, he was excited by the idea of exhuming Joseph’s body; it was he who informed us that smallpox is on the class A “special surveillance” list in the struggle against bio-terrorism. Our initiative, therefore, could cause a stir in the scientific community.
We asked if it would be possible, after all this time, to prove whether Joseph had been poisoned, killed by an artificial smallpox, or had instead died from natural smallpox. In the case of a poison, he answered, it should not be too difficult, since at the time they mainly used metals, which can be traced by modern equipment. The poisons used today, he declared, leave no traces.
In the case of death by inoculation, the professor went on to explain, the question was more complicated, but not impossible. It would be necessary to exhume several bodies, not just Joseph’s. The ideal situation would be to have bodies that had died from smallpox long before Joseph, when smallpox was not so lethal, in which case it would therefore be reasonable to assume that death was due to natural smallpox — and bodies that had died from smallpox later in the eighteenth century, in the age of inoculation. Then DNA sequences would have to be taken from these bodies and compared with those of Joseph I. Professor Amorosi kept us on the phone as he continued to explain all the possible ways to detect a possible artifical cause in the young emperor’s death, using an abundance of scientific terms. Lacking his professional expertise, we are unable to report Professor Amorosi’s ideas and intentions with the appropriate terminology.
We arranged with Amorosi that first of all he would send us the pages from Harrison’s manual on internal medicine concerning bio-terrorism, and in the meantime he would talk with some of his colleagues, whom he did not identify as yet, with the aim of forming a team to carry out the exhumation and analysis of the bodies.
We never heard from him again.
We never received the photocopies from the Harrison manual (we got hold of them by ourselves), nor did we succeed in talking to Professor Amorosi again. He never replied to our emails. Our numerous phone calls, over a period of months, all ran up against the insuperable barrier of his secretary, nurse or assistant, who regularly asked us for our names, put us on hold and then told us that Professor Amorosi was not there. Then one day we shifted tactics, calling and refusing to accept yet another vague and off-putting response. We insisted, we called back five times the same day, then the next day, and so on for a week. Each time we explained the whole matter from scratch, even though we could sense that the person at the other end of the line did not wish to listen to us. We began to recognise their voices, and the voices recognised us. Our interlocutors contradicted themselves, and one of them after the briefest of greetings put the phone down on us. The people on the other end of the line were armed with a good deal of patience; they could have treated us worse. In June 2006, when for the umpteenth time we pronounced the words “exhumation”, “smallpox”, “inoculation”, finally a weary voice whispered to us: “Just how old are you? Do you realise what you’re doing? Let it go. And leave the professor alone.”
We did not call again. For the first time since we had started our investigations into the past, we felt really frightened. The voice was not threatening. Quite the reverse: it seemed sincere. It was clear: Professor Amorosi had been intimidated by someone, to the point that he refused any contact with us, even to the extent of simply inventing a pretext and wriggling out of the business. Perhaps we really were playing with fire. We opened the chapter on bio-terrorism in Harrison’s manual on internal medicine. We read and re-read the same passage, as if it was only now that its significance had struck us: despite the continual urgings of the World Health Organisation to destroy every test tube sample of smallpox, at the CDC in Atlanta in the USA they still preserve these and carry out experiments of all kinds. The manual emphasised how the recombinant (or artificial) smallpox is much more devastating and dangerous than the natural one.
We went back to Professor Buchwald’s book. The book reports every sort of malpractice committed until just a few decades ago to hide the number of deaths due to the anti-smallpox vaccine, and to pass them off as natural smallpox: substitutions of clinical records, suppression of reports and other things. The horrifying photos (pp. 49 and 50) of Waltraud B., a child horribly covered with pustules and scabs from smallpox provoked by anti-smallpox vaccine, and of the blood issuing from the eyes and open mouth of the corpse of a young nurse who died at Wiesbaden in the sixties from haemorrhagic smallpox, also caused by vaccination, caused our pens to drop. And not only metaphorically.
As this book goes to press, the registered letter containing the application for the exhumation of the body of Joseph I, and a subsequent reminder, have received no answer from the Denkmalamt of Vienna.
The Flying Ship and its Inventor
The gazette of 24th June 1709 kept by Frosch reporting news of the arrival of the Flying Ship in Vienna is authentic. An example can be seen at the Vienna City and State Library. It is not the only eye-witness account of the Flying Ship: other gazettes reported the flight of the extraordinary device. The Diary of Vienna gazette of 1st June 1709 actually contains an engraving showing the Flying Ship (Wiennerisches Diarium Nr. 609, 1–4 June 1709, pp. 1–2) and the item read by the chimney-sweep is taken word for word from the newspaper.
Modern historians know perfectly well who the inventor and helmsman of the Flying Ship was: not the mysterious violinist Albicastro, as the chimney-sweep supposes, but a Brazilian priest, as reported in the Wiennerisches Diarium, Bartolomeo Lorenzo de Gusmão (1685–1724). He was an extraordinary figure: a Jesuit, scientist, adventurer, inventor, possibly a charlatan, undoubtedly a genius, who has gone down in history as having perhaps flown not only the first airship but also the first aerostatic balloon, decades before the Montgolfier brothers.
The flight of his wooden ship (if it really happened) was reported all over Europe; in addition to the Viennese gazette, printed news sheets were issued in London and in Portugal.
Did the ship projected by Gusmão really take off? Opinons differ. The expert on the history of flying, Bernd Lukasch, does not rule out the idea at all. But according to the historian Fernando Reis, the Passarola (this is the name Gusmão gave it) was just a fable invented by Gusmão to draw the attention of detractors and inquisitive souls away from his real experiments, centred on hot-air balloons. And the gazettes? According to contemporaries, they were the work of Gusmão and a close friend, the Count of Penaguilão, who had set up the gigantic prank with the assistance of other friends. But this is not certain either. Gusmão’s life was shrouded in mystery up to the very end.
Between 1713 and 1716 the eccentric Brazilian travelled around Europe and made a name for himself with inventions of all kinds: a system of lenses for cooking meat by sunlight; a mill that ground much faster than any already existing; a machine for the exploration of peat bogs, and other unusual ideas. He settled in Paris where he earned a living first as a herbalist, and then, with the help of his brother, as secretary to the Portuguese ambassador to the Sun King. After returning to Portugal, thanks to his brilliant gifts as a scientist and orator he first became a member of the Royal Academy of History, and then acceded to the post of court chaplain. But then his troubles began: he was accused by the Inquisition of sympathising with the crypto-Jews. Furthermore, as Saramago records in his Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda), he was involved in a scandalous trial, where the suspects included the King of Portugal, a brother of the Sovereign, their lovers, witches and prostitutes. Some suspect that behind the ecclesiastic authorities’ fury against Gusmão there lay hostility towards his aeronautical research. One of his brothers, perhaps to save him from the clutches of the Inquisition, declared that Gusmão was mad. To escape a possible conviction, the Jesuit secretly left Portugal and fled to Spain, trying to reach Paris. But in Toledo he was seized by a malignant fever and taken to hospital, where he died a month later, aged just thirty-nine. Even in these last moments he was not idle: just before dying he converted to Judaism. The truth about the Flying Ship is buried forever in Gusmão’s grave.
To conclude, one should not be surprised to discover, as reported in the gazette Frosch showed the chimney-sweep, that the pilot who came to Vienna on board his Flying Ship in 1709 was arrested and imprisoned, rather than borne in triumph as the first aviator in history. The Austrian soul loves tradition and distrusts anything new. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, Emperor Franz Joseph was hostile to the introduction of electricity and lifts.
The experiments and theories of Francesco Lana, Ovidio Montalbani and Geminiano Montanari are taken from the texts they themselves published starting from the second half of the seventeenth century (see the bibliography).
Ciezeber-Palatine
From the recesses of history there emerges several times the mysterious figure of a dervish, as the chimney-sweep describes him. In a “flying sheet” (a sort of short gazette handed out in the streets) containing a report of the Turkish audience with Eugene (Beschreibung Der Audientz des von tuerckischen Gross-Sultan nach Wien gesandten und alda ankommenden Cefulah Aga Capichi Pascia, Vienna, 9th April 1711) mention is made of an Indian dervish named Ciezeber in the ambassador’s retinue. In the account given by the chimney-sweep he will finally reveal himself under the name of Isaac Ammon, known as Palatine. Here again we are talking of a figure that really existed. And his political predictions on the future of Europe, formulated decades, even centuries ahead, have proved incredibly accurate. As already mentioned, reference is made to this extraordinary sorcerer figure, and his plots and prophecies, in the Mémoires du feld-maréchal comte de Mérode-Westerloo (Brussels 1840, vol.2, pp. 150-85 and 293). The author of these memoirs, which remained in manuscript form until the nineteenth century when they were published by a descendant, was a Belgian man-of-arms and diplomat, in the service of the Empire but often at odds with Eugene of Savoy. He gives a very unflattering portrait of Eugene, thus earning himself the displeasure of modern historians (see, for example, H. Oehler, Prinz Eugen im Urteil Europas, Munich 1944, pp. 369-75). Palatine (his name was in fact Isaac Ammon, as the chimney-sweep records), despite being the eldest son of an important family of Nestorian patriarchs, was close to the circle of dervishes in Babylon (Mémoires, p. 159–160). An expert healer and connoisseur of poisons, he successfully cured de Mérode himself of a serious illness. De Mérode remained close to him for eight years, and recorded his prognostication of the secret poisonings of numerous personalities: Louis XIV, the Dauphin, the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne and their son, and also the Duke of Berry, the King of Spain Charles II and above all Joseph I. With regard to this last named, Palatine speaks of an “Emperor”, but there is no doubt that it was Joseph because De Mérode-Westerloo dates his acquaintance and conversations with Palatine (p. 150 and 160-61) around 1708, when Joseph I was Emperor. Palatine was also in touch with Eugene of Savoy: De Mérode-Westerloo recounts (p. 293) that he heard with some concern, in 1722, several years after losing touch with him, that the strange character held talks with Eugene and gathered information about him.
Palatine’s uncannily accurate predictions of death include the following: that of the Sun King (who in 1714, three years after Palatine’s pronouncement, would indeed die of gangrene in the leg, as forecast by the dervish in the chimney-sweep’s tale and in De Mérode-Westerloo’s memoirs); that of the Duke of Berry, who died in May 1714 (grandson of Louis XIV and third son of the Grand Dauphin, the Duke died of an illness, as predicted by the dervish); that of the Grand Dauphin himself, who expired on 14th April 1711, just three days before Joseph; and finally those of the Duke and Duchess of Bourgogne in 1712: an incredible series of deaths that historians have termed “the hecatomb”.
The Place with no Name and its Enemies
All the information and descriptions provided by the chimney-sweep on the “Place with No Name known as Neugebäu” (as it appears in the archive documents), are confirmed by the historians as well as by the numerous studies published and listed in the bibliography. Today the manor is known as Neugebäude. That Maximilian II in his final years was obsessed by the thought of completing Neugebäude, as Simonis recounts, is confirmed by the Venetian ambassador Giacomo Soranzo: cf. Joseph Fiedler (ed.), Relationen venetianischer Botschafter über Deutschland und Österreich im 16. Jahrhundert, Vienna 1870, p. 217.
The ferocious black panther itself really existed. It is reported in the Wiennerisches Diarium (today Wiener Zeitung) n.483 of 17-20th March 1708: on the afternoon of Sunday 18th March, Joseph, with his consort, and a retinue of knights and ladies, accompanied his sister-in-law, Princess Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, to Neugebäude. Since his brother Charles was in Barcelona claiming the Spanish throne, Joseph had represented him at the wedding by proxy celebrated between Charles and the German princess in Vienna. Before she set off for Spain to join her husband, Joseph wished to pay her the homage of showing her the wild beasts kept at Neugebäude, especially the two lions and the panther, which had only recently arrived.
After the death of Joseph I the manor continued to decay relentlessly. Not only did the restoration work come to a halt: Maximilian II’s creation became the victim of an incredible series of omissions, indecisions, errors and general exampes of ill will, which almost seem to have been orchestrated by malign forces.
When Charles ascended the throne after his brother’s death, he abandoned his predecessor’s restoration projects and left the castle to fall to pieces. The gardens lapsed into decay, and the last traces of the wonderful flower beds, pot plants and hedges disappeared. With the ascent to the throne of Charles’s daughter, the famous Maria Theresa, things got even worse. At the request of the imperial artillery, the empress authorised the use of Neugebäude as a powder magazine. At her express order the precious columns supporting the grandiose panoramic terrace to the north were carried away. The perimeter towers underwent modifications so that powder could be stored, the four main ones were destroyed and the boundary wall heavily altered. The ball game stadium (from which the chimney-sweep tells us the Flying Ship took off) was covered with a roof, then divided into several storeys by means of a wooden structure, which in the end was destroyed by fire, along with the roof.
In addition to the columns, Maria Theresa’s soldiers dismantled fountains, stucco work, ornaments and possibly pieces of walls and bricks, and took them away to Schönbrunn. Some of the marvellous Tuscan columns of Maximilian’s palace were thus reutilised in the central part of the colonnade of Schönbrunn, on the side that looks out onto the famous gardens. Deprived of its columns, the great terrace of Neugebäude to the north was subsequently walled up, turning the castle into a kind of large, obtuse box.
Other columns plundered from Neugebäude went to form the framework of the Gloriette, the elegant triumphal arch, complete with two long terraced wings, that rises on the green hill behind Schönbrunn, and which figures in thousands of postcards and tourist brochures of Vienna. Various other items, useful for building massive walls, were probably set in the walls of the palace’s side wings, work on which began after Joseph’s death. The Viennese archives say nothing about this immense operation of stripping and recycling; no one will ever know in what point of the walls of the Schönbrunn these fragments are silently lurking, witnesses to an unfulfilled dream. Other materials for which no specific use could be found went to form the so-called “Roman ruins” of Schönbrunn: a clumsy and melancholy composition of capitals, cornices, decorative statues and lintels in the Renaissance or pseudo-antique style, after the fashion of a Piranesi view, set in a corner of the great park of Schönbrunn, in the guise of a ruined Roman temple.
And so every year, when thousands of tourists go to Schönbrunn and admire the impressive façade on the garden side, or the Gloriette, or the false Roman ruins, without knowing it they are also gazing at Neugebäude. Why, instead of honoring and saving the masterpiece of Simmering, did Maria Theresa choose to strip it and secretly bury its remains in another creation? People have pointed to her proverbial parsimony: the valuable sixteenth-century columns of the Place with No Name could not be left to rot in the wind and rain. Fair enough: but then why did the cautious Maria Theresa spend the absurd sum of a million gulden (the tourist guides point out to visitors that at that time a successful doctor or lawyer would earn 500 gulden a year) on the oriental-style sitting room on the first floor of Schönbrunn? If she really intended to curb expenses, the glorious sovereign need not have commissioned the great imperial bed covered in gold and silver brocade, a single piece of incalculable value, which, freshly restored, is once again on view in the great Viennese palace.
The secret debt of Schönbrunn to Neugebäude does not end here. As has been observed (Leopold Urban, Die Orangerie von Schönbrunn, typewritten degree dissertation, Vienna 1992), the Simmering complex is indeed “the mother of Schönbrunn”. In various ways a comparative study of the two masterpieces “reveals surprising similarities” (ibid., p. 62): for example, the layout of niches, arches and walls in the palace’s orangery and in the parts of the castle devoted to animals; similarities that can also be found in the underground gallery from the western stretch of Neugebäude (where, at the end of the chimney-sweep’s story, the illegal arrest is carried out by the dervish and his henchmen). Even the ornamental masks of Schönbrunn seem openly inspired by those of the fountains of Neugebäude. It could be added that the motif of the rows of columns supporting a long panoramic vault, interrupted by a central body, is common to the Gloriette and to the manor of Simmering; and that the essential elements (pond/ fountains at the rear, large courtyard/garden enclosed by walls) are found both at Neugebäude and at Schönbrunn. Were Neugebäude to be restored, it is quite possible that the modern tourist would greatly prefer it to Schönbrunn. Despite all this, no one has done anything to save the Place with No Name; quite the contrary.
After the havoc wrought by Maria Theresa, her successors also seemed to be possessed by a mysterious destructive impulse. The centuries that followed were marked by spoliations, neglect, fires, and even the disastrous stationing of military troops during the clashes between the imperial army and the Napoleonic army. In 1922 the city of Vienna decided to build the city’s crematorium within the walls of the upper garden of Neugebäude, which irremediably damaged the physiognomy of the entire complex. Where rows of flowers and fruit had once been laid out charmingly, where ivory Turkish-style towers had soared gracefully, and where avenues and groves had led harmoniously into one another, crematorium ovens and gravestones now stood grimly. A curious detail: many of the green areas occupied by the crematorium are not used at all. Was it really necessary to locate it here, of all places?
In 1952, in order to make way for vehicles, a Renaissance fountain, an admirable work by the sculptor Alexandre Colin which Maria Theresa had had moved from Neugebäude to Schönbrunn and which had been placed in the courtyard of the orangery (Urban, p. 71 ff.), was dismantled and left in pieces on the ground, in the open air. As time went by, various parts disappeared, probably ending up in some private garden. In 1962 a serious fire in the east wing of Neugebäude irreparably damaged the chapel, which was being used as a store for cinema reels. Proposals for restoration work were constantly being put forward, but invisible forces seemed to block them at every step. No one, except the common Viennese citizens in love with their city, seemed to care a jot for the only Renaissance villa still standing north of the Alps. In 1974 a great plan of restoration was announced, but never carried out. In 1982 a proposal was made to use the castle for the city’s historic armoury collection. Two years later there was fresh talk of restoration. In 1986 the newspapers emphatically announced that some archaeological excavations had been carried out, which threw light on certain important details of the construction and the history of the complex. But in 1993 another major fire brought down a large portion of the roof. Rumours began to circulate in the city that the underground station of Stubentor had been created using bricks taken from Neugebäude (instead of materials found on the site, as a plaque inside the stations claims). Just a few years ago an incredible proposal for the demolition of the castle circulated. After all, wasn’t that more or less what had been going on for years now? Fortunately Neugebäude found a bold champion: Othmar Brix, president of the 11th district of Vienna, within whose jurisdiction the castle of Maximilian II lies, generously set in motion a number of initiatives and petitions for the restoration of the castle. However, almost as if persecuted by the same mysterious enemies as his protegé, Brix suddenly died in 2003 aged just fifty-nine, without having seen any of his projects carried out. The road that leads to the venerable manor now bears his name. It is only in recent days that restoration work has begun on the Place with No Name, although no final use has been decided for the complex (cultural centre, museum or other institution). The flow of finances is always governed by the contorted logic of politics, and the spectre of demolition is forever lurking round the corner. For this reason an association of citizens imbued with a noble spirit of voluntary work has for some years now been defending the ancient walls, organising guided tours and a summer festival of cinema and music inside the main courtyard. Only in this way, perhaps, will it be possible to keep at bay the mysterious forces that for centuries have apparently been trying to consign Maximilian’s dream to oblivion, together with its glorious historic associations.
The mythology that surrounds the Place with No Name, it should be noted, was not invented by the authors. Accounts of the ghosts at Neugebäude and Rudolph II’s alchemic experiments as narrated by Simonis regularly emerge in the Viennese newspapers: see the Neues Wiener Tagblatt of 4th April 1940, p. 6 (“Ein Besuch in Wiens Gespensterschloß”, which is to say, “A visit to Vienna’s castle of ghosts”); and the Volkszeitung of 28th January 1940, p. 7 as well as the Neue Freie Presse of 7th September 1937, p. 6. Cases of ghosts that terrorised the Nachtwärter (night sentinels), soldiers guarding Neugebäude when the castle was a military store were reported until at least the nineteenth century. Up to the 1930s the inhabitants of the plain around Simmering avoided Neugebäude for fear of unpleasant encounters.
And the elephant? It is well known that Maximilian II did have an elephant brought to Vienna from the Iberian peninsula, and that a famous inn on the Graben (one of the celebrated streets that form the ancient centre of the city) took its name from i. The inn survived for almost three centuries and was then unfortunately demolished. There is nothing to prevent one from imagining, therefore, that the pachyderm found a home, as the chimney-sweep reports, in the place that Maximilian had chosen for his precious seraglio.
Eugene of Savoy
First of all, the Agha’s little slip of paper. In the documents of Eugene’s military campaigns is a copy of a report to Charles (Feldzüge des Prinzen Eugen von Savoyen. Nach den Feld-Acten u. anderen authentischen Quellen hrsg. von der Abtheilung für Kriegsgeschichte des k.k. Kriegs-Archives, Vienna 1876–1892, vol. XIII, Suppl. p. 14, chap. 7, Vienna 11th April 1711):
Finally on 7th afternoon the Turkish Agha arrived, to whom I granted audience on 9th. I attach for Your Majesty a copy of the written message that he delivered to me.
What about the original of the message? There is no trace of it in the documents, as the reader who has read the historical appendices to Imprimatur and Secretum will perhaps have already guessed: certain operations are always carried out in the same way, whether it concerns covering up a pope’s misdeeds, forging a king’s will, or endeavouring to conceal a plot to harm an emperor.
What is this message from the Agha and why on earth should Eugene have sent it to Charles? It was to Joseph I that he should have been reporting, unless it was a question that Joseph must not hear of but which Charles already knew about.
The machinations of Atto Melani. Abbot Melani had very cleverly devised the trap of the forged letter from Eugene of Savoy, and he came close to achieving his aim. It was true, as Atto himself recounted, that an apocryphal letter, which attributed to Eugene the project of betraying the Empire, was delivered to Philip V of Spain, who then sent it on to the Sun King and to Torcy, who finally prevented it from going any further, as Atto complained to the chimney-sweep. It was not until May 1711 (about a month after the events described by the chimney-sweep) that Eugene, having arrived in Tournai, in Flanders, was informed of the existence of the letter, but he succeeded in proving his innocence. The whole affair can be read about in Eugene’s correspondence held in the State Archive of Vienna or reproduced in the documents of Eugene’s military campaigns: in particular, the letter in which Count Bergeyck wrote to Eugene that he had received a mandate from Philip I to ask him if the letter was authentic and, if so, to negotiate with him (State Archive of Vienna, Kriegsakten 262, 22.3.1711; Kriegsakten 263, 3.5.1711); Eugene’s indignant reply (State Archive of Vienna, Grosse Korrespondenz 93 a, 18.5.1711), and the letters to the Queen Mother and Regent Eleonore Magdalene Therese and to Charles (Feldzüge des Prinzen Eugens XIII, Suppl., pp. 32-3, 13 and 17.5.1711) and to Sinzendorf (State Archive of Vienna, Grosse Korrespondenz 73 a, 18.5.1711), in which Eugene sent a copy of Bergeyck’s letter and expressed all his dismay; and finally the answers from the Regent, from Charles and from Sinzendorf, who recognise that he is not in any way implicated (State Archive of Vienna, Grosse Korrespondenz 90 b, 3.6.1711; 31.7.1711; Grosse Korrespondenz 145, 21.5.1711).
Atto’s analysis of the relations between Eugene, Joseph and Charles reflects the historic reality with surprising accuracy. For example, it is true, as Atto claims, that Eugene managed to have more influence at Charles’s court than at that of the unfortunate Joseph. Eugene would, in fact, manage to persuade Charles to continue the War of the Spanish Succession all alone, when the allies had already made peace with France. Then, not content with this, he would proceed to the war on the Turkish front.
But above all, the jealousy Eugene felt towards Joseph as recounted by Atto Melani is far from unfounded. It is historically authenticated that Eugene was excluded from the Battle of Landau of 1702 so that the stage would be left free for Joseph, as Onno Klop reports (Der Fall des Hauses Stuart, vol.11, Vienna 1885, p. 196). Furthermore, it is true that Joseph did not allow Eugene to go and fight the French in Spain, where Eugene had hopes of achieving great things, as Onno Klopp recounts (Der Fall op. cit., t. XXIV p. 12 ff.).
Atto Melani’s reflections on the personality of Eugene of Savoy are also perfectly in keeping with the reality of the historical documents. It is not surprising that official historiography devotes little attention to the murkier side of the great condottiere. In all the thousands of books and articles (over 1,800 have been counted) that have been published over the last three centuries celebrating Eugene, hardly any reference is to be found to his private life. The reason is very simple. Eugene left no personal papers: only letters of war, diplomacy and politics. Nor can any private correspondence worthy of the name be found in the archives of the numerous personalities who corresponded with him. There does not seem to have been any personal or intimate side to his existence: all we see is his granite-like exterior as a soldier, diplomat and statesman. An almost inhuman heroic figure, who has no room for feelings, weaknesses or doubts.
As for women, none seem to have left any mark on this bellicose monolith. Eugene, one of the richest and most celebrated (and hence one of the most eligible) men of the age, never married. A few women have been associated with his name, above all Countess Eleonore Batthyany, his “official lover” from 1715 onwards. But even in what remains of his correspondence with her, no trace can be found of an intimate relationship in the real sense of the word. Perhaps the female sex was more useful than congenial to Eugene: it seems to be historically proven that the condottiere, as the chimney-sweep writes in December 1720, set up Countess Pálffy, Joseph’s very young lover, in Porta Coeli Street (and so close to his own palace) so that he could watch over her and exploit her more easily (Max Braubach, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen, Vienna 1964, vol.3 pp. 21-2). The Viennese postman Johann Jordan, in his Schatz /Schutz / und Schantz Deß Ertz-Herzogthumbs Oesterreich, a carefully compiled street guide printed in 1701, reports on page 107 that a certain Agnes Sidonia Countess Pálffy, an old relative of Joseph’s lover, lived in the Strassoldo House in Himmelpfortgasse, the building owned by von Strassoldo, the directress of the convent’s novitiate (cf. Alfons Žák, Das Frauenkloster Himmelpforte in Wien, Vienna, 1906). A few years before Marianna arrived, therefore, the Strassoldo House had already been occupied by another woman from the Pálffy family.
There is no doubt that Eugene’s early years in France were unruly, unconducive to education and even dissolute. As the English historian Nicholas Henderson writes: “There can be no doubt of the existence of shadows in Eugen’s early boyhood. He belonged to a small, effeminate set that included such unabashed perverts as the young Abbé de Choisy, who was invariably dressed as a girl, except when he wore the lavish ear-rings and make-up of a mature woman.” (N. Henderson, Prince Eugen of Savoy, London 1964, p. 21). It was in those days, according to some letters of Louis XIV’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth of the Palatinate Countess of Orléans, that the homosexual adventures referred to by Atto Melani took place. Elizabeth had known Eugene personally from the days when he was still living in Paris. She recounts to her aunt, Princess Sophia of Hanover, that Eugene’s nickname was Madame Simone, as Abbot Melani recounts, or Madame l’Ancienne; that in his relations with his contemporaries the young Savoy “played the part of the woman”; that in his sexual revels he coupled with the Prince of Turenne; that the two were considered “two vulgar whores”; that Eugene would not have put himself out for a woman, preferring “a couple of fine page-boys”; that the ecclesiastic benefice he had sought was refused because of his “depravity”; that it was only in Germany that he may have forgotten “the art” he had learned in Paris.
Eugene’s most important biographer, Max Braubach, in his monumental five-volume account of the life and works of the great soldier, did not give much space to Elizabeth’s letters and their implications. Another historian, Helmut Oehler, reports her pungent remarks, but attributes them solely to Elizabeth’s personal resentment against Eugene: at the time they were written (1708-10), the Italian military commander was opposing the peace between the European powers and France, a peace that Elizabeth — given the dramatic situation in which Louis XIV found himself — hoped for ardently. In fact, this is not exactly true: Elizabeth wrote openly about Eugene’s homosexuality even years after the war had ended.
However, it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that it is Oehler who allows himself to get carried away; when he has to talk of another critic of Eugene, the Dutch Count Mérode-Westerloo, who left some vitriolic jottings on the condottiere, he changes register very markedly, defining Mérode-Westerloo a “know-all”, “charlatan”, “salon gossip”, “parasite”, and a “reprehensible individual” who “led a useless life”, and whose memoirs are little more than an instance of “senile dementia”. Finally Oehler explains that he deliberately ignored some passages by the Dutch diplomat because passing on Mérode-Westerloo’s “idiotic prattlings” is a “disgusting” task.
In the end it was only to be expected that the partisan historiography should have triumphed in Eugene’s case: a military hero can have no stain, least of all that of sexual inversion. The artificially created figure of the upright, irreproachable soldier triumphed — it is hardly a surprising — during the years of the Nazi regime; see, for example, the biography of Eugene by Viktor Bibl: Prinz Eugen. Ein Heldenleben, Vienna-Leipzig 1941, complete with a dedication to the army of the Third Reich.
The first of Elizabeth’s letters to accuse Eugene of homosexuality is reported in Wilhelm Ludwig Holland (ed.), Briefe der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans, Stuttgart 1867, in Bibliothek des Litterarischen [sic] Vereins in Stuttgart, Band CXLIV, p. 316:
To Madame Louise, Countess of the Palatinate — Frankfurt
St Clou, 30 October 1720
[. .] I would not have recognised Prince Eugene in the portrait to be found here: he has a short wide nose, but in the engraving it is long and pointed. His nose is so turned up that his mouth was always open, and you could see his two upper central teeth entirely. I know him well, I often tormented him when he was a child. At the time they said that he would soon take vows, and he was dressed as an abbé. I assured him that he would not remain so, which turned out to be the case. When he abandoned the habit, the young people called him “Madame Simone” or “Madame l’Ancienne”, and it was said he played the part of the lady with them. So you see, dear Louise, that I know Prince Eugene well; I knew all his family, his father, his mother, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts, he is not at all unknown to me, in short: it is impossible that he has a long pointed nose.
Another passage (letter from Elizabeth to her aunt on 9th June 1708) in Helmut Oehler, Prinz Eugen im Urteil Europas, Munich 1944, p. 108:
Prince Eugene is too sensible not to admire Your Highness. But since Your Highness wishes to know the real reason why Prince Eugene was called Madame Simone and Madame l’Ancienne, just as Prince Turenne was, it is because the two of them were called, if I may be allowed the term, two vulgar whores and it is said that they were so accustomed, and at every moment gave themselves à tout venant beau and played the role of the ladies; Prince Eugene may have unlearned this art in Germany.
From another letter in 1710 (Oehler, Prinz Eugen op. cit., p. 109):
Eugene does not put himself out for women, a couple of fine pageboys would suit him better.
From another letter in 1712 (Oehler, ibid.):
[. .] If value and judgement make a hero, Prince Eugene is certainly one; however, other virtues are also required, whether one has them or not. When he was Madame Simone and Madame l’Ancienne, everyone looked on him as a petite salope, he also ardently desired a benefice of 2,000 talleri, which was refused because of his débauche. For this reason he went to the imperial court, where he made his fortune.
The other accounts that Atto gives of homosexuality at the court of France are all authentic too, as can be verified in Didier Godard, Le goût de Monsieur — L’homosexualité masculine au XVIIe siècle (Paris 2002), and in Claude Pasteur, Le beau vice, ou les homosexuels à la cour de France (Paris 1999).
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 grievous death was not only foreseen by the English Fortune-Teller in his calendar, but was also pre-announced by the Sun itself, which for some days began to rise with a blood-red colour.
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.
Spannagel was perhaps too courageous, too keen to tackle delicate subjects, and perhaps he unwittingly committed the crime of lèse majesté. The seed of envy is always fresh: in the end the historian was never received by the Emperor, and his biography was never to be published.
Perhaps in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the Emperor, Spannagel began to write a history of the reign of Charles himself, in Latin. But the work was never completed, and the pages of the work actually devoted to Joseph’s brother (cf. Susanne Pum, Die Biographie Karls VI. Von Gottfried Philipp Spannagel. Ihr Wert als Geschichtsquelle, unpublished dissertation, Vienna 1980) are ridiculously few. The historian who had loved Joseph must have found it hard to appreciate Charles.
The censoriousness of the successor of Joseph the Victorious did not end here. In 1715, four years after Joseph’s death, Charles had already carried out a singular operation: he assigned two functionaries to go through all the correspondence preserved in the desks and in other furniture belonging to his father Leopold and his deceased brother. This meticulous examination lasted almost four months (from 28th January to 20th April, and from 26th August to 19th September).
In the end, having received the list of documents, Charles ordered that a large portion of them be burned, personally noting, page by page, which papers must not be passed down to his descendants: primarily, anything of personal or family interest. The State Archive of Vienna still holds the careful record of this examination with Charles’s annotations (Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Familienakten, Karton 105 n.239). What is striking, among the private papers of Joseph listed by the functionaries, is the great number of letters and memoirs concerning Landau: a simple glance is enough to show just how important the double triumph in Bavaria was for the young condottiere. Among the papers sent to the bonfire were dozens and dozens of letters between Joseph and Charles, between the brothers and their father and their wives, plus many more whose contents are not clear. When it is a matter of personal correspondence, the following words are written in the margin: “burn so it does not reach the public.”
Why had such a great mass of documents been abandoned for four years? (This is even odder when one considers that not only papers but also jewels are listed among the items examined.) What mysterious force drove Charles to destroy so many valuable family memories? Was the truth of the relations between the two brothers concealed there? Or was there something revealing about Joseph’s death? The bonfire Charles ordered means that we will never know the answer to these questions.
Atto Melani
The news of the arrival of a certain Milani in Vienna at the beginning of April, which the chimney-sweep tells us that he read with amazement in the newspaper, is not invented. According to the Wiennerisches Diarium of 8-10 April 1711, page 4, on 8th April a certain Signor Milan, an official of the imperial post from Milan, entered the city by the so-called Scottish Gate, and he settled at the post station. (Schottenthor. . Herr Milan / kayserl. Postmeister / komt auß Italien / gehet ins Posthauß). Anyone in Vienna can check this item at the National Library, or in the city library of the Rathaus, as with all other quotations from newspapers of the day.
By a strange coincidence, both Atto Melani and Joseph I had their funerals in a church of the Barefoot Augustinians: in Vienna the Augustinerkirche, in Paris the church of the Barefoot Augustinians of Nôtre Dame des Victoires. Atto’s funeral monument (a work by the Florentine Rastrelli, as the chimney-sweep correctly notes), can no longer be seen; it was probably destroyed during the 1789 revolution. His remains are thus forever lost, thrown into the Seine during the revolutionary frenzy, as happened with the royal family of France, including the corpses of Mazarin and Richelieu. However, a copy of the monument can be seen in Pistoia, in the Melani chapel inside the church of San Domenico. The Pistoia cenotaph gives us the only surviving portrait, among the many that existed, of Atto Melani: a bust representing him in his abbot’s robes, with a proud stare, and a capricious cleft in his chin. The authors published it for the first time in the volume they edited, I segreti dei conclavi, Amsterdam 2005.
All the details of the relations between Atto and his relatives (including the sending of candied oranges and mortadellas), the aches and pains of old age, his passion for expatiating on his haemorrhoids, the circumstances of his death, his contacts with the Connestabilessa, the account of the great famine in France in 1709, the financial crisis of 1713, his last words before dying, his burial and a thousand other details, are confirmed in his letters kept in Florence in the State Archive (fondo Mediceo del Principato 4812, lettere al Granduca di Toscana e al suo segretario, l’abate Gondi) and in the Biblioteca Marucelliana (Manoscritti Melani vol.9, lettere ai parenti in Toscana). As regards the relations between Atto Melani and Connestabilessa Maria Mancini Colonna, see the historical notes in the appendix to Monaldi amp; Sorti, Secretum, Edinburgh 2009, where many passages from Melani’s letters are published for the first time.
In Atto’s correspondence one also learns that in 1711 he was indeed one of those who collaborated with Torcy, the powerful prime minister of the Sun King, as he proudly recounts on the third day. But the letters sent from France to Tuscany during those years reveal that at the French court his opinions were no longer heeded, which is not surprising, given his advanced age. In a letter from Paris to Gondi on 23rd February 1711, for example, Atto reveals that he travelled to Versailles but that Torcy did not receive him.
Atto’s desire, despite his extreme old age, to end his days in Tuscany is also expressed (cf. also the notes in the appendix to Secretum, op. cit.). On 17th December 1713, eighteen days before his death, he wrote:
I have already resolved to go to Versailles to beseech the King to grant me permission to spend two years in Tuscany, to see if my native air will restore my strength and, what is most pressing, my sight; because not being able to write by hand myself, I am no longer of any use to His Majesty and His Ministers; in particular because the older ones, whose confidence I had, like M.r di Lione, Tellier and Pompone, have passed away; they acted as protectors with the King, whereas now, if I do not go and speak to him myself, it comes into no one’s mind to do so. I could hope that Signor Marchese de Torcy would favour me, but he is so circumspect that I have never been able to get him to present M. de Maretz with a memorandum for the payment of my pension.
In Florence Atto was not held in any great esteem either. On 30th of the preceding March, Gondi wrote to the Grand Duke of Tuscany:
[Abbot Melani] takes the trouble to give me his opinion. . thinking that I wish to be so enlightened.
However, Gondi let him have his way just to appease Atto’s relatives in Tuscany.
From the family’s correspondence one learns that on 12th April 1711 Atto did indeed have the colic, as described by the chimney-sweep. The false blindness, which he adopts mainly to reject his relatives’ requests for financial support, is confirmed by the letters that he sent in those years from Paris to Tuscany. On 23rd March 1711 he wrote to Gondi: “My health is always vacillating on account of the variety of weathers that we have here, but even more because of my great age, considering that although I can no longer read or write with my own hand, God grants me the grace of retaining my mental faculties at the age of eighty-five, which I will attain on 30th of this month.”
His blindness, which in 1711 already seemed to be well advanced, only started in actuality two years later: on 6th February 1713, when he had truly lost his sight, Atto wrote to Luigi Melani, Domenico’s brother: “And then as a last stroke of ill luck, I can no longer read or write. And yet Monsieur de la Haye, my friend, regained his sight at eighty!” Afflicted by faltering memory, like so many old men, Abbot Melani had forgotten that he had been claiming to be blind for quite some time now.
Camilla de’ Rossi
The spelling today is Camilla de Rossi, without the apostrophe.
A certain Camilla de Rossi was born and lived in the Trastevere quarter of Rome. She was a shopkeeper, from whom Franz de Rossi borrowed his bride’s new name. Her will is still in existence (Archivio Capitolino of Rome, 6th December 1708, deeds of notary Francesco Madesciro).
As the Chormaisterin herself recounts, Franz de Rossi was a musician at the court of Vienna and died of Lünglsucht (phthisis) at the age of forty, on 7th November 1703, in an apartment block in the centre of the city, the Niffisches Haus. The Vienna City Archive holds the deed (Totenbeschauprotokoll) certifying the death of Franz de Rossy, using the spelling often found in public administration documents for foreign names:
Der Herr Frantz de Rossy königlich Musicus im Nüffischen Haus, in der Wollzeile, ist an Lünglsucht beschaut. Alt 40 Jahre.
Franz de Rossi is referred to as “königlicher Musicus”, a musician of the King and not of the Emperor; he was therefore in the service of Joseph I, who in 1703 was still King of the Romans, and not of his father, Emperor Leopold I.
The death is also reported in the Wiennerisches Diarium, 1703, n. 28, 7-10 November 1703:
Den 7. November 1703 starb Herr Frantz Rosij / Königlicher Musicus im Nivischen Haus in der Wohlzeil / alt 40. Jahr.
However, almost no trace remains of the Chormaisterin, apart from the scores and libretti of her oratorios. What Gaetano Orsini tells the chimney-sweep is true: the composer never received any payment for her musical services. The lack of any mention in the books of the imperial administration makes the figure of Camilla almost invisible. Fortunately the Wiennerisches Diarium, as the authors have discovered, reports the performances of oratorios on Good Friday in the same years that Camilla de’ Rossi’s oratorios are dated (1707–1710), and it is no accident that Joseph I attended them, as he appears to have commissioned Camilla’s four oratorios. Apart from this indirect confirmation of the activity and presence of the composer in Vienna, all of the authors’ searches in the archives have proved fruitless: Vienna State Archive — Hofarchiv, OMaA (Obristhofmarschallamtabhandlungen) Bd. 643 (Index 1611–1749); Bd.180 (Inventaria 1611–1749); Bd.181 (the valet Vinzenz Rossi, probably the cousin of Franz mentioned also by the chimney-sweep, appears there); OMeA (Obristhofmarschallamt), Protokolle 6 e 7; Karton 654, Abhandlungen 1702–1704; Hofkammerarchiv, NÖHA (Niederösterreichische Herrschaftsakten), W-61/A, 32/B, 1635–1749, Fol. 455–929: list of various writings by musicians employed by Hofkapelle, Kammermusik and Hofoper (some years are missing, with a large gap from 1691 to 1771); Gedenksbücher, 1700–1712. No trace of Camilla in the birth, marriage and death certificates (Geburts-Trauung- und Sterbematriken), which start from the second half of the eighteenth century; the same is true of the Conscriptionsbögen (a sort of census of homes and occupiers), which do not start until 1805; above all, there is no trace of any payment to Camilla in the private coffer (Privatkassa) of Joseph I, from which payments were made to various musicians. Susanne and Theophil Antonicek (Drei Dokumente, op. cit.) have published the list of musicians paid by Marquis Scipione Publicola di Santa Croce in the years 1709–1711 as “music superintendent” of Joseph I. No mention is made in these documents (pp. 11–29) of Camilla de Rossi.
The information on other Italian musicians in Vienna is taken not only from the Viennese archives but also from L. Ritter von Köchel, Die Kaiserliche Hof-Musikkapelle in Wien 1543–1867, Vienna 1869, and B. Garvey Jackson, “Oratorios by Command of the Emperor: The Music of Camilla de Rossi”, in Current Musicology, 42 (1986), p. 7. Gaetano Orsini really did sing for Camilla de’ Rossi’s oratorios, and was among the musicians who received payments from Joseph’s secret coffers (cf. Vienna State Archive, Hofkammerarchiv, Geheime Kammerzahlamtrechnungen 1705–1713, varii loci, ad es. c.10v).
The convent of Porta Coeli really did exist. Unfortunately it was demolished by order of Emperor Joseph II in 1785, along with many other convents in the city. The archive of Porta Coeli, which survived the demolition, is kept at the Vienna City Archive.
The story narrated on the fourth day by Camilla of the Turkish slave girl assigned to the novitiate at Porta Coeli and rejected by the other nuns is also authentic. Cf. P. Alfons Žák, “Das Frauenkloster Himmelpforte in Wien”, in Jahrbuch für Landeskunde von Niederösterreich, new series, VI, (1907), Vienna 1908, p. 164: “In the year 1695 a Turkish slave girl of Gerolamo Giudici, the Spanish lieutenant of Cardinal Leopold Count Collonitz, was baptised at Saint Ursula, and she was to be educated at the convent of Himmelpforte. The nuns protested against the arrival of the girl, since they were all noble novices, while she was a slave. Even the Kaiser agreed with them, on 3rd September 1695, and after the lieutenant applied to the Viennese consistory on 12th September, requesting them to oblige the convent to take the slave into the novitiate, on 16th September, the request was turned down.”
Nor should the sudden appearance of Camilla de’ Rossi in the buttery near Neugebäude occasion any surprise: the convent of Porta Coeli did in fact possess some properties near the Place with No Name, as is attested by the documents concerning the convent held at the Vienna City Archive.
It is quite plausible that Camilla de’ Rossi should have retired to the convent of St Lawrence. This is not only because it is impossible to find any trace of the musician after 1711, either in Vienna or in her native Rome, but also due to a surprising account given by Lady Montagu, the famous English writer and traveller, who, visiting the capital of the Empire in 1716, writes:
I was surprized to see here the only beautiful young woman I have seen at Vienna, and not only beautiful, but genteel, witty and agreeable, of a great family, and who had been the admiration of the town. I could not forbear shewing my surprize at seeing a nun like her. She made me a thousand obliging compliments, and desired me to come often. It would be an infinite pleasure to me, said she sighing, but I avoid, with the greatest care, seeing any of my former acquaintance; and, whenever they come to our convent, I lock myself in my cell. I observed tears come into her eyes, which touched me extremely, and I began to talk to her in that strain of tender pity she inspired me with; but she would not own to me that she is not perfectly happy. I have since endeavoured to learn the real cause of her retirement, without being able to get any other account, but that every body was surprized at it, and no body guessed the reason. I have been several times to see her; but it gives me too much melancholy to see so agreeable a young creature buried alive.
(Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montague: Written During Her Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to which are Added Poems by the Same Author. Paris 1822, pp. 37–38).
The therapies used by Camilla de’ Rossi, based on the medicine of St Hildehard of Bingen, are all authentic. There is nothing surprising in the fact that the Chormaisterin learned these skills from her Turkish mother: as Karl Heinz Reger (Hildegard Medizin, Monaco 1989, p. 11) reports, some scholars see clear influences of Islamic culture on Hildegard’s writings.
Ottoman Customs, Embassies and Legends
All the descriptions that Cloridia gives of Ottoman customs, such as the particular concept of hospitality (the guest as muzafir), Populescu’s account of the harem, the dervish’s ritual, the Armenian use of the tandur, Atto Melani’s descriptions of the derebeys and the rebels of Giaur-Daghda, including his reflections on “men without a conscience”, faithfully reflect the accounts given by contemporary travellers visiting the Ottoman Empire and their scandalised reactions to customs and ways of thinking that were so different from those in the West. See, for example, Maccari, Diario del mio viaggio di Costantinopoli presentato alla Maestà dell’Imperatore Leopoldo I, Ms., 67 cc. This is a stupendous manuscript in Italian, kept in the manuscript collection of the National Library of Vienna, which the authors will publish in the near future.
Accounts of the Ottoman Empire remained practically unchanged from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. See, for example, Ferriol, Wahreste und neueste Abbildung des Türckischen Hofes. . 1708, 1709. ., Nuremberg, 1719; and the Piedmontese princess Cristina di Belgioioso, “La vie intime et la vie nomade en Orient”, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1855. Belgioioso, among other things, describes how she herself witnessed the magic dancing ritual of dervishes, who made cuts all over their bodies which then inexplicably healed within a few seconds, just as described by the chimney-sweep.
During our research in Istanbul we had the good (and ill) fortune to track down, at an antiquarian’s in the Grand Bazaar, the disjecta membra of a Venetian diary on Constantinople from the end of the sixteenth century; unfortunately the antiquarian had already stripped it of its cover and frontispiece, and had cut out all the individual pages in order to sell the engravings for 150 euros each. This kind of malpractice is, alas, common among antiquarians throughout the world; to our way of thinking, it should be severely punished by the law. Yielding to our heartfelt supplications, the antiquarian courteously allowed us a rapid examination of the fragmentary writings on the back of the engravings.
The Turkish legends that the students investigate (principally, that of the golden apple and the forty thousand of Kasim) are all genuine; they are reported, for example, by Richard F. Kreutel (ed.), Im Reiche des Goldenen Apfels. Des türkischen Weltenbummlers Evliyâ Çelebi denkwürdige Reise in das Giaurenland und in die Stadt und Festung Wien anno 1665, Graz-Vienna-Cologne, 1957.
The myth of Dayı Çerkes, or Dayı Circasso, recounted by Penicek, corresponds to the version provided by Kerstin Tomenendal, Das türkische Gesicht Wiens, Vienna-Cologne-Weimar 1999, p. 187 ff. The Turkish version of the legend is narrated in the excited travel account of the Turk Evliyâ Çelebi, who visited Vienna in 1665. The statue can still be admired on the façade of the palace. The address is: Heidenschuss 3.
Equally true is the inhuman practice of the kidnapping of Christian children by the Ottomans that Atto Melani describes. Robert Mantran discusses it in La vita quotidiana a Costantinopoli ai tempi di Solimano il Magnifico, Milan 1985 (original edition: Paris 1965), pp. 104–105:
After the second half of the fourteenth century, which is to say, after the conquest of a part of Balkan Europe, the Ottomans, in order to ensure the regular recruiting of an army that was expanding in strength and size, used a system that profoundly disturbed Christian consciences but which for a long period of time proved of great service to the Turks: we allude to the dev irme, the “harvest”. This system consisted of the annual or biannual culling, in a certain number of Christian families of the Balkans, of male children under the age of five. Separated completely from their parents, these children were sent to Anatolia, to Muslim families where they were brought up in the Muslim fashion, taught Turkish and initiated into Turkish and Islamic habits and traditions. At the age of ten or eleven they entered the educational institutions of the palaces of Hadrianopolis and Gallipoli and, after the conquest, Istanbul, and from this moment on they were termed acemi o lan. Depending on their aptitude they were sent to the army or to the palace, where they became pages and were termed iç o lan. There then followed a procedure that saw them rise from rank to rank, and if they succeeded in attracting the attention of the sultan or of a sultana or of some favourite, there was nothing to stop them from gaining access to the highest offices, even that of Grand Vizier. Having practically forgotten their origins and owing their own position solely to the favour of the sultan they showed him the utmost devotion and had no other ambition than to devote themselves to his service.
As regards the provenance of the upper classes of the “harvest”, see Giorgio Vercellin, Solimano il Magnifico, Florence 1997, pp. 11–12:
It is impossible to overestimate how much the presence of the Ottomans in Europe during the years around the Reformation influenced the course of history on our continent, starting with the history of the countries between the Rhine and the Danube. The Protestants were the principal beneficiaries of the conflict of Charles V and Ferdinand I with the “Infidels”, so much so that the greatest expert in relations between the Ottoman world and the Christian world, Kenneth Setton, has gone so far as to state (“Lutheranism and the Turkish Peril”, in Balkan Studies, III, 1962) that without the Turks the Reformation could easily have suffered the same fate as the Albigensian Revolt. The Empire’s strength was based on the crucial function of the janissaries, a highly specialised infantry corps created by Sultan Murad I (1362–1398) almost a century before the formation of the first regular army in France. Issuing from the singular institution that was the dev irme [. .] and distinguished by their white headgear, the janissaries were about a thousand in number in the fourteenth century, 5,000 in the following century and 12,000 in the age of Suleiman.”
The description of the Turkish procession in Himmelpfortgasse is closely based on accounts of the visit, which were printed and distributed at the time: Beschreibung der Audientz. . op. cit., Vienna, 9th April 1711.
The two subsequent audiences of the Agha at Eugene’s palace, respectively on 13th and 15th April 1711, are confirmed in A. Arneth, Prinz Eugen von Savoyen, Vienna 1864, vol. 2, p. 159. Arneth, however, makes a mistake: he says that the Agha left again on 19th April. This is not true. The farewell ceremony with Eugene’s substitute, the Vice-president of War, Count von Herberstein, took place on 16th May and is described in the printed report entitled Die an dem Tuerckischen Abgesandten Cefulah Aga, Capihi Pascia, ertheilte Abschieds-Audienz, mit Beschreibung aller Ceremonien so darbey ergangen, zu Wien, den 16. May 1711.
In addition the supplement of the Corriere Ordinario of 3rd June 1711, Foglio Aggiunto, (p. 91 of the year 1711) reports that the Agha did not leave until 2nd June, “making for Constantinople with five boats assigned to him, and he took with him various things, which he bought here, including some Casks with Pocket-Knives, Scythes, and Sickles, and similar Utensils.”
Further details on the various Turkish embassies to Vienna in those years come from R. Perger and E. D. Petritsch, “Der Gasthof ‘Zum Goldenen Lamm’ in der Leopoldstadt und seine türkischen Gäste”, in: Jahrbuch des Vereines für die Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 55 (1999), p. 147 ff.
During the Turkish siege of Vienna there really was a betrayal by the Armenian Schahin and his servant, as Koloman recounts to the chimney-sweep on the fifth day; see K. Teply, Die Einführung des Kaffees in Wien, Vienna 1980, p. 35 ff.
The story of Kara Mustafa’s lost head is also wholly authentic. Cf. Richard F. Kreutel, “Der Schädel des Kara Mustafa Pascha”, in Jahrbuch des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Wien, 32/33 (1976–1977), pp. 63–77. There was actually a second head of a Turk in the city Zeughaus of Vienna, at the address no. 10, Am Hof. It belonged to Abaza Kör Hüseyin Pascha, who fell near Vienna on 24th August 1683 at the Battle of Bisamberg (cf. Kerstin Tomenendal, Das türkische Gesicht Wiens. Auf den Spuren der Türken in Wien, Vienna-Cologne-Weimar 2000, p. 186). The head of this forgotten war hero was kept as a companion to that of the more celebrated Kara Mustafa, and was listed in the catalogues only until 1790. It had probably disappeared from the warehouses before that date, maybe long before, which is to say when it was stolen by Ugonio. .
Ilsung, Hag, Ungnad, Marsili
The essential information on Ilsung is all confirmed by Stephan Dworzak, Georg Ilsung von Tratzberg, typewritten degree dissertation, Vienna 1954.
As Simonis recounts, in 1564 David Hag was appointed on the advice of Georg Ilsung to the post of court paymaster (Hofpfennigmeister): cf. Vienna State Archive, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv, Familienakten, Karton 99, recommendation of Ilsung to Maximilian II of 3rd October 1563.
It really was Ilsung who advised engaging the mysterious healer Magdalena Streicher to treat (or to kill?) the dying Maximilian. This is reported in a letter from the doctor Crato von Crafftheim to Joannes Sambucus published by M.A. Becker, Die letzten Tage und der Tod Maximilians II, Vienna 1877, p. 41. On David Ungnad see Hilda Lietzmann, Das Negebäude in Wien. Sultan Süleymans Zelt — Kaiser Maximilians II. Lustschloss, Munich-Berlin 1987.
It was indeed Luigi Marsili (all the details concerning him are historically accurate) who taught the Viennese to prepare coffee, as the chimney-sweep says. In his leaflet Bevanda asiatica, brindata all’Enimentissimo Bonvisi, Nunzio apostolico appresso la Maestà del’Imperatore etc., Vienna 1685, the Italian commander explains for the first time how to toast the beans, grind them and mix them with boiling water. The other information on Marsili contained in Atto Melani’s account is confirmed by the numerous other works cited in the bibliography appended to this book.
Bettelstudenten and Chimney-Sweeps
In issue 280 of the Wiennerisches Diarium, which reports the news from 7th to 9th April 1706, and which is held in Vienna’s city library, we discovered a very rare account of the Viennese Bettelstudenten of the age, never unearthed by any historian:
Wednesday 7th April. For some time now it is to be noted that, despite the frequent Edicts published, many wandering students — and others who join them, but who are not truly such — are still to be seen begging night and day in the streets and in front of the churches and houses, even during the school term; these, feigning to study, devote themselves to idleness, to theft and robbery, like the tumult of 17th and 18th January last which broke out inside and outside the city, also at Nussdorf (for which detailed inquiries are still being carried out to identify the culprits and punish them severely) and they tarnish the good name of the other students. This lamentable mendicancy — which is the word for lounging about and succumbing to vice under the pretext of study — must be seriously uprooted: to this end it is necessary to complete the task laid down by the former Resolutions of his Caesarean Majesty; to this aim the Rector, the Caesarean Superintendents and the Consistory of this most ancient University were exhorted to issue a special Edict and to give a final warning to the Bettelstudenten who were roaming around and not studying: within 14 days they must depart from here and go to their homes or anywhere else. Failing to do so they will be seized by the guards and taken ad Carceres Academicos, where suitable punishment will be meted out. Those impoverished students, on the other hand, who daily and continuously apply themselves to their studies, must seek a study grant in the Alumnates or some other means of subsistence; only those who are unable, because of the numbers, to obtain such assistance, or those who have no choice but to seek alms outside lesson times, will be allowed to continue in this fashion until the arrival of new orders. But they must always bear their identity badge, get it renewed every month and show it if requested. Otherwise they will not be recognised as real students, but as vagabond students and will be immediately punished.
It is possible to verify that the chimney-sweep never invents anything by studying the numerous sources that describe student life at the beginning of the eighteenth century: for example, Rudolf Kink, Geschichte der kaiserlichen Universität zu Wien, Vienna 1854, or Peter Krause, “O alte Burschenherrlichkeit”. Die Studenten und ihr Brauchtum, Vienna 1987, or Uta Tschernut, Die Kärntner Studenten an der Wiener Universität 1365–1900, typewritten degree dissertation, Vienna 1984. The bizarre student ceremony known as the Deposition, during which Penicek is appointed Simonis’s Pennal, follows an ancient and genuine tradition, as is explained by Wolffgang Karl Rost, Kurtze Nachricht von der Academischen Deposition, Jena (no publication date).
The tricks, expedients, superstitions and devices used by Simonis and by his student friends are taken from the highly entertaining Henricus Caspar Abelius, Leib-Medicus der Studenten und Studenten-Künste, Leipzig 1707.
Even the tiniest detail concerning the wretched life of chimney-sweeps in Italy is authentic; see, for example, Benito Mazzi, “Fam, füm, frecc, il grande romanzo degli spazzacamini”, in Quaderni di cultura alpina, 2000. Equally authentic is the description of the happier life led by Italian chimney-sweeps in Vienna and the many imperial privileges granted to their corporation: cf. Else Reketzki, Das Rauchfangkehrergewerbe in Wien. Seine Entwicklung vom Ende des 16. Jh. Bis ins 19. Jh., unter Berücksichtigung der übrigen österreichischen Länder, dissertation, Vienna, 1952. All the details of the Gewerbe IV, the business number four, donated by Atto Melani to his chimney-sweep friend, can be checked in the deeds of the chimney-sweeps’ corporation held in the Vienna City Archive (Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv), including the vineyard and the house “close to the church of St Michael” in the Josephina suburb, which has now become the beautiful district of Josefstadt.
Free Time, Taverns, Feasts and Other Details
All the details concerning the incredible number of feast days, of processions, the continual absences from work for all kinds of religious observances, the general level of comfort even in the lowliest strata of society, and also the antelucan hours of the start of day, including the call of the night guard (“Now rise O Servant, praise God this morn, the light now gleams of a new day’s dawn”), inns, games, taxes, spies, free time and all other descriptions of life in Vienna, are authentic in every detail, starting with the Hetzhaus and the animal fights.
As Gerhard Tanzer records in his admirable degree dissertation on amusements in Vienna in the eighteenth century (“In Wienn zu seyn ist schon Unterhaltung genug!” Zum Wandel der Freizeit im 18. Jh., Dissertation zur Erlangung des Doktorgrades der Philosophie, Vienna 1988) and in the essay that derived from it (Spectacle müssen seyn. Die Freizeit dr Wiener im 18. Jh., Vienna-Cologne-Weimar 1992), between 1707 and 1717 there was great resistance on the part of innkeepers to the taxing of bowling alleys, exactly as Simonis tells the chimney-sweep when they go looking for Populescu. Those, like the Romanian student, who denounced rule breakers, were as common as mud. The payments handed out to them exceeded the revenues from tax, but people soon resigned themselves to looking on the bright side: the sums won at gambling all added to the money in circulation; the important thing was that money should not be sent abroad! And so in later years, as with dancing, gambling proliferated wildly. People danced and gambled everywhere, grumbled the conservatives, even when the Holy Sacrament was passing in procession outside the tavern.
The number of taverns in Austria at the time, and the list of dishes devoured at wedding dinners is taken from Franciscus Guarinonius, Die Greuel der Verwüstung menschlichen Geschlechts, Vienna 1610.
Despite what the reader may think, the scene in which diners indulge in all sorts of wild behaviour, witnessed by Atto, the chimney-sweep and Domenico on the fourth day, is not in any way an exaggeration on the authors’ part; the actions reported (blowing on hot food and spattering oil into other diners’ eyes, pouring wine down people’s shirt fronts, using napkins to blow one’s nose, pulling the tablecloth to bring the roast meat closer etc.) are all amply described — in order to castigate them! — by the famous court preacher, the barefoot Augustinian Abraham from Sancta Clara (cf. also E.M. Spielmann, Die Frau und ihr Lebenskreis bei Abraham a Sancta Clara, typewritten degree dissertation, Vienna 1944, pp. 125–126).
The incredible secret exchanges of bread and wine between Turks and Viennese during the 1683 siege are historically substantiated too: see K. Teply, Die Einführung. . op. cit., p. 30. But as Teply points out (p. 35), when the historian Onno Klopp (Das Jahr 1683 und der folgende grosse Türkenkrieg bis zum frieden von Carlowitz von 1699, Graz 1882) dared to question the conduct of the civilians who had defended the besieged city two hundred years earlier, he was immediately silenced by a hostile chorus of journalists, politicians and academics, with questions even being raised in the city council.
Nothing is invented in Koloman’s account of the incredible variety and quantity of fish that once reached Vienna. It was not until the 1780s that things changed: Emperor Joseph II closed many monasteries — which had previously been the main suppliers of good fish — and did away with many religious feasts with obligatory fasting. The fish recipes created to circumvent this obligation fell out of favour. Very soon the Viennese adopted a saying from the Elizabethan age, with which the Protestants indirectly made fun of the Catholics: “He’s a good person, he doesn’t eat fish.”
The alehouse known as The Yellow Eagle (Zum Gelben Adler), also known as the “Greek tavern” (Griechenbeisl), situated in the meat market (today’s Fleischmarkt), where Simonis takes Atto and chimney-sweep at the beginning of the sixth day, is still active. It is the famous inn where, according to legend, during the plague of 1679, the storyteller Augustin composed his famous Lied: O du, lieber Augustin, alles ist hin. .
The Blue Bottle Café (Zur Blauen Flasche) really existed and was the first place authorised to sell coffee.
The inn known as the House Goat (Zum Haimböck in German) still exists today. The tavern, which has splendid food and is much loved by the Viennese, is now called 10er Marie (Zehner Marie). It took on the new name in the mid-eighteenth century, combining the street number with the name of the host’s beautiful daughter. Unfortunately it is no longer surrounded by the beautiful vineyards of former days, but by ugly apartment blocks: to rediscover the unspoilt countryside described by the chimney-sweep one has to climb up to The Pulpit (Am Predigtstuhl in German), on the hill now known as Wilhelminenberg, where the chimney-sweep goes on the sixth day.
A small clarification on the Buschenschank, the hostelries similar to the Roman fraschette: today they are commonly known as Heuriger, taking their name from the new wine that is served there.
The poor quality of the wines of Liesing and of Stockerau, referred to by Cloridia, is noted in an almanac for the year 1711, Crackauer Schreib-Calender auff das Jahr nach Christi Geburt M.CC.XI durch M. Johannem Gostumiowsky, in der Hochlöbl. Crackauerischen Academia Phil. Doct. Ordinarium Astrologiae Professorem, und Königlichen Mathematicum, Krakow 1710.
The Viennese have always had a particularly sensitive palate when it comes to wine. It is well known that in 1453 Emperor Frederick III, enraged by a particularly unsuccessful grape harvest, decreed that the wine should be used instead of water to mix the cement needed to build the Cathedral of St Stephen.
The theory that the Habsburgs might descend from the Roman Pierleoni family, as Atto declares to the chimney-sweep, corresponds precisely to the ancient heraldic treatises in vogue in Vienna in the eighteenth century, including the dishonourable deeds of the Roman family (cf., for example, Eucharius Gottlieb Rynck, Leopolds des grossen Römischen Kaysers wunderwürdiges Leben und Thaten aus geheimen Nachrichten eröffnet und in vier Theile getheilet, Leipzig 1709, I, 9 ff.)
The Turkish cannonballs stuck in the walls of Vienna, which Ugonio would have liked to steal and then sell, are still visible in the places in the city listed by the corpisantaro.
The Neuer Crackauer Schreib-Calender, durch Matthias Gentilli, Conte Rodari, von Trient, Krakow 1710, the almanac for 1711, in which the chimney-sweep reads the tally of the days since the birth of Jesus Christ, is kept in the City Library of Vienna (Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek).
The legend of the Tekuphah is authentic: to read it in its entirety see W. Hirsch, Entdeckung derer Tekuphot, oder Das schädliche Blut, Berlin 1717.
The system of quartering rights as described by Simonis is entirely accurate: see Joseph Kallbrunner (ed.), Wohnungssorgen im alten Wien. Dokumente zur Wiener Wohnungsfrage im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Vienna-Leipzig 1926.
The list of the dead that Atto reads in the Wiennerisches Diarium is taken directly from issue no. 803 of the newspaper, 11-14th April 1711. The statistics on the dead in 1710, reported by the chimney-sweep, are confirmed in a supplement of the Corriere Ordinario of Vienna, 7 January 1711. The same is true of the dead recorded in Rome the same year (see Francesco Valesio, Diario di Roma, t.IV, anno 1710, p. 368 ff.).
In Vienna news of the sickness of the Dauphin of France arrived on 14th April 1711, the same day on which Cloridia gives Atto and the chimney-sweep the gazette bearing the news.
There is no element of fantasy in Penicek’s description of Hungary: his account faithfully corresponds to the sources between the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Cf. Casimir Freschot, Idea generale del regno d’Ungheria, sua descrittione, costumi, regni, e guerra, Venice 1684.
The information on the widespread use of Italian in Vienna is confirmed by Stefano Barnabè’s manual (Teutsche und Italianische Discurs, Vienna, 1660 and Unterweisung Der Italienischen Sprach, Vienna, 1675) and above all by Michael Ritter’s excellent text, Man sieht der Sternen König glantzen, Vienna 1999, p. 9. Ritter confirms that in Vienna Italian was not only the official court language, as the chimney-sweep tells us, but the dominant idiom tout court.
Cardinal Kollonitsch (“Collonitz” is the old spelling) really was one of the pillars of Viennese resistance against the Turks, as Gaetano Orsini recounts, and was indeed in close touch with the family of Pope Innocent XI Odescalchi, who financed the Christian armies that triumphed in the battle of 12th September 1683 (cf. the historical notes in the appendix to Monaldi amp; Sorti, Imprimatur, Edinburgh 2008).
The description of the tavern where Hristo Hadji-Tanjov played chess is confirmed in Michael Ehn and Ernst Strouhal, Luftmenschen. Die Schachspieler von Wien 1700–1938, Vienna 1998.
The Wiennerisches Diarium was indeed sold, as the young chimney-sweep recounts, in the palace known as the Red Porcupine (Rothes Igel). According to the Historisches Lexikon Wien by Felix Czeike (Vienna 2004, III, 300) it was not until 1721 that Rothes Igel hosted the editorial office of the Wiennerisches Diarium. However, in the Wiennerisches Diarium of 1711 one already finds the words “Zu finden im Rothen Igel”, which is to say “it can be found at the Red Porcupine”.
The Viennese and Their History
The Viennese — historians, scholars, professors, but also the common people and those residing in the surrounding area — are all highly sensitive to anything concerning the Habsburgs: woe to anyone who casts the slightest doubt on the noble imperial lineage! Joseph and Charles were universally loved, Prince Eugene should have been canonised, and the resistance of the besieged citizens in 1683 was nothing but heroic. While Onno Klopp, as has been seen, takes a rather different approach and is a great historian, Arneth is often unreliable. For example, he takes his information on the death of Joseph I from the biography of Wagner (a Jesuit!), gets the date of the Agha’s departure from Vienna wrong (see above) and constantly tries to convince the reader that Joseph I was surrounded by nothing but harmony and love. Arneth then describes in impassioned language Charles’s presumed grief on hearing of his brother’s death, claims that Joseph bade farewell to his “beloved consort”, but says nothing about the cruel treatment meted out to his young lover, Countess Marianna Pálffy.
Even today, anyone who dares to contradict the rose-coloured vulgate version is brusquely silenced, almost as if one were dealing with current politics (in a non-democratic regime), and not with history from the remote past. This is a minor defect of the Viennese, but it is also their most valuable quality: in their country everything is always fine, and woe to anyone who makes so bold as to claim the contrary, especially if a foreigner. The good side of this — and by far the most important — is that by dint of believing in and propagating the notion that everything is fine, they have succeeded to some degree in defending their world from the destructive forces of our squalid age, so that in no other capital city in the world can one live so well as in Vienna. It is a factor that writers who criticise Austria harshly, like Elfriede Jelinek, should bear in mind. And these are the words of two authors who have been forced into exile from their beloved homeland, Italy. Thank you, citizens of Vienna.
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