Travelling Hopefully

I must admit I think I am suffering from cathedral overload.  How often can one stare at soaring ceilings, stained glass windows, and magnificent artwork before one says "enough"?  Still I had to go to Stephansdom, the cathedral church of Vienna.  It has soaring ceilings, stained glass windows and magnificent artwork.  It also has the sarcophagus of emperor Frederick III.  Frederick was an early Habsburg emperor who spent much of his time being chased from one of his territories to another by various enemies.  He eventually beat them all by the simple process of outliving them and taking their lands after their deaths.  Frederick didn't have much success on the battlefield but he had a certain amount of political rat cunning.  He was frequently accused of indecision or procrastination but when it is crowned with eventual success I think we can give it the term, patience.

Having visited one dead Habsburg I decided to drop in on a hundred or so more.  The imperial crypt situated below a very modest Capuchin church contains the bones of a hundred and sixty or so dead Habsburgs including a number of emperors.  The most magnificent, of course, is the joint sarcophagus of Maria Theresia and her husband the emperor Franz (who was only a Habsburg by marriage).  By contrast that of their son, emperor Josef II, was very simple indeed as befitted a monarch who tried to make all his subjects get buried in tin boxes as a public health measure.  The reaction of the public for whose health he showed such concern was a universal "like Hell" and Joseph was forced to back down.  An emperor can annoy the aristocracy as much as he likes but it is very unwise to piss off the peasants.

Old Franz Josef is there of course, flanked by his wife and son both of whom predeceased him (being associated with Franz Josef didn't appear to be good for the life expectancy).  The sarcophagi of his wife Sisi and his son Rudolf are surrounded by fresh flowers and little gifts.  Nothing but a single modest bouquet (dating to 2011) adorns Franz Josef's austere sarcophagus but that dull, dedicated man would not expect to be rewarded simply for doing his duty.  If he were capable of irony he might be amused by the fact that all the bouquets have been given to two people who avoided theirs.

Having wandered around a room full of dead Habsburgs I decided that I might as well go through their stuff as well so I visited the Hofburg.  The Hofburg is the palace complex where the Habsburgs hung out when they were in Vienna.  There are arches, large buildings, wildly overblown statues and open spaces where the preceding can be comfortably surveyed.  My first stop was the treasure room.

Anyone who has read something of the history of the Habsburg empire knows that it spent a good deal of its existence teetering on the edge of bankruptcy so it came as a slight surprise that the treasure room is rather well stocked.  There are gorgeous robes, brocaded cloth and jewellery including an emerald quite literally as large as my fist (its the largest single emerald in the world).  There is the crown, orb and sceptre of the empire of Austria of course but there is also the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire including the crown, a cross set with pieces of the true cross on which Christ was crucified and the spearhead from the lance that pierced his side.  You can take the last two with as many grains of salt as is necessary to choke them down but they have been objects of veneration for over a thousand years.  There are gods from legitimate religions that aren't that old, they're practically sacred by osmosis.

Oh yes, they also have the holy grail and a unicorns horn (pass the salt again please).  The "grail" is a huge bowl carved from a single piece of agate.  As near as anyone can tell it was probably made in Constantinople in the third or fourth century AD.  That would make it early Byzantine or late Roman depending on your point of view.  How the Habsburgs got their hands on it is anybody's guess but they were nothing if not acquisitive.

I think my favourite piece was a Hungarian holy relic which was supposed to be given back to the Hungarians as part of the divorce settlement between the two nations at the end of the first world war.  The Austrians duly handed it over and it turned out to be a forgery.  It had been given to a jeweller sometime previously for restoration and rather than restore it he had made a copy, returned that to the Austrians and sold the original on the black market.  Subsequently the treasury museum managed to buy it back, what the Hungarians think of this was not recorded.