notables, was open to all scholars and persons of good birth and was exactly the kind of thing to fascinate Peter. He resolved, one day, to create a similar Kunstkammer in Russia. The Green Vault, so named because its walls were painted the national color of Saxony, was a secret storehouse, accessible through a single door in the Elector's living quarters. Here the rulers of Saxony kept a collection of jewels and precious objects which were among the richest in Europe. Peter was absorbed by both collections and remained, examining one instrument or object after another, until dawn.
The following evening, Furstenberg gave a small private dinner that expanded into the kind of noisy, boisterous party the Russians loved. Trumpeters, oboists and drummers were called in to provide music. At Peter's request, five ladies were also invited, including the beautiful Countess Aurora von Konigsmark, mistress of the Elector and mother of the future great marshal of France, Maurice de Saxe. The party went on until three a.m. with Peter exuberantly taking the drumsticks and playing 'with a perfection that far surpassed the drummers.' After this night of drinking, music and dancing, Peter set off in a light-hearted mood for Prague and Vienna, and as soon as the Tsar was out of town, the relieved and weary Prince Furstenberg wrote to the Elector: 'I thank God that all has gone off so well, for I feared that I could not fully please this fastidious gentleman.'
Four miles north of the old city of Vienna rise the twin hills of the Kahlenberg and the Leopoldsberg; east of the city, the Danube flows southward toward Budapest; to the west lie the rolling meadows and forests of the Vienna Woods. Yet, for all its magnificent setting, Vienna did not compare in size with London, Amsterdam, Paris or even with Moscow. Primarily, this was because Vienna, unlike the other great cities of Europe, was not a great port or commercial trading center. Its sole function was to be the seat of the imperial House of Hapsburg, the crossroads and administrative center of the vast sweep of territory from the Baltic to Sicily which owed allegiance to the Emperor Leopold I. In fact, in Peter's time, the Emperor ruled two empires. The first was the old Holy Roman Empire, a loosely bound union of almost independent states in Germany and Italy, whose ties and ancient traditions went back through a thousand years to the empire of Charlemagne. The other empire, quite separate and distinct, was the collection of traditional Hapsburg lands in Central Europe— the Archduchy of Austria, the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Kingdom of Hungary and other territories in the Balkans recently conquered from the Turks.
It was the first empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, which gave the Emperor his title and immense prestige and justified the enormous size and magnificence of his court. In fact, however, the title was hollow and the empire itself was almost wholly facade. The rulers of this congerie of disparate states, the hereditary electors,* margraves, landgraves, princes and dukes, determined for themselves the religion of their subjects, the size of their armies and whether, when war came, they would fight beside the Emperor, against him, or remain neutral. None of these great lords gave more than a passing thought to their ties to their imperial master when it came to matters of serious policy. They, or their representatives, sat in the Imperial Diet at Regensburg, originally the empire's legislative organ, now purely consultative and decorative. The Emperor could make no law without the Diet's consent, and the discussions never reached consent, as the envoys argued endlessly over precedence. When an emperor died, the Diet met and automatically elected the next head of the House of Hapsburg. This was traditional, and tradition was the single feature of the ancient empire which had not been allowed to die.
Despite the hollowness of his imperial title, the Emperor was
*The title 'elector' was given to the seven Germanic princes who held the privilege of electing the Holy Roman Emperor.
not unimportant. The strength of the House of Hapsburg, its revenues, its army and its power, stemmed from the states and territories it really ruled: Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Hungary and new claims and conquests which stretched across the Carpathians into Translyvania and across the Alps to the Adriatic. There were also Hapsburg claims to the throne of Spain with all of Spain's possessions in Europe, including Spain itself, the Spanish Netherlands, and Naples, Sicily and Sardinia. This second empire looked to the south and east for dangers and opportunities. Lying as a barrier between Western Europe and the Balkans, it believed in its holy mission to defend Christianity against the advance of the Ottoman Empire. The Protestant princes to the north had no interest in the Emperor's fears or ambitions in the Balkans; they saw these matters as private enterprises of the House of Hapsburg, and if the Emperor wanted their support in any of them, he usually had to buy it.
Austria was the center and Vienna the heart of the Hapsburg world. It was a Catholic world, heavy with tradition and elaborate ceremony, actively guided by the Jesuits who were never far from the deliberations of the councils of state. Or from the elbow of the imperial personage in whom God, they assured him, had placed a special trust.
His Most Catholic Majesty Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Archduke of Austria, King of Bohemia and King of Hungary, admitted no mortal man to be his equal except the Pope. In the eyes of the Hapsburg Emperor, His Most Christian Majesty the King of France was no more than an arriviste, an upstart of mediocre genealogy and odious pretensions. The Tsar of Muscovy was scarcely more notable than other Eastern princes who lived in tents.
Leopold was unshakably certain of his position. The House of Hapsburg was the oldest reigning dynasty in Europe. For 300 years, in unbroken succession, the family had worn the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, whose history and prerogatives traced back to Charlemagne. By the end of the seventeenth century, the Reformation and the Thirty Years' War had diminished the Imperial power, but in name, the Emperor was still the preeminent secular ruler of Christendom. His actual power might have faded in comparison to that of the King of France, but a sense of superiority—shadowy, medieval, semi-ecclesiastical—still prevailed. To preserve that sense of rank was one of Leopold's principal concerns. He maintained a staff of industrious historians and librarians who had managed by their research to link the Emperor's genealogy back through innumerable heroes and saints to Noah.
The man who bore this heavy weight of genealogical responsibility was swarthy, of middling height, with the projecting lower jaw and protruding lower lip which traditionally marked (if not disfigured) the Hapsburgs. Although in 1698 he had already occupied the imperial throne for forty years and would sit on it seven years more, he had not been born to the crown. Instead, Leopold was a younger brother, bred for the church, who had been snatched from his theological studies only by the death of his older brother, Ferdinand. Elected emperor at eighteen, Leopold throughout his long reign preferred the quieter things: theology, the arts, court ceremony and the study of genealogy; he especially loved music and himself composed operas. He was not a warrior, although under him the empire was almost continually at war. When the Ottoman armies surrounded and besieged Vienna in 1683, the Emperor quietly departed, returning only after the Turks had been repelled and driven down the Danube. His character was melancholy, apathetic and obstinate. Yet, in his lethargy he somehow projected an austere dignity which was not without grandeur, part of which lay in his attitude toward himself. To be the emperor, he knew, was to stand at the summit of mankind.
Every detail of daily life at the imperial court was designed to proclaim that sublime rank. In the chambers and corridors of his ancient Viennese palace, the Hofburg, the Emperor was the object of a rigid protocol more akin to Byzantium than to Versailles. Normally, the Emperor wore Spanish court dress: black velvet with white point lace, a short cloak, his brimmed hat turned up at one side, the red stockings worn only by Hapsburg emperors, and red shoes. On ceremonial days—which were frequent—he appeared in almost Eastern splendor, covered with scarlet-and-gold brocade embroidered with diamonds, surrounded by his Knights of the Golden Fleece, each wearing a long cloak of crimson velvet embroidered with gold. Thus attired, on religious feast days the Emperor went on foot to mass, marching at the head of a long procession. Whenever the Emperor and his family passed, courtiers bowed low and dropped to one knee. If his name was mentioned, even when he was in another room, all who heard it performed a similar genuflection. When Their Majesties dined alone, their dishes passed through twenty-four hands before reaching the imperial table. Wine was poured by a steward who filled the imperial glass while on one knee.
The center of this stultifying ceremony was the Hofburg Palace, a confusing maze of buildings constructed over centuries, linked by corridors and dark staircases, tiny courtyards and grand hallways. Into this jumble of stone and masonry, which had none of the symmetry and elegance of Versailles, the Emperor, his court of 2,000 noblemen and 30,000 servants were crammed alongside numerous government offices, a museum and even a hospital. Except when on occasional visits to the Favorits Palace just outside the city, where he hunted stags, or the Laxenburg Palace twenty miles away, where he set his falcons on the herons, Leopold ruled his empire from the Hofburg.
In fact, the chaos of the Hofburg was symbolic of the chaos of the empire. The administration of the Hapsburg emperors was not effective. They could never weld together all the chanceries, councils, treasuries and
