Simon Winder > Quotes

“In Transylvania it was memories of the Romanian revolt that stalked the Hungarian aristocratic imagination.. In Galicia it was memories of Tarnow that performed a similar service for the surviving Polish noble families. Both societies shared something of the brittle, sports-obsessed cheerfulness of the British in India - or indeed of Southerners in the pre-1861 United States. These were societies which could resort to any level of violence in support of racial supremacy. Indeed, an interesting global history could be written about the ferocity of a period which seems, very superficially, to be so 'civilized'. Southern white responses to Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in 1831, with Turner himself flayed, beheaded and quartered, can be linked to the British blowing rebel Indians to pieces from the mouths of cannons in 1857.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The bags full of Turkish noses sent by the Uskoks from Senj to Charles V in 1532 may have been one of those gifts more fun to send than to receive,”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Rather than defeat the reader with a family tree which would look like an illustration of the veins and arteries of the human body drawn by a poorly informed maniac, I thought it better to start with this summary of just the heads of the family, so the sequence is clear. I give the year each ruler became Emperor and the year the ruler died. It all looks very straightforward and natural, but of course the list hides away all kinds of back-stabbing, reckless subdivision, hatred, fake piety and general failure, which can readily be relegated to the main text. To save everyone’s brains I have simplified all titles. Some fuss in this area is inevitable but I will cling under almost all circumstances to a single title for each character. To give you a little glimpse of the chaos, the unattractive Philip ‘the Handsome’ was Philip I of Castile, Philip II of Luxemburg, Philip III of Brabant, Philip IV of Burgundy, Philip V of Namur, Philip VI of Artois as well as assorted Is, IIs, IIIs and so on for other places. So when I just refer to Philip ‘the Handsome’ you should feel grateful and briefly ponder the pedantic horror-show you are spared.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It is possible to get too hung up about this point. In, for example, the genealogical multiple pile-up of Swabia with almost every hill under its own prince, it is possible to imagine a feudal version of Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library, a world of so many hundreds of rulers that every variation of behaviour is possible, or indeed certain, in any given moment. So somewhere a ruler with a huge grey beard is dying surrounded by his weeping family and retainers; somewhere else a bored figure is irritably shooting bits off the plaster decorations in the ballroom; another is making an improper suggestion to a stable boy; another is telling an anecdote about fighting the Turks, staring into space, girding for battle, converting to Calvinism, wishing he had a just slightly bigger palace, and so on. This dizzying multiplicity makes each of hundreds of castles a frightening challenge – with the possibility of the guide making my head explode with the dizzying details of how the young duchess had been walled up in a tower for being caught in a non-spiritual context with her confessor and how as a result the Strelitz-Nortibitz inheritance had passed, unexpectedly, to a cousin resident in Livonia who, on his way home to claim the dukedom, died of plague in a tavern near Rothenberg thus activating the claim of the very odd dowager’s niece, long resident in a convent outside Bamberg. But it is probably time to move on.”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“In the usual proto-Art-Nouveau style, the sculptor follows through on an ethnographic hunch that surprising numbers of the tribal womenfolk would be in their late teens and free of clothing.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Or at least it would for perhaps two or three days before the general levels of illiteracy and provincialism became too wearying and for perhaps four or five before you were expelled or burnt as a witch.”
― Simon Winder, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History

“academics more than anyone else are (with help from priests) some of the greatest villains.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“The chances of anybody today being a ‘pure’ example of any specific medieval ‘race’ must be close to zero, quite aside from the category being patently meaningless.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“For much of the seventeenth century the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been relatively quiet – relatively in the sense that large-scale raiding did happen (baking in a level of violence which we would consider scarcely credible) but it was not by the standards of the time serious.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“John of Bavaria, realizing the game was up and his throwing in the priesthood and marrying had just wasted everyone’s time, made Philip the Good his heir. He was shortly thereafter assassinated in The Hague with a poisoned prayer book (yes, really – nothing can beat the fifteenth century).”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“otherwise the remainder of this book would be a trackless waste. The mayhem of the 1790s tends naturally to focus on France and its Revolution, but there is an equally strong argument for seeing a Europe-wide failure in this period which more broadly promoted irresponsibility and chaotic aggression. In the short time since the glory days of helping the United States gain independence, France had collapsed as a great power – demoralized, humiliated and financially broken down – and this had provided a peculiar and unaccustomed space for Austria and Prussia to muck about in without fear of French vengeance. Indeed one of the motors of the French Revolution was a new sense of national rather than merely dynastic humiliation: that the Grande Nation’s borders were being mocked by countries who would have previously shown much greater respect – most egregiously the Prussian invasion of the Dutch Republic in 1787 and the Habsburg crushing of revolution in the Austrian Netherlands in 1790. Joseph”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“It is the last place heading south before the landscape gets terminally dusty, glum and thinly settled, so it has an oasis or frontier atmosphere and a sense that the cappuccinos are a bit hard-won.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“Indeed, a parallel history of Europe could be written which viewed family life and regular work as the essential Continental motor of civilization. Then war and revolution would need to be seen by historians as startling, sick departures from that norm of a kind that require serious explanation, rather than viewing periods of gentle introversy as mere tiresome interludes before the next thrill-packed bloodbath.”
― Simon Winder, Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History

“The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“From Wilhelm’s point of view the most confusing aspect of the Saalburg must have been that all the time, while capering about on the ramparts, pretending to be a deeply professional yet humane Roman commander, staring into the savage-filled murk, waiting for the next attack, he was a German looking in the wrong direction. It was against people like him that the Saalburg had been built.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“By making himself Holy Roman Emperor he was genuinely refounding the earlier empire, the monumental remains from that period still scattered about him, along the Rhine and Mosel. The window of opportunity was small and happenstantial: in the still-continuing Eastern Roman Empire Irene was empress and, as she was a woman, this was interpreted by the Pope and Charles as implying there was a job vacancy. When she died a couple of years later, her successors continued to view themselves rightly as the true Roman emperors and Charlemagne’s successors as a barbarian Goon Show – but it was too late. This new Western Roman Empire lasted for almost exactly a thousand years and was ended only by Napoleon, who before his own crowning as Emperor of the French came to stand and mull before Charlemagne’s throne in Aachen, in the engagingly stagey way at which he excelled. Once Charlemagne was declared Emperor his successors were always Western Europe’s most senior ruler, however ragged and embarrassing their real circumstances.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The differences between West and East Francia were substantially those of geography. Whatever setbacks the ruler in Paris had to deal with, he had the confidence of much of his realm being defined by oceans and high mountains while in the east the border with the Empire was also clear. France proved almost impossible to invade, with even the persistent English seen off in the end. East Francia on the other hand was a colonial state, pushing further into Europe against innumerable Slavic, Viking, Magyar and Latinate peoples. In the later Middle Ages, the Emperor then became responsible for an enormous and permanent fighting frontier with Islam which settled the ‘capital’ (really, just the home town of the Habsburg family) at Vienna as the best place from which to watch the Ottomans – a role it would keep until the eighteenth century.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The Netherlands’ most off-putting of all town names, ’s-Hertogenbosch (‘the Duke’s woods’) – a wonderful place that would receive many more English-speaking visitors if their eyes did not bounce off the name – is rendered with great elegance in both Spanish and French, as respectively Bolduque and Bois-le-Duc.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“A grim start was made by Peter the Hermit, a compelling orator from Amiens, and the sinister visionary Count Emicho, who drew to them a huge mixed bag of pilgrims and set out to glory ahead of the Pope’s ‘official’ crusade. As they passed down through the Rhineland, communities of Jews were massacred at Trier, Mainz, Cologne, Worms and Metz. Exact numbers are unclear, but it seems probable that around eight hundred were killed just at Worms. As these were the very first military actions of the entire crusade movement, they tend to be passed over quickly by historians simply because the rest of the story is so long and complex, but in themselves they were a total catastrophe – the worst single recorded event in these communities, many of which had roots going back to the Roman Empire, until the Holocaust.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“As, over the following decades, it became clear that humankind's entire mental experience was about to be hit by a flood of slavery, sugar, gold, silver, genocide, jungles, pirate ships, howler monkeys, Brazil nuts and toucans, the old Europe in which English and French knights hit each other over the head for ownership of some drizzle-washed hamlet in the Pas de Calais suddenly seemed a bit old-fashioned.”
― Simon Winder

“Famine was very rare in Western Europe. A later chronicler in Louvain was able to state clearly (so etched were they in people’s minds) that there had been famine in 1146, 1197, 1316 and 1530. There were aftershocks (an Aachen chronicler talks of ‘tempests, hailstorms and epidemics’ as the flavour of 1322) but recovery seems to have been speedy before the second and completely overwhelming disaster of what came to be called the Black Death. A terrible cocktail of fatal illnesses, this plague was first mentioned in 1333 in China, and reached Sicily in 1346 and France and Germany in 1348. A reasonable estimate is that it killed 45–50 per cent of all Europeans, probably in greater numbers in the Mediterranean than further north. There was of course no understanding of how it killed or why.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“The modern English names for both Switzerland and the Netherlands attractively bury ancient usages: the inhabitants of the former (particularly as mercenaries) once being ‘Switzers’ (‘Where are my Switzers? Let them guard the door.’ Hamlet) and ‘Nether’ for ‘Low’ as in ‘her nether regions’ or ‘Nether Wallop’. Nobody will ever update these to Swissland or the Lowlands.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Museums are obliged to denature and make dreary the impulse which led to an object’s original creation. Serried rows of coins are like Panini football stickers in a more ponderous form. But as objects to be handled they tell an extraordinary story, from the most over-the-top gold monster to a clipped, almost featureless little square of rough metal used as emergency currency in the Siege of Vienna.”
― Simon Winder, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe

“There are a number of towns where how names are pronounced or spelled has sometimes meant a lot. French designs on the Rhineland led to Mainz, Trier, Aachen, Koblenz and Köln becoming Mayence, Trèves, Aix-la-Chapelle, Coblence and Cologne.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Nationalists prop themselves up by imagining they are living in a circle of virtue outside which shamble those not so blessed, despite their having near-identical beliefs and stews. Perhaps a distinction can be made between patriotism, which is a legitimate, sometimes vexed affection for and pride in the world one grows up in and knows well, and nationalism, where that central space tends to be hollow but given shape by the imagined foibles, vices and plots of those others about which, in practice, one knows little or nothing.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of France, Germany and the Countries In Between

“It is years since we have been to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford together because it happens to own his final masterpiece, that spectral twilit farewell to a lost world, Landscape with Ascanius shooting the Stag of Sylvia, a picture that on our final joint trip provoked poorly judged joke snoring noises. Still, even the happiest marriage has to be balanced sometimes by one partner silently soaking a pillow with tears in the darkness and whispering, ‘But I will always love you Claude and will never, never let you down.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“but I remained bouncy and immune throughout – by the early eighteenth century the Electors’ tombs are entirely out of control and indeed strongly anticipatory of the fine moment in Fellini’s Roma where the Vatican holds an excitingly modern ecclesiastical fashion show featuring neon-clad, roller-skating priests and entire reliquary skeletons of saints hanging like the Andrews Sisters from the sides of a jeep. Just”
― Simon Winder, Germania

“The Capetian dynasty, which had reigned since 987, had a single core competence: an ability to have at least one son who lived to adulthood. This gave them an astonishing cumulative heft: they were not ex-Viking pirates like the Norman chancers in London; nor were they mere embarrassing elected officials like the King of the Germans or the Pope.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Spiritually I have always been a bit confused. Both my parents were Catholic and I was raised as Catholic. But from an early age I was sent away to very Protestant schools. I cannot swear that I noticed the difference for a long time, but it gradually and dumbly occurred to me that these were two faiths with very different flavours. This quirk in my religious background has pursued me as an adult and inflected my attitude towards history, culture and writing in curious ways. Much of this book is, at the hidden wiring level, about this topic – for the obvious reason that since the Reformation the story of Lotharingia has been its crazy-paving of faith. My own sympathies veer around pathetically, depending on where I am. If I walk into some vast Reformed hall-church in Gelderland, with the only decoration provided by the shapes of the lettering in the prayer book, I recoil as a Catholic: oh, the arrogance of man, the cul-de-sac of mere words, arid and cheerless. If I walk into some baroque Catholic church in the Rhineland, an explosion of whipped-cream stucco, paintings of tortured saints, sobbing Marys, I recoil as a Protestant: emotionalism gone mad, the empty bluster of a picture-book religion, oh but this is practically Filipino. Of course, both these responses are infantile, curiously unmediated and not malicious as such. But through an accident of upbringing I find myself equally drawn to and equally repulsed by the great schism that has for five hundred years torn this part of Europe apart – I am as moved by an old Bible in German as by a really splashy Rubens. In the astonishing encounter at Worms between the young Emperor Charles V and Martin Luther I am paralysed by indecision as to which side’s colours to wear. The iconoclasm that burns through the Netherlands in the 1560s is at one level a cultural and spiritual catastrophe, at another a welcome bit of tidying.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country

“Godefroy is a key nationalist hero both for France and for Belgium. His massive statue is the centrepiece of the royal quarter of Brussels and in the nineteenth century he became the focus of a rather dank Catholic cult, a sort of boy Joan of Arc, but with a colonial conquest flavour.”
― Simon Winder, Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country