Books: The Real & Unknown Emperor

PRINCE EUGEN OF SAVOY by Nicholas Henderson. 324 pages. Praeger. $6.95.

The boy was frail and his manners effeminate. France’s Louis XIV concluded that he would never make a soldier, forthwith ordered him to study for the priesthood. It was perhaps the most damaging decision the Sun King ever made. For young Eugen, a minor prince of the Alpine duchy of Savoy, was defiant and outraged. He disguised himself as a woman and fled to Vienna and the court of Leopold I, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, who happened to be a distant cousin. Prince Eugen solemnly swore that he would return to France only in another guise —with sword in hand.

Over the next 50 years, Eugen made good his oath. He became the Habsburgs’ top commander, defeated Louis’ armies in the field, and frustrated Louis’ territorial ambitions. A century later Napoleon, an artist in the field himself, ranked Eugen as one of the seven most brilliant generals in all history.*

Poison Plot. Astonishingly enough, Eugen has been little studied, and this thorough biography by Nicholas Henderson, a high-ranking member of Britain’s Foreign Office, is the first full-scale account in English of this extraordinary man. His career is only comprehensible in terms of a day when Europe was fragmented into provinces rather than nations, when men were loyal to patrons rather than nations, and when aristocrats felt more kinship to other aristocrats than to their own peasants. Eugen was the product of just such confused loyalties, unimaginable in these tidier times. For all his years serving the Habsburgs, for instance, he never mastered German.

Eugen’s father was technically a prince of Savoy (and therefore as much Italian as French), but he earned his keep by serving as an officer in Louis’ army. His mother was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, who was Italian but lived at Versailles as the Sun King’s chief minister. She was also Louis’ first love and first lady of his court until he exiled her on suspicion of trying to poison him (people changed sides very fast in love as well as war in those days). Eugen stayed on in Paris for three years, leaving only after his petition to join the French army was turned down by Louis himself.

By that defection, Eugen changed not only his life and loyalties but also the history of Europe. Just after he arrived in Vienna, the Janissaries of the aggressive Ottoman Empire swept out of the East and laid siege to Vienna. His effort in the 60-day defense that was to save the city and end the Ottomans’ long westward advance won him a colonelcy and his own regiment. He was a major general at 22, a field marshal before he was 30. In his 54 years of service, the Emperor’s new recruit was to liberate Central Europe after a century and a half of Turkish rule, to establish Habsburg hegemony in Italy, and then to hold it and the rest of the Holy Roman Empire against a far more powerful and expansionist France.

In the process, Eugen was to revolutionize the set-piece siege warfare of the day. Among his trademarks: deploying cavalry the way Rommel was later to use panzers, pressing a campaign year-round instead of just in the summer season, and an inspiring (if reckless) bravado that was to get him wounded in action 13 times.

Admiring Apprentice. In the plenitude of his successes, Eugen flourished. The Emperor rewarded him with honors, favor and lands. The spindly boy whom Louis had rejected now advised the Holy Roman Emperor on foreign and even fiscal policy. He built palaces, cultivated poets, collected books, and the philosopher Leibnitz became one of his closest friends. The Prussian crown prince who was to become Frederick the Great maintained, after apprenticing as aide to Eugen, that he was “the real Emperor.” It was Eugen who devised the containment policy against France that he tried to execute in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-14).

In that war’s fickle alignment, known as the Grand Alliance, Eugen was under the supreme command of the Duke of Marlborough, and has remained in his historical shadow in the chronicles of such great victories as Blenheim, the Danube fortress where the allies routed the French and Bavarian forces. In Henderson’s accounting, Eugen emerges as a full partner in what one of the duke’s descendants called a “glorious brotherhood in arms which neither victory nor misfortune could disturb, before which jealousy and misunderstanding were powerless, and of which the history of war furnishes no equal example.” The descendant (Sir Winston Churchill) may have been prejudiced. He was writing in 1947, just after a long war of refereeing between less self-effacing generals.

Neither Eugen nor Marlborough won the war, because of what Churchill calls the “black treachery” of the British government, which made a secret pact with France and left Eugen to suffer a series of reverses in Holland that ended the war and darkened his remaining clays.

But neither in his victories nor his defeats did he truckle to either Emperor or courtier. He ferociously defended his troops, insisted even in the midst of triumph that they were underfed and underpaid. “If the people who run this country are not traitors,” he once wrote a colleague, “then assuredly they are the biggest asses I have ever seen in my life.” The courtiers in Vienna hated him because of his celibate abstention from their promiscuous pleasures. He was referred to as “the Mars without Venus”—and worse. “He does not get on well with women,” reported the Duchess of Orleans. “A couple of pretty page boys would seem to be more his line.”

Geniuses & Imbeciles. Biographer Henderson can find no corroboration for such allegations, notes that Prince Eugen did have several at least platonic heterosexual relationships. His “emotional feelings,” the book concludes, were merely “sublimated, his attentions fastened upon the ideas of war and beauty personified in his soldiers and his palaces.” The latter included three baroque monuments that still adorn Vienna—the Stadtpalais, and the Upper and Lower Belvedere. In decorating them, Eugen became the Maecenas of his day, commissioning artists such as Italy’s Giuseppe Crespi and stacking paintings seven high in the “Cabinet” of the Upper Belvedere.

But the Habsburgs still thought of him as the best defender of their particular brand of earth. At 71, senile and just two years short of death, he was dispatched to the War of Polish Succession. Outnumbered 5 to 1 by the forces of France, he failed miserably. Years later, Frederick the Great, remembering his days of apprenticeship, mourned the fate of both Eugen and Marlborough. “What a humbling reflection for our vanity,” he wrote. “The greatest geniuses end up as imbeciles. Poor humanity, boast of your glory if you dare!”

* The others: Alexander the Great, Hannibal, Caesar, Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus, France’s Marshal Turenne and Frederick the Great.