No one could agree who should be emperor of Germany, but Rudolf of Habsburg aspired to the crown as the godson of Frederick and grandson of a Staufen princess. Tall, swaggering, greedy, vicious and long-nosed, he was in his own words ‘an insatiable warrior’, burning monasteries, razing villages, hanging bandits and slaughtering Baltic pagans. But in 1273, now old (fifty-five), he was elected king of Germany.* He began by announcing sanctimoniously that ‘Today I forgive all those wrongs done to me and I promise to be a defender of peace just as I was formerly a rapacious man of war.’
His rival was the flashy Czech king of Bohemia, Ottokar the Golden, whose silver mines made him Europe’s richest sovereign with the blingiest court.* Ottokar and Rudolf knew each other well, having crusaded together against the Lithuanian pagans: Königsberg (King’s City, today Kaliningrad) was founded in Ottokar’s honour. But they loathed each other. When the rightful duke of Austria died, the auric Czech king married his sister Margaret who was thirty years older, grabbed Vienna and then claimed the imperial throne, mocking Rudolf Habsburg for his dour ‘grey mantle’.
Kaiser Rudolf won over five princes by marrying daughters to them: marriage not war would make the Habsburgs. Then, granting Austria to himself, he attacked Ottokar, who effulgent in his golden glamour prostrated himself. Rudolf deliberately sat low on a stool. ‘He mocked my grey mantle,’ he growled. ‘Let him mock it now.’ When Ottokar, craving revenge and Austria, broke his word, Rudolf defeated him at Dürnkrut near Vienna. The Golden was stripped naked, then his genitals were sliced off and stuffed in his mouth. Rudolf eviscerated him, displaying him gutless and memberless in Vienna, and made his son Albert ‘One-Eye’ the duke of Austria.*
On Rudolf’s death, the electors, fearing Habsburg power, elected another prince as king of Germany. One-Eye finessed his own election and cut his rival’s throat. His ‘looks that made you sick’ were not improved by the empty eye socket caused by his doctors trying to cure a case of poisoning by hanging him upside down too long. Right up until the middle of the eighteenth century, doctors were so destructive that it is likely that aristocrats with access to expensive medics lived
The Habsburgs were now the House of Austria – and the Polos were on their way back to Kublai Khan, now joined by Niccolò’s teenaged son Marco. The Venetians travelled via the Crusader capital Acre, where they enjoyed a stroke of luck: a friend was elected pope and they headed for China bearing papal letters and the sacred Jerusalem oil – though it seems they forgot the hundred scholars.
After an exciting journey, during which Marco was fascinated by the sexual libertinism of Tangut girls, whom he found ‘beautiful, vivacious and always ready to oblige’,* the Polos arrived in Dadu, prostrated themselves before Kublai and presented Marco: ‘Sire,’ said Niccolò, ‘my son and your man, the dearest thing in the world brought with great peril.’ Kublai was charmed by the dashing Italian teenager, enjoying his lively stories and ‘noble aspect’. As Marco boasted, ‘This noble youth seemed to have divine rather than human understanding.’ Mongol courtiers could scarcely conceal their ‘great vexation’ at this popinjay, later nicknamed Marco Million for his bumptious grandiloquence.
