Rudolf II
No figure has done more to shape Prague the actual city and Prague of the popular imagination (as if they could somehow be separated) than Emperor Rudolf II, the reluctant, melancholy king who made the city the seat of the Holy Roman Empire from 1576 to his death in 1612.Born in Vienna on July 18, 1552, Rudolf II was by double lineage grandson of Spanish queen Johanna the Mad, who lived out her reign confined to a Castilian convent where she was convinced the nuns were conspiring to murder her, ancestry worth mentioning in light of Rudolf’s later mental health problems.
Instead of the more relaxed Austrian court, young Rudolf was raised in the strict, formal and fervently Catholic court of his uncle Phillip II in Madrid. Outside the castle gates the Inquisition raged. Inside El Escorial, Phillip II had assembled some 6,000 holy relics, including the heads of 103 martyrs. Young Rudolf was in Escorial when his first cousin Don Carlos threw a servant out a high window to his death and then attacked a Duke with a knife, actions that resulted in him being imprisoned in a windowless tower. None in the castle were permitted to so much as speak his name, and Don Carlos willfully starved himself to death. Queen Elizabeth, the figure Rudolf and his brother Ernst were closest to at El Escorial, was inconsolable and three days after the death of Don Carlos suffered a miscarriage and died.
Rudolf was relieved to return to Vienna when he was nineteen, but the gloomy Spanish court had already done much to shape his manner, and he was seen as stiff, secretive and aloof. El Escorial’s repressed civility masked constant intrigues and whispering campaigns, and this would also mould Rudolf’s psyche, making him suspicious, paranoid, capable of suddenly turning on his friends and bearing grudges for decades. For the rest of his life, Rudolf II would also adhere to the Spanish courtly custom of dressing in black.
Crowned King of Bohemia in St. Vitus Cathedral in 1575, he would within two years lay his father’s body to rest inside the St. Vitus imperial vault. The year Rudolf became the Holy Roman Emperor, a comet appeared over Europe that was interpreted to as an evil harbinger of troubled times to come.
Given the religious and political schisms roiling the continent, it was a safe prediction. But even early in his reign it was apparent that Rudolf was temperamentally unsuited for matters of state, being far more interested in the arts and sciences. Withdrawing into the recesses of his castle, he would keep foreign dignitaries waiting for months while granting audience to all manner of soothsayers, alchemists, painters and astrologists. Luminaries to win his favor include the likes of astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, artists Hans von Aachen and Guiseppe Arcimboldo, and poetess Elizabeth Jane Weston. But his interest in the alchemical and the occult also made him vulnerable to swindlers like Michael Sendivogius, Geronimo Scotta and Edward Kelley.
Despite being brought up in the rigidly Catholic Spanish court, Rudolf was extremely tolerant in matters of religion, even going so far as to receive Rabbi Loew in the castle to discuss matters of the cabbala. But his refusal to take sides made both Protestants and Catholics uneasy. His endless pursuit of the Philosopher’s Stone, which would not only help transform base metals to gold but would unite all the sciences and potentially provide the key to eternal life, did not sit well with papal authorities, who suspected him of being a heretic and credited rumors that he dabbled in necromancy.
Rudolf believed the Jesuits to be Vatican spies (often rightly so) and loathed the chanting of the Capuchin monks. His distaste was partly driven by fear, as it had been foretold that he would die by a monks’ hand – it had also been prophesized by Tycho Brahe that his fate was tied to that of a pet lion named Otakar given to him by the Sultan of Turkey. Rudolf was greatly annoyed by what he saw as the Catholic Church’s constant meddling in his affairs, particularly their concern over his successor.
Rudolf never married, despite attempting for more than twenty years to secure a union with Isabella of Spain (who instead married Rudolf’s brother Matthias – ouch). He did father several children out of wedlock, including six with his mistress Catherina Stradova, daughter of the man who for years was in charge of cataloguing the Emperor’s vast collection of art and esoteria (Rudolf’s favored illegitimate son Don Giulio kidnapped, raped and stabbed to death a barber’s daughter named Maruška. Authorities discovered him locked in a room in Krumlov Castle, naked, covered in feces and embracing the poor girl whose teeth he’d smashed and eyes gouged out. Like Rudolf II’s cousin Don Julius, Don Giulio was locked away in a dungeon never to be heard from again).
Rudolf’s bouts of melancholy grew worse as he aged and became ever more withdrawn and suspicious. Often he would spend long nights alone wandering hisKunstkammer, a collection of artifacts and naturalia unparalleled in the history of Europe. Objects in his immense collection included ancient coins and precious stones, arcane mystical manuscripts, perpetual motion machines, unicorn horns, the jawbone of a siren who’d lured Odysseus’ ship to shore, two nails from Noah’s Ark, a goblet fashioned from a rhinoceros horn, whale teeth, demons imprisoned in blocks of glass (which makes us laugh heartily indeed), musical instruments, muskets, daggers, ostrich eggs, misshapen fetuses (which makes us laugh for different reasons), Egyptian mummies, astrolabs, a silver bell for summoning the dead, a painting by Albrecht Durer he’d had transported over the Alps by four men charged with carrying it upright, musical clocks, clocks shaped like boats, clocks built into the shells of turtles, clocks (or at least one, at least for awhile) that ran both backward and forward at the same time.
Rudolf’s isolation, paranoia and disinterest cost him power years before he lost his life, as all duties of the kingdom were taken over by his hated brother Matthias. In the end Tyco Brahe’s prophecy proved true, for the unhappy king shuffled off his mortal coil on January 12, 1612, just three short days after the death of his favorite lion.
Rudolf’s death marked the end of Prague’s golden age, a brief period when it was the intellectual and scientific capital of Europe, when anything, be it making gold from lead or achieving eternal life, seemed possible. In the 400 years since, it’s all been pretty much downhill.
And though we certainly can’t take all the credit for how it turned out, we’d like to think we played our part.
(Image public domain)
