Rudolf was the strangest Habsburg, turning Prague into a laboratory for original thinkers and new ideas while fighting the Ottomans and attempting to manage the religious wars.
Long-jawed, bulbous-eyed and fair-haired, Rudolf was a late starter, barely speaking for several years. While his father Maximilian II was sympathetic to Protestants, his mother, Philip’s sister, was a terrifying fanatic who, on his accession, tried to bully the shy, fragile young emperor into marrying Philip’s daughter. He wanted to get out of it. ‘You fear losing your states and peoples?’ sneered the mother. ‘What figure will you make before God and the world if you repay his kindness with an insult and put your mother in an intolerable situation?’
Refusing to conform, ambiguous about his Catholicism, avoiding any marriage, Rudolf left his mother in the dreary Hofburg Palace in Vienna to create his own secret world at Prague Castle. The city was cosmopolitan and Protestant with a rich community of 10,000 Jews and many artists and astrologers already patronized by his father. Cancelling restrictions on Jews, Rudolf was determined to learn all the secrets of the cosmos. He curated a chamber of curiosities, collecting two-headed babies and unicorn horns. In his laboratories, he investigated the obsessions of the age: alchemy, a widely believed ‘science’ aiming to transmute base metals into gold; and Hermetic occultism, the belief that spirits and mathematical formulae allowed man to access divine power. He dabbled in Kabbalism with Rabbi Loew who was said to be able to create a
In 1588, Rudolf recruited a freethinking Neapolitan, a former priest called Giordano Bruno, who questioned Catholic dogma and expanded on Copernicus, arguing that there were ‘innumerable celestial bodies’, that the stars were other suns, that the universe was infinite and that souls might migrate to other bodies after death. Bruno was excommunicated by Protestants and Catholics but rewarded by Rudolf.* In 1599, Rudolf attracted a Danish nobleman, Tycho Brahe, who had lost his nose in a duel with a cousin over a mathematical debate and sported a gold prosthetic. He amassed data on the stars in the Rudolfine Tables, labelling new stars as novas. While he half accepted Copernicus’ heliocentricity, he argued that the earth orbited the moon. His assistant, Johannes Kepler, a Lutheran mathematics teacher, disagreed cordially.
Rudolf, so impressed by his uncle Philip’s Titians at the Escorial, was also an avid collector, buying his own Titians and backing his father’s court painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted faces using natural objects: in his
But Rudolph’s world was darkening: the lions ate his courtiers, and his account books record his compensation payments for their maulings. He even singed his beard in conducting his explosive experiments. ‘Imperial girls’ and young men were procured. Falling in love with his artist Strado’s daughter Katarina, he had five children including Don Julius Caesar of Austria, a diabolic freak who would soon do terrible things. The magi fell out; after the two had experimented with wife-swapping, Dee fled for his life, while earless Kelley, arrested for fraud and devil worship, poisoned himself.
Though he was no soldier, living for art and sex, Rudolf was the defender of Christendom. A young padishah, Mehmed III, grandson of Blond Selim,* was keen to lead his army, defeating the Habsburgs at Keresztes, forcing Emperor Rudolf to strike back. As he fought a long war that stretched his resources and sanity, Rudolf struggled to balance Catholics and Protestants.
His ailing uncle Philip, criticizing Rudolf from the Escorial, made a decision that would affect millions. In 1595, keen to maintain supplies of the enslaved from Africa, he started to award licences –
