Rome’s defenses were a shambles, its army almost nonexistent. There were palaces with unimaginable wealth, but the walls of the city itself had crumbled. Too late, the pope tried to gather the money to build an army, appealing to the members of the Commune of Rome, who agreed but fretted over their own business interests. The commander of the defenses, Renzo da Ceri, reinforced the Leonine Wall, but was able to gather only eight thousand men, two thousand Swiss Guards, and two thousand survivors of the defeated army of Giovanni de’ Medici Bande Nere to man the battlements. There they waited through the night and the next day for the monster lurching toward them.
The army appeared over the Italian countryside and encamped north of the city. The Duke of Bourbon sent heralds to demand that the city surrender, but this was only a formality and nothing more. Before the attack, the duke spoke to his men to rouse up their battle fire, but a murmur of excitement and lust ran through the camp before he could finish. His men needed little from their generals. They wanted only to kill and gnash and burn. At four in the morning on May 6, 1527, an exchange of harquebus fire from both sides started the battle. The imperial troops attacked, but the Roman artillery slaughtered them by the hundreds and sent them running out of range to regroup. Suddenly, a fog gathered over the Tiber, making the Roman artillery useless, and the imperial troops attacked again. This time the Romans threw rocks and shouted insults: “Jews and infidels, half-castes and Lutherans!”
A stray shot from a harquebus hit the Duke of Bourbon. The prince of Orange ordered his body carried off to a nearby chapel, where he died. The imperial troops were downcast for a short time, but they didn’t really need their generals and pressed the attack once more. The Swiss Guards fought back courageously, as did a good portion of the Roman militia, the surviving soldiers of the Bande Nere, and the students of the Collegio Capranicense, who fought side by side until they were all butchered. Blood pooled ankle-deep in the streets and ran in little streams into the Roman sewers and then on into the Tiber. Many of the papal troops deserted. Many joined the refugees fleeing the city across the bridges over the river. The panic of the crowds crushed some to death, while others fell over the sides into the water.
The city was now open, defenseless. The Spanish commander Gian d’Urbina led his men through the Borgo, butchering everyone, armed and unarmed alike. They broke into the Hospitale de Santo Spirito and threw the patients into the Tiber while they were still alive. Then they murdered all the orphans. Once across the Ponte Sisto, the plunder started in earnest. Palaces, monasteries, churches, convents, workshops—they attacked them all, broke down the doors, and scattered everything they could find into the streets. Money, booty, plunder was everything to them. They dragged citizens, even those who supported the emperor, even their own countrymen living in Rome, and tortured them until they handed over whatever money they had. They assumed that everyone in the city was hiding some secret treasure and pulled them, beat them, burned them until they handed it over. Those who suffered the most were those who had nothing to give.
When they found a priest, they cut him open until his guts ran out onto the street. Some they stripped and at sword point commanded to blaspheme the name of God. They held satiric masses and forced what priests they could find to participate. The Lutherans killed one priest who refused to give Communion to a donkey. The marauders then shot at holy relics, spat on them, and played football with the severed head of St. John. They tortured on, grabbing any man or woman they could find, still searching for hidden riches. Some they branded with red-hot irons. Others they tied by their genitals. Some they hung up by their arms for hours, some for days. Others they forced to eat their own severed ears, noses, or penises. They raped every woman they could find, young and old, married and single, including nuns. Especially nuns. Many they sold at auction or as prizes in games of chance. They forced mothers and fathers to watch the rape of their daughters. Some they forced to assist in it. The city had collapsed; it was violated, alone, without hope.
Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, an enemy of the pope, rode in with two thousand men to join the attack. He wept when he saw the state of affairs in the city, but his men soon joined the revelers. Most of the soldiers were half-starved peasants who robbed people as poor as they were themselves. Soon the city was empty, and the invaders weary. The noise died down; the exhausted revelers gathered in stupefied clumps, heavy with wine, hung over, bleeding in places from wounds. No one seemed to notice anything. Grandmothers wandered through the streets looking for their children. Babies cried for their mothers. Children stood in the middle of the streets, stunned. Spot fires burned here and there in the city. Over all was the buzzing of flies and the stench of the dead. Here and there dogs gnawed upon the corpses.
The pope eventually fled the city disguised as a servant; he was dressed in a cloak and hood and had a basket over one arm and a sack over his shoulder. He stayed at the episcopal palace at Orvieto, where he waited out the storm, shrunken, jaundiced from a diseased liver, one eye nearly gone, like Dante in hell crossing a sea of shit. Incongruously, a delegation from Henry VIII appeared, seeking the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Finally, on February 11, 1528, the imperial army received its back pay and set out for home. Soon after, the pope returned to the city, or what was left of it.
“Rome is finished,” said Farrante Gonzaga, a nobleman of the city. The city was nearly empty, the citizens dead or dying. All trade had stopped—the shops were closed, the people gone, while the streets stank with the putrefaction of the unburied dead. The glory of Renaissance Rome had been plundered. In 1534, Clement VII died from a fever, and the people of Rome danced in the streets. They stuck a sword into his tomb, smeared dirt and filth on it, crossed out the words Clemens Pontifex Maximus, and wrote Inclemens Pontifex Minimus in its place. They would have dragged his body through the streets on meat hooks, if they had had the chance.2
Little by little, the city raised itself from the dead. The next pope, Paul III (1534–49), gathered what money he could and what artists he could find who were still alive to rebuild the fountains and the palazzos. Michelangelo Buonarroti returned to the Sistine Chapel and painted his greatest fresco, The Last Judgment. When he had finished, the pope fell to his knees in front of it and trembled for the state of his own soul. The pope then commissioned him to rebuild the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitol and to design the steps, the Coronata, leading to the top. Ten years later, Emperor Charles V, the man behind the rape of the city, would visit Rome. Paul III would order houses, even churches torn down to make a straight path for the emperor and his retinue of four thousand knights. Rome would do its best to hide its wounds as Charles rode in under the Arch of Titus, down the Via di Marforio to the Piazza di San Marco, and over the river to St. Peter’s.
Paul III tried hard to recover the festival spirit of the Roman Renaissance, but something had changed in the city. As Rome rose from the dead, a spirit of reformation rose with it. Paul III himself approved the founding of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. He called the Council of Trent and set the Catholic church on the path of Counter-Reformation. This new reformation was both in the spirit of Lutheranism and against it. It cleaned out the old evils, the simony of the past, the selling of indulgences and of spiritual privileges. Though these practices returned from time to time, they were never the same and soon died out. The Counter-Reformation also called priests to a higher standard of education and a higher standard of behavior. Most of all, however, it shifted the church’s attention away from a reconstruction of the glories of the classical age to a reconstruction of the roots of Christianity. Catholicism once more became interested in Scripture and in the writings of the church fathers. In the end, Luther finally got most of what he originally wanted from the church, though by this time, it was far too late.
Paul III’s successor, Julius III (1550–55), continued with the reconstruction of the city and with the Council of Trent, but after Julius came Paul IV (1555–59), a sour fellow who cared little for t
he glories of Rome. A devotee of the Inquisition, he refocused the Counter-Reformation along lines that fit his own rigid orthodoxy. Virtue, and not beauty, he said, was the concern of popes. He hated the nudity of Michelangelo’s frescos and threatened to destroy The Last Judgment. His rules for the city were equally harsh, ferociously punishing sexual misconduct. Homosexuals he ordered burned. His successor, after Pius IV (1559–65), was Pius V (1566–72), a former Dominican friar like Paul IV, who continued with the new strictures, adding new and more austere rules for religious, secular priests, and even bishops. He suppressed nepotism and restricted the granting of indulgences and the giving of dispensations. He also drove the prostitutes out of the city, expelled the Jews from the Papal States, and ordered the Congregation of the Index to draw up a list of forbidden books. The printers quickly followed the prostitutes and Jews out of the city.
The Counter-Reformation was as strict as the Renaissance was loose. Pius V’s successor, Gregory XIII (1572–85), instituted the Gregorian reforms of both the church and the calendar and founded the Collegio Romano, the great Jesuit college from which men of learning would spread out into the world, to Bavaria, to Austria, to little Graz, even to China. Galileo would visit the Collegio from time to time, have friends there, and also enemies.
IN 1596, the Counter-Reformation arrived in Graz, two years after Kepler. It appeared in the person of young Ferdinand, the fervent Catholic archduke, who received the oath of allegiance of all the representatives on December 16, 1596.3 He was eighteen years old at the time, seven years younger than Kepler. Up until then, the Protestants had dominated the region, which infuriated the archduchess Maria, Ferdinand’s mother. She had no room for tolerance and raised her son accordingly. As Ferdinand ascended the throne, those who were paying attention to the shifting political winds sniffed the air. They knew that the young archduke had just returned from study with the Jesuits, the one order in the Catholic church that the Lutherans feared the most, for they were educated men, able to hold their own against the best Lutheran preachers. Many of them knew the Scriptures as well as any Protestant, and many were as dedicated to reform. But their reform always led back to Rome and to the hated pope, not away from him, so they could never be anything but enemies.
By this time, the Reformation had become an entity unto itself, no longer a movement within Christianity, but a new church, a new way, with its own structures, its own laws and traditions, its own theology. Sadly, if all the bile of the previous eighty years could have been set aside for just one hour, people would have seen that the differences between them were not all that great, but such a thing was impossible by that time. History had rolled on, its momentum unstoppable, and the religious world of Europe would never be the same.
Kepler, alert for trouble, was one of those who sniffed the air. It worried him greatly to watch his fellow Lutherans taunt the religion of their new ruler. One does not ridicule a Habsburg lightly any more than one teases a leopard. From April 22 to June 28, 1598, young Ferdinand traveled to Rome to meet with the pope and to pray at the shrine of Loreto. There, some say, in the midst of his prayers, he vowed to God to lead his divided people back to the arms of the true faith. Back in Austria meanwhile, while Ferdinand was still away, Graz and all the countryside prickled as on a hot day before a summer thunderstorm. Those like Kepler who paid attention heard stories of events along the young prince’s journey, rumors and whispers, and found evil omens in them. “Everything trembles,” Kepler wrote to Mästlin, “in anticipation of the return of the prince. One says that he is at the head of Italian auxiliary troops. The city magistrate of our creed was dismissed. The task of watching the gates and arsenal was transferred to followers of the pope. Everywhere one hears threats.”4
When he returned, Ferdinand was even more ardent than when he left. The rumors, at least the ones about the prince’s new determination, were all too true, and the Lutheran church argued over what to do about him. Some of the more rash preachers circulated profane caricatures of the pope, infuriating Ferdinand. One, a certain Balthasar Fischer, punctuated his sermon on the cult of Mary with an obscene gesture, opening his robe and asking whether it was proper for women to crawl inside it. Ferdinand then called in the Lutheran chairman for church ministry, accusing the Lutherans of bad faith. “You would spurn peace even if I would give it to you,” he told him.5 Things spun out of control from there. Ferdinand ordered arrests and levied a new, burdensome tax on Lutherans trying to bury their dead. Poor Protestants languished in hospitals untreated. Murmurs and angry whispers flowed around town—perhaps riot, some said, perhaps rebellion.
In the midst of this—joy. Kepler had married Barbara Müller on April 27, 1597, as the flowers bloomed and the farmers gathered for the planting. Copies of his first book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, had just arrived, and everyone fussed over the young author. Marriage and publication both, in just two short months! Kepler sent copies of the book to everyone who mattered. The archduke, of course, and the emperor, of course. Tycho Brahe in Denmark, certainly. And one obscure mathematics professor in Padua, Galileo Galilei. Galileo wrote back, ecstatic to find another Copernican. He too was a Copernican, he wrote Kepler in a letter, but he was afraid to tell anyone after the treatment that Copernicus himself had received. Kepler wrote back, encouraging him to come forward, but Galileo did not acknowledge his letter, and Kepler did not write again for another thirteen years.
Then on February 2, 1598, more joy, but joy short-lived. Just before young Ferdinand left on his pilgrimage to Rome, Barbara gave birth to a son, little Heinrich, named, perhaps unpropitiously, for Kepler’s misbegotten father and misshapen brother. Kepler, typically, cast a horoscope. In his journal for that year, he wrote: “A son! Heinrich Kepler was born on February 2. The stars’ constellation promises a noble disposition, a strong body, strong fingers, agile hands, with a capacity for the mathematical and mechanical arts.” Then he went on to explain why: “The moon in quadrant to Saturn promises a vivid imagination, diligence, though some mistrust and some stinginess. Both indicate compassion, deep thinking, piety, empathy, sadness, and grace. The ascendant in quadrant to the sun supports those attributes and with Libra full of light south in ascension indicates one who is stubborn, unruly, and also one who admires greatness.”6 A proud father, certainly. He could have been describing himself.
With his stepdaughter, Regina, brought into the marriage by Barbara, and now little Heinrich, Kepler had become a family man, the one thing that he had feared most before his marriage—that he would be tied to Graz not only by Barbara’s estates, but also by family obligations. By now he knew that it was less likely that he would return to Tübingen to finish his studies for the ministry. He had become the comfortable burgher everyone had wanted him to be.
Perhaps it was an omen, or would have seemed so to Kepler, but little Heinrich died, however, after only two months from what Kepler called apostema capitis, possibly meningitis. Kepler’s joy was crushed. Unfairly, he blamed the boy’s ill health on Barbara’s diet, writing to Mästlin that the boy’s deformed testicles looked like a cooked tortoise, which was one of Barbara’s favorite foods. Even so, Kepler and Barbara tried again, and this time they had a little girl, Susanna, who also died after little more than a month of the same disease as her brother.
After Susanna’s death, Kepler fell into a black depression, seeing omens of death everywhere. “No day can soothe my wife’s yearning and the scripture is close to my heart: O vanity of vanities, and all is vanity.”7 He reported that bloody crosses were appearing on the bodies of people all over Hungary, a sure omen of the pestilence, and that he himself had found a tiny cross the color of blood, which had then turned yellow, on his left foot. He was the first to have seen the omen in all of Graz, he said. His depression took him into dark places, as if death had entered somewhere deep in his soul, and for some months all he could see about him was death. Between Kepler’s sighs and Barbara’s epic weeping, the Kepler household teetered on the brink of despai
r.
Then the storm struck.
The first time it hit him personally was when the Counter-Reformation officials charged him ten taler to bury little Susanna, simply because he was a Lutheran. The fact that they reduced the tax in his case only halved the anger, but did not remove it. Still, Kepler tried to stay out of the fight. No one liked a good intellectual dustup as much as he did, and he would defend his position vigorously if put to it, but in his deepest heart he disliked war, and he hated wars of religion most of all. Sacred things, he believed, ought to be sacred—the things of God should be protected by godly means, by theological debate, by ministers and priests, not by soldiers. Kepler knew that one’s conscience should be free to act, free to believe, and should never be subject to outside pressure, whether from the prince or even from the church. No one, he believed, should abuse the faith by slandering others for their beliefs.
In fact, for years he blamed his fellow Lutherans even more than Ferdinand for the troubles in Graz, especially the radical preachers such as Fischer and Kellin, who ridiculed the images of the archduke’s religion. Ten years later, he wrote to Margrave Georg Friedrich von Baden: “Some of the appointed teachers confuse the positions of teaching and ruling, want to be bishops and have an ill-timed zeal with which they tear everything down, defiantly relying on their prince’s protection and power, which they often lead to dangerous precipices. This has long ago ruined us in Styria.”8 In saying this, Kepler took a stab at his old teachers at Tübingen, who led the pope-baiting chorus. “Werewolf, whore of Babylon, Antichrist,” they called him, and Kepler, who was a peaceful man in his soul, could not abide it.
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