Meanwhile, Vlasta and her women fortified Devin and trained an army of Amazons. They lured men into the forest and then slaughtered them. There were no men living in Devin, though women lived in Vyšehrad and all the villages around. Many of these women became spies for Vlasta, stealing weapons and horses. The women of Devin knew everything the men were doing, but the men knew nothing of the women. Finally, the men gathered themselves together, thinking that if they marched out to confront the women, the sight of all those warriors gathered together would terrify them, and they would run away. Přemysl begged them not to do this, but they would not listen. They approached the women’s castle, but it was silent, apparently empty. Congratulating themselves, they approached the silent gates, little aware of the number of archers that lined the battlements. Suddenly, the gates opened and the women’s cavalry poured out. Arrows fell upon the men, and the cavalry, led by Vlasta, chased them back across the river.
After that, a new pride grew among the women. Some loved their husbands and would not leave them. Some disappeared in the night, only to appear among the women in Devin. Other women changed suddenly, and their men left their homes, fearful of being murdered in their sleep. For some time, the women’s army swept through the land, breaking up happy marriages with cunning where they could and murdering where they could not. With time, the men began to gather once again, this time in earnest, arming themselves for the fight.
Using cunning, the women captured and killed one of Přemysl’s men, Ctirad, who had been sent out to settle a dispute among the clans. A woman named Sárka was tied to a tree to make her look helpless, and when the men stopped to help her, she plied them with drugged mead until they passed out. Then the women came out of the forest and slaughtered them in their stupor, all except Ctirad, whom they took back to Devin and tortured on a wheel in front of the castle. At that point, seeing what the women did to their fellow, the men lost all doubt about attacking them, gnashed their teeth, and swore revenge. The men rode into the forest, looking for Vlasta’s gangs of warriors and cut their throats when they found them.
This infuriated Vlasta, and she gathered her army for an assault on Vyšehrad itself. The men saw them coming and, full of hatred, rode out to meet them. The two sides crashed into one another before the gates of the castle. Blood ran into the Vltava in torrents, and death was the only victor. Vlasta was the most daring of all the women, and in her battle fury she rode out ahead of her army, so far out that she was soon cut off and surrounded by seven young men, warriors who hated her most of all. She was soon cast to the ground and pierced with swords. Then the women retreated in confusion inside the gates of Devin. The men set fire to the castle with the women still inside and shouted curses at them from the fields beyond the walls. The castle burned through the night and into the day, and the light of it could be seen for miles. The wound between the men and the women, brought about by the loss of women’s wisdom, half of the whole, would take centuries to heal. And perhaps it never would.
KEPLER LIVED IN PRAGUE for eleven years, and during that time he heard stories. He most likely heard this one, for it was an old fairy tale, a Czech story going back a thousand years, to pre-Christian times. His marriage to Barbara Müller in those years was troubled, with little peace and little companionship, and somewhere in there, when he heard this story, he must have wondered if men and women were always destined to hurt one another.
Johannes and Barbara Kepler were not well matched. They lived in two different universes with two different sets of physical laws. It is not easy to be married, even for the most compatible couples, but when a simple girl marries a genius it is nearly impossible. Johannes’s mind was always elsewhere. He was the kind of man who would rather burrow in his study and work out his calculations than do anything else in the world. Even as he walked across the Charles Bridge and up the Steep Stairs to the imperial court, his thoughts swam through a sea of numbers, reeling in the movements of the heavens. Even while he was standing and waiting in the Bohemian chancellery, in the high-vaulted Vladislav Hall of Prague Castle, where they held banquets as well as jousts, making light talk with barons and imperial secretaries, or while attending the emperor himself in some alcove of his Kunstkammer, his mind was never far from his study, his papers, his computations. And yet the work was hard and taxed him greatly. He struggled through the rough emotional seas that creative minds must navigate—first up, then down, first elation, then depression. And yet he loved it so. He was, after all, a man who rummaged for God in the balances of his own mind. For him, the geometry of the heavens, the dances of the planets, the secrets of the universe were more real than the twists of human politics, for the first was complete with mystical joy, while the second was full of fear.
Barbara knew nothing of his work and cared nothing about it. His fame and his position as imperial mathematician gave her honor, but she would have preferred a more normal man. Her father, Jobst, had spent his life tending to his wealth and his position, and his daughter was much the same. She was in a sense an uncomplicated woman—uneducated, a small-town girl who saw little real value in book learning. She was, like her father, a practical woman. To outward appearances, Johannes and Barbara had, if not a perfect marriage, at least a good one. They were, to all those around them, comfortable German citizens, though some noticed how Barbara’s melancholy seemed to grow worse with each year. They had sufficient money to live on, though never quite enough for Barbara. Unlike the lives of many of their friends in the nobility, their life was simple, yet was adequate to the position Johannes held as imperial mathematician. Kepler joked about it, comparing himself to Diogenes, who sent his works to the king from a tub. He often referred to his home as his comfortable “tub,” though they had not rejected wealth, nor were they poor by any means. They were good middle-class people with good middle-class values and a good middle-class lifestyle. And with good middle-class uncertainty. When they first moved to Prague, Kepler spent between 400 and 500 gulden annually, but with newborn children adding to the family every few years, and with Barbara’s health in constant decline, his expenses jumped to between 600 and 1,000 gulden a year. Barbara’s own inheritance was sacrosanct, however; fearful of poverty, she would not let him sell or pawn so much as a pewter drinking cup to pay for firewood.
There were money problems, of course. The emperor kept making promises about Kepler’s salary, but because of his collection fetish and imperial shopping sprees, he almost never had enough money in the exchequer to cover his imperial debts. Depending upon whether Rudolf was flush or not, the Keplers’ lifestyle, like those of so many others at the imperial court, fluctuated from nearly comfortable to nearly impoverished. Barbara was constantly terrified of running out of money and saw her inheritance, which was mostly in land, as her hedge against an uncertain future. And uncertain it was. Who knew what the emperor would do next, because he was growing more unstable by the day? And who knew what disease would come burning through the city next, costing money for physicians and medicine? The children, some of whom actually survived into adulthood, came down with strange coughing sicknesses or burned with summer fevers, and everyone prayed that it was not plague or smallpox.
The Keplers had numerous friends as well, many from wealthy families with important positions, people who had plenty of money. These people had to be entertained. This was a sore spot for Barbara, who yearned for a taste of that noble life. Kepler’s house seems to have been a gathering place for men, along with their wives, who were interested in the stars—imperial secretaries and representatives of the Estates, the local Czech nobility; some were barons, some even dukes. There was Johannes Jessenius, the great anatomist, who was later executed by the Counter-Reformation; Johann Georg Gödelmann, the ambassador from Saxony, who was also a part-time expert on witchcraft law; Jost Bürgi, the imperial watchmaker and the man who first used logarithms in his computations; and Johannes Mathäus Wackher von Wackenfels, an imperial adviser and a relative of Kepler’s. Most of Kepler’s patro
ns and intellectual friends had solid positions at court or were nobility from the Estates and had independent sources of cash. Kepler even counted a few Jesuits among them, a fact that his fellow Lutherans did not overlook. Such men surrounded Kepler and sought his advice on astronomical and astrological matters. Many of them visited him in his home, showing off their wealth with the unconscious flourish that only the very privileged can manage.
One of Kepler’s friends was Johannes Pistorius, a former Protestant who later became a Catholic priest and the emperor’s confessor, and later bishop of Freiburg. Imagine the relationship between these two! They both loved to argue religion and did so every time they met. Imagine the effect this had on Barbara, who had no theological background and spent her life in simple piety. Later, when Pistorius became ill, he wrote a sweet letter to his friend Kepler, saying that soon he would shrug off the vanities of this world and find peace in the arms of his Savior. Kepler, however, responded in a most un-Keplerlike way, taking Pistorius’s letter as an opportunity to attack the Catholic church as an enemy to religious freedom because it staged an assault on free conscience and tried to rule salvation itself, making itself the single doorway through which to find Christ. Pistorius responded kindly, saying he didn’t really want a theological conversation, and that he had nothing but fondness for Kepler and wished him God’s blessing. This is the kind of argumentation that Kepler opened his doors to during his years in Prague. The bishop was undoubtedly sickly during that last exchange of letters; when he was healthy, he must have given as well as he received.
This was the house that Barbara lived in then, filled with Kepler’s intellectual circle of like-minded men and their wives, all of whom admired him and his work and wanted to be close to the flame. It must have seemed to Barbara that these people appeared out of nowhere, showing off their finery. On the other hand, Barbara herself spent a good deal of her own time and money keeping up appearances. She was, to all those who knew her, a woman of charity and generosity. People from many parts of the city admired her as a model of Christian virtue.
In private, however, Barbara was not so pleasant or so generous. She had survived much in her life. Her father yielded control of his children to no one, and all of them, especially his daughter, he wrapped inside his schemes for higher social standing. He was a demanding, unforgiving, towering presence in her young life. At his behest, she had married two older men, because of their standing and reputation, but also because Jobst wanted to add their fortunes to his family’s. Her one chance of marrying a man closer to her own age, that is, Kepler, her father disputed and resisted for years.
Barbara was prone to depression and therefore prone to a wealth of diseases that the tides of melancholy carry with it. She was an unhappy woman, made unhappy partly by her husband’s short temper and his obsessive work habits. Likely, however, she would not have been happy had she been married to a king. She was embarrassed by her husband’s work and often wished that he had a regular job. In response, Kepler, who had little patience, called her simpleminded, naïve, and silly. He hated the fact that she would disturb him at his work, bringing trivial household matters to him while his concentration was focused on the mathematics at hand. Kepler was often short with her or ignored her altogether. The two of them would then fly into rages or sulk, sometimes for days. She envied the wives of Kepler’s many associates, not realizing how much regard they had for her husband, that though they enjoyed a higher position at the imperial court, they valued Kepler’s brilliance even more. She could not help noticing, though, the difference between her station and theirs: her financial struggles, her one elderly, bandy-legged maid, her ordinary middle-class house compared with their grand coaches with four horses, their footmen, and their battalions of servants. When one of them had left the house, she must have watched him leave in grand style and compared him to her husband, who retreated to his study to calculate angles and scratch on pieces of paper.
Kepler admits in his letters that he was no great treasure. He was irascible and often unkind, and he vacillated between bouts of anger and windstorms of guilt and repentance. He never tried to understand Barbara, because gentlemen did not feel the need to understand their wives, only to provide for them. When he brought her to tears, he was immediately sorry, which never solved anything exactly, because what he considered important and what Barbara considered important were so very far apart.
It galled her that some of the people referred to them as “Mr. and Mrs. Stargazer.” Although Kepler thought this was highly amusing and often referred to himself as “Mr. Stargazer,” Barbara took these things to heart. Few women in her day had much education. For all of her complaining, she wanted nothing extravagant—freedom from poverty, social respect, a warm family, and her husband’s attention. Mr. Stargazer, the man whose mind was forever turning toward the heavens and to his endless calculations of the planetary orbits, was all too often absent, off in the world of his books.
In contrast, Barbara Kepler read almost nothing—no novels, no stories, and certainly no mathematics or astronomy. The one consolation she had was her prayer book, for she was intensely pious. But this too created a difficulty for her, for though Johannes was also deeply religious and his spirituality and hers ran along parallel lines, religion and piety are not the same thing. The religious person wishes to experience the full range of the faith, to understand its traditions, and to face its weaknesses without flinching. Kepler wanted to study the heavens as his contribution to the faith. In the course of his studies, he had developed a theological position that was his own, and even as a strict Lutheran, which he remained all his life, no matter what the Tübingen consistory (the duke’s council of advisers, both religious and secular) whispered about him while he lived in Prague and said openly later after he had moved to Linz, he had charted his own religious course through the troubled waters of the seventeenth century.
Barbara, on the other hand, was pious and would not have dreamed of doing what Johannes had done. Pious people often take their religion in narrow slices and are little interested in the grand sweep of its history or the range of its theological opinions. Indeed, there are religious people who are also pious; the two categories are not mutually exclusive. There is a sliding scale, however. In their intense search for a relationship with God, the strictly pious person often avoids intellectual challenges and cannot abide even the most favorable critique of the faith. For Barbara, her faith was in her Lutheran prayer book, and she could no more chart an independent theological opinion than she could understand the movements of the heavens.
What troubled her most was her own husband’s reputation within the Lutheran community. Pious Lutherans who knew them well could see that Barbara’s melancholy was growing, and they blamed Johannes for leading her away from the true Lutheran faith. Without trying to understand Kepler’s exact position on Calvinism and predestination, they had heard rumors that he was a crypto-Calvinist, an idea he thoroughly rejected, and so they believed that Barbara’s melancholy was the direct result of dark thoughts brought about by a belief in predestination and a fear that her soul was in jeopardy. This was not really the case, but given the times and Kepler’s reputation, one could see how some people might have believed this. In truth, the idea of discussing his theological opinions with Barbara never even occurred to Kepler. This did not mean that Barbara was stupid, not by any means; it meant she was ordinary and lived in an age when women were not expected to be educated or to have rational opinions. Barbara just had the bad luck of being married to a man who was not ordinary.
Almost all of Barbara’s side of the story has been lost, sad to say. Four hundred years later, all we have are Johannes’s letters and Johannes’s description of Barbara, but nothing of her description of him. The he said–she said is all too one-sided. With the single exception of one complaining letter that Barbara wrote to Johannes while he was visiting Graz, a letter that seems to back up his less than flattering hints about her, Barbara herself remains mut
e. One can at least say in all fairness, however, that Barbara and Johannes were constantly zipping past each other like shooting stars, constantly missing one another in understanding, constantly fighting over trivial things, a fact that drilled itself into Johannes’s soul. He knew that Barbara’s melancholy, which was perpetual, had sickened her body as well, and he felt a great empathy for her struggle, for he too had suffered bouts of depression. Often during an argument his comments would cut her to the bone, and immediately he would realize what he had done, that he had gone too far, and would pull back from the brink. He apologized profusely then, no matter who was right or who was wrong, which showed the depths of the fellow feeling he had for her. At those times, he would have plucked out his own eye rather than say something to embitter her further. For this reason, though there was no love between them and little passion, their marriage never sank to the point of open warfare; neither took the other to court or carried difficulties beyond the bounds of the family.
Surprisingly, however, in spite of the lack of love, the Kepler family grew at a fair clip. Barbara had difficulty in childbirth, but she still gave birth to three children in the years that they were in Prague. On July 9, 1602, she bore a daughter that they named Susanna, possibly in memory of their first little Susanna, who had died so soon after birth in Graz. On December 3, 1604, she gave birth to a son, Friedrich, and then on December 21, 1607, she gave birth to another son, Ludwig. Given the religious climate of the times, Kepler chose to have all three children baptized in an Utraquist service, the Czech Reformed church that followed Jan Hus and proclaimed that the people should receive Communion sub utraque specie, under both species, rather than by a Lutheran minister. By Rudolf’s decree, only Catholic and Utraquist clergy were allowed inside the city, and therefore the Utraquists were the closest thing to Protestants that Kepler could find, and besides, one of his friends, a vastly rich young man who had squandered fortunes on his interest in alchemy, Peter Vok von Rozmberk, was also a leader in the Utraquist church.
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