Kepler's Witch

by James A. Connor

  Kepler’s had his suspicions about alchemy, something Rozmberk’s misfortune may have had a hand in. In his last years, he got into a bit of a controversy with an English alchemist and practitioner of occult science, Robert Fludd. Kepler’s critique of Fludd’s work was devastating. He took Fludd’s ideas and analyzed them factually and rationally as a modern scientist would, while Fludd, who saw himself called to be a priest of secret knowledge, responded that Kepler saw only the outside of things and not the inside. This later controversy acts as a window into Kepler’s view of occult sciences, a view he may well have developed while surrounded by alchemists and theosophists in Prague. It also may account for Isaac Newton’s later coolness and his refusal to acknowledge Kepler, for Newton was a great devotee of alchemy and the secret sciences.

  Barbara and Johannes chose godparents for all three children from the highest ranks of Prague society. Susanna’s godmothers were three wives of imperial guards, while her godfathers were members of the nobility that the Keplers had met in Graz—Baron Ludwig von Dietrichstein, Baron Herwart von Hohenberg, Baron Weickhard, and Baron Dietrich von Auersperg. Friedrich’s godfathers included the Baden ambassador, Joseph Hettler, the imperial treasurer, Stephan Schmid, and the venerable scholar Johannes Mathäus Wackher von Wackenfels, Kepler’s distant relative and the imperial adviser. Little Ludwig’s godfathers included Philip Ludwig and his son Wolfgang Wilhelm von Pfalz-Neuburg, both Protestant counts of the Palatinate, whose prince elector was Frederick, the Winter King, the man who accepted the throne of Bohemia after the Protestant rebellion in 1618, starting the Thirty Years’ War.

  Kepler loved his children, doted on them, and showed them a level of patience he rarely showed anyone else, including his wife. Little Friedrich was his favorite, though the boy took up much of his father’s time. Just after Friedrich was born, Kepler wrote a letter to Herwart von Hohenberg, admitting that the noise around the house was keeping him from his work and from maintaining a proper correspondence with his friends and colleagues. Troops of women kept marching through the house to visit Barbara in her bed after the difficult birth. Children ran about, demanding attention. And Kepler had to play the host to all those who came to visit, so he couldn’t easily slip away into his study.

  Johannes didn’t complain much, however, about the other troops, the battalions of his relatives, who kept visiting him from Swabia. He was, after all, their celebrity relative, and a trip to Prague was a pilgrimage for many of them. His mother, Katharina, arrived in 1602. Two years later, his sister Margaretha showed up, expecting to see the sights and hanging on Johannes’s every word. Margaretha later married Pastor Georg Binder of Heumaden in 1608, a man who became a central figure in Katharina’s trial for witchcraft. Eventually, even Heinrich, the unlucky brother who wandered through the world with a dark cloud over his head, came to visit, stayed, and joined the imperial guard. He even married and had two daughters.

  And then there was travel. In 1601, after Jobst Müller, Barbara’s father, had died, Kepler traveled to Graz to settle her estate. That was when Barbara sent her letter, the one that got Kepler in trouble with Tycho Brahe. In October 1606, another round of plague mysteriously boiled up in the city, and Kepler fled Prague with his entire family to Kunstadt in Moravia. Kepler must have had some money set aside at the time, for not everyone could leave the city. Only those with enough money to travel could do so, which meant that the middle and upper classes could escape, while the poor had to stay behind in the city to suffer and die by the score. Because of the plague, the emperor at that time remained in Brandeis. In November of that year, he summoned Kepler to attend him at his court there, which meant that Kepler had to return first to Prague by himself, and then from there go on to Brandeis. By the beginning of the next year, the plague had burned itself out, and those who had left returned to the city. Kepler’s family returned with them and took up residence once again in their home in the New Town, near the Emmaus monastery.

  By the spring of 1609, Kepler traveled to the Frankfurt book fair, and from there to Heidelberg to supervise the final printing of the Astronomia Nova. The book was finally finished and the dedication to the emperor complete, but all along the way Kepler had struggled with Tycho Brahe’s heirs for the right to publish his own work, because so much of it was based on Tycho’s observations. Science had not yet evolved to the point where data could be exchanged freely. The emperor had promised 20,000 gulden to Tycho’s family to purchase his instruments and his observations so that Kepler might be able to finish the Rudolphine Tables. However, as with so many other imperial promises, the emperor did not have the money to cover his intentions, and while Kepler and Tycho’s family waited for the promised pay, the emperor’s bureaucrats dithered. Over the next year, the Brahe family received a few thousand talers, but this did not come close to paying the emperor’s debt.

  Meanwhile, Kepler’s own research led him further away from the Tychonic system. Because they had not yet received the promised price for the observations and instruments, Tycho’s family, led by Franz Gansneb Tengnagel von Camp, Tycho’s son-in-law, resisted any publication on Kepler’s part that would use his old master’s observations. They did this because they didn’t want to see any diminishment of Tycho’s glory, and there was money in it. Tengnagel was not a very accomplished astronomer, but he had enough of a reputation as one of Tycho’s former assistants to promise the emperor a publication of his own based on his father-in-law’s observations. But no publication was forthcoming, because Tengnagel was simply not competent to do the work. All that Tycho’s family could see was the potential profit that they could gain by taking control of the Rudolphine Tables, but there was no one in that family with the dedication, training, and mathematical acumen to do the necessary work to compile the tables, not to mention the ability to take those observations and create a proper theory of planetary orbits, which was something far beyond their intellectual means.

  Kepler’s luck did hold out, however. The emperor appointed Johannes Pistorius, his father confessor and a friend of Kepler’s, to supervise Kepler’s work. Because the two men had been friends for some time, this was a fairly easy relationship. Meanwhile, Tengnagel busied himself bolstering the family’s demands. In 1604, the Brahe family forced Kepler to sign an agreement in which he promised not to publish anything using Tycho’s observations without Tengnagel’s personal approval. A few years later, Tengnagel, who had been a Lutheran like Tycho, sniffed the political winds and converted to the Catholic church, so he could join the imperial council. This made Kepler even more dependent upon him. However, Tengnagel had promised the emperor he would finish his own version of Tycho’s work, but in four years time he had done almost nothing. Now, as a member of the imperial council, he could stop Kepler from publishing without ever having to publish anything himself. However, this did not stop Kepler from researching his own theories using Tycho’s observations. The agreement allowed him to continue to work on the Astronomia Nova, even if he couldn’t publish it without permission. When Tengnagel did not produce his own version after four years, Kepler believed that he was free of any obligation to Tycho’s family, but Tengnagel still tried to stop him from publishing.

  Finally, the two sides reached an agreement that allowed Kepler to publish the Astronomia Nova, as long as Tengnagel could insert a short preface to the work, in which he would explain that Kepler’s book was based on Tycho’s observations, that it did not follow the Tychonic planetary theory, and that Kepler had used Tycho’s observations for his own purposes. Nevertheless, Kepler agreed to this insertion so that the book could be published. Now, after many centuries, Kepler’s Astronomia Nova is accepted around the world as one of the foundational texts in modern astronomy, while Tengnagel’s inserted preface has become a mere tidbit of history.

  The other problem in publishing the work was money. The emperor promised him, and actually delivered this time, 400 gulden for printing, but because Kepler had not been paid in quite a while, this money quic
kly disappeared into the family coffers. This meant that Kepler had to scrounge together enough money to print the book himself. Eventually, another 500 gulden came his way, but suddenly the emperor forbade him from selling the book or distributing it to anyone, not even one copy, without his explicit permission. It seems that Kepler had written the book in his role as imperial mathematician, which meant that the emperor wanted to hold on to any works produced by him as imperial property. Rudolf could see the value of the work and wanted to distribute the Astronomia Nova himself. But once again his finances had become precarious, and the emperor had bigger problems to solve, so he dropped the idea of distributing the Astronomia Nova himself, allowing Kepler the chance to sell the entire edition back to the man who printed it, who could then offer it for sale on the open market.

  MEANWHILE, THE TENSION between Protestants and Catholics in Prague, and indeed all across Germany, had reached the boiling point. The German princes had been taking sides in the conflict since the days of Luther—some were Catholic and some Protestant—with the Catholics gathering around the Habsburg family and the Protestants gathering around Frederick IV, the elector Palatine, a Calvinist. The power of the princes had become too confused with their choices of religious confession, so that a strong defense of each ruler’s own religious beliefs became synonymous with legitimate rule. We must avoid the temptation to ascribe this kind of behavior only to the Catholic Habsburgs, though they were certainly the most vigorous defenders of the Counter-Reformation. ArchDuke Ferdinand of Styria, who would later become Emperor Ferdinand II, had already outlawed Protestantism in his territories in Austria, including Graz. The same was true in Bavaria. Nevertheless, the Lutheran Duke of Württemberg and the Calvinist elector Palatine practiced the same kind of intolerance, for it was an intolerant age, and many read any concession granted to other religious confessions as a sign of weakness. For this reason, across Germany, the tensions between Protestants and Catholics flashed into civil wars. In Donäuworth, the violence had become so great that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria used it as an excuse to march his army into the region and enforce his own solution. Everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, had forgotten the unifying teachings of Jesus, that anyone who is not against you is for you, and had abandoned forgiveness altogether, taking up with their own clutch of theologians, who forgave nothing.

  In May 1608, the Protestant princes gathered around the elector Palatine to form the Protestant Union. The next year, in July, Maximilian of Bavaria gathered Catholic princes around himself to form the Catholic League. Both sides began to conscript armies. Meanwhile, Rudolf was slipping further and further away from reality, sinking into paranoia about his brother Matthias, and leaving the rule of his own kingdom to his often corrupt ministers. Although most of the Thirty Years’ War occurred after Rudolf’s death, his melancholy and shyness had contributed greatly to the political tension that produced it by creating a power vacuum, permitting the squabbling princes to carry on without interference. Instead of trying to solve the problem, he let his paranoia toward his brother rule his actions, which made matters worse by inciting dissension in the Habsburg family. Moreover, Rudolf had no official heir, since he had never married, and none of his illegitimate children could ascend the throne. The leading contenders were his brother Matthias, the man Rudolf hated more than anyone else in the world, the man who Rudolf in his madness believed was trying to poison him, and Rudolf’s cousin Ferdinand, the ultra-Catholic Archduke of Styria.

  Rudolf’s own relationship with the Protestants had been checkered. In 1602, he had once again banned the Bohemian Brethren, closing their churches and schools. Meanwhile, in 1604, the Hungarian Protestant nobles, led by István Bocskay, rebelled against the Habsburg empire. This was not surprising. The emperor’s army, led by a clique of Italian generals, had been rampaging through Hungary and Slovakia, slaughtering peasants and generally terrorizing the people. Bocskay was quite good with light cavalry, returning the favor to the emperor by laying waste to the Moravian countryside and eventually threatening Vienna itself.

  By this time, Matthias had become the official head of the Habsburgs in spite of the fact that Rudolf was still emperor. Some of the members of his own family thought that Rudolf might be possessed; others thought that he was mad, which came down to the same thing. All in all, they were pretty much in agreement that dear cousin Rudolf was no longer good for the family business and had to go. In order to strengthen his position against his brother, Matthias had to make concessions to the Protestants, confirming the rights and privileges of the Estates. He then signed a peace treaty with Bocskay, and another one with the Turks, who were once again threatening the empire’s eastern frontier. Matthias then formed a confederation of Estates, including both Hungary and Austria, to ensure against future rebellion.

  Suddenly, Matthias was at open war with his brother, Rudolf. He marched on Prague, leading an army from his newly formed confederation to try to head off any attempts by Rudolf to sabotage his new peace agreements. But Rudolf wasn’t dead yet. Thin and sickly looking, he called a meeting of the Bohemian Estates and actually showed up in person. Somehow he managed to arouse Bohemian national sentiments. The Estates formed their own army and set out to fight Matthias’s invasion force. Now that Rudolf had an army of his very own, Matthias discovered a new flexibility. In June 1608, in the town of Libeò, now a suburb of Prague, he signed an agreement with his brother to slice up the empire. Matthias got Austria, Hungary, and Moravia, and Rudolf got Bohemia, Silesia, and Lusatia. Rudolf also got to keep the title of emperor, which was nice. Matthias, on the other hand, became the imperial heir, which galled Rudolf no end.

  Everything seemed to be over. Peace fell on the empire, except for one little problem. The Protestant Bohemian Estates had saved Rudolf’s kingdom for him, perhaps even his imperial skin, or at least his freedom. The Habsburgs had been known to do some pretty nasty things to one another. Rudolf owed them hugely, and he didn’t like it. A true Habsburg to his core, he wanted revenge, revenge first of all on his brother, that miserable traitor, and second of all on the Estates, who had forced concessions out of him when he didn’t want to give them. For months, he perched in his hidey hole in the Kunstkammer and schemed. His plan, however, was not thought through. He contacted his nephew, the twenty-three-year old Archduke Leopold, bishop of Passau, Bavaria, who was a notorious adventurer, a man who had no political and even less military experience, a typical young man who longed for glory. Leopold gathered an army at his estate, which he entrusted to a Colonel Ramée, a mercenary soldier, ostensibly to fight the Protestants in Württemberg and the Palatinate.

  The real, sneaky reason for this army, however, was to march on Prague, to crush the Protestant Estates, and to return to Rudolf all his previous lands and control of the Habsburg universe. But this was a nightmare army, smaller, but in character not too different from the horde that sacked Rome a century before. Both the Spanish ambassador and the papal nuncio had their doubts. Leopold’s army traveled through Upper Austria and then turned north toward Prague, occupying the Minor Town, south of the New Town, on February 15, 1611. And of course, they had to burn and pillage along the way, first going after the rich houses of the nobility and then, after everyone else. They tried to cross the Stone Bridge to the eastern side of the Vltava to take the Old Town, and then went back across the Charles Bridge to take the New Town. The Passauer cavalry finally beat its way up to the Old Town Square, a short walk from Kepler’s house, where the mechanized statue of death was banging out the waning time on the astronomical clock every hour on the hour.

  The Protestants, however, were waiting for them. They pulled the cavalry soldiers from their horses one by one and slaughtered them. Then the Protestants went mad in their turn, burning down monasteries and assassinating as many monks as they could find. From Kepler’s house, his family could have heard the riot easily, heard the gunfire and the cannonade. They could have heard the screams of death and the cries of rage. It must have been diff
icult at that moment to know who was friend and who was foe. When the most obvious monks were dealt with, the Protestant mobs stormed the Jewish ghetto, sacking the homes of the wealthy and killing any Jew they came across just for good measure. The Jesuits managed to escape, however, but only just.

  Matthias’s army was nearby, and he rallied the Estates, who brought up artillery to blast the Passauers out of the Minor Town. Finally, on March 10, Archduke Leopold led his ruffian army out of the city, and Matthias moved into Prague Castle with his army. He rounded up any local supporters of the Passauer invaders and tried them as criminals, then crowned himself king of Bohemia on May 23. Both Protestant and Catholic Estates supported him, because Rudolf in his madness had lost the support of everyone and, well, because Matthias had an army in town. Surprisingly, Matthias was generous with his brother, after a fashion. He didn’t imprison him and allowed him to remain in the Prague Castle surrounded by his glittering collection of wonders for the rest of his life. He could also keep the title of emperor, though he had no power whatsoever. Rudolf finally had the solitude he yearned for, but he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it. In January 1612, he took sick. He had a liver inflammation, his lungs were failing, and his body broke out in gangrenous sores. On January 20, Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, onetime king of Bohemia and Moravia, onetime ruler of Silesia and Lusatia, once leader of the Habsburg world, died quietly. They buried him respectfully, but without much fanfare, and thereby ended the golden age of Prague.1

  While this was still going on, back in 1609, Kepler was in the midst of the last touches on his Astronomia Nova. Rudolf was still alive, and the Passau invasion had not yet happened. After all his struggles at the Frankfurt book fair, he had finally negotiated its publication with Tengnagel and a publisher in Frankfurt, and after a swing through his native Swabia, including Tübingen, he returned to Prague and presented his work to the imperial council. For himself, Kepler was overjoyed by the emperor’s decrees of toleration. Protestants could now practice freely across much of Germany and Austria, that is, if Rudolf kept his word, which, unknown to Kepler, he had no intention of doing. But Kepler was no fool and, despite the general elation among the Protestants, he could see that the emperor’s power had been severely weakened and that this would not necessarily lead to peace and freedom for the Protestants. The more enmity there was between the denominations, the worse it was for everyone. The more each creed circled the wagons by defining all other creeds as the enemy, the more inevitable war became. When that war would happen in Bohemia, Kepler was not certain, but it would happen, and it would happen soon.