Most of all, what Katharina Kepler had against her, however, was the fear of shadows, fear that blocked people’s minds and strangled their sense of justice. So many people suffered so many mysterious illnesses. Children died unexplained. Cattle went mad. There had to be a reason. More than a reason—there had to be a conspiracy, a conscious group of secret malefactors out for ruin. Just as alienation envelopes people of our time, fear choked the people of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nighttime visions had plagued Albrecht Dürer all his life. His prayers were screams for help, for the terror of the night, of demons, and of eventual damnation twisted his sleep. So too for the good citizens of Leonberg and the duchy of Württemberg. They were victims of their own imaginations and, tragically, odd little women such as Katharina Kepler paid the price.
In some ways as well, the little town of Leonberg was a Freudian Disneyland. Upwelling sexual fantasies, rejected as sin and too horrible to admit, still bubbled away like mud pots and sometimes ended up in witchcraft testimony:
Dorothea Hanns Klebling, hunter’s wife, about thirty-three years old:
Five years ago, Barbara, the daughter of Schützenbastian, was at the witness’s home for some sewing and told her that she had also been to the Kepler woman’s house for sewing and that the Kepler woman had asked her to stay the night. Around midnight, the Kepler woman got out of bed and walked around the room. The seamstress asked her why she did that and would not lie in her bed. The Kepler woman then asked her if she might have a desire to become a witch. There would be much joy and fun in it, the Kepler woman said, where otherwise this world offered neither joy nor comfort. To this the girl answered that if one had joy and fun for a long time in this world, one would have to pay for it eternally. The Kepler woman, however, disagreed. She said there is no such thing as eternal life, but when a human dies, he dies just as the common beast. To that the girl responded that the clergy preach that whoever believes and is baptized shall be blessed, but whoever does not believe, shall be damned. To that the Kepler woman said the reason we have clergymen is so that we feel safe walking down the street….
She did not hear anything about a Bülen [possibly a young boy], but heard that [the Kepler woman] wanted to give the girl [Barbara] a man so that she would have joy and voluptuous pleasure all the time.
The forty-nine accusations were based on witness accounts like these, accounts that were hearsay or that waffled or admitted to an ignorance of the facts, but they were read into the record nonetheless. Part of the problem was Katharina herself, for when she was confronted with these witness accounts, her memory failed her and she confused names and dates. She was on the shy side of seventy-five years old and utterly uneducated. It is not really surprising that she could not remember. It is significant, however, that what had started off as gossip and what was admitted to be gossip by some of the witnesses had magically become official court record. What had started off as a dispute between two families and two old friends had become a fight to the death. Leonberg had already burned five other women for witchcraft. Why not one more?
The slander case against Ursula Reinbold had been filed in 1615, four years before, and although the court had gathered witnesses and heard testimony, nothing ever happened. The case simply disappeared into the mist. Not so with the witchcraft trial. On September 9, 1619, the court ordered the trial against Katharina Kepler to go forward and set the date for November 10, 1619. The magistrate examined his twenty-two witnesses, took down their stories, and entered them into the record. But what survives is not verbatim. There are no actual transcripts of what the witnesses said, only Einhorn’s summaries. Luther Einhorn, therefore, led the dance. What the witnesses said, believed, or felt about Katharina and how they might have interpreted their experiences were lost, and all that was left was the word of Luther Einhorn.
On December 23, 1619, the court assembled a protocol and began the witchcraft trial. A few weeks later, on January 23, Einhorn sent the protocol, gathered under the directives of April 3 and September 23, 1617, to the duke’s chancellery. The chancellery then presented the protocol to the duke, but he found the whole matter distasteful and let the case sit for a time. It is possible that the duke perceived that the charges were trumped up, but, like all men of power, he was caught in a web of his own bureaucratic creation. On February 11, the Reinbold faction contacted him asking for a decision. The Keplers, meanwhile, were still waiting for some closure on Katharina’s slander case against the Reinbolds, closure that would never arrive. On March 20, 1620, Johannes Kepler appealed to the duke personally and asked that his mother’s trial against Ursula Reinbold be expedited and brought to court as soon as possible. Instead, the duke passed the issue on to the high court, which voted in favor of the Reinbolds and ordered Katharina’s arrest.
The days in August around Stuttgart are warm and humid. The low trees along the riversides sip water as if through straws and puff it into the air. Morning rises with a thin mist, which evaporates as the day heats up and becomes invisible, though you can still feel it on your skin. Some days promise cool breezes off the Alps. Other days promise heat and still more flaccid air. On hot days, everything wilts, and people take what time they can to sit in the shade somewhere and drink cool wine. August is a time for peace and for children laughing, with their feet splashing in the streams. With evening, the heat relents, and the air softens. Crickets in the fields. Frogs in the streams. The farms and towns gradually settle into sleep. It was on such an August night in Heumaden that Marx Waltter, the Stuttgart magistrate, appeared at the house of Pastor Georg Binder to arrest his mother-in-law, Katharina Kepler. He arrived long past midnight, in the deep morning, August 7, 1620, when it was still dark but with a hint of sky, long before the town was stirring, before anyone could see what was happening. Marx Waltter had come with a detachment of armed guards, large men with swords, helmets, and grim beards. They pounded on the door, awakening the household, and shouldered their way in. Waltter announced the court order to Pastor Binder, then set about his business, in a hurry to get away. He could not have been proud of what he was doing, or he would not have come in the middle of the night. The men roughly shook Katharina awake, then stuffed her still half asleep into a wooden chest, and carried both the old woman and the chest out of town before anyone noticed.
Because of the general fear of witches, the men may have been as afraid of Katharina as she was of them. Who can say what a witch can do? Katharina sat alone in a jail cell for the next four days. Perhaps at night, when the jailers heard her weeping, they thought that she was weeping over her sins. The presumption of guilt was often so strong in witchcraft trials because the fear of witches was so great—each time they struggled, each time they complained, each time they protested their innocence, it was another proof of their cleverness. They were presumed guilty because the crime as imagined, as with child molesters and serial killers, was so horrible. The point of leaving her in jail for four days, barely attended, alone with her thoughts, was to accelerate her fear, to incite her imagination and inject terror.
On August 11, she was led to the courthouse, possibly still in chains, where the magistrate read her the charges, questioned her fiercely, and confronted her with her accusers and the accounts of witnesses. By law, she would have had the support of an advocate and of her family as well as the support of the war magistrates, since she was a widow, but Luther Einhorn was not particularly fussy about the niceties of law.
Not surprisingly, given the weight of prejudice against her, on August 18, the Stuttgart Oberrat, the chief judge, indicted Katharina: “The accused is once more and in all seriousness with warning of the executioners to be examined. If she will not confess and will not speak, all evidence shall be collected, and the accused charged ad torturam. If it is brought to light then, to execute the torture and report her confession, i.e., her statement after enduring the torture.”
At this point, Christoph, the man whose business dealings with Ursula Reinbold had started all t
he trouble, suddenly remembered his reputation as an upright citizen and distanced himself from the case. Pastor Binder joined him in this. After all, how would it look for a man of God to be associated with a known witch? On August 26, Christoph asked the town scribe, Werner Feucht, to write a letter for him to the duke, begging the duke to transfer his mother’s case to another town, any other town. Three days later, his mother was carted off to Güglingen, where they chained Katharina, now broken and confused, in a musty dark prison cell in the Güglingen Tower.
Margaretha had remained loyal to her mother, however. Soon after the arrest, she wrote to Johannes in Linz and described the entire situation to him. He wrote at once to the Duke of Württemberg and begged him in the name of his “God-given and natural right” to protect his mother, asking him to hold off Katharina’s actual trial until he could arrive. The Oberrat’s decision was an indictment, but the trial still remained. Soon after, Johannes Kepler left his home in Austria and traveled as fast as he could to his mother’s side, to a nasty wet prison cell in Güglingen.
AFTER THE RIOTS HAD DIED DOWN in Prague, the Estates gathered to form an interim government. They had revolted, so they said, to protect their rightful king, Ferdinand, from the insidious influence of the Jesuits. In truth, however, they rebelled in order to overthrow Habsburg power. They elected thirty directors, with ten for the barons, ten for the knights, and ten for the towns. The leadership of the directorate was radical, though the rank and file was moderate. As it turned out, there were moderates and radicals on both sides. The Protestant radicals wanted war, and actively sought alliances with other Protestant nations. The moderate Protestants still believed that they could negotiate and achieve their ends through peace. Emperor Matthias was the moderate on the Catholic side, because he too hoped for negotiations that could avoid a war. Archduke Ferdinand, now king of Bohemia, and the Catholic faction, however, wanted to crush the Protestants wherever they found them, to leave none standing, and to negotiate only with the dead.
Suddenly, Emperor Matthias, by then an old man, died in 1619, just after the defenestration. The most obvious choice for emperor was ArchDuke Ferdinand, an energetic man of forty who was intelligent, but not to excess, cheerful to those who knew him, and possibly the most virulent anti-Protestant leader in eastern Europe. His election was fairly certain. Even the Protestant electors voted for him, though there was some doubt about Friedrich V of the Palatinate, but in the end even Friedrich voted for him. In fact, just hours after the electors had met in Frankfurt to confirm Ferdinand’s election, Ferdinand learned that his own people in Prague had rebelled and rejected him as their king and that they had chosen the same Friedrich of the Palatinate to replace him.
The moderate Protestant faction had watched their hope of negotiation evaporate with the death of Matthias, and they began to gear up for war. It was not a particularly unified rebellion, however. The members of the Estates disliked and distrusted one another and fought over everything. They had no army to speak of and few allies. The Habsburgs, on the other hand, had a deep bench and could call upon the support of Spain, Bavaria, Poland, Tuscany, and even Lutheran Saxony. The Prague Estates, who were new at this game and had not yet established a network of support, approached England, Holland, the Italian Piedmont, and the Republic of Venice, asking for whatever military support they could get, and if not that, then loans to help them raise a local militia. But the Estates were outclassed. They were up against the most successful imperial dynasty in the history of Europe, a dynasty that had lasted longer than the Caesars, the Claudians, the Stewarts, and the Tudors. For hundreds of years, that single family had understood power better than any other on the continent. They knew how to use it and, as a lot, they were mad enough to use it without conscience or restraint. The last two emperors, Rudolf and Matthias, were indecisive and not very effective. That was not true of Ferdinand, however. He had a simple mind, given to seeing the world in blacks and whites, and he had the energy to act. He was, therefore, a dangerous man.
Soon after his election, Ferdinand removed Cardinal Khlesl from his position as the emperor’s chief political adviser. This was the same Cardinal Khlesl who had written the notorious response to the Protestant Estates. But that was not why Ferdinand removed him and ordered him confined. The cardinal, who was more intelligent than the new emperor, had advised Ferdinand to negotiate with the Protestants in order to avoid war and because it was the smart political move. But Ferdinand was an ideologue and did not want to make the smart political move, so he sent the good cardinal to his room.8
Ultimately, the Protestant Estates were not very successful in gathering international support, and so in the summer of 1619 the Estates in Bohemia and Upper and Lower Austria gathered into a confederation that declared itself to be the enemy of the Habsburgs. It officially banished the Jesuits from the city of Prague forever and gathered a war chest from the sale of confiscated Catholic properties. Then, with great ritual and the blaring of trumpets, it officially threw Ferdinand II off the throne of Bohemia and sent word of its offer of the throne to the young elector palatine, Friedrich, the husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of King James I of England. Friedrich was in Frankfurt at the time, voting for Ferdinand as emperor. As the prince-elector of the Palatinate, Friedrich was the most celebrated Protestant ruler on the continent, and no doubt the offer of the crown to Friedrich was done with the hope of bringing along more international support.
Friedrich certainly looked the part of the serene monarch. He was a slim, good-looking, elegant young man of twenty-four with a grave and serious demeanor, but one who had no head for war. They said that he would have made a better gardener. He was not particularly intelligent either, though he was not always wise enough to know it. The best that could be said for him was that he dutifully followed good advice when he got it. Had he been born in a time of peace, he would have done well. His education by the French Calvinists had made him into a philosopher, a rhetorician, and a good gardener. He was fascinated with mechanical fountains of any kind. He was a spoiled child married to a spoiled child, neither of whom had any idea about the world they lived in. His wife, Elizabeth, was probably better suited for rule, but she was too busy giving birth and raising her children to take control. Elizabeth, who was a plain woman, had once been courted by numerous princes and kings from all over Europe, from the French dauphin to Gustavus Adolphus when he was the crown prince of Sweden. Understandably, she did not like Ferdinand very much and said that he would make a bad emperor, and so she acquiesced when Friedrich, taken by a sense of divine call, decided to accept the Bohemian offer.
At the end of September 1619, they left Heidelberg accompanied by a thousand soldiers, several hundred servants, and over a hundred and fifty wagons full of goods. As a royal couple, they loved hunting, entertaining, and riding in the forests accompanied by witty young men and women, most of whom spoke only French. The fact that they were going to rule the Czech people, while none of them spoke Czech, did not seem to register. And neither did the fact that they might have to go into battle against the implacable Habsburgs. When they arrived at the Bohemian border, they were met by representatives of the Bohemian Estates, who welcomed them with a great deal of ceremony and at least several Latin speeches. Then, on October 21, they entered Prague to a great celebration, cheering crowds, adoring faces, and troops in review, and there they were crowned king and queen of Bohemia in two different ceremonies, Friedrich first and then Elizabeth, at St. Vitus Cathedral, one of the great religious centers of Habsburg power.
And while Friedrich and Elizabeth held court in the Prague Castle, receiving ambassadors and throwing gorgeous parties, the storm clouds gathered around them. The rebellion that had given them the crown was fraying, because none of the nobles trusted one another enough to levy the taxes that they needed to raise an army. Moreover, for all the grand celebration and the words of welcome, the new king and queen of Bohemia were outsiders, and though they seemed to be oblivious to it, they were tre
ated as outsiders by the very nobility who had hired them in the first place. When Friedrich approached the Prague burghers for a personal loan so that he could gather an army, they refused him, even though it was their own necks on the line as well.
No doubt Friedrich and Elizabeth had no sense of Slavic culture or of the Slavic version of Protestantism. They were both Calvinists, trained in the French style, and could not completely understand the Bohemian Brethren. Elizabeth did not make much of an impression either, with her lavish parties, her French entourage, her fashionable hairstyles, and her plunging necklines. Moreover, it was becoming increasingly apparent to the rebels that Friedrich and Elizabeth had been a bad choice. They were largely chosen with the hope that they would bring along the support of other Protestant rulers, especially James I of England, Elizabeth’s father. But Friedrich had never read his father-in-law’s signals correctly. King James may have been willing to marry off his daughter to the young prince, to spend a great deal of money on the wedding, and to give them a glorious send-off, but he did not want to involve England in the military quagmire that was central Europe. James could see that fighting the Protestant cause in Germany was a no-win situation, because the Habsburgs were too strong, and besides, the Church of England was never extraordinarily Protestant anyway. Going to war with Ferdinand meant going to war with Spain, and possibly even with France, a bit more than little England was willing to take on.
The rest of the Protestant rulers in Europe were not overly eager to jump onto Friedrich’s bandwagon either. The Bohemian nobles had set a bad precedent. The idea of an absolute monarch with the divine right to rule was firmly entrenched in many European courts. The age of constitutional government had not yet arrived, and so few among the royalty of Europe wanted to come to the aid of what looked like an anti-imperial revolution. The Bohemian nobles were not republicans by any means, however, but they had been willing to throw out the king that they had accepted only two years before and to choose a man who was more to their liking. Therefore, feeling the ground shift beneath their thrones, most of the Protestant kings stayed neutral, and although many of them were willing to raise a glass to Friedrich, they weren’t willing to do much more.
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