Kepler's Witch

by James A. Connor

  On the other hand, Ferdinand had to rely on allies to provide his own army. Most of the nobles in the Habsburg lands in Austria and in their attending provincial estates were Protestants and had already sided with the Bohemian rebels. Moreover, he did not have the kind of funding he needed in order to raise a mercenary army. But he was the emperor, and through the judicious doling out of imperial privileges and, of course, of the bits and pieces of Friedrich’s old territory of the Palatinate, he could make alliances. Ferdinand gave Maximilian, the Duke of Bavaria and an old Counter-Reformation partner, Friedrich’s electoral vote along with a chunk of the Palatinate. The rest of the Palatinate lands went to Philip III of Spain, Ferdinand’s cousin, who also sent an army to help. Oddly enough, after being given the promise of the Habsburg territories in Lusatia, the Lutheran elector of Saxony also joined the emperor’s side and sent his own army into Bohemia. This showed the fundamental political weakness of the Protestant cause.

  On October 21, 1620, Friedrich and Elizabeth were crowned king and queen of Bohemia, but by early November, two Catholic armies and one Protestant Lutheran army had entered Bohemia and were closing on the city of Prague. Suddenly, Friedrich and Elizabeth realized that they needed to be elsewhere. They packed what goods they could into a coach and took along what soldiers and servants they could muster. As they were beginning to set out, Elizabeth suddenly remembered that she had left the baby behind in the castle and sent Baron Christopher Dohna to go and fetch the child. The baron came running back with the infant, wrapped in a bundle, and handed him through the window as the coach was moving toward the gate. Somehow they managed to evade the three armies and to escape Bohemia altogether, but they could not return to Heidelberg, for by taking the crown of Bohemia and thereby usurping Habsburg privilege, Friedrich had made himself an outcast. His old principality of the Palatinate was gone, doled out to the rulers of the invading armies. His home was gone. His gardens were gone. His mechanical fountains were gone. Instead, he and Elizabeth and the children, their few servants, and a few soldiers made their way to Holland, first traveling to Kunstin and then on to Berlin, and from there across Germany to the Dutch lands. There they set up a court in exile. Friedrich retreated further into his fantasy world, styling himself the king of Bohemia until he died in 1632, two years after Johannes Kepler. Elizabeth stayed on in Holland after Friedrich’s death and returned to England only one year before she died herself.

  ON AUGUST 29, they moved Katharina to Güglingen in response to Christoph’s petition to the duke. When it had authorized the transfer, the court also ordered that Katharina be accompanied by a guard. As the two wardens looked on, the jailer shackled the old woman to an iron band with chains, and from that point on, as long as the guards were with her, they gouged her for money, eating their way through her small estate and burning an excessive amount of firewood to keep themselves warm.

  The next day Einhorn made it clear that he wanted to examine the accused once again, since he had made this a part of this complaint ad torturam, which he had sent along with Katharina to Güglingen. The term ad torturam turned the complaint into what we might call a capital crime. It carried with it not only the possibility of torture, but also of execution. Five days later, on September 4, the Güglingen magistrate, Johann Ulrich Aulber, presented the capital charge to the judges of the capital court, asked permission to hold the Kepler woman, and also asked to be given the power to force a reply from her.

  On September 26, 1620, Kepler arrived in Güglingen to find his mother sitting alone in a cold, wet, drafty, dark, and nearly unheated prison cell of the Güglingen Tower. The wardens had pressed as much money as they could out of her and heated their own station excessively at her expense. He was furious as well as terrified for her and wrote to the duke at once, appealing for his mercy in the name of God and asking to have her transferred to the house of the city magistrate, where she could at least be warm. She was an old woman after all, in a “dilapidated condition.” A broken, dispirited old woman like Katharina was not much of a threat and did not need a guard. The magistrate could keep her at his house “at her own, as minimal as possible, expense.” Because of her gender and her old age, guards would not be unnecessary. “To keep the prisoner warm, especially since she has not been convicted and continues to unshakably plead her innocence, but that you mercifully suggest to our adversary, since our mother is kept in such a cold shelter, and was sent to Güglingen in the first place, or perhaps priori casu, and not insured with my security (bond), that the guard look out for himself, and that in the interim he should pay [for heat] out of his own pocket.”

  Kepler also made contact with two of his old friends and advocates on the Tübingen law faculty and asked them to help in her defense. The defense moved into high gear, mounting argument upon argument against the prosecution’s case. Johannes was prominent enough in this process that the scribe of Güglingen wrote in the court transcripts that “unfortunately, the prisoner appears with the support of her son Johannes Kepler, the mathematician.” Johannes wanted to make sure that his mother got the best defense possible, so he and Katharina’s advocate, Johannes Rüff, presented the defense’s case in written form. This was expensive and slow going, but it was more certain than courtroom oratory, which could not be referred to later in any exact way.

  Suddenly feeling outclassed, the magistrate of Güglingen, Johann Ulrich Aulber, told the court that he could not lead the prosecution without a legal adviser of his own and without additional information. On November 4, the court assigned the duke’s own chancery advocate, Hieronymous Gabelkover, to take over the prosecution of the case and sent the files to him from Güglingen.

  Christoph Kepler then accused Johannes of spending too much money on their mother’s defense, saying that he was unnecessarily extending the trial through his involvement and opposition. Despairing, Christoph had decided to let the Reinbolds have their way with his mother, perhaps as a way of protecting his own reputation and perhaps, if looked at a little less charitably, as a way to protect his own portion of the inheritance. The Kepler children argued fiercely about the financial situation, about how much money was being paid out for the trial, for the advocate, and for their mother’s upkeep. Johannes and Margaretha were willing to protect their mother at all costs, while Christoph had decided that the best thing he could do was to protect the family fortune. Meanwhile, putting his own paddle into the water, Jakob Reinbold requested 1,000 gulden to pay for his dear wife’s pain and suffering and asked that this be paid out independently of the outcome of the capital trial, so that Katharina would have to pay even if she were declared innocent.

  Suddenly, noting how the wardens continued to consume Katharina’s estate, Jakob Reinbold, too worried about her financial condition. In the name of Christian charity, of course. The two guards were eating their way through Katharina’s money so fast that by the time the trial ended, there might not be anything left to comfort Reinbold for his trouble. Without any shame at all, he wrote a letter to the duke’s chancery, asking the duke that “in the name of God’s mercy” he protect Katharina Kepler’s funds, saying that she had already spent several hundred gulden since her arrest for food, shelter, heat, and her defense, and hinting that her money was disappearing rather too fast for his comfort. Suddenly, on November 23, out of the blue the Güglingen magistrate, working with the prosecution, included thirty-five new articles in his complaint. It would be a long trial indeed.

  On November 24, the high court, after being pressured by Johannes Kepler, denied Reinbold’s motion. No doubt even though Einhorn might have enjoyed a special line of communication with the duke’s government and had a close relationship with some of the duke’s servants, the council was doing its best to follow the law under the circumstances. In witchcraft trials, there was always fear, so that even though the law might be plain, the results of such cases were never that simple. There was always a subterranean assumption of guilt by the very existence of an accusation. After another letter
from Johannes Kepler, on December 4, the duke’s chancery in Stuttgart decided that the mayor and the court of Güglingen should bear half or at least a third of the cost of heating Katharina’s cell. After all, if they were going to insist on wardens, then the wardens would have to be kept warm, and Katharina Kepler should not have to pay for that. Suddenly the wardens decided that they did not need that much heat anyway. One more letter from Johannes, and they reduced her guard by half. But they still expected Katharina to pay for her own upkeep. The jail provided about thirty-five cents a day for a single meal, but that only included a hunk of bread and a bowl of watery broth.9 Anything beyond that—milk, eggs, meat, beer, or wine—the deputy charged dearly for, especially for any kind of meat, which Katharina “because of her missing teeth could enjoy little of.” On top of that, Johannes Kepler had to pay a few coins under the table to keep the magistrate in good humor.

  Finally, ten weeks after Katharina’s arrest, on December 11, 1620, Katharina Kepler went to trial. On January 8, 1621, the court took more witness examinations in Leonberg under the direction of Luther Einhorn. Even more witness examinations took place in Güglingen on January 13, and on February 23 they published the court protocol. At this point, on April 2, 1621, the court permitted Katharina’s advocate to present their defense. Finally, in May, the defense presented its last arguments to the court, written as a legal brief of 126 pages. Kepler had written much of this himself, in his own handwriting, using his own arguments to counter the prosecution’s arguments one by one. Gradually the tide began to turn.

  On August 22, 1621, the defense presented the final version of their written arguments. The court then sent the trial documents to the Tübingen law faculty, as was normally done in important cases, for the final word. Christian Besold worked behind the scenes. With all that, however, with all Kepler’s finely honed arguments, and all of Besold’s authority and influence, Katharina Kepler was still convicted. The prosecution had asked for a sentence of “Cognition of Torture,” or showing her the instruments and explaining their function. This was not a university lecture, but an exercise in terror.

  On September 10, 1621, the judicial faculty of Tübingen ruled as follows: “Learning the detailed facts of torture, but only in the first degree, i.e., in the form of the so-called territio verbalis, where the accused is taken to the usual place where one faces the torturer and the latter, under dire warnings, shows his instrumenta.” Although the law faculty had accepted most of Kepler’s arguments and agreed that there was not enough real evidence to warrant Katharina’s death, there was still enough doubt in their minds that they could not acquit her. In the final analysis, the learned doctors too were afraid. At this point, Johannes wanted to get the sentence over with, so he pressured Aulber, who was inclined to hold on to Katharina as long as possible, to set the day of her ordeal. Aulber announced that the sentence would be carried out on September 27 at seven o’clock in the morning. According to the rules, the Cleemeister, the Swabian term for the Wasenmeister, the one who executes sick animals and buries criminals, needed to be present, but he did not show at the appointed time, so Katharina had to wait one more day.

  Tormenting witches and sorcerers was a fine old tradition dating back to the Babylonians. The usual outcome was death by fire, generally by tying the convicted witch (or heretic, since the punishment was the same for both and sometimes the distinction between the two crimes was blurry) to a stake, piling faggots of wood all around, and setting it all on fire. Generally, out of Christian charity, the executioner strangled the witch before the flames could take her, but sometimes that did not work. All too often, the flames burned the executioner’s hands, and he was not able to finish the strangling. This happened in the case of Catherine Hayes in London in 1726, where the poor woman screamed for half an hour before she died. In the case of Kathleen Cawches and her two young daughters, also in England, all three women were burned at the same time on the same pyre. Right in the middle of the burning, the younger daughter gave birth to a baby. Someone in the crowd pulled the baby from the fire and gave the child to the priests. After some deliberation among them—the dean and the bailiffs, the jurists and the provost—the provost commanded that the child be thrown back on the fire, since the infant too was tainted with heresy.10 Similar stories occurred all too often on the continent as well. Certainly, on the day of her ordeal, they told Katharina quite a few such stories in gruesome detail.

  One of the favorite ways of determining the guilt of a witch was through a trial by water, in which they took the accused to the river, tied her hands and feet together so that she was bent over in a squat, and then threw her in the water. This was an old Babylonian idea, noted in the Code of Hammurabi. The idea was that the holy river would decide a person’s fate, drowning the guilty and floating the innocent. Thus justice was something even the waters of the river would attest to. However, the Assyrians turned this on its head. According to their rules, if those thrown in floated, then the waters rejected them, and they were guilty of witchcraft. If they sank, then the waters received them, and they were innocent. The Assyrians had an odd sense of humor. Of course, the onlookers had to be quick, or the innocents would drown before they could celebrate their acquittal. This Assyrian tradition was the one that traveled into Europe long before Christianity appeared, and Christian Europe, as it did with so many other pagan traditions, merely clothed it in Christian robes. Often when a witch was tried by water, the priest prayed over the water, recalled details of the Christian tradition, and thanked God just before they dunked the accused. One example from Germany:

  May omnipotent God, who did order baptism to be made by water, and did grant remission of sins to men through baptism: may He, through His mercy, decree a right judgment through that water. If, namely, thou art guilty in that matter, may the water which received thee in baptism not receive thee now; if, however, thou art innocent, may the water which received thee in baptism receive thee now. Through Christ our Lord.11

  Of course, all the other usual methods of torture applied to witches as well—branding with hot irons, the rack, the wheel, and so on, but one method seemed peculiar to witchcraft trials, the ordeal by pricking. The belief was that witches had numb spots on their bodies from the devilish growth of extra nipples used to suckle imps and demons of all sorts. These places on the witches body were said to be without feeling, insensible to pain or torment, and so one way to determine whether a woman was a witch was to tie her to a wall and, with sharp needles or sharpened metal rods, “prick” he accused witch over and over in every place imaginable, all in the hope of finding a place where she would not cry out in pain. Apparently, there was a class of witch-hunters called “prickers” who specialized in this form of torment, which had developed it into quite a science. Sometimes the pricking sessions would go on for days and, exhausted from screaming, the accused witches just stopped, too tired to cry out any longer. Which, of course, would be proof that they were indeed witches.

  All of these things would have been shown to Katharina Kepler. All the brands, the hot pokers, the rack, the wheel. The executioner would have explained their use in detail and what would happen when someone was burned alive, which, he would have said, was only the beginning of her eternal damnation in hell. He would have explained trial by water and the waters of baptism. He would have explained pricking and showed her the prickers, showed her how they hooked the skin and tore the flesh in little bits. He would have explained everything, but not quietly, not rationally. After each demonstration, he and the magistrate, perhaps even the guards, would demand that she confess her sins, so that even if she could not escape punishment in this life, she would at least escape the wrath of God. Then they would start again and tell her more stories and make more threats, until the old woman was kneeling on the floor, gibbering with fear. Nine times out of ten, by that point the accused would say anything.

  At seven o’clock the next morning, September 28, 1621, the executioner carried out the sentence and publis
hed the result. According to the Güglingen magistrate, the Kepler woman continued her denial, even after they showed her the instrumenta, even after they hounded her to confess. “They may do whatever they wish to me,” she said after they read the court protocol and showed her the instruments. “Even if they wanted to pull one vein after the other out of my body, I would have nothing to confess.” Then Katharina fell on her knees and prayed an “Our Father” to God, asking God to give a sign to show if she was indeed a witch or a demon or if she ever had her hand in witchcraft. “I know that God will bring the truth to light and will not take his holy ghost from me. The Reinbold woman had brought her illness with her from Ansback to Leonberg, and the schoolmaster’s lameness happened because he jumped over a ditch. I know that God will punish the witnesses who brought this upon me, for I am experiencing violence and injustice every day.”

  The sentence had been carried out, but Katharina had not confessed. According to the verdict, nothing more could be done to her, so Aulber, the Güglingen magistrate, led her back to prison. On October 3, Duke Friedrich of Württemberg commanded that Frau Kepler be released from prison, since she had cleansed herself through her ordeal. The sentence had been carried out, and she was free to go. Einhorn and Aulber refused to let her go and, instead, delayed the final proceedings while holding Katharina in prison, even after the order of her release. It worked once, but this time the duke had less patience. The ducal chancery in Stuttgart finally informed Aulber that if he wanted to hold Katharina after October 7, then any expenses incurred for her care would come from his own pocket. Aulber released Katharina almost at once. From the day that Katharina Kepler was arrested in Heumaden to the day of her release, October 7, 1621, 425 days had passed.