Shadows of My Father

by Christoph Werner

  Now I am coming to my gold water, the invention, or rather improvement, of which I regard as my most important achievement in Berlin and still today fills me with pride.

  Soon after I had begun my service as archiator of the elector of Brandenburg, I started to seriously occupy myself with the manufacture of aurum potabile. This problem had been of interest to me earlier, but time and circumstances of life, as I have described them, had prevented me from doing systematic alchemical work.

  Gold, or aurum or rex metallorum or whatever it may be called, is the purest, most durable, densest, heaviest, most valuable, and most excellent of all metals and can be called their king. How near, then, must be the assumption that it has a curative effect better than all other substances, like a king who surpasses all other people. The noblest metal must logically and necessarily have the strongest effect if—and that is the decisive condition—it can be administered to the human body in a form in which it can exercise its beneficial effect best.

  Gold is essentially determined by the purest and most mature quicksilver with a pure and solid sulfur heated so strongly by the power of the sun or subterrestrial fire that they cannot ever be separated from each other, and that is why gold is stable in fire and all sorts of aqua fortis.

  The last statement, which is shared by all alchemists, had been bothering me for a long time. If it were possible, by alchemical methods, to make an aqua fortis, or let us call it aqua regia, that could dissolve gold—absorb it into its liquidity, as it were—then one could, principally, drink it. This aqua regia is naturally of enormous power and sharpness and has to be diluted correspondingly so that it does not do damage but can exercise its healing effects.

  Gold water at the time I am writing about was, in my opinion, not effective or not effective enough. It consisted of the tiniest gold particles, really gold dust, suspended in a drinkable liquid, and naturally it left the body in the normal and natural way as all other food.

  It should be clear that the extraordinarily stable and noble gold, other than iron, quicksilver, and other metals, cannot be digested and taken in by the body vessels.

  I do not hesitate to admit, though, that even administered in this way, it is not without effect, as I could observe with some patients. All the more grew my conviction that the effect of aurum would have to be incomparably greater if it could be incorporated in the body like other substances—digested, so to speak, and built into the body. The famous Paracelsus said about this: “Of all elixirs, gold is the highest and most important for us, because it can make the body unbreakable. Aurum potabile, or drinkable gold, heals all illnesses; it renews and reconstructs.”

  Even now, at the end of my life, I cannot give up my secret. I will hand it down to my grandchildren, who can benefit from it. The recipe is in a safe place and will be made known to my progeny in due time.

  I will say the following: after many experiments, distillations, rectifications, and calcinations, I succeeded in making my aqua regia, or king’s water, and dissolved gold into it. I diluted the solution so far that it became drinkable and then made a liqueur from it, which tasted very good and had the best healing effects. The elector granted me a privilege license for the manufacture and sale of my gold water, which soon got a good reputation and even better profitability.

  Chapter 22

  . . . brings me, my family, and the reader to Dresden.

  In these my final days, I find myself more and more reflecting on how much the happy circumstances of my life are due to my own merit or are simply the result of lucky accidents. Such as how after the Grumbach Feud I found myself in a new position, happy again—a change for which I consider myself and my family fortunate. As soon as Joachim II and his brother, Hans von Küstrin, had entered eternal life, a message from the chancellor at the electoral court in Dresden, Georg Cracow, reached me saying the elector was thinking about an engagement of my person as his personal physician. My wife was beside herself with joy, and I, too, not forgetting the necessary manly refrainment from emotion, became quite elated. Had I known how they later dealt with Georg Cracow, I would certainly not have been quite so joyous.

  There was still another reason we were looking forward to a possible move to Dresden.

  As reported, Duke Albrecht of Prussia had died in 1568 of grief and the plague, grief because in Prussia a fanatical Lutheran named Heshusius together with a self-seeking party had won the upper hand so that there was no home for Christ’s true evangelism. Albrecht’s son Albrecht Frederick was only fifteen years of age when he succeeded to the title and was completely under the tutelage of the new councillors, who had been forced upon his father, and the son soon found himself in a deep depression.

  It was feared that the mean-spirited zealots, after an expected unification of Prussia with Brandenburg, would also gain influence in the electorate. Remembering my experiences in Jena, it made me afraid.

  Another point: the son and successor of my lord, Joachim II, who was on the whole a good-natured if lavish prince, John George, was an intolerant, severe, and parsimonious master, who treated the Jews in the electorate and, above all, in Berlin evilly and did great injustice to the court Jew, Lippold. I was afraid that nothing good would come to my family in Brandenburg-Prussia and was all the more eager to accept the appointment from Elector Augustus in Dresden, which dated from the 20th of July of the Year of the Lord 1571.

  Elector Augustus of Saxony, the reader will ask: Is he not the one who dealt so badly with your former lord in Gotha and took such gruesome revenge on his entourage? And now, Paul Luther, you are going to join his service?

  This I respond to with the following reasons.

  First, my lord, John Frederick, had formally dismissed me in Gotha and left it to me to go into the service of Augustus of Saxony, and, second, I, head of a family of five, was looking for a new employer whose reputation and wealth should at least be equal to my former one. What should be here so remarkable or cause me pains of conscience? Do we not all seek first for a good livelihood and contentment before we start examining our conscience? Is it not so that a good livelihood is the precondition for the possibility of such an examination? To put it another way: the poor peasant who has to fight for his daily bread does not have qualms of conscience because all his time and energy is spent struggling to survive. To put it still another way: Necessity knows no law. Admitted: my necessity was on a relatively high level, but does that mean it mattered less? Anyway, we moved to Dresden, which I did not regret during the first years.

  Dresden is a beautiful city, and the Elbe River, which in Bohemia is named the Labe River and is already a powerful watercourse in Dresden, gives the city its characteristic imprint through its broad and fine meadowed banks. The river passes Wittenberg, too, and therefore I was quite familiar with it, like an old friend.

  The residence lies on the left bank of the river, while on the other side, reached by a stone bridge, is Altendresden, which was not unified with Dresden until AD 1550 by the elector Maurice.

  This bridge, when I arrived, took my breath away. It is a stone arch bridge with originally twenty-four pillars and twenty-three arches, of which four arches had been filled with earth and were hardly visible at all. The length of the bridge is eight hundred paces, and nobody knows of a longer arch bridge in the whole of Europe. A drawbridge connects the two sides and is constructed of timber, for a good reason. In case of an attack, this part can quickly be burned down and so made unusable for the enemy.

  Trade and commerce thrive in Dresden, and on the Elbe River one can see the merchants’ barges and the nobles’ pleasure boats. Not far to the southwest, silver ore is mined, and in the surrounding fields there are abundant crops and cattle, and the forests teem with game. On the slopes of the Elbe Valley good wine is grown, particularly since Elector Augustus in 1560 imported Hungarian vines for the improvement of the Saxon stock.

  The city connects the trade of the east and west, and its importance has grown since Constantia, first wife of
Henry the Illustrious, brought a valuable relic, a piece of Christ’s cross, to Dresden, which attracts numerous pilgrims, who all want to eat and drink and be well accommodated and so help trade and commerce thrive in the city.

  The city achieved its prominent status when, in 1547, the electorship was transferred to the Albertine Wettins, and Duke Maurice of Saxony became elector. Now Dresden was the capital of an electorate, which added significantly to its development.

  My new master, Augustus, duke of Saxony, archmarshal and elector of the Holy Roman Empire, landgrave in Thuringia, margrave of Meissen, and burgrave of Magdeburg, ruled over a great and wealthy principality, which he knew to administer wisely.

  There were several things especially to his credit: the decision to receive the industrious Dutch who had fled from Spanish suppression, the improvement of the roads and the coinage by concentrating the mints in one place in Dresden, promotion of the Leipzig Fair, the exemplary cultivation and management of the ducal demesnes, and the support of pomiculture as well as cattle breeding. He himself wrote the Little Fruit and Garden Book. Also, he began laying the foundation of collections that show examples of human activities in important fields.

  His main fault was a narrow-minded religious attitude, which was caused by his worry that the Ernestinians might again claim, even by force, the electorship. Throughout his entire life he sought an alliance with the Habsburgs and carried on a fight with the Calvinists. This will be written about later, when the influence of such developments on my life will be presented.

  We arrived in Dresden almost like gypsies with bag and baggage in three wagons. It was a fine, sunny, and not-too-warm day in July in 1571. The roads between Berlin and Dresden had been rutted and dusty, and it took us seven long days of travel to complete the journey.

  The guards on both sides of the frontier between Brandenburg and Saxony showed themselves impressed by the orderliness of our passports, my past position in Berlin, and my future position at the court in Dresden so that they just glanced superficially into our wagons.

  Our horses could draw the heavy wagons only at walking speed, with which we were quite content. Our children, the eleven-year-old Johann Ernst, the nine-year-old Johann Friedrich, and our seven-year-old Anna, enjoyed the journey. Sometimes they rode on the broad backs of the heavy horses or jumped from the wagon—which each time alarmed their mother—and ran on the meadow beside the road. When the horses stopped and were fed and watered, they plucked grass and put it into the nosebags of the horses.

  Little Anna was the first to get tired, because she was small and tender, and she lay down on the sacks and blankets in the first wagon, which was meant for our transport. We spent the nights in wayside inns but slept two nights in the covered wagon. The first night was disturbed, not far from Finsterwalde. We heard wolves howling in the distance, which made the horses restive. The wagoners took turns keeping watch and tending to the fire. The two boys, anxious to appear brave, waved their wooden swords and scared their little sister with tales about wolves who preferred little girls for their food or even carried them off live. My wife had to intervene strongly to make them desist.

  In the meantime, I patrolled the wagons with a heavy stick and my sword and felt important protecting my family.

  Toward midnight the howling stopped so that finally we went to sleep. In the morning our servant surprised us with a hare that he had caught in a snare, slaughtered, and disemboweled. We roasted it and thus had, quite unexpectedly, a hearty breakfast of roasted hare, bread, and clear water from a little stream. In addition, the children had gathered sorrel and early blackberries, which served us as dessert.

  The little stream was very useful as my wife, chastely behind a blanket hung between two trees, and then the children could have a thorough wash. Where the stream formed a bay and had a gravel ground, the wagoners bathed the horses, curried them, and watered them.

  We reached Dresden in the morning and could immediately move into a house in the Kanzleigässchen, which was provided for me as archiator.

  We had hardly moved in when I was summoned to the castle, because the fourteenth child of the electoress Anna, the boy Adolf, born on the 8th of July, had fallen ill. I was called to his cradle before I was even introduced to the elector or his wife and the court. At first sight the little infant proved to be very weak, and I recommended to go on feeding the child breast milk from the wet nurse and in between fennel tea. A herb woman, in whom the ducal couple set great hopes, I tried to keep away from the child. He recovered a bit, but in the autumn he was again very ill. The herb woman had succeeded in sneaking in and giving the child a medicine of lion’s manure with droppings of doves and deer, mixed into his pap, also little cakes called manus Christi with fresh aniseed oil, infusion of lime tree blossom, a certain kind of root, and fresh honey from Lithuania.

  I must confess that I did not protest against this detestable medicine strongly enough, as I had just come to the court and did not want to jeopardize my position with the parents. I prescribed dandelion pap and small doses of theriac, but the child died in the following year. The parents really were ill fated, because of the fifteen children the electoress gave birth to, they lost eleven in child- or babyhood.

  Chapter 23

  . . . describes what we met with in Dresden.

  After I had been introduced at court and my wife had also made the acquaintance of the ruling couple, we soon settled down in Dresden. The children quickly got to know our neighbors, mostly court people, and liked playing on the banks of the Elbe River. It naturally was inevitable that they also befriended the children of the menial court staff, such as cooks, maidservants, grooms, stablemen, servants, barbers, craftsmen, gilders, silver polishers, and others. From them they acquired much useful knowledge about life in the city, the markets, the booths and stalls, etc., with which they entertained us at dinner and quite often made us laugh.

  They quickly learned to speak our beautiful German language with the Saxon-Dresden pronunciation, which Anna disliked, but she did not succeed in preventing such contacts. For life on the streets was too interesting. One could see and hear jugglers, buffoons, revolting deformities, beggars, dancers, tightrope walkers, traders, all kinds of wayfaring people, soothsayers, fire eaters, and ballad mongers. The latter made even me stop sometimes when they recited news and ghoulish stories from all the world.

  My wife had a lot to do, not so much in the way of household chores as in supervising the children, the cook, a maidservant, a stableman, and my servant. In spite of that, she seemed to me to be quite content, so I could devote myself extensively to my work at court.

  My new master, Elector Augustus, was from the beginning fond of me, which was a surprise, as I had been a faithful servant of his Ernestine relative and opponent, Duke John Frederick. In truth, my life long I have wondered how people could like me, because I am actually a weak person, not easy to be fond of. I myself have always found it difficult to put up with myself, and now that I will soon pass away, I can do so with a heartfelt sigh: God, I thank you that finally I have gotten rid of myself. With this, I do not mean to say that my life did not have beautiful, even irretrievable and unique, moments.

  But such thoughts did not move me at that time, and I eagerly threw myself into my new tasks, which were: bring order to the organization of apothecaries in Dresden, practice my medical duties at the court, and—a task that became more and more important—engage myself in the art of gold making, which, together with His Electoral Grace, I did to a growing extent.

  Dealing with the apothecaries began when one day Electoress Anna summoned me.

  The page knocked on my door very early. It must have been about seven of the clock. Because it was still dark, he carried a lantern. We were at breakfast when he arrived, and I had to ask the young man to wait in the hallway until I had dressed myself suitably to my station. We went to the residence, crossed the courtyard, and, passing the guards, entered the ground floor, which had four wings devoted to the ducal
economy, the storage and safekeeping of goods, the kitchen, and the accommodation of the servants. Also, there was the silver chamber and the court tailor’s shop, which I was allowed to make use of, naturally for adequate payment, for the making of my court livery.

  In the western wing behind heavy oak doors there were green-painted rooms, which served as the treasury. Already, one year after my arrival in Dresden, this secret safekeep of the duke was called the “Green Vault” and was actually not really very secret. Everybody knew what was locked behind those doors.

  We went up to the second floor, which accommodated the ducal family. Here the page led me to Her Electoral Grace’s study.

  She was sitting behind a desk on which there were, properly arrayed, all sorts of papers, writing materials, and an inkpot. The electoress was dressed very modestly; she wore, except for two rings on her fingers, no precious stones and appeared well prepared for what she was going to disclose to me.

  Born Anna of Denmark and Norway, she was called by the people Mother Anna. She had been interested in medicine, botany, and pharmacy all her life and, too, was herself quite a good, competent physician, though of course not very scholarly. She had invented a stomach plaster against hypochondriac melancholy, which became very famous, also certain antidotes and an eye wash, which I often prescribed for my patients.

  I did the required obeisance before the princess, who nodded at me graciously, said God be with you, and beckoned me to come nearer. A lady-in-waiting, whom I had not seen yet and who later was introduced to me as Countess Elsa von Grauenfels and looked her name, stood to the left of the princess and near to the window. She was silent during the talk, just listening and observing.