1616

by Christensen, Thomas

  It was not the last of Modena’s trials. The youngest of his three sons would be knifed to death by a Venetian gang. The middle son, whose behavior Modena disapproved of, would run away to Brazil, only returning after the Portuguese reconquest of that country from the Dutch in 1654, six years after Modena had died; on his return he would sue his sisters, contesting Modena’s will in costly legal actions they could ill afford. And, in 1634, his fourteen-year-old grandson was arrested for trying to print copies of Modena’s midrashic anthology, which was prohibited by Venetian authorities.

  Jews in Venice were confined to an island known as the Ghetto Nuovo, or New Ghetto. The word ghetto, of Italian origin, alludes to a place where a foundry is located. It became associated with places of Jewish community confinement after a law was passed at the beginning of the sixteenth century confining Jews to the island. The law established gates on each of its two bridges, which were to be locked at sunset and opened at sunrise. Jews caught away from the ghetto outside these hours were subject to hefty fines.

  Easter was the time of greatest danger for Jews in Europe. Just as women were blamed for the fall of man from the garden of Eden, so Jews were blamed for the crucifixion of Christ (never mind that he was Jewish too). Jews, like witches, were sometimes thought to bear the mark of the devil, and the segregation of Jewish communities made it easier for some Christians who lacked contact with them to believe fantastic stories of their having horns or tails. In addition, Jews were urban dwellers, and it was believed at this time that groups that did not engage in agriculture were economic parasites. Their presence was tolerated, however, in certain places because their networks of bankers, traders, and merchants stretching throughout the world was necessary for the functioning of incipient capitalism. In addition, they dealt in risky goods such as jewels that were dangerous to handle because of their attractiveness to highwaymen. Prohibitions against Christian money lending meant that the resentment of debtors tended to focus not just on individuals but on Jews as a group.

  One of the oldest ghettos in Europe was the Judengasse (“Jews’ Alley”) in Frankfurt (the district was destroyed in World War II). There Jews worked as money lenders and bankers, pawnbrokers, and small-scale merchants, paying taxes and tariffs beyond those required of the city’s Christian residents. In the mid-fourteenth century, Jews had been denied the rights of citizenship, and a century later the ghetto was established. It was a crowded place because it was not allowed to expand its boundaries.

  In the early seventeenth century guild workers, most of whom were Calvinists, objected to restrictions imposed by the city’s Lutheran patricians. They charged the city government (rightly) with mismanagement of funds, including taxes obtained from the ghetto. A hotheaded gingerbread baker named Vincez Fettmilch (his name means “milk fat”) pushed his way to a leadership position. Fettmilch demanded more guild involvement in city governance. He also demanded a reduction in the rate Jewish moneyleaders could charge, and a limit to the number of Jews allowed in the city. Economically stressed guild workers began to fantasize about their debts being wiped away by city edict.

  City leaders tried to negotiate with Fettmilch, but he was dissatisfied with their response, and he declared the Town Council deposed and himself in charge. This caught the attention of the emperor, who ordered the Council reinstated. At that a crowd took to the streets. The Jews of the Judengasse were a convenient target of their anger. Rioters stormed the ghetto, and intense fighting ensued. The outmanned Jews were defeated and driven from the city. Their homes were plundered. About fourteen hundred people fled the city in small boats, seeking refuge in neighboring communities. The emperor issued a sentence against Fettmilch. He was captured, and in March 1616 he was hanged and quartered, his house razed, and his family banished. Jews then began returning to the Judengasse. They declared a day to be observed annually as Purim Vinc (after Fettmilch’s first name); on this day a song was sung about the assault on the Jews and their eventual deliverance and return to the city.

  Plundering of the Judengasse, 17th century. Institut für Stadtgeschichte Frankfurt / Historisches Museum Frankfurt am Main.

  The Jewish ghetto was attacked by a mob during the Fettmilch riots of 1614, and the residents were forced to flee; their houses were plundered. When they returned in 1616 they established a purim, or celebration of deliverance, to mark the occasion.

  The Fettmilch riots responded to economic stresses, but the special treatment of the Jews because of their religion, along with tensions between Calvinists and Lutherans, set the stage for the uprising. Despite pockets of pluralism, many people assumed that one faith would soon be shown to be the only true religion, and the others would be defeated. Then, perhaps, the End would be at hand. In Europe the looming Thirty Years War seemed to presage such a moment.

  While there was comfort in looking back to the golden ages of lore in the face of a scary future that was fraught with unprecedented uncertainties, in many parts of the world there was a sense that the end of time was at hand. This sense was one of the factors that motivated Jesuits and other missionaries to carry Christianity to foreign lands. “If this is not the end of the world,” wrote the Habsburg king Philip II of Spain, “I think we must be very close to it.” Protestants who rejected the mediation of a church hierarchy discovered in the Book of Revelations prophecy of a coming apocalypse; some added 666, “the number of the beast,” to the thousand years of the millennium to determine that 1666 would mark the end of time. Writers like Joseph Mede optimistically foresaw the devil being defeated step by step in a triumphal progression of history; others like William Gouge grimly foresaw ever-increasing “chastisements and afflictions” prior to the final reckoning. Many Jews, facing growing difficulties, looked forward to the messiah’s deliverance. In parts of the Islamic world the anticipation of the final reckoning had reached its peak around 1591 and 1592, which was the year 1000 according to the Hegiran calendar. But the feeling barely lessened as predicted apocalypses passed; instead, astrologers and prophets renewed their study of the signs, attempting to formulate a new understanding of the order of the universe. This quest led to all kinds of forays into esoteric forms of knowledge, from which emerged both new scientific discoveries and new superstitions and heresies.

  Shah Abbas of Safavid Persia was forty-five years old in 1616, and he had ruled for twenty-nine years. Throughout the course of his reign he had dealt with many threats and outmaneuvered many opponents and dissident factions. The threats had not always been material or military ones; ideas could be just as subversive, and indeed during the early seventeenth century wars of beliefs and wars of arms were often inextricably entangled. In the early 1590s, for example, he had had to deal with an order of Sunnis called the Nuqtavis, who objected to his Shiite notions. The Nuqtavis were not powerful enough to bring down Shah Abbas by force, but they fomented unrest by announcing that they had read signs predicting that the ruler of Persia would soon die and that one of their number would occupy the throne. The power of the prediction derived from the mounting fear that momentous matters — perhaps indeed the end of the world — were at hand. A second millennium of the Hegira calendar was just beginning. When Shah Abbas consulted his own court astrologer he was shaken to discover that he confirmed the prophecy, based on the coming conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. But Shah Abbas was not a fatalistic man. So he acted decisively.

  The shah’s first maneuver was a practical one: he executed or imprisoned most of the Nuqtavis. This removed some of the threat, but it did not undo the prophecy, so he spared one young man among their number. He then abdicated the throne in favor of this unfortunate. He, Shah Abbas, would henceforth be no more than the guardian of the royal harem. Several days passed in this arrangement, until the planets moved apart. Now the young “sultan” was executed, and his body publicly displayed. The prophesies that the sultan would die and a Nuqtavi occupy the throne had both proven true.

  In 1611, following a long and exhausting but ultimately indecisiv
e war against the Ottomans, Rudolf II was forced to cede power over the Empire to his younger brother Matthias; nine months later Rudolf died at the age of sixty. With his death Kepler lost his powerful patron, and he left Prague for a position as provincial mathematician in Upper Austria. The childless Matthias reigned for only a few years. In 1617 he was succeeded by his nephew Ferdinand as king of Bohemia (the region around Prague that is now the western half of the Czech Republic). That’s when all hell broke loose.

  The Defenestration of Prague, 1618, woodblock illustration.

  Angry Protestants confronted King’ Ferdinand’s regents in Hradshin Castle in Prague and threw them and their secretary from a window. The incident is usually considered to mark the beginning of the calamitous Thirty Years War. This illustration appeared in a pamphlet published shortly after the event.

  Ferdinand was an ardent Catholic who had won the support of the Spanish Habsburgs. Restive Bohemian Protestants called a diet to press the new king for guarantees of religious rights. Ferdinand forbade the diet from meeting. It assembled anyway in May 1618. A deputation marched to Hradshin Castle and confronted the king’s regents, demanding an explanation for the diet having been declared illegal. Dissatisfied with the response, the delegates seized the two regents and their secretary and threw them out an upper-story window. Landing in a mound of manure, all three survived. Catholics subsequently claimed the three men had been saved by the intervention of angels, while Protestants attributed their survival to the horse dung into which they fell. This grotesque incident, known as the Defenestration of Prague, is traditionally marked as the beginning of the Thirty Years War.

  Protestants gathered around Frederick, the son-in-law of James I of England, Catholics around Ferdinand. Largely because of its religious implications, the initially local conflict escalated, eventually involving the nations of Denmark, Spain, Sweden, and France, among others; the pacifistic King James was one of the few leaders with a potential stake in the outcome to hold back from military involvement.

  By the time Denmark entered the conflict in 1625 the Empire’s finances had been strained to an alarming degree. At that point a Bohemian Catholic convert from Lutheranism, Albrecht Wallenstein, recruited more than thirty thousand men at his own expense and led them in battle. Wallenstein, who became supreme commander of the Empire’s armies, was a military strongman whom Ferdinand, wary of his ambition and fearful of his changing sides, would eventually have assassinated. This was the man to whom Johannes Kepler attached himself in the later years of his life.

  Rejecting invitations from Italy and England, Kepler remained in Germany through the years of warfare. “Am I to go overseas?” he wrote of an invitation from England. “I, a German? I, who love the firm continent and who shrink at the idea of an island in narrow boundaries of which I feel the dangers in advance?” In 1624 Kepler did a ten-year forecast of the generalissimo’s fortunes that concluded with a prediction of “dreadful disorders” in 1634. That February Wallenstein would be murdered. Meanwhile, in 1628, Wallenstein hired Kepler as his full-time personal astrologer and mathematician.

  For Kepler these were years of painful wandering. Perhaps he recalled his father’s distant wartime service during this time, or his mother’s difficult journey to the Low Countries in search of her husband. Her story anticipates that of Mother Courage, a character in a tale by the greatest seventeenth-century German novelist, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Grimmelshausen’s narrator, the title character, is a camp follower who refuses to bow to the slings of fortune but schemes her way through the Thirty Years War and prospers from it. For Bertolt Brecht, who would base his play of the same name on Grimelshausen’s character, Mother Courage was both complicit in and victimized by a capitalist system that profits from war. In the same way, Kepler, a committed Lutheran who had scant faith in astrology, spent his final years wandering war-torn Germany making horoscopes for the military commander of the Catholic forces.

  Finally, in 1630, in a Bavarian town at the confluence of the Danube and Regen rivers that was then called Ratisbon, now Regensburg, Kepler took to bed, delirious and raging with fever. He was bled, but it didn’t help. After a time he stopped raving, and in the end he spoke little, only pointing first to his head and then to the sky. Attended by Lutheran priests, he would be buried in a church cemetery. The churchyard would be desecrated by Swedish forces, and his bones scattered and lost. His epitaph, however, survives:

  I measured the heavens, now I measure the shadows of the earth

  My mind was of the heavens, here my body’s shadow lies

  It is estimated that a quarter of the population of the Holy Roman Empire — around eight million people — died over the course of the Thirty Years War, the most devastating in central Europe before World War II. More than four hundred years later, in 1939, as Europe was again descending into the madness of all-encompassing war, and new, even more ruthless and senseless witch hunts were beginning, German composer Paul Hindemith was, like Kepler before him, thinking about the harmony of the world, despite, or perhaps because of, the coming conflict. Also like Kepler, Hindemith (whose wife was Jewish) had a somewhat compromised relation to political power, accommodating the Nazi regime in small ways before fleeing Germany in 1938.

  Its Nurse Is the Earth, 1617, probably by Matthieu Merian. Engraving from Atalanta Fugiens by Michael Maier.

  The text reads:

  A she-wolf’s udders nourished Romulus,

  A she-goat Jupiter, so ’tis believed:

  What wonder, if we say the tender CHILD

  Of the PHILOSOPHERS is nursed by the EARTH?

  If poor beasts fed such Heroes, then HOW GREAT

  Shall be the one NURSED by the GLOBE of EARTH?

  Hindemith researched Kepler’s life and work for an opera that he would call Die Harmonie der Welt — “The Harmony of the World.” Through the cataclysmic war years the music of that opera coalesced and reverberated in Hindemith’s head. Finally, in 1951, he prepared a symphony based on passages from the as yet unwritten opera; the symphony was performed to acclaim by the Basel Chamber Orchestra. Then, in 1956, during the chill of the cold war, Hindemith completed the libretto of the opera, which premiered in Munich the following year. It portrays Kepler as a spiritual seeker in a violent and senseless world. Kepler’s spiritual quest is contrasted with the furious efforts of General Wallenstein to impose harmony by force. Yet Kepler does not succeed in hearing the harmony of the world until, at the last moment, with death approaching, in a surreal final scene in which Hindemith pulls out all the dramatic and musical stops, he relinquishes his own striving. Then he gives himself up to the world as it truly is.

  Foreign Ambassadors, 1616–1617, by Giovanni Lanfranco and workshop. Fresco. Sala dei Corazzieri, Quirinale Palace, Rome.

  In 1616 the room in the pope’s summer palace designated for receiving foreign dignitaries was adorned with frescoes. The overall plan was apparently charged to Agostino Tassi, who created an illusionistic plan in which ambassadors peer down from balconies opening onto imaginary rooms.

  Giovanni Lanfranco and Carlo Saraceni were among the artists who painted the figures. Those in the center here appear to be West Asian ambassadors, the younger of whom may be Robert Sherley, an Englishman sent by Shah Abbas of Persia on an embassy to Europe.

  Dark-skinned figures appear in most of the panels, one of which depicts Emanuele Ne Vunda, an ambassador sent by King Alvaro II of Kongo. Others seem intended to represent Ethiopians, South Indians, or other ethnicities. To Europeans such figures would recall the tradition that one of the wise men was supposed to have been black.

  At the right in this panel is Hasekura Tsunenaga, who traveled to Rome from Japan by crossing the Pacific to the Atlantic through Mexico.

  The commemoration of these notable visits was meant to emphasize the prestige of the pope. It also marks the beginning of the globalization of the world.

  5World in Motion

  Dark skin and black hair, long
, arched eyebrows, eyelids made up with kohl over dark eyes with “bright, sparkling pupils” — these were among the qualities the thirty-year-old groom admired in his eighteen-year-old Baghdad bride. All in all she had “very acceptable physical beauty,” he said, “not to exaggerate it, because it is not right for husbands to exaggerate the beauty of their wives, though were I otherwise, I would perhaps speak differently of her.” After all, she was “in every part finely proportioned” and “of very ancient Christian blood.” In December 1616, when the wedding was held, they had known each other barely a month, but theirs would be both an effective partnership and a true romance, if one with a strange, sad ending.

  Her name, as he wrote it, was Maani Gioerida (in a more conventional transliteration today it would be Ma’ani Juwayri). Ma’ani means “reason” in Arabic. She was linguistically adept, fluent in Arabic and Turkish, and conversant in Chaldean, Armenian, Georgian, and, soon, Persian. Her husband’s native language was Italian, and her ability to communicate across all sorts of cultural boundaries would prove invaluable to him in their travels together through the Ottoman and Persian empires.

  There was one small point of contention — her nose ring, which to the groom recalled “those worn by our oxen in Italy.” But she finally agreed to give it up, and marital bliss was restored.

  Her parents were Nestorian Christians who had moved to Baghdad from southeastern Turkey, and she had grown up in the city. Baghdad was part of the Ottoman empire at this time, having first been captured in 1534, but the Turks’ hold on it was tenuous. Within a few years it would be taken by Persians under Shah Abbas, though it would remain in Safavid control for only about fifteen years.