Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City
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At 6 a.m. on November 29, 1605, the famous executioner Jan Mydla—a long-surviving figure in Prague popular ballads—enters the room and, after Russwurm prays, severs his head from his body in one swift motion and with a “whistling sound,” as a witness remarks. The emperor’s reprieve arrives an hour later. Russwurm’s head is sewn to his body, the corpse is put in a wooden coffin to be briefly exhibited to the Prague citizens, and buried at St. Mary of the Snows. The grave has never been found.
The Last Years of Rudolf,
Rudolf had been always proud and stiff when dealing with people, and after his terrible crisis, lasting nearly two years (1598—1600), he increasingly withdrew from public view, immuring himself at Hradany Castle except when he periodically fled outbreaks of the plague. He was a strangely changed man, and his Hapsburg brothers, foreign ambassadors, and his councillors seriously discussed whether he might be possessed by evil spirits or by the devil himself; when he was told that the Infanta Isabella of Spain (whom he had selected to become his wife), after more than twenty years of frustrating negotiations, had decided to marry one of his brothers, he exploded in a tantrum of lèse-majesté, and in desperate fits turned against himself and others. He was said to have tried to commit suicide with curtain cords or splinters of glass, and in a mad moment he chased from the court both Wolf Rumpf and Paulus Sixt of Troutson, both of them long his loyal chief administrators. Access to him and correspondence was controlled for many years by a motley gang of butlers and lackeys, including the Calvinist Hieronymus Makofský; the infamous Philipp Lang, who fell from grace in 1608 and was interrogated under torture and tried on criminal charges; and later a minor painter named Daniel Fröschel.
In his time of rage and self-laceration, Rudolf was fortunate to enjoy the support of his confessor, Johannes Pistorius, who may have had particular sympathies for Rudolf’s search for ultimate spirituality beyond all historical religions, for Pistorius himself had a rich history of conversions—from Luther to Calvin and then to the Holy Church—and it was Pistorius who calmed the fears of the Vatican, telling Rome that Rudolf was not obsessed but laboring under the burdens of a heavy melancholia; as Rudolf’s master psychiatrist, he turned Rudolf’s self-centered mind back to the arts and to his dazzling collections. Another close friend of Rudolf during these doleful years was Heinrich Julius, duke of Braunschweig, whom the emperor looked on almost as a son. The duke came to Prague on a diplomatic mission and, having amassed what was to become the largest library in Europe and being interested in rare books, the arts, and the occult (at home, he sternly persecuted women accused of witchery), stayed near Rudolf, settled in a home not far from Hradany, and ministered to him both politically and diplomatically, even when it became clear that nobody could prevent Rudolf from destroying himself. I wonder whether many Prague literati knew that the duke was a playwright of note, composing plays in both Latin and German, and was the first to invite to his court English comedians to perform Shakespeare in Germany. The earliest German audiences of Shakespeare at least enjoyed the colorful melodrama, even if much of the language escaped their understanding.
In his disturbed mind, Rudolf came to care more about his extensive collections than about people; recent scholarship has shown that these collections were not merely a hodgepodge of curiosities but also expressions of a philosophical idea about the universe in which all things and corresponding human affairs had their proper place. The first inventory, as early as 1611, suggested that Rudolf’s mind, mortally tired of the chaotic world, found refuge in this private cosmos of precious objects, neatly ordered in categories of naturalia, artificialia, and scientifica. Rudolf’s grandfather, father, and uncle had had collections of precious paintings and objets d’art that represented their dignity and power, but Rudolf went much further, and it became impossible to separate his delight from outright obsession. There was a strongly conservative strain in his taste. He much admired Albrecht Dürer, as had his forebear Maximilian. Dürer’s great painting “Celebration of the Rosary,” or “Rosenkranzfest,” had to be carried from a Venice church to Prague by four strong men traveling on foot over the Alps to make sure that the canvas was held in an upright position untouched by the snow; and Rudolf fully shared in the fashionable aristocratic appreciation of Titian, the older Brueghel, Parmigianino, Hieronymus Bosch, and Caravaggio, relentlessly using state funds to buy the paintings of these masters for his private collections. To begin with, the paintings filled seven halls at Hradany, but he wanted more and other artificialia, and his agents traveled all over Europe and the Near East to discover and buy for him (making considerable commissions).
Apart from paintings, sculptures, and precious stones, Rudolf particularly collected clocks, perpetua mobile, rare books, ancient manuscripts, ancient coins, exquisite plants cultivated in botanical gardens, and exotic animals kept in a menagerie close to the castle. He also amassed most unusual bric-a-brac, including Pemysl’s peasant cap, two iron nails from Noah’s Ark, a jaw of one of the sirens from Homer’s Odyssey, the horn of a unicorn, and wondrous figures formed by mandrake roots. A few thieving servants were caught red-handed when their master was ill, but the great plundering began a few years after his demise when Bohemian rebels sold his jewels to Nuremberg merchants in order to finance their armed revolt against Vienna. During the Thirty Years’ War, both Catholics and Protestants were fairly equal in looting without shame. After the Battle of the White Mountain, Maximilian of Bavaria left Prague with 1,500 wagons of precious trophies—his contribution to Munich’s famous art collections—and when the Saxons came to Prague for a few weeks in 1631, they carried fifty wagons back to Dresden. For a few days before the Westphalian peace treaties were signed in 1648, the Swedish chancellor gave secret orders to an army group quickly to occupy Hradany Castle and to confiscate what remained of the imperial collections; Queen Christina duly received an itemized inventory of the loot, dated August 31, 1648. Next came Frederick the Great’s Prussians in 1757 and, ultimately, Emperor Joseph II, the enlightened philosopher on the Hapsburg throne, who wanted to transform Hradany into a useful artillery barracks, and appointed a commission to evaluate and sell what was left. Two centuries after Rudolf’s death, Prague’s junk shops were still full of the lesser stuff.
Rudolf’s collections were administered for more than thirty years by the Stradas—Jacopo, the father, and Ottavio, the son. The Stradas probably came from the Mantuan gentry; Jacopo studied the ancients at the University of Pavia and early discovered the highly profitable market for Italian art and artifacts north of the Alps, where princes, emperors, and early capitalists wanted to establish representative collections; he was the Bernard Berenson of the Renaissance. Being an expert on numismatics, ancient sculpture, and architecture, he first served the Fuggers at Augsburg, among the earliest financiers of the modern world, and then by way of good connections found his way to the Vienna court, where he was employed as architectural adviser and “court antiquary” (appointed in 1556) to Maximilian II. He wrote imposing books on numismatics, expanded scholarly knowledge of Roman history, and was among those few Italian professionals at the Vienna court whom Rudolf continued to employ. By 1577, Jacopo had settled in Prague together with his German wife, Ottilie Schenk von Rossberg (of a Frankish family of robber barons, we are told), and was asked by Rudolf to consolidate and supervise the collections; when he died in 1588, his second son, Ottavio, who had published impressive collections of symbols and emblems, took on his father’s job and, by 1600, shared his duties with an Italian colleague, Daniel Miseroni, in charge of precious stones and jewels. Later he relinquished the job altogether, went on to become a highly respected courtier, and loaned money, at steep interest, to proper people high in the imperial hierarchy.
A Venetian competitor accused Jacopo Strada of “unbearable arrogance,” and his portrait painted by old Titian shows a well-dressed social climber with all the appurtenances of his courtly station. In the revealing gestures of Jacopo’s hands, offering a little silver statue
of Venus to a noble customer, Titian may have suggested something about his life. It might have been mere rumor that Jacopo offered Rudolf the favors of his wife, Ottilie, but it is difficult to believe that he did not know what he was doing when he invited the emperor to his luxurious quarters and presented to him his young daughter Catharina—charming, well educated in Vienna, intelligent—on a silver platter, at least if we accept the assumptions of older research (D. J. Jansen has more recently suggested that it was, rather, Jacopo’s illegitimate daughter Anna Maria who was introduced to the emperor). Rudolf was well known for his sexual appetites, to say the least, and for quickly changing desires. “He prefers free love to marriage,” an unfriendly novelist remarked when speaking of his “troops of concubines” and “virgins who greatly valued their chance to be deprived of that title.” The father may have been surprised by Catharina’s (or Anna Maria’s) loyalty to the aging emperor, who had other favorites, but she was probably the mother of his three sons and three daughters—he legitimized them as far as was legally possible, but they were an unhappy group nevertheless. Carolina d‘Austria, the oldest daughter, managed to make a respectable marriage, but her two sisters disappeared into nunneries in Vienna and Madrid; of the younger sons, one died early and another perished in the wars. Julius Caesar, Don Juan d’Austria, the oldest, who was clinically mad (the heritage of his Spanish great-grandmother), was exiled to Krumlov Castle in southern Bohemia, where he killed a young girl named Maruška, disfiguring her corpse with his hunting knife. He lives on in the best of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Prague stories, about the first stirrings of desire of a young Czech girl from the provinces. In her feverish dreams she fears Don Juan d’Austria, who, like a wild animal, follows her up the stairs of a high castle tower, and, when he tears her blue silk dress to pieces; she jumps to her death from high up. Catharina (or Anna Maria) Strada was not untouched by scandal in her own life (evil tongues accused her of conspiring with a butler to steal from the collections), and it is truly deplorable that, whoever she really was, she did not find a poet or a historian to speak of her thirty years of loyalty, suffering, and silence.
After the cabinet changes of 1599-1600, the Catholic nobility dominated the administration of Bohemia and, as long as the war against the Turks went well, Prague Protestants had reasons to fear the worst. In many Austrian lands, including Styria and Upper Austria, Rudolf’s brothers brutally persecuted Evangelicals; in Prague, the emperor renewed the mandate against the Czech Brethren in 1602 and closed down many of their schools and chapels. The situation rapidly changed in 1604, mostly because the imperial army and Italian Catholic generals indiscriminately terrorized Slovakia and Hungary, and the Hungarian Protestant nobles rose in anger against the empire and appointed István Bocskay as their efficient leader of the revolt; his light cavalry devastated Moravia and threatened Vienna too. It was Matthias, Rudolf’s ambitious brother (by now officially head of the Austrian Hapsburg family), who, fully confirming the privileges of the Hungarian Estates, concluded a peace agreement with the Bocskay rebels as well as an armistice with the Turks and created a confederation of the Austrian and Hungarian Estates to protect the peace. Brother stood against brother; Matthias, commanding a confederate army, quickly marched on Prague to make certain that Rudolf and the Bohemians did not sabotage the peace arrangements and did recognize his privilege of being heir to the throne. Rudolf, appearing sick and pale, came to a meeting of the Bohemian Estates for the first time in years; they decided to fight the invaders and mobilized an army of their own. This military stalemate prompted Matthias, a political realist, to sign an agreement in 1608 in the village of Libe (now an industrial suburb of Prague on the west bank) according to which Matthias was to rule most of Austria, Hungary, and Moravia, while Rudolf was left with Bohemia, Silesia, Lusatia, and the imperial crown. Rudolf had been saved by the Bohemian Estates, but now they wanted a reward for their support, and immediately.
The Estates presented the first draft of their demands while Matthias was still close to Prague, but Catholics—including the papal nuncio, the Spanish ambassador, Zdenk of Lobkovic, and his Catholic friends—convinced the emperor that he should postpone discussion to a later date. The final document (actually written by Václav Budova, of the Czech Brethren) was ready for signature on the eve of July 9, 1609. It was basically the earlier draft with a few changes (the Estates wanted to call themselves “evangelical,” but the emperor insisted on the more traditional terms of sub utraque specie); fortunately, the internal tensions between Lutherans, or Neo-Utraquists, and Czech Brethren, who by now were closer to John Calvin, were calmed by the diplomacy of two German Protestants, Joachim Schlick and Matthias Thum, and did not endanger the unity of the Estates. The trouble was that the intransigent Catholics refused to sign ex officio as they should have, especially Bohemia’s high chancellor, but the declaration was signed after all by the Prague burgrave Adam of Sternberg and deposited in the state archives at Karlštejn Castle. The “Letter of Majesty” of 1609, as it is called, was the most advanced and enlightened statement of Bohemian religious tolerance yet, at least as far as Christian groups were concerned, and the fulfillment of many Renaissance dreams about the interdependence of all religious beliefs. The document guaranteed freedom of religious belief and practice to all Christian groups of the Confessio Bohemica (as it had been defined in 1575) and stated that the old university would be administered by the Estates, who were responsible for the appropriate appointments; a number of defensores , totally independent of imperial authority, would see that all groups respected each other’s rituals, possessions, and claims. New schools and churches were to be built freely, and not even peasants could be forced by barons or any other authorities to change their personal religious beliefs. Bohemian Protestants, even the heirs of the radical Hussites, could take a deep breath but, unfortunately, not for long.
In his earlier years Rudolf certainly wanted to establish a Society of the Wise (as the Czech pedagogue and philosopher Comenius believed), but in his later years an unquenchable thirst for revenge destroyed the last noble gifts of his unbalanced mind. He wanted to strike back at the Estates, who had forced his hand, as he believed, and at his brother Matthias, but lacking substantial support and possibly against his better judgment, Rudolf involved himself with an irresponsible adventurer of high birth and a colonel of mercenaries. Only a madman would have entrusted his future, and that of the kingdom, to his twenty-three-year-old nephew, Archduke Leopold, hungry for glory but devoid of political and military experience. Leopold had gathered at his residence in Passau, in Bavaria, a force of ten thousand men, under the command of one Colonel Ramée, allegedly to fight the Protestants in western Germany but actually poised to march on Prague to fight the Estates and force Matthias to return power to Rudolf. This was to be a banana-republic putsch, and even the papal nuncio and Spanish ambassador in Prague recoiled from the idea that the Catholic cause might be won by such a haphazard band of mercenaries. Nonetheless, the Passau soldiers wended their way through Upper Austria, turned suddenly north to Bohemia, took Budjovice and Tábor easily, and on February 15, 1611, occupied the Minor Town despite the bloody resistance of the local citizens (many stories were told of resident Italians firing at Protestants from the windows). Prague plunged into a brutal war again.
The first action of the Passau soldiers was, of course, to plunder the rich palaces of the nobles and town houses of the patriciate. The Passauers held the Minor Town but in vain tried to cross the stone bridge to take the Old and New Towns; when a Passauer cavalry fought its way across the bridge to the Old Town Square, the soldiers were pulled off their horses and killed, man by man. Protestant defenders of the Old Town proceeded to set fire to monasteries; they killed many monks, though the Jesuits were saved by their noble patrons; the Jewish Town was promptly invaded and pillaged.
Time went against the Passau army; Matthias and his forces were near, the Estates consolidated their defenses, using artillery, and on the night of March 10 the Pass
auers left town, taking with them irresponsible Archduke Leopold. Hradany Castle was occupied by armies of the Estates and Matthias, a criminal investigation was started against local allies of the Passauer mercenaries, and Matthias was crowned king of Bohemia on May 23, with the full support of both Catholic and Protestant Estates. Matthias agreed that Rudolf was to go on living at Hradany Castle, receive an appanage of one hundred thousand taler a year, and remain emperor as long as he lived. Nothing was to disturb the solitude that Rudolf had craved for so long, but in January 1612 his physician found his lungs seriously damaged, his liver inflamed, and putrefying wounds appearing on his body. He died, peacefully, on January 20, and his burial was a very decorous and quiet affair.
Rudolf has not left us any stately buildings for posterity to admire, and the citizens of Prague have never thought of erecting a monument to his memory; his collections are gone, and there is nothing tangible in the city to hold on to his moment in its history. Many Czech, German, and Jewish writers have told colorful legends about him, but among poets and playwrights it was only the sober and irritable Franz Grillparzer, that untiring Viennese student of Bohemian history, who in the last years before the revolution of 1848 deeply sympathized with Rudolf’s desire for solitude and tried to understand his self-destruction. Unfortunately, Grillparzer’s Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg (A Conflict of Hapsburg Brothers), first performed in Vienna in 1872, in the habit of the post-Schiller historical play spreads out a vast canvas of events extending from the Hungarian plains to Hradany Castle; only in its most magnificent scenes, in the second and fourth acts, in which Rudolf bares his soul to Duke Heinrich Julius, do we come close to the heart of the matter. Rudolf calls himself “a weak, ungifted man,” but he adores the order of nature manifesting the divine will to people who boast of their spirituality while brutally “cleansing” entire populations for religious reasons. Foreign tribes have not destroyed what is most noble in the world but, rather, the “barbarians in ourselves who push down everything” to the level of our own vulgarity. Rudolf even comes to have ambivalent feelings about his beloved Prague, that “malicious city” (die arge Stadt), and though he has long tried to protect Prague from murder and fire, he speaks of the savageries of the coming war that will engulf all of Europe, and utters a prophetic and merciless curse upon treacherous Bohemia and Prague. Grillparzer has not sketched a historical portrait but rather defined the Platonic idea of a ruler who believes that in a world in which spiritual conflict has turned into a battle for political power, procrastination is better than action. In a note in the margins of his manuscript, Grillparzer expressed a view of Rudolf’s age that did not lack either precision or insight. Rudolf’s “inertia,” he wrote, “would have created happiness but the actions of the others destroyed everything.”