Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  The servant stomped back into the inn and exclaimed ‘I don’t want anything to do with you, for you are surely in league with the Devil.’

  ‘Devil here, Devil there,’ Faustus replied, ‘but just beware pouring the wine like that again!’

  The whole inn fell to muttering about ‘the God be with us’, a euphemism for the Devil. Inspired or provoked, a painter and engraver from Nuremberg called Hirschvogel stood up and offered to paint the Devil on the wall. The other drinkers, who had evidently been spilling too much wine down their necks, raised a cheer and made way for him. Hirschvogel took a piece of charcoal from the stove and sketched the figure of a nobleman on the wall, sitting cross-legged, a short cloak like a dragon’s wing over his shoulders and a cap sporting a cockerel’s feather on his head. The face glowered scornfully. When he had finished, Faustus stood up and said, ‘now you see the Devil on the wall, but I will show you the same alive.’ Darkness stole over the cellar and the drawing started to move. The clothes became fiery red and slashed with sooty black. The cloak turned green. The eyes glowed like embers in an unnaturally pale face. With a thunderous crash he leapt from the wall amongst the drinkers.

  The joke had gone too far and with wild screams everyone ran out of the cellar. Faustus roared after them ‘you shouldn’t paint the Devil on the wall!’ The legend has it that this was the source of the popular saying and the inn was ever after known as Zum Roten Mandl, ‘to the Red Man’.

  The magical eating trick clearly echoes Melanchthon’s earlier tale, but there are inconsistencies. We are once again in the inn where so many of Faustus’s legendary exploits took place, but there is no sign of Melanchthon’s other magician or cave. Augustin Hirschvogel (1503–1553) was real enough, but he only moved to Vienna in 1544 and although we cannot rule out a brief trip, his role in the story is surely as legendary as that of Faustus.

  Meanwhile, the largest army Europe had yet seen was bearing down on Vienna under the banner of Islam. Estimates vary wildly concerning its size from anywhere between 120,000 to 350,000 men. One thing cannot be doubted. When Count Niclas von Salm (1459–1530) and his force of around 12,000 to 22,000 men saw them swarming over the horizon, they knew that they were heavily outnumbered.

  Charles V was in Bologna with Pope Clement VII, trying out the Iron Crown of Lombardy for size, whilst Ferdinand had retreated to Linz in Austria to wait out the result. Vienna’s defensive walls were in need of repair and an old soldier who had just turned seventy led the garrison. The city had been all but abandoned. It looked as though the disaster of Rhodes was about to be repeated. Only something like magic could, it seemed, possibly save them. Even if Faustus was not in Vienna, it is likely that, as an astrologer, he was asked about events taking place there.

  Suleiman I had begun his advance westward late in the year. Heavy rains had washed out bridges and turned the roads into quagmires, and it was late September by the time he reached his target, having abandoned his heavy siege artillery along the way. Vienna’s walls held the invader up into October with the weather worsening all the while. There was little need of a goosebone to tell the defenders who the victor was going to be. At the end of an extended supply line over difficult terrain, it was the weather that got the best of Suleiman’s army. His men threw themselves at Vienna’s walls and were slaughtered in their thousands. By December, Suleiman was back in Istanbul.

  The Return of Alexander (Innsbruck, 1530)

  A tale is told of Faustus at the court of Emperor Charles V in Innsbruck. The story appears in the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript of around 1580, Spies printed it in 1587 and the mysterious P.F. translated it in 1592, whence it ended up in Marlowe’s Faustus. There is no contemporary record of Faustus having been there, but Melanchthon did place him in Vienna, still within the borders of present day Austria although almost 500 kilometres away by modern roads.

  What is interesting about the Faustbooks here is that reference is made to Charles V and not anyone else. It would have been easier to look back to his predecessor Maximilian I and the stories that had already accumulated around Trithemius and his supposed feats of necromancy at his court. Charles’s successor Ferdinand I (r. 1558–1564) could also have been a candidate as could his successor Maximilian II (r. 1564-1576) and it would have been certainly more current, although probably politically unwise, to mention the reigning Emperor, Rudolf II (r.1576–1612). Rudolf would have been the natural choice. The melancholic and occasionally insane Rudolf once declared that he belonged to the Devil. As a champion of the counter-Reformation he was also much more of a target for Protestant hacks like P.F. and Spies. And yet the Faustbooks chose Charles V, an actual contemporary of Faustus.

  It is a chance detail that points to stories that must have been told more than a generation before Spies and P.F. plied their trades. Neither Spies nor those who came after him showed any real knowledge of when Faustus might have been born or died. They gave no dates, with the exception of Battus’s Dutch Faustbook, and named few of the characters. Amongst all this vagueness the name of Charles V clearly stands out.

  The unmistakable naming of Charles V can also be interpreted in another way. For a Lutheran like Spies, Charles V was an enemy of the Reformation and by consulting an irreligious black magician like Faustus he is shown with partisan intent as a patron of the diabolical arts. If this was his intent, then Spies played a dangerous game himself. To attack one Emperor, and one not long committed to the earth, was to attack the throne itself. Rudolf II could hardly be expected to welcome such a slander upon his forebear and the Frankfurt authorities, who held such tight reigns on the publishing industry, were cognisant of the respect owed to their ruler. Spies either took an unusual risk or was faithfully reproducing earlier stories told about Faustus. Spies may well have wanted to implicate a Catholic Emperor in stories of black magic, but the extent to which he invented parts of the story to suit his agenda has to be ruled out in this case. Spies’s religion could have had no influence on the earlier Wolfenbüttel Manuscript in which the name of Charles V also occurs. We cannot rule out the possibility that whoever wrote the Wolfenbüttel Manuscript named Charles for political reasons, but it was certainly not Spies.

  In the Faustbook this incident appears before Faustus’s trip to Munich, which if it did take place, must have been on 3 October 1522, suggesting a prior date for his meeting with the Emperor. However, the Faustbook is such a chaotic document that the order of its contents can hardly be taken as an accurate chronology.

  Although Charles had been elected Emperor in 1519, he did not arrive in Germany to personally acknowledge this tribute until 1520. From 1522 to 1529 Charles resided entirely in Spain. This would give us two ‘windows’ in which Faustus and the Emperor might have met in Innsbruck: sometime between 1520 and 1522, or after 1529. We have Faustus definitely placed in Bamberg for early 1520 and Ingolstadt for 1528, but this still gives him plenty of time to make the long journey south.

  In October 1520 Charles V was in Aachen being crowned King of the Romans. It was the first time he had set foot on German soil. In January 1521 he was in Worms convening the Reichstag and alarming the nobles with his foreign dress and less than fluent German. After discussing the important matters of state, Charles was also called upon to judge in the case of a troublesome monk called Martin Luther. The discussions and hearings lasted well into April until a sorely tried Charles issued the Edict of Worms, banning Luther and his supporters.

  In 1522 Charles was in Brussels where he nominated his brother Ferdinand as his regent in Germany – in the so-called ‘Compact of Brussels’ – before leaving once more for Spain by way of England. Once in Spain, Charles was so preoccupied by revolt and later the consolidation of his Spanish power-base that he left Germany and her problems entirely in Ferdinand’s hands. Given such a full schedule it is unlikely that Charles could have found the time to be entertained by Faustus, supposing that he was. If we are to seriously consider this possibility then we must concede that a later date, at least af
ter 1529, is more probable.

  Charles was only twice more in the Empire within Faustus’s lifetime: from April 1530 to January 1531 and from January 1532 to October 1532. After being crowned Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in February of 1530, Charles travelled north, passing through Trent and Innsbruck en route to Augsburg. This was the only time in Faustus’s lifetime that he stayed in Innsbruck. If Faustus did meet the Emperor in Innsbruck, then it could only have happened in April 1530.

  The Conjuration at Innsbruck

  Innsbruck was the final resting place of Charles V’s father, Maximilian I. Under Maximilian, Innsbruck had become an important political and military centre. Strategically placed at the gateway to the Brenner Pass just thirty kilometres to the south, Innsbruck formed the pivot in Maximilian’s Italian campaigns as an advance camp and refuge. The armourers and gunsmiths of the Tyrol equipped his forces. The silver and copper mines supplied valuable materials and the mint in Halle turned it into currency. Between campaigns Maximilian had indulged his favourite leisure pursuit of hunting in the well-stocked countryside.

  As P.F. told the tale the ‘Emperour Carolus the fifth of that name’ was holding court at Innsbruck where, as luck would have it, Doctor Faustus was also residing. It is not implausible that he should have been following the Imperial court. Cardano reported that Charles had in his train a juggler when he visited Milan who was so skilful that he was widely regarded as a magician. ‘Being there well known of divers Nobles and gentlemen’ Faustus was invited to the court, even into the presence of the Emperor himself, to dine with them. Charles ‘looked earnestly on him, thinking him by his looks to be some wonderful fellow.’ The magician could have employed an operation ‘for gaining dignity and honour’ from Codex 849 to his advantage here. Certainly the Emperor was intrigued. After dinner he called Faustus into his private chambers. ‘Faustus,’ said Charles, ‘I have heard much of thee’ but Charles demanded proof – not withstanding all those Italian victories Faustus had allegedly won for him.4

  Faustus put himself at the Emperor’s disposal, ‘To cast his magic charms that shall pierce through/The ebon gates of ever-burning hell’ as Marlowe (IV.2.20–1) so eloquently put it. Charles lamented that ‘mine elders and ancestors’, were unapproachable in their greatness – a confession perhaps of his own failings as Emperor – and requested that Faustus should conjure the shade of Alexander the Great ‘and his Paramour’ to appear before him. Well practised in raising ancient Greeks since his Erfurt show, Faustus consented, but had something more to add. He could only conjure spirits who had seen Alexander and his paramour, and hence able to take their shapes, but not those personages themselves.5

  It is an interesting change in perspective. The Erfurt stories assumed that he brought forth the real heroes from out of Hades, but here the influence of contemporary demonologists is felt. It is not the dead who return, but supernatural simulacra. It is part of the attempt to circumscribe the power of the magician: all of his works are illusions of the Devil, thus invocations of the dead must also be illusory. It is not a theory that Faustus himself would have ascribed to and even if he had, it is unlikely that he would have communicated it to his clientele.

  The Malleus Maleficarum used the example of Simon Magus, reputed to have caused the head of a dead man to move, to illustrate the argument that the raising of the dead was accomplished by illusion and specifically railed against the necromancers, with reference to the Witch of Endor, who, ‘when they think that they call the dead from hell to answer their questions, it is the devils in the likeness of the dead who appear and give such answers’.6 The Malleus had not convinced everyone and the invocation of the dead was still a live issue in the sixteenth century.

  According to the tale, Faustus added the condition that Charles must not attempt to speak to the spirits. Charles agreed and Faustus opened a door to admit ‘the great and mighty Emperor Alexander magnus’. The antique marvel entered the room, his costly armour dazzling their eyes, to offer a ‘low and reverent curtesy’.7 Faustus intervened to prevent Charles from returning the salute; to greet a demonic spirit as a royal equal would have been a serious breach of etiquette. The two watched on as Alexander made another bow and exited. Now his ‘Paramour’ came in, making her curtsies in a dress of blue velvet embroidered with pearls and gold – perhaps that same blue dress worn by the spirit conjured at Maximilian’s court in Hans Sachs’s Historia of 1564. She was tall and thin, but with a face as round as an apple and ‘excellent fair like Milk and blood mixed’.8

  Charles decided to test the visions shown to him and in a manner that is too reminiscent of Maximilian I testing the apparition of his Mary of Burgundy to be more than mere coincidence. Charles said that he has heard that Alexander’s paramour had a distinctive mark on the back of her neck, and finding that the spirit had one in the same place was ‘well contented’.9

  As a boy Charles had eagerly read Olivier de La Marche’s stories and would have found amongst his writings La Marche’s ‘proof’ that the Habsburgs of Austria were descended from a prince of the royal house of Troy. He would have seen the ancient world in some regards as his homeland and the heroes his ancestors. Foremost amongst these heroes was Alexander the Great.

  Already legendary in his day, Alexander’s exploits became popularised through the Alexander Romance. Once thought to have been written by Callisthenes of Olynthos, the historian who accompanied Alexander on his campaigns, but since attributed to an unknown Pseudo-Callisthenes, the Alexander Romance was one of the bestsellers of the Middle Ages, going through translation into every major language and more than a few minor ones. Plutarch, widely read and greatly esteemed in the Renaissance, wrote of Alexander in his Parallel Lives, placing him alongside Caesar. Quintus Curtius Rufus’s History of Alexander the Great (c.1470) was also hugely popular: the Bibliothèque Nationale of France alone holds ten Latin editions printed before 1550.

  Alexander’s astonishing triumphs endeared him to the myth-makers, and magical legends accrued around the romances. There were stories of enchanted gems and fabulous automata, and tales of the magical feats of Alexander’s tutor, Aristotle, and of the pseudo-Aristotelian grimoire, the Secret of Secrets.

  The name of Alexander was a title of the highest praise. Through successive victories against the Ottomans in Serbia and Bosnia in the years 1479 to 1483, the King of Hungary, Matthias Corvinus, won renown and direct comparison to Alexander the Great. When he became Pope in 1492, Rodrigo Borgia took the name of AlexanderVI as a purposeful identification with the ancient Macedonian king. In his address to the new Pope, the ambassador of Savoy, Pietro Cara, called him ‘a new Alexander the Great’.10 He decorated his living quarters in the Vatican (the Appartamenti Borgia) with a relief portrait in plaster of his illustrious namesake. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Villa Farnesina in Rome was monumentally embellished with Alexandrian motifs. François I likewise decorated his palace of Fontainebleau. Alessandro (‘Alexander’) Farnese, Pope Paul III (1534–1549) chose scenes from the life of Alexander the Great to adorn his apartments (the Sala Paolina) in the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome.

  Alexander the Great was not just another ancient hero, but a popular figure in the literature and art of the day and a role model for the princes of the Renaissance. It was no accident then that Charles should have asked Faustus to produce such an icon of the chivalric virtues of courage, generosity, magnanimity, self-restraint and, in those days when the threat of the Turk loomed large, victory over the infidel.

  The similarities with the earlier Innsbruck tale told by Hans Sachs and the rumours that the conjuror was Trithemius are clear. Consequently, students of the history of literature have tended to view such tales as the repetition of a type with only the names changed. This is plausible, but such an argument overlooks one important aspect in this case. Faustus was a self-declared necromancer, even the ‘font of necromancy’. Is it not to be expected that he should have attempted such feats as described at Erfurt and Innsbruck? A n
ecromancer who does not invoke the dead is not worth the name.

  After impressing the Emperor with his invocation of the spirits, the Faustbook added a further adventure, descending yet again to farce. After invoking Alexander, Faustus wandered off, presumably leaving Charles to reflect upon the marvels he had just witnessed. In a gallery he leaned out to admire the garden and observed the Emperor’s courtiers strolling about, but he also espied a knight slumped fast asleep at one of the windows of the great hall. Faustus conjured a pair of stag’s horns to grow out from his head. The knight woke up and tried to pull his head in, shattering the glass in the windows. The courtiers in the garden looked up and added their laughter to that of Faustus. The Emperor, on hearing the disturbance, came out to learn its cause and also found the poor knight wedged in the window with his antlers to be worth a laugh. The Emperor congratulated Faustus on such a merry jest and with a bow the magician relieved the butt of the joke from his cumbersome headgear. But the knight would remember him.