Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  For unexplained reasons of his own Faustus now left Innsbruck, but not before being heaped with ‘many rewards and gifts’. A league and half outside the city walls, perhaps even before he had finished singing Heinrich Isaac’s (1450–1517) Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen (‘Innsbruck, I must leave you’), Faustus came into a wood and was ambushed by the disgruntled knight. The knight and his companions charged Faustus with lowered lances. Faustus turned some nearby bushes into horsemen and sent them at the gallop against his foes. Luckily for Faustus there were more bushes in the wood than angry knights and he soon had his enemies outnumbered, surrounded and pleading for clemency. A merciful Faustus spared them, but not without adding a set of goat’s horns to each knight’s brow and ox’s horns to their steeds as ‘their penance’.11

  Marlowe added the name of Benvolio to bring this anonymous dupe to life, but the evidence may suggest that this was the unflattering portrait of a real person. Not only was this Benvolio humiliated in front of the Emperor, but he was further trounced by a mere illusion in front of his comrades-in-arms. The unnamed knight is introduced in a manner that suggests that his name is being withheld, but a note in the margin of Spies’s 1587 edition gives the name of Baron von Hardeck. This von Hardeck has been identified as Ferdinand von Hardegg (1549–1595), an obscure Austrian count who later became infamous for abandoning his command of the fortress of Györ in Hungary to the Ottomans for which he suffered execution for treason. However, von Hardegg was all but unknown when Spies printed his Historia in 1587 and his naming seems to have been a tactical move to forestall a libel case from what one historian has argued was the real target.12

  The year after publication, Spies was accused by Baron Fabian von Dohna of trafficking in libellous books. Von Dohna was advisor and military commander to Count Johann Casimir in Heidelberg, and his charges carried weight. Spies was compelled to write a letter of apology to von Dohna and after the deletion of the offending passages, the city council considered the matter closed. However, the roots of this went further back. Von Dohna had led Casimir’s mercenary army into France to support Henri III of Navarre (later Henri IV of France), but returned in humiliation after the army deserted him. Von Dohna was held responsible for the failure. He instigated a pamphlet war with his critics and claimed that there was a conspiracy against him, which led to the libel charges being brought against Spies. Spies and von Dohna thus had some ‘history’, but the cause was more than a failed military jaunt in France. The Calvinist von Dohna had been instrumental in driving out the Lutherans from Heidelberg, which was seen as an act of revenge after he himself had been expelled by the Lutherans.

  It is a plausible connection, but is that all there is to it? There is little that could be considered original in Spies, so why credit the printer with this hidden attack on von Dohna? In fact, we find the same stories in the earlier Wolfenbüttel Manuscript. While it might be thought that Spies was settling some scores on his own account, he clearly did not invent the stories themselves.

  The practical joking with stag’s horns and windows had been performed earlier by the fourteenth-century Bohemian sorcerer Zyto, suggesting that it was a fairly typical tall story or magical trick. Luther told a story about an unnamed magician who ridiculed Emperor Friedrich III (1415–1493) with a pair of antlers and Michael Lindener had a magician conjure horns on the heads of people looking out of their windows into the market square in his Katzipori of 1558. But the conjuration of magical armies was part of the standard repertoire of the magician, as we saw earlier.

  What look like the wildest tales to the modern reader can often be traced to the authentic tradition of magic. Summoning the dead and invoking magical armies were known to the magician and, if we are to believe the grimoires, practised by him. However, the evidence for Faustus having met the Emperor in Innsbruck rests entirely on the unreliable Faustbooks.

  16

  The Fugitive (1530–1534)

  While war still raged in northern Italy, in the Coliseum in Rome, Benvenuto Cellini witnessed a dramatic and terrifying invocation of demons. But it was not Faustus who was invoking them. Cellini’s experiments aside, 1530 was a bad year for occultists generally. Agrippa had published his De incertitudine, an apparent recantation of the occult philosophising of his youth. Friedrich Peypus’s underground edition of Paracelsus’s book on syphilis – the French Disease – caused such a great hue and cry that Paracelsus was forced to flee Nuremberg. Further publication of his books was banned.

  One can imagine that Nuremberg was not well disposed to receive any other vagabond philosophers that year. Ingolstadt had already closed its doors to Faustus. The Klinge faction would surely have him arrested if he returned to Erfurt. Kreuznach was out of the question. His old patrons were dead. For Faustus, Germany was shrinking. Perhaps he had found some employment interpreting the strange signs of 1529 and earned some favour at the Emperor’s court, but now what was he going to do?

  The Faustbook has Faustus almost continually at Wittenberg, living with his uncle there, studying there, setting out to a wedding in Munich from there, visiting the Leipzig Fair from there, but the historical sources are far fewer in number. In 1591 Moryson was told that Faustus had lived there about the year 1500, which is too early to tally with what we know of his career. In his lectures at Wittenberg as recorded by the faithful Manlius, Melanchthon makes the first mention of Faustus being in Wittenberg at some point, but omits to supply a date.

  Zacharias Hogel, drawing on a mid-sixteenth-century source, mentioned that Faustus lived in Wittenberg, oddly while lecturing at the University of Erfurt – an event we can date to 1513. In 1585 Augustin Lercheimer also claimed that Faustus had been in Wittenberg. It is not reasonable to think that Faustus actually lived in Wittenberg while lecturing at a city over 200 kilometres away. Not even a magician renowned for his magic flights by demonic horse or cloak would consider such an inconvenient arrangement. Lercheimer solves the problem by bringing Faustus and Melanchthon together.

  Escape from Wittenberg

  Melanchthon did not arrive in Wittenberg until 1518, giving us the earliest possible date that Faustus could have been here. Bar some visits here and there, Melanchthon stayed in Wittenberg for the next forty-two years – that is until 1560 – long after Faustus’s presumed death. This gives us a long span of time – twenty or more years – in which Faustus could have visited Melanchthon in Wittenberg. There are no clues in Lercheimer’s account to allow us to date this encounter, if it did in fact take place.

  Melanchthon (through Manlius) supplies another clue by mentioning the important role played by the ‘great prince Duke Ioannes’.1 This was Johann (1468–1532) ‘The Steadfast’, who succeeded his brother Friedrich III to become the Elector of Saxony from 1525 until his death in 1532. This gives us a much narrower range of only seven years.

  In 1530 Melanchthon was preoccupied with the so-called ‘Augsburg Confession’, attempting to demonstrate that the Protestants still belonged to the Catholic Church, which was presented at the Reichstag in Augsburg that year. Johann would also be at that fateful meeting, proclaiming his Reformed beliefs and winning the enmity of the great lords gathered there. In 1531 Johann seems to have been embroiled in intrigues. While 1530 and possibly 1531 seem too busy, the principal players too preoccupied, the incidents involving Faustus are so brief as to present no serious interruption to their other affairs. Sometime in the late 1520s or early 1530s does appear plausible.

  When Faustus arrived he would have found Wittenberg bustling. An artist would have been drawn to the busy workshop of Lucas Cranach and his son, but the wandering scholar had other reasons for his visit. Melanchthon’s theology lectures were drawing crowds, initially of between 500 and 600 students, eventually of 1,500. Like those other students, Faustus may have been drawn by the popularity of Melanchthon’s classes; he would not have been interested to hear Melanchthon discourse on philology – his official subject. Hardly anybody bothered to attend Melanchthon’s lectures on ph
ilology. Melanchthon also promoted astrology in his lectures, telling his students that it was both a legitimate field of academic study and an important instrument in the affairs of state. Faustus may have felt that he would receive a warm reception such as might be expected from one astrologer to another.

  Friedrich the Wise had but recently completed a twenty-one-year building project on the castle and its adjoining Schlosskirche, ‘Castle Church’ (1490 to 1511). Also serving as the university’s chapel, the Castle Church quickly became famous both for its artistic interior and for Friedrich the Wise’s unique collection of relics. By 1520 Friedrich had amassed 18,970 of them. The Church must have been piled high with holy bones, fragments of the ‘true cross’ and other tattered remains of dubious origin. Fire destroyed the building in 1760 during the Seven Years War and what we see today dates from the nineteenth century. According to the story, Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in 1517 – generally used as the university notice board – and Wittenberg became the centre of the Reformation.

  When Faustus arrived, assuming that he did, Wittenberg was a frenetic centre of missionary activity. Luther was an almost constant presence, installed in the former monastery with his ex-nun Katharina von Bora, the press rattling off his tracts and hymns, and his disciples swarming in and out through the city gates, pausing to admire the sooty spot where their leader had burned the Papal Bull. These zealots had little time for the stargazer who walked amongst them and Lercheimer, writing in 1597 painted a rather squalid picture of Faustus in Wittenberg:

  He had neither house nor courtyard in Wittenberg or elsewhere; he stayed nowhere, but lived like a villain, was a parasite, a gourmandised drunkard, and fed himself by his jugglery.2

  Lercheimer was compelled to take issue with the opinion that Faustus had lodgings in the town, arguing that he could not have ‘a house and courtyard at the outer gate in Scheergasse’ because there was no outer gate and no Scheergasse.3

  Lercheimer graduated from Wittenberg University in 1546 and had heard all the local tales about Faustus. In his day ‘the doings of this magician were still remembered by many there’.4 However, his denunciation had an agenda. In the third edition of his Christlich bedenken published at Speyer in 1597, he spoke out vigorously against the Spies history of 1587, decrying the fact that Faustus had been brought up in Wittenberg, had studied at Lercheimer’s alma mater and had later lived in his town. Lercheimer was surprisingly open about his ulterior motive of trying to clear his university and religious heroes, Luther and Melanchthon, from the stain of association with the necromancer.

  Lercheimer appeared to contradict himself when he confessed that ‘the doings of this magician’ were still well known when he himself studied there in the mid-1540s. As well as being shown the blackened tree where Faustus supposedly performed his magic, Moryson also saw Faustus’s alleged house in 1591. Writing in the nineteenth century, Gustav Schwab (1792–1850) recorded that Faustus, nearing the end of the term of his pact, drew up a will in which he left ‘the house and garden with the iron gate in the Scheergasse by the city wall’ and more besides to his assistant, Christopher Wagner.5 Another local tradition has Faustus living in the Bürgermeistergasse in Wittenberg beside the former residence of Hans Lufft, the man who printed Luther’s new Bible. Katharina von Bora, the nun who escaped in a fish-barrel and later married Luther, also lived for a time on the Bürgermeistergasse. Placing Faustus on the same street as Luther’s publisher and future wife sounds artificial, but there is no proof to decide the matter either way. To complicate matters, a bookshop at 31 Collegienstrasse today proudly bears a plaque above the door with the name of ‘Johann Faust’ on it.6

  Wherever Faustus lived, he did not stay there long. Both Melanchthon and Lercheimer were agreed upon that. Lercheimer said ‘he carried things so far that they were on the point of arresting him’ and according to Melanchthon it was Johann who had given the orders, but with the sound of boots clattering in the Scheergasse, Bürgermeistergasse, or Collegienstrasse Faustus made good his escape.7

  Melanchthon himself did not mention their supposed meeting, but Lercheimer recounted it in some detail.

  The obscene, devilish knave Faust stayed for a while in Wittenberg … He came sometimes to Mr Philipp Melanchthon, who gave him good words, berated and forewarned him that he should desist in time, or else he would come to an evil end, as did happen. But he gave no thought to it.8

  It is hard to imagine the frail looking Melanchthon berating anyone, let alone such an infamous necromancer as Faustus, and it is an indication of the severity and authority of that rebuke that Faustus ‘gave no thought to it’.

  Now one day about ten o’clock Mr Philipp left his study to go down to the table. With him was Faust, whom he had forcefully scolded. He spoke against him: Mr Philipp, you always ride me with smouldering words. One day, when you go to the table, I will make all the pots in the kitchen fly up the chimney, so that you and your guests will have nothing to eat.9

  It is not much of a threat, but equal, perhaps, to the seriousness in which Faustus held Melanchthon’s rebukes. Lercheimer has the mild man of the Reformation rouse himself against the calamity of going without his evening meal:

  Whereupon Mr Philipp answered: this you shall not do, I shit on you and your art. And he did [not] whatsmore: the Devil could not rob the kitchen of this saintly man.10

  In 1868 Grässe published a similar story about Melanchthon and Faustus, drawing most of his details from Lercheimer, but in the same context he added another incident. The story has no date and involves Faustus and an unnamed man. It is an attempted conversion story that could be told about Melanchthon or the earlier Dr Klinge. Faustus responded by sending a demon to scare him at bedtime, but the ‘God-fearing man’ gets the better of it through ridicule and it stalks back to its master to complain.11

  It was a sorry excuse for a demon, but still yet a more sorry excuse for another story about the power of faith. The tale turned up in the Faustbooks, set in Wittenberg as always.12 However, Grässe also added another anecdote. Again we are left wanting a crucial name, but this time the authority of Lercheimer himself is added, dating the story to sometime within Lercheimer’s own lifetime from 1522 to 1603:

  Dr Faust, however, did lead a student astray. Dr Lercheimer himself knew one of his friends well into an advanced age. This man had a crooked mouth. Whenever he wanted a hare, he would go out into the woods, make his hocus-pocus, and a hare would run right into his hands.13

  The hare, of course, is one of the Devil’s creatures and would be expected to run to one of his servants. The crooked mouth is taken as a sign of inner crookedness: physiognomy – judging character from the face – was widely considered reliable at the time. If Lercheimer did claim to know one of Faustus’s ‘friends’ it almost adds a little more weight to the stories he told about him.

  The Second Pact

  A streak of fire blazed across the heavens all through August and September of 1531 to the consternation of many and the excitement of a few. It was what we call Halley’s Comet today that was making the fearful cross themselves as they gazed skywards. Luther was sure that the sign was a portent of great events to come. Melanchthon wrote excitedly to several correspondents about it, asking for news and relaying the observations of others. The astrologers of Nuremberg – Johannes Schöner and Joachim Camerarius – tried to decipher its meaning with a morass of words as clear as they were inky black. Camerarius wrote to Daniel Stibar in Würzburg in October to warn that the comet presaged pestilence. In late December, Camerarius had finished writing his Norica sive de ostentis, interpreting the phenomenon of the comet with the support of a multitude of classical sources. Paracelsus also produced his own interpretation, predicting bloodshed. He dedicated it to the Swiss Reformation leader Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and sent him a copy. Two months later Zwingli lay dead on the field of battle at Kappel. Zurich’s militant Reformation had been decisively defeated by the combined forces of the Catho
lic Cantons. The victors desecrated his corpse: quartered by the public hangman, it was burnt on a heap of dung.

  It was a year for devilry. In Battus’s 1592 Dutch edition of Spies 1587, Faustus signed his second pact of seven years duration on 3 August 1531. In P.F.’s translation the pact is dated 25 July. We have no reason to suppose that he really did sign a second pact, but fiction outsells the truth. It is now that the Faustbook introduces the ‘old man’ who tries ‘to persuade him to amend his evil life, and to fall unto repentance’.14 If not actually Melanchthon or Dr Klinge, he is cut from the same sanctimonious cloth.

  This old man is of course a Christian, honest and virtuous, and a lover of Scripture. Seeing that many students made their way to Faustus’s door, the busybody immediately ‘suspected his evil life’, as if a few students was a sure sign of satanism. Feigning friendship, he beguiled Faustus to step into his house and dine with him. It was a trap and once the meal was over the old man rounded on him, accusing him of defying God, selling his soul to the Devil and of being ‘worse than a heathen person’.15

  After being subjected to an exhausting monologue, the Faustus of the Faustbook thanked the old man, confessed that he had been persuaded and departed. Whilst we might wish that Faustus stood firm in his beliefs, there are other examples to show – Agrippa foremost amongst them – how occultists wrestled with their conscience over the implications of their art in the face of the oppressive dogma of the Church. In the Faustbook, Faustus has a dark night of the soul, thinking over the words of his neighbour, until at last he decides to repent. Resolved now, he will renege upon his promise to the Devil.