In Our Time - Rudolph II

Episode Date: January 31, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the coterie of brilliant thinkers gathered in 16th century Prague by the melancholic emperor Rudolph II. In 1606 the Archdukes of Vienna declared: “His majesty is interested only in wizards, alchemists, Kabbalists and the like, sparing no expense to find all kinds of treasures, learn secrets and use scandalous ways of harming his enemies…He also has a whole library of magic books. He strives all the time to eliminate God completely so that he may in future serve a different master.”The subject of this coruscating attack was the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, and his court at Prague. Rudolph had turned Prague into a collector’s cabinet for the wonders and curiosities of the age – the great paintings of Northern Italy were carried to him over the Alps, intricate automatons constructed to serve drinks, maps and models of the heavens were unwound and engineered as the magnificent city of Prague itself was rebuilt in the image of its dark and thoughtful patron in chief. But Rudolf’s greatest possessions were people - the astronomers Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe, the magus John Dee and the philosopher Giordano Bruno had all found their way to his city. Far from the devilish inquisitor of the archdukes’ imaginations, Rudolf patronised a powerhouse of Renaissance ideas. With Peter Forshaw, Postdoctoral Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and an Honorary Fellow of the University of Exeter; Howard Hotson, Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford; Adam Mosley, Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Wales, Swansea.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.ukes, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1606, the Archdukes of Vienna declared of their ruler, His Majesty is interested only in wizards, alchemists, cabalists and the like, sparing no expense to find all kinds of treasures, learn secrets and use scandalous ways of harming his enemies. He also has a whole library of magic books. He strives all the time to eliminate God completely, so that he may in future serve a different master.

The subject of this attack was the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II and is caught at Prague. Rudolph had filled Prague with the wonders of the age. The great paintings of Italy were carried over the Alps, intricate automaton's constructed, maps and models of the heavens unfold and engineered. But Rudolph's greatest possessions were people. The astronomers, Johannes Kepler, Antico Brahe,

the Magus, John D, and the philosopher Gidano Bruni, had all found their way to his city. Far from the devilish inquisitor of the Archduce imagination, Rudolph patronised a powerhouse of Renaissance ideas. With me, to discuss the Court of Rudolph II, a Howard Hodson, lecturer in modern

history at the University of Oxford, Adam Mosley, lecturer in the Department of History at Swansea University and Peter Faw post-doctoral fellow at Birkbeck University of London. Peter Fawshaw, and the Archieux of made it very clear that Rudolph was an intellectually curious man, a pursuer of secrets. Can you explain broadly what sort of secrets he would have been pursuing?

I have to say almost everything, really. But one Venetian visitor observed that anyone who can give him knowledge of secrets of natural and artificial things will gain his ear. By natural, that's the three kingdoms of animal, vegetable and mineral. and artificial can be artistic creations, but also mechanical objects, scientific instruments and so forth, particularly to do with really the celestial and terrestrial, on the terrestrial level, the science, particularly of alchemy,

and obviously with celestial astronomy. They're pretty tough, aren't they, with the business of wizards, alchemists, cavalists, scandalous ways of how true is all that? There's no doubt that really Prague was the, magnet for anyone who was a practitioner of the occult arts. So

alchemists really knew that Rudolph was a grand patron of alchemy. At the heyday, at the height of his interest in alchemy, 200 alchemists and their assistants were working in the laboratories at the palace in Prague. Can you just address this business of alchemy for a moment,

Peter, because we're at the height of the intellectual interest and belief in and pursuit of alchemical. So just tell us how important that was to learning at the time. To learning extremely important. It wasn't yet a university-based

discipline. That wasn't until 1609, the first professor of chemical medicine in Marburg, University of Marburg. That financed by and funded by another aristocrat who was interested in alchemy. But intellectually, natural philosophers were increasingly seeking both knowledge on a theoretical

level, but practical level as well. So laboratories, and it's fascinating that someone like Rudolph, the emperor, the most powerful aristocrat in the Christian world, himself did alchemy, which raises the status of it, from just being a sort of craft that people did dirty themselves in laboratory,

he actually performs this himself and really increases the stature. So this is a way to discover the deepest secrets of life. That's what they're talking about. That's what the pursuit of, He's got 200 of them in this discipline alone. Yeah, in Prague.

And many visitors as well coming. I mean, these were just people who were based there. His second in command, the potentate of South Bohemia, Villam Rosenberg, was also another great patron of alchemists. So this is 200 alchemists, and he's got, I presume, he's got hundreds of others in the other disciplines, he's pursuing. Yeah, many other. I mean, astronomers, I don't know about hundreds with astronomy.

It's not my area, but certainly he had some of the most famous astronomers you could ever get. Can you tell us about one or two of the, well, one thing, before we, just to give one example, the Voynich manuscript, which you heard. Now, why is that, that's just one example of the things he collected. We'll get to his collections and amount to do. That is an interesting one to give us a specific example. That's an interesting one, I suppose, the most notorious one, really. All that we know is, I mean, this was a manuscript that was rediscovered, as it were,

in the early 20th century by an antiquarian book dealer, attached to it, and it's a cipher manuscript. It's a manuscript we do not know how to interpret it. It's written in the scripts that, no. one has ever cracked, even though people are bletchley tried to crack it, actually. It's also illustrated with incredible, well, diagrams, herbal diagrams, astrological and cosmological diagrams, lots of naked ladies, I have to say, as well, all adding to the attraction of it. And supposedly, it might have been created by the 13th century English natural philosopher Roger Bacon.

There are rumours or suggestions maybe it had gone through the hands of John D. Certainly, the account is there was a letter attached to this saying that the Emperor Rudolph had paid 600 ducats for it which is a huge amount of gold at the time Athanasius Kierke the 17th century polymath was really into the occult was

sent it and was asked to try and translate it though we don't know if he had any success so a very mysterious manuscript purporting to be about the secrets of the natural world still untranslated still untranslated it's in the Yale

University Binecker Library now and books have been written about it but still no, not cracked. Howard Hudson, in 5083 Rudolf left Vienna at the traditional seat of government and moved his court, his imperial court, to Prague.

What kind of statement was that? Why did he want to go there and what was he saying? Well, like so many aspects of Rudolf and culture there are a couple of different levels here. I mean, there's a pragmatic military level the fact that one of Rudolph's many responsibilities was act as king of Hungary, or what was left of Hungary after the Ottomans had swallowed up most of it and brought the border between the Christian and the Muslim world

to within 100 miles of the gates of Vienna. So moving out of that particular neighborhood had some obvious practical advantages to it. There's a political and dynastic question here too, because another of his responsibilities was as head of the Hapsburg family. and therefore, in some respect, supreme authority over the Austrian patrimonial lands, but they were not a consolidated monarchy. It was a hodgepotch, a jigsaw of individual territory, some of which he ruled directly, some of which were ruled by younger members of his family,

which was a recipe for a great deal of sibling rivalry, which eventually unseeded Rudolph completely. And to get some distance from that was also beneficial politically. But the most interesting dimension, I think, is the religious one, which one could formulate sort of paradoxically by saying he was attracted to Prague because it was associated with an ancient and successful heresy, the one, the Hussite Reformation, the one great medieval heretical movement which had actually succeeded, which had persevered.

A hundred years before Luther. A hundred years before, 100 years before Luther sort of paving the way in some respects for the reformation, successfully defying the authority of the Church of Rome, and also to some extent, inoculating the Bohemian kingdom against the religious development, which was most difficult for a whole series of subsequent Habsburg emperors to deal with and really culminated in the era of Rudolf II, which is this process of confessionization,

the dissolution of some kind of compromise, comprehensive, moderate, broad consensual, ecclesiastical settlement to a very rigid definition of the post-Tradentine Catholic Church over against Protestantism and the very rigid definition of Lutheranism over against Calvinism and the dissolution of a medieval Christendom into three increasingly antagonistic. professional communities. Difficult enough in other parts of Europe, but particularly difficult because all three of these are now well established in the Holy Roman Empire. And his highest responsibility was not merely being King of Hungary, king of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria, but also being the Holy Roman Empire and therefore responsible for keeping the peace. The fact that in Bohemia, this earlier religious development, in some respects, kind of inoculated the population against the radicalization, which was going on elsewhere, was, in fact, a very rather foresighted and ingenious solution to an otherwise intractable problem for Rudolph. So it was a heretical place to go to. It forced him to be tolerant, and we're told that the different sorts of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism

and the Jewish faith were tolerated because he had to. In fact, he's one of his biggest friends and backers in Prague was a Jewish merchant. And there we are with that. I just want to tell this we're putting aside the fact that he had a long and rather unsuccessful war against the Turks, that he's supposed to, after his death six years, after his death, the 30 years war started, which a lot of people, some people still say it was his responsibility, and his brothers ganged up against him and stripped him of most of his status to audience. That's to one side.

That is perhaps for future delectation. Right. Adam Mosley, one of the areas in which Rudolf's court would leave a lasting imprint was astronomy. So can you tell us about the state of astronomy at the time, at the time he moved to Prague? Well, in the later 16th century astronomy was in a very interesting place because there were available to astronomers two systems of modelling and calculating planetary positions, the ancient geocentric system of Ptolemy, and the new heliocentric sun-centric, sun-centric, system of Copanicus. These were mathematical systems. They utilized combinations of circles

to stipulate where the planets would be at any given moment. Both systems were philosophically problematic, and that created opportunities, but also difficulties for those who are working with them. Ptolemy's system was often taken to be the mathematical equivalent of the philosophy the model of the cosmos had it down from antiquity from Aristotle, which placed the earth at the centre of the universe. But it didn't quite mesh. And so there was a traditional way of dealing with this problem, which was to say that astronomers were really only in the business

of providing useful models, and it was really the philosophers who could tell you how the universe really was. And this, of course, informed the way in which people responded to the Copernicus system, the Copernican model, with some people trying to say, well, this is a mathematically useful model. Let's reconvert it to make it philosophically compatible with our knowledge, which is that the earth is at the center of the universe. As I understand it, somebody who wrote the preface, I've forgotten it in name now, to this, got it through, because of course it was heretical,

got it through by saying, look, he is not saying, that the earth is no longer the centre of the universe. This is a very interesting, what I'd say we call it, a thought experiment, the better to understand how things work. So don't get worried about it. Well, let's be clear. It wasn't heretical until 1616

when the Catholic Church condemned the Copacan theory. So why did they have to disguise it if they were not fearful about it? Oh, there was certainly anxiety about it. But it wasn't strictly heretical. It wasn't strictly heretical. It wasn't strictly heretical, no. And we can thank part. Galileo Galilei for pressing the issue in such a way that the Catholic Church felt forced to respond.

But certainly there was a concern about it, there was a concern about how it could be made compatible with scripture because there are passages in scripture that strongly seem to imply that the earth is stable at the centre of the universe. So in fact a Lutheran, Andreas Ozienda, wrote an anonymous preface in which he said, look, don't worry about, you know, the disturbing contents of this book, the job of the mathematician, the astronomer, is simply provide mathematical models. You don't need to take this as an account

of how the universe is really structured. So it's in a very interesting state. Collecting itself is also, just the last generalisation before we home in on... Collecting itself is changing at this period. Can you tell us how it's collecting and how Rudolf fits into that, perhaps is one of the agents of change?

The great printly collections of the medieval ages were typically treasuries. So they would be gold, silver, precious objects in strong rooms. But during the Renaissance, coming into the 16th century, the range of objects the princes collected, expanded, and the ways in which these objects were displayed expanded. So there was much more of a tendency to want to display objects in situ, and there was a tendency to collect a much wider range, natural objects, specimens, exotic, plants and animals, works of art, antiquities, coins, medals.

Objects that, as well as being precious and valuable, could also be seen as representing, contributing to knowledge in one form or another. Peter, for sure, one of the collections, or two of the collections, is a cabinet of furiously and a cabinet of wonders, which you're if you're a polite enough or acceptable ambassador you got the scene. Yes. One way to snub you is not, it wouldn't show you his collections.

Yeah, yeah. What were in these cabinets of wonders and why were they important? Adam Adelton a little bit, but could you develop that? I mean, Rudolf's, okay, got scientific or natural philosophical and occulted interests. So there are various ideas about it. One is that this is his microcosm. He's collecting specimens. of all the natural world.

So, for example, and they're not just sort of minerals. They're inanimate. They're also, he's got his menagerie. He's got his collections of animals, including even a dodo, for example. And he's got his botanical gardens. And these, they're not just sweet-smelling flowers, though I'm sure many were, but they've got healing virtues, occult virtues for medicines. But also, for example, he had supposedly 37 cabinets of minerals alone.

And they work on different levels. There's the antiquarian value to them. There's the artistic value. There's the fact that they're talismanic many of them. So they've got magical healing properties or other properties preserving you against demons and so forth. But he also has a unicorn horn, for example. He's got, in theory, Phoenix feathers. He's got unusual things like, I think, nails of Noah's Ark.

What were the principles behind this? I mean, would anyone like to take us up? Do you like to take us up? Well, what was the organizing principle? Well, one of the interesting things about these collections, which really differentiates them from museums, as we know them today, is the tendency to collect natural objects,

naturally on the one hand, and artificial objects, artificiality on the other hand, and to bring these together, and as it were, to merge the world of human artifice, and on the one hand, and the world of sort of divine creation on the other. And it almost as we're to blur the boundaries between these. This is one of the most fascinating and almost disturbing aspects of these collections.

The way in which so many of the objects, the fashionation derives from the way in which they blur this boundary. I mean, the automata, for instance, which are designed to replicate the movements, the sounds of living things, even though they're mechanical. There are many, I think there are many instances, particularly with Rudolph's collection, where, yes, it's the bringing together.

the intersection of the naturally artificial. So, for example, things like the agate basin that you would look into, and Christ was written into the stone as if by nature. That's, you know, nature imitating a human activity of writing. But things like goblets made of, ostrich eggs, those kinds of things where you take a natural object, you add to it in a way. Or indeed, the pictures, the landswomeness, the landslide, that were constructed from polished stone.

So this is an artwork representing a natural place made from natural materials, these kinds of things. Before you can minute, I'd like to get at it before we move on. These are there to help study, aren't they? Are these all serving the purpose of going through the occult to get to more knowledge? This is why they're all there.

It's just that he doesn't fancy. It's just that he... There you go. Yeah, okay, they are for study, they are for private reflection. I mean, on another level there, propaganda, their expressions of imperial power. But definitely they have studied. I mean, Rudolph tried his best to attract the greatest magical philosopher of his time. Well, natural magic, the philosopher of natural magic, Giovanni Battista Delaporta, from Naples.

And it's interesting that Delaporte, one of his best friends, was Ferente Imperato, who had, had a very important collection, again, of curiosities and wonders. And one of the most famous maguses of the time, Tomaso Campanella, said, this collection is really important because through it we can get to the reason and the laws of natural magic. So they're not just there as, they are there for their symbolic value, but symbolically it's the knowledge that can be gained from them. And the utility, I have to say, quite a utilitarian value.

It's not just things to be admired and adored, but they can be put to practical use. I think, as with the alchemy, for example, there's a very strong utilitarian streak to Rudolph's collection, which is different from universities. Howard Hoddodson. It was also a patron of the arts.

We told him he had about 3,000, more than 3,000 paintings he collected. It was one of the greatest Renaissance art collections. What kind of taste did it show him as having? Well, there's, excuse me, there's several different, dimensions to his collecting. I mean the one most

famous perhaps is his collection of paintings which have been commissioned by artists either in his court or at other courts which he'd been unable to pry loose from the clutches of other patrons elsewhere. In the contemporary

international style of mannerism which I think we'll perhaps talk about a bit later in more detail. Another thing he's very interested in is collecting major artworks patronized by earlier members of the Habsburg dynasty. And Albrecht Jure is a particularly good example, who was the favorite court artist of Maximilian I first, his great-great-grandfather. But also from the Netherlands.

I mean, Pieter Broigel, the younger was, he had something like 10 of his paintings, which is a very substantial proportion of his of his work. So it's comprehensive on the one hand, but it's, it's imperial, it's imperial on the other. And it's focused on this very late Renaissance development of mannerism, which is, as it were, pushing past the aesthetic standards of the, of the high Renaissance into genuinely new territory, and territory which overlaps in some respects with the, with the occult preoccupations of the court as well. the artist not merely, again, as the imitator of nature, but with a creative power to realize his own vision, which in some respects goes parallel to that of the alchemist

and some of these other occult disciplines as well. So we can say at this stage in the programme, Adam, that there in Prague he had this quite enormous collection, and even so we've only just touched on it, it's advanced, and people are attracted to it. He's bringing them in because his biggest collection is of people. He's bringing in scholars, he's in the field, transferred across to him all the time.

His agents are looking for them as well as they're looking for objects. Can you give us a sense of the people who began to come in early? Who was he after? Well, if we say that Rudolph collected people, which I think is absolutely right, we have to recognize that, of course, he inherited some of his collection in terms of objects and people from his predecessor's aspects.

So people like Giuseppe Archimbaldo, who's one of the artists who are asserted very strong, strongly with Rudolph. We made a portrait of Rudolph from fruit and flowers. That's right, yes. An image of Rudolph as the god of Artemis. Now, that's a very interesting painting because it fits with a whole set of earlier paintings

that Archenbolda produced for Maximilian II. That are, again, they look very jokey. They mix the natural and the human their portraits made up of animals or objects where the head is made up of an assemblage of objects. But these images would have come with a set of... came with a set of interpretive descriptions and poems

which make it clear that these are allegories of imperial power. And that, I think, is quite important for understanding how people come to be collected because in relation to the collections of objects, princes like Rudolph need scholars, they need artists not only to produce objects for their collections, but also to manage their collections, to interpret their collections,

to participate in the display. And that also connects to the kind of pageants and festivals that we see in the court context, where the same people, people like Archimbaldo, were responsible for managing these, for devising these, for picking out the classical themes that would be used for designing the costumes and for collaborating with the scholars who would write descriptions of these

that would explain the significance of them to the wider world. Can you tell us a bit about Cornelius, Drabble and Judon and Bruno then? Oh, yeah, Drebel's great. I mean, we don't really know whether it was Archimbald or Drebel who supposedly invented a prospective lute, for example, which is a very interesting example of a sort of hybrid art and music combined. supposedly with coloured tablature as well. But Drebel was fascinating.

He was very much involved with the court of James I, in England as well, supposedly invented a submarine that went under the Thames, attracted the interest of Robert Boyle, father of English chemistry later. But Drebble was of particular interest for Rudolph as an inventor.

He was fascinated by perpetual motion machines. And Howard earlier mentioned, these collections are Artificialia as well as Naturalia, and this is a wonderful example of a machine, perpetual motion, dredble invents, or does his vest to invent, such things.

He's also employed as someone knowledgeable about mineralogy and alchemy, the subject I love going back to. So he's one example of an inventor and proto scientist in a way. What Giudono Bruno, on the other hand, is

I'd say far more mystical. I mean, okay, he's a hermettist, is interested in the ideas of Hermes Trismegistus, and I suppose the ideal earthly representative of that would be Rudolph in Prague. He's also a Copernican, so he's very much a supporter of the heliocentric system of astronomy. He's a promulgator of the medieval art of memory. He had a prestigious memory and promoted techniques for using this and developing it on an occult level. And some people have suggested that Rudolph's cabinets of curiosity.

are in some ways analogous to this art of, they're a memory system in themselves. Of course, most people remember Bruno, because he was burnt at the stake in 1600, by the Inquisition, for beliefs, for example, plurality of worlds and other heretical scientific beliefs. Can I just ask you, Howard, there was a university in Prague. There were universities all across Europe. Yet Rudolf was attracting these people. What was he offering his court that the universities weren't providing? Well, Charles University in Prague is a bit of a special case

because in the aftermath of the Hussite Revolt, Prague had been sort of sealed off from the rest of Europe and not fully integrated. So it was in a bad state. But the more general point is that universities were set up effectively to teach the received heritage of the West and to pass it on to the next generation. They were not remotely regarded as research institutes. They weren't set up. They weren't founded.

They weren't funded for that kind of thing. And if you wanted funding, salary in the first instance, equipment and assistance in the second, to pursue natural philosophical inquiry and to move back the frontiers of knowledge to change the accepted order of things. And you were not very independently wealthy,

as of course Taikobrahe was. you needed to find a wealthy patron to sustain at least some part of that inquiry. And the obvious concentrations of wealth and prestige were in the courts of Europe. Central Europe, of course, was divided into many individual territorial principality, so it was very rich with this particular resource. Rudolph was at the summit of that system, notionally for the whole of Europe and certainly for central Europe. And the other part of the equation is, of course, that it's,

It began to dawn on rulers in the Renaissance period that there was considerable prestige to be attached from being associated with these collections with the kind of concentrations of knowledge and expertise and also conceivably with the discoveries, whether mathematical, astrological or whatever. So there was an incentive for them to patronize scientists, what we would call today scientists on the one hand alongside artists on the other. Just briefly, the courts there. He doesn't do much building in Prague, doesn't have any real building. He tries to bring Palladio over and Palladio doesn't want to come. Otherwise, he might have done a lot of building, but there'd have been great medieval building, an earlier Renaissance building done before

he got there. But inside his court, we're talking about laboratories, we're talking about him setting up a counter-university system. Let's turn, you mentioned Ticobrahe, Adam Mosley, who at the end of the 16th century, he was a Danish nobleman, who's rich, etc., one of the

one of the great observatories, or the greatest was at the time, on Danish soil. He lost favour in Denmark and he eventually ended up in Prague. What did he bring to Prague? Well, I think the biggest thing he brought to Prague was the Brahe brand, which he presented in the form of a, he represented the form of a magnificent book which described what his enterprise had been in Denmark and displayed some of the instruments, some of which he brought with him to Prague eventually,

although he couldn't bring some of the largest and best instruments because they were fixed in situ in his island observatory back in Denmark. The project that he brought was a project to reform astronomy empirically. Tika Brahez was an observational project. He was systematically observing the state. and the planets. And he was setting out actually to demonstrate, to produce with these observations

a new set of planetary models and to demonstrate that actually both Ptolemy and Copernicus were wrong and that the real account of the universe, mathematically and philosophically, was the ticonic world system, the world system that he invented, which had the Earth at the center of the universe,

but had the planet rotating around the sun, which rotated around the earth. Tico also brought his alchemical expertise. And that was another one of the attributes that I think would have attracted Rudolph, as well, of course, his astrological expertise. These three things went together with Tico. And although we tend to think of him as an astronomer particularly, that was partly because he made it clear that he felt it slightly impromat.

to talk about alchemy, but he conveyed, cleverly conveyed, that he had plenty of alchemical secrets to convey to Denver in person. Yeah, I mean, the plans of Oraniburg in Denmark, his famous observatory, also had laboratories underground. He sent Rudolph, I think when he was seeking patronage, one of his alchemical cures, which was meant to be far better than gold for him. and this definitely would have been an attraction for Rudolph. And the astrology, I have to say,

it may horrify people to hear that, you know, he is one of the most famous astronomers, but Rudolph employs him as his personal astrologer as well. I mean, and this is someone who's already had his horoscope done by Nostradamus when he was a child. It is a fascination of the time, and he's, as someone who's observing the stars, Brehe is more qualified

than most to do this. He's making very accurate observations. Can I just turn to, as you brought up Rudolf's personality a little, we have not talked about that yet. There isn't any, curious enough, there isn't any any mention about him as I answer. Let's find out what there is known about him. Do you want to start

Howard? Can I just prompted by Sir Philip Sidney, who was in a letter to Francis Walsingham are spiking at the time, and referred to him as a man of few words, sullen of disposition, very secret and resolute, extremely spanniolated.

What can we add to? That's part of the reason why, of course, we don't have as clear a picture of his personality as we might. He was very reserved. He was very taciturn, and particularly in his latter years he was extremely withdrawn. We can't unpack spanulated a bit, which actually meant

extremely stiff, formal, acutely aware of his own status and rank, extremely dignified, but also but also, you know, extremely stiff and formal. He spent some of his youth at the court in Spain. Yes, that's right. And that was the main thing he brought back with him.

I mean, what he didn't bring back, and this is crucially important, I think, for understanding the natural philosophical as well as other aspects of his reign, is the ethos of the counter-reformation. Because there was simply no way of translating that from the Spanish half of the, of the Habsburg family, to the Austrian half, because the political conditions were utterly different. He didn't have a consolidated state like Castile to make the center of his empire.

He didn't have the ethos of the reconquished 500 years of expelling the first of the Moors and then the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. And of course, he didn't have the boatloads of gold and silver coming in from the new world either to finance an aggressive military campaign, nor did he have the armies. So he needed to find, he needed to find,

he needed to find a way out of this trap which was building all around him, of his empire dissolving into equally antagonistic confessional factions. And part of the reason he then ends up patronizing this remarkable work in the arts, broadly conceived, including the arts of alchemy and astronomy, shifting into an interest in the natural world, is because here we have a field of cultural significance and creativity outside this fractious confessional domain. So he's actually responding, in fact, very creatively to the confessional pressures of the year

by shifting the center of gravity of his court in a rather different... Now, that doesn't tell you much about his personality, but given that he has a reputation, particularly in his latter years of actually going mad of actually sort of losing his grip. This suggests to me a visionary and a very creative response to an almost impossible situation,

one which had been prepared by previous Habsburg emperors, particularly his father Maximilian II, which Rudolph epitomizes and pushes to a new level because it is the only way of escaping from this dilemma that he finds himself in. And you think about his character before he was born? One, maybe,

Maybe I'm being slightly facile here, but his, Rudolph's father had a reputation for being extremely liberal. Hence, you've got this development of the ultraquists, the believers who tolerate both confessions, Protestants, Catholic. Maybe Rudolph is more that he can't stand either confession particularly. So he doesn't favour either, which gets him into a lot of trouble, of course, with the church. Well, he is, as they said at the beginning of the programme, he is trying to get God out of the equation, isn't he?

I don't, he's trying to get the Catholic interpretation of God perhaps out of the equation. But he's, there's no doubt. I mean, he's attracting people who are extremely devout, extremely spiritual. But then performing practices that orthodoxy will automatically condemn as being diabolic. I don't imagine. I think it's very interesting to, people were surprised by Rodolf's behavior. So, for example, when Tika Brahe first comes to court, he is very surprised that he gets to. see the emperor all by himself.

They have a private conversation with no one else present. And Tico is very flattered by that. But he says, Rudolph was very pleased to see me. He was smiling a lot. I couldn't follow every word he said because he was very softly spoken. So even

in a private audience with the emperor, there was a mystery there. It was difficult to really follow everything that was going on. You must point out that he had great accomplishments. Like Elizabeth I spoke several. languages. He didn't have her talent for ruling, but he was very learned

in that way. And quite egalitarian. I mean, okay, maybe this is just folklore, but supposedly he steps down off his throne, shakes hands with Tico, which is unusual. He gives audience as well to, I mean, he gives audience as well to, I mean, for example,

I mentioned very briefly at the beginning, John D. John D. Who's the Magus of Elizabeth's Court? The Magus of Elizabeth's Court arrives there, and also tutor of Sir Philip Sidney for a while. arrives at Gertz audience in 1584 with Rudolph. And interesting, given the fact that they are both Kanserian's astrology, D.Eich might have been more tactful.

He says, the angel of the Lord has spoken to me and rebukes you for your sins. However, if you listen to me, you'll be okay, and you'll overthrow the devil, by which Dye understood the Great Turk. Rudolph was surprisingly okay about that. I mean, afterwards they had a conversation about scrying conversations with angels and so forth. But the Roman nuncio from Rome really disapproved of this and he in the end had to leave in a hurry.

That's the other side of the equation to some extent, because while he's giving remarkable receptions to, you know, travelling May guy and artists and so on, he's very often keeping even the most senior diplomats who are visiting his court. and they all had to visit his court, both because he wasn't sending very many ambassadors abroad, and also because for the last years of his life, he didn't leave Prague. In fact, he didn't even leave his castle on the Prague Hill for long periods of time.

So these ambassadors would come, you know, to do the absolutely urgent business of running Christendom, running the empire, running, running Hungary, Bohemia, the Austrian patrimonial lands, and he'd keep them waiting internally while he's talking with Tico Brahe and John D. So that's the other side of the coin.

We've got to bring in Kepler. Tico Brahe died in 16001. He'd brought in Johannes Kepler. What Kepler did was probably arguably the most significant thing that came out of this entire Prague court. So briefly, Adam Merseley, I'm sorry it's briefly, but can you tell us about Kepler's three laws of panicked remotion and why being at Prague enabled him to get to them?

Well, Kepler, like Tika, arrived in Prague. against his will initially. He was forced out because of the counter-reformation from Gratz and Styria. He came to Prague because he had an offer from Tico. He needed an assistant to help him with his calculations. There were some problems with their relationship, but eventually Kepler was in the right place at the right time to become Tico Brahe's successor as imperial mathematician

and have access to Tico Brahe's data. And from that data, Kepler was able to pursue his project. His view had always been that Copernicus had demonstrated that the universe was sent on the sun, but he hadn't demonstrated why it was sent on the sun, or indeed why the planets had the particular positions that they had in that system. Through working through the problems of solving the planetary motions of modeling them, which was the task he had to perform as imperial mathematician under Rudolf and his successors,

he arrived at what we now think of it as laws of planetary motion. The first one, which from the point of view of the period, would be the most revolutionary, would be that planets don't move in circles, they move in ellipses, with the sun at one focus. The second laws are laws about, that describe that motion further, so the second law is the law that if you draw a line from the sun to the planet, it sweeps out equal areas in equal intervals of time. So that tells you that the planet moves faster at one point in its orbit and slow at another point in its orbit. The third law, which he didn't appear in a later work than the previous two laws,

and was buried a little bit in that work, is a law about the relationship between the periods of the orbits how long they take and the distance from the sun. And that became the basis of scientific astronomy in a way, is it? Yeah. But added on to what Copernicus had said. What happened to his court in his collection? He died in 1612.

And this was to be his great inheritance, not buildings, not an empire, but his brothers got him out. And what happened to this enormous collection? It was really sad. Matthias, his brother, most competitive brother, yes, had an inventory made. Some of the possessions got shared between the other siblings. I suppose the main thing was that in the 30 years war,

Queen Christina of Sweden, who was also a great collector of curiosities, her troops invaded Prague and swiped a lot of it, taking it to Sweden. So you can see a lot of Brutuske-a-Lawks. collection in Sweden? A certain amount in Sweden, she took other bits with her on her travels, so they get scattered around, and other bits get sold off by people who wear less interest in collecting and knowledge, really. Well, that's a bit of a side-end, isn't it really? Well, it is, and it takes place, to make it all the more pointed, it takes place in the last months of the war that's been going on for 30 years, when the peace negotiations in Westphalia have already been going on

for about five years. And the Swedish army retreating back to the north of Germany, makes a detour to Prague to make off with this, what was supposed to be part of the Habsburg Charitomony. So there you are. Well, thank you all very much. Thank you, Adam Mosley, Peter Faw, and Howard Hudson. Next week we will be talking about the social contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hugo Grotius, John Locke. Thank you very much for listening.

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