Noble Blood - The World Inside of Rudolf II's Cabinet of Curiosities

Episode Date: November 14, 2023

Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was an obsessive collector — of art, of rare and expensive artifacts, of scientific equipment, of natural curiosities. (He claimed he had a siren's jaw and a phoenix feather.) But religious tension and foreign invasion was tearing his empire apart at the seams, and Rudolf's response was to retreat further into his own private world.Support Noble Blood:— Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon— Merch!— Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story'See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Listener discretion advised. If you were a time traveler arriving at Prague Castle at the start of the 1600s, you would find yourself at the epicenter of the Holy Roman Empire, a hub of culture where scholars, scientists, artists, diplomats, and religious officials milled and mingled in the castle's grand corridors. But few of those illustrious visitors would have had the privilege of visiting the most private and opulent chambers in the castle, the personal domain of the emperor, Rudolph I of Habsburg. Rudolf was an accomplished, even obsessive, collector, and his private chambers housed the paintings, sculptures, and other treasures he had gathered over the course of his reign. This section of the palace was known as the Kunstcommer, which translates to Cabinet of Curiosity's.

That said, Rudolph's Kunstcomer was no mere cabinet. the collection took up an entire wing of the castle. The existence of the Kunstkamer itself was not a secret. Rudolph's political advisors were familiar with the emperor's collection hobby as an annoying distraction from his more important task of ruling the Holy Roman Empire. But no matter how much his advisors protested, Rudolf poured more and more of his time and energy into the Kunstkamer, meeting with artists that could contribute to his collection, sending diplomats across the world to bring back treasures, and wandering

through the rooms to gaze at his most prized possessions. But while everyone in court had heard about the Kunstkamer, only a select few had actually seen what was inside. If you were a high-level dignitary Rudolph wanted to impress, he might have escorted you into the chamber and showed off the collection to you himself. You could have also tried to bribe Rudolph by bringing him an especially rare painting or sculpture, hoping that it might earn you an hour or two inside. If you were feeling especially brave, you could have tried to sneak in. One merchant pulled that off.

He arrived at the castle to visit his friend, a painter that Rudolph had employed. The painter managed to bring the merchant into the Kunstkamer in secret while Rudolph was eating. In any case, if you were lucky enough to see the Kunstkamer, you'd be led through a narrow corridor, tucked between a study and a courtyard, up a set of stairs. Upon entering the main chamber, you'd encounter a large green table covered with, well, stuff, globes, clocks, caskets, strange musical instruments. At the head of the table, you would see a peacock automaton that operated by clockwork. It could walk, squawk, and wave its tail, which was made out of actual peacock feathers. Surrounding the table on all sides was a variety of paintings, statues, clocks, goblets, and more.

Some of the items were freestanding on the floor. Others were perched on writing desks, chests, or cabinets made of ebony and marble. A unicorn horn, which was most likely a narwhal tusk, lay on a green writing desk off to the side of the chamber, while a bust of Rudolph himself sat on a case pushed up against a wall. If you opened up these chests and cabinets, you would find even more treasures. One small gray writing desk contained 48 rings, shells, spoons, and various pieces of coral. Another case was filled with 105 knives and daggers, one of which was rumored to be the very weapon that killed Julius Caesar.

The Kunstkamer was so vast and chaotic that an archivist started compiling an inventory of the space in 1607 and wouldn't finish until four years later, just before Rudolph would die. It wasn't, and still isn't clear, how the collection was organized. It's even less clear why Rudolph II was so consumed with collecting all of these objects in the first place. On one hand, the Kunstkamer was an artistic and scientific achievement, which reflected Rudolph's commitment to expanding the frontiers of human knowledge.

Rudolph was the patron of many artists and scientists, some of whose work ran up against the worldview of the Catholic. Church. The churches attempt to stem the spread of Protestantism and protect their faith often meant punishing individuals whose ideas challenged it. Rudolph hoped his objects might become a universal encyclopedia of nature, which could lead to scientific breakthroughs. Even if those discoveries didn't happen during his lifetime, his collection and patronage laid the groundwork for further scientific exploration that would continue long after his death. But at the same time, the Kunstkamer reflected Rudolf's paranoia and gullability. Throughout his life, Rudolph suffered from what we now might call depression.

When his mental health worsened, Rudolph would spend months nearly catatonic with despair, unable to engage in official business. He had a persistent fear of assassination, and so he avoided people altogether, even his closest advisors. He spent all of his time alone in his Kunstkamer, the only place he felt truly safe. In the face of increasing uncertainty, anxiety, and hopelessness,

Rudolph developed an obsession with alchemy and magic, He fixated on finding the philosopher stone, which would give him eternal life and assuage his fears about an untimely death once and for all. That interest manifested in the Kunstkamer as well. It contained magical objects like the aforementioned unicorn horn. Towards the end of Rudolph's life, he started casting spells and even conducting sex rituals in the secret chambers. The question of how to understand the Kunstcommer and its emperor has vexed scholars for centuries. During his lifetime, Rudolf II was known by two very different nicknames that represent his diametrically opposed qualities. He was known as the Great Master of Prague and the Reclose of Prague. Which one was he?

The great master? tolerant leader who championed intellectual freedom, or the recluse, debilitated by anxiety and depression, and led astray by the fruitlessness of his quest for eternal life. These are the questions we can't find answers to in a cabinet of curiosities, no matter how vast. I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. Rudolf II was not the first Habsburg with an extensive art collection. His paternal grandfather, Ferdinand I had one too in Ambrass Castle in Austria, where he, Ferdinand, stored his fragments from classical coins, statues, rare books, paintings, and jewels. Rudolph's father, Maximilian II,

inherited Ferdinand's passion for art collection and philosophy. While Maximilian never had a Kunstkamer of his own. He did build a number of royal gardens in Vienna and Prague that displayed exotic plants and animals like lions, tigers, bears, oh my, and parrots, which Renaissance Europeans called Indian crows. Maximilian, Rudolf's father, was also the first to catalog and organize the Hepsburg holdings of books, which became the Austrian national. Library that still exists to this day. In 1522, Rudolph II was born. He was Maximilian's oldest son, and he grew up in Vienna into a free-thinking scholarly

environment. Maximilian attracted some of the greatest humanist philosophers and scientists in Western Europe to his castle in Vienna, and some of them became Rudolph's earliest tutors. Rudolph spent his childhood listening in on cutting-edge scholarly conversations about neoplatonism or decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics, while wandering through the palace's vast collection of books and admiring plants like lilacs and tulips, plants that you would only be able to find within the castle's walls. Rudolph's mother, Maria, was not happy with such an environment for her first-born son.

Maria was also a Habsburg. Surprise, surprise, Maximilian was her cousin, but she grew up in Spain, and aside from blood, she had almost nothing in common with her husband. In contrast to the gentle intellectual Maximilian, Maria was severe and morose. always dressed in black, as was typical for the Spanish court. Their greatest disagreement was religion. Maria, whose parents started the Spanish Inquisition, was staunchly Catholic. She was so religious that she refused to take anything to ease the pain when she was giving birth to Rudolph, not even a glass of water. Meanwhile, Rudolph's dad, Maximilian, had a pretty nondon. shalant relationship with Christianity.

He was ostensibly Catholic, but he was so averse to the Vatican that many thought he was a closet Lutheran. That worried Maria's side of the family. Maria's brother, Philip, insisted that young Rudolph spent his adolescence in Spain to make sure that he would be faithful to the church. Maximilian initially bulked at the request. Maximilian himself had been shipped off to say. Spain when he was a teen and he hated it. The Spanish court was known for being cold, rigid,

and formal. But the disagreements between him and his wife Maria were hard on Rudolph. Rudolph didn't like harsh noises, bright lights, or conflict of any kind. When his parents began to fight, he would flee, retreating into his own internal world. In the end, Maximilian and Maria sent 11-year-old Rudolph and his brother Ernst, off to Spain for eight years. Like his father, Rudolph hated Spain. When those eight years were finally up, Rudolph, typically reserved and morose, was uncharacteristically thrilled. Recalling this period later in his life, he said he was seized with such joy that it was impossible to sleep. Upon Rudolph's return, Maximilian was happy to see his son back in Vienna, but noted that his boy had changed.

Rudolph had always been quiet, but now at 20 years old, his reservedness came off as prideful, as if he was too high status to talk to lowly political advisors. Maximilian encouraged his son to loosen up so he could win more friends and allies at court. But Rudolph couldn't let his guard down so easily. His stiffness had been a survival strategy in Spain, which demanded absolute formality and piousness at all times. Maximilian had actually officially become the Holy Roman Emperor a year after Rudolph arrived in Spain, and he had spent the last seven years on the throne. So Rudolph got a promotion too.

He went from being the Prince of Hungary to the King of Hungary, and then three years later to the King of Bohemia and King of the Romans. Rudolph didn't do all that much with his first taste of political power, and there isn't a lot to say about his early years on the throne. Biographers note that he brought a bunch of imperial women to the palace so that he could finally get laid, which, needless to say, was not a priority for the deeply Catholic Spanish court where Rudolph spent his adolescence.

Rudolph had barely gotten his political bearings as King of Hungary, King of Bohemia, and King of the Romans, when his father, Maximilian, died in 1576 suddenly. It was intimidating enough for Rudolph to inherit the Holy Roman Empire at just 23 years old. It was also an incredibly politically fraught time. After the Protestant Reformation, there were increasingly violent conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and other religious groups. Meanwhile, the Habsburgs were also at war with the Ottoman Empire over territory in Cyprus and Hungary. Maximilian had done his best to balance those competing interests with policies that emphasized religious tolerance, barely keeping a civil war between the Catholics and Protestants at bay.

But his death would cause those tensions to rise up. Maximilian's death also caused conflict within his own family. In a move that was considered unusual, Maximilian gave all of his land to his oldest son, Rudolph, leaving out Rudolph's younger brothers entirely. Rudolph tried to rectify the situation by giving two of his brother's political control of Austria, but it was too little too late. The pressure proved to be too much for Rudolph. His brothers had come to resent him, and his father,

the family member he had been closest to, was dead. His empire was beset by internal conflicts from the Protestants and external threats from the Ottoman Empire, terrified that he wouldn't be able to live up to the expectations, Rudolph spiraled into a debilitating depression. For a full year, he withdrew to his private chambers, so despondent that he could barely walk. His attendants carried him from room to room. His entourage was worried. Madness was an inheritance in the Habsburg family just as much as Kuntzcombers. Rudolph was the great-grand-sense. Rudolf was the great-grand-sense. of Juana LaLocca, whom you might remember from her eponymous episode on this podcast back in 2021, who became infamous after her supposed descent into madness after her husband's death.

Rudolph's cousin, Don Carlos, also suffered from poor mental health issues. During Rudolph's stint in Spain, he had witnessed Don Carlos' erratic behavior, like roasting live animals and forcing a shoemaker to eat a particularly ugly pair of shoes he had made. After Don Carlos tried to stab a duke, he was imprisoned by his own father and starved himself to death. Rudolph's court and Rudolph himself feared that he might lose touch with reality and might suffer a similar fate. In the face of all of these familial, personal, and political stresses, there was one silver lining in Rudolph's life. He inherited his father's collection of art. Throughout his childhood, Rudolph escaped the pressures of early royal life by exploring the art that his father, grandfather, and uncle had accumulated.

Now that Rudolph ruled over the Holy Roman Empire, he would no longer. longer have to rely on his family's good graces to explore his passions for art and science. He could finally start a collection of his very own. Rudolph began his reign by moving out of his parents' house. He was sick of refereeing his brother's dramas and having to involve his mother in his political affairs. Vienna's bustling vibrance may have enchanted Rudolph as a child, but it overwhelmed. him as an adult. He much preferred the more peaceful and austere Prague, which was a better fit for his reserved personality. Rudolph's new home was Prague Castle, atop Radkney Hill, surrounded by foreboding

walls and a moat. This was perfect for Rudolph, who preferred to be alone. But even that isolation wasn't enough for him. Rudolph hated being seen so much. that he built roofed wooden corridors and staircases across the castle, so members of his court wouldn't be able to find him as he moved from room to room. These new corridors were just one part of the major home renovation project, Rudolph undertook, when he moved into Prague Castle in 1580. He built new stables for his favorite horses. He loved horses, particularly,

particularly Andalusian grays, and he devoted an entire room to his collection of rare saddles. Rudolph also loved birds and created a heated, walled aviary, filled with parrots, birds of paradise, and even a dodo. He created an enclosure with tigers, bears, and wolves. His favorite animal was a pet lion, which he occasionally let roam around, inside the palace. Rudolph also built a new wing of the castle to house the paintings he inherited from Philip Maximilian and Ferdinand's respective collections, along with a tower from which he could view the night sky, laboratories for alchemical and scientific experiments, and a botanical

garden full of plants like orange, olive, and pomegranate trees, which were exceptionally rare in Eastern Europe at the time. This new wing of Prague Castle reflected Rudolph's evolving vision of his role as emperor. Back in the depressive episode in the wake of his father's death, Rudolph's rule seemed as though it was promising to be an endless diplomatic nightmare of trying to appease power-hungry relatives and quash-increasing religious conflict. But Rudolph believed that his brain could transcend those political struggles. After all, he had been taught his entire life that he was chosen by God to rule, which put him at an advantage when it came to pursuing

deeper existential and philosophical questions. Rudolph took it upon himself to figure out the meaning of life, and in doing so, unite not only his empire, but all of humanity. If that That goal feels a little vague. It's because it ended up being a moving target. Sometimes Rudolph was more focused on more typical scientific concerns, like cataloging the world's animals and plants or mapping the skies. Other times he had more pie-in-the-sky ambitions, like finding the key to eternal life. In any case, he thought that by attaining this knowledge for himself,

he could save the world. As a homebody, Rudolph wasn't going to go out into the world to search for knowledge. He wanted the world to come to him. So Rudolph became a patron of the arts and sciences, bringing the greatest intellects to his court and supporting their work. He set up studios for artists to work in, gave them rooms in the castle and paid them annual stipends, with bonuses for commissioned work.

As such, the artists that worked for Rudolph tended to indulge his personal preferences, which were paintings that featured either, one, hot naked women, two, flattering depictions of Rudolph, or three, symbols from Greek mythology, ideally all three at the same time. Rudolph also loved hidden sources of knowledge

and searching for meaning underneath appearances, a proto-Divincicode lover. He was particularly fond of allegorical art. A perfect example of his preferred style of art was Allegory of the Virtues of Rudolf II by Bartolomais Spranger, an artist originally from Antwerp, who was appointed the Rudolfine Courts master painter around 1590. The painting features Belona, the Roman goddess of war, surrounded by other naked goddesses and mythological figures. What clues us in to the fact that this painting is an allegory, aside from the title,

is that the goddesses are wearing emblems of Hungary, symbolizing Rudolph and his empire's power and virtue. Another common feature of these kinds of allegorical paintings were depictions of Rudolf, atop one of his beloved horses, wielding a sword, even though Rudolph would never even come close to going into battle. Rudolph visited the artists he sponsored every day, spending the mornings admiring what they managed to get done the day before. This obsession with art was annoying to politicians hoping for Rudolph's guidance on religious conflicts

and skirmishes with the Ottoman Empire, but particularly shrewd diplomats found that Rudolph's love of art could be manipulated to serve diplomatic ends. There was no surer way of getting Rudolph's attention than by bringing him a particularly rare painting or sculpture. In 1605, an ambassador for the Duke of Savoy wrote that Rudolph spent two and a half hours sitting motionless, looking at paintings of fruit and fish markets that the Duke had given him as a gift. Rudolph also collected scientific drawings and telescopes and clocks, along with curios and objects which he believed had mystical powers. He wanted his Kunstkamer to function as an encyclopedia of natural phenomenon,

including skeletons, drawings, and preserved specimens of various, animals and plants. He also had what he believed was a Greek siren's jawbone, gullstones from animals that were supposedly antidotes to poison, feathers from a phoenix, and a biological drawing of a dragon. These more mythical objects are of dubious origin. It is likely that these jawbones and feathers came from other animals, and even more likely, that they did not have the magical powers that Rudolph thought they did. Still, if Rudolph was feeling poorly, he would go to his Kunstkamer, take out one of his enchanted objects,

and draw a magic circle around himself for protection. Rudolph's strong draw toward both science and the occult may seem contradictory, from a modern point of view particularly, we think of science as a position of skepticism, a way of disproving conspiratorial or speculative theories about how the world works. But we have to first remember that the world was less connected in the 16th century, and knowledge was less centralized. If you lived in 1500s Prague, a dodo bird or polar bear or penguin might have seemed just as, fantastical as a dragon or a phoenix. I mean, really, a narwhal really is kind of as magical as a unicorn. Most scholars in the 16th century thought that magic, science, and religion all reinforced one another.

Like the paintings in Rudolf's Kunstkamer, the natural world functioned as a kind of allegory that could expose God's design for the universe, or clarify the seeming chaos of the world. The best example of this is in Rudolph's passion for astronomy and astrology. Rudolph supported a lot of astronomers at Prague Castle, giving them a salary, a rent-free place to live, and state-of-the-art telescopes. In return, the astronomers were expected to provide Rudolph with personalized star charge. This wasn't uncommon, as astronomy and astrology were considered parts of the same discipline. Astronomers had to accurately map the movement of celestial bodies in order to figure out what they might portend about the future.

Rudolph consulted these astrologers nearly every day to get their advice about how to rule, while they also worked on their scientific projects. Rudolf relied so heavily on his favorite astrologer Tico Brahe that other members of the court referred to him as the evil spirit of the emperor because of his potential to influence the emperor for the worse. True to his nickname in 1600, Brai forecasted that Rudolph would be assassinated sometime that year. A biography of Rudolph notes that Bray was in a bad mood when he made this prediction. He was particularly unhappy that Rudolph had made him move to Prague from Denmark

so that he could receive more regular astrological readings. Rudolph took that prophecy very seriously, and it amplified his already simmering paranoia and depression. Rudolph had already suspected that he would die before his 50th birthday, and he had just turned 48, Fearing that any member of his court could assassinate him at any time, Rudolf refused to leave his Kunstkamer or entertain any visitors. As time passed, he grew so despondent that he couldn't even manage to visit his artist's studios

or the scientific laboratories in his castle, some of his previously more reliable sources of joy. Brahe's dire astrological prediction would turn out to be wrong. Rudolph survived 1600 without any assassination. That said, Rudolph's paranoia wasn't entirely misplaced, while Rudolph was busy pursuing artistic and intellectual flights of fancy, long-simmering political, religious, and family conflicts were reaching a breaking. point. 1600 may not have been the year that Rudolph died, but it was the year his rule would begin to fall apart. Beyond the walls of Rudolph's Kunstkamer, the Holy Roman Empire was in crisis.

After the Protestant Reformation challenged the Vatican's authority, the Catholic Church pursued a counter-reformation, trying to squash Protestant influence, once and for all. Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Empire's relationship with the Ottoman Empire was deteriorating. For a while, Rudolph had been paying 45,000 sailors to the Ottomans in exchange for peace, but in 1592, the Sultan's Grand Vizier suddenly demanded double the payment. Rudolph tried to get away with sending the Sultan gifts rather than money, but it didn't work. The Ottomans declared war on Rudolf invading Vienna and Hungary. Rudolph convened the Imperial Parliament to request funds for the war,

and it took months of arguments between the Catholics and Protestants before they finally agreed to send over the money. As much as Rudolph tried to distract himself with his impressive collection of Curios in his Kunstkmer, Rudolph was increasingly nervous about the sources of unrest growing in his empire. He had little sympathy for the Catholics and for the Protestants, and like his father, refused to take either side. Even though he had never been more depressed in his life and his empire was splintering beneath his feet,

Rudolph held out hope that he could unite all religions under his dominion, and usher in an era of peace. Meanwhile, there were two forces conspiring against Rudolph to try to remove him from the throne. On one side was the Vatican, which had a number of issues with Rudolph's reign. Not only was Rudolph too easy on the Protestants, but he was also turning his attention towards magic, alchemy, and the occult, which the church considered heretical. Rumors spread that Rudolph refused to go to Mass, fearing the sign of the cross. Even his depression was used as proof that Rudolph had turned his back on the church.

The court's papal ambassador wrote in a letter in 1600 that Rudolph's melancholy suggested that he was, quote, bewitched and in league with the devil. In September of 1660, the papal embalt's, ambassador sat down with Rudolph and explained to him that he was in serious threat of excommunication. Rudolph didn't take it well. At that moment, the only response he had was that the ambassador had bad breath. The president of the Chamber of Finances believed that Rudolph was more agitated than he was letting on, writing, quote, night and day the emperor is tortured by the idea that he is abandoned, that he can have confidence in no one, that his subjects have lost their respect for him, that one wants to

take his power and his life from him. Later that night, Rudolph was in such a state of panic that he couldn't sleep. He called for one of his ministers, and when he arrived, tried to stab him with a dagger. A sudden clap of thunder outside startled Rudolph, narrowly allowing the minister to escape. Servants heard the commotion and rushed to Rudolph's room, arriving to find him about to attempt suicide. They managed to rest the dagger away from him and calm him down, but Rudolph was immobile for days afterward, refusing to leave his chambers or let anyone inside. The other force rooting for Rudolph's downfall was his own family. who had little to know sympathy for his depression.

One family member in particular had a vendetta against Rudolph, his younger brother, Matthias. When their father, Maximilian, had died and left all of his land to Rudolph, Rudolph had done his best to distribute the land equally among his brothers, with the exception of Matthias. At the time, Rudolph had been angry at Matthias because he had taken on a diplomatic role without, Rudolph's permission, and Rudolph viewed that as a direct threat to his rule. In retaliation,

when Rudolph tried to more evenly distribute their father's lands among the brothers, he refused to give Matthias a share of their father's land. He also prevented Matthias from marrying and spread a rumor that Matthias was impotent. Matthias had been waiting for decades to get revenge, and Rudolph's debilitating depression gave Matthias the perfect opportunity to try and take over the empire. In November of 1600, Matthias and his two youngest brothers signed an agreement of concerted opposition against Rudolph. Rudolph was terrified that Matthias would send someone to assassinate him, just like his court astrologer had predicted. Rudolph finally turned his attention to marrying and producing an heir just so he could keep Matthias off the throne.

He disguised his court painters as ambassadors and sent them across Europe to create portraits of the available bachelorets. But when the artists presented their portraits to Rudolph, he found he had no desire to reach out to any of the women. Instead, he found that he much preferred, staring at the paintings in the safety of his Kunstcomer. Rudolph responded to his fears of losing political power by delving deeper into alchemy and the occult. He had become obsessed with finding the Philosopher's Stone, which would grant him eternal life, but had, as you can imagine, very little success. Rudolph spent less and less time in the outside world and more and more time in his Kunstcommer. He was so separate from public life that he became known as the recluse of Prague.

Some people even assumed he had died. Matthias began ousting Rudolf from the throne officially, maneuvering around the emperor to pursue his own ambitions. In 1606, Matthias consulted with the rest of the Habsburgs and formally declared Rudolph insane. The family nominated Matthias to lead the Holy Roman Empire, but in perhaps a rare moment of sympathy for Rudolph, refused to forcibly remove him from power. Instead, Matthias just took on de facto political power. He went behind Rudolph's back and, negotiated peace with the Ottoman Empire later that year, much to Rudolph's chagrin. Over the next

five years, Rudolph hemorrhaged authority and political goodwill, until finally in 1611, Matthias and his forces invaded Prague and forced Rudolph to finally abdicate the throne. Matthias was crowned king of Bohemia in the city Rudolf had made his home. Rudolph was allowed to retain the title of emperor and to continue to live in Prague Castle until his death. During this time, Rudolph drank heavily and barely left his chambers. Unable to make it to his stables, he would have his favorite horses paraded outside his windows

so that he could admire them from a distance. Rudolph reserved his energy to try and put a hex on Matthias. This part is a little gruesome, apologies. Rudolph baptized a dog and then killed it, hoping that Matthias would suffer a similar tragedy, and even witnessed ritual sex in a magic circle in an attempt to reverse his bad fortune. In 1612, Rudolph caught a bad case of bronchitis,

and his legs started to swell. Physicians told him not to put shoes on, but Rudolph didn't listen because he insisted on still going to the Kunstcommer to see his collection, the only thing that still gave him pleasure. After a while, his legs had swollen so much that he couldn't take his shoes off for days, and he developed gangrene. He died a few days later of those complications. It turned out that Rudolph's death aligned with at least one of his court astrologer's predictions. One astrologer pointed out that Rudolph and his beloved pet lion had a similar star chart and forecasted that they would die within days of each other. Sure enough, Rudolph's pet lion had died just three days before Rudolph did.

seemingly terrified of the vengeful spirit of his dead brother, Matthias refused to pay his respects to Rudolph's corpse. He had similarly dismissive attitudes towards Rudolph's achievements. He fired most of the scholars, artists, and alchemists Rudolph had supported over his rule and moved the imperial court officially back to Vienna. Matthias and his youngest brother, Maximilian, took a few paintings from the Kunstcommer, but left most of it to get pillaged by various merchants.

Only a fraction of Rudolph's vast collection has been saved. Given the tragic ending of his story, it's easy to see Rudolph as a failure. He was a superstitious, spacey, timid, ruler who was ill-equipped to have. handle the demands of the throne. It's hard to rationalize Rudolph's obsession with the occult and his fruitless pursuit for eternal life and easy to dismiss the real work he sponsored, especially because a century later the Enlightenment would undermine the scholarly achievements of the Rodolphin Court. The Enlightenment's most archetypal figures, Descartes and Newton, established that the world is

reducible to what can be observed and logically deduced, which is now the foundation of modern science. This is not to say that Rudolph's occult beliefs were particularly out there for the time. Plenty of respected scientists practiced alchemy on the side, including Isaac Newton, who had a fascination with alchemy that dominated the back half of his life. But the consequences of Rudolph's fixation on the supernatural were so dire that they threatened to overshadow the rest of his legacy. His political inaction stoked tensions that would lead to the 30 years war, one of the deadliest conflicts in European history. Meanwhile, Rudolph's greatest achievement, arguably, the Kunstcommer itself, has been lost to time. All that remains of it is an inventory, a list of the list of the

many, many objects that were once inside, along with whatever those who raided it had cared to preserve. But those same qualities that probably led to Rudolph's downfall had made his court vibrant and unique. Rudolph never questioned the value of art and knowledge. While he had his, let's say, quirks, he paid the artists and scientists that set up shop in his palace, and he had deep respect for their work. Rudolph's utter devotion to knowledge and to the people who produced it allowed both to flourish. Rudolf's Kunstkamer may have looked haphazard, but it did have an organizational principle. It wanted to surprise and delight in exposing that which was once hidden. The randomness heightened the pleasure of finding something you might be

might not expect by opening a cabinet or peering around the corner. Whether it was an allegory that explains a painting or a map of the planet that could predict the future, Rudolph's passion for discovering hidden meanings was infectious. You can still feel Rudolph's whimsy and curiosity through the artworks he commissioned. One of these is a portrait of Rudolph as Vertumnes, the Roman god of the seasons, a painting by Giuseppe Arcemboldo. This is no standard portrait. In fact, you might have actually seen this portrait and not known it was of Rudolph. Archimboldo paints a Rudolph constructed out of fruits and vegetables, with a pair for a nose, apples for cheeks, blueberries for eyes, grapes for hair, and cabbage for shoulders. The portrait shows Rudolph not as a

or as a savior or even a human being, but as nature itself in all of its beauty and abundance. This is what Rudolph wanted, after all, to transcend the chaos of everyday existence and find the meaning of life, absurd as it is in its purest form. That's the story of Rudolph and his Kunstkamer, but stick around to hear about how Rudolph's love of astrology led to the discovery of some of the most fundamental laws of physics. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program.

I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights. to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes.

Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent.

And that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The most famous of Rudolph's court astronomers was Johannes Kepler. Kepler had been brought to Prague as an assistant to Rudolph's head astrologer, Tico Brahe. Unlike Tico, whose dire predictions sent Rudolph spiraling, Kepler was more interested in formulating the laws that governed celestial bodies' movement in space.

Kepler had bad eyesight, so he couldn't map planets like Brahe did, so instead his strength was in mathematics. He wanted to find out what caused the planets to move in certain patterns at certain speeds. Kepler mostly stayed under the radar, letting Brahe deal with Rudolph's whims. After Brihi's death, an unfortunate urination incident that you can hear about in our episode that we've done on Brahe, and Rudolph's brief experiment in attempting to bring Brahe back to life, Rudolf turned his attention to Kepler, naming him the new Imperial mathematician. Kepler, like Brahe before him, had to give Rudolph personalized star charts in addition to continuing his scholarly work.

Kepler didn't necessarily mind, like many astronomers at the time, he believed in astrology's ability to explain people's personalities and futures. But he also recognized that astrology was vulnerable to grifters that manipulated their readings for their own personal gain. Because of Rudolf's credulity, Kepler wrote in 1611, I hold that astrology must not only be banished from the Senate, but also from the heads of all those who wish to advise the emperor in his best interests. it must be kept entirely out of his sight. Rudolph didn't follow Kepler's advice, and Kepler still acted as one of Rudolph's personal astrologers.

Kepler tended to use astrology to hype up his patron, a strategy that allowed him to stay in Rudolph's good graces. During his time under Rudolph's patronage, when he wasn't doing star charts, Kepler was wildly productive, producing 30 astronomical treatises. In one of them, Astronomia Nova, he found that Earth's orbit was elliptical around the sun. In the introduction to Astronomia Nova, Kepler explains how Rudolph's astrological profile made him a particularly powerful ruler. Kepler's reading was so flattering and effective that Galileo might have

have actually ripped him off. A year after Astronomya Nova came out, Galileo dedicated his astronomical treatise to Rudolph and included a lengthy appreciation of Rudolph's star chart that was so similar to Kepler's that some scholars think Galileo plagiarized it. This is not to say that Rudolph and Kepler didn't have their disagreements, especially because Rudolph rarely paid Kepler on time, and sometimes withheld payments and bonuses, because of the empire's financial trouble. But Kepler appreciated Rudolph's patronage. He described Rudolph as a star around which he orbited, like the Earth around the sun. Noble Blood is a production of I-Heart Radio, and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by

me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and Rima Il Kali, with supervising producer Josh Thane and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players

and IHeart Podcast presents soccer moms. So I'm Leanne. This is my best friend, Janet. And we have been joined at the hips since high school. Absolutely. A redacted amount of years later, we're still joined at the hip. Just a little bit bigger hips.

This is a podcast. We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey. With all the snacks and drinks. Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer? They had a bogo. Well, then you're not. you got them. Listen to soccer moms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.