1 Jan 2024's look at 1 Jan 1600
Books: Reflections on a full life, eccentricity, Type 7 Society
Happy 2024. A few days ago I celebrated my 66th birthday and the British welfare state went to much trouble to track me down in the Australian bush and offer me a state pension. I intend to use my state-defined retirement ‘age’ to pursue the greatest conceivable challenge in social science — a new theory and history of society.
Therefore my new year resolution is to continue to obtain knowledge that will sustain my ‘typology’ of 10 societies in history. That is the purpose of Social Science Files.
It is of necessity a slow process, and a little bit risky. There is a small possibility the experiment may fail. Like Rudolf II’s alchemists (below) I may be trying perversely to transmute base metal into gold and may either persevere or abandon the effort.
However, I am happy to have finished 2023 feeling I do already have Types 1-5 and 40,000 years of history under my belt in manageable and coherent compact packages: 1) the smallest society of individuals, 2) the egalitarian society, 3) the personal rule society, 4) the administered society, and 5) the participatory system society.
There are still loose ends in each category. I have case studies to finish on ancient Egypt and Greece. But the paper trail will be easy to follow when time comes to pull it together. I am privately especially pleased that my personal-impersonal π theory and evolutionary systems theory generated during 2021-2022 in an apartment overlooking Sydney’s Botany Bay—the exact landing place of Captain James Cook being visible through binoculars—has withstood the onslaughts of reality in good shape. Only I can know this. It has not yet been necessary to explain the sociological framework on Social Science Files in detail. The preliminary ‘ideal types’ are all that matter now.
Thus far the greatest challenge was Type 4 administered society. I had not realised it would require inventions of new concepts. It seems my secular-utilitarian approach is unique. Ingredients and traces of it are certainly found in the best studies of ca. 8000 BC to 1000 BC Mesopotamia. In broad terms agriculture ‘drove’ administration, and administration ‘drove’ societal complexity and civilisation. I have reduced this causal process to a categorical simplification. My original contribution has been to suggest on the basis of evidence provided by historians and archeologists that in consequence of prehistoric communalistic organisation and administrative experimentation in private households there probably evolved secular agricultural estates which in turn became the templates for effective public governance of cores and hierarchies of settlements.
‘Template’ commits the sin of replacing ‘temple’. My elevation of administration to a public good of Darwinian-level evolutionary significance commits a few philosophical sins. But both propositions seem, to me, to work just fine. I think my originality in the conceptualisation of Roman governance as ‘system’ governance was equally correct.
(No guardrail) It was a little bit risky taking this selfie
Now to the Holy Roman business of the 2nd day of 2024:
The best novels I read in 2023 were all by John Banville aka Benjamin Black, including several of the ‘Quirke’ entertainments, plus The Sea, The Untouchable, Eclipse, and Mrs Osmond. Mrs Osmond quashed all my previous misgivings about the novels of Henry James, who Banville claims as his main literary influence. As a result I now plan to read all the Henry James novels. Already I am engrossed in The American.
The reason for telling you this is that another of the Banville (aka Black) novels I read was Prague Nights (in the US it is titled Wolf on a String), and it is relevant to our current principal topic on Social Science Files — the so-called Holy Roman Empire.
Prague Nights is set in Prague and surrounding countryside during the reign of Emperor Rudolf II, who, on my count, was the 34th ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. The ‘hero’ is a young Czech mathematician, Dr Christian Stern, who adventurously wins the confidence of Rudolf until he gets into big trouble for among several rather exciting reasons secretly sleeping regularly with Rudolf’s powerful passionate and parlous mistress.
Banville (who has previously written novels about Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton) obviously became completely engrossed in the topic, researched it thoroughly, and has spent considerable time in Prague. He earlier wrote a short non-fiction book about the research process — Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, Bloomsbury 2003.
Reading Prague Pictures brought back to me memories of a week I spent 15 years ago in Prague getting to know my eccentric Czech cousin, a notorious and passionate ‘restitutioner’ of Jewish looted art, a ski instructor, and a good guide to the city.
What I would like to do now is offer a few short extracts—from Prague Pictures and then from the novel Prague Nights — to give Social Science Files readers an insight into perhaps the most eccentric of all the Holy Roman emperors. I recommend the novel with its sharp flavour of life at the time for commoner, middling folk and nobles.
Included is a reference to the strained relations with Queen Elizabeth of England who sent out spies to keep an eye on the Prague intrigues and geopolitics of empire.
The 1st Source:
John Banville Prague Pictures: Portrait of a City, Bloomsbury 2003
… The single historical figure who most epitomises old Prague is the Emperor Rudolf II. This melancholy madman, gull of all manner of mountebanks and charlatans but also a patient patron of the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, was born in 1552 into one of the more complicated Habsburg lines. His father, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, son of the Emperor Ferdinand I and Emperor Charles V's brother, married Charles's daughter Maria. … Maximilian was the son of Emperor Ferdinand I, who was brother to Emperor Charles V, founder of the Habsburg dynasty … Maximilian married his cousin Maria, daughter of Charles V.
… At the age of eleven, on the insistence of his mother, the mournful Maria, Rudolf was packed off from the relative liberality of his father Maximilian's court at Vienna to live in the household of the Spanish King Philip II, his mother's brother, there to be taught some of the harsher realities of life as a Catholic monarch in a Europe facing into the horrors of the Counter-Reformation. During the seven years he spent in Madrid, Rudolf became, in Ripellino's words,
“a perfect Spaniard, acquiring the customs and masks of that dissembling monarchy. Bigotry, intrigues, religious pomp, suspicion, persecution of heretics, the Inquisition's funeral pyres, the illusion of boundless majesty, vainglory on land and at sea such was his school.”
This was a disastrous experience for the dreamy and otherworldly Rudolf, who was more interested in alchemy, literature, and the wilder shores of art — it was Rudolf who brought Arcimboldo, that master of the grotesque, to Prague and made him one of his chief court painters — than in power and the machinations of European politics. Ripellino is firm in his conviction that the Spanish experience was a “fatal influence” on the young man's character:
“it heightened his morbid shyness, his yearning for solitude, and planted the seeds for the megalomania and persecution complex that later so obsessed him”.
Spanish influence became very powerful at Rudolf's court, as the Jesuit-educated younger generation displaced the older, liberal Catholic faction. The new men, supported by Rome and Madrid, were the ones who prosecuted fiercely the Counter-Reformation measures that would lead, after Rudolf's time, to the Thirty Years War. So strong was the Spanish presence that in Bohemia the more fervent Catholics were known as ‘Spaniards’. Jealous, paranoid, hypochondriacal, incurably melancholy, obsessed with the passage of time and terrified at the prospect of death, Rudolf was a compulsive collector, filling room after room of Prague Castle with talismanic objects meant to stave off mortality and be a barrier against the world, all sorts of rubbish and kitsch tumbling together with exquisite objets d'art.
As is so often the case with weak men who inherit vast power, he was obsessed with things in miniature, hiring entire schools of craftsmen to carve and emboss and inlay the tiniest surfaces, of pearls, nut shells, cherry pits, flakes of amber, birds' eggs, sharks' teeth, gallstones. No expense was spared, no effort was thought too great.
He purchased a painting in Venice, Das Rosenkranzfest, by one of his favourite artists, Albrecht Durer, and had it carried on foot across the Alps by four stout men, one at each corner. Ripellino fairly revels in Rudolf's collecto-mania:
“Among the many peculiar objects he collected I might mention . . . an iron chair (Fangstuhl) that held whoever sat in it a prisoner; a musical clock with a gilt lid decorated by a hunting scene of leaping stags; an Orgelwerk that performed ricercars, madrigals, and canzoni by itself; stuffed ostriches; rhinoceros chalices for boiling poisonous potions; a votive medallion of Jerusalem clay; the lump of soil from the Hebron Valley out of which Yahweh Elohim formed Adam; the large mandrake roots (alrauns) in the shape of little men reclining on soft velvet cushions in small cases resembling doll beds . . . [which] belong to the same family of man-like figures as the Golem, robots and Kafka's odradek.”
But that is only the merest sample. Ripellino goes on to compile an “unsystematic inventory” to represent the crowding and chaos in Rudolf's wonder-rooms:
“Plaster casts of lizards and reproductions of other animals in silver, Meermuscheln, turtle shells, nacres, coconuts, statuettes of coloured wax, figurines of Egyptian clay, elegant mirrors of glass and steel, spectacles, corals, Indian boxes filled with gaudy plumes, 'Indian' containers of straw and wood, 'Indian', that is, Japanese paintings, burnished silver and gilt 'Indian' nuts and other exotic objects the great carracks brought from India under full sail, a skin-coloured plaster-covered female torso of the kind the Prague Surrealists so loved, amber and ivory boards for playing dice, a skull of yellow amber, amber goblets, bagpipes, 'landscapes' of Bohemian jasper, a small table of enamelled silver, shells of agate, jasper, topaz and crystal, a silver picture in an ebony frame, a bas-relief in oriental alabaster, painted stones, mosaics, a small silver altar, a crystal goblet with a silver lid, a topaz carafe given to Rudolf by a Muscovite delegation, a carafe of starstone, a glass jug of Bohemian agate with a gold handle, a large topaz drinking vessel in the shape of a lion, ruby-inlaid gold tableware, clay pitchers (some of which are covered with red velvet), a coral ship with figurines, a ship of gilt wood, a tiny ship of silver-plated Cocus de Malediva, a jewel casket of rock crystal, a casket of mother of pearl, a silver lute, lamina of lapis lazuli, rhinoceros horns, ivory hunting horns, gaudy knives inlaid with gold and gems, porcelain, scraps of silk, globes of various guise including a silver one atop a hypogryph, armillary spheres, measuring instruments, Venetian glassware, an ancient head of Polyphemus, Deianeira and the centaur in silver, medals, maiolica in many colours, anatomical specimens, harnesses, spurs, bridles, rough wooden saddles, domed pavilions, doublets and other booty left by the Turks during their mounted forays, hunting gear, banners, muzzles and collars, every kind of plate, ostrich-egg goblets, sabres, cut-throat daggers, muskets, stilettos, sword cases, mortar pieces, pistols and verdugas. And automata and musical clocks. Clocks, clocks and more clocks.”
Mopping our brow, we take a step back from the glare of Ripellino's coruscating romanticism and consult a cooler source. In his authoritative study of Rudolf, the historian R.J.W. Evans identifies three distinct versions of the Emperor which have come down to us. First there is the “feeble, unstable and impoverished monarch”whose reign began in glory but ended with him humiliatingly deposed by his brother Matthias and cowering in terror within the fastness of Hradčany; second, the great connoisseur and patron of the arts and sciences; and third, the “wizard Emperor” in thrall to magicians such as John Dee and Edward Kelley, an adept of astrology, Hermeticism, the Cabala, and “plain old-fashioned superstition”.
While not wholly dismissing any of these versions — a man may be a multitude, after all — Evans sets out to show not only how they overlap one upon the other, but that beneath the multifariousness of Rudolf’s character there was an underlying unity.
“However hazardous it may be to speak of the philosophy of an age, there was nevertheless an underlying atmosphere, a climate of thought in later sixteenth-century Europe, which was particularly characteristic of the Imperial court in Prague . . . Part of the evidence for this is the universalist striving itself, an effort to preserve the mental and political unity of Christendom, to avoid religious schism, uphold peace at home, and deliver Europe from the Ottoman menace.”
Even Rudolf's dabblings in magic may be viewed not as a vulgar delving after dark powers but part of a great stirring of intellectual curiosity and adventurousness which led directly to the Enlightenment. Even John Dee, for so long viewed as a fraudulent opportunist and Quack-salb, has been radically reassessed, notably by the Renaissance scholar Frances Yates. Certainly Dee was an alchemist and necromancer, but he was also a geographer and mathematician, a bibliophile, a teacher of Sir Philip Sidney, and published books on mathematics, navigation, and the calendar. Evans writes:
“The occult striving was in essence an attempt to penetrate beyond the world of experience to the reality which underlay it, and as such it paralleled or overlapped with the artistic use of symbol and emblem. At the same time it belonged in a central way to the whole apprehension of nature during Rudolf's age, for the natural philosophers of the period were men who studied the forces at work in the world around them, not as discretely observed patterns of cause and effect, but as motive spirits acting through a divine scheme of correspondences.”
Thus it is possible to regard Rudolf's band of alchemists in their laboratories in lane not as black magicians but as something like today's quantum physicists, probing the mysterious and contradictory reality of the world. Like the alchemists before them, modern physicists work in far deeper darkness than the layman realises, trusting their instincts and making judgements as often on aesthetic as on purely 'scientific' grounds. Evans:
“The object of such a philosophy was not only to describe the hidden forces of nature but also to control them, since the initiate who understood their powers could also apply his knowledge.”
At the outset Evans points out that Rudolf held to the traditional, earth-centred cosmology, and
“the notions to which he and so many of his contemporaries subscribed were in their very essence magical. They believed that the world of men and the world of nature were linked by hidden sources of knowledge, and that the problems of alchemy, astrology, or the Hermetic texts were proper subjects for learned investigation.”
Against this, more than one of Rudolf's contemporaries insisted that there was nothing high-minded about his obsession with magic, and that all he wanted from his alchemists was that they should discover how to transmute base metal into gold so that he might replenish the imperial coffers that his crazed collecting was constantly threatening to empty.
The overseer of Rudolf's collections was the Italian antiquary Jacopo Strada, a resourceful and cunning scholar who not only amassed a huge treasury of coins, medallions and precious books for the Emperor, but also flattered his imperial pride by writing a number of texts on the royal lineage, including the Epitome thesauri antiquitatum, tracing Rudolf's forebears back to Julius Caesar. Strada was genuinely learned, however, and compiled an eleven-language dictionary, and produced works not only on antiquarianism but also on mechanics. His high position at court — Titian painted a very grand portrait of him — was no doubt sustained in part by the fact that his daughter Katarina was the bachelor Rudolf's long-time mistress, and bore him half a dozen children.
As the years went on Rudolf sank deeper into melancholy and paranoia, and the courtiers tussling for position behind his throne took on much of the running of the Empire. Foremost among these was Wolfgang Rumpf, who as Chamberlain and then High Steward and President of the Privy Council made most of the Emperor's decisions. In 1599, however, Rudolf began to suspect that Rumpf was working against him, perhaps in league with the Spanish throne and its Prague faction, and dismissed him, then took him back, then fired him for good. Rudolf's favourite punishment for those he considered betrayers was to fling them into a dungeon and throw away the key. Poor Rumpf was to spend the rest of his life in prison, where a decade later another fallen courtier, the splendidly named Philipp Langz Langenfelsu, a converted Jew and a dabbler in alchemy, was to die a mysterious and violent death. It does not do to cross a Habsburg.
With Rumpf's abrupt and final departure the business of government virtually ground to a halt. Rudolf was given increasingly to sudden, unprovoked and terrible rages, which alternated with profound depressions. He kept entirely to the castle now, where he had the walkways and promenades covered in so that he might move about his twilight world unobserved. In his poem, 'Prague', Seifert writes:
Night towers over all
and through the box-trees of evergreen cupolas
the foolish emperor tiptoes away
into the magic gardens of his retorts
and in the halcyon air of rose-red evenings
rings out the tinkle of the glass foliage
as it is touched by the alchemists' fingers
as if by the wind.
In 1611 Rudolf's younger brother Matthias, whom he had always treated appallingly, called a meeting of the family in the Hofburg in Vienna. There were fears of a Protestant takeover of the imperial throne which Rudolf’s slow decline had left unprotected. Matthias was named head of the House of Habsburg and declared Regent. He marched with an army to the gates of Prague, and on November 11th forced Rudolf to abdicate, leaving him with a pension, the castle on Hradcany, and, of course, his collections. Very soon, to his horror, Rudolf's tame African lion died, an event which according to an oracle would presage the death of its master. Rudolf submerged himself in drink, developed dropsy, and expired, no doubt painfully, on January 20th, 1612. For all his personal strangeness and the haplessness of his reign, the city on the Vltava mourned him, recognising him as a true spiritual son.
… Doctor John Dee, whose fame as Elizabeth of England's chief sorcerer had gone before him, was welcomed by Rudolf — Dee had visited Rudolf's father, Maximilian, twenty years before, and dedicated one of his most important works, the Monas Hieroglyphia, to him — and proceeded at once to bamboozle the Emperor by pretending to transmogrify mercury into gold, and conjuring, with Kelley's help, a host of spirits in his crystal mirror. This seems to have been the only time Dee was able to speak directly to the Emperor. The Catholic party in Prague was highly suspicious of this English magician, a favourite of the anathematised Queen Elizabeth, after all, and a Protestant, or so they thought — in fact, Dee held to a chiliastic form of universal Christianity unfettered by dogma. By 1586, two years after his arrival in Prague, Dee was being accused by the Papal Nuncio of having dealings with the Devil, and Rudolf had no choice but to banish him, ordering him to be gone within a day; Dee remained in the area, however, under the protection of the rich nobleman Vilem of on his estate at returning to England in 1594. Unadvisedly, Rudolf set Kelley in Dee's place. …
… The transfer of the imperial court from Vienna had made Prague the first city of the empire, and for the thirty years of Rudolf's rule there it was the centre of Europe not only geographically but in terms of wealth …
In 1608 Rudolf was forced to abdicate as Emperor, and after Rudolf came the deluge, in which Kepler, along with any prospect of peace in Counter-Reformation Europe, was swept up and washed away. By the winter of 1611, Prague was in chaos. Troops under the command, so-called, of Archduke Leopold V, Bishop of Passau, whom Rudolf had engaged in a hare-brained plot to regain power, ran riot in the city, doing the things that an undisciplined soldiery always does, and clashing in running, bloody battles with gangs of Bohemian vigilantes. In his house in the New Town, Kepler, labouring to uncover the secret harmony of the universe, could look down from the window of his workroom on the scenes of mayhem and rapine in the streets round about. Meanwhile on the the atmosphere in the royal palace “was thick with madness and ruin” as Rudolf's final piece of lunacy ended in his being stripped of all power and his hated brother seizing the Bohemian throne. In April Kepler had his own fall from grace, when the impossibility of life in Prague forced him to accept a teaching post at a school in Linz in Upper Austria. The Imperial Mathematician was once more a schoolmaster. …
… On May 23rd, eight days after Kepler had discovered his third law, a crowd of a hundred or so Protestant nobles forced their way into the Chancellery of Rudolf's palace to protest at the revocation of Rudolf's ‘Letter of Majesty’ which had guaranteed religious tolerance in the province — and the attempts by Rudolf's Habsburg heirs to suppress the Bohemian church, founded at such bloody cost by Jan Hus. Acting in the usual way of the devout when they have been slighted, they seized on two Catholic councillors, Jaroslavz Martinic and Vilem Slavata, and threw them and their secretary, Filip Fabricius, out of the Chancellery's eastern window. The three clung on to the sill, but the leader of the Protestants, Count Thurn, beat on their fingers with the hilt of his sword until they let go. Luckily for the victims, the moat far below the window was clogged with sewage, so that they had a relatively soft landing.
This was, as every schoolboy used to know, the Second Defenestration of Prague, and the beginning of the Thirty Years War. The Emperor Matthias died the following year, and the crown passed to his nephew, Ferdinand II, the Jesuit-trained bigot who had personally exiled Kepler and his co-religionists from Graz in 1600. The Bohemian Estates promptly rebelled, and invited Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, to become King of Bohemia. In 1613 Frederick had married the Princess Elizabeth, daughter of James I of England. Europe had high hopes for the golden couple, who “have something of the air of a Shakespearean hero and heroine”. Their fabulous castle at Heidelberg, “with its gardens and grottoes, its water organs and singing statues”, was a rival for Rudolf's palace and “a citadel of advanced seventeenth-century culture”.
Elizabeth was a young woman of wide learning, while her husband was described by the English Ambassador as 'much beyond his years religious, wise, active, and valiant'. The couple debated carefully the offer of the Bohemian crown, consulting among others the Archbishop of Canterbury, who urged acceptance, and Frederick's mother, who implored him to say no. However, Frederick the zealous Protestant considered that he had been divinely called, and on September 27th, 1619, he and Elizabeth set out with their eldest son, Prince Henry, for Prague. Much of Protestant Europe rejoiced, while England considered that the “only Phoenix of the world”, Queen Elizabeth I, was about to return in the form of her namesake. The coronation of the couple in St Vitus's Cathedral was, as Frances Yates remarks, “the last great public ceremony to be sponsored by the Bohemian church”.
Bohemia believed its new King and Queen would be the saviours of the country's autonomy and the religious freedoms which had been one of the more solid aspects of Rudolf's mystico-magical reign. But Bohemia was dreadfully mistaken. It had put its faith in Elizabeth's father, James of England, whom they believed would champion their cause, with military might if necessary. James, however, in awe of the Habsburgs, was against the Bohemian adventure, and behind the scenes busied himself in disowning his daughter and her husband. Nor did the German Protestant princes come forward with the support that might have been expected of them.
Meanwhile the Catholics were massing their forces, and on November 8th, 1620, Frederick's army was utterly defeated at the Battle of White Mountain, fought at Bila Hora just outside Prague. The ‘Winter King’ fled with his wife to The Hague. After the rout, the Habsburgs exacted a frightful revenge on the Bohemian Protestants. The following year, on the morning of June 21st, twenty-seven leaders of the Czech Protestants, including nobles, knights and burghers, were beheaded on the Old Town Square by the Prague executioner, Jan. One of those who died on that day of infamy was kindly old Jan Jesensky, Rudolf's doctor and later Rector of Prague University, who had acted as arbitrator in Kepler's negotiations over the terms of his contract with Tycho Brahe. The heads of the twenty-seven victims were impaled on spikes on the Charles Bridge, where they remained for a decade, until Swedish forces entered the city in 1631 and removed them for burial in the Tyn church. Ripellino in Magic Prague sees that terrible day as emblematic of the city's miseries down the centuries, and rages in particular against Mydlaf the executioner …
Kepler spent the final years of his life wandering restlessly back and forth across war-ravaged southern Europe, seeking support first from the Duke of Wurttemberg, which was refused on religious grounds, and, more successfully, from the Bohemian general Albrecht Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland and Mecklenburg and Prince of Sagan, who had scored a notable victory by repulsing an invasion of north Germany by Christian IV of Denmark — Tycho in his grave must have bridled with satisfaction [as he] was almost as strong a believer in the influence of the stars on the fortunes of men as the Emperor Rudolf had been. …
… I owe a large debt to Angelo Maria Ripellino’s Magic Prague, translated by David Newton Marinelli and edited by Michael Henry Heim (Macmillan, London, 1994). For the passages devoted to the Emperor Rudolf, I am indebted to R.J.W. Evans, whose Rudolf II and His World (Oxford, 1973) is a comprehensive, subtle, and sympathetic portrait of this fascinating man and the city on which he stamped his character indelibly.
The 2nd Source:
Benjamin Black, Prague Nights [or Wolf on a String], Penguin 2017
… And so I came to Prague, at the close of the year of our Lord 1599, in the reign of Rudolf II, of the House of Hapsburg, King of Hungary and Bohemia, Archduke of Austria and ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. That was a happier age, an era of peace and plenty before this terrible war of the religions—which has been raging now for nigh on thirty years—had engulfed the world in slaughter, fire, and ruin. Rudolf may have been more than a little mad, but he was tolerant to all, holding every man’s beliefs, Christian, Jew, or Mussulman, to be his own concern and no business of state, monarch, or marshal.
Rudolf, as is well known, had no love for Vienna, the city of his birth, and he lost no time in transferring the imperial court to Prague in—ah, I forget the year; my memory these days is a sieve. Yet I do not forget my aim in coming to the capital of his empire, which was no less than to win the Emperor’s favor and secure a place among the scores of learned men who laboured at His Majesty’s pleasure and under his direction, in the fabulous hothouse that was Hradčany castle. Most were alchemists, but not all: at court there were wise savants, too, notably the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the noble Dane Tycho Brahe, Rudolf’s Imperial Mathematician, great men, the two of them, though of the two Kepler was by far the greater.
It was no easy goal I had set myself. I knew, as who did not, Rudolf’s reputation as a disliker of humanity. For years His Majesty had kept to his private quarters in the castle, poring over ancient texts and brooding in his wonder rooms, not showing himself even to the most intimate of his courtiers for weeks on end; he had been known to leave envoys of the most illustrious princes to cool their heels for half a year or more before deigning to grant them an audience. But what was that to me? I meant to make my way into the imperial sanctum without hindrance or delay, by whatever means and by whatever necessary stratagems, so large were my ambitions and so firm my self-belief. ….
JANUARY 1600
Surely there could be no better blazon to lift the heart on a clear, crisp winter morning than the brassy blare of a bugle. That day, in the first month of a new year and a new century, even Rudolf the Melancholy smiled to hear those raucous notes. He hurried to the nearest window, his pale feminine hands clasped at his breast in excited anticipation, and peered down into the broad courtyard below. A multitude of townsfolk were massed there, filling the entire square. Through it a squad of halberdiers were clearing the way for the royal bugler; following after him, four sturdy young men bore between them on their shoulders a wooden pole from which was suspended by thick leather bands a very large, flat packing case wrapped securely in canvas.
I was among the band of courtiers gathered under the magnificently vaulted ceiling of the Great Hall of the Royal Palace, and counted myself the equal of any there … You shall judge of the great transformation that had come about in my fortunes when I describe the outfit in which I disported myself that day. … I wore a shirt of finest linen with a soft lace collar and matching lace ringlets at the wrists; a doublet of dark blue velvet boned to make a narrowing to the waist; wine-red trunk hose, paned, complete with a stiffened codpiece; silk nether stockings; and shoes of Spanish leather with silver buckles. I was, it pains me to confess, particularly vain of my hat, which was of soft velvet like the doublet, gathered into a high crown and decorated with a jewelled band and a jaunty white cockade at the left side. Over the weeks I had grown the beginnings of a pencil beard, which today was oiled and neatly pointed, and complemented by a fine stiff moustache; the beard and whiskers, to my pleased surprise, had come out a softly reddish hue. My hair was cut short and brushed well back—the Blue Elephant’s lice were the merest memory now—with a woven lovelock trailing gallantly over my right shoulder. I wore a ruby ring, too, a gift from the Emperor himself. “It was not so large or ostentatious as the one the Chamberlain liked to display, but to my eye it was more tasteful, by far. So, as you see, I had undergone a marvelous transfiguration, overseen and financed by a great lady [Rudolf’s mistress]. I was, in short, quite the gentleman.
“Come”, His Majesty said, “come, let us go down.”
He scurried to the door, with the rest of us behind him in a rush.
In the courtyard the four young men had halted, looking very solemn and self-conscious. They had come on an immense journey, by foot, all the way over the Alps from Venice, bearing their precious cargo. Rudolf thanked them, one by one, and presented to each of them a gold Joachimsthaler, specially minted for the occasion, while the crowd, held well back by the halberdiers, elbowed and jostled, craning for a rare view of the people’s reclusive sovereign.
He directed that the package, which when seen close to was indeed a mighty thing, should be brought up to the Long Corridor. So the four carriers, a pair in front and a pair behind, shouldered the two ends of the wooden pole again and tramped up the stone stairway, with us courtiers in their wake. Rudolf skipped ahead of them, glancing back anxiously, as if he feared that, after lugging their precious cargo safely over the mountain passes in the depths of winter, the quartet of bearers might still come to disaster in this last short stage of the journey.
Jeppe Schenckel, climbing the stairs beside me, snickered. “Look at him,” he murmured, gesturing after the Emperor. “Like a virgin on her wedding night, worrying for her maidenhead”.
In the picture room the package was set down on the floor and stripped first of its canvas covering, then of layer upon layer of soft carpet cushioned on cotton wadding, until at last, to a general and deliberately exaggerated sigh of wonder and admiration, the gorgeous treasure was revealed, aglow in its heavy gilt frame.
It was The Feast of the Rosary—how clearly I can bring it to my mind’s eye, even yet—a scene commissioned a century past from the master painter Albrecht Dürer by the banker Jakob Fugger and a guild of businessmen in Nuremberg, Meister Dürer’s birthplace. Since its completion, the picture had stood as a panel above the altar in the church of San Bartolomeo in Venice, a favourite place of worship for the numerous German residents of that seaborne city.
For years Rudolf had been lusting after this masterpiece, in which not only his ancestor the Emperor Maximilian I is depicted, but also, in the background, the painter himself, peering out at us with a curiously uncertain eye. At last the painting was in his possession, and now he stood gazing at it, where it leaned in its glory against the wall, the packaging strewn at its base like the jumble of a lady’s petticoats that she had let fall at her feet.
Without taking his greedy gaze from the picture, Rudolf flapped a hand at the courtiers crowding behind him, dismissing us from his presence. In silence we shuffled out of the room, leaving him to his pleasure.
On the morrow there would be a banquet to celebrate the acquisition of His Majesty’s heart’s desire—his agents had paid nine hundred ducats for the painting—but for now he wished to savour it in solitude, as if indeed it were his bride and he must be left alone with her.
At the foot of the staircase I was accosted by the Englishman Sir Henry Wotton, diplomatist and, as everyone knew, master spy, who plucked at my sleeve and drew me to one side.
“How pleasant to see His Majesty so pleased,” he said genially, “eh, Dr. Stern?”
He was a clever fellow, this Sir Henry, and handsome enough, in his way, clad in purple silk, with a beard fuller than mine, and a humorous though ever-watchful eye. I have an instinctive wariness of these silky-smooth Englishmen. But this one’s Latin was faultless and elegant, and I always would forgive a man much for a well-turned phrase.
“Yes, Sir Henry,” I said, “His Majesty does love a picture.”
“And this one in particular, it seems.”
“It’s a masterly thing, and he is a connoisseur.”
“Indeed, indeed.”
… It was a question at court as to why Sir Henry was in Prague at all. He gave it out, to anyone crass enough to inquire, that he was bound for Italy, to process some business at the Vatican on behalf of James of Scotland—but Prague was hardly a way station on the road to Rome. His chief patron, the Earl of Essex, had earned the displeasure of Queen Elizabeth after a disastrous campaign in which he was supposed to have quelled the unruly Irish but had failed. I speculated that perhaps the wily envoy had thought it prudent to quit his native land and take himself off for a while to a distant and safer place, until the royal lady’s choler had cooled and his aristocratic master was out of danger. It was said that Essex in a rage had half drawn his sword on the Queen: “He lost his head yet kept his head”, as Chamberlain Lang had put it to me, with a wink.
But for all the polish of Wotton’s manner, I could see from a glint of urgency in his eye that there was something he hoped to have of me. …
… We stood in the cloud’s shadow, the Englishman frowning and absently fingering a scrap of ribbon on the front of his doublet. I knew now why he had come to Prague, and why he wished to travel to Most. That was where the sorcerer and spy Edward Kelley was held captive, at the Emperor’s behest, in a prison cell set high on the wall of Castle Hněvín. But why should such a lofty gentleman as Sir Henry Wotton wish to talk to the likes of Kelley, disgraced and locked away as he was?
[MGH: discover what happens next by reading the whole novel…]
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