Prague in Black and Gold: Scenes from the Life of a European City

by Peter Demetz

  Jessenius described this feat in a longish Latin treatise which includes a marvelous Baroque dedication to nearly everybody who could be helpful in Prague. It includes a few hexameters in praise of Bohemia and the emperor, and a few pages of glowing praise of Prague, not only a city but “a world.” The emperor promptly requested the prince-elector of Saxony to let Jessenius come to Prague, but he stayed there only for six years (1602-8). He may have felt frustrated because the university did not offer sufficient possibilities for all his talents or because he felt uneasy about the distinct predominance of the Catholic faction at court. He transferred to Vienna to serve Matthias, Rudolf’s brother, perhaps feeling more at ease with a protector who, at that time, was supported by the Protestant Hungarian and Bohemian Estates. Jessenius published a good deal, both in Prague and in Vienna, especially on anatomy and the blood vessels, and when in 1617 he was offered the rectorship of the Carolinum he readily accepted and returned to Prague. He was deeply involved in the rebellion of 1618 and the conflicts between the Prague Estates and Vienna, as both university rector and diplomat seeking international support for the rebels, and he was the prominent academic among those executed in the Old Town Square in 1621. Nearly three hundred years later the Prague physician Jan Jesenský (father of Milena, dearly beloved by Franz Kafka), a Czech nationalist and pioneer stomatologist, proudly derived his ancestry from Jessenius, and I do not know whether he was aware that his Baroque forebear had done excellent work in stomatology too.

  The Alchemists Come to Prague

  To separate the scientists at the imperial court from the alchemists who flocked to Prague is to use anachronistic norms to define two distinct groups which, to their contemporaries, probably were but one. Some of them preferred systematic observation of natural phenomena while others, strongly believing in the unity of all creation and the necessary correspondences among its constituent parts, experimented with the transmutation of elements or, in the service of the great and the wealthy, hoped to make gold, silver, and precious stones, or to distill a few gulps of aurum potabile, fluid and drinkable gold that was said to guarantee eternal youth. Astrology was just beginning to be disreputable to professional astronomers, and the dividing line between chemistry and alchemy was uncertain and diffuse; in Prague—at the court, in the Minor Town, and downtown—there lived as many scientists trying to emancipate solid knowledge from vague Egyptian and Alexandrine traditions as traveling charlatans who, quoting secondhand Trithemius or Agrippa, tried to sell their tricks to the highest bidder, whether the emperor or somebody else. Learned court physicians, among them Tadeáš Hájek and Michael Maier, who had strong interests in pharmacology and chemistry, were not averse to studying the traditional texts of alchemy, but they usually kept apart from the self-assured amateurs, con men, and swindlers who appeared from nowhere, sought the protection of the court, the barons, or gullible rich patricians in the Old Town, took the money, and ran, if they could. Emperor Rudolf, extolled by his admirers as the second Hermes Trismegistos (the magical Egyptian king who had writ the secret of alchemy on sapphire), was rather lenient to the traveling alchemists. Under pressure from the law courts, he occasionally imprisoned an alchemist for debts or banned him from the country (unless a powerful baron intervened), but he never had one executed, as was the habit of the German princes beyond the Bohemian borders. Philipp Jakob Güstenhofer, after some éclat in Prague, was hanged in Saxony; the false Greek count Marko Bragadino, who had astonished Prague citizens while walking with his devilish black hounds at his side, was executed in Munich, clad in an elegant suit adorned with false gold; and the evil Italian Alessandro Scotta, first a great sensation in Prague but later forced to show his art in a little wooden booth in the Old Town Square, on his further journey by less than magic means impregnated the duchess of Coburg, who craved a child, and he would have been killed if he had not succeeded in disappearing. The unfortunate woman was sentenced to life in a nunnery and died twenty years later.

  The most famous, or infamous, purveyors of the occult arts appearing in Prague in the early 1580s were John Dee and Edward Kelley, two Englishmen who offered their services to the emperor and to powerful nobles. Prague contemporaries and later Czech historians took a dim view of that traveling pair (not entirely undeserved), but a spate of recent studies about Dee has clearly shown that the two radically differed in character, learning, and attitude, to say the least: the scholarly and earnest John Dee was “a unique intellectual force in Elizabethan England,” Peter J. French has argued, and Edward Kelley an imaginative fraud with a criminal record and a lusty eye for profits of all kinds. It is impossible to say with any certainty why Dee, a scholar of high achievements and independence of thought, for many years joined his and his family’s life to that of Kelley, an unscrupulous adventurer of the occult; in his thirst for knowledge he may have really believed that Kelley, and nobody else, was capable of understanding the pure language of Adam and would translate to him what the angels said in long magical seances. From 1582, when Kelley first appeared in Dee’s study, they traveled and worked together in Poland, Bohemia, and Germany, and parted ways only in 1589 in Prague, when Dee, upon Queen Elizabeth’s request, returned to England and Kelley preferred to stay on in Bohemia. Dee died in utter penury in England, forced to sell his books one by one, and Kelley came to a bad and bitter end in Bohemia.

  John Dee (born in 1527), son of a vintner who may have been employed in a minor function at the court of King Henry VIII, was early seized by an intense longing for universal knowledge; at St. John’s College, Cambridge, he studied for eighteen hours a day, he said, and was among the original fellows of Trinity College. He traveled twice to Louvain to take up mathematical and cartographic studies, lectured on Euclid in Paris, but turned down academic appointments because he wanted to be left to his independent work. His religious principles came under suspicion early; when he suggested to Queen Mary that a royal depository of books and ancient manuscripts be established, there was no official response; he then built his own library, which became one of the most famous in Elizabethan England, at his home at Mortlake, on the banks of the Thames River in Surrey. Queen Elizabeth favored his services and consulted him about naval affairs and her toothaches; he was invited to Richmond to see the queen, who, in turn, visited with all her official retinue at his Mortlake home. He had concentrated on mathematics as informing all creation, but in the early seventies, dissatisfied with the rhetorical canon of the universities, he shifted his interests to the occult meaning of numbers and, by 1581, held his first séance, trying with the help of a “skryer,” or translator, to bring down the angels to his study and to understand what they said; unlike Faust, who tried in vain to force the restive Erdgeist to speak up, Dee believed the angels were ready to talk if only confronted with a translator of unusual gifts. Unfortunately, on March 10, 1582, a young man appeared at Mortlake, trying to convince Dee that he was heir to occult knowledge and formulae, saved from a bishop’s grave (desecrated by iconoclasts); the visitor quickly succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. It was Edward Kelley, or Talbot, a trained apothecary’s apprentice, who had briefly gone to Oxford, worked for a time as a scribe, falsified official documents, and been punished by the Lancashire authorities, who cut his ears off (he wore his hair long or had a black cap with flaps to give him a scholarly appearance). Dee had found his disreputable Mephisto.

  It may have been Kelley’s idea to go to Eastern Europe to sell occult knowledge for profit and preferments; in any case, on the invitation of a Polish nobleman close to the Polish Hapsburg party, they first went to Cracow, then on to Prague, the new Mecca of alchemists. It was the influential Spanish ambassador Guillén de San Clemente who arranged for an audience with the emperor, not an easy feat, but the meeting, on September 3, 1584, was not a success, possibly because Dee, too self-assured, indulged in prophecies of a new age and the defeat of the Turks if only Rudolf would mend his sinful ways; even a subsequent letter addressed to the emperor hinting at the succ
ess of occult experimentation and the transmutation of metals did not entirely convince Rudolf, who appointed a senior secretary to find out more about the English visitor. Dee was quick to endear himself to the emperor’s trusted physician, Hájek, but papal diplomats persuaded the court to expel the English gentlemen from Prague and Bohemia; the emperor signed the required mandate.

  Dee and Kelley were saved from further wanderings in Germany and elsewhere by the southern Bohemian Vilém of Rožmberk, who protected them at his residence of Tebo, where they went on with their experiments. The foreign correspondents watching from Prague were astonished at the monies Vilém of Rožmberk invested, and wild rumors circulated about Dee’s crystal ball and his famous black mirror, made of a polished stone brought from Aztec Mexico, with which he claimed to look into the future (the crystal ball and the mirror are loyally preserved at the British Museum). However, Dee and Kelley began to fight, as Kelley did not want to go on translating angelic messages, all in numerical code. Dee could not do without him, and he finally submitted to Kelley’s blackmail and signed a formal statement, on May 3, 1587, declaring that they would own everything in common, as the angels required of them, including their wives. Fortunately, Queen Elizabeth requested Dee’s return to England, and he left Bohemia, where his intellectual importance has never been recognized.

  After the departure of Dee, Kelley (totally unburdened by scholarly seriousness) dominated occult studies both in Rožmberk’s Tebo and in Rudolf’s Prague, and went, at least for a while, from success to success. He seems to have convinced his protectors of the efficacy of his tinctures, acquired Bohemian citizenship, and was knighted by the emperor, accepting the title “de Imany,” referring to his alleged distant Irish forebears. He married a rich and well-educated Czech woman who gave him, apart from her opulent dowry, a daughter and a son; soon his brother arrived from England and married a rich Czech girl too. From his Rožmberk protector Kelley received, in 1590, the burgh of Libeice, the estate of Nová Libe, and about nine villages, peasants included; from his Czech dowry he bought a brewery, a mill, and a dozen houses at Jílové, well known for its gold mining, and two stately houses in the New Town of Prague, one of them not far from the Monastery of the Slavs. The home was famous in Prague as “Faust’s house”—though Faust never resided there. Kelley did, and later, in the enlightened eighteenth century, the home was owned by Mladota of Solopisky, the last Czech alchemist.

  Kelley was his own worst enemy. The emperor had strictly forbidden dueling (what duels there were usually took place on the hospital fields, outside the Poí Gate), but hot-blooded Kelley killed an officer in a duel, was intercepted by imperial agents while trying to escape to southern Bohemia, and imprisoned at Kivoklát Castle. Rudolf’s agents were ready to question him, under torture, about his tinctures, the drink of eternal youth, and the strange numbers in symmetric arrangements found among his papers (the results of the angelic séances, now at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford). He tried to escape but fell from the window and shattered his leg on the rocks below; when he was released for medical treatment, he had to borrow money to survive. In 1596, Emperor Rudolf renewed the mandate against him, and Kelley was imprisoned at the castle Most (Brüx), in northern Bohemia. Again he wanted to escape, but the cripple (the leg had been amputated) took another fall from on high, possibly into the carriage in which his son wanted to spirit him away, and he hurt his other leg. Facing a long prison sentence, perhaps for life, he took poison (he was a trained apothecary) and died. It is a matter of historical record that his unfortunate family was deprived of all property, and his son John Adam was last heard of in Most twenty years later, when he made himself a public nuisance.

  But there were others. Among Kelley’s guests in Bohemia was the Polish alchemist Michael Sedziwój, or Sendivogius, who impressed his contemporaries as a man of integrity, though he accumulated enormous debts for which he was imprisoned when he could not pay. Kelley tried to keep him in the provinces in order to have the Prague scene for himself, but Sendivogius, who gave himself the air of belonging to a noble family, traveled a good deal between Cracow and Prague and, in the name of alchemy, explored the chemical properties of sulfur and mercury; the scientific results were published from his papers. Emperor Rudolf liked him and made him a Hofrat; when Sendivogius, on one of his trips from Prague to Poland, was ambushed by an importunate Moravian knight who wanted to know how to make gold, the emperor imposed a heavy fine on the eager Moravian. Sendivogius much suffered from the envy of his German competitors, but he remained employed by Ferdinand II and probably died in Poland in 1636. His Novum Lumen Chymicum (The New Alchemical Light) was in its twelfth edition as late as 1702.

  The “Golden Age” of Prague’s Jewish Community: Rabbi Judah Loew and His Golem; Jewish Tradition and the New Sciences

  Prague’s Jewish community in the mid-sixteenth century, caught between the interests of the Estates and those of the king, again faced near extinction but within a generation consolidated its economic energy and intellectual power, and in the last decade of the century entered on what was called its “Golden Age.” King Ferdinand I had been educated at the Spanish court shortly before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, but the Bohemian Estates, fearing competition, were far more eager to get rid of the Jews than he. In the 1530s and 1540s, the Prague citizens, especially of the well-to-do Old Town, were less than tolerant, and Christian merchants and craftsmen busily accused the Jews of illegally dealing with coins, spying for the Turks, and being responsible for the fire of 1541 which destroyed much of the Minor Town and Hradany, including the state archives (the Estates needed the ancient documents there to defend their old privileges against the king). Under torture, a Jew arrested on charges of arson confessed to the crime; during the spring session of 1541 the Estates demanded the immediate expulsion of the Jews from Bohemia, and pogroms spread through the countryside. They were barely avoided in Prague, and the king ultimately granted the demands of the Estates. Jews had to leave immediately.

  Many Jews went to Poland and others settled in nearby Moravia under the protection of the local gentry, who felt independent of Prague or Vienna. It was a time of brutal trouble; many Jews were robbed on their way by villagers, or killed by soldiers accompanying them to the frontiers. Yet economic considerations prevailed again: important Jewish families received letters of exemption enabling them to order their business affairs, while others were allowed, for the same reasons, to return to Prague at least for a short time. To the despair of many, letters of exemption were bought at high prices, but the Hapsburgs’ economic needs in their war against the German Protestants forced the king within a few years to rescind the expulsion mandate, at least for the few Jews still living in Prague and in the country; Jewish merchants were important for delivering provisions for the armies. The king reversed himself once again as soon as economic pressure ceased. Mordecai Zemach Kohen, publisher and Jewish community leader, courageously went directly to Rome at the head of a Prague delegation to ask Pope Pius IV to intervene (he did, in a way), but legal uncertainties continued for years after the death of Ferdinand I.

  Finally, on April 4, 1567, Maximilian II, Ferdinand’s son, revoked all the expulsion orders, confirmed the Jews’ ancient privileges in Bohemia, and on a cloudless summer day of 1571 walked “in all his glory and power,” accompanied by his wife, Maria (daughter of Emperor Charles V), and the nobles of the realm, “through the jubilant streets of the Jewish Town of Prague to show his royal favor.” The Jewish privileges were also confirmed by Rudolf II in 1577 and by his brother Matthias in 1611. Rudolf also protected the self-rule of the Jewish Town by a number of legal measures: he made it incumbent on the imperial judge, not the Prague town authorities, to function as highest legal adviser in Jewish matters, exempted the Jews from paying fees to the townships (rather than to the crown), and went on to protect the community against continuing attacks by the Christian guilds. In his time eight to ten thousand people may have resided in the Jewish quarter, mor
e than ever before, and it was proudly praised as “the mother-in-Israel,” the most populous Jewish community in the Diaspora.

  The richest and most eminent man of Prague’s Jewish community was Mordecai Maisel, and many fairy tales were told about the magical origins of his wealth. Maisel came from an old Prague family that had resided in the Jewish Town for two centuries or more, and he was deeply concerned with the well-being of all its members; politically skilled and with excellent contacts at court and internationally, he did much to consolidate community developments after 1567, and we are told that his residence in Prague attracted many other Jewish families to settle there again.