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'44 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. There was worse to come when, in June, Barbara died of fever. Despite his genuine grief for this woman who had shared so many of life's vicissitudes, Kepler married again, a little more happily this time, although the children of his second marriage were also to die, as his and Barbara's had. Then, in 1615, a charge of witchcraft was brought against his mother, and he spent the next six years - yes, six years - engaged in her legal defence. He got her off, but she died a few months later. Through all these trials and troubles Kepler never ceased to work at astronomy. As the world around him collapsed into the disorder and horror of religious warfare, he became more and more obsessed with the quest for celestial harmony, turning now, as a true Pythagorean, to music as a model. On May 15th, 1618, completing the final stages of one of his key books, the Harmonice mundi, he discovered the third law of planetary motion, the 'harmonic law', defining the relationship between the orbits of the planets and their distances from the sun. He was exultant, and at the end of the Harmonice composed a paean of gratitude to his God: 'O You who by the light of nature arouse in us a longing for the light of grace . . . I give thanks to You, Lord Creator . . .'
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, Jaroslav z Martinic and Vi-lem 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.45 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.'46 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.'47 Elizabeth was a young woman of wide learning,48 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 Habs-burgs, 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 sup port 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 - Brahe's Scandinavian heart would have swelled with justly vindictive pride - 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, condemning him to the inferno: Tn ignem aeternum, in ignem aeter-numl'
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 - once again Tycho in his grave must have bridled with satisfaction and who was almost as strong a believer in the influence of the stars on the fortunes of men as the Emperor Rudolf had been. Wallenstein lured Kepler to Sagan in 1628 with the promise of a house and a grant of 1,000 florins a year, as well as a printing press on which he might publish his own books, in return for which rewards Kepler would act as the general's official astrologer. The printing press was particularly welcome, as publishing was more difficult than ever in those years of endless war, and Kepler had a pet project - his last, as it happened - that he was determined to put into print. This was Somnium, the world's first work of science fiction, a twenty-eight-page fantasy of a trip to the Moon. In it, the narrator visits Uraniborg and learns Danish in order to communicate with Tycho and his assistants, after which he travels to the Moon and gives an account of how the Earth and the planets appear from a lunar perspective.
Somnium was an unintentionally prophetic title. Printing of the book was still under way in October 1630 when Kepler set out on his last, brief wanderings. From Sagan he travelled 450 kilometres south to Linz - surely stopping off at Prague - in a vain effort to collect back pay from his teaching post there. From Linz he rode nearly the same distance north again all the way to Leipzig to sell his wares at the autumn book fair in the city. He had shipp
ed ahead nearly 150 of his own books, including sixteen copies of the Tabulae Rudolphinae, which, despite Tengna-gel's attempt to take them over, Kepler had finally completed in 1624; they were, as later scientific scholars have attested, a miracle of thoroughness and accuracy, and in them Kepler paid due regard to the man who had made them possible, Tycho Brahe. When the fair was over Kepler rode another three hundred kilometres south to Regensburg, where the Diet was meeting to settle the succession of the Emperor Ferdinand's son, another Ferdinand, who had conspired to depose Kepler's patron Wallenstein from command of the imperial armies. Kepler hoped to beard the Emperor and extract from him monies that were still owing to him as Imperial Mathematician, a title which he still held, worthless though it was. He arrived in Regensburg on November 2nd, riding a broken-down nag, and lodged at the house of an old friend, Hillebrand Billig. There he fell into a fever, and died two weeks later. He was a month short of his sixtieth birthday. He had already prepared his own epitaph, which, like everything this endearing, bizarre and prodigiously gifted creature wrote about himself, contains a hint of amusement and self-mockery:
I measured the heavens, now the earth's shadows I
measure.
Skybound my mind, earthbound my body rests.
18 When as an adult Tycho was at last told by his mother that he had a dead twin brother he seems to have been deeply affected, and wrote a Latin poem which he set in the mouth of the dead child, who looked down on the living mortal with compassion: He dwells on earth, while I dwell on Olympus.
19 Johannes Kepler's mother was branded a witch, for little more than the peddling of herbal remedies.
20 I could try to explain angular separation, degrees and minutes of arc, etc., but it would be confusing for you and tedious for me; besides, I am not as sure of my grasp of these matters as I like to pretend. Those thirsting for knowledge might consult Appendix 1 of Kitty Ferguson's book The Nobleman and His Housedog, which provides a brief and not unclear explication of these matters.
21 Not as generous a tribute as it sounds: most Newton scholars now accept that he was aiming a cruel gibe at his rival Robert Hooke, an undersized hunchback.
22 Before Kepler, all that was required of astronomers was that any planetary theory they propounded should 'save the phenomena', as the phrase had it - i.e., the theory was sound so long as it accounted for the movements of the planets as recorded from earth, and was not expected to be a picture of how things are in reality. 'Although it would be incorrect to say that people like Ptolemy and Copernicus never pondered such causal questions, their primary concern was to describe and predict where heavenly bodies were positioned and the patterns of their movements, not to answer what caused them to be where they were and to move in certain patterns and at certain speeds and distances.' (Ferguson, The Nobleman and His Housedog)
23 The inn no longer exists, but the first house on the street is called The Golden Griffin. Next door is The Golden Pear restaurant - also on Novy are The Golden Lamb and The Golden Tree. The Golden Griffin house bears an interesting inscription (in Czech): 'In the year of our Lord MDCCCI a memorial plaque in honour of the famous Dane Tycho Brahe, imperial mathematician and astrologer, was erected at the expense of the municipality of Prague on this house, known of old as U zlateho noha (The Golden Griffin). Brahe resided in this house in the year MDC and on 24th October MDCI died in a house which stood on the site of what is now the Palace.' Enquiries at The Golden Pear were met with a denial that The Golden Griffin next door had ever been an inn, but someone seemed to remember that there had once been a restaurant of that name down on Nerudova Street. Everything shifts, in magic Prague. 24 In 1592, this Rosenkrantz, along with another Brahe cousin, Knud Gyldenstierne, travelled on a diplomatic mission to London, where they must surely have encountered one of the leading English dramatists of the day . . .
25 Yet Dee should not be underestimated, or regarded in the same light as Kelley. In his book Rudolf II and His World, RJ.W. Evans, drawing on a number of scholarly studies as well as his own research, takes Dee very seriously indeed. 'Dee's broad metaphysical position,' Evans writes, 'was characteristic of an intellectual of his time: he believed in the theory of the microcosm, in hidden forces underlying the visible world, in cosmic harmony. His views led him . . . to advanced astronomical speculations. At the same time he believed . . . that access to these mysteries could be achieved through such things as symbols, intellectual 'keys', and combinations . . . [T]here is no doubt that Dee felt the spirit world to be a full reality. Whatever the origin of the messages which it communicated to him, Dee believed them unwaveringly, and when set against the contemporary mood of intellectual striving the schemes of universal reform and regeneration which he derived from his seances grow much more comprehensible.' (Rudolf II and His World, p. 219) Evans is an indulgent judge, and makes a case even for Kelley, noting the high esteem in which he was held by many of his contemporaries, not all of them fools.
26 In Magic Prague Ripellino is fascinating on the subject of Faust: 'According to legend, which made the Czech Romantics swell with pride, Faust was a Czech who practised the black arts, that is, necromancy and printing. His name was that is, Happy, that is, Faustus. During the Hussite Revolt he emigrated to Germany, where he took the name Faust von Kuttenberg after the town of his birth (Kutna Hora in Czech). In other words, he was none other than Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press . . . In Czech folk puppet plays, the pimprlata theatre, Faust is the more conventional figure of the even if, when conjuring up 'Alexander the Great with the cloak of a Czech duke and the fair Helen in Turkish dress' at the court in Lisbon, he comes dangerously close to the Czech Punch by name - who mistakes devils for owls.' {Magic Prague, p. 97)
27 Kelley was not the worst, and not even the most extravagant, of the mountebanks to take advantage of Rudolf's, and Prague's, gullibility. There was Mamugna of Famagosta, a Greek masquerading as the son of the Venetian Marco Antonio Bragadin, who had been flayed alive by the Turks during the siege of Famagusta. Mamugna arrived in Prague during Kelley's reign, accompanied by two enormous, black, satanic mastiffs. He had a brief success in the city, winkling much gold out of the Prague grandees. In 1591 he was unmasked as an imposter and fled to Munich, but found no sanctuary there, for he was hanged on a gilt gallows and buried in a pauper's grave along with the carcasses of his dogs. The Italian adventurer Geronimo Scotta appeared in Prague in the summer of 1590 with no fewer than three red velvet carriages drawn by forty horses. He was a skilled conman, whose speciality was contracting rich marriages and then absconding with the dowries. He quickly found his way into Rudolf's favour, but Kelley, who could spot a fellow rogue a mile off, soon proved his undoing, and Scotta ended up selling stag-horn jelly and vitriol of Mars from a booth in the Old Town Square. (Evans, in his book on Rudolfine Prague, speculates that in fact Kelley and Scotta, or Scotto, may have been one and the same person.) None of these crooks, however, was as outrageous as Michael Sendivogius, a Polish sorcerer, and his henchman, the mysterious Alexander Seton, a Scot known as the Cosmopolitan, who performed magic spells with the aid of an unidentified red powder. The pair are too much larger than life to be dealt with in a mere footnote. (Ripellino is splendidly entertaining on the scores of rogues who plagued the credulous Rudolf.) Seton died in Dresden after Sendivogius had sprung him from imprisonment at Konigstein Castle, where he had been tortured in a vain effort to make him reveal the formula for his magic red powder. Sendivogius himself was hanged in Stuttgart, like Mamugna on a gilt gallows, magnificently dressed in a gold-sequined suit.
28 Rumours have persisted down the ages, entertained by Ripellino and others but discounted by such authorities as Evans and Frances Yates, that Dee and Kelley were agents sent to Prague by Elizabeth or her wily Chief Secretary Sir William Cecil to seek Bohemian help in England's struggles with Spain, or else to work at preventing a Habsburg seizure of the Polish crown. Ripellino the romantic rubs his hands, of course, at the notion that the two might have been
spies - 'spooks' is here the mot juste - declaring that 'it would mean that the whole business of mirrors, omens and archangels was simply a camouflage for political intrigues and the diary in which Dee recorded his conversations with the heavenly messengers a cover or memorandum in code.'
29 Benatky Castle has been turned into a small, not very well appointed museum, run by an extremely charming and helpful staff. When I visited the place in the 1990s I was the only visitor. I stood in the echoing rooms trying to feel the lingering presence of the Dane, but no ghosts walked, that day.
30 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for preaching the Copernican doctrine.
31 According to quantum physics, He does.
32 Ahem. John Banville, Kepler, a novel (London, 1981).
33 The finest Romanesque survival is the Basilica of St George, after St Vitus's the largest church within the Castle complex. The Cistercians arrived there in the 13th century and brought a French influence to the city's architecture, still to be seen in St Agnes's Convent, founded by the sister of Wenceslas I, on U milosrdnych in Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter. It was abolished as a convent in 1782, but was restored in the 1960s and now houses a collection of nineteenth-century Czech art from the National Gallery. Don't say I do not give practical advice.
34At the age of twenty-six Kepler had written this half-serious, third-person description of himself: 'That man has in every way a dog-like nature. His appearance is that of a little house dog. His body is agile, wiry, and well-proportioned. Even his appetites were the same: he liked gnawing bones and dry crusts of bread, and was so greedy that whatever his eyes chanced on he grabbed; yet, like a dog, he drinks little and is content with the simplest food. His habits also were like those of a house dog . . . He was constantly on the move, digging among the sciences, politics, and private affairs, even the most trivial kind; always following someone else, imitating his thoughts and actions. He is impatient with conversation but greets visitors just like a dog; yet when the smallest thing is snatched away from him he flares up and growls. He tenaciously persecutes wrongdoers - that is, he barks at them. He is malicious and bites people with his sarcasms. He hates many people exceedingly and they avoid him, but his masters are fond of him. He has a dog-like horror of baths, tinctures and lotions.'
Prague Pictures Page 13
