by Leo Ruickbie
The propaganda machine was soon cranking out its version of events to excuse Charles V from the horrors of the sack. Alfonso de Valdés in his Dialogue put all the weight of condemnation on the Pope, whilst portraying Charles as dutifully defending his subjects against a despicable warmonger.
When Charles V visited the city after its conquest, the Via Sacra through the ruins of the ancient forum was repaved to facilitate his triumphal entry to the Capitol in time-honoured tradition. It may have been Charles V’s crowning victory, but it marked the end of the Renaissance in Italy.21
Bicocca in 1522, Sesia in 1524, Pavia in 1525, Rome in 1527 – these were the victories to which Faustus alluded. Pavia was the defining moment – two giants locking horns – whilst the sack of Rome was like the squashing of a cockroach, unpleasant and infinitely less heroic. Taken together, these four battles between the foremost powers of Europe represented a great accomplishment for any magician to claim – a bold assertion, but, being unverifiable, a safe one too. It could only have been made later, when he returned from the fighting (supposing that he did in fact go to Italy). Between 1522 and 1527 he may have come and gone in Italy, following the ebb and flow of the Landsknechte moving between battlefield and wheatfield, and the inner call of the habituated wanderlust of the travelling scholar.
There were still more victories to win in Italy, still more trophies Faustus could claim with his magic. However, we have a handful of references to suggest that he was elsewhere than Italy after 1527.
14
On the Road to Exile (1527–1528)
The Sack of Rome cast a heavy pall across Europe. Even Lutherans like Melanchthon regretted the indiscriminate mayhem of the philistine soldiery. Leonardo da Vinci had spoken prophetically when he wrote that ‘Creatures shall be seen upon the earth who will always be fighting one with another with very great losses and frequent deaths on either side.’1 The cannon smoke had hardly cleared when France and England allied themselves against Charles V and declared war. Three months later, Odet de Foix was leading yet another army into the Milanese. As if she was not troubled enough, a typhus epidemic was ravaging Italy that by the end of the year would claim tens of thousands of lives. While the European powers resumed their old games, the armies of Suleiman the Magnificent were gathering for the final assault on Christendom.
It was witchcraft and magic that was epidemic in Germany. Another victim was burned in Waldsee – the fourth in a witch-hunt that would send more than forty-three people from Waldsee to prison or more often the flames in the course of the sixteenth century. The Visitation of the Saxon Church (1527–8) had uncovered the ecclesiastical underworld that produced and harboured such works as Codex 849. As Luther would angrily recall in 1543, the Visitation had found a large number of books of magic in the possession of village pastors and churchwardens with such ‘evils’ inscribed in them as the Tetragrammaton and prayers in Hebrew.
Around this time another of those curious Faustian manuals was claimed to have been produced. Butler called it Praxis Magica Faustiana and gave it a date of 1527 or 1577 and its place of publication as Passau, but said no more about it. Her source was Johannes Scheible’s extraordinary collection and this is undoubtedly the same document called Praxis Magica Fausti of 1571 that Scheible published in 1847. In 1875 a Major Herbert Irwin translated the work into English but did not publish it – a situation that continued up until the late twentieth century. The occult scholar A.E. Waite (1857–1942) acquired Irwin’s manuscript and briefly described it in The Book of Ceremonial Magic in 1911. In 1924 it fell into the hands of the lawyer John G. White (1845–1928) who finally bequeathed it to the Cleveland Public Library in Ohio where it remains to this day.
On stylistic grounds Waite thought that it was probably composed in the seventeenth century. The claim appearing in the work to have come from an original manuscript in the Municipal Library of Weimar is disputed by Waite on the grounds that there was no Municipal Library in Weimar in 1571. It cannot be ruled out that there was some sort of library existing at this time, but the word ‘municipal’ is entirely misleading.
The whole was pithily summed up by Waite as consisting of ‘a few curious plates … and a few unintelligible conjurations, all exceedingly brief.’2 The entire ritual is directed towards the invocation of a spirit called Rumoar – a new addition to the Faustian pantheon. We do not find him in the so-called Black Raven attributed to Faustus, nor do we find this spirit listed by Wierus in his Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. The spirit is placed under the jurisdiction of Lucifer, but from the ritual it is not clear what the conjurer expects from him and no hints as to his character or sphere of influence are given. Like most of these rituals, its frame of reference is Judaeo-Christian, with God, Jesus and the Tetragrammaton invoked to command the spirit.
It is unlikely that Faustus ever wasted his time in composing such a thing, but we readily see how the name of Faustus became popular among the compilers and peddlers of dubious black magic rituals in the centuries that followed.
If 1528 was a dark year for Europe and the Empire, the stars were not favourable for Faustus either. In 1528 he was destined to be maligned and thrown out of one of the principal cities of Bavaria, but only after he had revealed some astonishing new information about himself. First, however, a mysterious letter from Agrippa suggests that he may have spent early 1528 in Paris.
The School of Wickednesses (1528)
The Ancients were wont to brand notorious folly with this proverb, viz. To bring Owls to Athens: but it is not a part of less folly, but of most great impiety, to send devils to hell. You know what I call hell, viz. that School of wickednesses.3
So the indignant occultist Agrippa wrote from Paris on 13 February 1528. The letter was written to ‘a certain friend of the King’s Court’ who has been tentatively identified as the French royal physician Jean Chapelain.4 It was a certain member of that ‘school of wickednesses’ that had roused Agrippa’s ire, a member, who although unnamed, is often identified as Faustus.5
Agrippa had been in Paris since January that year, trying to extricate himself from royal service and secure papers and a military escort to the border with the Low Countries. Travelling north from Lyon where he had left his family, Agrippa, impecunious and desperate, was trying to reach Antwerp and a new life. However, he still found time to associate with a circle of men interested in the occult and was evidently hanging on news of events at court. In his letter he said that ‘there was sent for out of Germany with no small charges a certain master of Spirits, that is a Necromancer, who possesseth a power over spirits.’6
The connection with Faustus is tenuous. The only clues are that this magician comes from Germany and makes extravagant claims. His identification as a necromancer stands in favour of the argument. Faustus had after all declared himself to be the source of necromancy. But there must have been other necromancers in Germany at that time besides Faustus – Agrippa himself was thought to have been one of them.
Paris, the city Balzac called ‘the ante-chamber to hell’, had a long history of association with the dark arts.7 One thinks of the notorious Chambre Ardente affair of the seventeenth century, but Parisian diabolism extends still further back. William of Auvergne claimed to have seen forbidden books of necromancy when he was a student in Paris in the early thirteenth century. Some years later in 1277 the Archbishop of Paris officially condemned all necromantic writings. A hundred years on, the University of Paris showed a similar inclination in declaring all witchcraft to be heresy. There was a strong interest in the problem of witchcraft. At least two editions of the Malleus Maleficarum had recently been published in Paris by the printer Jehan Petit (around 1507 and 1510) and another by Joanne Parvo in 1517.
But the talk in Paris would have been of the recent eruption of demonic possession at the convent of St Pierre in Lyon. A bishop and three priests had been called in to exorcise the cloister, running the demon to earth in a nun, Sister Alexis de Thesieux, whence they finally returned the spiri
t to hell. A dramatic account was published by Adrien de Montalembert in Paris in 1528. It was a story to discuss in context with the trial and execution for witchcraft of Catherine Peyretonne at Montpezat in 1519 and the two cases of lycanthropy and cannibalism investigated at Besançon in 1521.
Although Agrippa was writing from Paris, in 1528 the royal court was some nineteen kilometres up the Seine at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Robert de la Marck described it vaguely as ‘a very fine château five leagues from Paris, with a fine park in a fine hunting forest’.8 Unlike many other more occasional residences it was permanently furnished and a favoured winter retreat. It was another medieval fortress that would be remodelled by François’s Loire architect Pierre de Chambiges, and in 1528 work had already begun.
Having perhaps only heard the name of this king until now, Faustus – we shall assume it was he – now met him face to face. François prided himself on his accessibility. His personality was like that of his totem animal, the heraldic salamander, politically slippery and emotionally fiery. Jean Clouet the Younger’s famous portrait of around 1530 shows us narrow, self-satisfied eyes above a long, crooked nose. It was a nose to challenge the jib of Charles V’s Habsburg chin. The eyebrows arch superciliously, the small lips reject any hint of a smile, yet do not quite develop into a sneer. His costume is extravagant. His sleeves are puffed out to such an extent that they grossly distort the shape of his upper torso, giving him the shoulders of Hercules, an exaggeration which has the unfortunate consequence of making his head look disproportionately small.
What would this king have made of Faustus? Did he see in him a new Jambres, as the Devil saw in Cyprian? The ‘James and Jambres’ that Agrippa alluded to in his letter were the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres (or Mambres) who contested Moses and Aaron as related in the New Testament (2 Tim. 3:8). Agrippa suggested as much when he said ‘as James and Jambres resisted Moses, so he should oppose Cæsar – Caesar being Charles V in this context. François was not looking for parlour tricks and fairground hokum, but news of ‘all things to come’ and an insight into ‘all secret counsels’, according to Agrippa. This reminds us of the sorts of claims Trithemius was making for his steganography all those years before. Had Faustus acquired a copy of this precious manuscript or developed similar techniques of his own?
There was much going on in the world that François would have been desirous to learn. On 17 February 1528, just a few days after Agrippa’s letter, the Imperial army left Rome under the command of Philibert de Châlon, Prince of Orange – after making sure that they had taken all that was valuable – and was moving to counter de Foix who had so far been successful in taking Alessandria and Pavia, but had bypassed Milan to march straight for the prize, Rome. Imperial losses had been slight in taking Rome, but little more than half, about 11,000 men, marched out again – presumably the others were busy hauling their loot home. De Foix enjoyed a numerical advantage and so François surely hoped that here was another opportunity to defeat Charles once and for all.
Did Faustus use his magic to divine what Philibert de Châlon’s secret counsels were? He would have seen that in the coming months Prince Philibert would be helplessly besieged in Naples while the relief force coming down from Germany would be emasculated once again by lack of funds, but not only that. When the bills finally arrived there was no one to cash them and still less to buy, so depleted was the country. Nevertheless, François’s designs on Italy would be dashed within little more than a year.
Beyond merely showing the future, Faustus may have been claiming to be able to influence it. In his letter Agrippa talked of ‘mountains full of horsemen’ and ‘fiery Chariots’ with reference to Elisha in Dotham (Dothan) from 2 Kings 6:13–17. The besieged prophet Elisha prayed to his God ‘and behold, the mountain [was] full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha’. Such astonishing feats were certainly within the scope of current magical manuals, so it would not have been at all impossible for Faustus to have made such a claim. He may have taken the opportunity to inform the French king – as he had apparently informed Melanchthon – that all the victories that had been won in Italy were down to his occult intercession.
As well as mentioning the Siege of Pavia, there is also another clear reference to contemporary events in the letter. Agrippa stated that this magician claimed ‘he could bring back the King’s children through the air’. As we know, François’s two eldest sons were still in hock to Charles after he had reneged on his word of honour given in Madrid. The heir-apparent François (1518–1536) and his brother, the future king of France, Henri (1519–1559), returned home not through the air by magic in 1528, but by treaty and the promise of two million crowns in ransom in 1529.
Agrippa said that this necromancer claimed to be able to ‘fetch up the treasures of the earth’ – claims that would not have fallen on deaf ears given the extraordinary outlays in expenditure that the Italian campaign was costing François. Expertise in love magic was also hinted at, which would have warmed François’s womanising heart – a proclivity said to have been belied by that pendulous nose. Finally, Agrippa’s reference to this necromancer claiming to be able to ‘cure all desperate diseases’, although universally useful, was again particularly apt. François was widely rumoured to have syphilis. The story went that he had been deliberately infected by the jealous husband of one of his mistresses, passing it on to him through her. Paracelsus, that other Faustus, turned his fickle genius to the problem, so why not Faustus himself?
Of course Faustus visited Paris in the Faustbook, but his trip was fleeting and unverifiable. He apparently ‘liked well the Academy’, but the University of Paris would not have cared for Faustus, given what we know of its conservatism and earlier condemnation of Reuchlin.9 Agrippa used the excuse of the appearance of this unnamed necromancer to decry what he saw as the decadence of the royal courtiers who ‘run to the invocations of evil spirits’.10
Whatever François made of this necromancer’s claims, his courtiers at least seemed to have thought highly of him and been eager for his audience. Agrippa painted the ‘school of wickednesses’ in the blackest of colours. Its members were nothing short of Satanists, abandoning their faith in God and believing this magician able to command all things.
Agrippa, of course, needed to add an escape clause for himself or run the danger of being damned by his own words. He affirmed that there were ‘Occult Ingenuities’ that did not offend God and could deliver a whole host of benefits to health, wealth and wisdom.11 But for all of the ‘school of wickednesses’ and their supporters, Agrippa prophesied damnation.
Agrippa went on at length to recount how the ‘wicked’ shall ‘gnash their teeth’ and so on, but he had made his point.12 The tone of this diatribe against the ‘German Sorcerer’ is reminiscent of his sometime master Trithemius’s own invective against Faustus, which perhaps gives us another clue to the identity of the unnamed necromancer. There is also an element of sour grapes here. Reading between the lines, Agrippa was annoyed that a competitor had won the position and no doubt coveted some of the largesse that accommodated those ‘no small charges’.
At the time he wrote this letter, Agrippa had been out of royal favour for two years. Religiously he was too much of a radical and his political scheming contributed to make him persona non grata. Ostensibly, his decline can be charted from the offence he gave to Louise de Savoie, the Queen Mother, after refusing to draw up a horoscope for François at her request. He may have done so to avoid being the bearer of bad news. He wrote to Seneschal Bohier that the stars favoured, not François, but the Duke of Bourbon. Furthermore, Claude Bellievre recorded that sometime in May 1527, Agrippa had said that the malign influence of the heavens would kill the king within six months.13 Prophecy of the monarch’s death could be construed as constructive treason. Although François had outlived those six months by the time Faustus supposedly arrived, he may have wanted a second opinion. He may even have heard of Virdung’s gloomy prophesy for his pr
edecessor Louis XII and welcomed the chance to discuss its apparent accuracy with one of his colleagues.
After Agrippa’s cryptic letter we briefly lose sight of Faustus again. The next year, 1529, Agrippa was attached to the court of Margaret of Austria after turning down impressive offers from Henry VIII and the Imperial Chancellor Mercurino Gattinara, and wrote no more letters about expensive German magicians. The next reference appears four months later and almost 800 kilometres away.
The Meteorological Monk
The name Faustus curiously appears in the meteorological notebook of a monk. It seems so incongruous: a monk interested in science receiving a call from a necromancer. But this monk, called Kilian Leib, did indeed record in his journal some fragments of a conversation he had had with Faustus on 5 June 1528. Was Leib referring to a letter from or about Faustus, a conversation with someone else about Faustus, or was Faustus with him in person? Events later in the month point to the two having met.
Kilian Leib was the prior of the monastery of Rebdorf near Eichstätt, to the north of the Danube in Bavaria. From Eichstätt one passes by the formidable fortress of Willibaldsburg looming from a nearby bluff overlooking the river to find the monastery sitting directly alongside the road in the Altmühltal nature park. Now home to the Knabenrealschule Rebdorf, it is a stout, regular building, punctuated by the double spires of the church.
Rebdorf lies in the Diocese of Eichstätt, which was founded by St Boniface in the eighth century CE. The Bishopric of Eichstätt was a powerful position, controlling not only Rebdorf but also Ingolstadt. Like other German principalities in the thirteenth century, the Bishopric of Eichstätt was granted sovereignty and emerged in the fourteenth century as the independent ruler of a territory that at one time encompassed over 700 square kilometres and 56,000 subjects. In the sixteenth century the von Huttens also exercised some power here. When Faustus was there, Gabriel von Eyb (1496–1535) presided as Bishop, to be succeeded in 1539 by Moritz von Hutten (1503–1552).
