Rudolf II ( 18 July 1552 – 20 January 1612),
Holy Roman Emperor as Rudolf II
(1576-1612),
King of Hungary as
Rudolf (1572-1608),
King of Bohemia
as Rudolf II (1575-1608/1611) and
Archduke of Austria as Rudolf V
(1576-1608). He was a member of the
Habsburg family.
Rudolf's legacy has traditionally been viewed in three ways: an
ineffectual ruler whose mistakes led directly to the
Thirty Years' War; a great and influential
patron of
Northern Mannerist art;
and a devotee of occult arts and learning which helped seed the
scientific revolution.
Biography
Archduke Rudolf
Rudolf was
born in Vienna
on 18 July
1552. He was the eldest son and successor of
Maximilian II,
Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, and
King of Hungary
; his mother
was Maria of Spain, a daughter of
Charles V and Isabella of Portugal.
Rudolf spent eight formative years, from age 11 to 19 (1563-1571),
in Spain, at the court of his maternal uncle
Phillip II. After his return to Vienna,
his father was concerned about Rudolf's aloof and stiff manner,
typical of the more conservative Spanish court, rather than the
more relaxed and open Austrian court; but his Spanish mother saw in
him courtliness and refinement. Rudolf would remain for the rest of
his life reserved, secretive, and largely a homebody who did not
like to travel or even partake in the daily affairs of state. He
was more intrigued by occult learning such as astrology and
alchemy, which was mainstream in the Renaissance period, and had a
wide variety of personal hobbies such as horses, clocks, collecting
rarities, and being a patron of the arts. He suffered from periodic
bouts of "
melancholy" (depression), which
was common in the
Habsburg line. These
became worse with age, and were manifested by a withdrawal from the
world and its affairs into his private interests.
Like his contemporary,
Elizabeth
I of England, Rudolf dangled himself as a prize in a string of
diplomatic negotiations for marriages, but never in fact married.
It has been proposed by
A. L. Rowse that he was
homosexual. During his periods of
self-imposed isolation, Rudolf reportedly had affairs with his
court chamberlain, Wolfgang von Rumpf, and a series of valets. One
of these, Philip Lang, ruled him for years and was hated by those
seeking favor with the emperor. Rudolf was known, in addition, to
have had a succession of affairs with women, some of whom claimed
to have been impregnated by him. Many artworks commissioned by
Rudolf are unusually erotic. The emperor was the subject of a
whispering campaign by his enemies in his family and the church in
the years before he was deposed. Sexual allegations may well have
formed a part of the campaign against him.
Historians have traditionally blamed Rudolf's preoccupation with
the arts, occult sciences, and other personal interests as the
reason for the political disasters of his reign. More recently
historians have re-evaluated this view and see his patronage of the
arts and occult sciences as a triumph and key part of the
Renaissance, while his political failures are seen as a legitimate
attempt to create a unified Christian empire, which was undermined
by the realities of religious, political and intellectual
disintegrations of the time.
Although raised in his uncle's Catholic court in Spain, Rudolf was
tolerant of Protestantism and other religions including Judaism. He
largely withdrew from Catholic observances, even in death denying
last sacramental rites. He had little attachment to Protestants
either, except as counter-weight to repressive Papal policies. He
put his primary support behind
conciliarists,
irenicists and
humanists.
When the papacy instigated the
Counter-Reformation, using agents sent
to his court, Rudolf backed those who he thought were the most
neutral in the debate, not taking a side or trying to effect
restraint, thus leading to political chaos and threatening to
provoke civil war.
His conflict with the
Ottoman Turks
was the final cause of his undoing. Unwilling to compromise with
the Turks, and stubbornly determined that he could unify all of
Christendom with a new
Crusade, he started a
long and indecisive war with the Turks in 1593. This war lasted
till 1606, and was known as "
The
Long War". By 1604 his Hungarian subjects were exhausted by the
war and revolted, led by
Stephen
Bocskay. In 1605 Rudolf was forced by his other family members
to cede control of Hungarian affairs to his younger brother
Archduke Matthias.
Matthias by 1606 forged a difficult peace with the Hungarian rebels
(
Peace of Vienna) and the
Turks (
Peace of Zsitvatorok).
Rudolf was angry with his brother's concessions, which he saw as
giving away too much in order to further Matthias' hold on power.
So Rudolf prepared to start a new war with the Turks. But Matthias
rallied support from the disaffected Hungarians and forced Rudolf
to give up the crowns of Hungary, Austria, and Moravia to him. At
the same time, seeing a moment of royal weakness, Bohemian
Protestants demanded greater religious liberty, which Rudolf
granted in the
Letter of
Majesty in 1609. However the Bohemians continued to press
for further freedoms and Rudolf used his army to repress them. The
Bohemian Protestants appealed to Matthias for help, whose army then
held Rudolf prisoner in his castle in Prague, until 1611, when
Rudolf was forced to cede the crown of Bohemia to his
brother.
Rudolf died in 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of all
effective power by his younger brother, except the empty title of
Holy Roman Emperor, which Matthias inherited five months later. He
died unmarried. In May 1618 at an event known as the
Defenestration of Prague, the
Protestant Bohemians, in defense of the rights granted them in the
Letter of Majesty, began the
Thirty Years' War (1618-1648).
Patron of arts
Rudolf moved the Habsburg capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583.
Rudolf loved collecting paintings, and was often reported to sit
and stare in rapture at a new work for hours on end. He spared no
expense in acquiring great past masterworks, such as those of
Dürer and
Brueghel. He was also patron to
some of the best contemporary artists, who mainly produced new
works in the
Northern Mannerist
style, such as
Bartholomeus
Spranger,
Hans von Aachen,
Giambologna,
Giuseppe Arcimboldo,
Aegidius Sadeler,
Roelant Savery, and
Adrian de Vries, as well as commissioning
works from Italians like
Veronese. Rudolf's
collections were the most impressive in the Europe of his day, and
the greatest collection of Northern Mannerist art ever
assembled.
Rudolf's love of collecting went far beyond paintings and
sculptures. He commissioned decorative objects of all kinds and in
particular mechanical moving devices. Ceremonial swords and musical
instruments, clocks, water works, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes
and other scientific instruments, were all produced for him by some
of the best craftsmen in Europe.
He patronized
natural
philosophers such as the botanist
Charles de l'Ecluse, and the astronomers
Tycho Brahe and
Johannes Kepler both attended his court.
Tycho Brahe developed the Rudolfine tables (finished by Kepler,
after Brahe's death), the first comprehensive table of data of the
movements of the stars.
The poetess
Elizabeth Jane
Weston, a writer of neo-Latin poetry, was also part of his
court and wrote numerous odes to him.
Rudolf kept a menagerie of exotic animals, botanical gardens, and
Europe's most extensive "
cabinet
of curiosities" (
Kunstkammer) incorporating "the three
kingdoms of nature and the works of man".
It was housed at
Prague
Castle
, where between 1587 and 1605 he built the northern
wing to house his growing collections.
By 1597, the collection occupied three rooms of the incomplete
northern wing. When building was completed in 1605, the collection
was moved to the dedicated
Kunstkammer.
Naturalia
(
minerals and
gemstones) were arranged in a 37 cabinet display
that had three vaulted chambers in front, each about 5.5
meters wide by 3 meters high and 60 meters long,
connected to a main chamber 33 meters long. Large uncut gemstones
were held in strong boxes.
Rudolph's
Kunstkammer was not a typical "cabinet of
curiosities" - a haphazard collection of unrelated specimens.
Rather, the Rudolfine
Kunstkammer was systematically
arranged in an
encyclopaedic fashion.
In addition, Rudolf II employed his polyglot court physician,
Anselmus Boetius de Boodt
(
c. 1550-1632), to
curate the
collection. De Boodt was an avid mineral collector.
He travelled widely on
collecting trips to the mining regions of
Germany
, Bohemia and Silesia, often accompanied by his Bohemian naturalist friend, Thaddaeus Hagecius. Between 1607
and 1611, de Boodt catalogued the
Kunstkammer, and in 1609
he published
Gemmarum et Lapidum, one of the finest
mineralogical treatises of the 17th century.
As was customary at the time, the collection was private, but
friends of the
Emperor, artists, and
professional scholars were allowed to study it. The collection
became an invaluable research tool during the flowering of
17th-century
European philosophy, the "
Age of
Reason".
Rudolf's successors did not appreciate the collection and the
Kunstkammer gradually fell into disarray.
Some 50 years after
its establishment, most of the collection was packed into wooden
crates and moved to Vienna.
The
collection remaining at Prague
was looted
during the last year of the Thirty
Years War, by Swedish troops who sacked Prague Castle on 26
July 1648, also taking the best of the paintings, many of which
later passed to the Orleans
Collection after the death of Christina of Sweden. In 1782, the
remainder of the collection was sold piecemeal to private parties
by
Joseph II, who was
a lover of the Arts rather than the Sciences.
One of the surviving
items from the Kunstkammer is a "fine chair" looted by the
Swedes in 1648 and now owned by the Earl
of Radnor at Longford Castle, United Kingdom
; others survive in museums.
Occult sciences
Astrology
and alchemy were mainstream science in Renaissance Prague, and Rudolf
was a firm devotee of both. His lifelong quest was to find
the
Philosopher's Stone and
Rudolf spared no expense in bringing Europe's best alchemists to
court, such as
Edward Kelley and
John Dee. Rudolf even
performed his own experiments in a private alchemy laboratory. When
Rudolf was a prince,
Nostradamus
prepared a horoscope which was dedicated to him as 'Prince and
King'.
Rudolf gave Prague a mystical reputation that persists in part to
this day, with
Alchemists' Alley
on the grounds of Prague Castle a popular visiting place.
Titles
Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Margrave of Moravia, Prince of
Piombino, King of Hungary, King of Croatia, King of Slavonia,
Archduke of Austria, King of the Romans.
Ancestors
See also
Notes
- Hotson, 1999.
- Marshall, 2006.
- Rouse, 1977.
- Trevor-Roper, 116-120
- Trevor-Roper, 121-123. Trevor-Roper mentions many stories and
rumours, but not those of Rudolf's homosexuality
- Wendell E. Wilson, Joel A. Bartsch & Mark Mauthner,
Masterpieces of the Mineral World: Treasures from the Houston
Museum of Natural Science, Houston Museum of Natural Science Harry
N. Abrams/New York, 2004, .ISBN 0-810-96751-0
- Hayward, J. F., 1980. A Chair from the 'Kunstkammer' of the
Emperor Rudolf II. The Burlington Magazine, 122(927), 428 to 432.
[1]
References
- Bolton, Henry Carrington (1904). The Follies of Science at the Court of Rudolph II,
1576-1612, Milwaukee: Pharmaceutical Review Publishing
Co., 1904. From Internet Archive
Inaccurate and misleading
- Evans, R. J. W. (1953). Rudolf II and his world: A study in
intellectual history, 1576-1612. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd
ed, 1984. Considered the fundamental re-evaluation of Rudolf.
- Rowse, A. L. (1977). Homosexuals in History:
Ambivalence in Society, Literature and the Arts. MacMillan
Publishing Co., Inc. ISBN 0026056208
- Hotson, Howard (1999). "Rudolf
II", in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Paul Grendler. Vol. 5. ISBN 0684805146
- Marshall, Peter (2006).
The Magic Circle of Rudolf II: Alchemy and Astrology in
Renaissance Prague. ISBN 0802715516. Also published as The
Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in Renaissance
Prague (in the UK, ISBN 0436205211; in Canada, ISBN
0771756907); and in paperback as The Mercurial Emperor: The
Magic Circle of Rudolf II in Renaissance Prague (2007) ISBN
978184413537. Biography, focusing on the many artists and
"scientists" Rudolf patronized.
- Trevor-Roper, Hugh;
Princes and Artists, Patronage and Ideology at Four Habsburg
Courts 1517-1633, Thames & Hudson, London, 1976, ISBN
0500232326
External links
, Italy
, 2000.
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