Kepler's Witch (26 page)

The other problem in publishing the work was money. The emperor promised him, and actually delivered this time, 400 gulden for printing, but because Kepler had not been paid in quite a while, this money quickly disappeared into the family coffers. This meant that Kepler had to
scrounge together enough money to print the book himself. Eventually, another 500 gulden came his way, but suddenly the emperor forbade him from selling the book or distributing it to anyone, not even one copy, without his explicit permission. It seems that Kepler had written the book in his role as imperial mathematician, which meant that the emperor wanted to hold on to any works produced by him as imperial property. Rudolf could see the value of the work and wanted to distribute the
Astronomia Nova
himself. But once again his finances had become precarious, and the emperor had bigger problems to solve, so he dropped the idea of distributing the
Astronomia Nova
himself, allowing Kepler the chance to sell the entire edition back to the man who printed it, who could then offer it for sale on the open market.

 

M
EANWHILE, THE TENSION
between Protestants and Catholics in Prague, and indeed all across Germany, had reached the boiling point. The German princes had been taking sides in the conflict since the days of Luther—some were Catholic and some Protestant—with the Catholics gathering around the Habsburg family and the Protestants gathering around Frederick IV, the elector Palatine, a Calvinist. The power of the princes had become too confused with their choices of religious confession, so that a strong defense of each ruler's own religious beliefs became synonymous with legitimate rule. We must avoid the temptation to ascribe this kind of behavior only to the Catholic Habsburgs, though they were certainly the most vigorous defenders of the Counter-Reformation. ArchDuke Ferdinand of Styria, who would later become Emperor Ferdinand II, had already outlawed Protestantism in his territories in Austria, including Graz. The same was true in Bavaria. Nevertheless, the Lutheran Duke of Württemberg and the Calvinist elector Palatine practiced the same kind of intolerance, for it was an intolerant age, and many read any concession granted to other religious confessions as a sign of weakness. For this reason, across Germany, the tensions between Protestants and Catholics flashed into civil wars. In Donäuworth, the violence had become so great
that Duke Maximilian of Bavaria used it as an excuse to march his army into the region and enforce his own solution. Everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, had forgotten the unifying teachings of Jesus, that anyone who is not against you is for you, and had abandoned forgiveness altogether, taking up with their own clutch of theologians, who forgave nothing.

In May 1608, the Protestant princes gathered around the elector Palatine to form the Protestant Union. The next year, in July, Maximilian of Bavaria gathered Catholic princes around himself to form the Catholic League. Both sides began to conscript armies. Meanwhile, Rudolf was slipping further and further away from reality, sinking into paranoia about his brother Matthias, and leaving the rule of his own kingdom to his often corrupt ministers. Although most of the Thirty Years' War occurred after Rudolf's death, his melancholy and shyness had contributed greatly to the political tension that produced it by creating a power vacuum, permitting the squabbling princes to carry on without interference. Instead of trying to solve the problem, he let his paranoia toward his brother rule his actions, which made matters worse by inciting dissension in the Habsburg family. Moreover, Rudolf had no official heir, since he had never married, and none of his illegitimate children could ascend the throne. The leading contenders were his brother Matthias, the man Rudolf hated more than anyone else in the world, the man who Rudolf in his madness believed was trying to poison him, and Rudolf's cousin Ferdinand, the ultra-Catholic Archduke of Styria.

Rudolf's own relationship with the Protestants had been checkered. In 1602, he had once again banned the Bohemian Brethren, closing their churches and schools. Meanwhile, in 1604, the Hungarian Protestant nobles, led by István Bocskay, rebelled against the Habsburg empire. This was not surprising. The emperor's army, led by a clique of Italian generals, had been rampaging through Hungary and Slovakia, slaughtering peasants and generally terrorizing the people. Bocskay was quite good with light cavalry, returning the favor to the emperor by laying waste to the Moravian countryside and eventually threatening Vienna itself.

By this time, Matthias had become the official head of the Habsburgs in spite of the fact that Rudolf was still emperor. Some of the members of his own family thought that Rudolf might be possessed; others thought that he was mad, which came down to the same thing. All in all, they were pretty much in agreement that dear cousin Rudolf was no longer good for the family business and had to go. In order to strengthen his position against his brother, Matthias had to make concessions to the Protestants, confirming the rights and privileges of the Estates. He then signed a peace treaty with Bocskay, and another one with the Turks, who were once again threatening the empire's eastern frontier. Matthias then formed a confederation of Estates, including both Hungary and Austria, to ensure against future rebellion.

Suddenly, Matthias was at open war with his brother, Rudolf. He marched on Prague, leading an army from his newly formed confederation to try to head off any attempts by Rudolf to sabotage his new peace agreements. But Rudolf wasn't dead yet. Thin and sickly looking, he called a meeting of the Bohemian Estates and actually showed up in person. Somehow he managed to arouse Bohemian national sentiments. The Estates formed their own army and set out to fight Matthias's invasion force. Now that Rudolf had an army of his very own, Matthias discovered a new flexibility. In June 1608, in the town of Libeò, now a suburb of Prague, he signed an agreement with his brother to slice up the empire. Matthias got Austria, Hungary, and Moravia, and Rudolf got Bohemia, Silesia, and Lusatia. Rudolf also got to keep the title of emperor, which was nice. Matthias, on the other hand, became the imperial heir, which galled Rudolf no end.

Everything seemed to be over. Peace fell on the empire, except for one little problem. The Protestant Bohemian Estates had saved Rudolf's kingdom for him, perhaps even his imperial skin, or at least his freedom. The Habsburgs had been known to do some pretty nasty things to one another. Rudolf owed them hugely, and he didn't like it. A true Habsburg to his core, he wanted revenge, revenge first of all on his brother, that miserable traitor, and second of all on the Estates, who had forced concessions
out of him when he didn't want to give them. For months, he perched in his hidey hole in the
Kunstkammer
and schemed. His plan, however, was not thought through. He contacted his nephew, the twenty-three-year old Archduke Leopold, bishop of Passau, Bavaria, who was a notorious adventurer, a man who had no political and even less military experience, a typical young man who longed for glory. Leopold gathered an army at his estate, which he entrusted to a Colonel Ramée, a mercenary soldier, ostensibly to fight the Protestants in Württemberg and the Palatinate.

The real, sneaky reason for this army, however, was to march on Prague, to crush the Protestant Estates, and to return to Rudolf all his previous lands and control of the Habsburg universe. But this was a nightmare army, smaller, but in character not too different from the horde that sacked Rome a century before. Both the Spanish ambassador and the papal nuncio had their doubts. Leopold's army traveled through Upper Austria and then turned north toward Prague, occupying the Minor Town, south of the New Town, on February 15, 1611. And of course, they had to burn and pillage along the way, first going after the rich houses of the nobility and then, after everyone else. They tried to cross the Stone Bridge to the eastern side of the Vltava to take the Old Town, and then went back across the Charles Bridge to take the New Town. The Passauer cavalry finally beat its way up to the Old Town Square, a short walk from Kepler's house, where the mechanized statue of death was banging out the waning time on the astronomical clock every hour on the hour.

The Protestants, however, were waiting for them. They pulled the cavalry soldiers from their horses one by one and slaughtered them. Then the Protestants went mad in their turn, burning down monasteries and assassinating as many monks as they could find. From Kepler's house, his family could have heard the riot easily, heard the gunfire and the cannonade. They could have heard the screams of death and the cries of rage. It must have been difficult at that moment to know who was friend and who was foe. When the most obvious monks were dealt with, the Protestant mobs stormed the Jewish ghetto, sacking the homes of the wealthy and killing any Jew they came across just for good measure. The Jesuits managed to escape, however, but only just.

Matthias's army was nearby, and he rallied the Estates, who brought up artillery to blast the Passauers out of the Minor Town. Finally, on March 10, Archduke Leopold led his ruffian army out of the city, and Matthias moved into Prague Castle with his army. He rounded up any local supporters of the Passauer invaders and tried them as criminals, then crowned himself king of Bohemia on May 23. Both Protestant and Catholic Estates supported him, because Rudolf in his madness had lost the support of everyone and, well, because Matthias had an army in town. Surprisingly, Matthias was generous with his brother, after a fashion. He didn't imprison him and allowed him to remain in the Prague Castle surrounded by his glittering collection of wonders for the rest of his life. He could also keep the title of emperor, though he had no power whatsoever. Rudolf finally had the solitude he yearned for, but he didn't live long enough to enjoy it. In January 1612, he took sick. He had a liver inflammation, his lungs were failing, and his body broke out in gangrenous sores. On January 20, Rudolf II, emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, onetime king of Bohemia and Moravia, onetime ruler of Silesia and Lusatia, once leader of the Habsburg world, died quietly. They buried him respectfully, but without much fanfare, and thereby ended the golden age of Prague.
¹

 

While this was still going on, back in 1609, Kepler was in the midst of the last touches on his
Astronomia Nova
. Rudolf was still alive, and the Passau invasion had not yet happened. After all his struggles at the Frankfurt book fair, he had finally negotiated its publication with Tengnagel and a publisher in Frankfurt, and after a swing through his native Swabia, including Tübingen, he returned to Prague and presented his work to the imperial council. For himself, Kepler was overjoyed by the emperor's decrees of toleration. Protestants could now practice freely across much of Germany and Austria, that is, if Rudolf kept his word, which, unknown to Kepler, he had no intention of doing. But Kepler was no fool and, despite the general elation among the Protestants, he could see that the
emperor's power had been severely weakened and that this would not necessarily lead to peace and freedom for the Protestants. The more enmity there was between the denominations, the worse it was for everyone. The more each creed circled the wagons by defining all other creeds as the enemy, the more inevitable war became. When that war would happen in Bohemia, Kepler was not certain, but it would happen, and it would happen soon.

Meanwhile, in order to keep his family safe and to please his ailing wife, Kepler decided to look for a new position, somewhere outside Prague, somewhere in a town similar to Graz, where Barbara had been happy. But because Kepler had been a stipend student in the duchy of Württemberg and had received his education as part of the duke's educational program, he was sworn to the duke's service, even after all those years away. If he were going to seek a new position somewhere, he would need the duke's permission to work for another ruler outside the duchy. Kepler was quite faithful to this. Perhaps he still yearned after a professorship in Tübingen, but the one that was most suitable for him was still held by Michael Mästlin. Still, Kepler longed for his homeland and would have flown there like a cannonball had they offered him even a meager position somewhat worthy of his reputation as imperial mathematician.

While Prague was between battles, Kepler traveled to Stuttgart in May 1609 and petitioned the duke in person to consider the troubles that he was undergoing in Prague, without hope of finding sanctuary in his own homeland. Once again, he asked the duke for permission to work for another ruler, which the duke's councilors granted with the stipulation that, should the duke need his services, he would drop everything and enter the duke's service.

But once again, he stuck his foot in it. In a second letter to the duke, he promised that he would be willing to sign the Formula of Concord, but only conditionally. He would not struggle against it or speak out in any way, and he would seek to find some kind of unity between himself and the strictest members of his own church. Then, he naïvely tried to explain himself once again, not realizing that the decision against him had already
been made. He wrote that from his youth he leaned toward the Calvinist doctrine of Communion, and that this was the single article on which he agreed, even partially, with the Calvinists, and that for years he could find no reason why a person who held the Calvinist notion of Communion could not be called a true brother in Christ by a Lutheran. Now was the time, he said, to try to make peace with the Calvinists. They had made changes in their own doctrine, themselves rejecting predestination. Frederick IV, the elector Palatine and the leading Calvinist in Germany, was not at all happy with Calvin's predestination, which he thought cruel. So why not make peace now?

Whether this last part showed Kepler's naïveté is uncertain. It is possible that because he was getting his news about Tübingen from Michael Mästlin, who often softened the blow for his student, he did not have a complete reckoning of the true opinion of the theological faculty at the university. This would change, however, after his excommunication in Linz. Old professors like Hafenreffer, who had been kind to him as a student, suddenly became cold disciplinarians. It is likely, though, that Kepler was simply the kind of man who needed to explain himself at every opportunity, believing that if they only understood him and understood that he meant no harm, then they would accept him. He knew that his position was at odds with the official doctrine of the Württemberg Lutheran church, a church that was influential all across Europe, and so he took whatever opportunity he could to prove to them that he was not a bad Lutheran and that his deviation from the Formula of Concord did not constitute a break with the church. He would soon learn, however, that church leaders believed otherwise.