Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor

Personal life

Like Elizabeth I of England, whose birth was 19 years before his, Rudolf dangled himself as a prize in a string of diplomatic negotiations for marriages, but never in fact married. Rudolf was known to have had a succession of affairs with women, some of whom claimed to have been impregnated by him. He had several illegitimate children by his mistress Catherina Strada. Their eldest son, Don Julius Caesar d'Austria, was likely born between 1584 and 1586 and received an education and opportunities for political and social prominence from his father. Another famous child was Karolina (1591–1662), Princess of Cantecroix, mother-in-law of Béatrix de Cusance, later Duchess of Lorraine as the second wife of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine.

During his periods of self-imposed isolation, Rudolf reportedly had affairs with his Obersthofmeister, Wolfgang Siegmund Rumpf vom Wullroß (1536–1606), and a series of valets. One of them, the Jewish Philipp Lang von Langenfels (1560–1609), influenced him for years and was hated by those seeking favours with the emperor.

Rudolf succeeded his father, Maximilian II, on 12 October 1576. In 1583, he moved the court to Prague.

In 1607, Rudolf sent Julius to live in Český Krumlov Castle, in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, a castle that Rudolf had acquired from Peter Vok of Rosenberg, the last member of the House of Rosenberg, who had fallen into financial ruin. Julius lived at Český Krumlov in 1608, when he reportedly abused and murdered the daughter of a local barber, who had been living in the castle, and then disfigured her body. Rudolf condemned his son's act and suggested that he should be imprisoned for the rest of his life.

However, Julius died in 1609 after he had shown signs of schizophrenia, refused to bathe and lived in squalor. His death was apparently caused by an ulcer that ruptured.

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 Catholic Church in the years before he was deposed. Sexual allegations might well have formed a part of the campaign against him.

Reign

Historians have traditionally blamed Rudolf's preoccupation with the arts, occult sciences and other personal interests for the political disasters of his reign. More recent historians have re-evaluated that view and see his patronage of the arts and occult sciences as a triumph and key part of the Renaissance, and his political failures as a legitimate attempt to create a unified Christian empire that was undermined by the realities of religious, political, and intellectual disintegrations of the time.

Although raised in his uncle Philip II's Catholic court in Spain, Rudolf was tolerant of Protestantism and other religions, including Judaism. Rudolf's tolerant policy towards the Jews would see Jewish cultural life flourishing and their population increasing under his reign.

He largely withdrew from Catholic observances and even in death refused the last sacramental rites. He had little attachment to Protestants either, except as a counter-weight to papal policies. He put his primary support behind conciliarists, irenicists and humanists. When the papacy instigated the Counter-Reformation by using agents sent to his court, Rudolf backed those whom he thought were the most neutral in the debate, either by not taking a side or by trying to promote restraint. This led to political chaos and threatened to provoke civil war.

His conflict with the Ottoman Empire was the final cause of his undoing. Unwilling to compromise with the Ottomans and stubbornly determined that he could unify all of Christendom with a new crusade, he started a long and indecisive war against the Ottomans in 1593. The war lasted until 1606 and is known as the "Long Turkish War".

By 1604, his Hungarian subjects were exhausted by the war and revolted, led by Stephen Bocskai (Bocskai uprising). In 1605, Rudolf was forced by his other family members to cede control of Hungarian affairs to his younger brother, Archduke Matthias. By 1606, Matthias had forged a difficult peace with the Hungarian rebels (Peace of Vienna) and the Ottomans (Peace of Zsitvatorok).

Rudolf was angry with Matthias's concessions and saw them as giving away too much to further his hold on power. That made Rudolf prepare to start a new war against the Ottomans, but Matthias rallied support from the disaffected Hungarians and forced Rudolf to cede the crowns of Hungary, Austria and Moravia to him. Meanwhile, the Bohemian Protestants demanded greater religious liberty, which Rudolf granted in the Letter of Majesty in 1609. Bohemians continued to press for further freedoms, and Rudolf used his army to repress them.

Bohemian Protestants then appealed to Matthias for help. His army held Rudolf prisoner in his castle in Prague until 1611, when Rudolf ceded the crown of Bohemia, as well, to his brother.

Death

Rudolf died in January 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of all effective power by his younger brother, except the empty title of Holy Roman Emperor, to which Matthias was elected in June 1612. In May 1618, with the event known as the Defenestration of Prague, the Protestant Bohemians, in defence of the rights granted them in the Letter of Majesty, threw imperial officials out of the window and thus the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) started.

Art collecting and patronage

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 masterworks, such as those of Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Rudolf's collections were the most impressive in the Europe of his day. He was patron to some of the finest 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, Joris Hoefnagel, and Adrian de Vries, and commissioned works from Italian artists like Paolo Veronese.

Rudolf's love of collecting for the kunstkammer extended to decorative objects of all kinds, natural artefacts, and mechanical moving devices. In addition, his court included artists who contributed ceremonial swords, musical instruments, clocks, waterworks, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes and other scientific instruments. Rudolf also attracted some of the best scientific instrument makers of the time, such as Jost Bürgi, Erasmus Habermel and Hans Christoph Schissler, who had direct contact with the court astronomers and through the financial support of the court were economically independent to develop scientific instruments and manufacturing techniques.

Rudolf patronised astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who both attended his court. Brahe, who had spent much of his life making observations of stars and planets that were more accurate than any previous observations, directed Kepler to work on the planet Mars. In doing so, Kepler found that in order to fit the observations to the required accuracy, it was necessary to assume that each planet orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus, sweeping out equal areas in equal times, resulting in Kepler's laws of planetary motion. It was Rudolf's patronage of the two astronomers that made this possible, as Kepler recognised when he eventually published the Rudolphine Tables.

The poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, a writer of Renaissance Latin poetry, published numerous odes to him while appealing for him to release her stepfather's assets.

Rudolf kept a menagerie of exotic animals, botanical gardens, and Europe's most extensive "cabinet of curiosities" 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. A lion and a tiger were allowed to roam the castle, as is documented by the account books, which record compensation paid to survivors of attacks or to family members of victims.

The Codex Gigas was one of Rudolf's possessions. He was also alleged, by a single piece of hearsay, to have owned the Voynich manuscript, a codex whose author, purpose, language and script, and posited cypher remain unidentified to this day. In a letter written in 1665, Johannes Marcus Marci claims to have heard that Rudolf acquired the manuscript for 600 gold ducats at some unspecified time. No evidence in support of this assertion has ever been discovered.

As was typical of the time, Rudolf II had a portrait painted in the studio of the renowned Alonso Sánchez Coello. Completed in 1567, the portrait depicted Rudolf II at the age of 15. This painting can be seen at the Lobkowicz Palace in the Rozmberk room.

By 1597, Rudolf's collections occupied three rooms of the incomplete northern wing. When the 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 m wide by 3 m high and 60 m long, connected to a main chamber 33 m long. Large uncut gemstones were held in strong boxes.

Apart from the fantastic nature of the objects, the aesthetics of their arrangement and presentation played an important role in highlighting the harmonious expression of divine order and the analogy of a micro-macrocosm in art, nature, and the world.

Rudolf'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 employed his court gemologist and physician Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632), to curate the collection. Anselmus was an avid mineral collector and 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, Anselmus catalogued the kunstkammer and in 1609 published Gemmarum et Lapidum, the finest gemological treatise and encyclopedia ever written for this time.

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. Most of the paintings that reached Vienna remain there, in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, with other pieces in the Secular Treasury and other museums. 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 and took the best of the paintings, many of which later passed to the Orléans Collection after the death of Christina of Sweden. In 1782, the remainder of the collection was sold piecemeal to private parties by Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor. One of the surviving items from the kunstkammer is a "fine chair" that was looted by the Swedes in 1648 and now owned by the Earl of Radnor at Longford Castle in Britain, and others survive in museums.

Occultism

Astrology and alchemy were regarded as mainstream scientific fields 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". In the 1590s, Michael Sendivogius was active at Rudolph's court.

Rudolf gave Prague a mystical reputation that persists in part to this day, with Alchemists' Alley, on the grounds of Prague Castle, being a popular visiting place and tourist attraction. He was also a patron of the occult sciences. That and his practice of tolerance towards Jews caused during his reign the legend of the Golem of Prague to be established.

Issue

Rudolf had a relationship with the royal mistress Kateřina Stradová (also known as Anna Marie Stradová, or Catherina Strada, c. 1568-1629), with whom he had six children:

• Don Julius Caesar d'Austria
• Matyáš d'Austria
• Carlos d'Austria
• Karolina d'Austria
• Dorothea d'Austria
• Alžběta d'Austria

Titles

The full titulature of Rudolf after he inherited the Holy Roman Empire and the vast realms of Central and Eastern Europe went as follows:

His Imperial and Royal Majesty, Rudolf II, by the Grace of God elected Holy Roman Emperor, forever Augustus, King of Germany, King of Hungary, of Bohemia, of Dalmatia, of Croatia, of Slavonia, of Galicia, of Lodomeria, of Italy, of Cumania, of Bulgaria, of Serbia, of Rama, of Romania, etc.; Archduke of Austria; Duke of Burgundy, of Styria, of Carinthia and of Carniola; Grand Prince of Transylvania; Margrave of Moravia; Duke of Brabant, of Limburg, of Luxemburg, of Guelders, of Württemberg, of Upper and Lower Silesia, of Milan, of Mantua, of Parma, of Piacenza, of Guastalla, of Auschwitz, of Zator and of Teck; Prince of Swabia; Princely Count of Habsburg, of Flanders, of Tyrol, of Hainault, of Kyburg, of Gorizia, of Gradisca, of Namur; Lord of the Wendish Mark and of Mechlin; Landgrave of Alsace; Duke of Lorraine and Bar, Grand Duke of Tuscany; Marquess of the Holy Roman Empire, Burgovia, the Enns, the Upper and Lower Lusatia, Lord of the Marquisate of Slavonia, of Port Naon and Salines, etc.

Ancestors

Male-line family tree