Correcting History

Rudolph II, Holy Roman Emperor, and Philip II, King of Spain, cousins in the Habsburg family, were educated together as children in Spain. Same tutors, same library. When they grew up, Rudolph II was extremely tolerant religiously. He said, "I am not a Catholic or a Lutheran, I am a Christian." But Muslims and Jews were also welcome in his court, if they had talent and/or brains. 

Philip, on the other hand, is thought of, at least in the English-speaking world, as representing the most intolerant form of Catholicism. Elizabeth and the English defeated the Spanish Armada, striking a huge  blow for freedom.

 

That's the way we hear about it in English-speaking parts of the world. 

We learn that the only time in his life Philip smiled was when heard of the St Batholomew's Day Massacre in France, when 70,000 Protestants were killed in France, and most of the rest fled the country.

Except that it was probably less than 5,000. Many Protestants had to flee France. But by no means all of them. Still very bad, but not what we learn. And the part about Philip smiling for the only time in his life when he heard about it -- I'm thinking that might be bullshit too. I'm thinking it's entirely possible that he felt very BAD about a huge massacre, even if it was a huge massacre of Protestants. 

And the part about the defeat of the Spanish Armada being a great victory for freedom -- Catholics didn't get civil rights in England for another 200 years. And they didn't get FULL civil rights until even later than that. Spain, horrible repression, vs England, glorious freedom -- that's just one example of the huge whoppers we are taught about the Tudor dynasty and the world around it.

Just the same way that George Washington never chopped down a cherry tree or threw a silver dollar across the Potomac. We know now that Parson Weems made that up, and a lot of other things which were considered true for a very long time.

History is imperfect. We keep working on improving its accuracy and insight.

Prague and Germany

The nation of the Czechs reaches farthest to the West of any of the Slavs. Their capital, Prague, is quite close to several major German cities: 91.2 miles from Dresden according to Google Maps, a drive of 1 hour and 55 minutes. Leipzig is a 158 mile drive, Munich is 238 miles away, Berlin 217 miles, Vienna -- the usual capital of the Holy roman Empire since the 15th century -- 207 miles. Other major Slavic cities are considerably farther: Prague to Warsaw is 396 miles, Dubrovnik 794 miles, 556 miles, Kiev 881 miles. 

The Slavic regions between Western Europe and Russia have been ruled by foreign powers for much of their history. Prague has the distinction of having been the capital of a foreign empire, in the 14th century under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, and then again from 1576 to 1612 under the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II.

 

The Czechs were, and are, situated between Protestant and Catholic Germany: most of Germany north of Prague was, and is, majority Ptotestant. Most to the south was, and is, majority Catholic. From the time of Jan Hus onward -- he was burned at the stake for heresy in 1415 -- Protestantism among the Czechs tended to go with anegative view of the German Empire, and those Czechs who worked for the Empire tended to convert to Cathollicism. 

When the Prague defenestration is mentioned, most people think of the incident in 1618, but there have actually been three defenestrations in Prague, in 1419, 1483 and 1618. In German, the 1618 defenestration is called the Fensterstuerz, with the result that people actually know what is meant. Defenestration means being thrown out of a window. In all three Prague defenstrations, Protestants, followers of Hus, threw representatives of the Catholic Imperial occupation out of high windows, killing all of them in 1419 and 1483.

In 1618, surprisingly, the Emperor's representatives survived the 70-foot fall from a window in the Hradcany, the Prague Castle. However, the incident marked the beginning of the Thirty Year's War, in which millions died all over central Europe.

Prominent authors who lived in the Czech region and wrote in German range chronologically from Johannes von Tepl, who published der ackerman aus boehmen around 1400, to a remarkable amount of the very best German literature which was written in Prague in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, by authors such as Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Rudolph Fuchs, Egon Erwin Kusch and many others.

The Nazis led up to their invasion of Poland and the beginning of WWII with a series of smaller-scales crimes including the occupation of Czechia in 1938 and 1939.

In 1989, Czechoslovakia opened its borders, and ten of thousands of East Germans per day went through Czechoslovakia into West Germany, one of the major factors which forced the end of East Germany and German reunification.

Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor

Rudolf II continues to grow more interesting to me personally.

I have mentioned the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II on this blog before, who reigned from 1576 to 1612, welcomed both Protestants and Catholics at his court in a time when tension was high between denominations in most parts of western Europe, and named Ulrich Bollinger to be an Imperial poet laureate.

Recently I found out -- and it didn't surprise me at all -- that many of the leading clockmakers of the time worked in Prague, where Rudolf's court was. It fits in with Rudolf's fascination with whatever was new, strange and clever.

Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler -- you've heard of them, I'm sure -- were there too, and there was a certain amount of fruitful interaction between the astronomers and the timekeepers. When Brahe first arrived at Rudolf's court, the two of them spoke for a long time alone. A monarch and a mere lowly scientist, speaking with no one else around: that was very unusual at that time, for any monarch, let alone the Emperor. But Rudolf was very unusual.

So, anyway, leading clockmakers were at Rudolf's court -- and some of them were also attempting to make perpetual motion machines -- and this was the right time for them to be making early watches, also. Watches go back to before 1550. I don't know whether any watches were made at Rudolf's court or nearby in Prague. And it may possibly be hard to find out for sure, because Rudolf's collections were plundered by the Queen of Sweden around 1645, and many objects got lost that way. It's shame, because everyone at the time agreed that Rudolf had put together a very remarkable collection of art, books, machines (including clocks and possibly watches), etc.

One of my sources of information about these sorts of things is the book Rudolf II and his World, by RJW Evans. It came out in the 1970's, and, unusually for its time, Evans, when quoting things which were written in Rudolf's time, left a lot of German and Latin untranslated. My kind of guy, my kind of book. Most historians writing for English audiences in the late 20th century or later, no matter how snooty they are, would either translate everything into English, or cite the original German and Latin and follow it immediately with an English translation. But Professor Evans just assumes -- correctly, in my case -- that he doesn't need to translate the German and Latin. He does translate the Czech and Hungarian and other languages.

You see, there are a few other people like me.

 

Misunderstandings, Controversies, Versions of History

In 1415, the Czech priest and and professor John Huss was tried, condemned and executed, burned at the stake, at the Council of Constance.

A little over a century later, in 1521, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, appeared before the young Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms. Luther reminded some people of Huss. Luther himself said that he agreed with some aspects of Huss' teachings. Some people assumed that Luther would be condemned and executed as Huss had been, and were surprised when, after Luther has stood trial before him, Charles allowed Luther to leave the council under the same safe conduct which had protected him on his way there.

 

And ever since, people have wondered why Charles let Luther go. Perhaps Charles, and/or his advisors, were thinking of the situation in Prague and the surrounding Czech territory: Huss had been executed, but the Hussite church was very much alive. Perhaps Charles wondered whether Huss might have had less influence if he had been tolerated, ignored, treated as a well-meaning simpleton. 

I don't know why Luther was let go. Already in 1521 he was very popular, and the Lutheran church kept growing at an enormous pace. And, it seems to me, Luther was misunderstood from the start and is still misunderstood. For example, German peasants revolted in 1524 and 1525, and even a few nobles joined them. And these people in revolt called themselves Lutherans. As have many others to this day, they seem to have equated existing orders, and conservatism, with the Catholic Church, and Lutherism with all and any sort of protest or resistance to existing orders.  "Protest --" it makes up the first two syllables of the word "Protestant."

Luther did not sympathize with the revolts. He wrote and published a tract in which he advised the nobles to crush the rebellion thoroughly, to torture and kill the rebels. And indeed, they did exactly that. 

Would the powers that were have treated the rebels any differently if Luther had not said or written a word about the rebellion? I don't know. I tend to doubt it. I tend to doubt that this was one of Luther's most widely-read published works. Because people have not ceased to associate Catholicism with conservatism and Lutheranism with rebellion. Especially in Germany. Those who live in other parts of the world, and may be familiar with conservative Lutherans and Leftist Catholics, might be astonished, for example, to read, as I did, Schiller's history of the Dutch Revolution, where every imaginable sort of tyranny is associated with Catholicism, and every noble spirit of freedom with Protestantism, which in Germany meant Lutheranism. Except in painting and sculpture, where, Schiller said, it was all exactly reversed.

Schiller was an ignorant dingbat.

After the Diet of Worms, religious wars between Catholics and Protestants began, and did not cease for centuries. Luther condemned Lutheran peasants and championed Lutheran rulers, kings and dukes and counts. 

Decades after Luther had passed away, in 1576, a 24-year-old Habsburg king and archduke became the Emperor Rudolf II, and ruled until 1612. I wonder what Luther would've thought of Rudolph. Like every other Habsburg ruler before and after him, Rudolph was Catholic. Unlike many other Habsburgs, Rudolf did not dislike, distrust or disapprove of non-Catholics. His court in Prague became a center of artistic and intellectual activity. He valued individuals according to the abilities, their talents; if he cared at all about their religious beliefs, he gave little sign of it. 

A widespread belief about Rudolph at the time was that he was insane, and a very weak ruler, who did little to halt the gathering storm of religious conflict which exploded six years after his death at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. This view also tended to dominate among historians, until just a few decades ago. Now, it seems, an entirely different view of Rudolph is the mainstream, that of a wise and tolerant ruler far ahead of his time, who did nothing at all to fan flames of war, and whom many of his contemporaries feared simply because he was far ahead of his time in his habits and thought. Not a lunatic, but an enlightened monarch a couple of centuries before the Enlightenment. 

Who's right about Rudolph? Who's wrong? Or is everyone perhaps partly right and partly wrong? I don't know. 

Around 1600, Ferdinand's court, widely thought of at the time as a madhouse, was visited by an orphaned teenage Czech noble who would also go on to divide opinion -- Albrecht von Wallenstein. Raised a Hussite, Wallenstein converted to Catholicism and served the Habsburgs as a military leader,  and later also as a financier, until his death in 1634. 

Or did he? This is the most controversial point. The conventional view, challenged by Golo Mann's biography of Wallenstein published in 1971, is that, in the last couple of years of his life, he began to conspire against the Emperor, while pretending to still be his loyal Generalissimo. Having been born a baron and risen, through his extraordinary talent as a military leader and statesman, to count, then marquise, then duke, he was accused of wanting to rise, at the Emperor's expense, still higher -- and the only ranks in 17th-century Europe higher than duke were king and -- Emperor.

Mann and others maintain that there simply is no serious evidence that Wallenstein was unloyal to the Habsburgs, and that his rising power was inconvenient to certain thoroughly dishonest and ruthless politicians, who turned the mind of the Emperor Ferdinand II (1619-1637) against one of his best helpers. 

Who's right? I don't know.