Rudolf II

The collection came first. Rudolf gathered paintings, automata, clocks, mineral specimens, narwhal tusks sold as unicorn horn, mandrake roots, astronomical instruments and a bezoar stone in a set of rooms at Prague Castle arranged not as a hoard but as an argument: that the natural and the made world could be laid out in an order that revealed the correspondences running through them. That premise, that everything above answers to something below, is the working assumption of Renaissance natural magic, and the collection was its physical form.

The people followed the premise. Tycho Brahe came in 1599 as imperial mathematician, bringing the most accurate positional observations ever taken and an assistant, Johannes Kepler, who succeeded him in 1601 and did the work on the orbit of Mars in Prague that produced the first two of his laws of planetary motion. Both men also cast horoscopes, which was part of the post and not a lapse from it. Alchemists worked in the castle and in laboratories in the town, including Michael Maier, whose emblem books are among the central documents of the alchemical tradition.

John Dee and Edward Kelley reached Prague in 1584 with a different offer: transcripts of conversations they said they had held with angels through a scrying stone, containing a language and a revelation. They were received, and Dee presented an apocalyptic message. The papal nuncio pressed for their removal, and they were eventually expelled from imperial territory, though Kelley returned, worked for a Bohemian nobleman, and died a prisoner after failing to produce gold. The records those two men kept became, three centuries later, the foundation of Enochian magic in the Victorian occult revival.

Bohemia in 1600 was overwhelmingly non-Catholic. A century and a half of Hussite history had left the kingdom with its own settlement, and Lutheran and Bohemian Brethren congregations had grown up alongside the Utraquists. The emperor was a Catholic Habsburg presiding over a Protestant kingdom, and he needed the estates far more than they needed him, particularly once his brother Matthias began stripping territories from him.

On 9 July 1609 he signed the Letter of Majesty. It granted the Bohemian estates freedom of religious practice, allowed them to build churches and schools, and put the administration of the non-Catholic church under a consistory and a body of defenders drawn from the estates themselves. As guarantees of religious liberty go in early modern Europe, it was unusually wide, and it was extracted under duress rather than granted from conviction.

It did not hold. Rudolf was forced to cede Bohemia to Matthias in 1611 and died the following year. Under his successors, Catholic officials began obstructing the building of Protestant churches on land they argued was royal and therefore outside the charter, and the estates read that as a breach of the Letter. On 23 May 1618 a delegation of Protestant nobles threw two imperial governors and their secretary from a window of Prague Castle, an act deliberately staged to recall the Hussite defenestration of 1419. All three survived the fall. The revolt that followed became the Thirty Years War, which killed a substantial fraction of the population of central Europe and ended with a settlement, at Westphalia in 1648, that put religious rights on a treaty footing rather than a royal charter.