Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (25 page)

¹⁹
Johannes Kepler's mother was branded a witch, for little more than the peddling of herbal remedies.

²⁰
I could try to explain angular separation, degrees and minutes of arc, etc., but it would be confusing for you and tedious for me; besides, I am not as sure of my grasp of these matters as I like to pretend. Those thirsting for knowledge might consult Appendix 1 of Kitty Ferguson's book
The Nobleman and His Housedog,
which provides a brief and not unclear explication of these matters.

²¹
Not as generous a tribute as it sounds: most Newton scholars now accept that he was aiming a cruel gibe at his rival Robert Hooke, an undersized hunchback.

²²
Before Kepler, all that was required of astronomers was that any planetary theory they propounded should 'save the phenomena', as the phrase had it - i.e., the theory was sound so long as it accounted for the movements of the planets as recorded from earth, and was not expected to be a picture of how things are in reality. 'Although it would be incorrect to say that people like Ptolemy and Copernicus never pondered such causal questions, their primary concern was to describe and predict where heavenly bodies were positioned and the patterns of their movements, not to answer what
caused
them to be where they were and to move in certain patterns and at certain speeds and distances.' (Ferguson,
The Nobleman and His Housedog)

²³
The inn no longer exists, but the first house on the street is called The Golden Griffin. Next door is The Golden Pear restaurant - also on Novy
are The Golden Lamb and The Golden Tree. The Golden Griffin house bears an interesting inscription (in Czech): 'In the year of our Lord MDCCCI a memorial plaque in honour of the famous Dane Tycho Brahe, imperial mathematician and astrologer, was erected at the expense of the municipality of Prague on this house, known of old as
U zlateho noha
(The Golden Griffin). Brahe resided in this house in the year MDC and on 24th October MDCI died in a house which stood on the site of what is now the
Palace.' Enquiries at The Golden Pear were met with a denial that The Golden Griffin next door had ever been an inn, but someone seemed to remember that there had once been a restaurant of that name down on Nerudova Street. Everything shifts, in magic Prague.
²⁴
In 1592, this Rosenkrantz, along with another Brahe cousin, Knud Gyldenstierne, travelled on a diplomatic mission to London, where they must surely have encountered one of the leading English dramatists of the day . . .

²⁵
Yet Dee should not be underestimated, or regarded in the same light as Kelley. In his book
Rudolf II and His World,
RJ.W. Evans, drawing on a number of scholarly studies as well as his own research, takes Dee very seriously indeed. 'Dee's broad metaphysical position,' Evans writes, 'was characteristic of an intellectual of his time: he believed in the theory of the microcosm, in hidden forces underlying the visible world, in cosmic harmony. His views led him . . . to advanced astronomical speculations. At the same time he believed . . . that access to these mysteries could be achieved through such things as symbols, intellectual 'keys', and combinations . . . [T]here is no doubt that Dee felt the spirit world to be a full reality. Whatever the origin of the messages which it communicated to him, Dee believed them unwaveringly, and when set against the contemporary mood of intellectual striving the schemes of universal reform and regeneration which he derived from his seances grow much more comprehensible.'
(Rudolf II and His World,
p. 219) Evans is an indulgent judge, and makes a case even for Kelley, noting the high esteem in which he was held by many of his contemporaries, not all of them fools.

²⁶
In
Magic Prague
Ripellino is fascinating on the subject of Faust: 'According to legend, which made the Czech Romantics swell with pride, Faust was a Czech who practised the black arts, that is, necromancy and printing. His name was
that is, Happy, that is, Faustus. During the Hussite Revolt he emigrated to Germany, where he took the name Faust von Kuttenberg after the town of his birth (Kutna Hora in Czech). In other words, he was none other than Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press . . . In Czech folk puppet plays, the
pimprlata
theatre, Faust is the more conventional figure of the
even if, when conjuring up 'Alexander the Great with the cloak of a Czech duke and the fair Helen in Turkish dress' at the court in Lisbon, he comes dangerously close to the Czech Punch
by name - who mistakes devils for owls.'
{Magic Prague,
p. 97)

²⁷
Kelley was not the worst, and not even the most extravagant, of the mountebanks to take advantage of Rudolf's, and Prague's, gullibility. There was Mamugna of Famagosta, a Greek masquerading as the son of the Venetian Marco Antonio Bragadin, who had been flayed alive by the Turks during the siege of Famagusta. Mamugna arrived in Prague during Kelley's reign, accompanied by two enormous, black, satanic mastiffs. He had a brief success in the city, winkling much gold out of the Prague grandees. In 1591 he was unmasked as an imposter and fled to Munich, but found no sanctuary there, for he was hanged on a gilt gallows and buried in a pauper's grave along with the carcasses of his dogs. The Italian adventurer Geronimo Scotta appeared in Prague in the summer of 1590 with no fewer than three red velvet carriages drawn by forty horses. He was a skilled conman, whose speciality was contracting rich marriages and then absconding with the dowries. He quickly found his way into Rudolf's favour, but Kelley, who could spot a fellow rogue a mile off, soon proved his undoing, and Scotta ended up selling stag-horn jelly and vitriol of Mars from a booth in the Old Town Square. (Evans, in his book on Rudolfine Prague, speculates that in fact Kelley and Scotta, or Scotto, may have been one and the same person.) None of these crooks, however, was as outrageous as Michael Sendivogius, a Polish sorcerer, and his henchman, the mysterious Alexander Seton, a Scot known as the Cosmopolitan, who performed magic spells with the aid of an unidentified red powder. The pair are too much larger than life to be dealt with in a mere footnote. (Ripellino is splendidly entertaining on the scores of rogues who plagued the credulous Rudolf.) Seton died in Dresden after Sendivogius had sprung him from imprisonment at Konigstein Castle, where he had been tortured in a vain effort to make him reveal the formula for his magic red powder. Sendivogius himself was hanged in Stuttgart, like Mamugna on a gilt gallows, magnificently dressed in a gold-sequined suit.

²⁸
Rumours have persisted down the ages, entertained by Ripellino and others but discounted by such authorities as Evans and Frances Yates, that Dee and Kelley were agents sent to Prague by Elizabeth or her wily Chief Secretary Sir William Cecil to seek Bohemian help in England's struggles with Spain, or else to work at preventing a Habsburg seizure of the Polish crown. Ripellino the romantic rubs his hands, of course, at the notion that the two might have been spies - 'spooks' is here the
mot juste -
declaring that 'it would mean that the whole business of mirrors, omens and archangels was simply a camouflage for political intrigues and the diary in which Dee recorded his conversations with the heavenly messengers a cover or memorandum in code.'

²⁹
Benatky Castle has been turned into a small, not very well appointed museum, run by an extremely charming and helpful staff. When I visited the place in the 1990s I was the only visitor. I stood in the echoing rooms trying to feel the lingering presence of the Dane, but no ghosts walked, that day.

³⁰
Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for preaching the Copernican doctrine.

³¹
According to quantum physics, He does.

³²
Ahem. John Banville,
Kepler,
a novel (London, 1981).

³³
The finest Romanesque survival is the Basilica of St George, after St Vitus's the largest church within the Castle complex. The Cistercians arrived there in the 13th century and brought a French influence to the city's architecture, still to be seen in St Agnes's Convent, founded by the sister of Wenceslas I, on U milosrdnych in Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter. It was abolished as a convent in 1782, but was restored in the 1960s and now houses a collection of nineteenth-century Czech art from the National Gallery. Don't say I do not give practical advice.