Rudolf II's Prague: Library, Wonders and Alchemists

In 1583 the Habsburg emperor Rudolf II moved his court from Vienna to Prague. Over the following thirty years Hradčany Castle became one of the most remarkable centres of European culture: painters, goldsmiths, astronomers, physicians and alchemists worked there, and a collection of wonders was assembled that contemporaries considered unrivalled. Books and manuscripts were an essential part of it, alongside paintings and instruments.

The Emperor's Kunstkammer

Rudolf, born in 1552 and emperor from 1576, was a passionate and often reclusive collector. In the castle's halls he gathered paintings by Dürer, Bruegel and Arcimboldo, clocks and automata, scientific instruments, precious stones, horns of supposed unicorns and natural specimens. The Kunstkammer, the chamber of arts and wonders, was meant to be a small-scale image of the entire universe.

The library followed the same encyclopaedic principle. Next to classics and works of history were treatises on astronomy, medicine and alchemy, many dedicated to the emperor by authors hoping for his patronage. Among the most famous books linked to Prague is the Codex Gigas, the enormous medieval manuscript called the Devil's Bible because of the large figure of the devil it contains, which entered the imperial collections in 1594.

Astronomers and Alchemists at Court

Tycho Brahe, who arrived in 1599 and died in 1601, worked in Prague, as did Johannes Kepler, who took up his legacy and named after the emperor the Rudolphine Tables, published in 1627. The court also attracted physicians and alchemists such as Michael Maier, whom Rudolf made a count palatine, and the Pole Michał Sędziwój, known by the Latin name Sendivogius.

In 1584 John Dee and Edward Kelley also arrived in Bohemia. Dee obtained an audience with the emperor but did not win his trust, and he left Bohemia in 1589. Kelley stayed, gained lands and honours thanks to his reputation as an alchemist, then fell from favour and was imprisoned; his death, towards the end of the century, is surrounded by contradictory accounts.

The Voynich Manuscript and the Dispersal

Tradition also links the Voynich manuscript to Rudolf. A letter from the 1660s, written by the Prague scholar Johannes Marcus Marci to the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher, reports that the emperor had bought it for six hundred ducats, believing it to be the work of Roger Bacon. The report is second-hand and unconfirmed by any accounts, but it is the earliest indication of the codex's history.

After Rudolf's death in 1612, his brother Matthias took the court back to Vienna, and part of the collections was moved or sold. The final blow came in 1648, when Swedish troops occupied the castle and carried many of the remaining treasures to Stockholm, including the Codex Gigas, now kept in the National Library of Sweden.

Rudolf's Prague has often been portrayed as a city of magicians and alchemists, with much Romantic exaggeration. The sources, however, reveal a real and well-documented court, where the most advanced astronomical research coexisted with alchemy and the collecting of wonders. The scattered books of that court are found today in libraries across half of Europe, from Vienna to Stockholm and Rome.