Kepler's Witch (13 page)

The Turks were gathering as well. Even as Kepler married Barbara that April 1597, “under pernicious skies,” an army of over six hundred thousand Turks pressed the frontier. Would they attack? In spite of all, Johannes Kepler promised himself on April 12, 1597, “under the hand of the priest” to marry the “honorable, virtuous Frau Barbara.” The wedding ceremony took place a few weeks later, on April 27, in the house of Herr Hartmann von Stubenberg, on Stempelgasse. The
Stände,
or church authorities, in Steiermark sent a silver cup worth 27 gulden. Kepler made sure they were all invited.

L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO
M
ICHAEL
M
ÄSTLIN
J
UNE
11, 1598

L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO
H
ERWART VON
H
OHENBERG
D
ECEMBER
9, 1598

Where the Lutheran community of Graz is persecuted, then banished, and where Kepler, who must choose between his faith and his position, is finally banished with them.

T
HE
R
ENAISSANCE ENDED BADLY
for Rome. Pope Leo X excommunicated Martin Luther and called upon Habsburg Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain and Naples, Overlord of the Netherlands, and a good Catholic, to round up Luther and his followers, try them, and execute them as heretics. Charles agreed, but demanded a quid pro quo from the pope.
¹
The Reformation had already won too many converts, so trying to squash it in Germany might have ignited a civil war. Charles was willing to risk this, but if the pope wanted the emperor's support, the emperor also wanted the pope's. Charles planned to attack the French holdings in Italy, especially in Milan, and it would have been convenient, though not strictly necessary, to have had the pope's blessing. Leo agreed, and Charles attacked Milan, chasing the French back toward the Alps. Then Leo inconveniently died, and his successor, the Medici pope Clement VII, a suspicious and uncertain man, was not quite the decisive
leader his predecessor had been. He vacillated between France and the emperor, landing finally on the side of the French, who wanted to form an anti-imperial league.

The Emperor was livid. The pope had wanted him to punish the Lutherans—so let the Lutherans punish the pope! The emperor's brother, Ferdinand of Austria, gathered a vast army, an easy twenty-thousand German
Landsknechte,
low-level knights and warriors, very much like Kepler's father, Heinrich, and marched them across the Alps into Lombardy. They were not so much an army as a horde of locusts—undisciplined, sadistic, and bent on vengeance against the popish Antichrist. Not to mention the rich booty they hoped to get. Georg von Frundsberg, an old man, red-faced, corpulent, and given to rages, led them down the length of Italy. Rain didn't stop them. Blizzards didn't stop them. Nothing stopped them, for their fury against the Antichrist was enormous.

They destroyed one army on the way down, the army of Giovanni delle Bande Nere of the house of Medici, and then met, greeted, and joined up with the imperial army of Habsburg Spain, which had been marching with a force of Italians and even a few Frenchmen, under the rule of the Duke of Bourbon, the traitorous constable of France. The few professional soldiers like the duke quickly learned that they could not control their own men, that the emperor had punched a hole in a dam of religious hatred, and the army they commanded had poured through. Their men, in rags, nearly starved, with half them unable to communicate with the other half, marched on. Clement sent word to the generals offering payment in return for Rome's safety, but when the men heard about it, they turned on their own leaders and shouted them down—they would not go back without raping and thieving and murdering until they were sated. Raging at their cheek, Georg von Frundsberg had to be carried off on a stretcher after a fit of apoplexy. Now in charge of the army, the Duke of Bourbon looked around himself, a tiny boat caught in a roiling tide, and marched his men on toward the city.

Rome's defenses were a shambles, its army almost nonexistent. There were palaces with unimaginable wealth, but the walls of the city itself had crumbled. Too late, the pope tried to gather the money to build an army,
appealing to the members of the Commune of Rome, who agreed but fretted over their own business interests. The commander of the defenses, Renzo da Ceri, reinforced the Leonine Wall, but was able to gather only eight thousand men, two thousand Swiss Guards, and two thousand survivors of the defeated army of Giovanni de' Medici Bande Nere to man the battlements. There they waited through the night and the next day for the monster lurching toward them.

The army appeared over the Italian countryside and encamped north of the city. The Duke of Bourbon sent heralds to demand that the city surrender, but this was only a formality and nothing more. Before the attack, the duke spoke to his men to rouse up their battle fire, but a murmur of excitement and lust ran through the camp before he could finish. His men needed little from their generals. They wanted only to kill and gnash and burn. At four in the morning on May 6, 1527, an exchange of harquebus fire from both sides started the battle. The imperial troops attacked, but the Roman artillery slaughtered them by the hundreds and sent them running out of range to regroup. Suddenly, a fog gathered over the Tiber, making the Roman artillery useless, and the imperial troops attacked again. This time the Romans threw rocks and shouted insults: “Jews and infidels, half-castes and Lutherans!”

A stray shot from a harquebus hit the Duke of Bourbon. The prince of Orange ordered his body carried off to a nearby chapel, where he died. The imperial troops were downcast for a short time, but they didn't really need their generals and pressed the attack once more. The Swiss Guards fought back courageously, as did a good portion of the Roman militia, the surviving soldiers of the Bande Nere, and the students of the Collegio Capranicense, who fought side by side until they were all butchered. Blood pooled ankle-deep in the streets and ran in little streams into the Roman sewers and then on into the Tiber. Many of the papal troops deserted. Many joined the refugees fleeing the city across the bridges over the river. The panic of the crowds crushed some to death, while others fell over the sides into the water.

The city was now open, defenseless. The Spanish commander Gian d'Urbina led his men through the Borgo, butchering everyone, armed and
unarmed alike. They broke into the Hospitale de Santo Spirito and threw the patients into the Tiber while they were still alive. Then they murdered all the orphans. Once across the Ponte Sisto, the plunder started in earnest. Palaces, monasteries, churches, convents, workshops—they attacked them all, broke down the doors, and scattered everything they could find into the streets. Money, booty, plunder was everything to them. They dragged citizens, even those who supported the emperor, even their own countrymen living in Rome, and tortured them until they handed over whatever money they had. They assumed that everyone in the city was hiding some secret treasure and pulled them, beat them, burned them until they handed it over. Those who suffered the most were those who had nothing to give.

When they found a priest, they cut him open until his guts ran out onto the street. Some they stripped and at sword point commanded to blaspheme the name of God. They held satiric masses and forced what priests they could find to participate. The Lutherans killed one priest who refused to give Communion to a donkey. The marauders then shot at holy relics, spat on them, and played football with the severed head of St. John. They tortured on, grabbing any man or woman they could find, still searching for hidden riches. Some they branded with red-hot irons. Others they tied by their genitals. Some they hung up by their arms for hours, some for days. Others they forced to eat their own severed ears, noses, or penises. They raped every woman they could find, young and old, married and single, including nuns. Especially nuns. Many they sold at auction or as prizes in games of chance. They forced mothers and fathers to watch the rape of their daughters. Some they forced to assist in it. The city had collapsed; it was violated, alone, without hope.

Cardinal Pompeo Colonna, an enemy of the pope, rode in with two thousand men to join the attack. He wept when he saw the state of affairs in the city, but his men soon joined the revelers. Most of the soldiers were half-starved peasants who robbed people as poor as they were themselves. Soon the city was empty, and the invaders weary. The noise died down; the exhausted revelers gathered in stupefied clumps, heavy with wine, hung over, bleeding in places from wounds. No one seemed to notice any
thing. Grandmothers wandered through the streets looking for their children. Babies cried for their mothers. Children stood in the middle of the streets, stunned. Spot fires burned here and there in the city. Over all was the buzzing of flies and the stench of the dead. Here and there dogs gnawed upon the corpses.

The pope eventually fled the city disguised as a servant; he was dressed in a cloak and hood and had a basket over one arm and a sack over his shoulder. He stayed at the episcopal palace at Orvieto, where he waited out the storm, shrunken, jaundiced from a diseased liver, one eye nearly gone, like Dante in hell crossing a sea of shit. Incongruously, a delegation from Henry VIII appeared, seeking the king's divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Finally, on February 11, 1528, the imperial army received its back pay and set out for home. Soon after, the pope returned to the city, or what was left of it.

“Rome is finished,” said Farrante Gonzaga, a nobleman of the city. The city was nearly empty, the citizens dead or dying. All trade had stopped—the shops were closed, the people gone, while the streets stank with the putrefaction of the unburied dead. The glory of Renaissance Rome had been plundered. In 1534, Clement VII died from a fever, and the people of Rome danced in the streets. They stuck a sword into his tomb, smeared dirt and filth on it, crossed out the words
Clemens Pontifex Maximus,
and wrote
Inclemens Pontifex Minimus
in its place. They would have dragged his body through the streets on meat hooks, if they had had the chance.
²

Little by little, the city raised itself from the dead. The next pope, Paul III (1534–49), gathered what money he could and what artists he could find who were still alive to rebuild the fountains and the palazzos. Michelangelo Buonarroti returned to the Sistine Chapel and painted his greatest fresco,
The Last Judgment.
When he had finished, the pope fell to his knees in front of it and trembled for the state of his own soul. The pope then commissioned him to rebuild the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitol and to design the steps, the Coronata, leading to the top. Ten years later, Emperor Charles V, the man behind the rape of the city, would visit Rome. Paul III would order houses, even churches torn down to make a straight
path for the emperor and his retinue of four thousand knights. Rome would do its best to hide its wounds as Charles rode in under the Arch of Titus, down the Via di Marforio to the Piazza di San Marco, and over the river to St. Peter's.

Paul III tried hard to recover the festival spirit of the Roman Renaissance, but something had changed in the city. As Rome rose from the dead, a spirit of reformation rose with it. Paul III himself approved the founding of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. He called the Council of Trent and set the Catholic church on the path of Counter-Reformation. This new reformation was both in the spirit of Lutheranism and against it. It cleaned out the old evils, the simony of the past, the selling of indulgences and of spiritual privileges. Though these practices returned from time to time, they were never the same and soon died out. The Counter-Reformation also called priests to a higher standard of education and a higher standard of behavior. Most of all, however, it shifted the church's attention away from a reconstruction of the glories of the classical age to a reconstruction of the roots of Christianity. Catholicism once more became interested in Scripture and in the writings of the church fathers. In the end, Luther finally got most of what he originally wanted from the church, though by this time, it was far too late.

Paul III's successor, Julius III (1550–55), continued with the reconstruction of the city and with the Council of Trent, but after Julius came Paul IV (1555–59), a sour fellow who cared little for the glories of Rome. A devotee of the Inquisition, he refocused the Counter-Reformation along lines that fit his own rigid orthodoxy. Virtue, and not beauty, he said, was the concern of popes. He hated the nudity of Michelangelo's frescos and threatened to destroy
The Last Judgment.
His rules for the city were equally harsh, ferociously punishing sexual misconduct. Homosexuals he ordered burned. His successor, after Pius IV (1559–65), was Pius V (1566–72), a former Dominican friar like Paul IV, who continued with the new strictures, adding new and more austere rules for religious, secular priests, and even bishops. He suppressed nepotism and restricted the granting of indulgences and the giving of dispensations. He also drove the
prostitutes out of the city, expelled the Jews from the Papal States, and ordered the Congregation of the Index to draw up a list of forbidden books. The printers quickly followed the prostitutes and Jews out of the city.

The Counter-Reformation was as strict as the Renaissance was loose. Pius V's successor, Gregory XIII (1572–85), instituted the Gregorian reforms of both the church and the calendar and founded the Collegio Romano, the great Jesuit college from which men of learning would spread out into the world, to Bavaria, to Austria, to little Graz, even to China. Galileo would visit the Collegio from time to time, have friends there, and also enemies.

 

I
N
1596, the Counter-Reformation arrived in Graz, two years after Kepler. It appeared in the person of young Ferdinand, the fervent Catholic archduke, who received the oath of allegiance of all the representatives on December 16, 1596.
³
He was eighteen years old at the time, seven years younger than Kepler. Up until then, the Protestants had dominated the region, which infuriated the archduchess Maria, Ferdinand's mother. She had no room for tolerance and raised her son accordingly. As Ferdinand ascended the throne, those who were paying attention to the shifting political winds sniffed the air. They knew that the young archduke had just returned from study with the Jesuits, the one order in the Catholic church that the Lutherans feared the most, for they were educated men, able to hold their own against the best Lutheran preachers. Many of them knew the Scriptures as well as any Protestant, and many were as dedicated to reform. But their reform always led back to Rome and to the hated pope, not away from him, so they could never be anything but enemies.

By this time, the Reformation had become an entity unto itself, no longer a movement within Christianity, but a new church, a new way, with its own structures, its own laws and traditions, its own theology. Sadly, if all the bile of the previous eighty years could have been set aside for just one hour, people would have seen that the differences between
them were not all that great, but such a thing was impossible by that time. History had rolled on, its momentum unstoppable, and the religious world of Europe would never be the same.