History The city of Prague was a particularly exciting and dangerous place to be at the end of the 16th century. In 1583, it once again became the seat of the Holy Roman Empire.
This transformed a large provincial town into the centre of the world. Suddenly there were huge numbers of merchants, astrologers, masons, artists, soldiers, courtiers, bureaucrats, prostitutes, spies and diplomats swarming through its narrow medieval streets. They came from all over Europe, but mainly from Austria, Germany and Italy. In the Emperor's kitchen alone there were 44 people employed.
With so much power and people concentrated in one place it is not surprising that the streets were dangerous. You could be assassinated, poisoned or run through for no reason. In 1591, a gazette remarked that not one but four people had been stabbed to death over two nights in the Lesser Quarter, the area just below Prague Castle. Neither the perpetrators nor their motives could be discovered. Young virgins were also vulnerable. Kidnappers called raptores would come down from the castle to abduct maidens for the satisfaction of imperial desires.
Some of the finest scientists, thinkers and artists of the age also gathered in the city, jostling for imperial favour. Among these were John Dee, Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe and Giordano Bruno. They brushed shoulders with the numerous charlatans and quacks who had also come to try to get money for projects involving communication with angels, the production of gold from base matter and the capture of unicorns.
Above all this, secreted in his chambers overlooking the city, was the emperor himself, Rudolf II. Relying on portraits of the emperor, John Banville describes him thus in Kepler: "He was a short plump matronly man with melancholy eyes. A large chin nestled like a pigeon in a bit of soft beard."
A certain mystique has built up around his reign because he largely abandoned the affairs of state in order to build his art collection and cabinet of curiosities. He also became deeply interested, and possibly involved, in alchemy and necromancy. He hoped that eventually some of these pursuits would help him to solve the political and religious problems of his empire. However, these occult interests served only to distract him from confronting the terrible troubles that were in the offing. Within a few years of his death, the Thirty Years War would break out, turning central Europe in the years 1618-1648 into something like contemporary Sudan. It is difficult to say how much of the blame lies with Rudolf II, but the decades of his dithering and apathy towards political affairs cannot have helped.
Rudolf was extremely well educated and gave out his imperial favour with a keen discrimination for genius. But he left no written work that would explain his outlook, and even the spies, nuncios and diplomats whose business it was to discern what the emperor thought had a hard time. So at the centre of all this imperial intrigue, scientific discovery and cabalistic research, all we have is the rheumy, ugly face of the emperor himself, who does not say a word.
Peter Marshall's book takes as its theme Rudolfine Prague, and it is a kind of digest of the large number of historical accounts of the time. It is both a loose biography of the emperor and a portrait of the city in its heyday. Because historical documents give us little sense of the inner life of the monarchs of the time, Marshall is more often than not left with surmises. So we read that Philip II of Spain, when he first saw his nephews, Rudolf II and his brother, "no doubt" had a sparkle in his eye; there are no less than three similar "no doubts" on the same page, and each successive instance only serves to make us doubt Marshall more. He is also a bit shaky on the Czech names, many of which are misspelled.
But you could do a lot worse than to pack this book in your suitcase when you're visiting the city. His lucid prose and clear exposition will help you to decipher a good bit of Prague's labyrinth, and to explain in part why the capital of one of the less important European countries is one of the great cities of the world.
Justin Quinn's latest collection of poetry, Waves & Trees, has just been published by Gallery Press. He lives in Prague
The Theatre of the World: Alchemy, Astrology and Magic in Renaissance Prague By Peter Marshall. Harvill Secker, 276pp. £17.99