Rudolf II (18 July 1552 – 20 January 1612) was Holy Roman Emperor (1576–1612), King of Hungary and Croatia (as Rudolf I, 1572–1608), King of Bohemia (1575–1608/1611) and Archduke of Austria (1576–1608). He was a member of the House of Habsburg.
Rudolf's legacy has traditionally been viewed in three ways:Hotson, 1999. an ineffectual ruler whose mistakes led directly to the Thirty Years' War; a great and influential patron of Northern Mannerist art; and an intellectual devotee of occult arts and learning which helped seed what would be called the Scientific Revolution. Determined to unify Christendom, he initiated the Long Turkish War (1593–1606) with the Ottoman Empire. Exhausted by war, his citizens in Hungary revolted in the Bocskai Uprising, which led to more authority being given to his brother Matthias. Under Rudolf's reign, there was a policy of tolerance towards Judaism.
Early life
Rudolf was born in Vienna on 18 July 1552. He was the eldest son and successor of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, and King of Hungary and Croatia; his mother was the Spanish Princess Maria, a daughter of Charles V and Isabella of Portugal. He was the elder brother of Matthias, who was to succeed him as King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor.
Rudolf spent eight formative years, from age 11 to 19 (1563–1571), in Spain, at the court of his maternal uncle Philip II of Spain, together with his younger brother Ernest, future governor of the Low Countries.
After his return to Vienna, his father was concerned about Rudolf's aloof and stiff manner, typical of the more conservative Spanish court, rather than the more relaxed and open Austrian court, but his Spanish mother saw in him courtliness and refinement.Marshall, 2006. In the years following his return to Vienna, Rudolf was crowned King of Hungary (1572), King of Bohemia and King of the Romans (1575) when his father was still alive.
For the rest of his life, Rudolf would remain reserved, secretive, and largely a recluse who did not like to travel or even partake in the daily affairs of the state.
He was more intrigued by occult learning, such as astrology and alchemy, which were mainstream in the Renaissance period, and had a wide variety of personal hobbies, such as horses, clocks, collecting rarities, and being a patron of the arts. He suffered from periodic bouts of "melancholy" (depression), which was common in the Habsburg line. These became worse with age and were manifested by a withdrawal from the world and its affairs into his private interests.
Personal life
Like Elizabeth I of England, whose birth was 19 years before his, Rudolf dangled himself as a prize in a string of diplomatic negotiations for marriages, but never in fact married. Rudolf was known to have had a succession of affairs with women, some of whom claimed to have been impregnated by him. He had several illegitimate children by his mistress Catherina Strada. Their eldest son, Don Julius Caesar d'Austria, was likely born between 1584 and 1586 and received an education and opportunities for political and social prominence from his father. Another famous child was (1591–1662), Princess of Cantecroix, mother-in-law of Béatrix de Cusance, later Duchess of Lorraine as the second wife of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine.
During his periods of self-imposed isolation, Rudolf reportedly had affairs with his Obersthofmeister, Wolfgang Siegmund Rumpf vom Wullroß (1536–1606), and a series of valets. One of them, the Jewish Philipp Lang von Langenfels (1560–1609),Kaufmann, 2025, p. 61. influenced him for years and was hated by those seeking favours with the emperor.Rowse, 1977.Philipp Lang, Kammerdiener Kaiser Rudolphs II. Eine Criminal-Geschichte aus dem Anfang des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts
Rudolf succeeded his father, Maximilian II, on 12 October 1576. In 1583, he moved the court to Prague.
In 1607, Rudolf sent Julius to live in Český Krumlov Castle, in Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic, a castle that Rudolf had acquired from Peter Vok of Rosenberg, the last member of the House of Rosenberg, who had fallen into financial ruin. Julius lived at Český Krumlov in 1608, when he reportedly abused and murdered the daughter of a local barber, who had been living in the castle, and then disfigured her body. Rudolf condemned his son's act and suggested that he should be imprisoned for the rest of his life.
However, Julius died in 1609 after he had shown signs of schizophrenia, refused to bathe and lived in squalor. His death was apparently caused by an ulcer that ruptured.
Many artworks commissioned by Rudolf are unusually erotic.Trevor-Roper, pp. 116–120 The emperor was the subject of a whispering campaign by his enemies in his family and the Catholic Church in the years before he was deposed. Sexual allegations might well have formed a part of the campaign against him.Trevor-Roper, pp. 121–123.Trevor-Roper mentions many stories and rumours, but not those of Rudolf's homosexuality.
Reign
Historians have traditionally blamed Rudolf's preoccupation with the arts, occult sciences and other personal interests for the political disasters of his reign. More recent historians have re-evaluated that view and see his patronage of the arts and occult sciences as a triumph and key part of the Renaissance, and his political failures as a legitimate attempt to create a unified Christian empire that was undermined by the realities of religious, political, and intellectual disintegrations of the time.
Although raised in his uncle Philip II's Catholic court in Spain, Rudolf was tolerant of Protestantism and other religions, including Judaism.Kaufmann, 2025, pp. 61-62. Rudolf's tolerant policy towards the Jews would see Jewish cultural life flourishing and their population increasing under his reign.
He largely withdrew from Catholic observances and even in death refused the last sacramental rites. He had little attachment to Protestants either, except as a counter-weight to papal policies. He put his primary support behind conciliarists, irenicists and humanists. When the papacy instigated the Counter-Reformation by using agents sent to his court, Rudolf backed those whom he thought were the most neutral in the debate, either by not taking a side or by trying to promote restraint. This led to political chaos and threatened to provoke civil war.
His conflict with the Ottoman Empire was the final cause of his undoing. Unwilling to compromise with the Ottomans and stubbornly determined that he could unify all of Christendom with a new crusade, he started a long and indecisive war against the Ottomans in 1593.Craft, Kimberly L. (2011) The Private Letters of Countess Erzsébet Báthory, pp. 73–74. The war lasted until 1606 and is known as the "Long Turkish War".
By 1604, his Hungarian subjects were exhausted by the war and revolted, led by Stephen Bocskai (Bocskai uprising). In 1605, Rudolf was forced by his other family members to cede control of Hungarian affairs to his younger brother, Archduke Matthias. By 1606, Matthias had forged a difficult peace with the Hungarian rebels (Peace of Vienna) and the Ottomans (Peace of Zsitvatorok).
Rudolf was angry with Matthias's concessions and saw them as giving away too much to further his hold on power. That made Rudolf prepare to start a new war against the Ottomans, but Matthias rallied support from the disaffected Hungarians and forced Rudolf to cede the crowns of Hungary, Austria and Moravia to him. Meanwhile, the Bohemian Protestants demanded greater religious liberty, which Rudolf granted in the Letter of Majesty in 1609. Bohemians continued to press for further freedoms, and Rudolf used his army to repress them.
Bohemian Protestants then appealed to Matthias for help. His army held Rudolf prisoner in his castle in Prague until 1611, when Rudolf ceded the crown of Bohemia, as well, to his brother.
Death Rudolf died in January 1612, nine months after he had been stripped of all effective power by his younger brother, except the empty title of Holy Roman Emperor, to which Matthias was elected in June 1612. In May 1618, with the event known as the Defenestration of Prague, the Protestant Bohemians, in defence of the rights granted them in the Letter of Majesty, threw imperial officials out of the window and thus the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) started.
Art collecting and patronage
Rudolf moved the Habsburg capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583. Rudolf loved collecting paintings and was often reported to sit and stare in rapture at a new work for hours on end. He spared no expense in acquiring great masterworks, such as those of Albrecht Dürer and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Rudolf's collections were the most impressive in the Europe of his day. He was patron to some of the finest contemporary artists, who mainly produced new works in the Northern Mannerist style, such as Bartholomeus Spranger, Hans von Aachen, Giambologna, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Aegidius Sadeler, Roelant Savery, Joris Hoefnagel, and Adrian de Vries, and commissioned works from Italian artists like Paolo Veronese.
Rudolf's love of collecting for the kunstkammer extended to decorative objects of all kinds, natural artefacts, and mechanical moving devices. In addition, his court included artists who contributed ceremonial swords, musical instruments, clocks, waterworks, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes and other scientific instruments. Rudolf also attracted some of the best scientific instrument makers of the time, such as Jost Bürgi, Erasmus Habermel and Hans Christoph Schissler, who had direct contact with the court astronomers and through the financial support of the court were economically independent to develop scientific instruments and manufacturing techniques.
Rudolf patronised astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, who both attended his court. Brahe, who had spent much of his life making observations of stars and planets that were more accurate than any previous observations, directed Kepler to work on the planet Mars. In doing so, Kepler found that in order to fit the observations to the required accuracy, it was necessary to assume that each planet orbits the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus, sweeping out equal areas in equal times, resulting in Kepler's laws of planetary motion. It was Rudolf's patronage of the two astronomers that made this possible, as Kepler recognised when he eventually published the Rudolphine Tables.
The poet Elizabeth Jane Weston, a writer of Renaissance Latin poetry, published numerous odes to him while appealing for him to release her stepfather's assets.Furlong-Bolliger, Susan. "Elizabeth Jane Weston". EBSCO, 2023.
Rudolf kept a menagerie of exotic animals, botanical gardens, and Europe's most extensive "cabinet of curiosities" incorporating "the three kingdoms of nature and the works of man". It was housed at Prague Castle, where between 1587 and 1605 he built the northern wing to house his growing collections.Wendell E. Wilson, Joel A. Bartsch, Mark Mauthner, Masterpieces of the Mineral World: Treasures from the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Houston Museum of Natural Science, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004. A lion and a tiger were allowed to roam the castle, as is documented by the account books, which record compensation paid to survivors of attacks or to family members of victims.Simon Winder. Danubia. pp. 129–130. Picador, Pan Macmillan. . 2014.
The Codex Gigas was one of Rudolf's possessions. He was also alleged, by a single piece of hearsay, to have owned the Voynich manuscript, a codex whose author, purpose, language and script, and posited cypher remain unidentified to this day. In a letter written in 1665, Johannes Marcus Marci claims to have heard that Rudolf acquired the manuscript for 600 gold ducats at some unspecified time. No evidence in support of this assertion has ever been discovered.