Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II ruled as Holy Roman Emperor from 1576 to 1612, moved his capital to Prague, and collected art, instruments and scholars while the Empire drifted towards war. Born in Vienna in 1552, the son of Maximilian II, he was educated for eight years at the rigidly Catholic Spanish court of his uncle Philip II, and returned withdrawn and formal. He moved the imperial residence to Prague around 1583 and rarely left it. His Kunstkammer was the greatest collection of the age — paintings by Dürer, Bruegel and Correggio, Arcimboldo's composite portraits, clocks, automata, narwhal tusks, and mathematical and astronomical instruments — arranged as a model of the whole of creation. He employed Tycho Brahe as imperial mathematician from 1599 and Johannes Kepler after him. Kepler inherited Tycho's observations of Mars on his death and used them to derive the laws of planetary motion, publishing the Rudolphine Tables in the emperor's name. He also patronised alchemists and the occultists John Dee and Edward Kelley, and the distinction between that and the science was not one he drew. He was tolerant by inclination and paralysed by indecision. He would not enforce the Counter-Reformation as Rome and Spain demanded, nor settle with the Protestants, and let administration lapse for long periods of what contemporaries described as melancholy. The long war with the Ottomans from 1593 went badly and provoked a Hungarian revolt. His family forced him to cede Hungary, Austria and Moravia to his brother Matthias in 1608. He issued the Letter of Majesty in 1609 granting Bohemian religious freedom, and was deposed from Bohemia in 1611. He died in 1612.
- Lived: 1552 CE – 1612 CE
- Nationality: Austrian
- Roles: emperor, head_of_state, patron
