Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor

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 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. 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 was 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==

, c. 1580 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. Another famous child was (1591–1662), Princess of Cantecroix, mother-in-law of Beatrice de Cusance, later Duchess of Lorraine as the second wife of Charles IV 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, Philipp Lang von Langenfels (1560–1609), influenced him for years and was hated by those seeking favours with the emperor. Rudolf succeeded his father, Maximilian II, on 12 October 1576. 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. 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. ==Reign==

by Aegidius Sadeler (1603) Historians have traditionally blamed Rudolf's preoccupation with the arts, occult sciences, and other personal interests for the political disasters of his reign. , 1594 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. The war lasted until 1606 and is known as the "Long Turkish War". 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., crown and scepter of Rudolf II ==Death==

Rudolf died in 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 five months later. 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. later became the imperial crown of the Austrian Empire.Rudolf's love of collecting for the kunstkammer extended to decorative objects of all kinds, natural artifacts, and mechanical moving device. 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 patronized 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 recognized 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. , Roman god of the seasons, by Giuseppe Arcimboldo. Rudolf greatly appreciated the work. Rudolf kept a menagerie of exotic animals, botanical gardens, and Europe's most extensive "cabinet of curiosities" 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. 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 cipher 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. As was typical of the time, Rudolf II had a portrait painted in the studio of the renowned Alonso Sánchez Coello. Completed in 1567, the portrait depicted Rudolf II at the age of 15. This painting can be seen at the Lobkowicz Palace in the Rozmberk room. with clockwork, made for the Kunstkammer of Rudolf II, 1579 By 1597, Rudolf's collections occupied three rooms of the incomplete northern wing. When building was completed in 1605, the collection was moved to the dedicated kunstkammer. Naturalia (minerals and gemstones) were arranged in a 37-cabinet display that had three vaulted chambers in front, each about 5.5 m wide by 3 m high and 60 m long, connected to a main chamber 33 m long. Large uncut gemstones were held in strong boxes. Apart from the fantastic nature of the objects, the aesthetics of their arrangement and presentation played an important role in highlighting the harmonious expression of divine order and the analogy of a micro-macrocosm in art, nature, and the world. Rudolf's kunstkammer was not a typical "cabinet of curiosities", a haphazard collection of unrelated specimens. Rather, the Rudolfine kunstkammer was systematically arranged in an encyclopaedic fashion. In addition, Rudolf employed his court gemologist and physician Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550–1632), to curate the collection. Anselmus was an avid mineral collector and traveled widely on collecting trips to the mining regions of Germany, Bohemia and Silesia, often accompanied by his Bohemian naturalist friend, Thaddaeus Hagecius. Between 1607 and 1611, Anselmus catalogued the kunstkammer and in 1609 published Gemmarum et Lapidum, the finest gemological treatise and encyclopedia ever written for this time. and others survive in museums. ==Occult sciences==

Astrology and alchemy were regarded as mainstream scientific fields in Renaissance Prague, and Rudolf was a firm devotee of both. His lifelong quest was to find the philosopher's stone, and Rudolf spared no expense in bringing Europe's best alchemists to court, such as Edward Kelley and John Dee. Rudolf even performed his own experiments in a private alchemy laboratory. Rudolf gave Prague a mystical reputation that persists in part to this day, with Alchemists' Alley l, on the grounds of Prague Castle, being a popular visiting place and tourist attraction. Rudolf was a patron of the occult sciences. That and his practice of tolerance towards Jews caused during his reign the legend of the Golem of Prague to be established. ==Issue==

Rudolf had a relationship with the Royal mistress Kateřina Stradová (also known as Anna Marie Stradová, or Catherina Strada, c. 1568-1629), with whom he had six children: • Don Julius Caesar d'Austria • Matyáš d'Austria • Carlos d'Austria • Karolina d'Austria • Dorothea d'Austria • Alžběta d'Austria == Titles ==

The full titulature of Rudolf after he inherited the Holy Roman Empire and the vast realms of Central and Eastern Europe went as following: ==Ancestors==