The Emperor’s Collection and What It Means to Prove a Purchase
~ Monday, March 21, 2022 ~
The claim that Rudolf II purchased Beinecke MS 408 for 600 gold ducats rests on a single letter written in 1666, reporting what a now-dead man had told the letter’s author at some point before 1644, about a purchase made sometime before 1612. Archivists have a term for this class of evidence. It is called hearsay.
This is not a dismissal of the Rudolf II connection. The manuscript was in Prague in the seventeenth century. The figures documented in its provenance chain — Hořčický, Baresch, Marci — are real Prague residents whose careers are documented. The question is not whether Rudolf is connected to the manuscript’s Prague history, but what it would take to establish that he purchased it and at what price. Those are different questions, and the second has no satisfactory answer.
The Kunstkammer as documented practice
Rudolf II (1552–1612) relocated the Habsburg imperial capital from Vienna to Prague in 1583 and ruled from Prague Castle for nearly thirty years. His collection — the Kunstkammer — was not casual accumulation. It was organized on encyclopedic principles: a theatrum mundi, a theatre of the world, in which natural objects, scientific instruments, paintings, and mechanical devices were arranged to represent the total order of knowledge. Between 1587 and 1605 he constructed a dedicated northern wing at Prague Castle to house it, filling vaulted chambers roughly sixty metres long with thirty-seven cabinets of minerals and gemstones, works by Dürer and Bruegel the Elder, astronomical instruments, a celestial globe with clockwork mechanisms, sculptures by Giambologna, and a menagerie that included lions and tigers.
The collection also contained at least one major medieval manuscript: the Codex Gigas, the world’s largest surviving medieval codex, a Bohemian production of the early 13th century. The Codex Gigas entered Rudolf’s collection by 1594. It was seized by Swedish troops from Prague Castle on 26 July 1648, during the Thirty Years War, and is now in the National Library of Sweden in Stockholm. This is what documented Rudolf manuscript ownership looks like: an acquisition with independent corroboration, a date, and a subsequent custody chain that explains how it got from his collection to its present location.
The court and its scholars
Rudolf attracted the most significant concentration of scientific and philosophical talent in northern Europe of his era. Tycho Brahe was at his court from 1599 to 1601. Johannes Kepler served as court mathematician from 1601. Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550–1632) served as court gemologist and physician and published the Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia in 1609 — one of the major works of early modern mineralogy. The court painters included Arcimboldo, Bartholomaeus Spranger, and Hans von Aachen.
John Dee was in Prague from September 1583 with his associate Edward Kelley. The reputation of Dee and Kelley for angelic communication and alchemical practice has attached them to the Voynich manuscript in various theories over the years. The Wikipedia article on John Dee is clear on this point: “Dee’s contacts with Rudolph were less extensive than had been thought” and “Dee’s diaries show no evidence of a sale” of any manuscript to Rudolf. Dee returned to England in 1589. The association is a story about Rudolf’s court, not evidence about a specific transaction.
Jakub Hořčický served a different function from the astronomers and painters. As imperial distiller, curator of the botanical gardens, and personal physician, he occupied the scientific-household role — practical, applied, close to the emperor in daily life. Rudolf ennobled him in 1607. He is, in terms of his known interests and proximity to the emperor, the most plausible owner of a manuscript whose illustrations are predominantly botanical.
Strahov and what the inventories show
Rudolf II began construction of the Church of Saint Roch at Strahov Monastery in 1602 — a votive offering — connecting the imperial court materially to the Premonstratensian monastery on the edge of Hradčany. The Strahov Library holds over 3,000 manuscripts and 1,500 incunabula in its special depository and is one of the major manuscript collections in the Czech lands.
During preparation for this series I examined a facsimile of a Rudolf II period inventory held in the Strahov manuscript collection. I am grateful to Pavel Šimánek for facilitating that access. The inventory does not mention Beinecke MS 408, or anything answering its description. This is not particularly surprising: Rudolf’s inventories are fragmentary, and a manuscript acquired informally from a private bearer — if the Marci account is to be trusted — might not have been formally entered into any inventory at all.
The 600 ducats
The Marci letter’s key passage deserves a direct reading: “Dr. Raphael, a tutor in the Bohemian language to Ferdinand III…told me the said book belonged to the Emperor Rudolf and that he presented to the bearer who brought him the book 600 ducats.”
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky (1580–1644) was a Bohemian lawyer and cryptographer who served in court roles under Rudolf II, Mathias, Ferdinand II, and Ferdinand III. He died in 1644. The Marci letter was written in 1666. That is at minimum a 22-year gap between the last time Mnishovsky could have spoken these words and the moment they were written down, and Marci’s phrasing — “told me” — does not indicate that this was a recent or specifically datable conversation. Mnishovsky was reporting what he had heard; from whom and when is not stated.
The 600-ducat figure has attracted attention as evidence of the manuscript’s value to Rudolf. I note that it is a round number, and that round numbers in remembered financial transactions tend to be approximations at best. Court payment records from Rudolf’s era exist, partially, in the Austrian state archives. No payment matching this transaction appears in them. The absence of a record for an informal payment to an unnamed bearer is not evidence that the payment did not occur. It is simply the normal condition of undocumented transactions.
Roger Bacon
The radiocarbon dating places the vellum in 1404–1438. Roger Bacon died around 1292. The manuscript could not have been written by Bacon, on his own vellum, in his own lifetime. Marci reported Mnishovsky’s attribution without endorsing it — his own letter adds the caveat “on this point I suspend judgement” — and subsequent scholarly opinion has done rather more than suspend judgement. The attribution is finished.
In this series
- A Manuscript Without a History
- The Folios That Are Not There
- Prague Provenance and the Bohemian Hypothesis
Sources
- Wikipedia — Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor: en.wikipedia.org — Kunstkammer, Prague residence, court scholars, Swedish looting 1648.
- Wikipedia — Codex Gigas: en.wikipedia.org — confirmed Rudolf II manuscript ownership, acquisition by 1594.
- Wikipedia — John Dee: en.wikipedia.org — Prague period 1583–1589; no evidence of manuscript sale.
- Wikipedia — Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky: en.wikipedia.org — dates, court roles, source of 600-ducat and Roger Bacon claims.
- Wikipedia — Strahov Monastery: en.wikipedia.org — library holdings; Rudolf II and Saint Roch church construction 1602.
- René Zandbergen, voynich.nu: voynich.nu — provenance documentation.