Counter-Reformation 87also less inclined to diplomatic compromise than his father. The lat-
ter characteristic was soon evident, both in the Habsburg lands, where
he quickly departed from Maximilian’s policy of informal accommoda-
tion with the Protestants, and also in the Empire, where his change of
approach triggered off the long-running dispute over the exclusion of
the administrator of Magdeburg from the Reichstag in 1582, as discussed
in Chapter 1. Another early change was Rudolf’s decision to abandon
Vienna and set up his court in Prague, a city from which he increasingly
rarely emerged as time went by, while in his latter years he confined
himself almost entirely to the precincts of Prague castle.
Rudolf’s complex personality has baffled contemporaries and histori-
ans alike, as Evans shows in a useful summary of the contrasting and
conflicting observations made at the time, and the wide range of inter-
pretations subsequently derived from them.^10 Highly intelligent and
sensitive, but eccentric and unstable, his private interests ranged from
science and the arts to astrology and exotic animals, while he was an
eclectic and extravagant collector of both the old and the new, from
Dürer paintings to the latest and boldest experiments. Under his influ-
ence and patronage Prague became a world city and an intellectual
centre, attracting leading thinkers, scientists and artists, many of them
indeed Protestants like Kepler, but numerous fantasists and downright
charlatans also flocked to the court.^11
Rudolf’s personal life was equally unconventional, particularly for a
ruling prince of the time, in that although he had half a dozen ille-
gitimate children he never married, and indeed seemed to go to great
lengths to avoid marriage. During an eighteen-year engagement to his
cousin Isabella, daughter of Philip II of Spain, he repeatedly found rea-
sons for postponing the wedding, until the king finally betrothed her to
his younger brother Albrecht, news which Rudolf paradoxically received
with ‘rage and despair’.^12 Other marriage plans followed, but likewise
foundered because of Rudolf’s failure to follow them through, despite
which possibilities were still being floated until the last years of his life.
Meanwhile he rejected all suggestions of naming a successor, seeing in
them potential plots by his relatives to deprive him of his throne during
his lifetime.
Contemporaries already knew Rudolf to be a strange character when
he became emperor, but although anecdotes abound the actual conduct
of his government during its first quarter of a century was not notably
more erratic than others of the period. The last decade, on the other
hand, up to his death in 1612, produced a series of conflicts and crises
which, while not entirely attributable to his personality and behaviour,