West-Europese adel » Rudolf II van Habsburg Koning van Hongarije Keizer van het H. Roomse Rijk (1552-1612)

Persoonlijke gegevens Rudolf II van Habsburg Koning van Hongarije Keizer van het H. Roomse Rijk 

• Hij is geboren op 18 juli 1552.
• Titel: Koning van Hongarije, Bohemen en Kroatië Aartsbisschop van Oostenrijk
• Hij is overleden op 20 januari 1612 in Praag, hij was toen 59 jaar oud.
• Een kind van Maximiliaan II van Habsburg Koning van Hongarije Keizer van het H. Roomse Rijk en Maria van Habsburg Infante van Spanje
• Deze gegevens zijn voor het laatst bijgewerkt op 17 januari 2020.

Gezin van Rudolf II van Habsburg Koning van Hongarije Keizer van het H. Roomse Rijk

Hij had een relatie met Living.

Kind(eren):

1. Charlotte van Habsburg  1590-1662 

Notities over Rudolf II van Habsburg Koning van Hongarije Keizer van het H. Roomse Rijk

On 18 July 1552 in Vienna he was born, son of Emperor Maximilian II and Infanta Maria of Spain. Both his grandfathers were sons of Juana La Loca. Rudolf spent his formative years (1563-1571) with his younger brother Ernst in Spain at the court of King Philip II, where he evidently learned the newly modish Spanish manner of stiff reserve, of black and relatively simple clothing, and of exaggerated regard for one's personal grandeur and honor. He also learned to distrust and dislike the ambitions of his Spanish relatives. Plans that he should marry the Infanta Isabella, daughter of Philip II, dragged on for years until it became obvious that Rudolf would never commit himself to her. Aged twenty-four, he became Emperor, a position he held for some thirty-six years.

Emperor Rudolf II sent imperial commissioners to Braunschweig and the Rhineland in order to cope with repeated threats to Catholic interests in northwestern Germany, and was often asked to intervene in cases of insanity among other princely houses. However, Rudolf was himself mentally overburdened and dangerously melancholy from as early as 1577 onwards.

He moved his residence and government from their traditional seat in Vienna to the Bohemian city of Prague, partly to escape the crowds and pressures of the Austrian metropolis. In the fall of 1577 an official of the Elector Palatine wrote to his master in Heidelberg that the various embassies to the imperial court had provoked such disorder that 'his Imperial Majesty seems totally melancholy'. Here we find two elements that came to characterise Rudolf's long reign: his loathing for crowds, confusion, and court intrigue on the one hand, and a repeated tendency to fall into despondency and melancholy on the other.

Physically, Rudolf was frequently in ill health. In 1581, at the age of twenty-nine, he was so sick that there were fears for his life. His physicians and surgeons seemed to be having no luck in stopping an apparently rapid loss of weight. His uncle, Archduke Karl, began to take steps to ensure that the imperial succession would stay in Habsburg hands if the unmarried emperor died without legitimate heirs. These preparations proved unnecessary, or at least premature, because Rudolf recovered his health by the fall of 1581; but the example also reveals another characteristic of Rudolf's reign: the willingness or even eagerness of his brothers and cousins to replace him.

Even though Rudolf kept to himself a great deal, almost everyone at court had an opinion or an anecdote to tell about the reclusive and melancholy monarch. Historical popularisers have told and retold stories about the mad emperor, shut away with his smoky alchemists and mystical astrologers, frightened of marriage while dominated by lust, passive in the midst of mounting political chaos in the empire, devoutly Catholic, or bigoted, or enlightened, or fully persuaded that he was himself bewitched.

Rudolf's glittering court included the most able astronomers of the day, Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the mannerist painters Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Bartolomaeus Spranger, the occult philosophers John Dee and (briefly) Giordano Bruno, as well as notable Paracelsians, Platonists, Cabalists, Ramists, and Jewish scholars. However, Rudolf also had a reputation for libertinism and had a long-standing relationship with Katharina Strada, the daughter of a favourite courtier.

In June 1600 he returned to Prague, where the plague had died down five months earlier, and for a time Rudolf seemed suffused with a new vigour. He hunted joyfully and ordered parties and recreations. But then his illness broke forth in full flower. He hallucinated and lashed out at imagined plots against him. He raged. He announced that he had been poisoned or bewitched, and it seems he attempted suicide repeatedly. In September 1600 he dismissed his ministers Trauttson and Rumpf. He now complained bitterly of the machinations of the Capuchins and ordered them to stop ringing their bells during the night and even ordered their exile from Prague. Then just as suddenly he changed his mind and allowed them to stay.

The more his sexual excesses stood in radical contrast to those religious views that he had imbibed in his youth and which still dominated him, the more any thought at all of confession and of his responsibility before God must have terrified him in his state of worried turbulence. He fathered at least six illegitimate children and, on 20 January 1612, died in Prague. From H. C. Erik Midelfort: 'Mad Princes of Renaissance Germany'.
http://genealogics.org/getperson.php?personID=I00001683&tree=LEO

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