The Business of Alchemy

Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire

Pamela H. Smith

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781400883578
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative, she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher (1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power too must rest on liquid wealth.
Agrarian society regarded merchants with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor; however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher's career in its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and the modern state emerged.

ONE

PROVENANCES

Becherus Medicus, homo ingeniosus, sed polypragmon . . .
(Leibniz to Jakob Thomasius, September 1669)

BY HIS PAIRING of “ingeniosus” and “polypragmon,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempted to capture Johann Joachim Becher’s spirit and temper. While Leibniz celebrated Becher’s innate cleverness, he believed that his restlessness brought down odium upon him.¹ In the seventeenth century, polypragmon usually had negative connotations, suggesting that someone was overly busy, restless, and a busybody. It was, however, sometimes used in a positive sense to signify someone curious after knowledge. Its Latin equivalent, curiosus, was also frequently used at the time, and it too possessed both the positive sense of eager inquisitiveness (especially about the material world) and a negative one of weakness of will arising from too great a reliance upon the senses, as well as of overbusyness, ranging even to spying (figure 1).²

Such multivalent restlessness appears typical of Johann Joachim Becher (figure 2). A polymath, he published works on chemistry, politics, commerce, universal language, didactic method, medicine, moral philosophy, and religion. Becher was a man of deeds as well as of words, and, in the service of the most important princes of the German territories, he proposed and carried out many mechanical, chemical, and commercial projects.

A sketch of Becher’s life illustrates well the diversity of activity that was an expression of his restlessness.³ What little we know of Becher’s early life is gleaned from his own published works. His birth in 1635 to Lutheran parents in the free imperial city of Speyer is confirmed in city records, but from that time until 1655, when he appears again in documents, the portrait of the formative years of his life is his own. He claims to have left Speyer with his mother and brothers in 1648, the year of the signing of the Peace of Westphalia. His father had died in 1643 and his mother had remarried. His stepfather took the boys and their mother into foreign lands in search of a livelihood. Becher does not dwell on these facts, for they only provide the backdrop for the more evocative connections that he establishes in the presentation of his life, in which he emphasizes more than once his travels and autodidacticism. From the time he left the city of his birth in 1648, he claimed never to have attended school or university, learning instead by the light of nature and through conversation with the learned.⁴ In 1654, at the age of nineteen, he published an alchemical work under the pseudonym Solinus Saltzthal.

Figure 1. The Spy or Excessive Curiosity, wood-panel carving, by Francesco Pianta the Younger (1630?-1692). The spy is masked and accompanied by a lantern and winged boot. Scuola Grande di S. Rocco, Venice.

Figure 2. Portrait of Johann Joachim Becher, Mineralisches ABC, 1723. With permission of the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

In 1655, Becher appears in Vienna, where he titled himself mathematician to Emperor Ferdinand III.⁵ He had by this time converted to Catholicism, and was apparently supplying the emperor with advice on alchemical projections and perpetual motion machinery. In 1658, Becher was in Mainz, continuing his search for patronage, and in 1660 he was finally successful, for in that year the elector and archbishop of Mainz, Johann Philipp von Schönborn, appointed him Hofmedicus und -mathematicus (court physician and mathematician).

Becher’s status changed significantly in 1661. He moved from mechanical virtuoso to membership in an established profession, for in that year he defended a treatise on epilepsy before the faculty of medicine at the university in Mainz and was awarded the doctorate of medicine. Within the same week he became a member of the faculty of medicine, and in the next year married Maria Veronika von Hörnigk, the daughter of the Mainz professor of medicine, Ludwig von Hörnigk, who in 1663 stepped down from his position as professor in Becher’s favor. For the next three years, Becher published works on medicine conforming to his professional status within the university.

In 1664, Becher moved to the court in Munich, having been named Hofmedicus und -mathematicus to Elector Ferdinand Maria of the Wittelsbach House of Bavaria. His wide-ranging activities in this position mainly centered on work in the laboratory and the improvement of commerce. For example, he established a laboratory at the court, began a silk manufactory in Munich, traveled to the Netherlands in 1664 to try to obtain a colony in the New World for the elector and to hire artisans for his manufactory, and created various trade companies. In 1666, while carrying out trade negotiations in Vienna, he became involved in a dispute with the imperial treasurer, Georg Ludwig von Sinzendorf, and he returned to Munich for four years.

During these four busy years, he published the majority of his books. In 1667 he published a verse version of a devotional work, which he called an “Ethics,”⁶ and finished in quick succession a work on teaching Latin and didactic theory, the Methodus didactica; and a book of political economy, the Politischer Discurs von den eigentlichen Ursachen deß Auf- und Abnehmens/ der Städt/ Länder und Republicken (Political discourse about the true causes of the rise and fall of cities, territories, and republics). In 1669 he published his most important chemical work, Actorum Laboratorii Chymici Monacensis, seu Physicae Subterraneae libri duo (Two books of the acts of the chemical laboratory of Munich, or subterranean physics), and Moral Discurs von den eigentlichen Ursachen deß Glücks und Unglücks (Moral discourse about the true causes of fortune and misfortune). In the same year, he spent three months in Holland negotiating for a colony in the New World from the West India Company, not, however, for the elector of Bavaria, but for Friedrich Casimir, count of Hanau. In 1670, his last year in Munich, he perfected a method of extracting iron from clay and linseed oil, that is, of extracting a metal from nonmetallic substances. He performed this process before Elector Johann Philipp in Mainz, and it excited interest as far away as the Royal Society of London. In addition to all these activities, he managed his career so successfully that in 1666 he was appointed commercial advisor to the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Leopold I. Although Becher held this position simultaneously with that of medicus and mathematicus to the Bavarian court, from 1666 he always titled himself “Advisor on Commerce to His Majesty, the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.”

In 1670, Becher left Munich in order to serve the emperor exclusively. He advised the emperor on pretenders to alchemical knowledge as well as on commerical projects. He also performed a transmutation from lead to silver himself in 1675, and set up a Kunst- und Werckhaus (art and workhouse), which was to be a model manufactory, patent deposit, archive, cabinet of curiosities, and library.

In 1676 Becher set out with his brother-in-law, Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk, to enforce a ban on French imports imposed by the emperor on the trading cities of Germany. This trip ended his career at the Habsburg court since it provided his enemies an opportunity to make damaging accusations against him during his long absence from Vienna. Becher was accused (probably with just cause) of taking bribes, and the project ultimately failed.

Becher never returned to Vienna after this trip and spent the remaining years of his life again in the search for patronage, in northern Germany, the Netherlands, and England. In 1677 he entered the service of Duke Gustav Adolph of Mecklenburg-Güstrow in Rostock (where four volumes of Becher’s pre-1678 papers still remain). In Duke Gustav Adolph’s service, Becher attempted to secure the discoverer of phosphorus, Henning Brand, and his process for the icy noctiluca, but Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz preempted Becher and lured the phosphorus maker away for the duke of Hannover. In 1678-79, Becher raised a flurry of interest among the learned of Europe when he contracted with the States General of Holland to extract gold from the beaches of the Dutch Republic. A small-scale assay of the process succeeded, but Becher left secretly for England before the large-scale probe could be carried out. In England, where he was possibly patronized by the circle around Prince Rupert of the Palatinate, Becher advised on mines in Cornwall and wrote two large works: a collection of chemical and alchemical processes⁷ and a collection of failed and successful projects and inventions.⁸ In these works, Becher established for posterity his own and others’ priority to ideas, inventions, and chemical recipes.

Becher died at the age of forty-seven in London far from the main stage of his life’s activities, but he had enjoyed a very successful career in the service of the most important political figures in the Holy Roman Empire, and he had written more than twenty books—many of which were reissued several times. And he ensured his fame after death as skillfully as he had obtained patrons in his lifetime. He left behind a set of words and actions that would be put to use in the following generations. Becher’s life as a practical (active) but learned (contemplative) man became exemplary soon after his death and is expressed perfectly in the title of the first biography of Becher published in 1722: Das Muster eines Nützlich-Gelehrten in der Person Herrn Doctor Johann Joachim Bechers⁹ (The model of a useful scholar in the person of Dr. Johann Joachim Becher).

His name and work were also used in other ways in the eighteenth century. In 1703 Georg Ernst Stahl (1660-1734) edited and republished Becher’s major chemical work of 1669, the Physica Subterranea.¹⁰ Stahl claimed to have used Becher’s ideas in his own construction of a theory for the discipline of chemistry.¹¹ That theoretical construction, which has come to be known as the phlogiston theory, gave way before Antoine Lavoisier’s theory of chemical change based on the theory of oxidation in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Since Stahl wrote him into the history of chemistry, Becher has had an established place in the history of science.

In the history of economic thought, too, Becher’s place endures. His Politischer Discurs was used by the earliest teachers of Kameralwissenschaft (cameral science), a subject instituted at the universities of Frankfurt an der Oder and Halle in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Georg Heinrich Zincke (1692-1768) edited and republished this major work written by Becher in 1668.¹² Zincke’s own texts, which he claimed were based to a large extent on Becher’s ideas, became part of the discipline of Kameralistik.¹³

Zincke sought to delineate the boundaries and subject matter for his new faculty in the university, while Stahl attempted to establish his vitalist medical theories and Pietist doctrines. Both scholars wished to create a history for their disciplines and doctrines, and they placed Becher at its center. Later generations of historians have accepted the place in history assigned to Becher by Stahl and Zincke uncritically, and, as a result, the secondary literature on Becher fits clearly into one of two stories: the story of the rise of modern chemistry,¹⁴ or the story of the rise of modern economic thought.¹⁵ ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface to the New Paperback Edition
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Evocation
• Chapter One: Provenances
• Chapter Two: Oeconomia rerum et verborum: Constructing a Political Space in the Holy Roman Empire
• Chapter Three: The Commerce of Words: An Exchange of Credit at the Court of the Elector in Munich
• Chapter Four: The Production of Things: A Transmutation at the Habsburg Court
• Chapter Five: Between Words and Things: The Commerce of Scholars and the Promise of Ars
• Epilogue: Projection
• Bibliography
• Index