Read Man of Misconceptions : The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change (9781101597033) for Free Online

the city little by little,” recalled Kircher, “and since the orderly was not able to offer provisions necessary for a journey, given the very sudden state of confusion,” the priests and novices were “sent away whither Divine providence and fate might lead them. I together with three of my friends was among these.”
    Kircher and his companions made it out through the town gates. Avoiding the roads and making their way slowly, they hoped to reach the small city of Münster, home to another not always well-appreciated Jesuit community. It was located about fifty miles west, through thickly wooded lowlands. “The winter at that time was harsh and the snow was very deep, and, what was worst of all, we were poorly clothed and were lacking the necessary provisions,” he remembered. “But the driving fear of the pursuing soldiers furnished wings to us in our flight.”
    A dozen or more of Kircher’s fellow Jesuits were in fact captured. As a Catholic official later described it, Christian “took subjects prisoner, bound them, beat them, martyred some of them to death” and “similarly maltreated others.” He seized all of the town’s supplies, livestock, and grain, as well as its “cannons, munitions and silver plate.” Christian himself later boasted that during the rape and pillage of Paderborn he’d probably fathered enough “young Dukes of Brunswick” to keep the priests in line there for a generation to come.
    Kircher’s group “wandered in the most dense forest and fields” all through the night and into the next day. “Though immersed up to the knee in thick clods of snow, we were progressing as much as we were able on our journey through this harshest wilderness,” he recalled. He was so hungry, he claimed, that he gladly would have experienced “the degree of pleasure afforded by roots and grass, were the depth of the snow and the earth packed with ice not begrudging us this joy!” Finally, “frozen head to toe with trembling cheeks and faces turned completely blue,” they found their way out of the forest and came across a cottage, where they were given some crude bread to eat. “It was of the worst type . . . made from straw and bran,” he remembered. “Nonetheless it was as sweet to my famished palate as nothing that I can recall eating during my entire life.”
    Sometime that evening, in a place with poor dwellings and a fire burning in the dark, Kircher and his friends met up with “a certain man” who gave them warm food and a bed for the night. By the end of the next day they passed through the gates of Münster, which had seen its share of religious conflict. (Iron cages that were used decades before to display the corpses of executed Anabaptists still hung from the steeple of St. Lambert’s church, and still do.) They recuperated there for about a week, until they heard Christian was moving in their direction, and then set off again, heading west (farther and farther from Paderborn, Fulda, Geisa, and home), toward the Rhine, about sixty miles away. There was yet another Jesuit college in the town of Neuss, not far on the opposite side. From Neuss, the more permanent safety of Cologne could be reached in about a day of travel south along the river.
    After two more days of hiking, they came to the Rhine’s east bank near Düsseldorf. The river, which runs all the way from the Alps to the North Sea, appeared to be frozen over. As Kircher later learned, the locals were usually willing to pay someone to find out if the ice was “solid enough to bear the weight of men and livestock.” But with one look at Kircher’s group, they recognized an opportunity to save some money: “Since they saw that we were poorly clothed (for we were dressed in secular garb), and since they strongly sensed that we desired to cross the river that very day, and since