How the Shah’s watchmaker lost his head

When the designated imperial envoy Johann Rudolf Schmid, later Johann Rudolf Freiherr zum Schwarzenhorn, traveled from Vienna to Constantinople on a delicate diplomatic mission in 1627, his entourage also included a watchmaker, the then 22-year-old Johann Rudolf Stadler from Zurich. Watchmakers were in high demand at the Sublime Porte because watches, especially complicated automatic watches, were part of the emperor’s annual tribute to the sultan and were among the most sought-after diplomatic gifts of the time. They required constant professional maintenance and care.

It is significant that Johann Rudolf Schmid had himself portrayed next to a beautiful table clock at the height of his career as imperial ambassador in Constantinople. The Viennese mockingly called such gifts “Turkish worship.”

We are well aware of the diplomatic career of Johann Rudolf Schmid, who was born in Stein am Rhein as the son of the long-distance trader and mining expert Felix Schmid and the patrician daughter of Constance, Elisabeth Hürus. What we can find out about Johann Rudolf Stadler is that he was the son of the Zurich potter and mason Erhart Stadler and the daughter of the pastor Beatrix Hochholzer and probably completed his apprenticeship with the watchmaker Joachim Liechti, who moved from Winterthur to Zurich moved. We do not know exactly how Stadler ended up in Schmid’s entourage. Contrary to what an early 19th century constructive treatise states, the two were not related.

But two other tracks lead to Stein am Rhein: Stadler’s mother Beatrix Hochholzer was the daughter of Samuel Hochholzer, town priest of Steiner from 1590 to 1606, and his uncle Hans Ulrich Stadler, stonemason and twelvever of Zurich. Carpenters Guild, worked as a monastery official in Stein am Rhein from 1612 to 1619. Rudolf Stadler’s parents were married there in 1598 in the city church. In any case, this provides some possible starting points.

After Stadler’s arrival in Constantinople, everything initially went well. After working at Schmid for a year, he became self-employed as a watchmaker. In 1631 there must have been a serious rift between the two. Schmid, official imperial residence at the sultan’s court, was entrusted with the explosive task of preventing Turkey from intervening in the Thirty Years’ War. With Sweden’s entry into the war, the Turks would have had a favorable opportunity for a two-front war against the Habsburg Empire.

The envoys of the Netherlands, France, England and, from 1631, Sweden left no stone unturned to convince the sultan to participate in the war. They had much greater financial resources than the imperial resident, but were inferior to him in terms of knowledge of the Ottoman power apparatus and the Turkish language and mentality, because Schmid had lived for twenty years in Turkish captivity, most recently as a language slave at the Seraglio.

In this explosive situation, the Protestant from Zurich, Rudolf Stadler, took the opposite position of his now Catholic compatriot and sided with the Swedes. That couldn’t go well. After the political and personal conflict, in which it was apparently a matter of life and death, Stadler lived in the residence of the Dutch envoy Cornelius van Haag, Schmid’s most dangerous opponent.

When the French Huguenot, jeweler and oriental traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier passed through Constantinople on his way to Isfahan in 1632, Stadler had the opportunity to travel with him. That was probably what everyone involved had in mind. Tavernier documented the journey in his diaries. The 1676 under the title «The six voyages of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier… in Turkey, in Perse and in the Indies» The printed notes provide incomparable insights into the world of the East at the time and provide detailed accounts of the rise and fall of traveling companion Johann Rudolf Stadler at the court of the Safavid ruler in Isfahan.

Stadler, Tavernier’s sources assured, was the first watchmaker ever to come to Persia. The first clock owned by Shah Safi I was his work. When this small watch, which the Shah wore on a gold chain around his neck, broke, he sent for the watchmaker from Zurich to come to the court to repair it.

From this first meeting, a friendly relationship apparently developed between the two. From then on, Stadler is said to have paid his respects to the Shah every morning, not only to wind up the clock in question and wait for it, but also for an informal conversation about everything he had heard in the city, and for a first Glass of wine for which both the Persians and the Turks use the Arabic word Sharab from which, among other things, the German foreign word syrup comes.

The Shah is said to have repeatedly asked the watchmaker to convert from Christianity to Islam in order to tie him even closer to him. However, Stadler, who now lived with a Nestorian Christian, wanted nothing to do with it.

So far, Tavernier reports as a contemporary witness. Years later, he had to figure everything else out secondhand when he returned to Isfahan after Stadler’s death. For this purpose, a Holstein trade delegation stayed in Isfahan from August to December 1637, including the physician and Baroque poet Paul Fleming and the diplomat and travel writer Adam Olearius. Both had personal contact with Stadler, were eyewitnesses at his execution and reported on his fate posthumously.

From the travel descriptions of Tavernier and Olearius, which differ in details, the sequence of events that ultimately led to Stadler’s execution can be reconstructed quite reliably: when Stadler returned home from a reception at the relevant embassy in Holstein, he found, according to Olearius According to Tavernier, the thief presented a rival, whom he shot after a scuffle. Because he had killed a believer as an unbeliever, he could only avoid the death penalty by converting to Islam. Much to the Shah’s annoyance, he still did not want to do that. It remains to be seen whether he was ultimately put in the dungeon and executed at the instigation of the victim’s relatives and the Muslim clergy or the Grand Treasurer, who was hostile to Stadler.

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In any case, the circumstances of his death in the famous 1979 UNESCO– World Heritage Meidan-e Shah (Königsplatz), today Meidan-e Emam (Imam Square), and subsequent reports of the execution led to his being venerated as a Christian martyr. The tomb, over which Armenian Christians claimed to have seen angels the night after the burial, became a place of pilgrimage and required regular repairs as the pilgrims each took with them a small piece of the structure, which consisted of a sarcophagus and four columns. and a roof, taken home. The simple stone coffin still stands on the site, the grave structures have disappeared.

The fact that Johann Rudolf Stadler was a great-grandson on his mother’s side of the Zurich canon Johann Jakob Wick, who obsessively collected papers, pamphlets and news that would have appeared centuries later in the newspaper column ‘Accidents and Crimes’, is one of the surprising coincidences of the history.