147. Meanwhile Kepler's position at Linz had become more and more uncomfortable, owing to the rising tide of the religious and political disturbances which finally led to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War in 1618; but notwithstanding this he had refused in 1617 an offer of a chair of mathematics at Bologna, partly through attachment to his native country and partly through a well-founded distrust of the Papal party in Italy. Three years afterwards he rejected also the overtures made by the English ambassador, with a view to securing him as an ornament to the court of James I., one of his chief grounds for refusal in this case being a doubt whether he would not suffer from being cooped up within the limits of an island. In 1619 the Emperor Matthias died, and was succeeded by Ferdinand II., who as Archduke had started the persecution of the Protestants at Gratz (§ 137) and who had few scientific interests. Kepler was, however, after some delay, confirmed in his appointment as Imperial Mathematician. In 1620 Linz was occupied by the Imperialist troops, and by 1626 the oppression of the Protestants by the Roman Catholics had gone so far that Kepler made up his mind to leave, and, after sending his family to Regensburg, went himself to Ulm.
148. At Ulm Kepler published his last great work. For more than a quarter of a century he had been steadily working out in detail, on the basis of Tycho's observations and of his own theories, the motions of the heavenly bodies, expressing the results in such convenient tabular form that the determination of the place of any body at any required time, as well as the investigation of other astronomical events such as eclipses, became merely a matter of calculation according to fixed rules; this great undertaking, in some sense the summing up of his own and of Tycho's work, was finally published in 1627 as the Rudolphine Tables (the name being given in honour of his former patron), and remained for something like a century the standard astronomical tables.
It had long been Kepler's intention, after finishing the tables, to write a complete treatise on astronomy, to be called the New Almagest; but this scheme was never fairly started, much less carried out.
