L. Rauwolf

[ReneZ]

If I can play the Devil's advocate: we still do not know whether Raphael had actually seen the "600 ducats book" at Rudolf's court, do we?  

If he did see it, indeed the VMS should be it.

But if he did not, and only heard of the purchase (which must have left every alchemical book owner in Prague salivating), then his statement would have been just a wild guess,

Indeed, there is a remaining chance that Mnisowsky was mistaken about exactly which book had been sold for 600 ducats, but the risk seems small, for several reasons. 
(In any case, this is one of the reasons why I used the word 'probable' in the title of the talk).

First of all, while both Raphael and Marci are relatively 'no-name' people for almost all of us now, they were both high-ranking and highly educated people with close connections to the court. They could be called 'brilliant' in their days.
Raphael would not have seen the MS in 1599, I think, but his voluntary statements (unrelated to this MS) about his intimacy with Rudolf's books indicates that he knew what he was talking about. 
Had this been another 100-Taler book, we could have had more serious doubts, but the price is indeed high enough to stand out.
Finally, our doubt is one out of general principle. We have no particular reason to suspect that he was wrong.
But the whole thing remains subjective.

That Marci also sent Barschius' notes is in the Marci letter itself. These notes may have been lost at various points in time.

By the way, back at the first Mondragone conference, I had understood that Rafal Prinke had found that Barschius at some time had some job at the Court, in the Prague Castle.  Is that correct?

Yes, it should be in his biography, for which I sent a link yesterday.

By another way, I thought you said in the presentation that the currency was not ducats, but florins or thalers.  AFAIK the thaler was silver, not gold.  Wouldn't it be worth a lot less than those other two?

Rudolf's finance records have a very large number of references to prices and from some of these we can see conversion rates. The majority of acquisitions is in (silver) Taler or in (gold) florins. Around the time of interest, the florin was 60 'Kreuzer' and the Taler was 70 'Kreuzer', according to what I have seen. After the 1620's, the Taler was devaluated very significently, so this no longer holds true.

A small number of acquisitions refer to other gold coins: ducats and crowns ('Kronen'). Presumably, these were the physical coins that were involved. They did not seem to have a fixed exchange ratio, and as far as I can tell they would be a bit more valuable than the florin.
Here's an interesting puzzle:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
If you want to try, but can't figure out the German, let me know.