Tycho and Kepler (31 page)

The statue of
Tycho Brahe that stands in the restored portion of the garden at the Uraniborg site on Hven.

In December 1597 another Mars opposition brought Mars particularly close to Earth. “I wish he had been there,”
¹²
Kepler would write much later, “because this opposition was a marvelous opportunity, not often recurring within a man’s lifetime, for finding Mars’s parallax.” The parallax of Mars would
not be a weapon in the winning of the Copernican revolution. Tycho’s Mars observations, however, would be.

fn1
Science historian Bruce Stephenson has quipped that “most of the larger problems
²
that concerned Kepler throughout his career were raised in this book—raised, indeed, in its title!”

fn2
The paper-mill cornerstone stands today in a place of honor just outside the door of Knutstorps
Borg, its inscription still legible.

14

C
ONVERGING
P
ATHS

June 1597–November 1598

TYCHO HAD RESIGNED
himself to getting little work done during the move into exile, but traveling the alternately dusty and muddy roads did give him time to think about the future. Though he may have suspected that he would never go back, Tycho had not given up hope. He was not the first among his powerful family to be driven out of Denmark,
nor would he, if he could manage it, be the first to return and regain former status. His foster uncle Peder Oxe and his brother Knud had managed no less.

Tycho and his entourage settled into lodgings in Rostock in mid-June 1597, and the busy academic city was a tonic to his bruised ego. He had lived here for a while as a student and left missing most of his nose. There were still many Danes
and good friends at the university, and they received Tycho warmly, treating him as one who came in triumph and with great honor, not in disgrace. His prodigious intellectual and technical accomplishments and the splendors of Uraniborg were legendary here. In Rostock Tycho and his family could enter St. Mary’s Church and receive Holy Eucharist together, something they had not been able to do in
Denmark for eighteen years.

Tycho began to put into motion the plans he had made during the
journey
. He had decided on several points of attack. The campaign to restore his honor and position in Denmark would begin immediately. It would include a direct appeal to King Christian
¹
, with pressure brought to bear simultaneously from within Denmark (from Tycho’s still powerful relatives) and from
influential people abroad. At the same time, he would settle his family, entourage, and equipment in a semipermanent location and resume his astronomy and the publication of his books. The quicker he could proceed with that, the more secure the future would be for them all, whether in Denmark or somewhere else. The third part of his plan was to exploit his network to secure a new patron among the
royalty of Europe—someone else with fiefdoms and islands to bestow.

Tycho drafted his appeal to King Christian, explaining why he had moved abroad without taking leave of the king, and reminding Christian of the promises made by his father Frederick, the Regency Council, and the Rigsraad. Rather than abide by those promises, Christian had cut off Tycho’s income. Tycho closed his letter by
insisting that he would rather serve Christian than any other master but would seek a patron elsewhere if such service could not be rendered on “reasonable terms, and without damage to me.”

Tycho had never been an obsequious courtier, but he had known when and how to appear deferential and how to flatter kings. Yet his appeal to Christian had the tone of a letter between equals who had the
right to scold each other about unfulfilled promises, and it was certain to bring a negative response. Either Tycho wanted Christian to turn him down, or his pride and anger got the better of his good sense and political savvy.

Perhaps Tycho was more resigned to leaving Denmark than he willingly admitted at the time. Uraniborg had become an enormous administrative burden. The research for
which he had had such high hopes and designed his finest instruments—the search for Mars’s parallax—had ended in disappointment. Ahead were new challenges, and in Rostock he was filled with fresh energy and a renewed
sense
of his own worth. He could not in good conscience fail to make an appeal to Christian and apply what pressure he could on the king. However, he also used that appeal to remind
Christian, and himself, that the king was not dealing with a groveling underling but with a proud man of enormous intellectual and social stature, who was willing to return only on his own terms. In Tycho’s domain—in the intellectual world, in astronomy—he clearly felt he ruled as surely by divine right as Christian ruled Denmark. With similar impatient, well-warranted, but ill-advised arrogance,
Galileo would later incur the wrath of Pope Urban VIII. Tycho had at least been astute enough to remove himself and most of his worldly and scholarly treasure out of Christian’s reach.

While waiting for Christian’s reply, Tycho began putting to use the European network he had cultivated for years. Duke Ulrich
²
of Mecklenburg, King Christian’s grandfather no less, agreed to intercede with the
king. His intervention may have done more harm than good, for he praised Tycho as a man whose equal it would be difficult to find and who was famous in many lands. Christian, wishing for a subservient, compliant Tycho, surely did not take well to this reminder. Tycho sealed his friendship with Duke Ulrich by lending the guardians of the duke’s two nephews ten thousand dalers—which also did not
escape Christian’s notice. Tycho had cried poverty in his letter of appeal.

In early September there had been no reply from Christian, and Tycho sent out a feeler in the campaign to find a new patron. He still thought in terms of islands, and the first letter went to Lord Chancellor Erik Sparre
³
in Poland, asking about the possibility of obtaining an island in the Baltic from King Sigismund.
For political reasons having nothing to do with Tycho, that suggestion came to naught.

Also in early September, Tycho and his entourage left Rostock and took to the roads again. Tycho had decided to seek the hospitality and counsel of Viceroy Heinrich Rantzau of Schleswig-Holstein.
Learning
that the viceroy was not at home at his seat at Segebert Fortress, they traveled on to find him in Bramstedt.

Rantzau was a prodigious and highly respected scholar, older, far richer, and more powerful than Tycho, and equally famous. He and Tycho had much in common. Rantzau had built many palaces, as richly adorned as Uraniborg with Latin epigrams, pavilions, and pyramids. Now in his seventies, he was still an astute politician. The two men proceeded to pool their knowledge and experience of the politics
of royal patronage. Though Rantzau lived like a prince, he was only a viceroy and not a suitable patron for Tycho. However, he was in a position to lend Tycho a castle where he and his household could live until the moment came to return to Denmark or move elsewhere. Rantzau had plenty of castles. Tycho chose Wandsburg, on the outskirts of Hamburg.

In late September Tycho’s coach, drawn by
six horses
⁴
and followed by the long train of slower conveyances, rattled over the drawbridge into the courtyards of this massive Renaissance palace. It was a splendid dwelling, worthy of a man of Tycho’s stature, where he could maintain the princely image he thought necessary for regaining the favor of King Christian or winning a new patron. It was also near the city, where there were engravers
and printers for the publications Tycho was planning, and it had a tower with a clear view of the skies, roomy enough to set up instruments.

In mid-October a courier from the Danish court picked his way among servants unpacking instruments, printing press, furniture, and personal belongings to hand a letter to Tycho’s secretary, who broke the seal and read it aloud. It was Christian’s reply,
and it was openly hostile. He had written that he took great offense at the tone of Tycho’s appeal, which Tycho had composed “audaciously and not without
⁵
great lack of understanding, as if We were to render account to you concerning why and with what cause We made changes on Our and the Crown’s estates.” Tycho had “not blushed to [write] as if you were Our equal. . . . from this day on, We shall
be otherwise respected by you if you expect to find in Us a gracious lord and king.” Christian also took offense at Tycho’s going abroad with “his woman and children” (a reference to Kirsten’s low status) to beg from others, implying before all the world that Christian and Denmark were not wealthy enough to support them.

A woodcut of Wandsburg Castle, dating from 1590.

It was a brutal letter and clearly not drafted carelessly in a fit of pique. It confronted Tycho’s appeal point by point: Tycho had abused his position as a nobleman by appropriating incomes and tithes of the Hven church; he had failed to maintain the church buildings; he had not paid the parson a suitable wage; he had permitted economic
abuse of his tenants. Since all these charges had indeed been brought formally against Tycho, and the record was not yet clear whether he was guilty, the king may have had substantial reason for outrage at the argument that the crown had unfairly transferred fiefs from Tycho. The letter went on to insinuate that there was reason to doubt Tycho’s claim that the transfer of fiefs had so impoverished
him that he had had to sell his right in Knutstorp to support his astronomy, in the interest of the honor of Denmark and the future of science. News had reached the king that Tycho had money “to lend in thousands of dalers to lords and princes, for the good of
your
children and not for the honor of the kingdom or the promotion of science.” As for Tycho’s willingness to return on “reasonable terms,”
Christian replied, “If you would serve as a mathematicus and do what he ought to do, then you should first humbly offer your service and ask about it as a servant ought to do . . . afterwards We shall know how to declare our will.” Meanwhile, Christian would not “trouble Ourselves whether you leave the country or stay in it.”

Whatever ambivalence Tycho had about returning, and however much
he had been expecting the worst, this reply was a blow. Living in exile and seeking a new position were no easy prospect at his age. As he expressed his misgivings in a letter to a Danish friend: “No doubt the time will come
⁶
when experience and circumstances will render [Christian] more clear-eyed and sensitive . . . about what is of greater value to his realm than other useless things . . .
but it will be too late for me and my researches.”

Characteristically, Tycho took refuge in his self-image as one of the great men of history, many of whom, including the poet Ovid, had experienced the bitterness of exile. Tycho wrote an “Elegy to Denmark,”
⁷
102 lines of Latin verse modeled on Ovid’s elegies. After sending a copy of that to Rantzau, he moved quickly to other matters. Though
he would not yet cease pressuring the Danish government to restore him to Hven, it was all the more urgent that Wandsburg become a temporary Uraniborg while he sought a new patron.

The day after venting his rage toward King Christian in the elegy, Tycho resumed his systematic observations of the planets and moved forward toward the publication of a splendid new book.
Astronomiae Instauratae
Mechanica
would describe his instruments in words and woodcuts, document their superiority, and tell of his life, his work, and Uraniborg. Tycho saw this as a sort of extended résumé, but in a lavish, elegantly bound printing suitable to be a gift for kings—a powerful credential in Tycho’s patron search. By the end of the year he was busy writing a dedication for the book to Rudolph II, emperor
of
the Holy Roman Empire, who ruled from his court in Prague, and whose imperial mathematician was Ursus.

Tycho planned to use his star catalog as another credential. During the last weeks on Hven he had driven himself and his assistants, trying to finish “filling out the thousand,” in other words, to bring his catalog up to the thousand stars that were usually included in the ancient star
catalogs. Now, at Wandsburg, the assistants who had accompanied him into exile or rejoined him (possibly only two of them at this time) labored in the tower to complete that task. Neither Tycho nor his heirs ever published the catalog, perhaps because Tycho was unable to achieve the quality he hoped for by cross-checking independent sets of data. However, though the catalog may not have been, by his
standards, good enough to publish, it was good enough to impress European rulers. Tycho produced an elegant manuscript version, hand-lettered on vellum parchment.
^fn1

At New Year 1598, Tycho dedicated this volume also to Emperor Rudolph as a gift and entrusted its safe journey to Prague to his sixteen-year-old son Tycho, who was starting out on travels for his own education. In his search for
a new patron, the elder Tycho had chosen his target.