Tycho and Kepler (39 page)

As soon as Kepler had learned there was no possibility of drawing a salary from Graz while he worked at Benatky or in Prague, he had written to inform Tycho that the hoped-for arrangement with the emperor would not be possible. Tycho’s return letter came quickly: The failure of that arrangement must not matter, and he
urged Kepler to come back, either with or without his family, “with confidence
²
as rapidly as possible.”

Though it was impossible to remain in Graz, Kepler had profound misgivings about putting his and his family’s future at Tycho’s mercy. Without a regular salary, living from day to day on handouts, even if Tycho were the most well-meaning and generous patron, was too precarious and demeaning
an existence. Kepler wrote to Mästlin, asking whether some “little professorship”
³
might not be found for him at Tübingen. Kepler knew Mästlin’s reply could not reach him before he left Graz, so he told Mästlin to address it to him in Linz. Linz was on the way to Prague, and Kepler’s plan was for Barbara and his stepdaughter Regina to travel that far with him and wait there while he went on alone
to talk to Tycho.

It was two weeks beyond the deadline when, on September 30, Kepler, Barbara, and ten-year-old Regina left the city. They loaded two wagons with as many household goods and possessions as they could fit in and drove away from the comfortable home in the Stempfergasse where they had lived for three years. They had no real destination, and for Barbara the wrench was horrendous.
All she had ever known or cared about, all her friends and extended family, all her quite considerable property, were here in Styria. Because of her husband’s and her own religious convictions, they were leaving all that behind for an uncertain future among strangers. Barbara had an almost irrational fear of poverty, and there was no promise of a paying job ahead for her husband. It was unlikely
they would ever be able to recover the value of her property.

On the journey north to Linz, they kept the hope alive that a letter from Mästlin would be waiting for them, but when they arrived in Linz, there was no letter. Kepler changed his mind about leaving Barbara and Regina alone, feeling it was better they all stay together, in case one of them became ill. They left the household goods
behind in Linz to follow them later either to Prague or Tübingen—for there might yet be a letter from Mästlin—and continued toward Prague.

Kepler knew that now he was absolutely at Tycho’s mercy—and not he alone but Barbara and Regina as well. He made one last attempt
to
bluff
⁴
his way to a better job arrangement with Tycho, writing him in advance of their arrival, saying that because he had
at one time received a scholarship from the duke of Württemberg, it was necessary that he pay his respects to the duke before settling elsewhere. While in Württemberg, he wrote, he would find out whether the duke would recommend him to another university, perhaps Wittenberg, Jena, or Leipzig, for his teachers at Tübingen had given him hope that the duke’s connection with the university would be
a great advantage—an extreme exaggeration on Kepler’s part, if not an outright lie. His letter continued with the promise that if Tycho were to offer him an attractive position, he would give that offer first consideration. He named a deadline for the offer, four weeks at the latest. It was a feeble try, but it was the best Kepler could do.

Kepler’s serenity had evaporated. To make matters
worse, he developed a high fever on the journey from Linz to Prague. When the exhausted, depressed family arrived in the city, on October 19, 1600, it was the good Hoffmann who took them in, not Tycho. Although Kepler’s fever was stubborn and would recur intermittently throughout the winter and spring of 1601, he was healthy enough to return to work for Tycho in late October. There had been no word
from Mästlin, and no other possibilities had arisen. As Kepler would write, “God let me be bound with Tycho
⁵
through an unalterable fate and did not let me be separated from him by the most oppressive hardships.”

Kepler’s fever was accompanied by a cough, and he thought he had contracted tuberculosis. Barbara also was ill and desperately unhappy, lonely in a foreign city, watching the little
money they had disappear. She was not accustomed to enormous wealth, but she had always enjoyed a comfortable upper-middle-class standard of living. In Prague she would be reduced to maintaining their little family in a state of penury with nothing better in sight. The move had cost 120 gulden. Kepler’s annual salary in Graz had been only 200 gulden. Even if his income had remained the same, everything
was much more expensive in Prague, and now Kepler had no income.

Tycho made no “attractive offer” for Kepler to give “first consideration,” and the four-week deadline passed. However, Tycho was trying to secure a salary for Kepler from the emperor. Rudolph, Tycho had reported, had given “a gracious nod,” but both he and Kepler knew by now that even if that nod actually set the mechanism in
motion by which a salary might eventually appear, a man and his family could starve waiting. For the time being, the Keplers had no choice but to depend on Tycho for everything. Tycho, who was already paying the Müller family’s expenses out of his own pocket, because money for them from the emperor was overdue, now dug deeper and paid for the Keplers as well.

By the time the ailing Kepler
was well enough to rejoin Tycho, Tycho had complained about cramped quarters at the Sign of the Golden Griffin, and the emperor had provided a private residence, not much larger. Into this house Tycho nevertheless managed to squeeze Kepler, Barbara, and Regina.

Eventually there must have been a salary agreement between Tycho and Kepler. The only record of it appeared when Tycho’s daughter
Elisabeth and Tengnagel were making plans to wed in the summer of 1601, and Tycho braced himself to pay for a lavish wedding. He told Kepler he would have to dole out Kepler’s twenty-daler stipend in ten- and six-daler installments, because he did not have enough ready cash to do otherwise.

Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1600, Kepler, Barbara, and Regina still waited day after day in the faint
hope that a letter from Mästlin would bring an offer from Tübingen. Mästlin’s letter finally reached them in December. There was no job for Kepler in Tübingen, and Mästlin had no advice to give. “Here in Prague
⁶
I have found everything uncertain,” Kepler replied to him, “even my life. The only certainty is staying here until I get well or die.” He continued to write letters to his mentor, pleading
for help, but the old man would not reply again for four years. Evidently there
was
nothing he could do, except, as he had promised in that December letter, to “pray for you
⁷
and yours.”

Tycho’s frustration and despair were almost equal to Kepler’s. The
months
were passing with no possibility of going back to Benatky, and he abhorred the work Rudolph asked him to do. Though Tycho had not given
up the idea that the movement of the planets and other celestial events somehow influenced life on Earth, he found astrological advice of the sort Rudolph wanted boring and a waste of valuable time. He was particularly ill at ease with the detailed predictions that would have best satisfied a monarch worried about military campaigns, the choice of generals, and the possibility of his own assassination
(Rudolph had now reached the age at which his father had been assassinated). For Tycho, who believed that the free will of each human participant mitigated the influence of the stars, producing meaningful predictions about military campaigns, for example, seemed nothing short of ludicrous. Nevertheless, Rudolph was paying the bills, at least theoretically, and Rudolph believed devoutly in
astrology. Tycho knew that were he to disabuse the emperor of that belief, he would quickly be out of a job.

The emperor also wanted advice that was more psychological and political than astrological. At court there were precious few who were politically neutral and could be expected to offer straightforward counsel without a personal agenda. Tycho’s only agenda was getting back to Benatky
with sufficient support to continue his work. Rudolph found Tycho’s objectivity invaluable. Tycho thus had no choice but to try to meet Rudolph’s needs and gear himself up to learn whatever he did not already know about dealing with competitors for imperial favor, secret alliances, opportunists hoping to link their careers to his own, and lies, exaggerations, and half-truths designed to thwart an
ambition he did not even have

There was, however, more that needed to be dealt with than the usual affairs of the imperial court that summer and autumn of 1600. Not long after Rudolph summoned Tycho from Benatky, Rudolph suffered a temporary but severe mental collapse. It was not a rational ruler whom Tycho was advising. This was a particularly unfortunate moment for such a breakdown. Though
Rudolph was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the area that fell under his
most
direct control was Bohemia, the northwestern part of what is now the Czech Republic—a multiethnic region ruled by a foreign dynasty (Rudolph’s) that had not, even in the best of times, been free of explosive tensions. By the summer of 1600 this diffuse, smoldering enmity had become polarized by the Counter-Reformation
and threatened to ignite in a major conflagration.

Rudolph II was a devout Catholic, but he opposed the more flagrant manifestations of the Counter-Reformation, not only in Bohemia but also in the larger empire. Incidents like the expulsion of Protestants from Graz and Styria represented a tragic failure in Rudolph’s policy of attempting to keep Catholic zealots and Protestants, who actually
were in the great majority, from all-out conflict. It was possibly in reaction to that failure in Graz that a mentally unstable Rudolph decided to expel a cloister of Capuchin monks from a residence where he had earlier invited them to live, near the palace. The normal Rudolph was not given to such unexplained acts. The monks accused Tycho of having influenced Rudolph to banish them because their
prayers interfered with the black magic he was using to turn base metal into gold. (Had Erik Lange heard this accusation, he would have rushed to Tycho’s side without delay.)

However much Tycho disliked the work he was doing, it is a tribute to his reawakened skills in the delicate handling of monarchs and the balanced nature of his counsel that he survived Rudolph’s period of madness. Many
other powerful men were permanently banished from court. Nor had Tycho contrived to remain on the periphery. He was considered one of Rudolph’s closest advisers. Extensive correspondence survives in which moderate Catholic leaders communicated with him about influencing Rudolph to name his second brother Albrecht as his successor rather than his first brother Matthias, whom they judged to be virulently
anti-Protestant.

On the more positive side, for Tycho, that summer and autumn, he finally received his own long-overdue salary. Also, there was undeniably a part of him that enjoyed moving in the most elite circles
at
court, having powerful men trust in him and be aware of the emperor’s enthusiasm for him. It was vindication for the treatment he had received in Copenhagen. He also took pleasure
in the company of other well-educated people, of whom there were many in Prague. Hoffmann had ordered a copy made of one of the quadrants in Tycho’s
Mechanica
, and the two men had used it to observe the same solar eclipse Kepler observed from Graz in July.

For Tycho, another mitigating factor about the move from Benatky to Prague was that he was able to initiate the long-delayed proceedings
against Ursus. Tycho had heard that Ursus was seriously ill. The various legal actions Tycho set in motion proceeded much too slowly and inconclusively to satisfy him, for he chafed at the possibility that the man he considered his nemesis, this slippery, underhanded swineherd, would escape punishment by dying. In mid-August Ursus did just that, with Tycho’s lawyers harrying him even as he lay on
his deathbed. Ursus had not survived long enough to be, as Tycho reported that the commissioners had promised him, “branded in infamy,
⁸
and beheaded or quartered according to Bohemian law.”

Hence, by the time the Keplers arrived in Prague, Ursus in the flesh was beyond Tycho’s reach, but Ursus’s book was not, and its very existence was a threat. Tycho told Kepler that he was not so much concerned
with “destroying his person,
⁹
whom everyone knows was clownish and vainglorious, but rather his book, stuffed full of so many insults and lies, and restoring the glory and reputation of myself and my associates.” On order of the emperor, the printer sought out all copies that could be found in Prague and consigned them to the flames, and the book was banned throughout the empire. It was an affront
to Tycho when the council paid Ursus’s widow three hundred gulden to compensate her for the confiscation of the books. But Tycho could console himself that Rudolph in sound mind would never have let that happen. It was a smaller setback than many suffered as a result of the emperor’s brush with insanity.

With all the time spent carrying out the move from Benatky to Prague, then from the hostelry
to the house, while at the same time dealing with a half-mad emperor, Tycho accomplished little meaningful work in the summer and autumn of 1600, and this situation looked unlikely to improve. Longomontanus left, succumbing to the homesickness that had been drawing Tycho’s Danish assistants and servants back to Denmark. Tycho reluctantly watched the departure of this man who had helped him
for so many years and joined him in exile. Tycho had tried hiring various German scholars, none of whom worked out successfully. More in need of analysis and computation than observation, he had been attempting to engage men capable of that sort of work. But in the autumn of 1600 there was no one else but Kepler in Tycho’s employ with whose assistance he could hope to complete his planetary theories
in the way he wished.