Tycho and Kepler (41 page)

All the barriers that had kept Tycho and Kepler at a distance had
now
disappeared, and it is Kepler’s description that provides more intimate details about the days that followed than are available about any other episode of Tycho’s life. Kepler wrote,

Holding his urine
²¹
longer than was his habit, Brahe remained seated. Although he drank a little
overgenerously and experienced pressure on his bladder, he felt less concern for the state of his health than for etiquette. By the time he returned home, he could not urinate any more. [Kepler here noted down the positions of the Moon, Saturn, and Mars on the night of the banquet.]

Tycho’s own medical expertise was considerable, and he tried various remedies, but with no success. He endured
five days and nights of agony, unable to sleep.

Finally, with the most excruciating pain, he barely passed some urine. But, yet, it was blocked. Uninterrupted insomnia followed; intestinal fever; and little by little, delirium. His poor condition was made worse by his way of eating, from which he could not be deterred. On 24 October, when his delirium had subsided for a few hours, amid the
prayers, tears, and efforts of his family to console him, his strength failed and he passed away very peacefully.

At this time, then, his series of heavenly observations was interrupted, and the observations of thirty-eight years came to an end. During his last night, through the delirium in which everything was very pleasant, like a composer creating a song, Brahe repeated these words over
and over again: “Let me not seem to have lived in vain.”

It was only to God and Kepler that the prayer could have been addressed. Several years later, Kepler added to his description in a chapter of his book
Astronomia Nova
that when Tycho lay dying, “although he knew
²²
that I was of the Copernican persuasion, he asked me to present all my demonstrations in conformity with his hypothesis.”

Tycho Brahe’s tomb in the Maria Tein church in Prague.

Perhaps, had there been a choice, Tycho would have preferred burial on his once-beloved Hven, or in the parish church in Kågeröd on his ancestral estate where his parents and other family lay. In Prague, even at Benatky, he had always felt like a man far from home. But it is doubtful that Denmark, even had it chosen to do so, could
have given Tycho a more magnificent burial than Prague did, or one that would have pleased him more. Kepler described it:

The casket
²³
was draped with black cloth and decorated in gold with the Brahe coat of arms. In front of the casket were carried candlesticks, likewise adorned with his arms, and a black damask banner displaying his titles and arms, in gold. Behind the casket was led his
riding horse, followed by a black taffeta banner and then another horse draped in black cloth. [Followed by men walking single file, carrying Tycho’s sword and armor.] The casket was borne by twelve imperial officials, all noblemen. Behind the casket walked Tycho’s younger son, between the Swedish count Erik Brahe and Baron Ernfried von Minckwicz, in long mourning dress. They were followed by other
imperial councillors, barons, and noblemen, Tycho’s assistants and servants, then Tycho’s wife, guided by two distinguished old royal judges, and finally his three daughters, one after the other, each escorted by two noble gentlemen. Then proceeded many stately women and girls, and after them the most distinguished citizens. The chairs in the church in which the family sat all were draped with
black English cloth. The streets were so full of people that those in the procession walked as if between two walls, and the church was so crowded with both nobles and commoners that one could scarcely find room in it. When the sermon was over, the banners, helmet, shields, and other arms were hung over the crypt.

Kepler did not record where he walked in the procession. He must have been among
the assistants and servants. However, he already knew that he was no longer to continue as any sort of “hired hand.”

19

T
HE
B
EST OF
T
IMES

1601–1606

KEPLER HAD THE
news two days after Tycho’s death: Barvitius, the imperial secretary, came to tell him that the emperor had named him imperial mathematician, and he should apply for a salary immediately. The title carried with it responsibility for the care of Tycho’s instruments and manuscripts, as well as for the completion of his unfinished work,
most urgently the Rudolfine Tables. The legacy was Kepler’s. Tycho’s full set of observations had fallen into his hands, the pages open at last.

Tycho’s instruments and intellectual property were not really the emperor’s to bestow, for they belonged to Tycho’s family. So Rudolph purchased them for 20,000 florins, more than Kepler at his old Graz salary would have earned in a century. Of course,
as the Brahe family were aware by now, collecting on such a promise from the emperor was no easy matter. To Kepler, the value of the observations was beyond any price.

Following Tycho’s death and burial, the Keplers moved out of Tycho’s mansion by the wall to a house across the river from the imperial enclave, in a section of Prague known as the New Town (it dated only from the fourteenth
century). For the first time since
leaving
Graz, they had a home of their own. Their house was across the street from the Emaus cloister, an hour’s walk from the palace. Tycho would have been pleased to have that much distance between himself and the emperor, though it was a long journey for Kepler when he had to make it.

The first decade of the seventeenth century was a glorious time to be
living in Prague, albeit an expensive one. With the court in residence, it was the center of political life in Europe, wealthy, cosmopolitan, rich in history but moving with energy into the new century. Its narrow streets echoed with many languages. Kepler called it “a gathering of nations.”
¹
Carriages of courtiers drove along its wider avenues and stopped at splendid houses that were not only
impressively large but also exquisite in their proportions and details and furnished with treasures. Other men than Tycho and Kepler also learned that the royal coffers were unable to make good on all the promises Rudolph II made. Nevertheless, Rudolph’s interest in learning and the arts set the tone of a court and a wider community that drew many superbly productive artists and scholars to Prague.
One of Rudolph’s numerous idiosyncracies was a shyness that at this time in his life caused him to shut himself away for days at a time, paying little if any attention to the activities he supposedly supported, but his name and reign are still linked with a great flowering of the arts and scholarship.

There was no higher honor to which an astronomer could aspire than the one that was now Kepler’s.
After so much despair and struggle, it seemed that he and his family were at last on their feet. Barbara Kepler had a house of her own to manage, and in July 1602 she gave birth to a daughter, Susanna. The little family that had consisted only of three uncomfortable refugees—Johannes, Barbara, and Regina—was growing larger and looking forward to happiness and prosperity, with freedom from
religious persecution.

The years he lived in Prague were indeed golden years for Kepler, the peak years of his life, with many friendships, respect he richly deserved,
and
splendid scientific accomplishments, but the difficulty in collecting his salary cast a pall over them. Not until five months after Kepler’s appointment did he receive the first payment, and he continued to encounter obstacles
collecting even a pitifully small portion of what he was owed. He made such a pest of himself with the royal treasury that a nasty note about him is still appended to the treasury records. When persistence failed, and it almost always did, the Keplers fell back on meager revenues trickling in from Barbara’s property and whatever extra compensation Johannes could scrape up here and there. The
Keplers did not, however, live in poverty. Their home was “simply run,”
²
as Kepler put it, but the lifestyle they managed to maintain was comfortable and appropriate for a man in his position. Kepler’s wardrobe included fashionable attire with a standing lace collar, the expected work clothing at court and when an imperial mathematician appeared in public.

Barbara Kepler did not find Prague
nearly so congenial as her husband did. What is known about her comes almost entirely from Kepler’s letters, and in these when he mentioned her he most often wrote in her defense, placing the blame on himself that their marriage was not happy.
³
Though their lifestyle in Prague was similar to the way Barbara had lived when she was a young woman, she had few skills in simple household economy and,
to judge from a few of Kepler’s more candid letters, opted instead for a miserliness perhaps born of fear of sinking into true poverty. Whether her overzealous attempts to economize were well-meant self-sacrifice or a kind of self-martyrdom thrown in the face of her husband is uncertain. She chose, for instance, to cut back severely on her own clothing budget, at the risk of becoming an embarrassment,
in order to spend everything on her children.

While Kepler flourished, Barbara grew melancholy and was bitter about real and imagined differences between her life and the lives of the women she saw around her. Her husband wrote that she had neither “the heart nor the means”
⁴
to make herself better known in Prague
society
, a plight she may have lamented as much as he. She did, however, make
a good impression on some who met her. Contemporary descriptions call her lovely in appearance, polite, respectable, modest, pious, and generous toward the poor.

At home, where she was burdened with unpleasant economies and a husband often buried in his studies, the more sympathetic Barbara seems not to have been much in evidence. In one of his later letters Kepler described Barbara as “weak,
annoying,
⁵
solitary, melancholic” and “fat, confused, and simple-minded.” She immersed herself in prayer books, yet for all her piety she could not curb an ugly temper. Kepler also was not unfailingly placid and long-suffering, and of their relationship he admitted, “There was much biting
⁶
and getting angry, but it never came to any hostility . . . both of us well knew how our hearts felt toward
each other.” The quarrels would end when Kepler saw that something he had said had deeply hurt Barbara. Overcome with guilt, he would stop immediately. But “not much love
⁷
befell” him.

Barbara did not understand astronomy, and though she had followed him into exile because of his conscience, and both of them were deeply religious, there was little if any discussion of religion between them.
Kepler, either because he thought his mature, complicated faith would disturb his wife’s simpler beliefs, or because these were not matters to discuss with a woman, always spoke in Latin and avoided German (the language she understood) when he conversed about religion with visitors to their home.

Meanwhile, though Kepler may have felt he lacked for love from Barbara, he was deeply and widely
loved in Prague. Both as imperial mathematician and as a private individual, he received attention and appreciation of a sort he had never known before and had always, shamefacedly, longed for. The emperor himself kept up with Kepler’s scientific work, and visiting dignitaries and royalty sought his company. He had many devoted personal friends, from the highest court officials to simple uneducated
people whose uninformed opinions
about
astronomy and astrology he seemed genuinely to value as a spur to his own thinking. His old friend Hoffmann, who had first brought him to Prague, remained close and provided him with two astronomical instruments, for Tycho’s instruments remained locked away, unavailable, waiting for the emperor to make good on the promised payment to the Brahes. Kepler also
kept up a lively correspondence—for he was an engaging letter writer—with numerous acquaintances and scholars.

As imperial mathematician, Kepler was expected to produce calendars—as he had in Graz—and to give Rudolph advice based on astrology. Kepler had become less and less fond of casting horoscopes, an activity he now described as “unpleasant”
⁸
and “begrimed” work, which should nevertheless
not be “smothered.” He began applying a new, more scientific approach, attempting to trace whatever appeared to be established from experience back to causes and physical links, and in 1605 he stopped producing prognostications entirely. His advice to Rudolph often came in the form of essays, not all directly related to astrology, for Rudolph had got into the habit of asking Kepler’s predecessor
Tycho for many kinds of advice. One essay was an opinion about a dispute between the Republic of Venice and Pope Paul V about a pump without valves that Kepler had invented. Another had to do with Galileo’s discoveries with the telescope.

When it came to Kepler’s scholarly work, it was antagonism with the Brahe family that unexpectedly determined his research agenda. At the time of Tycho’s
death and funeral, Tengnagel, Elisabeth, and Tycho’s eldest son were away. Kirsten was distraught with grief, and of the rest of the family only Magdalene and Tycho’s younger son Georg were in Prague. Kepler did not wait to consult them or find out how financial matters would be settled. He took charge of Tycho’s astronomical observations. During the year after Tycho’s death, he reveled in the freedom
to consult them whenever he wished, without Tycho to snatch them away and accuse him of being too inquisitive.