Kepler's Witch (41 page)

In 1625, however, things began to move in the wider world. Duke Albert von Wallenstein had convinced the emperor to put him in command of an army, so that he could fight under the general command of Count Tilly, the victor at White Mountain and also the commander-in-chief of all the forces loyal to the Catholic League. The emperor was not disappointed. Wallenstein soon defeated the remaining followers of Friedrich,
the onetime king of Bohemia, and consolidated Ferdinand's power over his territories. Ferdinand was now more powerful than ever, which was fine for Ferdinand, but the rest of Europe worried. It was good that Ferdinand had managed to put down his little rebellion, and everyone agreed that the Catholic church's success with the Counter-Reformation in Austria was laudable, but having a Habsburg emperor with real power behind him frightened everyone.

Cardinal Richelieu began scheming at once. He had been running the French government for one year when Wallenstein took command and, typical of Richelieu, the arch-Frenchman, he did everything he could to undermine Ferdinand's position. Admittedly, he was a cardinal of the Roman Catholic church and a supporter of the Counter-Reformation and, admittedly, Ferdinand was doing the work of the church, but Richelieu was a Frenchman first and gave his primary efforts to the ascendancy of France, even at the expense of the faith.

Secretly, he contacted the Danish king Christian IV, who was always looking for good fight, and offered him money to take on the Habsburgs. Christian invaded, and Tilly and Wallenstein quickly made plans to coordinate their armies in the fight against the Danes and then to take on the princes of northern Germany along with them, thereby bringing the Counter-Reformation into another Protestant stronghold.

Then, unexpectedly, in the spring of 1626 a peasant revolt exploded in Upper Austria. The pressure that Kepler could see building after his return to Linz 1621 had finally burst. The forced conversions, the loss of a proper Lutheran ministry, the insulting presence of the Bavarian soldiers had all slowly enraged the Austrian peasants, and, as if with a single unified shout, they rose up and formed an army. Amazingly, they organized themselves into troops and burned and plundered the homes and castles of the powerful. Monks and nuns fled into the night as peasant battalions gathered around their cloisters and burned them to the ground. A new leader emerged among them—Stephen Fadinger—who not only formed them into an army, but a successful army. They quickly conquered the city of Wels, occupied it, and then laid siege to Linz. That day was June 24, a day when farmers would ordinarily be planting and growing crops, and
so the quick drop in agriculture promised a lean winter. Many starved in the city, and some took to eating horsemeat. The peasants besieged Linz for nearly two months, until August 29, when the peasant army withdrew at the appearance of imperial forces. Eventually, by the end of that year Count Peppenheim defeated the peasants and slaughtered them by the thousands.

During the siege, the peasants started a fire that destroyed the house of Johannes Planck, Kepler's printer. Planck was in the middle of printing the
Rudolphine Tables
at the time, and his printing press and all that he had printed up to that time was destroyed, with the exception of those parts that Kepler had taken home. Kepler would have to begin again with another printer. To do that, he would have to leave town.

At the time, Kepler was living in a country house near the city walls. The battle burned on all around him, and the city had garrisoned troops in Kepler's house. Every time the battle caught fire one more time, men rushed out to fight, no matter what time of the day or night. Guns fired off all the time, the air was filled with the smell of gunpowder, and the noise of the war was all about him. All in all, Kepler was lucky. He was one of the few who did not starve during the siege. He had enough food to keep his family healthy, so none of them were forced to eat horsemeat or rats.

When the battle was finally over and the peasant rebellion put down, Kepler knew that he could no longer print the
Rudolphine Tables
in Linz, so he wrote to the emperor to ask permission to leave Austria and move to Ulm. Ferdinand agreed, for there was nothing else the emperor could do if he wanted the tables printed. Once again, Kepler packed his bags, his possessions, his family, and his precious set of printer's type, loaded them onto a barge, and traveled up the Danube to Regensburg. He would complete the
Rudolphine Tables.
He must. He was committed to it.

L
ETTER FROM
K
EPLER TO
J
OHANN
M
ATTHIAS
B
ERNEGGER
F
EBRUARY
15, 1621

F
ROM
K
EPLER'S
J
OURNAL
1623

Where Kepler seeks a home for his last few years after fleeing Linz, argues with the Jesuits, finds patronage with Wallenstein, and dies in Regensburg.

K
EPLER TOOK TO THE ROAD
once again, but this time there was no Tycho Brahe waiting at the other end to welcome him. Where would he find a home this time? How would he live? How would he raise his children? Where would he find a place to work in peace? All of Europe was at war it seemed, and wherever he tried to run, the war was already there. Kepler's greatest joy was in the ecstasy of perfect order, in the astonishing beauty of God's mind, and that is where he preferred to stay; and yet, as if by some irresistible force of gravity, he was forever pulled back to the mud and the blood of the earth, to live out his life in the battlefield that was Germany.

The most immediate task before him was to find a publisher for the
Rudolphine Tables,
and the best place to do that was in Ulm, on the Danube River, a few days' walk from Tübingen. He had many connections there, old friends and acquaintances, correspondents of many years standing, even relatives. Ulm was the home of his distant cousins the Ficklers,
the city where the great Benigna Fickler, a woman of learning, had once held court. With great sadness, Kepler gathered his family about him once again and bought passage for the journey upriver, away from their home in devastated Linz. It was the middle of winter, however, and the river was frozen above Regensburg, so they could go no farther together than there.

After spending a few days finding a safe residence for his wife and children, Kepler packed his precious letter type into a wagon and continued the journey on to Ulm alone, fighting cold and snow all the way. Once in Ulm, he found residence with an old friend of his from Prague, Gregor Horst, who had once been a professor of medicine at Wittenberg and was now the city physician. Horst owned a small house adjoining his own larger house near the Cathedral Place, but facing a back alley; there Kepler, exhausted from his trip, unpacked his bags and settled in.

Horst immediately sent out feelers to his friends and acquaintances in town to scout out a printer for the
Tables.
The word on the street was that one local printer, Jonas Sauer, could do the work quickly and cheaply—especially cheaply. Horst spoke well of him, which was good enough for Kepler. He was ready to begin printing. He had the ink. He had plenty of paper, already sent to him in Ulm—two bales of the good stuff for the presentation books and two bales of the ordinary stuff for the general market. And he had his set of letter type, including the special type blocks he ordered cast in Linz to print the astronomical symbols.

The work carried on, but Kepler was soon disappointed with the personality of the printer. The man was proud, rash, and unpleasant. At one point, Sauer ran into money problems and tried to extort more money out of Kepler, money that Kepler didn't have. Then, as his money problems increased, Sauer began arguing with Kepler over the contract and even threatened not to finish the job unless Kepler helped him with his problems. Furious, Kepler decided to take the printing job away from him and find someone else in Tübingen. Because Kepler was feeling cornered by his situation, his moods had become more erratic, and he did his best to fend off depression, that dark beast always lurking inside him, waiting like a leopard for him to slip and fall. In a sudden fit of pique, he set out for Tübingen to check on alternate printers. He couldn't ride a horse, though,
or sit in a rough wagon for long, for he had developed an inflamed abscess on his buttocks, and the gunshot of pain he felt with every trot of a horse or bounce of a wagon had become intolerable. Instead, he set out on foot, and made it all the way to the town of Blaubeuren, when the deep February weather stopped him. He was not as young or as healthy as he used to be, so he turned right around and walked back. Sauer got to keep the job after all and, surprisingly, completed it without too much more trouble. Kepler, however, fought through the blizzards of his own changing moods. The world had once again become too heavy for him, and eventually the depression avalanched over him.

Meanwhile, his son Ludwig had reached university age and was studying medicine in Tübingen. The cost of a university education, then as now, was enough to drain a family's resources, and Kepler had to shepherd his money carefully to be able to pay for his part of Ludwig's education and the printing of the
Tables
at the same time. Ludwig, of course, always needed more money in order to live the life that every university student believes he deserves, and so he wrote to his father asking for help. Kepler would not give it, for he had given his son “expense money” enough, he said. He had given him the clear understanding that the Kepler family was poor and would have to live accordingly. Ludwig had enough money to survive and to complete his education. He would get no more from his father. Kepler had only enough money to complete the printing of the
Tables,
a task he considered his sacred duty. “To use this money, even a bit of it, for my son would delay the work, and that for me would be a sacrilege.” Although he loved his son and wanted to provide for him, the proper time for the production of the
Tables
was rapidly ending. The emperor expected the work to be done. His sense of responsibility to his old master Tycho Brahe hung over him. “This is the way the matter stands: either I finish the work now, or I don't finish it at all.”
¹

Finally, after months of work, the printing was nearly done. Kepler contacted the Brahe family to inform them of this so that they could write a dedication on behalf of their long-dead Tycho. The old master's two sons, Tycho and Georg Brahe, composed a title page and a dedication, which they sent to Kepler, who then sent it on to the imperial commissioners,
saying that he had no disagreement with what they had written. Kepler, however, had written another dedication to the emperor, which he wanted to include, a longer one, in which he explained the reasons for the long delay. With all this, the printing, almost miraculously, was finished.

The print run was fairly large for Kepler—a thousand copies. Since he had paid for the entire printing himself, he needed to recoup its expenses, so he decided to send the entire run to a book dealer named Tampach in Frankfurt for the book fair. On September 22, 1627, Kepler arrived with a few copies of the
Tables
. But because of the legal issues raised by his complicated relationship with the Brahe family, Kepler could not set a price for the book, so the whole question went into arbitration. The imperial commissioner sent copies to various experts at the fair to ask their opinion about the price. The Jesuits he sent one to set the price high, at 5 gulden. Some of the other experts set it at only 2, so the commissioner split the difference and set the price at 3.

It was a decent price, but not enough to make any real money. Kepler figured that the amount of book sales of astronomical tables would never be very high, since mathematical works were rarely popular, especially in wartime. “There will be few buyers, as with all mathematical works, especially in these times.” He decided to pursue alternative markets, including international sales, so he secretly sent a number of copies to a friend of his in Strasbourg, Johann Bernegger, with the request that he spread the word about the
Tables
among the university crowd in that part of France.

Then once again the Brahe family decided it was not happy and made a fuss. More than likely, they saw this as a duty to the memory of their father. A little rain, a little tempest, and no one would be allowed to forget Tycho the Dane. Kepler had broken their agreement, they said. He had not sent them a copy of the finished tables for the family to review before the book went to print. This was true. Kepler did not want to send them a copy of the
Tables
before the printing because they were such fussbudgets, and because it would give them another chance to harangue him about following the Tychonic cosmology rather than the Copernican. Kepler didn't want to go through that again. They complained they didn't like
Kepler's dedication because it took too much attention away from their illustrious parent. They didn't like this phrase, they didn't like that phrase. They wanted a new title page. Finally, to please them, Tampach the bookseller had to replace the signature page on all the copies, and then they nitpicked about that too. Needless to say, when they were done, Tampach wasn't very happy either.

But for Kepler, the great work was accomplished, and he felt the wind shifting in his life, a sea change bringing along something new. Kepler realized that after printing the
Rudolphine Tables,
an important phase in his life had ended. He had been working on the
Tables
ever since the death of his old master. For twenty years, he had burrowed into the mathematics of Tycho's observations and, with antlike labor, built the jumble of data into a set of tables that would revolutionize astronomy. It was over. He had done his duty to the emperor. So where would his life go from there? What he wanted, what he had always wanted, was a nice, comfortable position somewhere far away from the war and the endless bickering between Christians, a little position somewhere that would allow him to give lectures on things astronomical and astrological, where he could gather his family about him without having to leave them in some other city, and where he could live out his remaining years in peace and security. After years of struggle, he was willing to go anywhere, anywhere at all, in Germany, Italy—even England.

He was fairly certain by that time that his days as imperial mathematician were coming to a close. After all, Emperor Ferdinand had already reinstated his Counter-Reformation measures in Upper Austria and was busy extending them throughout the empire. In the summer of 1627, Ferdinand had decreed that all non-Catholic officials in Upper Austria should be removed from their positions and encouraged to emigrate. Sooner or later, Ferdinand would remember that his imperial mathematician was also a Lutheran and would put him to the question as well. Kepler would not give in, no more than he did in Graz or Linz. Drowning in his depression—so much death, so many of his children lost!—Kepler imagined the worst.

Nevertheless, he was required to bring the
Tables
to Prague to present them to the emperor, but he was afraid. That February, he had written to his friend Schickard that he had a “heart swarming with anxiety and stung by fear of the future, but a heart that could still find new hope in a single word of encouragement.”
²
Fearing that Ferdinand would receive him badly, both for his Protestantism and for the tardy publication of the
Tables,
he decided he needed help, so he visited an old friend, Philip, Landgrave of Hesse, in October 1627 and asked the prince for his assistance.

The landgrave was sympathetic and understood Kepler's insecurity quite well. He knew how shaky Kepler's position was and had always been. Philip referred the matter to his nephew Landgrave Georg, who had succeeded him as ruler of the principality. Georg had remained Catholic, loyal to the emperor and the Counter-Reformation, while his uncle Philip had become a Calvinist. Nevertheless, the two men were both well disposed toward the imperial mathematician and agreed to help him in any way they could. They advised him to go on to Prague, while they would write letters to people they knew.

With Landgrave Georg's help, Kepler gathered the remaining copies of the
Tables
and set out for Prague. He left Ulm on November 25, 1627, and on the way stayed with the Jesuits, especially Father Albert Curtius in Dillingen for two days. Oddly enough, for all his unmovable Protestantism, Kepler had an excellent relationship with the Jesuits, the chief architects and ideologists of the Counter-Reformation. As a Lutheran, he was expected to avoid them as the very spirit of evil, just as they were expected to see him as a heretic and an apostate. But the Jesuit motto to “find God in all things” was similar enough to Kepler's own view of mathematics and astronomy that Kepler and the Fathers of the Society of Jesus found that they were kindred souls, that they were all men of scholarship and faith. His letters to them were always cordial, and so were his visits. Kepler enjoyed the intelligent conversation he found among them and often looked forward to his short visits to their houses. After a few days, however, he took leave of Curtius and traveled on to Regensburg, and from there went on to Prague.

He found the city in quite a state of celebration. The first phase of the Thirty Years' War was winding down, and it seemed as if Ferdinand had triumphed. The peasant revolt had been put down, and the last remnants of the Protestant rebellion had been cornered and their leaders killed. Wallenstein had defeated both Ernst von Mansfield and Christian von Braunschweig, the last two supporters of the exiled Winter King, Friedrich, and both men had died during the battle. Wallenstein was the man of the hour; his star was shining. He was the most successful general in the empire and had proven it. He was more successful than Tilly, more successful than anyone. He had fought the Danish king and pushed him back all along the northern part of Germany, until the Danes finally had retreated to a series of islands. A few weeks before Kepler arrived, Wallenstein had come to the city, set himself up in his opulent, some said decadent, new palace in the shadow of Prague Castle.

The general had already been appointed the General Colonel Commander-in-Chief and the General of the Baltic and Oceanic Seas. He had risen so fast and had become so wealthy so quickly, that he was roundly hated in Protestant circles all across Europe and held in suspicion and fear in Catholic circles. Both France and Sweden, one country Catholic and the other Protestant, fretted about Wallenstein and schemed to bring him down. He was simply too successful, and his successes were too brutal and too final. The Swedes worried that the emperor might turn his eye northward, might convince himself that the Catholic church needed to return to Scandinavia. The French thought what the French always think, that the rest of Europe would be a better place if it were French. Nevertheless, as Kepler entered Prague, Wallenstein was the most celebrated man in the empire. People waved to him in the streets, knelt before him, kissed his hand, while plots within plots, schemes within schemes, swirled around the General Colonel Commander-in-Chief as the mist swirled above the Vltava River. The fact that he would one day be assassinated would have come as no surprise to the people of Prague.