Tycho and Kepler (12 page)

The island’s isolation weighed both ways in his considerations. He would be near enough to Copenhagen to allow the occasional appearance at court or university, yet Hven was, as he put it, “free from the commotion
²
of the common herd.” Great sailing
vessels, after queuing up to pay the toll across the sound at Elsinore, swept on in a steady procession as though the island were invisible. His time would be his own, his work interrupted only when he chose. But Tycho also realized that Hven’s isolation made it less than ideal for a major building and landscaping project. He cast an appraising eye over the residents of Tuna, a seemingly docile
lot. As their lord, he was entitled to two unpaid workdays per week, from sunup to sundown, from each farm on the island, and a certain amount of “cartage.” That seemed very little in view of the undertaking he had in mind. Besides, they
were
not skilled laborers. Those and most supplies would need to come from the mainland.

By the time three months had passed, Tycho had made his choice. Set
in a sparkling sea with a haze making the passing ships and the distant shores seem a mirage, his island’s fields, pastures, village, and its tiny church of St. Ibb’s glowed in the piercing sunlight of a northern early summer. Frederick had offered Tycho a paradise.

There were violent legends surrounding the early history of Hven, but more recent years had been tranquil. Until Tycho arrived
in 1576, there had been little to break the peace and no lord to rule the island since 1288, when Viking marauders, led by the vividly named Eric the Priest-Hater, paused there to demolish several castles. The rulers who lived in them either perished or soon left. Traces of four fortresses were all that remained when Tycho came.

Several years later, after Tycho had erected a palace on Hven
suited for entertaining royalty, Frederick’s young Queen Sophie was obliged to spend an extra night when a violent storm made the Øresund impassable. The company gathered around the fire, and one of Tycho’s students entertained them by recounting tales
³
from before the time of Eric the Priest-Hater. Nordborg Castle, whose ruins guarded the landing where Tycho first came ashore, had once been a
formidable stronghold. Lore had it that Lady Grimmel, whose family ruled the island, invited her two brothers to a feast there and murdered both of them during the festivities. Her maiden-in-waiting Hvenild was already pregnant by one of the brothers and gave birth to a son, Ranke, the true heir to the throne. While Ranke grew up, Lady Grimmel continued to rule from her four castles, Nordborg, Sönderborg,
Karlshög, and Hammer. But Hvenild did not let her son forget his aunt’s treachery and his father’s fate, and when Ranke reached manhood he cast the evil Grimmel into a dungeon and abandoned her to starve. The name Hven was said to come from Hvenild, Ranke’s mother.

The peasants also told of “Lady Grimmel’s treasure,” buried in the alder fen and guarded by a dragon (who, report had it, was
only
seldom
seen). Supposedly, two golden keys in the sea could unlock the treasure, and at one time two boys saw them gleaming through the water. One of the boys revealed the secret, but when others ran to look, the keys had vanished.

More scholarly accounts report Stone Age habitation on Hven, a name evidently already used for the island in the ninth century, and it seems to have been a
hive of activity during the Bronze Age. The sea battle of Svolder between powerful Viking forces took place at “Sandevolleön,” the Viking name for Hven. The island’s cliffs and location in the center of the sea-lanes made it a natural citadel, but after Eric the Priest-Hater’s onslaught it was never again fortified.

With Tycho’s coming in the spring of 1576, the little island was about to
emerge from this murky history that was little more than legend and, in spite of its out-of-the-way location, move to the center stage of Europe. Yet Tycho would come to seem to the villagers of Hven, and to the descendants to whom they passed on the stories about him, not the enlightened genius of the age but a figure as mysterious and malign as the ancient Lady Grimmel herself.

On any of
the other estates the king had offered him, Tycho would have found peasants, however disgruntled, accustomed to serving a lord of the manor. The peasants of Hven, nestled in their thatched, half-timbered village, had never experienced anything of the sort. They had been enjoying their utopian isolation without the interference of a lord for almost as long as their history could recall. For generations,
forty peasant families had tilled the land that could be tilled, grazed a few animals on the broken areas where the cliffs had fallen away and other areas that did not lend themselves to tilling, fished, and managed to eke out a living, a portion of which they paid to a provincial governor on the mainland. They thought they were freeholders, that they owned their land. No one had disabused
them of this notion.

The village’s three great fields
⁴
covered most of the northwestern half of the island, near the village, with common grazing land and meadows taking up the center and the southeastern half. There were almost no trees except for a grove of hazelnuts and the alders that grew in a moist area or fen, where the dragon was supposed to be guarding the treasure. St. Ibb’s Church
stood on the cliffs, and on another high place near the village there was a great windmill. All the islanders lived in the village, and with the exception of the pastor, a miller, and almost surely a blacksmith (though that may have been a part-time job combined with farm work), they were all peasants and rural laborers.

An old map of Hven that is not oriented strictly north to south. The village’s three great fields covered most of the northwestern half of the island, nearest the village; St. Ibb’s Church is visible at the top of the map.

The islanders had been accustomed to governing themselves. Though their claim to be freeholders was supported by tradition, not by written documents, each farmer believed
that he owned an individual
narrow
strip within the great fields. Since it was more convenient and productive to farm them together, they had organized a guild to set down bylaws and administer daily activities, choosing one prominent villager to be responsible for maintaining the peace and collecting annual taxes. The choice had to be approved by the provincial governor on the mainland, but Hven
was remote and uninteresting enough to keep him from taking much notice beyond that.

In other ways Hven was more in contact with the rest of the world. Some islanders sold their produce in towns along the coasts of the Øresund. Others took their swine to graze in summer on acorns in the forests of Skåne, on the eastern side of the sound, where a few islanders had intermarried with local peasant
families. But compared with communities on the mainland, Hven was remarkably independent in its day-to-day existence, which unavoidably set the stage for considerable disruption and even flat refusal to accept the situation should a lord of the manor suddenly present himself.

Tycho, after considering the advantages and disadvantages of various building sites, chose the exact center of the
island, regarded by the villagers as common grazing land. It was his legal right to make this choice without consulting them.

On May 23, 1576, Frederick formally granted Tycho the island. Tycho sailed again to Hven
⁵
. He and his party met the bailiff, “grands,” and most of the population at an area near the center of the island, marked with boulders since ancient times as the meeting place
of the “Hundred Thing,” the local court of law. Tycho’s clerk read aloud the parchment document that bore King Frederick’s seal. The island was granted in lifetime fee to Tycho Brahe of Knutstorp, “to have, enjoy, use and hold his life long, and so long as he lives and desires to continue and pursue his
studia mathematica
.” The grant required Tycho to “observe the law
⁶
and rights due to the peasants
living there, and do them no injustice against the law, nor burden them with any new dues or other uncustomary innovations.” For the cottagers, everything
would
depend on who defined what was “customary,” and there was little doubt who that would be.
^fn1

Soon after the formal granting of Hven to Tycho in May, the peasants began to find out how drastic a change was in store for them and their
island. Instead of paying the accustomed taxes levied in the kingdom of Denmark, they were to render their labor services to Tycho, with no payment in return. Tycho’s bailiff began taking down their names and noting the sizes of farms and cottage holdings so as to assess what Tycho’s rightful dues of labor were from each family. The islanders soon learned about the obligation of each household to
provide two man-days of labor each week and to appear with draft animals and wagons (the “cartage” requirement) on a prescribed number of days each year.

This was the peasants’ role within the system, new to Hven but customary elsewhere. It was, in the theory of the time, not far different from Tycho’s obligation on a higher rung of the ladder to serve the king. But the islanders were incapable
of recognizing any parallel between their duty to sweat and toil for nothing and Tycho’s duty, in rich robes and plush surroundings, to peer at the sky and boil up wizardly mixtures. As for Tycho, he surely no more thought of himself as placing unreasonable demands on his tenants than he thought of himself as placing unreasonable demands on his garden to produce plants.

Tycho spent much of
the early summer of 1576 contemplating the site he had chosen for his palace, pacing it off, studying architectural theory, poring over designs, drawing circles and squares in harmonious proportion, setting stakes in the ground, pulling them out again, and repeatedly consulting experts and friends. During his recent
sojourn
in Venice and its environs he had had opportunity to become well acquainted
with the architecture of Andrea Palladio. Soon after their publication in 1570, Palladio’s
I Quattri Libri Dell’ Architettura
(Four Books of Architecture) had become a sensation throughout mainland Europe and England. They set the standard for years to come for the architecture of palaces and great houses. In addition to being a guide to classical architectural theory, the books could almost be
used as a do-it-yourself manual, with clearly written text keyed to examples, detailed drawings, and ground plans. Palladio had combined a passion for the classical past with a gift for reinventing it. Tycho, in turn, reinvented Palladio.

At first glance, there was little resemblance between the palace Tycho designed and Palladio’s simple, airy Italian masterpieces. It was the ideal of symmetry
in Palladio, and the extension of this symmetry into the landscape, that most captured Tycho’s imagination. In Tycho’s house, in the projections and the towers that adorned it, and in his flower beds and orchards, he followed Palladio’s example of using only pure geometric shapes.

In Palladian architecture, the symmetry of a house went beyond balancing architectural elements such as rooms,
towers, windows, and avenues. More subtle proportions reflected a musical symmetry that had been an ideal since the Pythagoreans in the sixth century
B.C.
studied the sounds made by vibrating strings and discovered that there are harmonic ratios in nature. Johannes Kepler would later study those same relationships when trying to discover the design of the universe.

Tycho’s house plan
^fn2
7
had portal towers on the east and west sides of the house, each fifteen Danish feet wide and fifteen feet long.
^fn3
The height of the facade was thirty feet (twice the width of the portal towers), the peak of the roof forty-five feet, the side of the central square sixty feet. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five, and sixty form a ratio of 1:2:3:4. The progression 1:2:3:4 contains all the ratios of harp
string lengths that since ancient times had been known to produce sounds pleasing to the human ear. Similar ratios of musical harmony were to underlie the proportions of Tycho’s rooms and other relationships among elements of the building. Without knowing the designer’s intentions, it would be all but impossible for someone viewing the house to recognize all these mathematical/musical subtleties,
but Tycho was convinced that they would inevitably make his home and landscape a harmonious whole, pleasing to the eye, conducive to peaceful, intelligent pursuits, and inspiring to any sensitive person.