Tycho and Kepler (15 page)

It was possibly also on this occasion that Frederick reiterated his
promise
to Tycho of the canonry at Roskilde Cathedral on the death of an incumbent. He could look forward to the incomes from endowments of the Chapel of the Magi there.

Tycho’s ties to the king grew even stronger in the summer of 1578 as the construction progressed at both Uraniborg and Kronborg, the new palace at Elsinore.
Craftsmen, materials, and architectural ideas moved swiftly back and forth across the sound.

For his “architect” Tycho had made an unlikely but inspired choice. Hans van Steenwinkel was a Dutch master mason who came to work for King Frederick at Kronborg. Tycho brought him across to Hven, hoping he might be trainable as a master builder. He gave Steenwinkel some instruction in astronomy and
geometry, explained the symmetrical scheme of the building and grounds, and set him to work drawing more detailed plans. Steenwinkel was a quick study. Before long he had mastered classical and Italian Renaissance architectural theory as well as perspective drawing and was producing designs for windows, spires, domes, and other architectural details that pleased even the exacting Tycho. So great
was Tycho’s confidence in Steenwinkel that he put him fully in charge of the construction.

A few months after Steenwinkel came, Tycho engaged a twenty-three-year-old university graduate named Peter Jacobsen Flemløse to assist him in astronomy, alchemy, and other work—the first of a long procession of assistants and students that would finally end with Johannes Kepler. Flemløse, like Steenwinkel,
was able and quick-witted. Tycho taught him to use the cross staff and the sextant and delegated to him the task of compiling a new catalog of reference stars for the comet. Flemløse also liked to draw, and from this time forward whimsical pictures adorned Tycho’s star catalogs and observational journals.

When the building season slowed down once again in the autumn of 1578, Tycho’s interest
turned back to the comet and his book. He gathered all the observations
⁷
he had made of distances from the comet to twelve stars, as well as descriptions of the observing conditions
(the
weather and other things such as moonlight that affected the observations), and put this material in the first chapter—an unusual way to begin in Tycho’s day. It was unprecedented for anyone to share so much data
with his readers. The book was also unusual in its author’s willingness to admit error and his capacity to analyze why the error had occurred. On the first night of observation, the position of the comet figured from the twelve stars was at odds with the position figured from the Moon. Tycho left this discrepancy in the book, permitting his readers to see the conflict. Later, when printing was
almost completed, he found the reason for the problem and added an “annotation by the author derived from later observations of the Moon.”

With so much introductory material, it took Tycho ninety pages to get to the real crux of the matter: whether the comet was higher than the Moon. By now he was more convinced than ever that it was, and that the comet moved in a great circle, like the Sun,
the Moon, and the planets, though with a less regular motion. He estimated that the comet came no nearer to Earth than six times the minimum distance of the Moon.

In December another royal prince was born, and that meant another horoscope, but Tycho was not averse to setting his book aside. There was already a plethora of commentaries on the comet coming off the printing presses of Europe.
Tycho knew that he would have to produce something extraordinary to make an impact, and, curious about what his competitors were saying, he began collecting, through friends abroad, all the publications on the comet that they could put their hands on.

A
FTER
H
EINRICH
K
EPLER
moved his family, including four-year-old Johannes, away from the
overcrowded house in Weil der Stadt to Leonberg in 1576, he stayed with them only about a year before leaving again to sell his services to the Belgian military. Home
became
a more peaceful place for Katharina and her children. But Heinrich’s Belgian adventure was a disaster. He lost what little fortune he had and nearly ended on the gallows. He trudged back to Leonberg and announced that they
had to sell the house. The family moved to a rented property in Ellmendingen. After three years of near destitution, they somehow managed to acquire some property back in Leonberg and return there. It was at about this time that Johannes, reading of Jacob and Rebecca in the Bible, decided that if he should ever marry he would take them as a model. Their faithfulness was a marked contrast to his unstable
and undependable parents. Five years after the move back to Leonberg, when Johannes was sixteen, Heinrich abandoned his family forever. Johannes never saw his father again.

Johannes would grow up an ardently religious man whose life was repeatedly, tragically disrupted by the political/religious strife around him. Nevertheless, at the start, the religious establishment served him well. The
Lutheran Church’s commitment to education provided a singular stroke of good fortune in an otherwise hopelessly bleak childhood. The Lutheran duchy of Württemberg had established a fine free school system, and this system rescued Johannes.

Much more information survives about Kepler’s school days than about Tycho Brahe’s. Johannes began at the German Schreibschule in Leonberg, where pupils
learned to read and write the German they needed for everyday life. His teachers recognized an exceptional young mind and transferred him to a “Latin school.” The dukes of Württemberg had established such schools in all small towns like Leonberg.

Johannes’s transfer was a significant advancement, for Latin schools were the Lutheran substitute for the monastery schools that, before the Reformation,
had provided primary education for boys who would become civil administrators, clergymen, and scholars. Latin was the common language in which educated men all over Europe communicated, lectured, debated, and wrote books; and Leonberg’s Latin school set its boys firmly on this path by requiring
them
from the start to converse with one another day and night in Latin, or not at all. In the first
year, they learned to read and write the language; in the second they endured endless grammar drills; in the third they read the classical texts.

It took Johannes five years to complete the three-year course. The move to Ellmendingen interrupted his education when he was about eight and had been a pupil in Latin school for a year. During that period of abject poverty, his parents set him to
heavy agricultural labor rather than allow him to continue in school. Those two years were hellish for Johannes, for not only was he an undersized weakling of a child, pathetically unsuited for such work, but he loved school. His one source of happiness had been snatched away. However, when the family fortunes improved, his parents reenrolled him at age ten. Two years later, in 1584, he passed the
competitive examination marking the end of Latin school and moved on to the “lower seminary” at Adelberg, where his room, board, and tuition again were free, courtesy of the duchy. After two years there he advanced to the “higher seminary” at the former Cistercian monastery at Maulbronn for two more years of study. Maulbronn was a preparatory school for the University of Tübingen.

It was at
about the time that Kepler left Latin school to enter Adelberg that he first became aware of a potentially explosive rift in the Protestant world. He heard a sermon in Leonberg given by a young deacon who spoke vehemently and at length against the Calvinists. Twelve-year-old Kepler went away deeply worried about this harsh controversy between those who adhered to slightly different confessions of
the same faith. At the age of thirteen, he wrote a letter requesting that the University of Tübingen send him copies of Martin Luther’s disputations. Kepler decided to make it a practice, whenever he heard a preacher or lecturer argue about the meaning of the Scriptures, to consult the passages himself rather than to take anyone’s word for what they meant. He usually decided that both interpretations
had good points. This was not a healthy attitude for a
young
man who was hoping someday to find himself in a Lutheran pulpit—indeed for anyone wanting to survive unscathed in the political/religious milieu of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather than win friends in both camps, it was likely to make enemies all round. As Kepler recalled his youthful inclination to see all
sides of an argument: “There was nothing I could state
⁸
that I could not also contradict.” It was a gift, and sometimes a curse, that would remain with him all his life.

7

A
P
ALACE
O
BSERVATORY

1578–1585

IN THE LATE
1570s and early 1580s, Tycho Brahe’s fortunes continued to soar. The long-promised, prestigious canonry at Roskilde Cathedral and the incomes from the endowment from the Chapel of the Magi there were finally Tycho’s when the incumbent canon died. The Chapel of the Magi was no ordinary chapel. It was and still is one of the most lavishly
decorated in Denmark, housing a tomb, then under construction, for King Frederick’s father, Christian III.

Though the earlier agreement had been that when Tycho received the canonry he would relinquish the fief of Nordfjord in Norway, he successfully appealed to the king to allow him to keep both, giving him a higher total income than any other scholar in Europe. King Frederick was setting
a new standard of royal support for scientific research. He was also spoiling his young favorite, who was learning to think of himself as the equal of kings and to assume that his priorities would always be clearly recognized as the priorities of the kingdom.

Tycho’s grandiose dreams for the island of Hven were becoming a reality. On the plot so carefully and symmetrically laid out at the
center of the island, a magical structure was rising. Even though Tycho and his family would not occupy the house for another eighteen
months
and he wouldn’t declare the building complete until the autumn of 1581, in July 1579 Tycho sent messages to his friends Vedel and Dançey that it would be well worth their while to pay a visit. There was ornamentation still to be done on the exterior of the
house, and inside only the framing was finished, but the grounds were laid out according to plan, and it was possible to see the shape of things to come. Kirsten lived in temporary quarters on Hven that summer, and it was there that she gave birth to another daughter, Elisabeth.

“House” hardly sufficed to describe the magnificent vision that confronted Vedel and Dançey on the old common lands
of Hven. In its geometric extravagance, Tycho’s design rivaled Ptolemy’s scheme of the cosmos. An earthwork wall surfaced with stone (built up of earth the peasants had dug to make the fish ponds) surrounded an 839-foot-square area. The plot enclosed by the wall formed a compass (see color plate section), with four avenues leading from the compass points to the center where the mansion stood.
One of these avenues ran from the house to a two-story gatehouse at the east corner. An identical gatehouse mirrored it at the west corner. Later, kennels perched above these gates would house English mastiffs to announce the approach of visitors and frighten off intruders. The servants’ quarters were at the north corner of the compound, and Tycho’s printing establishment would later be situated at
the south corner, with both buildings designed as miniatures of the main house.

Inside the earthwork wall were fruit-bearing and ornamental trees, eventually three hundred of them, each one a different variety. This orchard/arboretum enclosed another inner square, set off by a low wooden fence, with geometrically laid out beds for a botanical garden of flowers and herbs—as many interesting
and exotic examples as could be brought to Hven. Wooden fencing also lined the four avenues and a central circle where the house stood facing east.

It was a palace like no other in the world, a whimsical bauble with carved sandstone ornamentation and a remarkable roofline noticeably
lacking
castle turrets or crenellation (
see here
). Crowning the building instead was a large pavilion with clock
faces on its east and west fronts. At the roof peak, sixty-two feet off the ground, a smaller cupola housed the clock chimes. Two cone-shaped wooden roofs flanked this central block. They were the roofs of Tycho’s primary observatories and were connected by galleries to smaller, similarly roofed projections in a hen-and-chicks arrangement. Pyramids, spires, dome, cupola, chimneys, galleries,
and other fantastical decorations suggested more an illustration from a northern fairy tale than a Palladian villa. The appearance of Tycho’s castle cannot have failed to reinforce the image the peasants had of him as a golden-nosed wizard brooding over their island, robbing them of their freedom, and performing strange incantations, experiments, and transmutations in his subterranean alchemical laboratory.