Tycho and Kepler (25 page)

The result of Tycho’s new study of refraction was heartbreaking. He found that his solar refraction table was badly flawed. He had, in fact, found
no
parallax for Mars in 1587. Tycho never again claimed he had discovered a parallax for Mars, nor did he make any more serious attempts to find it. The oppositions of Mars in 1591 and 1593 took place in summer, when the nights were too short to try to measure a parallax.

W
HILE
T
YCHO UNDOUBTEDLY MADE
some of his problems worse by mishandling,
in other cases he acted with extreme patience and care for his family. The sad love story of his sister Sophie was one of the latter.

Twelve years younger than Tycho, Sophie had always been a favorite. When she was a child, he had taught her some astronomy, and, when she was fourteen, she had assisted him in the observation of a lunar eclipse at Herrevad. Since then Sophie had married a rich
nobleman, borne a son, and lived in splendor at his Eriksholm Castle.

In 1588, Sophie’s husband died, and with her own family inheritance as well as her husband’s she was left a wealthy young widow. Sophie was a frequent visitor to Uraniborg in the autumn and winter of 1589, and it was there that she met Erik Lange, the well-educated, well-traveled young gallant who had first brought Bär to
Hven as part of his retinue in the autumn of 1584.

Sophie fell in love with Lange, an exceedingly foolish choice for a wealthy widow, for Lange’s own considerable fortune was rapidly vanishing, squandered to support his obsession with a futile branch of alchemy devoted to trying to turn base metal into gold. In 1590, the same year he and Sophie Brahe were betrothed, over the objections of
all Sophie’s siblings except Tycho, Lange had been forced to sign over his estate of Engelsholm to make good his debts, and even that had not been enough to cover them. He was placed under house arrest. Though creditors could not touch the substantial part of Sophie’s deceased husband’s estate that was held in wardship for their son, soon after the betrothal they began closing in on her personal fortune.

In 1592 Sophie’s and Lange’s problems became, more than ever, Tycho’s when Lange fled in secret to Hven, and Tycho helped him escape from Denmark and his creditors. Lange’s addiction to the dream of turning base metal into gold was beyond control, and he continued to run up enormous debts, dodging from place to place in Europe. Sophie, distraught and besieged by his creditors at her home at
Eriksholm Castle, often sought refuge at Uraniborg. In spite of having followed her heart where no sensible person should have allowed
it
to lead, Sophie was a strong, quick-witted, self-confident woman, involved in numerous intellectual pursuits and highly respected by many people, not least Tycho. He considered her one of the most intelligent and learned women he knew and he enjoyed her company.
Nevertheless, her problems and Lange’s continuing disastrous foolishness were a drain on his patience and energies.

W
HILE
T
YCHO WAS RISKING
loss of respect from his peers over the Pedersen affair and breaking the law to help his brother-in-law, he was treading even more perilously in another respect. The estate attached to the Chapel of
the Magi at Roskilde was extensive and provided Tycho with a large annual income. Nevertheless, he had neglected his responsibilities and allowed the chapel to fall into disrepair. Since 1591 he had received repeated requests from the boy-king Christian to repair the leaking roof. Tycho ignored him. There seemed little to fear. Christian had not yet reached majority, and his limited powers allowed
him to do little more than play at being king. Furthermore, the Regency Council that ruled during his minority was packed with Tycho’s friends and relatives. Christian’s father Frederick had been so enthusiastic and supportive of Tycho that Tycho had forgotten that kings needed extremely sensitive treatment and could not safely be regarded as familiar equals or, if they were still minors, as irritating
nephews.

Tycho had every reason to expect Christian to be as supportive as his father had been. Christian made a royal visit to Hven in July 1592. Not only was the weather beautiful and the banquet, wines, music, conversation, and the humor of Tycho’s jester all very much to the king’s liking, but he was fascinated with Tycho’s instruments and the many treasures of Uraniborg.

Though Christian’s
memories of Hven would in fact remain fresh with him all his life, in the summer of 1593, a year after his day on the island, Christian visited Roskilde Cathedral, and his attitude toward
Tycho
Brahe changed catastrophically. Christian found the roof of the Chapel of the Magi in such a state of near collapse as to threaten the alabaster and marble sepulchers of his father and grandfather. The
young monarch dictated an angry message demanding that Tycho begin repairs. If he failed to do so, Christian himself would hire a builder and have the work done at Tycho’s expense. The message commanded a reply by return courier.

Tycho must indeed have been distracted by other matters to have ignored this ultimatum. By the following autumn, 1594, there had still been no repairs, and Tycho
received another angry complaint ordering him to have the work completed by Christmas or forfeit the fief with its incomes. This message succeeded in getting Tycho’s attention, but, still seemingly unaware of the dangerous path he was treading in his cavalier treatment of Christian, Tycho had the roof rebuilt as a flat one with wooden beams rather than restore the original vaulting.

The problem
that seemed much more urgent and troubling to Tycho in the autumn of 1594 was the arrangement of a marriage
⁴
for his eldest daughter. Plans had begun happily the year before. Tycho’s four daughters—Magdalene, nineteen, Sophie, fourteen, Elisabeth, thirteen, and Cecilie, twelve—were wealthy, accomplished young women. Because their mother was a commoner, they could not marry into the nobility, but
Tycho had every reason to believe that he could arrange matches so that their standard of living would be equal to what it had been at Uraniborg. Among the academic elite there were young professors and physicians of high social status who were as well versed in late Renaissance culture as noblemen, often more so. Clearly, Tycho Brahe’s daughters were enormously good catches for any of these.

In May and June of 1593, a young man named Gellius Sascerides became a prime candidate for Magdalene’s hand. Gellius came from a prominent academic family. His father, though Dutch, was a distinguished professor in Copenhagen, and the family and Gellius himself had a wide circle of important friends there. Gellius and his brother David had both been assistants at Uraniborg, Gellius for five
years
when
he was in his early twenties. He had been one of Tycho’s most promising young disciples. Tycho’s daughters had been children then. Magdalene was only about eight when he arrived and thirteen when he departed in the midsummer of 1588, but they must have met at the dinner table. Gellius had continued to serve as Tycho’s representative to foreign courts and universities. Now he was back,
thirty-one years old—well traveled, brimming with confidence, with a medical degree and a reputation as a rising star among the young scholars of Europe. There could not have been a more appropriate suitor for Tycho Brahe’s eldest daughter.

According to the courtship and marriage customs
⁵
of late-sixteenth-century Denmark,
^fn2
the procedure did not begin with the couple themselves but with
tentative, informal feelers among friends, relatives, and the broader network these could provide. If a situation looked encouraging, a young man asked trusted friends to act on his behalf and present his proposal to the prospective bride’s immediate family. Gellius chose his friend Mogens Bertelsen Dallin as his emissary. After preliminary discussions with Tycho, Dallin and Gellius went to Hven with
a formal proposal on September 19.

Custom required the suitor’s spokesman to deliver a long, elegant speech, climaxing in the formal proposal of marriage. The suitor and his party then took seats, and the bride’s family replied. Tycho’s sister Sophie probably was the spokesperson for the Brahes when this ceremony took place at Uraniborg, for it was she who went on to negotiate on their behalf.
Her speech would not have answered yes or no: At this point the suitor was committed, but the bride’s family was not.

After that, the negotiations began, and almost immediately there were difficulties. Although Magdalene was not of the nobility, she had been raised as a noblewoman, and her immediate family was far wealthier than Gellius’s. Gellius had no substantial fortune and no permanent
position providing him an income, only his prospects as a brilliant young scholar. There was a huge discrepancy between Tycho’s and Gellius’s expectations of what the wedding and the couple’s living style would be like.

Magdalene’s family was of course well able to supply a suitable dowry, including not only money but such necessities as enough fine gowns to last a lifetime, jewelry and embroidered
caps, table and bed linens, kettles and cooking pots and pans, tapestries, a bed and all its hangings, duvets, bolsters, and pillows. All of this was laid out in the marriage contract. By custom a young woman entered marriage supplied for life, leaving her husband responsible only for day-to-day needs.

Nevertheless, Gellius must soon have realized that he was out of his depth. Even if he had
anticipated Tycho’s plans that the marriage take place on the scale of a noble alliance, he had no experience of how costly that would be. The wedding itself, although most of the cost fell to the bride’s family, would be staggeringly expensive for him. A nobleman’s wedding lasted five to nine days, and the groom needed new, sumptuous clothing every day. Gellius’s entire inheritance, and then some,
could easily have been eaten up in supplying a betrothal gift—customarily a number of small silver items and a massive gold chain that ensured his wife could support herself for life merely by pawning it—and a “morning gift,” which might be anything from valuable jewelry to the hereditary rights to landed estates. Clearly it was the duty of Dallin, Gellius’s spokesman, to scale down these expectations
as he negotiated the contract.

When it came to a way for Gellius to support his bride, Tycho proposed that Gellius reenter his service at Uraniborg, no longer as an assistant but as a son-in-law, subordinate only to Tycho himself. This arrangement had been part of the nuptial contract agreed on at Uraniborg in late September. Tycho may well have been considering Gellius as a prime candidate
to succeed him either as director of Uraniborg or as codirector with one of Tycho’s sons.

Thus matters stood when Tycho received his ultimatum from Christian about the Chapel of the Magi and went to Roskilde, taking Steenwinkel and another builder with him. He was away again for a short period in late October, and when he returned to the island there was a letter waiting for him from Sophie
Brahe in Copenhagen. Gellius had requested an amendment to the contract so as to have only a small wedding with a banquet for a limited number of guests, not a celebration lasting for days, and he would agree to remain in Tycho’s service only until the following Easter, no longer—which seemed astoundingly unappreciative of what had struck Tycho as an extraordinary offer to the young man. It is testimony
to Tycho’s concern for Magdalene that he swallowed his annoyance and sent word to Sophie that he would accept Gellius’s amendments but hoped he would not go on changing his mind.

However, for reasons that still remain mysterious, Gellius had grown extremely skittish about an alliance with Tycho Brahe’s family. He continued to raise fresh objections and make new demands. The renegotiations
continued, then floundered and fell apart entirely in late November, with Gellius frustrating every effort at reconciliation. Ominously, his remarks about the Brahes in public and among his close friends seemed contrived to bring an irreversible end to the marriage arrangements.

On December 12 Tycho formally declared the wedding contract canceled. A devastated Magdalene wrote a statement describing
her mistreatment in this matter by Gellius. The breakdown at this point in marriage negotiations, when the man and woman as a formally betrothed couple could by custom already have slept together, was like a death knell for her. No man would ever marry her. At the age of twenty, having had every prospect of happiness and family before her, Magdalene knew that her erstwhile friend and suitor
Gellius had condemned her to spinsterdom.