A More Perfect Heaven

by Dava Sobel

  Copernicus surely anticipated ridicule from his contemporaries. If the Earth rotated and revolved at great speed, they could argue, then anything not nailed down would go flying. Clouds and birds would be left behind. Moreover, his fellow astronomers could insist the Earth truly belonged at the center—not because humanity’s home deserved any special importance in the cosmic scheme, but because heavy, earthy things fell to rest there, and because change and death befell Earth’s inhabitants. The Earth represented the pit, not the pinnacle, of Creation. Therefore one dare not shove the Sun—“the lamp of Heaven,” as many called it—into the Hell hole at the center of the universe.

  Several Islamic astronomers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had found fault with Ptolemy for the same reasons Copernicus did. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and Ibn al-Shatir, for example, managed to adjust Ptolemy’s circle violations without requiring the Earth to turn or abandon its central place. Copernicus used some of the same mathematical devices in his revision of Ptolemy, but reached his own singular conclusions about the Sun’s centrality, the Earth’s mobility, and the grandiose inflation of the cosmos required by his design.

  If the Earth trekked all the way around the Sun, as he maintained, then two neighboring stars should appear now slightly closer together, now farther apart over the course of the year. Yet the stars never displayed any such displacement, or “parallax.” Copernicus got around the absence of parallax by supposing the stars too far away to reveal it. He increased their distance more than a hundredfold—so remote that the Earth-Sun separation shrank by comparison to the point of insignificance. “Compared to the great height of the sphere of the fixed stars,” he averred, “the distance between the Sun and the Earth is imperceptible.” The enormous chasm that suddenly yawned open between Saturn and the stars did not trouble Copernicus, as he had a ready explanation for it in the Creator’s omnipotence: “So vast, without any question, is the divine handiwork of the most excellent Almighty.” Beyond the periphery of the stars, God and His Angels hovered in the invisible heavens of the Empyrean.

  After completing the Commentariolus around 1510, Copernicus began the slow work of elaborating his theory. The thirty-four circles of the planetary ballet now required exact design specifications, such as the radius of each one, its rate of rotation, and its spatial relationship to the other thirty-three. He could calculate many of these hundred-plus parameters using time-honored methods and tables. Then he would test the values by making his own observations.

  The chapter, however, had other expectations of him.

  In November 1510 Copernicus and fellow canon Fabian Luzjanski, who had studied with him in Bologna, went on an important mission to the chapter’s southern provinces. There they accepted the large sum of 238 marks—a full year’s revenue from the labor of peasants on Church land—for safe transport back to Frauenburg. Given that the Teutonic Knights were regularly and ruthlessly robbing the population of Varmia, the two couriers traversed the wooded, hundred-mile route home in constant danger of being waylaid and relieved of their cargo of coins. (Paper money had not yet come into circulation in Europe.) When they reached Frauenburg without incident, they distributed the funds among the canons according to custom.

  The next November, in 1511, the chapter named Copernicus its chancellor, charged with overseeing the financial accounts and composing all official correspondence. The pace and volume of that correspondence quickened at the sudden death of his uncle the bishop on March 29, 1512. A week after Lukasz Watzenrode’s passing, the canons met on April 5 to elect his successor. They voted unanimously for their own Fabian Luzjanski—all except Luzjanski himself, who wrote another’s name on the ballot. The next day the canons gathered again and chose Tiedemann Giese to conduct the necessary confirmation negotiations with the Vatican. By June 1 the chapter needed two more spokesmen to contend against the king’s objections to their designated bishop. King Sigismund found no particular fault with Luzjanski; he simply preferred to install his own candidates in such positions. The Rome-Krakow-Varmia wrangle over the bishopric wore on through the summer and fall. On December 7, under a new agreement, Sigismund at last accepted Luzjanski, in exchange for the right of final approval over all future bishop selections. In addition, he insisted the entire chapter must pledge an oath of allegiance to the Crown, which they did on December 28, confident the king would honor, in return, his promise of royal protection.

  ASTRONOMICAL INSTRUMENTS

  Between Frauenburg and Rome—the northern and southern limits of his lifetime travel—Copernicus could see most of the same thousand stars that earlier astronomers of Egypt, Babylon, Greece, and Persia had observed. He measured each star’s celestial latitude and longitude to create a stellar catalog, which he published in On the Revolutions, Book II, chapter 14. He also tracked the positions of the planets against the background of the stars. With his wooden triquetrum, like the one pictured here, he could gauge a body’s altitude by sliding the hinged bar until its peepholes framed the planet or star, and then reading its elevation from the calibrated lower scale.

  Only one canon failed to sign the new agreement and swear his loyalty to the Polish king. This was Copernicus’s brother, Andreas. The chapter had released him from all responsibilities in Frauenburg when he developed leprosy and, fearful of contagion, forced him to quit the region before Bishop Fabian’s formal investiture. They could not strip him of his canonry, which carried a lifetime tenure, but death would do that soon enough. Not even Doctor Nicolaus could cure the biblical curse of this painful and disfiguring disease. Already, eager contenders vied to become Andreas’s “coadjutor”—the person legally empowered to discharge his duties so long as he lived, and assume all his entitlements later, after his death. To a man, every canon could name some deserving relative qualified to fill this post. Naturally King Sigismund also had nominees in mind.

  As Andreas left for Italy, in search of whatever solace he might find, Copernicus accepted a new line of duty as overseer of the chapter’s mill, bakery, and brewery. These establishments provided bread and beer to the canons—and also served the peasants, for the price of dues, which Copernicus would need to collect from them.

  On March 31, 1513, according to the Varmia ledger of accounts, “Doctor Nicolaus has paid into the treasury of the Chapter for 800 bricks and a barrel of chlorinated lime from the Cathedral work-yard.” With these materials he built a level platform in a garden near his curia. By now he had traded the first residence he had been given for this new one, which must have been better situated for his purposes. The large paved patio, or “pavimentum,” as he called his construction, provided an unobstructed view of the sky and a solid footing for his astronomical instruments. He owned three with which he took the heavens’ measure: a triquetrum, a quadrant, and an armillary sphere. None of these devices contained lenses or sharpened his vision in any way. Rather, they functioned as surveyor’s tools, to help him map the stars and trace the paths of the Moon and planets.

  In the spring of 1514, taking advantage of a redistribution of the chapter’s property, Copernicus purchased living quarters inside the cathedral complex. While holding fast to his estate and pavimentum on the outside, he paid 175 marks for a spacious, three-story tower at the northwest corner of the fortification wall, complete with kitchen and servant’s room. The top floor let in light through nine windows and gave out on a gallery, but he still preferred to observe from his patio platform. He stole hours from his sleep to stand watch out there, perched above 54° north latitude, on a forested hillside where the air hung heavy with mists off the Vistula Bay.

  “The ancients had the advantage of a clearer sky,” he wrote in his own defense. “The Nile, so they say, does not exhale such misty vapors as those we get from the Vistula.” At the site of Ptolemy’s fabled observatory on the Nile, with its near-tropical climate, the planets climbed almost straight up from the horizon, instead of loitering along the tree line, and rode high in the sky, easily sighted through countless cloudles
s nights.

  Everything Copernicus knew about Ptolemy when he prepared the Commentariolus, he learned from an abridged interpretation of Ptolemy’s work, called the Epitome of Ptolemy’s Almagest, published in Venice in 1496. Now, as he launched his own serious research project to revise astronomy, the full text of Ptolemy’s Almagest became available for the first time in a printed Latin translation. Copernicus consumed his copy, covering its margins with notes and diagrams.1

  Copernicus found in the Almagest a model for the book he wanted to write, in which he would rebuild astronomy in a framework as impressive and enduring as Ptolemy’s. Meanwhile the Commentariolus, his prequel to On the Revolutions, was already making his name as an astronomer. This growing recognition no doubt accounted for the invitation Copernicus received from Rome to consult on calendar reform. The Julian calendar then in use, established by Julius Caesar in 45 B.C., had overestimated the length of the year by several minutes. Over time, the small founding error amounted to a gain of almost a day per century. Easter was on its way to becoming a summer holiday, and the Church’s other movable feasts were falling similarly out of step with the seasons. Therefore Pope Leo X, as part of his agenda for the Fifth Lateran Council, called on theologians and astronomers of all nations to help correct the flaw. Copernicus duly submitted his comments to Paul of Middleburg, the Bishop of Fossombrone, who coordinated the calendar effort for the duration of the council, from 1512 to 1517. The bishop listed the contribution from the Polish canon in his official report. Unfortunately he did not describe even the gist of Copernicus’s suggestion, and later, even more unfortunately, Copernicus’s original letter was lost.

  Chapter 3

  Leases of Abandoned Farmsteads

  Stenzel the herdsman took possession of 3 parcels, from which Hans Calau ran away. Stenzel got one ox, 1 cow, 1 piglet, 2 sacks of rye seed, nothing else. And I promised to add 1 horse.

  —FROM AN ENTRY BY COPERNICUS IN THE VARMIA LEDGER, APRIL 23, 1517

  A long with his name and his faith, Copernicus inherited his country’s long-standing conflict with the Knights of the Teutonic Order. His father had fought them hand to hand in Danzig and Torun, while his maternal grandfather, a Torun alderman, floated loans to finance the city’s sporadic warfare with the order. As a boy, Copernicus loitered among the ruins of the knights’ citadel in the city of his birth.

  The knights first arrived in Torun early in the thirteenth century, fresh from bloodying Jerusalem during the Crusades. Several Polish dukes and princes invited them in, to control unruly elements throughout the province known as Old Prussia. With free rein and a heavy hand, the knights subdued the Balto-Slavic tribes that troubled the landed gentry, and converted the pagans to Christianity. They crusaded for five decades through territory they came to regard as their own—despite the prior claims of their noble hosts.

  The knights’ brutish ways chafed against the interests of the rising merchant class and town burghers. Around the year 1280, when Torun joined the German commercial cooperative called the Hanseatic League, the knights established grand new headquarters to the north, at Marienburg on the Nogat River. This sprawling castle and other Teutonic forts along the waterways—together with the port of Danzig, which they seized in 1308—made the knights the gatekeepers of the Baltic Sea. For the next hundred years they tempered their marauding with domination of the amber trade. The “Great War” they declared on Poland in 1409 went badly for them, however, because the scattered princes united against them under a strong new king. After this defeat, the knights’ strength gradually diminished.

  In 1454, around the time the elder Niklas Koppernigk moved to Torun, the residents of the city rose up against the order. The first clash of this “Thirteen Years’ War” destroyed the knights’ founding fortress. The final coup, delivered with the 1466 Treaty of Torun, deprived them of the western half of their realm in Old Prussia. Torun henceforth belonged to “Royal Prussia,” officially annexed to the Kingdom of Poland. King Kazimierz IV occupied the knights’ Marienburg castle for a time, but soon removed to the traditional royal seat at Wawel Castle in his native Krakow.

  The knights retreated to the east, where they continued to rage against their Polish neighbors. Varmia particularly galled them. Even its geography provoked insult—the way this little bubble of Royal Prussia intruded into eastern Prussia by a narrow neck, then swelled within those borders. Bishop Watzenrode had warded off the order’s aggression throughout the twenty years of his heyday. But Bishop Luzjanski lacked Watzenrode’s power to command, and proved a poor match for young Albrecht von Hohenzollern, thirty-seventh Grand Master of the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

  Albrecht was only twenty years old when the knights chose him as their leader in 1511. He had been bred for a Church career and already held a canonry at the Cathedral of Cologne. In addition to his Catholic devotion, his parentage appealed mightily to the order’s liking: Albrecht’s father—the German prince Friedrich I, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach—ruled a choice piece of the Holy Roman Empire; his mother, Princess Sofia of Poland, was King Sigismund’s sister. Albrecht embodied the knights’ every best hope of regaining their former luster, their former territory, and sovereignty over Prussia. True to that vision, Albrecht grew into his role with a vengeance, courting allies in Germany and Moscow as he braced for more war with Poland.

  In mid-July of 1516, in Elbing, a town near Frauenburg, the Teutonic Knights robbed a citizen and maimed his hands. The Varmia Chapter sent a posse to give chase across the border into the knights’ part of Prussia, where their guards caught one of the culprits and took him into custody. But Grand Master Albrecht demanded his subject’s return. Then he retaliated with further attacks across Varmia. On July 22, Tiedemann Giese, who had succeeded Copernicus as chancellor, wrote up the canons’ concerns in a desperate appeal to King Sigismund, beseeching him for the protection he had promised.

  The uneasy standoff with the knights still prevailed the following November, when the Varmia Chapter elected Canon Copernicus to administer its vast landholdings in the south. This post, which rotated among the sixteen canons, separated the current officer from the rest of the chapter by many miles and saddled him with new responsibilities.

  Albrecht of Prussia, Grand Master of the Knights of the Teutonic Order.

  Time and custom had divided the diocese of Varmia and its ninety thousand inhabitants into nine districts. The bishop personally owned six of these, including Heilsberg, where his palace stood. The other three belonged communally to the chapter: Frauenburg on the northern coast, the official seat and site of the cathedral; Melsack, its contiguous neighbor; and Allenstein at the southern extreme. Between them, Melsack and Allenstein contained 150,000 acres of fertile fields and pastures that fed the Varmia canons and generated their comfortable annual incomes. Keeping the land productive meant keeping it tenanted by peasants who shouldered all the hard labor of farm work—a personnel problem that would preoccupy Copernicus throughout his three-year term of office as administrator.

  Immediately upon his election, he left his curia in Frauenburg for the chapter’s southern headquarters. He had lived in one lost fortress of the Teutonic Knights when he served his uncle at Heilsberg, and now he moved into another: Allenstein Castle on the meanders of the Lyna River. He assumed his new post on St. Martin’s Day, November 11, 1516, which, according to the Church calendar, marked the first day of the new ecclesiastical year 1517.

  The picture of Copernicus that normally comes to mind—the solitary figure, cloistered with his books in a monkish study carrel, or ascending some parapet to implore the night sky—all but falls apart at Allenstein. His time there plunged him among the people as a sympathetic party to all their mundane concerns.

  The peasants under his charge lived in huts, in poverty, and in dread of the knights who raided their villages. They paid the chapter a fee of one Prussian mark per year, per parcel of land, for the privilege of plowing, sowing, and harvesting—though the Church also claimed
the bulk of their harvest as revenue. In a sense a peasant owned his land, because he could trade it to someone else, or pass it down to his children. But in fact the chapter lorded over everything, and kept track of all exchanges of parcels by recording their locations in official ledgers. On a clean page in one of these books, the new administrator wrote, “Leasing of Farmsteads by me, Nicholas Coppernic, A.D. 1517.”

  Duty called him first to Jonikendorf, where he approved Merten Caseler’s takeover of three parcels of vacant land. The former tenant, Joachim, had been hanged for thievery. On account of his crimes, or his punishment, Joachim had failed to sow his fields, and so Copernicus waived Merten Caseler’s rent for the whole year. He also noted the several assets that accompanied the three parcels: “He got 1 cow, 1 heifer, an ax and a sickle and, as for grains, a sack of oats and barley for the sowing omitted by his predecessor.” Copernicus datelined his description of this business “weekday 4”—meaning Wednesday—“10 December 1516.” After that he wrote, “In addition, I promised him 2 horses.”