Prague Pictures

by John Banville

  From an early age Tycho had been fascinated by astronomy, and as a student at Leipzig he 'bought astronomical books secretly, and read them in secret'; obviously the science of the stars was not an interest that the tankard-banging Brahes would have approved, although his Aunt Inger was probably quietly encouraging. At the age of seventeen Tycho was already testing the accuracy, or otherwise, usually otherwise, of the various star charts drawn up by Ptolemy of Alexandria, who at the time was still one of the most revered astronomical authorities, or the more recent Prussian Tables devised according to the Copernican system. Tycho's measuring equipment consisted of nothing more than a little globe of the heavens, 'no bigger than a fist', and a taut length of string, which he would hold up against the night sky and align with a planet and two stars, then check the position of the planet according to the positions of the stars on the celestial globe.

  Tycho's passion for accuracy was the mark of his greatness as a scientist. He was not a theorist of the first rank, such as Copernicus, for example, or Kepler, or Isaac Newton, nor was he Galileo's equal as a technologist of genius. But he did recognise the paramount necessity of making and recording accurate observations. In Leipzig he had bought an astronomical radius, which, although little more than a calibrated wooden cross-staff, was a far more sophisticated version of the taut-string device. However, the radius allowed for measurements accurate only to one degree of arc, while Tycho was after minute-of-arc accuracy - and a minute of arc is one-sixtieth of a degree.20 In Augsburg, to where his European wanderings brought him in the spring of 1596, he was chatting to a friend in the street one day, telling him of his urgent need for a bigger and better instrument, and by a lucky chance was overheard by a local businessman and amateur astronomer. This philanthropist - Paul Hainzel: every good man deserves to be named - put up the money for the building of a mighty oak-and-brass quadrans maximus, or great quadrant, five and a half metres in radius and so massive it took forty men to set it in place. Even if the instrument proved less successful than Tycho had hoped - the effort involved in wielding the monster meant that for practical reasons it could not be used more than once a night - its renown brought Tycho to the attention of the scientific world, and made his reputation as an astronomer.

  The data that Tycho accumulated over some thirty-five years of stargazing - without, we must never forget, the benefit of a telescope, which had not yet been invented - were the basis upon which Johannes Kepler would institute a cosmological revolution. Newton a century later would say that he had been able to see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants,21 and it was upon Brahe's broad yoke that the diminutive Kepler perched to peer into the shining depths of space. It was the purity and dependability of Brahe's data which made Kepler lick his chops and brought him trotting up to Prague in the notable year 1600 in hopes of being thrown a bone or two from the great Dane's star tables. Kepler himself was a less than perfect technician. For one thing, he suffered from double vision, a grave handicap, surely, for an astronomer. Also, he was no more interested in the actual disposition of the heavens than was Copernicus, who in his long lifetime took only half a dozen star readings. It was not the appearance of things that preoccupied Kepler and Copernicus, but the higher reality lying behind appearance.22

  Not so Tycho Brahe. Before he was out of his teens he had, as he said himself, 'got accustomed to distinguishing all the constellations of the sky.' The truth of this modestly expressed claim is attested by his discovery on the evening of November 11th, 1572, of a 'new star'. At the time he was living at Herrevad Abbey, a converted Cistercian monastery not far from his family home at Knudstrup, in what is now southern Sweden. Walking back from his alchemical laboratory to supper at the abbey, he was stopped on the spot by the sight, directly above his head - those old astronomers must have had a permanent crick in their necks - of a light in the sky, near the constellation of Cassiopeia, which had not been there before. Modern astronomers have concluded that the 'new star' was probably a supernova, a huge explosion deep in space caused by the collapse of a 'white dwarf under the force of its own gravity. Curiously, the records Tycho made of his sightings of the star over a period of weeks are the only observations of his to have been lost. Perhaps an explanation of this carelessness is the fact that it was at this time that he met the woman who was destined to share his life, as the old books used to put it. Kirsten Jorgensdatter was 'a woman of the people from Knudstrup village', that is, a commoner. As such, she was not a person a Brahe could marry. Nevertheless, she was the one for Tycho, and he stayed loyal to her until his death, fathering on her a brood of more or less troublesome children. Although such liaisons were not uncommon, one wonders what the noble Brahes thought of young Tycho's slegfred, or common law, wife. According to Brahe's first biographer, Pierre Gassendi, 'all of Tycho's relatives were very disturbed by the diminished esteem the family suffered because of Kirsten's low birth, so that there were hard feelings toward Tycho that were put to rest only when the king intervened.'

  The precise nature of that intervention is not known. However, Tycho's reputation as an astronomer continued to grow until at last, on May 23rd, 1576, spurred by a threat from Tycho that he would take himself off to Germany and ally himself to some prince there, King Frederick II put his signature to a document granting 'to our beloved Tycho Brahe . . . our land of Hven, with all our and the crown's tenants and servants who live thereon, and with all the rent and duty which comes from it . . . to have, enjoy, use, and hold free, clear, without any rent, all the days of his life.' An offer, one would think, the Dane could not refuse. He hesitated nevertheless, canvassing friends and colleagues for their advice. They, at least, knew a good thing when they saw it. One of Tycho's old pals, the physician Johannes Praten-sis, summed up the general feeling when he wrote of the King's offer: 'Apollo desires it, Urania recommends it, Mercury commands it with his staff.' For a watcher of the heavens such as Tycho, there is no disobeying the gods.

  Still, he was not going to be rushed. He spent some months investigating his new domain, even measuring the island's circumference by pacing out the entire coast, finding it to be 8,160 strides in length. He seems to have put the fear of God into the locals, too, huddling in their thatched cottages in the only village on the island, Tuna, or on Hven's few scattered farms. From the start he had a bad reputation among the people for cruelty, arrogance and greed. As Kitty Ferguson puts it in The Nobleman and His Housedog, Tycho 'would come to seem, to the villagers of Hven and 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.' For generations the islanders had been virtually self-governing, and did not welcome the advent of this new lord. Straight off he got on their wrong side by choosing for the site of his observatory a large tract of land at the centre of the island that until then had been common grazing ground. This high-handedness was hardly in the spirit of King Frederick's document of grant, which had enjoined Tycho to 'observe the law and due right towards the peasants living there, and do them no injustice against the law, nor burden them with any new dues or uncustomary innovations.'

  If ever there was an uncustomary innovation, surely it was Uraniborg, the palatial edifice that Tycho built to house his observatory, alchemical laboratory, residence and administrative centre. He designed it according to the ideas of Vitru-vius and Palladio, following especially the latter's strictures on the harmonic proportioning of the individual parts of the building and of the parts to the whole. The result, as can be seen from contemporary woodcuts, was a cross between Frankenstein's castle and a giant gazebo. For twenty years Tycho would work here, building vast astronomical instruments which he used to map the sky with a thoroughness and accuracy undreamed of by anyone except him, and making Uraniborg the wonder of scientific Europe. But even wonders fade. Tycho's patron, King Frederick, died, and his successor, Christian, was far less indulgent. Uraniborg, and Tycho's increasingly grandiose projects there
, were a drain upon the royal coffers. Pressure was brought to bear on Tycho; there were lawsuits, investigations were ordered by the Crown, he was accused of mistreating the peasants; on top of all this, the issue of his twenty-five-year morganatic marriage was raised again, and there was even a question as to the legitimacy of his children. Heartbreaking though it must have been for him, it was time to move on. In June of 1597, Tycho and his two-dozen-strong household took ship for Germany.

  There followed eighteen months of uncertainty and worry for Tycho and his numerous dependants. During that time Tycho expended much energy in trying to get back into King Christian's favour, but without success. In the end, despairing of his homeland, Tycho turned his attention to Prague, that imperial city at the geographical and political centre of Europe. He knew of the Emperor Rudolfs interest in science and the occult arts, and had been in contact with a number of Rudolf's courtiers and advisers. At last, in the summer of 1599, the imperial sum mons came, and Tycho and his retinue set off southwards, the Brahe family riding in a splendid new coach purchased in Hamburg. All seemed set fair, and Tycho was filled with hope and a new sense of purpose. However, there was an ominous occurrence when, during an overnight halt at a castle along the way, Tycho's pet elk found its way to an upper floor, drank a dish of beer, and in the resulting inebriated state fell downstairs and broke its neck. Tycho was inconsolable at the loss of his beloved animal, perhaps seeing in its demise, as Rudolf saw in the death of his African lion, a dark portent of the future. Like most people of the time, even the educated ones, Tycho had his superstitions - he was, according to Gassendi, mortally afraid of rabbits and, inconveniently, old ladies - and no doubt the elk's death gave him a premonitory shiver.

  Yet his reception in Prague was all he could have hoped for. When he arrived at the beginning of July he probably lodged at The Golden Griffin inn 23 on Novy ('New World' Street) beside the castle grounds on the and within easy distance of the Emperor's palace. However, the aristocratic Tycho would not stop long at a mere inn - besides, the tolling of bells from the nearby Capuchin monastery gave him a constant headache - and he made it plain that his prime requirement was an establishment of his own that would be spacious enough to accommodate his collection of mighty instruments, still on its way from Hven. On his first day in the city he was greeted, in one of the palace gardens, by Rudolf's private secretary, Barwitz, who welcomed him warmly and spoke of the Emperor's high regard for him. A few days afterwards he had his first audience with Rudolf himself. Tycho described the triumphal occasion to his disreputable cousin Frederick Rosen-krantz24 in a letter which itself fairly swells with pride. In what indeed must have been an indication of special favour, Rudolf received him in private, 'sitting in the room on a bench with his back against a table, completely alone . . . without even an attending page.' That the Emperor was alone might have been boasted of as an indication of special favour, but Tycho the Meticulous found it necessary to point out that the absence from the royal chamber of the usual clutter of courtiers, petitioners and sentries might have been due to the fact that there was plague in the city, that some of the castle staff were thought to have been infected, and that Rudolf, as we already know, was a full-blown hypochondriac. Tycho made a speech in Latin, presented letters of introduction from the Bishop of Cologne and the Duke of Mecklenburg, which Rudolf graciously did not bother to read, 'and immediately responded to me graciously with a more detailed speech than the one I had delivered to him, saying, among other things, how agreeable my arrival was for him and that he promised to support me and my research, all the while smiling in the most kindly way so that his whole face beamed with benevolence.' The old boy must have been in a good mood that day. The moment comes to less than thunderous life in the letter's next sentence: 'I could not take in everything he said because he naturally speaks very softly.' One pictures them there, in sweltering midsummer, in that murmurous room, the seated Emperor, moist-eyed, pendulous of jaw, and the big, eager, blond Dane with his ruff and his moustache and his metal nose glinting.

  When the audience was at an end and Tycho had stepped out of the room, secretary Barwitz was summoned inside for a word with the Emperor. He returned to tell Tycho that His Majesty, who obviously did not miss a thing, had looked down from his window and had seen him arriving at the castle, and, ever the beady-eyed collector, had wondered what was the mechanical device attached to his carriage. It seems this was a milometer, of Tycho's own making. Tycho had his son fetch the thing, and Barwitz brought it into the Emperor's chamber, returning after a little while to say that His Majesty had one or two such devices already - well, he would have, of course - but not so large or made in the same way. Tycho hastened to offer his as a gift, but Rudolf said he would content himself by having one of his craftsmen construct a similar one based on Tycho's design. Barwitz also assured Tycho again of the Emperor's high regard for him, and his determination to confer him with an annual grant and to provide suitable quarters for him and his family. Tycho was delighted; here at last was a royal who knew how to treat a man of genius.

  Despite his capriciousness and extreme proneness to suspicion, Rudolf was indeed a remarkably steadfast patron. He stuck doggedly by his magicians and necromancers - what is the collective noun: an alembic of alchemists, an abyss of alchemists? - despite their inevitable failure to locate the philosopher's stone or distil the elixir of life. Repeated disappointments and even betrayals could not destroy his faith in the power and efficacy of magic. When the great Doctor John Dee, 'who understood the language of the birds and could speak the idiom of Adam the protoplast', as Ripellino tells us, arrived in Prague in 1584 he brought with him the infamous Edward Kelley, who among other unlikelihoods boasted of being able to conjure spirits in Dee's magic mirror, a sphere of smoky quartz the Doctor claimed had been given him by the angel Uriel. Kelley was an Irishman, or at least was of Irish descent, officially but somewhat confusedly described in the (national records of the Czech legislative assembly, the ), as 'Eduard Kelley, born an Englishman, of the knightly kin and house called Imaymi in the county of Conaghaku in the kingdom of Ireland' Kelley was known to Praguers as a Jahrmarkts-doktor, or mountebank, and, even less flatteringly, a cacochymicus, which does not require translation. His real name was Talbot, and he was born not in the 'country of Conaghaku' (Con-naught?) but in Worcester. In 1580 he was arrested for forgery and as punishment had his ears cut off by the Lancaster executioner. Earlessness, added to his hooked nose and pinkish eyes, gave him a decidedly, and no doubt useful, aspect of the diabolical. In his wanderings about England he had discovered in a Welsh pub, so he swore, a magical document which had come from the grave of a magician, along with two phials, containing respectively a red and a white powder. The document was written in an indecipherable language, but Kelley was convinced it contained the formula for the philosopher's stone. He brought parchment and phials to Dee's laboratory at Mortlake in London, and was appointed the great man's assistant. Doctor Dee, it seems, was as gullible as his future royal patron. But then, Dee himself had claimed to have found some of the elixir of life in the ruins of Glastonbury.25

  On a visit to England in 1583, the Palatine of Sieradz, Olbracht a great Catholic landowner,visited Dee at Mortlake, where a spirit appeared in Dee's crystal ball and predicted that would inherit the Polish throne. The thrilled and grateful promptly invited Dee and his assistant to come to Poland, and it was from Cracow, perhaps hurrying away from another disappointed patron - never did get to wear crown of Poland - that the pair arrived in Prague only a year after Rudolf had transferred his court there from Vienna in 1583. Dee, whose fame as Elizabeth of England's chief sorcerer had gone before him, was welcomed by Rudolf - Dee had visited Rudolf's father, Maximilian, twenty years before, and dedicated one of his most important works, the Monas Hieroglyphia, to him - and proceeded at once to bamboozle the Emperor by pretending to transmogrify mercury into gold, and conjuring, with Kelley's help, a host of spirits in his crystal mirror. This seems to have been the onl
y time Dee was able to speak directly to the Emperor. The Catholic party in Prague was highly suspicious of this English magician, a favourite of the anathematised Queen Elizabeth, after all, and a Protestant, or so they thought - in fact, Dee held to a chiliastic form of universal Christianity unfettered by dogma. By 1586, two years after his arrival in Prague, Dee was being accused by the Papal Nuncio of having dealings with the Devil, and Rudolf had no choice but to banish him, ordering him to be gone within a day; Dee remained in the area, however, under the protection of the rich nobleman Vilem of on his estate at returning to England in 1594. Unadvisedly, Rudolf set Kelley in Dee's place.

  Kelley did very well for himself in the Emperor's service, earning enough gold to buy a brewery and a mill and a number of houses in the city - one of them, according to legend, the house in the sinister Cattle Market, now Charles Square, in which Dr Faust lived; the Dum, or Faust House, still stands at Karlovo 40.26 Fortuna, however, is a fickle mistress, and after his time at the top Kelley's subsequent turns of the wheel were all downward. In 1591 he killed one of Rudolf's courtiers in a duel, and although he lost no time in going on the run, the Emperor's police caught up with him, and after another sword fight he was imprisoned at Castle. He remained there for two and a half years, then one night, having bribed the jailer, he lowered himself from the window of his cell on a rope. However, the rope broke and he fell into the moat, where he was found next morning, unconscious and with a broken leg. Rudolf relented and allowed him to return to Prague, where his leg, by now infected, had to be amputated and replaced with a wooden one. So now the earless sorcerer was also a pegleg. By now he had run out of properly and money, his Bohemian wife had to pawn her jewellery, and eventually Rudolf had the bankrupt thrown into prison again, this time at Most Castle, eighty kilometres upriver from Prague, from where even the diplomatic intervention of Sir William Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's Secretary of State, could not rescue him. Never daunted, Kelley attempted the rope trick again, but again the rope broke and he fell once more into the moat, smashing his remaining leg. Hauled back to his cell, he took his own life by drinking a phial of poison smuggled to him by his wife, who perhaps was, understandably, impatient for her viduity. Kelley died on November 1st, 1597.27