Tycho and Kepler

by Kitty Ferguson

  Tycho told the king about his visit to Wilhelm IV in Kassel and glowingly described this ruler who surrounded himself with scholars and artists. For work on Frederick’s Elsinore building project, Tycho recommended the landgrave’s former hydraulics expert, a portrait painter from Augsburg, and a sculptor trained in Italy, all of whom were willing to work in Denmark. He also reported on Rudolph of Hapsburg’s coronation. He did not mention any intention of emigrating.

  King Frederick regarded the impressive young astronomer with heightened interest. An emissary from the astronomy-loving landgrave had already informed him of Wilhelm’s high regard for Tycho and recommendation that Frederick encourage him, and Frederick could read between the lines that if he did not, Wilhelm would. Perhaps there were rumors at court that Tycho had plans to move abroad. In any case, Frederick received Tycho with extraordinary graciousness and offered him not just one but a choice among four fiefs. Two were castles on Baltic islands, rather far from Copenhagen but of great strategic importance. The others were Helsingborg, which Tycho’s father had commanded, and Landskrona, both of which guarded the Øresund, the sound that led to the Baltic. At any of these castles Tycho would have power over hundreds of peasants and villagers, with servants, knights, troops, and courtiers to serve him.

  But Tycho surprised the king by accepting none of these castles and major royal fiefs. Instead, he politely insisted that he needed time to think about them. Frederick had nothing better to offer. Nor was this a matter that he could simply let drop. He had no wish to lose Tycho to a foreign ruler or university. Moreover, it was a matter of honor that he show some form of substantial recognition for this young member of one of Denmark’s most powerful families.

  However, while the king was pondering the problem, Tycho wrote to Pratensis, “I did not want to take9 possession of any of the castles our good king so graciously offered me. I am displeased with society here, customary forms and the whole rubbish. . . . Among people of my own class . . . I waste much time.”

  In the two months following the king’s offer, Tycho went ahead with preparations for his departure, but he was still somewhat ambivalent about it. To maintain an aristocratic lifestyle in Basel, he would have to purchase an estate, and the only way to afford that was to sell his portion of Knutstorp. That was a complicated undertaking, because he shared ownership with his brother Steen, his mother held a lifetime interest in the estate, and both lived there. Furthermore, refusing the king’s magnanimous offer was sure to shed a bad light on the entire extended family. On the other hand, if his decision was going to be swayed by consideration for others, he should consider Kirsten first. There were heavy social duties connected with being lord and lady of a castle. Kirsten was as ill equipped as he was unwilling to perform these duties.

  Tycho’s uncle Steen, of Herrevad, not pleased at the prospect of seeing his favorite nephew disappear over the European horizon, took matters in hand himself. Steen found a roundabout way to let the king know that Tycho was considering emigration and what the reason was: The royal fiefs the king had offered involved duties that would distract Tycho from his work. As the king later told Tycho, it was at this point in the conversation that he recalled Steen mentioning, a year earlier, that there was an island in the Øresund that had a special appeal for Tycho. Frederick’s next offer was designed to be one Tycho could not refuse.

  The king had a flair for the dramatic. Tycho described his summons in an excited letter to Pratensis:

  Hear now10 what has happened these last few days . . . and hear it alone—do not reveal it to a soul, except our friend Dançey, when you two are alone. As I lay awake in bed, early on the morning of February 11, restlessly considering to myself the journey to Germany time and again from all sides and figuring out how I should be able to disappear without arousing the attention of my kinsfolk, when lo!—it was announced quite unexpectedly that a royal page had arrived here at Knutstorp, who had hastened the whole night through in order to bring me a letter from the king without delay (it was still dark of night, towards the break of dawn, and the sun did not rise for another two hours). Therefore I bade the page, a nobleman and a kinsman, to step up to the bed. He straightaway produced a letter and said that he had been commissioned by his king to ride night and day without rest, seek me out wheresoever I might be found . . . personally deliver the letter to me, and return immediately. . . . I broke open the letter and found that the king had commanded me to come to him without delay. This I did obediently without wasting a moment so that I presented myself before the king at the [royal hunting lodge of Ibstrup, in the forest about a mile from Copenhagen] that same day before sundown. Through his chamberlain, Niels Parsberg, he let me be called to him in private.

  Frederick received Tycho with the news that his plans to leave Denmark were no longer a secret. The king said he also knew, and sympathized with, the reasons Tycho had not accepted his offers. He, too, was concerned that political and social duties should not interfere with Tycho’s research. Frederick described a recent visit to Elsinore, where he had been overseeing the progress of the new castle: As he surveyed the seascape from one of the windows, his eyes happened to fall on the little island of Hven, on the distant horizon to the southeast—a beautiful, isolated place, not held by any noble in fief, carrying with it only minimal administrative obligations. Were Frederick to pay, out of the royal coffers, all expenses for building a suitable residence there and for founding and maintaining a research establishment, there was surely nothing abroad that could possibly lure Tycho away. His work at Hven would redound to his own credit and that of his king and his country. Tycho should not answer immediately, Frederick insisted, but consider the matter and reply as to whether he would accept this new offer.

  Tycho returned to Knutstorp the next day, stunned by the proposal but still undecided. Another day passed before he wrote the letter to Pratensis asking for his and Dançey’s advice. Both responded enthusiastically on the same day that Tycho’s letter arrived. They emphasized, among other things, that the king’s generosity was a powerful vindication for Tycho over those relatives and fellow nobles who disapproved of his straying from their own career paths and who had predicted a dismal future for him.

  Frederick’s new offer implied endorsement not only of Tycho’s unorthodox career choice but also of his alliance with Kirsten. One of Tycho’s later students reported that the king’s “intervention” put to rest hard feelings toward Tycho among relatives who suffered diminished social esteem because of Kirsten’s low birth. The gift of Hven was a clear indication of Frederick’s favor and also (though the intention remained unspoken) a provision from the royal coffers of a haven for Kirsten and their young family.

  By February 18, six days after Frederick made the offer, though Tycho had not yet decided whether to accept Hven as his fiefdom, he had made up his mind to stay in Denmark. He pledged his fealty to the Danish crown in the same words Brahes, Billes, and Oxes had uttered for generations as they began their service to the kings of Denmark. His royal pension began, nearly doubling his yearly income.

  5

  THE ISLE OF HVEN

  1576–1577

  FOUR DAYS LATER Tycho rode from Knutstorp to the harbor at Landskrona, on the eastern shore of the Øresund, and set sail across the icy sound to the island of Hven.1 The crossing took two hours. Cliffs on all sides of the island made the top in many places unreachable from the rock-strewn beaches. From Tycho’s small boat these cliffs would have loomed tall as he drew near, and as he wrote in a letter to Pratensis, “Since the waves of the sea surround [Hven] on all sides, it has difficult, often quite dangerous landing places.” Nevertheless, the boat managed to land on the north shore of the island, where there was a break in the cliffs and it was possible to get to the top.

  It was a stiff climb, as well as cold, for this was late February, when the short winter days begin to lengthen at this latitude but bitterly sharp winds blow across the island. Tycho soon arrived at the only settlement, the vill
age of Tuna. The cottagers there, ignorant of the future and the havoc he would wreak in their placid lives, very likely welcomed this aristocratic stranger with a warm fire. Tycho probably went beyond the village across the level top of the island to its center. From there, the promontory where King Frederick was constructing his new castle was visible on the distant horizon across the water. Tycho must have thought on that first day that this center point of Hven would be a splendid place to erect his own palace. He spent that night on the island and observed a conjunction of the Moon and Mars in the foot of Orion—his first recorded observation from Hven, February 22, 1576.

  Tycho followed the king’s suggestion that he take his time deciding whether to accept Hven or choose another fiefdom. He spent much of the next three months there, studying the conditions, weighing advantages and disadvantages. He measured the island by striding along the perimeter at the clifftops, counting 8,160 strides. For a man who had been considering emigrating to a warmer part of Europe, the climate was not enticing, but Tycho was a Dane by birth and breeding and accustomed to enduring cold and wet for much of the year. A more serious problem was that at Hven’s latitude he would see less than he wished of those parts of the sky most interesting to an astronomer. The planet Mercury would frequently be out of sight below the southern horizon. Nevertheless, as spring damp and mists gave way to the promise of a hot, idyllic summer, Tycho was falling in love with Hven.

  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 commotion2 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 tales3 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 fields4 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 acce
pt 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 Hven5. 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 law6 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.