This was the peasants’ role within the system, new to Hven but customary elsewhere. It was, in the theory of the time, not far different from Tycho’s obligation on a higher rung of the ladder to serve the king. But the islanders were incapable of recognizing any parallel between their duty to sweat and toil for nothing and Tycho’s duty, in rich robes and plush surroundings, to peer at the sky and boil up wizardly mixtures. As for Tycho, he surely no more thought of himself as placing unreasonable demands on his tenants than he thought of himself as placing unreasonable demands on his garden to produce plants.
Tycho spent much of the early summer of 1576 contemplating the site he had chosen for his palace, pacing it off, studying architectural theory, poring over designs, drawing circles and squares in harmonious proportion, setting stakes in the ground, pulling them out again, and repeatedly consulting experts and friends. During his recent sojourn in Venice and its environs he had had opportunity to become well acquainted with the architecture of Andrea Palladio. Soon after their publication in 1570, Palladio’s I Quattri Libri Dell’ Architettura (Four Books of Architecture) had become a sensation throughout mainland Europe and England. They set the standard for years to come for the architecture of palaces and great houses. In addition to being a guide to classical architectural theory, the books could almost be used as a do-it-yourself manual, with clearly written text keyed to examples, detailed drawings, and ground plans. Palladio had combined a passion for the classical past with a gift for reinventing it. Tycho, in turn, reinvented Palladio.
At first glance, there was little resemblance between the palace Tycho designed and Palladio’s simple, airy Italian masterpieces. It was the ideal of symmetry in Palladio, and the extension of this symmetry into the landscape, that most captured Tycho’s imagination. In Tycho’s house, in the projections and the towers that adorned it, and in his flower beds and orchards, he followed Palladio’s example of using only pure geometric shapes.
In Palladian architecture, the symmetry of a house went beyond balancing architectural elements such as rooms, towers, windows, and avenues. More subtle proportions reflected a musical symmetry that had been an ideal since the Pythagoreans in the sixth century B.C. studied the sounds made by vibrating strings and discovered that there are harmonic ratios in nature. Johannes Kepler would later study those same relationships when trying to discover the design of the universe.
Tycho’s house planfn2 7 had portal towers on the east and west sides of the house, each fifteen Danish feet wide and fifteen feet long.fn3 The height of the facade was thirty feet (twice the width of the portal towers), the peak of the roof forty-five feet, the side of the central square sixty feet. Fifteen, thirty, forty-five, and sixty form a ratio of 1:2:3:4. The progression 1:2:3:4 contains all the ratios of harp string lengths that since ancient times had been known to produce sounds pleasing to the human ear. Similar ratios of musical harmony were to underlie the proportions of Tycho’s rooms and other relationships among elements of the building. Without knowing the designer’s intentions, it would be all but impossible for someone viewing the house to recognize all these mathematical/musical subtleties, but Tycho was convinced that they would inevitably make his home and landscape a harmonious whole, pleasing to the eye, conducive to peaceful, intelligent pursuits, and inspiring to any sensitive person.
An imaginative painting of Uraniborg, done by Henrik Hanson in 1862, is based on a sixteenth-century woodcut. It makes the house appear somewhat darker and more oppressive than it probably actually was. One of the observatory roof sections is shown open on the right.
Tycho designed his castle-observatory to be a miniature gem of a palace, not nearly so massive as most noble dwellings. The entire building was no larger than even one of the four wings of Knutstorps Borg, and there were many larger castles being constructed by Tycho’s contemporaries. Nevertheless, it was a major building project, and in late spring the grumbling heads of peasant households began sorting out which younger brother, younger son, or not-so-able hired hand could be spared with least inconvenience to fulfill the labor obligation. Poorer cottagers had no choice; they went themselves. They shouldered spades and trundled wheelbarrows and wagons to the center of Hven at sunrise, worked on the excavation, and kept at it until the sun set. The group changed constantly as men rotated in and out, fulfilling each household’s obligation of two man-days of labor in a week.
There were no trained masons, carpenters, stone carvers, or tile workers, and certainly no hydraulics engineers among the local peasantry, so Tycho sought out and hired more skilled labor. For the most part he didn’t have to look even as far as Copenhagen. King Frederick, on his own building site across the sound, was employing not only Danish craftsmen but Dutch and Flemish artisans as well. Tycho managed to convince the king or his architect that George Laubenwolf of Nuremberg was the only man alive with adequate skills to build the fountain that the king wanted for the central courtyard of his castle. While Laubenwolf was close by, just across the sound, Tycho also engaged him to design a water system for the palace on Hven. In an astounding innovation, water would not only supply a magnificent fountain in the lower central hall but would travel through “pipes reaching8 in all directions, to the various rooms, both in the upper and lower story.”
Meanwhile, while Tycho was overseeing the work on his house almost on a daily basis, he still attended to the rest of his extensive new holdings. That first summer, he was constantly on the move between Skåne, Sjaelland, and Hven, taking boats across the sound and riding back and forth with a retinue across country, on horseback or by carriage, enjoying his new role.
As the plans for his palace took shape, Tycho’s friends were almost as excited as he. Dançey said he would supply the cornerstone. Pratensis began to organize a ceremony for putting it in place9 and to draft an appropriate inscription. Dancey ended up writing the inscription himself, for tragically, in June, Pratensis collapsed and died while giving a lecture at the university. Tycho grieved for this friend who had encouraged him so enthusiastically when he had faced life with far less certainty than he did now, and who had shared many of his happiest moments.
Tycho studied planetary positions to find what date would be most propitious for laying the cornerstone, and when the ceremony had to be delayed, he studied them again. He chose August 8. High government officials, professors from the university, and Tycho’s noble relatives arrived the day before. Tycho had commandeered hospitality for his guests in the homes of the beleaguered villagers of Tuna so that everyone could gather at the building site at sunrise. Late summer was perennially the most beautiful time of year on Hven, when at dawn mists hovered over the fields and the trees made long shadows that touched the horizon. In any direction Tycho and his guests looked, they could see the bountiful crops and grasslands of Tycho’s domain, with the sea glowing beyond. It was not such a wild landscape as might be expected in the middle of a northern estuary like the Øresund, at least not at daybreak on a halcyon day in August. It was a place of soft, shimmering, tranquil beauty and of great expanse. The inscription on the stone that Dançey cemented into place and “consecrated with wines10 of various kinds” dedicated Tycho’s future palace to the contemplation of philosophy, especially astronomy, and named it Uraniborg, the castle of Urania, muse of astronomy.
Only the absence of Pratensis darkened that golden day, but the tragedies of that summer and autumn did not end with his death. In September, Tycho’s and Kirsten’s older daughter, Kirsten, nearly three, died in an epidemic in Skåne. They buried her in the church at Helsingborg, and Tycho moved his wife, who was pregnant again, and the baby Magdalene to a more remote region farther north on the eastern shore of the Øresund.
In the late autumn, when building work slowed with colder weather, Tycho himself continued to live on Hven, but not in the new palace, which wasn’t far enough along to be occupied. On December 14, his thirtieth birthday, he wrote in his journal that he was making his first observation of the Sun from the island. He
also recorded observations on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of December, so he spent Christmas there. Kirsten and Magdalene must not have been with him, for Kirsten was in Väsby, higher up the coast, on January 2, when their first son was born. Tycho never saw the baby boy, who lived only six days. The gravestone at Väsby called him the “natural son” of Tycho Brahe, as young Kirsten’s bronze plaque, still in existence at Helsingborg, calls her his “natural daughter.”
During that winter of 1577, Tycho began for the first time to make systematic observations from Hven. Ten to fifteen times a month, he would go out either at noon for an observation of the Sun or in the evening for positions of a planet. His astronomy was interrupted in late May by the christening of the long-awaited heir to the throne. Tycho retrieved his court attire from Knutstorp and with a full complement of servants—but without Kirsten—went to join in the more than two weeks of festivities. His mother, his uncle Steen, and his brother Steen were godparents, but the king and queen gave Tycho an enormous honor and responsibility as well. They asked him to cast the horoscope of the infant Prince Christian, to discover what the stars promised for him and the kingdom.
It was not an assignment to be taken lightly. If it was accurate, the horoscope would be an extremely valuable document, making it possible for the prince to anticipate personal and political crises. Tycho began by using both the Prutenic and Alfonsine Tables to calculate the positions of the planets at the moment of the prince’s birth. Then he employed the observations he had made during the past winter to correct the positions for the Sun, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter, only relying directly on the older tables for Mercury, Saturn, and the Moon. With these and further calculations, Tycho already had twenty-seven pages. The royal family was to have a state-of-the-art horoscope.
Tycho predicted, with plenty of supporting astrological reasoning, that Christian would be “well-formed, righteous, charitable, nimble and capable of hunting and warfare, and equally nimble of mind for a broad spectrum of cultural and intellectual interests.” The less welcome news was that the young man would be a little “over fond of11 sensual pleasure, subject to danger when it came to religious matters, would have to overcome adversity to win honor and riches,” and would have few children. This second part of the horoscope added another forty-four pages.
Tycho pointed out that even if an astrologer produced a superbly accurate horoscope, as he was certain he had done, an error of as little as four minutes in the royal clock establishing the time of birth would render the document useless. He also repeated what he and Hemmingsen had agreed on at the time of the lecture in 1574, that it was possible for either divine intervention or human free will to avert the fate predicted by the stars. (Presumably that was how Christian later managed to have eighteen illegitimate children.)
Tycho had finished the horoscope by the end of June and translated it into High German, the language with which Queen Sophie was still most comfortable. He dated it July 1, 1577, and soon thereafter presented it to the king at Kronborg Castle at Elsinore.
The second year of construction on Hven was well under way, with the villagers of Tuna again laboring every day but Sunday. With the foundations completed and more skilled workers taking over as the walls rose, Tycho set the peasant laborers to digging no fewer than sixty fishponds, filling them with water, trundling the excavated earth and rock over to build the perimeter wall for his garden, leveling the area within the wall, and planting the first trees and shrubs. Tycho’s tenants were particularly displeased with the job of carting and planting all the trees, which struck them as a frivolous and tedious bit of make-work. Others of the men were sent to Kullagaard on the mainland to cut wood and boat it back to Hven to fuel fires for brick making, for Tycho had noticed the potential of the great forests in Kullen when he had taken Kirsten and Magdalene north to escape the plague.
With all this work going on and the islanders increasingly disgruntled as no end seemed in sight, the bailiff, overseer, and “summoner” on Hven, who knew the villagers well, began to notice that faces were missing. Younger men with no wives or children to tie them to Hven were finding ways to escape the island. The desertion of some of his most able workers troubled Tycho, and he was not about to allow it to continue, but at this stage of his life he was finding it possible to take such management problems and exasperation in his stride and still not neglect his astronomy. He had a new and much-improved quadrant, and with it, among other observations, he recorded lunar eclipses in April and again in September.
Later in that autumn of 1577, the skies provided a far more unusual and mysterious spectacle, one of the most thrilling events of Tycho’s career as an astronomer. In the early evening of Wednesday, November 13, Tycho was out in the gathering dusk catching fish for dinner in one of his new ponds. Looking toward the west across the fields of his island, he saw an exceptionally bright star12. The only planet in the evening sky at the time was Saturn, and Saturn was never so bright. Fish and dinner were forgotten, and Tycho watched, transfixed. As the sky continued to darken, the star grew a long, fiery tail. A comet! Ever since the nova five years earlier, Tycho had been longing to see a comet.
fn1 This grant was to be only the beginning of Frederick’s largesse to Tycho. He would later add the fief of Kullen, eleven farms in Skåne (where the Hven peasants grazed their swine), and the entire district of Nordfjord in Norway.
fn2 “In his book The Lord of Uraniborg, Victor Thoren has provided these specifics about the way Tycho carried out this ideal of symmetry in the design for Uraniborg.
fn3 The Danish foot that Tycho used was 259 millimeters, a little more than 10 inches.
6
WORLDS APART
1571–1584
THE COMET REFLECTED in Uraniborg’s ponds in the autumn and early winter of 1577 hung in the skies of all Europe and far beyond. Thousands of awestruck men, women, and children went out at night to peer at it with curiosity and superstitious fear, wary of what this apparition would do and what it meant. One clear evening in southern Germany, a small boy named Johannes Kepler clasped his mother’s hand and followed her up the hill above the little town of Leonberg, where she pointed out the bright star with a tail.1 He did not see it clearly, for his eyesight was poor, and he was too sleepy for the comet to make much of an impression. More unusual and remarkable, for him, were the warmth and companionship of the moment with his mother—an exceptional instance of grace in a harsh, dreary childhood.
Johannes Kepler was five years old when he saw the comet. He had been born on December 27, 1571, in his grandfather’s house in Weil der Stadt, a small city on the edge of the Black Forest near Stuttgart. The time of his birth was two-thirty in the afternoon, a detail that was carefully written down even in this disorganized household, for in this era astrology was still a respected discipline. Tycho Brahe had celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday earlier the same December.
The Keplers had once been a noble family.2 At Whitsuntide in 1433, Emperor Sigismund had bestowed a knighthood on Johannes’s great-great-great-great-grandfather for valiant military service at the Tiber Bridge in Rome. By the time his descendants had emigrated to Weil from Nuremberg, about fifty years before Johannes’s birth, straitened financial circumstances had brought them down to the level of craftsmen, still cherishing tales of better days and a family coat of arms.
Later, when Johannes was in his mid-twenties, he drew up a “birth-horoscope” of his ancestors, and the notes he made for that describe his grandparents and parents and some of the events of his childhood, including seeing the comet. Kepler was usually respectful and loyal in his treatment of his relatives. However, in these fragmentary jottings that he made solely for his personal use and never intended for publication, he was devastatingly candid about his severely dysfunctional family,3 as well as about himself.
The Keplers evidently maintained a reasonably good public image. Grandfather Sebald, head of the family, had been bürgermeister of Weil der Stadt for ten years when Johannes was bor
n, and a portrait of him shows a well-dressed, distinguished, bearded man with a ruddy complexion. Johannes’s notes said that though Sebald was not eloquent, he gave wise counsel in the city and had a strong enough personality to see that his opinions were respected and his advice heeded. This proud civic figure did not, however, come across so well in the privacy of his home. Kepler described him as arrogant, stubborn, sensual, and irascible, with little affection for the grandchildren who spent their early years underfoot in his house. “His face4 betrays his licentious past,” wrote Kepler.
Johannes gave an equally unsympathetic picture of his grandmother. She was a restless woman, thin, fiery-tempered, resentful, clever, “blazing with hatred,” “violent, and a bearer of grudges,” and a liar. She was also devoutly religious.
Johannes’s father, Heinrich, was their fourth son, and he, by his own son’s report, was a vicious, immoral, brutish, uneducated man. “He destroyed everything. He was a wrongdoer, abrupt, and quarrelsome,” and he “beat his wife often.” Theirs was “a marriage fraught with strife.” Through a combination of bad behavior and bad luck, Heinrich had brought the Kepler family to an unprecedented low. Before Johannes was three, Heinrich set off adventuring and fighting as a mercenary. He returned only occasionally to his wife and children, and his short stays were not happy.
The task of raising Johannes and his brothers and sisters—there were seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood—fell mainly to their mother, Katharina. She was the daughter of another prominent civic leader, the bürgermeister of nearby Eltingen, Melchior Guldenmann, who was also an innkeeper. Kepler described his mother as small, thin, dark-complexioned, garrulous, quarrelsome, not a pleasant woman. Her acquaintances regarded her as an evil-tongued shrew.
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