Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (19 page)

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.
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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.
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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
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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-krantz
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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.