Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (23 page)

Back at Benatky, Tycho and Kepler quickly came to agreement on the latter's terms of employment. The Emperor would appoint Kepler as Tycho's assistant for a term of two years, during which time Kepler would continue to receive his salary as Styria's District Mathematician, along with a grant of half that amount again from the imperial purse. Arrangements were also put in place to fetch Kepler's wife and stepdaughter from Graz. In May Kepler travelled south to Styria, accompanied, at Tycho's direction, by the scapegrace Frederick Rosenkrantz, who was on his way to Vienna to join the Austrian army to fight against the Turks.
³⁵
At last all seemed set fair for Kepler's life and work; as usual, everything went wrong. On June 10th, Rudolf returned to Prague from
where he had gone nine months before to escape the plague. There was a backlog in the affairs of state, many decisions were called for, and the advice of the Imperial Mathematician - read: imperial astrologer - would be required on a daily, nay, an hourly basis. Tycho must come at once to Prague. Accommodation was arranged for him, his family and assistants at The Golden Griffin. Tycho, of course, was appalled. Work on Benatky was nearing completion, the northern shipping lanes had thawed sufficiently to allow the rest of his instruments to be sent down from Hven, and now, suddenly, he must abandon the New Uraniborg and be subject once more to the whims of an Emperor whose extreme eccentricities seemed to be tumbling over into plain madness. It was small comfort to the Dane when Rudolf expelled the Capuchins and their unbearable bells from their monastery behind The Golden Griffin; the good monks insisted Tycho was behind the expulsion, since the odour of sanctity which their prayers diffused about the
would surely be a hindrance to the dark and devilish works in which Brahe the well-known alchemist was no doubt engaged.
³⁶
Tycho indeed had complained of the inadequacies of The Golden Griffin, so loudly that the Emperor quickly agreed to resettle him and his people in a house 'near Baron Hoffman's' on present-day Tycho-nova Street.
³⁷
Rudolf further directed that Tycho might set up his astronomical instruments on the superb arcade of the very beautiful imperial summer palace, the so-called Belvedere.
³⁸
These facilities were not ideal, certainly not when compared with those at Benatky; when he had installed his instruments in the new premises - and his library of three thousand books - Tycho discovered to his dismay that a large part of the sky in the southwest was obscured by the buildings of the royal place. Still, he would have to make do.

Meanwhile, in Graz, Kepler was floundering in water that got hotter and hotter as the summer advanced. First of all the Styrian authorities had refused to grant him leave to work in Prague, then said they would not continue to pay his salary as District Mathematician, despite the Emperor's instructions - Protestant Styria gave scant heed to the wishes of Rudolf the Catholic. Kepler's hopes of working with Tycho were waning, and in desperation he sought the sponsorship of the Austrian Archduke, Ferdinand II. Ferdinand did not reply to Kepler's beseechings; worse, at the end of July he issued a decree expelling from the province all Protestants unwilling to convert to Catholicism. Kepler, whose increasingly radical scientific theories served only to strengthen his Lutheran faith, would not contemplate conversion. Faced by an inquisition panel headed by Ferdinand himself, he stuck to his faith, and along with sixty others of his stubborn co-religionists was given six weeks and three days to quit Graz. He realised at once that Prague, formerly the site of all his hopes, was now the only hope remaining to him, and that he must once more throw himself on Tycho's mercy. By mid-October, accompanied by Barbara and his stepdaughter, he was back in the city, exhausted, burning with fever, but knowing he was lucky to have this refuge; as he later wrote, 'God let me be bound with Tycho through an unalterable fate and did not let me be separated from him by the most oppressive hardships.' It is a mark of Rudolf's extraordinary religious tolerance that a man who had been banished from Styria on confessional grounds should be allowed to return to Prague by a Catholic Emperor who, in theory at least, was ruler of the Styrian province that had expelled him as a Lutheran. Kepler and his little family were taken in first by the long-suffering Baron Hoffmann - what, one wonders, was the Baroness's opinion of her husband's unfaltering hospitality? - and later moved in with Tycho and the gang.

It was a hard time all round. Rudolf was still in the throes of dementia, more secretive and paranoid than ever. Tycho was summoned regularly to the palace, sometimes twice or three times a day, to offer astrological advice and, inevitably, to fight for favour among the machinations of an increasingly chaotic court. By now he must have despaired of returning to Benatky. Indeed, in that autumn and winter of 1600 the worm of a general despair seems to have begun to gnaw at him. He was in his middle fifties, a considerable age in those times, and must have been exhausted after more than thirty years of struggling with princes and potentates for the means whereby to fulfil his dream of vindicating the Tychonic system of planetary motion. Although his hated rival Ursus was dead by now, the Ursine legacy lingered, and Kepler was hardly back in Prague before he found himself forced by Tycho to take up again the task of rebutting 'even more clearly and more fully than you have [done] previously Ursus's distorted and dishonest objections to my invention of the new hypothesis,' that is, the Tychonic system. Kepler got to work without enthusiasm on the
Apologia Tychonis contra Ursum.
He was never to finish the book, although the fragment of manuscript he did complete was published in the nineteenth century. Throughout that winter, plagued by a fever he could not shake off, Kepler laboured on the
Apologia,
with little time for his own astronomical concerns, although he did manage to do a little work on the orbits of Mercury, Mars and the moon. The following spring he was back in Graz, trying vainly to secure his wife's confiscated holdings. By the autumn he had returned to Prague. There, Tycho escorted him to the royal palace for a first and, as it would prove, momentous meeting with the Emperor.

Rudolf by now had regained his sanity, such as it was, and Tycho had a proposition to put to him. He would publish, with the help of his assistant Johannes Kepler, a great set of astronomical tables, based on decades of celestial observations and, not incidentally, founded on the Tychonic system, to be called the
Tabulae Rudolphinae.
The Emperor, delighted at the thought of being thus immortalised, readily agreed. In another perhaps uncharacteristic but admirable display of generosity, Tycho stipulated that for the venture to go ahead, Kepler would have to be granted an imperial salary. Again Rudolf nodded assent. Kepler, one surmises, found it hard to know which was the more welcome outcome of this royal meeting, the fact that he was to have a guaranteed wage, or that Tycho had talked himself into a position in which he would find it necessary at last to surrender the observational treasures he had guarded so jealously for so long.

Kepler now suddenly found himself in a favoured position in Tycho's laboratory and in the Brahe household, no longer an assistant but, whether it was acknowledged or not, the Dane's peer, and partner in science. This stellar partnership, however, was not to last for long. On October 13th, a few days after the meeting with the Emperor, Tycho went with a friend, one Councillor Minckwicz, to dine at the Schwarz-enberg Palace, the home of Peter Vok Ursinus
³⁹
Rozmberk, where he drank too much wine and rapidly found himself in urgent need of emptying his bladder. Good manners forbade a guest to rise from the table before his host had done so, and Tycho, ever a stickler for the social niceties, 'felt,' in Kepler's account, 'less concerned for the state of his health than for etiquette.' Grimly he waited, but
was either very abstemious or had a prodigious capacity for liquids, and by the time Tycho managed to get to the jakes he found he could not urinate. He returned home, but was still blocked. Kepler again: 'Uninterrupted insomnia followed; intestinal fever; and little by little, delirium. His poor condition was made worse by his way of eating, from which he could not be deterred.' As he lay on what by now he must have known was his deathbed, he begged Kepler, despite his Copernican convictions, to 'present all [Kepler's] demonstration in conformity with [Tycho's] hypothesis,' and repeated over and over, 'like,' according to Kepler, 'a composer creating a song,' the heartbreaking imprecation: 'Let me not seem to have lived in vain!' On October 24th, Kepler continued, 'when his delirium had subsided for a few hours, amid the prayers, tears and efforts of his family to console him, his strength failed and he passed away very peacefully.'
⁴⁰
He was buried in the Tyn church on Old Town Square, with grand ceremonial, his coffin draped in black cloth decorated in gold with the Brahe coat of arms - to this day, probably coincidentally, black and gold are the predominant colours in the interior of this rather forbidding church - his wife following, 'escorted,' according to Kepler's account 'by two distinguished old royal judges, and finally his three daughters, one after the other, each escorted by two noblemen.' Tycho had been ennobled by the Emperor, which meant that Kirsten had at last been 'made an honest woman of, and their children were now fully legitimate, in Bohemia, at least. The Dane would have been gratified by the send-off accorded him by his adopted city. 'The streets were so full of people,' Kepler wrote, 'that those in the procession walked as if between two walls, and the church was so crowded with both nobles and commoners that one could scarcely find room in it.'
⁴¹

Tycho Brahe's tomb still survives in the Tyn church, surmounted by a life-sized effigy carved in relief in pinkish-grey marble, and bearing a splendid if slightly obscure epitaph: 'To be rather than to be perceived.'

The end of Tycho's mortal life marked the beginning in earnest of Kepler's professional career. Two days later, with the Dane hardly cold in his grave, imperial secretary Barwitz came with the news that the Emperor had appointed Kepler to succeed Tycho as Imperial Mathematician; even death would not be allowed to delay work on the Rudolphine Tables. Kepler's salary, he was shocked to hear, would be six times less than that which had been paid, or at least promised, to Tycho. On the other hand, Kepler now had unrestricted access to Tycho's observations and the use of his instruments, the Emperor having purchased Brahe's astronomical effects from the Brahes for a promised 20,000 florins, although use of the instruments would hardly benefit the bespectacled, double-visioned Kepler. He and Barbara moved from the Hradcany to a house on Vysehradska Street in the Old Town, not far from the Faust House and opposite the Emmaus Monastery.
⁴²
Despite domestic woes his marriage was unhappy, his children died and unseemly squabbles with the Brahes,
⁴³
the years he spent in Prague as Imperial Mathematician were the perigee of Kepler's life, the time when he came nearest to the things he desired, gilt rooms if not gold, and, if not spontaneous applause, at least the odd royal clap on the back. He did some of his greatest work in Prague, on many and diverse subjects, from the orbit of Mars through the functioning of the human eye to the structure of snowflakes, and completed the first of his masterpieces of theoretical science, the justifiably titled
Astronomia nova.
He kept Tycho's dying plea in mind, and gave the Dane his due recognition, but he could not vindicate Tycho's misconceived system. As one biographer neatly puts it, '[h]istory celebrates the Copernican Revolution, not the Tychonic Revolution.'