Tycho and Kepler (2 page)

Though Kepler may have been becoming aware of his own genius, he was still a modest, pious, unassuming, ill-at-ease twenty-eight-year-old in the thrall of a glamorous,
formidable, somewhat jaded world figure. Yet in Kepler the mighty Tycho met his match. If Tycho was the dragon of fairy tales, coiled on a fabulous golden hoard—the astronomical observations that he had spent years and a fortune making and now would let almost no one see—then Kepler was the unpromising folklore antihero who was nevertheless endowed with the power to wrest that treasure from him and,
from it, forge a new astronomy.

Modern scientists and historians, with hindsight, know this is precisely who Johannes Kepler was. The kindly Hoffmann didn’t know; nor did Tycho’s son, or Tengnagel. No one at Benatky Castle suspected . . . with the possible exception of Tycho Brahe himself.

Aware only of what Tycho and Kepler had accomplished before that February day when they met, one
would not be likely to identify
either
of them as a prime candidate for immortality. Both men were engaged in developing theories that to modern eyes seem hopelessly misguided. Yet Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe would turn out to be two of a mere handful of men who would precipitate humanity into the modern era of scientific inquiry and discovery. When Kepler’s exceptional gifts of imagination
and inventiveness, his insistence on mathematical rigor and reasonable physical explanations, and his belief that God had created a universe in which harmony and logic prevail came to grips with Tycho’s superb, unyielding observational data, the result would be the revelation of profound laws that govern how the heavenly bodies move. Kepler’s struggle to find those laws would itself become a prototype
for what science would
be
from that time forward. Sir Isaac Newton was referring to Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo when he said he had stood “on the shoulders of giants.”

The colorful, dangerous world in which Tycho and Kepler lived and worked—the courts, universities, cities, palaces, and hovels of Renaissance Europe—afforded them little peace. Against this background, shaped
by it and often at its mercy, they nevertheless stood as towering figures not really conformed to any age or time. Nor was their genius the only thing that set them apart. On a more superficial level, they were truly eccentric personalities. Either man, if encountered in a novel, would seem a fantastic or even absurd invention. The same can be said of many of their acquaintances: the unabashedly
villainous Nicolaus Bär, the reclusive emperor Rudolph with his largely imaginary royal treasury, the rascal Rosenkrantz who sparked Shakespeare’s interest, Kepler’s mother Katharina, who was tried for witchcraft. . . .

In this setting and among these people, all manner of events conspired to foil Tycho’s and Kepler’s loftiest and best-considered plans, destroy their happiness, and distract
them from their science. However, this same chain of events brought them together and thus secured for them an immortality that they probably would not have
achieved
otherwise. No wonder Kepler concluded that the benevolent will of God led men along desperately unwanted paths that only later could be recognized as the right ones.

If invisible cords drew Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler over
the passage of many years to their crucial encounter, and to the brief, strife-torn, amazingly fruitful relationship that followed it, those strands seem to have been moving almost from the moments of their births.

1

L
EGACIES

1546–1561

THE ORIGIN OF
the Danish castle Knutstorps Borg—in what was once part of Denmark but is now southwest Sweden—pre-dates written and even oral records. One ancient section of wall in the cellar comes from an eleventh-century structure, but no one knows who lived there then or what the building looked like, secluded among gentle folds of meadow and woodland. There
are records from the fourteenth century of an inhabited stone keep. It was probably surrounded by the small lake that appears in sixteenth-century drawings. By that time the keep had become a substantial castle home, the ancestral seat of the noble Brahe family. The lake served as a defensive moat with a causeway and drawbridge.

Here, on December 14, 1546, more than half a century before Johannes
Kepler’s winter journey to Prague and Benatky, Beate Bille, wife of the Danish knight Otte Brahe, gave birth to twin sons. Only one of them lived, and he was christened Tyge (pronounced “Teeguh”), probably in the small stone parish church of the manor at Kågeröd. Tyge, who would later Latinize his name to Tycho, was Otte and Beate’s first son and second living child. His parents did not tell
him that he had been a twin.

He was also kept ill-informed about an unusual episode in his early childhood. When Tyge was two years old, his young uncle and aunt, Jørgen Brahe and Inger Oxe, abducted him from his parents’ castle and carried him to their own stronghold at Tostrup. As far as records show, and as Tycho Brahe understood this bizarre incident when he was older, there was no outraged
protest from his mother or father, no family schism, no scandal, and no attempt to recover him. Otte and Beate by then had a second son, Steen, and were expecting another baby. Tycho would later write simply that his uncle Jørgen “without the knowledge
¹
of my parents took me away with him while I was in my earliest youth.” It seems that was all Tycho knew.

Short of being a member of the royal
family, it was impossible to be higher born than young Tyge.
^fn1
His ancestors and his relatives had for generations been powerful leaders who served the Danish kings with consummate skill and loyalty, who knew how to maintain a position of influence amid shifting factions at court and how to regain that position if it happened through some stroke of misfortune to be temporarily lost. On the Brahe
side the men were warrior knights, at home in the heavy-drinking military circles of the Danish court and ably commanding and administering royal fiefs. Tyge’s great-uncle Axel had been one of the first Danish aristocrats to reject Catholicism, so effectively supporting the Lutheran king Christian III during the Reformation in Denmark in the 1530s that he was chosen to carry the scepter at the
coronation in 1537. Tyge’s father Otte and his uncle and foster-father Jørgen honed their courtly and military skills during that same period of political and religious upheaval. In 1540, six years before Tyge’s birth, the king granted them the joint fiefdom of Storekøbing, a step toward increasingly strategic fiefdoms. Otte
would
eventually become governor of Helsingborg Castle, the fortress
that guarded the Øresund—the crucial strait that led from the North Sea to the Baltic (
see map, Tycho’s Denmark
). He would also hold a seat in the Rigsraad, a body of twenty nobles whose responsibility it was to seat kings, appoint regents, declare war, make treaties, and work with the king on a daily basis in affairs of state.

Tyge’s forebears on his mother Beate Bille’s side of the family
had combined that same kind of secular service to the king with high ecclesiastical positions, and these connections had allowed considerable wealth to be channeled to family members who did not enter the church. When the Reformation came in the 1530s, no fewer than six Billes were in the Rigsraad, and most commanded important castles in Denmark and Norway. Less fortunately, seven of the eight Catholic
bishops of Denmark were blood relations, linking the family embarrassingly with what turned out to be the losing side. However, by the time of Tyge’s birth the Billes were rapidly repairing their fortunes. The marriage of Beate Bille to Otte Brahe was part of that recovery.

Neither the Billes nor the Brahes were scholars. However, Tyge’s childhood abduction had made him the intellectual heir
to a third line, the Oxes, the ancestors of his aunt and foster mother Inger. The Oxe family was traditionally more learned and cultivated than most of the Danish nobility. The family had arrived from France at the end of the fourteenth century, and hence their roots did not go back as far in Denmark as the Brahes and Billes. Nevertheless, they had produced four members of the Rigsraad before losing
their position in civil upheavals at the time of the Reformation. A decade later, at the time of Tyge’s birth, the Oxes’ political fortunes were soaring again, thanks to Inger’s brilliant eldest brother, Peder Oxe. Inger shared something of Peder’s intellectual interests and abilities. She was a woman of great charm, intelligence, and social grace. One of her correspondents and closest friends
was the sister of Denmark’s King Frederick, Princess Anne,
herself
a scholar who, despite the time-consuming burden of royal duties and the unlikeliness of the role for a woman of the time, was a skilled alchemist.

Young Tyge was certain to be brought up in a princely fashion, whether he lived with his parents or his uncle and aunt. Having two families gave him an added advantage. He had the
attention of an only child in Jørgen’s and Inger’s castle and would have the support of four younger brothers in Otte’s and Beate’s family if he later chose to compete in the power politics of the adult world. Most significantly, thanks to the tradition of Inger Oxe’s family, Tyge grew up with a somewhat unorthodox view of the world and of the educational and career choices available to him.

There is little record of Tyge’s childhood and early youth. Presumably he spent considerable time at his uncle Jørgen’s ancestral seat, Tostrup, which was on the side of the province of Skåne that is nearest the Baltic Sea, well to the east of Knutstorp and the Øresund. He also must have visited his parents and his brothers and sisters (seven eventually survived to adulthood) at Knutstorps
Borg.

The duties of a Danish knight took Jørgen and almost certainly Inger and their nephew Tyge elsewhere as well. Administering royal fiefs meant periodically spending time in residence, assuring that the buildings and armaments were in a state of repair and ready for defense. However, a nobleman also had to protect his interests at court, networking and second-guessing royal whim. New royal
fiefs did not fall one’s way if one was continuously absent administering distant royal fiefs, and yet distant royal fiefs did not stay in good enough shape to satisfy the king if one was continually at court. It was a balancing act that required an ambitious vassal to be frequently on the move, and Jørgen clearly carried it off well. Tyge also may have accompanied Inger when she traveled with
her own retainers to administer her large share of the Oxe family’s domain. When it came to taking an extensive aristocratic household on the road without ever
appearing
to be a nomad, a young Danish nobleman such as Tyge had plenty of early experience.

In 1552 Jørgen was promoted to the command of Vordingborg Castle, an enormous medieval stronghold on the south coast of Zealand (Sjaelland).
Tyge was about six, old enough to participate in some of the pomp and lavish ceremonial entertaining that were part of the life at such an important castle. Vordingborg stood guard over the principal travel route between Copenhagen and the Continent. Duke Ulrich of Mecklenburg and his court rode through the gates in 1556. Princess Elizabeth of Saxony stopped there in 1557 with an escort of no fewer
than sixty knights, on the way to visit her grandparents in Denmark. King Christian III himself visited from time to time. Young Tyge was soon no stranger in the company of kings and princes.

Beginning soon after the time of the move to Vordingborg, Tyge began formal schooling. He wrote later that he “was sent to grammar school
²
in [his] seventh year,” and he continued elementary studies until
about the age of twelve. Tyge’s was probably a cathedral school near the castle. At such establishments, sons of the nobility studied side by side with lower-class schoolboys. The curriculum was mostly Latin grammar and religion, with some music and theater, and perhaps Greek and elementary mathematics. Tyge’s father thought Latin was a waste of time, but his uncle Jørgen disagreed and insisted
Tyge learn it.

When a nobleman’s son attended grammar school, he usually lodged in the household of a bishop or other highly placed clergyman so that he could continue to develop, as much as possible outside the castle, the niceties of a gentleman. The days when bishops in Denmark were Catholic aristocrats had ended with the Reformation. In Tyge’s school days they were Lutherans of middle-class
background, often with large families of their own and not wealthy enough to support luxurious establishments. Nearly all these men
had
studied at Wittenberg in Germany, and their households emulated those where they had boarded with professors like Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon.

Family, boarding students, guests, and colleagues gathered for meals at long tables in a wood-paneled room.
Tyge wouldn’t have found that too different from mealtimes at the castle except for the conversation. In the household where he lodged, he probably heard for the first time the lively, wide-ranging, intellectual mealtime discussions that traditionally went on around a scholar’s table. Mealtime conversation at his uncle’s castle, by contrast, would more likely have dealt with warfare, politics,
and court gossip.

Tyge Brahe went farther from home to continue his education at the University of Copenhagen when he was twelve—which was not an early age to begin university in those days. He may actually have matriculated, for he recorded the date he began, April 19, 1559. Matriculation was an unusual step for a nobleman’s son, because young aristocrats didn’t need university degrees as
credentials. It was more common for them only to attend selected series of lectures as part of a course of study set by the professor under whose supervision they lived and worked, with no more formal arrangement.

University students lodged with professors rather than bishops or clergymen. Living conditions were comfortable, at least by sixteenth-century standards, because a university appointment,
though it did not make a man a member of the nobility, paid fairly well. The professor who provided the lodging also supervised his students’ reading and lecture attendance and arranged tutoring with older students residing in the same household. On a smaller, more personal scale, such a household was not unlike a college at Cambridge or Oxford.