Kepler's Witch (18 page)

In truth, the Catholics in Graz hoped that he would turn Catholic under pressure as so many others did. For them to convert to Catholicism a man with his growing reputation would have given great honor to the Catholic church and would have embarrassed the Lutherans no end. The Jesuits especially were interested in this, for they could see in Kepler a searching and sincere mind. They were in some ways kindred souls, separated only by a divided faith. The rumors seem to have originated with a Capuchin Father Ludwig, a man who had once spoken to Kepler soon after his refusal to convert. In that discussion, Kepler claimed to be a
Catholic, which Ludwig imagined was the first sign of conversion, but it wasn't. Kepler did not mean he was a follower of Rome, but that he was a child of God, like all children of God who are brought into the Christian faith through baptism. The Jesuits were disappointed in their expectations, for Kepler would not bend, no matter what they said or did.

But where to go? All that was left to him was a bare hope in Tycho Brahe. Kepler wrote to Mästlin once more, describing his misfortune and once more seeking some position at Tübingen. He planned on traveling to Linz, he told Mästlin, where he would leave his family and travel on to Prague alone to look for employment. He hoped something would come along. He wondered if he could return to Tübingen to study for his
“professiuncula”
in medicine, and would await Mästlin's return letter in Linz.

Suddenly free of Graz, he left the city on September 10, 1600, with all his goods stuffed into two small horse-drawn wagons. Barbara and little Regina sat with him in the lead wagon as they rolled along through the city gates, leaving behind their home, leaving behind Barbara's inherited lands, leaving behind the sad graves of their two babies, now gone to God. “I would not have thought,” he wrote to Mästlin, “that it could be so sweet, in union with my brothers, to suffer injury for religion, to abandon house, fields, friends, and nation. If real martyrdom is like this, to lay down one's life, our exultation is so much the greater, the greater the loss, and it is an easy matter to die for faith.”
²³

F
ROM
K
EPLER'S
E
ULOGY ON THE
D
EATH OF
T
YCHO
B
RAHE
OCTOBER
24, 1601

Where Kepler takes employment with Tycho Brahe and moves his entire family to Prague.

P
RAGUE, THE
G
OLDEN
C
ITY
, was founded by a witch. A seer perhaps, a prophetess, but in those days, it was all the same. According to legend, her name was LibuÅ¡e, and she was a princess in her own right, a princess of the Czech people, who had lived in the land for generations and who were flourishing under her rule, turning old forest to new farmland to feed the scores of new babies born to them every year. Knowing she was a wise woman, her people came to her for advice. “Where shall we settle?” they asked. “Where shall we build our farms and have our babies?”

“Look for the place where the four elements dwell in abundance and settle there,” she said. “Look for fertile soil that gives life. Look for water, clean and pure. Look for fresh and healthy air. Look for fuel to give you warmth, where the trees grow down to the waterside to give you both wood and shade. If harmony among the four elements rules a place, then you will want for nothing.” The people followed her advice and prospered.

When the time came for her to marry, Libuše took her own advice and chose a man to balance her gifts. She was undoubtedly beautiful and had suitors from all over Europe seeking her hand, but out of them all she chose a simple plowman, a man of the people named Přemysl. Where she was air and light, he was water and earth. They lived together in his castle, which stood on a cliff above the Vltava River, the Moldau of legend. Přemysl had named the castle Vyšehrad, which meant, prosaically, High Castle, because presumably that's what it was. All around them, the people flourished.

As royals do, the couple often moved between castles, sometimes to his, sometimes to hers. One day, when they were living in her castle, which they had been doing for some time, the two of them wanted to see the wide lands unrolling all around them, so they climbed the battlements up into the highest tower, to the tallest spire, where there was a room made of stone with windows all around and firing slits in the walls for archers. Behind them, the whole court huddled on the steps, breathing hard from the climb, gossiping here and there and speculating about whatever business the prince and princess had up in the tower. Outside, the evening gathered, rose-colored, with green and brown fields all around, bluing slowly in the distance, out to the edge of the forest, and then deepening to purple near the horizon. Swallows wheeled and hummed, snatching mosquitoes from the air. It was an evening ready for prophecy.

Suddenly, the world hushed. Princess Libuše stretched out her hand to the evening and pointed into the distance. A light gathered around her. The court quieted, fearing to breathe and break the spell—even the birds fell silent.

“I see a great castle and its glory reaches to the stars,” the princess said. “The place lies deep in the forest—the Brusnice river valley guards it from the north, while a rocky hill protects it from the south. The Vltava winds between, at the bottom of the great hill. Go there,” she said, “and on the left bank of the river, you will find a man carving the doorway of a new house. You will build your castle there and name it ‘Threshold,'
Praha,
the sacred doorway leading into hearth and home, to warm fires and to meat on the spit, and finally leading into the place of the dead. You know
that tall men must bend their heads to enter any doorway. So will all, tall and short, men and women, bend before this castle, and one day it shall be a great, golden city.”

The prince and the men of the court tried to follow where Libuše pointed, but could see nothing but the night. Then, after a time, the princess fell back, the light of prophecy fading from her. The birds sang once again, and the court buzzed with gossip. The next day, the men packed their horses and set out to find the place. Quite soon they found the valley, just as the princess had described it—the narrow river valley to the north, the great hill to the south, the winding Vltava in between. And there, near the river, they came upon a man carving the lintels of a doorway. The men of the court set to work building the castle. They felled trees and opened up new lands; they built a rampart and a great hall, just like the one at Vyšehrad, at the court of Prince Pøemysl. This new castle was bigger, however, greater and taller than any other, built as Libuše had said, on the left bank of the Vltava. Its fame grew and has lasted even to today.
¹

 

I
T IS LIKELY THAT
K
EPLER
, on his way to Prague via Linz, never realized his good fortune, never realized that his life was about to change for the better. It is likely that all he could see was a future full of darkness. Tübingen had abandoned him, though. Hoping against all evidence to the contrary, he still waited for word, waited for some letter from his old school that would change his life. Other prospects and other universities were vague chances at best. And attaching himself to Tycho was risky. Kepler, his wife, Barbara, and his daughter, Regina, with all their worldly possessions stuffed into two little wagons, rode behind a plodding horse on their way to Linz. Kepler, his face drawn with fear for the future, wondered how they would all survive. The trip to Prague was no great adventure, no wonderful new thing—it was an act of desperation. Kepler was a refugee—the greatest tragedy that could befall a man, finding himself on the highway, banished from his home, with no way to support his family and with
nothing but poverty following behind. He was fearfully, agonizingly homeless.

When he and his family arrived at Linz, Kepler asked about the letter he had hoped would be waiting for him there. He was praying, irrationally perhaps, for some magic word from Mästlin, a change of heart from the faculty that would, in spite of everything, call him back to Swabia, where so much of what he knew and loved resided. But no such letter had come, and Kepler's last hope of returning home died. What should he do? What could he do? He decided that he could not leave his family behind in Linz among strangers, for fear that one of them might sicken and die, far away from her friends and family. So he left his household goods in the care of someone in Linz and, taking Barbara and Regina with him, he set off for Prague.

On the road between Linz and Prague, he took sick. The distress, the exhaustion, the desperation encircled him, and he fell into an intermittent fever, a
febris quartana
that would level him for the rest of the year. The fever swelled for about four days, sucking the life out of him, and then it would fade only to return a few days later. Was this malaria? Or typhus? While on the road, weakened and shivering, he sent a letter to Tycho Brahe announcing his arrival.

Tycho had hoped to establish a new Uraniborg at Benatky and had sent his son with Longomontanus to fetch the four great instruments he had abandoned on Hveen when he left the country. Because of bad rains and swollen rivers, because of one bureaucratic tangle after another, the instruments did not arrive in time. A recent outburst of plague had sent the imperial court scuttling from Prague, but then after the plague subsided, the emperor returned. Fretting over the future, Rudolf suddenly needed the astrological advice of his imperial mathematician and on June 10, 1600, sent for Tycho. Tycho took residence near the palace, because the emperor often commanded his attendance twice a day.
²
He set up his household at an inn, the Sign of the Golden Griffin, built on the slopes of the Prague Castle, the emperor's palace.

The letter from Kepler was businesslike, full of hidden bravado.

Bereft of everything, Kepler's pride was touchy. He certainly did not want to appear like a supplicant before Tycho; and he would not allow himself to become one more in Tycho's battalion of servants or one more mouthpiece for Tycho's theories. He had a reputation of his own to defend, a theory to prove, and, after all, he did not completely agree with Tycho. Perhaps he had overstated his case in his letter, pretending that he had more prospects than he had. Perhaps he had hidden Tübingen's rejection, for he didn't want to admit that his own people had abandoned him. It was true that Tycho had invited him even without his salary from Graz, but he was a destitute man, and he did not want to look destitute. In the letter, he told Tycho that as a scholarship student, he needed to travel to Württemberg to ask the duke for his support and for the support of the duke's ambassador at the imperial court. He was looking into a position at a university, perhaps Wittenberg or Jena or Leipzig. He made it sound as if the professors at Tübingen had also offered him a position and that he was trying to make a choice between several lucrative opportunities. However, he said, if Tycho had a position for him, then he would certainly give him first choice.

Kepler arrived in Prague on October 19, 1600. He was in a bad way—depressed, nearly broke, shaking with fever, with his wife and stepdaughter on the verge of illness themselves. He sought refuge in the house of Baron Hoffmann, where he was warmly received. The fever carried on, however. He began to cough and feared tuberculosis. Added to that were money problems. The cost of living in Prague was so much higher than in Graz that what little money he had was rapidly disappearing. In Graz, he had made only 200 gulden a year, and it had cost him 120 to move his family to Prague. Barbara complained constantly. Because of her husband's religious scruples, she had been torn from everything she ever knew and loved. Her father's conversion, on the one hand, and her husband's refusal to convert, on the other, must have torn the poor thing apart. Besides, as the daughter of a rich man, she was used to a much higher standard of living. Everything was so much more expensive in Prague that Barbara had to live like the poor. She soon fell into a terrible depression, missing her family, missing her city and all that was familiar to her, and then she too fell sick.

Tycho, meanwhile, received Kepler warmly. Tycho was a builder and an observer, a gatherer of information, and although he was a master of astronomy and calculation, he lacked Kepler's sublime fire, his lightning insight into how things fit. If he wanted a true victory, he needed someone who could take his observations and fashion a proof out of them. The bare observations alone wouldn't be enough. They had to be sorted, calculated, and woven into the right patterns to prove the Tychonic system, and that required Kepler. Besides, it was hard to hold on to good assistants. He had gathered good astronomical minds from all over Europe, but after a time, one by one, they found other positions, returned home, or set out on their own. Tycho wasn't all that easy a master. Therefore, he worked hard to secure a position for Kepler, not only with his own staff, which he was willing to do in spite of their often prickly relationships, but also with the imperial court. The emperor, for his part, was well disposed toward Tycho, partly because he needed him for his astrological advice and partly because he was an expert in all the little machines the emperor
loved so well. He was therefore well disposed to any suggestion that Tycho might have had for Kepler.

But the emperor was not completely his own man. He was surrounded by an imperial bureaucracy that seemed to go on in Byzantine fashion for miles and miles. To secure a position for Kepler would not only require the emperor's approval, but the approval of every little bureaucratic head in every little bureaucratic office down every little bureaucratic corridor in the palace. One of their functions was to make sure that things did not happen, because when things happened, it cost money. They excelled at this job. As with all governments, without a strong hand from the emperor, the imperial bureaucracy was glacial, so that no matter what Rudolf wanted for Kepler's salary, the money somehow never showed up, and Kepler quickly became dependent upon Tycho.

In December, the last nail in the Tübingen coffin was hammered in; the last of his hopes for that university was crushed. The letter he had looked for arrived, but his former teacher offered him no advice, no comfort except for his prayers. Kepler wrote back at once: “I cannot describe what paroxysm of melancholy your letter has occasioned me, because it destroys all hope of going to your university. So I must stay put until I either get well or die.”
³
Several weeks later, he wrote once again, this time begging: