At this point the method and style of this narrative will change. The emphasis will shift from the evolution of cosmic ideas to the individuals who were chiefly responsible for it. At the same time, we plunge into a new landscape under a different climate: the Renaissance of the fifteeenth century. The sudden transition will leave certain gaps in continuity; these will be filled in as the occasion arises.
However, the first of the pioneers of the new era did not belong to it, but to the old one. Though born into the Renaissance, he was a man of the Middle Ages: haunted by its anxieties, ridden with its complexes, a timid, conservative cleric, who started the revolution against his will.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE TO PART TWO
PART THREE THE TIMID CANON
I THE LIFE OF COPERNICUS
1. The Mystifier
ON 24 May, 1543, Canon Nicolas Koppernighk, 1 by his Latin name Copernicus, was dying of a haemorrhage of the brain. He had reached the age of three score years and ten, and had published only one scientific work, which he knew to be unsound: On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 2. He had delayed publishing his theory for some thirty years; the first completed copy of it arrived from the printers a few hours before his death. It was placed on his bed, so that he could handle it. But by then the Canon's mind was wandering, and he could not comment on the anonymous preface to the book, which told the reader that its contents need not be regarded as true, or even as probable. Thus posterity never knew for certain whether Canon Koppernigk had authorized that preface, and whether he really believed in his system or not.
The room where the Canon was dying was in the north-west tower of the fortified wall surrounding the Cathedral hill of Frauenburg in East Prussia, on the outskirts of civilized Christendom. He had lived in that tower for thirty years. It was three storeys high: from the second floor a small door led out onto a platform on top of the wall. It was a grim and forbidding place, but it gave Canon Nicolas an open view over the Baltic Sea to the north and west, the fertile plain to the south, and of the stars at night.
Between the town and the sea stretched a fresh-water lagoon, three or four miles wide and some fifty miles long – a famous landmark of the Baltic coast, known as the Frisches Haff. But in the Book of the Revolutions the Canon insisted on calling it the Vistula. In one of his asides, he remarked enviously that the astronomers of Alexandria"were favoured by a serene sky, for the Nile, according to their reports, does not exhale such vapours as the Vistula does hereabouts." 3 Now, the Vistula falls into the sea at Danzig, forty-two miles to the west of Frauenburg; and the Canon, who had lived in these parts nearly all his life, knew perfectly well that the vast expanse of water under his tower was not the Vistula but the Frisches Haff, which in German means "fresh lake". It was a curious mistake to be made by a man dedicated to scientific precision – and who, incidentally, had been commissioned to make a geographical map of the region. The same mistake is repeated in another passage of the Book of the Revolutions: in the chapter "On the Longitudinal Places and Anomalies of the Moon" it is said that "all the foregoing observations refer to the meridian of Cracow, since most of these were made from Frauenburg, on the estuary of the Vistula, which lies on the same meridian." 4 But Frauenburg lies neither on the estuary of the Vistula, nor on the meridian of Cracow.
Posterity had such faith in the precision and trustworthiness of Canon Koppernigk's statements, that a number of scholars blandly transferred Frauenburg down to the Vistula, and as late as 1862, a German encyclopaedia did the same. 5 The foremost of his biographers, Herr Ludwig Prowe, mentioned this puzzle in a single footnote. 5A Herr Prowe thought the Canon wanted to help readers of his book to locate Frauenburg by displacing it to the shore of a well-known river; and this explanation was taken over by others who wrote after him. But it misses the point. For in the casual remark about the noxious vapours the Canon was clearly not concerned with giving locational clues; and in the second remark, which indeed purports to locate his observatory for other astronomers, a matter which requires utmost precision, the displacement of forty miles was preposterously misleading.
Another of Canon Koppernigk's whims had been to call Frauenburg "Gynopolis". Nobody before or after him had thus graecised the German name of the little town; and this might perhaps provide a clue to the apparently senseless mystification of calling the Haff the Vistula, and placing both on the meridian of Cracow. Frauenburg, and with it the whole Province of Ermland, lay wedged in between the lands of the Polish King and of the Order of Teutonic Knights. It had frequently served as a battleground before and during the Canon's life-time. The burning, plundering, peasant-slaying Knights, and the vapours of the Haff had grievously interfered with the Canon's work; he loathed them both. Ensconced in his tower, he longed for the civilized life of his youth – which was spent on the friendly banks of the Vistula and at Cracow, the brilliant Polish capital. Besides, the Vistula did send out a small, half-dry side-branch which trickled into the Haff a mere twenty miles from Frauenburg – so that, stretching a few points, one could almost think of himself as living not in Frauenburg on the Frisches Haff, but in Gynopolis on the Vistula, and also, more or less, on the meridian of the Polish capital. 6
This explanation is merely guesswork, but whether true or not, it is in keeping with a curious feature in Canon Koppernigk's character: his inclination to mystify his contemporaries. Half a century of bitter experiences, alternating between the tragic and the sordid, had turned him into a weary and morose old man, given to secretiveness and dissimulation; his sealed-up feelings leaked out only rarely, in roundabout ways. When, two years before his death, he was at last persuaded by his old friend Bishop Giese and the young firebrand Rheticus to publish the Book of the Revolutions, he went about it in the same secretive and mystifying manner. Did he really believe, when he looked down from the small window of his tower on the famous lagoon, that his eyes beheld the waters of the distant Vistula – or did he merely wish to believe it? Did he really believe that the forty-eight epicycles of his system were physically present in the sky, or did he merely regard them as a device, more convenient than Ptolemy's, to save the phenomena? It seems that he was torn between the two views; and it was perhaps this doubt about the real value of his theory which broke his spirit.
In the room leading to the platform on the wall lived the Canon's instruments for observing the sky. They were simple, and mostly made by himself according to the instructions given by Ptolemy in the Almagest, a thousand and three hundred years before. They were, in fact, cruder and less reliable than the instruments of the ancient Greeks and the Arabs. One was the triquetrum or "cross-bow", about twelve feet high; it consisted of three bars of pine. One bar stood upright; a second bar, with two sights on it, as on the barrel of a gun, was hinged to the top of the first, so that it could be pointed at the moon or a star; the third was a cross-piece, marked with ink like a yardstick, from which the angle of the star above the horizon could be read. The other main instrument was an upright sundial, its base pointing north and south, which indicated the sun's altitude at midday. There was also a "Jacob's Staff" or Baculus astronomicus, which was simply a long staff with a shorter, movable crossbar. Lenses or mirrors were nowhere to be seen; astronomy had not yet discovered the uses of glass.
Nevertheless, better and more precise instruments would have been available to the Canon – quadrants and astrolabes and huge armillary spheres of shining copper and bronze, such as the great Regiomontanus had installed at his observatory in Nuremberg. Canon Koppernigk had always enjoyed a comfortable income, and could well afford to order these instruments from the Nuremberg workshops. His own cross-bow and cross-staff were crude; on an unguarded occasion he had remarked to young Rheticus that if he were able to reduce observational errors to ten minutes arc, he would be as happy as Pythagoras was on discovering his famous theorem. 7 But an error of ten minutes arc amounts to one-third of the apparent width of the full moon in the sky; the Alexandrian astronomers had done better than that. Having m
ade the stars his main business in life, why in heaven's name did the prosperous Canon never order the instruments which would have made him happier than Pythagoras?
Apart from his niggardliness, which had grown worse as the bitter years went by, there existed a deeper, anxious reason for this: Canon Koppernigk was not particularly fond of star-gazing. He preferred to rely on the observations of Chaldeans, Greeks and Arabs – a preference that led to some embarrassing results. The Book of the Revolutions contains, altogether, only twenty-seven observations made by the Canon himself; and these were spread over thirty-two years! The first he made as a student in Bologna, aged twenty-four; the last referred to in his Book, an eclipse of Venus, was made no less than fourteen years before he sent the manuscript to the printers; and though during these fourteen years he continued to make occasional observations, he did not bother to enter them into his text. He merely scribbled them on the margin of the book he happened to be reading, in between other marginal jottings, such as recipes against toothaches and kidney stones, for the dyeing of the hair, and for an "imperial pill" which "may be taken at any time and has a curative effect on every disease." 8
All in all, Canon Koppernigk noted down between sixty and seventy observations in a life-time. He regarded himself as a philosopher and mathematicus of the skies, who left the work of actual stargazing to others, and relied on the records of the ancients. Even the position he assumed for his basic star, the Spica, which he used as a landmark, was erroneous by about forty minutes arc, more than the width of the moon.
As a result of all this, Canon Koppernigk's life-work seemed to be, for all useful purposes, wasted. From the seafarers' and stargazers' point of view, the Copernican planetary tables were only a slight improvement on the earlier Alphonsine tables, and were soon abandoned. And insofar as the theory of the universe is concerned, the Copernican system, bristling with inconsistencies, anomalies, and arbitrary constructions, was equally unsatisfactory, most of all to himself.
In the lucid intervals between the long periods of torpor, the dying Canon must have been painfully aware that he had failed. Before sinking back into the comforting darkness, he probably saw, as dying men do, scenes of his frigid past warmed by the merciful glow of memory. The vineyards of Torun; the golden pomp of the Vatican gardens in the jubilee year 1500; Ferrara entranced by its lovely young duchess, Lucretia Borgia; the precious letter from the most reverend Cardinal Schoenberg; the miraculous arrival of young Rheticus. But if memory could lend some deceptive warmth and colour to Canon Koppernigk's past, its soothing grace does not extend to posterity. Copernicus is perhaps the most colourless figure among those who, by merit or circumstance, shaped mankind's destiny. On the luminous sky of the Renaissance, he appears as one of those dark stars whose existence is only revealed by their powerful radiations.
2. Uncle Lucas
Nicolas Koppernigk was born in 1473, half-way between the transformation of the old world through Coster of Haarlem's invention of the printing press with movable metal types, and Columbus' discovery of a new world beyond the seas. His life overlapped with Erasmus of Rotterdam's who "laid the egg of the Reformation", and with Luther's who hatched it; with Henry VIII who broke away from Rome and Charles V who brought the Holy Roman Empire to its climax; with the Borgias and Savonarola, with Michelangelo and Leonardo, Holbein and Dürer; with Machiavelli and Paracelsus, Ariosto and Rabelais.
His birthplace was Torun on the Vistula, formerly an outpost of the Teutonic Knights against the Prussian pagans, later a member of the Hanseatic League and a trading centre between East and West. At the time when Nicolas Koppernigk was born, the town was already in decline, steadily losing its trade to Danzig which lay closer to the river's estuary. Yet he could still watch the merchants' fleets sailing down the broad, muddy waters toward the sea, loaded with timber, and coal from the Hungarian mines, with pitch and tar, and honey and wax from Galiczia; or making their way upstream with textiles from Flanders, and silk from France, and herring and salt and spices: always in convoys, to be safe from pirates and brigands.
It is unlikely, though, that the boy Nicolas spent much time watching life on the river wharfs, for he was born inside the sheltering walls where, protected by moat and drawbridge, the gabled, narrow-chested patrician houses stood hemmed in between church and monastery, town-hall and school. Only the lowly folk lived outside the crenelated walls, among the wharfs and storehouses, in the noise and stench of the suburban artisanate: the wheel and waggon-makers, blacksmiths, coppersmiths and gun-barrel makers, salt refiners and saltpetre boilers, schnapps distillers and hop brewers.
Perhaps Andreas, the elder brother who was something of a scamp, liked to loiter in the suburbs, hoping to become one day a pirate; but Nicolas remained, through all his life, fearful of venturing, in any sense, outside the walls. He must have had an early awareness of the fact that he was the son of a wealthy magistrate and patrician of Torun: of one of those prosperous merchants whose ships had, only a generation or two earlier, roamed the seas as far as Brugge and the Scandinavian ports. Now, when the fortunes of their town were on the decline, they were becoming all the more self-important, stuffy and ultra-patrician. Nicolas Koppernigk senior had come from Cracow to Torun in the late fourteen-fifties, as a wholesale dealer in copper, the family business from which the Koppernigks derived their name. Or so at least it is presumed, for everything connected with the ancestry of Canon Koppernigk is shrouded in the same secretive and uncertain twilight through which he moved during his life on earth. There lived no historic personality in that epoch of whom less is known by way of documents, letters or anecdotes.
About the father we know at least where he came from, and that he owned a vineyard in the suburbs, and that he died in 1484, when Nicolas was ten. About the mother, née Barbara Watzelrode, nothing is known except her name; neither the date of her birth, nor of her marriage, nor of her death could be found on any record. This is the more remarkable, as Frau Barbara came from a distinguished family: her brother, Lucas Watzelrode, became the Bishop and ruler of Ermland. There are detailed records of the life of Uncle Lucas, and even of Aunt Christina Watzelrode; only Barbara, the mother, is blotted out – eclipsed, as it were, by the persistent shadow thrown by the son.
Of his childhood and adolescence up to the age of eighteen, only one event is known – but an event which became decisive in his life. At the death of Koppernigk senior, Nicolas, his brother and two sisters, became the charges of Uncle Lucas, the future Bishop. Whether at that time their mother was still alive, we do not know; at any rate, she fades out of the picture (not that she had ever been much present in it); and henceforth Lucas Watzelrode plays the part of father and protector, employer and maecenas to Nicolas Koppernigk. It was an intense and intimate relationship which lasted to the end of the Bishop's life, and which one Laurentius Corvinus, town scribe and poetaster of Torun, compared to the attachment between Aeneas and his faithful Achates.
The Bishop, twenty-six years older than Nicolas, was a powerful and irascible, proud and sombre personality; an autocrat and a bully who brooked no contradiction, never listened to others' opinions, never laughed, and was loved by nobody. But he was also a fearless and dedicated man, impervious to slander, and just – according to his own lights. His historic merit is the relentless fight he put up against the Teutonic Knights, preparing the way to the eventual dissolution of their Order – that anachronistic survival of the Crusades, which had degenerated into a rapacious, plundering horde. One of the Order's last Grand Masters called Bishop Lucas "the devil in human shape", and its Chronicler reports that the Knights prayed every day for his death. They had to wait till he was sixty-five; but when death came to the vigorous Bishop, it came through such sudden and suspicious illness that it was assumed they poisoned him.
The only endearing feature of that hard Prussian Prince of the Church was his nepotism – the loving care he took of his numerous nephews, nieces, in-laws, and his bastard son. He procured Nicolas and brother Andr
eas the fat prebends of the Canonry of Frauenburg; through his influence, the older of the Koppernigk sisters became Mother Superior of the Cistercian convent at Kulm, while the younger was married off to a nobleman. A contemporary chronicler further reports that "Philip Teschner, by birth a son-of-a-whore, born to Luca the Bishop by a pious virgin when Luca was still a magistrate at Torun, was promoted by the Bishop to the post of mayor of Braunsberg." 9
But his favourite, his fidus Achates, was young Nicolas. It was evidently a case of attraction by opposites. The Bishop was overbearing, the nephew self-effacing. The Bishop was impetuous and irritable, the nephew meek and submissive. The Uncle was sanguine and unpredictable, the nephew pedestrian and pedantic. Both in their private relationship and in the eyes of their small provincial world, Bishop Lucas was the brilliant star, Canon Nicolas the pale satellite.
3. The Student
In the winter of 1491-92, at the age of eighteen, Nicolas Koppernigk was sent to the famous University of Cracow. The only record of his four years of study there is an entry according to which "Nicolas, the son of Nicolas of Torun" was immatriculated and paid his fee in full. Brother Andreas was accepted too, but the record says that he paid only part of the fee down. Also, Andreas was late at the immatriculation: fifteen other names were entered after Nicolas' name in the roster before the older brother turned up. Neither of them took a degree.
At twenty-two, Nicolas returned to Torun on Bishop Lucas' request. One of the Canons of his Cathedral at Frauenburg was dying, and the Bishop was anxious to secure the prebend for his favourite nephew. He had good reason to make haste, for the patricians of Torun were in a state of grave anxiety regarding their economic future. For several months they had been receiving disquieting letters from their business relations and their agents in Lisbon, concerning the alleged opening of a sea route to India by a Genoese captain, and about the endeavours of Portuguese seafarers to achieve the same aim by rounding the south Cape of Africa. Rumour became certainty when the report which Columbus, after his return from the first crossing, had addressed to the Chancellor Raphael Sanches, was printed as a broadsheet first in Rome, then in Milan, and finally in Ulm. There could no longer be any doubt: these new trading routes to the Orient were a grave menace to the prosperity of Torun and the whole Hanseatic League. For a young man of good family and uncertain vocation, the safest thing was to secure a nice, comfortable prebend. It is true that he was only twenty-two; but after all, Giovanni di Medici, the future Leo X, had been made a Cardinal at fourteen.