by Dava Sobel
Copernicus traveled on horseback among the region’s 120 villages, often accompanied by his servant, Wojciech Szebulski, or his errand boy, Hieronim, both of whom he named in the ledger as frequent witnesses. He alone, however, decided every case, and his word spoke for the whole chapter.
“Bartolt Faber of Schonewalt took possession of 1½ parcels, sold by Peter Preus, who is very old. As regards these parcels, Bartolt will give the overlord ½ mark as rent for the half-parcel. But as regards the other parcel, the Chapter graciously donated 1 mark to the aforesaid Peter for life.” In other words, Copernicus allowed Bartolt Faber to rob the chapter (the overlord) to pay the aged Peter Preus an annuity through his declining years. “After his death the entire rent will revert to the overlord. Done on the second weekday after Laetare [March 23], 1517, in the presence of Wojciech, my servant, and Hieronim, etc.”
Similarly, when Alde Urban, “who is aged in fact and in name”—and who had “no sons”—felt compelled to cede one of his parcels, Copernicus granted him exemption from payments on the rest of his holdings. Jan of Vindica, on the other hand, received no such exemption when he took possession of four parcels. Apparently Copernicus judged Jan well provided for by an uncle on his mother’s side, Czepan Copetz, who had worked that land to his dying day and left upon it “4 horses, 1 colt, 4 cows, 6 pigs, 1 leg of pork, 1 sack of rye, 1 sack of flour, ½ sack of peas, 4 sacks of barley, 5 sacks of oats, 1 large kettle, 1 wagon, iron plowshares, 1 ax, 1 scythe.”
In Voytsdorf, Copernicus encountered another family with a good uncle likely to stir his memories of the old bishop: “Gregor Knobel adds to his 2 parcels 1 more parcel that belonged to Peter Glande, who died in a fire. Gregor is the guardian of his brother Peter’s sons, who are minors, and promises to satisfy them when they are grown up.”
Copernicus’s own grown brother now wandered alone somewhere in Italy, a leper, shunned by everyone, as the nerves in his skin slowly disintegrated. The last communication from Andreas, by proxy the previous February, acknowledged that he had received his share of Uncle Lukasz’s estate. More than likely, those funds would see him through to the end.
“Hans Clauke has 2 parcels for which he was bound by hereditary payments to the church in Berting. As a man incapacitated for a long time, he sold those parcels to Simon Stoke with my permission. Done on 4 May.”
If Copernicus lent his medical skills to any of the sick or elderly peasants, he did not note such treatments in the ledger. Death—whether by hanging, by fire, by illness or old age—caused the usual degree of attrition in the population. Desertion also took its toll.
“Jacob Wayner, who with his wife ran away last year, has now been brought back by the overseer,” Copernicus wrote on August 2, 1517. The peasants’ hard lot caused many of them to flee in search of a better life. More than one quarter of the cases Copernicus recorded made reference to land made vacant because Simon—or Martzyn or Cosman—had run away. The village overseer typically pursued these fugitives on behalf of the chapter and returned them to work, lest the land lie fallow or, worse, revert to its wooded state, in which case new cultivators would have to be bribed to clear and resow.
Copernicus holds a lily of the valley, an early Renaissance symbol of a medical doctor (probably because of the flower’s association with the god Mercury, whose snake-entwined caduceus promoted healing), in this wood-block portrait by Tobias Stimmer.
“Jacob took possession of one parcel,” Copernicus’s account continues, “from which death removed Caspar Casche. The building is in ruins, and the parcel is of little value, and for that reason was abandoned by Caspar’s heirs and guardians. When Jacob took possession, I gave him one horse, a quarter of the previously planted millet, and exemption from the next annual payment.” Copernicus also named Michael Wayner, brother of the runaway, as “his guarantor in perpetuity”—to guarantee that Jacob would never again run away.
“Gregor Noske took possession of 1½ parcels, from which Matz Leze ran away because he was suspected of thievery.”
Land changed hands among the peasants in every month of the year—from “the antepenultimate of January” and “the Sabbath before Palm” to “the day of Peter and Paul,” “the feast of Michael,” “St. Cecilia’s,” and “the day of the 11,000 Virgins.”
As he alternated between saintly and standard designations for dates in his record keeping, Copernicus kept up his lone struggle to define the true duration of the year. His invited remarks to the Lateran Council about the problematic Julian calendar had probably lamented astronomers’ ignorance of the year’s exact length. With or without calendar reform, Copernicus still needed to ascertain this fundamental parameter. The length of the year defined the Earth’s orbit around the Sun—or, as other astronomers believed, the Sun’s orbit around the Earth—and pertained to almost every calculation in the heliocentric or any other planetary theory.
“Petrus, a herdsman in Thomasdorf, took possession of 2 parcels, which are vacant because Hans ran away.”
Copernicus fashioned a new yardstick for the year in an open loge on the south face of Allenstein Castle, just outside his private apartment. Laying white stucco over the ruddy bricks, he painted the grid of a sundial onto the smoothed surface. The lines and numbers must have been blue and red when new, though only a hint of color survives in the faded dial fragment still clinging to the castle wall. Underneath, either on a table or the floor, he set a mirror—or maybe he used a bowl of red wine—to catch the Sun’s reflection and throw it up to the dial, where he charted the changing solar altitude through the seasons.
“Jacob of Jomendorf took possession of 2 parcels, which were sold to him with my permission by Marcus Kycol, who is very old.”
The Sun reaches its highest point at the summer solstice, which occurs on the longest day of the year, and a year may be gauged by the lapse of time between one summer solstice and the next. Or one could measure the time passing between one year’s vernal equinox—when the Sun crosses the Equator at the start of spring, dividing the day into equal halves of dark and light—and the vernal equinox that follows. The equinox proved easier than the solstice for Copernicus to capture, because the Sun’s position changes more dramatically day to day during the run-up to equal day and night than it does near the longest day of the year. Still, determining the exact moment of the equinox challenges even the most diligent observer. In some years, the moment defies observation altogether if it occurs during the night or twilight hours of the given day.
Copernicus worked around the natural obstacles by making a series of noon observations over a period of several days before and after the anticipated event, and then interpolating the time. His calculation gave him the year’s duration down to minutes and seconds in an age when no clock could shave moments so closely. He repeated the process annually, pooling his figures to improve their accuracy. He also factored in a few results from Ptolemy, to further increase his baseline, and he adopted Ptolemy’s technique of reckoning dates by the reigns of ancient rulers. Thus Copernicus recalled observing an autumnal equinox at Frauenburg “in the year of Our Lord 1515 on the 18th day before the Kalends of October, but according to the Egyptian calendar it was the 1840th year after the death of Alexander on the 6th day of the month of Phaophi, half an hour after sunrise.” Despite its awkward phraseology, the Egyptian calendar appealed to Copernicus’s contemporaries because of its consistency: The list of kings stretched all the way back to the eighth century B.C., and every year consisted of twelve identical months, thirty days each, plus an extra five days tacked on at the end—with no leap years. A sixteenth-century date converted to Egyptian style allowed easy computation of the time elapsed since any similar observation by Ptolemy.
“Jacob has 2 parcels and sold them with my permission to Lorenz, the overseer’s brother.”
The coins the peasants put down on their transactions were a mishmash of old and new currencies, both Prussian and Polish. The Teutonic Knights had been minting Prussian marks in the re
gion since the thirteenth century, but at the start of the Thirteen Years’ War in 1454, King Kazimierz extended minting privileges to the cities of Torun, Elbing, and Danzig. The burghers then turned out their own Prussian coins at an enthusiastic rate, in the familiar denominations: marks, skoters, groats, and pence. In the absence of anything resembling national standards or official exchange rates, however, the intrinsic value of a mark—the volume of silver it contained—varied from mint to mint. Even the same mint might shift the balance of silver to copper in its specie on a whim. Thanks to a suspiciously diminishing proportion of silver in successive issues, a new mark weighed less than an old one, while pretending to equal the old value. Copernicus proved the weight difference by comparing coins in a balance pan. He knew that canny citizens were taking advantage of the discrepancy by spending the new coins and hoarding the old ones, which they would take to the goldsmith to be melted down for the greater worth of their metal content. Other abuses, such as nipping off bits of coins’ edges, also contributed to the currency’s debasement. Sometimes the pennies the peasants paid toward their rent, despite a full quotient of the proper alloy, had been pinched and handled through such long use as to be worn thin.
Martin Luther, “the great Reformer,” as depicted by Lucas Cranach the Elder.
Aware of all these ills, Copernicus spent part of his first summer in Allenstein penning a private reflection on his fears for the state of the currency. He completed the Meditata—his Latin meditation on the money problem—on August 15, 1517, and then circulated it among a few chosen associates, much as he had done with the Brief Sketch.
At the same time as Copernicus listed these financial concerns, the priest and theology professor Martin Luther in Wittenberg also drew up a list. Luther’s list enumerated his many complaints against the Catholic Church, contesting its sale of indulgences as tickets to salvation. “When the money clinks in the box,” Luther had heard some mercenary clerics claim, “the soul springs up to Heaven.” Like Copernicus, Luther directed his so-called 95 Theses to a small, select group of acquaintances. But while Copernicus’s money advice drew a polite response that hardly distracted him from his duties, Luther’s outrage lit a fire that soon filled the public squares.
“Voytek, who has 2 parcels in the same place, took possession of two additional parcels, which have been abandoned for a long time on account of the flight long ago of Stenzel Rase. Voytek will pay the next annual rental.”
“Lurenz, having bought the tavern in Branswalt, with my consent sold 4 parcels.”
In November of 1518, word reached Copernicus that the sickly Andreas had succumbed at last to the final stages of leprosy and left this world. As he mourned the death of his brother, his friend Tiedemann Giese lost his two sisters to an outbreak of plague in Poland.
“Stenzel Zupky took possession of 2 parcels, which Matz Slander with my permission sold to him for 33 marks.”
Some of the local civic authorities who read Copernicus’s currency essay deemed it worth discussing at a regional assembly. Copernicus agreed to translate the text, for the benefit of representatives from Danzig, into German (still the official language in that city, despite its fealty to the Polish king). He finished the revised version by the end of 1519, when his term as administrator ended, and looked forward to seeing his suggestions implemented for the standardization of coins and the improvement of minting practices. Within weeks of his return to Frauenburg, however, the long-threatened war with the Teutonic Order broke out. On December 31, Albrecht invaded Braunsberg, the largest town in Varmia. Copernicus rode the six miles from Frauenburg to try to reason with Albrecht, but after two days of effort as the bishop’s emissary, January 4 and 5, all he won from the grand master was a promise of safe conduct through the region should he wish to resume negotiations in the future. He went home in defeat.
A fortnight later, on January 23, 1520, Albrecht’s knights attacked Frauenburg. They sacked and burned it. Only the walled cathedral complex, protected by a phalanx of Polish soldiers, escaped destruction. Copernicus’s curia outside the walls was reduced to rubble and ash. His pavimentum, too, lay in ruins.
Chapter 4
On the Method of Minting Money
Coinage is imprinted gold or silver, by which the prices of things bought and sold are reckoned according to the regulations of any State or its ruler. It is therefore a measure of values. A measure, however, must always preserve a fixed and constant standard. Otherwise, public order is necessarily disturbed, with buyers and sellers being cheated in many ways, just as if the yard, bushel, or pound did not maintain an invariable magnitude.
—FROM COPERNICUS’S REVISED MONEY ESSAY, 1522
The canons fled the torched city of Frauenburg for temporary shelter in Danzig, Elbing, and Allenstein. Copernicus perforce returned to the heavily fortified castle he had so recently vacated. The new administrator, Jan Krapitz, welcomed him there, happy to have such an experienced diplomat by his side in a time of war. But each month brought more terrible news to the canons trapped at Allenstein, as Albrecht’s armies swarmed over Varmia. Copernicus, resuming the office of chancellor, composed letters to the king to request arms and men for defense. He directed these pleas first to Heilsberg, where Bishop Fabian signed them and sent them on to Sigismund in Krakow. Sometimes the enemy intercepted the desperate correspondence, and sometimes the king received it but could not comply. Even when he responded with reinforcements, the new recruits failed to rout the knights.
Confined to the castle, Copernicus continued the planetary observations that clarified his picture of the universe. On February 19, 1520, his forty-seventh birthday, he judged Jupiter, at 6:00 A.M., to be 4°3’ to the west of “the first, brighter star in the forehead of the Scorpion.” Sometime in the spring, Jupiter would reach its annual opposition, to appear exactly opposite the Sun in Earth’s skies. No one could see both bodies at once when that happened, but an experienced practitioner might fix the time by combining predictions from theory with observations over a period of months. Having thus begun his watch in February, Copernicus marked the moment of opposition at 11:00 A.M. on April 30. Jupiter was then moving in reverse, or “retrograde,” as though backing away from the Scorpion’s sting—and also making its closest approach to Earth. While other astronomers viewed the timing of these several events as coincidence, Copernicus linked them inextricably together as the consequence of planetary order: The Earth, being closer to the Sun, overtook the slower Jupiter once per year. In passing, it left the Sun to one side and Jupiter on the other, coming as close to Jupiter as ever it could. Jupiter itself never changed the direction of its movement at such times, but merely appeared to do so to observers on Earth as they sped by. The same logic governed the annual opposition of Saturn, which Copernicus tagged a few months later, at noon on July 13.
The movements of Jupiter and Saturn at this juncture raised alarm among astrologers. The two planets were heading toward their “Great Conjunction”—the close heavenly union that they consummated every two decades, always with momentous effects. The popular almanac by Johann Stoeffler and Jacob Pflaum foresaw in the upcoming Great Conjunction of 1524 “changes and transformations for the whole world, for all regions, kingdoms, provinces, states, ranks, beasts, marine animals, and everything that is born of the earth—changes such as we have hardly heard of for centuries before our time, either from historians, or from our elders. Raise your heads accordingly, Christian men.”
On October 19, 1520, a detachment of knights surrounded Bishop Fabian’s palace at Heilsberg and settled in siege there for weeks. Under these circumstances, the chapter turned Jan Krapitz out of office at the November election, though he had served only one year, and drafted Copernicus to replace him. On the day his second stint as administrator started, November 11, restless knights hovered within a day’s ride of Allenstein, where only a hundred of the king’s soldiers stood guard at the gates.
Copernicus filled some of his most anxious hours cataloguing the chapter’s
archives, which had been moved to Allenstein over the years for safer keeping inside the castle treasury. The whole embattled history of the diocese lived in these documents, going all the way back to the bull of Pope Innocent IV in 1243, defining the boundaries of Prussia, and the 1264 parchment on which Anselm, the first Bishop of Varmia, envisioned the raising of a great cathedral at Frauenburg. The several hundred items—bulls, treaties, grants, deeds, wills, testimonials, petitions—filled a chest of many drawers. Even as Copernicus sifted and re-sorted the legal materials with their ornate official seals, he wrote new letters of appeal, begging King Sigismund to bolster the forces protecting Allenstein’s repository:
“Most Gracious Prince and Lord, Sigismund, by the Grace of God King of Poland, Grand Duke of Lithuania, Sovereign and Hereditary Lord of Ruthenia and Prussia, and our Most Gracious Lord,” Copernicus addressed His Majesty on November 16. He described the awful details of the previous day’s invasion of the nearby city of Gutstadt, now fallen to the knights, and expressed his willingness to die—as it seemed likely he would—in defense of Allenstein.
“For we are desirous to do what befits noble and honest persons, who are completely devoted to Your Majesty, even if we had to perish. All our possessions and ourselves we commend and entrust to Your Majesty’s care.” Meanwhile he continued methodically to list those possessions: “Document concerning the transfer of the head of St. George from Heilsberg to Frauenburg Cathedral,” “Document of the king of France concerning a gift of wood from the Holy Cross.”
In this 1520 painting by Stanisław Samostrzelnik, King Sigismund kneels beside the Bishop of Krakow to be blessed by St. Stanislaw, the patron saint of Poland.
Sigismund’s infantry marched in at the end of November. The Varmia canons took little comfort from the presence of the troops, however, and abandoned the castle in terror. Only Copernicus and Canon Henryk Snellenberg stood their ground at Allenstein. They were there when the king’s cavalry arrived in December, and even then the two canons did not relax their vigil. They faced their greatest test in January 1521, when Albrecht and an expanded army of his order demanded the castle’s surrender. But then, in a sudden reversal, Albrecht merely ransacked the nearby villages and withdrew homeward toward Königsberg, having agreed to a provisional cease-fire. Still Copernicus would not stop shoring up the castle’s defenses. He procured cartloads of the long guns called harquebuses from Elbing, and lead for shot, and food, and salt. Ready now for any sort of escalation, he received word of the April 5 treaty, signed in Torun, declaring a four-year truce.
