Free A More Perfect Heaven by Dava Sobel Page B

understood that you always support my affairs and those of my son with special kindness, and we look upon you as the anchor of our hope) to deign to assist him with the same utmost kindness and good-will and help.”
Right at the same time that Raphael came to Frauenburg to assume his canonry, in May of 1539, another youth—a brilliant mathematician—also entered the city in search of Canon Copernicus. No one had invited him or even suspected his arrival. Had he sent advance notice of his intent to visit, he doubtless would have been advised to stay far away from Varmia. Bishop Dantiscus’s most recent antiheresy pronouncement, issued in March, reiterated the exclusion of all Lutherans from the province—and twenty-five-year-old Georg Joachim Rheticus was not only Lutheran but a professor at Luther’s own university in Wittenberg. He had lectured there about a new direction for the ancient art of astrology, which he hoped to establish as a respected science. Ruing mundane abuses of astrology such as selecting a good time for a business transaction, Rheticus believed the stars spoke only of the gravest matters: A horoscope signaled an individual’s place in the world and his ultimate fate, not the minutiae of his daily life. If properly understood, heavenly signs would predict the emergence of religious prophets and the rise or fall of secular empires.
Rheticus had left Wittenberg the previous autumn, in October 1538, amidst squabbles over some vulgar verses written by a friend of his to mock Martin Luther. On leave from his teaching duties, he had spent months traveling around Germany, intent on seeking out the best practitioners to enlighten his understanding of astronomy and its astrological applications. In Nuremberg, he learned for the first time of the Polish canon who accounted for the celestial motions by centering them on the Sun. This concept seemed to Rheticus a redemptive cosmology, and without delay he undertook the five-hundred-mile journey to northern Prussia to learn the details of the theory from its source.
The name Rheticus, like that of Dantiscus, derived from a place instead of a person. Rheticus would have used his real surname if allowed to, but his family had been stripped of that privilege after his father, the physician Georg Iserin of Feldkirch, was beheaded for his crimes in 1528. Some accusers branded Iserin a sorcerer; others called him a thief who had come into their homes to give medical care but left with their valuables. Rheticus, fourteen at his father’s execution, first took his mother’s maiden name, de Porris, but later changed it to the more German-sounding von Lauchen, which meant the same thing: “of the leeks.” At the start of his university studies at Wittenberg in 1532, he acquired the toponym that tied him to his Alpine homeland of Rhaetia.

Rheticus had begun school with an interest in medicine but displayed an uncanny aptitude for numbers. He quickly came under the wing of the renowned humanist scholar Philip Melanchthon, “the teacher of Germany” and also Luther’s trusted supervisor of university affairs. As Rheticus later reported, the fatherly Melanchthon pushed him toward the field of mathematics—to the study of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. In 1536, rather than lose Rheticus after conferring on him the master of arts degree, Melanchthon established a second mathematics professorship especially for him to fill. Rheticus, now twenty-two, marked his transformation from student to faculty member at Wittenberg with a public inaugural address. Feeling awkward at the center of such attention, he warned his audience that he was “shy by nature,” and most dearly cherished “those arts that love hiding-places, and do not earn applause among the crowds.” Nevertheless he acquitted himself admirably in his oration. “It is characteristic of the honorable mind,” he said, “to love nothing more ardently than truth, and, inspired by this desire, to seek a