John Banville - Doctor Copernicus

*

The battle dragged on for three months. Chapter sessions grew more and more frantic. At one such meeting Andreas himself made an appearance, stumbled drunk into the conference hall and sat laughing among the outraged canons, mumbling and dribbling out of his ruined mouth. At length they panicked, and gave in. The seizure of his prebend was withdrawn, and he was granted a higher annuity. On a bleak day in January he left Frauenburg forever. He did not bid his brother goodbye, at least not in any conventional way; but Max, the Canon’s sometime servant, went with him, saying he was sick of Prussia, only to return again that same night, not by road, however, but floating facedown on the river’s back, a bloated gross black bag with a swollen purplish face and glazed eyes open wide in astonishment, grotesquely dead.

* * *

It rose up in the east like black smoke, stamped over the land like a ravening giant, bearing before it a brazen mask of the dark fierce face of Albrecht von Hohenzollern Ansbach, last Grand Master of the brotherhood of the Order of St Mary’s Hospital of the Germans at Jerusalem, otherwise called the Teutonic Knights. Once again they were pushing westward, determined finally to break the Polish hold on Royal Prussia and unite the three princedoms of the southern Baltic under Albrecht’s rule; once again the vice closed on little Ermland. In 1516 the Knights, backed up by gangs of German mercenaries, made their first incursions across the eastern frontier. They plundered the countryside, burnt the farms and looted the monasteries, raped and slaughtered, all with the inimitable fervent enthusiasm of an army that has had its bellyful of peace. It was not yet a fully fledged war, but a kind of sport, a mere tuning up for the real battle with Poland that was to come, and hence the bigger Ermland towns were left unmolested, for the present.

In November of that turbulent year Canon Koppernigk was appointed Land Provost, and transferred his residence to the great fortress of Allenstein, lying some twenty leagues south-east of Frauenburg in the midst of the great plain. It was an onerous and exacting post, but one with which, during the three years that he held it, he proved himself well fitted to cope. His duties included the supervision of Allenstein as well as the castle at nearby Mehlsack and the domains in those areas; he supervised also the collection of the tithes paid to the Frauenburg Chapter by the two towns and the villages and estates roundabout. At the end of each year he was required to submit to the Chapter a written report of all these affairs, a task to which he applied himself with scrupulous care and, indeed, probity.

But above all else he was responsible for ensuring that the areas under his control were fully tenanted. With the rise of the towns, the land over the previous hundred years had become steadily more and more depopulated, but now, with the Knights rampaging across the frontier, driving all before them, the exodus from the land to the urban centres had quickened alarmingly. Without tenants, so the Frauenburg Chapter reasoned, there would be no taxes, but beyond that immediate danger was the fear that the very fabric of society was unravelling. As long ago as 1494 the Prussian ordinances had imposed restrictions upon the peasants that had effectively made serfs of them — but what ordinance could hold a farmer locked to a burnt-out hovel and ravaged fields? During his three years as Provost, Canon Koppernigk dealt with seventy-five cases of resettlement of abandoned holdings, but even so he had barely scratched the surface of the problem.

Those were difficult and demoralising years for him, whose life hitherto had been lived almost entirely in the lofty empyrean of speculative science. Along with the rigours of his administrative duties came the further and far more wearying necessity of holding at arm’s length, so to speak, the grimy commonplace world with which those duties brought him into unavoidable contact. For it was necessary to fend it off, lest it should contaminate his vision, lest its pervasive and, one might say, stubborn seediness should seep into the very coils of his thought and taint with earthiness the transcendant purity of his theory of the heavens. Yet he could not but feel for the plight of the people, whose pain and anguish was forever afterwards summed up for him in the memory of the corpse of a young peasant woman that he came upon in the smouldering ruins of a plundered village the name of which he did not even know. As he expressed it many years later to his friend and colleague Canon Giese: “The wench (for indeed she was hardly more than a child) had been tortured to death by the soldiery. I shall not describe to you, my dear Tiedemann, the state in which they had left her, although the image of that poor torn thing is burned ineradicably upon my recollection. They had worked on her for hours, laboured over her with infinite care, almost with a kind of obscene love, if I may express it thus, in order to ensure her as agonising a death as it was possible for them to devise. I realised then, perhaps (to my shame I say it!) perhaps for the first time , the inexpendable capacity for evil which there is in man. How, I asked myself then (I ask it now!), how can we hope to be redeemed, that would do such things to our fellow creatures?”

As well as Land Provost, he was also for a time head of the Broteamt , or Bread Office, at Frauenburg, in which capacity he had charge over the Chapter’s bakeries and the malt and corn stores, the brewery, and the great mill at the foot of Cathedral Hill. Repeatedly he held the post of Chancellor, supervising the Chapter’s records and correspondence and legal paperwork. Briefly too he was Mortuarius , whose task it was to administer the numerous and often considerable sums willed to the Church or donated by the families of the wealthy dead.

Along with these public duties, he was being called upon in another sphere, that of astronomy, to make himself heard in the world. His fame was spreading, despite the innate humility and even diffidence which had kept him silent for so long when others far less gifted than he were agitating the air with their empty babbling. Canon Bernhard Wapowsky of Cracow University, a learned and influential man, requested of him an expert opinion on the (defective, defective!) astronomical treatise lately put out by the Nuremberger, Johann Werner, a request with which Canon Koppernigk readily complied, glad of the opportunity to take a swipe at that proud foolish fellow who had dared to question Ptolemy. Then came a letter from Cardinal Schönberg of Capua, one of the Pope’s special advisers, urging the learned Doctor to communicate in printed form his wonderful discoveries to the world. All this, of course, is not to mention the invitation that had come to him in 1514, by way of Canon Schiller in Rome (no longer the representative of the Frauenburg Chapter, but domestic chaplain to Leo X, no less), to take part in a Lateran Council on calendar reform. Canon Koppernigk refused to attend the council, however, giving as excuse his belief that such reform could not be carried out until the motions of the Sun and Moon were more precisely known. (One may remark here, that while this account— ipse dixit , after all! — of his unwillingness to accept what was most probably an invitation from the Pope himself, must be respected, one yet cannot, having regard to the date, and the stage at which we know the Canon’s great work then was, help suspecting that the learned Doctor , to use Cardinal Schönberg’s mode of address, was using the occasion to drop a careful hint of the revolution which, thirty years later, he was to set in train in the world of computational astronomy.)

Thus, anyway, it can be seen that, however unwillingly, he had become a public man. The Chapter was well pleased with him, and welcomed him at last as a true colleague. Some there were, it is true, who did not abandon their suspicions, remembering his extraordinary and unaccountable behaviour at the time of the distasteful affair of his outrageous brother’s banishment. Among that section of the Chapter, which included of course Canons Snellenburg and von der Trank, it was never finally decided whether the Doctor should be regarded as a villain because of his connection with the poxed Italian (as von der Trank, his pale sharp aristocratic nose a-twitch, had dubbed Andreas), or as a cold despicable brute who would not even rise to the defence of his own brother. While that kind of thing may be dismissed as the product merely of envy and spite, nevertheless there was something about Canon Koppernigk — all saw it, even the kindly and all-forgiving Canon Giese — a certain lack, a transparence, as it were, that was more than the natural aloofness and other-worldliness of a brilliant scientist. It was as if, within the vigorous and able public man, there was a void, as if, behind the ritual, all was a hollow save for one thin taut cord of steely inexpressible anguish stretching across the nothingness.