Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Minky Listener Discretion is advised. There's an anecdote that's often included in biographies of sixteenth century astronomer Tico Braie that, while almost entirely irrelevant to his life or scientific achievements, I think is worth talking about.
You see, Tico Brie had a pet elk. He had a few pet elks, we can determine that from primary sources, but one in particular was Tame, who would trot along at the side of his carriages and join him inside the house. He and his family would feed it beer and delight in the way that it lapped it up. One of Brie's German friends wrote to him once asking if it was true that in Denmark there was an animal called a ricks that was bigger and faster than
a deer. Brian, you, his friend. He knew he was one of those wealthy aristocratic types who just wanted as many different animals as possible for his own private zoo. Brian wrote back, saying, no, there's no ricks. You're probably thinking of a reindeer. But hey, if you happen to want an elk, I have a tame one that you can borrow. The letter was sent off to Germany, and by the time the friend wrote back saying sure it was too late, bra he had already sent his tame
elk over to a neighbor's house for a party. That party's guests were so amused by the animal that they kept giving it more and more alcohol. The elk made it to the top of a staircase and then drunk it stumbled down and broke its neck. Now I reiterate the tame drunk elk who fell down the stairs isn't relevant to Tako Brie's scientific achievements, but the story strange does sort of capture why Bray has become such a
figure of fascination for centuries. A drunk pet elk is a detail you expect to find in the biography of a romantic Arab poet. It's genuinely astonishing that it didn't happen to Lord Byron. It's debauchrous and whimsical, and yet Ticobry's scientific legacy is basically the opposite of that. It's
an incredibly precise and comprehensive data that he collected. He was the last of the major naked eye astronomers working in the era before telescopes, and for decades of his life he pioneered equipment that brought a brand new level
of accuracy to the astronomical community in Europe. But he was also the wildly strange figure that paraded around Europe with a brass nose, who became lord ruler of an entire island, who worked as an alchemist, and whose death was either humiliating and mundane or a captivating murder of scientific jealousy, depending on who you ask. Personally, I believe the science even when it disproves the fun murder theory. But as Ticobrie taught us, a devotion to science doesn't
have to be boring. I'm Danish schwartz and this is noble blood. Ticobra was actually born by the name tegobri In, but since starting university he would refer to himself by the Latinized version of his name, Tico, and since that's the name by which most history refers to him, that's the name will go with here. He was the oldest son of an incredibly storied lineage of Danish nobles. Almost every one of his male relatives had a prominent position
in the Danish or Swedish king's privy council. They almost all had castles. He was the oldest of eight children who lived to adulthood, and all of his brothers went on to become well respected government or military officials. Tico probably would have shared their fate had it not been for the strange decision to send him off as a toddler to be raised by his aunt Anger and Uncle Jorgan.
Books often refer to the couple as childless, which paints sending them Ticco as a polite act of charity, giving them a child to raise since they didn't have one of their own. But that's an incorrect impression based on hindsight. At the time that they got the little tych Tico Inger was only twenty. It's strange to think that they would have known at the time that they would have been childless. But Uncle Jorgan was a military hero and
an intellectual. Maybe Tico's parents thought the were reason enough to have him raise a child. Jrgen valued education in a way that Tico's actual father might not have. Tico attended a prominent church school, and then at age thirteen, he was sent to the University of Copenhagen to study law as his uncle requested. It was at the University of Copenhagen that Tico's love of astronomy sparked into focus.
On August one, fifteen sixty, when Tico was fourteen years old, the Moon passed between the Earth and the Sun, resulting in a total solar eclipse. Even though the eclipse was only partial from Mortico observed it, it was incredible, the type of profound event that makes you wonder about the meaning of life and mankind's place in the universe. But Ta Tico even more fascinating was that it had been predicted.
By tracking the positions of the Sun and the Moon, astronomers had been able to predict that a solar eclipse would occur decades or even centuries before it happened. It was the closest thing to actual magic in a world that did still believe in alchemy and being able to foretell the future. The problem Tico realized was that these predictions of the solar eclips by astronomers had been a
full day off. If only they're observational tools had been more precise, Tico thought, then humans could fully understand the universe. Tico's uncle Jorgan tried to get his nephew to focus on a more respected and conventional field, but Tico wouldn't be deterred. He had found his passion. At sixteen, Tico was sent on a tour of Europe to learn foreign
languages and about the other major European courts. It was a rite of passage for noblemen who would need to become not only well educated in intellectual matters, but also matters of decorum and diplomacy. Escorting Tico on the tour was a twenty year old middle class student named Andrew Sorns and Fidel, hired to teach Tico and also to
keep him in the line. Fidell begrudgingly pretended not to notice when Tico secretly purchased books of astronomy, and he also pretended not to notice the tiny, fist size celestial globe that Tico would consult whenever he thought Fidel wasn't looking. By the time the two boys returned to Denmark in fifteen sixty, they were met with two surprises. First that Denmark was at war with Sweden, and also that Tico's
uncle Jorgan was dead. Jorgan was vice admiral of the Danish fleet, and he had achieved several prominent military victories, including sinking Sweden's biggest worship. But he died a hero in a different way. The King of Denmark, Frederick the Second, got drunk following a victory and fell off his force into a canal in Copenhagen. Jorgan leaped into the icy water to rescue him, got pneumonia and died two weeks later.
Tico wouldn't stay in Denmark long. He left to go to Germany to study medical alchemy at the University of Rostock. It was there that Tico would experience one of the most infamous events of his life, the duel where he lost his nose. The duel didn't actually start with a duel. It started with a lunar eclipse. Tico Bri, who had just turned twenty years old, analyzed the lunar eclipse of October fifteen sixty six and decided that it foretold the
death of the Turkish Sultan Suleman the Great. So certain was he about the accuracy of his interpretation that Tico wrote a long Latin poem about it and posted it publicly. There was only one problem. Word came that Suleiman the Great did die, but he had died six weeks before the eclipse even happened. Bray was humiliated, and the humiliation
would continue for months. In December, Bry's host in Germany through a party and happened to invite along another Danish noble, Mandraup Parsburg, who also happened to be Tico's third cousin. Parsburg mocked Tico for his hilariously earnest and completely wrong Latin poem, and Tico did not have a sense of humor about it. The two almost came to blows, but they were pulled apart until a little over two weeks later, when the two met again, this time in a dimly
lit bar. Parsburg snorted at Tico's assertion that he was a better mathematician. Tico stood and touched the sword at his hips. In that dark bar lit only by candles, with everything obscured by their smoke, the two decided to duel to decide once and for all who was the better mathematician. With a single stroke of his blade, Parsburgh hacked off the bridge of tico bride's nose. The injury
led to weeks of lonely, panic and uncertainty. The real danger was not the injury itself, but the deadly infection it could lead to. Besides, until the scar tissue formed, the extent of the disfigurement couldn't be known. Eventually, Tico Brie came to terms with the fact that he was missing most of his nose. Rather than get a wax prosthetic, he chose to instead affix a brass false nose. He had another nose made of a mixture of silver and gold as to be more or less skin colored, that
he brought for special occasions. Tico kept a small box filled with adhesive with him at all times for the moment that his nose began to slip in public. When he returned to Denmark again when his father was dying, it was as a new man. Literally upon his return, he built an observatory at Harevard Abbey, a property belonging to one of his maternal uncles, and it was there that he would make the discovery that would turn him
into an overnight scientific celebrity. Tikobri had been memorizing the stars in the sky since he was a child, and so when on November eleventh, seventy two, a brand new star seemed to appear in the sky right next to the constellation Cassiopeia. Tico noticed right away. First, he asked his sister, Sophia Brie, who worked alongside him as a research assistant. She confirmed that star definitely hadn't been there before. Batiko Brian couldn't wrap his mind around it. He couldn't
believe his eyes. He begged servants and passing peasants to look up at the sky, see that star there that wasn't there before. Right, My guess is the passing peasants and servants weren't much help. The thing is, nothing new was supposed to happen in the stars. New things happened
in the sky all the time. That was different. In Bride's day, there was an understanding that the Moon revolved around the Earth, and things could happen and change beneath the Moon in the sub lunar space, but beyond the Moon that was supposed to be fixed and unchanging. And this new star, this was further away than the moon. The heavens were changeable. One quick aside to explain how Tiko knew for a fact that the star was beyond
the moon. It was using the principle of parallax, or the idea that closer objects will move more relative to their surroundings when you look at them from a different perspective. It's a little tough to explain orally, but have you ever noticed that, when you're driving in a car, the nearby scenery right alongside the window seems to whip past, while the further scenery moves incredibly slowly. That's an illustration
of parallax. With his observation of the new star, Tico worked alongside his sister to write a short book called to Stella Nova, or fittingly, the New Star. He had found what we now know was a super nova. Tico Brie is where we get that name. This feels like the right moment to go back a bit and understand just a little about astronomy as it was understood before the sixteenth century. Bear in mind this will be just
a really cursory overview. In three hundred and sixty BC, Plato posited a version of the universe to explain the way the moon, stars, and sun all would move across the sky. The Earth was the center of the universe, obviously, and then the Sun, the Moon, and planets all moved around us in perfect celestial spheres. But if you actually observe the motion of the planets, there's a problem. They don't move consistently across the sky the way they were
if they were in a perfect divine sphere. The planets, at certain points in their trajectory moved back and then forth again. It was Ptolemy who came up with a solution for this retrograde orbits along the route of a planet's main orbit. In simple terms, little epicycles are little loops that planets would make during their big loop. It made sense mathematically with the observations they were seeing, sort of,
but philosophically it was a mess. God created the universe, and he created it to be divine and perfect circles were symmetrical and mathematically clear. These epicycles were complicated and messy. It was Copernicus, then, who actually figured things out for European astronomers when he posited a heliocentric model, a model of the Solar system with the Sun at the center.
For the record, there were Islamic astronomers who had more or less been figuring out the exact same thing both can currently and also a little bit before Copernicus, but in European circles, it was Copernicus and his controversial theory that scientists were butting their heads up against, because while it flew in the face of the religious teachings that were accepted as gospel, science was seen as just a
way to better understand God's divine vision. It would be absurd to conceive that we were not the center of the system that God created. Copernicus died three years before Tico Brahe was born, and it's important to recognize Brie was not a heliocentrist. He never believed that the Sun was at the center of the Solar system or that
the Earth revolved around it. He the pre eminent astronomer of his day, went to his grave thinking that the Earth was stationary sixty years after Copernicus published his more correct model. Science is not a series of steady accomplishments at even intervals, where one great man takes on the mantle of a great man before him. That's a convenient way for some people to oversimplify and create a pretty narrow and a little sexist understanding of history, but it's
also just not the truth. After his publication of Distella Nova Ticobrai was an established European astronomer. It was around this time that he almost completely rejected the responsibilities of his noble position. He had no interest in a castle or lordship or fancy aristocratic marriage. Most of the scholars that he was engaging with weren't married for that very reason. An aristocratic marriage was an ordeal. It took time, energy,
and attention away from science. But Tico didn't remain unmarried. He fell in love with a woman named Kirsten Jorian's daughter, a commoner. Though they lived together for almost thirty years and had eight children, it was technically illegal for a noble and a commoner to get married. Technically illegal, but not entirely unusual. There was an established term under judish law for what they had together, basically modern day equivalent of a common law marriage. The main consequence of their
relationship was that Tico's children would be commoners. They would have to enroll in school as commoners, and they wouldn't be allowed to inherit any of his noble property. Presumably, the twenty year old Tico who just got his nose hacked off, who met a pretty girl named Kirsten wasn't thinking about inheritance when they met, and again it wasn't scandalous necessarily, or even uncommon that he took up with a commoner. It was more just seen as a rebuffed
Danish high society. Another rebuff Tico Brie was touring around Europe looking for a better place to build a laboratory. When King Frederick the Second caught wind of Brye planning on building a lab in Basil, Switzerland, he panicked that simply wouldn't do. Brie had just become a well known scientist,
and he was Danish. For God's sake. Denmark needed to hold on to its scientific celebrities if it wanted to be a world player, and so King Frederick offered Bride a number of castles and positions, all of which Tico Brye rejected. And then the king made another offer, the island of Ven, a small island with forty farms which Brian could rule over like a fiefdom. Brie thought about it.
On one hand, Denmark was a little further north than he would have liked in terms of astronomical observations, and it was often wet and cloudy, but fun was attempting offer. It was isolated. That was a plus plus. Frederick the second was prepared to give Ticco whatever funds he needed to build a truly spectacular laboratory. And remember those farms on the island, the king would throw in their free labor, and so Ticobrie accepted. Uraniabourg was about to come into being.
Though the island of Ven had always technically been owned by the Crown, the forty or so families that lived there were freeholding farmers. They made their own community laws and interacted with the outside world in a very limited capacity, maybe when someone went to sell on the mainland. But when Frederick the second gave ven to Ticobry, that all would change. Tico first insisted that they cultivate twice as much on their farms, and he was allowed to make
that insistence. Also, as part of his position as lord, he was entitled to two full days from sun up to sundown a free labor from each of the farms every single week. These farmers were the foot soldiers who would help him build Uraniabourg, the Castle of the Heavens, named for the Greek muse of astronomy Urania Uranni Aborg was a Palladian style castle meant to represent, in its dimensions and architectural symmetry, the elegance and order of the cosmos.
The castle itself was surrounded by a square wall oriented perfectly to the north, southeast, and west. Diagonal paths cut through perfectly manicured gardens towards the main central castle, which was three stories high and home to dozens of people at any given time. On the top floor, Braye built unheeded apartments where his servants and assistants lived. On the second floor there was a summer room, the Queen's Chamber where Queen Sophia of Denmark once came to stay, and
the king's chambers. The first floor had living quarters, four huge observatories, a kitchen, and a massive museum library, where Tico kept the giant brass celestial globe that he had personally commissioned. The globe took years to make and get to bra but in a sense it would actually take twenty five years to be completed Brah. He would carefully engrave it with the position of stars he measured one
by one. In the basement of Uranniaborg were salt and wood sellers and also Tico's alchemy lab for someone who became famous for the rigor of his mathematical precision and skills of observation. Bray was also fascinated by alchemy and other sciences that are let's say, dubious at best. He studied not just astronomy but also astrology for his entire life. He did readings of the lives of famous men from history and would sometimes perform them for the royal family.
At some point, Tico Brie kept at Uranniaburg a dwarf named Jip who acted as a sort of court jester. Brian would bring Jep out at parties to tell the future for his guest because he believed that he had psychic abilities, and Tico's guests were often incredibly prominent people the Danish royal family, famous writers and fingers, even King James the sixth of Scotland later King James the First of England came to visit Ven when he came to
Denmark to pick up his new wife to be. If you're a longtime listener of the podcast, you might remember James the six the witch hunter King, and his trip to Denmark. Another of the visitors to then would be a young astronomy student named Johannes Kepler. He'll come back into the story later, so remember that name. And if you're listening to this podcast and planning a Mozart Salieri
Onmadeus Style Oscar drama about these two men. I imagine the scene of a young Kepler in tram By the strange and enigmatic, brass nosed Tico Brie at the height of his power, would make a good cold open. Uranni a Boorg was sort of a Wonka's factory for science. There was running water, something Queen Elizabeth the First didn't have at Hampton Court, nor did Henry the third of France at the Louver. And it wasn't just the castle.
Uranniaboorg became a compound. Bray recognized the importance of publishing his own work, but he was also highly suspicious of thieves and copycats, and so he hired a printer and built his own printing press on the island. When he couldn't find access to paper of a high enough quality that he demanded, he also built a paper mill that produced sheets with a water mark, the name and an
illustration of his castle. The island also had a tannery that made the parchment for book binding, a grain mill, and a machine shop for Tico to continue to build new and better astronomical instruments. Telescopes weren't in use yet, but Brahi designed and built large specialty equipment that would allow him to record measurements far more precisely than anyone
else in Europe. His instruments out on balconies, though, were exposed to wind and the elements, and that could distort his readings, and so Tico Brahi built another laboratory called Serenberg, or Castle of the Stars. This one dug under the ground, so he and his many assistants and proteges could measure angles and distances in the sky from beneath ground level,
where wind couldn't affect the readings. Along the halls of Serenberg, Tico hung portraits of great astronomers throughout history, with the stated purpose of inspiring his students. Of course, one of the portraits was of himself, and the final portrait was of someone who hadn't even been born yet. It was an imaginary person named Ticondas, a descendant of Tico Brye, whose inscription beneath his portrait read that he only wished to be worthy of his great ancestor. Modesty wasn't one
of Ticobrie's strongest suits. It was that ego that would eventually lead to trouble for Ticobrye. His laboratory was renowned, but it was also a massive expense. At one point one percent of Denmark's wealth was going to urania Borg. After Frederick the Second died, his son, Christian the fourth was far less amused by Tico's science and his antics. Tico had already made a number of enemies at court, and these enemies were far closer to Christian the fourth.
When he came of age, Tico was just a thorn in his side, and incredibly expensive thorn. For one thing, the peasants on Fen kept complaining about Tico exploiting them. If you can imagine, the commoners would riot sometimes in front of Brye's family home in Copenhagen. The winds were changing for Tico Brie, and he knew it. He tried quickly before he lost too much favor, to get the Dowager Queen to put into writing that his kids could maybe be an exception to the no commoners inheriting noble
property rule. But Soon after, he left Fen and then Denmark. On his way out, he wrote one of his famous Latin poems about his exile, called an Elegy to Denmark, all about what fools they were for letting him go. It was the Latin poem equivalent of the email you write to your ex who breaks up with you, the one that you're not supposed to send. Brie spent a year at a friend's castle in Germany before he became
court astronomer to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph the Second. Tico and his family then moved to Prague along with Tico's most famous assistant, Johannes Kepler. Tico Brie worked in Prague for a year before his death, and for that year he and Kepler endeavored side by side to create the
most accurate astronomical tables possible. Keppler would eventually publish them after Brie's death, and they'd be known as the Rudolphin Tables, named, of course, for their royal patron Kepler kept all of Tico Brie's incredibly important work and notes after Brie died, no doubt taking advantage of the confused and when it came to the ability of Brie's children to inherit his property.
Using Brie's data, Kepler was able to make one of the most important scientific discoveries of the last thousand years. The planet don't move in perfect circles. Their orbits are elliptical. Tico Brie, in his lifetime, had made his own model of the Solar system, a sort of compromise between Plato and Copernicus, where the Sun does revolve around the Earth, but the other planets revolve around the Sun. Depending on the size of those orbits and the way you draw it.
Tico's model isn't too geometrically different from Copernicus is more correct theory, but it was a compromise that the Church and established scientific community at large could swallow. Kepler disagreed with his boss. He knew, like Copernicus knew that the Earth actually revolved around the Sun. But Kepler also knew that Tikobray's measurements were extraordinarily precise. Using ticho Bray's measurements for the path of Mars, Kepler realized that his calculations
for a circular orbit we're off by about eight arc minutes. Now, eight arc minutes is not a lot to be off by. To put it in layman's terms. If you were to hold a penny out at arm's length and turn the penny sideways the edge of the penny, that amount of space was the distance of the margin of error that Kepler got. But Bray was more precise than that, and Kepler knew it. Ray would never be off by more
than four or five arc minutes. And so Coupler tried again, this time with the calculation for an elliptical orbit, and there was it fit. Kepler became a scientific hero, and the idea that planets traveled in elliptical orbit became the first of his three laws of planetary motion. Kepler was a german Man born to a struggling mercenary and the daughter of an innkeeper. Very convenient, how Brie died, and then Kepler was able to use all of the data
he left behind to achieve glory. Almost too convenient. Some positive just an idea that Kepler had poison Ticobrie, who died at age fifty four. Kepler, his assistant, would have had the opportunity, he would have had access to the poison mercury, and he definitely had the motive. In his writings, Kepler explained Brie his death a little differently. He wrote that on October one, he and Brie were at a
banquet for Rudolph the Second. Bran had to urinate, but as royal decorum dictated that you couldn't leave the table before the king, he had to hold it in. Eleven days later, now unable to urinate and in extreme pain, brah died, but not before begging his pupil to finish his work and published the Rudolphine Tables. Of course, Kepler readily agreed. The Lord of Uranni Aborg died a urine
related death. Urania urine sounds like fate. Unfortunately, there is no etymological link between those two words, but you know, doesn't make it any less interesting. Ticobrie's achievements were vast and remarkable, especially when one remembers that all of his work was done with the naked eye. Galileo wouldn't use a telescope until eight years after Tico Brie's death, so Tico did all of his work just looking up at
the sky. That's all it took. Well, that and the sponsorship of King's a near infinite supply of money in free labor. But just that, that's the life and death of Tico Bride, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about when scientists decided to examine those pesky murder rumors Tico bri His body was exhumed twice, first in one and then in when scientists investigated once and for all whether those kepler murder rumors had any
truth to them. Unfortunately, the answer is no. Brian did have a little bit of mercury in his hair follicles, but no more than the normal amount that an alchemist slash scientist in the sixteenth century would have. Plus, the data didn't indicate a sudden amount of mercury flooding his
system right before his death. Brian also had gold in his system, which people tended to drink at the time in their wine for medicinal purposes, so it was more likely scientists decided that Tico had some bladder or kidney issue before that fateful banquet that ultimately led to his demise. So no murder by a jealous, ambitious assistant, exciting as that might have been, thanks a lot science. Noble Blood is a production of I Heart Radio and Grimm and
Mild from Aaron Minky. The show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble blood tails dot com. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M